Book 93. Fool by Christopher Moore

I love Chris Moore.  So much so, that I wrote to him long ago, commending him for his work.  I was equally stunned when the dude wrote back.  And not some kind of stock “Thank you for your kind response.” type bullshit, but an honest to God thoughtful response.  I also introduced him to the word “douchewaffle.”  You’re welcome, America. 

Part of the reason I’ve been drawn to authors like Chris Moore, JA Konrath, and Jim Butcher is that they are very accessible to their fans, and seem to express a genuine appreciation that people like their work.  And so I try to find their work and pimp it out whenever possible. 

Now with Christopher Moore, his work has been really hit or miss.  Lamb is probably one of the most enjoyable novels ever written.  And Stupidest Angel banks extremely well on all of his previous canon.  But for all the good stuff, I really disliked Fluke and Coyote Blue.  So it doesn’t mean I automatically give him a free pass. 

Our superbook gal Jennifer already gave a brilliant review of this, so I won’t wax poetic on it too much.  It’s right in my wheelhouse, a sort of mash-up of Shakespeare with his usual sardonic wit.  The problem with this is that I think he’s pushing a little too much of his wocka-wocka in the material.  It feels like late Mel Brooks, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.  It’s funny, and that’s the problem.  The material’s almost a little too schticky, but since I laughed so much, I feel strange in complaining.  When Pocket – Lear’s fool — gets wistful, it’s got a really belabored feel to it.  

If you’re a Moore fan, you’ll enjoy it, and I am, so I did.  It’s not his best work, but it was slightly better than You Suck, and a little less so than Dirty Job.

Book 92. The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg

Have you been on Facebook and gotten a friend request from someone in your past, someone you went to school with, and you look over their profile, and can’t remember a single thing about them?  There was nothing memorable about them at all, no quality that was particularly offensive or outstanding.  They just kind of existed as a placefiller, a blur in the background of a scene.  We used to call them Milpools, people that you would spend time with because there was no one else around, and you would constantly be on the lookout for someone more interesting to spend your time with.  (The designation came from that scene in The Simpsons when Bart broke his leg, and tried to get Milhouse to sign his cast.)  

That’s this book.  It has been sitting on my shelf for almost six years, a recommendation from an old co-worker in my earliest incarnation as a bookseller.  The author was a friend of hers, and she asked me to read it.  I kept picking it up, and putting it back in lieu of other books.  Several times, this was on the chopping block for the Cannonball Read, so that I could replace it with something better that came along.  But I was determined that, goddammit, I would finally read this book.  And I did.  And it’s done. 

It’s supposed to be a hilarious satire of academia, but really, it’s just a very dry, quietly clever text.  The framing of the story is so awkwardly paced, spending inordinate amounts of time on seemingly non-essential moments, and then sprawling forward months, or years, or even decades.  It’s the story of a professor of the literature of the lost European country of Gravine, and particularly of their most famous undiscovered poet, Henderson.  There was so much more that could have been done with this, but really, Ellenberg seems content to sort of lazily let the story tell itself.  It doesn’t help matters when he saddles us with a terrible narrator, one who’s the worst kind of malcontent — the remorseful one.  At least with some of Roth’s protagonists, or someone like Ignatius Reilly, they’re unrepentant bastards.  Here, the guy sucks, and mopes about being a shit.  It’s dreadful.  

Thankfully the novel’s short, mostly because it was published by an independent press.  I finally finished it, and I will never have to read it again.  And since no one has ever heard of — or will hear of — Jordan Ellenberg, you won’t have to read it either.  It’ll fill space on random library shelves, forgotten.  Where it belongs.

Book 91. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I often compared Murakami to Kurosawa, because I am a narrow-minded racist, but also because before I was acquainted with their works, I thought they were works that people bandied around to sound more intellectual.  But then after actually experiencing it for myself, I realized that while cerebral and dreamily existential, they’re also amazingly badass.  

I’ve only read two other Murakami before this, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hard Boiled Wonderland.  I found them both to be great reads, but I also felt there were almost a little too out there for my personal tastes.  I had trouble accessing them as much as I would have liked.  It didn’t necessarily hinder my appreciation, but it made me a little reticent to pick up the works.  It’s the same reason I tend to space out foreign films — it’s a world I need to hold my breath before I dive into, and I can’t stay there too long without coming up for air. 

Kafka on the Shore was different.  I was drawn into the narrative immediately, which spills out slowly, as it changes between the two main characters: Kafka, a young fifteen year old runaway who holes up in a library to escape an Oedipal prophecy, and Nakata, a mental deficient who speaks to cats.  Indeed, it’s weird that I was able to access this novel, particularly since it’s a ghost story involving talking cats. But Murakami’s style is so natural everything over the top just works.  

I think that the supernatural works better in the older foreign cultures.  For some reason, ghosts work when they exist in Japan, Italy, England.  And this ghost story is particularly bizarre.  The strange beauty comes as the two stories interweave.  Not because it’s startling or shocking, but because it’s so outstanding.  Murakami infuses his story with a multitude of fascinating characters, and to explain them would be to give away pleasant surprises.  

I had stalled on reading this, because I had assumed it would take me a really long time, as I find Murakami to be dense and heady, but this was practically a breeze.  It’s a brilliant novel that had me grinning with delight.

Book 90. Out of My Skin by John Haskell

It seemed like such a good idea: a writer decides to become a Steve Martin impersonator, but then it goes a little too far.  And in theory, that’s what this book is about.  But in theory, we’re all an infant’s dreams, and when he wakes we cease to exist. 

More or less, this reminds me of a less able version of John Fante’s Bandini books.  It’s about an East Coaster trying to find themselves on the West Coast.  More specifically, about finding one’s self in L.A.  Now, this I can appreciate, as I’ve lost my mind, soul, and sense of humor while drifting through these streets.  It’s a town that can sandblast you. It’s a town where nobody is who they seem, and you can get caught up, because there’s always an audience.  You are always being watched and observed by someone here.  It’s a strange animal.  

Haskell’s book follows an author — sometimes a screenwriter, sometimes a journalist? — as he decides to embody Steve Martin.  Admittedly, this is a strange person to imitate, because Martin isn’t an outrageous guy — he plays one on TV.  Twenty years ago. The author meets a girl, kind of loves her, and they have a relationship.  And he tries to be an actor kind of maybe.  There’s never really anything specific going on, which makes this very L.A.  There’s no immediacy about this city.  Events occur, but time exists in a strange vacuum.  For example, a mutual friend was visiting another friend of mine (star of Yeast Amy Judd).  I told her to come see me.  She asked how far away I was.  This is not an easy question to answer someone.  Rarely do you respond to this with actual physical distance; at the time it was about three to five miles give or take.  Normally, you answer by saying the time it would take.  But in L.A., it depends on what time of day it is and in which direction you are traveling.  I told her, “It takes either fifteen minutes or an hour and a half.”  This is a true but not helpful statement.  This is L.A.

Haskell’s novel hints at being devious and creepy, but never fully takes the plunge.  The author (not Haskell, but his narrator, who is also named Haskell) hints at this pseudo-psychosis, that he is consumed with the becoming of Steve vs. his not-Steve persona.  It could have been this very effective insight into someone gone mad.  There’s almost a point where you think the character is going to become a serial killer.  But this instead sort of casually blows over, and we’re left with a droll, dreary relationship story.  It’s not even a particularly effective existentialist piece.  On the plus side, it’s short, barely breaking the 200 page minimum requirement.  I’m still kind of curious to check out American Purgatorio by Haskell, but this was a breezy disappointment.

Book 89. All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris

Book 7 of the old Stackhouse classics.  As I’ve said, it’s the goddamn cheeseburger and fries books you crave, southern fried like you like.  Since TrueBlood’s all HBO’s got in the face of AMC and Showtime (goddamn Weeds is good — and I hate fucking marijuana), the television series is sure to bespoil these plot lines, so get ‘em while they fresh and fun. 

All Together Dead sends Sookie to the long-awaited vampire summit that’s loomed over the last few books. I don’t know how far Harris has her novels planned in advanced, but I appreciate when authors set up things in the distant future and pay them off.  And by God, does Harris deliver.  What draws me to the novels — and what I find somewhat lacking in the show — is the sense of goofy humor and the spunky innocence.  I mean, for those who know of Bubba, he’s got no place in Alan Ball’s vision of sparkly sex and violin-string menace.  Harris writes Sookie with a natural bubbly southern sass — so when shit gets ugly it shows up against the white paint.  

All Together Dead gets UGLY.  By the end of the book, everything is a fucking horrible mess.  This deep in a series, it’s rare to see an author shake the snowglobe like this.  It’s easy enough for most to just keep the status quo and add a few more new characters on top of the stale old ones.  Or in some cases, they might advance the plot a step or two while keeping mostly filler.  Or even cleaning house and killing everyone off and starting fresh.  Harris takes an even more interesting tack: she fucks people up.  By the novel’s close, you have no idea where things stand, who’s alive, who’s crippled beyond recognition (which is such a wickedly brilliant choice) and who’s gonna be loving who.  

I have the next book in the series sitting not but an arm’s length away, and it’s taking me effort not to burn away another book in the last ten for this one.  But if I didn’t push anyone out for Butcher (Long Lost is book 101, I promise you Lizzie), I can’t throw it aside for Harris.  You’ll have to wait, Sook.

Book 88. The Tourists by Jeff Hobbs

I blame Bret Easton Ellis for this book.  He taught Hobbs, and you can see his greasy, coke stained crib notes scribbled all over this mess of a story.  And it’s a shame, because if Hobbs didn’t try to ape his mentor, he’d be a hell of a fucking writer.  As it is, there are moments of greatness shining through this dismal doppleganger of The Informers. Actually, it’s the Great Gatsby as translated by the younger brother of Patrick Bateman after doing a bump off Amber Heard’s ass.  

Once more, we’re asked to take pity on a group of well-to-do New Yorkers as they drug and double-fuck and party and sigh and pine.  The narrator, who is never named, is a part of the story by force majeure, crammed into the lives of his social betters by virtue of a shared Yale schooling and the weird ties that bind all classmates.  He doesn’t belong to this world, and he bangs despondently and emo-ly against it like a docked rowboat in a summer storm.  He’s not much of a writer, struggling with his career and writing fluff pieces for magazines.  And so, he ends up writing the story of one summer in the lives of four awful people engaged in a love rhombus. 

The casual bisexuality and drug abuse is sort of a Hallmark of an Ellis novel, so without it, we’d be reading Vanity Fair.  We’ve got David Taylor, a boring ass financier, married to Samona Ashley Taylor, a caramel goddess, former fashion model, and struggling designer.  Enter Ethan Hoevel, a stylish designer who’s the talk of the town and the fuck of your dreams.  At risk of spoilerizing stuff, everybody ends up fucking everybody else, metaphorically, spiritually and physically.  And there is the crux of the novel.  While it’s carefully cadged in the concept of unrequited longing, and the idea of “What is Love?”, it’s handled about as deeply as the Arista song that the Butabi brothers sexually assault to.  The mopey narrator stands back as an observer, the fat girl at the formal, who mouths the words to the songs and adjusts her corsage, gazing around and hoping someone will ask her to dance.  

The characters themselves are ridiculous archetypes that manage — thanks in no small part to Hobbs’ actual talent — to rise above the mediocre borrowed plot he crammed them into.  The most interesting parts of the novel surround the peripheral characters: the arsenal of assholes that swing at the beautiful people with sledgehammers of pent-up rage.  Aidan, Ethan’s slag of a fucking brother; James Gutterson, a cockhead hockey jock swinging dick prick who works for David; and Stanton Vaughn, a protypical flaming gay stalker who spurts drama like distilled Project Runway: these fellas set the novel on fire. 

The Tourists reads like a particularly decent gossip rag.  We’re supposed to give a shit about people with better jobs and looks and lives than us.  We’re supposed to feel bad that they feel bad — even though they go to the $$$$ restaurants and escape to Peru for beachfront fuckfests when they feel blue.  You can tolerate Ellis’ excess because it’s timestamped in the eighties.  In the post 9/11 world, it’s hard to give a fuck about the woes of the richfolk.  Even though the narrator is mostly poor and outside the world of the characters, it’s nearly impossible to take pity on him because he so badly wants to be with the glitteratti.  

I feel bad, because you can see how good of an author Hobbs is.  His talent is palpable, and despite his penchant for ellipses which read like an audiobook performed by Malcolm’s wheelchair BFF in Malcolm in the Middle, you can tell he’s going to do well.  Hopefully, out from the wings of Ellis, he’ll venture into less Dallas-like territory.  The Tourists came out in 2008 to strong reviews — because it’s the kind of shit that most LitMags eat with a fucking silver fork — so he’s gonna be doing a second book.  And I’ll read it, because the man’s got skills.

Book 87. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Just shove this into your face and accept you’ve been dominated, punk.  You can’t read this book.  You can’t digest it in one sitting.  It’s a quadruple Whopper with bacon.  Having read only Cryptonomicon, I was expecting a long, droll, science-heavy quarkfest geekothon.  Instead, I was smacked in the face with a hoverboard and told to cover the bleeding with an icepack laced with X.  This book will fuck your brain.  You don’t read this — Eric Stoltz jams a needle of it into your cerebral cortex to impress a pierced Arquette.  

If I tried to write an SAT problem explaining to you what this book was about, nobody’d break a 1000.  A train carrying the Da Vinci Code meets Blade Runner going west heads for a commuter line carrying The Matrix meets Catch-22.  They collide somewhere in Chicago in the living room of a man watching Repo Man.  Show your work.  Give up on life.  Join the Borg.  

The book is totally ridiculous and amazing.  You consume it and can’t believe what’s happening.  If you try to stare directly into the characters and plot, you’ll burn your retinas.  Hiro Protagonist is a pizza-delivery man/hacker who carries two katanas and works for Uncle Enzo’s Mafia.  On a near failed delivery into one of the franchulates — society is now broken up into corporate-sponsored mini-city states/suburban enclaves where a Best Buy doesn’t just sell you flat-screen TVs but also heroin, prostitutes, and is also a prison — he’s saved by a teenage Kourier named Y.T., a badass chick on a killer skateboard.  And they somehow get embroiled in a worldwide plot to erase the minds of hackers with a virus called Snow Crash based on the Sumerian nam-shub (think magic spell — wiggity wiggity wizards of waverly YOUR FACE) that caused the downfall of Babel.  

Breathe.  Breathe!  Your brain is fucking flatlining, fool!   It doesn’t make sense now, but it will.  And shit, I haven’t even got into the fucking Aleut glassassin with the fucking nuke hardwired to his lifeline.  You can’t take this heat, you can only get a tan from two states away.   Stephenson deftly frappucinos sci-fi and video game avatar with ancient pre-biblical arcana in ways that staple the brain.  On the surface, it’s crazy-sexy-cool.  With pun names, insane half-spinning plot lines leaping like a speedfreak reading four simultaneous comics, and insan-o forethinking socio-political commentary (this book was written in 1992.  wrap your brain around that shit.  had facebook existed at the time, i think N.S. would have gone fucking Tron-bonzer on this bue-weeesness) it’s almost impossible to try to break down in it’s awesomeness. 

It’s a book you put in someone’s hand, press a finger to their lips, kiss them on the forehead and walk away.  So here you is.  Smooches, motherfucker.

Book 86. Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich

I often find my Netflix watching nicely overlapping my book reading on occasion.  As occasional background/foreground to my late night Pogo.com solitaire sessions to quell the renewal of my insomnia, I’ve been watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 1.  Old school half-hour mini-plays of death and murder and subterfuge.  Good times.  This was thoroughly apropos as I began reading Cornell Woolrich, a man who often gets wrongly shunted aside by the personages of Chandler and Cain when it comes to the granddaddies of noir.  Woolrich penned the novel for Rear Window, arguably Hitchcock’s finest films — at least of the several featuring the uncanny James Stewart.  

Rendezvous in Black is nothing short of brilliant, if not amusingly dated and readable only as in black and white.  The most telling facet of how good the story is is that I can tell you everything that happens up front, and it’ll still kill you.  Johnny Marr meets his special gal outside the drugstore every night at 8 PM.  The night before they’re supposed to get married, May 31st, he comes upon a gruesome scene.  A blanket draped corpse, face smashed unrecognizable, a broken bottle littering the street.  You see, some gallivanting businessmen in a charter plane fresh from a fishing trip decided to wing an empty liquor bottle out the window, dooming the young lady.  Marr loses it, and I mean in a big way.  He instantly smashes his watch, turns back the hands to read three minutes to eight, and then decides to stand vigil outside the drugstore, convinced that his gal will be right along, and that everything all right.  He does this for months, losing his apartment, his job, his mind.  A new beat cop, swinging dick bravado and all, roughs him up, tells him his girl’s dead and to get lost before he takes him in.  So Johnny leaves.  And cooks up a plan.

He quickly takes jobs at all the charter plane services, checking records to find out which plane flew over.  He finds a list of the five men involved, and decides to get his vengeance on them.  Not by killing them, but by taking away the women in their lives that matter to them most.  And that’s where Woolrich is fucking brilliant.  The following five chapters follow as Johnny goes on his rampage, murdering each of the five women on May 31st.  And it’s not all wives who fall under his wrath, which adds that necessary element of awesomeness.  

Each incident is a like a short story unto itself, my favorite being the second rendezvous.  A schlub cop dogs Marr at each turn, desperately trying to foil the plan.  It’s a bit hokey, I will definitely admit, but if you read it in the context that the novel was written in the 40s, and if you give it that black and white hardboiled noir approach, it’s sure to be an instant adoration.

Book 85. Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan

Yea, verily, I have completed a mighty task.  Slowly, did I trek through this hearty banquet of a novel, taking nearly a month and a half to complete it as I journeyed through other novels along the way.  And forsooth, would I be loathe to explain my feelings on Book 6 of a 12 or potentially 14 book series, each of which are clocking in at 1000 pages a clip.  I will say that once again, the Wheel of Time is like watching most long running television dramas.  It’s a huge sprawling work, and so we’re weaving around through tons and tons of characters, a huge cast, and so he touches on them here or there.  It staggers around for a long stretch of time, and then  hits you with all the action in the finale.  And Lord of Chaos gets ugly towards the end.  

But what this marks is a close to a huge chapter of the Cannonball Read.  Once I started taking recommendations, I was bombarded with fantasy.  Most of this was my own doing, taking public my wading through of Jordan’s massivepiece, and thus people were quick to belittle Jordan (alright, well, me too) and hurl huge selections at me.  I snagged as many starters as I could.  

Thus, I read the first two Song of Ice and Fire, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss — the first Kingkiller; the first First Law book by Joe Abercrombie, the first Robin Hobb, the first two Temeraire, and the first half of the Wheel of Time.  My Kindle is fit to burst with the followups to most of these, as well as the first few of the Discworld novels, the Arabesk series, and even more fantasy that I found scouring the interwebs for the others.  

But alas, with the Lord of Chaos closed, I look to my final fifteen books as fantasy free. (Unless you count Sookie Stackhouse  – got one more of those up my sleeve). No more will dragons or dwarves or assassins or Athan’Miere or orcs or oliphaunts cross my eyes until I put a close on this contest.  I thank you for your suggestions on fantasy, and I only hope my own little quest and the cannonade of recs were picked up by others.  Hopefully a few more of you will crack the nerdlinger crease and check out a few sword and sorcery pieces.  

Either way, onwards and upwards into the classics.  Hopefully the lingering memory of saidan will get me through Dosteofvsky and Steinbeck.  Tally ho!

Book 84. Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Amazon offered five fantasy novels for free on the Kindle, most of which were in series.  Among them were two that were on my list, the first Temeraire novel — which as you well know I adored enough to include two in the Cannonball — and the second being the first in the Farseer trilogy.  Usually, they don’t give away free shit unless they’re convinced you’ll buy more, so it boded well.  Also, I think it was a brilliant marketing ploy.  If you read the first few chapters — as Amazon allows you to do for free with most of the Kindle books — you might not bother to continue.  But if you stick with this series, it becomes pretty incredibly solid by the close.  

My brother and I share booklists on the Kindle, so most of the time when I just up and pop something there to read, I usually have to give him a little explanation on what I picked.  And thus I realized that fantasy tends to be broken down in three facets: magic, monsters, and maturity.  Is there magic, who can do it, and how is it flavored?  Are there monsters, are they among the folks, and are they the bad guys?  And how much blood and swearing exists?  You can explain almost all series this way.  

The Wheel of Time: magic — channelling, some can do it some can’t; monsters — Trollocs/Halfmen which are a little Lord of the Ring-a-dingy, but also Ogiers who are good guys; and lots of blood and guts, but no bad words. 

Song of Ice and Fire: magic — not really; monsters — dragons, but only late in the game; and tons of blood and swearing and killing. 

Codex Alera: magic — like Avatar, almost everyone controls elemental-based furies; monsters — tons of weird creatures both bad and good; and lots of blood but more or less PG on the swearing. 

And so on.  Assassin’s Apprentice basically is a yes, no, no, series.  The magic comes in the form of Skilling — which is more like psychic powers and akin to channeling than anything else.  The monsters aren’t the critter kind, but instead come in the form of soulless humans called The Forged, who are like living zombies without compassion or basic human affinity.  And there are fights, but relatively tame on the violence for now.  Which is funny, because with a title like Assassin, you’d think there’d be people dying all up in the place. 

Instead, it falls into the same category as the Kingkiller trilogy, as in it’s another one of those recounting all your glories tales, only less sharply written.  And just like that, I feel like the flashback is a crutch that weakens the effect of the story.  Take it out, and it’d be much better.  

Essentially, it tells the story of a prince’s bastard named Fitz, who trains to become an assassin.  I’m completely simplifying this, and practically dashing ahead 2/3 of the book.  And that’s part of the problem.  It’s become another orphan training for greatness, who secretly will end up being one of the most powerful (wizard, barbarian, godlings) in creation.  Hobb feels like she’s holding back a little, which is frustrating, because she’s a strong enough writer that if she slacked a little on the reins, she’d be tearing ass all over the place.  It lingers when it should be forceful.  And having read so much fantasy over the course of the Cannonball, I think I wouldn’t notice the weakness if it weren’t up against such stronger series.  

But the thing is, if you like fantasy, you’ll like Hobb.  And I’ll definitely read the other two in the series.  It won’t be as fervent a desire as some of the others, but I’ll get around to capping off the series.