Reading: Even some flawed books are worth reading...

I don't read too much in the "true crime" genre any more.

I've always been interested in the procedural aspect of the solving of crimes, but at some point it just got too depressing to read much of that sort of thing. Yeah, the crimes that get written about are the ones that end up getting solved sooner or later, mostly. I think that's why a lot of people read true crime; the bad guys get theirs eventually, and that's a comforting thought. But, after awhile, it just got to the point that all that tragedy and blood got too depressing for me to continue to make it a regular part of my reading.

However, I just finished an interesting true crime book, Hands Through Stone (2012, Craven Street Books; 350 pages), by James A. Ardaiz.

I wouldn't have picked it up at the library, except that it is about a local case, or actually two cases a few years apart that turned out to be connected. Not only did I remember the latter of the two cases (the first one was before I moved to the area), but in the years after there were rumors that a woman who lived in my neighborhood was related to one of the people involved. I didn't pay much attention to the talk then, but when I saw the book I made that connection and decided to read it.

I'm glad I read it, because it cleared up some stuff about the case that I had not connected up before, including exactly why the second crime - a triple homicide during what initially appeared to be the robbery of a mom-and-pop grocery store - was committed. I'd always heard that it was a crime of revenge, but I never really understood why the revenge was being sought until I read this book.

Yes, I'm deliberately being vague about the details of the case, which got fairly wide publicity especially after the second crime was committed, because I want you to read the book, and I don't want to give a lot away. Because the book was written by the prosecutor in the first case, who later went on to become an appellate judge, there are enough inside details to make the whole thing interesting.

I'm not going to claim that it is a particularly well-written book, because it isn't. There is no real evidence that it had the benefit of much editing. I'm not sure whether that is the fault of the author or of the publisher (a small local press). It could also have used a good proofread. All of that would have ordinarily made me put the book down unfinished, but the story being told was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages.

The other flaw of the book is that at some points, the narrative becomes more about the writer than the subject of the book. However, I even found those passages interesting because of the insight they gave into the mind of the prosecutor, who followed the case even after he was out of it, seeing it out to its bitter end over twenty-five years after the first crime was committed when the former prosecutor attended the execution of the man who had masterminded the crimes.

And that's another thing about the book. No matter which side of the capital punishment debate you are on, the book will give you things to think about. I happen to be on the anti-death-penalty side of the discussion, for various reasons, but I'll wait to write about that another time.

Right now, I'll just say that, yes, Hands Through Stone is a flawed book. But if you can find it, and if you are interested in the subject of crime and punishment and the people who both commit crimes and those who attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice, you should probably read this book.

John Scalzi's "Redshirts" - Best book I've read this year

I mentioned the other day that I was reading Redshirts, by John Scalzi (Tor, 2012; 317 pages).

I'm finished reading it now, and all I can say is, Damn, that was a good book. I can't do a proper review of it. I'd have to give too much away in the way of spoilers, and I don't want to do that. I want you - all of you - to go out and read it, and I want you to come to it as it did, with only the most basic idea of what it is about. I want you to discover its delights for yourself.

I will say that I wasn't sure how the codas were going to work (there are three of them), but all three of them relate quite solidly to the main story and are an essential part of the whole. It may even be said that the codas are where the book's soul resides.

I will also say that I can state with certainty that Redshirts has vaulted into the list of my favorite books. At some point, I will have to acquire a copy of my own (I read it out of the library). I like the other things I've read that Scalzi has written very much, but I love Redshirts.

There are a couple of basic things you probably do need to know about the book. It takes a meme from the original "Star Trek" series, turns it on its head, plays with it, and does some extremely odd and interesting things with it. Also, you might have heard that Redshirts is a funny book. And it is - it is very funny; laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. But don't let that fool you. There are interesting ideas here, too, and some interesting issues are raised. These issues show that Scalzi studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, but you shouldn't let that make you hesitate to read the book, either. It all works really well, and he sneaks those philosophical issues into the story in ways so that you might not realize he's dealing with philosophical issues until well after he has you caught up in them.

So that you'll know what you're looking for when you go online to order Redshirts or to the bookstore to buy it or to the library to check it out, this is what the cover of the book looks like:

Whichever way you read it, just go read Redshirts. There's even an audiobooks version, performed by Wil Wheaton.

Oh. One other thing about Redshirts. It won this year's Hugo as Best Science Fiction Novel at Worldcon.

Reading: A trip back to the Sixties...

I am a child of the Sixties.

I was 3 years old when the Sixties began, and 13 when they ended. I remember a lot of that decade, putting lie to the oft-stated conventional wisdom that "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Of course, while I was alive in the Sixties, I was too young to participate in the excesses of the decade, so it makes sense that I might actually remember more of that time than people who were older and did participate more fully.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, yearning for what seemed to be a simpler time (although the Sixties were not simple at all), but I'm fascinated by that decade. So, when I was at the library the other night and, while browsing the shelves, found What They Didn't Teach You About the 60s (Presidio, 2001; 360 pages), by Mike Wright, I picked it up immediately. I'm also doing some research into the decades following World War II, so I also had research aims in mind. But I mostly picked it up because it just sounded like something I would enjoy reading.

And I did. Now, I have to point out that it is not a perfect book. I found a few really obvious but probably minor errors. For example, Wright says that the actress who first played Catwoman in the 1960s "Batman" television series was Julie Newman, when even a non-fan of the show like me knows that it was Julie Newmar who played the role. This might even have been a simple typographical error; there are several of those in the book. Overall, these errors did not spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Wright covers almost every aspect of US culture in the Sixties, from music and television to politics, the Vietnam War, and the protests of that non-declared (from the US standpoint) war. He also covers the Cold War, the space program, the political assassinations that seemed all too common during the decade, and the Civil Rights movement that continued into the Sixties from its roots in the 1950s.

That's a lot to cover in the course of less than 400 pages, but Wright does a pretty good job of balancing completeness and detail. Having lived through those years, I have to admit that there wasn't really that much that he wrote about that I didn't know about, at least in outline. But I can see how someone who wasn't there might not know a lot about many of the events of the decade. In high school history classes, there is generally some attempt to stay away from controversial issues, and there was much in the Sixties that remains controversial even today. So, unless the student who was in high school in the Eighties and the Nineties and beyond, or even, really, in the Seventies, might not know a lot about the events of the Sixties unless they have deliberately sought out the information. While I wouldn't recommend this as the only book someone might read about the Sixties, I think it's a good starting point for anyone who doesn't know much about that decade and would like to know more.

I already mentioned the main drawback of the book, in the form of some mostly insignificant errors. One of the things I most liked about the book as I was reading is that Wright is very good about providing fairly specific dates when different events happened. Perhaps this is just the researcher in me, but I like to know specifically when things happened, not just the month or the year involved. There is some of that here, but there are also a significant number of specific dates. It makes it even more interesting when you can, as I was able to in a couple of instances while I was reading, to be able to say, yes, I know exactly what I was doing on that day, when this or that event took place. But, as I've noted here before, I have a particular fascination with different events that happened to occur on the same date.

It is going to be interesting as I continue my research and fact check the information here against information from other sources (here's a research hint: always fact check, no matter how authoritative a source seems to be), to see just how accurate Wright's dates are, and how his evaluations of events match up with other writers' perspectives on those events.

Which, I suppose, is just another indication of the extent of my geekiness.

When is a cooking book not a cookbook?

Sometimes, you just pick up a book because it's there, and you aren't sure you're going to like it, and then you end up loving it.

That's what happened to me with Julie Powell's Julie & Julia (Little, Brown and Company, 2005; 359 pages in mass market paperback). I was at the library one day and couldn't find anything I wanted to read. Nothing. My last stop was at the "free" paperbacks rack, where they put the donated paperbacks that aren't even really part of the library's collection. You don't check them out; you just take them home and then bring them back whenever you've finished reading, or you bring back another in its place.

Well, I'd seen the film version of the book, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, and liked it all right. So, I figured I'd give the book a try.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book or the movie, this is the (mostly?) true story of Julie Powell, a secretary for a government agency in the wake of 9/11, not really loving her job and looking for something fulfilling to do. So, she decides to cook her way through volume one of Julia Child's' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". That's something over 500 recipes, some of them very intricate and involved, in a year. Not only did she decide to do this, she decided to blog about it.
The blog eventually brought her a bit of national media attention, as well as a book contract to write Julie & Julia.

I was leery of the book at first. I'm not much of a cook, but more the heat and assemble type. I'm getting better. In fact, after I finish writing this post, I'm going to put on some potatoes and eggs to boil for potato salad. It's a simple potato salad, but it's good. Just the potatoes and eggs, plus salt and pepper, mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, and a little water. Oh, and some wedged black olives if there are any in the cabinet. It's the potato salad my grandma taught me to make when I was very young. Every once in awhile I get a craving for it.

Oops. Sorry for the tangent. The book...I was afraid that there was going to be too much cooking detail that I wouldn't understand. Well, there's cooking detail there, but not too much, and I actually understood most of it. But there is also Julie's life for that year, and the life of her husband and her friends. And there's the blog, which kind of became a character all its own, in a good way.

What the book isn't, is just like the movie. There is much more Julia Child in the movie than there is in the book. There are vignettes between most of the chapters from Julia's life and the life of her husband, Paul, taken from his letters, but they are brief. I would have liked there to be a little more Julia in the book, because the parts about Julia's life in the movie were what I liked most about it.

On the other hand, we learn a lot more about Julie in the book than in the movie. As it turns out, I like Julie much more in the book than I did in the movie. She's plain-spoken and opinionated, and when she screwed up the cooking, she lets you know. She's profane at times - and writes about how some of the readers of her blog were uncomfortable about her use, especially, of the word "fuck". But that's Julie, and it wouldn't be the same book if she reined herself in.

I suspect that Republicans, or at least those without a sense of humor, might not like the fact that Julie isn't enamoured much with the Republican Party, and is plain about that fact in the book. This comes out mostly in her writing about her job, which was for an agency dominated by Republicans during a Republican administration. But, again, that's Julie, and the book wouldn't be the same if the reader didn't get to know that part of her.

This is a good book. If you like cooking, and if you like good writing, you should probably read it. If you don't like cooking, read it anyway. It might make you want to try to do some more cooking. That's the effect it had on me. When I was finished reading, my first instinct was to go grab a cookbook, any cookbook, and see what I might make.

First book of the year...

I've got a confession to make: I grew up watching talk shows on television, and I love them.

Not, I hasten to add, the crap that passes for talk shows today. I'm talking about the shows that were on in the 1960s and 1970s, where people actually talked about things, and told stories, and didn't necessarily show up only to plug their latest project or to see which celebrity could be the most outrageous. My favorites were always Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, who would often get a guest on and just let them talk.

So, when I was in the library the other day and saw Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (Times Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2010; 279 pages), by Dick Cavett, on the shelf, I had to check it out and read it.

Cavett has had talk shows on a variety of networks and in a variety of formats through the years, but I mostly watched his show when it was first on, on ABC late at night, from 1968 through 1974. I had one summer, especially, when I was about thirteen years old, when I had horrible insomnia (there was a reason for it, which is another post for another day), where I slept maybe one night per week. Cavett's show got me through that sleepless summer. He had all the best guests, including many figures from the rock world as well as literary guests who wouldn't have turned up on any of the other shows. If I had to be awake, watching these interviews was a great way to pass the time.

Talk Show is comprised of a series of columns written for The New York Times online between 2007 and 2010. Some of the columns recall Cavett's talk shows and the guests he hosted, while others are personal recollections from his childhood or exercises in political or social commentary. A few are disappointing - the man has an aversion to fat people that he isn't shy about expressing - but most are fascinating. I was disappointed that he didn't write more about hosting people like Janis Joplin and John Lennon. On the other hand, he writes at length about interviewing Richard Burton (you can see those shows on YouTube, if you're interested, and some of Cavett's interviews with others), about the show in which writers Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer appeared to nearly come to blows.



The audience at the time, of course, loved it. Cavett's interviews were sometimes not for the faint of heart, at a time when political correctness had not yet been invented.

Surprisingly, perhaps, some of the most moving columns revolved around when Cavett met John Wayne during the time when Wayne was already sick with the cancer that killed him. At the time, Wayne was making his final film, The Shootist, and Cavett recalls being on the set during filming of the famous scene where a doctor, played by James Stewart, tells Wayne's character, who was also dying of cancer, exactly what he could expect the rest of his life to be like. It was no secret that Wayne was sick, and according to Cavett's description, some of those watching the filming had difficulty holding it together during the filming of the scene, including, I suspect, Cavett, although he doesn't say so.

I really liked this book. I must have; I was awake until three this morning finishing it. Maybe you have to have been there, in the sense of having seen Cavett's interviews at the time they were first broadcast, to find his recollections interesting. I'm not silly enough to think that someone who was born in the 1990s is going to be fascinated by Cavett's apparent delight at having been at least a casual member of Richard Nixon's enemies list in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The thing is, Cavett is at least as good a storyteller as some of the guests on his shows, some of whom were consummate storytellers. That alone makes Talk Show worth reading.

I started with a confession, and I'll end with another. It has taken me an unconscionably lengthy period to write today's post. I got distracted by You Tube clips of Cavett's old shows and spent quite a bit of time watching them rather than writing. If you're interested, I'd recommend going over to YouTube and finding some of these clips and full shows. You might be surprised, especially if you weren't around in the sixties and seventies, at what a real talk show could be.

Book review: "The Overlook", by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is a good writer. No, make that a great writer. I haven't found a book of his yet that doesn't keep me turning the pages, often late into the night.

The Overlook (Vision, 2008; 262 pages) is not an exception. This is true even though I've read it before, although not in exactly this version. Written originally as a serial for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, I read it first in its reworked hardcover version. The version I read this time has an extra chapter added to the end of the book. This extra chapter, a sort of epilogue, was originally written as an "extra" for Connelly's mailing list, but was included in the paperback edition of the novel.

In The Overlook, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is called out in the middle of one night to the scene of a murder at an overlook along Mulholland Drive. Very quickly, the murder starts looking like part of a plot by terrorists to gain access to some radioactive material; the victim was a physicist who transported such material to hospitals for use in treatments for cancer patients. Because of the suspicions of terrorist involvement in the crime, it isn't long before the LAPD's Office of Homeland Security and the FBI both become involved in the case. Both try to freeze Bosch and his partner out of the investigation.

It isn't long, however, until Bosch begins to suspect that there is something very wrong with how the case is being viewed. What follows is an exercise in showing that even law enforcement, on all levels, sometimes sees what it wants to see, or what it thinks it could be to its advantage to see, rather than what is really there. I won't reveal any more of the plot, except to say that there are twists in the plot that you might not see coming.

An interesting part of the novel's construction, or at least it is interesting to me, is that the whole story takes place within a span of approximately twelve hours. I've read novels of the same length that take place over months or years. What Connelly does so well here is to manage the detail in which the story is told so that it doesn't become boring or repetitive.

As a writer, I'm interested in the ways in which writers choose to tell their stories and in studying what works for them and what doesn't work. This novel works very well, combining suspense, action, and what I took to be social and political comment (which might be just me; I don't know what Connelly had in mind when he was writing the story) in a way that is never dull.

The Overlook is a quick read. That suited me very well, as I've been engaged in some pretty heavy reading recently, as research for some writing I'm doing (some of which could conceivably appear here sooner rather than later), and reading this was a refreshing change from all of that. It was nice to sit down and be able to finish the book in a couple of days even though those days have been busier than usual.

Now that I think about it, reading The Overlook has put me in the mood to go back and read (or re-read) all of Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, in order. That might be a good project for next year's reading.

Book Review: "How to Think Like a Neandertal"

As you know if you've read very much of this blog, I am a huge anthropology geek. It's what I studied in school. It's what I've loved since I was seven years old. And so, when a good friend who is currently studying anthropology at Cal recommended How to Think Like a Neandertal (Oxford University Press, 2012; 210 pages), by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge, I immediately requested it from my local library system.

Wynn and Coolidge, an anthropologist and a neuropsychologist respectively and both professors at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, have been studying the evolution of cognition for several years. Part of the result of their study is this book. It's fascinating stuff, written with enough rigor that it is a text for the course on Neandertal cognition that my friend is taking at Cal, but it is also accessible to the layperson. No, not just accessible. It is a well-written, informed, and witty look at how Neandertals might have lived and thought during their time on Earth, from around 200,000 (or a little earlier, depending on which expert you consult) years ago to about 30,000 years ago, when the last of their kind died, probably somewhere on the Iberian peninsula, where they had been pushed by the dominant anatomically modern humans who had arrived late in their history, from the Neandertals former range across much of Europe and western Asia.

The authors cover the expected ground: how Neandertals lived and hunted, including what their tools and weapons reveal about what kind of thought processes they might have used. And really, what the Neandertals left behind in the form of campsites, food remains, tools, and weapons, plus their own remains, are all researchers like Wynn and Coolidge have to go on to figure out how the Neandertal mind worked. Thoughts themselves, after all, do not fossilize. Wynn and Coolidge speculate on what kind of family life the Neandertals had, and point out that it is clear from the remains of some Neandertal individuals that they helped out their fellows who were injured or ill, at least in some cases. However, the authors also show that evidence earlier interpreted as proof that Neandertals buried their dead with religious ceremony and therefore had a concept of an afterlife really only shows that they took some minimal care of their dead but then probably later pushed the bones aside in a manner that was no more caring than their treatment of the bones of the animals they killed for food. And, in fact, they share evidence that at least some Neanderdertals practiced cannibalism at least some of the time.

Aside from matters of survival, Wynn and Coolidge also explore such topics as whether or not Neandertals had language, concluding that the Neandertals probably did have language, at least to some extent. They also explore what Neandertals' personalities were like, explaining their belief that Neandertals were probably stoic, pragmatic, unimaginative for the most part, empathetic and sympathetic to the extent that their pragmatism would let them be, but likely intolerant of change, not welcoming of those outside their local group, and dogmatic. The authors also take up the subject of whether Neandertals slept and dreamed as we do and what that says about their capacity for memory and ability to learn. The Neandertals probably did have REM sleep, but their dreams were probably not as creative as those of modern humans, and they probably did not have as much working memory capacity as we do. They also ask the question, could a Neandertal tell a joke or clown around? The conclusion Wynn and Coolidge come to is that the Neandertals could smile and laugh, as we do and as chimpanzees do, but they probably could not tell a joke, although they do say that there might have been some Neandertals who would clown around to elicit laughs from other Neandertals.

The authors also analyze what it would be like for a Neandertal to live among modern humans today, and what it would be like if a modern human could time-travel back to the time of the Neandertals. They conclude that adults of either species would not deal well living out of their time and with those not of their species. However, they also say that a baby Neandertal raised by modern humans or a modern human raised among Neandertals would likely be able to function in a society not naturally theirs, although not in all roles and not as well as natives to the society. They also say that a Neadertal raised in modern times would probably fit in somewhat better than a modern human raised by Neandertals.

This is a good book. It is not dry and dusty prose even though the science here appears accurate and rigorous. It is obvious that Wynn and Coolidge enjoy their subject, which they write about with humor and vitality. Just a glance at the chapter titles will tell you that - the chapter on humor is titled "A Neandertal Walked Into a Bar...". There is even a reference to time travel and Doctor Who in the chapter on how Neandertals would fare in modern times and we in theirs, with the authors providing a definition for "Doctor Who" in the glossary for their readers who are not Whovians.

More science writing should be like How to Think Like a Neandertal, and just for that it deserves to be read widely.

I finally finished reading a book...

I finally finished reading a book.

This was a big problem, apparently, in August. Didn't finish reading one book all month. Started a few. Rejected a few. A couple had to go back to the library, even though I wanted to finish them. I had other things to do. It was kind of a weird month.

But...then came Shadow of Night (2012, Viking; 584 pages), by Deborah Harkness.

I'd been waiting for this book to come out for awhile...ever since I read the first book in the trilogy, A Discovery of Witches. It was one of those books that I powered through because it was so good. Then, I got to the end and...cliffhanger. It didn't take me very long to find out when the sequel was scheduled to be published. Fortunately, it was only a few months. Because, you know, I wanted to know what happened next to Diana and Matthew. When we left them at the end of the first book, they had just dropped from the present day into Elizabethan London.

Shadow of Night picks up right where A Discovery of Witches leaves off, and follows Diana, a reluctant witch, and Matthew, a vampire, who have fallen in love and married, as they return to his ancestral home in France, go back to England, visit Prague and the lecherous Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who wants to possess Diana, and then back to London, all in search of the alchemical text that Diana discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford before it disappeared back into the stacks, and which it seems the whole world of creatures - witches, vampires, and daemons - want to get their hands on. Danger and intrigue seem to follow the couple wherever they go.

I really don't want to say any more about what happens as the plot unfolds; suffice it to say that a lot happens, and if you read it you will laugh, you will cry, and you will not want the story to end. Or, anyway, those were my reactions as I read. And I will warn you - there is no word yet on when the third book in the trilogy will be forthcoming. But if you are a fan of historical fiction, or of historical romance, don't put off reading the first two books in the trilogy. They really are a treat, romance for those who don't usually read romance novels (that would be me), with history that has been researched by an expert - Ms. Harkness is a professor of history at the University of Southern California.

Really. Go read Shadow of Night and, if you haven't already, A Discovery of Witches. The writing is wonderful, the story involving, and the cast of characters - a few of which you will recognize from history - fascinating.

Music Sunday: Music Plus Book Review Edition

I grew up listening to rock music. I also spent a lot of that time reading the writing of Robert Hilburn, the legendary music critic for the Los Angeles Times. So, when I discovered that Hilburn had written a memoir, Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales From a Rock’n’Roll Life (Rodale, 2009; 280 pages), I had to read it.

I’m glad I did.

Hilburn, who wrote his first story as a freelancer for the Times in 1966 and was hired as full-time pop music critic and editor in 1970, is a fabulous writer. He spent his career at one of the epicenters of the music industry, and he writes about his adventures with grace and wit and a great deal of insight. As part of his job, he met and interviewed and reviewed the biggest and most legendary names in music, and became friends with not a few of them. These friendships did not stop Hilburn from calling these performers on the missteps in their recordings and in performance, although he writes about being worried that his relationships with these artists could be seen as a conflict or interest or result in bias toward them.

Hilburn also writes about his questions concerning continuing to write about music aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults as he aged, addressing his doubts in the context of covering musicians who kept making music, sometimes relevant, sometimes not so much, as they aged. I found this interesting as a person of a certain age who still loves rock music but finds fewer and fewer new artists whose work I can relate to as I get older. Hilburn quotes Paul McCartney on the subject, recalls that at one point Mick Jagger said that he couldn't envision still singing “Satisfaction” at the age of thirty but has continued singing it much longer than that, and celebrates the fact that Johnny Cash’s work remained relevant until the end of his life.

Then there are the stories. Hilburn recalls being the person John Lennon would call to spend an evening with during Lennon's year-and-a-half long “lost weekend”, spent primarily in Los Angeles, when he needed to remain relatively sober to get up for an early meeting the next day. He relates serious and deep discussions he had about the music with Bruce Springsteen. He talks about the difficulties inherent in interviewing people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young. He explores his ability to connect with musicians much younger than himself, such as Kurt Cobain, and from very different backgrounds, such as Ice Cube. He describes hanging out with the members of U2 in and out of the recording studio.

In the course of all this, Hilburn pulls no punches in writing about artists he admires and those he finds, following Bob Dylan’s three categories of musicians, “superficial”, which in Hilburn’s eyes includes some very big name acts and musicians. But Hilburn spends much less time on the superficial than he does on the natural performers and the supernatural performers, Dylan’s two other categories.

I’ll leave you to read the book to discover how various performers Hilburn discusses fit into which category. If you think this is my way of making you read the book rather than giving away the good parts, you’re absolutely correct. Every music lover should read Corn Flakes with John Lennon.

Because it is Music Sunday, I’m going to end this review with three of the artists and performances mentioned by Hilburn in the course of his book.

One of the musicians that Hilburn had a friendship with was Johnny Cash. He calls Cash's cover of "Hurt" "stirring" (p. 194):



Another artist Hilburn has high praise for is Bruce Springsteen, whose "Brilliant Disguise" Hilburn described as "a chilling reflection about commitment" (p. 148):



Hilburn said that U2's album, "The Unforgettable Fire" "confused" him, but he called two of the songs on the album, "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and "Bad", "brilliant" (p. 141). Just last week, I shared the band's performance of "Bad" at Live Aid, so here is "Pride":

Book Review: "The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To", by D C Pierson

The other day when I was at the library, I picked a book up off the shelf because it had such an improbable title: The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (2010, Vintage Books/Random House; 226 pages). How was I supposed to resist a title like that?

Maybe that was author D C Pierson's strategy in picking the title. If it was, it was a good approach. It also describes the premise of the book quite well. Eric Lederer is a high school student, one of those who a lot of the rest of the students at his school have pegged as mostly likely to shoot the school up. He's a loner, a geek who is probably a little too intelligent for his own good. He just doesn't fit in. But, one day he approaches Darren Bennett, another student, the become fast friends, and Eric soon confesses that he doesn't sleep.

Of course, Darren's first reaction is what most of ours would be: so, don't drink so much caffeine. To which Eric's response is something along the lines of, "Dude, you don't understand..." Soon, the two boys are planning a multi-film epic that will be tied together with comic books and video games and, inevitably, a television series.

But, the course of true friendship and entertainment-moguldom is never an easy path, and...stuff happens. It would be unfair to say more.

Pierson is a good young writer, who has claimed J. D. Salinger as one of his influences. As far as I'm concerned, he has written a much better book than anything I've ever read of Salinger's. I find Salinger's work unpleasant and his characters (principally Holden Caulfield) impossible to like or to sympathize with. On the other hand, Pierson has created in Eric and Darren two characters who do stupid things, sometimes colossally stupid things, and sometimes mean things. There were a couple of points while reading the book where I would have cheerfully throttled both of them. But I continued to like them and to pull for them to work it all out.

I like this book more than I like most novels that are meant to be literary, rather than genre, works. And, The Boy... was clearly meant to be a literary novel. But deep down, this is a fantasy novel, and I like it all the more for that.

Book Review: "Virgin", by F. Paul Wilson

Virgin (Borderlands Press, 2007; 309 pages), by F. Paul Wilson, is an odd book.

This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. I can’t remember the last time I read a book where it took so long to figure out where it was going. Again, not a bad thing, although I did nearly give up on it about a quarter of the way in, just because I wasn't sure what the writer was up to.

It starts out with the discovery, in 1991, of an ancient manuscript in the wilderness of Israel. Some years later, two manuscripts surface, written in an archaic form of Aramaic, seemingly authentic...until it turns out that the words were written with ink that was only a few years old.

One of the manuscripts, along with a translation of the text, ends up in the hands of a Roman Catholic priest in New York, given to him by a friend who thinks he will get a kick out of it. But there is a Shin Bet agent who is after the manuscripts, and he is willing to kill to get them back.

Who is the agent? Why does he want the forged manuscripts so badly? What or who is he protecting? And who is he, really?

There is much more to the story, including a US Senator with aspirations to the presidency with secrets of his own and a nun who is determined to find what the priest’s manuscript says is hidden. To say much more than that would be to take all the fun out of the reading of this novel.

It would be easy to say that Wilson set out, in Virgin, to out-Dan Brown Dan Brown. And there is an element of that to the novel. But Wilson takes a different, much more original tack to the genre than Dan Brown could ever have managed.

I do have to say that I didn't find the resolution to the novel to be completely satisfying, but that has to do with my own personal outlook and not with anything in the storytelling. And, the quibble I have with it is so small within the whole that it didn't bother me enough to ruin my enjoyment of the reading experience as a whole, considering that the larger message was something that had me nodding my head in agreement as I read the last few pages of the book.

I've not read anything by Wilson before, but on the strength of my experience in reading Virgin, I suspect that I will be seeking out more of his work.

Book Review: "The Calling", by Catherine Whitney

Every once in awhile, when I'm at the library, a book catches my eye for some reason as I'm walking down an aisle looking for something else. I'll pick it up for no other reason than I take noticing it as a sign that I should read it. I've found some really good books that way, books that I wouldn't have read otherwise.

That's the case with The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1999; 250 pages), by Catherine Whitney. I was walking down the aisle between aisles of books, on my way out of the library on Thursday, when the title of the book caught my eye. I backed up, pulled it off the shelf, read the flyleaf, and put in in the pile of books I was taking home.

It might seem that this book is an odd choice for me to be interested in reading. I'm not Catholic, and never have been. I'm not really a religious person. However, when I was studying anthropology at university, my concentration was in the anthropology of religion. Additionally, I've always been fascinated by the question of why certain people choose to devote their entire lives to religion in a formal sense...those who believe they have a calling, whether it be as a priest or a nun or other Christian clergy, or as a religious professional in any religion. So, a book like this is really right up my alley.

Turned out, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Yes, it explores the question of how some of the nuns in the teaching and nursing order that Ms. Whitney studied - it was the order that had educated her as a high school student - came to their callings, and how some of them felt that calling even after they left the order. But it also looks at the concept of the calling in a wider sense, in the sense that people often feel called to do the thing that they do, not only to make a living but to feel fulfilled in their lives. The gist of it, I think, is that one's calling is the thing one feels that they must do.

I was left with the impression that doing the research for and writing the book had left Ms. Whitney, who left her church and her faith behind after high school, and after a short flirtation with joining the order herself, with a sense of closure regarding her relationship with the nuns who had taught her. She notes that, when she spent some time with the sisters in the order, some of whom had been her teachers so many years before, they always referred to her as "one of our girls", and that this had left her with a feeling that she really had always been a part of the order, even though she had spent so many years feeling estranged from her high school experience and her religion.

The best part of the book, however, for my money, are the portraits Ms. Whitney draws of some of the women who were members of the order, and who remained, in many ways, members of the order even after leaving, as much members as the women who chose to stay when so many were choosing to change paths for many different reasons. Ms. Whitney does the valuable service of showing that these women, far from being the stereotype of women who became nuns because they were unmarriageable, or running away from the world, are in most cases, strong, intelligent, competent, vibrant women who chose the life they did as a positive step rather than as a "settling" for what was left for them.

I read it, but I didn't necessarily love it...

I grumbled all the way through, but I finally finished reading Natural Selection (Hyperion, 2006), by Dave Freedman, after posting recently about how I wasn't sure I really wanted to finish it.

I think reading it probably wasn't a waste of time, since I believe I learned some things about how not to write a novel as I read along. I did nearly throw it across the room in the last 50 or 100 pages, when there were some things said or implied about evolution were unclear and didn't seem to jibe with what I've learned about how evolution works. Or, maybe the author just left things out that would have made that part of the story make more sense. There was also the fact that Mr. Freedman included one of those "I never mentioned it but..." scenes as he was wrapping up the story. I hate it when a writer does that, especially when it contradicts things that were established earlier in the story.

That said, what was going on within the story managed, in the end, to keep me turning the pages, and I ended up reading much later into the night last night than I should have done to finish the book. It was a near thing the whole time, but my need to know what happened outweighed the things I found frustrating and irritating about the book and about Mr. Freedman's writing.

I never did really warm up to any of the characters. I didn't like how Mr. Freedman handled the chapters and parts of chapters that were written from the creature's point of view. I don't know that I can say I liked the book as a whole.

On the positive side, that makes fourteen books I've read so far this year, and takes my total pages read (aside from reading for research for my current writing project when I haven't read a whole book through) this year so far to 5788 pages. With not even half the year over, I'm more than halfway to my pages read goal (10,000 pages) even though I'm still six books shy of the half-way mark to my goal of 40 books read this year, up from the 31 books I read last year. I know I should probably be reading at least a book a week, but with writing and, now, job-hunting, my reading time is more limited than I would like at the moment.

Life according to Keith Richards

There's a great video on You Tube that I stumbled on the other day, in which Rolling Stone magazine contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis interviews Keith Richards. DeCurtis starts out the interview by mentioning that, in an earlier interview Richards had answered a question about how he thought things had changed since the Rolling Stones had first started out by observing that "nobody reads anymore". DeCurtis then asks Richards to talk a little bit about what books and libraries have meant to him. Richards says that libraries are the "center of things", and that this is the way it should be.

And then Richards says that when he was growing up, libraries were the only place he "willingly obeyed the rules".

Reading Richards' autobiography, Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2010; 564 pages), written with James Fox, there is a continuing sense that this must be the truth. Richards, it seems, has broken just about every rule there is, in all aspects of life, and managed to come out the other side with intelligence and wit intact.

Richards makes no apologies for the things he's done, not about the drugs, not about relationships, not about anything. His philosophy seems to be that, yes, he'd done some stupid things, and some dangerous things, and that no one should try to emulate him in doing them, but that, hey, that's life, what can you do. And, in the end, it doesn't seem like all that bad a philosophy to have. Far too few of us can forgive ourselves for the things we've done, and Richards' ability to forgive himself for his transgressions is probably healthier in the long run.

Of course, he talks about the drugs. And there were a lot of drugs, including years of addiction to heroin despite many attemtps to clean up. This has been documented endlessly. But, he feels compelled to point out that, despite the reputation as a junkie that still follows him around, he's been clean of heroin for over thirty years, finally kicking it after an ultimatum from his manager. He admits that he loved heroin but that enough was, finally, enough. And, at one point, lest any of his fans think that they might like to try to emulate their hero's drug habits, he blatantly warns, "Don't try this at home" (p. 262).

But he also talks about the music, and about his long and rocky relationship with Mick Jagger, saying that from his point of view, Jagger makes it hard to be friends with him, but that they're brothers and that he would be there in an instant if Jagger really needed him and that he believes Jagger would be there for him in time of crisis. Richards documents, in fact, the times Jagger was there for him when he really needed him. This does not mean that Richards didn’t also point out what he sees as Jagger’s personality flaws.

The only time the book dragged for me, as a reader, was when Richards wrote about the technical side of his guitar-playing, about his discover and use of alternative tunings and so forth. It was interesting, but I don't play guitar, and so the discussion was too technical for me to really understand.

There is a lot in this book, stories of the road, stories of friends, those lost and those who have remained for decades. He talks particularly fondly about his relationship with Gram Parsons, who didn't manage to make it out the other side from drug addiction. He writes about meeting some of his own musical heroes, who didn't always live up to expectations as people, but who mostly met and exceeded expectations as musicians. And he talks about the women in his life, both those he had long relationships with and those who came into his life briefly while he was on the road with the Stones. In his case, at least, he claims that there wasn't nearly as much sex going on as one might assume.

Well, you can believe him or not about that, but in the end it all seems beside the point.
I've read a lot of books about rock and roll music and those who make it, and this is one of the best. It is written as if, as I commented to someone while I was reading it, someone put Richards before a tape recorder, turned it on, and said "Go!", and then edited it just enough to put events in a roughly chronological order. Richards' voice comes thorugh loud and clear, telling the story of his life as he sees it.

And an interesting life it has been, and continues to be.