David G. Cookson's Blog, page 5

The Fake

The Fake by Zoe Whittall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Shelby has lost her wife, Kate to a brain aneurism. When she seeks help from a grief support group, she meets Cammie. Cammie is a cancer survivor who wins over the group and becomes Shelby’s best friend.

Gibson is fresh off a divorce. But when a younger woman takes an interest in him, his world is changed. Her name is Cammie. And she becomes Gibson’s new girlfriend.

Cammie tells stories of a troubled past, replete with cancer, a dead sister and a father who committed suicide. Soon she has not one but two people wrapped around her finger. But soon things don’t add up. Cammie explains away some of her lies with quick thinking…but still the lies continue. And soon Gibson and Shelby find themselves comparing notes and spotting inconsistencies. And then Cammie’s true aim becomes evident…

Wow. A slow burn, very well-done. It doesn’t quite go where I might have expected and I appreciated that. It’s not necessarily trying to keep anyone guessing, but it’s much more interested in exploring the effects that a person who simply lies about everything has on people.

These people exist. They live lives where lying is no big deal. They get called on lies, and they go on to succeed anyway. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all lived it.

This is my first time reading Zoe Whittall and now I want to read everything. So good.




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Animal Husbandry

Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Jane Goodall (not that Jane Goodall) gets a dream job as a TV producer for a prime time talk show and soon finds herself in a relationship with a coworker named Ray…who just happens to still be in a multi-year long relationship… It gets deep, it gets serious and soon they are planning to move in together. He will leave his girlfriend! They are happy together! They are IN LOVE! She breaks her lease on her New York City apartment and they are all set to move in together…

Then it goes sideways. Suddenly Ray becomes distant…emotionally unavailable. Uninterested with her…and then he decides to break it off with her. And now Jane is homeless (a section about the hopelessness of trying to find an affordable NYC apartment feels pretty darn real).

Desperate, she moves in with coworker Eddie, a notorious Lothario. Woman after woman, all the time. Jane, fascinated, takes notes on his behavior. Like the more famous primate researcher, Jane goes into the field. And that is when she comes across the Old Cow theory: that a bull will only mate with a cow once before moving on to another. Applying this theory to mankind, it makes a lot of sense…it might even explain why Ray dumped her! She starts working on a series for the talk show she produces, under a pen name…

I was happy this didn’t take some of the steps I thought it might take. It didn’t turn into zany romantic comedy or madcap misunderstandings and near misses. It goes somewhere else, and that is terrific.

Animal Husbandry was Laura Zigman’s first novel. I decided after reading Separation Anxiety that I wanted to read all her novels. This one has a few rough spots (did she really have to be named Jane Goodall? It’s a little on the nose) but overall, it’s what I came for. Her writing is so enjoyable and this is pretty right on.





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The Ship Beneath the Ice

The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton's Endurance by Mensun Bound

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


One of the most famous shipwrecks in history was that of the Endurance, which got stuck in the ice off Antarctica and eventually sank in the Weddell sea on November 21, 1915. The expedition and its indominable leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton, had to find a way to survive the brutal weather and escape the fate of the doomed ship. In one of the most incredible survival stories of all time, Shackleton led his 27 men to an eventual rescue, not losing a single man.

One hundred years later, an expedition was undertaken to locate the wreck of this ship. Led by Mensun Bound, the initial expedition took place in 2019 and was met with many fits and starts and ultimately led to failure. Three years later…they try again.

It is an amazing day to day account of the search for a ship that has eluded discovery in part due to its remote locale but also because it is under a pack of ice that is constantly shifting. And the parallels between 1915 and 2019-2022 are astounding---the Covid epidemic is still raging, there is war in Ukraine. —and the world needs some good news. Bound recaps many of Shackleton’s efforts, as well as the petty squabbles that took place on the 1915 expedition. And ultimately, though Shackleton did not achieve his initial aim to cross the frozen continent, he is a hero for the actions he took to save his men. And that is why he is a celebrated figure in Antarctic exploration.

A solid account of the search for a legendary ship, dotted with many observations of the climatic collision course our planet is on, evident in even the coldest place on earth.





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Separation Anxiety

Separation Anxiety by Laura Zigman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Judy’s marriage is crumbling, her writing career is stalled out, and her best friend is dying of cancer. One day while cleaning out the house that (due to the economic reality of divorce) she still shares with her pot-addled husband Gary, she finds an unused baby sling that at one time intended to use with her son Teddy, now 13. Perhaps it is the disconnect she feels with her son, her husband, or her dreams…but something snaps and seeking a physical closeness she cannot get with her family, she seeks out the 20-pound family dog and puts her in the sling…and wearing her all the time.

And away we go…Judy starts off wearing the dog around the house and then she graduates to wearing it outside the house. And then when the same economic reality that forces two separated people to live in the same house also threatens Teddy’s ability to stay in school, Judy agrees to offer boarding to a weird and fully immersive performance troupe called the Puppet People, which causes Judy and Gary to confront their issues while hiding them from strangers.

This is the second Zigman book I’ve read and I get the same kind of enjoyment that I got when I first discovered Tom Perrotta. I feel compelled to seek out everything she has written. The writing is crisp and funny and absurd and the whole time I felt like I was in good hands. The situation is deliberately ridiculous but within that is a level of insight about life and second chances and the direction that it can take you.




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Best. Movie. Year. Ever.

Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


At the end of the last millennium, back when some of us were living our lives and hoping the Y2K bug wouldn’t end humanity as we knew it, Hollywood was quietly having its best year ever.
Fight Club. Office Space. The Matrix. The Sixth Sense. The Blair Witch Project. Election. Boys Don’t Cry. The Best Man. The Phantom Menace. Being John Malkovich. Eyes Wide Shut. And many, many more. Brian Raftery makes the very excellent case that 1999 is a singularly great year in cinema, the likes of which we may never see again.

BMYE explores the causes of this phenomenon while ploughing through a long list of interview subjects to give texture and substance to what happened behind the scenes in several of these films. Many of these were not considered successful in their time but made a massive leap in their life after on DVD (Fight Club and Office Space are two notables). It was a great time for directors and auteurs of cinema, perhaps one of the last times when you could just take a risk and make a movie with out any option for sequels or franchises.

I lived through this time but presented like this, I suddenly realize what a great time it was to live through. It was still during a period where people went to the movies, rather than watch them at home. And there were so many good ones it was almost impossible to take in everything.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It’s like watching a really good documentary, recognizing things and learning more along the way. As a sucker for any and all things 90’s, this was right in my wheelhouse. Excellent.






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Small World

Small World by Laura Zigman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Joyce and Lydia are 2 forty-ish sisters who become roommates a year after Joyce’s divorce. Joyce takes her sister in after her own divorce and the cohabitation is rocky but functional. The two have had their differences in the past---the loss of a sister in childhood due to a dreadful disease hangs heavily, as does the subsequent breakup of their family--but the commonality of their situation leads to an uneven peace. Joyce amuses herself with a habit she picked up: making blank verse poetry out of the posts on a local gossipy neighborhood site called Small World. Things are going well enough until a new couple moves into the apartment upstairs. And the fragile peace is upset and lines are drawn in the sand.

This is a terrific book, a great examination of the dynamics of sisterhood—how people get over the past versions of themselves and try to relate as adults, how open wounds are always there, and how parents mess their children up for years to come.
I’ll be reading more, that is for certain.




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The Brainwashing of my Dad

The Brainwashing of My Dad: How the Rise of the Right-Wing Media Changed a Father and Divided Our Nation—And How We Can Fight Back by Jen Senko

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Once in a while a book comes along that is so relatable that I can’t help but nod my head in recognition while I’m reading. Such is the case with TBWOMD.

America is a bitterly divided country. Left and Right paint each other in the most awful terms to the point where we can’t even agree on anything.

Things weren’t always this way. We used to get along. We used to argue but still respected each other. We used to agree on reasonable gun control and abortion. We weren’t always fighting over basic facts. But something changed.

Senko’s father Frank was a happy go lucky basically non-political Democrat all his life, believing in the values of hard work, charity and treating his fellow human with kindness and decency. Then he started to change…not all at once, but slowly. For when a job later in his life gave him a long commute, he filled the time in the car not with music, but with talk radio. Specifically, with Rush Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed most dangerous man in radio aka the harmless little fuzzball. And later he started watching Fox News. The combination of the two changed Frank, as he began repeating things he heard and saw, and became increasingly hostile. The change impacted how he got along with his family; every conversation steered back to politics, every person whom he once liked and respected began to turn into the enemy.

For this is the effect three hours a day of listening to a lying hateful man topped off with a nonstop barrage of a news network that has been little more than a mouthpiece for a Republican Party that has gone further and further into crazy town…

Senko does a fairly masterful job of synthesizing the history of how we got from being a nation of basically decent and compassionate people who could agree to disagree to one that is divided and tribal and distrustful of each other. She links it to what happened to her father. And then she tells of his miraculous journey back to being the kind and loving human he used to be (spoiler alert: it had a lot to do with turning off the radio and turning off the TV.)

I can relate to a lot of what she says. Indeed, the Limbaugh effect is/was more common than I ever realized. So maybe the confirmation bias is there, maybe I am enjoying it because I agree with much of it. But that said, it is a great place to start if one is trying to find out just how the hell we got into this mess.






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Killing Yourself to Live

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In the early part of the last decade…well, maybe the last, last decade…Chuck Klosterman was sent out on a vaguely defined assignment by his employer, Spin Magazine. The assignment was to explore some of rock music’s more or less notorious sites of rock star deaths. He gets in a rental car and just goes. And on the way he pontificates on many things…his lost loves, his current loves, what it means to love, why Nirvana is totally misremembered, why Kurt Cobain’s death bumped PJ from being the much hotter band at the time…but most pointedly, he tackles death and what it means for the popularity of your band…

And it goes on this wild ride which goes across the country. It’s a digressionary style, flowing from thought to thought and there is no telling when he will take a turn and talk about Kiss or Falco or the Grand Canyon or what it’s like to talk to someone from Los Angeles…I at first compared it to a really well-written zine. Now I’m thinking I want to write a zine like Chuck Klosterman writes a book…maybe I already do….

And I’m sorry if my description of this book is so bad, but I just wanted to say that I loved it so much and I have to agree with one of the assessments on the back cover which compares reading this with going on a road trip with a really, really interesting dude. I found myself laughing out loud and nodding along with many of his observations. And I was indeed very sad to see it end.

After reading his book about the 90’s, I really wanted to read another Klosterman book. After now reading this, I want to read it again.





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Halloween Ends

Halloween Ends: The Official Movie Novelization by Paul Brad Logan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Novelization of the final installment of the 2018 Halloween trilogy, Halloween Ends. The final showdown between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode makes for a fun read and gets us closer to the motivations of Corey Cunningham, the de facto protégé of the maniacal serial killer of Haddonfield. The 2 wreak havoc in the final chapter of the trilogy but it is obviously constrained by the limits of the material.
That said...
Anyone disappointed in the movie may find solace in the book. It develops a few of the themes of the movie, changes a few things, and leaves a door wide open for the future of the franchise. I don't usually read movie novelizations, but this is a pretty good one.



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Once Upon Atari

Once Upon Atari: How I made history by killing an industry by Howard Scott Warshaw

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In the early 80’s, the Atari home video game system was just about the coolest thing ever.

In 1982, my family had one. We played games, shoveled snow to buy new ones, traded with others, went to stores looking for the next new game. I remember my dad staying up half the night to “flip” Pac-Man: when your score is so high that they run out of numbers and it re-sets. If you were a kid in those days, this is what you did. We played Atari and was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Howard Scott Warshaw is something of a legend within the Atari community, having written the hit Yar’s Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Arc, and the infamous E.T, The Extra-Terrestrial Video Game. It is this third game that gained the label “Worst Video Game of All Time.” There is an Urban Legend that it was so bad that Atari buried it somewhere in the desert; that it was so bad that it single-handedly tanked the entire home video game industry in 1983.
And Once Upon Atari is a book about that.

There are many, many reasons for the video game crash, which he talks about. And there are more than a few reasons why this urban legend is false (why would a company go through the expense to bury something in the desert when it would be cheaper and easier to simply throw them in the trash? But hey, we are getting ahead of ourselves.) Warshaw details his days and experiences in the hallowed halls of the Atari Headquarters. It is a dream job at first. But it is only a matter of time before things go downhill and it starts with a leadership change.

But it is also an engaging history of a unique time when the home video game system was a whole new frontier. People were going crazy for the Atari system and Pac Man and Missile Command and a whole slew of new and (at the time) state of the art games. And Warshaw describes a fun, chaotic office full of fun people…and this is where the magic happened.

Interspersed within the story is the story of the 2014 archaeological dig into a garbage dump in New Mexico, where the ET video games were rumored to be buried….

The game itself has an interesting history. The hit movie was turned into a game where you move the little alien around and try to assemble pieces of a phone to “phone home” while avoiding the scientist and the FBI man who try to take away your supplies or capture you. Many players found it frustrating because of the ease with which you could fall into one of the many pits stationed throughout the game. It could be really annoying. But as someone who grew up playing that and many other games from the period, it really wasn’t dramatically worse than many other games that were out at the time.

But the important thing to remember is that through a series of cascading missteps Warshaw only had 5 weeks to complete a task that should have taken at least 10 months.
The story of the ET video game is a story about what happens when a company is run by the new management who doesn’t understand the product. There are many pearls of wisdom throughout that could be applied to certain enterprises today:
“When people think a core department in their company is unnecessary, it’s a sure sign of corporate pathology. A well-run company considers everyone’s input and MAINTAINS A STAFF WORTH LISTENING TO (emphasis is mine.).” Page 257.

Once Upon Atari is a delightful book, Warshaw has such a great perspective on his eclectic life (he’s a therapist now!), as well as a great sense of humor about it all. He wears the badge of Creator of the “Worst Game Ever” with a cheeky sense of honor.

Highly recommended for both the nerd and the non-nerd alike.







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