Paul Beatty. Slumberland. Funny, clever, irreverent, scatological. If you can’t deal with toe jam, stop
now. A young black guy from LA who calls
himself DJ Darkie is an accomplished DJ besides having an IQ that varies between 89 and 174. Although he had a perfect score of 800 on the
SAT’s, counselors didn’t bother to direct him toward math and science in
college, and he settled for an associate’s degree in library science and is
making his living spinning. When he puts
together a “beat” that is nearly perfect, his friends tell him he can only
perfect it if he gets the approval of Schwa or Charles Stone, a legendary jazz
musician who hasn’t been seen in years.
In the mail he gets a pornographic video tape with a music track that
was definitely laid done by Schwa. The
return address is a bar in Berlin, so he calls there and gets a job as a
jukebox sommelier, and begins his search for Charles Stone. He finds him just after the wall comes down
and helps Stone rebuild the wall with music.
None of this makes any sense. I
had no idea what the author was talking about in long passages about music, but
who cares. What a fun ride! June 2012
Joseph Boyden. Three
Day Road. June 2012 The three day road is the journey a man takes
after death on his way to join the Great Spirit. Two Cree hunters, Xavier and Elijah,
volunteer for service in the Canadian army in WW I. Xavier and his aunt Niska, the woman who
raised him and taught him the old ways, narrate the story. Both young men are excellent marksmen and are
used as scouts and snipers, often operating in no man’s land between the
opposing trenches. Elijah learned his
skills from Xavier, but his English is much better and his nature is flamboyant
so he becomes the leader of their small team.
He also becomes a morphine addict and adopts a totally amoral and
self-promoting attitude. With Xavier’s
help he builds an amazing kill record.
Just days before the end of the war, Elijah is killed. As Xavier puts Elijah’s documents in his own
pockets and prepares to carry his body back to their lines, he is hit by a
bursting shell and almost mortally wounded.
He wakes up weeks later in a hospital, where they assume he is the hero
sniper Elijah. Minus a leg, addicted to
morphine and close to death, he is handed over to Niska, who takes him away in
her canoe and tries to cure him by telling him stories of the old ways. The story was inspired by a real life
Canadian hero, Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibway who had 378 kills, received his
medals and then was treated very badly by the Department of Indian
Affairs. The theme of disrespect for and
discrimination against Indians runs throughout the novel.
Harlan Coben. Hold
Tight. Coben keeps so many balls
in the air that it doesn’t seem possible that he can bring all together at the
end in a unified but multifaceted mystery story. It’s suburban middle class New Jersey. There are a couple of murders, a teen suicide,
some good kids gone temporarily astray, strains between parents and teens, and
a homicidal maniac unwittingly unleashed by a teacher in trouble for
humiliating one of his students. The
most likeable character is the lady police detective who unravels most of the
mystery. June 2012
Tim Dorsey. Atomic
Lobster. Serge is an insane criminal genius. His constant companion is a clueless drugged
out alcoholic named Coleman. Serge is
constantly engaged in nutty research projects, which inevitably clash in some
way with some criminal enterprise. His
way out is to murder whatever criminal has gotten in his way and some that he
just observes in passing like the purse snatcher, whom he knocks out with a
crowbar he holds out the window as he drives by him. That night he ties him to a chair in front of
a baseball pitching machine and leaves him there with the machine on and well
stocked with balls. The thief is just a
bloody lump by morning. This was one of
at least five murders, he arranged himself, as well as accidentally burning
down two houses and setting a couple of gangs up to start killing each other
and breaking up a ring that was smuggling Mayan antiquities and cocaine into
Florida. June 2012
Donna Leon. Suffer
the Little Children. The
recorded version of this book is a delightful performance. We accompany Commissario Guido Brunetti of
the Venice police force, who lives a beautiful life, despite having to deal
with a daily diet of crime. We start
with an investigation a brutal assault against a local pediatrician by the Carabinieri,
who entered the doctor’s flat in the middle of the night to take away the 18
month old boy he was accused of buying from an immigrant Albanian mother. There are no murders in this story, but the
investigation eventually leads Brunetti and his team to identify a
self-righteous pharmacist, who uses the information he gleans from patients’
records to punish them for their sins.
It would be a better world if all policemen were like Brunetti and his
team. June 2012
Elmore Leonard. The
Moonshine War. This one wasn’t very good. A revenuer tries to horn in on the 150
barrels of bourbon his wartime buddy has hidden somewhere on his farm. Some really nasty bootleggers also come after
the whiskey and eventually the revenuer and his buddy team up and blow up the
whiskey and the bootleggers. I’m not shy
about summarizing the plot because it’s all clear from about page 2. June 2012
Alan Moorehead. The
White Nile. This history of the
exploration of the White Nile was published in 1960 and recounts the exploration
of the river in the second half of the 19th C. The story of exploration, the search for the
source and the attempts by the British and the Egyptian government to hold the
areas along the White Nile is told through the experiences of the principal
explorers: Burton and Speke, Baker, Grant, Stanley, and Livingston and
officials such as Emin and General Gordon.
The explorers did succeed in laying out the course of the river as it
flowed through several lakes and an almost impassable swamp, but ironically,
according to Wikipedia, no one is yet sure of the exact sourced of the White
Nile. July 2012
Richard Russo. That
Old Cape Magic. This is a novel about two marriages, the narrator
Jack Griffin and that of his parents. Jack’s
parents were both university professors in Indiana, who regretted through their
whole lives that they had not been able to get positions at a prestigious eastern
university. They were mean spirited,
unpleasant and rather uninterested in their son. Jack is 60 when the book opens and he tells
his story in flashbacks. He did hack
work as a screen writer after he got his degrees and later moved east to a good
school to a tenured position teaching screen writing. His wife Joy comes from a very normal middle
brow family. They have a good marriage
and a wonderful daughter, Laura. Jack
has always shielded Joy and Laura from his parents but he can’t shield
himself. It almost costs him his
marriage until he makes one last effort to escape from the imprint his parents seem
to have left on him. Perhaps all of us sometimes
feel that when we are acting badly, we are acting out some trait we noticed in
one of our parents. June 2012
Nassim
Nicolas Taleb. Fooled by Randomness. Taleb
gives endless examples of how people make decisions on the basis of faulty
information. He mentions his ideas about
black swans, of course, but goes on to describe one trader after another
crashing because he or she put too much faith in compilations of data that
contained strong elements of unrecognized randomness. By the time he’s finished, it’s hard to have
confidence in anyone, and markets appear to be no more predictable than crap
games. June 2012
Richard Wright. Black
Boy. This is Wright’s autobiography from his days
growing up in Jackson Mississippi through his early adult years in Chicago in
the 1930s. One theme that runs through
almost the whole book is hunger and the constant effort to find jobs to stave
it off; another is the abominable treatment of blacks in Mississippi and later
in Memphis before he moved to Chicago.
He only finished grammar school, but he educated himself by reading and
writing and once he had done that he could tell us about the inability of
blacks like himself to even imagine a better life for themselves. In Chicago he joined the Communist Party,
having found for the first time an organization that respected blacks and
treated them equally. After several
years of trying to play a role in the party, he had to leave because they would
not let him think for himself. I wish I
had read this book 50 years ago. June
2012
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