Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 65
August 7, 2018
Mendocino Complex fire and fantasy football
As I sit here typing, I can smell and see the smoke from the Mendocino fire about 130 miles north of here. The sun rose with an eerie red tint. Despite this, the weather people say the air quality is good. The smoke, at least the dangerous part, is too high to affect the ground level badly. The fire is the largest in state history and only about 35% contained, so it’s a bad one. So far there’s been no loss of life on this one that I know of. It’s located near Clear Lake, the setting for much of my fourth Cliff Knowles novel, Death Row.
In my last post I complained about needing to fill my time with more reading and having trouble finding good stuff to read. In the last twelve hours I’ve started and given up on three books, two of which were audiobooks: The Strange Bird by Jeff Vandermeer (too artsy-fartsy and weird), The Crack in the Lens, by Steve Hockensmith (audiobook reader had horrible hokey Southern+Western accents, a sort of cross between Gomer Pyle and this narrator of Huckleberry Hound), and Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich (an author reading her own work is usually a mistake).
So what’s next? I joined a fantasy football league. I’m no pro football fan, although I often watch the local team, the 49ers. I record the games and don’t bother to finish watching if the Niners are losing badly. I joined the league for two reasons: I like analyzing data and it gives me an opportunity to do that, and a good friend and my son are both in this league, so it provides and activity to share with them. I don’t care about winning or losing as long as I get a season’s worth of entertainment. I just looked at several websites ranking players for fantasy football purposes and I’d never heard of about 98% of them. I also don’t have much idea of strategy beyond what the pros say (yes, there are fantasy football pros), but the point scoring system for my league is different from the standard one, so that strategy may not be of much use. Still, I’ve got my spreadsheet going already. By the way, in case you’re wondering, my research indicates that the league I’m in is legal in California – skill required and no rake – so it’s not considered gambling.
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August 5, 2018
Seven books in three weeks
I’ve posted seven book reviews in the last three weeks. That’s a record for me, and must be a personal record just for reading that many books in that short a time. There was also one other book I started and gave up on quickly because it was so bad (Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer). It just goes to show how much free time I need to fill. TV fare is so bad I watch news three times a day and even watched some daytime TV – old B movies. Then there are the crosswords and computer games I’ve been devouring. Thank heavens my son and his wife came over to visit Friday and we had a fun evening after a good Mexican dinner. When I’m not writing a book I crave something to occupy my time. Maybe I’ll think of a plot for the next one soon. When the books are good, the reading is really enjoyable, but when I hit a streak of losers as the last few have been, it gets me down. One bright spot: Welcome to the Family, a “Netflix original” (meaning they found a TV series in another country that they retitled in English and stuck subtitles on. It’s a wacky comedy entirely in Catalan! Try it.
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The Real Michael Swann by Bryan Reardon
The Real Michael Swann by Bryan Reardon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The story is told from two perspectives. The first is that of an unnamed man who has just been injured in a bomb blast in Grand Central Station, New York. It’s told in the first person. The second, told in the third person, is from the viewpoint of Julia Swann, a suburban housewife living near Philadelphia. The man has head injuries and doesn’t know who he is or what happened to him. His only tie to the real world is his briefcase clutched tightly in his hand. Inside it he finds identity documents and phone for Michael Swann. He only knows he wants to get home. He begins his journey, his flight, to Philadelphia. Julia, meanwhile, realizes Michael was in or near Grand Central Station when the blast occurred. In fact, he was on the phone to her at the time. She begins her separate attempt to find him. Local law enforcement at all levels tries to help. This is yet another in the current fad genre of “unreliable narrator” stories.
That’s a great set-up for a story. Unfortunately it’s all downhill from there. Nobody in the story does anything remotely believable after that. Some of it is physically or legally impossible. The “big twist” at the end is totally predictable from soon after the blast. I certainly knew it was coming. The writing is tortured trying to keep it from the reader until the end. As a retired FBI agent I’m always sensitive to police procedure, and this book gets almost nothing right in that respect. I managed to get through it, so I got my hours of “entertainment” if you want to call it that, so I can give it a couple of stars but I can’t recommend it.
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August 3, 2018
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This translation of a German novel about post-wartime Germany is engaging but ultimately left me with a feeling that it could have done more. Michael, a teenager, falls for an older woman in his neighborhood and she proceeds to satisfy his lust, playfully at first as though he is her boy toy. It develops into a real relationship of sorts, although Michael is not sure if she feels about him the way he does for her. When it stretches beyond a mere sexual relationship, they spend a weekend together. She likes his voice and asks him to read to her. He obliges. This continues for some time. Then one day she ends it cold. It turns out she has a secret. I’ll stop there to avoid spoilers.
I listened to the audiobook, which was well acted by the narrator. The translation is excellent, too. As I listened, I didn’t know it was a translated German novel, although I suspected it. The book is somewhat dark, but not overly so. I think it resonates better with Germans than it could with most Americans, including me. In the end, I felt lukewarm about it. There was a movie made of it, but I never saw the film.
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July 31, 2018
One Across, Two Down by Ruth Rendell
One Across, Two Down by Ruth Rendell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is something of a time capsule. It was written in the 1970s but might as well have been in the 1930s. Modern day Americans will have a hard time believing that people in the U.K. in the 1970s lived the way Stanley and Vera did, with no car and no refrigerator. Stanley is a lazy, greedy lout who married Vera for her family money, only to find that his mother-in-law controlled it all and planned to leave it all to Vera. She lives with them in their dumpy house but is trying to convince Vera to leave Stanley and come stay with her in a nicer place she will pay for. Vera supports them with a menial job while Stanley goes from temporary job to temporary job of an even more menial nature, like gas pump attendant. Make that petrol pump. The story is told from Stanley’s point of view as he cogitates how to bump off the old bat before she lures Vera away and leaves him penniless. Then fortune provides him with an opportunity. I will leave it there to avoid spoilers.
The book is unsophisticated in several senses – the plot line, the writing style, the lifestyle of the characters. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend be rather heavy-handed. The title refers to Stanley’s penchant for crossword puzzles, but that aspect really has little to do with the plot. I suspect it was chosen solely so the author could insert some clever British-style cryptic crossword clues she had on hand for general amusement. There’s no gore, sex, or sadism, so it wouldn’t sell in today’s market but that aspect is at least a refreshing change for some of us.
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Geocaching map – South Bay (Silicon Valley)
Above is a geocaching map of my local area. For my geocaching friends, this is old hat and doesn’t need explaining, but for those not so addicted and with nothing better to do, I’ll provide a bit of context. Click on the map to enlarge it if you want to understand it better.
This is a map of most of the southern section of the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of what is now known as Silicon Valley. The big blue part is the southern end of San Francisco Bay itself. The area shown is approximately 20 miles across by 10 miles from top to bottom. Geocachers from other parts of the world may be surprised at the cache density. All the icons represent caches that are still active, i.e. can currently be found. It does not include ones I have found or hidden in the past if they are now archived. The yellow smilies represent caches I have found. The blue ones with the frownie face are ones I looked for but Did Not Find (DNF). The green ones with stars in them are caches I hid. The green ones with the box-like thing in them are regular caches I haven’t found. The blue, orange, and any other colors are caches of other types that I have not found.
A good forensic analyst, one who figures out where serial killers or arsonists live or work, could probably identify where I live from this. If you’re a fan of my Cliff Knowles Mysteries, but don’t know much about geocaching, this map may give you a better idea of the nature and popularity of the sport.
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July 28, 2018
Rocket Men by Robert Kurson
Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This thorough recounting of the first manned trip to the moon is riveting in parts and educational throughout. The complexity and enormity of the undertaking are only appreciated after reading this book. The mission was an extremely daring choice by NASA since the Atlas rocket was not a proven vehicle and the training schedule had to be greatly rushed. The biographies of the three astronauts are set forth with the right amount of detail, enough for us to get to know them and their families as people but with the focus kept on the voyage to the moon. The author tends to be quite repetitive, thus causing me to drop a star on the rating. How many times to we need to be told that if step X goes wrong the astronauts could end up crashing into the moon, flying off into space or trapped in a lunar orbit indefinitely? He does it about three or four times every chapter. Still, it was an enjoyable read.
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July 23, 2018
Educated by Tara Westover
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The author, a young woman brought up in a violent, fundamentalist, survivalist family in mountain Idaho, writes of her escape from that life and joining the modern world where she ended up earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge. As unlikely as that may seem, it pales besides the absolutely incredible (yet believable despite this) story of the abuse, fanaticism, and rationalization that her family experienced. It is difficult to read at times. It is much like the cliche of watching a train wreck in slow motion. At least in this case you know from the book’s very existence that she has survived the ordeal. She was “home schooled,” which in her case seems to have consisted primarily of learning domestic skills, obedience, and religious doctrine of a most bizarre nature. She never attended a real school, yet was able to enter BYU at age 17. Her ignorance of the outside world was so extreme as to be amusing at times, embarrassing at others, and not understood by her peers and professors.
The story is also difficult to read without drawing parallels to today’s national politics, but I’ll leave it at that. The writing is beautiful, but about very unbeautiful things. I’ve noticed that most of the negative or lukewarm reviews are by people who simply don’t believe some of the greatest excesses the author describes or the fact that she couldn’t see how abusive and destructive her family was and why she didn’t just stay out and not look back once she left. I’ve heard reports from enough cult members and kidnap victims to find it very believable, if not totally understandable. It is a very hard thing to reject everything your parents have taught you at least when you’re a teenager even when you are rebellious. Think about all the things your own parents did wrong or believed that you only came to realize when you were an adult, maybe not even until middle age, and how you probably still clung to family loyalty even if it wasn’t 100%. The book was so compelling I raced through it. You may not necessarily like it, but it is an education.
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July 20, 2018
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Lydia works in a bookstore and is in a happy relationship with her boyfriend David. But she harbors a secret, a violent one, from her past. The funky local bookstore is home to a collection of characters she calls the BookFrogs. One day, one of her favorite BookFrogs, a troubled young man named Joey, hangs himself in the store. This tragic act opens up a cascade of events reopening her troubled past and changing the fate of several of the characters in the book.
The story is slow to get going, but it eventually unfolds into something like a traditional mystery. The characters, including Lydia, are not entirely likeable for various reasons. One bugaboo I have is that many of them smoke, which to this author, is apparently still a cool thing to do and makes people attractive. (NOT!) This fallacy is still prevalent in movies and TV, I’m afraid, but I digress. The pace of the book is good once the plot gets into full swing about halfway through. The story is told in two temporal stages, switching from the present day to Lydia’s childhood, another irritating but currently popular stylistic choice. The clues to the mystery are doled out sparingly but fairly so that the astute reader can begin to see a glimmer of the solution before it arrives, but the full resolution isn’t revealed until the end. There were a few loose ends that were never explained, like Joey’s unusual manner of “writing” to Lydia before his death. The ending, especially the epilogue, were not entirely satisfying to me, but it avoided cliches and sappiness that might have been worse.
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July 15, 2018
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I read this book all the way through and I’m still not sure what the point of it is. The main theme seems to be that statistics and analysis are better predictors of performance than people’s gut instinct or commonly held stereotypes. Sure, I’ll buy that, and expected as much since this is the same author as Moneyball. But that point is made in the first chapter. Then the author goes off into a long section on the Houston Rockets and their recruiting strategy. Then he jumps to a biography of an Israeli psychologist who is the smartest person in the university, including every discipline, even Physics. Then he does the same with another Israeli psychologist who is also the smartest person anyone has ever met. Then yet another. Funny, I’ve never heard of any of these reputed geniuses. After that it seems to be a series of anecdotes about various experiments they conducted that seem to prove people often make illogical decisions. Well, duh. Throw in some Israel-Arab war bits, a stretch about the friendship that formed between the first two psychologists, and you have the book. I don’t understand what either the title or subtitle has to do with the content of the book. It seems to be to be a rambling collection of loosely related stories, biography, and personal views about pro sports. It’s readable and non-offensive, so I couldn’t give it one star, but beyond that, it has little to recommend it. Had it not been a selection by my book club, I would have put it down much earlier.
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