Recently Read - February 27th 2007

Here's a list of the books I've read recently, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

• Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
  
• A Man Without A Country - Kurt Vonnegut

  See a separate review for these two.

• Diamond Dogs, Turqouise Days - Alastair Reynolds

  Two large novella's by Reynolds set in the same universe as most of his other works like Revelation Space and Chasm City. I really enjoyed them but if you are looking for "normal" happy endings, then you won't find them here. Given the way that each story progressed though, the endings were perfect.

• Nero Wolfe - The Final Deduction - Author

  Another short Nero Wolfe novel by Stout. Here our calorically challenged hero is firmly enscounced in his home, and solving the mystery without leaving it by forcing everybody to come to him and using Archie Goodwin, his sidekick, to do all the dirty work and running around for him.

  I understand most of the Nero Wolfe books are in this vein. It's probably going to wear thin for me soon. It's already a little implausible. I'll try a couple more though.

• The Thirteen Clocks - James Thurber

  I have no idea why I didn't come across children's books like this (or Once On a Time) when I was growing up. My parents pointed me at books like the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton and the Biggles books by W.E. Johns (with titles like Biggles Flies East, Biggles Flies Again and Biggles Flies Undone).

  It's presumably because I was raised on the other side of the big pond and/or they didn't know any better.

  The Thirteen Clocks was listed as one of the books in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (I still have about 650 of them to go). Whereas I gave up on The Hours -- another of their recommendations -- I reckon they were spot on with this one.

  I just wish I'd had the opportunity to read it when I was a young kid that's all.

• The Assassins - Elia Kazan

  A best-seller from the early 70's. It's about the cold blooded killing of a "violent drug selling hippie" by Master Sergeant Cesario Flores in New Mexico and the trial of Flores afterwards. Lots of character examinations in a hippies vs The Establishment setting. Bit dated now but still a page turner.

• Why Do Men Have Nipples? - Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg M.D.

  I've no idea why this was a best seller. It's a collection of (mostly) medical questions and answers put together by a writer and his emergency room physician friend. The sort of things that you'd either be to embarrassed to ask your doctor straight out, or that you should consider would be a waste of his or her valuable time. A few minutes on the Internet, and you could probably have found the answer to most of them. A lot of the times Leyner and Goldberg don't have answers. In these cases, at least they admit that there is no scientific basis to allow a definitive answer.

  And what's with the insipid IM (instant message) transcripts that are sprinkled throughout the book? Are they to show us that you are hip (or whatever the kids are calling it this week). Or maybe as a way of introducing more attempts at humor that mostly fall flat. Or are they just filler for an already thin book? Maybe all three...

  I suppose it could have been worst. According to one of those IM transcripts, if Leyner had got his way, the book would have been called Is Sperm Fattening?.

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( Feb 27 2007, 08:02:09 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]