Tag: books (Page 3 of 24)

Tales from the Torrid Zone – Alexander Frater
I mentioned in my last entry that I was taking on a rather long book that seemed like it might be a chore to get through. With that in mind, I decided that since it is divided into three parts, I would take a break after each section and squeeze in another book. This was my choice for break number one.

Frater was the son of a Presbyterian minister who was based in the Pacific. He was born in the then New Hebrides islands in 1937, which eventually became the country of Vanuatu. Frater spent his adult life as a travel writer, employed by various British newspapers, magazines, and even the BBC.

This work is built on his explorations of the tropics, mostly in the Pacific. However, it isn’t a collection of the articles he published about those trips. Rather it is a new work that pulls together anecdotes those previous pieces were based on. Because of that, it lacked either a central thread that tied everything together, or hard breaks between each story that made them clearly distinct. It was one of the least rewarding travel books I’ve read, which was a big disappointment. His personality never really shined through, and I found his observations to be far less interesting than in other Pacific travelogues I’ve read. I bet if I had read Frater’s magazine work that was focused on a specific area, I would have enjoyed them a lot more.

I just started a book that is probably going to take me a few weeks to get through. Seems like a good moment to clear out the queue so I don’t forget about these two.

We Cast a Shadow – Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Writers have been using the “how far would you go to protect your child” trope for ages. Many of us can relate to it in a strongly emotional way, so it often works.

Here Maurice Carlos Ruffin takes that idea and places it in a near-future world where things are, to put it mildly, not good for Black folks in America. Things are so bad, in fact, that many Americans with dark skin are pouring their savings into treatments that will “de-melanize” them, a painful and sometime unsuccessful process that slowly lightens their skin to the point where they can pass as white.

Our narrator has effectively won the lottery. The law firm he works for has a periodic competition amongst its Black associates to earn a coveted promotion to shareholder status. It is a competition more about debasing yourself more than your opponents than proving you are the best lawyer or can generate the most billable hours. The losers? Their lives as attorneys are basically over, and are forced to find new employment. Mr. Narrator wins, though, and his victory brings not just security but enough money to begin his son’s de-melanization. The son is dubious about the process. His wife, who is white, is strongly against it.

Over the course of the book the narrator makes a series of progressively more frustrating decisions, all with the goal of paying for his son’s treatment and putting him on the path for a better life. As you might expect, things don’t go as the narrator plans.

This is a satirical novel that is often hilarious. It is also quite troubling. Those questions of how far you’ll go for your kids are always fraught. The hoops Ruffin puts his narrator through seem maddening. But as a white, male, American I don’t know that I could ever fully understand the choices he is forced to make.

Also unsettling is that the new America Ruffin builds doesn’t seem that ridiculous. He bases little pieces of that future world on things that are happening right now, such as the dishonest fights over school curriculums. It feels like his book is as much a warning about the path we are on as it is a speculative piece of fiction. It is also a reminder that we have all been programmed to look out for our own interests first and to be suspicious of the collective good, making it easier to divide us and restrict the rights of anyone who is a little different.

With A Mind to Kill – Anthony Horowitz
It took me several months to get to Horowitz’s final book in his James Bond trilogy, so I kind of forgot where things were left. Apparently Bond was brainwashed by the Soviets and sent back to London to kill M. That plot was thwarted and Bond was “re-programmed,” but it was announced that M had died in hopes the Soviets would attempt to sneak 007 back to Moscow, where he could undermine their efforts from the inside.

That’s pretty much what happened. There’s a woman involved, of course. The Russian baddies are all bad. Bond does good things in the end and saves the world.

I didn’t find this one as compelling or interesting as the first two in the series. But I’ll still take a gander at some of Horowitz’s non-Bond mysteries at some point.

I’m not sure why but I’ve struggled to put together blurbs for my most recent books. I’ll bash away for a paragraph or two then realize I’m not really sharing anything interesting other than a basic summation of the plot and give up. After three false starts I’m officially throwing in the towel and offering the briefest of notes about these books and hope that by my next post I’ve shaken this mini-writer’s block.

Fates and Furies – Lauren Groff
The story of a marriage told in two halves, from two perspectives. The first half is about the husband’s upbringing, how he came to marry his wife, what their life was together, and his death. The second covers his wife’s pre-marriage life, the ways she filled in the holes during their marriage, and how she moved on after his passing. Critics and book nerds love Groff. This is the second of her books that I’ve read. While both were far from wastes of time, I can’t say I truly loved either one.

Judas 62 – Charles Cumming
I read the first book in Cumming’s Box 88 series earlier this year, focused on a British agent in a super-secret, US-UK intelligence agency. This second edition flips between an effort to sneak a biological weapons scientist out of early 1990s Russia before other countries can snatch him up and the modern effort to root out the Russian agent that is killing Russians like that scientist who have been hiding in the west for decades. A good espionage thriller.

Pappyland – Wright Thompson
A multi-layered history, about bourbon in general, Pappy Van Winkle in particular, the men behind Pappy, Kentucky and the South, and Thompson’s relationship with his dad and his own approaching fatherhood. Since it is Thompson, it is gloriously written, even in the moments he lays it on a little thick. Also got me drinking bourbon after a break. Not Pappy, though. I’m just fine with the cheaper stuff that comes from the same buildings.

Rememberings – Sinéad O’Connor
After O’Connor’s death, there were many references to her autobiography, most of which came with the comment that it was a fantastic read.

Those recommendations were right on.

This is one of the best musician autobiographies I’ve ever read. It’s frank, funny, and frightening although also incomplete. O’Connor admits that a long stretch of her life after that tumultuous period in 1990–91 is lost to her. Which is a shame, because she is often shockingly honest about other parts of her life, and it would have been fascinating to read how she dealt with the years when much of the western world thought she was the embodiment of evil. Alas, I can understand why she was either unable or unwilling to dive deeply into those years.

Much of the book is laugh-out-loud funny, though. Especially when she writes as she talks. For example, she made no secret that she enjoyed having sex with a variety of men over the years. She wrote that people thought she was a “hooer” because of her number of relationships. Every time she used that word, she spelled it that way. It made me laugh every time.

She also mentioned that there was a man she was in love with because he was so beautiful and kind, but that he was “…as gay as Christmas” and nothing ever happened. I laughed for awhile after that line.

That humor balances out the truly terrible moments in her life, which she writes about just as openly as the funny moments. It is truly a shame the world turned its back on Sinéad, and not just because we lost having her voice be part of popular music.

Crook Manifesto – Colson Whitehead
The follow-up to Whitehead’s excellent Harlem Shuffle, it again follows Harlem furniture salesman Ray Carney. He has gone legit, turning his back on the fencing career that supplemented his regular income as he climbed into the middle class of Black New York. When his daughter begs him for tickets to see the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden in 1971, he calls up his old police contact, knowing he’ll have a line on admission to the sold-out show. That call soon has Carney chin-deep in the crooked world again.

The book follows a similar path to Harlem Shuffle, just updated for era and with a few more twists. What makes it great is Whitehead’s writing. There aren’t many better crafters of fiction around these days. His words constantly delight. There are so many sly little turns of phrase that I missed at first glance, then had to back up and re-read when they struck me moments later. A fine story written with amazing skill.

The Guest – Emma Cline
From my casual scanning of the web, people either love or hate this book. And I totally get why it pushes people either way.

Alex is an escort who has turned a New York City client into a summer-long relationship. Through a series of dumb choices on her part, he kicks her out of his beach home the week before Labor Day. All she has is a bag of clothes he bought her – even the bag was a gift – a few hundred dollars in her account, a glitchy phone, and a train ticket back to the city. A place she does not want to return to lest the guy she stole drugs and money from earlier in the year find her and exact his revenge.

She believes if she can just survive the week, she can show up at her former lover’s Labor Day party, all will be forgiven, and she can get settle back into the comfortable existence she had been enjoying.

Naturally that week goes off the rails quickly and often.

The split regarding this book is all about how people feel about Alex. Some view her as a survivor, a woman who ended up on a difficult path and is forced to reckon with a world that is hostile to her. Others view her as a grifter who uses people in endless ways to get what she wants no matter how much wreckage she leaves in her wake.

I did not like Alex at all. I think she is selfish and cruel. But I was also all-in on her journey. Not that I wanted her to find happiness or tranquility necessarily. I wanted to see how bad her predicament got along the way and how the story would eventually resolve. While I viewed Alex as an awful person, I did admire her instinct for self preservation, even if her choices led to even bigger problems down the road. In a better person that could be an amazing gift. In Alex it just made for an engaging novel that I couldn’t put down.

I’ve been on a decent reading run. A few blurbs about my most recent completions.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – Quentin Tarantino
This has been sitting in my cabinet for something like two years. I’m glad I finally got to it. This is not a straight novelization of the movie, but rather an expansion on its base. Lots of weird tangents about the history of Hollywood. Lots of backstory about the characters in the movie. And very little overlap with the actual story (as far as I can recall). In fact, the biggest scene in the movie is a mere blip in the book. It is pulpy, entertaining, and fun. Now I need to watch the movie again.

Sunset Empire – Josh Weiss
The second book in Weiss’ Morris Baker series. Once again we are in the late 1950s, Joseph McCarthy remains president, the Korean War continues to rage, and American’s civil liberties are even more trampled upon in the name of stopping Communism and whatever else raises McCarthy’s ire. This time Baker, now working as a PI, is asked to investigate three separate missing persons cases, all of which are, naturally and eventually, related. And all of which point back to the people taking away American’s rights. This was more of a pure detective novel than the first in the series, but there were still some good alternative history nuggets.

While Justice Sleeps – Stacey Abrams
Former Georgia state representative and gubernatorial candidate Abrams put together a pretty engaging legal thriller. It centers on a cranky and old Supreme Court justice who puts himself into a coma just before a major ruling is due. A ruling that he is THE swing vote for and has major ramifications for the sitting president. The justice places his care not in the hands of his estranged wife or son, but one of his clerks, to the shock of pretty much everyone. There are many layers of bad actors who want to control the justice’s health, and they all press down on Avery Keene as she struggles with her new responsibilities.

I don’t know if the legal side of this book stands up to scrutiny, and a few basics of the story seem far-fetched. But the story is full of twists and surprises that entertain. You really hate the bad characters, who do really bad things. Summer is almost over, but this is a great beach read that will quicken your pulse and keep you turning pages.

All the Sinners Bleed – S.A. Cosby
This was one of my favorite reads of the year. Cosby writes so well about race and America’s history with it. Here he intertwines that with a deeply disturbing mystery.

The book begins with a shooting in a school in a small town in Virginia. As the local sheriff and his deputies attempt to clear the scene, the assumed gunman exits the school and runs towards them. A white deputy shoots and kills the Black suspect, who had killed a white teacher inside the school. Left to unravel that is county sheriff Titus Crowne, a Black man who much of the county (I.e. most white folks) view with suspicion. Crowne also faces pressure from the Black churches that helped get him elected, as they assume since he’s a cop he will not hold his deputy accountable for his shot.

Pretty good bones for a story there. Cosby pushes beyond those basics.

The initial investigation of the shooting uncovers a ring of child abuse and murder that crosses racial lines. Soon bodies, old and new, are piling up all over the county, and Crowne struggles to find the killer and end the deaths. There is intense pressure from both the white and Black communities, often for very different reasons. A confrontation between them seems inevitable, regardless of what Crowne’s investigation finds. And that investigation keeps turning up even more disturbing acts that have taken place just beyond the public eye for decades.

Along the way Cosby writes about the lack of respect for Crowne, despite his education and FBI background. He faces constant challenges from every side of the community as they project their own prejudices and assumptions upon him. Cosby slices through the hypocrisy of the aggrieved, Southern White Male and the dishonesty of the “Heritage Not Hate” movement.

I raced through this book. It was compelling, frustrating, made me angry, and kept me engaged from start to finish. I had only read one of Cosby’s previous books. I need to go back and knock out his others.

Small Mercies – Dennis Lehane
According to my master reading list, it’s been eight years since I had read a Lehane novel. Which doesn’t seem possible, until I realized he’s only released one new novel in that span.

This story takes place in the summer of 1974, just before the city explodes when forced busing to desegregate Boston’s public schools takes effect. Mary Pat Fennessy’s teenage daughter disappears after a night out with friends, and no one wants to tell her what may have happened. Her daughter’s disappearance coincides with the death of the son of a Black co-worker. Fennessy has to go up against the biggest powers in Southie to determine what happened to both kids.

Lehane’s story is a pretty stark representation of racism in Boston (or any other city) where poor whites and Blacks were often pitted against each other for jobs and resources. To his credit he includes several characters who are pretty racist, but realize the hypocrisy in their racism.

Red Widow – Alma Katsu
It’s kind of crazy how many spy novels I read that are written by former CIA employees. This one is the latest addition to that list. It’s pretty spicy.

Katsu’s story is about an agent, placed on leave for having an affair with a British intelligence officer, who is brought in to help identify a possible Russian mole inside the CIA.

The spy’s identity is revealed pretty early before Katsu takes the reader on twist after twist after twist about the spy’s motivation, who knew about their deceit, who covered for whom, who is turning on whom, and so on.

Those twists are the story’s strengths. While they may be a bit over-the-top, they combine to result in a pretty engaging tale.

The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal – Laine Nooney
In this book I was expecting something more focused on the general coolness of the Apple II and other computers of that era.

Instead, after going through a quick history of the computer industry up to the 1977 Trinity of the Apple II, the TRS–80, and the Commodore PET 2001, Nooney explores how the market for software specifically built for the Apple II changed the entire computer industry. People were struggling to understand how these cool, but very expensive, new objects could be used to improve their lives. It was the development of software made for specific purposes that began to make the personal computer integral to people’s homes.

Nooney’s account is more academic than I expected. It reads a little dry. At times it veers too far into critique of consumer capitalism. It’s not my favorite book written about that era, but I added some new knowledge along the way.

City of Dreams – Don Winslow
Book two of Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy. He sticks with the style of the first: short, choppy sentences and limited descriptions. I have to say I enjoy reading that style, as I can knock out a book in about two nights.

However the story is not as good as in his longer, more expressive books about the Mexican drug cartels. There’s plenty of material to mine in the conflict between the Italian and Irish mafias of Providence, RI. But perhaps the brevity of his writing here takes away from its impact. It reads as rushed and unfinished, as more of an exercise to get away from his traditional style than an effort to crank out a well formulated story.

Reptile Memoirs – Silje Ulstein
Whoooo, this book! It begins a little slow, bouncing back-and-forth across a 15 year period among a small group of characters in Norway, one of which is a tiger python. Eventually it becomes clear that two of those characters are actually the same person, appearing under two different names in two parts of her life. Shortly after that reveal things go crazy. And keep getting crazier. There was a moment, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, when I let out a gasp followed by an appreciative laugh. There are several shocking, “Holy Shit!” moments throughout the back half of the story.

This book is dark and disturbing. There will be some people who probably can’t or shouldn’t read it (Semi-spoiler alert: if you can’t read about violence against children you should skip). But if you can deal with the extreme darkness, it is a hell of a story, one of the more unique and memorable ones I’ve come across recently.

I’ve been in a weird reading space since May began. Over that span I did not enjoy two of the books I have completed. As I mentioned in my previous RN post, I only finished Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards because I’m stubborn. I think that effort wore me down, as shortly afterward I quit a book after struggling with it for over a week. Put all of that together and in the last four weeks I’ve only logged two books into my reading list for 2023.

Retracing the Iron Curtain – Timothy Phillips
This was the one book I finished that I did enjoy. Phillips travels from where Norway and Russia touch down to the border between Turkey and Armenia. Along the way he explores where the Iron Curtain separated East from West during the Cold War. He tells stories of both the past and present, and how the ages are irrevocably connected because of the trauma of the Cold War era. While I’m sure this will appeal most to people who came up in that time, it is filled with fascinating stories that should appeal to any history buff.

Transcription – Kate Atkinson
I get a newsletter a couple times each week that shares good crime/thriller/espionage reads. I’m pretty sure I found this book via that list. It promised a cracking story that bridged the early days of World War II and the early days of the Cold War when the world was still trying to find its footing.

While promising, the story did not live up to my expectations.

The World War II stuff was interesting. It focused on a British government effort to spy on Brits who were sympathetic to the Nazis and plotting to force the UK to get out of the war in 1940.

However, the shift to 1950 did not work nearly as well. There was a lot of meandering about. While I knew Atkinson was building towards something, it was never clear what. When she finally offered her big reveal – one apparently based on real events – I was more confused than thrilled. I thought she didn’t build to that twist in an effective way, taking away much of its potential shock value.

So the story was kind of a bummer. It did get me thinking about how long people will continue to write about World War II. Forever, I guess? We just passed the 79th anniversary of D-Day and are still getting tons of new books, both fiction and non-fiction, about the war each year. I guess it is the most evil collective act in our species’ history, so until something worse comes along it will continue to push people to write about it.

Abandoned Book

Double or Nothing – Kim Sherwood
My threshold for continuing to read a book has always been about 100 pages. If I’m not enthralled with it by that point, I usually don’t feel bad about putting it down and trying something else. Get deeper and I feel obligated to knock out whatever is left, even if it isn’t entertaining me.

I made it right to 100 pages on this, but it took something like 10 days to get that far. As I didn’t feel inspired to pick it up each day, I decided to send it back to the library rather than renew it and attempt to push further.

That’s a real shame, because this is the beginning of a new chapter in the literary 007 series. Sherwood has been contracted to write three 007 novels, and she was not shy about taking the series in a very different direction. In this novel James Bond is missing, and presumed dead, a trope that has been used before in the 007 world. Sherwood places the focus on the remaining double-oh agents and their search both for Bond and their investigation into the Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos figure Bond was looking into before his disappearance.

Sherwood’s 00 world reflects modern Britain. Her spies are very diverse, comprising of men and women, children of immigrants with very non-traditional British names, and even a gay agent.

That’s all fine with me, although I wonder if introducing so many characters at once was part of the reason I struggled to connect with her story.

The bigger issue, I think, was that Sherwood might be too good of a writer to pen a James Bond novel. Double-oh stories, good or bad, should always have a pulpy, tongue-in-cheek quality to them, an element that was definitely missing here. It felt much more like a standard espionage thriller, firmly rooted in reality. I say that as a massive fan of the Daniel Craig 007 world, which scaled the ridiculousness way back for a healthy dose of realism. But where the Craig movies featured so much amazing action, Sherwood’s story lacked those set pieces that keep the story exciting and moving.

A shame, as I would have liked to see how she carries the series forward. Might be time to be done with the James Bond stuff for awhile and pick one of the, oh, 8000 or so other spy series I could dive into.

Beat the Devils – Josh Weiss
The genre of alternate histories can be very fun if done right. I recently ran across a list of best recent alt history novels and was amazed by how many were centered on World War II. I guess that era has a lot of opportunities for writing about What Ifs. Or people are just obsessed with Hitler. Still.

This takes a different tack, and does so well. It takes place in 1950s America, deep into Joseph McCarthy’s second term as president. His brand of anti-communism/anti-semitism/hyper-patriotism has taken over nearly every aspect of American life. What we think of as the FBI today has become a force that roots out any communist sympathizers, and picks on Jews when they can’t find any commies. The media is totally under government control, and is all about advancing McCarthy’s agenda.

Morris Baker is an LA detective who survived the Nazi concentration camps in Czechoslovakia. As a Jew he is constantly under suspicion, but counters that by being one of the most effective detectives in the LAPD. Until he becomes the patsy government forces are using as an excuse to crack down further on Americans’ rights.

Weiss gets to the formula that makes these kinds of novels work. He sets up a tantalizing alternate universe that doesn’t seem too far fetched. Hell, there are a lot of elected officials in our country at this moment who are behaving very closely to the McCarthyites of Weiss’ book. But he spends more time on a pretty fun and effective mystery than on spelling out the exact details of his universe. When the reader wants more details, you’ve done your alt history right.

There is a second Morris Baker book that I will for sure be reading.

Rogues – Patrick Radden Keefe
A collection of Keefe’s long-form work, mostly for The New Yorker. They are almost all great, and left me fascinated about the process of spending months/years on a subject then turning that into a piece that can be knocked out in 30–45 minutes. That’s the kind of stuff I aspired to do nearly 20 years ago when I went to grad school, but my brain could never figure out how to construct.

The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis
I loved, loved, loved the cinematic interpretation of Ellis’ American Psycho. I thought it ridiculously funny in its skewering of late 1980s Wall Street culture. The key was I didn’t take it too seriously. I know a lot of people hated it, and many more hated Ellis’ original book.

I think I’ve only read one of Ellis’ books, probably 20+ years ago, and as best as I can recall did not love it. I heard a lot of people very excited about his newest book, which went back to his high school days in the early 1980s and the world he grew up in in super privileged LA. I let that enthusiasm by others draw me into it.

That was a mistake.

I did not like this at all. If I wasn’t stubborn about getting so deep into a book and not stopping, I likely would have not wasted an entire week reading it.

I have no issue with Ellis’ graphic sex and violence. I mean, it is a bit much. Or a lot much. But after a couple hundred pages I was numb to it.

What I hated was how long it took him to get anywhere. Entire chapters that took 10–15 minutes to read, were about the minute details of one conversation. Or of his thought process in a specific moment. It reminded me of a Karl Ove Knausgard novel, without any of the beauty or redeeming moments.

I pretty much hated every character. I though the plot was dumb. I did not like the twist at the end, which seemed forced and an effort to rescue a story Ellis knew was a failure.

I occasionally give books my highest recommendation. I give this whatever the total opposite of that is. Stay away.

Stay True – Hua Hsu
This was a wonderful little memoir, written by a Taiwanese American. Although checking in right around 200 pages, Hua covers a lot of ground.

Ostensibly it is a straight memoir about his high school, college, and grad school years in the 1990s. He was your original California slacker who still managed to get good grades while going to Cal and then Harvard for his Ph.D. He was often more interested, though, in ridiculing the music tastes of others (he was into Pavement and Nirvana and couldn’t understand how someone could like Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews), and otherwise looking down on people who didn’t match his tastes. A very ‘90s attitude.

Once you get past those pop culture details, though, the book is much more about defining/discovering identity. How does he fit in with his parents, who are from Taiwan and eventually move back there, when he feels thoroughly American? Why do people insist on calling him Asian American when he feels distinct from both his classmates who are immigrants and from his Japanese American best friend whose family has been in the States for generations? What is the proper role of the non-White activist, to tear things down or try to repair them from the inside? What is friendship, and how can men communicate with each other? What is a sellout?

And so on. Although I’m obviously not Asian, his broader concepts took me back to my life in the ‘90s, when I and my friends were all trying to figure out who we were as we got through college and entered adult life.

It wouldn’t be a book about the ‘90s without some kind of tragedy, and when his best friend is murdered in a random robbery, Hua is forced to consider mortality, America’s gun culture, how decisions made in the spur of the moment can have lasting effects, and grief. Oh, and guilt, of which there is a particularly heartbreaking example.

The best memoirs open your eyes to perspectives you aren’t familiar with while also connecting with your life. Stay True hits every note of that requirement perfectly.

Africa Is Not A Country – Dipo Faloyin
Those of you who read these posts should know I’m perpetually behind, and even after nearly 20 years I’m still not smart enough to jot down my thoughts about a book shortly after finishing it. So the first entry in each post is usually going to be about four weeks old and my thoughts about it murky.

That’s the case with this, a very good book written by a native African raised in London about how the rest of the world views his ancestral continent. The constant theme throughout the book is how the white, western world often views all of Africa through a series of stereotypes. As Faloyin points out, not every country had the same colonial experience, history with slavery, process of gaining independence, experience with democracy, or has the same racial/ethnic makeup and resulting issues. Yet we always want to apply the same filters when we are looking at the problems African countries face.

He also gets into the history of the continent, specifically how colonialism royally fucked things up. There’s also a chapter about the misguided, if well-intended, aid programs that often come from grass roots movements in the west. One example was the Kony 2012 group, created by Americans to help oust the militant Joseph Kony from Uganda. Only problem was Kony hadn’t been in Uganda for six years. The movement was hyper-focused on this one, unattainable goal rather than going to Uganda and asking people there how they could help make the country a better place and protect its people.

Anyway, this was both a very good and fun read. Faloyin has a great writing style that made the book a joy to work through.

Trigger Mortis – Anthony Horowitz
Forever and a Day – Anthony Horowitz
Two modern James Bond novels, or at least written in the past few years. I’ve read similar efforts by other authors, but Horowitz is the only writer who gets them right.

Both books take place in the 1950s, early in Bond’s career. Both feature tidbits from Ian Fleming’s notebooks that his estate allowed Horowitz access to. And they both very much fit the aesthetic of Fleming’s early Bond novels, from the precise references to the consumer goods and fashion that 007 prefers to the general vibe of the era.

Horowitz updates his Bond a bit. He’s far less chauvinistic and cold than Fleming’s Bond. Minorities are treated with respect rather than disdain. There’s even a gay character that is one of Bond’s closest confidants rather than an overly affected person who is evil at their core.

That may trigger the woke alarms on some people, but I’m not sure why a book written in the 2020s that takes place in the 1950s has to mimic the most unfortunate beliefs of that time if they aren’t a key part of its plot.

The stories are quite good. They are page turners, to be sure. But they have some depth, are at least anchored in the vicinity of reality, and are fun to tear through.

I have one more Horowitz Bond novel to get to, then I’m going to check out some of his other thrillers. They seem like they will be good pool reads over the coming months.

The Candy House – Jennifer Egan
Boy do critics love Egan. And for the third time I came out lukewarm about one of her books.

Apparently this has some repeat characters from her earlier book A Visit From the Goon Squad, but since I read that 13 years ago I didn’t make those connections.

Again she has written about a series of people and moments that all have connections. I haven’t gone back to read my thoughts about her earlier books, but I bet I struggled to find a point to those books. That sure is what happened here. I enjoyed how she slowly presented these people. I couldn’t ever see a real point to them or their stories, though. I know she was making a statement about how our relationship with our memories affects us. But there was never any real plot, just another character with their set of stories.

The writing was very good. There was just no plot train pulling those words along that kept me engaged.

In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin’s work was the inspiration for so many other travel writers I’ve read over the years, so this piece has always been in the back of my mind. If you’ve ever purchased a Moleskine notebook and bothered to read the insert that came inside, you know that Chatwin documented his trips in notebooks similar to them.

I mention the notebook angle because that’s very much how this book reads: like a series of brushed-up notebook entries made while traveling through the South American region of Patagonia in the mid–70s. Some are the barest of entries. Others are extended vamps on things he experienced, or deep dives into the history of the region. Often one entry leads into the next with a set of ellipses. It has a very casual presentation.

Because of that it was hard for me to establish a reading rhythm. I can see how it would influence writers who came later. But I think I’ve read so many of those authors, and enjoyed their styles more, that this didn’t really resonate with me.

It was fun, though, to look at his travels in a relatively primitive technological time and imagine how different his travels were compared to someone making the same trip today.

Fairy Tale – Stephen King
So there’s a parallel world, with a portal between ours and it. There’s strange magic in said parallel world. There’s a quest through that world whose end result will have major ramifications in both worlds. There’s an unlikely friendship between a young person and an older person. There are creepy characters.

Basically it’s every note from the Stephen King greatest hits collection. And, as happens more often than not, it works. Not a classic but worth the 5–6 nights it took me to get through it.

The thing that really stuck out to me was how King spent over 200 pages on what amounted to setup for the real story. In some ways that felt like too much. But he tells that part of the story in such a compelling manner that it makes complete sense.

Walking With Ghosts in Papua New Guinea – Rick Antonson
This was an account of Antonson’s walk along the Kokoda trail in Papua New Guinea. It wasn’t just about his trek, but also about the battles that were fought along the trail during World War II.

That historical angle stuck with me more than the actual hike. It helped me to remember that there are so many stories from that war that are left out of its broader narrative, but which were insanely important to the people directly affected. Most of Antonson’s group was Australian, and many of them had family members who had served in PNG during the war.[1] They often had incredibly emotional responses to the stories they heard as they traversed the country.