My Varied Interests
January 14th, 2010 — books
Just finished up Donald Westlake’s Get Real. (I bought it the other day). I haven’t read a caper novel before, but have enjoyed the various caper movies that were popular a few years back. (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, etc.)
A big plus for this novel: it appears to have had a pretty good editor. The prose was tight and the plot moved along with all good haste. Perfect for the flight home from MAN.
I think I’ll now follow this advice.
June 28th, 2008 — books
What was I doing when I was 15? I don’t remember. Eating fries. Moving to New York. I started dating someone. Oh and I had a tendency to watch the Thundercats.*
What was John Kennedy Toole doing? Writing Neon Bible. It’s a slice of life covering about a decade of a young man’s life in Mississippi ca. WWII. There’s some bigotry, domestic violence, town prudery and a revival preacher who seemed to have a talent for collecting the greenbacks.
Why does it make me hate 15 year olds? Because Neon Bible is pretty good. I liked the language and the plot (such as there is), and the ending was just excellent. Makes me want to know what happened to the main character, Dave, in later years.
And dag nabbit there’s already a movie based on it with Dennis Leary as the wayward father. From 1995. More than a decade ago. Seriously? What am I the last to hear about any of this stuff? I have to discover it at random while killing time in a Border’s in northern NJ?
Well if you’ve never heard of it (which is pretty unlikely, apparently) you might enjoy it.
* Having skimmed the article, I now know more about the Thundercats than I ever really wanted to. Certainly more than I picked up when I watched it more than a quarter century ago.
February 13th, 2008 — books, parallel reading
I bought Presentation Zen (Link: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
I bought Time and Motion Study off eBay. It’s from 1927.
The main thing that stands out so far is this: both books point to the impact of personality.
Presentation Zen (intro, quoting a book quoting another person [which is kind of a long tail])
…many people think that serious people are the best suited for business, that serious people are more responsible. “[But] that’s not true,” says Kataria. “That’s yesterday’s news. Laughing people are more creative people. They are more productive people.”
Time and Motion Study (Chapter III: Qualifications of a Good Time-Study Man [yes, "man" is in the chapter title])
A time-study man must first, last, and at all times be able to get along with people in a positive way. … To do this requires tact, sympathy, and an understand of the wishes and desires of those with whom he is working. He must have a real interest in his fellow men.
January 11th, 2008 — books, chicago
So I just found this little paperback from 1951. It’s by two guys, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, who wrote three of these books. (Not LA Confidential — that was fiction.) Lait was almost 70 at the time and died before they were made into movies. What is it?
“A cheeky, impudent, uncensored, shocking account of the fast fabulous city.” “complete and unabridged”
“The facts are told… the names are named… it’s sensational … it’s shocking…. the spare-nothing, spare-nobody, expose of the big town” (from the back)
The whole “complete and unabridged” thing is cute. Not sure if that’s just to satisfy people that it includes all the naughty bits or just to say that this little pb isn’t the reader’s digest version.
Favorite parts so far:
The introduction gives a very interesting perspective on how the city has changed and where it was at that time. For example:
” In 1910, Chicago breezily and confidently expected to surpass New York by 1950; in 1950 it no longer talks of growing bigger than New York–it wonders when it will be smaller than Los Angeles.”
From early on, Lait and Mortimer’s basic hypothesis is that Chicago was then on the way out. Interesting because, according to WikiP, population of Chicago peaked in 1950 at 3.6 million. (Today it is 2.8 million. LA today? 3.6 million). People who could were moving to the suburbs and only came to the city to work. The next generation of the civic greats — those who helped Chicago recover after the fire — they were just sitting on their heels.
There are detailed chapters on the Levee, Chicago’s old red light district, Bronzeville, The Crime Cartel, Police Corruption, etc. The language is very much of the time, as are the attitudes about ethnicity, skin color and gender.
Always good to get a little history, even when it is sensational.
Now it’s time for work.
June 1st, 2007 — books
I just finished Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter. It was a delight. Urrea spoke at a Neighborhood Writing Alliance event that I went to a couple of months back. He’s engaging as a speaker so I figured I’d take a shot at the book. I’m very glad I did.
The work details the life and times of a aristocratic landowner, his illegitimate daughter (who he finally recognizes when her life is just about 1/2 over — at 16), indigenous religion and culture, and the brewing Mexican Revolution. The joy of this book is in the humanistic details surrounding the plot and the fantastic language used to move everything along.
When it comes to historical novels, works that gloss over some of the differences between, for example, the aristocracy and their peasants tend to turn me off. Hummingbird does an excellent job at acknowledging and detailing the differences between the two worlds. For example, there’s a great scene, 2/3’s of the way through, when a child comes to the house for help. He stinks to high heaven because he is covered in lice and his skin is infected where he has scratched at them. The landowner, Thomas, has no idea what to do because he’s never had to deal with lice. He’s repulsed. The daughter Teresita has dealt with lice her whole life and leads the way. Urrea doesn’t leave us stuck in the filth overly often — just enough to make his point.
Indigenous culture and religion, and the way everything was all mixed up with the Roman Catholics, play a major role in this work. Teresita (UTexas, UMN) is a historical character (look closely and you’ll notice that she and the author share the same last name — she’s a great aunt or something), and Urrea relates a number of miracles attributed to her as they were reported in the press. I’m always skeptical of these things — in the same way that I’m skeptical of Salt Mary. I would guess that there’s more to the story that what’s in the book. That’s OK. It’s fiction.
I enjoyed The Hummingbird’s Daughter immensely. It is definitely worth a read.
March 27th, 2007 — books, reviews
I don’t love this book yet, either. Which is tough because I just finished it and I generally like Lethem’s work, and I really wanted to like this book. So why didn’t I?
It all seemed so … unsurprising. Lethem’s other works — Motherless Brooklyn, Gun with Occasional Music, etc — are delightfully surprising, interesting and fresh without a whole lot of effort.
You Don’t Love Me Yet is none of these. It feels tedious and false. And it’s not that his body of work, which is largely speculative, made me think he would stick anywhere close to reality. But I had hoped for … more.
Maybe the title is meant as a prediction. Maybe I’ll come to love this book the longer I think about it. Or maybe it won’t happen until I go back to reread it in some distant future. Maybe he has embedded layers and layers of meaning that I’m too superficial to get on a first reading. All of that is possible.
If you like Lethem’s work, my opinion on this doesn’t matter and you should read it. But if you want to dive into him for the first time, don’t start here. Try Motherless Brooklyn instead.
