Appreciation From Time to Time

Very enjoyable sequel to Time and Again until the ending that almost ruins the whole thing.  This book violates a rule that Finney seems to have established with the first book: a sense of wonder and fun is more important than a sci-fi plot device or message.  The ending is a cruel trick on a character who deserved much better, just to re-state a message already mentioned many times over. 

This also does an injustice to the sinking of the Titanic, treating like an "ah-ha" morality trope, rather then the world-changing tragedy (as the book itself says) that it was.  Also unfortunate were that the two characters who witness the sinking of the Titanic don't describe it--an impossibility, as it jarred for life every single survivor.  Here it's unmentioned, and the narrator offers a sort of epilogue and the thing ends.

There's also false advertising, as the back of the book blares the news that the novel revolves around the main character's attempt to change the course of history by changing the fate of the Titanic.  But, actually, the Titanic doesn't show up in the book until the last 20 pages or so, and the main character's only on it for 10.  Despite the ad copy, this book has almost nothing to do with the Titanic at all.  In fact, this book could have very easily ended without including the fateful voyage at all.  Had it done so, it would have been a much better book.

This time, everything I'd written about the wonder of the 1880s of Time and Again also fits here.  The era is 1912, of course, and it mostly focuses on Broadway, its plays, and an odd but entertaining digression about vaudeville performers and other circus-like performers.  They evidently graced the Broadway stage in the time, as did many other types of performances that may surprise you.

Again, the main reason to read this is the description of NYC in 1912.  The plot doesn't matter.  The tropes don't matter.  The messages don't matter.  If you can lose yourself in the world described here, and forget the ridiculousness of plot and morality--passed off here as philosophy, but don't be fooled, it's morality--then this book is still worthwhile.  It's taken me a few hours to get over the ending, and the movie Titanic has been on HBO all day, and is on now as I write this, which doesn't help at all, but the two books really are fantastic escapism into another time and place.  They are worthy of reading and of wonderment.

What isn't worthy, again, is Finney's treatment of his female characters, who are again very minor, very in love with the main character, and frankly treated like little girls who can't help themselves.  Both girls (Julia from the first one, and the unnamed woman [!] from this one) are better women than their author treats them, and deserved better.  You'll probably tire, as I did, each and every time the main character apologizes to the reader (and to Julia, by association) for kissing this book's heroine, which he does consistently and, apparently, uncontrollably.  Again, she deserves better than the ending she got, and the name she didn't get, and I'm getting annoyed about it all again as I write this.

Whatever.  Feel free to just let those things pass and to lose yourself once again into the very well-realized New York City of the past.  Again it'll seem like you're walking down Broadway yourself, seeing what he sees and living the life he lives.  It's worth it to do this.

If you do, let me know if the ending bothered you as much as it did me.  I can overthink things sometimes, which you already know if you've read my reviews. Too bad Finney died at approximately the same time this book was published.  As he re-wrote the ending of the first book to make this one possible, so too could he have changed the ending of this one in the beginning of a third.  These are now as stuck in time as his two New York Cities are in theirs.  It's a curious statement of the solidity and permanence of history, as their own unique--yet similar--times and places, to be experienced and appreciated, never to be either again.

Time and Again the main character states an appreciation for the moment he has just experienced, the thing he has just seen, the air he has just breathed, appreciated for the unique and temporal experiences that they were.  If only I could do the same, as often as I should.

A Sense of Wonder--Time and Again

I read this book partly because I'm researching a book of my own that takes place partly in 1892--ten years after the 1882 of this book, but still, I didn't have any 1880s information at all.  Turns out, Finney infamously uber-researched for this book.  In fact, it seems that the sole reason he wrote this book is to simply describe 1882 until it felt like he lived there.

This he does.  If you're at all interested in the past--and the 1880s in particular--you should read this book.  If you live in New York City and want to know how Broadway and Fifth Avenue and the many buildings constructed in that time became alive in their own right, and then grew into the life's fabric of the city, you should read this book.  If you're even a little bit a traveler or an explorer at heart--if you're even a little curious or interested in history and people at all--you should read this book.  And if you think it's interesting to understand the people of the era--the actual, flesh-and-blood people of a time--more than just the important historical facts themselves (as I do), then you should read this book.

In short, this was quite a little pleasure, a rare, quaint joy that reading should bring but often does not, even when reading a good or important book.  This gets you away.  Not just into 1882 NYC, but the mid- to late-Victorian Era of your own town and city.  Have you ever wondered what it was like in 1882 where you are?  This book may give you an idea.  Chances are, it was like this, just maybe on a lesser scale.

But the air was clean and the people were evidently a little more carefree than the early pictures would have us believe.  There were horses and sleighs everywhere; children played outside, even in the winter.  There were no screens to enslave us, no computers to weigh us down.  People awoke early, at sunrise, and went to bed just after sundown.  There were telegraph wires everywhere, like electric wires today, so the landscape wasn't as bare as you might think.  The el rattled the city, and electric trains shouldered aside horse-drawn carriages and coaches.  Everyone walked, and people probably spent more time with each other.

This is romanticized history, of course.  You won't see how the very poor live here; in fact, the author just barely refers to them at all.  Most of the action takes place in the richer Broadway, Fifth Avenue part of Manhattan.  There aren't minorities here, either--these things, and the way Finney handles female characters, make the book seem a little less sophisticated than what we may be used to today.  They aren't jarring, and they aren't what this particular story is about, but there it is nonetheless.

It was written by the guy who wrote the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (that was the other reason I wanted to read this), so there's a slight sci-fi aspect here, but it is very slight.  This is more historical fiction than it is science fiction.  It's a bit of fantasy, too, if you think of 1882 NYC as another world, which it sort of is.

My favorite thing about this book (and books like it) is the sense of wonder that it instills in the reader.  Finney clearly was enjoying himself as he wrote this, and the writing and tone exude a sense of wonder that he himself must have been feeling while writing this.  You get the feeling that if Finney has the chance to walk into 1882 NYC and to stay there, he would have as well.

Would you want to stay in the 1882 of your own place?

When People Say Stupid Things About Others

Just a few quick things...

--Giuliani used to be the Joe Torre of NYC for those of us who don't live in NYC: a classy guy amidst a whirlwind of blech!  Not anymore.

--And, yeah, Obama loves his country.  The proof is the job he took--again, I might add--though he knew he'd have to deal with idiots saying stuff like this.

--And now the governor of Wisconsin says he doesn't know if Obama loves his country.

--Yeah, he does.  So much, in fact, that he's trying to make health care, voting and the economy fair for everyone.  In a democracy, what's better than that?

--I've had enough of people saying stupid crap about Obama.  Make it a point to notice: Those who are saying such things, they're not the President.  And they've had unsuccessful political aspirations, even if they're otherwise successful politicians, like Giuliani, who wanted to run for president many years ago, but just didn't have the support of his party.

--And, P.S.--Just because you don't like somebody, that doesn't mean you have the right to stay stupid crap about them.

--People who say such things, those things say more about them than they do about the person they're complaining about.  And they don't know this, because they keep on saying them.

--I've had it with people who say stupid crap about anyone, actually.  I wish I had the time to say stupid things about people.  Things get back to me every now and then about people who say crap about others, including about me.  I don't play that game.  I don't have time to.  I'm too busy actually doing my job, writing my stuff, livin' my life.  So busy, in fact, that I don't even know the stupid things said about people, or about me, until someone (or MSN) tells me. 

--Do I retaliate by doing the same?  Nope.  I simply don't have the time.  That's just not who I am.

--I'm not saying that makes me a better person.  I'm just saying that it's not what I want to do, and it's not who I want to be.  I don't define myself by comparing myself to others.  I just decide who I want to be, and then I try to be that.  Sometimes I fail and do incredibly stupid things, too--but usually not to the detriment of others.  Just myself.  I pretty much just leave other people alone in life.  I stay in my cave and I do what I do. 

--And I don't have the jealousy and bitterness that people like that have, that make them say the stupid things about people that they do.  I simply do not get jealous, or bitter, about others.  Because, again, I don't compare myself to others to begin with, so there's nothing to get jealous or bitter about.

--I'm just sayin'.

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Photo: from the author's webpage and bio section.  It's on her latest books, too.  And in Entertainment Weekly, which says that her newest, Station Eleven, is "the must-read of the fall."  I don't doubt that it is.  I love her writing, from her first book, reviewed here, to her online essays.  Good writing is good writing, no matter the form or the genre.

An exquisitely-written, stays-with-you little gem of a book, more about the people who are left behind than about the people who leave.

Very short, at 220 pages, but very deep about obsession, depression, leaving and staying behind.  The characters are all representatives, of course, more than they are flesh-and-blood, exactly, which made me hate Lilia a little less at the end, when we learn in the last few sentences of the book that she lived happily-ever-after (mostly) after all, despite all the (mostly unintentional, but c'mon) heartbreak she left in her wake.

But she has been thrown through a window, seen a man driven off the road, seen a woman pulverized by a subway train, and she never had a lasting friendship or relationship until she married in her late-20s after finally staying somewhere--in this case, Italy.  Some reviews hated on her character, and I could see their point, especially how this waif with tight dark hair just so easily grabbed relationships with men and women (bisexuality is hinted at in the book)--and all she has to do to get them is to read in cultured little coffeeshops...  Yet, I don't doubt that there are a lot of Lilias out there, and that there are indeed affected women who sit in coffeeshops all the time, and bookish male intellectuals trip over themselves to be with them.  Plus, looking at the author's picture, I think it might be a bit of a self-description.  Maybe a little Freudian analysis is necessary here.  But I digress...

Lilia is representative of a type, and not full-blooded, so I ultimately gave her a pass.  After awhile of thinking about it.  Plus, I'd sit down next to her in a coffeeshop...

But all the characters are this way.  They're representative, and many of them come off far worse than she.  There's the aforementioned mother who threw her young child out the window...which was closed, by the way.  And she left the child in the winter snow to freeze, too.  Luckily that didn't happen--the freezing, I mean. 

Then there's the detective father who is the real obsessive of the book.  He leaves his wife and daughter for weeks, months and, yes, years at a time, to track down Lilia and her father, long after her abduction ceased to be worth tracking down.  (She's in her 20s, and plus she was better off away from the free-throwing mother.)  This guy's wife leaves him, then he leaves his 15-year old daughter alone as he again obsessively tracks Lilia down.  Ultimately he ends up returning to his young daughter for a short time, but then he leaves again and disappears forever from her life.  It's possible he commits suicide somewhere. 

This girl, his daughter, quits school, which he doesn't notice, and eventually befriends Lilia, and then her ex- (who Lilia leaves at the beginning and who tracks her down in Montreal, in a fashion, but he actually latches on to this guy's grown-up daughter, kinda gets obsessed with her for two weeks and never really seems that intent to find Lilia...) and then she becomes a stripper, learns something even more unsettling about her father, and then kills herself.

She's the real victim here.

The above paragraph may make the book sound like a soap opera, but it's really not.  In lesser, untalented hands, this would have been a real mess, and worthy of mockery and lampooning--but it's in great hands, and really stylishly and compactly written.  It's not my kind of book, normally, but there's huge buzz right now about Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, so I wanted to read her early stuff first.  I also read a couple of her online articles--one about NYC's reaction to Ebola before the doctor got sick there--and those were very well-written as well.

You've got to read this one.  For the writing.  For the interweaving structure.  For what it says about those who leave.  And for what it shows about those who are left.

It's well-constructed, a bit haunting and lyrical, and it'll stay with you.  It'll resonate.

And, oh yeah--Don't go to Montreal in the winter.

Cheap Shot--Book Review

Photo: The book's hardcover...cover?  From its Goodreads page.

Another good, compulsively-readable entry into the series by Atkins.

There's not much here you haven't seen before if you've read the others by Parker and Atkins.  But this one still stands apart from the others because of its purposely scattered structure.  Spenser's all over the place, from Boston to NYC and back again.  He speaks to old characters (Gerry Broz runs a fish store?!?), only some of whom are actually useful for this case.

This is the one startling aspect of this book.  Old, non-regular characters either come up (Broz; Tony Marcus; Ty-Bop) or are brought up (Rachel Wallace; April Kyle) simply to stir them up in the readers' minds.  Doing this could've led to disaster, almost like name-dropping, but Atkins handles it well.  It doesn't distract.  It adds.

This one reads a little more gritty, a little more true-to-life.  This is also different than many, but not all, of Parker's.  His often tended to get wrapped up neatly.  The better ones, now that I think about it, didn't end that way: Looking for Rachel Wallace and April Kyle's second (and last) come to mind.

Who-dun-it is not a surprise, exactly, although I was a little surprised about how it suddenly came to a head.  I mean this in a good way.  It makes sense, and the reader and Spenser were kind of heading there, but it all gets sidetracked, as did Spenser, as does the reader.  So when the ending happens, it all makes sense, and isn't really surprising, and yet it was a nice, little twist at the same time.

In a gritty, realistic kind of way.  Would it really happen that way?  The motel room?  The trunk?  Yes, I believe it really could happen that way.  But in the trunk?  Yes, because he just didn't care.  (I won't reveal the end, so you'll just have to read it to fully grasp what I'm talking about.)  Would it have ended that way in Parker's hands?  Nope.  But that's okay.

It works.  That's all that matters.  Things change.  People change.

And, often, they don't change.  The bad ones, when they get really pissed, tend to stay that way.  And then they do bad things.  And then everything sort of goes to hell.

Sometimes that kind of thing ends well.  Other times--I'm thinking Cormac McCarthy here--they don't.  As it is in real life as well.

Police Log--Paranoia and Brazen Honesty

There's still two weeks to enter my free contest and win stuff.  To do so, please go to this link, or just scroll down to the previous entry.  Thanks.

Until then, I thought I'd pass this along.  This is a snippet from my local paper's police log, where some very wacky people do some very wacky things.  And in Warwick, R.I., no less.  If this stuff is happening here, ca you imagine the shenangigans happening in L.A., NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc.?

From the Police Log (and from the Warwick Beacon's address):

PARANOIA

Officer [   ] reported he was doing a fixed traffic post around 4:40 p.m. on Feb. 4 when a man approached him and told him it felt like people were following him. [The officer] said he talked with him some more and learned the man thought every car that was driving past was following him and looking at him and told [the officer] that he should know because [the officer] was one of the people investigating him. He said the man claimed he spoke with numerous lawyers and they all confirmed that he was being investigated. [The officer] said he asked him who was investigating him and he said the police, although he did not know where he was or who he was talking to but he knew that Warwick Police were investigating him. He said the man was alternately excited and calm and inquisitive. He said he called for another car and patted the man down. [The officer] said he was nervous about the way the man’s hands would go into his pockets and then into a bowling bag. He said he had no weapons on him but did have what looked like $1,487 worth of gold Teddy Roosevelt $1 coins. [The officer] said he also found a prescription bottle in the bag and the man said, “That is Adderall.” He said the man claimed he had a prescription for the drug but the particular pills [the officer] was holding belonged to his sister. He said he and a sergeant discussed what to do with the man and they decided he needed professional psychiatric help. [The officer] said he confiscated the pills but did not arrest the man because Kent Hospital does not do psyche evaluations on people who have been arrested. He said they took him to Kent, where the staff began to explain how the evaluation would proceed and he became impatient and belligerent and turned and said, “[Expletive] it, you are just going to have to arrest me for the Adderall.” He was taken to headquarters, where he was charged with possession of a controlled substance and held for the bail commissioner. [The officer] said they learned that the man, who earlier said his name was Kenneth [   ], was in fact Giovanni [   ], 25, of [   ] Ave., Pittsburgh, Pa., and that he was staying at a local extended-stay motel. [The officer] said he asked the man why he had so many presidential coins, 54 identical rolls of Roosevelt $1 coins, and [the man] told him he was a collector but there as nothing else in the bag to indicate it was a collection. He said they did run a check on [the man] and discovered numerous arrests and convictions for robbery, burglary, fraud and receiving stolen goods in several states. [The officer] said a Google search turned up an account of $2.4 million worth of presidential coins were stolen from the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 2011. [The officer] said there was enough probable cause to believe the coins were stolen and that the Secret Service, who were investigating the heist in Philadelphia, be notified of the arrest.

(Me again.)  Now that's messed up!  How does a heavily-medicated, homeless paranoid schizophrenic man from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, get to Warwick, Rhode Island with 1,487 Teddy Roosevelt $1 coins in a bowling bag?  What?!?  Loved his response, too: He's a collector!  He probably sounded offended while he said it, too.

I couldn't make that up.  Or this:

Det. [   ] reported that a woman who was asked to come into headquarters about some fraudulent checks she’d cashed and quickly learned that it was about a purse that was stolen from a customer at Sullivan’s Publick House on Dec. 13 of last year. [The detective] reported that they had surveillance of the woman taking the purse and leaving by the back door but had more evidence that she used the credit cards in the purse at several places in Warwick and other places, but, under the circumstances, he welcomed her candor in regard to the fraudulent checks. She claimed she was cashing five checks worth $1,270 over the past week for a friend of hers and she only got $20 for one check but got a cup of coffee or a pack of cigarettes for the others. She said her friend was stealing the checks from an 80-year-old Warwick man who trusted her.

[A different detective] reported that he was there when [the first detective] was asking “the suspect in a stolen purse caper from Sullivan’s” and took the opportunity to ask her about charges made on her sister’s credit cards last November and about her sister’s laptop that went missing in December and charges on her debit card in March. He said she admitted using the debit card but denied stealing the computer. By the time the interview was over, [   ], 44, of [   ] Ave., Warwick, was charged with five counts of felony fraudulent checks, three counts of fraudulent computer access and larceny for the stolen purse that reportedly contained $140 in cash along with the credit cards.

(Me, again.)  It's hard to tell with writing from reports, but I do believe there was a little tongue-in-cheek with the underlined sentence above, as it seems a bit too dry and straightforward to me.  "He welcomed her candor," indeed.  Sounds like the first detective waved the second one over not because he feared for his safety, but because, "Hey, Harry, come here, you gotta hear this."

And this is all in one day, in one police blotter.

So let me know what you think, and maybe I'll offer up more of this stuff.

The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr

Photo: Book's cover from its Wikipedia page

Almost as quick a read as its predecessor, this one is told from the point of view of Stevie, from his cigarette shop, as he looks back on his past.  The cast is all here, and a few more characters show up, including one of the all-time bad women you'll ever read about--who unfortunately reminded me of a few people I used to know, but that's a review for another day.

NYC in the late 1890s is brought to vivid life again, but with a bit more of a bittersweet tinge to the tale, as Stevie also writes about his love at the time, a drug addict / prostitute who never had a chance to go straight.  The very strong theme here is the role of females in that world, and, no doubt, in this one, and what, if any, males in a male-dominated era (then and now) may have helped cause some women to kill their children.  The socio-politics described are too complex to go into here, but they are not easily dismissed or ignored, and the reader may recognize some of what is described.  The villainess is almost as much of a victim as the actual victims--so much so that I looked up the real-life women mentioned by the author as topics of research in his acknowledgement section.  These real-life women all killed their own children, and many of their men, to such a degree that you'd have to wonder if anyone in the legal or medical communities were paying attention.  One woman brought one child to the hospital, dead.  Then another.  Then another...until all twelve were dead.  Another woman killed off her children, and literally dozens of men who came to her farm to win her favors--favors that were advertised in area newspapers.  This woman was often seen digging in the middle of the night in her hog pen--and she'd had dozens of heavy trunks delivered to her property.

At any rate, this one has more than a few things in common thematically with my own WIP, including how women are treated in a male-dominated society.  This novel also ends with a slow declining arc, more than a little bit after the main conflict has been resolved, just as mine does.

Anyway, great writing (except for an aboriginal hitman that didn't work for me), great historical detail, and some strong wistful nostalgia at the end that readers older than 30 should recognize, all coalesce in a novel that was quickly read and thoroughly appreciated.

Published in 1997, this has been the last in the series, and you have to wonder why.  Both were tremendous bestsellers, and this second one mentions frequently that the group was involved in many other cases, both all together and, for Sara Howard, by herself, so there's plenty of other potential material to write about...and yet Caleb Carr never has.  Here's to hoping he comes out with another one soon.

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

 Photo: Bellevue Hospital Ambulance, New York Times, 1895--from the Wikipedia page of The Alienist.

Been a few weeks away with illness, exhaustion, overwork, and some good headway on my novel and some shorter pieces.  Sort of an odd time lately, mostly without focus.  I've been reading six or seven books, and writing too many things at once--and not completing any reading or writing at all.  My sleeping patterns have been all screwed up, and...blah blah blah.  I'm tired of my own whining, but it is what it is.

That changed with The Alienist, a novel so well-written that I finished all 597 pages in just a few days, even waking up early to read it.  I read it through my cluster-headache on Sunday; I read it through an otherwise scattered-minded few weeks.  It cut through all that and straightened my focus and psyche out--for quite awhile, I hope.

I'd heard great things about this for a long time, and finally I gave it a go, with regret, since I'm trying to finish about six other things, like I said.  But I'm glad I did.

This novel has a lot going for it.  It's told in a first-person limited POV, by a reporter narrator who's good at describing his world without making it seem like he's purposely describing his world.  But he is, and he needs to for us, because he's describing 1896 NYC (and a little of D.C. and New Paltz, NY, too).  Caleb Carr does a fantastic job making this world interesting and alive, and the crimes he covers--and the investigation they cause--are top-notch.  (But not for the squeamish.) Essentially Carr describes the first wrinkles of what has become known as criminal profiling, which basically can be boiled down to analyzing the crime, and then asking yourself, What kind of person could have committed this crime, exactly this way, in this exact place and time?

As readers of this blog should know, I've long been interested in this kind of thing myself, so it was very cool to see some characters using these methods as the focus of their investigations.  In addition to profiling the crime, they profile a letter the serial murderer sends to a victim's mother--with some handwriting analysis as well, also new at the time--and there's a lot of attention paid to the earliest childhood years of many criminals in the book, also a cornerstone of criminal profiling.  Abusive and criminal parents will, more often than not, create abusive and criminal offspring.  This sort of implies that it's more nurture than nature, and that free will isn't all that strong, either, but that's a misreading that many people today--and many characters in the book--suffer from.

I'll leave that to the reader.  Bottom line is, if you like historical fiction, or crime/criminal investigation, or the 1890s in general, or if--like me--you happen to like all of those things combined, than this book is the one for you.  As I've said about some of Stephen King's books, there's something to be said for a 597-page book that's read in about three days.

As I mentioned, it was so good that it straightened out my psyche for a few days, and made me feel more complete, more whole, more in my own realm--whatever the hell that is.  Next up: his follow-up, The Angel of Darkness.

As the footnote at the beginning of the book says, an alienist is today's psychiatrist, or mental health researcher, as someone who needed to speak to someone like this (because there were few private practices in those days, so most people, especially the poor, would have to be committed to a facility or to a hospital to speak to one) was thought to be alienated, both from their society and from their own true natures.  (Sort of like how I've felt the last few weeks, though not to the extremes you'll read here.)  So a helper to these people would be an alienist.

Caleb Carr himself is quite an interesting guy, as is the story surrounding Lucius Carr, his (in)famous father.  It seems as if his father stabbed to death a man who was hitting on him, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac helped him dispose of the body and of some evidence before Carr confessed.  He served a couple of years in an Elmira prison, then worked for UPI for 47 years, though he was apparently also an alcoholic and an abusive father.

Caleb Carr comes off as a novelist of historical fiction who also dabbles in historical articles and books (and, it turns out, screenplays of two Exorcist prequels), but it turns out to be the opposite.  He's a well-respected historian.  Caleb has an injury to his arm and shoulder, similar to his alienist character, and he lives in a beautiful, self-made home with a wrap-around porch, in the mountains--alienated from his society, and recovering, as Carr admits, from being alien to himself.

Art imitates life.

Signs You Have Too Many Books

Photo: The Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, Manhattan

I realized recently--okay, I've had this "realization" frequently over the years--that I have a book-hoarding problem.  You know, like those people on the show Hoarders, who have psychotic breaks when a professional therapist, visiting the squalid house, tells them that pooping and peeing on their stereo speakers because they have too much stuff in the way to make it to the bathroom is not a normal thing?  Well, I'm not that bad, as my floors and hallways are mostly bare, but I have lots of piles of books in the living room, on the table, and on the kitchen table, and in my office on my desks and chairs.  I have books in seven bookcases in the house, and in about nine boxes in the garage, and in a giant bookcase in the spare office/bedroom downstairs, which has ten deep bookshelves.

If this sounds like you, these are signs enough that you have a book-hoarding problem.  But here are a few more signs that you have too many books:

--You find yourself reading six books at once, and yet you still look for more things to read.

--You realize that fifteen bookcases are not close to enough to hold all of your books.

--Your reading material in your bathroom impedes your path to your "favorite chair."

--And you look forward to needing to go to the bathroom so that you can read.

--You read much more than you need to in order to research your novel or story.

--You have so many books that you actually consider opening your own free library, somehow.

--Except that you don't want anyone else reading your books.

--You have so many books that you end up getting duplicates at yard sales or library sales because you forgot you had them to begin with.

--You buy books that your friends want to borrow from you because you don't want them to read yours.

--You own every book ever written by Stephen King, and Robert B. Parker, and Jonathan Kellerman, and Mickey Spillane, all of whom have written at least 40 books each.

--You've forgotten which books are in the seven or eight boxes in the attic and basement.

--You have about fifty anthologies of short stories, poems and short novels.

--You still have all of the books you ever needed to read in college, and you majored in English and Philosophy.  That's a lot of required reading.

--You tell your friends that they should ask you if you have a book before they buy it, even though you have no intention of ever letting them borrow one.  (See the comment five bullets above.)

--You have to instigate a policy of no book-buying for yourself.

--You promise yourself that you'll just get new books from the library, so that you can read them without being driven to keep them.  And you know you won't follow through with this.

--You say to yourself that you won't buy anything new until you've finished reading all of the books you have, even though this couldn't possibly happen during what's left of your lifetime.

--You realize that you'd rather stay at home and read a lot rather than go to Disneyland or some such thing during your vacation.

--You think that the best thing about summers is the reading you can do on your house deck or in your house in the central air.

--Your favorite characters are more endearing to you than are your favorite people.

--You realize that you like more characters than you do real people.  And you're okay with this.

--You think that e-readers of any kind are blasphemous.

--You have books by Wilkie Collins on your computer desktop.  Unread.

--You think that one of the best things about finishing a book is the review you'll write on Goodreads.

--Or for the blog entry, of course.

--You've considered wall-papering a wall with small posters of your favorite book covers.

--You can actually tell someone why the white bookcovers of the post-1990 Catcher in the Rye is a sinful, crying shame compared to the classic red carousel horse and NYC skyline of the original.  And you sound like a lunatic doing so, and don't care.

--After you've recently shelved literally hundreds of books into your new library, someone says to you, "Are you actually keeping all of those?"  You say, "Yes," and don't realize their incredulity until over an hour later.

--You've been in minor branches of public libraries with fewer books than you have in your house.

--You have five favorite genres.

--One of your favorite places in Manhattan is the New York Public Library.  And an actual wish is to have one that's just as beautiful, if not a little smaller, in your house.

--You have three different editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works.  And you're not getting rid of any of them.

--You realize you have more books in your home than some of the more poor schools do in their classrooms, their bookrooms and their libraries.  Combined.

--You have over 30 bulleted reasons about why you have too many books, including this one.

Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

photo: cover of French version, second edition, from the book's Wikipedia page

Very effective book--about the French populace not recognizing the culpability of the French police being the Nazi's stooges in 1942--that would have been great without the emphasis on the present-day relationship struggles and the moralizing/browbeating by the author, through the main character.  Though the real incidents portrayed via Sarah were real and horrifying, there isn't too much room for moralizing and browbeating in fiction.  I could've taken quite a bit of that, as it is that warranted, but this book crosses the line and becomes a bit of a soapbox.

Having said that, this book is worth the read just for the scenes with Sarah, culminating upon her return to her apartment--though, really, culminating with a car and a tree in Connecticut.  The tragedy of the tragedy ends with that car and tree, as we want our victims to live long and prosper.  That doesn't happen too often in real life, and it doesn't happen here, and the tragedy is multiplied because of that, and because of the reasons behind the suicide.  You never want the victim of unspeakable horrors to commit suicide, but the reality is that they often do.  All of this is very sad, and it will stay with you, whether you want it to or not.  Sarah's character will be a long-lasting one in the world of fiction, and Sarah's key is one of the better metaphors and symbols to come along in a long time.  In fact, as such, it is shockingly underused in the book.

That the book focuses instead on the relationship between the main character and her husband is an author's mistake, I think, that is further highlighted by her comment in an interview at the back of the book that she did not want to write a book of historical fiction.  Her aim was to include a bit of that, but to focus instead on creating a parallel to a modern-day relationship and its problems.  It is this parallel, unfortunately, that very much doesn't work.  You expect them to cris-cross at some point, and of course they do, but when they do, the moralizing starts, which degrades the effect of the tragedy.  Part of the tragedy, in fact, is that the tragedy was largely ignored.  It needed to stay tragic, rather than become fodder for a soapbox.

This failure with the parallel--and, I think, a failure on the author's rationale, as she states in the interview at the end that she thinks her readers want a book more about relationship struggles (and, hell, maybe they do, though this reader doesn't)--is that it counts too much on that moralizing, and on over-sentimentality, and on a large dose of coincidence.  The main character's marriage ends in divorce, it is said, because the husband couldn't handle her devotion to the tragedy, and to her unborn baby (though the marriage was actually in trouble long before that, and one supposes that the husband would've had a problem with her focusing her attention on anything and anyone at all but him, and he was cheating on her for many years even before the timeline for this novel started); another man's marriage falls apart because his wife couldn't handle his preoccupation with the same thing--even though Sarah was this man's mother, so he had a much better reason for his preoccupation.  Anyway, the main character and this man, separately, move to NYC after the failure of their marriages, and they both think about each other and keep track of each other without letting on to the other.  They fall for each other right away, though the man was also upset with her, and his marriage was fine at the time.  That they get together at the end, and the name that she gives her new daughter, will not surprise even a six year old reader, especially since the main character goes out of her way, several times, to narrate how beautiful this man's fingers and hands are...

...sigh...It becomes Schindler's List Meets Sleepless in Seattle.  I do not exaggerate.  (Well, perhaps a little.)

Could've been an outstanding book had the author book-ended the main story with the suicide, perhaps, or otherwise focused more on that.  Focusing the entire second half of the book on the aforementioned things, rather than on Sarah at all, or on the tragedies in her childhood, and then at the end of her life, actually degrades the real-life tragedy and drags the whole thing into quasi-sappy melodrama.

Sarah deserved a LOT better than that.  Sarah, in fact, transcends the trappings of this novel she's trapped in, and will live within you, outside the rather narrow confines of this book's borders.  She's a character, much like Shakespeare's Juliet, that is superior to the work she's placed in.  You'll be grateful, though, that the book exists as a vehicle for her to be born in, and then to survive and surpass.

For a look at a movie review from the New York Times that agrees with my assessment of the book the movie's based on, go to http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/movies/sarahs-key-directed-by-gilles-paquet-brenner-review.html.  Its final word is the same as mine, in terms of the essential fault of the book and film: both stories couldn't co-exist in the same vehicle, and the one about the pitfalls of today's relationships trivializes the truth and tragedy of the horror that really did happen in Paris, France in July, 1942.

Weekends at Bellevue--Julie Holland, M.D.

photo: Book cover, from Goodreads

Fascinating book about a woman who had been in charge of deciding who does, and does not, get admitted to a stay at Bellevue.  She did this for nine years.  Obviously the book is about many of the patients, but the coolest thing about the book is the sheer number of other things it's also very much about: admitting you're crisped at your job; branching out; moving on with life; the different forms of mental illness; how we're all mentally ill, in varying degrees.  Having the courage to switch gears in life.  Changing as a person.  Letting down your often necessary defenses--and then realizing that doing so makes you incapable of doing the job you needed the defenses for to begin with.  I saw a lot of myself in here, and a couple of family members and friends--and a few ex-friends.  It helped me to understand all of them better in small, but important, ways.

It's a quick read.  You may grit your teeth at the oddly sudden and thorough instances of her sexual interludes, as I did, though I understood they were meant to underscore her adrenaline addiction.  All of the psychopathy stories are quick snippets, from the unknown patients, to Spalding Gray and the aftereffects of 9/11 on NYC.  She doesn't linger too long on any one person or event, but mentions the big ones long enough to sustain the shock and horror they instilled in her and everyone else.  Many of her patients, for example, saw dozens of professionally attired men jump out of the WTC to their deaths.  She says that, more than any other facet of the attacks, it was this that mostly traumatized and PTSDed her patients--watching the bodies fall.  And land.  Her narrative voice skims and occasionally probes, while at the same time staying far enough away from the patients so the reader doesn't feel like a morbid voyeur, rubber-necking at the psychopathic miseries of others.

I read this because I thought such a character had a place in one of my novels--where else, perhaps, would a possibly real, re-visiting Jesus or Lazarus be sent, after all, but to a place like Bellevue?  I don't know that such a plan would work now, but I liked the experience of reading this to find out.  It took two days to read.  Highly recommended.

H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was one weird dude.  After having read a lot about him (and after having bought a collection of his works), it seems that "weird" doesn't seem to be quite enough.  And that's me saying this.  He seems to have been a victim of a sort of social anxiety disorder, except from among his letters it seems that he also had a "nervous disposition" while alone, or while living with his mother and aunts.  His mother's mental and emotional spiral wouldn't have helped, and she ended up in Butler, the same asylum his father died in--though his father undoubtedly had syphilis, while he and his mother were simply...nervous.  (Mary Karr's mother was apparently the same, and the word "nervous" was used to mean someone who was barely functionally insane.)

Lovecraft married and moved to NYC, but the marriage didn't last long, and his wife complained that he was more comfortable communicating with her through letters.  He moved back to RI; she moved to Cleveland and later to CA after she re-married.  He then proceeded to write maybe more letters than anyone else, ever.  One scholar places the number of letters at over 200,000; one wonders how much more fiction he could have written.  Yet, he was more comfortable writing letters, and getting comfortable seemed to be his life's work.  His letters, perhaps more than his writing, may prove to be his most lasting legacy.

His fame doesn't rest upon that much fiction, and much of that fiction is just plain bad.  Yet the good is very good, of its type.  Storyline and plot were not important.  More than Poe, Lovecraft was interested in atmosphere and feeling, and he got those across very well, as well as, or better than, even Poe.  Reading Lovecraft is to feel dread, even if you don't know what you're feeling dread about, exactly.  Reading his best is like having a nightmare you don't understand, but that which makes you fear and dread.

His fiction and letters had a major similarity: fear of others, or, more exactly, Others.  His most ardent fans are forced to admit his rampant racism; his racism is flat-out fear.  Scholars point to his NYC days, in which he was jobless.  He felt immigrants took job opportunities from him.  Probably it was his demeanor and nervousness.  Would you hire this guy?  Upon returning to RI, he quickly decided that he would work from home, writing, ghostwriting, editing and corresponding.  He did not ever become otherwise employed.  Due to his mother and aunts' spoiling of him, he perhaps never had to.  (To be a fly on that wall...)

When he knew that death was close by (colon cancer), he appointed a teenage fan from Florida to be his literary executor, which one scholar said was like hiring you or I to lead an army platoon into battle.  This kid promptly gave over most of the works to August Derleth, Lovecraft's aunts, and a university, thereby causing one of the most confusing copyright wrangles in the history of literature.  Who owns the rights?  The writing from the 20s, nobody, as they are now in the public domain.  Perhaps everything now is.  Or the aunts, or Derleth, got cheated.  It is further now established that the Cthulu Mythos is more Derleth than Lovecraft, which makes sense to me, as Lovecraft often stated that he was after atmosphere and feeling, plot be damned, and the Mythos stories clearly show a consistent and connected sort of plotline, in a Good vs. Evil sort of way.  Lovecraft, an avowed atheist and overall nihilist (and elitist), probably did not believe in a good vs. evil distinction.

His stories, like his life, defy simple explanation, besides to say that they are an exercise in supreme oddity.

Just Do It

I told a friend of the new novella/novel idea expressed in the last blog, and he said, "Another one?"  Then I told my better half about the idea, and she said the exact same thing.  And so it's occurred to me that I've got too many things going on at the same time, and not too much time to write any of them.  Doubly frustrating!!!

Right now I'm working on:

1.  Novel idea expressed last time.
2.  The Gravediggers--one of the Novels in Progress that may form a trilogy with...
3.  Apocalypse--one of the Novels in Progress that takes place right at the end of a major world calamity and the end of WW3.  Most of it takes place in Kansas City, NYC, Rhode Island, and occasionally at a few other points throughout the world.  A couple of excerpts of this NIP are in blog entries below.  This is the NIP I'm probably furthest into, and will probably form a trilogy with The Gravediggers, and with...
4.  The novel about the plague(s) throughout history, one of which will happen in the timeline of Apocalypse and The Gravediggers, but that also took place in places like Eyam, England, a similar locale of which forms the backbone of this NIP.  See excerpts and research in blogs below.
5.  The Observer--a NIP that I really like, on which I've written many chapters, fragments, etc. over the years, but which I'm maybe still not ready to fully get into.  You can just feel that, you know?

So that's, what, 5 novels (or NIP)?  That's a lot.  But also there are...

6.  A long article on Pedro Martinez's peak brilliance, as compared to the peaks of others, in our time and before, using some stats (and common sense) that I have not found on baseball-reference.com, or in anything by Bill James, or in Baseball Digest, etc.  Maybe excerpts of #6 and #7 on my sports blog?
7.  A long series of articles on the Hall of Fame voting for MLB.  This series is unique because it focuses not on the fact that HOF players got into the Hall, but on the number of voters who felt that they didn't belong.  Large numbers of voters felt that Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, etc. did not belong in the Hall.  There has never been a 100% unanimous selection to the HOF.
8.  Research for short story and novel submissions--and the actual submissions themselves.
9.  Critiques for the pieces submitted by members of the three writers groups I belong to.
10.  My house, my better half, and the fact that I have an actual life, which also includes my career.

I need to set some sort of schedule.  I just finished my grad. class, thank God.  Now I have to pick one of the novels above, just go for it and finish a draft, while spending time with the submissions as well.

And the energy to do it all.  I heard that J.K. Rowling woke up at about 4 a.m. and wrote until 6 a.m. to get her kids to school, and then wrote until she had to pick them up, and then wrote after she put them to bed.  And then over and over again.  Good Lord, give me the strength!  How?!?  I guess...just do it.