read read read

Well! Our gunslinger Roland and his gang go all Magnificent Seven (Kurosawa too) in this longish (709 pp) tale of a town under threat by dangerous raiders. The threat is real and compelling enough to stop them in their journey to the Dark Tower, to organize the citizens, and to wipe out the threat.

I find Ms. S.’s pregnancy unsettling, richly and deeply creepy. Ugh. Only you can get away with something like that. And the inclusion of self-reference to me is both amusing and odd. Thank you for that too!

Well told Mr. King! But you do ramble a bit at times. I was eager to get on with the story at times, as I am now. Today I will return this volume to the LI-BARY, take a quick look for vol. 6, and continue the journey with Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah, and the wee beastie if I am able.

Ah….Mr. King. Where do I start? Ya kill Blaine. He needed it. And move Roland and the gang along then WHAMO! Flashback! Half the book goes back to proto-Roland! It’s a good tale, a love story, and full of youth and vitality and, well…Nicely done!

But the book’s end? Really? you went there? With those? and that story line? Yes, I understood this to be a quest series. And I saw it when you added the four-legged follower and thought Well! He’s following the same pattern! But you went and dragged it all into your story! In your way, yes, but still!

So of course as soon as I was done I scurried off to muh local library for volume five, due May 23, and I’ll find out what happens next. Thank you, Stephen, and go Sox!

I’ve been on a trilogy roll lately, scooping up those which I’ve noted and desire over the years. And that is the source of my selecting THE GUNSLINGER, the first of King’s Dark Tower series begun in the 1980s and so far as I know continuing and continuing forever.

This is the introductory work and gives us the main character, Roland, who was born and bred to handle himself. He’s got no police authority but he does have a moral code. And a compulsion, a mission, an obsession, with making something wrong right at a Dark Tower.

We don’t know what he is really all about. But what we know is enough. He is living in what seems to be a modern, post apocalyptic west. Technology and information have fallen away and though there is evidence of a greater age before him he is 19th century man. He is not unfriendly, can be loved and loves as much as he might in return, but he has no social circle for that is the world of his type.

As the first of a quest series we learn that in this time is malleable. A dead boy from another time and eastern urban city, New York, is resurrected in a new life to serve Roland. The boy will die again, this time at Roland’s neglect, but I expect to see him again in later works. We learn too that those Roland likes and knows may turn against him for no real good reasons, reasons beyond what we can understand in this first work, but that Roland has the ability to deal with this threat as well.

What we most learn is that Roland is product and force of powers, including the landscape of the Arid West, that are for now beyond our comprehension. Roland needs water and time to rest more than he needs other people. Yet his quest has other people before him. They are required. And they are not all good people.

In THE DRAWING OF THREE King gives us Roland’s acquisition of other souls/persons that are needed for the continued pursuit of the tower. Again we find characters from New York including the boy that Roland sacrificed in the first book. The Three are characters linked by one man, a serial killer, whose demise is the Gunslinger’s purpose. It is, apparently, required to complete the journey to the tower. And in the killing of the killer the other characters find healing of their own significant problems. The Gunslinger is not just an avenging angel, but a saviour too.

I’m eager to to move on to the other works. Thank you Mr. King, for the thrill of your words.

A quirky novella of the King variety. He’s combined his affection for baseball with his penchant for odd, for violence, and for (yes) not getting away with it.

Blockade Billy is called up to the majors from the lower minors. A team needs a catcher, in a hurry and Billy is the man.

Billy is quirky, odd. But quite at home between the foul poles and behind home plate. It is the collision aspect of coming home that ruined the team’s last catchers. And though there is some question as to whether Billy is really big and tough enough to withstand a major league mow-down, the answer comes quickly enough: yes. And you may be punished in addition to being stopped.

Billy is something of a baseball specimen. He knows the game instinctively. He’s got a sharp eye, and a never-say-die demeanor. He’s from the rural heartland and his parents are said to have given him enough support and time to develop as a player, potentially a good one. Billy’s past got him started. He made the minors but was headed down, not up, when he got the call. He is good but simply wasn’t major league material. It is only the pro teams crisis that has given him this chance.

But Billy IS good. So good he in part carries the team, develops a fan base, saves the season (as much as he is a part of it). If his team mates and the coaches and the front office staff don’t really follow him (there is something off ) the fans at least adore him. He can hit, and does. But it it is his work on the third base line with a man coming in that they most adore. No one is allowed to score on Blockade Billy.

The book ends in the usual King way. It is unusual. (Stop reading here if you don’t want the ending revealed).

Billy isn’t Billy at all. Billy is someone else who loves baseball. Someone else who had better and more skills than the real Billy. But Billy is also a working-and-lower class kid who never got a chance. Until he took Billy’s place.

It’s implied that the team’s season is over after Billy’s arrest. The team folds later too, probably for employing and marketing its homicidal catcher. Billy was, in fact, great at the game. Not so good at life.

Thank you Mr. King. It wasn’t The Body or Shawshank or even my favorite, the one about the long, long race in which you succeed for life or die if you don’t win. But it was good. And by the way, yes. I think it really is your work and not the work of a working-and-lower class writer who will never, otherwise, get a shot at the majors.

Well! Mr. C. told me of this. He’d found it on a shelf, a prequel to the Ender series, a one of three prequel originating from comic books of the Ender series. How can I pass THAT up?

It is titled Earth Unaware: The First Formic War. And there is no war. There is an opening to war but no war. Not Yet. The book, because it is part of a trilogy has no ending. Nothing satisfying, nothing resolved. I could say the same about The Lord of the Ring of course, but Card ain’t Tolkien and there ya go. No. I did not look for the second volume when I dropped it back to the library.

It’s a good story and much in the same vein as the Ender books. I’m glad Card did it. I really am. And that it came first as comics, so much the better. This is a true case of milking a thousand words from every picture.

Thank you Mr. Card and the other guy. There. Done.

Yes, it’s been a movie. At least twice. But I’ve not seen the movies. I saw this on the library shelf. I grabbed it because I ran across it and wanted to read it. It is a classic, very highly regarded, and a genre I have in the past greatly enjoyed.

It is a spy novel of course. And it is unlike other spy novels because in this one the spying is pretty much all on and within one intelligence agency. It is the British. They have a terrible leak. They’ve had it for a generation and did not know it. But now they do.
It is at the top too. One of four or five or six or seven (hence the title Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) people in the agency.

A single spy, George Smiley, is brought back from recent retirement to find the leak and close it. He’s told to spy on his own past, his own life, his own world and not let anybody know. And he does.

The story is marvelously construed and at times wholly unexpected. It hits themes I learned about at The Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. but had never given much thought to: spying at times is excruciatingly low, akin to rooting through sewage or body parts without morals, qualms, emotion. Or making thefts, planting evidence, participating in wee hour dead drops and making meeting plans that seem over-wrought, childish, small and mean. A spy, good or bad, can make friends, family, lovers, or even children pawns, disposable, tools. And be able to credit love of country for it.

This is a 1971 book. Ages before the Philby bust or the several in Washington. Le Carre’s work previews big and ugly themes in the notable revelations of these spy crises. There is the money first, and wanton sexuality (implied by Le Carre, not explicit). There is hunger for power, blind and naked ambition too. In fact, I’m not so sure Le Carre did not have a check list of the Seven Deadlies and made sure he hit hard and well on each in some form. Spying in this and the real world is noble and vice-filled and Patriotism the most wretched excuse for pursuit of vice.

In part, this is what makes the book good. It is a period piece reflecting the numerous crises of the late 1960s and 1970s and these do not include rock and roll or a lot of bad poetry. It is the corruption of ideals culturally and at the highest levels that the book works on. And what really makes the book timeless is that these ideals and the potential for corruption of them is timeless. Beyond this, what makes the book truly classic, is that the writing, the handling of the themes, is also timeless and beautifully crafted.

Tinker Tailor is an ugly story beautifully conceived, construed, and conveyed. Le Carre is at the top of the writing game in this one. There is a secret language to this world. Job titles, verbs, small actions of big import. Everything is interpreted and explained of course, but the reader has to pay attention too, stay focused. The language of secrets is a huge part of the game and draws the reader further in, making him or her part of the fabric, part of warp and weave of the tail, an insider. Le Carre’s moral judgments are somehow simultaneously withheld and conveyed as well. We see choices made or pursued that begin, within reason, within all of us. Or within sight of us. His characters are simultaneously full of good and evil, nobility and scum. The only real question is the tipping point and if we will see it or not. Does anyone rise above it all? Yes. His hero, Smiley, but he does not do so without regret or loss. It is a tragic tale. And in the end secret too. This was a great read.

My only regret is that I wish I’d read this book years ago. I really do.

Thank you Mr. Le Carre. Thank you.

Robert Archibald.

This shouldn’t have been a tough book for me. It has loads of personal interest for me. I’ve been to and seen the places he discusses. I’ve even lived in some of them. My work historically also takes meto the themes and issues that he so badly wants to explore. And I’m engaged with the subject matter intellectually. It invigorates and broadens an already invigorated interst in sprawl and the associated loss of historic towns, communities, economy, philosophies.

Archibald wants to show us what we are losing when the box stores and fast food joints open at the edges of town and our downtowns begin to rot. We lose our pedestrian-level neighborhoods, our intimacy of community, our person touches and knowledges that include the friendships and opportunities and broader social safety net of our historic past. Archibald takes on and rejects the notion that suburbs are “good development,” that our social circles now are not contingent on place but on technology, that growth at any cost is growth we want. He uses his personal history, where he was raised, where he went to school and got his first professional jobs, and where he matured and became a leader of good growth and good history to convey the nature and import of fighting sprawl. I know what he’s talking about. I’ve stood in many public meetings and mentioned that geographic growth is exponential, that every new ring is a pi-r-squared cost for providing and maintaining our most basic needs, that the greenest buildings are those already built, that sidewalks and neighborhood schools exponentially enhance property values too, and on and on. I very much wanted this book to win, to sing to me like Tom Hylton’s Save Our Lands Save Our Towns.

The book was a huge disappointment. And here is why: the subject matter is of paramount importance to us as a nation and though he recognizes this, he treats it as an indulgence. He is a professional historian, one whose career is spent conveying important historic themes to the public (not the academy). He is trained and understands the nature of historic context but fails to go there. His only real whack at it is in land use: the 35 percent population growth of St. Louis from 1950 to 1990 resulting in a 400 hundred million percent (or something like that) land use growth. Now that is a good argument, a good point to make. It’s easy for people to see that their sewer bills will be ten times higher and that his kind of growth is pocket-book expensive, no matter where you live. Throw in the need to pay for roads and gasoline and cops and lights zoning officers and rec departments, and suburban campus schools, and people get it.

But he never really goes there for much of the book. It’s, instead, indulgence. He has inspired and fond memories of graduate school, and work, in Albuquerque, but never saw or understood the city’s sprawl the whole time he was there. For him, it’s not an issue until he’s conscious of living in it, in St. Louis, or seeing his boyhood neighborhood in the Upper Peninsula being ravaged by “good development” choices. For him, the evidence is in what he remembers, or hopes for, not in what is factually before us adn has been for a long time. And that is a huge disappointment. As evidence it’s just not good enough. It is anecdotal, personal. It is listening to a grandfather and removed from the need to universalize the issues he most wants us to believe in. His approach is to have us believe in his own journey, that his own awakening and awareness should drive us to awakening and awareness, and that’s not good enough, not by a long shot, for this.

Archibald could have grabbed his themes by the heels and like a real purveyor of historical evidence could have used a lot of other things, especially statistics, for a LOT of metropolitan areas, Boston to Seattle, Miami to Marquette. He could have talked about the numbers of school buses that we disproportionately support, ever declining church membership (if that’s your thing), the wanton waste of whole, complete, functioning cities resulting from suburban flight, the lies and half truths that Chamber-of-Commerce Growth-At-Any Cost types continue to get away with. It’s not like there’s a lack of evidence. Or the ability to ask a developer “When will we be developed? When are done?” (The answer is always NEVER). The evidence is everywhere before us, in the numbers, in the landscapes, our wallet, absolutely everywhere in our everyday existence.

I mentioned Tom Hylton because his book is a terrific example of how to both celebrate the past and move the anti-sprwal good growth cause forward. Hylton is a journalist, disciplined, imaginative. He is a researcher first, and a purveyor of emotion second. Archibald is the other way around. Hylton is the better historian, in this. He deserved the Pulitzer he got. And I wish dearly that Archibald had bothered to even look at Hylton’s work for his own efforts.

In the end, A Place to Remember is a slog of a read. It could have been great. But it’s not. I finished it, and that’s the best I can say.

This work is inspired, loosely based on the Columbine shootings. Coupland takes into the world of the event, and of the roghly fifteen years after the event in which lives play out. He’s got a great construction. He picks four voices, two directly involved in the event, and two directly involved in the lives of the first two.

I think DAMUS is the operative part of the book title. Coupland does not say how lives may have played out without the massacre. He does not rely on sociology to convey the lasting and widespread affects of the massacre. He simply takes four samples, four viewpoints, four lives and shows them to us with the shooting spree as a backdrop. The novel does not convey analysis or deep thinking (none of the four are capable or mature enough) to critically analyze or fully understand), but he does show us how people who might go through such a thing are simply and terribly damaged.

Elements of the work are poignant. There is working class empathy/understanding of relationships and what informs them that is very appealing to me. He handles the Christian Values, including the ugliness and culpability, with grace and aplomb. He handles the feelings and nature of teen-age thinking, boy and girl alike, similarly. He captures the pride and fall of middle aged men whose entire value systems are uprooted, their whole lives fall apart, by events and family members they never really understood. This is a very tragic tale. It is dark. It is full of hurt, and it is, generally highly believable. I found myself wanting to quibble with details, writer’s license perhaps gone a bit fast without consideration, but the writing is also strong enough to forget the quibbles, to keep pushing, to find out what happens next.

It’s a reflective book and in the shadow of Newtown not a good choice for me. I found muh self reflective, angry at gun culture and parents who do not parent, who don’t really have a clue. But I also found myself admiring the virtues and vitality of youth whose potential for great love is just unfurling, or is carried forward despite the slaughter. There is, at times, great humor as well as great insight. There are moments of astonishment too: how could a woman do THAT? followed by of COURSE somebody would see and pursue something like that. It’s a very human book. It carries a lot of the worst of us to the surface, without blame, while giving due to the very best of us, with full credit.

Is it cathartic? Not to me. But there is catharsis for the main characters. Less so for the human race. It is a compelling and realistic insight. It is tangible and thoughtful. It is at times powerful. And yes. It is a great read. Thank you Mr. Coupland (again), for your words.

Another writer’s look at writers, this under the fine (and not so fine) hand of the New Unpleasantness. Martin’s got two central characters, both authors. One is a fraud, but successful. The other is a failure, and no less a fraud. The story is centered on the one bringing down, exposing the other. Because he is a failure, he will, ultimately even fail at this.

This book was hugely hilarious. The writing at times is so crisp and clean it sparkles, the subject matter so adroitly handled it shines. Personal interchanges, dialogues between characters, generally have steel teeth and furry linings, both. Some of the descriptive narrative too is off-the-charts funny. This was a great read.

One of Amis’s strengths is vocabulary and love of language. He’s an honest penchant for milking words, phrases, thoughts, for more than we usually get. He is adept at street slang and Cockney outlooks. He is adept at the snobbery and snubbery of the English aristocracy, new and old. His looks at American norms and language are stabbing, somewhat dead-on and yet over the top too. His characters are all marginal people, even the best of them, and Amis lines them up, with language alone, like duckpins just to see how they will bounce and fall. At times I roared with laughter, My eyes watered, I couldn’t stop reading. I had to read parts to those around me. It is full of imagination and constructions that fire and fire.

But this is also a mean and ugly story, for even the children are at times mean and ugly. At times it is severe and cruel and bereft of kindness (except as a tool to something else). Everybody is the butt of Amis’s humour. It’s this cruelty that makes the book, and writing, work so well. But it is ugly, and not for the faint-of-heart. This is not one to be taken seriously, but as slapstick, even if written as a parallel to the author’s real life troubles.

I couldn’t help but comparing THE INFORMATION to Paul Theroux’s MY OTHER LIFE (reviewed earlier here). Both have London-based failing authors, middle aged white males, with children, failing marriages, friends that are not really friends, agents that suborn and perjure. All of the consequences (drugs, booze, insularity and on and on) are the same. Yet the books are not at all comparable. It is Rashomon, entirely different views, perspectives of highly similar people, events. Amis’s was a LOT more fun. Thank you, Mr. Amis. Thank you. And thank you, Ms. R, for exposing me to this book.

Protagonist Gustad Noble is a simple man with the usual ambitions of men (and women) everywhere: modest success and security, a close knit and happy family, friends and neighbors he likes and that like him. His life journey, at least the portion of it Mistry gives us, is full, at times difficult, and ultimately not enough for he is a simple man in a complex world. It’s a downward spiral. He’s locked into a job that he has little love for, neighbors that in turn bray and trouble him, family members who have ambitions contrary to his own, and friends that betray him, return to him, and betray him again, even by the simple fact of their deaths. His government at all levels is unsound. Clerks and merchants cannot be trusted, and his minority place in a complex setting (India, 1970s) is both defining and limiting.

He is not a loser. He is a good man and smart enough. He understands and appreciates his place as patriarch and his place in a genealogical chain of places. He is loved and respected as much as he is cheated and exploited. And his comforts are simple and true, just not strong enough to push aside his discomforts.

The book is a slice of life and very appealing in that it is typical and universal though the setting to a western reader like me is not. And this is the beauty of Mistry’s writing. He is able to clearly and with talent delineate a complex slice of life in a complex culture with which we are unfamiliar. The story is compelling, if at times mundane, because the characters themselves are rewarding, especially Gustad. Three thumbs up (peers down) Ooops. Two. But I’d give him a third if I had one.