Just picked up the greatest book for years: S by Jeffrey Abrams and Doug Dorst. The premise is that two grad students pass back and forth an old novel (Ship of Theseus) by a famous but mysterious author named V.M. Straka. They conduct an epistolatory relationship with margin notes while they take turns with the book. Very innovative. Get this book and read it when you can.

    In nonfiction, I'm reading Difficult Men by Brett Martin, about the creative revolution in TV, from The Sopranos to The Shield to Breaking Bad. Unfortunately, there is little mention of my two favorites, Nurse Jackie and The United States of Tara. Still, interesting behind-the-scenes book.

     For a real sleep-killer - but very interesting! - read a nonfiction title; Command and Control; nuclear weapons, the Damascus accident, and the illusion of safety  by Eric Schlosser.  A little town VERY near where I grew up was the site for a Titan II missile that nearly detonated, WITH its nuclear warhead, because a trainee dropped a wrench. And that's far from the only incident. Of course, most of them happened in the seventies and eighties, not so much nowadays, but how much of this stuff is still around? As one of the generals said, "You can't eliminate human error, and you can't plan for it."

     Also, of course, Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett, a continuation of The Writing Class. Any book by her is an automatic must-read. I just love her attitude. Read it to see what I mean.

      Jean Thompson, author of  the short story collection Throw Like a Girl , highly recommended, has a new novel out titled The Humanity Project - the title is from one of the characters, an old lady, starting a rather fuzzily conceived do-good  foundation. The broad array of characters have encompassed every present-day calamity in American life - that might be my only criticism of this book. It's still very good & worth reading.

     You Are One Of  Them, excellent first-time novel by Elliot Holt, about a young woman who goes to Moscow, ostensibly for grad school work, actually to track down the truth about her childhood friend Jennifer, who achieved world wide celebrity in the fifth grade by writing a peace letter to Yuri Andropov, visiting the then-Soviet Union, and getting killed in a plane crash on the way back home. A decade later she finally begins to realize all may not have been as it seemed;

               "She was ten years old," I said. "She wasn't a spy."
               "Nyet," said Sveta. "But her father was."
               "That's ridiculous," I said. "He was a consultant."

      On a completely different note, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was just republished and it is just a lovely little book. A young veteran of WWI spends a summer restoring a mural in a country church in England, between the wars.

    Just finished Marisha Pessl's (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) new book  Night Film, and it is well worth reading. Big book with a plot powered by a murder mystery, that draws the reader in completely. Even the critical reviews make it clear that the reviewer accepted the premises.) Anyway I would recommend this to any fan of horror.
    Also, Doctor Sleep is here, also very good. Not quite as good as The Shining, but how could it be?

     Well, Mother's cancer is back with a vengeance. Tumors, and now it's gotten into her lungs. Caroline says she'll be with us for Xmas, but she won't last a full year. And she refuses surgery and chemotherapy. Well, that's her choice, I can't say I really blame her.  She says everyone she knows except me and Caroline is dead, including Daddy. There's no arguing with her.

EL

     Oh hell.  Elmore Leonard died.
      I remember when that whole Miami Vice thing started he got right in the first wave of that, with Glitz and his other novels set in South Florida. Of course he had been around writing good stories before that. E.G. Mr. Majestyk. In one of his interviews he said he subscribed to Arizona Highways to get the scene descriptions for his early Westerns.
     I remember George Will wrote in the introduction to one of the later ones - the one set in Detroit? - that you should just read the first chapter right there in the bookstore. "The owner won't mind because he knows you will then buy the book."

   Right now I am reading the new Ace Atkins, The Lost Ones, starring Quinn Colson et al. So far it is just as good as the others.
   Also Lauren Beukes has come out with a crime thriller, The Shining Girls, which is pretty good even though I usually don't care for science fiction. We'll have to see if the sci-fi neutralizes the story too much.

         Tom Piccirilli  has followed up his  Last Kind Words  with another semi-thriller, The Last Whisper in the Dark, with the same characters.  If you liked the first one you'll like the second one.

7/13/13

 Pain, Parties, Work - Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953  by  Elizabeth Winder. I remember when being a Mademoiselle Guest Editor was absolutely the top thing you could do, as a college girl. I also remember when The Bell Jar came out. To think Mlle isn't even around anymore. Anyway, everybody should read this, as a window into a forgotten world. (The portrayals of people she knew that were supposedly so vicious in TBJ were amalgams and largely fictional - Fiction, remember? - plus the tone was supposed to convey her alienation and numbness due to her mental state).

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves  by  Karen Joy Fowler, who wrote The Jane Austen Book Club, about a family who tries raising a chimp as one of their own children.  (Mostly this isn't a good idea).
It's a bit of a surprise or trick story, since she starts telling the story in the middle - actually it's quite similar to Sara Gruen's  Ape House. Kind of a trend lately for some reason. Anyway it's a very good read.

    Well, this has been a long hiatus. Had a bunch of stuff going on with Mother and Caroline and Ira (my brother in law). Let's just say if any major mail order meds company switches to UPS and then won't deliver to someone because they only have a PO Box and not a street address, maybe an alarm should go off somewhere -- hey, there's this little old lady on Dauphin Island that's not getting her medicine. Let's investigate!

    Anyway my next recommend is  The Good House , by Ann Leary, a sort of play on words, but really it's just a very amusing novel about yuppies real estate and rehab chic. Light but worth reading.

    Another title, with an unusual title; Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles - a good first novel, whose beginning premise is housesitting a famous composer's very elegant apartment.  It's a little unusual - it's Scandinavian - but if you stick with it all the way to the end you'll be glad.

    Ghostman by Roger Hobbs -- a new thriller/crime story, starts off with a casino robbery.  Fast moving, and with a Tom-Clancy level of technical knowledge.


     Also, The Burgess Boys , Elizabeth Strout's  continuation of  Olive Kitteridge, very much in the same New England vein, which I happen to like very much.

Something that came out a while back and I forgot to put in here -- Jonathan Evison's  Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.  A man whose life has come completely apart takes a night course and becomes a home health care worker, for a teenage boy with MD. They forge a strong relationship and he ends up taking the kid on a road trip to see his estranged father. There's a lot more to it but this is a book everyone should read if they get a chance - it's very, very good.

     A new novelist named Mary Stewart Atwell  has brilliantly combined Ozarks Gothic and teen-angst, outsider-in-a-rich-school genres into Wild Girls, about a townie named Kate Riordan who gets a scholarship to Swan River Academy because her mom is the dean's secretary. The tiny Appalachian town of Swan River has a "bug" as my dad would say, a historical mental flaw which presents as; every few years one or several of its females between the ages of sixteen and eighteen become "wild girls", who can start fire just by looking, fly, and kill anyone within shouting distance including themselves. One of the tangles in the skein is that anyone that has ever gotten close enough to see one of the wild girls is dead. The subtext is the rage teenage girls often at their own powerlessness. Anyway, it is a very good read.

    Oh, I love Ian Frazier in any form, and I love Cursing Mommy in the New Yorker. The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days  by Ian Frazier is out now and he has joined all the columns together into a pretty good light novel. It just makes me happy.

     A. M. Homes' new book,  May We Be Forgiven,  is long, but worth the time. It's gotten mixed reviews, so I wonder if everybody read all the way to the end. (You kind of have to do that).  The title is from the Yom Kippur prayer - why will become apparent upon reading. Hapless Harold, who has always felt second-fiddle to his semi-sociopath baby brother George, ends up taking charge of George's family after he goes to prison. The real star of the book is George's son, Nate.

      Also, new in Southern Gothic; American Ghost by Janis Owens. Concerns present-day Florida Panhandle, what everyone calls Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings territory, both present-day and Depression-era. Yes, there's a lynching. Plus a love story and several Bible-thumping preachers. Anybody that likes Carolyn Haines should like this.

      New in fiction: Gun Church, by Reed Farrell Coleman, author of the Moe Prager mysteries.  A former literary wunderkind, burnout from the coke-fueled Eighties (we're supposed to infer a Brat Packer a la Bret Easton Ellis), has ended up teaching English in a community college in upstate New York (rusticated!). He foils a school shooting in his own classroom, enters the news again, AND is prosyletised into a local cult, the Gun Church, that revolves around gun culture. The plot moves quickly from there, including a semi-digression concerning a former IRA gunman, into a quick and clever conclusion. Well worth reading, for thriller fans and others.