Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y, 2006.

I read a review of this book in Salon, and was intrigued. It’s an interesting story, well-done (though falls down a bit at the end). A magazine writer becomes a Ph.D. student in English literature, taking a look at 19th century gedankexperimenten. Ariel stumbled into this life: she happened on a presentation about a book, The End of Mr. Y, by an author named Thomas Lumas—a book that is notorious as cursed.

Her supervisor disappears, leaving her somewhat at odds, and she just happens to find a copy of the book—and, despite the curse, reads it. Wackiness ensues as Ariel enters another world based on instructions that are part of the novel. As worlds collide, Thomas weaves together philosophy—quite the fan of both Heidegger and Derrida—and modern physics, not overly well but not too poorly, either. She sometimes loses both plot and characters, and gets distracted, because this book really is a novel of ideas—though she finds her way back to both.

It’s suspenseful, and it plays well with ideas about what language is, and what it does. It’s a fun read, made more fun by some familiarity with philosophy and science—and more fun still if you’re interested in a fascinating romance about what University life is like, filled with sex and intrigue. Ariel finds herself chased, in mortal danger at every turn, before coming to a solution that seems almost too easy but costs her dreadfully. It's a book worth its read.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead.

The sequel to Dance of Death, it was nice to return to this quick read (less than 24 hours, one late night, but no reading during my work day). An enjoyable yarn, totally implausible, but making me remember far too much of when I wanted to be an Egyptologist. At any rate, this one may be the last of the Pendergast novels; I think it’s a decent though far too obvious an ending.

Short version? Picks up right where Dance of the Dead left off: Pendergast in prison, D'Agosta working to bust him out, the evil brother Diogenes up to no good--and of course, all set at the American Museum of Natural History (wikipedia summary of museum here). The stories those walls could tell--how many murders, beasts, evil spirits, etc., have wandered through those 46 acres of downtown New York in the world of Preston and Child? Ah well. The story revolves around an exhibit being opened to restore the Museum to the good graces of the public: an exhibit of the tomb of Senef, supposedly a vizier to and regent for Thutmose IV. I can't actually think of anything else about the plot to write without giving things away.

Entertaining, overly contrived, but a fun bit of pulp. The most fun thing about these books is the imagined exhibits themselves; Preston and Child should go into the museum curator business. They populize well.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Dance of Death, 2005.

A nice bit of pulp. Pendergast's evil younger brother emerges as a master criminal, Pendergast and D'Agosta try to stop Diogenes before it's too late. Things snowball badly. To say more would reveal too much.

Far from anything special, this book's an enjoyable and quick little read.

Stephen Coonts, Liars and Thieves, 2004.

More of the same from Coonts. Less good than the others.

James W. Huston, Flash Point, 2000.

The roommate of a Navy fighter pilot--Tomcats--is killed by terrorists in Israel; the pilot retaliates, writes to the Hill, gets war declared on the terrorists, bombs them, gets shot down, etc. Predictable, and plotted a little too loosely. Some fun, but not convincing enough for me to read anything else by Huston.

Stephen Coonts,
America, 2001,
Liberty, 2003.

Hm. Well, that's all of the published Jake Grafton novels; now we can move onto something else.
America is the story that revolves around stolen submarines, plots to destroy the United States' economy through electromagnetic Tomahawk missiles, a Star Wars -type space defence missile shield. Improbably, ridiculous, decent pulp.

Liberty was written after the attacks of September 11th. Like a number of other books, it's about bad guys--this time terrorists, instead of agents of other states--trying to get a hold of WMDs, in this case Russian nuclear warheads. Jake has to find all four before they're exploded. Naturally, life's complicated. He decides to retire at the end of the book--two or three books late, in my opinion, but hey. Decent fun, nothing special.

Stephen Coonts,
Under Siege, 1990
The Red Horseman, 1994,
Cuba, 1999,
Hong Kong, 2000.

Four more Jake Grafton novels. (Two to go)

Under Siege I've read before. Jake serving his Joint Chiefs tour, in the Counter-Terrorism sector. A whole bunch of drugs lead to domestic terrorism, assasination attempts, etc. Decent but unexciting.

The Red Horseman is a tad too unrealistic. Russia/CIS falling apart, post Gorbachev, etc. Nukes stolen, invading the country that they were sold to by corrupt Russian forces officials, etc. Jake's there with the Defence Intelligence Agency, observing and then running the show. Hard to swallow.

Cuba deals with Castro's death, biological warheads. Jake's in command of the carrier battle group that's in the Caribbean, and has to deal with the mess. Solid.

Hong Kong is weaker than Cuba. Coonts' plot has Grafton sent to Hong Kong back to investigate Tiger Cole, his old bombardier from Flight of the Intruder, now the consul-general to Hong Kong, a tad after the Chinese takeover. Revolution ferments, bad things happen, more Jake in hand to hand combat.

Two left--let's see how they are.

Stephen Coonts,
Flight of the Intruder, 1986,
The Intruders, 1994,
Final Flight, 1988,
The Minotaur, 1989.

Four Jake Grafton novels.

The first one, Flight of the Intruder, has become a movie that's not awful, but the story definitely makes a better book. What the movie does do well is attempting to capture what life is like aboard an aircraft carrier as the pilots of the air wing conduct bombing missions over Vietnam in the dying days of the war. Lots of implausible bits, but on the whole, it affords a view of what life must have been like.

The Intruders, which was written after the other three that I'm posting about here, but is the next in the sequence, is about Grafton's life aboard a carrier immediately after his last tour ended, this team with a Marine A-6 squadron, instead of a Navy squadron, thanks to an ill-advised barfight with a civilian. Really, it's about Jake trying to decide if the Navy will be his career. Sadly, this book's a little too much like Flight of the Intruder and Final Flight, in a way that The Minotaur is not. More implausibility, more general fun.

Final Flight is a nice, riveting thriller about a plot to steal nuclear bombs from a carrier. Nice segue from attack planes to fighters like the F-14, and far more interesting than Top Gun-type crap.

The Minotaur is all about Jake finding a life in the Navy after his flying days are done, and is an intriguing little spy thriller that's quite nicely done.

Tom Clancy, The Teeth of the Tiger, 2003.

This book is weak. It's not a good Clancy, nowhere near Red Storm Rising or Without Remorse or Debt of Honor: instead of careful thought and analysis, he indulges in fantasies of killing terrorists swiftly, without mercy or real justice.

Unwilling or unable to come up with plausible new characters, Clancy spins off Jack Ryan's son & Jack Jr.'s two cousins, coming up with characters that aren't even as plausible as cardboard caricatures. The story meanders, focuses in far too much detail at the wrong times, never becomes particularly gripping. In short, it was a waste of money even though bought on remainder. Avoid this book like the plague: it will bore you, and possibly rot your brain.

Kathy Reichs, Monday Mourning.

Enjoyable pulp, nothing special.

I dislike the way Reichs can't manage suspense. Quit talking about it, just let it come. Do not, do not, do not at the end of a chapter write the line "Whenever I think back on that moment, I wish to God I'd done what Tawny was asking. I wish to God I'd listened and understood."

I'll put up with this crap, but only 'cause my brain needed a quick break from thinking.

<sigh>

Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four, 2004.

yadda yadda two Princeton students trying to solve riddles yadda yadda in the middle of a poorly written murder mystery yadda.

This book was poor. It was poorly written, poorly plotted, and poorly conceived. The only thing to recommend this book at all--and what made me downright eager to pick it up--is that it's structured around the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The HP is an endlessly fascinating book, and The Rule of Four persuaded me to get my copy down from my shelves, and peruse it again.

Read the HP. Forget about The Rule of Four and its endless and trivial obsession with steganography. If you really want something fun to think about, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the way to go. You can see the original--in its wacky combination of languages--here. You can buy an English translation, like me, here.

James Patterson and Andrew Cross, 3^rd Degree.

Fluff. An explosion. A friend being beaten by her husband. A liaison with the deputy director of Homeland Security. Some more death, some sadness, and a solved murder with ends neatly tied up in string.

My palate was cleansed; it certainly wasn't stimulated.

Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising, 1986.

It's always nice to reread some pulp.

Red Storm Rising is a gedankexperiment. Back in 1985/86, in the height of the Cold War, Clancy wondered what a modern war would like. This book details a potential cause (albeit with the USSR as the aggressor), and a war plan for the Soviet side.

He posits the need for a severe resource grab, and in this case chooses oil. Clancy (or his main character, Jack Ryan) is fond, in later novels, of arguing that all wars are just examples of "grand larceny writ large." The Soviets try to achieve surprise before attacking Germany--in an effort to capture Europe--in order to prevent NATO from interfering while the Soviets would attempt to capture the Persian Gulf and its oil.

At any rate, the novel is vintage Clancy. It's fun, it jumps all over the place, and it presents a neat bird's-eye view of tactics and strategy for war in a modern environment. Except that it's twenty years out of date now. And there are no longer any modern states for the United States to worry about...

A pleasant distraction that's mostly just light fluff, the book still disturbs you, as any book about war is likely to do.

Ian Fleming, Casino Royale.

When I was a kid, I loved the idea of James Bond. I'd heard of him--and even seen a couple of the movies--and still wasn't allowed to take the books out of the library. Not their restriction: my mom's. She thought it wasn't yet age-appropriate material. Or so she always said: she never mentioned that they're poorly written, unexciting books, too.

Casino Royale is where Bond made his first appearance in print. It's a slow, plodding book--the first half deals with Bond trying to beat a Russian spy at Baccarat, and the second half is him recovering from being tortured--and setting up SMERSH as his future antagonistic agency. The entire book is a plodding exploration of the philosophy and psychology that Fleming creates to explain Bond. That is to say, the whole book sets up the rest. Whether they're better, substantially, is hard to say: the extensive descriptions that are so much a part of Fleming's style do not provide a background of excitement necessary to a spy/thriller novel, in my opinion.

Stick to the movies.

Kathy Reichs, Bare Bones.

Much the same as the ones I mentioned earlier. Quite good, pleasant reading. Nothing taxing, but a fun little bit of forensic pathologist crime-solver fiction.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Reliquary.

More of the same as Relic. That'll be enough of that bit of nostalgic rereading, then. On to other things.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Relic.

Some nice light brain-candy.
My mom had brought home Preston's new book, Codex. It was quite awful. Trite, obvious, overly predictable, and corny. So I decided to go back and reread Relic, which is actually decent for this odd genre that mixes detective/horror/sci-fi in a jangled mishmash.

I quite enjoy Special Agent Pendergast; he's in that detective tradition to which I'd be quite happy to belong.

Rereading this book, though, had the unfortunate side-effect of renewing my desire to visit the Museum of Natural History, though.

Elmore Leonard, The Big Bounce. © 1969.

Leonard writes good crime novels. This one was first. Short, concise, and cleverly plotted, it keeps moving but does not fall into the trap of believing that frenetic is better. Jack Ryan (and reading this now, I couldn't but think of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) is a small-time burglar, who gets mixed up with Nancy--a charming young woman interested in getting kicks in whatever way she feels like. Life gets interesting; people act stupidly. It's only the fourth Leonard I've read, but I feel willing to say that it's a typical Leonard novel--enjoyable, pleasant, all too soon done, and not something to which I could return.

I thought that I’d celebrate finishing reading Ulysses by reading some relaxing stuff. What’s more relaxing than a crime novel or four? Mer had two on her shelves, and kindly agreed to loan me the middle two on the list below. HPL was kind enough to loan me the other two. Ahh, public libraries make me happy.

Kathy Reichs

Deja Dead

Death du Jour

Fatal Voyage

Grave Secrets

So. Yes, clearly good enough for me to read all four. I think that the nice generic "you" that is anyone who might read this website would enjoy them, too. Let’s remember that as I state my only problem with them.

A writer of mysteries, of stories about crime, naturally has to withhold certain information as she relays her stories. What should be withheld? Well, whodunit, most of the time. How. Why. These are things for which—even if we, reading the story, figure them out—we read. But not details. Not what the characters see, hear, smell. And, in first person narrations, not what the character concludes. If a character figures something out, ending the chapter and telling us in the next, while cheesy, is fine in my book. It’s a commercial-break cliffhanger, to use televisionic terms. But if a character figures something out, and doesn’t share it with us till the end of the book? Or substantially later in it? No. That’s overly manipulative, on the part of the writer. It’s an ineffective and annoying way of attempting to create suspense.

The really annoying part is that Reichs proves that she doesn’t need to resort to such tactics. But she does, anyway. Maybe she’ll outgrow it?
Well, I’ll still read her books over Cornwell’s.

So. I doubt I’ll read these books again. The only mysteries that I’ll continue to return to are those solved by Mr. Holmes. Some things are worth rereading.

I had felt the need for a divertissement.

I remember an English teacher in high school, who once said that "Reading is kind of like sex. Most of the time you want the serious, good stuff--relationships, or great books. But there are times when you just need to get laid, and times when you just need to read pulp."

My mom & sister are big fans of Patricia Cornwell. So Blow Fly is home from the library at the moment. I read it. It was awful. The plot was razor thin and lacked any and all cohesion. Not a mere moment seemed plausible. The characters seemed unrealistic and annoying. Why can't half-decent, popular authors learn when to call it quits? Isn't there a point at which an X amount of money is sufficient?

I mean, really. I need some better pulp.