Walking on the Moon

This is a Kindle single, really a short insider’s memoir, about the early days of the James Bond franchise.  It’s primarily about the translation from novels to movies in the 1960’s and 70’s.

There’s lots of insider goodness – telling anecdotes and personal remembrances – that I’m sure will delight detailed fans.  I’m not a deep fan, so I actually felt a little adrift in the thing.  I felt like I was expected to recognize some of the names as they came on stage, but other that Ian Fleming and Sean Connery, I didn’t.

Even coming in cold like that, this was a diverting enough read, but I think a bigger fan would get more out of it.

John Irving writes a John Irving novel better than anyone else does.  That’s more of a trick than it sounds like.  More than many writers, Irving pays explicit homage to his influences and has become closely attached to a set of symbols and touchstones.  Having such a strong and imitable voice will attract parodists and rip-off artists at a surprising rate. It’s easy for a rip-off to become more noticed than the original; ask Bill Hicks.

It’s amusing that Irving has chosen to practically parody himself in In One Person. Reading it isn’t so much a game of “spot the trope” as looking for ground that hasn’t been covered by Irving before. It’s a misleading game, though.  Even as I was checking the boxes (there’s a cross dresser, there’s a wrestler, it’s a New England Prep School, Dickens story, oh, look Austria) it never felt old. It’s a nice way to make the point that individual characters and people are individuals, even if they share experiences.

And really, what Irving does better than anyone is build his characters lives that bring them into sharp focus.  There’s usually an issue of the day to address as well, of course.  The man is a Dickens disciple, after all.  While his well-wrought characters generally illuminate that issue, I always enjoy them just for their clockwork completeness and emotional verisimilitude.

In One Person has a lot to say about the lives of non-heterosexuals (that sounds PC, but Irving covers a fair amount of this ground) that is certainly worth hearing.  Irving says it all by walking a real person through that world and inviting us along. Writers have been doing that since Dickens (at least), but few as well.

Recommended.

E. Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who did her field work studying hackers – in the “free software geeks” sense of the word.  And that’s “field work” in the sense of “serious social science investigation of a culture by immersion” sense of the word.  She applied the same techniques and rigor to studying Debian maintainers as others have applied to Maori tribes.  If I’m not a member of that hacker tribe, I’ve certainly lived around them for many years, and it’s both enlightening and disconcerting to see that analysis progress.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I find the analysis insightful and largely accurate. It’s strange to see the values, mores, and rituals of my community described with the clinical compassion of the anthropologist.  In addition to describing these features, her dissection of how they relate to and are motivated by larger societal issues is compelling.  I think someone reading this could explain hacker culture more effectively both to non-hackers and to hackers themselves.

In addition, I learned some specific things about the Debian project.  I understand their positions and why I didn’t know more about them now.

Coding Freedom is a scholarly treatise and an anthropological one at that, so it is thick both with anthropological jargon and with references and citations.  That can make for dense reading, but for me, it remained compelling.

Recommended.

I picked up Greg Rucka’s Alpha because Warren Ellis had nice things to say about it and because I’ve enjoyed his comics writing.  In Alpha I found a well executed thriller that didn’t have much ambition beyond that.  Now, I like a potboiler more than the next guy, so a well-executed thriller is nothing to apologize for.  It did throw Gun Machine into sharp relief, though.

Rucka’s action is tautly written and clear to follow.  Even though we’re pretty sure how things will go in the long run, there is plenty of suspense in the individual engagements. It’s always clear who’s doing what to whom and what the stakes are.  Tension builds and the action proceeds at a snappy clip.  The tactics and strategy of heroes and villains are believable and original in an action movie kind of world. The pot boils nicely.

I do wish that I cared about the characters some more.  Everyone is a little too much a variation on a theme from central casting.  I gave up trying to tell members of his anti-terrorist team apart, though they all do have cool code names.  The most interesting variations are a well realized sleeper agent and the protagonist’s deaf teenage daughter. Probably the worst thing about the undercharacterization is that when the protagonist is feeling put upon by his alienated family it’s hard not to see their point.  He is a duty-driven action hero who doesn’t do enough to help people he ostensibly cares about to see his side and that’s what they tell him.

Back at the plot, things are moving quickly and cleanly toward an exciting conclusion.  As long as you keep your eye on that, Alpha is a lot of fun.

Ted Saves The World is a novella for young adults that intentionally has the feel of a smart TV action drama.  Bryan Cohen, the author, is very up front about his goals and inspirations.  He’s writing in the vein of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Ted was originally intended as a TV pilot.

In terms of those goals, I found Ted to be very well done.  The writing is clear and engaging.  The characters are sharply drawn, and the story moves along well structurally.  Everything in the story serves the narrative and it all meshes well. This is all very promising.

It will be interesting to see if Cohen can go beyond these technical achievements and infuse his work with something unique.  Right now he’s sticking very close to his inspirations in theme, tone, and character, but Buffy already exists. There are good reasons to hope that he can begin mixing in new elements and make something completely original.  This is worth a look and keeping an eye on.

Recommended.

James Daily and Ryan Davidson have a fun idea in The Law Of Superheroes.  They take situations that arise in the comics and show how current and future US law  would apply.  Extreme hypothetical cases are a good way to understand the ramifications of any set of rules, especially the law, and it’s tough to come up with more extreme hypotheticals that comics.

The execution was a little dry for me.  I felt like too many of the problems had cut-and-dried solutions that would be helpful in getting law students to remember the principles, but that were less thrilling to the layman.  That’s not to say that the book reads like a police blotter.  There are several places where interesting aspects of the law pop out, but I think the book would benefit from a deeper look at the more interesting cases, rather than trying to survey too much of the legal landscape.

Worth a look through, especially if you are a law student or have a strong interest.

Warren Ellis has the skills and ambition to take a genre piece and lead it to uncommon places.  Gun Machine is a thriller that boasts a fabulous hook – a cop literally falls into a cathedral of guns each tied to an unsolved murder – but Ellis has more on his mind than just creeping the reader out.  He doesn’t let it get in the way of a propulsive thriller, though.  Gun Machine hits all the police thriller beats, but comes at them all from slightly askew.

So, take the cop/thriller stuff as all there.  In addition, Ellis brings us many views of New York – subjective and objective – each of which is telling part of the story that makes Gun Machine turn. He brings us larger than life characters who still have a soul, and a redemptive arc for his protagonist that is measured in realistically sized steps. Each turn of the story has some whorls that tug at the reader’s interest, but the whole machine never stops moving forward.

It isn’t perfect, of course.  For all the different perspectives that he tries to capture New York from, I did not get the feeling of being there.  Key locations feel photoshopped into place, and the place isn’t quite recognizable as either the New York I’ve visited on occasion or the fictional versions I’ve seen.  The sense of place doesn’t emerge as strongly as I was expecting.

Realistic or not (whatever that means), Ellis’s New York is the scene of a breakneck race where every turn, taken or not, offers a glimpse of fascinating possibilities.

Strongly recommended.

Dear Life is a collection of short stories from Alice Munro, one of the acknowledged masters of the form.  She is also getting old enough to wonder if each book will be her last.  Dear Life closes with a set of stories somewhere between fiction and autobiography that are closer to the facts than the others.

All of the stories display the craftsmanship and inspiration of a great writer.  Nothing is wasted.  Each story illuminates a character and a time sharply, usually caught in a key conflict. I found them quite beautiful, if a bit cool.  Some distance remains between me and them.  While some of that may be the inevitable gulf between an American man born in the 60’s as compared to Canadian women characters with another ten or twenty years of life, I think that a the tone is intentional.

The more autobiographical stories crackle more with life.  Some of this is because of their younger protagonists, but not all of it.  It’s difficult to put one’s finger on it, but there’s definitely more zip in the last few.  All of them are well worth reading though.

Recommended.

Ken Jennings is rapidly moving into that set of authors that I read and enjoy unconditionally.  He’s informative, interesting, funny, and doesn’t take himself too seriously except when it’s merited. Reading one of his books is like passing time with an old friend, except that he doesn’t laugh at your jokes.

The hook in Because I Said So! is that Jennings takes a list of rules that parents lay down for their children and see how well those rules hold up to objective assessment.  It’s kind of a Snopes for kids.  This is easy to do wrong – too much droning of facts, too much chafing about foolish rules in one’s youth, or not giving parents their due for doing their best and the whole thing would become mean spirited.  Jennings navigates around these pitfalls and produces a book that’s got a warm feel of pleasant memories that also deflates baseless platitudes.  It’s fun to read.

Strongly Recommended.

It took me quite a while to develop an opinion about Christopher Hitchens’s Arguably, a collection of his essays. My recollection was that many of the essays were book reviews for the New York Times.  These are a kind of essay unto themselves, often touching only lightly on the book under review and letting the reviewer expound their ideas at length in the service of evaluating the book.  These are most interesting to read if you have a horse in the race.  For a lot of the essays in Arguably, I did not. They’re all well written, but often turn on what I would consider minutae.

Then I got to “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” That’s a well-written, completely wrong essay.  Understanding why it irritated me was a very illuminating experience, both about these essays and persuasive essays in general.  The essay in question is as good an argument as could be constructed for the position.  Hitchens points out the job statistics about numbers of professional funny women, trots out some evolutionary justification, mixes in a few personal observations and structures it all in a way that draws the reader’s attention to where his points are strong and away from where they’re not.  It combines the techniques of a good legal argument with the rhythms of a troubadour.  I just disagree with virtually all of it.

That’s where I understood that Arguably is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a collection of arguments – or argument starters – not a philosophy.  It’s good to remember that most opinion pieces are exactly that, and that scholarship and compositional skill do not imply one’s position is correct.

Looking at Arguably through this lens, it becomes a more interesting and less vexing experience.  There is much to like about the essays in terms of composition – and certainly in the vocabulary.  I even agree with much of what Hitchens says (that I care about anyway).  There are a lot of them here, too.

Recommended.