70 posts tagged “books”

Books: Roseanna - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Sep 20, 2009
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The husband and wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo virtually invented the Nordic police procedural genre in their series of 10 Martin Beck novels in the late 60's and early 70's. It's obvious from the first few pages that Mankell, Fossum, Indridasson and the rest writing in that space today owe everything to these two. And except for the absence of current technologies this story - an investigation into the murder of an American tourist whose body is thrown from a cruise ship - did not seem dated at all. The rest of the series is in my 'To Read' pile.

Books: Books - A Memoir - Larry McMurtry

Sep 19, 2009
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Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Larry McMurtry is a prolific Pulitzer and Oscar winning writer, but his real love affair with books is in the reading and, especially, in the buying and selling of them. Odd for a boy who grew up in a book-free house in Archer City, Texas.

McMurtry has been in the antiquarian book business for 40 years and a few years ago moved his Booked Up store from Georgetown D.C., back to Archer City after his Georgetown rent became a burden. Booked Up occupies a number of buildings in Archer City and reportedly is home to some 400,000 volumes.

'Books' is not so much about books themselves but is more a glimpse into the strange subculture of antiquarian and used book buyers and sellers and at the many eccentric characters who occupy it.

A quick and easy read. Lots of short page-or-two chapters. But a worthwhile read for bibliophiles.

Books: This Republic Of Suffering

Aug 21, 2009
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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In This Republic of Suffering historian and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust explains how the mass casualties of the Civil War forced Americans to re-examine and radically alter their attitudes toward death.

Pre-Civil-War Americans sought "The Good Death" - to die at home, surrounded by family, prepared and at peace, fully confident of the life to come, to be buried in a family plot or familiar local churchyard. The Good Death was obviously impossible for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fell in the war. Many were buried in makeshift graves near battlefields hundreds of miles from home. Others were simply left where they fell, to be picked at by scavenging animals and, eventually, to rot away.

There was no official apparatus for notifying families that their loved ones had been lost. Families often learned of the fate of their sons, brothers, husbands from letters from comrades. Sometimes the letters home from their distant soldiers just stopped.

The mass carnage led many to begin to question their deeply-held belief in a benevolent diety. Others turned to spiritualism in an attempt to contact their lost on The Other Side.

After the war's end there was a growing acknowledgment of the country's and the Government's obligation to the dead. The military rituals and honors for those killed in the line of duty that we take for granted today - notification of next of kin, graves registration - were simply non-exisitent prior to this time. Faust describes the grisly and harrowing post-war efforts to identify and gather together the dead from thousands of sites for reinterment in newly established national cemeteries. The disparity in the handling of the Union and Confederate dead - efforts to identify the South's dead were left entirely in private hands - led to a reinforcement of Southern nationalism.

Faust writes wonderfully but many of the most poignant passages in the book come from the letters of soldiers and survivors which she cites extensively. She discusses the impact that the war's carnage had on American writers like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce and Herman Melville.

In the end, Faust says, 'We still live in the world of death the Civil War created..... Even as the Civil War brought new humanity ... in the management of death, so too it introduced a new level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come." A heartbreaking but strangely wonderful book.

Originally posted at Goodreads.

Books: The Lost City of Z

Jul 25, 2009
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The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm nearly finished with this audiobook and I have to say it's one of the most fascinating stories I've ever read - the story of the early twentieth century British Amazon explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, a real-life Indiana Jones, whose obsession with finding a legendary lost city in the Amazon jungles leads to tragedy, not only for himself but also for dozens of others who follow his trail into the jungle after his disappearance, attempting to learn his fate. If there's a Hell on Earth for humans, it's certainly the Amazon jungle. On many expeditions, Fawcett and his parties had to contend with the most appalling conditions - heat, hunger, unrelenting insects, bizarre tropical diseases, infection, deadly vipers, jaguars, piranhas, hostile cannibalistic tribes - and this for years at a time. Highly recommended. Truly a Ripping Yarn! Originally posted at Goodreads.

Books: The Glister

May 17, 2009
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The Glister: A Novel - John Burnside

John Burnside

I picked up this strange, beautifully written book in the library just yesterday. I planned to do a short peruse and then go back the the books I already have in progress, but ended up devouring this in a couple of sittings. Highly recommended.

Excellent NYT review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Rafferty-t.html

Originally posted at Goodreads

Books - Chris Knopf - The Hamptons Mysteries

Feb 20, 2009
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Last summer in this post I mentioned my discovery of and fondness for Chris Knopf's Hamptons mysteries, featuring the hard-drinking tough guy Sam Aquillo. As Publisher's Weekly said, "How can you go wrong with a philosophizing hero who drinks Absolut, reads Kant, drives a '67 Grand Prix and has a dog named Eddie Van Halen?"

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I received an email from the author himself asking if I'd like an advance reviewer's copy of of the fourth novel in the series, Hard Stop, which is due out in May.

Sure!, I said and, lo and behold, a few days later I received and uncorrected bound galley copy of the new book. Pretty cool! (Chris's day job is marketing and he's obviously very good at it.)

I haven't gotten around to Hard Stop yet because I realized I had yet to read number three in the series, Head Wounds, and we all know (repeat after me) "You have to read them in order!"

Head Wounds finds Sam accused of the murder of a local builder. (Real estate seems to be to the Hamptons what Politics is to D.C.) As Sam tries to extricate himself from his predicament, we're treated to a parade of colorful characters - lawyers, barkeeps, good cops, bad cops, and a sexy school psychologist with an outsized nose - and to plenty of action.

Like the two earlier installments, Head Wounds oozes with Sam's (and Chris's) cynical humor. Sam reminds me of nothing less than a latter day Travis McGee.

Knopf's Hamptons in not the Hamptons of Ina Garten and Billy Joel. Conflict and tension between Hamptons old-timers and the big money that has turned the area into a haven for the super-rich is bubbling below the surface in all of these books.

Each book in this series has been better than the last. I'm looking forward to Hard Stop and to many more Sam Aquillo novels to come.

Vacation Report

Sep 28, 2008
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As I mentioned, we just got back on Tuesday from our annual "disappearance" (see Lisa Lutz's Curse of the Spellmans) to the Carolina beaches. Basically lazed around and read for two and a half weeks, punctuated only by trips to the local seafood shack for just-off-the-boat flounder, shrimp, scallops, and crab, accompanied by hush puppies and washed down with gallons of "unsweet" iced tea.

Here's the collection of stuff I read. The Mosley was great - the end of Easy Rawlins??. Daughters of the North was an interesting dystopian novel along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale or Children of Men. The Leopold and Loeb book made for some nice, light beach reading. Tama French's The Likeness wasn't as good as her first one, Into The Woods. Oscar Wao was sad/funny. I feel like I've been reading Les Miserables for years. I found a nice four volume edition from the 1930's for sale in our library's Book Cellar. Right now I'm about a third of the way through volume 3. It's a fine book when the story is moving forward, but there are so many digressions - pages and pages of French history and politics - that it's a bit of a plod at times. The rest of the stuff - the MacDonalds, Lee Child, et. al. - was just great escapist beach reading.

Anyway, one afternoon a wicked front blew through and it rained pretty heavily. I was in the shower and my wife came pounding on the door: "Wanna see a waterspout?" So there I am all soaped up checking out this waterspout off the beach directly in front of our condo. I ran to get the camera, but by the time I got back it had pretty much dissipated. But it looked just like this:

Waterspout

Cool!

Another Little Reading Project

Aug 29, 2008
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Someone recommended Lee Child's Jack Reacher series to my wife a few months back. She ended up going through all dozen of them in, like, a week or something ridiculous like that. So I stuck a few of those in my beach bag as well as a few of the Travis McGee's. Should be a fun couple of weeks!

Killing Floor (Jack Reacher) - Lee Child

Lee Child

My New Reading Project

Aug 29, 2008
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One of my favorite mystery writers - or writers period - is John D. MacDonald. MacDonald wrote dozens of novels beginning in the 1950's until his death in the 80's, most notably his Travis McGee series, one of the landmarks of the genre. Robert B. Parker called it "one of the great sagas in American fiction".

His work has influenced a whole generation of hardboiled writers. Carl Hiassen said: "Most readers loved MacDonald's work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty." Stephen King called MacDonald "the great entertainer of our age".

Over the years I've read a bunch of the McGee novels and a few of his others, and I've collected quite a few in paperback from library sales, yard sales, etc., but I'm sure that there are at least a few that I've missed.

So I'm planning to embark on a new project: to read all 21 Travis McGee novels - in order of course.- and then to move on to MacDonald's other work.

Next Friday we're headed to the beach in NC for 17 glorious days - barring any hurricanes (I'm talking to you Hanna) - so I hope to get a good start.

One thing that's fascinating is the evolution of the cover art for these novels, from the racy covers of the 60's when they were first published, to the more, shall we say, staid covers of the recent editions.

To wit:

60's - Va Va Voom!

Sixties

Eighties: Not so much.

Eighties

Nineties: Zzzzz....

Nineties

The John D. MacDonald Homepage

Vox Hunt: What I'm Reading

Jul 20, 2008
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Show us the book you're reading right now.
Submitted by Strive2Be.
I've got these three going right now:

Plus this audiobook:

The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria