Ready When You Are, C.B.

Goldenboy and How Town, Two by Michael Nava

2013-05-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

"You have a call."

Opening to

Goldenboy

by Michael Nava

Henry Rios, attorney for the defense, has a habit of taking hopeless cases, cases with defendants who are certainly guilty. He takes these cases as favors for a friend or for his sister, intent to provide the best representation his clients can hope for. It's his dedication to this principal, that everyone deserves representation no matter how guilty they look or how guilty they actually are, that leads him to fight for his clients until the end, when he finds them innocent, at least innocent of the crimes they are charged with.

In Goldenboy, Henry Rios has a young client who was found in a locked room with the murdered victim, the murder weapon, a knife, in his hand. That the accused claims that he can remember going down into the basement room and waking up with the bloody knife in his hand, but that he has no memory of what happened in between or of committing the crime at all. Everyone, the police, the accused's friends and co-workers, even Henry Rios, thinks he did it--no one else possibly could have-- and that once he gets his memory back they'll be able to figure out his motive.

No one suspects that he can't remember the murder because he didn't do it.

In How Town, Henry Rios goes back to his home town in rural California, to represent the husband of his sister's friend. The accused is an admitted pedophile, the victim a known child pornographer who may have been involved in a blackmail scheme or possibly child trafficking. While no one would call the defendant 'innocent', Henry Rios believes that he did not commit this murder. To many details just don't add up. And it's Henry's belief that no one should be punished for a crime they did not commit, no matter how horrible a person he may be.

The road to my sister's house snaked through

the hills above Oakland, revealing at each

curve a brief view of the bay in the glitter of

the summer morning.

Opening to

How Town

by Michael Nava

In my review of the first Henry Rios novel, The Litle Death, I commented on how surprised I was to find no mention of AIDS in a mystery with a gay detective written in the mid-1980's. I imagine the circumstances of taking a book to print simply put The Little Death on paper before AIDS became the topic of every conversation at least in the Gay community in California, because it's all over the place in both Goldenboy and How Town. AIDS hits home for Henry Rios right away, too. In Goldenboy, Henry falls in love with Josh, a 22-year-old sometime college student who is briefly a suspect. The two move in together by the end of the novel even after Josh tests postivie for HIV. In How Town, Josh is fighting the disease, undergoing treatments and dealing with the early stages of what became the typical path AIDS took.

I must give Mr. Nava credit for this. He does not shy away from the subject at all. But his books never become AIDS books either. AIDS was part of living in the Bay Area in Goldenboy and in Los Angelos in How Town. Mr. Nava deals with AIDS just as he does with other aspects of California life in the 1980's. This portrait of California life is one thing that makes the Henry Rios novels so successful. Reading then is a bit like trvelling back in time. As someone who spent the 1980's in California, I continually found myself recognizing the places Mr. Nava described and remembering the events his characters go through.

The Henry Rios novels are what it was really like. The portrait they paint is not always flattering, but it is true-to-life.

The Little Death by Michael Nava

2013-05-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

"I stood in the sally port while the steel

door rolled back with a clang and then

I stepped through into the jail."

Opening to

The Little Death

by Michael Nava

Michael Nava was not the first to create a detective series with a gay protagonist, but he was the first one I read, back in the 1980's when the Henry Rios novels debuted. Since a new edition of all seven novels came out this year, and since I enjoyed reading all ten of the Martin Beck series last year, I decided to give Micael Nava another go, see how well they hold up, maybe collect all seven, too.

I'm pleased to say that I enjoyed the first one, The Little Death, and that it holds up very well.

When we first meet Henry Rios, he is working for his final client with the Public Defender's Office, where he recently lost a big case and was transferred to a smaller branch office as a result. His boss thinks he just needs to take some time away, but Henry wants to look for other work. When an old friend turns up in need of protection, Henry finds himself involved in solving a murderous plot to keep his friend from coming into a sustantial inheritance. By the end of the book, it's clear to the reader if not quite clear to Henry, that he will soon be a private detective of the old school kind.

This is a left-leaning detective story. While not overtly about gay rights, The Little Death is told from the perspective of those on the ground looking up. Our detective is an outsider--because he is gay in a straight dominated world, because he is Latino in a world run by whites, becuase he works for the defense when his classmates became corporate lawyers. His first 'client' is the son of a powerful, wealthy family, old money in California where there is not a lot of old money, but his client is the blacksheep, a drug addict, unsuccessful at everything he ever attempted, and gay, too. His eventual murder will lead Henry to continue his investigation into the highest levels of the Bay Area's upper crust, without payment, just the way an old-school detective works.

No one ever seemed to get around to paying Phillip Marlow or Sam Spade, did they?

While The Little Death still works perfectly well as a detective novel some thirty plus years after its first publication, it's also a window into its time. I'm not sure how clear of a window it is, though. It struck me as set in the present. (It was first published in 1986.) The descriptions of San Francisco and the surrounding area, much of the book takes place on the Peninsula south of the city, are all spot-on. While Mr. Nava changes the names of some of the places he describes, I still felt like he was taking me on a tour of the city since I could recall so many of the places he 'named' in The Little Death. Mr. Nava does this at least as well as Armistead Maupin does in his Tales of the City series. It wasn't just the era's geography that Mr. Nava got right either. The way people lived, the things they did, the opinions they held and the actions they took all rang true to my memories of living in San Francsico in the 1980's.

But it seemed very strange to find no mention of AIDS. When did we become overwhelmed with AIDS in San Francisco? 1985 maybe? The disease was certainly around before that, but at some point in the 1980's every aspect, every organization, every entertainment, every interaction, was tinged by it. You couldn't go anywhere in the city without running into an information table or a fundraiser or at least a poster advertising safe sex. I was once late to a party because my bus was completly blocked by an ACT-UP demonstration. By the beginning of the 90's every time you ran into someone on the street, which happens all the time in San Francisco, there was a slight sense of dread as soon as the conversation turned to how is so-and-so these days...

So I was surprised to find no mention of AIDS in The Little Death. There's no clear date stated in the novel, and I'm sure it was written and sent off to the publishers well before 1986. You could read The Little Death thinking the book took place in the late 1970's, and I didn't find mention of any current event that would clearly establish an exact date for the novel's setting. Were we all that unaware of the crisis we were already living in? Was I?

I intend to read more of the Henry Rios series this summer; I've already got the next two in the series on my TBR shelf. I imagine AIDS will soon play a big role in the story.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

2013-04-29T16:09:00.001-07:00

I was sitting outside the Commodore's

mansion waiting for my brother Charlie

to come outside with news of the job.

Opening to

The Sisters Brothers

by Patrick DeWitt

I found myself sincerely moved by this story of two ruthless, hired killers on their final journey through Gold Rush era California.

This story probably didn't move most readers.

Eli and Charlie Sisters have spent their lives in the service of The Commodore, a weathly, powerful baron who reigns from his mansion in the Oregon Territory. He has sent Eli and Charlie to San Francisco to meet one of his agents who will tell them where to find the man they are to kill. Charlie does not question his job, but Eli has trouble with it. Eli has been having trouble with their line of work for some time.

The Sisters Brothers is firmly planted in Larry McMurtry territory--an American west where life was cheap and bullets flew fast and frequent, a familiar setting to fans of Deadwood. Eli and Charlie would have felt right at home in Lonesome Dove. I made no effort to keep track of how many people Eli and Charlie killed during the course of the novel, but if memory serves me correctly, it's between 12 and twenty. Not all of them deserved it, but most of them did. We are talking about a very rough sense of frontier justice, but Charlie and Eli never kill anyone they don't have to, at least from their point of view.

Which is why Eli has a problem with this particular job. The man they are supposed to kill has invented a formula for a liquid that causes gold to shine bright when poured into a stream. It doesn't seem right to Eli that they should steal this man's hard work and then kill him just so the Commodore can become even richer than he already is.

What moved me, though, were two things, Eli's narrative voice and the bond between the two brothers. Eli's narration is relatively unadorned, but his lack of advanced education and his straightforward manner of speaking, give the book's prose a quality that I found musical and probably historically accurate. Someone from 1851 should sound different than someone from 2011, when the book was published. Eli certainly does. His narration has a formal edge to it that fits the time period but doesn't reach a level higher than what his character probably would have had. He writes like someone who knows he should be more proper when writing than when speaking and like someone not familiar enough with writing to avoid sounding a little stilted. That Mr. DeWitt pulled this voice off so well, impressed me greatly. I was reminded of Charles Portis's young narrator in True Grit.

But no one is moved by a narrative voice, not really. What got to me in the end was Eli's devotion to his brother Charlie. Though both men are morally beyond the pale, if one really thinks about it, Mr. DeWitt gets what it's like to have a brother just like Norman McClean, the author of A River Runs Through It does. The narrators of both books know that their brother is somewhat lost, that they may not be able to reach him, that they may have to leave him to his fate. Eli wishes he could convince Charlie that they should leave the Commodore's employ, go back home to their mother, and set up a shop where they could make a peaceful living. He knows that Charlie is the more capable gun fighter as well. Charlie is the one who has carried them so far, but his way of life is no longer one Eli can be satisfied with.

He just can't bring himself to abandon his brother.

There's more to it than this; there was more to it in A River Runs Through It, too. The way Mr. DeWitt and Mr. McClean understand the complexities brothers share is beyond my ability to describe. It may be something it takes a novel to do. But, that is what moved me about The Sisters Brothers, what made me read the entire thing in a weekend and what made me root for Charlie and Eli even though the horrible end they seem to be heading for is one they truly deserve.

Virus Thirteen by Joshua Alan Parry--The Last ARC I Will Ever Read

2013-04-25T16:42:00.001-07:00

Tell me if you lived through this---

You’re a brand new book blogger. You’re having a grand time figuring out how the book blogs-o-sphere works when you realize that other bloggers are getting free books in the mail, Advanced Reader Copies or ARC’s.

How can I get these ARC’s, you wonder.

You sign-up at LibraryThing, NetGalley, various publishers, a few months go by and sure enough, a free book arrives in the mail.

You’re excited to read it until you get twenty or so pages in, then you experience a growing sense of dread. You keep reading but you know that you’re not going to have anything nice to say about the book. Wracked with guilt, you figure out a way to be truthful but not hurtful. You could just be vague. Focus on the plot. Don’t directly say that you didn’t like it. Maybe an author interview instead of a review, you think.

Free books keep coming, a slow trickle then a steady rain, and soon you’re getting books you enjoy, a few you really love. A year or so passes and you’re getting first string books, things by authors you genuinely admire, popular authors, books you would have bought anyway.

Then you notice just how high your ARC TBR pile is and you begin to experience a new sense of dread.

Do I really have to read all these books, you wonder.

You decide that you’re only going to accept ARC's that "interest" you and start to get very picky. No e-galley’s, no self-published works, no genres outside your comfort zone. You post very explicit instructions regarding ARC's on your about page. The free book offers continue to come your way, but not like they used to. The ARC TBR pile slowing grows smaller, but a few titles manage to slip through your filters and you still find yourself feeling obliged to read books you don’t really enjoy.

Then, one day, you have had enough. No more ARC’s you say. I’ve already got more books than I’ll ever be able to read.

So what book was the last ARC you ever read?

Last week, I read mine, a book called Virus Thirteen by Joshua Alan Parry. The good people at Tor, who send me a list of ARC’s every month or so, sent it to me. A science fiction thriller set in a cancer free future, Virus Thirteen is about a madman’s plan to release a gene-altering virus on the world, one that will make people susceptible to cancer once again, so that the human race can return to its normal course of evolution. About forty pages into the book, I realized that I am simply not the target audience for Virus Thirteen. Sorry about that good people at Tor. I finished the book, but I’m not going to review it. Since I decided to retire from full time blogging and become a part-time consultant, I’m only reviewing books I honestly want other people to read.

Before I could stop them, Tor books sent me another book, A Time of Change by Aimee and David Thurlo. I can tell from the cover that I am not the target audience forA Time of Change. I know there are people out there who take offense when I judge a book by its cover, but seriously. Look at the cover. A hot young cowboy is one thing, but throw in a hot young cowgirl and….seriously, I’m just not the target audience. I can tell from the cover. I really can.

So no more ARC’s for me ever. It’s been fun, it really has. ARC’s have brought me many books that I loved, a few that have become favorites, and I even enjoyed doing the author interviews. But no more jello for me, Mom. I have had enough.

However, if you think you’d like to read either Virus Thirteen or A Time of Change, just let me know in a comment and I’ll be happy to send one or both along to you.

After all, a free book is a free book.

Little Boy Blue by Edward Bunker

2013-04-11T16:38:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1943, a plain

black Ford sedan carried three

people through the Cahuenga

Pass from Los Angelos into the

San Fernando Valley.

Opening to

Little Boy Blue

by Edward Bunker

Edward Bunker's novel Little Boy Blue is not your father's Bildungsroman.

I looked it up. Turns out, I've been misusing the term myself. And I thought I was being so smart, showing off literary terms I learned in graduate school. A Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story that portrays the development of the protagonist's psychological or moral self from youth to adulthood. This applies to lots of novels, of course. But I thought the term referred specifically to novels about artists, writers in particular. Turns out that is a Künstlerroman. Both terms are German. The Germans have a word for everything.

Kunstlerromans your parents may have known include David Copperfield, My Brilliant Career, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The 400 Blows and The Outsiders. (Usually, the hero of a Kunstlerroman doesn't start making art, writing, until after the novel has ended.) I was going to argue that Edward Bunker's Little Boy Blue stands out from the other Kunstlerromans I've read because the hero is a criminal, but now that I think about it-- Ponyboy in The Outsiders spends much of the novel on the wrong side of the law and the young hero in Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows moves from petty crime to reform school. Little Boy Blue is clearly based on the author's own childhood, but The 400 Blows was based on that of its director, Francois Truffaut.

So the hero of Edward Bunker's Little Boy Blue, Alex Hammond, who moves from an orphanage escapee to petty crime to a stint in San Quinten, isn't really all that exceptional. However, though Alex has it much worse than the other petty criminal Kunstlerroman heros I have known, he is much less sympathetic. I can't say that I liked him, even a little. I liked the hero of The 400 Blows and everyone likes Ponyboy.

Alex certainly has it rough from the start, growing up in an orphanage because his father cannot support him and his mother died years before the novel opens. Shortly after his 11th birthday, Alex's father dies, too. Alex then runs away for the first time. The novel follows him through a series of stints in reform schools, then prisons interrupted by periods of freedom lasting from days to months. Alex finds that he loves the freedom he gets when he runs away so much that he repeatedly does so throughout the novel. To survive on the streets, he resorts to crime, first petty ones, then a series of increasingly bad hold-ups that eventually end in shootings.

At every turn he makes bad decisions. I can't fault an 11-year-old, or a 15-year-old for that matter, for making bad decisions, but it can make for a very unsympathetic hero. Alex is not really a nice guy. That he is a fanatic reader helps. When behind prison bars or reform school fences, Alex finds escape in books. He is much smarter than his incarcerated peers, but he is also forced to hide this fact in order to survive. The reader can't help but wonder how society could have saved him. But I also wondered why he didn't save himself. When a character screws things up and ends up back behind behind bars three, then four times, I don't think it's unreasonable to blame him a little, even if he is only 15-years-old. When Alex turns on the aunt and uncle who take him in and give him a basically good home after only two days with them, it's probably impossible for any reader to refrain from blaming him for his fate.

I should say that neither Alex, nor Edward Bunker, ever ask for sympathy from the reader. If Little Boy Blue really is the story of Edward Bunker's childhood, then I do have to admire him for being so open about his own life. Little Boy Blue is not a novel raging against the injustices of society. Alex was dealt a bad hand from the beginning. He played his cards as well as he could, but he doesn't really understand the rules of the game. While this makes for a frustrating character, it is also very true to life.

That Alex, Edward Bunker, managed to survive it all and become a successful author, is a testament to something. I'm just not sure what.

Teaching Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea to 7th Graders: Finale

2013-04-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

I'm paraphrasing.

Student #1: I don't really get why Hemingway throws in those two characters in the end.

Teacher: What do you mean?

Student #1: The man and woman on the terrace who look at the fish skeleton on the very last page. That part just seems weird.

Student #2: It's if you read the fish as a metaphor for a book and the sharks as critics, then they are people who don't understand the book, becuase, after the critics get through trashing it, all they can think is what the critics said about it. They can't see the a really good book anymore.

Student #3: Are we going to read any other books by Hemingway? I think we should read more books by Hemingway.

For the record, when I asked everyone in both classes to give the book either thumbs up, thumbs sideways or thumbs down, there were a handful of thumbs sideways and one thumbs down. Everyone else, probably 85%, gave The Old Man and The Sea an enthusiastic thumbs up. Third period was actually disappointed to find out that I was not going to have them write a paper about it.

First Execution by Domenico Starnone

2013-04-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

When I heard that Nina had

been arrested, I called her

parents.

Opening to

First Execution

by Domenico Starnone

Translated from the Italian by

Antony Shugaar

If you are a longtime reader of crime fiction or thrillers of any kind, you are probably used to having the rug pulled out from under you, narratively speaking. For some of us, finding out that what we thought was true is completely wrong is just want we want in a mystery thriller.

While Domenico Starnone's novel First Execution certainly does this, it does it in a way that will proabably anger as many readers as it pleases.

The story opens when Domenico Stasi, a retired professor learns that a former student, Nina, is being held as a suspected terrorist. He wonders if the radical ideals he taught in his classes inspired her in a way he did not intend. After her release, she visits Stasi and asks him to perform a simple task for her. Go into the apartment of an aquaintance, look up a page in a particular book, copy down the underlined sentence on that page and mail it to an address she provides him. Stasi refuses at first, but after some convincing agrees to perform this one task for Nina, unsure if she is fighting for the right cause or not.

Things become complicated, of course. The events of the novel move along at a quick pace putting Stasi in danger very quickly. At least he thinks he is in dnager. I also thought he was in danger and was really getting into the story when the author pulled the rug out from under me, just about 30 pages into the book.

Completely out of the blue, the narrator breaks character, informs us that he is the author and that he's having trouble deciding what should happen next. He then describes how he personally differs from Stasi, though he is also a retired professor a little too involved with a younger woman. The rest of the novel moves between the life of the retired professor who is struggling to write the novel and the novel the professor is writing.

I was reminded of my favorite book from last year, HHhH by Laurent Binet, which takes a similar tactic featuring a narrator/author who comments on the book as it progresses leaving the reader unsure just how much of the story is to be believed along with if the author is going to go through with writing the end of the book or not. Until now I had thought HHhH was so original, but First Execution predates it by a couple of years.

I've no idea if Laurent Binet read First Execution, but both authors comes from a literary world that spends much more time experiementing with the form of the novel than English language authors do, at least the English language authors I've been reading lately. Binet, who is French, and Starnone, who is Italian, both are as interested in what the novel can do as they are in writing a decent thriller. I found that HHhH delivered the goods, thriller wise, much more than First Execution did, but if you liked one, you'll probably enjoy the other. And if you hated one, don't even bother.

Sunday Salon: All things must come to an end.

2013-03-31T03:02:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of the TBR Double Dog Dare, and the last day of Ready When You Are, C.B. sort of.

I've been thinking about retiring from book blogging lately. I knew that I would have to keep going at least until today, since I had 56 people participating in the TBR Double Dog Dare this year. (Did you make it to the end? Let me know in a comment, and don't be embarrassed if you gave in. Failing to perform a dare is almost as much fun as keeping one.)

I almost threw in the towel a few weeks ago, when Jenners announced her retirement. I've been at this many years now, so I've seen quite a few people come and go. Book blogging is something people do for a while then move on to other things. I've been feeling that I'm one of the last left from the bloggers I followed closely the first year I started keeping Ready When You Are, C.B. I don't really want to be one turning off the lights as I leave.

And, to be honest, I haven't been as intensely interested in writing up every book I read lately. It's become something of a chore. That's not entirely true. What's true is that last month I spent a lot time really working on a couple of posts that I was very proud of only to see them fail to generate anything much in the way of comments. I will own that situation. In retrospect, one post really just missed the mark completely and the other was about a book so obscure it was unlikely to generate any interest. If you're not reading what other people are reading, you won't get much in the way of traffic. (My single most visited post is still my scathing review of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens.)

I've long known this to be the situation, but it still bugged me enough to consider throwing in the towel.

I've also come to realize that once RSS feeds like Google Reader have gone the way of Geocities, remember them, I'll have to start using Twitter and Facebook if I want anyone to find Ready When You Are, C.B. I really don't want to use Facebook more than I already do and I've no desire at all to look into Twitter.

But I had accepted an advanced reader's copy of Elizabeth Strout's new book which I would have to review so I postponed announcing my retirement.

And I'm glad I did.

For Ms. Strout's novel, I decided to just write something up, limit myself to one thorough rewrite and publish immediately instead of scheduling my review to publish days later so I could rework it to perfection. As a result, I had a pretty good time with The Burgess Boys. Good enough to reconsider retiring completely.

I'm still retiring from Ready When You Are, C.B., but I'm also hiring myself back to work as a part time consultant.

So from here on, I'm just going to write up reviews of books with no more than two drafts. No scheduling anything ahead of time. I'm also only going to review books that deserve a review, not every single book I read. If this site "goes dark" for a week or two because of this then so be it. No more regular weekly events, Sunday Salon included. Probably no more challenges and probably no TBR Triple Dare next year. Sorry about that.

But, honestly, when I started this blog, low these many years ago, I did it because book reviews had vanished from my local newspapers. So book reviews only from now on. I expect that I'll see an overall decline in traffic, but that's okay. My new status as a consultant may even free up enough time for me to start Twitter feed so I can alert anyone who wants reviews of obscure books.

I think this consulting gig could work out pretty well.

"It was an hour before the first shark hit him."

2013-03-29T15:58:00.003-07:00

If you find yourself reading Ernest Hemingway's, The Old Man and the Sea to a room full of seventh graders on a Friday afternoon, after you read the line "It was an hour before the first shark hit him." close your book and say,

"We're going to stop there for today."

I promise you at least three students will say, "Noooo!"

But, don't give in.

Make them wait until next week before you read any more.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

2013-03-26T14:33:00.000-07:00

My mother and I talked a lot about

the Burgess family.

Opening to

The Burgess Boys

by Elizabeth Strout

Towards the end of Elizabeth Strouts new novel The Burgess Boys, the title characters are reunited with their sister after a long separation. The three exchange guarded pleasantries until they can warmly welcome each other home. We watch this scene through the eyes of the upstairs neighbor, an elderly tenant who has lived above Susan Burgess for years. We listen in to the conversation, eavesdropping along with the upstairs neighbor, glad to hear, finally, that it looks like everything is going to be okay.

After this scene near the end of the novel, I realized that this was how I'd been reading most of The Burgess Boys, by listening in on conversations, getting the story second hand, instead of watching the main events as they unfolded.

It's an interesting choice for an author to make, distancing the reader from the novel's major events instead of presenting them as they happen. Emily Bronte did the same thing, so it's nothing new, and it was more of a frustration for me in Wuthering Heights than it is in The Burgess Boys.

I should have known from the prologue. As you can see in the opening sentence above, in the prologue, the narrator describes how she and her mother have followed the Burgess family for many years, reading about them, getting second hand gossip about them-- they may have even spoke to them now and then--until, one day, she finally decides to tell their story.

While this sense of being removed from first hand experience of the novel's events may be difficult for some readers, I admit that I found it a bit off-putting at times, in the end isn't this how we all experience many of the most important events in the lives of our own families, not through actually sharing them as they happen, but by sharing them afterwards, through second hand accounts. You may have gone to your sister's wedding, but you only heard about what happened that made the groom so late to the church. By the end of The Burgess Boys, I felt this little literary trick Ms. Strout had used ended up inviting the reader into the family since I was getting all the details at the same time as one sybling or another.

And by the end of the novel, I had come to like them all, too.

If you've read Ms. Strout's award winning Olive Kitteridge, then you know her characters are not always easy to love. The Burgess boys, Jim and Bob, and their sister Susan, are far from perfect, not really admirable, somewhat likable, often annoying, very human. The three of them share a tragic past--they were all in the car when four-year-old Bob released the parking break. Their father didn't notice them rolling down the hill until the car struck and killed him. Since that day, Jim grew up to become a famous then a jaded trial lawyer; Bob became a lawyer also, but one too timid to ever go to trial; while Susan remained in their childhood home town in Maine.

When Susan's grown son, a strange, lonely young man named Zach, throws the butchered head of a pig into the storefront mosque of the Somali refugees who have moved to Maine, he sets a series of events into motion that will change all of their lives. While the events of Zach's legal case and the community's reaction to him make for interesting reading, they are secondary to the Burgess family drama. The Burgess Boys is at its best when it stays within the confines of the family. I'm going to say the same thing for Elisabeth Strout as well. While I think she gets most of the larger political and societal picture around Zach's crime correct, as far as I can tell, Elizabeth Strout is really at her best, her most insightful, when she is focused on familial relationships. She has a way of getting under the skin of difficult people like Susan and Jim Burgess, like Olive Kitteridge, and finding their humanity. It's in this family of difficult people that you'll find the strongest parts of The Burgess Boys.

Full Disclosure: I received an advanced readers copy of The Burgess Boys from the publishers.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

2013-03-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Sooner or later, it was bound to

happen.

Opening to

Rendezvous with Rama

by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is a master of science fiction in it's classic sense. One could probably argue that he created the genre. His novel Rendezvous With Rama is considered one of his best novels. While I found reading it today, some forty years after is was first published, a bit problematic, I would have to agree with the editors at Gollancz who labelled it a "masterwork."

Mr. Clarke typically deals with the probable. While his work is set into the far future, it's always firmly grounded in the scientific knowledge of "today." Rendezvous with Rama speculates about the arrival of a spacecraft sent to our solar system by a very distant and very advanced species. The spacecraft, called Rama by the scientists and astronauts sent to explore it, is the size of a large asteroid, big enough to contain a small world inside its great rotating mass. But once humanity finds away inside Rama, it becomes clear that no one is living inside the spacecraft/asteroid.

What happened to them? Why was Rama sent to orbit our sun once and then head back into interstellar space?

The characters in Mr. Clarke's novel explore Rama as much as they can before it passes too close to the sun for humans to survive. This makes Rendezvous with Rama a travelogue, much like so many early and proto-science fiction novels of the late 19th and early 20th century were. While it's very interesting reading, the way Mr. Clarke's characters come and go made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the story the way I would have liked to. I'm not sure this is a fault with the book. It's actually very realistic. A military expedition would use personnel as needed, send this squad to climb a mounting, this other man to pilot a boat across an ocean; it's unlikely that one single person, or even a small group, would do all the work of a large mission.

As for the ship itself, the ship really is the main character after all, I found it to be just about completely believable. Mr. Clarke sticks very close to what was considered scientifically possible in 1973, as far as I know--I was ten-years-old at the time. Most of what he predicts remains plausible today. I was actually very impressed by this.

While he is very good with science, Mr. Clarke's people remain a bit cold. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey which was based on a screen play by Arthur C. Clarke who worked very closely with director Stanley Kubrick. While the visuals from the movie and its depiction of space travel, remain vivid and entirely believable, it's very difficult to remember the characters. There was a guy called Dave, but it's Hal the computer most of us recall. Tell me what Dave was like. I couldn't tell you anything about him, but I can do a decent impersonation of Hal, good enough to creep out my younger brothers.

In the end, this is one of the major complaints non-fans of the genre have against science fiction, too much science and too little humanity. I think this is a fair criticism of Rendezvous with Rama, but the science, and the speculation, are both good enough to make it worthwhile reading, certainly good enough to consider the book a 'masterwork.'

Wordless Wednesday: Yale library stacks

2013-03-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

Mixed media mail art featuring the stacks at the Yale library. Y

Sunday Salon: A lifetime in a sentence.

2013-03-17T06:06:00.000-07:00

I started reading The Old Man and the Sea with my students last week. Like last year, when I posted a long account of how this went, my current 7th graders are doing very well with the book. I'm having a great time with it, too, but I'm not sure that I'll do it again after this year. I find the book is really getting to me this time around.

Take this sentence:

Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.

I think this sentence is a masterpiece, a wonder of economy by the master of economical writing. From it we learn enough about the old man, Santiago, to make him real and to break our hearts. A tinted photograph, not black and white because he spent money on this particular picture, color tinting would have been extra. It would probably have been a wedding photograph since only a wedding could justify the expense of a tinted photograph in the days when tinted photographs were made.

How long ago did his wife die? Did she die or simply leave him? What matters is that he still loves her, so much that he keeps this photograph, one of his very few possession, and so much that he cannot bear to look at it day in and day out. He keeps it under the one clean shirt that he still keeps. He can bear to look at his wife's picture as often as he needs to wear his one clean shirt, not very often.

Grammatically, this should be two sentences, at least. There really should be a period after "see it." There are four "it"s in this sentence. And a comma after "on the wall."

Of course it's the better the way Hemingway wrote it.

Friday Picture Reading

2013-03-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Andre Kertesz

Kyoto, Japan, 1968

The Corpse-Rat King by Lee Battersby

2013-03-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

The battle was over.

Opening to

The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

When I begin writing a book review, I start by brainstorming a list of ideas, quotes, general things I want to talk about in my review. This is what I came up with for The Corpse-Rat King by Leet Battersby:

fun
fun
fantasy quest fiction
interesting characters
fun

The Corpse-Rat King is about Marius Helles, who is picking what he can from the bodies of the dead after the battle has ended. We're in a medieval like setting, typical for most classic fantasy fiction. Along with his 'apprentice' Gerd, Marius hopes to find something worth enough to retire on the body of a dead nobleman, when he stumbles on the king. Just after secreting the king's crown underneath his cloak, Marius and Gerd are spotted by the king's men, who open fire on the looters killing them both.

As he lies dying, Marius sees the corpse next to him give him a wink. Soon he finds himself pulled under the earth to the land of the dead where he is asked to become their king. He explains that he is not a king but that he can find one for them if they'll let him go back up to the land of the living. They agree, but they send along Gerd to keep an eye on him, to make sure he keeps his promise to find the dead a king to rule over them.

Marius intends to look for a king but he also intends to get as far away from the dead as he possibly can. He and Gerd move through the world, largely hiding from the living who can sometimes tell that they are dead. There's a series of encounters, a bit of unexpected character growth, a few entertaining chase scenes, and eventually the discovery of a suitable king for the land of the dead.

It was fun.

Wordless Wednesday: Fish-eye Photo

2013-03-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

Mixed Media mail art featuring a fish-eye photograph and text from The Great Gatsby.

You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik

2013-03-12T06:13:00.000-07:00

You live in one place.

Opening to

You Deserve Nothing

by Alexander Maksik

Just in case, I want you all to know that I thoroughly enjoyed You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik's debut novel; I think it's terrific. I think it rises above the usual cliches about charismatic teachers and their affairs, but the cliches are all there none-the-less.

You Deserve Nothing is about a high school English teacher who has an affair with a student. Teachers often have affairs with their students, in books. While I've never known a teacher who has had an affair with a student in real life, not with a current student, it's a fairly common trope in books about teachers. Usually, it's a male teacher and a female student, though not always. I've worked in education for over a quarter of a century now and can think of four teachers I've known who have become involved with a student, all of them with former students. I could say five if I was willing to count rumors. Two of these four first met at the college level. To my knowledge, none of them began dating until after the teacher/student relationship had ended, two of them until several years had passed.

William Silver, the main character of You Deserve Nothing, begins an affair after going out for drinks with a few of his students. Do high school teachers anywhere go out for drinks with their students? Even in Paris, where You Deserve Nothing is set, even among the well-heeled clientele of a private school, do teachers really do this? It's like my theory on serial killers, you're much more likely to find one in a novel than you are in real life. Much more likely.

You will probably never find a novel about a teacher working with a full set of students. It's too many characters, 30 to 40 in a class, five classes a day. Instead, what you get is almost always a teacher and that one special group of students. In Donna Tart's terrible, (yes, I said terrible) novel The Secret History, we get a mysterious professor and a very small, specially selected seminar, six students or so. How many students did Robin Williams have in The Dead Poet's Society or Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? Mr. Maksik's teacher, William Silver has a group of ten in his senior seminar, but we see very little of the rest of his day. He seems to teach only the one small class.

It's a wonderful class, mind you. I'd love to take it. I'd love a chance to teach it. That it's in a private school for American students in Paris only makes it more exotic. In books, a very high percentage of teachers work in private schools in wonderful places like Paris. Even the horrible places are really kind of wonderful places. William Silver's high achieving students stand out in sharp contrast to the group of London ruffians Sydney Portier faced in To Sir, With Love, though Sydney Portier kept his hands off throughout the movie. Mr. Portier worked in the East End, true, but it was London's East End. You'll have a hard time finding and American English major who'd turn that job down.

Still, I enjoyed the classroom scenes in Mr. Maksik's book. William Silver is excellent at what he does, if a little bit too close to Miss Jean Brodie for comfort. You might remember The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from either the Muriel Spark book or the Maggie Smith movie version. Miss. Brodie also had a very small set of special students. Both Miss Brodie and Mr. Silver push their students to think about things in ways that make them uncomfortable, make them look at their lives and the place in society in ways their parents may not approve of. Very much like the Robin Williams character in The Dead Poet's Society did.

They all ended up out of work, too.

I suspect I could match the students in Mr. Maksik's book up with those in Ms. Spark's novel. There's the usual assortment: a boy who admires Mr. Silver so much he's practically in love with him; a rebellious boy who comes to admire him in spite of Mr. Silver's flaws; the girl who is not on the ball enough to see through his actions; the girl who hates him, insulted because he didn't choose her as his favorite. You just know someone is going to end up dead or pregnant or both.

So, you may be wondering how is it that I liked You Deserve Nothing?

I admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the classroom sections of You Deserve Nothing. These are likely guilty pleasure for me. Mr. Silver's classroom is often exactly what I aim for with mine, students discovering ideas through their own exploration and discussion with the teacher serving more as a guide than as a director. It's exactly what Socrates had in mind all those years ago.

Outside of the classroom, there is a tension to You Deserve Nothing even before Mr. Silver begins the affair that dooms his career. Even before I knew the plot would take this turn, there was a strange kind of tension to Mr. Maksik's narrative. I wanted to read more before I knew why I wanted to read more. Much of this came from a push/pull attraction/revulsion kind of tension that really began to work its way under my skin early on in the novel.

So, although it contains many of the things that bother me most about novels about teaching, I ended up quite enjoying You Deserve Nothing maybe in spite of itself, maybe in spite of myself.

I'm looking forward to Mr. Maksik's next book.

Sunday Salon: Blah, blah, winter blahs

2013-03-10T00:24:00.000-08:00

I have no idea how to get rid of the little blue
square to the right of this graph.

Lately, I've become a bit disenchanted with reading.

This month I've started and set aside five different books. It's rare for me to do this. I usually have very good taste when it comes to selecting books I'll enjoy, but this year the TBR Double Dog Dare has not exactly been good to me. I've only found one unread treasure on my TBR shelf so far, some good reads, too, but five books I didn't bother finishing at all. That's a lot for me.

Maybe it's the time of year, I thought, but I seem to be reading less these days than I usually do.

So I went back into my archives to check the data. It's all about data in 2013.

Looking at just the two months of January and February since I started keeping this blog in March of 2007 there has been a decline in the overall number of books I read each winter, but thiit levelled off this year.

You can't tell from the above graph, but in 2008 I read a very high percentage of Young Adult books, which may explain the overall decline in reading if you're counting only the number of books read. I've read fewer and fewer Young Adult books since 2008 when they made up a substantial portion of the reviews here at Ready When You Are, C.B.

I suspect I've read more-or-less the same number of pages each winter since 2008. I didn't actually count all the pages for all of the books I read each year, so this isn't very good data, but you get the picture.

I don't know where any of this is going, today, except to say that I may go out and buy a Kindle Fire this afternoon.

Maybe reading will be more fun on a Kindle Fire.

Friday Picture Reading with Michael Nava

2013-03-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

Mr. Nava's six mystery novels featuring Henry Rios are now available as eBooks.

Wordless Wednesday: Mail Art with Airplane

2013-03-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

Mixed media mail art with text from The Great Gatsby.

Widows by Ed McBain

2013-03-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

She'd been brutally stabbed and slashed

more times than Carella chose to imagine.

Opening to

Widows

by Ed McBain

When we've been disappointed by a series of books, many of us turn to comfort reading, old reliables that we can count on to entertain, to satisfy, to be something we enjoy reading.

For many of us, this kind of reading is genre fiction of one form or another, often a subset of very specific genre fiction, maybe the work of one or two very prolific authors.

For me it's crime fiction.

Detective stories, rather authors of detective stories, are very reliable creatures. With most of them, if you liked one of their novels, you'll like them all.

So after a short string of books that just didn't interest me much, a few of which I didn't bother finishing, I turned to Ed McBain. While Mr. McBain wrote over fifty novels in his career, I did not discover him until last year, seven years after he died. He is just my cup of tea, comfort reading.

I recognize just how odd it is to list a book with multiple murders and a sex scandal as comfort reading, but there you are. Book like that just make me feel kind of good.

I knew right from the first sentence of Widows that this was a book for me. A good piece of crime fiction should always start with the discovery of the crime in the opening sentence, preferable with the discovery of a body. Widows not only begins with a body but brings the detective into the story as well. Not just a passing mention of him either, but a nearly full characterization. Carella still sees things more horrible than he can imagine. He'll see a lot in Widows before the book is through.

What I like most about Mr. McBain is how ordinary the work-a-day lives of his police officers are. They all stick very close to procedure, most of which is procedure because it works. Police work is interesting enough from my point of view that excessive violence, ludicrous chase sequences and over-the-top criminal motives aren't necessary to make the story compelling, at least in the hands of a master of the craft. Once you've opened with a woman stabbed to death, you ought to be able to hold the reader's interest from then on.

Mr. McBain certainly does. Widows even manages to bring in a couple of nearly jaw-dropping twists along the way. That Mr. McBain does this without resorting to extreme violence or the revelation of some horribly twisted childhood trauma is one reason why I like him so much.

That and the relationship between Detective Carella and his wife Teddy. Theirs is one of the great unsung romances in literature. Mr. McBain gives us just enough of his character's private lives to fit the bill. For I consider a good comfort read to be a crime story focused on the crime with a minimum of character development and a decided lack of quirky characters.

So when I've had a string a bad reads, I turn to comfort reads like the crime novels of Ed McBain.

So far, he's delivered the goods every time.

Sunday Salon: Most Handsome Classic American Novelist

2013-03-03T05:09:00.000-08:00

Jack London

When I saw this picture of Jack London over at Thomas' blog, My Porch earlier this week, I couldn't help but notice just how handsome Jack London was.

So I thought it might be fun to ask who you think the most handsome classic American novelist was. For my purposes here to be considered a "classic author" one must be dead at least two decades and still in print. That's a good enough random definition for today. I'm limiting this to American authors just to keep things under control for today.

What do you think? I've found five nominees. If you'd like to suggest another, please do so. I'll find a picture and add them to this post.

Leave your vote and/or your suggestions in a comment.

Ernest Hemingway

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Richard Wright

John Steinbeck

Jack Kerouac

Friday Picture Reading

2013-03-01T05:32:00.000-08:00

Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas

Mortality Bridge by Steven R. Boyett

2013-02-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

Too much Bosch.

The notes and blurbs for Steven R. Boyett's new novel, Mortality Bridge all mention three of the big four when it comes to depictions of hell: the Greeks, Dante and Faust; the back of the book jacket mentions Hieronymous Bosch.

Heironymous Bosch was evil.

Mortality Bridge is a mash-up of sorts. The novel's hero, Niko, once made a deal with the devil, like Faust did. In exchange for a successful career as a rock star, Niko will spend eternity in hell. He doesn't know that as part of the bargain all those he loves will also spend eternity in hell.

When his girlfriend is unexpectedly taken down to the underworld, Niko sets off on a journey to set her free combining elements of both Dante, who was looking for his own lost love in Inferno, and Orpheus who travelled to the underworld to win back Eurydice.

Unfortunately, the hell Niko visits is the one imagined by painter Hieronymous Bosch, who was famed for his depictions of hell like the one below.

The underworld of Greek mythology is a bleak place, but not a particularly horrible place. The souls there become mindless blobs of flesh. Actually, they can be accurately described as soulless. They don't really suffer; they just lose everything that made them individuals. It's easy to see why Orpheus wanted to get his true love out of there and why Homer's Achilles said he would rather be the servant of the lowest shepherd than the king of all the underworld. Dantes hell is much worse, but it makes for interesting reading. It's a very organized place; Dante does a very good job laying out the geography of hell. In Dante's hell, the worse the sin, the worse the punishment. However, most of the time the punishment is simply the eternal repetition of the sin. That's a very clever, and terrible idea, if you ask me. Sent to hell for committing cannibalism, spend eternity forced to eat human flesh again and again and again.

Bosch is the worst. His hell is a landscape of tortures performed on people we don't know. Dante's sinners get what they deserve, at least what his society thought they deserved, while Bosch's sinners, who look just like all of us but have no names, get disgusting and cruel punishments inflicted on them for no reason that we can determine. One gets the feeling with Bosch, that he is having a very good time dreaming up all this suffering he is inflicting on the people he has populated his hell with and that he thinks eternal damnation is just part of the human condition.

I love Steven R. Boyett's books. Love them more than they deserve to be loved, probably. Ariel and Elegy Beach are two of my favorite guilty pleasure reads. So I was excited to see that Mr. Boyett had written a new book; it's been a very long time between novels. But I couldn't make it through Mortality Bridge. I gave it 143 pages, but it was just too much Bosch.

Niko finds someone undergoing a terrible torture which is described in detail, then finds someone else undergoing terrible torture described in detail, then finds another person undergoing terrible torture described in detail. Sometimes the person he finds is someone from history, but I didn't find the punishment designed to fit a crime nor was the geography of Hell laid out in an interesting way like it is in Dante.

Instead, Mr. Boyett's hell is the hell of Bosch. It's well done, I suppose, Cory Doctorow and Publisher's Weekly gave the book a terrific blurbs and most of the reviews on Amazon.com are four and five star reviews, but I think a little Bosch goes a very long way. Unfortunately, not long enough to last more than 143 pages.

Not for me anyway.

Wordless Wednesday: Mail Art

2013-02-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

Mixed media mail art made by me.