Review: Joe Gould's Teeth

Joe Gould's Teeth by Jill Lepore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting read about people I came to care for less and less as the book went on. Joe Gould, no matter how quirky a character he may have been, seemed like a colossal asshole. If you're attached to Joseph Mitchell's profiles, steer clear.

An aside: Ezra Pound's letters were weird. Lepore quotes from his correspondence with e e cummings a number of times—here's him telling cummings to write "a nice lil piece" about Gould:

"mebbe that wd/ start somfink IF you
make it clear and EGGs plain WHY Joe
izza his
Torian"

I didn't know a thing about Pound. When I first saw this kind of phonetic spelling I thought it was neat, being so free and easy. But when I read on about what a racist/fascist he was, hiz funETIC style became more and more irritating. Alas, another celebrated colossal asshole. (Can't comment on the poetry, though.)

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Review: Satans High Priest

Satans High Priest by Judith Spencer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A truly disturbing book. The murder/cults/aliens show Last Podcast on the Left flags their most gruesome content as Gold Star territory, and this story repeatedly and regularly goes farther than anything I've heard them touch. There are major issues with the sources Judith Spencer relied on for this narrative, but if anything it's a relief to have reason to doubt it. This story must have been gasoline on the fire of the Satanic Panic. Regardless of its truth or untruth, it tells a horrific story about the most outrageous abuse being inflicted down through a generation, and of a secret society formed around fear, shame, and rage.
What Spencer does masterfully is capture how human true evil can be. The whole book is in painfully down-to-earth language, so it's all too easy to believe. Don't expect the supernatural—people can be so much worse.

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Review: Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah

Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah by Colm A. Kelleher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The good occult read lets its facts (or "facts", if you prefer) speak for themselves. Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in UtahHunt for the Skinwalker does just that, and lets your imagination play with the possibilities. Kelleher tells us as rationally as can be expected about holes in the sky, sentient floating lights, and impossible creatures. The skeptic will find plenty to hector, but if you write off ghosts, UFOs, etc, as a rule, you're probably not picking up this book anyway. But know that Kelleher doesn't ask you to believe anything, nor does he attempt to offer some zany theory that explains the inexplicable.

When the news is as anxiety-inducing and bleak as it's been in the last few years, the "occult/paranormal" bookshelf reminds me that the world is bigger and stranger than we can know. As with the best books of the genre, it gives us just enough to sense some strange pattern, but leaves the real theorizing for us to rant about, as our long-suffering friends and families regret opening the conversation.

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Review: The Myrtles Plantation: The True Story of America's Most Haunted House

The Myrtles Plantation: The True Story of America's Most Haunted House by Frances Kermeen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somewhere in the depths of the internet, I stumbled on a list that put this as the best true account of a haunted house, so that'll teach me to trust the internet. There were certainly plenty of ghosts, but the book was more Disney's Haunted Mansion than what I was hoping for. Kermeen's recollections of the many (many) incidents around the house have the ring of well-rehearsed patter, which is precisely what they are, as she doesn't try to hide that she ran ghost tours through the house for years. This book would be sold in the gift shop, I'm sure, and it's a fun read if you're looking for silliness. It did not, however, cause me to question the very nature of existence, which is admittedly a high bar to set.

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Review: A Wizard of Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was, for me, an instant classic. Le Guin's voice is at once immediate and timeless.

You know the characters already, and have always known them, because they are the stuff of fairy tales and myths and legends, but they are also right here, right now, and do and think as they please. You know the story, too, because it's every story Joseph Campbell ever dreamed of, but it's also only this one, small story, about this one small person named Ged.

That sounds all high-falutin', and maybe it's because I was just coming off a James Ellroy where everyone was torturing each other and doing heroin and dying and shit-talking JFK, but Wizard of Earthsea is a story I fell in love with. Read it to your kids! (Harry Potter ripped it off anyway!)

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Review: Neuromancer

Neuromancer by William Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wish I'd read this book when I was fifteen. "This is even cooler than Fight Club," I'd have thought, and maybe I'd have gotten more into... I dunno, manga? Help me out here.

I appreciate the immense worldbuilding, and I appreciate the ingenuity of putting action in a digital space, and I appreciate the cryptic slang - there's a reward to figuring out what the hell everybody's talking about several chapters in (or not).

Our characters don't have a lot going on: there's the criminal mastermind, the sexy assassin, the Rastafarian techie guy, the innocent victim, and of course our drunken antihero. Or maybe I'm getting the attributes mixed up, but they all slotted in neatly. The plot is fast and thick, full of hardboiled twists and turns, and wades nicely through grey moral areas, where despite the thin cast I was genuinely interested in what choices they would make.

There's a lot going on, and the razzle dazzle future-speak is laid on so thick that I'm sure I missed a lot. I'm glad I read it; it's earned its laurels as a milestone of sci-fi (and not just because the Matrix ripped it off mightily); it's still a little too cool for its own good.

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Review: The Eighth Tower

The Eighth Tower by John A. Keel
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Did you read the Mothman Prophecies? Did you love how mysterious it all was, and were you intrigued by how rationally this John Keel fellow was compiling accounts of these bizarre goings-on?

Well, here you have it: The Eighth Tower is all the stuff the editors wouldn't let him publish!

What they cut, it seems, was hundreds of pages of very confident assertions about how the aliens built the pyramids! how the Bible was psychically dictated to the prophets! how "Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln, Edison and so many more all had brief contacts with the supermind of the universe"!

And yes, that stuff can be funny. But this book is not fun. This is John Keel's laborious attempt to fit everything supernatural he's ever encountered or heard reported into one giant theory about vibrations on a superspectrum. It's eye-glazingly longwinded.

I loved Keel's The Mothman Prophecies. Suspense! Terror! Mystery! But this is more math! diagrams! rambling! Take a pass. Read Hunt for the Skinwalker instead.

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Review: Foundation

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Yes, I know it's a classic, and sure, all sorts of great sci-fi followed in its legacy, but honestly, it sucks. So sue me.
I started off on the wrong foot by reading the foreword, by Asimov himself, in which he goes on at staggering length about how much his publishers begged and pleaded him to bestow upon them his brilliant, best-selling, prophetic, fortune-making, important and profitable manuscripts. (Why haven't I learned to skip forewords yet?)
As for the book itself, it's about a brilliant, prophetic, important scientist who is so clever he's figured out everything that's going to happen for the next zillion years, and creates the "Foundation", essentially a cult of scientists through which he can posthumously continue to guide humanity through its crises. He's also careful to pre-record a number of holographic cameos, so he can pop up to gloat about how smart he was for figuring everything out.
The book, for all its crises, is told almost entirely through long political conversations between men who each fancy themselves the smartest in the room. There's enough of that crap in the news. Pass.

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Review: The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking

The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking by Brendan I. Koerner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In 1972, two lovers decided to escape their downtrodden, small-time lives by hijacking a plane. Koerner follows their story from beginning to end, while also giving us a fascinating overview of the hijacking "golden age". We read not only the stories of individual hijackers, who are generally a desperate, ill-prepared lot, but also how government and airlines struggled to adapt as the crime became more and more romanticized. Among other things, we see the US government in the pocket of industry (surprise, surprise), voting down security measures because they would slow down passengers by ten minutes; Fidel Castro gladly receiving hijacked flights, so he could lock up the hijackers and sell the planes back to American companies; the FBI, hearteningly/quaintly loath to shoot-to-kill; and the French, who love ze passion of ze crime. It's a great read that covers a lot of ground, and while I may not like an airport queue, at least now I can appreciate it.

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Review: Affliction

Affliction by Russell Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like blood spilled from Richard Russo's veins, this is a masterpiece of the charms and violence of small town life. Dark but still warm, speaking softly with a big stick, etc, it hit all the beats for me of a beautifully written story. I read a lot of nonfiction and genre stuff, but when I'm going for just "fiction", I hope for books like this. A steak dinner.

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