The Bone - blackdogbooks 2016

Welcome to the 2016 thread. I'm not as active as I used to be here in the 75er's group, but I've been with it since 2008. I guess I'm more an old, hard to find title, buried in the dusty backroom of a forgotten used bookstore. Only some know about the store, even fewer know about me, but those that know are rewarded, I hope.

Since some may not know me - I'm a 40-something living in the Southwest United States. My day job is in law enforcement, but with my off-time, I'm reading and writing and sending my stories out into the ether. The reading is pretty eclectic - if you're interested in some of my favorites, I've got lists on my home page. I answer to blackdogbooks, BDB, Dawg - and Mac.

I'm hoping that old friends find me and new ones follow my reading/reviews - I just can't figure out how to link this thread to the Threadbook, Doc!?!?!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Mac! Looking forward to your reviews in 2016.

A couple of old friends found me right away!

Don't worry - I have you covered in the Threadbook. Welcome back!

Thanks, doc!

good to see you back- happy reading!

So good to see you here, Mac!

Book #1 B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton

My Review on the book's home page:

Sophomore entries for series often suffer a bit as the author struggles to legitimize their first publication success without regurgitating it exactly. The idea that a publisher was attracted to your creation and believed in it enough to midwife it into the world is intoxicating. But the ever present doubt about your own ability and talent don’t disappear – it just transforms itself, like any good virus does, to survive. Afflicted with that doubt, authors sometimes strain to push out another book that will both prove that they belong but also highlight something new.

Sue Grafton’s B is for Burglar is a perfect example. Very shortly after killing a man, the climax in the previous book, Kinsey Milhone takes on a new case. A woman can’t find her estranged sister. Kinsey tries to track the woman down, learning that there was an arson and murder in the house next to where the sister lived – coincidences usually point toward resolution, in real life and in fictional mysteries.

While the plot for this book was not quite as telegraphed as the plot from the first book, it stretched the boundaries of plausibility quite a bit more. Trying to find a balance between a truthful mystery and one that builds fictional tension is hard. And Grafton is clearly finding her way. Ultimately, the book falls a little flat, as murderer, or murderers, aren’t given neither a realistic motivation nor a believable murder plot. Besides a couple of characters from the buildings where the sister lived, there aren’t as many real people in the story. The best murderers are fully realized, conflicted people – people who we might know and connect with, even if they choose to do something awful. It brings the mystery home for the reader.

That shortfall extends to Kinsey in this book as well. Where her life was vibrant and difficult before, she is skimming along on the surface here. She doesn’t touch on the difficulties over killing a man, even if justified, from the previous story, except in the most superficial ways. Grafton puts her in the beginnings of a relationship that feels forced. The character just doesn’t seem as real, seems more like a plot technique in too many places.

So, why read the book then? Why continue with the story? The answer is because you can feel Grafton’s growing pains and see that she’s so close to breaking through. This book may be a let-down, but it has the promise of better things to come. Kinsey Milhone is too good a character and Grafton has too much talent to give up on either.

Bottom Line: A let down but with promise.

3 ½ bones!!!!!


Book #2 C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton

My Review on the book's home page:

With C is for Corpse, Grafton and Kinsey Milhone are back on track, with but one failing. In Grafton’s previous book, she had a difficult time making good on her debut, offering an implausible, shallow murder and mystery plot. But she goes back to what made the first book good – character depth, especially for Kinsey.

Kinsey accepts a job for a young man who suffers from amnesia after an attempt on his life. He senses that he knew something that put his life in danger, but he can’t recall the details. The people in the man’s life think that he is just broken and paranoid, but Kinsey believes him. When her investigation reignites the danger, the man is killed and she finishes the job to honor him.

The book is populated by much more a cast of more completely realized characters, and offers a new, deeper look into Kinsey’s own life. Finally, she has to begin fully confronting the fallout from having killed a man in the first story in the series. And we also get to follow as she helps her landlord and friend who has been hooked by a con artist. The multiple stories and subplots sink deeper into the Kinsey’s psyche and life, cementing a friendship that will pay dividends for many books to come. This is the person who hooked us in A is for Alibi and she will be a friend for a long time.

Bottom Line: Grafton is back on track, developing a friendship with Kinsey that readers will be able to carry throughout the series.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #3 Armed and Female by Paxton Quigley

My Review on the book's home page:

Reviewing Armed and Female is a little like playing Russian roulette – with more than one cartridge in the wheel. There is a short list of topics that produce venom in the public forum gun control is frequently near the top. In the last week, the NRA and the President have been calling each other names, the pundits have been calling the NRA and President names, and the politicians have been frantically trying to get in on the game to maximize their numbers with the frothing extremes of the electorate.

Meanwhile, only about 40 people in Librarything claim owning this book, and only three of them have rated it while none have reviewed it. What does that mean? It’s a topic that news media and politicians want you to believe is hotly debated – yet very few readers on Librarything, a smart and information-hungry group, have commented on this book. Is the book too esoteric? Is it too controversial in topic or position? Maybe the topic is like many other supposedly important issues – it gathers support without study among the masses.

Part of the problem for Armed and Female is that it is a little dated, having been published in 1989. Reading through Paxton Quigley’s statistics, I often wondered if the conclusions at which she arrived could still be supported by modern statistics. One particular conclusion was that any locality that passed restrictive gun laws charted significant upticks in violent crime. But the late 1980s were quite new to the concept, and there have been a lot more gun laws put to the books since then. So, it’s hard to know whether the numbers would bear out her assertions today.

Those oft-quoted studies Quigley is so keen on troubled me in a deeper way. Anyone with a passing understanding of statistics knows that they are extremely flexible. You can support almost anything with almost any study. The numbers that gave me the most pause were from a Florida State University study that declared 645,000 crimes were defended against by a civilian wielded firearm, with only one-third of those guns being fired. She also uses FBI, California, Chicago, and Cleveland crime statistics from 1981 to say that civilians justifiably killed felons much more frequently than do police. I’m suspicious of those numbers and conclusions.

Quigley’s claims that she’s not engaging in rhetoric, but just look at the book cover and judge yourself. Even still, she does a fair job of laying out the gun control side’s positions without taking them to task too much. The book is obviously meant to encourage gun ownership, especially in females. But, having been a gun control proponent in her earlier life, she at least concedes that the issue is more complicated than is often argued by the extremes. The danger is that she combines that fair stance with overwhelming statistics supporting her own position – she’s sly.

Outside the gun control issue, Quigley spends a great deal of time on violence against females, which is part of the reason I read the book. Violence is plentiful, but violence against women has been epidemic in our country and around the world for a long time now. With provocative anecdotes and interviews, Quigley provides a serious wake-up call. Too often, women find themselves in danger. It’s not a blame thing – it’s an awareness thing. And Quigley wants to awaken women to the power they possess to control their safety. Even if part of her solution is gun ownership, it’s a powerful and important message. The early chapters on “Women with Guns”, “Futile Defense”, “Rape and Consequences”, and “The Politics of Self Defense” could be mandatory reading for any female coming of age.

Quigley gets points for thoroughness. She looks at gun control as an issue and female safety, but also covers gun ownership from a legal standpoint, how to choose a firearm, gun and defense tactics, and basic home safety. And she covers the topics after serious study and exposure, using what she learned from multiple shooting and defense courses. If you want to buy a gun, you could do a lot worse than this book.

So, why the relatively low rating for the book? Two things. First, it’s dated, which I’ve already discussed. But second, it’s a book that slyly argues the loosening of gun restriction. Quigley’s ultimate position is that crime would go way down in our country if everyone owned a firearm. I’ll give Quigley some points for her qualification that gun ownership should be responsible, educated, and informed by training. But I can’t go with her basic premise. Perhaps the best counterpoint is one I read in a E.J.Donne, Jr.’s editorial today. He points out that the NRA and many gun proponents are trapped in an endless circular argument. The circular arguments are ones that Quigley uses. The gun proponents claim that there are already too many guns in the United States for it to do any good to stem the violence. Then, they also claim that any thoughtful and reasonable approach to regulating gun ownership is essentially the first step toward total confiscation.

The truth, for me, is that there are too many guns, and that they have maintained a violent history that dates back to the very formation of our country and it’s bloody expansion west. So, I agree with the premise of the NRA and gun proponent’s first argument. But that should, from common sense, inspire us to the extreme solution, on which the second argument from the NRA and gun proponents is based. To say that there’s just too many for us to do anything about is preposterous. The problem is not that there’s just too many for us to be able to do anything about – we have done some pretty amazing things in our country. The problem is that too many people make money from the manufacture and sale of guns, from the jobs they create, to the entertainment industries they support, to the politicians who whip people up about government conspiracies. For my money, I’d like to see some courageous people leading us who say, “Hey, it’s not a secret conspiracy anymore. We’re going to do it, however hard it might be.” It’s not a popular opinion, and it’s a rather idealistic and difficult one in practice, I know. It wouldn’t eradicate violence, but it would stop some of the pretty awful things happening in our country that make us one of the most violent.

Bottom Line: A little dated and a little imbalanced in position, but there’s some good, thoughtful instruction on safety, especially for females, and how to responsibly go about gun ownership and use.

3 bones!!!!!

I have been slowly working my way through audiobooks of the Kinsey Millhone series. I have "read" up to M is for Malice. I find the stories to be a nice bit of mystery/detective escapism with a wonderful retro feel, given the amount of detail Grafton included in her stories about technology, etc when she was writing them (typewriter, no cell phones, etc). ;-)

Book #4 Assumption by Percival Everett

My Review on the book's home page:

Sifting through new authors to try, I came across a reference to Percival Everett, describing him as gritty, in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, with an Elmore Leonard twist in his realistic crime fiction. He was billed as one of the best recent authors on the market. I picked up Assumption because he set that set of stories in the high desert of New Mexico, a milieu with which I am familiar.

Assumption is three stories – novellas – roughly following the same narrator, Plata County Sheriff Deputy Ogden Walker. He is faced with some unusual crimes in the sleepy and eccentric area, ones that would get even a big city detective. For one, he has to work through a locked room mystery – the murder of a curmudgeonly old lady whom he visits just minutes before her demise. Even though he’s sitting and watching her house when the murder is committed, there is no sign of her body or a killer when he goes in her back door just a few minutes later. The second mystery is a missing person case – a skip-trace, in the parlance. And finally, the book ends with a murdered Fish and Wildlife officer.

Two problems. First, Everett chose the lonely New Mexico high desert to set his stories. There’s a lot of eccentricity up there – think a 1960’s Haight Ashbury flowerchild mating with Doc Holiday. Dickens would have been jealous of the character material. And the landscape is breathtaking. But Everett barely succeeds with a brief touch and go, never really giving the place or the people time to breath. There are paragraphs where it feels like he’s going to settle in, and then he switches to rapid fire dialog that lasts for pages. Secondly, just as you’re getting used to Deputy Walker, he changes the game, drastically. I won’t ruin the reveal, but suffice to say that there is no warning and no set up for what becomes of Walker. I don’t mind a dramatic turn, but give me some warning, any warning, that I’m dealing with a less than trustworthy narrator. The result is that the book ends in a muffled haze, the reader wondering what just happened.

It feels like both problems with the book could have been settled if Everett had decided who he was and what he wanted to do. It’s like he’s trying to strike two different chords on the same saxophone, and there’s not enough fingers or tongue for the feat.

Bottom Line: Not as gritty or as well written as billed, but solid, even if his grasp of the he’s set the stories isn’t particularly deft.

3 bones!!!!!

Book #5 Wild by Cheryl Strayed

My Review on the book's home page:

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a rare book. There is an honesty coursing through it like a river, unimpressed with its own power, oblivious to itself. A lot of books like this feature authors wallowing in their own distorted thinking and missteps, trying to astonish the reader with just how low they’ve gone, so that their transformation at the end is that much more powerful. But Strayed just plods along, marking her trail with little tidbits here and there to illuminate a moment rather than to make a big point.

The narrative is Strayed’s hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, from Southern California to Oregon. It’s an idea that has been used by a few authors. But Strayed’s choice to hike the trail in search of herself, or of a new self, doesn’t seem as self-indulgent as others. It’s a proposition – broken person seeks redemption in a physical feat beyond her capabilities. But there’s a sense throughout that the journey was a personal one and we are just lucky enough to have picked up her journal in the give-away box at the end of the trail. More than anything else, you can see the strands of a budding writer in every described landscape, every new character she happens upon. You can see her begin to develop her own personal narrative, the one that will run through everything else that she writes later, that helps to define her and her work forever after.

Strayed never makes herself out to be more broken than the next person – her story is imminently relatable. And she never makes her transformation out to be miraculous. It’s just a basic spiritual rebirth brought about by a lot of time alone with herself, the kind that is available to anyone, if they make themselves open to it. She doesn’t hold herself out to be more or less than she is, and that makes for an easy connection.

Bottom Line: Raw and honest and beautifully composed.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #6 Ernest Hemingway on Writing ed. by Larry W. Phillips

My Review on the book's home page:

Hemingway engenders strong opinions. Of late, there has been a surge in opinion that he doesn’t deserve the attention and acclaim that he garnered over the years. There are those who think that his stripped down, powerful prose is just a sign of a writer lacking in language and imagination. Others continue to hail him as a genius. If anything, Papa would be pleased to be at the center of such a debate, to have so many arguing over the worth of his work.
If nothing else, Ernest Hemingway on Writing shows us that worth was something he thought a lot about. The book excerpts Hemingway’s letters, books, and essays for comments on the craft. The man refused to reduce his own thoughts in one place for any one treatise on the topic – he said many times that it would knock the dust from the butterfly’s wings to do so. But he commented on his work many times in private correspondence and in the fiction he wrote. On nearly every page, there is a comment from Hemingway that he is constantly striving to be the best author and to produce the best writing.

“…writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done – so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.”

Passages like that are paired with rants about other authors, and how is either measures up or doesn’t. Say what you want, but I’ve read few author’s comments that anguish so over whether they’ve achieved a measure of success with their writing. Today, writing books go out of their way to make everyone feel better about themselves, to see success in the act of putting any word to paper. But Hemingway believed there was a truth to fiction that couldn’t be achieved without constant and committed work. He was not be the kind of teacher who could cultivate the midrange writer up standards, but he could inspire anyone to strive in their soul with his example.

Along the way, he comments on his writing practice, even down to how he picks up the thread from the previous day’s writing in a way that helps to create a unified narrative. He comments that on how to write from the senses, how to observe the events of the day and translate them into truth on the page. And he even comments on what a writer should be reading, providing a reading list of the authors he thinks have something to teach. He even debunks symbolism, reminding us that sometimes the boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.

I wish that Hemingway had not been worried about the butterfly, that he would have had the confidence in his own ability to share it without worry that the act would separate him from the spiritual connection he felt. And that’s the only criticism for the book. It’s not one that could be remedied, and, in a way, it makes Larry Phillips success in creating the book that much more impressive.

Bottom Line: An all too narrow glimpse into a master’s mind, but a glimpse worth taking for anyone who has the same passion.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #7 Just After Sunset by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

In the introduction to Just After Sunset, Stephen King admits that he’d lost the rhythm for short fiction, that he had quit writing for that format and didn’t know how to find his way back. It’s a declaration that might befuddle the casual reader, but one that writers will understand, maybe even be uncomfortable with. If anything, it’s a subtle warning not to ignore something that works for you, not to lose the muscle or brain memory once you’ve trained it. King found his way back to short fiction when he was asked to edit a collection of short stories, meaning that he had to read a lot of short fiction and remember what good work looked like. The experience reignited the spark, and he began writing short format stories again – the Constant Readers in us rejoiced.

Just After Sunset collects mostly stories from after that point in his career when he’d quit writing in the arena. There is one – The Cat From Hell – from his early days, and it’s a hoot. I mean, haven’t we all looked at a cat and wondered how many way’s it was plotting to do us in? The others are all written as King is stretching some atrophied muscles, and it shows occasionally. Not all the stories are up to the quality that we’ve come to expect. But those that are up to snuff, are marvelous.

Harvey’s Dream is one of the shortest stories, but one of the most powerful. A man wakes up and recounts a dream he had the previous night for his wife. The tension that King builds in the wife’s narration, as she sees the tragic signs glimmering in the corner of her eye, is palpable. It’s the kind of story that you want to put down, because it’s too much to handle, and you can’t possibly put down, because you’re afraid not to know. Part of the reason it works so well is that it is a slice of everyday life, a nightmare told over a kitchen table. You’ll feel yourself in the room, because you’ve been in that room before, and the connection to your own fears makes it all the more frightening.

Mute is another story in that same vein – an everyday guy with everyday problems is thrust into the fringes of experience. A guy tells the sad story of his failed marriage to a person he thinks is deaf, only to find out that the deaf guy is going to be a bloody avenger for him. But it’s a story in a story, because the narrator is confessing his situation to a priest – the device allowing us to walk in the narrator’s shoes, dip into his mind a bit – King’s a master at that, and it’s another thing that make his fiction so relatable.

Finally, Things They Left Behind, is a story about the aftermath of 9/11. There have been a few stories and novels over the decade plus since the towers came down. But I challenge you to find one more evocative and heart-wrenching than this one. King taps into the horror and guilt we all felt watching those black obelisks implode more than anyone I’ve ever read. The story centers on a man who called in sick to work that day. After a couple weeks, items from his colleague’s desks began to appear in his apartment, and they are not silent. King’s narrator quotes a magical realist writer – he can’t recall whether it is Borges or Marquez – “As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mothers’ fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along.”

Bottom Line: Not the best collection of King’s short fiction, but there are a couple that match the best work of his career.

4 bones!!!!!

Book #8 Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

My Review on the book's home page:

The grit in Battleborn is born of barren desert sand. The brutality stinks like the stale musk in the sealed up Vegas casinos, two days of body odor and three packs of cigarettes. To protect against the searing sun and the flashing neon, you must narrow the eyes in consuming these stories. But consume them you must – devour or be devoured is the pledge of Clair Vaye Watkins.

Hemingway said that a writer has to endeavor to just write one true thing each day. For some, that truth is dangerous, and Watkins falls into this category. All the stories here are sore and bruised affairs, bloody, either in the flesh or in the spirit. But they all ring of Heingway’s truth. The truth that must be midwifed in fiction, because reality is too stark, too close. The lost man, writing to another man whom he doesn’t know beyond the leavings of a car wreck on a deserted highway, finding the loneliness in his own life measures up better than that he imagines in the other’s. The young girl who contributes to the rape of her friend, finding release in the pain of another. A young man’s obsession with a whore that distracts him from the death of his friend. And the violence in an old west gold rush camp where a man fights to save his brother, learning that his own redemption will come at a cost.

Not every story in Watkins’ collection bleeds so openly like those. The book leads with a creative fiction riff on her father’s connection to Charles Manson, and it reads a little too close to promotion than the others, like an attempt to get the reader’s attention so they settle back and listen to her other work. A couple stories that focus on friends and lovers and wives and husbands feel much colder than the sizzle of the others. But on the whole, Watkins is a voice to be reckoned with. Read her, if you will, but hang on for dear life.

Bottom Line: Vivid and brutal, a force to be reckoned with.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Dear Mac, in 1984 I bought a book of short stories, Magicats, eighteen fabulour feline fantasies--Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Randall Garrett, and many more, including--Stephen King. Now, I don't read King because I don't handle violence, gore, and horror well. But well, cats. I was so traumatized by "The Cat from Hell" that I stopped reading anthologies because one never knows what they might spring upon you!

It's a frightening story, no?

Scarred me for life!

ETA so much so that when you just mentioned it in passing, I was able to go straight to my bookshelf and find the book and location of the story even though it's been 30 years since I read it and I didn't remember the title.

Uncle Stevie makes a lasting impression.

>14 blackdogbooks: Great review! Added it to my list. I can't say I have fond memories of the mandatory Hemingway reading in school, but I can appreciate that he was an artist who had a profound influence on others.

>15 blackdogbooks: I wonder if my partner has Just After Sunset. It's exactly his sort of book...

Thanks - Hemingway is a favorite for me.

Book #9 The Protector’s War by S.M. Stirling

My Review on the book's home page:

S.M. Stirling is a local product here in New Mexico, and I like to support local authors. He’s a prolific cuss, too, with over a dozen different series, some of which overlap somewhat. The Protector’s War is a continuation of The Change Series, which follows a watershed moment in the world where combustion and other related scientific processes no longer work. It shifts the world back to feudalism, essentially.

The second in the series picks up about ten years after the Change, giving us a look at Mike Havel and Juniper MacKenzie’s newly forged kingdoms in the Oregon wilderness. Up around Portland, Norman Arminger has also solidified his more brutal state, and is threatening to invade Havel and MacKenzie territory. Though the title would lead you to believe that the war gets underway in this installment, the battles herein are smaller skirmishes that will clearly lead to the full conflict in a later book.

There is a penchant in fantasy, particularly the sword and dragon worlds, to be painfully detailed in descriptions, down to the blood spatter from each blow and the rivets in every shield. That level of detail was on display in the first book, Dies the Fire. So, I was on notice when I undertook this one. But the reading gets burdensome occasionally. There are flashes of some good story material throughout, but it gets bogged down in the weeds quite frequently. And it seemed that Stirling was itching for a fight, because he looks for ways to pit these people against each other, sometimes without a strong reason or element of plot involved.

Additionally, Stirling brought the outside world into this book, featuring some British folks who must escape their isle and eventually make their way the Oregon Coast. It was interesting to read about how other lands were dealing with the Change, but the connections between these characters and the Oregon group seemed a little too much coincidence.

On balance, I will probably be back for more, but the further the story gets from the Change, the less I feel engaged with the characters. A little more character development and a little less detail would probably solve that disconnect, but it’s doubtful to go that way.

Bottom Line: Good enough to keep turning the pages – maybe even try the next book; flashes of a better story buried under the excruciating detail and jarring contextual shifts.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #10 The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

My Review on the book's home page:

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was virgin territory for me. I’ve never read a Neil Gaiman before, and he seems to inspire some strong feelings in his readers. I picked up several but decided on this one because it was a relatively short read, and seemed a good introduction to his style.

The book never names the narrator, inviting us all to read ourselves into the gap. And it’s easy to slip into the narrator’s shoes, as the early pieces clearly mark a search for identity and meaning. Our substitute arrives at home after a long absence without visiting to attend a funeral. He decides to visit his childhood home, where his memory begins to work in overdrive. He recalls a summer when the little girl down the road befriends him. She introduces him to an unseen world, but one that courses just below our consciousness. And she saves him from a monster that he unwittingly carries back into our realms with him. At the end of his reminisce, he meets up with the little girl’s grandmother and they discuss his memory, though it’s clear that he has been here more times than he can recall and will be here again.

Meredy, a Librarything pal, who is obviously more well-read than I, suggested that the book is not as original as Gaiman has been credited for; that Gaiman hangs his stories Jungian or Joseph Campbell archetypes like paper gowns on a paper doll.” That’s a level deeper than I could plumb with my limited knowledge of Jung. Nonetheless, I found Gaiman’s story provocative, prodding me to cogitate on the narrator’s search for identity in his childhood. That the narrator literally carries a dark, malevolent force back to our world buried within his body, prompts questions about the darkness within us all that we have to sort through as we mature.

Easily the best parts of the story were the ones focusing on the narrator as an older man at sea in his mundane middle-aged life, wondering what he’s lost from his childhood and only able to remember it in the presence of magic. There was an element to it that reminded me of Roland, from Stephen King’s Dark Tower, who re-lives his quest endlessly, trying to change the outcome and succeeding only in small ways with each iteration.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was, indeed, a good introduction to Gaiman’s style, and it is tasty. I’ll be back for more – perhaps American Gods is next.

Bottom Line: What was lost with our childhood innocence, and what can be regained.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #11 The Last Interview and Other Conversations Philip K. Dick ed. by David Streitfeld

My Review on the book's home page:

Or “What a long strange trip” as an alternate title. PKD fans should flock to this little gem, as it’s a chance to hear him in his own paranoid musings. There is little doubt after finishing this collection of interviews from over thirty years that PKD was among the most unique and brilliant writers ever minted. And strangest, too.

Was he paranoid – truly paranoid? Or was he putting on for those who sought to get inside his brain? Maybe a little of both. But the result is a trip in reading this book that Hunter S. Thompson would envy. At one point, he declares himself to be both John the Baptist and Elijah – that the spirits of both these men inhabited his body so that he could announce the appearance of the true messiah, Maitreya. At another moment, he’s declaring that he tore his own skin with an aluminum can at the death of Anwar Sadat and that he was simultaneously enamored of Khadafi, the man likely responsible for Sadat’s assassination. You’ll hear him describe his voluntary commitment to a drug abuse clinic and how he faked his addiction to be able to stay there and recuperate from what was likely a break-down.

Along the way, you get behind the scenes for many of his great books and stories, see how he crafted them and what inspired them – even that he used I, Ching to plot some of them. It’s wildly fascinating and disturbing, in equal parts. There will be moments that he outthinks you along with the person who is interviewing him, only for you to wonder if he is completely mad.

Ultimately, if you read this book, you’ll be compelled to immediately read everything he ever wrote – and that’s a perfect result. Like so many others we’ve lost recently, he is one you’ll wish was still tripping for us, in the literary sense.

Bottom Line: What a long strange trip it was – and I wish it was still going. A must read for any PKD fans, or any fans of classic Sci-Fi.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

>24 blackdogbooks: Re: Gaiman and 'originality': That's sort of His Thing - he's incredibly well-versed in mythologies of all varieties and he takes those stories and weaves them into his own and re-tells them. He's a master at it, and he understands the point of myth, which is a vehicle for so many things. It why, in fact, that I love his stuff so much - anyone who revers and uses mythology in a proper manner that much is a-okay in my book.

Book #12 Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

My Review on the book's home page:

“Mountain now loosens rivulets of tears.
Washed stones, forgotten clearing.”
--Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

When my father was a boy, he learned that he’d been adopted by the man whom he’d thought was his father. Digging through a dusty trunk in his attic, he found legal documents that gave him the name he wore and the father he knew, but also uncovering an origin that had been hidden from him.

His mother was, by all accounts, a volatile woman – her siblings called her “the hornet” because her sting was quick and painful. She was a hard woman, and reticent to either acknowledge or divulge anything about his biological father. Over the years, he eventually learned from other relatives that she met Mr. Black – it was his name, but also a metaphor for much more – in a late 1920’s dance hall. He left her pregnant, taking whatever money he could get his hands hand on when he went.

Late in his life, after his mother died, my dad started quizzing other relatives for information about Mr. Black, and learned that he had a half-brother and half-sister. He reached out to them, curious about the man who would have been his father. Curious, too, about his other, unlived life, the one that you imagine still plays out, with another you – who isn’t really you, but a slightly better you, in a slightly better corner of the universe – with another family, another father who didn’t abandon you. It’s universal, sons and daughters searching for the person their parents used to be, if only a little more charged in those who’ve been disconnected from their bloodline.

Dad was a junior high school English teacher. He often brought a copy of the books he was teaching his students – Romeo and Juliet or Shane. Before teaching, he had served in reconstruction Japan after the bombs were dropped. What little he ever said about his war service, he always brightened up when he spoke about Japan and the Japanese people. So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that he brought home a copy of Farewell to Manzanar when he introduced it to his class. Of course, I ignored it, like the other books Dad brought home, exiting the room quickly when he tried to talk to me about why it was important to him.

Wandering through a bookstore in California, I happened on a bright orange and yellow-covered book, calling out to me from the shelves. When I pulled it down, my breath caught as I read the title – Farewell to Manzanar. I brought it home and shelved it with the other non-fiction titles in my library, but it pulled at me when I walked by, urging me to reconnect with my father.

Compact and paperback, it was a perfect choice for a recent business trip. In the pressurized air, as I began to read it, I heard my father in Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s story, saw his own longing and search for a father he didn’t know.

Farewell to Manzanar is generally categorized as a story about the internment of Japanese American’s following the attack on Pearl Harbor – a cautionary tale about how fear can overcome basic honor and respect. But it’s so much more, if you listen.

Jeanne Wakatsuki was interned with her family at Manzanar, in a desert valley between two mountain ranges in eastern California. She was seven years old and she spent the next four years of her life in the camp. But her father was taken first to Fort Lincoln, falsely accused of aiding Japanese submarines off the California coast while fishing. When he joined his family at Manzanar, he was broken, changed. He arrived with a limp and a habit for the bottle. Wakatsuki longed to discover what had happened to her father, but it wasn’t until she begin writing Farewell to Manzanar that she started to understand that her father’s life ended at Manzanar, where her life began. She may have embarked on writing this book to tell her family’s story, and the country’s, but what she was really doing was giving voice to the search for her father, a man she didn’t know.

It’s no wonder that my own father found himself in the pages of Wakatsuki’s book, saw her search as his own. And reading Farewell to Manzanar helped me to understand him

Bottom Line: Life in a Japanese internment camp – but also a search for a father.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year!!!!!

Book #13 Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

My Review on the book's home page:

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.”
--Ray Bradbury

That quote from the preface of Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing would suit for a review for the entire work. Few books on writing and the writing life communicate the sheer joy, the wonder and elation, that writing provides, if given reign. But Bradbury was on to it all early in life. Only the rare writers, like Jack London or Stephen King, are hear the call in their formative years. The result, for them and Bradbury, is that they manage to retain the youthful magic we all lose in maturity and translate it for us so that we can touch it again, even if for a brief moment.

In the opening essay, Run Fast, Stand Still, Bradbury lets us in on one of his secrets – his noun or title lists. Early in life, he began making long lists of simple nouns, not knowing what they would become, or even what they might mean, as he wrote them. But when he needed inspiration, he ran to these lists, and from single words, great monsters and wonders grew. The lesson is to always be open to what life offers, even if it is communicating opaquely at first. Among the nouns in those lists, “The Carnival. The Carousel. The Night Train.” They don’t mean much on their own, but he would select one and just begin writing, vomiting words onto a page in a “long prose-poem-essay.” Somewhere along the middle of the first or second page, he’d come across an idea he liked – a character or a story.

Such a list isn’t much help without an open mind, and a willingness to follow where the mind, subconscious or other, leads. And that’s a tenet that Bradbury constantly repeats:

“What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.”

Natalie Goldberg, in her Writing Down the Bones – another Zen treatise on writing – echoes Bradbury’s direction. Just put the words down and let the mind work without that directed thinking. The truth will emerge on its own – the one true thing that Hemingway sought in every sentence. In the essay The Secret Mind, Bradbury comes back to this regimen, that “(t)oday’s ideas are blueprinted, mocked-up, engineered, electrified, wound-tight and set loose to rev men up or run men down.” For him, the ideas had to entertain, provoke, and terrify, and they had to flow from the truth that exists underneath. That truth, the one that is truer than real life, is what writers seek, what they rely on to communicate reality so that it’s more real than the everyday.

Another facet of the writing life on which Bradbury and Goldberg agree is on work. There is no failure in writing, only writing. If the work is good, you learn – if it’s bad, you learn more. But the journey is more important than the success; it uncovers more of yourself and the world around you. He says, “the writer who wants to tap into the larger truth in himself must reject the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews. He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation. He must ask himself, ‘What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?’ and begin to pour this on the paper.”

More than any other book I’ve read on writing, save maybe Joy Writing by Kenn Amdahl, Bradbury communicates the marvel in the work, the kid-like joy in telling stories for the only good reason people tell stories – to observe and understand the world. It’s unfortunate that more writing programs and literary publications suck that dry from writing. They could learn a thing or two from Zen and the Art of Writing.

Bottom Line: Ecstasy in the writing life.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year.

Book #14 Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

My Review on the book's home page:

“And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high, it was like another city – a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.”

Denis Johnson’s stories in Jesus’ Son are like the desert wind. In one minute they are whip around you and scour the earth. In the next, they are a gentle, welcoming breeze on your face. They touch down in whims, unheralded and capricious. They wreak havoc in one place while leaving the sand untouched just a few feet away. In their wake, you feel changed. Not exactly refreshed so much as different, altered.

That Johnson first came to attention as a poet is evident in the elegant language on display throughout:

“Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex>”

“We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening our tongues.”

“For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.”

But beyond the language, Johnson’s keen eye for humanity is also at work. His stories are an exhibition of the fringe, the life that exists in the periphery. In these stories about the lost, he captures us all – the longing for something more in the same mind that works against us in the scrabble. If you can’t see yourself in the unnamed narrator, you’re deluded beyond any chemical alteration. But seeing yourself there will be painful.

Bottom Line: Spare, surreal, and provocative – beautiful language describing us all, even if we don’t want to see it.

5 bones!!!!!

A favorite for the year.

Great reviews! I sympathize with your father's quest. I don't know who my biological father is and have been hesitant to probe since my mom just shuts down when stressed, and I imagine her pregnancy with me at 19 is deeply tied into the childhood abuse she experienced. I didn't stumble over documents revealing an unknown truth, more like the conviction grew upon me adding up obvious differences between me and my dad's family and snippets of information gathered over the decades.

You are reading multiple books by authors on the process of writing. Does this mean that you too are a writer? I would like to be, but I am not actually doing the writing part. Mostly reading and thinking. Held back by fear and procrastination no doubt.

Thanks, justchris.

Yes, I am also a writer, though unpublished as yet. I have been submitting some stories to several literary publications but haven't had one accepted yet. Don't wait. If there's anything consistent I've heard or read from writers is to just start writing and do it regularly.

Yep. I know the importance of regular habits and have read it over and over again from writers. And yet somehow I just don't make it happen. Same with tai chi. Love it. Very important to me. Don't practice much at home. Sigh. Most of my writing is long-form book reviews, and I haven't done much of that in the last couple of years either. But hey, I got a new camera and am starting to dabble in that, so maybe this will be the year of all-round new creative beginnings.

I am impressed that you have started the submission process! I hope you will share the positive news someday when an acceptance letter comes to you. First of many, I hope.

Thanks - lots of rejections, though I've started seeing some encouraging responses, asking for more submissions.

Good luck with all your creative beginnings. On the writing, I also found that it helped to have a goal in mind - finish a story by a time or finish a novel by a time. And to have some writing friends who kept me honest, who expected to see something in way of production. Right now, in addition to my other projects, I'm writing a novel length project with a partner, and I'm serving that purpose for him, to get him more accustomed to carving out time in the busy week for the creative mind.

>33 blackdogbooks: Glad to hear that the tide is starting to turn in terms of responses to your submissions.

Ages ago, I set up a writing group with friends, and we were all willing to work on a joint writing exercise together, but no one was willing to share personal writing with the group. In my case, because I didn't really have something to share. I was hoping the group would provide the structure to move me along. With the lack of actual writing to share among ourselves, the group fell apart relatively quickly. Sigh.

I have thought about plunking down serious money for one of those write a novel in a year workshops as a way to really commit myself. There's one offered locally. But it will have to wait until my personal situation is stabilized. Plus, I do actually need to read up on the science and social science research related to my science fiction idea. Been collecting materials...

Glad you have someone to connect with who helps with the structure and accountability. I might get there yet, but not this year. Thanks very much for the encouragement and suggestion.

>34 blackdogbooks: ??

Hi Mac, as usual, quite a few interesting books for me to pick from on your thread.

Glad you're still around, pal. You'll have to let me know what you end up reading from the thread.

Thanks Mac, I signed up for this year just last week. I surely will!

Book #15 The Courage of a Samurai by Lori Tsugawa Whaley

My Review on the book's home page:

For a veteran, the idea of living by a code is second nature. But, in today’s world, that idea –living by a unifying set of principles – is a bygone of eras past. Especially in the high-tech, Huxleyian world where everyone is entitled to fame and attention by virtue of their ability to exhibit what they eat or what they look like or what they’re doing at literally every second of the day.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned. If I am, I’ll live proudly with it.

It’s that old-fashioned sense that drew me to The Courage of a Samurai by Lori Tsugawa Whaley. She’s a local author up in the Seattle area, and I happened on her book in an independent bookstore and market – Kinokuniya. The sheer size and bustling environs of the store had my book-buying pulse pounding anyway. But I wanted something to remember the store by, as well as feed my bibliophilia. The beautiful cover and the fact that Whaley had been hosted for a signing event, and signed this copy, helped push me over the edge. But it was the book’s message that really appealed to me – living by a code.

The Bushido Code for a Samurai includes the following principles: Courage, Integrity, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty. Whaley examines each principle in detail, starting with a description of the Japanese kanji for the principle. These sections, where she crosses into linguistic frontiers to explain how the different characters and their meanings combine, were easily the highlight of the book. She moves on to discuss the principle and then offer examples from life where those principles were followed by some person in Japanese history. Her descriptions of Senator Daniel Kim Innouye’s service and World War II’s Purple Heart Unit – the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team – were provocative and enlightening.

Whaley’s downfall is the all-too-often struck, repetitive self-help tone. The book is well researched and well thought out, but she seemed to lose her way when she reverted to life-coaching. She would have done well to make her points more subtly, letting the stories and her description of the kanji’s make her points.

Bottom Line: A great historical vignette, and a cool peek into Japanese culture, if you can forgive the ham-handed recitations.

3 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #16 The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh

My Review on the book's home page:

An author friend of mine who knows what I’ve been working on suggested that I should read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field. He said that few writers these days are focusing on the real lives of policemen, detectives. Sure, procedurals and thrillers strain the shelves at your local bookstores, but few, if any, give you a look at a cop as he truly is – his life beyond the work, the problems and joys of real life. Most crime books focus on how the work invades and crowds life, until there really isn’t any life at all, and what existed before the work is tossed a quick nostalgic line or two. But Wambaugh, he said, went deeply into the psyche of the two policemen at The Onion Field’s center, letting them exhibit their full personalities and struggles so that the consequences of what happened to them is that much more troubling.

Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, former Marines, made a car stop in an unmarked squad car while on patrol in Los Angeles in 1963. During the stop, the two crooks disarmed them and kidnapped them, taking them to a remote agricultural area near Bakersfield. There, Campbell was shot and killed. Hettinger escaped serious physical injury, but was never the same. Their actions that night, especially Hettinger’s as the survivor, were heavily scrutinized. A policy was enacted by the Los Angeles Police Department stating that officers were never to surrender their firearms, under any circumstances; that if they were confronted with such a situation, they were to fight at all costs. The killers were convicted after several trials that took up many years, but at a mammoth cost in resources and personal sacrifice.

One terribly interesting section features a “young red-faced vice officer at Wilshire station {who} had been a policeman less than three years.” Through his eyes, we see the debate about whether Hettinger sealed his partner’s fate or did the best thing by surrendering his firearm. The young officer lays out several other instances where cops were disarmed and kidnapped but survived. He chastises the departmental policy enacted after Campbell’s murder, laying it at the feet of administrators who don’t understand the street and the street cop’s mentality. He speaks up at roll-call in defense of Hettinger, criticizing the policy. I don’t know for certain, but I think this young cop is Wambaugh in anonymity, sending the message he wants the book to carry. Indeed, I’m told that this book helped to end Wambaugh’s law enforcement career with LAPD.

The thread running through the entire book is the fallout in Hettinger’s life over the event. At a time before post-traumatic stress was recognized, and in a field where any weakness signals the sharks, Hettinger is a sad case. He devolves into alcoholism and shoplifting, eschewing anyone who would try to talk to him about what he felt, what he was experiencing. If you didn’t have Wambaugh’s name on the front cover, you might be drawn to a conclusion that Hettinger himself wrote the book, given how deeply Hettinger’s inner life is on display. It’s the reason this book is so provocative. To be able to see a cop as something less than a superhero, something more than a broken-down bulldog, is a revelation.

Bottom Line: Brilliant, insightful glimpse into the mind of policemen – policemen as real people, with real lives, as we rarely think of them.

4 ½ bones!!!!!

Book #17 On Writing by Stephen King

My Review on the book's home page:

In 2009, I read this book and reviewed it here for my Libraything library. What I said then was adequate, but after several years writing on my own stories now, I wanted to come back to it. There was a lot that caught my attention that didn’t last time. So, I’ll give you some highlights:
(20) In his youth, King was trained to withstand any critic by Beulah the baby-sitter, who would sit on his face and fart on him. “After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell, “Pow”, The Village Voice holds few terrors. I suspect this is good advice, equating what a critic of any kind has to say with a smelly emanation with little substance.

(37) The real work in generating stories is to recognize an idea when it shows up, in whatever form or dressing it presents. King is oft heard saying that there is no secret place from which stories emanate, but he spends the better half of the book describing his life. If you listen closely, he’s really telling you that books like Carrie and The Stand and The Gunslinger are about his own life – however fantastical and horrific they are, they are him, and he just had the good sense to recognize the opportunities when they arrived.

(50) After committing a youthful crime by novelizing The Pit and the Pendulum film, and selling it at school, a teacher shames him for “wasting his abilities.” He says, “I have spent a good many years – too many, I think – being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forth before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.” That really hit home for me – not because anyone has ever been that mean-spirited with me, but because my own internal beast is constantly at work shaming me. If you can get past the externals, can you give yourself permission to be a writer?

(57) An early newspaper editor told King, “When you write, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Good advice that, and simple. Workshops and MFA programs abound, spending semesters and years on crafting a story – but that simple piece of advice changes the game. It’s what King describes as writing with the door closed and rewriting with the door open. Behind closed doors, everything goes in. But when you begin to edit, keep the door open so that the world can look over your shoulder and keep you honest, dedicated to the truth of the story.

(77) Everyone knows the story that King wadded up three pages of notes that would later become Carrie and tossed them in the trash can. They were saved by his wife, who told him that she wanted to know the rest of the story. But On Writing tells you why he gave up on Carrie White – he didn’t like her and he thought the story would be too hard to write. He says about what he learned from Carrie, “The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all your managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

(101) When King had garnered some success he got an ornate desk and put it in the middle of a well-appointed study. But it never felt right to him. So, he moved it to the corner of the room, under a cramped eave. “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” David Morrell, in his book on writing Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft, says something similar – that writing illuminates your life, helps you figure out who you are and what your fears are, to work through them, describe and decipher them.

(134) A new concept – that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing – “the place where coherence and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words. If the moment of quickening is to come, it comes at the level of the paragraph.” This concept makes sense for a writer like King for whom pace and tone are everything. His work makes so much more sense, from a rhythm standpoint, if you understand that he’s writing with the paragraph as the basic unit. It’s something that Constant Readers understand instinctively, and are drawn toward. But it’s a revelation to see him working through it from a writer’s craft standpoint.

(146) King’s two Golden Rules for a writer are: Read a lot. Write a lot. On reading, he even provides a three-page suggested reading list at the back of the book. But his command to read includes reading everything, even the bad stuff. “So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles.” I still remember the book I was reading when I finally said to myself, “I can do better than this. If she can get published, so can I.” It was The Water Witch – please, don’t try to find that book. I think I still have my review up here on Librarything – it essentially reads, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” It was a book I read to review for a blogger for whom I reviewed. It was a revelation, and a goad. I’ve been writing ever since.

(249) I’ll leave you with the closing words to one section of the book, where King describes what writing has meant to him. “There have been times when for me the act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. The second half of this book was written in that spirit. I gutted it out, as we used to say when we were kids. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. That was something I found out in the summer of 1999, when a man driving a blue van almost killed me.”

That’s the kind of inspiration that sustains me. Thanks, Uncle Stevie.

Bottom Line: The value of this book grows with time and re-reading.

5 bones!!!!!


All Time Favorite!!!!!

Book #18 The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

My Review on the book's home page:

“But the sparrow still falls.”

The passage in Matthew’s gospel that describes God’s attention to even the one sparrow that falls never had so much meaning. Most quote Jesus’ words as a comfort, but the necessary revelation that God won’t reach down to stop the sparrow’s fall is usually lost in the safe glow. Mary Dora Russull, in her debut novel The Sparrow, takes a close look at whether humans can recognize God, and in the recognition identify that he is more than preternaturally good or bad, that He is as complex as His creation.

There’s a lot more to The Sparrow than just the theological philosophy, which speaks to why it’s been such a popular book in literary circles. First contact with an alien race is made through the capture of a radio signal that is translated into music. Among the crew who deciphers the signal and then travels to find its origin is Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest. Ultimately, he is the only survivor from the tragic mission. The book shifts between the mission and Sandoz’ recuperation as he tells the Society’s leader what he and his team suffered on the the newly discovered planet Rakhat. So, the book is firmly set in the speculative fiction world – it won Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.

Laid over the story is Sandoz’ crisis of faith, a cycle that has replayed itself several times throughout his life, with ever increasing depth and consequences. Reaching Rakhat and making contact with an agrarian people there, Sandoz reaches his faith’s highest pinnacle, finally making up his mind that God has led him throughout his whole life to this discovery, that God has finally filled his heart completely. Not everyone on the mission feels the same way – Anne Edwards, a doctor, posits a different effect at God’s introduction:

“Once, long ago, she’d allowed herself to think seriously about what human beings would do, confronted directly with a sign of God’s presence in their lives. The Bible, that repository of Western wisdom, was instructive either as myth or as history, she’d decided. God was at Sinai and within weeks, people were dancing in front of a golden calf. God walked in Jerusalem and days later, folks nailed Him up and then went back to work. Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.”

Russell’s book owes something to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and the Morlocks and Eloi. It turns out that there are two different humanoid species that inhabit Rakhat, and how they’ve evolved through time leads to the Jesuit mission’s failure. Russell, with several anthropology degrees, uses the simplest of things to bring down the mission – a planted garden. In her brilliant hands, she brings about the near destruction of an entire species because the earth people plant seeds. Another concept Russell develops that owes to her education is the purchase and use of children as investable commodities. The abandoned or orphaned are snapped up by wealthy men who then develop the children, requiring them to sign a contract to repay the debt from their training with a lifetime’s earnings. The idea is an outgrowth of the consumer economy that we are living in today, but Russell follows the thread to the end. That such ideas populate this book is a testament to her intelligence, and to a non-literary background.

When the mission fails, Sandoz is imprisoned. But he’s also finally offered the opportunity to meet the being that created the music that was captured on earth in the radio signal – the signal that convinced him that God was moving him toward a purpose. In his chains, Sandoz thinks about what he will say:

“There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life – moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness – times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth. He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you.”

From the first pages of the book, though, it is clear that the mission failed. The question of how the mission failed takes up some space, but it is Sandoz’ broken soul that inhabits every line. As we learn more about Sandoz’s youth and early years, knowing that this Jesuit finally stretched his faith to the breaking point on Rakhat whips the tension up to hurricane levels. With the tension buffeting everything, and Sandoz about to meet the being that he thinks God spoke through to bring him here, Russell reveals the measure that would break him. Even in the moments just before the meeting, quoted above, Sandoz is at faith’s precipice, determined to share God. But then, he says of the meeting, “He had also discovered the outermost limit of faith and, in doing so, had located the exact boundary of despair. It was at that moment that he learned, truly, to fear God.”

Russell wraps up Sandoz’ cycle of faith and despair with the Society’s Father General trying to digest what the man’s been through:

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, creation exists. … He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it be caring passionately about us, and remembering. …But the sparrow still falls.”

There’s hope and despair and abandon in that exegesis of the sparrow passage, the same mixture that threads throughout The Sparrow.

Bottom Line: Finding God might be a deeper and more complex proposition than we are willing to live with.

5 bones!!!!!

All-time favorite

>42 blackdogbooks: Great review.

Thanks.

>42 blackdogbooks: Oh, I LOVE that one so much. I'm glad you do, too.

>42 blackdogbooks: Excellent review of The Sparrow! I have only heard good to great things about it. Definitely will add it to my reading list.

Have you read A Case of Conscience by James Blish? It too involves a Jesuit's first contact with alien intelligence on a distant planet and a crisis of faith. I found it very interesting but didn't quite get it. Maybe my lack of religious background is why I had such a hard time understanding the religious themes and story resolution.

Thanks, justchris! Glad there's still some who check in here, given I'm not as active as before in the group.

Russell has commented on Blish's book when people said that she used it as a springboard. She says she didn't read the book or, if she did, doesn't remember reading it before starting her own. But I haven't read it. I don't think a lack of religious background would be an obstacle for reading The Sparrow. Though it would enhance the experience, it wouldn't detract.

Blish is a an old hand at sci-fi. I have a couple Star Trek books in paper that he penned when the show developed a cult following.

Don't worry - there's plenty of us checking in...

Always count on you lurking, Doc

I know you don't have the time to just hang out here, Mac, but I want to thank you most sincerely for taking the time to write and post these wonderfully well-crafted reviews and letting us read them. It is truly a pleasure.

That's very nice, do I. Thanks. Am I remembering right that you're one of the people who talked about The Sparrow? Several folks got me interested and I thought maybe you were one.

>47 blackdogbooks: Makes sense that lots of people would draw the comparison between the 2 books. I tended to assume that my lack of familiarity with the religious themes was a large reason why I really couldn't grok A Case of Conscience or the protagonist's struggle. The Sparrow has sounded much more approachable from everything I've heard. I appreciate the confirmation.

Actually, it's far more easy for me to stay caught up on your thread exactly because the activity is limited. I've already given up on staying abreast of Roni and Paul's threads among several others that are just too active for me and my slow ways. I did keep up with them longer this year, though. All the way through March! Ha!

I hope this doesn't violate some LT policy, but I wanted to share some good news with you who have followed my reading.

I received word that one of my stories is going to be published in a literary journal in August.

If anyone is interested, PM me and I'll provide more details. But I don't want to run afoul of the LT police.

Awesome! I'll PM you.

Oh, that's wonderful!! Congrats!

Congratulations!

Congratulations! And I do not think there is any policy prohibiting you from providing the information on your own thread. It's all those pushy people who announce it wholesale on everybody else's threads that are the problem.

Thanks all. I'm still leery, roni - I've heard horror stories.

DMed you. And I agree with Roni, I don't think you run afoul of any policy posting something on your own thread.

Thanks again, Piyush. All this is so new to me and I just don't want to run afoul of the LT policies. So, I've been PMing anyone who wants the information on when and where to pick it up. Thanks very much for all the encouragement.

>53 blackdogbooks: Congratulations! That's a big deal!
Please do PM me too with the info.

Well, a message from my classic pal, Piyush, made me realize that this thread is languishing over here.

More good news - I've had another story accepted for publication. This time it's a more regional (American Southwest) journal published in my home city. It's called bosque, and the issue with my story will be out on December 1. I'm not sure this one will be as easy to purchase, as I don't know if it's sold on Amazon, or through the journal's website. But based on the comments I've gotten here, I may post a link to the journal's website here on my own thread and test the LT god's, once the issue is published.

For those of you interested, this second story is linked to the other that was published in September - based on the same basic event, a boy's death in a hit-and-run on a road near an Indian Pueblo in NM. I've actually written a total of five stories about the event, each focusing on a different person and perspective in the story. I am diligently working on trying to get the others, and a separate stand alone story accepted for publication.

I've had less time for reading and reviewing this year, as I had a summer away from home for a work thing, and I've been trying to read through and edit the first draft of a novel I finished up at the end of 2015. I have a couple of reviews I need to get through but just can't set aside the time.

I owe reviews or soon will on My Reading Life by Pat Conroy and Jonis Agee's new novel The Bones of Paradise - both which I highly recommend.

Very late congratulations, but heartfelt all the same!

Ditto, Mac!

Thanks, luxx and roni.

I went this whole year not being a member of the group here - not on purpose, but mistakenly. I started a thread but didn't join the group. Remedied that yesterday afternoon.

I'm way behind on reviews -

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy
The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee
End of Watch by Stephen King
Ripper by Isabel Allende
Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison
Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Every time I sit down to write, I write the stuff other than reviews. I've entered a couple of flash fiction contests - no wins. And I've been trying to get the book marked up and a second draft written. I'd hoped to have a second and more final draft ready to enter into a contest at the first of next year, but that looks like a pipe dream at this point.

I'll have a third publication coming out, sort of. The story that was published in Sixfold this summer - Sign - was turned down by Carve Magazine. Carve is a magazine named for Raymond Carver to honor his work, and partly to honor his style and voice. Carver is a favorite writer for me, so submitting there was a no-brainer. They also provide feedback and notes when they turn a story down, which is rare, and very valuable. Anyway, they have a feature called "Decline/Accept" where they showcase stories they declined but were later accepted in other publications. They are going to feature Sign in their Winter 2017 Premium Edition. The section will have excerpts of the story as it was submitted to Carve and excerpts from the re-written story as it was published, along with an essay I wrote about the process of revision. I believe it will be one of their print editions, though I'm not sure. I'll be sure to put something up here.

I hope everyone has a peaceful Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for all the support I've gotten over the years for my writing, reviews and other, here on LT. You guys are a supportive bunch.

>66 blackdogbooks: "Decline/Acept" - what a fascinating and fantastic column idea! Very cool.

It sounds like your writing is doing very well, as even a rejection turns into an acceptance. Hooray!

Thanks, luxx and Roni - glad to hear from you guys. Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

Thanks, mstrust - you know from personal experience the grind of submitting and rejections. I've gotten an awful lot of the rejections from editors lately that say how much they like the story or the writing but just couldn't use the story, and to please send more. I'm hoping one of the other stories gets an acceptance soon.

Hopefully, this won't generate any trouble -

The most recent publication I have, for my story "Ain't No Grave" is in bosque, the magazine. The only place to get a copy looks like the journal's website here:

http://www.bosquepress.com/purchase.html
The most recent issue, #6.

>71 blackdogbooks: Thanks for sharing. Goes away to find a copy...

That's great, thanks justchris.

Wouldn't it be nice if 2017 was a year of peace and goodwill.
A year where people set aside their religious and racial differences.
A year where intolerance is given short shrift.
A year where hatred is replaced by, at the very least, respect.
A year where those in need are not looked upon as a burden but as a blessing.
A year where the commonality of man and woman rises up against those who would seek to subvert and divide.
A year without bombs, or shootings, or beheadings, or rape, or abuse, or spite.

2017.

Festive Greetings and a few wishes from Malaysia!

This is the Christmas tree at the end of the Pacific Beach Pier here in San Diego, a Christmas tradition.

To all my friends here at Library Thing, I want you to know how much I value you and how much I wish you a very happy holiday, whatever one you celebrate, and the very best of New Years!

Looking forward to your continued company in 2017.
Happy New Year!