Liked it. I was, though, hoping for an examination of the legal situation. The news frequently contains stories like Jake’s, but in which some crusading prosecutor decides to save the kids from themselves by hitting both parties with child porn charges. Sex crime penalties being what they are, that means the end of any hopes for any kind of life, never mind a beautiful one.

The book, though, barely touches these issues, focusing instead on the family’s reaction. That’s compelling, too, just not what I was hoping for.

Oedipus Rex in modern times. The new story redoes the original about as creatively as name of the new titular character replaces the old. It’s all there and all obvious from a mile away.

Hence, the quality of the book depends on stuff other than the plot. None of it impressed me. The book  runs from the early sixties to about five years from now, but without the depth or precision necessary for me to feel like I was in those times, or to have nostalgia, vel sim, for the times I have experienced. I didn’t get the characters. Some were treacherous for no apparent reason. Some changed with similar types of motives. The writing could be annoying, too. I skimmed page after page describing Dianne’s attempts to make herself look younger. Ditto Ed’s interactions with his artificial intelligence friend.

In short, sounds cool, and might be worth reading if you really need something and it’s all that’s available, but a real dud.

Great writer, great subject. When I taught the first half of American History, I always enjoyed having a debate about whether John Brown was a martyr or terrorist. Around here, the latter is the dominant answer. I never made up my mind until reading this book. Now I think I lean towards the former.

Being a werewolf is a curse. The change comes every full moon; the changed has no say in the matter. An all consuming hunger forces the werewolf to kill and eat humans. “Peace” comes in accepting that this life is all there is, thus, might as well eat. Meanwhile, an army of exterminators have eliminated all but the titular character, who, due to the lack of peace, is now more than ready to accept his own extermination. Then something causes his desires to change. Now he wants to live. But will he?

Fascinating. Best with scotch on a rainy and cold day.

That is, if you own a dog, or have ever owned a dog, and – especially – if you, like me, are the type of person who will have a conversation with your dog, supplying both voices. Bernie is a detective from central casting: checkered past, divorced, “down on his luck” etc. Chet is his large, goofy, mismatched eared, extremely loyal dog. Most importantly Chet also narrates the books. The dog is awesome. I can’t think of any other book that has ever made me laugh out loud like these do. (Maybe Straight Man, but that’s it.) Chet’s voice is pretty much exactly how I’ve always imagined my own dog thinks. I guess that makes Chet a stereotype, but I don’t care, these books are fantastic.

Of course, their goofy dog personalities aren’t the only similarities between Chet and my own pooch. Chet’s a bit self-conscious about his one white ear and one black ear. Though I’ve always found it one of her best traits, Allie can sympathize.

She also heartily recommends this book. “Not really sure what the point of books is, other than always leading to my owner taking a nap. But after this one, he took me for some extra long walks. So it must be good.”

Still, I think I’ve read them all. Why? I dunno. Reading the books makes True Blood more interesting, and vice versa. The first few books were really interesting. Not that I remember anything about them, beyond a vague recollection of a sense of pleasure. I do remember that these early books were the anti-Twilight. Then I discovered they were ante-Twilight, from which fact I conclude that on top of being the star of the Worst Book Ever Written, Bella is a cheap imitation. These facts alone get the books big stars.

The author sort of fascinates me, too. She’s from Mississippi and now lives in south Arkansas. From the picture on the dust jacket, she looks like the typical good ‘ol southern wife, strolling into the church pot lock with some kind of casserole. Yet, she’s writing about vampires and werewolves and lots of sex and lots, and lots and lots of killing. More shocking than the carnality, despite living her life in the most bass-ackwards sections of the Bible belt, or more likely, because of it, conservative Christians do not come across very well in these books. She’s not unfair. Given how these types have reacted to everything from desegregation to gay marriage, how do you think they would respond to the news that vampires are real and live among us? I bet the first image in your head was not a welcome mat. All she’s done is extend their attitudes to a new area.

So despite the repetitiveness, I keep reading. Like John Grisham books, If I’ve finished something serious and need filler until the next real book, I know I can count on Sookie.

On that note, my first review will be that kind of book. Not book. Books, actually. It’s a series called the “Body Movers” by Stephanie Bond. These books are complete and total fluff. I started reading them right after E was born. I was nursing at all hours of the day and night, and needed something that was easy to pick up and put down without having to try too hard to remember the story line or major plot lines. It needed to be entertaining enough to keep me awake at 3:00 a.m. but not too much so that it was hard to put down when E fell asleep after twenty minutes. These books pretty much fit that bill. (Unlike The Hunger Games trilogy that I also started reading right after E was born. Those books were a little too engrossing and I ended up staying up way too long when I should have been sleeping.)

I really can’t offer a review of each individual book in the series (there are six) because they tend to merge together after reading more than one. The main characters in all of the books are the same. The storyline begins in the first book and continues uninterrupted through each one. In the first book, Body Movers, we meet the heroine, Carlotta Wren. She’s a high-end sales lady for Neiman Marcus who’s wealthy parents abandoned her and her younger brother, Wesley, ten years earlier. Her father was accused of embezzling funds and faced prison time. Instead of facing trial, he and the mom disappeared, leaving spoiled, rich Carlotta to quickly grow up and raise her younger brother. In the first and each subsequent book, we learn of some new catastrophe that has found Carlotta and her brother. Most of these catastrophes lead to Wesley moving a body (his side job when he’s not gambling, being arrested, or doing community service) for the local morgue.

There are a series of other characters that come and go. Several men who either want to/have/or will have sex with Carlotta. Some seedy characters associated with Wesley. Crazed killers who always seem to target Carlotta and those closest to her. None of these characters are particularly memorable, likeable, or believable. As a matter of fact, that pretty much applies to the main characters too.

I’m not even sure why I have read so many of these books. (I just finished the fifth one and have the sixth – and last one – on the shelf to read next.) As I said, the characters aren’t believable. The story lines are incredibly outlandish, but with just enough of a hint of reality embedded deep in them to prevent you from rolling your eyes and putting the book down mid-sentence. It’s very hard to believe that any one person (Carlotta) can attract as much trouble and as many serial killers as she does. Then there’s the matter of Jack, the detective who was charged with reopening her father’s cold case, arresting Wesley, and investigating EVERY crime that involves Carlotta. Seriously, does the Atlanta Police Department consist of this one and only detective?

These books remind me slightly of the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum books. They’re both a series revolving around tough chicks who take control of their own lives. Then there’s the name issue. Stephanie Plum is Evanovich’s heroine. Plum is a bail bondsman. Stephanie Bond is the author of the Body Movers series. Totally confusing, but that’s where the similarity ends. Evanovich’s books are way more believable and fun. Even though there are now eighteen of the Plum series, I have no hesitation in picking up the next one of those and reading it. Whereas with the Body Movers books, I have had to talk myself into reading each one.

And I’m sure I will read the next and last one. If for no other reason than to have some closure in the ongoing saga of these unbelievable, annoying characters’ lives. They are entertaining. I will give them that. And as with any mystery, there is the suspense, even though it’s not done well and there’s not nearly enough of it for it to be called a mystery series. So unlike the Evanovich books, which makes me want to read other things by the same author, these books almost make me wish I’d never found them on the library shelf. Then I wouldn’t have this inner torment as to whether or not to continue reading.

Within twenty or so pages, the book had already gotten on my nerves. The offense? Using specialized and technical language as if it’s something everyone ought to understand. In particular, the job titles, tasks, foods and other things associated with a somewhat high class restaurant’s kitchen. I understand that the characters all work in that kitchen, and thus would use that language. So for the sake of authenticity, they need to speak that language in the book. Still, the point of a book is to communicate, and descriptions of meals containing lists of ingredients I have ever heard of, and prepared in ways completely foreign to me, by people with titles that mean as much as random letters, well, that doesn’t really paint any pictures in my head. Granted, I’m not the most sophisticated guy in the world, but I can’t be the only person who had this issue.

Yet I kept reading. Not long into the book, the main character, who is the head chef at the restaurant, finds a dead body in a storeroom in the basement. In the same room, he finds a young immigrant girl. He takes the girl home to live with him. Given these events, I thought I was in for an exciting time. I expected the cops to infer that the dead body was the result of some kind of lover’s quarrel, and, since the girl was now with the chef, he must have been involved. In addition to the possible legal fun, at the same time the chef brought the immigrant home, he also had a girlfriend. As if these ingredients weren’t enough for a suspenseful story, some of the employees at the chef’s restaurant are involved with human trafficking. These expectations kept me going; I love books in which a normal person makes one decision that quickly destroys his life. That’s what this appeared to be.

Alas, nothing happened. In spite of all of those facts, this was one of the more boring books I have recently read. Somehow, all the interesting events become asides. Over the few hundred pages of the story, the body concerns maybe five or ten. The chef’s girlfriend does leave him, but it was anticlimactic. Most of the narrative involves the chef’s waffling over a secret deal with two other men to open a new restaurant. He also spends a lot of time anguishing over his relationship with his parents. His life does fall apart after finding the body and bringing home the girl, but only in the interior sense.

The external story wasn’t the only disappointment; the interior struggles didn’t lead to anything interesting, either. For instance, the chef and his parents, his mom, especially, have arguments about immigration. Yet nothing goes beyond the shallowest kind of thinking. She repeating urban legends and making generalized complaints about how the neighborhood was better before all the immigrants moved in; he babbling about diversity. No one asks hard questions or offers any insightful answers.

Even so, I made it to the end of the book. No excitement. No depth. In other words, probably a pretty good picture of real life. Which made it a rather boring book.

They either turn their subject into a metaphor for something vast and unrelated to the outcomes of relatively meaningless games (the strongest examples being Friday Night Lights and the more recent Scoreboard, Baby), or they attempt to expose how things “really” are behind dead-bolted locker room doors (Jim Bouton’s Ball Four being the genre’s progenitor and Jeff Pearlman’s Boys Will Be Boys serving as the most entertaining contemporary offering).

Bottom of the 33d fits both.

While describing the longest baseball game ever – a minor league contest starting the night before Easter, pausing in the early hours of the next day, and then finishing over a month later – Barry spends plenty of time behind the locker room, and front office, doors. He provides details on some of the players who would make it to the big leagues, and, in the case of Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame. He also spends a lot of time on the ones who never made it. Not much is breaking news, but it’s all interesting.

It’s also Dan Barry writing. To his credit, the stories about the ones who didn’t make it are more interesting. Both career coaches and players are his real interest. Those stories are where the literary part takes over. Now the theme expands beyond baseball to dreams, and determination, and finding meaning when, in spite of all the determination, dreams die.

Of course, Barry’s writing gets on my nerves from time to time. Too consciously literary, I think. And I lost count of how many times he emphasized some player or coach’s minor league bona-fides by listing, or more like chanting, the many mid-sized but not terrible important cities through which the pilgrim had passed: “From Shreveport to Rochester to Little Rock to Yadda, yadda, yadda, another minor league town.” By mid-book, whenever I saw the name of a town, I just skipped to the next paragraph. Kind of like I do whenever Tom Wolfe mentions an article of clothing.

Even with the at times overdone language and style, I enjoyed the book. If nothing else, my next Captains experience certainly differed from previous visits. That’s a place where dreams die; our local independent minor league team, the Captains are the hospice of professional baseball. Having read Bottom of the 33d, though, I appreciated the hustle, work, and desire these guys all had. None of them are going anywhere, yet they all still play as if they could. At one time I would have called that pathetic, now I’m more sympathetic. They’re chasing a dream, and who am I to fault them, even if the dream is obviously winning.