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June 30
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David
is currently reading:
Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (Paperback)
by
Robert Montgomery Bird
bookshelves:
currently-reading
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my rating:
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David
gave  to:
Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon (Hardcover)
by
Gideon Defoe
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
David said:
"I love Gideon Defoe’s pirate books. Humor is such a tricky, subjective thing. I generally don’t go for things that get too cartoonish and outré, at least when this is combined with an attempt at making me care about the characters and invest in ...more
I love Gideon Defoe’s pirate books. Humor is such a tricky, subjective thing. I generally don’t go for things that get too cartoonish and outré, at least when this is combined with an attempt at making me care about the characters and invest in their progress. I have a hard time caring about cartoons. Human comedy and droll narration are more my style. Until a book goes so far beyond that pale that it goes totally round the bend. Then I’m back in, all the way. That’s what the Pirate books do. They are giddy, loony, ridiculous, delightfully inspired nonsense, crammed with sight gags, outlandish fancies, and the kind of infantile, elastic-faced hijinks of a Bugs Bunny Cartoon or a Monty Python episode or Marx Brothers movie. In this installment, the Pirate Captain, in a funk after losing the Pirate of the Year award to some corporate ass-kisser, decides to hang up his cutlass and take up bee-keeping on the island of St. Helena. Sadly, his attempt to retreat from the pressured popularity contests of piracy backfires when he is joined in his island retreat by the insufferably perfect Napoleon. Never mind the plot. Defoe is just very good at tickling the funny bone with images like a butter covered pirate swaggering around in a thong, or the fabulous Pirate King punctuating a sentence by punching a Great White shark in half. Defoe keeps filling your glass with this smartly stupid, intoxicating nonsense until you are tipsy, drunk, blotto, and laughing all over yourself. (less)
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David
gave  to:
Every Man Dies Alone (Hardcover)
by
Hans Fallada
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
David said:
"I must have read dozens of thrillers set in Germany during World War II, but even the best of them (possibly Marshall Browne’s Eye of the Abyss) cannot touch Fallada’s unforgettable novel of life under and in the midst of the third Reich. The dea...more
I must have read dozens of thrillers set in Germany during World War II, but even the best of them (possibly Marshall Browne’s Eye of the Abyss) cannot touch Fallada’s unforgettable novel of life under and in the midst of the third Reich. The death of their son in the conquest of France provokes taciturn factory foreman Otto Quangel and his meek wife Anna into an act of resistance that is no less dangerous for its smallness and ineffectuality. They drop subversive postcards around the city like messages in a bottle, in hopes of waking the sleeping consciences of the fellow citizens, and slowing down the war effort bit by bit. They hope that these seeds will grow and spread, but in fact many of them are turned in to the authorities. The Gestapo go to work tracking down the source of the cards, with results that are both woefully expected and tragically surprising. The Quangels are unlikely heroes, as was Fallada, a man wrecked by life under the Nazis. Fallada (his real name was Rudolph Ditzen) spent the much of the war in an asylum and died soon after the end of the war of an overdose of morphine, shortly after writing this novel in just 24 days, a truly heroic – and astonishing – act. The story is based upon a Gestapo file of a family that participated in the resistance, and the moment by moment truth of the account is obviously drawn from Fallada’s own lived experiences as a troubled, fallible and deeply moral man who made his own share of compromises to get by. The book eschews the easy generalizations and simplifications of most such stories, exploring the daily realities of life under the Nazis, and the countless shades of gray that exist between black and white. It is not a story of great men or dramatic acts of courage or villainy, but of small adjustments, little denials, expedient compromises and real struggles that take place not in the abstract realm of ideals, but in a world of groceries, careers and families. Reading the book, you can’t help but ask yourself just what you might have done if you had been living in Berlin during the war. You look at your friends and coworkers and imagine which of them would hunker down or go along to get along, which would fight back, and which would be basking in the glow of success within the party ranks, rising stars of the Reich. After all, the Nazis were people. There is no difference between a toady and a Nazi toady, a bully and a Nazi bully, a bureaucrat and a Nazi bureaucrat, a zealot and a Nazi zealot. The Reich played upon those same personality traits that exist within us all. There is a staggeringly short distance between not valuing one’s fellow beings, and committing acts of genocide upon them, and the very same kind of casual cruelty and apathetic selfishness that put Hitler in power is at work each and every day in the streets of our cities, and our own lives. The book has the rough texture of documentary history, yet ultimately it is a work of tremendous moral heft. In fact, I think it just might be one of the best things I’ve ever read. Yes, it is desperately bleak, and yet there are small moments of kindness, and a resounding sense of how even a small, doomed act of rebellion can be a triumph of the spirit, and a triumph in God’s eyes, if there is a god, and if he’s watching.(less)
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June 27
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David
marked as to-read:
You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! (Paperback)
by
Fletcher Hanks
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
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June 26
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David
gave to:
Tierra del Fuego (Paperback)
by
Francisco Coloane
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
David said:
"Here is the magic of libraries again, those fathomless oceans of story that cast up rare marvels and monstrosities, and unimagined jewels lost to time in their obscuring depths, for us beachcombers to find. Coloane was a much beloved writer in his na...more
Here is the magic of libraries again, those fathomless oceans of story that cast up rare marvels and monstrosities, and unimagined jewels lost to time in their obscuring depths, for us beachcombers to find. Coloane was a much beloved writer in his native Chile, and is only just now reaching America with this and one other collection of tales. I think there are some other things in English, and hopefully much more to follow. A jacket blurb compares him to Jack London, which is apt in a number of ways. The world of his stories is the furthest verge of South America, a stark landscape of rocks and sea, windswept pampas and cliffs. And gold. Gold that appears in traces among the dark ferrous sands, beneath the bleached bones of a whale. Gold that drives men mad. Men who struggle and strive in the vertiginous chasm between great riches and starvation, while migratory sea birds cast a cold eye on it all from above. Most of the men just get by, clinging to their ships and rocks like crabs, clinging to their superstitions and beliefs, including a childish faith in the myth of the self-made man. Here too, Coloane and London meet in their unsparing view of society – a hard and mostly indifferent world where men are not masters, but subjects, all. Coloane was a communist while London was a socialist; both have the skeptical sympathy of men who have lived hard and seen a great deal. One story about a strange, hidden valley and the strange ones who dwell there even recalls London’s fantastic side. And finally – and this may be all you need to know – there is the great sense of adventure, which was heightened by the fact that Patagonia and the Straits of Magellan are so strange and unfamiliar to me. It reminded me of reading London as a child, my wondering soul harkening to those mythic lands far to the North. I will definitely be looking out for more Coloane.(less)
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David
gave to:
The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook)
by
Guillermo Rosales
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
David said:
"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita… In the middle of my life’s journey, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. That’s how Dante’s Inferno begins, and this is pretty much the starting point for Rosales’ hellish litt...more
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita… In the middle of my life’s journey, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. That’s how Dante’s Inferno begins, and this is pretty much the starting point for Rosales’ hellish little novel about Cuban exile William Figueras. After his American relatives greet him at the airport, expecting a successful man of letters but finding a bitter and irrational husk gibbering insults, Figueras finds himself shunted to a succession of psychiatric wards and asylums, winding up at long last in the circle of hell realized by a converted Miami home packed to the gills with dazed and suffering souls, watched over with casual cruelty by the demons of this place – a sports fishing capitalist and his degenerate, abusive flunky. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Or as Figueras says, “The house said ‘boarding home’ on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb.” The book is completely unflinching in its depiction of these lower depths, and the hapless castaways that populate its cells and hallways, enfeebled by age, insane, crippled, or simply abandoned by the living, breathing world that exists all around them, and yet seems at an unbridgeable remove from their sordid, shambling existence. But the reek of urine or the tang and stench of other vile bodily frailties and exigencies are not the most disturbing thing. For many readers the book will cross a threshold when the narrator himself, a man of learning if questionable sanity, takes part in the cruel treatment of his fellow inmates. This happens in Dante also, when the narrator does terrible things to the damned like kicking at heads that emerge from the brimstone, but Dante enjoys a rock-hard certainty about the damned and deserving status of his victims, while for Rosales/Figueras, life seems to have more to do with chance than karma. There is hope here, too – the kind of hope that noir buffs such as me can spot a mile off – and a romance, of sorts. I shouldn’t say more, but I hope I’ve given enough of a window on the various debasements of this book that when I say the book is beautiful, it will resonate with the sort of reader who knows what that means, and drive away the rest. It is beautiful, not like a car crash, or like a ruin, or like cancer. It is beautiful like Dante.(less)
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June 11
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David made a comment in the group Hard Case Crime—The Cutie topic:
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March 08
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February 18
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David
gave  to:
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Hardcover)
by
Haruki Murakami
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my rating:
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read in January, 2009
David said:
"A very quick, fairly slight read, which kind of feels like running along with someone who is telling you about his impressions on running. Almost nothing memorable here, but very pleasant along the way, and certainly some things that runners and jogg...more
A very quick, fairly slight read, which kind of feels like running along with someone who is telling you about his impressions on running. Almost nothing memorable here, but very pleasant along the way, and certainly some things that runners and joggers will nod their heads at, as well as anyone with a body that is growing older.(less)
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