Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy

Title:		Blood Meridian
Author:		Cormac McCarthy
Rating:

I cannot read this book.  I read one and a half chapters and gave up.

A while back I read - and thoroughly disliked - The Road, another work by McCarthy.  It was, however, the only thing by him I had read, and I thought I would give him another try.

Mistake.  Big mistake.

This book is just about as unreadable as The Road.  The prose is deliberately stilted, and convention - like quotes around dialog and apostrophes in contractions - is ignored.

In a nutshell, it's junk.  I couldn't comfortably follow it, and was disinterested in it - and the characters involved - nearly immediately.

The only reason I am not giving it the worst possible rating is because I didn't finish it, and I cannot in good conscious do that to something I didn't fully read.  That said, I did flip around after giving up, and no, it clearly gets no better.   The complaints above apply from page one right through the end.

I won't be reading any more McCarthy.  Not my thing.

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

Title:		Lady Oracle
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:

I've been holding off on this review for a while, which is something I tend to do. A bit of distance from the book I am reviewing lets me see how well it holds up, and if it sticks with me or not.

Lady Oracle is an earlier work by Atwood, and one I have struggled to come to an opinion about.

On the plus side, Atwood's writing is generally quite good, and her characters are very alive. Her heroine has history in a way most people can't remember about themselves, and Atwood writes it lovingly.

On the minus side, though, all that history is just about all there is. She spends most of the book on back story, and then suddenly the pace picks up to tell about what is happening in the present. It comes across feeling disjoint as a result of those pacing issues. To me it was like the heroine now and the heroine in the past were two entirely different people.

Finally, the biggest issue for me is that almost nothing happens. Yes, the heroine does fake her own death – don't worry, that's on the back cover, and not a spoiler – but that's about the only actual event that takes place. The rest is all interior monologue and a few conversations.

To be clear, it's not that I only like books in which things are blown up, but I sadly conclude that Lady Oracle goes too far into the realm where nothing ever happens for my taste. Lovers of Atwood or less action based stories might appreciate this one.

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

Title:		Mother Night
Author:		Kurt Vonnegut
Rating:

Meh. Once again Vonnegut fails to appeal.

Mother Night is the supposed tale of an American who worked for Germany during WWII, but had a double life of sorts as a spy. He was an English language broadcaster who was passing information out to the allies as part of his show. But what he did and said on his show was really awful. Supposedly this is supposed to make the reader think.

I found the presentation boring, and the lack of humor - supposedly one of Vonnegut's strengths - a real problem. That said, it wasn't bad, really, but it barely held my attention and didn't stick with me.

A blurb on the back cover says Mother Night is "in the Catch-22 vein." Had I known that in advance I wouldn't have wasted my time. I really didn't like Catch-22. Oh well.

Other than Cat's Cradle, though, it appears I am just not cut out for reading Vonnegut. I have one more on my TBR shelf. Maybe I'll get to it one of these days.

The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum

Title:		The Bourne Identity
Author:		Robert Ludlum
Rating:

Published in 1980, The Bourne Identity tells part of the story of Jason Bourne, a man who, well... this gets a bit complicated.

First of all, the book and the movie of the same name, while related, tell very different stories. I have a fascination with the conversions of novels into movies, and it was only after I watched the movie (9 years after it was released) that I bothered to track down and read the book, mostly to see how it had been converted into a movie.

Both the movie and the book center around an individual suffering severe amnesia who gradually discovers his past. Some of the other characters share names between the book and the movie, but the story arcs are very different.

In the book we learn that Jason Bourne is part of a plot to remove a master assassin named Carlos. He has to figure that out of course, thanks to the amnesia. As in the movie there is a woman, Marie, who helps him, though in the book she's an expert in international finance instead of a student.

Oddly - and rarely, in my experience - the movie may actually be better than the book, though it's a close thing. In the book I didn't buy the relationship between Bourne and Marie. She fell for him too easily given their "introduction" and nothing in his character made me think he loved her, even though those words were used. Early chapters bogs down in needless detail about certain financial transactions. Later chapters moved along better, but the details of some of Bourne's history got hazy, so things weren't perfect there either. And, frankly, Carlos seemed too good - and too powerful - to be true.

That being said, Bourne himself has a less nasty past in the book than he does in the movie. He feels a bit cleaner here, and possibly a bit more likable. The movie, while being more up to date in many ways, gives Bourne an uglier background, one where his motivations and origin are a lot more gray than white. It then promptly sugar coats it, though, leaving the audience happy and probably not thinking about it too much.

I guess the book is worth reading. Ludlum did get some things right, but it's not perfect.

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

Title:		The Robber Bride
Author:		Margaret Atwood
Rating:

I didn't get this book. Of 466 pages it seemed as if 460 were back story, and there was little action of any kind. Instead we get a pseudo-drama, expressed in the thoughts and discussions of three women: Tony, Charis, and Roz. What little story we get revolves around a fourth woman, Zenia.

The three main characters are actually too well drawn. We don't need to know every little detail about their lives to understand why they might be reacting this way, but we get that detail in any case. And more. And still more.

Tony's a history professor with a specialization in battles. She's a fairly ineffective and self effacing person as well. Her real name is Antonia.

Charis is another ineffective character, but this time with no real talents she can earn a living from. She does, however, have a spiritual side that "works". Her real name is Karen.

Roz is a business woman - someone with power and money - but who is also hopeless in her own way. In this case it's her marriage she cannot manage. Her real name is Rosalind.

None of these characters has it all together. In fact, though they could each potentially be interesting in some sense, collectively I found them pretty annoying. They whine and worry but rarely do anything, and when they try they fail. Every time. Then they whine about failing. Roz's twin daughters are a lot more interesting than anyone else here, and they're only bit parts.

There might be something important about the fact that Tony, Roz, and Charis all operate under something other than their real names too, but if so I can't tell you what that might be.

Zenia is something else. She's a liar and a thief, and ruthless about getting whatever it is she wants - including the man each of the three main characters loves - but that's about all we learn of her. She's the central mystery around which the book is written and we never figure her out. Never.

The story is told mostly in flashbacks - sometimes nested - and it can be a bit hard to keep track of if you set the book down at the wrong point. Unfortunately I found it easy to set it down just about anywhere given the vast back story. Complicating matters, at least for me, is that I didn't really relate to any of the characters. They were either boring or irritating, but never become important or interesting.

The only reason I continued reading The Robber Bride is because I've read other work by Atwood and really enjoyed it. This one, however, just didn't work, at least not for me. It needed both something significant to happen and a resolution.

Oh, and I didn't like Charis's spiritual muck. Or rather, the fact that it "worked" in some way seemed wrong. If she'd believed in it but nothing had come of it, fine. Instead we get a couple of mystical but completely unexplained incidents that make no sense. Then again I'm less spiritual than most bricks, and such tripe is liable to irk me in any case.

Perhaps Atwood is making some feminist point, but if so I missed it, along with just about everything else.

If you want to read something good by Atwood, try The Handmaid's Tale, or Oryx and Crake. I'd skip this one.

Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard

Title:		Get Shorty
Author:		Elmore Leonard
Rating:

This is another in my occasional series of readings that come from wanting to know how the movie differs from the book. Exactly why I want to know that isn't clear even to me, but it is the case.

Get Shorty - the book - is fun. I read it in just a few days and took it to work to read over lunch time. That was a good sign given my recent string of books I haven't been all that enamored of.

The story revolves around Chili Palmer, a movie lover and shylock who is tired of that business - for various reasons. He finds himself getting involved movies when he goes to Las Vegas and then LA to look into some loans that are past due.

There are, of course, all kinds of complications. Chili winds up dealing with some local drug dealers who are laundering their money through a B movie production company, and so on. It's well written and well paced.

For those who have seen the movie, it differs from the book in both small and medium sized ways. Example: the drug courier's father is never mentioned in the book, and never makes an appearance. Nor does the wife of the writer - Doris, played in such outrageous fashion by Bette Midler - exist in the novel.

Other semi-important changes include the fact that it isn't Harry Zimm who causes Ray Barboni to go to LA, and there isn't even a confrontation between Barboni and Zimm, so that hospital scene - "Who wants to take a crack at wiring Mr. Zimm's jaw?" - doesn't happen in the book either.

The smaller changes are too numerous to mention, and yet don't add up to anything all that important.

In all I'd have to say that the conversion to the screenplay was done with skill and attention to detail.

The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker

Title:		The Mezzanine
Author:		Nicholson Baker
Rating:

I'm not at all sure what to make of this one.

Is it philosophy? It examines the meaning of life through the study or our simple, daily activities and thoughts, so perhaps.

Is it humor? It clearly points out some of the oddities of human nature in ways that make the reader laugh, or at least crack a smile.

Is it satire? Certainly some bits - like the long footnote about footnotes - can be thought of that way.

Is it meditation? Nothing "of the world" discussed here is particularly important, and yet, something about the presentation makes the whole something greater than the sum of its parts.

Is it some kind of high art? Well, maybe, but I'm not sure I could defend that description.

In my opinion, The Mezzanine is a novel written in the style of Jerry Seinfeld, only extended. Seinfeld's comedy has been described to me as being "about nothing", or at least about nothing important.

The Mezzanine - in which the entire plot revolves around the author's thinking over one escalator ride, with extensive diversions into things related to those thoughts - is Seinfeld's comedy on steroids.

Instead of a few lines about broken shoe laces, we get whole pages with footnotes and later references. We get an interesting discussion of the frequency of the author's thoughts about various topics, and the idea of comparing that data with similar charts for others. We get expositions on cashier efficiency and polishing the handrails of escalators. In all, it's a disordered and unrelated group of chapters, very loosely bound together by the author's occasional reference to his return from lunch.

But in the process of writing these un- (or barely) related blurbs we actually examine the way people think. There is amusement, at a minimum, in these pages as a result.

In all honesty I don't know that I learned from The Mezzanine. I already assumed that everyone had crazy thought patterns similar to my own, but different in their specifics. Still, I did enjoy it. Recommended.

The Scorpion's Gate, Richard A. Clarke

Title:		The Scorpion's Gate
Author:		Richard A. Clarke
Rating:

I think I heard an interview with Clarke on NPR at some point and thought this book sounded interesting. Clarke, if you'll recall, was the counter-terrorism advisor to Bill Clinton who then carried over to work for President George Bush. Clarke was very critical of the Bush administration in a number of areas and wasn't afraid to say so publicly. There was a lot of controversy over what he said that can still be found in Clarke's Wikipedia entry, or at least in the discussion page related to the entry.

The tag line (if you want to call it that) on The Scorpion's Gate is "Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction." I'm not so sure - at least in this case - but he tried, and clearly he tried hard. So hard, in fact, that it appears he may have been dragged along by his publisher who saw a good thing if they made the right market window.

The story is set in the not-too-distant future and follows the activities of several groups in the middle east. There are two significant points of difference from the current situation:

1. The Saudis have been overthrown and their kingdom replaced with an Islamic republic.
2. The US was "asked to leave" Iraq sometime after the Iraq war ended.
3. As a result of the above, the US has less power in the region, and most of it is in the form of naval vessels.

From there Clarke spins a tale of intrigue where the bad guys are in positions of power in the US, and where catastrophe (in the form of a significant war) is narrowly avoided by a small group of renegade intelligence and military people working on their own.

Quite frankly, the plot was OK at best. He does his best to drive the action hard - probably on the orders of his publisher as mentioned above - but as a result the characters are basically cardboard cutouts. And there's an off stage sex scene in here that may well have been added as an afterthought, again possibly at the request of the publisher. Gotta get the racy stuff in or no one will read it, right?

The writing is uneven, sometimes sounding a bit like those old radio news broadcasts. "FLASH! Something interesting just happened in Iran!" But again, the entire work feels rushed, just as if the publisher said "you've got two weeks to write a book so we can make a lot of money." Then when he handed them the book they said "OK, we don't have time get you an editor, but add a sex scene somewhere and we'll shove it through the presses." I have no proof that sort of thing happened, of course, but it feels like it did.

One of the more amusing things appears in the acknowledgments section. It says, in part: "Some may think, as they read this volume, that they see themselves or others portrayed. They do not. This is a work of fiction, in which all characters are fictional." If I hadn't read those lines I might not have seen various Bush administration people in these roles. But having read that blurb first, it was impossible not to see at least one or two of them represented here. I suspect that was deliberate. An amazon.com review suggests that the book is allegory for the US invasion of Iraq. Perhaps, but that may be a bit deep for Clarke given what I see here.

Overall I think the book is far from great. Clarke's got a newer novel out in 2007, but based on this I have no desire to read it. Perhaps his time in the national spotlight is coming to an end. I don't see his career as a fiction writer taking off all that well, but I have the predictive powers of a gnat, so even I don't give that thought much credence.

Shopgirl, Steve Martin

Title:		Shopgirl
Author:		Steve Martin
Rating:

I picked up Shopgirl some time back - on a whim - via paperbackswap.com. I was ordering several books from someone else and found this on their list. Martin's films are hit or miss for me, but when they work they're very funny. I figured it couldn't hurt to try his prose.

I was right - it didn't hurt - but it wasn't all that enjoyable either. In fact, I think Shopgirl qualifies as "chick-lit" written by a male. It wasn't all that interesting, the major plot points were predictable, and I didn't buy the development of at least one of the three main characters. The other two main characters really don't undergo much development at all, leaving me wondering what the point of the story is.

The cover claims the book is "Now A Major Motion Picture" like that's some sort of recommendation. It wasn't for me. I had no clue that was the case when I requested the book, and I have no desire to see it now.

All in all this was mostly a waste of time and paper.

A Disgrace To The Profession, Charles Newton and Gretchen Kauffman

Title:		A Disgrace To The Profession
Authors:		Charles Newton and Gretchen Kauffman
Rating:

Summer starts today, so I finally get around to writing the review for a book about school teachers. Go figure.

Doug reviewed A Disgrace To The Profession some time back, and as a result of his review I added it to my list. Eventually paperbackswap.com came up with a copy, and I've now read it. Doug's review is pretty much spot on. The story and characters are interesting, but the writing is amateurish. I found it a bit distracting, as I suspect Doug did.

The one thing I might say that Doug didn't is that the book suffers a bit from being a propaganda piece instead of just a story. The authors cram in all kinds of diatribe about various teaching issues that don't directly affect the plot. Yes, I know these issues are real, and yes I understand that the purpose of the book is to make the reader aware of just how bad teachers have it, but it did muck up the story a bit.

I am unlikely ever to teach children. Teaching adults (where "adult" is defined as junior college and older) is a possibility in various ways, but not teaching kids. But even so, this book was interesting, and it makes me wonder if there are any good fixes out there for the problems our kids, schools and teachers face. A Disgrace To The Profession isn't exactly full of suggested solutions for the myriad problems it points out.

Perhaps those solutions were deliberately left as an exercise for the reader.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Title:		Catch-22
Author:		Joseph Heller
Rating:

I've been slogging through two different books lately, neither has been fun, and neither is all that interesting, but this one finished up first.

"What?" I hear you cry. "Catch-22 is famous! It's one of the top 100 books! It's a classic! It has to be good! It is good!"

Forget it. I don't care that it appears at number seven on The Modern Library's list. It's not that good. Not even remotely. I'm giving it a neutral rating for a very specific reason, rather than the negative rating I think it really deserves.

My reasons for such a harsh judgment are pretty straightforward:

1. It borders on incoherent. The story isn't told in any order the reader can fathom. Yes, perhaps, if you take detailed notes about a couple of things you might be able to track some of it, but overall, it's impossible to follow.
   
   
2. There is no - and I mean zero - character development. None. Not a single one of the characters we meet changes in any appreciable way during the book, except that a bunch of them die. At the very end you might think that the Chaplain has possibly changed, but three pages later the book is over and you never find out. Yossarian - in theory the hero of the book - also never changes. Right up until the very end he's still the same confused git that he was at the start.
   
   
3. There are no characters to care about in here. People talk about Major Major Major Major as being hysterically funny. He's a bit player, mentioned in any depth in a couple of short chapters and just a passing character after that. What about the guy who's extending his life through boredom? There's almost no actual mention of that here. Again, he's just not there. None of the characters has a role significant enough to cause me to get interested in them. I kept wondering when someone would do something interesting, and if I should even bother finishing the book if they didn't.
   
   
4. The characters have no motivations. Why is Yossarian good (or at least as good as he is)? Why does Nately's whore go off the deep end like she does? Why are Colonels Cathcart & Korn slimy bastards? We don't know. Nothing is ever explained about them. This just adds to the fact that I don't care about any of the characters in the least.
   
   
5. The writing is poor. Heller describes the appearance of characters we've met before almost every time we meet them again. Each time he blurs the few distinct impressions we have of them until they're all just faceless, pointless people. That may be deliberate on his part, but it keeps them from being memorable. Again, maybe that was part of the point, but if he's going to write about people we're supposed to forget, why bother writing about them in the first place?
   
   Oh, and every so often Heller tosses in a word or two that you need an OED to lookup. I'm good at picking meanings up from context - I do it all the time - but this was just pointless. All it did was irritate me.
   
   
6. It's not funny. Pure and simple. It's just not funny. I never even cracked a smile while reading this, let alone laughed out loud. It's so off that it doesn't even work as farce. That was my biggest frustration with the book. I'd been lead to believe that it was hilarious when it simply wasn't.

So why am I giving it a neutral rating? I suspect there is a matter of perspective here, and I grant that I may not have the right one. It is possible that - for its time - this was a ground breaking book. Maybe no one had written like this about WWII before. Perhaps no one had made fun of "The Greatest Generation" in this way. If so - and I think it is possible - then taken in that context it may be an important work. Viewed with my sensibilities, from 2007, though, it fails totally. But on the assumption that lots of people think it is either important or funny or both, I'm not going to trash it completely. I don't claim to understand those points of view, but perhaps there is something to them. I'm giving it a neutral rating for that reason only.

Lastly, I have another frustration to go with this book that I want to call out separately. For as long as I can remember I've known the expression "Catch-22" and wondered where it came from. I'd been told it came from this book, so I was hoping for a real explanation here. Not of what the expression means - that I understand - but why that phrase was picked. Is there perhaps some historical reason for it? Or does it come from some obscure legal jargon?

Nope. He made it up. From whole cloth. There's nothing in the book about it at all. Nothing except the first explanation of what it means. But if you search wikipedia for "Catch-22" you learn (as of the date this review was written anyway) that the book was originally titled Catch-18 and the publisher wanted it changed to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18. Read the wiki page for the details.

Now let me be clear. If an author is good enough to get some new phrase stuck into the language as completely as "catch-22" has become a part of idiomatic English, I congratulate him or her for the achievement. Heller deserves full credit for that. But when I stand back and say "OK.. why that phrase?" there is no answer. If he'd done something really clever - based the phrase on something that was obscure but interesting or relevant, I'd really applaud him. But in this case he could just as easily have called it the "olgleblat rule" as "catch-22" (or "catch-18") and it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest:

"That's some rule, that ogleblat rule," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

See. No change. Nothing important differs. It's just silly. Now I do admire and appreciate silliness, but for it to work it has to be funny, and as I pointed out above, it's not.

I wish I'd enjoyed this book.

As it happens, I saw the movie of the same name just before starting to read the book. The movie is actually much worse than the book. Entire series of events are explained even less well in the movie. For example, I had no idea who it was that was stabbing Yossarian in the movie at all. None. I had to read the book to learn that tidbit. Of course I still didn't care, but at least the book let me know who it was. So give the movie a pass along with the book. Neither is any good.

America The Beautiful, Moon Unit Zappa

Title:		America The Beautiful
Author:		Moon Unit Zappa
Rating:

I was attracted to this book for two reasons:

1. I have always been a fan of Frank Zappa, and wanted to know more about him and his family.
2. Another review on Doug's book review site.

I didn't have any huge expectations going into this book, but a quick glance convinced me that it would be a quick read, and thus good for a time just before I start up a new class at the local community college, rather than get wrapped up in something more weighty.

That off-the-cuff assessment was right on target. The story concerns the trials of America Throne, daughter of a famous painter, and unsuccessful at anything she's tried so far. We follow her starting (essentially) when she is dumped by her long time boyfriend and watch her flounder as she tries to regain some sense of herself and control over her life.

I divide the book up into three parts:

1. In which the main character whines a lot.
2. In which the main character doesn't wine so much.
3. In which the main character has her life come back together.

That's no doubt overly simplistic, but it covers the highlights. As you might suspect, while I was engaged enough to finish the book and wonder what would happen to America next as I read, I wasn't that really into it all that much. There were a number of issues here that bothered me:

• I always assumed - based on the content of much of his music and some of the between song commentaries - that Frank Zappa was an avowed atheist. Perhaps I was wrong in that assumption, though I am certain that he had no love of any organized religion. Regardless, Moon Unit seems to have more of a spiritual side to her than I would have expected, and while I didn't find it overbearing, it certainly stuck in my craw from time to time while reading this.
• In addition, she seems to have a fixation on just about every bodily function possible, and a willingness to describe them all as needed. I didn't find they advanced the story much.
• The end (perhaps the last 5th of the book or so) was just too trite. The new love interest was expected, and everything came together too simply for me to be comfortable with it. I am a sucker for a happy ending, but this was too simple given the build up of the previous 4/5ths of the book.
• I kept wondering how much of this book was autobiographical. But my reaction may be backwards from what others would expect: the more of it that is true, the less I think the story should be told, really. If it were entirely true, then (to my mind) it is entirely too personal to share, given it doesn't also (as far as I can see) tell a higher level story or expose some deeper truth.
• Finally - and this may be the root of the problem - I am pretty sure that I am not even remotely the target audience for this book. I suspect I have just read my first bit of "chick lit" - a genre I didn't know existed until perhaps two months ago. The target audience is definitely female, and probably younger than me. After too much whining about her relationship breaking up, I just wanted the main character to shut up. That, I suspect, is not what the author intended.

I am not averse to a good, inner, psychological story, in which the characters go through (and even whine about) horrible things. But if that happens I want to see there is some point to it all in the end; some reason for telling the story. I didn't find that here, alas.

I may have to watch things get blown up in a movie tonight. A dose of testosterone to offset this book seems in order.