Review: The Long Ships

The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Written in the 50s as a 10th century Viking epic. Apparently a megahit overseas. Bengtsson apparently said he just wrote something he thought would be fun to read, and it springs off the page. If you've seen The Northman, it's like that but with Viking humor and a plot that travels all over Europe. So I guess the similarity is that there's plenty of people hacking bits off each other.

I can't remember if I read this in 2023 or 2022, but it's such a great read it would top either list.

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Review: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A fun read at first, that slowly but surely got bogged down in the sheer volume of Summerscale's research. It's a compelling premise, and you can see why it became such a sensational newspaper story at the time: a group of people go to bed in a locked house, and in the morning a child has been murdered. But the murderer was pretty clear from the start, and before long I lost interest in the next wrong theory the police explored, and what the washerwoman said the fourth time they asked her about Thursday afternoon. Despite the media taking things in any number of wonky directions, the narrative often wades into minutae. I hope there wasn't a shocking revelation saved for the epilogue, because as we were diving into the semi-notable events of a secondary character's career illustrating coral thirty years after the murder trial was done and dusted... I gave up.

Review: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is exactly what I'm looking for in a history book: riveting storytelling that pulls from documented texts, compelling insight into the way the subject at hand rippled through time to shape our lives today, a vibrantly written and gripping structure and voice, and unobtrusive first-hand impressions of the writer from their research and travels to the places in question. I drove the guys in the band a little crazy telling them Mongol facts.

I read this a few years ago, but making these notes now I am almost tempted to go back and read this book again. But I say "almost" because a review I read when I finished this book in 2018 has bothered me ever since. That review called into question Weatherford's choice to write two books about the Mongols, being this one and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire. This volume goes into great (and fascinating) detail about the sons of Genghis Khan, while barely touching on his daughters. From the reviews, however, the Queens book shows those daughters as central to the story. As I recall, this review questioned whether modern-day gender politics on the bookstore shelf may have played a role in telling the "male" history and the "female" history in separate volumes.

So instead of re-reading this book again, I'll move on to Mongol Queens, make up my own mind about the politics, then perhaps loop back around and make my own Machete Order of Mongol History. (How fitting.)

Review: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Terrific, down-to-Earth, practical instructions on writing from a long time editor. I've put several of her suggestions into practice (put your ideas on index cards), and encountered several of the obstacles she told me to expect (I have too many index cards).
Read this two years ago and it still sticks with me. I must have been vocal about it, because now somehow I have two copies of it on my bookshelf. It's a good problem to have.

Review: The Rich Pay Late

The Rich Pay Late by Simon Raven
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The used bookstore guy recommended this, as Evelyn Waugh-meets-Anthony Powell, the old "moneyed white dudes having literary problems but generally being well off" type affair. It was funny and even reasonably warm-hearted, which was a pleasant surprise. In fact, it encouraged me to take another few paces through Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music Of Time, which my dad (and his buddy, and my buddy) say is perhaps the best series of books ever to be written, but I get awfully bogged down every time I wade in.

Review: Election

Election by Tom Perrotta
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A fun, incredibly quick read. One of those rare books about high schoolers and adults that is neither creepy nor patronizing (nor a Carrie-esque bloodbath), and in fact heightens high school intrigue to the level where I still care about it as an adult.

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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Review: The Metrognome & Other Stories / Impact-20

The Metrognome & Other Stories by Alan Dean Foster
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The short story is flexible. You don't have to keep a plot aloft for long, so you can float some pretty thin ideas and see if they survive. Yet their brevity means that every word counts. That is, unless you're selling material to a sci-fi magazine, and you've got to stretch that idea over four thousand words... or maybe they pay by the word, and since you know some sneering editor is going to chop it down anyway, why not linger on your description of your gnome's beard and suspenders, and let him ramble awhile in his tough New Yorker dialect?

I suspect Alan Dean Foster may be a write-to-contract kind of guy. His Hollywood novelization credits are impressive to say the least - Star Wars (both A New Hope and Force Awakens), Star Trek (countless), Alien (one thru four), Terminator, etc. etc. - so I have no doubt he is a master of his craft, but these stories read flabby. I always imagined that any story published has survived the author's own vicious cull, and sits atop a pile of rejected ideas and aborted drafts. Now, I fear that in some cases, pretty much anything that's done may make the cut.

Impact-20 by William F. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impact-20, on the other hand, is exactly what I would hope for from a sci-fi short story collection. Nolan puts on all sorts of different and entertaining voices, exploring fearlessly and in every direction, and the stories jump from horror to mystery to space to suburban mania. Above all, the stories are only as long as the plot demands - when there is an interesting concept to explore, Nolan explores it, but he never lets an idea get stale on the page. (The only thing I skipped was Ray Bradbury's introduction.) The writing is fresh, funny, and often absurd. Good stuff.

Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is truly disgusting. I understand that work on a whaling ship was not clean or appetizing or lemon-scented. I also understand that by means of the revolting passages we are reminded that life on an 18th century Arctic whaler was about as far from the luxuries of civilization as one could get. (Unless, of course, something were to happen to one's ship...)
That being said, some passages were so riotously revolting that I couldn't take it seriously. It's the grossest book I've ever read, and it was an act of titanic restraint not to read aloud while my friends were eating.

On thirst:

"The deep cavity that remains [in the dead bear] is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid--blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forward and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands."

On incontinence:

"He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases and involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. [...] The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat."

On scavenging the blubber from a decomposing, bloated whale corpse:

"The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous--much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse."

All that being said, there's a ripping yarn in here too. McGuire does an amazing job of bringing this salty, frigid world vividly to life. The elemental forces lend it an air of fable, as dark forces play out on these poor saps. If you can swallow these passages, there isn't much worse in there--and there's a whole lot better. Best read on an empty stomach!

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Review: American Tabloid

American Tabloid by James Ellroy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's terrifically brutal, bloody, and hard as nails. It's only after you've adjusted to the savagery on every page that you begin to see how brilliantly Ellroy creates - and destroys - his characters. There's Big Pete Bondurant, the goon who's losing his interest in mayhem. Cool, calm Kemper Boyd, the spy whose lust for penthouse suites is only outstripped by the tower of lies he's building. And Ward J. Littell, the rabid anti-Mob investigator with no brakes attached. They're all despicable, and yet at the same time I had to know where they'd end up.
As with any book about the web between the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, the invasion of Cuba, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys and JFK's assassination... it's dense. There are a zillion players, lies, conspiracies, and coverups, each one slimier than the last. For all it's complications, everything can be traced back to motive, demand, need. If you've ever finished a hard-boiled mystery and thought, "Geez, I wish that was more violent, cynical, complicated, action packed and political!" then this is the book for you.


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Review: Tenth of December

Tenth of December by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unfortunately, this is some of the most powerful writing I've ever read. It's unfortunate because most of these brilliant stories are huge downers. Fortunately, this collection is bookended by two notes of glorious optimism.

His narrators are the resentful, lonely casualties of the American Dream. They're the people about whom Michael Moore would make a polemic, but who wouldn't bother seeing the movie. They hold onto a deluded sense of manifest destiny with a death grip, and the reader's agony is to see the distance growing between these people and the better lives they desperately strive for. The experience of living inside many of these character's heads is draining - after some stories, I had to put the book down for a day or two before I was ready to pick it up again.

Nevertheless, even the darkest stories float with the perfect words, and Saunders' humour is sharp without breaking stride. Reading the whole collection makes the finale all the sweeter, but if it's all just too real, skip to the end (the titular "Tenth of December") and you'll feel all better again.

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