Tag: books (Page 2 of 24)

Reckless – Chrissie Hynde
While doing my research for the recent RFTS post about The Pretenders, I came across several references to Hynde’s memoir. As soon as I completed that post, I checked and, LO!, the ebook was available at the library. I got it onto my Kindle and knocked it out over the next 36 hours.

It is a great, if limited where it really counts, rock memoir. Hynde shares pretty much everything she experienced in life, good and bad. From her traditional childhood in Ohio to her discovery of music and the alternative lifestyles available on college campuses in the early Seventies. I’m not sure I knew she was a student at Kent State and one of her friends was among those killed when Ohio National Guard troops fired on students during Vietnam protests. She shares her discovery of drugs and sex, and how there wasn’t much in those realms that she didn’t dabble in. She never asks for the reader’s forgiveness or expresses much regret about her actions, even those that seem pretty harrowing in retrospect. It was just the journey she was on and those experiences are what turned her into the woman and artist she became.

I say the book is limited because it takes her a long time to get to her actual career as a musician. There are lots of starts and stops in that aspect of her life, especially when she moves to England and works with a number of artists who go onto create legendary bands of the punk area right after they stop working with her. The Clash. The Sex Pistols. The Damned. The Slits. Chrissie Hynde worked with members of each group before they became the bands who became famous.

Finally, in the last quarter of the book, she finds three musical partners in crime and forms The Pretenders. Their success is quick but the lifespan of the core four is brief. She basically ends the book after the band fires Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott dies. The Pretenders had most of their biggest hits after the summer of 1982, but she glosses over everything that came after those terrible days in July.

Hynde has been through a lot. There is a Keith Richards quality to her life. After learning the details, you wonder how the hell she is still alive to tell her story and continue singing her songs. Her frankness and acceptance of all that she has been through make this a compelling read.

Crooked Seeds – Karen Jennings
My latest “Critically Acclaimed Book I Didn’t Quite Get.” There might be a reason I’ve never been in a book club…

This book centers on a disabled woman in modern South Africa struggling to get through her daily life. Police show up and begin asking questions about her past and force her to confront some ugly truths about her family’s history at the end of the Apartheid era. Along the way we learn how she became disabled, and how that is tied to an extremely problematic episode in that family timeline.

I know Jennings was making some broad statements about the ugliness of both the Apartheid era and how the promise of the New South Africa got trampled upon pretty quickly. I just didn’t find any of the characters to be interesting. I kept searching for ways to be sympathetic, especially to the main character, but never could connect with her.

The Bitter Past – Bruce Borgos
As with Crooked Seeds, this tells a story from two different time perspectives. The first is a modern investigation into a brutal murder of a retired FBI agent in rural Nevada. It soon becomes apparent that the murder was done by a Russian agent searching for a turned Soviet spy from the 1950s. The local sheriff, who had served as an Army intelligence officer and did a tour in Russia, with assistance from an FBI agent, is tasked with finding the modern Russian before they can kill again.

In parallel we are told the story of the 1950s Soviet agent, who infiltrates the US nuclear testing program in Nevada with the goal of creating an accident that kills thousands of civilians and turns the American public against the nuclear weapons program. This may surprise you, but he has misgivings. And, obviously, he is still alive in 21st Century Nevada so something happened to keep him in the States.

A few of Borgos’ plot elements are pretty clumsy. Their clumsiness makes the twists in the final quarter of the book apparent from a long way away. Yet it’s still an interesting story, and I read most of it near the pool over the weekend, so I didn’t mind that clumsiness. It was just fine for sitting in the sun and turning virtual pages without having to remember too many details.

The Bullet Swallower – Elizabeth Gonzalez James
This book has gotten crazy praise in literary circles, landing on numerous Best Of lists already. With good reason. It is a very well-told, fictional story of three generations of Mexicans and their family history. One is a bandit in the late 19th century border territory, who is forced to bargain for his life after a raid on an American train goes off the rails (so to speak). The other two are his son and grandson, living in 1960s Mexico City, with the third generation uncovering the secret family history the middle generation tried to hide.

The bulk of the book is solid, but it builds and builds to a truly glorious final chapter. It was one of those endings that grabs you in an unexpected way, takes your breath away a little, and makes you want to go back and read it again.

I actually read the author notes in the back and James said she had wanted to write a Magic Realism novel, and do so while pulling in some of her family history. I’m not really sure what Magic Realism is, and nothing about her story seemed all that magically real. So I can’t really comment on that part of it. It was just a damn good story, regardless of genre.

The Helsinki Affair – Anna Pitoniak
Hey, another book about generations discovering family secrets!

In this case a young CIA officer becomes one of the youngest station chiefs in the service when she correctly predicts a US Senator will be assassinated and her superior officer ignores her warnings. With her new position, she is tasked with tracking down connections between the killing and Russia. She learns that the senator was working with a Russian businessman to expose efforts by the Russian government to manipulate the US stock market while blackmailing US companies. And, in turn, she finds her dad, who was once a CIA agent and now works in the agency’s PR division, listed among people involved in the blackmail.

Uh oh.

As she unravels the Russian conspiracy and protects her source in Moscow, she learns a hidden secret about her father’s career, the truth of why her parents’ marriage ended, and we get a nice setup for a sequel.

The Family Chao – Lan Samantha Chang
You know, I read so many books that they seem to fall into certain patterns of general themes. This one slots into the “immigrant family coming to terms with generational changes, troubles assimilating, and the younger generation feeling disconnected to both worlds” camp. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it?

Here James, the son of Chinese immigrants, is returning to his small hometown in Wisconsin for his college winter break. He steps into a fraught situation between his parents, who have split up, and his father and oldest brother, who has been pushing to take over the family restaurant. The first half of the book tracks all the various tensions in James’ and his family’s lives. Then, smack in the middle, his dad dies when he is locked into the faulty freezer in their restaurant and the book turns into a pretty compelling mystery. Finally, it spools out an unexpected plot line where a family secret is revealed as the likely cause of the father’s death.

Again with the family secrets!

Chang also throws in elements of teenage sexual awakenings, parent-child dynamics, issues unique to small towns, economic disparities and the anxieties that come with them, and religious barriers. There is also a part of the eventual trial for the accused killer of James’ dad that contains an element that is highly ridiculous, but is used to show how arguments against immigrants are often nonsensical and based on fear and stereotypes rather than facts.

There’s a lot going into the story, and Chang makes it all work.

Bottoms Up And The Devil Laughs – Kerry Howley
Howley dives into the “Deep State,” that semi-mythical, mysterious part of our government that allegedly pulls all the strings, protects child sex traffickers and baby eaters, and torpedoed our last president’s efforts to reform our country in his image.

However, she does not look at it either from the MAGA perspective or as a “Well, actually…” explainer. Rather, she hones in on how, in the post 9/11 world, so much of society has bent over backwards to give the NSA and its various offshoots and related agencies almost unchecked access to information about our lives. The general public often participates willingly in allowing the details of our daily lives to be weaponized, if needed, against us. The spread of that data has severe consequences.

Eventually Howley settles on Reality Winner, an NSA translator, to show the real power of the Deep State. When Winner comes across documentation that shows that the Russians actively sought to undermine the 2016 election, she is disturbed that no one is talking about the evidence in the public sphere. Not the media, not the government, not countless other watchdogs. There are general claims that something went wrong, but the evidence she has seen is never used to justify those claims.

So she leaks it. And is eventually caught. Then she enters a Kafkaesque investigation and trial where her defense attorneys are not allowed to see the evidence against her because they are not cleared, even though the same evidence has been published on public websites. And then they can’t access those websites because it would endanger both their efforts to earn clearance and violate court orders against accessed leaked, classified data. And on and on.

The danger of the “Deep State,” Howley argues, is not that this shadow government is working to undo the acts of elected officials. Rather it is that these massive, largely uncoordinated elements of our system can be leveraged to investigate the personal lives of regular citizens, finding data that, freed from context, can make anyone look like a terrorist, terrorist sympathizer, or enemy of the state. And unless you want to totally unplug and live off the grid, there’s not much we can do about it.

My reading pace has slackened a bit. I’m actually taking a day or two off between books, which is likely a good thing. Because of that I only finished three books in March.

Nettle and Bone – T. Kingfisher
I famously don’t read much Fantasy fiction, yet something about the genre always holds an allure. I occasionally search for something that can reignite the magic of reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was 12, only to be disappointed by another impenetrable story.

This book isn’t strictly Fantasy. It does take place in a mythological world that is both more primitive than ours and where magic plays a large role in daily life. There are parallel worlds people with certain powers can visit, kings and queens, and weird creatures. But no dragons or dwarves or wizards.

Inevitably this story becomes a quest. A quest for a third sister to save a second sister, who took the place of a first sister who died in an arranged marriage to save their home kingdom. The third sister makes unlikely friends along the way. She discovers she has strength and abilities she was unaware of. Her quest is successful despite some tricky moments near the end.

It’s all pretty standard stuff. But Kingfisher is a terrific writer, and they sprinkle their story with little moments of dialogue that tie their fictional world to our modern one. There is sarcasm and ironic detachment in the characters that you don’t expect in strict Fantasy writing. Those modern touches combined with Kingfisher not trying too hard to build an elaborate world helped me to really enjoy this book.

Brooklyn Crime Novel – Jonathan Lethem
My spring break book. The trip, with its many distractions, combined with the style Lethem wrote with made it a little tough to stay engaged with the story.

The book slowly builds to describe a specific act of violence. But the lead up to it stretches across decades, both setting up the characters and what life in Brooklyn was like in each moment.

Where the book excels is in Lethem’s scene setting within his Brooklyn. All the little details that help paint the picture of what life was like in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or later. I’ve been in Brooklyn for the couple minutes it took my tour bus to cross the bridge then turn around and head back to Manhattan. Lethem’s details fit right in with what I expect the Brooklyn of my youth to be.

The title is designed to throw the reader off. This isn’t a book about crime, as in a detective novel, or one about a spectacular caper, or whatever. It’s about regular life in Brooklyn. How that life, in ages gone by, was often about avoiding and surviving the little crimes that were a part of daily life. It’s about how the borough has changed over the years, with the racial and financial status of the people who dominated it changing over time. Pre-gentrification Brooklyn was one type of city. Post-gentrification Brooklyn was completely different. Lethem’s story mostly falls into the long years of transition between ages. And while the book leads up to that specific moment of violence, that is really secondary to setting up what it was like for Lethem’s generation to come of age in the borough.

Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude is one of my all-time favorite books. This doesn’t reach that level, but I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. I believe I also failed to connect ever so slightly with this book because I was reading it on planes and at the pool when there were other things going on, and it never had my total concentration. Not an all-timer, but still pretty solid.

The Future – Naomi Alderman
A really fun speculative fiction story set in the near future. The three biggest tech leaders in the world have come together to find a way to save themselves should a catastrophic event put modern society’s survival in jeopardy. When an event with that potential does appear on the horizon, they follow the correct protocols to protect themselves and their interests. Until things begin to go sideways.

There is a very large twist in the final third of the book that I don’t want to give any hints about as they would affect how you would read the first two-thirds. That twist is terrific, one that took intricate planning by many of the book’s characters to pull off. While wildly unrealistic, it gives some hope that we can adjust the direction of the world. Maybe not on the scale as in the book, but enough to avoid some of the catastrophes that could be in our future.

I really enjoyed this book. It fits our moment in time, both in terms of how we interact with technology and how it dominates our lives, and how a handful of unelected business leaders likely have too much sway on the direction of society.

I might be reading too fast. This is the 10th week of the year and I’m about to finish my 14th book of 2024. Because of that they are running together a bit. I apologize, as these summaries aren’t the most detailed of my writing career.

The World We Make – N.K. Jemisin
Jemisin’s Great Cities series was supposed to be a trilogy. Between the pandemic, US politics, and some other things that got her down, she decided to cut it off at two books.

Because of that, this book felt rushed and incomplete. Her story about the avatars of the boroughs of New York battling with and against each other as forces from another dimension attempt to destroy the city just never found a good rhythm. What should have been an epic finale came and went with a whimper.

I understand why she decided to cut things off. If your heart ain’t in it, your heart ain’t in it. But I think she let what could have become a great story wither and turn into something not worthy of her talent.

Moscow X – David McCloskey
McCloskey’s Damascus Station was one of my favorite espionage books of this decade. This was nearly as good.

Instead of focusing on the Middle East, here McCloskey pivots to the growing, new cold war between the US and Russia. When a rift develops between the ruling Russian elite, a secret CIA group – Moscow X – pounces to exploit it.

Rather than standard spy stuff, though, this book reflects the reality of the new Russia: the conflict is all about using capitalism to gain leverage over an opponent. The Russians are fighting with each other over money they’ve stolen, in one way or another, from their country. The CIA is using money to gain entry into the world of the Russian elite to find ways to bend them to the West’s advantage. That seems a long way from the original Cold War, when capitalism was battling communism as much as the countries were competing.

Calico – Lee Goldberg
This mashup of genres was a terrific read.

On a February night in 2019, a vagrant runs in front of an RV in remote Southern California and is killed. At the same moment, there are mysterious fires at two nearby military bases. And, soon, a semi-famous TV chef is reported missing from the same area.

I don’t want to give away too much about the plot, but it is a delightful mix of mystery and sci-fi. I really enjoyed how Goldberg laid out the elements of the story. Time travel plays a big part in the book and I loved some of the observations about living in the past one of the characters made. Not many stories about going back in time mention how much the past stank!

Sing Her Down – Ivy Pochoda
I read this book while I was sick. Maybe the infection or virus or whatever was plaguing me combined with a lack of sleep and cold meds kept me from appreciating it. Because I did not get this book at all.

It is the story of two women who are released from prison during the Covid lockdown and travel from Arizona to LA. They run into some troubles and get the attention of an LA cop who has her own issues she’s dealing with. And, well, I’m not sure what else to say about it.

I didn’t get Pochoda’s style, didn’t like her dialog, didn’t understand any of the journeys the characters were on. I kept waiting for some “Aha!” moment that brought it all together and illuminated it for me, but that never came. I remember this getting good reviews so, again, I’m going to chalk it up to my illness and not to any actual deficiencies in the story.

Music Is History – Questlove
Man did I love this book. Questlove uses his life as a map for tracing various developments in music history. Beginning with his year of birth 1971 – mine too! – each chapter tackles a broad issue, using songs from both that year and others to flesh out that idea’s significance. He examines sampling, Blaxploitation films and the music that came from them, what should be correctly categorized as funk, political music, following lines of influence between artists and genres, the meaning of stardom, choosing your own path in the music world, the rise of hip hop, and so on.

I dig Questlove’s worldview and his writing. But, again, I read this while sick, and I fear his points didn’t stick with me as much as they would if I read it next week or next month. With that in mind, I may revisit it at some point.

The Peacock and The Sparrow – I.S. Berry
I ran across so much praise for this novel in various outlets. Much of it was from people who, like I.S. Berry, had served in the CIA or other intelligence services. They all agreed that the novel presented a hyper-realistic accounting of what it is like to be an agent in another country.

That’s cool and all, but as someone who has never been a spy,[1] should that matter to me? A good story is a good story, and since I don’t know what it is like to be operating in a foreign land, I can be tricked pretty easily into believing whatever the author wants me to as long as their story isn’t too outrageous. Good writing and a solid story are generally enough for me. Having people who claim to know what it’s really like suggest it comes close to reality is just a cherry on top.

That’s a thought I had while reading this book, which was indeed excellent. A CIA officer who is near retirement finds himself in the midst of an uprising in Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011–13. His official mission is to liaise with a member of the underground opposition to gauge their strength, intentions, and possible ties to Iran. As he discovers that the government was behind a bombing officially attributed to the rebels and that the US is illegally supplying weapons to the government, he grows disillusioned. He also falls in love with a local along the way (naturally), making him even more suspicious of the CIA’s aims. He ends up making a series of decisions that clear his conscious but have massive implications for the fate of Bahrain.

There are a couple of “twists” in the story. I put that word in quotation marks because I don’t think they are supposed to be big surprises. They become more expected and obvious the deeper you get into the book. I don’t think Berry’s goal was to shock the reader, but rather show how easily people can be deceived and take actions suggested by other. Even the most jaded intelligence service lifer.

I have started 2024 on a huge reading run; I finished my seventh book of the year early this morning. It helps that I’ve been sick the past couple days and unable to sleep, so I’ve stayed up deep into the night knocking out the final book in this list.

Said illness and lack of sleep will also push my sports notes entry to Tuesday this week.

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
I read, and loved, Mandel’s Station Eleven nearly nine years ago. Then I watched, and also loved, the seres based on it exactly two years ago.

When her next novel arrived, it came with great critical praise, and it immediately went on my reading list. However, since I knew it was about time travel and spanned hundreds of years, I assumed it would be sprawling and I kept putting it off. So I was very surprised when I finally added it to my Kindle and was able to knock it out in a single day. I was dumb for putting it off so long.

Mandel’s story indeed jumps from the early 1900s to the 2400s, with several stops between. She doesn’t linger in any age too long which is one of the novel’s true strengths. Despite the 500-year span the story feels tight and intimate. She wrote it during the worst days of the Covid 19 pandemic, and you can feel the anxiety and fear of those months in her words.

That said, did it all work? I’m not sure. Time travel stories always require some suspension of belief. Even allowing for that, there were some pretty big holes in Mandel’s plotting. The resolution is a bit of a letdown as it felt too easy. If I were a bigger fan of sci-fi/speculative fiction, I might be even more disappointed in how it all worked out. Since I am not, the quality Mandel’s words helped smooth some of the story’s flaws.

Kennedy 35 – Charles Cumming
Book three in Cumming’s Box 88 series. Where the first two flipped back and forth between the past and current times, this one kept those two halves largely separate. It began a year after the Rwandan genocide ended, when young agent Lachlan Kite is tasked with assisting a Box 88 team as they attempt to capture one of the key figured behind the genocide. Their operation goes awry and 25 years later Kite sets out to bring the figures who survived that mission to justice.

Meets the standard Cumming set in the first two editions, with the added bonus of this being a little tighter of a novel.

The Breakaway – Jennifer Weiner
I doubt I would have read this under normal circumstances. Weiner, as much as she hates the term, gets shoved into the Chick Lit genre. And this book is certainly built around a romance that, at times, seems crafted so it could be transferred effortlessly from the page to the screen. She throws in just enough Big Issues, though, that this can appeal to non-Chick Lit readers. That’s probably why it showed up on so many Best Of lists and got my attention.

Abby is a struggling 30-something that can’t quite get her life on track. While on a bachelorette party in New York, she hooks up with a guy and has an unforgettable night with him. She sneaks out the next morning without saying goodbye, fearing that he would not be interested in her in the light of day and sober, and returns to her life in Philadelphia.

Two years later she is leading a bicycle trip from New York City to Buffalo when who should show up in her group than Mr One Night, Sebastian! What were the odds?!?! Guess who else shows up? Her mom, who she has a tense relationship with. Naturally Abby and Sebastian have some moments along the trip. Which leads to moments of conflict and romance.

There’s a lot more going on in the story and it’s more fun to discover it for yourself. As I said, Weiner attacks some large issues. Body image and societal expectations of women. Relationships between mothers and daughters. Internet fame/infamy. The different tolerances for how men and woman behave sexually. Oh, and this is a good one, teenage pregnancy and abortion! Good times.

I shouldn’t be so cheeky. This was a good enough story to stick with it even for someone like me who doesn’t usually read stuff like this.

It also got me thinking about what the male equivalent of Chick Lit is. Westerns? Mysteries? Pulpy fiction with violence and sex? The espionage novels I read far too many of? I don’t think there is a true equivalent but that’s probably something best left for a separate post.

The Seventh Girl – Andy Maslen
Finally, another book I would not have normally read. From time to time Amazon offers free Kindle books to Prime users. I’ve explored these in the past and they often end up sucking. Something about this book’s description struck me, though, so I grabbed it.

It is a pretty standard detective mystery, set in southern England. Detective Kat Ballantyne is obsessed with a serial killer who had plagued her city ten years earlier without being caught. His final victim was her best friend, and she’s been haunted by ditching her on the night of her murder.

When a new series of deaths that mimic the previous series begins, Ballantyne is assigned as head investigator. What follows is a harrowing series of weeks as she attempts to put the few clues they have together while new bodies are discovered with increasing frequency. Along the way her family life gets complicated (of course), she faces obstacles within her detective unit, and discovers something new and shocking about her best friend’s death.

I don’t know if it’s the deepest mystery I’ve ever read, but it kept me turning virtual pages.

Julia – Sandra Newman
My first book of the year was a real uplifter!

Officially sanctioned by the estate of George Orwell, it is labeled as a re-telling of his classic 1984. Newman flips the script, and instead of focusing on Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, she uses Smith’s lover, Julia, to explore Oceania.

It’s been a decade or so since I last re-read 1984. As I processed Julia I wished I had done another review of the original just to better compare the books. Julia stands up on its own, but I think having a fresher memory of Orwell’s work would have helped me compare and contrast.

Many critics have called Julia a feminist re-telling of Orwell’s story. I didn’t get those vibes. Julia the character certainly wasn’t a pushover, and found ways to subvert Big Brother’s society and express her individualism. But to earn her path to what she hopes will be freedom, she does the bidding of men in power, including a form of sexual slavery. I guess she’s making her own decisions, but being forced to sleep with people to incriminate them doesn’t seem very feminist to me.

Newman does expand the story, giving Julia a chance to escape the inner workings of London and learn that big changes are coming to a power structure that has been in place for fifty years. As she sees the old order begin to crumble she learns that the new boss may not be that different from the old boss.

Democracy Awakening – Heather Cox Richardson
I’ve avoided books like this is recent years. While they speak to my political point of view, they also end up frustrating and angering me. Which isn’t good for my mental health.

Still, this book was recommended by many people/sources that I respect so I gave it a shot.

Guess what? It frustrated and angered me.

It traces all the worst impulses of the modern Republican Party to subvert democracy back to their earliest days. Believe it or not, some of their tactics go back to before the Civil War. They’ve just been updated and adjusted for modern needs. And, of course, switched parties, since it was the Southern Democrats of the 19th century who asserted that society should be hierarchical with power concentrated amongst the elite and that government power was best left to the states. All hallmarks of the current political right.

I keep saying it and I truly believe it: the next 12 months are going to be an awful time for our country. Our democratic institutions are teetering and one side of our political divide is highly invested in pushing them to tipping point rather than finding ways to repair them. I should have known that this book would just piss me off more rather than help me find hope that our situation can be salvaged.

When The Game Was War – Rich Cohen
A very clear change in subject matter and tone here. It is fun look at the 1987–88 NBA season and the four teams/stars that defined the season.

The Lakers, led by Magic Johnson, were about to win their fifth title of the decade, completing a back-to-back campaign coach Pat Riley had guaranteed. The Boston Celtics, featuring Larry Bird, were beginning their slow slide to mediocrity. The Detroit Pistons and Isiah Thomas were on the ascent, pushing the Lakers to the brink (they probably should have won the title that year if not for a key call and a horribly-timed injury to Thomas) before winning their own back-to-back titles. Finally, Michael Jordan was gaining competent teammates like Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, setting up the Bulls to become the team of the 90s.

Cohen uses a single game for each franchise in the regular season to explore how they reached their ’87–88 state. Then he dives deep into the playoffs and Finals. The book closes with the obligatory update on where each franchise and player went after 1988.

I found the book a bit light, both in content and tone. He argues that this is the greatest season in NBA history both because of the status of those four franchises, but also because of the massive collection of Hall of Fame talent present across the league. These discussions are hard to decide definitively, and nothing about his work undermines his assertion.

As a Chicago native, Cohen does a lot to rehabilitate the image of fellow Chicagoan Thomas. He argues effectively that Zeke’s prickly relationships with Jordan and Johnson, many failures in coaching/management, and a general dislike of the Bad Boys era Pistons have led people to ignore what a singular player he was. I’m on board with this. When you look at his numbers, his biggest performances, how he molded his game to fit his teammates’ strengths and weaknesses, and remember he wasn’t close to six feet tall, it is a little ridiculous that so many of us who saw him play have pushed him out of the conversation for greatest player of his time. He wasn’t as good as either of the MJs. But he wasn’t too far behind. I still hate the dude, but I’ll give him his roses.

One big quibble I have is that Cohen ignored the All-Star Weekend in Chicago, which was a major part of Jordan becoming THE star in the league.

Not the most in-depth NBA book I’ve read. It was still a good way to spend a couple days revisiting some sports memories.

Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man – Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer
Each December, as I listen to a shitload of Bing Crosby music, I think, “I should learn more about his life.” I picked up a little of the general, collective pop-cultural memories of him as a kid. But I was six when he died and that was all basically background noise.

This year I finally looked into his biographic options. Our library has two massive volumes of a not-yet-complete biography. I had no time for that. Instead I chose this, which came out in 1981, and, I would imagine, shocked a lot of people. It seems pretty tame by today’s standards, but tearing apart the carefully crafted and sanitized image of an American icon had to have been a big deal back then.

Honestly, nothing that Crosby did was that bad. He was aloof and forgot/left behind people who helped him become a star. He let other people share bad news and generally avoided confrontation. He was cold to people who loved him. He had some affairs. He hid a drinking problem that nearly derailed his career in the 1920s, then held his first wife’s drinking problem against her. He left for business when she was having their children, and went to Europe for pleasure when she was dying. He was a hypocrite when it came to religion, carrying on his extramarital affairs while icing out family members and friends who got divorced. He was a bastard when he wrote his will.

I’m sure all of that surprised people in my grandparents’ generation. It seems pretty small potatoes, and not unexpected of people in the public sphere, today.

A Christmas Story – Jean Shepherd
Sixteen straight years of holiday reading pleasure.

Kind Of A Big Deal – Saul Austerlitz
I think I may have shared an excerpt of this earlier this year in a Links post. Austerlitz is a professor of writing and comedy history at NYU and his book, about the movie Anchorman, reads very much like an academic text. There are plenty of anecdotes from the making of the movie and quotes from the actors, writers, producers, etc. But there is a certain dryness to his writing that keeps it from becoming a hilarious, rollicking accounting.

That said, this it was an interesting look at how a fairly unlikely candidate became one of the funniest and most revered comedies of its era. Not only that, it is strikingly – and shockingly to some – critical of our society. Austerlitz shows how the movie not only turned Will Ferrell into a superstar – he was about two-thirds of the way there when Anchorman hit theaters – but was the first step in the shift in Adam McKay where he became more interested in being overtly political, which led to movies like Vice and The Big Short.

Dead Lions – Mick Herron
Book two in Herron’s Slow Horses series. I didn’t love the first one, largely because it was sooooo British. I also didn’t love the Apple TV+ series based upon it. Again, a little too English for me. But so many people love that show that I kept hearing about it, including love for seasons beyond the first. Looking for a quick read over the holidays, I decided to give Herron’s novels another shot.

Again I didn’t love it. But having read/watched Slow Horses, it made more sense to me and I enjoyed it more than the first volume. It is more deeply British, domestic espionage drama. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll probably dig this.

Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ‘80s – Gary Gullman
I had never heard of Gullman before, but saw this on a Vulture list of best comedy books of 2023. It sounded up my alley. It indeed was. He is a year older than me, but thanks to being held back in first grade, we ended up being the same academic year.

The memoir begins with Gullman describing a mental breakdown he had in 2017. Part of his therapy was to look back at his life and the events that led him to that mental health crisis. He lays out that exploration in neat chapters that align with each academic year of his life. In between those chapters are brief glimpses at his slow recovery from his breakdown. Those jumps back to his childhood struck me the most. There were so many elements of his life that matched up with mine. Little neurosis and obsessions. Moments when he transitioned through the phases of childhood that were very similar to my own experiences. We were both children of divorced parents. In general we were very different kids and are very different adults. But all those common threads really pulled me into his story.

It seemed like he might be going for a Jean Shepherd vibe in his writing. Shepherd’s work always masked the pain in his life with humor. For Gullman, the funny moments aren’t quite big enough to hide the anxiety that was behind them. As a comedian he might view that as a failure. As a man looking to control his mental health demons, it was probably just fine.

I finished this book at about 11:45 PM on New Year’s Eve. It was the 54th entry in my reading list of 2023. Three photography books padded the numbers, but once again I achieved my goal of knocking out a book a week. I’m already well into my first book of 2024. The quest never ends.

Please Report Your Bug Here – Josh Riedel
This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too.

This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company. One problem: an employee has discovered a huge bug in the software that allows people to time travel. But with very unpredictable and possibly life-threatening results. With the influx of money, though, no one really wants to hear about the bug. Expect for those within Big Tech who have discovered it on their own and are trying to find a way to monetize it.

I guess it makes some commentaries on modern work life. But I found the story to be cold. Or, rather, I found the characters to all be very cold and isolated. I wanted to smack them all and tell them to pull their freaking heads away from their screens and learn how to relate to other humans. My God, am I a Boomer???

Anyway, there were some very interesting directions this story could have gone that it failed to. Which made it a disappointment.

The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz
I knocked out Horowitz’s Bond novels earlier this year and promised to check out some of his other work. This is the first in a series that is pretty meta.

Horowitz himself is a main character and our primary narrator. He joins forces with a somewhat disgraced former police officer, Daniel Hawthorne, as he assists on a murder case. The idea is that after Hawthorne, not the police, solves the case, Horowitz will write a true crime summation of it.

There are a series of predictable issues between the men. They don’t trust each other, aren’t honest with each other, and each questions how the other does his job. Horowitz, the newby to real murder investigations, nearly mucks it all up, but Hawthorne saves the day. There’s very much a Holmes and Watson vibe to their relationship.

The story was good enough, but not one that makes me want to jump into the series and read another installment.

Mad World – Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein
This book is nearly a decade old, but I just learned of it thanks to a mention in Tom Breihan’s Alternative Number Ones series. He clipped a quote by Echo & The Bunnymen lead singer Richard Butler when he refers to Bono as a “…gibbering, leprechaunish twat.” That is tremendous! I immediately sought out the book.

It is a series of brief sketches about New Wave bands and some of their biggest songs, mostly based on interviews with the artists themselves. Some of the chapters are only a couple pages long, none more than 10. None of them are super-deep dives. For the most part it is filled with artists you know, like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, OMD, Simple Minds, etc. There were only a couple bands I hadn’t heard of, and of the bands I knew of, only a couple songs that were new to me.

This is far from a definitive account of the era, but it is a quick, very fun read if you lived through that time.

Everybody Loves Our Town – Mark Yarm
And this was my Nineties music book, an oral history of the Seattle scene, from its earliest days well before the giants emerged to Layne Staley’s death in 2002. Most of the big names of the scene contributed, but many artists I had never heard of were involved, too, giving a truly full accounting of the Grunge era. There was a lot of shit talking, which was kind of funny given most of the interviews were done 20–25 years after actual events. Name a famous Seattle artist, and for every person that spoke admiringly of them and their music, someone else was slamming them. And then pretty much everyone laid into Courtney Love.

More than the Eighties book, this one made me reminisce about my own experiences in the moments these events occurred. Maybe that’s because I was a child in the 80s and became an adult in the 90s? Or maybe my memories of the 90s are just more distinct? Who knows the real explanation, but this book was not only illuminating, it also constantly dredged up snapshots from my own past. Which was mostly a good thing.

This Is Christmas, Song By Song – Annie Zaleski
Finally, a third music book, this one spanning decades. Zaleski breaks down 100 of her favorite holiday songs, mostly modern interpretations, basically from “White Christmas” up to Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm.” All little blurbs, so this is a book you can skim casually as time allows. And I bet you’ll learn something about one of your favorite – or least favorite – songs along the way.

The Kennedy Men – Laurence Leamer
After about a month of reading, split into sections, I knocked out my Big Book for the fall.

A neighbor passed this to me over the summer. We were sitting on the porch having some drinks and somehow books or the Kennedys or something along those lines came up and she mentioned she had read this book and loved it. She offered it to me. I’m not one to turn down a book so I happily accepted. I was in the midst of a run of reserved library books coming in, so I let it sit on my bookshelf figuring I’d get to it eventually.

The book is subtitled “1901–1963: The Laws of the Father.” The first section was the hardest to get through, as it focused on the Kennedy family’s early history in America and then Joseph Kennedy’s childhood and rise to power. It was hard to get too interested in that part when I knew that there was much bigger stuff coming. It took me over a week to get through Book One, then I set it aside to knock out another book to reset my mind.

Section two begins just after Joe Kennedy Jr. is killed in World War II, with the family, especially his younger brothers, struggling to cope with their loss. John F. Kennedy was thrust into the role as anointed child, the one expected to fulfill all of Joseph’s grand plans. That section takes us through his first run for congress, election to the senate, and finally winning the presidency in 1960. Brothers Bobby and Ted are also covered, if not as in-depth as the future president.

Finally, section three is about the Kennedy presidency, with much time spent on the administration’s various battles over and with Cuba, and JFK and RFK’s uncomfortable relationship with the civil rights movement.

I feel like I know a lot about the Kennedys, so not much here was a true revelation. It was rather shocking, though, to see just how poor JFK’s health was his entire life, and how compromised he was in his final years. I knew he was a womanizer, as well, but the sheer number of women he “entertained” was pretty staggering. I mean, Bill Clinton got impeached over a relationship with one woman. JFK would have laughed at that had he still been alive in 1998.

All that underscored my biggest takeaway, which is you can’t hide anything anymore. JFK was a serial philanderer, suffered from a number of significant health issues, and was under the care of several doctors who used treatments and drugs that the Leader of the Free World probably should not have been using in the nuclear age. But the pubic knew very little about that, and the press, which did know, chose not to publicize it.

Compare that to today when we probably know far too much about our political leaders.

It was also fascinating to read about JFK’s leadership style. In college I learned all about his collegial method of coming to decisions. He believed that you surround yourself with the smartest people you can find, talk issues through from every angle, and then arrive at a decision. I knew less about what a pragmatic, centralist he was. He was suspicious of every political extreme, and worked hard to minimize both those on the far left and far right. That practical style of leadership may have prevented him from accomplishing more in his nearly three years in office. But it also likely was the key factor in avoiding nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Like politicians of today, he always had his eye on the next election. But he also had a special gift for seeing through the emotions of a moment and identifying pitfalls others couldn’t see, as well as paths towards compromise that would neuter his opponents in the process.

The book was a bit of a chore to get through, more because of Leamer’s writing style, than its length. I’m guessing his technique was typical of how some biographies used to be written (this was published in 2001). He had a tendency to overwrite, with most sentences stuffed with too many $1000 words. Here are a couple examples that I noted.

“Kennedy treated gossip like chocolate bonbons, a pleasant little addiction he enjoyed tasting several times a day.”
“The youths dressed up in ersatz adulthood on their forays into the Manhattan nightlife, acting with the nonchalance of the regular habitués.”
He also referred to cheating men like JFK as “swordsmen” far too often. That term has always given me the creeps for some reason.

Anyway, the Kennedys are endlessly fascinating, so while this sucked up most of a month of reading time, it was not a waste even with some stylistic hurdles along the way.