The last of the pile of books I read in 2011. In which I finish the complete works of Plato and Aristotle, solve one of the greatest classics in detective fiction ever written, puzzle my way through J.M. Coetzee and J.G. Ballard, cheer my way through The Hunger Games, and finish off the year simply enjoying myself with Wonder Woman, Harry Dresden, Dortmunder and Discworld.
Enjoy!
White People Problems: Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
She makes another circuit of the room. “Is this your wife?” she asks, stopping before the framed photograph on the coffee table.
“My mother. Taken when she was young.”
“Are you married?”
“I was. Twice. But now I’m not.” He does not say, now I make do with what comes my way. He does not say, Now I make do with whores. “Can I offer you a liqueur?”
She does not want a liqueur, but does accept a shot of whisky in her coffee. As she sips, he leans over and touches her cheek. “You’re very lovely”, he says. “I’m going to invite you to do something reckless.” He touches her again. “Stay. Spend the night with me.”
Across the rim of the cup, she regards him steadily. “Why?”
“Because you ought to.”
“Why ought I to?”
“Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It’s part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.”
His hand still rests against her cheek. She does not withdraw, but does not yield either.
“And what if I already share it?” In her voice there is a hint of breathlessness. Exciting, always, to be courted: exciting, pleasurable.
“Then you should share it more widely.”
This is a very short novel, 220 pages, with short chapters and a quick read. I got through the entire book on two sessions on the epilleptical. I burned over 1600 calories during those two hours, and so they were not completely wasted.
Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999, and Coetzee is a Nobel Prize winner in literature, and so his book is clearly seen by the experts as having great literary merit. Maybe someone with literary tastes different from mine will comment and tell me what I missed.
I find it hard to appreciate works in which the characters are difficult to like or even understand. In Disgrace, the main character is a literature professor in post-Apartheid South Africa who pretty much lets life happen to him. He seduces one of his college students, and then refuses to cooperate with those among his fellow academics who want to soften the professional consequences, with the result that he loses his position and everything that goes with it, with an air of stoic fatalism. He rebuffs everyone who sympathizes until they just go away and leave him miserable, at which point he goes and lives with his lesbian daughter out in the country. At the daughter’s farm and kennel, the professor is attacked and set on fire by a group of black thugs who rape the daughter. The daughter in turn doesn’t bother seeking prosecution, and the attackers, when their identities become known, go about their business in a consequence-free environment. The subtext from there on in, though not explicitly stated, is the (former) professor’s frustration at having accepted the full consequences of his wrong while violent criminals go free and are even rewarded. Amidst that subtext, the characters pretty much bumble along in a what-can-you-do sort of way. And there is racial tension. Because of Apartheid, it is implied that it is acceptable for a white woman to be raped, as partial reparations.
The book jacket praises Coetzee for telling “truths that cut to the bone”. I escaped with a paper cut and considered myself lucky.
Bejeweled Blitz: The Crystal World, by J.G. Ballard
--but what most surprised me, Paul, was the extent to which I was prepared for the transformation of the forest—the crystalline trees hanging like icons in those luminous caverns, the jeweled casements of the leaves overhead, fused into a lattice of prisms, through which the sun shone in a thousand rainbows, the birds and crocodiles frozen into grotesque postures like heraldic beasts carved from jade and quartz—what was really remarkable was the extent to which I accepted all of these wonders as part of the natural order of things, part of the inward pattern of the universe. True, to begin with, I was as startled as everyone else making his first journey up the Matarre River to Mont Royal, but after the initial impact of the forest, a surprise more visual than anything else, I quickly came to understand it, knowing that its hazards were a small price to pay for its illumination of my life. Indeed, the rest of the world seemed drab and inert by contrast, a faded reflection of this bright image, forming a gray prenumbral zone like some half-abandoned purgatory.
This one was a one-trick pony. The protagonist visits a remote third world location where the jungle is slowly becoming overgrown and encrusted in layers of gemstone while the political and military leaders and the common people react in the way political, military and crowd forces tend to react in these stories, messing up everything. There is an implication that the expanding jewel area will eventually cover the whole world, and further implications that this will be a good thing. People make pilgrimages to the place and get themselves sealed up in crystal. Scientific people gibber and behave incomprehensibly. Explanations involving time manipulation and healing properties of the crystal are offered. Yeah, so what?
It suffers from having the main character bumble through the strange world without apparent motive or character. I’ve seen this all before, with more depth.
Farewell to Plato: Gorgias, Philebus and Sophist, by Plato
Now, seeing that there are four arts which are ever ministering to the body and the soul for their highest good, flattery knowing or rather guessing their natures, has distributed herself into four shams or simulations of them; she puts on the likeness of one or other of them, and pretends to be that which she simulates, and has no regard for man's highest interests, but is ever making pleasure the bait of the unwary, and deceiving them into the belief that she is of the highest value to them. Cookery simulates the disguise of medicine, and pretends to know what food is best for the body; and if the physician and the cook had to enter into a competition in which children were the judges, or men who had no more sense than children, as to which of them best understands the goodness or badness of food, the physician would be starved to death. A flattery I deem this and an ignoble sort of thing, Polus, for to you I am now addressing myself, because it aims at pleasure instead of good. And I do not call this an art at all, but only an experience or routine, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defense of them.
These three medium-length dialogues are the last in my year's reading of Plato, and they more or less cover matters that were already dealt with in other dialogues. Gorgias, the most dramatically interesting of the three, is also the simplest; it takes 100 pages to tell us that rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is useless or dangerous unless it is coupled with the wisdom to understand right from wrong and the scruples to use persuasive art only for good purposes. At least, that's what I took from it. Plato actually goes further and claims that rhetoric is dangerous in and of itself, in the same way that cuisine is supposedly inherently bad because it enables a chef to prepare good-tasting food and drink that is bad for you, as opposed to the dieticians who will rightly make you eat your liver and spinach which are good for you. Apparently, it never occurred to Plato that it is possible for a good cook to make healthy meals, even to make that liver and spinach palatable, so that people who otherwise couldn't bring themselves to gag it down would, by golly, spoon it into their mouths and say, "Yum-BO! That's good stuff!" Similarly, a rhetorician can as easily persuade people of right as of wrong. I wish Socrates's companions wouldn't be so quick to say "Yes, that is true, Socrates" when he gives them whoppers like that. You'd think they were suckers for bad rhetoric...
Philebus is a middling dialogue, in which Philebus barely appears and the dialogue is conducted between Socrates and somebody else. They begin by asking whether pleasure or wisdom is the highest good, and devolve into yet another discussion about “the one and the many”, still fascinated that something can have many parts and yet be one thing on its own merit. They finish up by declaring that good things are good in the following order: Measurements (best); symmetry and beauty; wisdom; arts and sciences; and pleasure. There. You now know the central tenet of Philebus. You’re welcome.
Sophist is one long exercise in "victory by definition", in which a stranger standing in for Socrates, using Theatetus as a sock puppet to agree with his conclusions, "proves" that Sophists differ from real philosophers in that they embody all of the bad qualities of argument and discourse while philosophers embody all the good qualities. He does this by, for example, claiming that sophists have no real knowledge, on the grounds that only a professional shoemaker, baker, ship captain, etc., is able to intelligently discuss their one particular craft, and so the sophist, not being a master of one craft, is not able to talk about anything at all. It's a bit like watching some Fox "News" commentator attribute everything from bad breath to genocide to the "essence of liberalism", and about as convincing.
Farewell to Aristotle: Rhetoric, by Aristotle
Another line of argument is used when we have to urge or discourage a course of action that may be done in either of two opposite ways, and have to apply the method just mentioned to both. The difference between this one and the last is that, whereas in the last any two things are contrasted, here the things contrasted are opposites. For instance, the priestess enjoined upon her son not to take to public speaking. "For", she said, "If you say what is right, men will hate you; if you say what is wrong, the gods will hate you." The reply might be, "On the contrary, you OUGHT to take to public speaking; for if you say what is right the gods will love you, while if you say what is wrong, men will love you." This amounts to the proverbial 'buying the marsh with the salt.' It is just this situation, viz. when each of two opposites has both a good and a bad consequence opposite respectively to each other, that has been termed devarication.
This was a good choice to conclude my year-long study of Aristotle; while nominally a treatise on how to persuade listeners, it really extends both the Organon and the Ethics, and acts as a counterweight to the nonsense found in Plato’s Gorgias and other assertions that speech, performance and art are no different from frauds.
Granted, the Rhetoric falls prey to a different kind of nonsense, the kind associated with Aristotle. He asserts that there are three kinds of rhetoric (Political, making promises of the future; Legal/Forensic, proving what happened in the past; and Ceremonial, making flowery statements in the present), begins with “Political”, and spends the greater part of Book I listing all the “good things” it is possible for a politician to promise to deliver—that is, ALL The Good Things, including size, strength and psychological well-being. Later, he provides several chapters listing all of the possible emotions, with expanded definitions and examples.
Eventually, we do get to actual rhetoric, which to Aristotle consists mostly of correct grammar and logic, with only slight attention paid to the “illogical” techniques like folksy aphorisms and appeals to ridicule. Outright propaganda and misdirection, such as ad hominem, post hoc fallacies and begging the question, are not mentioned. Contrast this ethical, logical approach to Plato’s assumption that rhetoric consists of nothing but propaganda and misdirection.
Having laid down the foundation of rhetoric for centuries, Aristotle no longer has much to offer to anyone who has had even the most basic learning in writing and public speaking, in part because what he wrote has come to be defined as the most basic learning. Still, it’s worth while going back to the basics from time to time. Among Aristotle’s works, this is one of the four (along with Ethics, Politics and Poetics) that can be actually entertaining to read.
Film Blanc: White Night, by Jim Butcher
”There linked,” I said quietly. “The victims. There’s a connection between them that the police files don’t show. The magic folks know it. That’s why they’re scared.”
Mac frowned at the beer. Then he looked over at the NEUTRAL GROUND sign by the door.
“I know”, I said quietly. “You don’t want to get involved. But someone out there is killing women. They’re leaving calling cards for me, specifically. Whoever is doing it is going to keep on doing it until I find them.”
Mac did not move.
I kept the quiet pressure on him. “A lot of people come in here. They eat and drink. And they talk. You stand over there running the grill and pouring drinks and you might as well be invisible. But I know you hear a lot more than most people realize, Mac. I figure you know something that might help me.”
He gazed at me for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he asked, “Is it you?”
I almost barked out a bit of laughter, until I realized that he was serious.
It took me a minute to get my head around that one. Since I had gone into business in Chicago, I had spent a lot of time trying to help the supernatural community. I did exorcisms here and there, helped with ghost problems, taught young and out of control talents enough discipline to restrain themselves. I’ve done other things too, smaller, not necessarily directly involving magic: giving advice on how to handle problems dealing with friendly but inhuman beings that mingled with magically aware mortals, helping parents to deal with the fact that their kid was suddenly able to set the cat on fire, and otherwise trying to help.
Despite all of that, the same folks I’d tried to help were afraid of me. Even Mac.
I wish Jim Butcher would make up his mind whether he wants to kick ass or just taste like it. If you read last month's bookpost, you know that I suffered through the abysmal Proven Guilty and took some small comfort in tearing into Butcher and his statutory rape fantasies. Out of the nine books I've read so far, Proven Guilty is easily the worst, and it was only due to my mild OCD where books are concerned that I kept going.
I'm glad I did. Out of the nine books I've read so far, White Night is easily the best.
The whole Dresden Files series is mostly praised for combining two genres I love: the urban fantasy and the noir detective novel. In most of the books, the Private Eye schtick takes a distant backseat to the wizards, vampires, faeries and other supernatural characters that populate Butcher's Chicago. with White Night, we're back to the goons with guns, the femmes fatales, the pathos, the contrasts between glitzy rich and desperate poor, the competing villains whose mutual distrust is the hero's primary weapon, the macho therapy and victim recovery offered in the style of Spenser and Travis McGee and most of all, the hard bolied detection. There's an actual mystery here with actual clues and an opportunity to figure out before Dresden what's going on and who is doing what to whom and why.
It begins with a series of murders of low-level practitioners in the area, some of which appear to interlock into a pattern, and some of which seem unrelated. Is there one killer, or two, or even more? Is someone trying to get Dresden involved in the case, or trying to drive him away? Why are so many of the baddies who got away in earlier books suddenly back for more? And how exactly are the crimes being committed?
That's where it starts. To tell how it continues would invite spoilers. But there's enough detection, action, plotting, counterplotting and all around skullduggery to satisfy anyone's appetite for noir fiction. The plot is clever. The climax is like a John Woo movie with monsters. And the interplay with Lasciel is a stroke of genius. And, other than an unfortunate passage near the beginning of the book, just enough to make me groan and roll my eyes, the things I hated about Proven Guilty just aren't there, thank God.
I must be fair. White Night is a genuinely good book, and I recommend it highly. I'm just sorry that readers will have to wade through earlier books that are much less good to get to it. Otherwise, you'll be constantly confronted with passages where they open the door and, OMG, it's so-and-so from some earlier adventure standing there, and you'll have no clue what that signifies.
The Running Girl: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Just as the town clock strikes two, the mayor steps up to the podium and begins to read. It’s the same story every year. He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose from the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.
The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.
Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch—this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. “Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there’s nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy you. Just as we did in District Thirteen.
She’s tough and practical, and a survivor. He’s quiet, kind and resourceful, and a survivor. And yet only one of them is allowed to survive.
The Hunger Games is apparently the new Hot Thing, and so naturally I checked it out, target demographic or no. Turns out maybe I am the target demographic after all. The book is an awesome depiction of a far-fetched, impossibly bleak dystopia in which (brace yourself) there are huge divisions between the haves and have-nots who live in segregated “districts”. Young people are drafted by the government and forced into kill-or-be-killed situations with people who aren’t really their enemies. The desperately poor participate in degrading and dangerous activities on television in the hopes of winning big prizes. The government not only does not care about the concerns of the common people, but is empowered to detain and kill them. And everyone just goes along with it, because, hey, what can you do? It made me shudder, even if it’s (thank God) only fiction.
I knew just enough about the book to be prepared for the dystopian future aspect. I was not prepared for the Celtic folktale aspect, beginning with the heroine’s name (Katniss Everdeen) and continuing with a plot drawn from the old stories in which youngest sons named Simpleton seek their fortune and succeed by finding the right objects and sharing their meager provisions with wizened old beggar ladies.
I love books that can be read on several levels. The Hunger Games can be read as a straightforward adventure, with plenty of fights and other dangers, romance and a Wicked Girl protagonist who saves not only herself but the male protagonist, frequently. On a deeper level, it’s a biting satire at a society with huge wealth and privilege gaps, mired in entertainment-seeking behavior. And the very last words of the novel (End of Book One) made me squee in exactly the way that the same words at the end of Twilight didn’t. In fact, the idea of Katniss replacing Bella as the female role model du jour is alone grounds for rejoicing at the existence of this book.
Land War in Asia: Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant
To gain successes for his people, God commits or commands brutalities as repugnant to our taste as they were acceptable to the morals of the age; he slaughters whole nations with the naive pleasure of a Gulliver fighting for Lilliput. Because the Jews "commit whoredom" with the daughters of Moab he bids Moses "Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun"; it is the morality of Ashurbanipal and Ashur. He offers to show mercy to those who love him and keep his commandments, but, like some resolute germ, he will punish children for the sins of their fathers, their grandfathers, even their great-great-grandfathers. He is so ferocious that he thinks of destroying All The Jews for worshiping the Golden Calf, and Moses has to argue with him that he should control himself. "Turn from thy fierce wrath," the man tells God, "and repent of this evil against thy people"; and "the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people." Again Yaveh proposes to exterminate the Jews root and branch for rebelling against Moses, but Moses appeals to his better nature, and bids him think what people will say when they hear of such a thing. He asks a cruel test--human sacrifice of the bitterest sort--from Abraham. Like Moses, Abraham teaches Yaveh the principles of morals, and persuades him not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there shall be found fifty--forty--thirty--twenty--ten good men in those cities; bit by bit he lures God towards decency, and illustrates the manner in which the moral development of man compels the periodical re-creation of his deities. The curses with which Yaveh threatens his chosen people if they disobey him are models of vituperation, and inspired those who burned heretics in the Inquisition, or excommunicated Spinoza.
The Life of Greece (Bookpost, July 2011) was actually the second book in Durant’s huge eleven volume history of the western world; I read it in between the two major parts of Our Oriental Heritage, which Durant wrote when he was planning a much smaller scale history, and in which he made his beginner’s mistakes while he was finding his style. This is by far the worst book in the series.
Part one surveys the pre-Greek civilizations from Egypt to Persia and ends with Alexander’s invasion; part two attempts to survey the entire history of Asia southeast of Russia and east of Iran down to 1939, the year of publication. It’s like sprinting through a vast museum.
Durant likes comprehensive history; he touches not just on rulers, wars and important events, but on the lives of the common people, the economies, morals, manners, art, music, literature, scientific advancements, religious beliefs, and philosophy. You can’t do justice to any of that in just 500 pages if you’re trying to cover 3000 years of civilizations as different as India, China and Japan (not to mention the brief digressions into countries called “Tibet”, “Burma”, “Siam” and “French Indochina”; one of the major, unintentional lessons of the book, which stresses the vast immutability of these long-lasting eastern cultures is how much changed after the book was written, by a man who was alive during my lifetime). A thousand years in India is covered in six pages; China from the Mongols to Pu Yi in four. The literature of Japan mentions only two books by name: The Book of Genji and the Hizakurige, and Durant expresses regret that the brevity of life prevents him from reading more than the first of Genji’s many volumes. Compare and contrast with the Durants’ final volume, which is as long as the first and covers approximately 25 years in Europe, from the Bastille to Waterloo.
It’s not too bad if you start out knowing absolutely nothing about Asia, but you won’t learn more than enough to recognize some common terms when they come up in conversation, and the danger is that boors may come away thinking they know all they need to know about “those Orientals”. If you have some knowledge already, it can be an amusing commentary; I found the passages on the Old Testament in ancient Judea hilarious (it’s full of little asides like, Samson, like many modern orators, slew thousands using only the jawbone of an ass). Recommended, not for serious scholars, but for casual readers who aren’t intimidated by 900 page tomes.
Too Many solutions: Trent’s Case Book (Trent’s Last Case, Trent’s Own Case, Trent Intervenes), by E.C. Bentley
In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumor flew around the sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning comes--a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone--together with an urgent selling order--by some employee in the cable service. A sharp spasm convulsed the convalescent share list. In five minutes the dull noise of the curb market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the exchange itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous "short" interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of "Yankees" in London at the close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York still had four hours trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as the saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone, listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of finding Mandelson's body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide, was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Didn't write the books about Dirk Gently
But they probably wouldn't have been bad
If he had.
Bentley was a friend of GK Chesterton and known primarily for those little four-line poems about people (called "clerihews" after his middle name) when he wrote one of the most famous detective books of all time, with a twist that matches anything done by Chesterton, Christie or Sayers. That book, Trent's Last Case, is in here, along with another novel, Trent's Own Case and a collection of short stories, Trent Intervenes.
The other novel is a standard detective novel, and the stories share Arthur Conan Doyle's biggest flaw, in that their solutions depend on whether you know some obscure bit of trivia that they don't give you until the detective explains it, like the climate around Dartmoor and how many people attend a particular seminary in any given year. The best part of them is their literary quality. Trent's Own Case contains several chapters of plot digressions that have little or nothing to do with solving the mystery, but that are fun to read nonetheless.
Trent's Last Case, on the other hand, is a masterpiece that can definitely be solved--several times--if you're clever and pay attention to all the clues surrounding the mysterious death by shooting of a financial giant in a country manor with an estranged wife, a couple of secretaries, a saucy French maid and, of course (shift music to dark minor key) a butler.
Nothing is wasted. If you're reading it for the first time, I suggest you stop at the end of chapter 10 to puzzle out what you know, and that you do the same at the end of chapter 14, and once more at the end of chapter 15. Yes, there are THAT many reveals.
Amazon Wish List: Wonder Woman, the greatest stories ever told
Amy Kelley is no longer with us. But I am sure that you made her very happy by awarding her the Oscar for best actress of the year.
Amy will live forever as the Cinema Wonder Woman.
Amy was not born an amazon. But because of her sublime courage...she died an amazon.
Included here for completeness. My Sister in law cheered me up during a depressing time by lending me this anthology of Wonder Woman comics spanning years from 1942 to 2001, with an introduction by Lynda Carter. It's a mixed bag. The early ones are kinda awful, as were the gender roles of the time, and feature corny plots lacking in continuity and characters drawn with muscles that make them look like balloon people. If they represent the best of a given decade, the rest of the comic must have been sad indeed. They get better and edgier as time passes. Compare and contrast with the Adam West Batman TV series vs. the Dark Knight.
Here are fandom fetish tales like Wonder Woman vs. Giganta the Gorilla Girl; a Twilight Zone type episode about ironically bad results of wishing on an amulet, and two "mysteries"--the first of which is ridiculously non-mysterious, and the second of which is the best in the collection. Finally, we see WW interviewed by Lois Lane in an attempt to reveal her "true" self. Depending on your mood, you'll either find it fun or illustrative of how messed up fandom can be. Or both at once.
Murder By Numbers, One, Two, Three: Case of Lies, by Perri O'Shaughnessy
He didn't really want to do it, but he felt he had to. He did the unthinkable. He divided by zero.
The white sky split and the rules gave way to random crime. The universe compressed into its basic reality, the four numbers surrounded by their clouds of probabilities. But Zero, staggering, was vanishing into the mist. One was a hard black branch beating the other integers. Two, the cop in blue, struggled to keep order, but it was outgunned by Three, red and bursting, rampaging all through the set.
The Three destroyed adelic space and time. Elliott, horrified, had to watch the gruesome factoring of the prime.
His angel faded away, leaving him to drift all alone in this disintegrating universe. It would all collapse into pure theory soon.
He became very frightened. Flying low across the sea, he found a hidden crater a few fathoms beneath: the square root of minus one, a geyser of fresh water rushing out of it into the saltiness.
He dove into the deep cold system.
This one is a legal thriller mixed with a savant story. It begins with a quirky, socially inept mathematical genius who goes to MIT and is drawn away from his studies to join a group of students who make money counting cards at casino blackjack tables. On one excursion in Lake Tahoe, a stranger mugs the group at their motel and fatally shoots an innocent bystander. Enter O'Shaughnessy's stock legal heroine Nina Reilly, who represents the victim's family in a civil suit against the motel and the unknown shooter, and who needs to track down the math geeks and get them to cooperate. At which point the layers of the onion begin to peel away and Nothing is What it Seems while Everything is More than It Appears.
The perspective shifts between Reilly and Elliott in a very satisfying way. Few stories manage to pull off having the reader chase with the hounds and run with the hare while making both sides compelling, but this one manages. The best parts have to do with Elliott’s mathematical perspectives. Highly recommended as light reading.
Archive Material: Small Favor, by Jim Butcher
Think of every fairy tale villainess you've ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, some time, they've all been real.
Mab gave them lessons.Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd set up some sort of certification process, just to make sure they were all up to snuff.
Mab was the ruler of fully half of the realm of Faerie, those areas of the Nevernever, the spirit world, closest to our own, and she was universally respected and feared. I'd seen her, seen her in the merciless clarity of my wizard's Sight, and I knew--not just suspected, but knew--exactly what kind of creature she was.
Fucking terrifying, that's what. So terrifying that I couldn't summon up a single wiseass comment, and that just doesn't happen to me.
Book Ten of the Dresden Files turns out to be...another good one, featuring pretty much my favorites among the supporting cast (Marcone, the Denarians and especially The Archive; for all his problems, Butcher really can take some of the common tropes and turn them upside down to make original characters) and a challenge to figure out in which ways some of them are messing with Dresden, and why, and what's actually happening to him. As in White Night, above, Butcher benefits from remaining truer than usual to the noir detective style that gets lost in some of the other books in favor of Just The Monsters.
Also, as usual, the arc plot progresses in ways that will spoil previous books if I talk about them. I will say that I like what's happening in the war between the Denarians and the sword-bearers; I was confused by the involvement of the Summer court; and I rolled my eyes and groaned at a cheesy cameo at the end by the guy Morgan Freeman will be asked to play in the big budget movie version.
Dresden isn't for everybody; when he's bad, he's awful, but when he's good, he's downright awesome.
The One Percent Solution: Watch Your Back, by Donald E. Westlake
Dortmunder said, "I mentioned from time to time, a character called Arnie Albright."
"A fence", she said, and put her pen on the coffee table. "You sell him things sometimes. You don't like him."
"Nobody likes him," Dortmunder said. "He doesn't like himself. He told me once, he finds himself so disgusting, he shaves with his back to the mirror."
"But you sell him things."
"He makes up for his personality," Dortmunder explained, "by paying a better percentage than anybody else."
May said, "Is he really that bad?"
"Well," Dortmunder told her, "he just came back from the intervention."
"Intervention? He's a drunk, too?"
"No, he's just obnoxious, but it's enough. Turns out, his family couldn't stand it any more, it was either drop him out of an airplane or intervent. I don't think any of them had a plane, so they went for the other."
"John", May said, "when a group of people do an intervention, they go to the drunk or the druggie or whatever he is, they tell him you have to go to rehab now, or detox, or whatever it is, or nobody wants you around here any more. If they did an intervention for obnoxiousness, where would they send him?"
"Club Med", Dortmunder told her.
For the day of the year most associated with joy and spirit and giving and warm fuzzies, I choose to make a tradition of reading a Dortmunder book, and never mind that the central characters are a bunch of thieves, because out of all the book serieses I could choose, this one gives me guaranteed warm fuzzies and joy. More than anything else I could tell you, that should let you know what absolute gems these books are.
Maybe it's the atmosphere at the OJ Bar and Grill, where the restroom doors feature pictures of dogs labeled "Pointers" and "Setters" and the regulars engage in hilarious, heated arguments on various subjects about which they are ignorant. Maybe it's the supporting cast of sad sack crooks: the hapless Andy Kelp; the traffic route obsessed Murch; the man-mountain Tiny (You didn't walk with Tiny; you walked among him). Or Dortmunder himself, whose foolproof plans keep running into unprecedented fools and worse luck. Mostly, it's the plots.
Most of the later Dortmunder capers involve the kind of villains Frank Capra might be featuring if he were alive and making films today. Instead of Edward Arnold, they're younger, fitter, more sociopathic, more crassly rude to women, servants and employees, and they steal from the same government officials they bought to begin with. They are the one percent, and even if Dortmunder doesn't get away with their billions, he certainly makes these villains lose them, and get comeuppances in other creative ways.
Watch Your Back has Arnie the Fence come back from his personality makeover not quite as cured as he thinks, but with a lead on how to steal a fortune from a billionaire venture capitalist even more obnoxious than Arnie. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right? Not until the initial planning stage when the Dortmunder gang tries to meet at their usual back room at the OJ and discover that mobsters are muscling in on the place, little knowing that, in pissing off Dortmunder, they've bitten off more than they can handle.
I had a merrier Christmas because of this book. You'll have a merry time with it, too.
Oh-Ee-Oh, YOHH-Oh: Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett
It was about to be the worst night of his life for Zebbo Mooty, Thief Third Class, and it wouldn't have made him any happier to know that it was also going to be the last one. The rain was keeping people indoors, and he was way behind on his quota. He was, therefore, a little less cautious than he might otherwise have been.
In the night time streets of Ankh-Morpork caution is an absolute. There is no such thing as moderately cautious. You are either very cautious, or you are dead. You might be walking around and breathing, but you are dead just the same.
He heard the muffled sounds coming from the nearby alley, slid his leather-bound cosh from his sleeve, waited until the victim was almost turning the corner, sprang out, said "Oh shi-", and died.
It was a most unusual death. No one else had died like that for hundreds of years.
The stone wall behind him glowed cherry red with heat, which gradually faded into darkness.
He was the first to see the Ankh-Morpork dragon. He derived little comfort from knowing this, however, because he was dead.
When I run out of Dortmunders to read for Christmas maybe I'll replace them with Pratchett's Discworld books; this is only the eighth one in a series with at least 20 more to go, and they've all delighted me so far. This one is a tribute to the Castle Guard, those people whose fate it is to come running in during Chapter Four and get killed one at a time. The weary captain, the red-faced Sergeant, the corporal in whose hands any cigar immediately burns down to a dog-end and then remains a dog-end indefinitely....
...and the new boy in town, Carrot Ironfoundersson, a handsome six-foot six-inch dwarf (he was adopted) with huge muscles, an even huger sense of duty, and the naivete of a newborn lamb, who comes to Ankh-Morpork to seek his fortune as an enforcer of The Law. He arrests the head of the Thieves' Guild, who indignantly demands an apology from the ruler and threatens to go on strike, while the ruler scratches his head wondering why on earth anyone would want to arrest the head of the Thieves' Guild. He goes to break up a barroom brawl against the advice of his quivering corporal, and ends up beating Detritus the Splatter (like a bouncer, except he's a troll and uses more force). He is impressed that the local brothel-keeper has so many nice daughters, thanks them politely for their offer of a bed, and goes to sleep. Comic mayhem continues to ensue.
And then the dragon comes...
Discworld is the hardest series to choose a representative quote from for my bookposts; there are wonderful jokes on almost every page, the kind of jokes that involve holding up tropes and laughing both with them and at them, because yes they're silly and overused, but yes they got that way from being part of the best stories. Definitely my kind of humor. If I had a problem with this book, it was that, whenever Death showed up to collect someone like the above mentioned Zebbo Mooty, I kept imagining the day, not far off, when he comes to have that inevitable little chat with Sir Terry, and I teared up.