Read it awhile ago. PETA type activist accidentally shot by daughter using brother-in-law’s hunting rifle. Family and legal issues follow. Recall enjoying it. That’s about it.
The Chet And Bernie Series By Spencer Quinn
Greatest. Books. Ever.
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.”
Dead Something Or Another by Charlaine Harris
That’s not really the title. The real one, like the book’s story, has blended with all the others in the Sookie Stackhouse series into a mixture so thorough that I will never recall the individual parts. The word dead is always in the title. Each begins with Sookie in relative peace. Then someone dies. Sookie is anxious and has issues in her love life. Then lots of folks die. Then Sookie hopes all will be normal again.
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.
My first post here
I love to read. Aside from sleeping and eating, it’s probably my favorite activity. That said, I tend to read some pretty low-brow stuff. During the school year, I blame my uncultured reading habits on the fact that I have to do so much at-home prep for my advanced math and science students that when I can finally sit down with a book, I just want to relax and not think. But that’s just an excuse. The truth is that I like fluffy, easy to read, non-intellectual books. And I’m okay with that. It’s what I enjoy. So, that’s the majority of what you’ll see from me here.
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.
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
The wife brought this one home from the library and gave up after about a hundred pages. I, having just finished another book and needing something to read, decided to give it a try.
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.
Bottom of the 33rd by Dan Barry
I’ve heard there are two kinds of sports books:
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.
Sniffing Glue by Meghan O’Gieblyn
This isn’t a book, but an article that closely mirrors my own experience.
No, I’ve never sniffed glue. That’s way too low class a vice to ever tempt me. That’s not the literal subject of the article, either. Instead, the author spends time reflecting on her musical and spiritual development. She began as a homeschooled evangelical Christian, for whom even contemporary Christian music was a risk. Recounting her discovery of 1990′s bands like DC Talk, Jars of Clay and All Star United, she describes how those and other bands tried to make legitimate music with a Christian message:
This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking diet, “Wait, this is Christian?” The logic was that the more these bands fit in with what was playing on the radio, the more someone like me would feel comfortable passing their album on to my non-Christian friends (supposing I’d had any), giving them a chance to hear the gospel.
That worked for her, until she discovered real music when, on an out of town trip, she watched MTV for the first time, becoming entranced by Nirvana.
On one of those gray afternoons I saw Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video. In a smoky warehouse, the band and a team of tattooed cheerleaders performed for bleachers full of kids. As the song progresses, the scene dissolves into anarchy: the students jump off the bleachers, strip off their clothes, destroy the band’s equipment, and light the entire set on fire. I watched this perched on the edge of my bed, about three feet from the TV screen, while Sheena was taking a nap. I didn’t catch any of the lyrics, but I was mesmerized by Kurt Cobain stumbling around the set, squinting into the light, barely suppressing a sneer. I couldn’t have told you what the word “irony” meant, but I knew I’d been cheated by Christian rock. This was crack, and I’d been wasting my time sniffing glue.
Hence the title to the article. And also the beginning of the end of her faith, as she realized that Christian music, and the church in general, could never compete with secular entertainent. And, by making the attempt to be relevant, the church had actually lost what made it special.
Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.
This is very familiar.
Not totally, of course. I did not begin as a home school evangelical, isolated from the world’s temptations. I like telling people that in fourth grade, two friends and I sang the Beastie Boys’ “Girls” for a school talent show. In high school, Nevermind stayed in my tape deck. Then, not long after high school, I became the an extremely raging and annoying convert, and all the old favorites went in the trash. The love of music would not disappear, though. In what I then certainly considered a godsend, not long after my conversion, groups like those mentioned in the article began to become popular. I attended many of their concerts, and still have many of their CD’s. My iPod might even still have some Grammatrain. That experience is what makes me say Amen to much of this article.
Likewise, the new christianstuff, good as it was, just could not compete. Most of christian music was like imposter perfumes: “If you like . . . you’ll love….” I liked DC Talk, but while I was majoring in Biblical Studies, the Beastie Boys released Hello Nasty. I loved it, even though I couldn’t. I resisted that temptation, but soon enough, I surrendered to it and others.
At the same time, I also became disenchanted with the whole relevance idea. Not only did Christian versions of music lose when competing with the real thing, but, when incorporated into worship services, they left me feeling empty and cheated. I didn’t immediately abandon church. I did, though, become a Catholic, looking for something more ancient and authentic than what I now considered the evangelical world’s a cheesy imitation of pop culture.
I’ve since given up on Catholicism, too. Why? Too many reasons for a blog post. This article reminded me, though, that music played a role. How big? I doubt I can ever really know. I do know, however, that I still love the Beastie Boys:
Good Neighbors by Ryan David Jahn
This is a fictional version of the Kitty Genovese murder, which, if you are unfamiliar with it, involved a woman being stabbed in Queens outside her apartment while several people inside the building either heard or saw it, yet did nothing to help.
The book caught my eye in the store because I remember our criminal law textbook mentioning the case. The point in law school being that even given such a horrendous situation – all the neighbors had to do was call the cops – there is no criminal culpability for failing to help or aid someone in a dangerous situation. (Unless you helped create the situation, of course. Or if it’s your kid, or someone in similar relationship) It was with that lesson in mind I read the book.
I enjoyed the descriptions of all the neighbors. When discussing the case in class, the horrific nature of the observers was a given. These were clearly the worst kind of people. Jahn, though, personalizes them. They aren’t virtuous at all. But they aren’t demons, either. Each had their own reasoning; to each, their lack of action was understandable.
Unfortunately, the book only concerns that night. I wish it had a part two, covering the reactions of the neighbors after they realized what their apathy allowed to happen. Even more than the neighbors’ reactions, I wish the book had explored the political consequences. This would have been a fantastic time to explore everything from grandstanding district attorneys – who, with a cry of “Justice for Kitty” would bring charges against the neighbors even knowing they had broken no laws – to local politicians rushing to enact something I am sure would be called Kitty’s Law.
Such was not to be, though. I’ll have to imagine all of that myself. Not that it’s hard. Which is maybe why Jahn skipped it and stuck with the tough part.
How Is This Going To Work?
When I’m done reading a book, I’ll post about it. No matter how good or bad, memorable or forgettable, each will receive a post. The amount of verbiage depends on the qualities of the book and its impact on me, but the mere reading of each each will at least be memorialized here.
Generally, I’ll wait until I’m done with a book, and then post about it. To start, though, I’ll go back a few reads, because I don’t want to wait until I am done with my current book. Besides, it’s pretty lame, and it would be anticlimactic to announce this AWESOME NEW BLOG only to begin with such a pedestrian book. Also, I’ve read some good books already this summer. Sooo, for the first several posts, I will attempt to recreate what has been my summer reading list.
This is definitely not a literay site. I never took anything beyond required English classes in college. I also have no idea who the latest and greatest writers are. My exposure to literature is no more than the New York Times Book Review. This won’t be the place to come if you want amazing insights or the the newest books.
What you will get is regular updates, probably a few a week, about whatever it is I happen to be reading. Some nonfiction, mostly fiction, and, of that, some good, some mass market. It all depends on what kind of mood I’m in.
Finally, I am only speaking for me. The Wife will be also be posting here. What she does is up to her.
Why This Blog?
Because I want to keep track of the books I read. I also want to express my opinions of them. That is all.
Wheeler
Jenny
