Abundance

Next up was Abundance by Jakob Guanzon.  This humble scribe had suggested this book for two reasons – first it might strike the same father-boy (son?) chord as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  In this case rather than father and son moving through dystopia, this father and son would be moving through landscape of poverty in America.  I welled up during The Road (so did you!), looked at my boys and thought even though one of you doesn’t have good grades, I would do anything for them.  If there was any chance that this book could tap into that bond between father and son, then it was absolutely worth a shot.  The second was to potentially ignite something within oneself to identify people in a poverty-stricken situation and to lend a hand or some cash to ease what must be the unbearable stress of modern poverty.  Unfortunately, the book was only 1 for 2.  More to follow on the one.

Right out of the box there were some criticisms that this was not literature but rather an opportunity for social commentary.  A fictional Ford F150 Hillbilly Elegy.  There was some criticism around there being only one character of note, Henry.  Michelle was universally disliked, and Papa’s imprint on Henry was heftier than Papa himself.  Flamboyant Al was solid in his scenes, but Junior, who could have really impacted this book, was reduced to a kid complaining about a stomachache.  Papa did add element of race to the book, but interestingly it was subtle and well done rather than today’s ubiquitous in your face approach.  In a real twist, Henry’s father was cancelled by today’s typical college jack ass, but he doesn’t complain, nor does Henry.  Although that and the racial angle does linger ever so slightly in Henry’s persona where you get the vibe that he doesn’t feel he’s worthy of anything good.  This despite being the son of two college professors.  The insecurity may also come from the fact that he never gets a break.  Whatever the circumstance, he gets the bad luck bonus plan.  Taking an Advil from Walmart becomes a slam your head on the hood event.  Henry’s atrocious luck was relentless.

The book did take us down some unusual paths.  We have lawyers in the group who looked up and discussed the applicability of inherited debt and in what jurisdictions that was a real issue.  We also did not realize that ex-cons are not eligible for welfare or food stamps, which sounds insane because no doubt they are broke once they come out of the slammer.  The most surprising topic was when the question was raised have you ever been poor?  You would have expected crickets from these Masters of the Universe, but that wasn’t the case…and we will leave it at that.

Did Abundance ignite a sense of generosity?  On behalf of this humble scribe, I submit yes.  I was selling one of my sons’ tricked out bicycles when I received the call from a guy in Bridgeport.  He worked at a car wash in The Hollow (a.k.a., the ghetto) and his truck had been stolen, so he wanted to bike to get to work.  I loaded the bike up and drove it to him because he had no wheels and was going to give it to him for free, but the car wash turned out to be closed and the dude was sending me text breadcrumbs taking me deeper and deeper into the hood.  It felt squirrely to begin with, and now my 1970s Brooklyn street smarts said tap out.  I did, but the thought counts since I’m doing the counting. 

Now a word about our author.  Jakob Guanzon is an awesome dude.  15-minutes before our meeting, which we Zoomed for convenience not COVID, we found the author’s web page.  We shot him an invite, which of course we considered a no-hoper.  However, about 10 minutes after the meeting was over, Jakob Guanzon was in the meeting waiting room.  Let’s just say we all have a new favorite author.  Obviously going forward buy all his books (https://www.jakobguanzon.com/publications) so he can continue to put bread or caviar on the table, and once you’re done reading those, consider that lately he’s a big fan of Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish.  No doubt we will be reading that one.  Thank you Jakob from your newest fanboys.

Beloved

Our next book selected was Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  I have to say this humble scribe was a little surprised at the selection, as all I knew about it was that Oprah Winfrey starred in a movie based on the book.  So, a man’s book club is going to read a book heavily associated with the leader of the opposite sex?  Had many women’s book clubs read Andrew Dice Clay’s important work The Filthy Truth?  There’s no way to tell, but no matter, the die had been cast.

Because of the cultural weight of the author and her works, had everyone genuflected and gushed, would anyone be surprised?  But being who we are, i.e., straight shooters, the reviews were mixed.  Some found it a real tough read, bordering on a slog, while others compared it to an epic poem, with many tracts of lyrical writing.  Some thought the periodic reveals via the recount of a character’s memory to be clever, while others found it frustrating.  Regardless of what folks thought of the structure or language, the story certainly opens your eyes to the absolute chaos enslaved or recently enslaved people endured.  Imagine a parent, child, sibling, friend, lover, or some other foundational person in your life is there for you and then poof!  They’re gone.  Sold off.  Traded.  Like Thanos snapped his fingers and they are a memory.  You will never see or hear from them again.  Somewhere out there is your father, your daughter, your wife, whatever.  Regardless of how cruel or not so cruel a master you’ve been dealt, that’s a powerful reason to run.  Screw freedom…I just want to see my kid!  That’s hard to think about that for more than 8-seconds, but less than 200-years ago it was pretty standard in some parts of our country and the world (one Brother gave us a little history lesson on slavery in South America.)

If you know nothing about Beloved, you will be in for a surprise, e.g., it’s quite the unique ghost story, and you will get a hint of what it was like to be freed black person shortly after emancipation.  It’s often fitting to end the review by saying enjoy, but that probably isn’t going to happen.  Lots of discussion points though, so underline and take notes.

Silence

Before saying anything about this book something has to be said about the book cover.  While many editions of this novel have gorgeous covers, the one by Yuko Shimizu (see, above) is an absolute masterpiece.  If this were hanging on the walls of the Hermitage or the Met, one would likely stop and stare at it for five minutes.  Never mind that it captures the essence of this book perfectly.  Bravo.

Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the story of three young Portuguese Jesuits, who upon hearing that their mentor apostatized, travel to Japan to investigate what could have induced him to renounce his faith rather than join the martyrs.  The action takes place shortly after the Shimabara Rebellion which saw the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate make increased efforts to eradicate Christianity from Japan.  With the Church being chased out of Japan years prior, the priests are also hoping to be the shepherds who return to tend an unattended flock.  It’s an arduous journey from Portugal and along the way one of the priests falls ill and is left at Macau.  We mention this because the events and characters in this novel are based on real people.

Fathers Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe make it to Japan and fall in with a Christian community in hiding.  There they are hidden and watch as the authorities martyr any Christians they uncover.  At this point Father Rodrigues, who is the main character and has been continuously contemplating silence of God while his adherents are tortured and killed, must confront his own silence in the midst of the martyrdoms of the local villagers.  As you would expect, with the help of a Judas character, the priests are captured and we lose Father Garrpe in his suicidal attempt to save drowning Christians, leaving only Father Rodrigues for the showdown with the boogeyman in Nagasaki.  This boogeyman, understanding the value of propaganda is completely disinterested in the torture of Christian peasants, but laser focused on getting captured Jesuits to apostatize, so he has developed a near foolproof program to ensure he gets what he wants.

To go any further would be to completely plot bust.  This is a powerful book and credit to Endo (RIP), who’s done a tremendous job here.  Interestingly, the book does intersect with some of our club’s prior reading as it is similar to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and brings in the Dutch experiences of David Mitchell’s The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Silence is a short book worth reading.

In God We Trust – All Others Pay Cash

For the Holidays the Iluminado drank plenty of egg nog and cozied up to Jean Shepherd”s In God We Trust – All Others Pay Cash, which is the book that provided the basis for the movie A Christmas Story.

The movie is just a part of the larger novel which tells the story of an adult Ralphie who returns to his Midwest hometown of Hohman, Indiana from NYC and reminisces with his boyhood chum turned barkeep Flick.  The book is quite the time capsule…Ovaltine, Simonize, Dick Tracy, Lux soap, The Little Orphan Annie Secret Circle, Castro bed, Victrola Turntable, Texaco Fire Chief, Nehi orange soda, the Diners Club card, root beer barrels, Captain Queeg, jawbreakers, the Grasselli Chemical Company and of course the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.  Does a Gen Z’er even know what any of these things are?  True, they don’t care because it has nothing to do with their phone, but getting in touch a little hokum around Christmas would do them good.  How was the book? Honestly, you are better off watching the movie with your family.  You can mention that that several of the chapters were published in another family institution…Playboy Magazine.

Best Books of 2021

Again, we must clarify that these are the most appreciated books mentioned in this blog during the Year of Delta-Omicron (i.e., 2021.)  The books themselves weren’t published during these variants, because then they would be expensive and not available on Thriftbooks.  As you can see below, The Iluminado did not read many books this year.  (Booo!!!) On the plus side however, most of what we read was solid.  The Booby Prize this year goes to Kadare’s The Ghost Rider, which failed to create a spooky Transylvania-esque atmosphere or any characters of interest.

Drum roll.  The accountants from Arthur Andersen have handed over the envelopes, and this year’s winners are:

Gold: Killers of the Flower Moon.  Super surprised to have a work of non-fiction take the cake, but that this book was not a work of fiction was that jarring.  The social media cesspools can numb you to identity group grievances.  They are often used by activists with bad intent to help political extortionists, so one can tend to dismiss all grievances as largely fake and scroll by while the very loud band plays on.  In the case of Native Americans, every October there are lunatics center stage trying to ensconce a narrative that Christopher Columbus was a genocidal madman bent on destroying the no-questions-asked noble civilization he encountered in the New World.  That’s a point of view, not a fact for a serious history book.  I digress, but you can see how in this media hoax-a-day world, one can become a skeptic.  After reading the Killers of the Flower Moon you have to say…dang, some of those Oklahoma pale faces really were SOBs.  The book offers no eye-popping language or quotes, just a telling of ugly scenes of wolves among sheep.

Silver: Shadow of the Wind.  This one earns a silver for the group’s universal enthusiasm for the characters and its recreation of Barcelona in print.  Not to plot bust but working an angle other than incest to doom the lovers would have been more tasteful and appreciated, but few books have produced so many mid-read text messages into our group chat extolling a book’s engagement.  Carlos Zafon tells a heck of a story.

Bronze: The Thing About December.  Speaking of text messages, Donal Ryan is a remarkable writer.  Here’s a quick blurb “wasn’t it an awful dangerous thing, a text message, because once you pressed that little send button, that was it. Like pulling a trigger” I think one of the attorneys in our little group summed a reader’s reaction to this book best in that he wanted to break into this book and give Johnsey a shake, a hug and legal advice.  By shake, he doesn’t mean a massage parlor Happy Ending and I assume he meant this would all be pro bono.  This is an unforgettable book about the loneliest chap you’ll ever meet.  

We’d call it a slow, but good reading year.  Only the one clunker mentioned above.  As always, Happy Festivus and if you want to read slightly more detailed reviews on any of books we’ve read through the years, scroll down.

Blood Meridian

No, we didn’t read it this year.  I’m sure everyone would re-read it in a heartbeat, but I was just looking at the blog for books that were read (not by you Nick) but have no commentary here.  We missed a few, but Blood Meridian was a momentous omission.  I won’t rehash the discussion of the book because it was my inaugural book as an Iluminado, and hence the omission by this humble scribe, plus it was years ago.  I remember it well…I had been tricked into reading the book as the cost of admission into an exclusive beer swap.  When I arrived, there was good beer and Tostitos to dip in Beluga caviar in honor of those who had been scalped, but then a thoughtful discussion of the book broke out.  It was impossible to grab all of the beer and run, so I sat and listened.  Our host was Jay, a spry 184-year old and had ridden with the Glanton Gang because jazzercise hadn’t been invented yet, but bailed before their disastrous foray into the ferry business.

There is a hundred things to discuss about Blood Meridian, a masterpiece, and they all were that night, but thinking back it’s all a whirl.  All you need to know is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etOkZ6YBAZY Now read the book.

So Long. See You Tomorrow

There is a limit, surely, as to what one can demand of one’s adolescent self.  This sentiment is the driver of William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long. See You Tomorrow.  The narrator, now an old man, ruminates about the time he failed a teenage friend in a time of need.  He also imagines the unknown details of the dissolution of his friend’s family.

While playing after hours on a construction site, the narrator, a friendless nerd in a central Illinois small town, meets a local farm boy named Cletus Smith.  They hit it off famously.  One day its suppertime and the boys part saying “So long” and “See you tomorrow.”  However, by the next morning Cletus’s father has shot a neighboring farmer, who had been having an affair with his wife.  Clarence Smith’s wife was divorcing him, and her attorney had negotiated crushing terms where he lost his farm and was faced with a humiliating future.  Add to this that fact that the philandering neighbor he shot had been his best friend.  There wasn’t much to live for, so avenged, Clarence shoots himself.  With a scandal of this magnitude, Cletus’s mother can no longer continue in that small town.  She flees with Cletus and the boys don’t see each other again.

Years later the narrator is enrolled in a high school in Chicago.  As he hurries to a class on the opposite end of this gargantuan school with over 3,000-students, he passes Cletus Smith.  Going in opposite directions, neither says a word to the other.  He never sees Cletus at that school again.  (Evidently, Mrs. Smith isn’t taking any chances.)  Its his failure to reach out to Cletus that day that pains the narrator in his later years.

This is a short, well written book with several powerful passages that make it a must read.  No excuses…read it.

The Mark and the Void

The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s satirical look at the banking scandals of the not too distant past.  Set in the Dublin office of the Bank of Torabundo (BoT), a bank incorporated somewhere in the South Pacific on an island with an extinct volcano and an extremely benevolent tax climate, it has many industry details that parallel the idiocy of actual banks going bust.  However, thanks to its conservative CEO, BoT has survived the subprime mortgage meltdown, while its larger neighbors in the Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre have become zombie banks, i.e., banks that exist only because the government will or may prop them up with taxpayer funded loans.  Rather than reward their CEO, the bank Directors replace him with a new lead banker who has just led an enormous bank into insolvency.  The reason for the change…no one is crazy enough to do risky financing now, so BoT will make a fortune!  The new CEO establishes BoT’s new motto as Think Counterintuitive! and proceeds to overleverage the bank.

The story’s protagonist is a highly respected analyst named Claude.  While a good banker, Claude’s level-headedness takes a vacation when he hires an obvious conman to be his biographer/life coach.  Of course, hijinks ensue.  While Claude and his office mates make financial decisions that can ruin companies, industries, countries, even their own finances, the biggest decisions of the day are always where to go for lunch or for a few beers after work.  That part of the book reads like nonfiction.

In the end, you will enjoy the cynical look at banking and the characters that work at the bank, but there are many other things going on in the book, and had it been half as long, it would have been twice as clever.  Neither a BUY or a SELL, this one is a HOLD.

Ghost Story

For Halloween the Iluminado read a book that Stephen King rated as one of the scariest ever, Peter Straub’s 1979 trailblazer Ghost Story.  It was a surprising read in that no one found it particularly scary, but everyone thought this author from a strange genre could really write.

First off, as a non-horror reader why is it so difficult to find a ghost story?  There is always something wacky going on like interdimensional stuff or mental illness, but rarely a straight-up ghost.  Not to tip anything, but the book was confusing and there was nothing resembling Casper involved here.  What was interesting was “The Chowder Society.”  A group of old fellows getting together in each other’s homes on a periodic basis to have a boy’s night out.  More power to that idea.  The idea of reading Ghost Story?  Not a good idea.

The Ghost Rider

This is Ismail Kadare’s take on an Albanian legend where a mystery rider returns a lonesome daughter to her mother.  The rider appears to be one of the girl’s brothers.  This brother, Kostandin, promised his mother that if she is ever lonely in the family home, he would fetch his sister, who married a dignitary from far away Bohemia.  The problem is there was a war in the intervening time since the daughter’s marriage and all of her brothers have been dead for years.

I can’t say my old Albanian grannie with 1-tooth ever told me the original version of this story, or why this story is even interesting, e.g., what a nice boy that Kostandin is, he keeps his promises (or besa, which means oath.)  This version concentrates on the local police chief’s investigation, which runs parallel with the potentially cuckolded husband’s investigation and the Church’s investigation.  After all, you can’t have just anyone come back from the dead.  As the story progresses there’s the hint of incest, an all too convenient patsy and a rousing speech from the chief in the final pages. 

This book was published in 1980, and who of us knows what was going on in Albania then…Communism losing its grip seems likely.  Kadare seems to have a message for Albanians that the time to either stand for truth, or some easier mealy-mouthed untruth is coming.  He has hope his countrymen will stand for the truth when Albania rejoins the community of nations, and that their institutions like the besa is part of his evidence that their salutation will be “we are Albania, this is who we are” and not “we are Albania, who would you like us to be so we fit in.”  Someone more versed in Albanian politics will have to let us know what happened.

Let the Great World Spin

I missed the meeting for this one.  Also didn’t finish the book, which I was enjoying.  Very odd.

How Not to Diet

Yup. Our health nut Brother strikes again! I only read about 100-pages into this tome, and also had to leave the meeting very early in to pick-up kids from their practices.  With this book, Michael Greger, who was Carl Sagan’s roommate at Cornell, has created an encyclopedia of how to eat.  He mentions that he employs a staff to constantly screen research papers and update his offerings on healthy eating.  Clearly, a book based on ever evolving research would be out-of-date right after its printed, so Greger maintains a site called https://nutritionfacts.org to remain current and accessible.  We read another book by a Cornell man, T. Colin Campbell, that aligns with Greger’s thinking that there’s no money in people eating healthy, so there are few cheerleaders for healthy eating, except scammers, and many outlets pimping unhealthy food choices and drugs. 
 
Having missed the meeting, and read ~15% of the book, I later asked those who plowed through it “So what do we/I do?” and the answer wasn’t on the tip of their tongue.  There was a lot of info in this book, but I’m not sure there was a implementable plan.  I traded the book for a six pack of beer, so the plan would have been wasted on me anyway. If you have health issues, you really should pick up a copy or check out Greger’s website. Good luck.

The Shadow of the Wind

This and the next few entries are for books we read earlier this year, so the descriptions will as short as this scribe’s memory.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s bestseller, Shadow of the Wind, was a masterful yarn.  Within a few days of this book’s selection my phone was lighting up with texts saying, “loving this” and “H8 2 put it down but G2G so CU L8R CTPI” from fellow Illuminado.  Zafon created a unique and spellbinding atmosphere in his semi-fictional Barcelona.  This was originally written in Spanish, so the translator deserves credit here as well.

It’s been a while since we read this novel, so all we will (can) say is if you are looking for a page turner with heroes, villains, great names (e.g., Julian Carax), a mystery, a setting in post-civil war Barcelona, plot twists, and puppy love getting punched in the teeth – this book is for you.  It won’t change your philosophy or provide a glimpse of the meaning of life (beyond envy/pity for young people in love), but it will make you want to visit Barcelona, or uncover a forgotten great book.  Both fine things, so give it a read.

L.A. Confidential

We decided to read the basis for the 1997 hit film of the same name, James Ellroy’s 1980 novel L.A. Confidential.  Speaking for myself, I was concerned that since all of us had seen the film, the discussion would principally be a compare and contrast session.  The Illuminado who suggested the book, a legal brief-filing crime fighter by day, assured the group that the takeaway would be Ellroy’s character development.  So game on.

It turned out there were several takeaways.  The character development was admirable, but there really were too many of them.  Some characters seemed important early on where dead ended, and others that seemed to be filler, played an important role in the finale.  Another was aside from characters modeled on real people like Walt Disney and Jack Webb, Ellroy sprinkles real people into the novel e.g., Chief Parker, Micky Cohen, Johnny Stompanato and real events like Bloody Christmas.  We found the old fashion police work to be pretty impressive.  Pulling files, knocking on doors, beating information out of someone who may have it.  Today’s detectives likely just look at your cellphone and that’s all that is needed.  Also of note was Ellory’s use of newspaper articles and LAPD work fitness reports, which was an effective tool for moving the story along.  We have to say, the ending was rushed.  There was a sprawling investigation conducted by the three protagonists, that gets wrapped up at soap opera speed.  It was as if the next page would bring “And then Bud woke up.  It had all been a dream.”

Finally, it’s impossible not to bring the movie into the discussion.  Good book.  Good movie (Ellroy hated it.)  Quite different.

Killers of the Flower Moon

On the recommendation of the newest addition to the Illuminado brotherhood, we turned our attention to a piece of nonfiction, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann.  Typically we focus on books that may refine our philosophy, scratch some armor off the meaning of life or have toilet jokes, but here we have an account of a murder in the Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1900’s.  Sounds humdrum, but it doesn’t take long for that murder to become a few murders, then bloom into a bunch of murders, before it reaches a batsh1t bonkers number of potential murders.

How to start…the Osage were a powerful tribe that lived in the Ohio River valley until the neighborhood got nasty, i.e., the Iroquois showed up.  The Osage moved into some prime real estate in the central US, until Thomas Jefferson made them an offer they couldn’t refuse…give us your 100-million acres, move to a plot in Kansas and you won’t die of lead poisoning.  They moved.  Then white settlers started moving in on their plot.  Then it was fast becoming the settler’s plot and the Osage weren’t welcome.  Then it was off to Indian Territory and land that had near zero agricultural value, which is perfect to keep the white settlers away.  But no buffalo and little cropland meant no easy living for the Osage. Then a funny thing happened, they struck oil.  Enter the oil barons and the formerly destitute Osage County, was home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet.  The Osage were America’s oil sheiks.

Happy ending?  Hardly.  Where there is money with little power or guile, there is mischief.  Enter the con artists, thieves, and worse.  The local whites spin tall tales about millionaire savages who don’t know how to handle their money.  A caring (or complicit) Congress has white guardians appointed to help the Osage manage their wealth.  From that point on, all sorts of criminality abounds.  Some of it simple grift, some of it you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.  An absolute disgrace.

With local law enforcement compromised, J. Edgar Hoover and his fledgling FBI then enter the book.  The author focusses on how a straight-shooting lawman, Tom White, builds a case against the local Boss Hogg, William Hale. This is a quick and interesting book.  Also, a tough book, as if you, are like we…are Whitey.  You will discover what evil lurks in men’s souls when they aren’t posing for Sunday morning pictures with their wife and daughter and wonder why the Osage didn’t bury the hatchet in these mother-fletchers.

The Thing About December

You might say its back to Donal Ryan or you might say its back to a book with December in the title or you might say get on with it.  Here goes…  This is a discussion book, so if you’re in a book club, it merits being on your list.  Ryan leaves a lot for the reader to interpret and debate, so you won’t be stuck after the “What did everyone think of the book?” preliminaries.

In the shortest of shorts, the book is about an Irish lad, Johnsey, who is orphaned way too young (for him especially) …in his early twenties.  That’s awful, but it is compounded by the fact that Johnsey’s parents sheltered him or he has no executive abilities (debate point), and therefore for the first time, he has to deal with problems on his own.  Life in rural Ireland should be lovely, but in this Irish town Johnsey has been red meat for the town bullies for years.  A miscreant from the nearby city takes the bullying to a level even the local tormenters find squeamish and Johnsey ends up battered and temporarily blinded in the hospital. Without the prejudgment of being the local gom (i.e., fool), Johnsie actually makes two friends, Mumbly Dave and Siobhan.

When he regains his sight, Johnsey has to leave his hospital room sanctuary and return to his lonely farm.  Only his lonely farm is now worth $20M due to some rezoning and anticipated foreign investment.  Johnsey, whose family has lived there for ages, has no intention or clue how to sell the farm.  The local muckedy-mucks want Johnsey out and engineer news stories and gossip to ensure he must sell.  Already canceled and securely in the lifelong grip of inertia, Johnsey appears a hardball negotiator determined to keep his interests ahead of his neighbors and does nothing.  BTW – a few of the neighbors have already tried to rip him off. Mumbly Dave and Siobhan try to help him or themselves (debate point), but the situation spirals out of control in the final pages leading to a debate point ending.

This is a slim book in which Donal Ryan absolutely nails the inner voice of a young fellow with no self-esteem.  You will recognize these thoughts. Also and unfortunately, he nails the effects of the brutal daily harassment of a boy descended from a long line of men’s men via a description that borders on palpability.  Its absolutely heartbreaking in stretches.  That said, the book is also told in good humor, with hilarious scenes, dialogue and observations.  It’s well worth reading…Bejaysus!!!

The Best Books of 2020

As always, we must clarify that these are the most appreciated books mentioned in this blog during SARS-CoV-2, err…2020.  The books themselves weren’t published in 2020, because then they would be expensive and not on Thriftbooks.  The happy news is there were very few clunkers this year.  We’d say there were four weaker books, although you would have treasured The Tree of the Toraja if you had terminal cancer.  (Yes, that remark won’t age well.)  Our biggest stinker, You Should Have Left, would have been amazing on mushrooms, but hindsight is 20/20, so it sucked.   Now down to business.

Drum roll.  The accountants from Arthur Andersen have handed over the envelopes, and the 2020 winners are:

Gold: A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles) – Imagine being stuck in the same few rooms…day in, day out?  Well Count Rostov shows you how to make lemonade out of lemons in this 2020 comfort book.  He also shows you how to behave in a manner that does credit to you and your upbringing.  During the lockdown we can all use a new friend in our lives to fill gaps.  The Count can be that friend for 2-weeks or so.  An important book in these times.

Silver: The Plot Against America (Philip Roth) – Half of you may think since this book was originally written by a Democrat for Democrats, and since it has been extrapolated into pre-11/3/20 “Fake News” it should be avoided.  Understandable, but a big mistake.  This story and the family it depicts are wonderful.  Get out of your safe space and read it.  Its fiction…although you may hit on some thought provoking google searches on Lucky Lindy after.

Bronze: Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) – Massive surprise.  Frankenstein has been so bastardized, the work of genius we encountered was unrecognizable from the commercial hot mess Frankenstein has become.  The book’s author, publisher and legal rights are fainter dust than Dr. Frankenstein himself.  You have to be able to get this for free on Project Gutenberg or some such website.  Or get it for $1 somewhere.  If you want to admire a story that asks important questions via immaculate writing from the most well-known, unlikely source, Frankenstein is you man…book.

It was a good reading year.  While the ups weren’t very high, i.e., a lot of our previous Medal winners are better that A Gentleman in Moscow, the lows weren’t very low, i.e., only one book that went straight into the recycling bin.  Big upps for The Overstory, and The Power and The Glory, who would have garnered wildcard berths, but are likely consulting with their attorney for just missing an important literary medal.

As always, may St. Francis de Sales, the patron Saint of writers keep smiling and if you want to read slightly more detailed reviews on any of these, click Home & scroll down.  Happy Holidays.

All The Pretty Horses

Let’s end 2020 on a cheery note…enter Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy cheery?  Nope, but the genesis of this blog started while discussing Blood Meridian, so this was a significant pick by Brother Dave B. (we have multiple Daves.)

If you distilled the early Zoomed discussion down, the distillate would be a recurring acknowledgement of the book’s authenticity.  Had McCarthy ridden these trails, been in Mexican prisons and broken wild horses?  Probably not.  Despite that, he is the link to those who have.  Maybe these particulars are in Louis Lamour and others in the Western genre, but McCarthy has won all the big prizes and is read internationally, consequently his account will be immortal.

Then, we asked what makes this a great book for you?  The answers were the descriptive writing, the natural landscape, the budding romance and the effortless development of the main characters.  This is how horses are broke.  This is what crossing the Sierra del Carmen is like.  When Rawlins asks, “Did you see that little darlin?” you know why John Grady can’t answer and early on, without ever saying “Rawlins is my best buddy, I’d go through a wall for him” that is established immediately via their dialogue.

We spent time on Blevins.  He was some character, but why exactly did McCormac insert him?  To tease out that John Grady was the leader?  Rawlins wanted to ditch Blevins, but John Grady wouldn’t allow it.   To make Rawlins more endearing?  It was Rawlins who was shaken after Blevins does come back out of those ebony woods with the Captain.  We couldn’t figure out exactly why the Blevins character was developed.

While everyone enjoyed the book, the scene where John Grady seeks absolution for killing the cuchilero from the judge seemed a bit ridiculous.  Perez hired the guy to do John Grady in, why give him a second thought?  A small criticism among heaps of praise.  Good book…but supposedly a sh1t movie.  Oh well.  That’s a wrap tortilla for 2020.

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein.  You think you know the fellow and his story…but do you?  He didn’t have a Bride, a Son, a Weenie or a strawberry breakfast cereal.  He didn’t meet Abbott & Costello or attend the Monster Mash.  Remarkably, he is the creation of a teenage girl.  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later to become Mary Shelley. She developed this tale to win a horror story challenge with the celebrated Lord Byron.  While Byron is an immortal, are any of his works as well-known as Frankenstein?  No, but on that score Hollywood better hope Victor doesn’t reanimate Mary Shelley, as they have turned her masterpiece into a caricature.

Frankenstein is a marvelous work of literary fiction.  The writing is impeccable.  The tale asks meaningful questions about good, evil, loneliness and responsibility.  Victor Frankenstein creates an Adam and abandons him.  No guidance, no fellowship and no Eve.  In return the creature tries to extort what he lacks from Victor.  Fearful of creating a new race at odds with mankind, Victor refuses and the creature exacts a heavy toll.  The remainder of the book is Victor trying to remedy the what he considers a creation of his intellectual folly.

This is a brilliant story, abound with points to discuss and reflect upon.  Don’t wait until Halloween to read it.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This one, by Olga Tokarczuk, is a whodunnit narrated by a quirky old lady, Janina Duszejko.  The old girl, a retired bridge engineer, lives in a small Polish town on the Czech border and refers to her acquaintances throughout the story by the covert nicknames she has bestowed on them, e.g., Bigfoot, Dizzy, Oddball.  The unexplained death of her neighbor Bigfoot soon becomes a series of potential unexplained killings, yet the local police haven’t taken much of an interest.  Never fear, Janina is on the case.

Janina arrives at an interesting revenge theory as to who is committing the killings, but it is bonkers.  The reader starts to wonder if her take on events is accurate.  After all, do you know many (any?) civil engineers who believed in astrology like Janina does?  Something is off.

In the end, it is a revenge story, just not the one Janina has us looking for.  Whether you like this book depends how you warm up to Janina.  The book was solid, not spectacular.

The Overstory

Richard Powers is brilliant, but boy does he have his critics.  As the author of The Overstory, he can show them his Pulitzer Prize for Literature and they can show him…some cool dance moves, a picture of their cat, their 3^rd COVID beard, whatever.  Was the book too long?  Probably.  Does the reader get hit over the head a lot for not doing enough for the environment?  Sure.  Was there any reason for the author to hint that Olivia Vandergriff could be the daughter of the childless Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly?  I can’t see why.  What was the point of Neelay and why in heavens name bring up his sexuality?  Damned if I know.  There surely are nits to pick here.

But think of how you felt as you read the Roots stories.  They were wonderful, particularly the Hoels and the American Chesnut.  Young Mimi and Patricia and their bonds with their fathers were beautifully written.  What about when Douggie is falling from the sky and Powers describes how below him, 300-years earlier, a pollen coated wasp crawled into a fig to lay its eggs and that was the genesis of a banyan with 300-main trunks and 2,000-minor ones.  Would you like to know what Mimas looked like?  What is Dendrology?  Dutch Elm Disease?  Yggdrasil?  Chances are, now you know.

The point is, you are better off for having read the book.  You likely can tell beech bark from birch.  Are the trees on your street maple, oak or sycamore?  You were likely moved to figure it out.  You are woke.  Take The Overstory in moderation though, e.g., you don’t have to commit suicide to protect a tree, just start noticing them.  Cut away the vines holding a tree down.  Learn what an Asian Longhorned Beetle and an Emerald Ash Borer look like.  Check out the Arbor Day Foundation website.  Wake up.

A Gentleman in Moscow

We read this one a long time ago…my guess is it was early this year, not late last year.  The details are dim, and the book was given away early in the lockdown, but who can ever forget Count Rostov?  Amor Towles has created one of most delightful characters in print.  Each time I picked up the book, I felt I was joining my old friend at Moscow’s Metropol Hotel for a drink.  Informed, charming, compassionate…this “Nonperson” as the callous Soviet authorities called him, serves his life sentence of house arrest while adding to the ambiance of his luxury prison.  We all felt similarly.  Not to love the Count would be to have no heart, no grace, no optimism.

His moments are brilliant.  During his trial, at which the assumed outcome is he will be put against the nearest wall and shot, a Commissar judge disparages his aristocratic lifestyle and the Count absurdly demands satisfaction on the field of honor.  When he is considering ending his own life, the Count meets an old beekeeper who shows him that a bee’s honey carries the fragrance of the place where it has been collecting.  Then the bees return with the apple-scented honey of his childhood home near Nizhny Novgorod.  This miracle restores the Count’s will to carry on. 

Eventually the Count relates a cautionary tale born of his own hubris.  As a young man he arrives at a party for a princess and finds a hussar who slighted him somehow (I forget how…sorry) successfully making time with the princess.  The Count, who has a rap that would make an ice princess swoon, cockblocks the guy.  Touché.  Sometime later the Count returns to his parent’s home to meet his beloved sister’s fiancé.  You guessed it, the hussar, who lets the Count know he’s only there to smash his sister’s heart as revenge.  The Count deals with this scoundrel immediately and forcefully, but the damage is done, and he must spend some time in a Parisian exile to avoid any legal entanglements.  During this exile, his sister dies of fever, thus sealing the hardest lesson he has ever learned.

Because the action is limited to the hotel, we can see why an impatient reader is not a suitable audience for A Gentleman in Moscow, but if you have found this page, you have nothing to worry about.  Enjoy the book.

Tenth of December

I think we discussed the Tenth of December on the Tenth of September, so these recollections will be rusty, but hopefully trusty.  The consensus was the immediate takeaway on George Saunders writing is its immediacy.  First story, first page, the reader is in Alison Pope’s quirky daydream.  Then neighbor Kyle Boot’s OCD-governed existence.  Then the brute trying to abduct Alison.  In ~20-pages, we know all about their family life and acquaintances.  What other writer pulls that off with such consistency?  The collection’s second story is 2-pages long and in that space, you become attached to a crazy Dad’s antics concerning a metal pole.  I honestly was getting a little misty when I found out that a young couple bought the recently deceased Dad’s house, yanked out the pole and put it in the trash for pick-up day.  2-Pages!!!  Why would a reader care?  Because this author knows what he is doing.

He does it in eight other stories.  Soccer mom meets white trash mom, pharmaceutical research sans ethics, a motivational memo from a Sales Director who’s lost it, a small businessman with business envy, Sci-fi status symbols, and a few others you can investigate.  Funny, sad, weird, provocative…typical George Saunders.

In the Skin of a Lion

Yes, its been a while.  Writer’s block?  COVID induced depression?  Daytime drinking?  Nah, just laziness.  Once again, the Illuminado Zoomed and soared with a virtual discussion of a Michael Ondaatje a pre-English Patient novel.  I confess this book was a tad hard to follow.  Time could skip many years at the turn of a page, and it wasn’t immediately clear who the protagonist would be, so in my mind, whether this book would be voted as a YEA or a NAY was an open question.

The answer was YEA, although nearly everyone was certain that the well-drawn Nicholas Temelcoff was going to be the book’s protagonist, so we were surprised and disappointed when a grown-up Patrick Lewis parachuted in the lead role.  Brother Dan (was it him?  Zoom beers!) felt the first few pages of the book, which were about Patrick’s boyhood, put a stake in the ground for Patrick as the protagonist, particularly due to a show-stopper scene of immigrant Finn lumberjacks holding burning cattails while night skating on a frozen pond.  After we acknowledged that lead role twist, Brother Nick was the first to pipe up (yup, he read this one), that he was impressed with how sensual the writing was.  The attention to colors, touch and smells resonated with him.  Whether “it” moved during the love scenes he didn’t say, but even this battle-hardened critic was knocked out of a stupor by Clara’s declaration “He was the first to bugger me” on page 71.  I immediately looked up Canadian millionaire, Ambrose Small, who’s real life arc matched the one in the book.  Wikipedia could not corroborate the buggering.

An advantage to having Patrick as the protagonist was that, in a story replete with immigrants, a native-born orphan is a natural ally and welcome.  Patrick moves easily within the immigrant communities of Toronto, unlike his youth when he and his father stayed distanced from Finn lumberjacks.  In the end, Patrick does elicit sympathy from an unlikely source, R.C. Harris, Toronto’s Public Works Commissioner, who instead of shooting Patrick, now a barely-explicable violent Marxist, tucks him into bed and calls off the police.  Patrick is left to either head north in search of a buggering with Clara, or to pull a Humbert Humbert with Hana.  Read The English Patient to find out.

While everyone enjoyed the writing, history and geography lesson (Canada is quite near…who knew!), Patrick was meh.

The Power and the Glory

With the aid of Zoom, next up for dissection was Graham Greene’s 1940 masterpiece, The Power and the Glory. As grown men can be little be-otches, the first order of business for some was to complain about the Audible/Hoopla narration. To borrow a quote from The Natural (movie), it was “as dry as your Grandpappy’ s scalp.” Those who listened doubly regretted it, as this a novel that demands underlining.

The Whiskey Priest and the Lieutenant. The Power and the Glory…or do we have that backwards? Both are imperfect in their official roles, but the Whiskey Priest is the star of the show for discussion purposes. His shortcomings were numerous and certainly acknowledged as he confesses them remorsefully to the reader and is concerned as to the example he’s set among the peasants. His principal virtue, which he himself does not acknowledge, is that he tends to his flock. Collectively the Illuminado loaded both sides of the scale and found that the priest was not a bad man. Despite his vices, with few exceptions (e.g., not hearing the confession of that lady holy roller, drinking all the wine), he endeavors to serve the spiritual needs of the Catholics in his state while under a death warrant.

As some stripe of socialist, the Lieutenant was likely an automatic boogieman from 1940 to 1970, but Greene humanizes him with a genuine drive to provide for the peasants. The suggested childhood trauma at the hands of the clergy makes the Lieutenant’s hostility to the them a bit more understandable in 2020. Even if we are projecting, the Lieutenant believes the Church has neglected the corporal needs of the poor. We did debate whether the Lieutenant’s kindness to the priest in the final pages was organic or to absolve the state of the priest’s pending martyrdom. (Plot Busted!) There really is no way of telling as the Lieutenant had been kind to the incognito priest prior and is smart enough to resist making a martyr.

We then ran through the supporting cast and a few stuck out. There was confusion over who in the Fellows family had died, the sickly mother or the caring daughter. We sorted it…the daughter. (Not a plot buster. Relax.) The Mestizo as Judas plays his part, albeit in time. The American, a Barabbas. Padre Joe, who the state cleverly forces to get married, but why does he not hear the priest’s final confession?

It’s a book some us read in high school and naturally hated it. However, it deserves its great book status, and in our dotage, we now know it’s a brilliant discussion book. Book clubs pounce!

The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Sebald is a lot like Bill Bryson…put him in a place or hand him something and he will tell you where it has popped up in history. Significant, yet gone history. Granted, there is a lot of history worldwide and no one can know it all (sorry Know-It-Alls), but with history being rewritten in 2020, you better get it while its real. Warts and all.

Sebald, a German transplant in England, embarks on a walking tour of the Suffolk coast. The area, in its present state is considered to be run down and desolate, yet his itinerary and focus on past glory will have you considering following in his footsteps, so long as you can access Wikipedia. You’ll be looking up Thomas Browne, Lowestoft, the American fighter pilots who crashed near Somerleyton Hall, herring stock at the Dogger Bank, Major George Wyndhan Le Strange, Tlon, the Battle of Sole Bay, Jasenovac, Roger Casement, Joseph Conrad’s family history and travels, Tz’u-hia, early Dunwich, Algernon Swinburne, Edward FitzGerald, mysterious Shingle Street, Ordfordness, Thomas Abram’s model of the Temple of Jerusalem, tree diseases, European silk production and more.

This is a 296-page travelogue that will require you to read a bit to catch-up (sorry again Know-It-Alls.) You decide how much. For example, there is a story of young love between a rector’s daughter and a French exile. The French exile turns out to be Francois-René de Chateaubriand. Should you read the 6,000+ page Memoires d’Outre-Tombe to enhance Rings of Saturn? Your call.

This is an occasionally tedious, but amazing book. There is a lot to be learned from W.G. Sebald’s approach to travel. Before you go somewhere, do your homework. For example, if you pick someone up at JFK or LaGuardia and they are starving, the restaurant in Queens you stop at maybe the place where Donald Trump hired Andrew Cuomo to greenlight a new football stadium in Queens for the USFL Generals. You never know.

From a Low and Quiet Sea

A 181-page book by Donal Ryan that you’d expect to polish off in a few sittings. Fat chance. This book is dense with tracts of powerful writing which act as literary speed bumps, forcing you to dine rather than devour. Critics have intimated that the book is dull…so go read an effing comic book you dopes!!!

The book was three short stories that the dust-cover plot busted by tipping us off that the stories would intersect. A Syrian(?) doctor trying to save his moderately observant family from religious zealots. A fatherless lad, with a limited future, madly in love with the lass who dumped him. A local mover & shaker coming from a tragic upbringing goes too far. Where will these stories intersect? There are no clues until its laid out in the last few pages. Not quite M. Night Shyamalan, but it still qualifies as a reveal. Nothing to analyze, just a quiet book well worth reading.

Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

The Autophagy book went over so well, i.e., this humble scribe and other Illuminado dropped a few lbs, that T. Colin Campbell’s book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition was on the menu this meeting. Dr. Campbell considers himself a man screaming in the wilderness “Eat a Whole Food, Plant Based (WFPB) diet if you want to live!” You may think that’s nuts, he’s nuts, deez nuts, but by the end of the book you’ll understand why he is screaming and a bit paranoid. BTW, he approves of you eating some nuts.

The book is in 4-Parts, but there is really 2-Parts. In the first part Campbell describes astonishing data that a WFPD diet not only provides enough nutrition in that absence of animal protein, but prevents and even arrests cancer. Un-effing believable…who is this miracle worker and why hasn’t anyone heard of him? The second part explains why you’ve never heard of him. The medical community, Big Pharma, your favorite disease society…none of them benefit from healthy people. A WFPB diet produces healthy people. There is a lot of money in disease management. Another phenomenon holding the WFPB diet back is the granular studies and follow-up quick fixes that miss the big picture, e.g., vitamin A is good for you and found in carrots, but who has time to eat a carrot? Jam the vitamin A in a pill. Wrong. Carrots have a lot more going for them than vitamin A…just eat the damn carrot.

A knock on the book was it was missing recommendations on what to do to transition to a WFPB diet. Buy carrots and other produce and just start eating them raw? What about the rest of the family? The kids might go on a hunger strike. There was agreement that widespread adoption of the WFPB diet would result in longer healthier lives, but society would not be able to align behind it. Lack of access to whole food, addiction to salt/fat/sugar, doctors incentivised to prescribe pharmaceuticals, and a host of other entrenched roadblocks are too much to overcome.

Although this humble scribe put on a bunch of weight supporting local BBQ and Mexican restaurants during the blasted COVID-19 lockdown, Whole is well worth reading. Click the link below for a preview:

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The Old Woman and the River

Ismail Fahd Ismail’s tale of an old Iraqi woman who returns to her village of Sabiliyat during the Iran-Iraq War. The village is occupied by Iraqi soldiers and subject to periodic Iranian shelling, but the old woman is carrying the bones of her husband who she claims cannot rest until he is returned home. The local landscape has taken beating with the bombardments and the damming up of offshoots from the Shatt al-Arab River. Out of respect for the burial rights of her husband, the soldiers allow her to stay for 10-days, then she must leave for her own safety. Within those 10-days she begins repairs on the buildings and brings water back to the town thereby reviving local flora and wildlife. When the Iranians knock out the Iraqi’s supply line, the only company not begging for supplies is the one at Sabiliyat. The men subsist, under the old lady’s guidance, who in turn is relying on guidance from her dead husband via dreams, on fish from the river, local stores and plantings. Headquarters commends the Sabiliyat company and the old lady can stay on and continue with her projects, this time officially supported by the soldiers.

There is more to it then that, but we’ll leave it here. The writing was a bit bland and the story dull, but you are left with a heartwarming smile on your face when you finish. Your call as to whether to read it.

The Tree of the Toraja

Phillippe Claudel…we were awestruck by his novel Brodeck. Can he wow us again with The Tree of the Toraja? Unfortunately, no. The most fascinating passage in this book occurs in the first 3-pages. When and infant dies among the Toraja of Sulawesi, it is placed in a cavity of a ceremonial tree and over time the tree engulfs the child and takes it to the heavens as it grows. Great start. The next 155-pages are about the narrator’s reflections on mortality after learning that his great friend has, then succumbs to an aggressive cancer. Of course the book is beautifully written and may resonate powerfully with some, but it can’t hold a match to Brodeck on approachability. Try a different Claudel novel.

Fox 8

Dis slim buk was ritten by Fox 8. He’s sory if some wurds are speld rong because he leard the Yuman talk by listening to a momma Yuman reed to her cubs. Fox 8 is open minded and wants to get along with the Yumans, but then they built a Mawl and rekked his group’s wuds. Plus, without the trees the dirt ran into the river and now all the fish are ded. There is no more fud. Then with no eksplanashun, too construcshun wurkers killed his frend Fox 7. And they wer laffing about it. Fox 8 woslike, I’m outta here.

Cute story by George Saunders, but the book/pamphlet is $17. You can get a bottle of Jameson’s for that instead.

Beartown

With the help of everyone’s new best friend, the Zoom app, the technically slick Illuminado (except Nick who was probably stuck in traffic on the deserted Merritt Parkway) discussed Fredrik Backman’s novel Beartown. Beartown…in short imagine Friday Night Lights on skates. Like FNL, the townsfolk’s feeling of self-worth is tied to the success its Junior hockey team. Deep in the woods and under the direction of its returning NHL hero, Peter Andersson, the Beartown Juniors are pitted in Sweden’s national semi-finals against nearby big town Hed.

Beartown is led by an elite sharpshooter, Kevin, and his hard-nosed wingman Benji. Sort of a Mike Bossy – Clark Gilles arrangement, but instead of Bryan Trottier, Beartown has the fairly useless William Lyt on the 1st line. Beartown’s Chamber of Commerce types are banking on the title to lure Sweden’s national hockey board to build its training facility in Beartown. A prize like that will bring other businesses to town. With a lot on the line, the brain trust breaks its policy and promotes Amat from its 15’s to its Juniors (minimum age 16.) Amat, a refugee from the Middle East, is a complete nonentity to the team until he sacrifices himself in team hazing and, in the semis to push the team forward. After the semi-final win (Shaddup! You knew they would win) the team has a blowout party at the house of Kevin’s absentee parents. Something happens there that incinerates everyone’s best laid plans.

At the Zoom meeting the consensus was, while there wasn’t much to underline, there’s a lot to chew on. Beartown is a character driven book. It had heroes and after the semis, villains. A new Illumindo made a correct observation that Beartown itself is a character deserved similar analysis. A question that every reader will have, and we tussled with, was if a hundred Kroner bet wasn’t made at the party, would Beartown have remained on the track to success?

Beartown was a good read. You don’t need to know anything about hockey.

Autophagy

llluminado come from all walks. Commercial, Legal, Scientific, Academic and Medical. We had a book pick from our medical expert, Autophagy by Serena Baker. This slim volume was chosen so as not to bog anyone down in medical mumbo-jumbo, but just to introduce the concept. Today autophagy has been marketed to the masses as the 16/8 Diet. Fast for 16-hours, eat for 8 and lose weight. However, the intermittent fasting used to induce autophagy is more about cell health. The benefits of cell health go beyond weight loss, the biggie being cancer and other disease prevention. Autophagy a not a silver bullet. You must take other steps in conjunction with fasting to maximize benefits, but as an enticing incentive to check it out, those of us that played along with the book lost about 10-lbs each with minimal sacrifice.

Look Who’s Back

Timur Vermes decides to touch the 3rd rail in this satire starring Rip Van Hitler, who wakes up in modern times on the site of the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin. Having Hitler as your protagonist is definitely dicey, but it works here. His take on the voice of smaller nations in the European Union, the “Internetwork’s” potential as a propaganda tool and dog-walkers picking up poop are a hoot, but his more serious case for an unnuanced leader who doesn’t tap dance around his or her (Hitler just laughed!) foes is rather persuasive. Some of his supporting arguments aren’t the best, e.g., when you are beating a communist, you’d better be wearing your swastika so he knows damn well why he’s being beaten, but say what you will…Hitler got results. When was the last time a nation was fully behind its elected Leader? Sorry North Korea, you don’t count. Vermes reenactment of Hitler’s voice makes this book worth reading, but be warned, if you expect Hitler to have mellowed with time, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. He’s Hitler after all.

Bad Blood

Subtitled Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, this page-turner is John Carreyou’s expose of Elizabeth Holmes’s start-up Theranos. If you are not familiar with the tale, an ethically nimble kid, Holmes, plays the Tulipomania of venture capitalists, corporate fear of missing the next big thing, and tech workers willingness to slave to be set for life like a maestro to create a 9-billion dollar medical equipment company based on an idea, a black box and her fondness for dressing like Steve Jobs.

With an All-Star board, A-list investors and her own allure of hyper-competency, few questions are asked, and even fewer answered until its clear the Empress has no clothes. Besides the story, it’s interesting how fate makes impossible intersections between some of the characters, both fringe and main. You also will be surprised to learn that the esteemed lawyer David Boies may be America’s sleaziest. You’d Better Call Saul instead. Watch master diplomat George Schultz choose farce over family as he ditches his grandson in favor of Holmes. Thanks Grandpa!

But wait…there’s more!!! The most interesting person in the story may be Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Not only is he the world’s worst manager and a walking caricature, but he’s also Holmes’s paramour. You’ll love him or your money back!

You Should Have Left

A short story sold as a widely spaced 111-page book by Daniel Kehlmann. A writer, his wife and daughter move into an Alpine rental. The writer is having trouble delivering on a deadline and keeping his wife happy. He pops into town for supplies and the locals do the “oh, you’re in that house” routine. A kindly old lady gives him the creepy “Get Out” advice, but to no avail. Next comes problems with lighting, angles and spatial relationships. Now there’s no cell phone reception. Now the cell phones gone missing. The wife’s cheating? Who cares? They try to leave but can’t. The wife and kid may be able to. Wait a minute, is this a haunted house, another dimension, or is the writer losing his mind? Again, who cares? Skip this one.

The Plot Against America

Apologies…it’s been a while since we last posted. Obviously the Illumando continued to redefine literary criticism, but our humble scribe had a case of writer’s block so there is no record of those legendary thoughts.

We resume this vital scroll with Philip Roth’s seemingly prescient 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. And it was a delicious plot. Having returned to Roth a few years after discussing Portnoy’s Complaint, we found his pre-ejaculatory self to be as brilliant as the guy who ruined the chopped liver. If you follow what passes for political reporting these days, you might think Roth provided the blueprint for Russia, Russia, Russia half of the media wars. Perhaps his fiction was being imitated, or perhaps it’s not conspiracy theory, but all true…POTUS is a Russian asset. Da, Da, Daaaa! Whatever side you’re on, you are 100% correct and no one will fight with you because you have all the facts and the other guy is stupid. Everybody wins. Everybody loses.

The book? As counter factuals go, this one is riveting. The novel’s realities are believable, and Roth immerses the reader into the atmosphere of his 1940s Weequahic masterfully. We did feel that the ending was rushed. The narrative’s arc goes off a cliff with the entrance of the Lindbergh baby.

As we ran down the dramatis personae, it was Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf who stirred the most debate. The gut reaction was that he was just a sellout. There was some push back on that notion, after all, isn’t pacifism a legitimate position? Not to mention his rousing love of country and reluctance to spill the blood of American boys. Can he be viewed as a sympathetic character? One of our Jewish Illuminado brothers clarified that a Rabbi is charged with maintaining, if not enhancing, the Judaism of his congregants. Under that charge, it’s difficult to defend the compulsory export of said congregants to the Danville, Kentuckys of the world to bale hay, milk cows and eat bacon. Everyone has their role to play, and he doesn’t play his, ergo he is a useful idiot.

Aversion to, or disgust with today’s politics is a legitimate reason to avoid The Plot Against America, but take it from us, you’d be missing something. Enjoy.

At Home

Brother Dan is a brave lad. He decided to reject our quest for the meaning of life amongst the make believe of our fiction picks and choose a nonfiction read. The book was Bill Bryson’s At Home. Bryson, who is no doubt a polymath, lives in a parsonage in the English countryside and is captivated by its history and design. He uses each room of his home to go off on subjects related to each. Clearly, he did his research, but you will reflect on how all he discussed (i.e., your similar dwelling) has been under your nose day and night and you never probed any of it. Sorry, you’ll never make Detective.

Ever heard of Skara Brae? Do you know a gardener designed the Crystal Palace? How can a guy with an awesome name lake Canvass White be unknown? Ever wonder why Rembrandt’s paintings look like they were painted in the dark? By the way, Jethro Tull isn’t just a rock band with a flute player. Bryson dug it all up and wove it (the “it” being scores of facts and stories) into a tour of his house. Respect.

Respect is what the book received from us reviewers, but invoking the 80/20 principle for expediency, only 20% of the group got past page 200. Well written, well researched, well received, the question for you is how deep into this well of knowledge do you want to dive. At a minimum, go to the library and read 50-pages. Most of us felt we had learned enough to be interesting at the barbecue.

Nutshell

Our kids are out of the womb, but after many years none are as well-spoken as Ian McEwan’s fictional fetus. Raised on BBC Radio and adultery the young chap has opinions. It all takes a back seat when he overhears a plot to murder his unjustly estranged father. He will avenge his father! How many years will it take…18? New information…mom’s lover is his uncle? WTF! The personal space incursions are that more outrageous. Naturally, he wonders if he is a modern day Hamlet.

Further beans will not be spilled. It’s a fun book, but McEwan has a three or four amazing riffs/rants in the book. If you don’t buy the book, at a minimum read pages 24-26 as an example of McEwan going off. You don’t have to share his concerns, but at least acknowledge they are well articulated.

American Gods

Storytelling is a gift, and Neil Gaiman is gifted. This one is about how men carry their gods with them. When those people lose their belief or are conquered their gods fade. Thought provoking, sacrilegious, and certainly interesting. In broad strokes, the main character, who has the ridiculous name of Shadow Moon, links up with an incarnation of Odin. We are not sure when the last time was that he was worshiped in Minnesota, but he is still going. Odin wants to rally the old gods (e.g., Egyptian, Slovak, Leprechauns, etc…) to confront the new gods. There are many new gods, but for simplicity sake imagine your cell phone as the new gods (it ain’t far off.)

The climax is a battle between the old and new gods at Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. It’s only a book, so don’t worry, you’ll still have you cell phone. God forbid that gets hurt! The reward is looking up the old gods, learning their origins, then thinking about where they went…or if they ever were.

A Meal in Winter

This is Hubert Mingarelli’s story of three German soldiers who one winter’s day scammed their way into Jew hunting duty. As appalling as that sounds, they did it to get out of Jew shooting duty. An inornate tale in which these soldiers do catch a fish, but also fall in with a nasty Pole out hunting. To the soldiers, the business they are engaged in is just business. An unpleasant one, but they hold no animosity toward their captive. This hunter however, seems like he would relish their inhumane duty. His attitude causes the soldiers to empathize with their captive. There is a big discussion point that comes in the book’s last few pages. This is a book club book. Not a joy to read.

Elmet

Interesting story…maybe because it was a little odd and thereby left plenty of things to ponder. Did author Fiona Mozley plan them all? Who knows, but on the discussion level…the book clicked. Daniel, the son of this off-the-grid me, Daddy and Sis family provides the narration. Daddy, who might be based on Tyson Fury, is such a bare knuckles virtuoso that the matchmaker/fixers have to import a Ukrainian giant (Klitschko?) just to get action on the other side of their bets. At work, Daddy’s knuckles came in handy when he was collecting rents for Mr. Price (i.e., the local Boss Hogg), but now Daddy is squatting on Mr. Price’s land and leading a rent strike.

Meanwhile, Daniel and his sister Cathy learn how to survive off the land in their house in the copse. Cathy turns out to be a chip off the old Daddy block, while Daniel seems to be headed to be the “B” in the English version of NAMBLA. Daddy, a sweetie with his kids, goes from muscle, to community organizer, to (potential) thief. That final profession is with little explanation. And how about wacky home-schooler Vivien? She doesn’t want to get involved no matter what is at stake. That said, there is an intimation that she was the victim of domestic violence in the past which must be leading her to cower. Even the evil Mr. Price may have justification for his actions. Yup, plenty to ponder.

Ultimately , Elmet is not a bad book, but not a great one either.

White Teeth

Zadie Smith is terrific. There is no need to herald how hip and multicultural the writing is. Plenty of insulated white people have already done that. Needless to say, we are from the 203, so we cool, we cool.

Her characters are wonderful, and Smith is reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen in Freedom in her development of the Chalfens. Joyce Chalfen and Patty Berglund together would be something. It would also be interesting to poll readers as to who they believe the lead character(s) is in this multigenerational tale. For us, it was Archie and Samad, dull as they are, but the younger set would likely go for the kids. For the ladies…the female leads were equally appealing. Great balance. Put this book in a prestigious spot on your shelf ASAP.

The Buried Giant

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is a rich tale masquerading as an easy read. Set in Britain soon after the reign of King Arthur, the title of could be interpreted as a metaphor for the hatred stowed in men’s hearts. This hatred, be it ethnic, historic, specific, whatever…is obscured by the business of life. However, once the fog of life dissipates, that hatred must be met and overcome. An allegory wrapped in myth, with numerous vignettes where one can try to unlock a fuller meaning…what a good book. There are some slow tracts and the dialogue takes some getting used to, but 2019 is off to a nice start with The Buried Giant.

Best Books of 2018

As always, we must clarify that these are the most appreciated books mentioned in this blog during 2018. The books themselves weren’t published in 2018, because then they would be expensive and not on Thriftbooks. The happy news is unlike 2017, which was a minefield of clunkers, 2018 held some absolute gems. Not that we would have known it as Fortuna, that capricious sprite, started us off with the Scooby Doo book Meddling Kids, which was fun, but was no harbinger of the fine literature to come. Brass tacks? Here they are:

Gold: Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stenger) – If there is better writing out there anywhere, contact us immediately. As Stegner says, how can you create a story from such ordinary lives? By being a writer, whose characters are almost corporal, that’s how. Writing, writing, writing. Not a pile of coke on a black desk.

Silver: Brodeck (Philippe Claudel) – The best discussion book of all time…unless we are forgetting another. Hopefully, high schools rotate out some of their ineffective reading list in favor of Brodeck. The danger of the forming mob, being or targeting the outsider, that is how trouble starts, and its very scalable. Powerful novel. It took a miracle to keep it from taking the gold.

Bronze: Submission (Michel Houellebecq) – Furious battle for the Bronze. This one is not about the writing, because there were better. If you are certain that “Build the Wall” is the dog whistle of MAGA wearing goat effers, then validate your odium with a story involving a probable forecast of France’s future. LBJ swore the Immigration Act of 1965 would not affect the culture or composition of the U.S. but look at us now. What do you think about Houellebecq’s projection?

As our 2017 picks blew birds, our 2018 picks were mostly on target. Big upps for Wonder Boys, Lincoln in the Bardo, The Killer Inside Me, The Painted Veil and Brooklyn. All remarkable reads. Let’s hope we don’t roll a crap 7 in 2019. May St. Francis de Sales, the patron Saint of writers keep smiling.

If you want to read slightly more detailed reviews, click on the word “Home” & scroll down. Happy Festivus.

I Am the Messenger

Hoping to tap into some of that George Bailey Christmas magic, the Illuminado read Markus Zusak’s award winning I Am the Messenger as our group finale for 2018. What we didn’t realize was that this book falls into the Young Adult genre, so consequently there was more death, rape, alcoholism, adultery and general violence than we are used to. Fortunately per another YA staple, it read quickly.

To sum, some did not like the book, but it did win a majority split decision and however you felt about it, there were topics to discuss. The biggest gripes from the book snobs were the lack of character development, the discard of characters with potential, and ease of some (all) of the messages. There also was a problem with suspending disbelief. The person pulling the protagonist, Ed Kennedy’s, strings had information about Ed’s life that Ed himself didn’t have. Also from the world of the unbelievable, no guy who has been friend-zoned ever busts out, but behold…Ed gets the girl! Complete nonsense.

The book is famous for its ending, which we debated to no conclusion. Barring aliens, a Truman Show return of his father or an “it was all a dream” scene, there was no other way to wrap this puppy up. Will the author’s message spurn the reader to act(s) of kindness? Only you know. For us, it’s a probably not. Probably more like a no. It’s a no. Yes. A No.

Wonder Boys

Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys is a wonder alright. Wonderfully imaginative writing that paints a cynical picture of writers, particularly those posing as college professors. The bulk of the story takes place over a fictional Pittsburgh college’s WordFest weekend. Our hero, Grady Tripp, has just had his 3rd wife walk out on him and his married mistress, the college’s Chancellor, inform him that she is about to be his baby mama. This particular catastrophe is the most conventional thing that is happening to him at the moment.

He just found out the car he won gambling is stolen and its owner, an ex-boxer wants it back. His new writing protégé shot his mistress’s dog and stole her husband’s prize possession, the dress Marilyn Monroe wore to wed Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. He has a shot with a hot Mormon coed. His father-in-law wants him at Passover dinner regardless of the pending divorce. His chief enabler, who is also his editor and a fellow drug abuser, is attending WordFest and crashing at his place. And he just can’t figure out how to finish his 2,000+ page novel Wonder Boys, despite its seven years in development. He has a lot on his cannabis-soaked mind.

So, what’s to admire amid the slapstick chaos Tripp triggers? An interesting observation of the separation of the writer from the human collective. The importance of family as Tripp, who only knew his grandmother, heads out to a Seder with his soon to be ex-father-in-law and his hodge-podge brood. Chabon’s character development, even the quick hitters that Tripp describes in a sentence or two that have the reader saying “Yup, I know the type.” The humor. Q’s Doppelganger. The obscure and memory jolting references.

The downside? You could say this is just the story of a pothead making poor choices. There are spots where you may feel that Chabon is trying too hard. He could push the story forward with a simple paragraph sans the extraneous detail. It’s like…Dude, you banked a lot of credit throughout the book, use it and give us a breather.

Wonder Boys was very well received by our group, and it was little wonder because the book is intellectual, trendy (i.e., from a fashionable author) and funny. Of course, finding an impromptu back-up Diner (Frankie’s) in Bridgeport at 7AM on a Sunday morning after the Famous 50’s Diner was found to be closed on Sunday…despite the sign by the door and the internet which say OPEN, may have added to the euphoria. Thumbs up.

The Killer Inside Me

Jim Thompson…he ain’t squeamish. Like the protagonist of Thompson’s Pop. 1280, Sheriff Nick Corey, The Killer Inside Me’s Deputy Lou Ford isn’t the affable lawman he appears to be. Unlike Nick Corey, Lou Ford’s dark side is driven by a sexual sadism and reoccurring bouts with the sickness. The last time the sickness brimmed up in Lou, something bad happened to that poor little girl. Now it’s back, and the environment is target rich.

This is an intense book. Written from the POV of a two-faced psychopath and the reader will believe that they are communing with a real-life madman. Lou Ford’s inner voice is so genuine, it has likely been lifted, copied, echoed, etc…in innumerable media. We wouldn’t say plagiarized or ripped-off, because The Killer Inside Me was written in 1952. Any resemblance is likely a fourth-generation derivative.

The book has some hardcore violence against women that most readers will justifiably be revolted at. Therefore, we recommend reading the comparatively amiable Pop. 1280 first to gauge how much of a Thompson fan you are. See our 12/23/2015 review of that book below…
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The Talisman

Breaking things up a bit, for Halloween the group decided to try the horror genre via Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman, however it seemed more a fantasy than horror. Like a Mark Twain coming of age story, 12-year old Jack Sawyer sets off on a cross country quest to save his stricken mother. His trek simultaneously includes a parallel plane called the Territories where his mother’s “twinner” is the beloved Queen and is likewise at death’s door. There is a bad guy, evil minions and allies throughout, which raises the question of who is this book written for? We were hoping to get a little fearful while sipping on our Woodford Reserve Pumpkin Spice, but it wasn’t even close. This 944-page book could have been chopped-up and massaged into a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson type juggernaut decades prior to their ascendancy, but from a horror perspective…it seems a case of two positives (King, Straub), made a negative (The Talisman.)

The Painted Veil

Written by an esteemed British novelist/playwright of yesteryear, you might expect The Painted Veil to be a bit stodgy. However, in today’s parlance, W. Somerset Maugham keeps it real in this story of betrayal and quest for redemption or revenge or self-realization. You can’t be sure what the characters are after.

The story begins with the beautiful, but shallow Kitty cuckolding her all too serious husband, Walter, with the life of the ex-pat party in Hong Kong, Charles, the Assistant Colonial Secretary. Walter, knowing that Charles was just looking to pull the pump and dump on Kitty, agrees to let Kitty go amicably if Charles divorces his wife. If not, she must accompany him, a bacteriologist by training, inland to battle cholera in the stricken Chinese city of Mei-tan-fu. Ecstatic, Kitty runs to Charles with her offer of perpetual happiness only to learn that she is a fool.

Despondent, she now must travel inland with Walter on the apparent suicide mission. During her days in the dying city, Kitty realizes that her life to date has been self-centered and indolent. In the city, she meets self-sacrificing French nuns and a quirky confidant, the alcoholic Customs-man Waddington. She also watches the city’s knight in shining armor, Walter, save thousands of lives, to the adoration of tens of thousands. You might think you know where this is headed, but a broken heart can’t be mended, nor the fires of passion reignited where they never once were. Somerset Maugham deserves credit for not attempting to tie a bow on anything here. Mistakes made aren’t always learned from or pardoned. That’s life. One heck of a good book…and racist as all eff.

Imperium

Via Christian Kracht’s Imperium we head back to the South Seas to revisit the nudist vegetarians of Kabakon Island. Rather than playing around with a fictitious murder mystery amongst the sparse facts of the Cocovores as Adrian McKinty did in The Son is God, Kracht focuses on their leader, August Engelhardt, and generating tracts of clever writing. The clever writing is quite clever, but occasionally, it is a bit much.

The story is of Engelhardt’s path to Kabakon, followed by his time and demise there. Sprinkled in are some possibilities and/or improbabilities used to enhance the story of guy who ate coconuts and sun bathed all day. Living the dream, but not much action for a writer to work with.

So, Kracht or McKinty? Imperium is certainly better written and would appeal more to a book snob, but the pages in McKinty’s tale do get turned mighty quickly. It’s a draw. Either one will provide a history and geography lesson.

The Sun is God

Adrian McKinty injects a little fiction into the stranger than fiction story of the Cocovores of the Bismarck Archipelago. In the early 1900s, German crackpot August Engelhadt decided that worshipping the sun via nude sunbathing and eating the fruit that grows closest to the sun, the coconut, would beget immortality. He’s dead, but McKinty uses an invented English Boer War MP escaping his past in Imperial backwater of Herbertshohe to turn a death among these Moonies into an interesting whodunit. A short book that will shed some light on a part of the globe and German history you likely know little about. There is a wonderful POV switch in the book’s penultimate chapter, which alone makes it worth the investment of a few hours, but don’t bump it up your queue too much.

Brooklyn

Like the movie, the book recreates a picture-perfect atmosphere of 1950s small town Ireland and bustling Brooklyn. The story is about some big decisions made by a smart cookie, one Ms. Eilis Lacey. Eilis’s choices aren’t life or death, as she likely land on her feet either way, but you will be pulling for her to realize her dreams in a time when opportunities were scarce for young ladies.

This one those rare instances were the movie is better as it features the uber-talented Saorise Ronan playing Eilis, and nice work by Domhnall Gleeson. Still, Brooklyn is a pretty good book. A little soft for a Men’s Book Club, but hey, why not?

The Sound of the Mountain

With the author’s name being Yasunari Kawabata, there is no doubt that this is a Japanese novel, but it is a really-Japanese novel. Written in the 1950s, the novel preserves a Japanese culture that likely has been wiped away by the opening of their society. The reader will promptly understand that they don’t understand the Japanese people, but despite the bizarre nature of the discourse, there is strength in the strictures of their traditions.

The main character is 62-year old Ogata Shingo, an executive coming to the end of his run in business and beginning to take stock of his home life. A home life which began so promisingly, provincial boy meets and marries a striking young beauty, but took a bad turn with his young wife’s death. Her family sent him a plain daughter to assist him after the tragedy and he married her, then fathered a son and daughter. The son and daughter are both disappointments, and both involved in deteriorating marriages.

The one ray of sunshine is his live-in daughter-in-law, Kikuko. Shingo watches while she nobly suffers his son’s brazen adultery. Kind, attentive, beautiful, she becomes the muse who replaces his first wife, his second wife being a blunt, unappealing crone.

The book is interesting in the domestic dynamic between the characters, as to what is and is not appropriate in post-war Japan. There is also the people’s relationship to the natural environment, particularly flora, and descriptions of Japanese landmarks. Not an exciting book, but well done.

Submission

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, Michel Houellebecq’s provocative book about the possible future of French politics and society is a must read. For the Connecticuter/Nutmegger it provides a better understanding of the (unimaginable) more than two party systems that govern in Europe.

The story is told through the lens of Francois, an innately brilliant professor of French literary figures and movements, principally those concerning J.K. Huysmans. While intellectually strong, Francois’s character is equally weak. His chief interests are sleeping with his students and locating soirees with premium free food and wine. He has no interest in office politics and even less in national politics, that is until French politics get white hot and spill into the street’s. With the impending election of Nationalist Marine Le Pen as France’s President, the far left and center-right parties swing their support to the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood party, who becomes France’s first Muslin president. The Brotherhood then hands over plumb Ministries (e.g., Economy, Defense, Agriculture, Heath, etc…) which it has zero interest in, to its coalition partners, while it takes control of lesser spoils like the Ministries of Education, Justice, Culture.

The immediate effect on Francois is the departure of his Jewish girlfriend to Israel and the closure of the Sorbonne University while it adjusts its catalog to be compliant with Islamic teaching and digests vast amounts of petro-dollars and students that begin to flow into the University from the Gulf States. Ultimately the faculty is told that they must convert to Islam to keep their positions. Their package is generous as retiring faculty go off on full pay, so almost every professor leaves, thereby delivering a black eye to the new Muslim administrators. Now lacking the intellectual firepower they’ve paid for, the Gulf emirs direct Sorbonne administrators to get the top talent back at whatever the cost. Francois is then courted by the new Department head, who is wealthy and under Islamic law has several wives, one of which Francois notices is a teenager wearing Hello Kitty garb under her bhurka. The thought of wealth, status, access to being published and 3 or 4-teenage brides proves too much for Francois, who converts to Islam.

Did we just plot bust? It doesn’t matter. Francois is the imperfect messenger here. The message is that the open borders of today will radically change Western countries in the future. You can debate how, and how much, but that change is coming is a fact. Not a page turner and some unrecognizable French politics, but well worth reading and discussing.

All That Man Is

Warning: If you are a woman who lives with a cat, do not read this book. Your poor opinion of men (excluding your fine father and moronic, but sometimes decent brother(s)) will just be further cemented. The protagonist in each piece is flawed and this slice of their life is one where those flaws are rather acute.

If you do read these short stories by David Szalay, remember that it’s not so much about the stories or the likability of the characters. It’s about the ever-present craft of the writing and the occasional spot-on insight. The progression is scared kid who can get with older woman, disappointed slacker who takes what he can get, unrequited love, unappreciated love, guy who would watch the world burn for career advancement, guy running out of time to make a big career score, fool who thinks he is a big man finally realizes he is a fool, self-made man faces a demise of his own making, and man dealing with his loss of vitality. You will recognize more than a few of the characters and the extracts of their self-examination.

Not a book you are likely to recommend or fall in love with, but one you will respect.

Lincoln in the Bardo

Smart, and funny as hell, George Saunders earned his cult leader status as an unconventional and revered short story teller. And now for something completely different…a Saunders novel. If you reduced the white space and compressed a few chapters, is Lincoln in the Bardo really that much longer that Pastoralia? (The story, not the collection.) Not really. Surely not many, if any, multiples on the work count. Bardo is smart and its funny and its longer, but it is through its unique structure that it levels up on some of Saunders’ prior work. Whether it meets the bright-line of a Booker Prize winner, that is debatable, but also decided.

The story is of the loss of Abraham Lincoln’s young son Willie to typhoid fever in 1862. Willie was all boy and only 11-years old. His death was a crushing blow to his family. Lincoln, already hardened via early Civil War casualty lists, was periodically incapacitated with grief. Mary Lincoln almost went mad. Amidst this background reports circulated about Lincoln making late night visits to Willie’s tomb in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Contemporaries even speculated that during these visits, Lincoln entered the vault and pulled Willie out of his coffin to hold him. That is the backbone of Saunders tale. From there he introduces a cacophony of ghosts and even deader references. The book is busy and its ingenious.

Will Honest Abe’s love keep Willie’s spirit in that boneyard, or will its more heroic denizens be able to move Willie on. You already know the answer, but Lincoln in the Bardo worth the experience

Replay

Living your life over again is a popular book under many titles. It sells, as it stokes the fires of self-examination, which prompts a good review or a recommendation. While there are many variants on this theme, one that is held up as a masterstroke is Ken Grimwood’s 1986 novel Replay.

The protagonist, 43-year old Jeff Winston, exits a strained marriage and disappointing media career via a fatal heart attack. He immediately revives as his 18-year old college self at Emory University. Knowing a few Kentucky Derby, World Series and stock market winners allows Jeff to live a wildly successful 2^nd life until that set-in-stone 1988 heart attack. He wakes up again a smidge older and embarks on another replay of his life. Each time he takes a different angle, e.g., hedonism, altruism, isolationism, etc…, and each time his replay get a little shorter.

Love, which died in the first go around with his wife is a principal pursuit in the replays. While most of us would look up Farrah Fawcett or…Hillary Rodham (no comment), Jeff seeks fulfillment with his college sweetheart, a Las Vegas floozy and even a 2nd go around with his wife. Aside from his children, who we Illuminado spent time debating whether they survive in the multi-verse after Jeff’s death, his soulmate turns out to be another repeater, Pamela. Jointly they try to manage the oncoming repeats, but are handed several curveballs.

Literature, this is not. Though provoking, it is. More of a book club book, than an individual read.

Brodeck

If you are seeking a novel that will pump life into your flagging book club, Brodeck by Philippe Claudel, is a gargantuan needle of adrenaline to the heart. It is a powerful allegorical tale with a thousand points of discussion.

In broad strokes, little orphaned Bodeck is brought to an out-of-the-way border town by the forever old gypsy Fedorine. He grows up seemingly accepted in this town of kindly villagers. Recognizing his smarts, they even elect him to be the one young man to get an education and return to serve the town that sponsored him. However, when Brodeck returns, it is on the winds of war and soon the town is occupied by enemy troops. The enemy is generous at first, but when the enemy commander insists that the locals cleanse their village, Brodeck is remembered as an outsider. An Other. Thus, he is shipped to a concentration camp and, sacrificing his dignity for his life, he becomes a Brodeck the Dog.

After the war, the villagers are stunned when Brodeck returns. Though he is a reminder of their past weakness, they allow him to remain among them. After things settle, enter the Anderer. The Other. A flamboyantly dressed imp that, unlike any other visitor, came specifically to their isolated locale. But why they all ask? Different in every way, he quietly paints their portraits and local landscapes. These pictures, like holograms, look very differently at different angles. A benevolently smiling fellow seen from the left is a malevolently sneering fellow from the right. Like windows to the soul, these portraits incite their subjects to murder The Anderer. Brodeck is one of the few villagers whose knife doesn’t stick the Anderer, and seemingly since he is the only educated villager, he is charged to write a report whitewashing the crime.

There is no point summarizing the plot any further. Just know that the book is replete with thought-provoking themes, observations and vignettes. Honestly, some Illuminado would not let the meeting break-up and then would not leave after it did. The book is required reading. Nuff said.

To the Back of Beyond

Astrid goes inside to check on the kids and her husband, Thomas, puts down his wine glass and walks out the backyard gate. No note, no obvious reason. Days roll by. No contact, no information. It turns out that Thomas has gone on a Swiss walkabout. Author Peter Stamm leaves a lot for interpretation, but not when it comes to the description the alpine outdoors and the little unseen trails between inhabited places. You will start to notice, and wonder what is in the open space near you. As for Stamm’s actual intent, he likely wants you to wonder about what it would take to make you truly free and/or happy. If the reader uses this book as a jumping off to life altering self-discovery, then the author will be sated. If the reader finds the book monotonous, implausible and owning a wholly unsatisfying ending, then the author will have to be content with the reader’s money.

The North Water

The North Water is Ian McGuire’s tale about a whaling expedition beginning in Hull and heading up to Jan Mayen Island (think way above Iceland), then around Greenland and into Canada’s Lancaster Sound. Aside from the yucky whaling, it sounds like a picturesque and educational voyage, but with a serial killer for a shipmate and a clandestine insurance fraud scheme in play, this trip into the north waters is anything but a pleasure cruise. Sadly, Hollywood and the media have done such a job on our senses, that the book’s revulsive aspect loses some of its impact because we are inundated with so many killers on TV, in movies and in the news. If Anthony Hopkins had played Drax before Lecter, what a sensation this book would have been.

Although on the Booker Long List, The North Water is more a good yarn, than literature. There’s nothing wrong with that, it was just a bit surprising. The writing is skilled, but is there any reason to analyze Drax or Sumner? Will you feel compelled to contrast Sumner to Drax? Does the author have a message for the reader? Without really chasing it, the answer could be no. You will have to decide…and quickly, it’s a page-turner.

Crossing to Safety

Stunning. A quiet book that reminds you that you’re sh1t. You couldn’t form a thought or a sentence that would be good enough to be page-filler here. Wallace Stegner is Ty Cobb, and almost all the other writers you’re reading now are Little Leaguers…How???

The story is about the friendship struck by two young couples while the husbands taught as Assistant Professors of Literature at the University of Wisconsin. While he has you wrapped in his web, Stegner asks “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect?” Where are the sex, drugs and rock ’n roll needed to keep people’s attention? Does he ask that question in the secure confidence of his genius, or as an archetypal writer wondering if his cogitations will find an audience. Only he knows.

There are several simple set-ups in this modest story that will have readers arguing over the obvious questions. But those arguments can will be rich, and the writing is rich and the experience, for a serious reader is a clear must have. You’ll likely never see the Vermont detailed in Crossing to Safety, even if you live in Vermont. You’ll likely never meet a full-blast Charity Lang, but one wishes we all could. You probably will never possess the wisdom to look back on the beginning of your family, career and friendships as is done here, but take some time to do it. Without that, the wisdom you lay on the nieces, nephews, sons and daughters of the next generation is hooey.

“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered…” Reading this book is a doorbell. Push it.

Ray

Ray is a Tuscaloosa-based ex-Vietnam fighter pilot turned alcoholic doctor of Barry Hannah’s creation. Hannah’s writing is so creative that in the early pages of this short novel you will wonder if you are wasting your time. I’s a legit question, but if you choose to stick it out, you do become accustomed to Hannah’s rhythms and Ray’s nuggets of wisdom. Little snippets of an uneven home life, his well detailed foot fetish, Civil War flashbacks, vigilantism, womanizing and the envy of a redneck neighbor’s gift of poetry. The story bounces, but has its rewards.

For example, after losing the love of his life, and amidst the deterioration of his current relationship, Ray takes a moment to think back about the picture perfect life early on with his first wife…his perfect children and friendly neighbors and thinks “What a release, to look into the past that way I just tried. A petrified log just rolled off my heart.” There are better ones to quote, but again, I neglected to underline.

As there is an equal chance you will hate Ray, this isn’t a pound the table buy. Accumulate.

Rebranding

An informal survey of thousands has uncovered that while people from Connecticut are still called Nutmeggers, Connecticut’s moniker as the Nutmeg State has fallen into disuse. The “Constitution State” entry on the bottom of vehicle license plates has drown out the Nutmeg, so we are jettisoning the Nutmeg as well. Since the preponderance of our brotherhood live close the shores of the mighty Pequonnock River, we are choosing the Pequonnock Iluminado. Pequonnock being the local Native American term for place of slaughter or place of destruction. Manly and apt.

Change is hard, but it can be good. In 1738, our forbearers, the then Hooker Iluminado, named after Colony of Connecticut founder, the Puritan Reverend Thomas Hooker, and not the after the pliers of the world’s oldest profession, booted out an Iluminado slacker who later founded Yale’s Crotonia society. That worked out well for both him and for Yale. Semper Anticus!

Penance

This is a well-crafted murder mystery written by Kanae Minato. A middle school girl is plucked out of a circle of friends and becomes the victim of a deadly sexual assault. The surviving schoolgirls blame themselves for losing track of their new posh friend. Their perceived failure, opens the door to their guilt getting amped-up by the victim’s mother, who demands results from the girls in catching the perp or a penance from each of them for allowing the murder to transpire.

As the girls grow up, they continually imagine their dead friend’s tiger mom judging them, until each girl finally snaps. Hearing of those snaps, the condemning momacita has to confront her complicity in the original crime and lift the curse before more sin adheres to her own conscience.

Whilst it ebbs and wanes, the impact of original sin, the transfer of guilt and the power of unintended consequences make this a good novel. The common paperback is 227-pages and worth reading.

Meddling Kids

Last night it was back to Brewport to discuss Edgar Cantero’s Scooby Doo/Lovecraft mash Meddling Kids. Those Brewport pulled pork and kimchi pizzas…dang they are good. Great beer list as well, so whatever the verdict, we were happy campers. Mr. Forman, has the jury reached a verdict? Yes, your honor, we have. How do you find the defendant? Not Guilty of being literary fiction, by reason of being a fun book.

In a nutshell, Meddling Kids mirrors the Hanna-Barbera classic with four young protagonists, a dog and a Chevy Vega standing in for the Mystery Machine. The story goes well beyond the bounds of a typical Scooby adventure, getting into the serious occult before flat out horror fiction. There’s no doubt Cantero is a clever writer, using the full bag of tricks and plenty of humor in what is either his second or third language, but he is trying a little too hard. One of our Brothers summed it up best when he said, I feel like the writer just came from a class where they all learned about similes. Like this, like that…crafty ones, but way too many or not properly spaced. They overshadow much of the writing.

That said, there were positives. Treating the Daphne character’s hair as an entity of its own, the state of the Peter character, the lesbian angle and the nods to the original series. A fun read, that doesn’t generate much discussion beyond whether as kids anyone was attracted to the brainy Thelma.

Brother Jason, who picked the book ended the meeting with “And I would have picked a better book, if it hadn’t been for a Good Samaritan and their meddling book recommendation!”

Best Books of 2017

These are the most appreciated books mentioned in this blog during 2017. The books weren’t published in 2017, because then they would be expensive and not on Thriftbooks.

Gold: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Perfect writing. We’d like to imagine it was pounded out on a typewriter that has no corrective tape in one masterful sitting. When Penguin plans to release a 50th Anniversary Edition, if any in-house “genius” offers edit it, the blockhead should be sent to Abu Ghraib for re-education. Not one word can be altered.

Silver: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Too long…yes, but enlightening via illustration. Read it. It will change your perspective on everyone, including you.

Bronze: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Some strands of the story aren’t as riveting as others, but at the end you’ll sound like a Saturday morning English Premiere League commentator after a wonder goal struck on the half-volley “Brilliant! Juuuust Brilliant!!!”

Unfortunately, there were a lot of clunkers this year, but a proper shout-out for Absurdistan, Fahrenheit 451, An Actor Prepares (Short Story) and The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, each of which stand out from the mostly bombs we read this year. If you want to read more detailed reviews, click on the word “Home” & scroll down. Happy Festivus.

Stoner

John Williams goes deep in his tale of farm boy turned English professor, William Stoner. As a professor himself, Williams may be mixing in quite a bit of non-fiction to achieve a reality literary fiction experience. He may also be thinking the life (his) worth living thoughts.

In the book’s beginning has a summation of Stoner’s life that describes him as a nobody. An Aggie turned middling professor that nobody would bother to remember. That description does haunt you throughout the book, as Stoner is actually a zealot about his craft. He goes so far as to intellectually assassinate a Ph.D candidate who is the pet of the new Department chairman. His integrity sentences him to the loss of cherished upperclassman studies and a decades long condemnation into sophomoric general studies. He does a fine job with standard text among the indifferent, but eventually realizes he must soar. He pulls a Dead Poet’s Society move and chucks the syllabus text book in favor of more breathtaking alternatives. There is outrage, but his student’s flourish measurably.

This is a surprisingly passionate read. Except for an extramarital affair, it’s a pretty quiet…almost. Big Ups to John Williams. He does accomplish something that many writers cannot. He is able to change the mood of the reader. When Stoner is up against his antagonists, if you put the book down at the wrong time, you may be going to Happy Hour fuming. Williams also leaves you wanting more of the late Dave Masters insight. You’ll like the book. Not overtly philosophical, but thoughtful.

The Incarnations

The Incarnations is Susan Barker’s tale about two spirits that continue to find and love/hate each other from the Tang Dynasty (632 AD) up through the Beijing Summer Olympics (2008.) Well written, although some of the past encounters are more appealing than others, so the urge to pick-up the book will oscillate a bit. As a user of the earth’s most effective tongue, Dear Reader, whom the Chinese affectionately refer to as barbarian, foreign devil, gwai lo, etc…you will appreciate the insight into Chinese culture because besides a menu, you have none. Now mind, some of this may not be accurate, as you find out when you Google the Emperor Jiajing expecting a hyper-sadist biography, but it’s still more 411 on China that you came to the book with. A word of warning, if you are imagining a bunch of Romeo & Juliet iterations, consider that while a boundary condition of the reincarnation here is that you don’t come back as the main ingredient in General Tso’s Chicken and your soulmate as fodder for roast pork on rice, your gender isn’t a constant. Boy-girl, two boys, two girls…buckle-up Dear Reader. Also, don’t despair over the main contemporary character, Wang Jun’s, aim for a mundane existence as a cabbie, the people around him are interesting throughout.

Not raving about it…the first 5-pages of the book are critics, papers and authors doing that…but this is certainly a well done book. If you read it, keep a scrap of paper handy and try to map the spirits through time (and watch for other spirits.)

The Fountainhead

After a clunker, Brother Nick decided to take matters in his own hands with moose move, jumping the line to pick our next book, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The novel has a reputation for being a vehicle for Rand’s individualist philosophy, but whether it was to be a good discussion book was certainly up for discussion. The meeting was held in an upscale restaurant, and us being men of power and abreast of current events, that we would sexually harass the wait staff was quickly settled. As fate would have it, we wound up being assigned an imperturbable African-American gentleman, so there will be no expose of the Illuminado on Gawker. Just kidding…of course. Harvey Weinstein…who knew!

The Fountainhead is comprised of four studies of main characters, Peter Keating, Ellsworth M. Toohy, Gail Wynand and Howard Roark. These four can easily be paired off as sets of foils. Keating vs. Roark and Toohy vs. Wynand, but they, and the other characters eventually all need to be compared to Roark, who is Rand’s ubermensch here. Keating is a second-hander who measures success by how others view him, while Roark is more like Cyrano de Bergerac and rewards himself internally for meaningful accomplishments. Toohy and Wynand both have the capacity to identify individual greatness, but both extinguish it for their own reasons. Toohy to advance the mediocrity of collectivism, and Wynand, to ensure that he always runs the mob via his vulgar New York Banner newspaper. Wynand turned out to be the most discussed character at our gathering. He is the one that evolves the most during the story, although Peter Keating devolves to such an extent that it become necessary to suspend disbelief in his case.

The book generated an excellent discussion regarding these and other brilliantly drawn characters, as well as the book’s philosophical angles, such as the needed balance between Collectivism and Individualism and the use of altruism to control the masses. Perhaps the book’s most controversial topic is the relationship between Dominique Francon and Howard Roark. The willful submission of a strong-willed woman to a strong-willed man and that Rand chose to explicitly name their first encounter as a rape. That has triggered many a feminist through the years. Like everything Rand, it is bold. She doesn’t go in for bromide.

Picking knits, this book could have used a 250-page haircut. The soapbox was wore out after 700-pages. In sum, and in the tradition of Lois Clark’s, The Gallant Gallstone, this is a brilliant book by a superb writer. Get your book club on it.

Slade House

Very excited about reading a creepy book from an excellent writer around Halloween. David Mitchell’s Slade House turned out to be a Trick rather than a Treat. It’s well written, but nowhere near the quality of the masterful The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Possibly inadvisably, this humble scribe also purchased for $1 the Cloud Atlas audiobook from a local library housecleaning. Not since Peter Minut paid $24 for Manhattan has there been such a deal. Cloud Atlas is a monumental achievement…but unfortunately we are talking now about Slade House. It’s sort of like Peyton and Eli Manning’s other brother, an excellent chap no doubt, but he didn’t win two Super Bowls. That’s not meant to be cruel, just an illustration. Like Jamie-Lynn and Britney Spears’s brother what’s his name. Some of the Baldwin brothers. Fredo Corleone. Pass on Slade House.

Pillars of The Earth

There is a first time for everything, so who might the first repeat author assigned to all the Illuminado be? Hemmingway? Vonnegut? McCarthy? Steinbeck? Turns out its Ken Follett with Pillars of the Earth.

On the bright side, it was better written than A Dangerous Fortune. On the puzzling side, it was written 4-years before a Dangerous Fortune…so is Ken getting worse? I’d say a different ghost writer, but all the Follett hallmarks are there. The repetitiveness, nair do well plotters pulling the strings of the virtuous, two sentence major plot twists amidst large tracts of tedium and silly names for the caricatures…I mean characters. Once again, Ken, who could easily get a gig as a writer on Days of Our Lives or General Hospital, never lets anyone get too high for too long without raping or mutilating them. After two books, its also pretty clear that Mrs. Ken isn’t getting away with any Missionary horsesh1t. The dude is pervy.

As predictable and trite as this book is, it goes very quickly. Enjoy.

Little Apple

You can never tell where a thought-provoking book is going to come from. Not too many come from 1928 Germany anymore, but Arcade Publishing keeps Leo Perutz’s Little Apple in circulation and that is a good thing.

Little Apple is the story of WWI Austrian POW Georg Vittorin’s Ahab-like pursuit of his white whale…the Chernavyensk prison camp Commanding Officer, Staff Captain Mikhail Mikhailovich Selyukov. Whilst in prison, Vittorin and a few of his comrades swear a pact to even the score with the cruel Selyukov after the war. However, upon their release the POWs all fall back into their pre-war routines in comfortable Vienna. Only Vittorin, who dwells on a specific personal, though somewhat minor, humiliation at Selyukov’s hands, still burns with vengeance.

Abandoning his duty to his family, his presumed fiancé and good career opportunities, he plunges into the heart of the Russian Civil War on a fanatical hunt for his enemy. The undertaking brings him to the brink of starvation, again to prison, spells of criminality, into the arms of a beautiful starlet, to great cities and peasant’s hovels and most often to death’s doorstep, but through it all, he remains insulated to his environs by his fixation on Selyukov. After 2-years of travel throughout Europe, he learns that Selyukov has settled in, of all places, Vienna. It is there that Vittorin encounters the collateral damage of embarking on his selfish quest. It is also there that he faces the arrogant Russian Captain, that to him, over time, has come to personify all of the evil in the world. To be continued…by you reading the book.

A Voice from Old New York

We enjoyed Keysean Johnson’s Just Give Me The Damn Ball so much, it was time for another biography. This one of the auto- nature. The voice here is that of Louis Auchincloss, a member of Manhattan’s recognized “Society,” who grew up directly with the descendants of Gilded Age barons. Auchincloss went on to carve out a successful duel career as an estate attorney and writer. As always, whether this is a fascinating or dull read depends on the reader.

The more thoughtful will be pleased with the insights into long elapsed manners, class-driven interpersonal relations, views on wealth, even a few unique WWII stories. Does the name dropping of the no longer important (or living) persons get a bit droll? Sure. Can there be too much dry wit? Maybe. Either way, this is a valuable peak into the lives of the New York set of the 1930s. It is worth noting that Louis Auchincloss wrote this book when he was in his nineties. That these tracts still remain in his aged memory is astonishing, and his command of the written word is even better. We will have to read one of his dry novels one day.

The Emerald Light in the Air

It was time to revisit Donald Antrim, author of our 2016 Book of the Year Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. The venue, a collection of seven short stories, in a volume called The Emerald Light in the Air. The stories are replete with characters of quirky action, thought and/or past, but only one of the stories captures the magic of Mr. Robinson, An Actor Prepares. Please read it and get turned on to Donald Antrim…

http://www.condenet.com/mags/newyorker/asme/categories/artwork/pdf/06_21_Antrim_Actor.pdf

The Lighthouse

The cover of Alison Moore’s book The Lighthouse says “Longlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2012.” Astonishing. The book stinks, and we are not referring to book’s repeated use of olfactory imagery. The main character, Futh, who may/must be retarded to some extent, could really use a spell of no luck at all. One awkward, bad luck scene after the next. In real life, rather than reach 40, he would have hung himself or shot up his high school. The profile of a satisfied reader of this book would be one who enjoys a damp, grey day at the shore. One where a seagull dropping lands on their sandwich just as they take a bite. A mildly engaging, but wholly unsatisfying read. Pass.

The Driftless Area

Magical Realism. It can have little magic. Exhibit A: Tom Drury’s The Driftless Area. The dreary tale of a Midwestern simpleton, Pierre Hunter. Not a bad guy. Tries to do the right thing, but he’s an idiot.

The reader gets the impression that the author thought long and hard on the characters’ full names, names of towns (which Saint Ivo is your town named after???) and the name of the bar that Pierre works at. Those bland details may move someone disconnected from reality, e.g., an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, but it falls flat for someone not currently on drugs. Even if these clever details resonate, they do little for the story.

If you are looking for another strike, there is some pretention here too. The publisher includes Questions for Discussion on the final 3-pages of the book. While that ink is always appreciated, the publisher frames the questions as if this book is an acknowledged seminal work. Linking the it to the Coen Brother, Jonathan Franzen, Charlie Chaplin, Hemingway, Odysseus…Thelma & Louise for Chistsakes!!! Out of context, but question 4 is How do we begin to realize we are in a fabulous tale… Tom Drury is an acclaimed writer, so he isn’t written off yet.

Absurdistan

Absurdistan is the story of Misha Boisovich Vainberg, a.k.a., Snack Daddy, the son of the 1.238th richest man in Russia, his Khui (pecker) and his odyssey to reclaim his cuero, Rouenna, in the Bronx. The problem is, that although Misha is an avowed Amero-phile with a degree in Multi-Cultural Studies from the Midwest’s Accidental College, the gangster-like activities of Beloved Papa have convinced the wise generals of the INS to bar Misha’s reentry into the United States. But now that rival gangsters have tossed a landmine into beloved Papa’s SUV on St. Petersburg’s Palace Bridge, thereby making Misha an only child orphan, the time to get out of Russia is now. Dubious official connections set his journey in motion by directing him to the former Caspian soviet of Absurdistan in pursuit of a forged Belgian passport.

Throwing off its Russian yoke, arrival in Absurdistan allows the book’s comic absurdities to level up. Ridiculous ethnic tensions, natural resource-swindling multinational corporations and a scripted civil war starved for CNN’s attention provide an entertaining backdrop for Misha’s escape. Turns out that Beloved Papa is a legend in Absurdistan for selling an 800-kilogram screw to Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, and is the longtime benefactor of Absurdistan’s Mountain Jews. Consequently, Misha is appointed Commissar of Multicultural Affairs and asked to speak to Israel about getting some better news coverage and post-war development funds. Though naturally indolent, e.g., his hero is Goncherov’s Oblomov, Misha springs into action by drafting a grant proposal for the Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies. A 5-page crescendo of the absurd.

Does Misha make it to NYC? Who cares, the book is a roll. Gary Shteyngart really channels John Kennedy Toole in this one. It’s a slow starter, but gets real funny about a third of the way through.

Norwegian by Night

The set-up is intriguing. Sheldon Horowitz, an 82-year old former Korean War sniper has relocated from NYC to Oslo, to be near his only living relative, granddaughter Rhea. Sheldon audibly witnesses a mother pitilessly murdered in Rhea’s apartment, whilst hiding in the closet with the woman’s 9-year old son. The killer is an experienced brute from the Balkan’s ethnic wars and the 9-year old is his son. Unsurprisingly, the killer wants the boy back. Sheldon is short on the operative details, but his street smarts tell him he needs to keep this boy hidden until the gentle Norwegian police can catch-up with the urgent implications of this case. Thus, octogenarian and 2nd grader go on the lam. Sounds good…but the book doesn’t deliver.

The only character that is developed is Sheldon. The police chief, the boy, the killer, others…could have been interesting, but they aren’t. The thrills in this thriller are as docile and the author, Derek B. Miller’s, description of the average Norwegian’s outlook. You will likely need to read a classic Scandinavian Noir novel to restore your faith in the genre after this one.

That said, book does have its merits. Sheldon’s character is expertly drawn, particularly via recalled discussions with his son Saul, a Vietnam casualty, and current dialogue with his long dead NYC pal Bill. Sheldon does not go out of his way to endear himself. He is cantankerous and summarily dismisses any notion he has no use for, regardless of its origin. Mr. Miller does a good job emphasizing Sheldon’s Jewishness. If you are, or know lots of Jews, you will recognize Sheldon as the type of Jew that is becoming more scarce. Fully Jewish, but in no way insular, i.e., confined in an ethnic neighborhood. It may not be intended, but in this way the book does ever so lightly touch on the works of the all-pervading, great assimilator. Sheldon, a red-blooded American Jew, joins the Marine Corps, packed with its southern Christians, serves and returns home as the same red-blooded American Jew. Then, little Norway, always accepting the migrant du joir…Albanian, Somali, Iraqi, Syrian, etc…and ever confident that it will remain Norwegian.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

If you enjoy Monty Python and the massively understated, silly British humor of the 1970s, then you have an obligation to yourself to read this book. If that is not your thing, this is not your thing. It will still, at times, be funny, clever and wildly capricious, but if you can’t deal with the meaning of life, the universe and all things being 42, you won’t be able to deal with The Guide. Reader, know thyself.

Post Office

Charles Bukowski is the great author of the working man. In Post Office, his semi-autobiographical protagonist, Hank Chinaski, illustrates that outside the office you never know what your coworkers are into. In Hank’s case, while he is an insubordinate subordinate down at the Post Office, he can stick mail with the best of them. Outside the office though he is a major alcie, drunk almost all the time. His life’s striving is to hit a few horses at the track, so he can buy a big steak and keep drinking. The book is amusing when Hank offers his cynical take on the people and events in his life. Many readers don’t like the book, because Hank is a jerk, but is he anymore of a jerk than the book’s other characters? No, he’s actually a lot less callous.

Even though Post Office is dated, it is different and it will have you imagining what your own life would be like if you partied all the time. Beyond that, it’s not very interesting.

A Dangerous Fortune

There aren’t many writers whose careers have been as prolific and profitable as Ken Follett. He has sold many millions of books and his wallet is likely much thicker than the most profuse of those books. Our host for this meeting selected Follett’s A Dangerous Fortune for examination. He had enjoyed the book many years ago. While familiar with the name Ken Follett, of our assemblage, only this humble scribe was unfamiliar with the writings of Ken Follett. Time for enlightenment.

Due to a last minute conflict, I missed most of the scheduled discussion and upon arrival was hit with a “What did you think?” Well, to be honest, the writing was terrible. Simplistic and tediously repetitive. Tonio is intimidated by Mickey Miranda…I know Ken, you told me ten times. Augusta knows nothing of banking…I KNOW ALREADY!!! And the plots and schemes of the story’s antagonists? They go off without a hitch and even more quickly and effectively than even the plotters could have dreamed. Am I being harsh on Ken? Ken, who had the audacity to remark about J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a Man Booker prize winner & my last book pick, that the book was “very poor … terrible.” Incredible. Shameless. The world turned upside down.

That said, I, like everyone else, enjoyed A Dangerous Fortune. Despite the writing, it was as riveting as a 1980s episode of Dynasty or Dallas. Devious villains pulling the strings of sympathetic characters. Ken Follett is McDonalds. We all eat at McDonalds sometimes.

The Tartar Steppe

Number 29 on Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. Dino Buzzati’s short novel unquestionably provides food for thought. Giovanni Drogo’s tour of duty at Fort Bastiani is an apt metaphor for the American Dream of go to work, send your kids to college, pay off your mortgage, then upon entering your sunset years…you get the cancer diagnosis.

The story is set at the aforementioned fortress, which guards the northern pass against a potential barbarian invasion. The young Lieutenant Drogo arrives and quickly surmises that this posting is a dead end for his military career and all the exertions of the fort’s inhabitants are pointless, as a barbarian has not been seen in these parts for generations. Expertly talked out of requesting an immediate transfer, Drogo falls in step with the fort’s rhythms, and the days, then soon the decades start to slip by.

You might be bored with the book, but you will be impressed by Buzzati’s impressions on life slipping through one’s fingers. If you care at all, go to the library and request the book, then read the last seven paragraphs of the book’s 6th Chapter. Got it? Then read the final chapter where you will hear again about the grey, monotonous sea that has been there since time immemorial. Carpe Diem…or else.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

You may have to make room for one more on your list of favorite authors. David Mitchell is a spellbinding writer. He manages a large cast of double-dealing characters, obscure Nippo-Dutch historical facts, entwined stories, brilliant plot twisting strokes and still leaves himself room to show off. There will be two or three spots where a reader will think “Wow…that’s different.” Neglecting to underline in this book (big mistake), all I can recall at the moment is the Captain’s earthly thoughts during the Chaplin’s numinous reading, but there are several passages where you have to say Mitchell’s writing is something else.

The story takes place on Dejima, an artificial island a few steps off shore of Nagasaki. Dejima is the Shogun’s inventive work-around to ensure that no barbarian (particularly Portuguese Jesuits) step foot on Japan, while keeping trade with the outside world flowing. After the Portuguese get their walking papers, the Dutch set up shop on Dejima. They work under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), the power of which makes Google, Facebook and Halliburton look like pikers. As the VOC unravels, ordinary employee corruption became epic corruption. To drain the swamp, the new Chief Resident of the Dejima Station brings with him an industrious, honest clerk named Jacob de Zoet. De Zoet has signed on for a stint with the VOC in order to make his fortune, thereby allowing him to marry slightly up in society upon his return to his hometown of Domburg.

There are some entertaining characters in the cast…Jacob, of course, the evil abbot and a particular favorite, Dr. Marinus. While vastly differing in content, the pregnant dialogue between Jacob and Dr. Marinus reminds one of that between Lord Varys and Tyrion in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Conleth Hill must play Marinus in the movie, but alas there won’t be one. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was 3-hours long and panned as being too ambitious and rife with yellow-facing. But all of this is beside the point, which is that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an engrossing read…and always keep David Mitchell on your radar.

Disgrace

The Iluminado have varied their approach to selecting books over the years. Sometimes we do it systematically via weighted multi-voting. Sometimes folks just make suggestions at the end of the meeting and a consensus is swiftly reached. At present, we are in the midst of a once-though rotation where the host selects the book. This provides an opportunity for every Brother to take us somewhere interesting without having to hard sell the book to the group. It fell to this humble scribe to pick the current book. Playing it safe, I picked a blue chip…Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. A Booker Prize winner by a Nobel prize winner. What could possibly go wrong…right? Well…apparently I am surrounded by ignoramuses.

Right out of the box it was “Oh, I hated everyone!” “Too much raping!” & “It wasn’t a fun story!” As this book was as about as close to perfection as I’d ever encountered, I was stunned. One Brother was able to throw me lifeline by recounting a conversation about the book with his South African neighbor, which opened the door to a “you Americans just won’t understand” dismissal of the book. My choice and book-picker reputation were on the ropes…I had a hand in The Dwarf, which went over like a lead balloon and Blindness, which had a good discussion, but only a few gents read the book.

In spite of the high level dislike, we began chewing over the scenes and themes. And a funny thing happened, a long and interesting discussion arose. It helps that almost every event or inner observation in the book is worthy of analysis.

Did Melanie say no? Did David approach his inquest properly? Was Lucy’s making up for the past just foolishness? What did you think of Petrus? What about Ettinger? Poor Bev Shaw? Why does David visit Melanie’s parents? What do you think of the Servant of Eros defense? What is to be expected when a single, aging Lothario hits the wall? Why were Lucy and David disgraced when they were on opposite sides of unwanted encounters? Was everyone too blasé about teachers hooking-up with students? Are we cruel to God’s creatures with our human privilege? Will Byron in Italy ever be written and why is it included in the story? Why won’t Lucy leave the farm? Does racism breed the deepest hatred? There are so many topics to discuss.

Clearly, based on our experience we can’t predict if you will like the book, but if you read it and discuss it…to steal a phrase from David Lurie – you will be enriched by the experience.

The Hunting Gun

This story was written in 1949 by the burgeoning poet Yasushi Inoue as a serial for his high school buddy, who happened to be the editor of Japanese equivalent of Field & Stream. The hunting hook is a Churchill shotgun that is lovingly polished and aimed at a lead character behind her back. That doesn’t sound like much, but a young writer has to get published by any means necessary.

The main narrative is wrapped in a gimmick that isn’t impactful, but the emotions of these players are. The narrative itself is composed of three letters, written by three women, to one Mr. Josuke Misugi. The first is from a young woman who is the daughter of a family friend, a pseudo-niece. The second is from Misugi’s wife. And the third is from the dying woman Misugi has been in long-term affair with. Plot buster – he didn’t get away with it.

The niece’s letter is blah. Misugi’s wife’s is thought-provoking as she reflects on why she didn’t confront the cheaters when she, by chance, spotted them. She reflects on the biggest fork in her life’s road. Perhaps she couldn’t confront them, because The Other Woman was her closest, most respected friend. The one she called Elder Sister…superior to her in every way. She was likely afraid that Musagi would be forced to choose between them and she didn’t like her odds. Ultimately (i.e., 13-years later,) she confronts the dying woman. In the book’s final letter, the one from the dying woman, the dissimilar interpretations of the encounter between the wife and the cheat are also of note.

The final letter is the most powerful and you can read it if you come across this slim booklet. What you will probably remember is the school girl story of whether you would rather love or be loved. Everyone’s swift answer is the latter…but really? Think about it.

Fahrenheit 451

Currently making a comeback are the state paranoia books “1984,” “It Can’t Happen Here” and “Fahrenheit 451.” The Iluminado choose 451F as the book to examine in February. It’s been a while since we met and advanced literary criticism and demolished a few pulled pork & kimchi pizzas at Brewport in Bridgeport, CT, so this memorialization of that discussion will be brief…because I forgot a lot of it.

That said, some semi-eternal impressions…Captain Beatty’s explanation of how things came to pass was riveting, Mildred love of creating roadkill and kicking local dogs – endearing, the Hound – terrifying, everything being boiled down to a snap ending – condensing, and adding a fourth wall in the living room hit a little too close to home, but let’s say it is promising!

We discussed the usual stuff, e.g., all the hands references, but obviously the poignant discussion surrounded this seeming 1953 anticipation of our current culture. Did this book predict the rise of the low information voter? President Noble wins a lot of votes being the nicest looking man running for president, while the hopeless Outs keep running homely guys who don’t brush their hair. Maybe President Noble is orange? There is also a lot of distraction in their world, after all, who wouldn’t want to see men in tuxedos pull 100-lb rabbits from hats, then again we have the Real Housewives of Wherever and an overdue pregnant giraffe. Before we think too badly of ourselves, was 1953 any better than today? Yes, we all like Ike, but even he warned us that beyond the white picket fences were powers that were interested in maintaining our continued disinterest. While Eisenhower waited until his term was up to spill the beans on the military-industrial complex…yes he needed campaign cash too…1953 probably wasn’t a rose garden we might imagine it to be. The big ray of hope was Khrushev replacing Stalin.

As there are at least two ways to look at anything, some editions of the book have a Coda written by Bradbury in response to a young Vassar lady, a progenitor to the current SJW, advising him to rewrite the book with stronger female roles and persons of color. Ray was having none of that PC crap and advised the young lady to write her own book. Maybe his old white ghost’s vote wasn’t in the bag for the divisive politics of the Democrats. It’s nice to see a work that can be politically appropriated by both sides.

An interesting question between burps was, if we are all as blind as Mildred and her two marvelous, White Clown-watching friends, then who is today’s Guy Montag? An anarchist? A hermit? A conspiracy theorist? We couldn’t settle that one. Please comment if you have the answer.

Some of the material in the book doesn’t fly, e.g., bums as libraries, and some things don’t come to pass, e.g., Beatty vs. Faber, but there are many amazing thoughts captured in its ~173-pages. Well worth the effort. Go read it. It has pores.

Comic Books (a.k.a., Graphic Novels)

In the anteroom of the Illuminado’s Athenaeum & Natatorium (the Old A&N,) sits a copy of Patrick Ness’s “A Monster Calls.” The story was made into a $43M motion picture, which was a financial flop, but a critical success, which generally means it was probably a good flick. In order to investigate the graphic novel space, a couple of these comic books were examined.

The first was Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Asterios is a 50-year old effete, paper architect whose NYC apartment burns down as a result of a lightning strike. Possibly uninsured and/or unmoored, Asterios uses his remaining funds to buy a bus ticket out of his bases of operation in NYC and an unnamed Ithaca NY college, to travel deep into Trumplandia. Seeing a Help Wanted sign and a nearby library, a rock-bottom Asterios steps off the bus in the inaptly named town of Apogee. A quick study of a few car repair books and he is hired-on and rented a cheap room by local mechanic and all around good guy Stiffly.

As Asterios adjusts to his new life and friends, he takes heed of the saying the unexamined life is not worth living and reflects on his professional career and collapsed marriage. These reflections introduce a fascinating character in his wife Hana. Equally brilliant in her field of art and, like Asterios, a professor in Ithaca, Hana lacks Asterios’s self-assurance and toggles between strength and fragility during the recollections. To the reader it is a believable and absorbing relationship, which Mazzucchelli’s artwork enhances gorgeously. The use of the blues for Asterios and reds for Hana and their intensity and interchanging is worth noting and reading into throughout. Contrastingly, the action in Stiffly’s red state is yellow, as are Asterious’s dreamlike conversations with his stillborn twin brother Ignazio, who also serves as the book’s narrator.

Though the size of a chemistry textbook, this book is a quick, worthwhile read, but be warned…these graphic novels are more expensive than those with black type on a pale page, so try your library or getting a used copy somewhere. Yes, that’s not nice for the author or publisher, but a new copy is $29.95.

While in the local library, Blankets by Craig Thompson stood out as a thick well drawn graphic novel. 600-pages later, same result. Powerfully personal story with picture-perfect artwork. The graphic novel space has a lot more than Bone or the X-Men…not that we are knocking either those yarns. Check these books out.

Ghosts

In Ghosts, Argentinian writer Cesar Aira describes events that take place on New Year’s Eve at a luxury Buenos Aires high rise construction site. The building is near completion and has been built by poor Chileans for wealthy Argentines. The Argentines are portrayed as superficial whereas the Chileans workers are “real” with the one unreal exception…these real Chileans can see that the building is infested with ghosts. The workers pay the ghosts no notice, except to occasionally tug on the ghosts’ penises as a gag while working. The ghosts just happen to all be nude males. There are no phantom-homoerotic undertones, nor are the Ghostbusters needed to deal with ghost malevolence.

There is little action in the book. In the morning the future Argentine owners inspect the site with their interior designers, a nephew of the main worker is sent to the store for food, the children of the one workers who lives at the site run wild, the workers get drunk at noon and take a siesta, everyone prepares for the New Year’s Eve party on the roof deck and occasionally ghosts float by. There are a lot of clever observations, comparisons and internal dialogue. In fairness, there also a lot of nonsense.

Cesar Aira is considered a plus writer. In one of the book’s main themes, he often alludes to the uniqueness of being Chilean. It’s probably something all fellow South Americans get, but North Americans can only speculate on, so something appreciable is lost in translation there. Otherwise the book is spotty, with equal tracts of dullness and interest. There is a big decision that is to be made at the end which makes that last 10-pages quite compelling.

Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke is by an acclaimed writer and was the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction. That said only 3-Illuminado Brothers were able to finish the book. The book may be great, but your humble blogger was in the majority who were bored to death between 200-300 pages in and didn’t complete the mission. Undeniably a poor book club pick. If this book is on your group’s to do list, get ironclad assurances that folks will read the book to its 720-page conclusion. Tree of Smoke beat Jim Shepard’s “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” for the 2007 Award. Rigged!

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn is a whodunit in the genre of Clue or any other nobody leaves until the Inspector shouts “Twas the Butler!” The book, by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, stars a vacationing Inspector Peter Glebsky in the Hercule Poirot role amidst a collection of wacky guests and Inn staff. What starts with a missing gold watch and various pranks and bumps in the night leads up to a murder at the Inn. With everyone trapped due to an avalanche, Inspector Glebsky must make like a homicide detective (his actual specialty is catching counterfeiters) and find the murderer.

To give any more of the plot away would be a disservice. The authors are Russian Science-Fiction writers, so this tale eventually goes off the rails, but it enhances the story. A quick, fun read that will have you thinking about reading more mysteries and visiting a Mountain Inn.

There is a 1979 movie based on this book, but it’s in Estonian, so good luck finding it. Actually it wasn’t too hard:

Best Books of 2016

These are the most appreciated books mentioned on this blog during 2016. They weren’t published in 2016, because then they would be real expensive to buy. If you want to read the reviews, scroll down from here.

Gold: Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World. Donald Antrim is a genius. That’s all…nuff said.

Silver: White Noise. Don Delillo is pretty good too. Maybe it’s the name…Don. It has been the year of The Donald. Another pattern is like Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the book is hilarious. We’d love for Pete Robinson and Murray Jay Suskind to sit down and talk. Important hair…we never thought of that.

Bronze: All the Light We Cannot See. A pure pleasure to read, while asking the players the gritty question of when you are confronted by evil…what are you going to do about it?

Proper shout-out for East of Eden, Palace Thief Stories, The Dog Stars, A Visit from the Goon Squad and Blindness, all of which stand out from the other fine books we read this year.

Blindness

This is not a cheery book, but it is an excellent one for discussion. For instance, how long does it take for human beings to go feral? Jose Saramago doesn’t think it will take long. Let’s hope none of us ever find out.

In an unnamed city, unnamed people go blind for an unknown reason. It starts with “the first blind man” and rapidly engulfs everyone, except “the doctor’s wife.” She is the witness to the collapse of society, as more and more victims enter a resplendent, milky-white blindness, rather than ordinary darkness. The government effects an ineffective quarantine that lands a pod of patients from the doctor’s waiting room in a ward of a previously abandoned mental hospital. 15-commandments are repeated from loudspeakers every day, the fifth of which, the only one that is a recommendation and not an order, turns out to be critical – internees should organize themselves. That never effectively happens and a might-makes-right organization takes over, leading to dreadful consequences for the interred blind, particularly the women.

As the internees make their way into larger blinded society, the reader is shown how society is reliant on the individual performing their specialized role. Each of us can’t do it all, especially with our eyes closed.

There many details worth analyzing, e.g., can society reorganize, were the doctor’s wife’s decisions the correct ones, the dignity of the women vs. the men, the old man with the eye patch’s monstrous wish, the blindfolded saints, why did the doctor and the girl with the dark glasses get busy, the use of old adages, etc…, but the writer saves the big question for the last page – are we all blind people who can see? Very good discussion book.

East of Eden

If you went to high school before the standards dropped, ahhh…the 90s, then you probably read either Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath. They are OK are far as high school reading goes, i.e., a lot better than Billy Budd, Ethan Frome, and that awful Catcher in the Rye. So you left school with the feeling that Steinbeck is OK. There are worse.

John Steinbeck referred to East of Eden as his “big book” or masterpiece…and deservedly so. It is big, and it is packed with powerful description, history, character development and biblical parallels. This epic chronicles three generations of Steinbeck’s maternal ancestors, the Hamiltons, and the fictional Trasks (from our own little Nutmeg State, Connecticut….well not really.) And don’t forget, the unforgettable Lee, a West Coast, Chinese-American Mr. Carson jam-packed with philosophy.

The first question out of the box was why two stories in one book? Why not a straight Trask fiction and a separate book about his family, plus some artistic license sprinkled about. The answer is, the Hamiltions, with the exception Samuel, just don’t merit a stand-alone, historical non-fiction, and, with respect to our great state, the Trasks need the Hamilton’s Eden/Gomorrah-like Salinas Valley as a backdrop.

Cain and Abel, Cain is able…C & A. Charles and Adam. Caleb and Aron. Maybe Cyrus had a brother named Aloysius as well, undoubtedly East of Eden is chiefly known for its parallels to the story of Cain and Abel. Charles and Caleb are Cain…and in some fashion so is Cathy, who is Caleb’s mother…probably via Charles, thereby making Caleb a Mega-Cain, but for Timshel. Both parents, who bear the mark of Cain on their foreheads, also produce a mini-Adam via their recessive genes in person of Aron. There are other parallels for the readers’ entertainment, e.g., who works the field, who is Dad’s favorite, etc…

During our discussion, the Brothers spent some time on Original Sin and the consequence of ill-begotten wealth. Subsequently discussed events that caused characters to just jump completely out of character, e.g., the two female suicides. Entertained a conspiracy theory that Liza was pregnant with George, forcing Samuel to make an honest woman of her and them both to flee an intensely Catholic Ireland. We imagined the warmth of a few whiskeys around the anvil, the taste of ng-ka-py and a room full of ancient Chinese guys studying 16-Hebrew verses in heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. One Brother even jettisoned Pamela Anderson and W.C. Fields off their list of The Three People You Would Like To Have Dinner With, and put Samuel Hamilton and Lee at the table with Hulk Hogan. Powerful stuff.

Thou mayeth read other books. Thou mayeth read other Steinbeck books. Thou mayeth be an idiot if thou musteth and pass on East of Eden. It won’t care. It’s amazing and very secure in that fact.

FYI…Google can be great. Tooling around for images of the area returned this travelogue of a trip to the Hamilton Farm. The photo here was lifted from this post. You should look this as well…tough farming.

http://epiphanyinbmore.blogspot.com/2013/07/steinbeck-scholars-tour-hamilton-ranch.html#!/2013/07/steinbeck-scholars-tour-hamilton-ranch.html

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter is sort of an amalgamation of Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Penthouse Forum. His description of American ex-pats in post-war Europe is very Hemingway. His idolization of vapid, lay-abouts is very Miller. His authoring a book largely about anal sex is very Guccione.

The milquetoast narrator meets fellow American Phillip Dean at a Paris party and inspires Dean to move his underfunded French sightseeing tour from the City of Light to provincial Autun. Having arrived in Autun, Dean hooks-up with a peasant waitress, which sends the narrator into a full-on vicarious description of what their life must be like. Driving to a new small town every day, eating in a hotel or café, walking at about at night and screwing. An annoying amount of screwing. That the book was written in 1967 and goes from standard sex, to oral, to anal, to essentially Ann-Marie just assuming the position, working the lube and reading a magazine is stunning. That year the moral majority were trying to ban S.E. Hilton’s The Outsiders. Talk about preoccupied…they really missed a doozy by Salter.

The book does have some fine writing, but also has some kvetch worthy writing as well. Just like free-association, scattered jazz music makes no sense, Salter peppers the book with non-linear absurdities. Without bothering to look one up, an example might be that the lighting of a room or some cool air makes Dean temporarily terrified. WTF?

Besides inducing a mild erection, a reason to own the book is that it makes a fine travel guide. With Paris currently flooded by those splendid migrants, visits to Nancy, Dijon, Beaune, La Baule, Sens, Les Settons, Montsauche, Dole, Bagnoles, Angers, Perros-Guirec, etc…might still be like visiting France.

The Dog Stars

Welp, there’s been another apocalypse. A military plane carrying a shipment of Africanized bird flu crashed in Brampton, England starting a pandemic that wipes out the world’s population. There are only a few survivors. No zombies, so there is some good news.

Holed-up for 9-years at the Erie, Colorado Airport are Hig, his dog Jasper and a gun nut named Bangley. Brotherly love has long since evaporated, so any survivors who cross their perimeter get waxed, then converted into dried jerky for Jasper. Hig and Bangley are an unlikely team, as Hig is pensive outdoorsman/carpenter and Bangley is Wayne LaPierre. It’s clear that Bangley could shrink the airport’s headcount whenever he wants, but although Hig is a comparative softie, he does have his uses. Hig and Jasper sleep outside in furrow near a porchlight the team leaves on all night. Jasper senses approaching intruders, then Hig keys his walkie-talkie a few times, then he and Bangley neutralize the threat. Hig is also a very rare bird in a depopulated world…Hig is a pilot. He flies his Cessna to reconnoiter their perimeter, get supplies, and to help a group of nearby Mennonites who have been stricken with the blood sickness. Bangley is dumbstruck over why Hig engages in the latter, but he has learned that Hig needs his projects.

Hig has been coming a little undone after finishing off a group of five intruders that included one kid. He then flies out to a Coca Cola truck to get some treats for Bangley and the Mennonites and wouldn’t you know it, he has to fight-off two survivors there. Needing some R&R, he grabs his rod and he and Jasper hike into the mountains to fish. Jasper, who is an old dog, passes away peacefully one night and Hig absorbs another gut shot. He hikes down and is unknowingly being tracked by a large group of hostiles. Enter Bangley.

Hig is shot (figuratively.) He needs a change, because what they are doing isn’t living. While on patrol 3-years prior, he received a signal from Grand Junction Airport. Its past his Cessna’s point of no return, but now that doesn’t matter. He’s going. So should you. This is a good book. It’s by Peter Heller. The book cover is an understated masterpiece.

Life & Times of Michael K

If Michael K had any luck, he’d have no luck at all. Born with a hare lip deformity, he is ditched by his unmarried mother and grows up somewhat abused in a government institution. When his mother becomes ill, she contacts Michael and they try to return to the town of her birth, where as a young girl she had known happiness. The country is in a state of quasi-martial law, so getting papers for a trip for two paupers from Cape Town to the interior turns out to be impossible. So they walk. Rather, K walks and pulls a cart that his afflicted mother rides in. Of course they are harassed all the way and the mother cashes in her chips before they get there, but K pushes on with her ashes until he reaches an abandoned farm that is his best guess as to where she grew up.

From this point on in the book, K makes an assault on the maxim that no man is an island. He lives in a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere, sleeps for days at a time and begins to live on the brink of starvation. Coetzee really goes deep on describing how little K is subsisting on. Despite endless bad luck, people do try to reach out to K, but he maintains an internal independence, even in a forced labor camp or among a band of nomad bums.

Readers compare this book to Kafka or The Bible, but Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning may come to mind as well. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” K is living that way.

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was the best book we read in 2015. Regrettably, the Life & Times of Michael K is not in that category. You may feel that you are wasting away while you are reading it. In sum, a solid book, but slow and featuring a protagonist that you may not care much about.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

What the heck, it was just Halloween. If you have ever read reviews of Thomas Ligotti’s work; you’d almost be too afraid to read anything by him. He is deep in a niche that is window dressed by nice guys like Steven King, Dean Koontz and other scaremongers. Ligotti’s books are unlikely to be on a library or book store shelf, but that may change. Penguin Classics released a compilation of short stories from two collections that were released six years apart, hence the disjointed title. Penguin probably didn’t do themselves any favors by putting a creepy cover on a volume celebrated for its disturbing content.

The book starts with a story called The Frolic, a story about some after-work decompression between a newly minted prison psychologist and his wife. The story is really well written and moves at a sound, anxiety-building pace. Its ending is predictable, but is a perfect landing none the less. There are 30+ more stories in this book, so it’s going to be a nice ride, or frolic if you will.

You read the next one….screech!!! That sucked. Oh well, next one….effing dreadful. Next one…pointless. Next one…ugh! Next one…better, but that was really bizarre. Hmm, do I really want that stuff in my memory banks? Next one…groan. Now you are at the “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story” chapter. No thanks. The book has now become an exercise in finding stories that you can connect with.

Comes a point where you have to bail on the Dead Dreamer stories and jump to the Grimscribe stories to take their temperature. However, at this time, we just can’t. You broke us. Anyone who can power through these stories really needs a psych evaluation and their backyard excavated and searched for the remains of local paperboys. See you next Halloween Grimscribe. Unless we forget.

The Things They Carried

They carried a lot. An M-16, ammo, body armor, water, rain poncho, packets of Kool-Aid, toilet paper, a machete, a lighter, but they also carried things that weighed nothing, but meant a lot. The respect of family and friends, their patriotism, their rage, their dignity, their life. Thank you for your service.

As for the book, most of the Brothers were frustrated with narrator grunt Tim O’Brien. Was there really a skinny Viet Cong with a star shaped hole for an eye? If so, why all the angst over that hole? Why was Lieutenant Jimmy Cross wracked with guilt over Ted Lavender’s potluck death, but able to carry on after his selection of a base camp mistake that doomed Kiowa. Was there really a boy who turned on a flashlight in the sh1t field that night triggering the bombardment? Was that boy Tom O’Brien? Was burning Than Khe a reaction to Kiowa’s death or under orders? Bobby Jorgenson was on guard duty with an automatic weapon, who would mess with him under those circumstances? What’s true and what’s malarkey in a book that attempts to pass off “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” as a true story?

Obviously, you had to be there to truly appreciate the intricacies of these war stories, with the notable exception of “On the Rainy River.” Though no active Iluminado were old enough to be drafted for Nam, the core question of whether you would have reported for duty or fled to Canada was with American males up until the Reagan Administration. We received Selective Service notices and had to go to the Post Office to register or face the potential consequences…and there were many rumors back then of the consequences. Having that notice in hand prompted the big-boy conversation of what would you do if called up. 99% of us answered in public that we would go, but had we sat down and wrote about our true feelings, it might look a lot like tracts of “On the Rainy River.” And yes there ought to be a law, and a big plaque in the chambers of all the world’s governing bodies that states if you want to start a war, it’s your precious fluids (i.e., your blood, your sons, daughters, nephews, grandsons, etc…) that will be the first to go to into the meat grinder. No Air National Guard, no college deferment, no exemption, no conscientious status…your family members are 1A, available for unrestricted military service, and sent straight to the front lines. That would be a more robust peace keeper than a nuclear deterrent.

This book has moments like that, but also carries stuff it doesn’t need, like the baby water buffalo, the dancing girl, and Curt Lemon’s dentist appointment. One Brother simultaneously read Karl Marlantes’ book Matterhorn and enjoyed it much more. Those Marines got on with it and had some serious war stories, whereas O’Brien’s Vietnam was a bit of a cluster.

Daughter of Time

Even more eviler then Lord Farquar? Mystery writer Josephine Tey tackles the case against England’s monster, Richard the Third, by means of her fictional Scotland Yard detective Alan Grant. Grant has the time for this cold cased because he is laid up in hospital with a broken leg. (English people are “in hospital” or “at university” they do not use a “the” in those circumstances. Absolutely no reason for this, but that’s how they roll.) An actress lady friend brings Grant photos of interesting historical celebrities who have been involved in mischief. Grant is intrigued by Richard’s portrait. Can an enlightened looking fellow like this be guilty of murdering his brother’s pre-teen sons? He and his partner, Sargeant somebody, know a killer when they see one, and Richard ain’t one.

If you are unfamiliar with the case for and against Richard III, you will find this book fascinating. The theory that the Tudor Public Relations Department, pinned the murders on their Plantagenet subsidiary (there was a hostile takeover in 1485) seems plausible and Shakespeare’s nothing but a useful idiot spewing his Tonypandy against Richard. (We leave to you to look that reference up…1910, riots.)

It is also a bit confusing. There are a lot of people in England named Edward, George, Henry and Richard. There also a lot of “of” people, e.g., of Buckingham, of Norfolk, of York, of Ely, of Warwick, etc… You may need to make an org chart.

Very stuffy English writing…even some pot shots at the Welsh, Scots and Irish, but in truth, if you know the story, the book isn’t that compelling. You’d be better off Wikipediaing the players, then watching the documentary Richard III: The King in the Car Park. That show gives you the pro-Richard account via a driven Richard advocate named Philippa, a goofball narrator and a fine-looking CSI girl in a lab coat. Their accomplishment of finding Richard’s actual body 500+ years after he was tossed in a grave is one for the ages.

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe gives the reader a look at primitive culture in rural Nigeria. The culture does make a lot of sense…polygamy for example, but with the arrival of whitey, the times…they are a changing. That does not sit well with the story’s leading man, Okonkwo. Kind of the Archie Bunker of the Umuofia clan. He is old-school and has some anger management issues.

The most compelling piece of the story is after receiving the spoils of a settlement with a neighboring tribe, Arch grows a heart. That’s right Meathead. Part of the spoils is supervision of a young lad from the other tribe. He is a smidge older than Okonkwo oldest son, so of course the younger boy adores him.

In time, the captive boy becomes well-regarded by his alpha step-Dad. The kid is tough, bright and a great example for the younger boys. However, after many years, the village elders get around to deciding the case of the captive boy and the verdict is why are we wasting yams on him? Just kill him. Okonkwo’s buddy, sensing the damage that will be done pleads with Okonkwo to sit this one out.

Okonkwo, always sensitive about his humble beginnings, can never let an opportunity to enhance his street cred go by. He affirms his commitment to the old ways in one reluctant machete stroke and after that, it’s all downhill for him. His favorite daughter falls ill, then his gun explodes and kills a bystander. For the latter, the elders banish him from the village for 7-years.

When he returns there is a Christian Church in the village, which initially only attracts the dregs of society, but continues to gain a higher level of convert. Eventually Okonkwo’s own estranged eldest son is down with JC. The inevitable face-off with the new European authorities occurs, and you can’t fight City Hall, so the Igbo ways fall into decline.

Yams, seed yams, yam barns, yam foo-foo, kola nuts, snuff bottles, cowries and pots of palm-wine, whether you enjoy the story or not, the book is a trip.

City of Bohane

This ain’t an easy read, ya’check me? Irish tossers aren’t easy to comprehend as is, but author Kevin Barry mucks it up further with the concocted west Irish Klingon of dystopian Bohane. What is Bohane? Imagine the Five Points of New York City, but The Priest un-croaked returning to do who knows what to Bill the Butcher.

The book has won some prizes…not Man Booker, but quality awards. However, viewed for the International Space Station, the story is a standard gangster yarn. The protagonist, Bohane’s own Tony Soprano…The Long Fellow, The Albino, Leader of the Harnett Fancy, one Logan Harnett, is feeling it from all sides. Bohane’s old boss, Gant Broderik, is reported to be lurking about town, which is an obvious business and potential health problem on its own, but throw in the fact that Gant is Logan’s wife’s ex and now there are problems at home and the office. An ill-timed shanking also has rival gangs from the Northside Rises out for blood. Logan, short on options, makes a deal with some marginalized devils that want in on Bohane’s rackets, so he at least has a fighting chance. These are the external threats. Internally, there’s intrigue among Logan’s lieutenants and his still powerful 90-year old mother has gone full Uncle Jun by linking up with a female capo that plays every Fancy hardboy like a violin.

If you give it enough time to get down pat with the lingo, it’s a real page turner. If you don’t, you’ll hate it.
P.S. – Barry does rip-off Philip K. Dick’s wardrobe descriptions from Ubik.

The Palace Thief Stories

And that brings up the new outfielder from our Triple A affiliate, Ethan Canin. The rookie is 4 for 4 in his major league debut and has hit for The Cycle.

Nope, never happens. Similar to when you pick-up a book of short stories, invariably a few strike out. If you bat .500, you’re happy. However, in this case the four stories that comprise The Palace Thief Stories are all hits. There maybe some variability in what each reader feels is the triple and the double in the set, but there are no sacrifices made in order to get the book to the publishers preferred heft. This is a quality collection.

If you think the upcoming Ben Affleck move The Accountant is based on the story of the same name in The Palace Thief Stories, it isn’t. If you think the Kevin Kline movie The Emperor’s Club is based on the title story, it is…complete with the absurdly simple Roman history questions.

There’s Something I Want You to Do

Much like A Visit from the Goon Squad, you better pay attention to everyone in this act of knitting by Charles Baxter. The book’s ten virtue/vice titled chapters orbit with, once again, minimal degrees of separation from Minneapolis-based pediatrician Dr. Elijah Jones or the city’s Washington Avenue Bridge. Additionally, the book has two built-in sports: 1) finding how the action in the chapter relates to its title, e.g., where is the Chastity or Gluttony in their chapters, and 2) where did a character ask another about something they want them to do.

Games aside, the book a quiet accomplishment. Within the 221-pages are well drawn players, delicate details and always something that’s a little off. That off-ness lays anchor in the reader’s grey matter and persistently agitates. A worthwhile read, with enough diverse content to hook most. Examples being the straightforward introspection of Wes in Loyalty or the inspired breakthrough in Forbearance. Enjoy.

Sweet Promised Land

When a reviewer cites beautiful prose, we all envision a jumped-up blogger in their pioneer-neighborhood apartment treating their cat(s) like offspring and partaking liberal amounts of recreational drugs. Beautiful prose? Are you kidding? Did the author describe, in detail, nearby flowers, the evening sky or how a character’s soul was touched during lovemaking? Bounder-dash!!! Well, the verdict is Robert Laxalt wrote some beautiful prose in Sweet Promised Land…and we all own dogs, so its legit!!!

The story is unassuming. Laxalt and his brothers assist their Dad, Dominique, on a return visit the mothership, the Basque country town of Tardets, after 47-boom & bust years as a shepherd in Nevada. You can forecast a lot of the book’s content early on, but you will not preempt the writing. Dominique’s chi, his humble stories and their impact on his life are treasures for the thoughtful bookworm. We all know that these experiences occur to a multitude of likewise stoics, who true to form, take them forgotten forever to their graves. However, in this instance we are in luck, because the stoic’s son happened to be a talented writer. FYI- Dominique also sired a Nevada Governor & Senator in Paul Laxalt, so there is successful immigration story here too. You can decide if it mirrors today’s challenges…we’ll be in New Zealand.

This is an understated, yet potent read. If you are under 40-years old and want to take up this book, you better be an old soul. Truthfully, if you are under 30 and still partying it up, you need not apply and eff you…you lucky bastard.

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

Quick, quixotic and funny read. There are no dopey teenage romances in what we have to guess is a post-apocalyptic, sea-side Florida municipality of author Donald Antrim’s creation. Instead of that sop, nascent mayoral candidate and dedicated educator, Pete Robinson, sits padlocked in his own attic going over a series of recent events, which despite Pete’s best efforts to nurture them as teachable moments, went a bit too far.

Pete’s inner voice is the POV and it is marvelous. The thoughtful enthusiasm at which he tackles his tasks, while analyzing himself and others, will endear him to you. The town civic and business leaders are quirky (half-nuts) as well, which leads to memorable vignettes of the Rotary’s theriomorphism workshop, the use of library reference books to set off the claymores laid in the local park and the defenses at places like the Rainbow Pillbox and Fort Ed & Jane.

But Pete takes the cake with his attentiveness to the previous mayor’s last request, his ruminations on the local MILFs, recruitment of instructors and students for his home school, explanation of the dead’s resurrection into trees, and his campaign slogans – PETE ROBINSON BLEEDS FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE.

185-pages of frivolities with no important destination, but well worth the trip.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Tony Robbins, Steven Covey, Harvey MacKay, M. Scott Peckerhead…they are all just Beatlemania compared to Dale Carnegie, i.e., the original article himself. Admittedly, this was a different sort of a book for the Iluminado to examine, but the discussion was in no way dulled. It appears simple…be positive, appreciate people, hear them out with sincere interest and for the love of Pete…Smile! And yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it. The tricky part is in the application, after all this is an unashamedly mercenary title. We had almost all read this staple decades ago and had our benchtop studies to recount, but the truth is we felt we had moved on. But had we? Meeting Carnegie again was like bumping into an old school teacher and remembering what that teacher had tried to pass on years ago… some bits of good advice. As our dear friend Art Vandelay, who owns the largest Import-Export Company in Clayton, Missouri used to say “Sharpen the Saw. Re-read the Classics.” This reinforced that.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

As hip a piece of fiction that has been pumped out over the past several years. A book you want to be seen carrying as you sport your urban lumberjack threads at the local farmers’ market or coffee den. Tight, stylish and a well written account of characters with an average of 1.5-degrees of separation from the life and career of a music executive. The book has harvested loads of literary awards and is a fine read, but it is it all that good? Without spoiling anything, let’s say it has as promising a start as any book we’ve picked-up, but in the end there was a slight feeling of unfulfillment. If you are a baseball fan, then the book was a bit of a J.D. Drew.

If it was a group of short stories instead of a novel, what awards does it win? Without the PowerPoint chapter, is there as much buzz?

In correspondence with the great Nathan Hobby, the James Wood of Australia, one thing we could agree on…the newspaper-wrapped striped bass that made it from the East River and into the gleaming skyscraper office of a music executive was clearly Robert Freeman Jr. circling back to Sasha or Jesus Christ.

The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist

Shazam! The 1951 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature created one malevolent son of gun. Amongst a pack of back stabbers, one man stands above all at 26-inches tall. Piccoline, the Court dwarf. He cuts off beloved kitten’s heads, kills rival dwarves, loathes young lovers, wants the riff-raff (especially poets) beaten and poison’s his master unsuspecting frenemies…throwing in those he doesn’t care for for free.

At moments this is a fun book, especially when he throws an extra poisoning in, but this study of good and evil does not fulfill. The Dwarf works for a Renaissance Italian Prince who funds many artists and intellectuals, and while associating with that lot is, to The Dwarf, despicable, it is the excepted norm for a great prince. Therefore, he holds his tiny nose and tolerates his Prince’s behavior, because he knows the time when his Prince needs him will come. When there is a dirty job to be done, he is the man, errr…the dwarf to do it and he does it with aplomb. In his view, evils bubble up in people and he is there to act on it for them.

The reader does expect the converse to occur, i.e., goodness to bubble up in the Dwarf, but alas, that never materializes. One can’t be sure that it would have improved the book if it did, but the reader does trend that way, which makes the book’s ending a smidge surprising and fruitless.

Disturbing the Peace

Happiness is a spouse, enviable children and a job that makes more cake that the Joneses. Some find that even after they check all of those boxes they still are not happy. Having achieved upper middle classdom, John Wilder, rather than become an advertising titan or SuperDad, puts it on cruise control, which affords him plenty of free time to indulge in alcohol and women.

Early in the novel, triggered by either alcohol and/or mental disturbances, Wilder lands in Bellevue’s Mental Ward. That stinks because it’s early in the novel and it is the book’s high water mark. From there on you gradually stop caring about Wilder. Wilder’s alcohol keeps flowing and his paranoia and delusions begin…but so what, he isn’t the genius that breaks out of the conventional to become a Galileo, an Einstein, or Caitlin Jenner. He’s a nut.

Assault on greatness is likely not the point. Yates may be illustrating the other side of the coin. That is, to an outside observer, it doesn’t take much (or perceivably anything) for a guy to just hit the eject button and plummet. We all know that guy. Many of us have put our finger over that button…but just weren’t crazy enough to hit it. In this instance the ejector seat had no parachute and the plane sailed on.

White Noise

This is a tremendous book for book club discussions. Astonishingly, the book is 30-years old. Yet, even before smartphones, the 24-hour news cycle, Breaking Bad, Gawker, the weekly supermarket aisle updates on Jennifer Aniston’s search for Mr. Right…no wait that was around in 1985, Don Delillo was feeling the pressure of what was the ever present, ADD-inducing advertising of the day. With the advent of digital marketing, there is no doubt he’s on prescription Dylar today.

Early in the book you will wonder if you will ever care a lick about the Gladley’s family, with their inane idiosyncrasies and their who’s who to who family structure, but the veracity of the described ambient white noise captured in the writing is absorbing. Dacron, Orlon, Lycra, Spandex. Then just as you are ready to curl up with solid old Hitler in J.A.K.’s worn copy of Mein Kampf, along comes Murray Jay Suskind and his fascination with the psychic data continually at our disposal. Murray becomes Jack’s unacknowledged analyst and they have remarkable conversations throughout the book. Murray appearances are like dumping nitrous oxide into the book’s engine. It just leaps in power when he is present.

There is a lot discuss, e.g., Nyodene-D, fear of death, enhanced sunsets, toxic cloud eating microbes, New York emigres, SIMUVAC, Babette’s important hair, etc… Enjoy. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida.

The Woman in the Dunes

Not a thrill a minute, but certainly an evocative book. The daily grind reduced to shoveling sand just to keep one’s head above, well, sand.

The protagonist, an amateur male entomologist, heads into some extensive and remote seaside dunes in the hopes of smacking his surname in behind the Latin binomial of a new species of beetle or other revolting insect. His search for taxonomic immortality lands him at the bottom of a sand pit inhabited by a woman who shovels sand away from her house every night, all night. Yes, she is fit, but before you start debating if you would rather be stranded on a deserted island with Ginger or Marianne, this is a sand pit where you wake up covered in sand, walk around with sand in your mouth, nose and ears unremittingly and only for the fact that the villagers who tricked into the pit lower food and water down, you would die in short order.

You hope for the best for each of the two characters, but if the walls came crumbling down you’d get over it in a jiffy. You will sympathize with the man and hanker for him to regain his freedom, but he is a buffoon. His idle threats, his disregard for the woman, his sense of entitlement, his blindness to the fact that he who catches insects in his net is caught…there are a lot of irksome aspects to the man. You will also hope the woman can think more expansively, but she is wedded to the shoveling and satisfied with whatever the villagers toss into her hole. She is noble in a sense, but certainly preposterous.

The book is only mildly recommended. If you enjoy Neil Sedaka’s “One Way Ticket to the Blues” you might be just the type for this Japanese classic. FYI – There is a 1964 film based on this book which looks interesting. Wikipedia has a quote about it from Roger Ebert mentioning King Sisyphus. Nice connection.

The Kept

The book’s cover is grey and boy do the contents deliver. In midst of a dreary western New York winter, a midwife returns to her remote home to find her family slaughtered. There is a sole survivor, her 12-year old son, Caleb. Caleb witnessed the edges of the massacre from his hiding spot in the barn, and since he can identify the three killers, mother and son set out on a vision quest of retribution. The prospect of a future showdown is a tantalizing payoff in The Kept.

The protagonists track the killers to the NY equivalent of Deadwood, SD, complete with its own Al Swearengen, and there the story gets a sprinkling of kidnapping, cross-dressing, murder, gay-bashing and lots of bad luck. The book is narrated from the points of view of the Caleb and his mother, Elspeth and jumps between them and back in time, but it isn’t too difficult to keep your bearings.

There are surprising details that emerge as the story progresses, including how Ma assembled their family of seven. As for the showdown at the end? No worries, we won’t spoil it…not that we could anyway.

Just Give Me The Damn Ball!

The “Unauthorized story” of star football player, author, fashion designer, ESPN analyst, interior designer, domestic abuser, jewelry designer, DWTS contestant and current Panera Bread franchisee, Keysean Johnson. Although Keysean is the author (with Shelley Smith) of this book about his rookie campaign with “the sorry-ass Jets,” it seems he never got around to authorizing it.

The book itself is actually quite a page turner. Self-absorption, bluster and capriciousness are taken to new heights in this (auto?) biography. That one could actually be this self-centered, is mind boggling and for that reason alone it’s a must read. The sports world teaches many noble life lessons, but it also showcases that if you have (or project) enough talent, you can run around demanding respect, yet giving and earning very little. No worries everyone will tow the line.

A note…we have not come here to bury Keysean, but to praise Keysean and the many Keyseans that came after him. Sure he stole things, sold drugs, scalped tickets and gambled, but that doesn’t make him a bad guy. It’s just life growing up poor in L.A. Keysean just wants to win, give back to the community and those who helped him, see USC clobber Notre Dame & UCLA annually and, of course, end racism.

Another striking thing about Keysean is that his opinions are pretty fluid. He seems to dig Frank Reich, most of the time, unless Frank’s being knocked senseless by the defense and can’t get Keysean the damn ball. He’s fond of Glenn Foley, because Foley likes to throw to him, but Foley is a no-hoper, but how can he be so hopeless when Keysean is open every single play? Wayne Chrebet? He sucks. Keysean admits you have to give Chrebet his props, but he sucks. Heck, Keysean even throws limited support 1-15 Rich Kotite’s way.

Some opinions however are firm. Three time Super Bowl Offensive Coordinator Ron Erhardt has got to go and Keysean means like yesterday. Terrible game planning. Why do you play with power football when you have a Keysean. He’s open every play…get him the damn ball!!! QB Neil O’Donnell? Too afraid to hurt his passing stats, so he dinks & dumps off short passes to his pet Chrebet so old Neil can keep getting $25M contracts. (Keysean likes to get paid too, but he may be onto something here.) 10th all-time NFL scorer and 5 x All Pro Nick Lowery misses a kick, he’s got to go. Keysean has no use for kickers who miss kicks. Legendary USC coach John Robinson is Da Man, on and off the field. He got that one right, and he is right about a few other things too, e.g., the Jets need to figure out a way to draft Tenessee Quarterback Peyton Manning, O.J. was a sellout to the black community, if a locker-room tolerates losing its all over.

The upper case “I” is used thousands of times in the 200 or so pages, but you’ll get used to it. Probably a $3 book on Thriftbooks and a 3-hour read. You decide. We’ll end it here with the way Keysean ends a lot of his stories…”I just laughed.”

All the Light We Cannot See

There are so many reviews on this book, it’s probably not worth adding to the clamor, but here goes… The last time a book had this much penetration with the masses, it was the Da Vinci Code. Unlike the Da Vinci Code, which thrilled the masses and appalled the Salon, All the Light We Cannot See (“ALWCS”) has met nearly universal approbation. It won Entertainment Weekly’s 2014 Book of the Year, beating out Kardashian Konfidential & Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette. ALWCS probably won a few other awards as well.

The book’s format, i.e., the compact chapters, was a plus as it allows readers to tear through a 500-page plus book with ease. Such ease that one of the first questions out of the gate was is this a piece of literature or a beach read? The opinions were strongly in favor of the former, as the brothers gushed over richness of the prose and the character development. Many felt they smelled what Marie-Laure smelled and heard what Werner heard via invocation from the writing…or their drinking. It was an easy read and that should get the average blockhead buying more books, which is a good thing.

While not quite an epic, there was a lot packed in there. The most righteous message in this book is that of “What are you going to do about it?”

-Jutta to Werner: When that school tries to transform you into a brutish Hitler Youth, what are you going to do about it?
-The drill sergeant to the Hitler Youth: We all will prey on weakness here. What are you going to do about it?
-Dr. Hauptmann to Werner: You want an extra slice of cake to remain my pissant? I‘ll send you straight to the front line like all the others. What are you going to do about it?
-Mademe Marnec to Uncle Etienne: These bastards have taken France. What are you going to about it?
-Fredrick to Werner: Nothing said. Fredrick remains a model of decency in an indecent place and pays the price because no one is brave enough to do something about it.

Do you want to live your life or have others dictate how you can live it? It’s a great question and we’ll leave it at that. No need to drone on. Chances are you have already read the book and/or will be there for opening night when the movie comes out.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thorton Wilder’s clerical gumshoe, red-haired Brother Juniper, investigates why the Almighty would, in his wisdom, commit an Act of God that drops 5-random travelers into a crevasse, along with the remains of the finest rope bridge in all Peru on July 20, 1747. Brother Juniper’s motive is not completely antiseptic, as he watched the 5-gesticulating ants take the plunge, as he too was headed to cross the bridge…”within ten minutes, myself…” After a six year investigation into why those particular ants had to meet their maker, Brother J publishes an enormous book related to the investigation. In it, the five victims are graded on Goodness, Piety and Usefulness. The book is declared heretical and burned in Lima’s public square along with its author.

The details of the five interconnected victims lives was a bit dull, so the read isn’t a pleasure. Still Wilder is an esteemed writer (The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928) and won’t be outlawed for this book alone. The book does have a famous passage at the end, where speaking of the five who died, the Abbess (a great character) tells Dona Clara:

“But soon we shall die and all memory of these five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Pop. 1280

That’s what the road sign says. 1280 souls, located as close to the assh*le of creation as you can get and under the care of High Sheriff Nick Corey. An amiable, even progressive fellow, as unlike that Sheriff Ken Lacey, who holds that colored folk don’t have souls and shouldn’t be counted. Riddicerlous! While backwards in his social views, ole Ken ain’t pre-zackly all bad. He does help handle those two pimps that were sassin Nick down by the whorehouse. But dealing with those pimps won’t help Nick win re-election against a truly fine man like Sam Gaddis. You see, Nick has an image problem.

Folks are starting to think he’s an active graft sucking crook, a womanizer and a do nothing Sheriff. What folks don’t realize is, Nick realizes the only thing he can do is sheriffin’ and he will stop at nothing to keep the job…and that means more than just Nick’s public vow to crack down on the coloreds and poor white trash who can’t pay their poll tax. It means anything.

This book is a fun read. It’s quick, colorful and quite a guessing game as you move along. Written from Nick’s perspective and in his native tongue, Jim Thompson has created a memorable rogue. It is shocking that the only film adaptation of this book is the French Coup de Torchon. Wake up Hollywood!

The Best Books of 2015

These are the most appreciated books mentioned on this blog during 2015. They weren’t published in 2015. A slight cop out on the Bronze Medal, but standards are eroding everywhere, why not here too….

Gold: Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee) – So simple, so thought provoking…how does he do it? Certainly a book for our times. How do you prepare for the seemingly barbaric enemy? Institute a police state or try to build bridges? Maybe Trump knows the answer. The book had a nice touch of old guy pervy-ness too.

Silver: The Stranger (Albert Camus) – Congratulations…you almost won. People spend careers studying this little pamphlet. Unassuming, but unforgettable. You will be thinking about the story when you are on a Coney Island beach blanket, having a Zima in Telluride, taking a dump in a Orelousas Waffle House.…essentially on & off for the rest of your life.

Bronze: (tie) Appointment in Samarra (John O’ Hara) & The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) If John O’Hara were a Gen X Dominican, he’s be Junot Diaz. Well…maybe not. O’Hara is fixated on social strata, while Diaz deals in the ethnic, but both write with such intelligence that even a buffoon recognizes that a master storyteller is on a roll in these two books.

From The Mouth of The Whale

Sjon. Not a very descriptive designation for a guy whose culture uses a suffix in everyone’s family name to describe them as someone’s son or sen or dottir. That said, like George Dubya was a decider, Sjon is a describer. What he describes is the life of Jonas the Learned, exiled Icelandic mystic, naturalist, natural philosopher and accepted crackpot, during the 1630s.

Jonas’s misfortunes move between descriptions that are Iceland’s landscape, flora and fauna and the wind’s instrument that sits off its coast…his penal home of Gullbjorn’s Island. You will pull for Jonas against his mainland tormentors and hanker for him to give them their comeuppance upon his return from Copenhagen University. Unfortunately he returns to…plot buster…ruin. Sad.

There is sunshine in the North Sea. The laugh he shares with Rector Ole Worm over Danish King Christian IV’s unicorn horn. The most uproarious ghost story you are ever likely to hear. His love for his wife, his children. Sweet.

The book isn’t action packed, but it’s packed with interesting writing and plenty of oddities. Expect something modest and you will find it extraordinary.

The Pale King

DFW’s Big Book. Prolix, exhaustive, self-indulgent. Understanding that this is a sacrilege, a blaspheme and a violation of all that Lit majors, used bookstore junkies and hipsters hold dear, we say no thank you. The author isn’t being questioned. He set out to write a dull book and he did. There are tracts of great writing and a mystical grasp of the IRS bureaucracy, but nothing worth investing in. Pass.

And Again?

A chance to live your life again? It’s been written about many times before, but not as adroitly as by Sean O’Faolain. The residents of Mount Olympus sponsor a confusing ride in reverse for one Mr. B.B. Younger, who in life #2 becomes lover to his daughter (possibly) and two granddaughters without any misgivings. O’Faolain, a cultured and charming storyteller, certainly has us wondering if the official Irish reputation for uptightness is baloney as this 1970s taboo laced tale was published in Ireland without any fuss. Unfortunately, the book itself has fallen out of print, but is available on used book websites. Go get it before its gone.

The YA Genre

It’s hard to know what you will find in a Young Adult book. It seems the more of these you look at the more you notice the genre is dark. Kids go from pointing at the white mouse in “Goodnight Moon” to reading about kids being murdered in “The Lovely Bones” in a jiff. These books probably need warnings similar to movie warnings or ratings on their covers.
We have some 4-year old Illuminado prospects we interviewed recently and as preparation they were asked to read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie. An acclaimed YA book. To hear 4-year olds give their opinions of how poverty, racism, alcoholism and even masturbation are used in this novel is a bit unsettling. Granted, these are advanced intellects, but they are like 3-feet tall.
We left a comic book (now called a graphic novel) in the waiting room for the candidate on deck to read. It was Patrick Ness’s “A Monster Calls.” It’s about coping with terminal cancer in the family, which in the YA category, is downright cheery. Know what your kid is reading. It may make them stronger or the star of next “We Need to Talk about Kevin” book.

Appointment in Samarra

Brilliant book. You will want to go to the Club for a ginger and rye as you read along in this story of the force of society rules and keeping up appearances in a 1930’s moderate-sized town Pennsylvania. One impulsive, trivial act sends an esteemed Gibbstown prince down the path of self-destruction and it is marvelously described. The author’s own internal struggle with his place in America’s caste ignites a superb outcome in this novel. Pound the table buy.

The Stranger

The first question right out of the box amongst a group of confident, well-hung, independent thinkers like the Nutmeg Illuminado is “Is this truly the greatest book of all-time?” Eff no, but it is an incredible discussion book. Meursault…you gotta love him, or not. It doesn’t matter. It’s starting to annoy me. It’s getting on my nerves. I was tired. I was a little bored. I didn’t feel like it. None of it really mattered. It didn’t make any difference to me. I gave up the idea out of laziness. I felt kind of annoyed…yet this Mousier takes some conclusive action when the sun hits him like a slap in the face.

As low key as the extremes were, they were fantastic. Meursault’s indifference, the little woman at Celeste’s exactness, Marie’s nonsensicality, Salamo’s meanness (both in terms of nastiness and dependency), Meursault lawyer’s hopeless assurance and the prosecutor’s fixation on the absence of remorse, they were all fun to discuss. How did Meursault even survive into young adulthood? He was so sensitive to the beauty of the sky and to upticks in temperature, yet he is completely oblivious to the trouble you can get in by emptying a revolver into another person. Was he on the autism spectrum? Did Maman keep him out of trouble all these years before she went to the old folks home? Who knows?

Today it wouldn’t only be in front of the old people that he would get the ridiculous feeling that he was being judged. He backs up a Raymond, who plans on killing another guy…and has no problem going Ray Rice on his girlfriends. He stands by while a guy beats an animal. He only cares about his girlfriend’s body (free pass.) He swings at a priest. He kills an indigenous person. The P.C. Police would be pulling some serious OT pay tuning him up time and again. Amazing.

Going against the recent trend, we wouldn’t cut a word out of The Stranger. It was an absorbing read from start to finish. No nonsense. No tangents. Also, the single narrator worked in this one. Camus did a great job of framing up what the other characters thought of Meursault. Theon Greyjoy needn’t be consulted. Fun book. It’s short. Go read it.

Room

A freaky Fritzl-esque story narrated by a 5-year old boy born to a captive mother in an 11’ x 11’ shed. Interesting and intensely gripping leading up to the escape attempt, but it peters out after that. It’s well documented that readers eventually turn on the boy narrator, and the author should have predicted that and offered other POVs like Old Nick, an old boyfriend who married someone else or Theon Greyjoy.

Unbelievably, in the second half of the book you will even start to lose patience with Ma, the brilliant heroine who raised Jack in such a balanced fashion within an astonishingly stunted environment. Just because you were abducted and abused for 7-years, that doesn’t give you the right to be so snippy with everyone!

As has become a theme on this blog, this book could have withstood a 100-page haircut with no damage done. If you are curious, go for it. Otherwise, there are better things to read out there.

Case Histories

What is wrong with Netflix? You would think you can order anything but the very latest TV to be streamed into you domicile. Nope, you need to rent the DVD for Case Histories? With that kind of service, they could be the next MySpace or Friendster.

The actual book is engaging. Enter caricature private eye with a soft spot for damsels. His bread and butter is tailing potentially philandering wives, but now he will be investigating some rather cold, rather sad cases. Unsurprisingly, via some massive strokes of luck and without much wasted effort, he solves them. The reader isn’t given too much to go on as you advance, so you will have to wait for Mr. Brodie to have his breakthroughs.

It’s likely that you will only care for 2 of the 3-cases presented, one is really brutal, but as the fat man waving and squeezing a handful of scarves said…don’t be sad, because 2 outta 3 ain’t bad. Beach read for the CSI, CSI-LA, CSI-NY, CSI-New Orleans and CSI-Ottumwa, Iowa set. Enjoy, and send Netflix an email entreating them to actually become Netflix.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Well, there certainly are a lot of folks that say when I read the first sentence, I was drawn into a book I knew I would love. Those people love rainy days, scrapbooking, picking strawberries and Caitlyn Jenner. The Illuminado don’t go for that sap. Owen Meany is a fine book for discussion, but the next edition should cut about 200-pages out. Pruning it a bit won’t diminish your opinion of the wrestling coach who wrote it. The dude can rastle and write…it’s just that in this instance he may have written far too much.

There are many intertwining details and themes throughout the book, and one of the most central is that of free will versus fate. Owen has a vision of his future, one which is not completely in his best interests, but rather than taken steps to protect himself, he takes steps to ensure his date with destiny. While Johnny Wheelwright, with no vision of his future, allows fate to act on him by making very few non-Owen directed decisions. Johnny, an aptly described “Joseph,” to Owen’s higher calling, either cements the theme of the power of great friendship between the boyhood buddies or unwittingly becomes an Instrument of God’s Instrument.

You probably won’t enjoy the sojourns to Reagan-era Johnny Milquetoast, now raging self-righteously against America, wrestling with questions of faith, boring his students and practicing his nonpracticing homosexuality full bore. You may find yourself wishing Owen missed “The Shot.” In sum, a well-constructed novel, but long and eccentric enough to test your faith in Irving.

The Sense of an Ending

You typically trust first person narrative in a book. Yet, when the narrator keeps realizing that he has the narrative all wrong, it gets a little frustrating and it starts to remind you of a first person narrator who, from time to time, does get a little sketchy with past facts. Yep, that first person.

When schoolboy narrator Tony Webster is asked by his history teacher “What is history?” He replies that “History is the lies of the victors” to which he is given partial credit and warned that history is also “the self-delusions of the defeated.” Fast forward forty years and Tony sits atop his personal history as the loser of a few battles (e.g., his marriage, his grandpa-dom), but winner of the war, enjoying retirement.

His peaceful (his word) existence is interrupted, by an the old girlfriend’s mother bequeathing the diary of an old suicided school chum and 500 quid. This sends him sleuthing into his past and his discovering the narrative he has constructed for himself, does not fit the facts. There is an interesting plot twist at the end, however no real sense of ending for the reader. What’s up with the 500 smackers? The Diary? The behavior of the girlfriend? The cryptic brother?

Still a good read. Well written. Great observations on the past and one’s participation in their own life….”We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

The Moviegoer

The title sets you up for a different sort of book, but it’s not about that. Sure Binx Bolling, goes to the movies, often and in earnest, but the book was more about coping with depression and the search for meaning. Binx, a New Orleans patrician with a Midas touch in the stock market and with the ladies, isn’t content to take his due place in polite society and put it on cruise control for 50-years. Instead, he is obsessed with his vertical, then horizontal “search.” The search with its “rotations” and “repetitions” is one for meaning and escape from tedium. As illustration, one morning Binx wakes up in the grip of everydayness. In such a state the search itself is not possible. In a fit of rage he rolls off the bed, the shock of which loosens the grip of the malaise and he vows “I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll be defeated by the everydayness.”

Binx has many interesting takes…on the upper class, liberals vs. conservatives, his Aunt’s black butler, Southern Belles springing from the loins of rednecks by the millions, the return to the same movie seat after a 14-year absence and being subjected to other people’s personal rays. You may think he is a little crazy, but you haven’t even met Cousin Kate yet.

While not quite Hesse, Walker Percy packs plenty of existentialism in the book. Not a must have on the book shelf, but bear in mind The Moviegoer did defeat Revolutionary Road, Catch 22, Franny & Zoey, and books by Maxwell and Malamud for the National Book Award, so any philosophical or literary friends that see it on your bookshelf will rate you a tad higher than they did when they came through the door.

The Maltese Falcon

It started off as quite the page turner, became a bit tangential then finished up OK. The whodunits are interesting, because you really don’t trust any of the characters except maybe Sam’s secretary, Effie. A bigger mystery are the scenes that go nowhere and leave the reader wondering what they were about. Sam however, doesn’t like wondering. He combats it by proclaiming he knows everything, so everyone else better start talking, which some do, but he doesn’t trust them anyway, so he remains incensed about the whole thing. He also must possess incredible charisma as he hurls his patented monkey wrenches to gum up the works and no one ditches or beats the urine out of him.

His charisma was validated, as to remain in the company of San Francisco’s #1 private dick (circa 1930, as today’s S.F. dick is another matter altogether), the Brothers retreated to the Illuminado’s Boethius Memorial Theater to watch the 1941 film version of the book. Bogie was a heck of a Sam Spade. Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, were stellar as well. But, it was pearls among swine as nearly everyone fell asleep. It takes a tiger in a Las Vegas bathroom, a male model walk-off or the No. 4 prostitute in all of Kazakhstan to keep this crew awake after 9PM.

With giants as actors, The Maltese Falcon is a must see movie, but the book is optional.

Anil’s Ghost

Summer is approaching and you need to line up your beach reads. Like CSI type stuff? Of course you do. Hit the wall with Patricia Cornwell and Alex Cross? Take a whack at Anil’s Ghost, about forensics expert Anil Tissera, and you will get a whole lot more than blood work…mysticism, idealism, history, descriptions of life in Sri Lanka, vignettes that reinforce the level of terror the local people lived under during their Troubles. Fascinating book. Lots of neat, intertwining details and memorable moments. Endorsed. You’ll enjoy it.

Tropic of Cancer

As often as the word cunt is used, it probably should be called the Tropic of Uterine Cancer. You may find parts of it you like, but the consensus was that the book was dogshit. You could imagine the barriers it broke when published and credit Henry Miller for that, but the lives of the skells it chronicles really was unforgivable. There wasn’t one character in the book that anyone cared a lick about. So we have to guess that this really was just an exercise in writing past the boundaries of 1930s common decency. Early shock jock material. Unless you feel you need to add it to your resume to be somehow enlightened, there is no reason to waste your time. If the book ever comes up, just say you are outraged that it was banned and you’re covered.

To be fair, one Brother started to read Tropic of Capricorn to see if Miller had anything else to offer. He burned the book.

Book of Illusion

Credit the writer for an unconventional plot. There are some truly engaging points in the book, but in the end, you’ll be left as flaccid as Burt Reynolds at a Village People concert. If you read it, you will probably have to read Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from the Tomb and Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, so be warned. Pass.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Packaging. It’s important. Chevrolet realized that when it couldn’t sell Novas in Mexico because folks didn’t like a car that translated as “No Go.” It work’s that same way with guys who are ready to worship a beautiful woman, but don’t have the looks. This can be overcome via muscles (see, Carrot Top), cash (see, assorted old billionaires), drugs (see, the bouncer at your local strip club), confidence (see, Marc Anthony) or a decent rap (see, Salmon Rushdie.) In many cases, it’s not overcome…Cyrano de Bergerac, the Jonas Brothers (we can’t get a date!), John Travolta at a massage parlor and the protagonist of Junot Diaz’s book, Oscar De Leon.

The main story details the life of Oscar, a Dominican geek with no game amongst females, as told by his counterweight, the narrator Junior. It stylishly describes his sudden mega-crushes, which all end in crushing rejection. Compounding those disappointments, the realm outside his love life also serves up heaps of rejection, pushing Oscar into the sanctuary of his Sci-Fi writing.

When we know who Oscar is, we are given the stories of his sister Lola, mother Belicia and his grandfather Abelard. All good reads. Oscar at times seems simply a supporting character until the book validates its title in final stretch. The mythology and superstitions of old Caribbean peoples are not ignored as the book presses on and the golden mongoose combats the Cabral family curse.

You get a few stories in this novel, a little interesting Dominican history, some geek speak and wondrous writing. Diaz’s use of slang, New Rican Spanish, Tolkienisms and footnotes are dazzling, but don’t forget this guy’s isn’t just bullsh1tting at a barbarcue, he wrote it. He packaged some well know sentiment beautifully. For example…”Sucks to be left out of adolescence”…”But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead”…”Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes”…”We all know how tolerant the tolerant are”…”You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.” Couple that with the passages about feeling the knot on Belicia’s breast and daaaaaamn, you have someone in touch with being a human being.

Obviously, this book has been praised in many quarters, and we find that the praise is well deserved.

Le Grand Meaulnes

It was written before the 1980’s, therefore before greed was good, which means in a time full of baloney. It was 1913 (whenever that was) and Blue Horseshoe didn’t care about Endicott Steel and the world was full of dreamers. You may respect the humans of that time for starting WW1 and KIA, WIA or MIA-ing 38M peeps, but they were a pack of hopeless romantics. Enter Alain Fournier, the frog who penned Le Grand Meaulnes. If you check him out on Wikipedia, it’s clear if he lived to be 600, he would never have penned “I got 99-problems and a bitch ain’t one.” He appears to be a perfect gentleman and has a wonderful little story in his entry…

“while he was taking a stroll along banks of the Seine he had met Yvonne Marie Elise Toussaint de Quiévrecourt, with whom he became deeply enamored. The two spoke, but he did not manage to win her favors. The following year on the same day he waited for her at the same place, but she did not appear. That night he told Rivière, “She did not come. And even if she had, she would not have been the same.” They did not meet again until eight years later, when she was married with two children. Yvonne de Quiévrecourt would become Yvonne de Galais in his novel.”

Amazing stuff to have in your life. Showing up a year later to torture yourself…it worked. You pumped out a fine book, which Le Monde lists as an all-time book. From today’s perspective, it’s sappy, but captures the angst of reflecting on missed opportunities and although that blows dog, it’s part of growing up as a person and as a reader of written reflections.

We can’t recommend it, as its pretty dated and pie-in-the sky stuff, but it isn’t rubbish, it’s sincere. Boy meets girl on bridge, girl is elusive, at age 27, boy gets killed in the trenches. As with Catcher in the Rye, there is no follow-up, but Alain has an excuse.

Waiting for the Barbarians

If you enjoyed Jack Kerouac’s On The Road contrast of the American police, who are “involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats” to the Mexican sheriff making his lonely rounds with no suspicions, no fuss, just as the guardian of the sleeping town, then you must read this book. Other than that, you really should read this book.

It’s Just the Beating of My Heart

Richard Aronowitz’s book will have you thinking more about the beating of your head. The book is about an Amer-Anglo art dealer who has separated from his wife and as a result picked up the pace on his drinking. Far from fretting, Mr. John Stack takes his breathtaking alcoholism very much in stride as he takes many a stride pursuing his second favorite amusement of hiking the local countryside. The author describes the drinking and hiking in such rich detail that you will find yourself starting to crave a drink or a jaunt. But not so fast…his descriptions of the morning-after after 2-bottles of red wine and sleeping all night in the dry heat of forced air will have you craving water over wine. It will be hard to find more opulently described hangovers or commercials for a humidifier.

As for the rest of it, you’ll have to suspend reality to believe that he lands the piece of ass he does, but maybe he’s wine-goggling and she isn’t a 9, but more like a 4. He has some predictable mental disturbances, the source of which becomes clear in the final reckoning.

The book isn’t a Jason Bourne novel and is slow and internal, but Aronowitz comes off as a plus writer and an even keener observer of single maleness than Warren (Charles Grodin) in The Lonely Guy. Here’s a snippet…

“There is one set of footprints in the snow behind me; there will be one pint glass at the pub table at lunchtime; there was one bowl and one spoon in the kitchen sink this morning. I am bloody fed up of speaking in monologue.”

No shootouts or piles of coke on a black desk. Just stuff like that.

Qu’est-ce Elixir de Ubique, Monsieur Dick?

If science fiction is dated, is it still science fiction? Perhaps in the way post-feminists are still feminists, it is. Is Wade Boggs still a Red Sox legend, while a Yankee? And why wasn’t Boggsy allowed to go into the Baseball Hall of Fame wearing his cashmere Devil Ray cap, sporty maroon wrapper, electric yellow cummerbund, birch bark pantaloons and twinkle-toed cleats like he wanted? You might say that’s neither here nor there, but its assuredly more certain than what’s going on in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.

The book was discussed at the Illuminado’s Athenaeum & Natatorium (the Old A&N) located on Connecticut’s shoreline. It was hoped that this restful retreat on the picturesque Long Island Sound could settle the chaos Ubik had released within the frontal lobes of our virtuoso cerebrums. To some extent the serene environs were a comfort, although a few brothers ultimately yielded to the vapors. Either those, or the off-gases being released from the keg of home brew percolating on the premises.

The session began with a stern “mind your p’s & q’s” as those who just closed the back cover wanted to reach immediate consensus on the impact of the coinage Glen Runciter just pulled from his pocket. “Let’s not be premature!” ejaculated Brother Jason, and splendidly said since he had finished UBIK shortly after it was selected. Once things had climaxed on Luna, he said couldn’t hold back and just finished, the book. He had waited near a month with his book in his hand for this meeting and as always served as a splendid prophylactic for the proceedings.

Right out of the box, there was criticism of Joe Chip. Brother Brian does not suffer bumbling protagonists well. (See, Reilly, Ignatius) How could a guy who couldn’t afford cleaning bots and whose door had threatened him with a lawsuit, so easily grab the reins of a company with the reputation of Runciter Associates? Seriously, this company was moving to planet-wide commercials every hour. That’s even more than Oxi-Clean. A look back at the VanGuard Prudence Sector Fund in 1992, shows a 38% decline on the day Joe Chip took control. Maybe the story didn’t go on long enough to document any activist shareholder proxy fights (in half-life?) Still Chipper was an apt metaphor for the numerous contradictions throughout the book.

He contributes to the yo-yoing with his erratic knowledge of Latin. First he think’s Pat’s Carpe Diem tat is written in Hebrew, next he is translating Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsong’s arias from Latin to English. Joe later asks Pat(?) for a cigarette, she says she all out, then she lights up a few sentences later, which is of course nothing to Pat’s undressing lack of sexual interest in Joe. Yet she marries him on an alternate time line and tells Wendy (on the book’s baseline reality) that she’s Joe’s mistress. Pat mind eff’s everyone. Still, thickhead G.G. Ashwood believes there is a sexual understanding between Joe and Pat, but clear-headed Runciter dismisses it out of hand. “He’s too poor even to-“what? Take her out? Get a hard-on? How we wish Glen would have finished that sentence.

There is certainly a bleak projection of where runaway commercialism will take society. The coin-operated phones, washing machines, TVs and Magic Fingers beds of Dick’s time evolve to coin-operated doors, showers and coffee makers even in the individual’s own conapt. When Pat explains that everything in the Topeka Kibbutz is free, Joe is stunned. Free! That’s not economically feasible! Then to lead-off 16 of his 17 chapters, Dick shows it isn’t too hard to ape the high priced campaigns of Madison Avenue as he schlocks all sorts of products as the greatest thing ever…when used as directed, thereby highlighting what a whore the ad man is. Even so, some of us were ready to cut a check from the Ubik Savings & Loan for the salad dressing and the razor blades. Within this nightmare of commercialism, Joe Chip, our humdrum hero, does have his heroic moments, particularly this scene where he lashes out at a coffee maker that threatened to call the police on him…

‘‘One of these days,’’ Joe said wrathfully, ‘‘people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a poscred readily available or not!”

Another large chunk of the discussion was consumed with the religious symbolism. While he deals with higher and lower realities, is Joe Chip a stand-in for JC? We couldn’t remember exactly how many inertials went with Joe to Luna, but were they The Apostles? Saints Tippy, Al, Tito, Ziggy, Fred, Don, etc… Was Pat Conley Judas? She gives herself a non-biblical portrayal as she can’t “turn stones into bread or give birth without impregnation or reverse the illness process in sick people…not even common talents like that.” Or is G.G. Ashwood Judas? Can Ray Hollis, S. Dole Melipone and their organization be the Pharisees or Romans? Is Jory Miller, with all his cephalic power, the Devil? Is Runciter God? Is Ubik God? Is Ubik, since it’s manmade (in half-life) a representation of religious creeds as they add structure to the world that may decay via the Devil’s (or Jory’s) works? Are these reaches? Check out the only noncommercial chapter opening, which occurs in the final chapter…

“I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.”

The book’s religious. There also were two “so it goes” references in the book which had us wondering if Dick was a Vonnegut fan or that was part of the lingua franca of the day. We went with the former because it seemed groovier.

These and many other questions which this writer forgot lay in store for the UBIK reader. It’s a challenging discussion book and just because it’s characterized as Science Fiction don’t sack it. We’ll bet you a Walt Disney 50-cent piece you will enjoy the read no matter who you feel is dead or alive.

Oh yeah, Spoiler Alert!!! For all the stuff you already read. But don’t worry. It won’t matter.

Everyday is For the Thief

After years of soft living in the U.S., Nigerian-born writer Teju Cole is heading back to his old home on the outskirts of Lagos. While he is proud of the progress made by Nigeria and Nigerians during his absence, especially in literature and the arts, he is exasperated by two destructive traits engrained in Nigerian society. The first he calls “the same old, same old” which he blames for the peoples’ enduring tolerance of omnipresent corruption and low level criminality. The second is the attitude of “close enough.” While Nigerians overcome this in their art and literature, it stops them from making any meaningful contributions in the precise disciplines of science and technology. For this he views a lot of the country’s progress as borrowed.

The book is an enjoyable (and safe for the reader) jaunt through a city most readers are unlikely to visit or even take the time to think about beyond wondering if anyone is still falling for those Nigerian Internet Scams…Dearest Sir, I am the Director of the 1st Nigeria Bank of Petroleum have a confidential business proposal, please send me your bank account number so I can route $87,000,000 into your account to hold yada, yada, yada. Cole knows that certain ideas about legality that have taken root in him while in the West, thereby making him an easy target in the Wild, Wild West that is most of Lagos. Black skin alone doesn’t get you a free pass. The hunters look into the eyes of those of the herd to find the hunted. Fortunately, our self-aware chronicler has a pair and heads into the big city on his own. It makes for some great vignettes.

He is flabbergasted at the condition of the national museum, which seems to be ignored by the public and to have been looted of its cultural treasures.

He is appalled that a government official is only sentenced to 6-months for stealing over $100,000,000 from the people.

He thinks about what a powerful writer like John Updike would have produced had he lived in Africa rather than outside Reading, Pennsylvania. My goodness! What the explosive raw material of everyday African life would have done for his writing Cole can only wonder.

There is a great chapter revolving around a bus ride where a woman gets on carrying a book by Michael Ondaatje. This a rare sight on an NYC subway, let alone an African danfo. His mind races with questions…where did she get it, how could she afford such a book and still be on public transportation, what does an African woman who likely has not studied in the west get from the writing, are there others like her? In those few minutes he fell in love with what she represented for Nigeria.

There are other neat scenes, such as when he visits his first sweetheart, now married and with a family of her own, but you can’t help remembering the one where he drives by a billboard that blazes “Corruption is Illegal, Do Not Give or Accept Bribes” and is left to wonder how much the billboard owner bribed the government official to land the ad.

The book isn’t a must read, but if you want to spend a few hours in a strange land with an intelligent, affable writer like Teju Cole, you won’t begrudge him your time. A quick read. Accumulate.

A Syndicate of Imbeciles

Just kidding…A Confederacy of Dunces. The book was read and discussed prior to the Holidays. We are just putting a placeholder in the blog for some future deeper thoughts, but what’s to say? Do you like the sound of your own unexpected laughter? Read the book. Then try the late Romans, including Boethius, of course. You may skip the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That is mostly dangerous propaganda. Better skip the Romantics and the Victorians, too. For the contemporary period, you should study some selected comic books. We recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he’s found himself. His morality is rather rigid, but The Illuminado rather respect Batman.

Oh, Fortuna, you capricious sprite, thank you for this book.

Side Piece…Jamilia

The Side Pieces keep rolling in. Task Force # 17 out of Nutmeg Iluminado Lodge # 9 completed Jamilia by Chingiz Aitmatov. Our order always felt it was unfortunate that this author’s first name came to attention of the writers of Bevis and Butthead, but life is not fair…just Google the actress Gene Tierney and the Hollywood Canteen and you’ll be glad you are just non-descript flotsam. Incidentally, while Gene attended the Unquowa School in Fairfield the Iluminado monitored her closely for breeding purposes.

As the story was tipped as one concerning unrequited love, a Jesuit-educated Brother stepped up to lead the Task Force. As his specialty was the oral history of the Soninke peoples, this was thought odd. Privately he was asked about his commitment, and described a high school incident that nettled through the years and hinged on unrequited love.

In the middle of his sophomore term, he was identified as a promising student who needed to be bumped from the lowest Language Arts class (he was born in Brooklyn and commuted to this Manhattan institution, therefore thought to be gruff) to the highest. Prior to his first advanced class, he bumped into a friend who was in the top class from the onset. He asked what can I expect from, call him Father Taylor since that was his name, Father Taylor’s class?

Well Chummy, you can expect a lot of time describing unrequited love six ways from Sunday.

I see. Thanks Pal and I look forward to discussing our interpretations on the matter.

What does unrequited mean? Oh well, I’ll look it up later. Class #1 pop quiz on a book our nascent literary high flier didn’t even possess. “Why was I too proud to ask my friend what unrequited meant! I could have wung it if I had at least that much!!!” Immediately jettisoned from the high flyers, it was back to reading The Pigman and Ethan Fromme.

Now Jamilia. She is That Girl. Among 100-girls her spunk, her effortless joy and her lithe, non-buxom, athletically structured body catch the admiration of all the young men. Her personality is Elizabeth Bennett. Sharp and playful. Hubby is away, not so much “to make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan,” but fighting for Joseph against Adolf. That leaves little bro, a convalescing soldier and Jamilia to work a grain wagon for Mother Russia. The unrequited love could come from anywhere, except maybe from J to little bro. It dances around a bit, settles and does a reversal, but in the end seems requited, but is it? Your impression will be that it is somewhere else. It might be Daniyar’s love of the Kazakh Steppe that is unrequited. He sings to the high heavens of the land’s beauty, yet the strict cultures of those lands afford an old orphan like him no chance for peace.

Because it is less than 100-pages, the book is prime material for a tweener prior to a scheduled book club meeting. Be advised, this isn’t hard core unrequited love. That kind of story could be painful or fun…like the movie Just One of the Guys. This one is lovely writing, but a bit fem. Your wife’s book club could use it as a tweener, but there is some geography and nationalism here that would confuse them. “Where are they? In Canada or someplace like that?” Not a Buy or a Sell…Hold.

Side Piece – Please Don’t Stand so Close to Me

Side Pieces. The Urban Dictionary defines them as a girl you call up at 2AM and she knows what’s up. Here in the IlumoStratus, Side Pieces are books that small task forces of Brothers read and report back on as to whether the book is worthy of our powerful examination. Behold some reconnoitering…

When back in 1980, Sting sang “Just like theee, old maaan in, that book by Naaabokov” many of us teenagers hadn’t the vaguest idea what that meant.

Lo. Lee. Ta. Lolita. That is the book by Nabokov. In the IMHO of many readers, it is undoubtedly one of the finest bits of writing in existence. Replete with luxurious words, buoyant wit, and clever wordplay. At times the reader will soar in this book. So welcome aboard…also on-board are: Statutory Rape, Pedophilia, Guilt and Cupid…although the pudgy little guy took an Ambien and put a blanket over his head to feign a quick sleep. The debonair Humbert Humbert, having lost young love by the seaside, finds himself willingly or unwillingly craving a replacement. A nymphet. In due course, he tries to recapture that lost love in New England pre-teen Dolores Haze. Either its true love or he’s a common, filthy pervert. The tough part is he cops to both.

People who are caught, tend to justify anything in the name of anything. Slap Love in the 2nd anything slot and the first anything can be a doozy as is the theme of Lolita. To murk it up a bit more, at a few paces distance, love and lust are identical twins. Dr. Humbert treats the reader as if they sit in the jury box. The intensity of his love for Delores at many points in the book would be enough for Kim to kick Kanye to the curb, but that needs to be weighed against his time on a Parisian park bench looking over the top of his book.

Although the book could certainly be shortened without losing any merit, this is still an amazing read and provides fodder for lively discussion. Recommended.

A Farewell to Hemingway

He ain’t bad. But a real sticking point to guys who went to high school 70-years behind him, was that his work seemed dated. There is no way our…that is to say today’s bitches would talk to us like that. “There isn’t any me anymore. Just what you want.” “You’re pretty wonderful.” WTF??? Maybe the Women’s Liberation Movement wasn’t such a bad thing after all. We’re not kidding!

Hemmingway’s stark style was notable. Subject, verb, object and repeat. Also, if you are looking for wit, language or character development, please see another novel. That said, this is an acknowledged classic. To deny that would be to say Babe Ruth was fat and couldn’t play for today’s New York Mets. There are people, books, ideas, that stand above their peers and warrant respect. Along these lines, our discussion of the book’s context likened it to watching an old movie. You need overlook the caricatured characters and hammy acting to appreciate what the writer wants to impart. From that perspective A Farewell to Arms had enough content to merit praise without having to rely on a free pass based on the lost context.

The main character, Tenente, seemed like an average chap. In fact he likens himself to a .230 hitter, but everywhere he went he found an old acquaintance to have a vermouth or cognac with, nurses marveled at his lovely temperature, he read many a newspaper and calls Othello the N-word. He also pays locals to do everything for him. Even as he convalesces in a Milan hospital, he has everyone on his payroll running errands or holding train seats. It’s not clear why this American joined the Italian Army since, unlike San Francisco’s Ettore Moretti, he is not motivated by glory or sacrifice for Mother Italy.

Like most drunks, Lieutenant Henry can get philosophical. When speaking to a pre-syphilitic Rinaldi about how the war might end he wonder about the wisdom of the defeatist peasants who have been inhaled off their farms by the Italian Army for wartime service. “That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.” The reader knows he has hit on a certainty and an equitable peace would be brought about in short order by a peasant intelligencia. Later, while waiting in the hospital he provides a unyielding view of death and elucidates it with a story of his own failure to play messiah to log full of ants in the fire. God happened to be too busy filling his cup with whiskey to save the fated ants.

Aaaah, Catherine. You are bonkers. While holding off the frisky Frederic, she seemed large and in charge, but when she falls for him, she must have hit her head on something on the way down because she falls apart. Her friend Nurse Ferguson warns Catherine that fooling around with one of these wounded warriors will be her undoing. Fergie turns out to be prescient and all but calls her a slut as she exits the novel. Catherine does get off one of the books best lines: “Darling, please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian army.” Funny, but unfair. The Austrian-Italian front was brutal. With Italy dropping out of the Triple Alliance, then joining the Allies for assurances that could annex the southern Tyrol, enraged Austria’s Tyrolian-born War Chief Conrad von Hotzendorf and he vowed to punish his hereditary enemy, which he did.

The group agreed this was not a war or anti-war novel, but a love story set in a war. The book is recognized for its vivid description of the Italian retreat after Caporetto, however it doesn’t share much beyond a traffic jam. An unnecessary shooting and a narrow river escape wrapped up in the retreat provided much of the books action. The balance of the action involves all of the hauling of Tenente’s baggage by flunkies. We’re still mad at the bartender for not rowing Frederic and Catherine to Switzerland. After all, Tenente “nearly sent him some pipe-tobacco once.”

This wasn’t a great Book Club book. The only issue participants disagreed on was whether this was a classic. Whether it is or isn’t, it is likely Papa will continue his torture of high school students for years to come.

Hollywood Triumphant….The Natural

If you are a person who can’t stand unimaginative show-offs declaring “The Book was Better!” as they exit a movie theatre, then Bernard’s Malamud’s The Natural is the book for you…to hit them over the head with. This mediocrity of a Fisher King rip-off inspired the sappy, yet classic baseball film starring the positively dreamy Robert Redford. As for Malamud’s Roy Hobbs, you’ll prefer Bump Bailey.

Hobbs of the written word isn’t shooting for the ideal of “There goes Roy Hobbs. The best there ever was in this game.” He is watching his stats, hoping to smash lots of individual records and planning to cash in. The only thing missing from this Boy of Summer’s wish list is a PEDs hook-up from Victor Conte. Sadly, even the baseball strategy detailed in the book was a mess. Plus, what year was the intentional walk discovered? Jeez!

A couple of Brothers tried valiantly to stimulate any discussion beyond how badly this book had struck out. Brother Dave tried the bird theme…Harriett Bird, flyballs dropping like birds, Flores touching his genitals whenever a bird flew over his head, the hamburgers being called dead birds. It was all to no avail. The bird theme shifted to “what kind of slob eats 6-hamburgers and drinks a gallon of whole milk before bed?” Brother Nick read a bunch of Malamud’s short stories and concluded that this guy is no honey dripper. The stories didn’t finish up with “and they lived happily ever after!” They were gritty and the protagonist wasn’t always rewarded. Malamud in better context somewhat explains the wet fart that was The Natural. So it goes…

On Deck…Literary: A Farewell to Arms, and in Sports: The Life and Crimes of Don King

The Queue

Although we had read it in 1994, the Brothers began 2014 by reading Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. As we did 20-years ago, we remembered things past by baking madeleines, drinking champagne and singing Frere Jacques outdoors…in the nude. Wonderful book, wonderful memories.

After the year’s inaugural book, it was down to brass tacks, hot lead, stray loads, an oddessy and so it goes…

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut

At the All Star break, we are reading Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, with the following works on deck…

Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky (824-pgs)
Mao II (256-pgs); Underworld (832-pgs) – Don Delillo
Little Bee – Chris Cleave (271-pgs)
The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson (480-pgs)
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (384-pgs)
Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann (375-pgs)
Martin Dressler…The Tale of an American Dreamer – Steven Millhauser (293-pgs)
The Tender Bar – J.R. Moehringer (370-pgs)
Wait Till Next Year – Doris Kearns (272-pgs)
The Gift of Rain – Tan Twam Eng (450-pgs)
New York – Edward Rutherfurd (880-pgs)
The End of Faith – Sam Harris (348-pgs)
Tortilla Flat – Steinbeck (208-pgs)
Brave New World – Huxley (288-pgs)
Shadow of the Wind – Zafon (487-pgs)
Suite Francaise – Nemirovsky (448-pgs)
The Roadhouse – Erdich (368-pgs)
Disgrace – Coetzee (224-pgs)
The Joke – Kundera (336-pgs)
The Abyss – Yourcenar (374-pgs)
Oryx & Crake – M. Atwood (389-pgs)
Matterhorn – Marlantes (640-pgs)
Cutting for Stone – Verghese (688-pgs)
The Naked and the Dead – Mailer (736-pgs)
Pastoralia – Saunders (208-pgs, short stories)
My Documents -Zambra (200-pgs, short stories)
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe – Ligotti (464-pgs, short stories (10/6/15 release))
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Christie (304-pgs)
Something Wicked this Way Comes – Bradbury (304-pgs)
Lucky Jim – Amis (296-pgs)
Going Bovine – Bray (496-pgs)
Rabbit, Run – Updike (336-pgs)
Blindness – Saramago (352-pgs)
The Boys in the Boat – Brown (416-pgs)
Frankenstein in Bagdad – Saadawi (352-pgs) Upon translation into English
David and Goliath – Gladwell (320-pgs)
In the Lake of the Woods (336-pgs), Going After Cacciato (352-pgs) – O’Brien
Absurdistan – Shteyngart (352-pgs)
Dublinesque – Vila-Matas (320-pgs)
The Land Breakers – Ehle (368-pgs)
Promise at Dawn – Gary (348-pgs)
Skippy Dies – Murray (672-pgs)
My Name is Red – Pamuk (432-pgs)
Ready Player One – Cline (400-pgs)
The Hired Man – Forna (304-pgs)
The Sound of the Mountain – Kawabata (288-pgs)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – Rosa (494-pgs)
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World – Antrim (192-pgs)
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age – Hrabal (160-pgs)
The 39 Steps – Buchan (134-pgs)
Oh, The Places You’ll Go! – Seuss (56-pgs)

Looking forward to a prosperous second half of 2014.

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Some of the Brothers could not finish the book. Understandably, the dated hillbilly speak was too much for their gentle sensibilities. They did, however, recover sufficiently to partake in the wine & cheese and allow the resident canine to pleasure itself on one of their legs, so it wasn’t an unrewarding gathering for them…although they remain 4th Degree Iluminado until they go back and finish the book or complete the next book.

There was consensus that the book was a labor up until the dialogue of Addie Bundren, with the bracketing chapters of Cora and Whitfield adding a great deal of value. Her terrible blood flowing, her aloneness vanished, she realized she was getting ready to stay dead, so she killed Anse without his knowledge and clothed herself in sin. After her fall, she had her Jewel, cleaned her house and prepared to stay dead, but not before taking her revenge on the family that dared claim her as their own via a seemingly small request. My mother is a fish…elusive and after a few days you don’t want a whiff of her.

With the exception of his talent for getting women to marry him at breakneck speed, Anse took a beating for his selfishness. Surprisingly, Cash generated a great deal of discussion and dissention. Some saw him as hard working and noble, while some saw him as weak and enabling. With respect to the other characters…Whitfield, despicable…Vardeman, puzzling…Darl, even more puzzling…and Jewel, from harsh to tender to harsher to semi-heroic. He had fans.

The meeting ended with the Brothers Google Image searching Dewey Dell and wondering if the pharmacy rendezvous scene in the upcoming movie will be explicit. Did I mention there was wine and cheese served?

Summer Read – – The Natural – Bernard Malamud & The Brothers’ Karamazov, for any Hercules that can get to it.

To Publish or not to Publish…

that is a question. After decades of clandestine meetings and surreptitious signals in public places, the Nutmeg Iluminado broached the possibility of opening a window into our world. From this window we may only throw one small pearl to the swine named John Q. Public, but the window is open…a crack, and you should be glad of it.

That you have read these sparse words means you are an outlier. The right sort of outlier.  Standing to the right of the swollen Bell mountain and the bilge of its left-side down slope.  Post something connecting Judge Holden, Alex Portnoy and poor old Edgar Derby and we may contact you.  For now, hold your nose and return to the huddled masses.