I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: DECEMBER 2009 EDITION

[defrog]

Book reports! You want them. I has them.

JUST FINISHED

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
I’ve not read much Asimov outside of a couple of Robot books, so I thought I’d try this – partly because it was his first book with aliens and sex, and partly because the premise – scientists discover free energy technology, but ignore warnings that it could blow up the sun because giving up free energy would be politically unpopular – resonates with current events. Unfortunately, Asimov is better at hard science than he is at dialogue, and the hard science (and the sex, for that matter) reads like a science journal. I think I’ll just stick to the Robot novels.

JUST STARTED

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore
I’m a big fan of Moore, and Christmas is coming, so this is perfect seasonal reading – provided you associate Christmas with cannibalism and middle-aged sex. The book opens with a property developer hitting a Salvation Army Santa (his ex-wife) with a ten-pound bag of ice. If that doesn’t capture the true meaning of Christmas, what does?

RECENT TITLES

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
This is regularly cited as one of the all-time science-fiction great novels and a major cyberpunk influence – a Monte-Cristo style story of a man trapped on a wrecked starship bent on getting revenge on the ship that abandoned him, set against a time where corporations rule, the solar system is at war and people can teleport. It’s not bad, but I couldn’t really get into Gully Foyle as an anti-hero, and Bester’s writing style tended to lose me at key points in the story. That could be my problem, but either way I didn’t get a lot out of it.

The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson
The incredibly strange but (possibly) true story of how top Pentagon officers became enamored with New Age beliefs as a ticket to creating psychic super-powered soldiers who can walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them. It starts off twisted and hilarious, then gets more grim as Ronson starts drawing lines between the infamous MK-ULTRA experiments and Abu Ghraib. The details and reliance on mostly anecdotal evidence make it easy for Bush apologists to write Ronson off as another batshit conspiracy theorist, but as Ronson himself alludes in the book, the real point may be that we DON’T know the full extent of the truth of what the US intelligence community does, and that history is written by the people who put the first spin on a story. Recommended if only to get an argument going.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
I’ve not read much O’Connor apart from a couple of short stories, and I admit I only considered this because I found out Ministry sampled dialogue from the film version (which I haven’t seen) for “Jesus Built My Hot Rod”. And I have to say I’m not sure what to make of it. As a satire on how faith affects people even when they try to get away from it, it’s interesting, but the motivations of the two main religious nuts weren’t all that clear to me. Still, there’s an oddball quality to it that stays with me. And it’s hard to fault a novel with a sentence as great as: “Wherever you come from is gone. Wherever you were going was never there. And where you are ain’t no good unless you can get away from it.”

Queenpin by Megan Abbott
Not quite the female version of James Ellroy, but Abbott is definitely riffing from the same time period and same tradition of classic pulp crime when gangsters were real gangsters and everyone spoke in snappy dialogue. It’s pastiche, but it’s good-quality pastiche – Abbott has the patter mostly down to a T, and the tale of a young girl who becomes the protege of mobster Gloria Denton – and makes the mistake of shacking up with the wrong guy – adds just enough twists to keep you on yr toes. Rather good. I’ll be looking to read more of her.

The Boy Who Kicked Pigs by Tom Baker
Yes, THAT Tom Baker, Doctor Who fans, though this is about as far from Doctor Who as you can get – a short illustrated horror story about a 13-year-old boy who hates everyone and starts killing people with Rube Goldberg-style mayhem. It’s a comedy. But you need a seriously black sense of humor to appreciate most of the funny bits, because it does get extremely nasty. Not for everyone. Obviously.

A Diet Of Treacle by Lawrence Block
A Hard Case Crime reprint of Block’s 1961 tale of NYC beatniks caught up in drugs and, eventually, murder. Credit to Block for actually trying to show beatniks as misunderstood outsiders and making an argument that marijuana is less dangerous to society than alcohol at a time when most beatsploitation novels stuck to the usual stereotypes. But it’s painfully obvious that Block wrote this when he was just starting out and writing fast trashy pulp novels, and that he was padding it out to get it to a publishable length. Still, it’s interesting how it only really picks up once the murder bits start kicking in.

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