Monk

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I'm back! This was a much better trip. And I'm not just talking about the chicken fried rice, though that was definitely food for my soul; if anything, they put too much chicken in it! Not that I'd complain.

Maybe I was just more in the mood for books, because many more of them were looking so good to me that I was regretting again having only one lifetime to read.

For my fiction, I went with the intention of getting Thomas Harris's "Red Dragon", which is the predecessor to "Silence of the Lambs". I thought it would be a good bet to get deeper into that story, but I came across John le Carre and I was feeling guilty for not reading more of him, since I enjoyed his "Perfect Spy" and "A Little Town in Germany" and knew he was a quality novelist. So, I browsed his books, and I decided to pick up "The Little Drummer Girl" and enjoy a fictional dip back into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And this will probably be my last novel for this library season, just as Fox's "Classical World" will be my last non-fiction book. We'll call it a good season.

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I'm glad I read the review. Being behind on my news rounds, I was going to pass over it. The book is titled "The Abstinence Teacher" and I have had enough of this culture war stuff. I decided to give it a quick skim, and this was the first paragraph:

Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”

Christian fundamentalism is overtaking an American community. It looks like a winner. I may get around to it this winter.


(Source: Liesl Schillinger for The New York Times)

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The Supreme Court returned for business today, and the Times welcomed the justices over the weekend with a rather biting editorial, lamenting the absence of moderation and consensus that Chief Justice Roberts promised us during his confirmation hearing. Like a hard lover, he took what he wanted and will not even bother to call again. But I'm sure that only true virgins are shocked by this selfish remorselessness.

We have noted the hard right-wing shift of the high court, but this editorial shall serve to further impress this cold reality on these blog pages.

While on the subject, I am interested in checking out a new book by Jeffrey Toobin that apparently documents with some flair this fascist evolution of today's Supreme Court, titled "The Nine". It may be worthwhile to get more deeply grounded in this historical development, even if it must be a sad story, and one which promises to continue to be felt in America for decades to come.

Tangentially related, another new book deals with the consolidation of executive power that the Bush Administration has been able to cull, which is striking when taken in consideration with the co-opting of the Surpreme Court, a real coup. This is "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy" by Charlie Savage. This book and "The Nine" should make for a depressing double-header, but I'm feeling kind of bluesy.

( editorial )

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Stephen King is an editor for this year's edition of The Best American Short Stories, and he is hawking the volume at the Times. Here is a flavor of his style and what he looks for in a short story:

Talent can’t help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks. It gets emotional. It struts its stuff. If these stories have anything in common, it’s that sense of emotional involvement, of flipped-out amazement. I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive — like “Sans Farine,” by Jim Shepard — I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

I was also struck by the point made by one Amazon.com reviewer:

Stephen King starts out well, never once using the word "diversity" in his introduction. This was a welcome relief to me, because for too many years to count the "The Best American Short Stories" series has felt compelled to include every year a black short story, a Hispanic short story, a gay short story, and maybe even an Albanian Jewish short story, all in an effort to produce the most diversified, but not necessarily the best, collection of short stories available. As somebody else once said, "One man's multiculturalist is another man's mediocre poet." The same applies to short story writers. Stephen King, to his credit, never confuses the aims of diversity with the standards of quality.

I'm tempted. If only time and money were not such draconian tyrants over our lives. This book would have to be somewhere lower down on my wish list. Indeed, as far as Stephen King goes, I'm oddly hankering to take on his mammoth "It", which I have never read, and which seems to be haunting me these days and nights, "Come and get me! Read me, read me, bwahahahaha!"

( Stephen King )

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Having finished both "Caesar" and "What Is the What", I can now go to the Hard Case Crime pocketbooks that I have been holding in reserve. They are definitely handy for filling in the gaps in my reading life: BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY! I begin "Say It with Bullets" by Richard Powell, and the very first paragraph is this sweet-nothing:

At the overnight stop in North Platte, Nebraska, Bill Wayne didn't copy the other tourists in the party when they bought postcards to mail to friends. He was running a little low on friends these days. Once he had classed five guys as friends but they had picked up a habit of doing things behind his back, like shooting at it. The only wish-you-were-here postcard he wanted to send them was a picture of a cemetery

You can imagine the smile that put on Monk's face. He knew he could settle down into another fun, dark-alley read. That noir, hardboiled style. It ain't too pretty and literary. But it's like the blues in story form. It can hit the spot, striking all the right, low-down notes.

I think this will close out the summer reading, and then we ride off into library season, and get an early start, even if it does mean going without my chicken fried rice, and you know how much that has to hurt.

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I had heard the story of the cattle and the What many times, but never before had it ended this way. In the version my father told to me, God had given the What to the Arabs, and this was why the Arabs were inferior. The Dinka were given the cattle first, and the Arabs had tried to steal them. God had given the Dinka superior land, fertile and rich, and had given them cattle, and though it was unfair, that was how God had intended it and there was no changing it. The Arabs lived in the desert, without water or arable soil, and thus seeking to have some of God's bounty they had to steal their cattle and then graze them in Dinkaland. They were very bad herdsmen, the Arabs were, and because they didn't understand the value of cattle, they only butchered them. They were confused people, my father often told me, hopeless in many ways.

-- "What Is the What" by Dave Eggers

These are the reminiscences of the Sudanese refugee-protagonist going back to the days just before the civil war broke out in his own village, as the new Arab-Islamist government has taken over Khartoum seeking to spread sharia law throughout the country.

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As I drove to Malibu I wondered what a strange world it had become... What was it about movie stars that so touched the imagination of even the most dedicated and intelligent?... Hundreds of millions around the globe sought daily refuge in the cinema to watch beams of light play upon lives that seemed to matter much more than our own. We could be ugly and unloved, broke, boring, and unhappy, unlucky not just in love but in every choice we ever made, but when the houselights dimmed we became, like everyone else in the audience, the same characters living the same story. For a few brief hours we might experience lives more coherent than our own, shaped not by raw chance but by the rules of drama, lived not in obscurity but glorified in shifting light, personified by actors gifted with beauty, charm, and soulfulness we wished for ourselves.

-- "Burning Garbo" by Robert Eversz

That's my Nina!

And this completes my reading of all five books of the series, not one a disappointment - Nina and I are an item.

I'm sorry to see the old NinaZero.com site is no longer up, though. I wonder if this means that there will be no more books in the series. I can respect that. Mr. Eversz would have had a big challenge trying to carry the character forward, and it is better to end leaving us wanting more, rather than with a bittersweet disappoinment. But there is also some disappoinment in this, too, but I guess it is a good kind, this wistfully longing kind.

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I thought I was the only one sick of non-competitive sports days and playgrounds where it's practically impossible to hurt yourself. It turned out that the pendulum is swinging back at last. Boys are different from girls. Teaching them as though they are girls who don't wash as much leads to their failure in school, causing trouble all the way. Boys don't like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don't like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes.

-- Conn Iggulden for The Washington Post

Mr. Iggulden is the author of "The Dangerous Book for Boys". It has been taken up in our culture wars with respect to education and gender. Boys have been lagging in school these years, and Iggulden represents the approach that part of the reason may be that school has become too sissified. You can perhaps appreciate the controversy. He opens this column with a boysy story:

When I was 10, I founded an international organization known as the Black Cat Club. My friend Richard was the only other member. My younger brother, Hal, had "provisional status," which meant that he had to try out for full membership every other week. We told him we would consider his application if he jumped off the garage roof -- about eight feet from the ground. He had a moment of doubt as he looked over the edge, but we said it wouldn't hurt if he shouted the words "Fly like an eagle!" When he jumped, his knees came up so fast that he knocked himself out. I think the lesson he learned that day was not to trust his brother, which is a pretty valuable one for a growing lad.

Boys will be boys...

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A majestic new book on the Nazis is out. It is the second half of the two volumes that Saul Friedländer has written “establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework.” It is titled "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945". The reviewer, Richard Evans, writes for the Times that this in-depth work has the virtue of reading like a novel and is therefore meant for more than academicians and amateur enthusiasts. Evans, however, also notes that Friedländer's focus on the Jews has its disadvantages:

And the book’s focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader context of Nazi racial policy — which includes the mass murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe’s Gypsies — possibly too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown, the Third Reich’s genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe. Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis; they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.

To be honest, I am happy with William Shirer's great work "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" which perhaps has even more of the page-turning force of a dramatic novel while also providing a broader sweep of the macabre events. Shirer's work is one of my rereadables, and it will probably continue to serve me in my interest and fascination over this cataclysmic epoch. But this new work is definitely worth a mention.


(Source: Richard J. Evans for The New York Times)

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You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why unaccountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for the promises you didn't keep.

-- "Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz

I have struck a particularly rich vein in the Koontz canon. Good timing. I could use a hungry page-turner at this time. A little something to sweeten the flow of time.

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