Listening to David Sedaris’s Calypso a few days after Anthony Bourdain’s suicide is a bit jarring. David talks about his sister’s suicide with the same cold disinterest that he talks about everything else in this small collection of personal essays. His sister’s problems are on a par with bickering with his husband, wasting money on odd clothes in Japan, and picking up trash as he walks around the English countryside. This is nothing new, David has always been a narcissistic sociopath. His lack of empathy just seemed to stand out a little clearer for me this time around. I had…
Category: book review
Noir by Christoper Moore
I’m a fan of audiobooks, since I tend to do a lot of driving for work of one kind or another. So I got the audiobook version of Christopher Moore’s Noir. The reader, Johnny Heller, takes to the idea of a Noir novel with some gusto. He swings wildly from Edward G Robinson to JFK to FDR and once or twice meanders into Droopy the Dog and other cartoonish voices. For me, at least, a little of this goes a long way. I found myself lost more than once amid the voices that sounded a little too much alike a…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“We’re all one head injury away from being someone else.” -quote from a book about the brain I have forget all of but this line. I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about thirty years ago. At about the same time I read If You Meet The Buddha On the Road Kill Him. Another very interesting book. I remember enjoying Zen and it’s tale of a madman traveling around the Northwest with his son riding along behind him on his trusty motorcycle. I mainly remembered a scene near the start of the book about a clumsy mechanic…
The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire tells the story of a handful of people living in the far flung future. Humans are scattered around the galaxy or the universe or something. Lots of random settlements, two of which we see, are connected by a McGuffin bit of sci-fi called The Flow. This is much like a Stargate system or a series of Portkeys or Jump Gates or a Warp Field or any other made up means of transport over vast distances you have ever seen. Like these other constructs, the tech doesn’t really matter. So it’s kind of odd when John puts a…
The Chemist
Stephanie Meyer writes long books. The Chemist is a nice cosy 530 pages long. Plenty of time to get attached to three main characters and a handful of supporting players. We open up with our hero talking about how much she loves the Bourne novels…except they aren’t very realistic. And thus we enbark on a Jason Bourne novel starring a woman instead of a man. I liked The Chemist except for one thing. Our hero tortures and occasionally murders people. Nothing wrong with that…she maintains she’s a good person and like Arnold in True Lies…she only tortured bad people. It’s…
Back of the House
Scott Haas hangs around chef Tony Maws restuarant Craigie on Main and watches the great chef and his team work. Tony is a chef and an asshole-of course, that’s a bit redundant. Anyone who has watched Hell’s Kitchen is familiar with the foul mouthed antics of Gordon Rasmey and one of my personal heroes for lo these many years has been Anthony Bourdian. Neither man seems to suffer fools easily. So Tony is the self centered, I’m Right, You’re Wrong demi-god of his tiny little world. There are times when Scott shows one of the revolving cast of line cooks…
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Iain Reid’s novel is short. A couple of hundred pages. The story is broken up into small bits. A snippet of a love story. A bit of a horror tale. A little mystery. What is the meaning of the title? What things are they thinking of ending? Who is thinking this? I’m thinking of ending things is a highly stylized book. It reminded me a bit of Flowers for Algernon. It’s not quite as good as Flowers for Algernon. Few stories are. The stylistic tick here. Is the use of short sentences. Sometimes. Very. Short. Sentences. A little of this…
The Things They Carried
After fifty years or so, it seems impossible that there would be anything new to hear about the war in Vietnam. Boys were sent to the other side of the world to commit murder and mayhem and many of them came back damaged and broken. Many of them didn’t come back at all. We’ve seen their stories in TV shows and movies, read about them in books and short stories. We’ve even laughed about the conflict in the sort-of-a-protest song Alice’s Restaurant. So it is a bit surprising to read yet one account of yet one more soldier’s experience and…
Revival by Stephen King
The genius of Stephen King is his ability to write in such a way that you feel as if he is talking to you across the dining room table. This time he seems to be talking directly to men of a certain age, somewhere between fifty and sixty, who share memories of the same TV Shows and the same popular music, among countless other things. I listened to the audiobook read by David Morse and he does a great job of reading the story of a man from Maine who loses his faith as a boy. We follow our hero…
Crimson Death
As with the last Anita Blake book, there was some hope to be had in the opening pages. Edward calls and tells Anita that rogue Vampires are running amok in Ireland and that he needs her help. But instead of the next chapter starting with Edward driving Antia away from Dublin Airport, we spend the next few chapters watching Antia and two of her sex slaves looking for a good place to take a shower. Seriously. Laurell K Hamilton doesn’t so much write novels anymore, as several hundred page long sermons on the poly lifestyle. One of the themes she…