July 5K: Locally Grown

It’s about that time, kiddos! We’re announcing another 5K for July. We’re going to start it up July 3rd and run it until July 17th.

The incredibly beautiful SaBrina — champion of our last 5K — has chosen our contest. The premise is simple: all five books should be set in towns you’ve lived in or plan on living in. We’ll make it “in or around abouts” just to make it fair. There’s plenty of books set in Philadelphia but none for scenic downtown Quakertown. So if I were competing, my five would be from Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles. I could also chose Italy, as I will have my own villa there. Eventually.

As always, the 5K is open to EVERYONE, not just participants in the Cannonball Read. Rules are the same: 200 pages or more is a book, you must start and finish the 5 books (with reviews posted) by the end of the 5K. Winner gets to set the limiter for the next 5K, which I’m feeling for late August.

Enjoy, and get to reading!

A Pyrrhic Victory

I done it.

September 1st seems so far away.  In just a scant 296, I managed to complete 100 books, varying in page length from 202 to well over 1300.  This means on average, I completed 1 book every three days.  To even complete the Cannonball Read meant you’d have to average at least 2 books a week.  There were some weekends where I banged out four books over the course of two days.  Others seemed to take me forever.  I think I finished ten books while in the course of reading Book 5 of the Wheel of Time.

When I took up the mantle of my friend Marci’s challenge, to see if I too could read 100 books in the course of a year, I just did it to see if I could.  Pink and I decided to pull a Kenny vs. Spenny on it, which quickly spiraled out of control, and by the time December rolled around, we had almost 60 participants, with people STILL trying to leap on the bandwagon as it rolled.  I read faster than Manda, but she kicked my ass in the reviews.  I must admit, I hate writing reviews.  Unlike my movie tastes, I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to a book.  It takes a lot for me to hate a book outright.  But thanks to the awful recommendations of some of you, I finally found books I could loathe.  Amazingly, I only threw aside two books in the course of reading this: Donna Tartt’s odious The Little Friend, and Dostoefvsky’s Demons, which I will complete on my own time.

I finally knocked down a bunch of the books that were sitting on my shelf of “To Be Read” for damn near a decade now, like East of Eden and Infinite Jest.  I still have to get to Don Quixote, Pnin and Pale Fire, and The Old Curiosity Shop — which finally surpassed Crime and Punishment as the book I’ve started more times and put aside.  I was introduced to a slough of new authors, who now fill the ever gaping capacity of my new Kindle.  Seriously, the motherfucker has 156 books on it, only four of which aren’t mine, and that only includes the first four of the thirty-some-odd Discworld books I have yet to read.  I’ve only managed to The Colour of Magic, much to the disgust and chagrin of my friends and well-wishers.

What I hoped would happen with the Cannonball Read happened: that people would share books and authors they loved with each other.  It was something I loved about working in a bookstore — giving people a new book to love.  There was nothing better than discovering a new author and telling people about it.  I handsold like a bastard, because I’m passionate about books I love.  And now I have a ton of new scribes to shill.  I’m looking at you, Swiercynzski and Huston.

It was a tough year.  I knew obstacles would arise.  That was part of the challenge.  If I didn’t have to go to work, be social, pay attention to my girlfriend, or go to stupid Bacons, then I would easily knock out two-hundred.  But life gets in the way.  When I went into the hospital with heart problems — stress and poor diet skyrocketed my blood pressure to around 212/113 — I got jammed up.  I was too scared about dying to bother with reading.  And let me tell you, holed up in a hospital bed with crushing melancholy and suicidal thoughts is no fucking time to be reading Infinite Jest.  How that unwieldy tome didn’t end up soaking up my slit wrists is beyond me.

I lost two people I care about to cancer this year, and didn’t manage to raise a single damn dollar for the cause as Pink and I had pontificated.  The point wasn’t to turn this into a fundraiser or a contest.  It was about challenging ourselves to see if we could pull off a pretty daring feat.  It wasn’t the immediate glorious vomit-violence of a wingeating championship, or a fist pumping dance on the steps of the art museum.  It was a slow plod, a marathon, and I crossed the line.  Now, I’m waiting on the rest of my contenders.

As I approached the upper echelons of the hundred, I could hear my fellow Cannonballers lamenting.  Oh, man, I’m never going to reach one hundred.  I’m only at thirty or forty.  But what they fail to realize is that holy shit, you read thirty books!  That’s thirty one more than most people read in a lifetime.  Even if they only manage to crack fifty, that’s still one book a week for an entire year.  That’s no small feat.

I don’t know if I’ll do this again next year.  I’ve been hemming and hawing about it for a while.  Writing the blog entries is a bitch.  Getting snarled at by fucktard bitchass literary snobs with their library cards so far up their asses they can’t smell their diplomas isn’t really much fun either.  I certainly won’t do the recommendation requirement again.  It would have been more fun to just pick as I went along the way.  I won’t stop reading, but I don’t know if I feel the spirit of this event anymore.  It became about Pink, and well, we lost her.  And I don’t want this to become some sort of memorial to her.  I don’t want this to be another cancer contest.  I never did.  It was supposed to just be me and my pal Manda taking shots at each other as we made our way to 100.

I told her I’d win.

I’m giving the trophy, the Bea Arthur Justice — a pink machete — to her husband.  I’m still trying to figure out what to do for participant prizes and rewards for those who cross the finish line behind me.  I’m still trying to sort out 5K vindicators and the like.  It’s a lonely task, because originally, Pink and I were brainstorming, but now, I have to do it alone, and it’s not nearly as much fun.  I made it, and I’m proud of myself, because it’s really the only task I set for myself this year that I accomplished.  But it’s kind of sad, crossing the finish line, looking back, and realizing that’s it.  The one you started running with lost it on Heartbreak Hill.

So thank you for following us on our journey.  You’ll still get to enjoy the other Cannonballers reviews, as I’m through.  Thank you for the recommendations, and the compliments, and the encouragement.  Thank you and fuck you to those who gave us shit for our reviews.  Yours was the fire that kept me wanting to write worse and worse, bending the laws of grammar over a table and unlubricatingly having my way with them.   We started some fires with our reads, we started some jokes with others.  It was a wild ride, and for me, it’s come to an end.  My blog gets to return to the former nonsensical ramblings and egomaniacal headtrip it once was.  I’ll get to rant about hipsters, and what’s pissing me off today, and how much I hate you all while secretly loving you while openly loathing you.  It’s finally over.  I celebrated with a pizza.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to A Storm of Swords.  What?  You thought I’d stop reading after 100?  Bitch, please.

Book 100. Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

What a way to go.  This was a brilliant fucking novel.  It’s like an amazing combination of Catch-22 and The Office.  It’s dangerous to tread the waters of cubicle politics without getting droll and stupid.  Just like everyone thinks THEIR office is so much like Dunder Mifflin.  But Ferris creates a whipcrack tome that will ring true to anyone who’s ever toiled in the bitter halls of corporate hell.

What’s even more phenomenal is that his narrator is a “we”.  Never named or identified, it instantly draws the reader into the story as if they’ve always been a part of it.  As if they were one of the office drones populating the cubes.

It treats the atmosphere like a high school, lunches together, best frenemies, deadlines, pranks, hating the bosses.  Never once does Ferris go for wacky setups or try to push jokey ideas.  And he covers some pretty insane territory, involving homicidal clowns and totem poles.  But it all feels natural.

I’ve toiled for years in shitty desk job that I loathe but I need.  At times I’ve threatened the lives of all of my co-workers and bosses.  I still tell stories of the people who’ve left, as if they were heroes of lore.  How my one co-worker used to buy everyone food, and how we had Smiths dance parties when everyone else left the office.  We talk shit on each other, we console each other.  We love and hate simultaneously.  I spend more time with these people than the people I love, so they become like a family.

Ferris is an excellent author, and I look forward to his next book.  As soon as I finished this, I decided to give it to my coworker to read.  Even though he’s a fucking idiot.  And my favorite person in the office.

Book 99. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher

Aaaaaaaaggggh!  I couldn’t wait any longer!  With serious apologies to Fyodor Dosteofvsky, especially since I can never spell his fucking name right, I had to put aside Demons so that I could read the latest Harry Dresden.  I’ve never been one to put off delights, and frankly this came out almost two months ago.  It didn’t help matters that Lizzieborden’s been pushing me.

Butcher’s outstanding.  Again, another amazing novel where he advances the entire mythos and series while still keeping a solid buttoned down story intact.  And he’s got no easy task.  He’s juggling about seventeen flavors of supernatural, and in this one he basically says, “Throw me another flaming chainsaw, kid.”  He’s doing magic, werewolves, vampires, faeries, angels and demons, with a cast of at least twelve solid characters, and he decides to center this novel around a skinwalker — so let’s add Native American folklore to the stack.  I know, after the dreadful film Skinwalkers, I was nervous, but it fucking killed.

The book starts off with a motherfucking punch in the face.  Morgan, Dresden’s archnemesis on the Wardens, who’s been waiting for him to screw up so he could decapitate him for crimes against wizardry, essentially shows up on his doorstep covered in blood asking for sanctuary from his own people.  Essentially, Morgan’s been framed for the murder of one of the White Council, and Dresden’s gotta figure out what happened.  In two days.  Or Morgan, and quite possibly Harry, are dead meat.

What follows is almost boilerplate murder mystery, but it’s totally couched in the tension of the entire overarching supernatural civil war waiting to erupt.  Butcher’s at the top of his game, and this was a sound and killer book this deep in the mythos.  According to Butcher, he’s going into the deep twenties, and at this rate, he has established that he can pretty much go anywhere with this.  It’s like a great television drama which you know can still run another three or four seasons easy.  The only other book series that I feel has managed to stay as fresh is probably the Sookie Stackhouse stuff — even though I hate the living fuck out of the television series.

But this raises an interesting point.  How do you make a television series based on a series that’s still in print and active?  Does the television stuff start to influence the progression of the books?  If the TV series craps out, does that mean the books will go the way of the buffalo as well?  Thankfully, the terrible fucked-up series they made out of the Dresden Files is dead, and can possibly be revived later down the road.  I’m more curious about something like Dexter, which diverges so strongly from Jeff Lindsay’s shitty books.  Are they going to just go wherever they want and ignore the books?  And even more so with the Sookie Stackhouse books?  For those of you who’ve read the novels deep in the series, do you see where this is quite possibly going to fuck junk up?

Regardless, Butcher’s still kicking ass, and Turn Coat was terrific.  If you’ve been waiting to read this series, get the fuck on it.  You’re missing out, kids.

Book 98. An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

Man, I so wished this was a better book.  It’s like watching a friend in a track meet come in fourth place.  You don’t even get a medal or points, but you still beat the hell out of most everyone else.  And Clarke’s novel is just that, a hell of an effort that just barely falls short of being unbearably awesome.

Sam Pulsifer did a bad bad thing.  He burned down the Emily Dickinson house when he was 18, accidentally killing two people.  He spent ten years in prison, was released, couldn’t return to his old life in Amherst, Mass, where he was hounded by outraged academians, so he attempted to start over.  Sam’s a terrible narrator, who seems vaguely autistic, but unlike the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident… here, the narrator’s just coming across as socially inept and awkward and ridiculous.  Most of the novel I found myself clutching a fist and shaking it with frustration, which makes it hard to hold the pages open.  Sam’s such a fucking idiot, and he keeps fucking up and making things worth for himself.

Because Sam never told his current wife about his former life, going so far as to even pretend his parents are dead instead of alcoholic ex-academics.  So naturally, his life comes back to haunt him.  Former prisoners, the son of the people he murdered, and the looming spectre of a person trying to burn down other author’s homes follow him everywhere, destroying his life.  And Sam seems reluctantly content with fucking up things to offer the assist.

My biggest issue with the novel was the use of memoir style.  I don’t mind flashbacks, but I fucking hate it where authors do that lingering cluedrop. Where events are unfolding, and the author will mention what’s going to happen next.  He keeps ruining the next event, with comments like “And it would be the last time I saw my parents again” or “And I should have known better, because the Twain house would be burned next.”  It’s distracting, and aggravating.  If he had just let the events unfold instead of trying to pull off some sort of bullshit Brechtian attempt at contemplative narration, it’d be so much better.

While the scathing commentary on the intelligentsia and academics in general are amusing, it sort of falls apart around the frustrating hump of a narrator.  It’s not a terrible novel, but you can see where with a few minor adjustments it could have been fucking brilliant.

Book 97. The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson

F. Paul Wilson indeed.  This was the first of the Repairman Jack novels, the concept of which gave me an instant boner.  You see, Repairman Jack fixes things that other people can’t.  He finds things, he hurts things, he’s pure rage.  So it says on the package.  Then you get into the novel.

The Tomb reads like the worst combination of Childs: the supernatural retardation of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child sewn drunkenly to the thug justice of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher.  Repairman Jack spends most of his time pining awkwardly for the girl that got away.  Most of his time.  The rest of the time, he’s fighting weird Indian shadow demons.  He’s not nearly as creative or badass as I had hoped.  The dialogue, especially the internal monologues of all the characters, is fucking embarrassing.  You read it, and you’re like, “Really?  You wrote ten fucking books of this?”

The villains aren’t that impressive, nor are the bad guys.  It’s like a less fun version of Drag Me To Hell, with a one-armed Hindi religious fanatic trying to raise a vendetta against the rich Brit who killed his family over a century ago.  The dramatic twists are boring at best, trite and dreadful at worst.  The biggest mistake is that the Jack’s attached to the lady pal.  It’s the Bond dilemma: if Bond found monogamy, it’d be really boring.  Even Jason Bourne lost the girl he loved.  Repairman Jack’s coming off more like a family man.  A family man who goes on rampages.  And when a character goes apeshit on a freighter with a flamethrower and it’s unexciting, you know you’ve made a terrible mistake.

I’ll stick this series out a few more books, but otherwise, this is going the way of the buffalo.

Book 96. The Wheelman by Duane Swiercyznski

Duane don’t give a FUCK.  It’s the best kind of high octane book to smash your face with.  He takes the rage from living in Philly saddled with a last name that diabolical to spell and wedges it into a book that screams JASON STATHAM in your face without being a wannabe.

It’s a heist/mob book that careens through Center City Philly with reckless abandon, killing through characters like you would not believe.  Anyone can die at any moment.  It’s brilliant and breathtaking.  Characters are more disposable than diapers.  We sort of hinge ourselves on Lennon, a mute wheelman who’s a driver for hire for bank robbers.  What seems like an easy job turns to shit quick, and the rest of the novel deals with Lennon trying to live through the day.

The Wheelman is gloriously spastic, smashing along in bite-sized hunks of fleshy violence, like the Dorsey novels I adore with a bit more directed plot.  It’s ridiculously fun, like people accuse Crank of being, and it’s wonderful.  It’s smashmouth ridiculous, and there are two more where that came from.  I will always herald a hometown hero, and Duane’s got it.  It’s fucking shitballs crazy, not necessarily well written so much as like a bump of straight asskicking.

Read this in your face, fucker.

Book 95. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I feel bad when we read classic literature pieces on the Cannonball Read, because it seems more or less like an opportunity for English majors to get out their inner Prisco by unleashing wrath about how unlearned the rest of us are in comparison to them and their bookshelves.  That because we don’t laud the same titles or expound for miles on great books, we’re somehow idiots.  The entire purpose of the Cannonball Read was to open our minds to 100 new books.  Whether they be tomes of rich greatness, classics, or junk food paperbacks from the airport.  It’s not meant to be a goddamn honors thesis, just a few scattered thoughts about the material.

I can’t rightly say what makes John Steinbeck so fucking great.  I never had to read him in school, so he wasn’t forced on me by an inept teacher (not that all high school english teachers are inept, but my American lit teacher was fucking wretched and almost spoiled the entire genre for me — yes, ALL American lit) and so I had a chance to enjoy myself with him on my own time.  I loved the hell out of Tortilla Flat for no good reason.

And a friend and writer I trust has been pushing this book on me ever since I’ve been trying to make out with her.   I’ve owned my copy of East of Eden since 2000, but I finally managed to read it this year.  It’s a huge sprawling story set during the early part of the 20th century, covering several branches of the Trask family tree.  It contains one of the most brutal femme fatales in literary history in Cathy/Kate, even more so for the complexity of her character.   Entire academic careers can be pinioned on the servant Lee.  I can’t tell you what it’s about, because the whole point of reading East of Eden is having the story unfold and wrap around you.

I sat down and tried to go over the events of East of Eden to relate them in the review, but I was baffled.  It was like taking a warm bath and trying to explain it in a poem.   I’ve always felt that way about Steinbeck.  I love reading his work, but whenever people ask me why, I have no answer.  It’s like trying to describe a color to a blind person.  It just is.

Book 94. The Universe in a Single Atom by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Whenever science and religion get up in each other’s faces in the schoolyard and start swatting at each other like two gradeschool children battling in snowsuits, it gives me a chuckle.  Anyone who has studied science, particularly the quantum physics and really intensive stuff, realizes that the further you go out in science the closer it begins to resemble religion.  There’s far more overlap than dichotomy.  It’s like when two rival teams play football.  The fans are the ones in the stand slapfighting and screaming swears.  The two teams have a job to do, and they go out and do it.  It’s not personal.  It’s only the really asshole idiots who make it so.

But this has nothing to do with this book.  It’s just my stupid opinion based on stuff I heard about once.  And that’s kind what this book is about.  Boy, that’s a dick statement to write about the highest member of a major religion.  The Universe in a Single Atom reads mostly like what it is: a learned religious scholar, and really a very nice old man, talking about all the famous people he talked to.  It’s kind of like watching television with your grandfather, if he were one of those people fond of pointing out the obvious.

The Lama spends most of the book discussing a scientific theory, and then discussing a Buddhist tenet, and then saying see?  Aren’t they similar?  Shouldn’t we all be friends?  I’m grossly oversimplifying matters, but really, each chapter is him saying, In Buddhism we say emptiness.  In physics, they are studying the space between atoms.  It’s very much alike.  Would you like a flower?

I admire the fact that a religious scholar is trying to openly bridge the gap between faith and science.  And the Dalai Lama is an extremely well-studied man.  But really, the book seems incredibly unnecessary, and I didn’t feel like I learned anything from it.  It was more like a thoughtful discussion with an old person who’s been well travelled and who is well read.  I didn’t come away with any great insights.  But it’s not like the Lama is preaching some sort of radical tenet of string theory.  So he’s got that going for him.