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Saturday, July 14, 2007


The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Tartt is a close friend of Brett Easton Ellis, he of Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and so on. One suspects that this friendship powerfully influenced both her writing and her relationship with the book publishing industry.

The Secret History reads a bit like Less Than Zero meets Dead Poets Society. Set primarily on the wooded grounds of an upper-crust Vermont liberal arts university, this epic novel is the tale of a middle-class California teen who goes off to college, is seduced into a world of wealth, elitism, and intellectualism. Under the tutelage of their classics professor, a small group of students descend into a lifestyle which shrugs off currently accepted social mores. There are consequences.

On one level, this novel reads like a “going off to college” bildungsroman. On another level it’s a great social satire filled with cokeheads, cheap sex, buffoonish administrators, ignorant townies, and so one. Hanging in the dark skies above all of this, is a fairly tightly written psychological thriller.

The novel is long and loses it’s focus periodically, but it is (given the potentially dry nature of a story about a classics club) quite engaging. I was pulled forward through the entire thing in about four late night sessions by a burning desire to know how things would work out for Bunny, Henry, Camilla, Francis and the rest.

And on some level, this is the book’s greatest success: Like the protagonist, you can’t help yourself being impressed and enchanted by these awful characters and feeling like you want to keep on knowing them. By the bloody final reckoning the reader has become as much a part of the Secret History of our ill-fated group of outcasts as the narrator.

Good stuff. Well written, if far from perfect.

Thanks for the loan, Senator.

A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee, wanderer, knight, poet and solver of problems is back! In this installment, written in about 1965, he witnesses the murder of a beautiful stranger and is drawn into the complicated web of connections that makes up small town life. Along the way he kills a few people, solves some crimes, wisecracks, and saves a damsel in distress by teaching her about love. Standard MacDonald fare, but lots of fun.
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The Farm by Scott Nicholson

Lets see… Scarecrows returning to life and seeking human victims? Check. Isolated farmhouse, teenage daughter estranged from her mother? Check. Weird rednecks? Check. Ghosts, murdered wives, asshole religious scholars, corrupted soil, even goat orgies? Check, check, check and check.

The Farm was bad horror at it’s baddest. Bought in a Vancouver grocery store checkout line, it delivered the exact grade of horror novel retreads, plotting clichés, and stylistic pap one would expect.

Nothing wrong here. Nicholson clearly knows where his bread is buttered.

In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

“Slap it up your wack!”
Saunders has written a collection of hyperactive, highly post modern short stories which fall somewhere between Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, and Chuck Palahniuk. They shout, sing and dance their way across the pages, and are, frankly, delightful, funny, sad and cynical. Characters include ghosts, Jesus freaks, puppets, a Slap-O-Wack bar, market research subjects, monkeys, salesmen, television show characters, and even a talking orange.

Some of the tales are a bit tedious, or make their points with all the subtlety of a meat cleaver, but others are complex and beautifully written. The one about a bad Christmas among Chicago’s working class and the tale of the two old women both come to mind.

Generally, the social commentary rails against consumerism and advertising, but there are a host of other modern dilemmas that crop up here in various guises, some deep and involved, some quickly sketched from the notebook of a 10th grader infatuated with Ad-Busters.

Lots to like here, and I’m eager to read more of what Saunders has written.

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

My Name is Red is a fascinating, erudite and incredibly long novel which is obsessed with the relationship between painters and their subjects in Istanbul in the year 1590. It’s a murder mystery, a story of unrequieted love, a history lesson, and a great introduction to the history of Turkish painters. If this subject seems a bit beyond arcane, rest assured: it is.

It took me a number of months to finish My Name is Red, in part because it is exceedingly long, and in part because it is the antithesis of the thriller. The novel is filled with long winded first person speculation about the nature of perspective, the morality of representation, and the lives and times of master illustrators, called miniaturists by the Turks of the time.

The novel is told from dozens of different perspectives, about six of whom are main characters, and the rest of whom are walk ons, or fictional constructs of main characters. (“I am a Gold Coin”, “I am a dog”, “I will be called a murderer”, etc.) Through each of their tales, the truth about a complicated conspiracy among the sultan’s illustrators, and the murders which stem from it unfold. There’s murder, sex, disease, betrayl, drugs, homosexuality, and lots and lots of philosophizing about artistry.

The book is highly topical, as East / West tensions, and the nature of what it means to be a devout muslim are at the heart of the tale, and resonate throughout every back alley and coffeeshop of Istanbul. For those Norm Americans, like myself, who have been so bombarded with post 9/11 imagery decrying the negativity of Islam, this novel is an important tour of the rich cultural history and structure of deeply held beliefs which are a mystery to most of us. One of my goals over the last year has been to develop a deeper understanding of the Middle East, because it’s clear that my countrymen have too long remained willfully ignorant of this region of the world, and are currently suffering for it. Pamuk has helped in this goal in ways the Economist simply never could.

Fascinating and challenging book. I know of absolutely no one to whom I could recommend this one. Also, no more Pamuk for me for a while. Good stuff, but there’s a lot out there which is less dense, less tangled, and less arcane.


Camoflage by Joe Haldeman

Haldeman’s fast sci-fi novel is a quick, fun summer novel which you’d not be disappointed to take to a beach with you. It’s neither bad nor great, and though it does devolve into silliness by the end, there’s enough good science fiction, sex, violence, and historical popcorn to keep you occupied for it’s rather short duration.

What if two aliens came to earth? Both of them could look like anyone or anything they wanted. And they needed to kill one another. Because one is fundamentally nice and the other is fundamentally mean. So when a deep sea salvage team with government ties pulls up a spaceship from the Marianas trench, these aliens get interested and come check it out. Somewhere along the way, a scientist falls in love with an alien. (Thus upping the sheer geek factor on this novel by a full letter grade.) A showdown (yawn) ensues, and love wins the day. The end.

I’d read another Haldeman novel; some of his others get higher praise. It’s always fun to read pulp sci-fi, but this is no Hyperion, just a fun, lighthearted and derivative romp.

The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

I really wanted to love this novel. Pamuk is regarded as the most interesting writer to come out of Turkey in the last century; he even won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 for his novel My Name is Red.

I’ve been reading My Name is Red, and it is a fascinating piece of worldcrafting, on par with (though more subdued than) Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Unfortunately, The White Castle, an earlier effort by Pamuk is not up to the same standards.

In brief: In a found manuscript, we read the tale of a young scholar of Venice who is captured by the Turks in the seventeenth century. He is enslaved and moved to Istanbul. But because of his keen intellect and his knowledge of medicine and science, he becomes the personal property of a Turk named Hoja, with whom he shares a remarkable physical resemblance. The two work together on problems of pseudo-science and philosophy which obsess Hoja. Eventually, they switch places and one “becomes” the other. The end.

We get a lot of byplay about the nature of self and the relationship between the east and the west during the time period. But the doppelganger story seems to have been so thoroughly mined already by everyone from Hesse to Wilde, that it’s hard to see what’s new here. (Besides, does anyone in the modern world really think about the doppelganger theme anymore?) The details of life in sultanic Istanbul at this time period are interesting, but they are so secondary to the story that we only barely get the flavor. And the end of the piece simply fizzles out in a confusing welter of events which leave me at least with no real take-home-lesson.

I feel embarrassed to suggest that I was bored by the world of a Nobel Prize Winner, but I was. This is a book which is not particularly interesting, and in which you keep waiting for some fine philosophical point to be raised. When no pearl of wisdom ever materializes, I felt let down.

However, My Name is Red is much, much finer (also much, much longer) so I intend to continue exploring to find out more about Mr. Pamuk, his culture, and his philosophy.


The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“Will you come home to me on the Smile?”

Didion, sixties counterculture chronicler and maven chronicles the year after the death of her husband with heartbreaking detail and a vivid ability to recollect the hardest parts of life.

This is likely as essential a book for the now withering Baby Boomer generation as was Slouching Towards Bethlehem fifty years ago. It’s a heartbreaking mediation on marriage, aging, and the lonliness of widowdom. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had tears in my eyes and had to stop reading several times.

My good friend KM tells me that the tragic footnote to this tale is that Didion’s daughter, QR, did not actually make it through her illness after all, and died some months after the publication of the book. This makes even the small ray of hope offered at the memior’s conclusion fade out and disappear.

Read this book if you are a Baby Boomer with a spouse. Eventually, one of you will lose the other. The Year of Magical Thinking may help in some small way prepare you.

Read this book if you have parents who are Boomers. You will lose them eventually too.

Read this book if you’re human and care about other people in your life. As another sixties counterculture icon warned us long ago, “No one here gets out alive.” Plan accordingly.

The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

It’s lucky that the Devil’s Highway deals with such a topical subject since the writing is atrocious. Somehow, it won a few journalism awards, which is a bit shocking to me. I’d expected that the overall standards for journalistic excellent might have been higher.

The Devil’s Highway deals with the ill-fated voyage of a dozen Mexican illegal immigrants, and the “coyotes” who led them to ruin in the desert of Arizona, a few hundred miles west of Tuscon. It chronicles the poor choices and lack of economic prosperity that led these men to decide to go on this trip, and the equally poor skills in navigation that wound up killing many of them.

There’s a level of (wholly justified) outrage here on behalf of the writer which makes this feel much more like an Op-Ed piece than a work of journalistic objectivity.

The book humanizes the often abstract border debates in the US, and it does tell an interesting if sad tale. But the author’s use of the English language is so without regard for the traditional rules of grammer as to make it difficult on occasion to discern his meaning. I’m not trying to pick a stylistic quibble here, but the common misuse of clichés, poor punctuation, and strange narrative intrusion into otherwise factual paragraphs makes this read more like a high school report on events than those of an award winning journalist.

The familiarity with local flavor (music, clothing, foods, lingo, etc.) goes a long way towards counteracting these shortcomings and make the book worth spending time on for anyone interested in the border culture of the southwest.

Likewise, the avalanche of speculation, seemingly unsupported assertions, and the fantastic statistics tossed around without any citations weaken this book’s messages: the immigration debate cannot lose sight of the humanity of its subject. Illegal immigrants are people and deserve a more humane policy to deal with cases in which they decide to break the law and cross illegally into the United States. I don’t think that Mr. Alberto Urrea proposes any workable solution to the problem, but he’s certainly good at bringing it to everyone’s attention.

Perhaps I missed some secret genius here? Others have seemed to be mightily impressed by this work…


A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

As may be clear, I was sufficiently enchanted Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything that I immediately went out a bought a few of his other books and moved them to the top of the queue.

A Walk in the Woods had been recommended to me by my old friend Kitty in Iowa, so I read it next.

It’s a delightfully good humored walk along the Appalachian Trail with Bryon and an old highschool friend of his. Along the way, you get a lot of history of Appalachia, a lot of light forestology, and a lot of Bryson’s cheer and self-deprecating sense of humor.

This book is delightful, though nowhere near as impressive in scope or depth as A Short History. This one is exactly what the title indicates: A Walk in the Woods with Bill Bryson. But it definitely leaves one with a profound respect for the trails of North America, and a strong desire to go backpacking.


A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Bryson has created a primer for the physical sciences which should be a part of every ninth grade curriculum. This book is funny, fascinating, and extraordinarily informative. The title is remarkably apt; by the time you’ve reached the end of the book’s five hundred plus pages, you will know a great deal more about almost everything, from whales, to magnetism, to mathematics, to microbiology and cosmology. Bryon begins with the remarkable fact of your existence, and carries you through to several possible end of days scenario, stopping to have tea with nearly every major scientist and thinker of the last five hundred years along the way. And did I mention that it’s a delightfully funny book? Seems impossible, but it’s true. If A Short History of Nearly Everything were required reading in highschool or middle school in North America, within ten years, we would see our global math and science disadvantage shrinking. It really is that kind of inspiring. At least it was to me. By the end of each chapter, I found myself thinking, “Yes! That’s what I’m going to devote my life to studying! I never knew there was so much we still don’t understand about that topic!”

I will briefly address some critics who have (correctly) pointed out that Bryson shies away from delving too deeply into any particular topic, instead seeming to reach a certain point of complexity and then pull his focus away with a sort of “and gee isn’t this all just fascinating!” attitude. This is an accurate criticism of this book. As a primer on nearly everything, it doesn’t give you textbook depth of detail on any of the topics it covers, preferring instead to give you a rudimentary knowledge of the topic, the challenges, the current state of the art, and the major players in the field. For my money, that’s more than enough. If you want more on a particular topic, go buy books on that topic. As a primer and an onramp, ASHONE does what it intends to do.

I finished this one somewhere around three am over the pacific ocean in February. Upon arrival at home, I immediately bought copies for Mike, Vic & LAF, hoping that they would be as inspired by it as I was.

Run, don’t walk to get this book and read it. Thanks, Mr. Bryson.


In the Flesh by Clive Barker

Misfit Teens beat up a homeless guy and steal something from him that they shouldn’t. A rich misogynist descends into an urban labyrinth of monstrous femininity. And so on… These are more great Barker short stories from the eighties. I only wish he’d written more.


The Inhuman Condition by Clive Barker
A delightful collection of horror shorts from the eighties by Clive Barker. Start with Books of Blood, but wander through these dark halls when it’s time for more.


Bangkok City Guide by Lonely Planet
Bangkok, crown of Thailand, tropical jewel of southeast asia is a world unto itself. It sprawls for miles on either side of the peaceful Chao Phayra river and rises up to touch the polluted skies in the form of hundreds of modern glass and steel skyscrapers.

My well traveled friend Dave L. loaned me this handy pocket size city guide to the city before our departure, and it proved a welcome companion to the more robust but diffused knowledge in the general book on Thailand. More than once, I was able to get where we wanted to be by unfolding the front cover map and pointing out our desired destination to the patient, but sometimes English-lacking tuk-tuk drivers.

I will definitely buy a city guide to any mega-city I intend on visiting in addition to the general country guides. The two in tandem provide an excellent introduction to a place.


The Talisman by Stephen King

This is one of the more beloved books by many King fans, I believe. So I decided to take it with me on our trip to Thailand and read through it again. Last time for me had been in High School, where I believe my old friend S.G. had really enjoyed this one.

Talisman has never been one of my favorites, and now I remember why. It’s a young man’s journey across the 80’s US and a parallel dimension called the territories. Evil chases him because he’s a sort of chosen one who can rescue the talisman and stop a wicked plan to make the territories as bad as the US. His dying mother is caught up in things as well…

A few of the characters are interesting. A few are wholly unbelievable. (“All boys are baaaaad! Axiomatic!”) All of the usual King writing style characteristics are here, and as a frowning look at mid eighties America, I suppose there’s a little substance. But overall, it’s a fun idea whose execution is a bit forced, and which goes on both way too long, and not long enough to be epic.
Been quite a long time since I've posted anything. About to fix that.

I'm here in Houston, TX for the last week. The Professor has been doing a nine week rotation through the white wizard's tower of a prominent downtown firm. So we've been living in a small place in Midtown, among the ferraris, crackheads, and high end resturants of central Houston.

Sixteen new book posts coming up, ranging as far back as January of this year.

In our lives: A formal tonight, tuxedos, gowns, and partying until dawn. Then one more week here with the Senator, the esteemed KM, and other fine new friends. Then we're back to Austin for a few weeks, with a brief detour through LA, followed by two weeks in Vancouver and the Gulf Islands.

Cheers,
-tf

Sunday, April 29, 2007

A few moments of personal reflection. An update on the varied aspects of my life which might interest anyone who reads this, and may serve to amuse me in future years when I glance back at this post:

First, an apology for whatever has happened to the font on this page, which has turned any number of symbols, from the common " to the slightly less common -- into some silly block. I'm going to experiment with changing the font on the page, but if I were REALLY going to spend any serious time on this blog, I'd first post on the 15 books I've recently read that I've not yet written about. Some of them were even great, like Bill Bryson's works...

The Professor and I are both home tonight at our house in Hyde Park after an enjoyable and low-key afternoon of celebrating Vic's 60th birthday. We had a water-balloon fight on the back deck of the house, and MF & SKF made some incredible dinner. Yesterday we attended Eyore's birthday down in Pease Park, and enjoyed a relaxing hippie vibe with the Keep Austin Weird crowd.

I'm still jet-setting between Austin and Vancouver, which is enjoyable though frequently exuausting. The Professor is finishing up her first year of law school, and it's safe to say she'll be happy to have it behind her. We're leaving in a few weeks for Houston, where we'll be spending about nine weeks this summer while she does a summer associateship with a big firm down there.

MF is working at a sushi-bar again this spring, and seems to be enjoying it immensely. LAF is working for a web-developer, and enjoying it not-at-all, but she has a new puppy named Reece, who is delightful, and I suspect that she'll really enjoy living here this summer. SKF recently won an award for her pastel work, so we're all very proud of her, and she's still kicking much ass on the real-a-tor front; displaying an impressive amount of adaptibility and business savvy. Vic says he is now "the cat's gardener."

So for now, I'm off to read in bed until The Professor finishes reading her Con Law.

Goodnight,
-tf

Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield

Pressfield’s engaging retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which three hundred Spartan warriors held off the boundless hordes of Persia for seven days is a really fun “Last Stand” type historical novel. For those of you who have seen the kickass trailer for the upcoming movie “300” – this novel well chronicles the same events. And if you aren’t quite up to reading Herodotus’ chronicle of these same events in ancient greek, then you might quite enjoy this book.

If, on the other hand, descriptions of manly valor, piss, blood and mutilation, and senseless warfare are distasteful to you, you might not enjoy this book. At all.

In the course of reading this tale of heroism and slaughter, I came to two conclusions: First, I now know a good deal more about the history of ancient Greece than I did before, and second, the Spartans were probably not very nice people. Valuing the ability to take and dish out massive punishment above all other attributes doesn’t make for a very nice society, but it does make for warriors who are superb fodder for historical epic battle tales like this one.

I’m now eager to see the movie “300”.

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

The oddest thing about Odd Thomas is that it was actually a little moving at the end. See, I expected this book to be really weak, since the premise, the writing, and the emotional maturity of the characters all seemed to hover around the age-appropriateness of, say, a novel featuring a scimitar wielding dark elf. But despite all this, the book had some cool imagery, a surprisingly appealing central character or two, and a decent twist at the end.

So, Mr. Dean Koonz, despite your novels being widely sold in grocery store checkout lines, I must admit that I rather enjoyed both of the novels of yours I’ve read. So, I suppose I’ll add to the massive tub of gold doubloons you use to bathe and by another one sometime.

Sorry Didion, McCarthy, Kundera, Carter, Pamuk, Atwood, and all you other serious writers out there working to improve the craft and placate the ghost of Alexander Pope. The novel may well be a trashy form for the lower classes, but it sure is a lot of fun as popcorn sometimes.

Pareto & Mosca by James H. Meisel

As is easy to do these days, I found myself incensed and fascinated by the current political climate in the United States. The last few years have provided a fascinating study in the breakdown of the democratic process at the hands of a few corrupt elites. But it seems clear that this sort of behavior is nothing particularly new. It wasn’t new with Mills obseverved a similar clustering of Power Elites in the post Eisenhower days. It wasn’t new in the Roman Senate. Corrupt and elite individuals or cabals seem to have been excercising their power in ways which are not necessarily in line with the common weal for as long as monkeys have been talking to one another.

So I started blogging on the topic a little here: http://unfettereddiscourse.blogspot.com/

My great social and political science mentor, Columbia University graduate and ex-CIA analyst recommended that I check out Pareto & Mosca if I wanted to better understand some early Italian philosophers’ take on the relationships between the individual and the state, which seemed to have some significant bearing on the topic.

So I read and skimmed my way through this somewhat dusty tome, very impressed by how currently relevant the work of these two great minds still is today.

A fascinating if somewhat arcane look at two early social / political scientists.

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

The Hellbound Heart is a tightly written horror novella. Apparently it served as the inspiration for the Hellraiser series of films.

In The Hellbound Heart, Frank, a man for whom life’s pleasures have ceased to be enough is given a puzzle box. Once opened, the puzzle box summons a breed of sadomasochistic demons from another dimension, who thrive on torturing eternally those mortals who foolishly open the box.

Somehow, Frank’s tormented soul escapes from the Cenobytes and inhabits an attic room in the house where his brother and his brother’s unpleasant wife life.

I’ll not give away anything further except to comment, as I have before, that I really admire the unique tone, the brutality, and the overt sexuality of Barker’s writing. Lots of good wordplay here, like mixing “abattoir” and “boudoir” for example, or fun phrases like, “his flesh a catalog of torments”, and so on…In the early to mid eighties, Barker was doing things in the horror genre that were quite outside of what the mainstream horror novelists attempted.

This novel was fun, vicious, and fast.

Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Freakonomics has a subtitle: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

This subtitle is a bit misleading, but Levitt (who does the number crunching) and his author Dubner, who is a writer for the New York Times, do a good job of looking at a number of different social phenomena using economist’s methods and mindset. They mostly use complex statistical correlation tracking to draw conclusions from data on a variety of topics quite unrelated to what most people think of when they consider the dismal science.

They tackle Sumo Wrestling (it’s rigged), teacher cheating to improve student performance on standardized tests (they do), the pyramid scheme of Chicago crack dealing, the correlations between infant name selection and socio-economics, and most controversially, the relationship between the passage of Roe v. Wade and a drop in crime rates.

Of course, economics is really little more than a set of theories to interpret data which is based on statistics, so it applies nicely to these sorts of topics.

Levitt and Dubner are interesting, convincing, and the book is certainly written for the layman. No background in math, statistics, social theory, or economics? No problem. Just let the boys explain a few basic principles for you, then sit back and be dazzled by their factoids.

The book is delightful, fast to read, and will encourage you to think, however briefly, about the world in a slightly different way. And that’s never a bad thing.

Thanks to Tucker for loaning me this one.

World War Z by Max Brooks

“And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles…”

Max Brooks’ novel of human v. zombie warfare is vastly better than it has any right to be. Brooks has given us a retrospective oral history of the first war between humans and the living dead. The book gives us interviews with a wide array of people who relate their experiences during “World War Z” – from the Chinese doctor who discovered patient zero, to the marine grunts who held the line during the disastrous Battle of Yonkers.

Seems like this book was almost required reading for the game developer / geek set last fall. Everwhere one turned in these circles, it was being mentioned. Certainly, it doesn’t really deserve a place alongside serious apocalypse fare, but it WOULD make a good MMO video game, I suppose…

Good stuff here if you appreciate the cultural meme that the zombie gene occupies

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Larson weaves together the stories of two obsessed men in this interesting, dark historical novel.

I suppose that the work is non-fiction. These folks lived and died in much the way Larson tells it, though one suspects that he had to imagine quite a bit (to echo Han Solo) in order to provide us with this level of detail.

In the months leading up to the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair a killer worked Chicago. He lured young women to their deaths in an oddly productive way. This isn’t your lurid sex-fiend serial killer, so much as a homicidal opportunist with a zeal for capitalism.

At the same time, young America’s foremost architects, planners, landscape artists (Frederick Law Olmsted, father of Central Park, for example) were all gathered together to create a World’s Fair which would outdo the one put on by the Parisians some years earlier.

This was a fascinating look at large scale project management, the spirit of the age, attitudes and lifestyles at the turn of last century.

While the serial killer stuff almost felt tacked on to lend enough lurid wickedness to the tale to make it more mass marketable, the book was still fascinating, and made me understand why the Chicago World’s Fair of 1892 features so prominently in the mind of those young men and women who grew up in the early years of the 21st century.

Coming off the post-civil-war farm and into the White City of Chicago and the modern age must have been an incredible awakening for the country.

Friday, February 02, 2007


The Road by Cormac McCarthy

“The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.”

So ends the modern human race in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road. I lack the superlatives to accurately praise McCarthy’s work in this arena. The Road is a stark, frighteningly bleak novel of post nuclear holocaust America, through which two characters, The Man, and The Boy travel, in an effort to reach the sea.

The Road is a road novel, of an epic, wandering journey. Its sustained tone and bleak imagery are beyond powerful. It is a compelling vision of what a purgatorial world of ash might well be. There are few colors save for the orange of fires and the crimson of blood.

The Man protects the boy. The boy tries to understand the world his father is leaving him. The language grates against your soul and bones.

A passage chosen at random:

“They plodded on, thin and filthy as street addicts. Cowled in their blankets against the cold and their breath smoking, shuffling through the black and silky drifts. They were crossing the broad coastal plain where the secular winds drove them in howling clouds of ash to find shelter where they could. Houses or barns or under the bank of a roadside ditch with the blankets pulled over their heads and the noon sky black as the cellars of hell.”

Among McCarthy’s paragraphs, this passage is not particularly powerful (though it is), it’s just the first one I opened the book to and jammed my thumb towards. McCarthy’s voice never falters. It’s a feat of wordcraft every bit as powerful as Blood Meridian, and dealing with a subject which is much more topical.

Ever want to know what it’s like to be one of the last humans alive at the beginning of nuclear winter? Can you imagine the crushing bleakness of trudging through a world of ash, coughing up your lungs as radiation sickness consumes you, and wondering what will become of your son when you are gone? Want to envision what kinds of life go on in this circle of Dante’s world?

“…life in the deep. Great squids propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkess. Shuttling past like trains, eyes the size of saucers.”

This is not Jericho. This is not the feel good Apocalypse. This is the hopelessness of cities buried under radioactive ash, of slavers, of sickness, of death. There are no plants during a nuclear winter. There are few living animals upon the surface of the planet. It’s terribly cold and the sun’s heat is blocked from reaching the planet. There are no stars, and the moon is not visible. The societies of man are vanished, and those ragged survivors who don’t give up immediately face a long journey to perdition down on McCarthy’s Road.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper by John D. MacDonald

The second John MacDonald novel I read was every bit as quick, but a good deal less interesting than The Deep Blue Goodbye.

Travis McGee goes to a small community in Florida where a beautiful young woman is busy flushing her life down the drain. Investigations, fist-fights, drinking, and boat chases ensue. McGee nearly finds love but is thwarted.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still first class pulp ripoff-noir stuff. It’s just that first class tripe is still tripe.

Entertaining, fast, violent, and characterized by the same sorts of “look at the wreckage of our modern lives” observations as MacDonald’s other work. Great for students of the genre, largely already lost in the back lots of used bookstores for everyone else.

The Lonely Planet Thailand

The Lonely Planet guides to various countries have long been a staple for backpackers and the adventurous mainstream traveler. This one is thorough, detailed, and possessed of a great number of useful maps, phone numbers, etc. At over eight-hundred pages it’s also quite a bit too big to take with you on the road. So it’s a helpful book to read through in detail BEFORE you buy your plane tickets and plan your itinerary.

So that’s what I did. Over the course of several rainy nights in Vancouver I plowed through all the descriptions of the different cities and provinces, skimmed the restaurant and hotel reviews for the most part, then selected three destinations for The Professor and my trip there over New Years.

This is a book review site, not a travelogue, so I’ll skip all the details on the trip, except to say that Thailand is an incredible place, which I look forward to returning to—and that the Lonely Planet: Thailand helped prepare us for the trip quite well.

My only complaint is that the section on health towards the end of the book tends to be a bit scarier than it needs to be. It’s got grisly descriptions of all the various jungle diseases that one MIGHT contract; enough to make the faint of heart say, “I’m NEVER going there!” Which would be a major mistake…