What I’m Reading These Days

This is in no way alphabetical or grouped by subject—just a quick rundown of books I’ve read recently.

The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern  Lilian Jackson Braun

How could I not? A series of books about a mystery-solving cat? It's a wonder that I've waited so long to actually pick up one of these. The owner of Twice Sold in Capitol Hill said she thought this was the first in the series; unfortunately, it's second, to THE CAT WHO COULD READ BACKWARDS, but this served as a reasonable introduction. It's an enjoyable enough read: Jim Qwilleran is a reporter for a newspaper in an unnamed Midwest city, whose new assignment is to start up a Saturday supplement on interior decorating. Things go wrong with the first publication: the day after the first edition hits the stands, the house profiled as the feature article gets burglarized, with half a million dollars worth of jade stolen. Something about it doesn't seem right to Qwilleran, who was a crime reporter once upon a time. He's fairly milktoast, with a cat named Koko that seems to either be psychic or just coincidentally leads him to clues that further the case.

All in all, not great mystery, not a very interesting crime. Makes for a Gregory MacDonald-type tour of interior design, without the wonderful dialogue. But the interplay between cat and owner is nice. Did I mention I like cats?

The Plague  Albert Camus

I heard from someone that THE PLAGUE is actually not very good Camus. For his sake, I hope so, since this book was long, dull, and near as I can tell, pointless. I'm an existentialist, but this story has me running back to Sartre, who at least is entertaining (I mean his fiction, not that BEING AND NOTHINGNESS tome: I managed two chapters or so before giving up, but if I ever want an exhaustive and confusing treatment of ontology, I'll snap it right up).

The coastal town of Oran in Algeria is beset by an outbreak of bubonic plague, and before long the government has the place under general quarantine indefinitely. The residents can't leave, and are faced daily with the possibility that they may get the plague and die. So it's the old existential chestnut: you can die at any time, so what difference does it make what you do? Never have I seen it rendered so dull and uninteresting. The characters are forgettable, the prose is detached and flat, and the story is just about non-existent. And as epidemiology goes, this is mediocre at best. Defoe did better in JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR. I'll try THE STRANGER, maybe, but I have no enthusiasm.

The Leaf Storm  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I hadn't read any Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though I've had a copy of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE on my shelf for five years. I'll have to read it now: I found his short story The Leaf Storm very evocative and engaging. In a small Colombian village, a man honors a promise he made to the town pariah: to see him buried properly, since he has no friends or family, and the town hates him. The events of a single afternoon, leading up to the burial, evoke memories that make the backstory of why was an outcast in the village, and his unusual relation to one family. It's told in three perspectives, a man who was a colonel in the Colombian army, his daughter (married but abandoned by her husband), and her eight-year-old son, each of whom has a different take on the proceedings. I've never liked Faulkner, but I love his technique. The shifting perspectives make the story come alive.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  Ken Kesey

I'd heard a lot about Ken Kesey's book:  that it's a counterculture classic, that Kesey had based the book on his experiences working as an orderly in an Oregon mental hospital in the early '60s, that the money he made from the book funded the Merry Pranksters. And I'd seen the movie, though I didn't particularly like it. I don't know why, since I've always loved the whole the-one-everyone-calls-crazy-is-actually-the-most-reasonable bit. CATCH-22 is my favorite book, after all. But as movies go, I thought COOL HAND LUKE was the same story, and more engaging. I'll have to read that book some time.

Anyway, the book CUCKOO'S NEST is an interesting read, since it's told from the perspective of Chief Bromden, a paranoid delusional: he describes the machinery that he thinks runs the mental ward, with the staff as robots. And that sometimes they use a fog machine to cloud up the place, so that all the patients stay lost in a haze. But while that makes for some wonderfully detailed observations, it makes for too much distance from the two main characters, Randle Patrick McMurphy and Big Nurse Ratched, so that they only function as elements of the plot, free spirit vs rigorous authority. No insights into why rebels are rebellious, or why authority has to be so rigorous. I guess that's not this story; as it is, it's rightfully a classic depiction of taking on The System, with a set of memorable characters.

Civil Disobedience  Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps this one suffers from anticipation: I haven't read Walden, and only know that Thoreau has a reputation for rugged individualism. And I'm all for that. But I guess I was hoping for something a little less political: Emerson on self-reliance didn't raise the issue of whether a local tax is worth avoiding--this seeming to be the substance of Thoreau's titular disobedience. He spends a single night in jail, after which his neighbors bail him out. After Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, you'll have to pardon me not being impressed.

He makes some allusion to the fact that the nation at large condones slavery, which he obviously finds reprehensible. But it seems to me that since the tax he is evading is a local one, his protest as a political statement thereupon is indirect at best. Seems to me he's just indignant about having to pay a tax.

And I can kind of see his point, since he's writing from an America that has one hell of a lot less in the way of infrastructure, the primary justification for why our current tax system is necessary. But all this talk of the outdoorsy individual having no need of an overbearing government rings a little hollow, seeing as Thoreau didn't get much further into the wilderness than a few miles from Boston. He was a few decades younger than Daniel Boone: now there's someone who meant it.

The Rolling Stones  Robert Heinlein

With a title like that, how could I resist? Started reading it the week before the concert, October 19th. Suffice it to say, this one isn't rock and roll. A modest effort by Heinlein, about a family of eccentrics living in the lunar colony, who decide to take an extended family vacation aboard a fixer-upper spaceship they christen The Rolling Stone (Stone is their last name--cute, huh?).

Not bad, for the teen crowd of its day (published 1952), and has an amusing bit that predates Huple's cat's infamous sleeping habit in Catch-22, but overall this one won't fire your imagination.

War With the Newts  Karel Capek

In the preface to his very unsettling short story "The Ninth of Av", Dan Simmons pointed out a bias in science fiction publishing: while most science fiction written in English is translated into other languages, very little of non-English sci-fi gets to American readers. As a result, the American audience misses out on good fiction that isn't American, Canadian, British, or Australian.

Well, here's a great example. I found this book by accident, at a used bookstore, a tattered reprint of the 1932 original. If the name Karel Capek rings a bell, it's because he's the Czechoslovakian who coined the term robot back in 1920, in his play ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS. And while he may be remembered as a social commentator in the style of George Orwell or H.G. Wells, it should be noted that he has a good respect for science as it fits into his story: a Dutch sea captain in the East Indies of the 1930's happens upon a species of large salamanders, or newts, living off the shore of a particular island. They can walk upright, out of the water, for limited periods of time, have prehensile forelimbs, and can vocalize, with an impressive mimicry of human speech. But they're fairly unsophisticated (other than their penchant for building dams and artificial reefs), so once captured they make for easy, cheap labor. Capek sets up a commerce in newts as a Swiftian parable on human slave trade; and for the most part, it works very well. By the time the newts come to be integral to the world's industrial and maritime economies, there arise debates about newt rights and the role of newts in human society...just as newts begin to coalesce into what could pass for a civilization of their own. And a slave revolt can't be far behind....

I really like H.G. Wells, not so much for his social commentary (which was fairly progressive for his day) as his attention to scientific detail. Allow me to call him, and of course Jules Verne, the first writers of what can be called hard science fiction (as opposed to most of the sci-fi of the 1930's and 40's, which don't seem to be much interested in the factual or realistic basis for a given scenario--culminating in Ray Bradbury, who is just short of scientifically illiterate). I just read a book of Wells' short stories earlier this year, and I was impressed by how intriguing and inventive his ideas were. Underlying it was a subtle sense of humor, as evidenced in stories like "In the Abyss" or "Aepyornis Island"--and Capek has a similar tone. I'm very curious to read Capek's other stuff, including R.U.R., of course.

And, come to think of it, the only other modern science fiction writer I've read that's had to be translated into English was Stanislaw Lem. Oh, and Jorge Luis Borges (who's sci-fi, I'll argue that any day--). So maybe we in English could try to understand the musings of other cultures, once in a while.

A Fan's Notes  Frederick Exley

Here's a book I loved.  Heard a lot of bad things about it before I sought out a copy; most everyone said that the narrator was a lout, and that the book was unpleasant.  One guy I read on-line said that he felt dirty for having read it, and it was a book he wishes he could un-read.  First heard of him from EDO, and the song "Frederick Exley":  "It was the winter of my upset, I was so depressed/I wanted to jump off a bridge and end it all/Then I read your horrible little book I was so relieved/I knew had a long way down to go"

I don't get it at all.  Sure, Fred Exley may be perpetually drunk and quite often irresponsible, but I don't think he's necessarily a bad person.  Particularly when compared to another novel I read from the same era, John Updike's RABBIT, RUN:  Harry Angstrom, now that guy's nothing but a prick. Where Updike was trying to invoke some of the restive complacency of the 1950's and 60's, Exley was out railing against it.  This cost him more than a few jobs (public relations, school teacher, and a brief stint as aluminum siding salesman), led him back home to his parents' house in upstate New York for an extended stay, and landed him in a mental hospital (twice).  But he's no Holden Caulfield:  sure, I loved CATCHER IN THE RYE, but there's something about J.D. Salinger that's fairly superficial and, dare I say it, immature.  I just read FRANNY AND ZOOEY last year, and just about hated it.  I think, like Updike, Salinger tries to get at suburban angst via exhaustion, sending his characters through the paces of vapid dialogue and empty situations, to give them something to do while you as the reader get frustrated with the meaningless of it all.  You can call it a character study, but at least as I read it, you're not going to like the character much if they don't get frustrated themselves.

Which is why I like Ex.  He's an observer of humanity, like Ishmael or Huck Finn, in the classic tradition, always commenting on the situation he's in, but he's no hero, even in his own life.  When, frequently, he finds himself doing or saying something reprehensible, he shares his thinking and motivation, tinged with a realization of how terrible he can be, but without any sort of remorse or apology.  Confession, without guilt:  like someone getting up at an AA meeting and telling all, but without the mea culpa.  This makes him all the more human.  Perhaps the best example of this, which I can easily envision as a scene in a movie, is when he gets out of the mental hospital in New York, and contacts the family of a fellow patient, about to be released, who doesn't have anywhere to go.  From a payphone in Grand Central Station, he calls the man's sister and her domineering husband, and quickly realizes that they won't take him in.  Whatever their history or family situation, Ex is struck by their callous disregard for a family member who needs help.  He has something of a meltdown on the phone, and whether he's correctly admonishing them for their indifference or exorcising his own demons isn't clear--just like in most cases where you overhear someone going off like this.  The kind of poignancy this lends to such a confrontation makes the book a real winner.  But challenging, and far from perfect.  That's Frederick Exley for you.

The Postman Always Rings Twice  James M Cain

Didn't know what to expect with this one, but it was short--only 120 pages, more of a short story or novella.  A fast read, too, about a young drifter who finds work at a roadside diner in southern California; he and the owner become friends, but of course he falls for the man's wife, and together they conspire to kill him.  Cain also wrote that other definitive noir story, DOUBLE INDEMNITY (and no, film buff that I am, I've never seen it), and I may have to read that some time.  His writing is very spare, almost at a Bukowski level, and while not quite as racy he's at least as blunt; I can see how this was scandalous back when it was first published, in 1934.  I read Dashiell Hammett's THE GLASS KEY a while ago, as I heard it served as the basis for MILLER'S CROSSING, one of my favorite movies.  Now I have to pick up some Raymond Chandler, to round out my 30's noir experience.  And what do you know:  James M Cain taught journalism at St John's College, my alma mater--though this was before they adopted the Great Books Program in 1937.

Autobiography Of a Fat Bride: True Tales Of a Pretend Adulthood   Laurie Notaro

How could you not like Laurie Notaro?  Anyone who could come up with a title like THE IDIOT GIRLS' ACTION-ADVENTURE CLUB is just about guaranteed to write a good story.  In this follow-up to that first collection of anecdotes about being single and unemployed, the chain-smoking and hard-drinking Catholic girl from Phoenix gets married and settles down--much to her own surprise.  Though her self-deprecating my-family-screwed-me-up-for-life hyperbole can wear thin at times, she's pretty good at finding the humor in small moments:  she works herself into a panic one night when she thinks her husband is late getting home, running through all the scenarios, from a fatal car accident to an affair--only to realize that's she's misread the clock, and that in fact he's on time.  This is perfect reading for a bus commute (which is how I read most of it).

Zodiac  Neal Stephenson

Whatever else you want to say about Neal Stephenson, he’s not dull. This is his second book, about a punk Boston ecologist who specializes in busting the balls of the local industrial polluters, one of whom has developed a toxic waste-eating bacterium which, of course, doesn’t quite yield the intended results once released into Boston harbor. The science isn’t too hard, and the humor isn’t wry, it’s outlandish. But he doesn’t give as vivid a vision as he does in his other books that I’ve read, SNOW CRASH (an alternative present-day California where an L. Ron Hubbard-type is spreading an atavistic Sumerian computer program that lobotomizes people), or THE DIAMOND AGE (Shanghai, China, centuries in the future, is built around nanotechnology and an interactive book ends up teaching its lesson all too well). He’s always entertaining and thought-provoking; definitely worth your time.

Billy Budd  Herman Melville

I was supposed to read this in college, but didn’t. Don’t know why, since I loved MOBY DICK, and this has to be Melville’s next-most-famous work. Didn’t carry me along the way that MOBY DICK did; I don’t know how many of his works have that narrative style, which is completely original and the primary reason that it’s called—rightfully—the greatest American novel. Melville’s prose is dense but rich, an integral element in this meditation on morality and justice on the high seas: a naïve young sailor strikes and kills an officer who wrongly accuses him of conspiring to mutiny, and is sentenced to hang by a morally conflicted captain. Melville’s other short stories, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”, didn’t do much for me either: more than anything, this made me want to pick up MOBY DICK again.

Hombre  Elmore Leonard

Leonard is another one who may not always be stellar, but seemingly can do no wrong. I’ve read KILLSHOT, MAXIMUM BOB, and UNKNOWN MAN #89; he’s consistently engaging and his style is a delight. His name is almost synonymous with ‘crime drama’, but, I learned, he started out writing westerns. I want to sample all different literary genres, and till somebody can recommend a Louis L’Amour to me, this will serve as my western sampling. And a fair one, telling the story of a white man raised by Apaches, caught up in a stagecoach robbery gone wrong. Pulpy, but in a good way.

Future Crime  Ben Bova

Since I like science, someone told me to try Ben Bova, as he’s supposedly scientifically-correct (“If it won’t fly in real life, it won’t fly in a Ben Bova story.”) If that’s the case, it’s not first and foremost in this short story collection, the unifying theme being crime and its consequences in various sci-fi scenarios. Nothing really intriguing here; best entries are “City of Darkness”, about a teen trapped in an ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK-like Manhattan (which reminded me of the much better story by Asimov, “Profession”), and “Diamond Sam”, an amusing, but dated, late-Cold War take on what free enterprise can teach The Commies. He’s not a bad writer; I’ll have to try another one of his at some point.

Count Zero  William Gibson

I told a friend I thought William Gibson’s BURNING CHROME was dull and uninteresting; I got handed this as a result. Well: I liked it better than BURNING CHROME, but still wasn’t all that impressed. Made me run out and grab a Neal Stephenson book at random (which turned out to be ZODIAC). It’s the muddled story of a mercenary assigned to facilitate the corporate defection of a scientist, and of a teen cyberpunk-wannabe caught up in cyber-voodoo. Doesn’t hold a candle to Stephenson; not as dense as QUEEN OF ANGELS, but not as interesting, either. Best thing about it is that it’s a fast read.

Howl!  Allen Ginsberg

I don’t much like poetry—but I especially don’t like modern poetry. I do have a certain affection for the Beats that I’ve read (mostly William S Burroughs, to be honest), and I put off reading this quintessential Beat landmark till I could find the appropriate format: an old, beat-up paperback copy from that era. I haunt used bookstores looking for various items, and though I was always on the lookout for such an edition, all I ever found was reprints or reverential compendia of Ginsberg’s seemingly considerable output. Until a few weeks ago, when I came across an original printing by City Lights of San Francisco, dating from ’68 (as, coincidentally, do I). So I repaired to a U District coffee shop, got a tall coffee, and started in.

What dreck. This is what inspired a generation? It’s not good poetry, not an interesting use of language, not a good evocation of its subject, the unfocused anguish of the best minds of its generation. Some OK metaphors and some jarring imagery, but overall, I’d have to agree with an admonition I’d been given: just take the acid yourself, it’s more fun that way. At least when Burroughs does it, it’s as flat prose with no pretensions to call itself poetry. (Did Burroughs ever say NAKED LUNCH was a novel?) I didn’t mind another poem in the volume (which I read just as a control), “In Back of the Real”: that at least has the benefit of Wallace Stevens-like brevity.

Vector  Robin Cook

I have a strong medical curiosity; in particular, I'm fascinated by human anatomy.  I'm a big fan of Dr Michael Baden of HBO's AUTOPSY series, and I've attended two of the cadaver sessions offered annually at the University of Puget Sound (something of a gross anatomy seminar for nursing students and EMT trainees).  Also, epidemiology is one of my hobbies.  So I looked forward to reading VECTOR, which I found on the bargain rack at Couth Buzzard.  (A vector is the medium by which a contagious disease is spread.)   The story involves a disillusioned Russian immigrant living in Brooklyn and driving a cab, who used to work in a covert bioweapons lab in the Ukraine; he teams up with some white supremicists, in a plot to release anthrax in Manhattan's Javits Center.  This was written in 1999, before the 2001 anthrax scare, but three years after Tom Clancy's EXECUTIVE ORDERS, which offered a biowarfare scenario of aerosolized Ebola unleashed in the United States.

On the whole, not a terrible read, but very disappointing.  Not a whole lot of medical detail, which I'd expected, since Robin Cook is himself a doctor (as opposed to Clancy, who packed a lot of medical information into EXECUTIVE ORDERS, though he's a goddamn investment broker from Merrill Lynch).  The characters are facile, and the story is just this side of oh-you-gotta-be-kidding-me hokey.  Michael Crichton (who directed the film version of Cook's novel COMA back in the 70's--a tight little thriller, actually) is maybe higher up on the implausible scale, but his books read faster and are a lot more informative; whereas his novels read like Hollywood script drafts, Cook reads like a USA Network movie of the week.  I didn't think much of Patricia Cornwell, a few years ago when I read her first Kay Scarpetta novel, POST MORTEM, but she's better than this.