Walking on the Moon

I’m Starved For You is a Kindle Single published by Byliner Originals, who specialize in short pieces from great authors.  It is also from Margaret Atwood, and I’ll read almost anything she writes.

I found it enjoyable, but surprisingly it felt a little rushed.  Atwood often bases her worlds on simple ideas taken to their extremes, and I would have expected the simple ideas to be more compelling in a short story than in a novel. Somehow the simplicity of the underlying idea stuck out more here.  Questions about the logistics and motivations of the system that I often don’t consider came to me in the shorter form.

I think this is because Atwood’s novels often move at a slower pace, bringing the ideas and the characters out into focus slowly, drawing the reader toward exactly the way she wants you to see them.  In the shorter form, she wasn’t able to exert the same kind of control.  At least that was the impression I got from this piece.

While I don’t think this is the best example of Atwood’s writing, it certainly has its merits.  She brings ideas of how humans react to even self-imposed confinement with desperate passion into play in distinctive, powerful ways.  And those are not the only ideas she lofts onto the table in a few pages.

Overall, I prefer other things she’s written, but this is a fine way to spend some time.

Recommended.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was one of my favorite books growing up.  I recently took the opportunity to read it again, partially as an excuse to buy it on the Kindle.  It remains a great and unique space opera.

Dune is frequently praised as a skillful exercise in world-building – and it certainly is – but on rereading it I was struck by how few details outside those necessary for the advance of the story are there.  Despite spawning an enormous number of (impressively inferior) sequels, the novel does not read as first book in a series. Herbert has a beginning a middle and an end, all the thematic and plot arcs wrap up and if you never read a sequel you are left with a great story set in a believable world (or three).  It is a lean bit of storytelling.

I won’t recoup the plot, but Herbert makes the action large enough and the stakes high enough to hold a reader’s attention throughout, while brushing up against many interesting ideas about nature and nurture in becoming who we are, the limits of foresight and the size of events that can alter destiny, and other interesting stuff.  If that’s not of interest – and if not, why are you over in the science fiction section – there’s still a rollicking political and action thriller here.

Strongly Recommended.

Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is a book that software designers often hear mentioned in respectful tones.  This is Fred Brooks, one of the architects of the old mammoth IBM operating systems of the 1970’s discussing his lessons learned from those projects and applying them to general software engineering.  It is rightly praised for spending the lion’s share of its content on coordinating people rather than coordinating computers.

Academically, it lives up to its reputation quite well.  The edition I have includes retrospective chapters written 10 and 20 years after the initial publication.  In one of these Brooks mentions asking an airplane row-mate who did not know him and was reading The Mythical Man-Month what the fellow thought of it.  The fellow replied that there was nothing in it he didn’t already know.  While Brooks is disappointed, I think it is high praise.  He has taken an arcane topic and made it accessible to the point where readers think they’ve had all these ideas themselves.  By and large they haven’t.

While it is well worth reading and understanding this book if you have any interest in managing large scale creative endeavors there is no question that it is a product of its time.  Discussions of productivity are given in terms of machine instructions and cautions about overflowing resident memory abound.  PL/I is put forth as the only viable operating system programming language.  For the student of computing it is a fascinating look at how these technologies – many of them obsolete – were viewed by their contemporaries.  While these examples may confuse modern readers, the fundamental ideas are put forth with such clarity that the ancient examples are more an interesting side light than a barrier to understanding.

It is also amazing to see how Brooks unapologetically refers to the Bible and religious teachings.  He advocates two-person superior/subordinate programming teams and while he makes an excellent technical argument for the arrangement, it is jarring to see the topic annotated in a summary with “Note God’s plan for marriage.”  The technical arguments do not rest on theology, but it is surprising to modern eyes to see the references.

Overall, this is a classic that deserves its reputation and adds the joys of a unique voice and  historical perspective.

Strongly recommended.  (A must for software people.)

I heard about Jay Wexler’s interesting The Odd Clauses through Lowering The Bar, an entertaining and accessible blog of legal humor.  Anyone who enjoys Lowering The Bar will enjoy The Odd Clauses.

Now that aficionados of legal blogs have stopped reading, I should say that Wexler picks 10 of the least exercised constitutional provisions and both explains their face meaning and application and uses them to illuminate the overall document. He picks the clauses from recent events, which both makes them more relatable and shows that even the oddest corners of the Constitution are relevant today.  Now, some of the examples have been thrown out in debate rather than brought before the Supreme Court, but it would be a sadder world in which a discussion of Ron Paul’s suggestion to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal was dismissed on such a technicality.

Wexler does a nice job at making his discussion both accessible and informed.  The reader can see the research habits of a lawyer influencing his preparation and structure, and the phrasing and timing of a presenter in his prose.  The result goes down easy as it covers all the bases.

Strongly Recommended.

The Best American Noir is a pretty sizeable sampling of hard-boiled stories that is largely very entertaining with a few real gems.  The editors, James Ellroy and Otto Penzler, argue at some length for a broad definition of noir.  This is not the sort of broad inclusion that means “anything we like is noir.”  Their definition is broad, but excludes more than it includes.  It is reasonable and they stick to it.  They include a few stories that are outside of my characterization of noir, but there’s nothing in here I would not feel comfortable defending as noir.

While sticking to a definition is all well and good, my point is that the stories in here are different enough that you never know quite what you will be getting.  That is largely good.  Any collection will have highs and lows, but this one has many more hits than misses.  And several of the hits are outstanding.

In particular, I found James Crumley’s “Hot Springs” to be breathtaking.  Every sentence seems cut like a diamond for maximum sparkle and precision of meaning, and each is integrated into a seamless propulsive narrative.  Brilliant work and I will be looking for more.  Elmore Leonard does not disappoint with his “When The Women Come Out To Dance,” a tour de force of dialog and spare prose.  Dennis Lehane’s “Running out of Dog” is atmospheric and sad, and Tom Franklin’s “Poachers” has a strong sense of place.

Several of the stories here are more experimental than noir’s usual reputation.  I thought Joyce Carol Oates’s  “Faithless,” Bradford Morrow’s “The Hoarder” and especially Christopher Croake’s “All Through The House” did unexpected things well.  Croake’s horror story told backward in time is particularly compelling.  I liked Harlan Ellison’s “Mefisto in Onyx” and Chris Adrain’s “Stab” less.  Even for the stories I didn’t like, it was more a matter of not being won over, not of thinking that the work was badly done.

As with many of the things I read these days, I read this on the Kindle.  I found the OCR to be noticeably bad.  Most stories have at least one word break that is confusing in them.  And Joyce Carol Oates’s name is misspelled – an “O” taken to be a “D”.  The prose quality is high enough that this was never more than an annoyance, but if you notice these things you’ll be annoyed.

Strongly Recommended.

J. R. Weil’s autobiography, “Yellow Kid” Weil: The Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler, is an interesting read for anyone interested in how confidence men live.  It is not about the mechanics of the cons, really, but about how a life of playing them played out.  To see the logistics of the  games and the world, check out The Big Con, to which Weil also contributed.

What struck me about the autobiography is how much of a toll this all seems to have taken on Weil, even when he does not really seem to admit it to himself.  He is in no way contrite about how he lived his life or made his money.  He never expresses any regret at having lied to people.  But, over the course of the book, the reader sees that the life of a confidence man has its stresses.

Most of those stresses seem to stem from not being able to get out of the criminal underground once you have risen to a certain point in it.  Weil tries to become a legitimate businessman several times in his life, only to be foiled by one of his buddies involving him in some scheme or other – often without his knowledge.  Weil does several stretches in prison, and while he does not characterize them in horrific terms, it is clear that he does not want to do it again.  Throughout the book he seems to be moving from one place that he’s burned a bridge to another in which he’ll burn one when he gets there.  It adds up to a difficult existence.

Not that he dwells on it.  There are plenty of high times, blowing money he swindled, rubbing elbows with the wealthy, or just carrying out another con.  And his joy in carrying out a con is evident.  He knows that the details on paper are just the details of lying to people to get their money, but his excitement at doing it well jumps off the page.  He delights in the small trappings and tweaks that make the general scam into a personal trap.  It is hard not to share his enthusiasm.

Other than the part where each chapter starts with who he is on the run from this time, that is.

A diverting read told with – I may rethink this later, but – honesty.

Strongly recommended.

For me, reading Pulphead was the experience of discovering a great new writer.  I know others have already realized that John Jeremiah Sullivan is a great writer – these pieces have all been out in the world in some form or another for a while – but for me this was a slow pleasant immersion in his thoughtful, personal, intellectual explorations of American culture.

The topics in Pulphead range from the nakedly personal –  an essay about his brother recovering from a traumatic brain injury – to the glossily fluffy – a description of a personal appearance by people on MTV’s Real World reality franchise.  The breadth of the topics is not remarkable; we live in a world of stunt authors willing to dive into unusual situations and drag a book out of it.  What is remarkable in Sullivan’s essays is how he invests himself personally and intellectually in each situation.  These are personal essays in the very best sense of the word.  He brings his unique perspective to each encounter fearlessly while balancing the personal with keen analysis, introspection, and consideration.  Each one is a compelling cozy conversation with an interesting thinker.

The range of topics encourages a range of tone, though, that shows off Sullivan’s range admirably.  He can be a surprisingly playful writer and each essay offers opportunities to show off different aspects of his style.  To his credit, these aspects are not the ones one might expect from the essay topics.  It brings a certain sense of discovery to each one.

While Sullivan works some of the same territory as Chuck Klosterman, they are very distinct writers.  I do suspect that Klosterman fans who have not read Sullivan are in for a treat.  As are readers who have not read Sullivan for any other reason.

Strongly recommended.

One of the interesting things about the Kindle store is that one can find a lot of work by very small authors in there.  I forget how I happened on Christopher Daniels’s  Teleport This, but I know I was looking for a science-fiction-flavored page-turner for light entertainment.  Teleport This fit that bill nicely.

Overall I would say that Teleport is a new writer working out his chops, not a virtuoso performance, yet.  While the plot was diverting, it was also fairly pedestrian.  The characters were distinct, but all likeable; I could sympathize with the villains.  While those elements were competently executed, I found the dialog to be very strong.  Daniels writes characters that are fun to listen to, in the sense that screwball comedies or Oscar Wilde characters are fun to listen to.  Their dialog is just stylized enough to be snappy while staying realiztic enough to be believeable.

Probably the biggest weakness is that the characters are all just a little too likeable.  As with Deadman’s The Art Of Arrow Cutting, everyone here is agreeable and reasonable, or they are a villainous caricature.

Fun to see a writer working out his voice somewhat.

Richard Bak’s The Big Jump does an excellent job telling much of the story of the creation and pursuit of the prize that Lindbergh was to win for the first solo crossing of the Atlantic from New York to Paris.  There’s a lot of specificity in naming the goal of the Orteig Prize, and one of the fascinating parts of this particular chunk of history is how that specific feat captured so much of the world’s attention.  It is an odd little niche of history and well worth the treatment Bak gives it.

You cannot tell this story without talking about Lindbergh, of course, but Bak admirably brings to life both the other daredevils seeking the prize and the man who established it.  Raymond Orteig found the challenge that would ignite not only the imaginations of the flyers who would try for it, but also of the public who would breathlessly watch it.  Bak is insightful in pointing this out.

Orteig is an interesting character, and in many other histories would be one of the most interesting players.  1920’s aviation had a bumper corp of remarkable folks in play, though, and Bak paints them all with some verve.  One-legged French aces, sparky engineers, and a self-promoter who sneaks himself onto a trans-oceanic attempt to duck out on his wife are only a few of the characters who drift on and off the stage illuminated by the prize.

There are certainly some things left out, and in many ways The Big Jump is like the Ortieg prize itself.  It generates interest in a great achievement, but there is more to do fully realize its promise.  Lighting that fire is an fine achievement.

Strongly Recommended.

When people hand me books, I tend to read ’em.  My Dad handed me this one when I saw him over Christmas break.  He’d been killing some time in a used bookstore and he liked the title.  It’s a great title to get you to pick up a book, so I see how it drew him in; Lewis Grizzard, the author, pulled it out of a country western song for just that reason.  My Daddy Was A Pistol And I’m A Son Of A Gun is also a great title because it sums the book up so well.  Grizzard’s father was larger than life, and their relation shaped him.

The title is so universally appealing that it is easy to imagine that the book is about fathers and sons in general.  It is not.  This is about a specific father and son, a larger-than-life engaging but eventually tragic drifter and his son.

Grizzard does a great job at getting all of his enormous father on to paper.  His daddy was such a man of extremes that most people trying to think about him would have to constrain themselves to one or two aspects, to write the man into a caricature.  Grizzard manages to give a fully realized picture without pulling a punch or failing to give credit.  Getting something like that right in your own head is hard enough; putting explaining it to someone else on paper is much harder.

He looks at his father’s influence on himself with the same clear eyes.  Again, clearly sizing that up and presenting it honestly is a feat.

All that would only be interesting to Grizzard and maybe a mental health professional except that Grizzard writes an entertaining yarn.  This is entertaining in the best sense of that word – diverting and interesting.  This is a great story told to keep an audience listening.  The yarn is much more than a shaggy dog story, but its told with the rhythms that hold a listener’s interest without exhausting their patience.  Being honest and engaging simultaneously is Grizzard’s great achievement here.

Strongly Recommended.