serna Book Blog

From Russia With Love

2012-01-23T21:35:00.000-05:00

Subject: spy novel
Author: Ian Fleming

I normally try to put a cover photo with each post but in this case the cover was simply a naked girl artfully covering her breasts so I decided it would be a better idea to leave it off.

Mom was cleaning out a bunch of old books and told me to take whatever I wanted before they got thrown away. I don’t know if this belonged to my dad or to my grandfather—it surely wasn’t Mom’s—but in any event I grabbed it. I’m sure I read it before, probably when I was much younger, but I don’t remember doing so.

For some reason I have a memory of the Ian Fleming novels being very different from the 007 movies, but as I read this one the plot followed the plot of the movie very closely. (Well... obviously it’s the other way around and the movie followed the book’s plot.) To my surprise, though, it turns out that Fleming is actually a good writer when it comes to spy novels. A bit off when it comes to writing women^*, but aside from that glaring point he’s a good writer. I might take the opportunity to read his other books. Except... I don’t know if it’ll be worth the money. (Aren’t e-books supposed to be available by now, at a cheap price, so that one can buy books one is only half sure about without paying an arm and a leg?)

^* When I say that he’s “a bit off” when he writes women, I mean that he seems to feel that rough sex is the only good sex and all women want to be owned and mastered by a brute. I’m just glad there were no graphic sex scenes. Psychology is also a problem; for example, there's a scene in which Bond and Tatiana are walking together and all of the women are looking at them and wondering how good Bond is in bed. Now... I’m no expert in women, but does that sound realistic? Fleming’s critics cited this as part of the problem with his writing, although they also criticized him as a writer altogether and I don’t go that far. If it wasn’t for the caveman stuff the book would have been very good.

The Secret History of MI6

2012-01-17T10:48:00.002-05:00

Subject: History, espionage
Author: Keith Jeffery

This book was on my to-do list for a long time but the hardcover was expensive so I figured I’d wait and see if it would come out in softcover. (I wasn’t sure if it was the type of book that would come out in softcover, but luckily for me it did.)

It’s the back story of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence organization. Well... one of them. This it the one that James Bond works for; MI5 is the organization featured in Spooks. Or, if we have to live in the real world:

MI6 is Britain’s intelligence gathering organization, and operates almost completely outside of Britain
MI5 is Britain’s counterintelligence organization, operating almost completely inside Britain trying to root out foreign spies (and terrorists)

Anyway, this book covers MI6’s first forty years, 1909–1949, which takes us through the two World Wars and brings us into the beginning of the Cold War. In order to allow him to write an authoritative history MI6 allowed Jeffery into their archives and, so he claims, gave him free reign to write whatever he wished. There are instances where he had to change or redact individuals’ names, but other than that he wasn’t censored. If this is true it explains why he had to stop at 1949, since anything more recent might have been under closer scrutiny.

It should be noted that MI6—where the “MI” stands for “Military Intelligence”—didn’t always go under that name. In its earlier days it was called the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, and for some reason this is the name Jeffery prefers to use throughout the book. Aside from a brief mention that the agency came to be called MI6 near the beginning of World War II, and that from that point on everyone started calling it that, and despite the fact that he used the name MI6 in the title of the book, he continues to call the agency SIS throughout the book. (I suppose if he’d called the book The Secret History of SIS nobody would have known to what he was referring, and therefore nobody would have bought it.) He does consistently refer to MI5 as MI5, however.

It took me months to get through this book’s 752 pages. Not so much because of its length—I’ve got other books on this blog that are as long and which didn’t take as long to read—but because it was so dry. The book is a history written from a historian’s point of view, and it reads as such. For anyone who has grown up on James Bond and Robert Ludlum and John le Carré there is a certain mystique about espionage which isn’t done justice in this book. To be clear, I’m not saying I’m disappointed because the book isn’t action-packed and full of sex; le Carré’s books often deal with the same kind of plodding and dry behind the scenes politics that this book does, but le Carré’s novels are still interesting. This book is just... dry. (Again, not that I’m trying to compare novels and history, but... well, keep reading. You’ll see.)

Let’s look at a representative quote, to give you an idea. There is yet another period in which people are considering amalgamation of MI6 and MI5—something which came up quite frequently during MI6’s first forty years, so it gets covered in this book with regularity—and some reports have been written on the topic:

Although Cavendish-Bentick was associated with both the Bland Report and the JIC study, the two papers broadly embodied different conceptions of how SIS, in both organisation and function, might fit into the wider government framework. The JIC paper reflected the operational, technical and scientific priorities of the armed services, which, moreover, dominated intelligence requirements in wartime. By contrast, the Bland conclusions embodied the longer-term, more political needs of the Foreign Office, which tended to be more apparent in peacetime. At the command level throughout the war (as had been the case in 1914–18), SIS was under continual pressure to integrate its organisation and activities into the military machine. For the most part, arguing both security considerations and a sustained obligation to gather political as well as military intelligence, the Service resisted these attempts to erode its autonomy, although in some places (notably South-East Asia Command) it was unable fully so to do. What the Cavendish-Bentick and Capel-Dunn paper represented was an attempt at the highest level, once victory [of World War II] was in sight, to ensure that the peacetime organisation of ‘the intelligence machine’ largely matched the wartime needs of the service departments and their particular perceptions of what intelligence was about. Why this attempt failed was in part down to superior Whitehall footwork by the Foreign Office as opposed to the service ministries; but it also reflected the anticipated peacetime intelligence requirements. It may also indicate a more profound British uneasiness with military and potentially militarised organisations which the Bland committee hinted at in the concern that their report expressed about public suspicions that ‘something like a Gestapo’ might have been operating in Britain. For British decision makers, and perhaps also for the British people, part of the price of winning the war was the ostentatious rejection of those very military values and strengths which had made victory possible. In institutional terms, SIS, even though it embodied many military qualities and to a very great extent served the needs of the armed forces, was much more likely to survive and flourish in the postwar world as an explicitly civilian organisation under the accommodating supervision of the Foreign Office.

What we have in this quote is some interesting history of MI6 transitioning from wartime to peacetime, some insight into the British character and public opinion of MI6’s role, and a lot of unnecessary detail about the reports that were written. What I’ve spared you from in choosing this quote is page after page of detail about funding. Oh my goodness was there ever a lot of material in this book about funding! I’d estimate at least 10% of the content is devoted to the topic. I’m sure that’s of interest to people, and frankly I’m not even against it being in the book, but not to such an excruciating level of detail.

Which, I think, is the main problem I had with the book. While I found it informative, a lot of it wasn’t actually necessary. Jeffery could have cut the book to almost half its length without eliminating any of the actual history, just by eliminating some of the irrelevant detail. Perhaps to a historian nothing is irrelevant, but to the casual reader it’s enough to know that, for example, in 1919 SIS was partially funded by income obtained through running Britain’s foreign Passport Control office. We don’t need to know that in 1919:

there were 24 officers and 25 clerical staff working for SIS at the time, as well as 5 officers devoted specifically to Passport Control
there were 30 oversees Passport Control offices, most with 2 or 3 staff, with a total oversees staff of about 80
the total “expenditure” was £295,296 (yes, right down to the pound), which is about £9.7 million in current terms, and which was divided as:

£237,700 for secret service work
£45,500 for “PC” secret service (probably anti-Bolshevik work of some sort)
£56,690 for running Passport Control itself
the remaining £2,866 for other unspecified anti-Bolshevik work

And this is not an isolated example; there are interludes of these kinds of figures throughout the book.

So MI6—or SIS—was created to gather intelligence about enemy (and sometimes friendly) states. But anyone who’s seen a spy movie or read a spy novel or watched Get Smart knows that there’s more to spying than just gathering information; there is also sabotage of the enemy’s plans, and rooting out the spies who are spying on you. We’ve already talked about the fact that, in Britain, the gathering of information is handled by MI6 and the rooting out of enemy spies is handled by MI5; what about the sabotage bit? During World War II, Britain formed a special organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who were responsible for this. This is the group who were the first ones to start coming up with the cool gadgets that one sees in 007 movies.

However, this is not to say that things always went smoothly between the three organizations (and others); aside from the constant threats of amalgamation of MI5 and MI6, there was also the fact that special operations sometimes put intelligence gathering agents at risk, and that... well... the people running SOE were sometimes a bit different:

At the beginning of the war special operations, which comprised mostly sabotage and propaganda work, had been organised within SIS by Laurence Grand’s Section IX. But as Menzies [head of SIS at the time] observed to the Secret Service Committee in March 1941, the practice of ‘SO’ was frequently quite inimical to that of ‘SI’—intelligence. Any spectacular act of sabotage, for example, was likely to provoke an intense security response from the enemy, which in turn could jeopardise the less dramatic and more sustained activities necessary for the acquisition of secret intelligence. Within SIS, moreover, the tension between special operations and intelligence was exacerbated by the personalities involved. Grand, for all his evident imagination and enthusiasm, was markedly better at ideas than administration, and there were worries about the lavish way in which he spent money on his various schemes. While in March 1940 Hankey had given him a qualified benefit of the doubt, in SIS Claude Dansey had raised the question of whether Grand should ‘conform and co-operate’ with the rest of the Service, or simply ‘go on galloping about the world at his own gait’. Cadogan was sufficiently concerned in May–June 1940 to canvass opinions about Grand and his work. Beaumont-Nesbitt, the Director of Military Intelligence, described Grand as ‘gifted, enthusiastic and persuasive, but I do not regard him as being well balanced or reliable’, and Archie Boyle of Air Intelligence said he was ‘an expensive luxury’. Gladwyn Jebb was the most damning of all. Grand’s judgement, he wrote with evident relish, ‘is almost always wrong, his knowledge wide but alarmingly superficial, his organisation in many respects a laughing stock, and he is a consistent and fluent liar’. Jebb conceded that Grand was ‘generous and liked by his staff’, but ‘to pit such a man against the German General Staff and the German Military Intelligence Service is like arranging an attack on a Panzer Division by an actor mounted on a donkey’.

So that’s that. A couple of interesting things I learned, though, that I’ll pass on.

The head of MI6 is always referred to in James Bond movies as M, and in John le Carré novels as C (where “C” is short for Control). This is based on real practice at MI6, where the head of the organization is indeed called C—although in reality C is short for Chief. Another interesting tidbit of information was that, by tradition, C always writes in green ink (or green pencil). So if you saw the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you may not have noticed it but right at the beginning of the movie C is handed a document and signs it “C,” in green ink. A nice touch, that.

Another interesting point: in John le Carré novels MI6 is often referred to as the Circus, and although this name sounds fanciful we are told that it’s because the head office is located at Cambridge Circus. This is also based in reality, as MI6 was often called Broadway in its early days, since it was located in Broadway Buildings. (I wonder if le Carré didn’t purposely pick the name “Circus” for the more whimsical aspect of the name as well.)

Finally, for James Bond fans, there really is a Q branch. After World War II, when SOE was disbanded, what was left, including the gadget-making operations, was absorbed into MI6.

The Matlock Paper

2011-12-10T17:17:00.001-05:00

Subject: Thriller
Author: Robert Ludlum

Another Ludlum novel (I don’t know why I did two Ludlums in a row), and this one didn’t grab me as much for some reason. The characters didn’t seem three-dimensional, and though there was lots of action (like in all Ludlum books), it felt more... sporadic, interspersed with scenes of the protagonist investigating things in a fairly boring way. (I have no problem with investigation; it just wasn’t interesting this time around.)

I also felt that the relationship between James and Pat felt fairly unrealistic. (Spoiler coming:) When Pat gets captured and assaulted it feels more realistic than most instances in books where women get captured, and the author tries to give the sense of danger that she’ll get raped but doesn’t actually have it happen. That never feels realistic to me; if she’s captured, and the men who’ve captured her are the sorts of barbarians that would do it, then they’d do it. Instead, it’s usually, “We have your woman, and we’re going to do terrible things to her! Er... later. You’ll probably have a chance to save her first.” Authors usually try to have it both ways, by introducing the danger but then keeping it from actually happening. In this case, it was more realistic that it would actually happen, terrible as it may be. But then it seems to have very little effect on Pat and James, which is completely unrealistic. There’s maybe a hint of “let’s get the bastards that did this,” but not even much of that. It happens, it’s terrible for a few pages of anguished grief and pain, and then it’s forgotten. So I feel Ludlum went only halfway with the realism, when it comes to this circumstance, but then he held back from the consequences of that realism.

And let’s be honest, this happens all the time in literature. There’s a constant threat of women getting raped (especially wives or girlfriends of male protagonists) and having to be saved in the nick of time by men. It’s no wonder people have such messed up ideas about sexual assault in our society, since we can’t depict it realistically in our fiction (books, television, movies, or whatever otter medium you can think of).

The Gemini Contenders

2011-11-26T13:02:00.001-05:00

Subject: Thriller
Author: Robert Ludlum

I had read or started to read three books in a row that simply didn’t do it for me, and I wanted something that I could be more sure I’d be able to get into. Mom had given me a pile of Ludlum books, so I figured this would be a good place to go next, but then I had to decide: Which one?

I’ve read so many Ludlum books, some recently and some not so recently, and to tell you the truth, I get them confused in my head because the titles all sound so similar: The Gemini Contenders, The Parsifal Mosaic, The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Rhinemann Exchange, The Chancellor Manuscript , The Holcroft Covenant, etc. etc. etc. So I couldn’t remember if this was a book I’d read recently or not.

As it turns out, it’s one I hadn’t read at all, which was a pleasant surprise. (As it also turns out, the title has only a marginal connection to the story, and there is no description of the plot on the cover, so when looking at the pile of books there’s no way I could have known if I’d read this before or not!)

I thought this was a great example of a Ludlum book. The action wasn’t always as fast-paced as some of his other books—not a good thing or a bad thing, just different—and because there wasn’t too much love in the book, he didn’t have to fall into his melodramatic way of writing lovers talking to each other. (He still managed to squeeze in some, but not enough to make me roll my eyes like The Bourne Supremacy or The Bourne Ultimatum.)

I thought his choice of showing the different generations of Fontini-Cristis was very smart, and then having the two brothers against each other at the end was great. I do sometimes get tired of plots about ancient religious documents that call the legitimacy of the Church (especially the Roman Catholic Church) into question, but I was pleased to see some of the characters saying essentially how I feel about the subject: Just because you find an old document, doesn’t mean it’s an important document, nor a valid one. It’s just old. Of course there were people at the time of Christ who would have claimed that he was a fraud; just because you find some writings by one of them, it doesn’t mean that it suddenly calls into question everything else. The Church has been dealing with claims and counter-claims about Christ for 2,000 years; what’s one more? But stories with these plots can’t be that realistic; if they are, it takes away from the suspense.

Murder at the National Gallery

2011-11-26T12:36:00.001-05:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Margaret Truman

I had just read—correction, I had just started to read, and then thrown down in disgust—two books that I’d considered to be awful. Then I picked this up, and couldn’t decide if I liked it or not. But, since I was starting to feel a bit too finicky, and since it wasn’t as obviously awful as the previous two books, I made myself finish it.

I know, I know, not exactly a rousing opening description of the book. But it just... it was what I’d call workaday. It was a passable novel, Truman got through the essential plot points, she brought us to some exotic locales (Italy, and a bit of Paris), she did everything she needed to do. But, at the end of the day, the story just didn’t grab me, nor did the characters or the writing.

Whose Body?

2011-11-26T12:26:00.001-05:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

The previous book I’d only made to page 66 before putting it down. This book I didn’t even make it to page 10. It was all the clichés you’ve ever seen about a British murder mystery, and not put together in a clever way.

I was going to put up an example of the writing, so you could share my misery, but I couldn’t bring myself to transcribe it.

This was actually just the first part of a four-part Dorothy L. Sayers collection. Obviously I didn’t bother to start reading the other three...

Running Scared

2011-11-26T12:17:00.001-05:00

Subject: Suspense (?)
Author: Elizabeth Lowell

The last time I went home to my mom’s she gave me a bag of books to take home with me. Most were Robert Ludlum novels, since she knows I like him, but there were some other new authors for me to try as well. This was one of the new ones.

Unfortunately, it was so bad that I’m creating a new label for the blog, for books that were So Bad I Couldn’t Finish Them. (There have been others, but I didn’t go back to look for them and label them.) I only got up to page 66 before I had to put this down, and move on to something else.

One of the things I didn’t like about the book was the way she tried to write sexual tension; she didn’t know how to do it well, so instead she simply hammered us over the head with a constant barrage of it, hoping that we’d get the point that way. Out of the 66 pages I read, I’m sure at least 60 of them had some example of her throwing more “sexual tension” in our faces; I’m glad I stopped where I did, before someone could give in to their raging lust...

All the Devils Are Here

2011-11-25T17:58:00.001-05:00

Full Title: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Subject: Politics, Finance
Authors: Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera

This book is a perfect example of why this blog is not intended to be a blog of book reviews, it’s simply a diary of books I’ve read. (Of course that fact doesn’t stop me from saying when I loved or hated a book.) I have no expertise or ability to review this book; although I felt it was informative, and there were definitely things I learned, I have nowhere near the level of expertise that would be needed to review it. Or, let’s face it, even an appropriate level of comprehension; I fully admit that I only picked up about 60% of what was going on in here, and some of that was just due to laziness—occasionally the authors would refer to some type of financial instrument and I’d know that they’d already explained what it was, but I just couldn’t be bothered to go back and remind myself about it again. Lazy.

But if the book does nothing else, it does a very good job of helping us get to know the people behind the financial meltdown of 2008. It does much more than that, of course; it gives us the entire history behind why the system crashed in 2008, going back thirty years, but I think the insight into the people is one of the book’s great services. Systems are systems, but they’re thought up, implemented, and maintained by people.

For example, there is Angelo Mozilo, who ran Countrywide Financial. Countrywide was a company that dealt in subprime mortgages—but not at first. At first, like most lenders, Countrywide dealt only in mortgages in which there was a good chance that—gasp!—the people taking out the loan would be able to pay it back. In 1991 a competitor of Countrywide had been dealing in subprime mortgages and had to take huge losses; Mozilo told National Mortgage News that, “They tried to take a shortcut and went the way of every institution that has ever tried to defy the basics of sound underwriting principles.” Mozilo was...

… an extremely dark-skinned Italian-American, and very sensitive about that heritage. He once told a colleague about returning from his honeymoon with his new wife, Phyllis, and stopping in Virginia Beach on the way home. They went into a restaurant to have dinner. “We don’t serve colored,” the waiter said. “I’m Italian,” Mozilo replied. “That’s what they all say,” said the waiter.

We get this kind of back story on some of the characters involved, and we get some of their motivations; how Countrywide, for example, was built from the ground up by Mozilo despite a lack of fancy education in finance, and about what an honest organization it was. Everything that we know about subprime mortgages, how much damage it did to the system when they were bundled into complex financial instruments, puts us firmly on Mozilo’s side when we read about him ensuring that his company takes only solid loans. And we feel the inevitability of the situation when, a few years later, Countrywide ends up dealing in subprime mortgages anyway—and, in fact, becoming one of the country’s leaders in subprime mortgages—because they simply have no choice. The way it works is that Countrywide makes the original loan which is then bought by a financial institution; if the financial institutions are only buying subprime mortgages, what else is Countrywide to do? That’s not to say that their practices are exemplary, they end up getting into all of the same shoddy business practices that all of the subprime lenders are getting into, but without excusing their later actions it is important to understand the situation they found themselves in, and why they essentially had to start doing subprime mortgages or go under; we don’t have the luxury of blaming anything on a “few bad apples” when the entire financial system is driving everyone in one single direction.

Another individual we learn a bit more about is Hank Paulson, who had once worked under John Ehrlichman in the Nixon White House, and ended up head of Goldman Sachs. He left Goldman to become Treasury secretary, and as I started to read that, I thought to myself, “okay, here we go, another person who leaves Goldman to go into government, no surprise here.” What did surprise me, however, was how Paulson quickly becomes an “almost hero” of the book; one of the people who is portrayed as really trying to do the right thing.

His move to become Treasury secretary is described here:

… to Goldman insiders, Paulson’s departure was startling. He had never expressed the slightest interest in the job. He didn’t make lavish campaign contributions, or serve as finance chairman for ambitious politicians, or even hang around politicians. He told everyone, whether they were close confidants or passing acquaintances, that he was staying put at Goldman. Head fakes had never been his style. As he later related in his memoir, when he first got the call from the White House in the spring of 2006, he agreed to a meeting with the president, but then quickly canceled when John Waters, the firm’s veteran Washington hand, told him that going to the meeting was tantamount to accepting the offer.

Having been through several ineffectual Treasury secretaries, Bush wanted Paulson badly, largely because his Goldman Sachs credential gave him a stature his predecessors had lacked. Paulson was initially deterred by “fear of failure, fear of the unknown,” he later wrote. But he finally said yes. “I didn’t want to look back and have been asked to serve my country and declined,” he later explained. “So I just took the plunge.” He did so after getting an unprecedented agreement from Bush that he would have real power: regular access to the president, on a par with the secretaries of State and Defense, and the ability to bring in his own people.

For Paulson, one of the toughest parts of his decision was telling his mother. His entire family, including his wife, Wendy, and his mom, Marianna, was deeply opposed to the Bush administration. In his book, Paulson recalls standing in the kitchen of his house in Barrington, Illinois, announcing the news. “You started with Nixon and you’re going to end with Bush?” his mother replied. “Why would you do such a thing?”

In some ways, Paulson was an odd choice for Bush. As an ardent environmentalist, Paulson believed that climate change was real, a view not embraced by the White House. More important, he was neither a partisan Republican nor a free-market ideologue. He would later cite the pressure on him to get rid of Sarbanes-Oxley, the law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal, which Republicans in Congress hated. Paulson refused. “I don’t find a single provision bad,” he said.

He also worried about the widening gap between rich and poor—also not a subject often discussed in the Bush White House. In a speech at Columbia on August 1, 2006, he said that “amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits.” The comments sent Republicans into a tizzy.

But just as one starts to get a warm feeling for Paulson, in the very next paragraph the danger signs start to set in: no matter how well-intentioned he is, will he actually be able to do anything?

Like all captains of industry who join the Treasury, Paulson was in for a bit of a shock after his nomination was approved by the Senate in July 2006. He hadn’t understood how outdated Treasury’s systems were—there was no real-time access to market information, and the voice mail system was antiquated. … As he recounts in his book, he was shocked to discover that “an extraordinary civil servant named Fred Adams had been calculating the interest rates on trillions of dollars in Treasury debt by hand nearly every day for thirty years, including holidays.” Nor had Paulson fully appreciated how limited Treasury’s tools were: Treasury was not a bank regulator. It had moral suasion, but no supervisory levers, and it couldn’t spend money unless it had been appropriated. “At Goldman, he had the responsibility, but also unbridled command over thousands,” says one Treasury employee. “Here, he had the responsibility times a thousand, but no ability to command.”

Later on in the book we are told that Paulson himself admitted that he never foresaw how bad things were going to get in 2008, but, at the same time, he says that even if he had seen it coming he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. He simply didn’t have the power.

But let’s talk about subprime mortgages for a second. First of all, what is a subprime mortage? Simply put, it’s a mortgage which is made even though there isn’t a solid financial basis underpinning it; in other words, there is a good chance that the person getting the loan won’t be able to pay it back, but the loan is given anyway. There are a couple of reasons why subprime mortgages became the underpinning of almost the entire American economy; one was that financial institutions were using subprime mortgages as part of some financial instruments that are so difficult to understand I don’t even pretend to, and, irony of ironies, a main intent of these instruments was to protect the financial institutions from risk.

But another reason was that people truly believed that housing prices would never go down. To suggest that it was even a possibility was to expose oneself as a fool; housing prices had only ever gone in one direction: up. So if you gave a person a loan for $300,000, and it turned out that the person wasn’t able to pay the loan back it wasn’t so bad, because by the time you repossessed the house it would be worth $310,000 or $330,000 or $400,000. You’d get the extra value of the house, and whatever money the person had already paid back on the loan before defaulting would be gravy. (In fact, the vast majority of loans that were given near the end of the housing bubble weren’t for new houses anyway; something like 70% or 75% of the loans being given were for people to refinance their existing house—taking advantage of the higher values of the house—not for buying a new house.)

Paulson believed the same thing everyone else did: housing prices only go up, not down.

This was Paulson’s blind spot—though not because he was a free-market ideologue. Perhaps because he had spent his entire career on Wall Street, he thought the way others on Wall Street did and the way economists did: Housing prices hadn’t declined on a nationwide basis since the Great Depression! People always paid their mortgages! He didn’t see the boarded-up homes that were blackening neighborhoods like rotten teeth in places like Cleveland. His was a bloodless view, the world as seen from the perch of high finance.

Besides, why would Paulson suspect that Wall Street’s securitization process was deeply flawed? After all, Goldman Sachs had moved into this business on Paulson’s watch. Paulson was part of the machine, not outside it. That also meant, for all of Paulson’s worries about derivates, he didn’t understand the dangerous potential of credit default swaps on mortgages. (Though he’d later say, “If I had known some of the things that were happening, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”)

Paulson certainly wasn’t alone. Everyone else on Wall Street and in Washington shared his views. In late 2005, Bernanke said that home prices, rather than being in bubble territory, “reflect strong economic fundamentals.” In 2006, he said that he expected the housing market to “cool but not to change very sharply.” He went on to tell CNBC, “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So what I think more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize.” As late as the spring of 2007, he said, “[W]e believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or the financial system.”

Another reason for Paulson’s blind spot, say people who worked with him, was that he had too much faith in regulators. “He thought the regulators were more capable than they were,” says a staffer. Paulson today concedes he’d put too much faith in regulation itself. During his time in office, Paulson would change his tune. “The system was so outdated and screwed up, you just couldn’t have imagined it,” he’d later say. A big part of the problem, of course, was that both the regulators and Paulson assumed that financial institutions were more competent than they were. Paulson spent his career at Goldman, which at least didn’t need anyone to tell it how to protect its own bottom line. He had no idea that other firms weren’t as capable of looking out for their own interests. “No financial institution wants to blow itself up,” he’d later explain. “So I’ve always taken some confidence in the fact that their survival instinct would help protect the system. But I was shocked by how bad risk management was in some institutions. And many banks thought they were smarter than they were.”

Another interesting person we meet is Lew Ranieri. We first meet Ranieri on page 4 of the book, when he and two others—called the Three Amigos—invent something called a mortgage-backed security, or MBS. As the authors tell us, “In the simplest of terms, it allowed Wall Street to scoop up loans made to people who were buying homes, bundle them together by the thousands, and then resell the bundle, in bits and pieces, to investors.” We’ve all seen countless news stories about the financial collapse of 2008, and even those of us who didn’t understand any of it at least understood the basic concept that things were being torn apart and rebundled together into financial instruments that were so complex that nobody understood what they actually contained, and nobody could properly calculate what the risk actually was. These mortgage-backed securities were at the heart of it, and Ranieri was one of the ones who invented MBS’. Not that he foresaw what was going to become of these securities.

And I mention Ranieri because he mostly disappears from the book after that—until 2006, when we find him at a conference. How does Ranieri now feel about these mortgage-backed securities?

The poor level of disclosure in CDO prospectuses, Ranieri says, “makes the risk levels neither readily apparent nor easily quantifiable.” You can hear the anger in his voice. “This. Is. A. Private. Securities. Market,” he says evenly. “It gets sold to the public. It get sold to foreign investors who, I will tell you, don’t have a clue. It is supposed to be equal information that is available to all.”

When Ranieri finishes, an audience member asks a simple question: “What do you see as the less than rosy scenario when the mortgage market goes into the toilet?”

“I don’t understand what the ripple effects would be,” he replies. “All sorts of people are holding risks that would be hard to track down. And in some cases they wouldn’t even know they are holding the risk.”

To me, a non-expert, that’s scary; people were tying up billions or trillions of dollars into instruments that they didn’t even understand, and then selling it to others. And even worse, some of these things could actually be sold multiple times.

“Wall Street is friction,” said Mark Adelson, the former Moody’s analyst. “Every cent an investment bank earns is capital that doesn’t go to a business. With an initial public offering, you get it. But with derivatives, you can’t tie it back. You could argue that at least it’s not hurting things, and that was a compelling rationale for a long time.” He concluded, “We may have encouraged financial institutions to grow in ways that do not directly facilitate or enhance the reason for having a financial system in the first place.”

If only that were the worst of it. But it wasn’t. The invention of synthetics may well have both magnified the bubble and prolonged it. Take the former first. Synthetic CDOs made it possible to bet on the same bad mortgages five, ten, twenty times. Underwriters, wanting to please their short-selling clients, referenced a handful of tranches they favored over and over again. Merrill’s risk manager, John Breit, would later estimate that some tranches of mortgage-backed securities were referenced seventy-five times. Thus could a $15 million tranche do $1 billion of damage. In a case uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, a $38 million subprime mortgage bond created in June 2006 ended up in more than thirty debt pools and ultimately caused roughly $280 million in losses.

Breit, by the way, is another individual who comes off well in the book. Someone who actually cared about containing risk—and, at the end of the day, so much of the financial catastrophe was due to ignored or denied risk—but was ignored at the times when he could have actually helped avert the disaster. By the time people started listening to him the most he could do was give back-of-the-napkin estimates at how bad the damage would be.

There’s one last quote I want to end with, but first some more background: The way things worked is that all of these financial instruments were rated according to risk. Something rated AAA (triple-A) was considered to have so little risk as to be practically risk-free, something rated AA was slightly more risky, etc. There were three rating agencies: Moody’s, Fitch Ratings, and Standard & Poors. In theory, it was a good thing that these instruments were rated by third parties, because it made them more reliable. In practice, since the people issuing the financial instruments were paying for the ratings, the rating agencies essentially had indirect incentives to give as high a rating as possible; if I’m issuing a new financial instrument, I’m going to shop it around to all three rating agencies, and then pay for the rating from whomever gives me the highest rating. If a rating agency gives too many low ratings, it’s losing business to the other two agencies.

But ratings were used for more than to boost sales of securities. They were also built into certain laws; financial institutions had to have different amounts of capital on hand to cover their securities depending on the rating—if something had a high rating, meaning essentially no risk, then less capital was legally required to be on hand to cover it. So we end up with another part of the systemic problem: eventually many, many financial instruments were rated higher than they should have been, masking billions or trillions of dollars of risk—risk that many investors thought didn’t exist, because of the ratings. Eventually, however, people started to realize that the ratings were too high, and that some would have to be lowered.

Yet even in July, the rating agencies still weren’t ready to go all in and actually downgrade triple-A tranches. Instead, on July 10, 2007, S&P [Standard & Poors] placed 612 tranches of securities backed by subprime mortgages on “review” for downgrade; almost immediately, Moody’s followed, placing 399 tranches on review. Both agencies made a great point of saying that the downgrades affected only a sliver of the mortgage-backed securities they had rated.

Why had it taken so long? Sheer overwork played a part, as did paralysis. But it was also because the rating agencies feared the consequences of a widespread downgrade of mortgage-backed securities. With ratings so embedded in regulations, downgrades would force many buyers to sell. That forced selling, in turn, would put more pressure on prices, which would create a downward spiral that would be nearly impossible to reverse. With subprime mortgages, that situation was exacerbated a thousandfold, because the flawed ratings of residential mortgage-backed securities had been used to create countless CDOs—and synthetic CDOs. Downgrades of the underlying mortgage-backed securities could cause the CDOs to default even before any losses had shown themselves. The ripple effect was bound to be enormous.

Later that day S&P held a conference call for investors to discuss the pending downgrades. Most people were fairly polite. But one man on that conference call, a hedge fund manager named Steve Eisman, who had taken a big short position in mortgage-backed securities, was not.

“Yeah, hi, I’d like to know why now?” Eisman began. “I mean, the news has been out on subprime now for many, many months. Your ratings have been called into question for many, many months. I’d like to know why you’re making this move today when you— And why didn’t you do this many, many months ago?” S&P’s Tom Warrack, a managing director in the RMBS group, tried to break in. “We took action as soon as possible given the information at hand …” But Eisman wouldn’t be stopped. “I mean, I track this market every single day. The performance has been a disaster now for several months. I mean, it can’t be that all of a sudden, the performance has reached a level where you’ve woken up. I’d like to understand why now, when you could’ve made this move many, many months ago. I mean, the paper just deteriorates every single month like clockwork. I mean, you need to have a better answer than the one you just gave.”

The next day, Mabel Yu, an analyst at Vanguard, told Mary Elizabeth Brennan at Moody’s that when Eisman started talking, “my phone was on mute but I jumped up and down and clapped my hands and screamed. He was the only one to say it, but all the investors were all feeling the same way.” Yu went on to tell Brennan that Vanguard had stopped buying mortgage-backed securities in early 2006 because they were less and less comfortable with the ratings.

I bring in this final quote because I can relate to Eisman; I’ve been in that position before, when I’m the only one who’s saying, “what you’re saying doesn’t make sense, and you’re avoiding the truth.” But too many times I could have been that person, and didn’t say anything.

A Traitor to Memory

2011-11-04T09:53:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George
Quotes: On Quote Blog (mostly)

I’m enjoying George’s books more as I go, and I think the ones I’m enjoying the most are the ones written latest, which means that she was getting better as she went (in my oh-so-humble opinion).

I thought the device of alternating between Gideon’s diary and “normal” narrative was a clever one, although Gideon’s writing style really annoyed me at first. It bothered me less as the book went on, and I’m not sure if that’s because I got used to it or if it’s because he toned it down. He was supposedly writing in his diary for the sake of his psychiatrist, so he was addressing it to her, but his manner of arguing with himself through her voice really got on my nerves. (Partially because it was annoying in and of itself, but also partially because it just didn’t seem realistic to be doing it so much.)

For example:

I want to begin by saying that I believe this exercise to be a waste of my time, which, as I attempted to tell you yesterday, is exactly what I do not have to spare just now. If you wanted me to have faith in the efficacy of this activity, you might have given me the paradigm upon which you are apparently basing what goes for “treatment” in your book. Why does it matter what paper I use? What notebook? What pen or what pencil? And what difference does it make where I actually do this nonsensical writing that you’re requiring of me? Isn’t the simple fact that I’ve agreed to this experiment enough for you?

Never mind. Don’t reply. I already know what your answer would be: Where is all this anger coming from, Gideon? What’s beneath it? What do you recall?

Nothing. Don’t you see? I really absolutely nothing. That’s why I’ve come.

Nothing? you say. Nothing at all? Are you sure that’s true? You do know your name, after all. And apparently you know your father as well. And where you live. And what you do for a living. And your closest associates. So when you say nothing, you must actually be telling me that you remember—

Nothing important to me. All right. I’ll say it. I remember nothing that I count as important. Is that what you want to hear? And shall you and I dwell on what nasty little detail about my character I reveal with that declaration?

Instead of answering those two questions, however, you tell me that we’ll begin by writing what we do remember—whether it’s important or not. But when you say we, you really mean I’ll begin writing and what I’ll write is what I remember. Because as you so succinctly put it in your objective, untouchable psychiatrist’s voice, “What we remember can often be the key to what we’ve chosen to forget.”

Chosen. I expect that was a deliberate selection of words. You wanted to get a reaction from me. I’ll show her, I’m supposed to think. I’ll just show the little termagant how much I can remember.

Et cetera. As I say, it did get less annoying for me; I think as the book goes on Gideon gets more involved in trying to remember, and has less time to be hostile. (Incidentally, the word “termagant” apparently means “a harsh-tempered or overbearing woman” according to the Google definition page for it.)

Unfortunately I don’t often pay attention to details (a bad trait in someone who reads a lot of murder mysteries), and I didn’t realize until very late in the book that Gideon’s diary entries were not in sync with the rest of the story; some of his entries were written much before the beginning of the “normal” narrative. The dates of his entries were clearly put at the top of each chapter, but I didn’t pay enough attention to notice that difference in chronology. (It’s also possible that George did that on purpose, and sprung that on the reader later on, but I’m nearly positive that she would have mentioned dates early on in the “normal” part of the narrative too.)

As I say, it was a clever device, but the flip side is that it immediately made me think that Gideon was the killer, and that we were being given a glimpse into his mind so as to see why he did it. One can’t escape the fact that one is reading a mystery novel, and so one starts thinking in terms of clues that the author might be giving the reader. (And then one starts over thinking, and wondering if “clues” are actually misdirects, intended to throw the reader off.) But once again, George gives us a satisfying killer—I was quite happy for Richard to be the one getting arrested—while also paying off the Gideon-centred aspect of the story by making him a killer too. (Everybody got to kill somebody!) I also found it interesting that Gideon was the centre of the story for the reader, while for the detectives (Lynley and Havers, of course), Gideon wasn’t much more than a very minor character.

The plot was suitably intricate for a 1,000+ page book; if it wasn’t any reader would have thrown it down in disgust. And as she often does, George does a good job in this book of letting her characters come to conclusions based on the facts they have at hand, and also letting her characters misinterpret things from time to time.

And I got a wry smile on my face at the end of the novel, when Gideon finds his violin smashed. (You did read the thing at the top that warns of spoiler alerts, right?) So even Libby got to kill someone! Or... something. Gideon finally seems like he’s about to get his life in order in a meaningful way, and it’s thwarted by the very person who’d been urging him to get his life in order. Perhaps George thought that her readers wouldn’t appreciate a baby killer (spoiler alerts, I tells ya!) having a happy ending, and would prefer him to suffer instead.

The English Assassin

2011-10-24T14:52:00.000-04:00

Subject: Spy novel
Author: Daniel Silva
Quotes: On Quote Blog

I wasn’t familiar with Daniel Silva, but the last time I visited my mom she gave me a pile of books and this was one that she recommended. And overall I liked it, so I’m sure I’ll pick up some more of Silva’s books. He doesn’t have quite the polish of a Ludlum or a le Carré (but then, who does have the polish of le Carré?), but it’s a good, fast-paced read, with a sufficiently complex plot. It’s a good spy novel, in other words.

If there were any complaints it’s that the novel lacked a certain depth in some places. I believe this is one of Silva’s earlier novels, however, so maybe in later books he’ll develop the knack of knowing when to go in depth on something, and when it doesn’t need it. (I’m hoping his pendulum doesn’t swing too far in the other direction, causing him go to into laborious detail on each and every thing. That gets very tedious very fast if a writer doesn’t do it well, so I’d rather he leaves the level of detail as it was in this book than do that.)

I had just finished reading A Man Called Intrepid, and now I’ve read The English Assassin. I also have The Secret History of MI6 on the to-do shelf, but I think I’d better leave that for a while, or I’ll get all espionaged out. Maybe I’ll read a good ol’ fashioned murder mystery next...

A Man Called Intrepid

2011-10-19T14:32:00.000-04:00

Subject: History, espionage
Author: William Stevenson
Quotes: On Quote Blog

This book was on the secret history of British and American espionage during World War II, much of which was coordinated by a man named William Stevenson, codenamed Intrepid. Who, by the way, is not the William Stevenson who wrote this book. Luckily, to avoid confusion, Intrepid usually went by “Bill” rather than “William” so we can just call him Bill Stevenson, to differentiate him from the author. (Or, as I intend to do, simply keep calling him Intrepid.)

There are those who believe that Intrepid was the original inspiration for James Bond, since he worked with Ian Fleming during the war. In fact, Fleming himself said (according to Wikipedia): “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is ... William Stephenson.”

It was definitely interesting to read this behind the scenes account. I wonder how much of it is taken seriously today, however. For example, in the book Dieppe is considered somewhat of an intelligence victory (despite the staggering human losses), and the claim is made that the goals of the mission (which were intelligence-oriented, rather than military) were accomplished, whereas the Wikipedia page for Dieppe doesn’t touch on this subject. Is it because it didn’t occur to anyone to mention it, or is it because the history as presented in Intrepid isn’t taken seriously?

More importantly, some aspects of the book were rather sad to read, since reality hits you all the way through. When you see a James Bond movie, or other action/spy movies, there are sometimes casualties, but they’re always limited and almost always voluntary; some noble person decides to give their life for the greater good of the mission. In Intrepid, the story is often different: time and again the Allied leaders have to make a heart-rending decision, whereby they come across a piece of information and have to decide whether they can use it to prevent casualties.

This is because the allies managed to get a copy of the German Enigma machine, which was used by the Nazis for coding secret messages during the war. This gave the British a great intelligence advantage over the Germans, but only as long as the Germans didn’t know that the British had it. As soon as the Nazis discovered that the British had cracked Enigma, they would have discontinued its use and moved on to something else, and the British intelligence advantage would have been lost, but as long as they thought their messages were impenetrable they felt free to continue using Enigma and the British continued to decode messages. But suppose a German message was decoded indicating that a particular city is going to be bombed tomorrow; in coming across a message like this, you would have two options:

Alert the people in that city that they’re going to be bombed, and hopefully save a number of lives. However, by doing so you alert the Germans that you have cracked Enigma, prompting them to discontinue it and thus eliminating any opportunities to decipher any future messages—so many more lives may be lost in the future.
Don’t alert the people, allowing you to keep your intelligence advantage over the Germans and continue with your ability to decode future messages. As the war continues you will continue to have good intelligence on what the Germans are doing and potentially save many more lives, but in order to do so you have to sacrifice the lives of people you could have saved in the short term.

It wasn’t always a decision that Allied leaders agreed on, and you can see why. So the book felt, to me, as if it was tinged with sadness much of the way through. However, as one who enjoys espionage thrillers, and also prefers realism in his books, a history of espionage in World War II is a good read.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

2011-10-10T12:23:00.001-04:00

Full Title: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Subject: Philosophy, work
Author: Matthew B. Crawford
Quotes: On Quote Blog

This book was on my to-do list for a while, but I forget where I first heard about it. Probably The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. I was finally in a bookstore recently with no ideas of what to buy, so I looked at my to-do list (aren’t smartphones wonderful?) and saw that I hadn’t bought this yet, so I headed over to the philosophy section.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, though. I think the point is well taken—that the way we’re devaluing skilled trades in favour of “knowledge work” is not necessarily beneficial to the people we’re advising, who might very well enjoy skilled trades as much as any knowledge work, and even make as much money as they do in knowledge work. (That, I’m sure, is a poor summary of the book.) I could even mention a friend of mine who’d once thought of going into knowledge work, but ended up in skilled trades instead and is much happier for it.

Yet that would be exactly the problem that this book has: Crawford leans too heavily on his own experience, and less on general issues and statistics. And it’s too bad, because when he does introduce studies or the like, that look at the big picture, he does it very well. But then he falls back on talking about his own situation again, and it’s not as compelling (to me). Even if I did get a chuckle when he described a former job where he worked at a think tank, where:

... I would quickly discover that it was not to my taste. It was concerned more with the forms if inquiry than with the substance; the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interests, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank. ...

Deception On His Mind

2011-10-04T16:25:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George
Quotes: On Quote Blog

In the past when I’ve had complaints about Elizabeth George novels they’ve usually had to do with psychology. Someone did or said or thought something that just didn’t ring true, because that’s not how people act in real life. In this case, psychology was probably the book’s main strength, because human nature and behaviour is the essential basis behind everything that happens in this book—and I think George did a fantastic job of it. Everything rings true.

Now... I do have some reservation when I say that, because the book takes place in England and is centred around Pakistani immigrants to the country. Cultural issues and issues to do with religion are central to the story, and so if George got those wrong, the whole book is off. And while it rings true to me, there’s also a chance that it’s way off, and not realistic at all. But I felt that the characters mostly rang true, and their motivations mostly rang true, so as far as I can tell the psychology behind this book is right on. (When I say that the characters and motivations “mostly” ring true, it’s just because it’s a novel, and obviously George can’t get into every character in depth; of course some of the characters come out as stereotypes more than as actual characters. But that’s true of every novel; George can’t give every single character a back story, and go into detail about their thoughts and actions and desires.) (I should add, in this case, that the characters I found to be stereotypes were usually white British folks, not Pakistani folks; for example, Mrs. Shaw seemed like a stereotype, to me.)

Also in terms of psychology, I found the ending to be very satisfactory. It was one of those books when you’re glad when they figure out who did it, because you really want the person to be punished. With some murder mysteries the situation is just sad; by the time you find out who did it and why you end up feeling that it’s just a shame that two lives are wasted, and putting the murderer in prison (or to death) doesn’t seem like justice so much as another senseless waste. But in this case? I was happy for this murderer to get caught and punished. (Take that, fictional character!)

The Template

2011-09-30T10:18:00.000-04:00

I came very close to changing the blog template to one of Google's new dynamic templates. (I already did for the quotes blog.) I was going to use the Flipcard view, which you can preview by clicking here since Google provides a handy way of trying out the new templates before you commit to them.

Unfortunately none of the dynamic templates have a place to create a sidebar, and, personally, I actually find myself using my sidebar quite a bit. I will often come here to find all of the posts pertaining to a particular author, and once in a while I'll look for all posts on a particular topic. (Well, technically, the sidebar view has a bit of a sidebar, but only to scroll through recent posts. I can't put anything of my own in there, like a tag cloud.) The Flipcard view I would have chosen does provide a very cool way to show posts by Label (or date or author, although I'm the only author on this blog), with cool little HTML5 animations and all that, but I have my Labels broken down into two categories, for Topics and for Authors, and they simply have all of the labels together--perhaps not such a big deal, but still, it's my blog and I'll be anal retentive if I want to.

I suppose I could start playing with pages, which would allow me to put content aside from the posts somewhere. (Assuming that the dynamic templates allow pages, but two of the Google blogs have them--the Gmail blog and the Blogger Buzz blog--so it doesn't appear to be a problem.)

I'm still playing around with things, so who knows, maybe the template will get updated soon. And it's not like I have a bunch of readers, so it might get changed before anyone even sees this post...

The Tommyknockers

2011-09-24T18:39:00.000-04:00

Subject: Horror, Sci-Fi
Author: Stephen King

I don’t know how King would feel with me putting Tommyknockers in the sci-fi category, since he thinks of himself as being solely a horror writer, but I’m guessing that at the very least he’d understand why.

I read this book again because my wife wanted some suggestions for some novels to read that would be outside her normal sphere of reading, and this is one of my favourite King books. (The Stand is still my favourite, but based on some of the criteria she was looking for I didn’t think that saga would be suitable; Tommyknockers, while long, is still more of a “story” than a “saga.”)

I like the way King can effortlessly skip back and forth between stories; most of the story focuses on Gard, but occasionally King will skip back to the action of other people in Haven and show what’s happening in their lives. His skill as a short story writer serves him well in his novels, because he has a great ability to break off for a chapter or two and tell a mini story-within-a-story, sometimes pushing the larger plot along and sometimes a simple tangent, but drawing in the reader and making us interested. (I’m going out on a limb and assuming I’m not the only one.)

Of course, as a horror/suspense writer, he sometimes does this in a very suspenseful way. I’m thinking especially of the scene between Gard and Bobbi, sitting at the kitchen table, him pointing a gun at her under the table and her pointing one at him above it. He gets the drop on her and shoots first—only for the gun to misfire. They stare at each other in disbelief for a second, him in horror that the gun didn’t go off and her in horror that he tried to shoot her... and then the chapter ends, and the next chapter is someone else’s story! And it’s not like the chapter is a total throwaway, it very much pushes the story forward and gives us what’s happening in the larger plot, but at the same time the reader is left with that little bit of suspense in the back of their mind for an entire chapter; “yes, yes, this is interesting and all, but what’s happening right now with Gard and Bobbi?!?”

As is my new habit, rather than posting quotes here I’ll just link to the quote blog.

The Naive and Sentimental Lover

2011-09-19T09:16:00.000-04:00

Subject: Love Story
Author: John le Carré

When I first picked this book up the title didn’t mean much to me. I was anticipating a spy thriller where a naive but perhaps well-meaning middle-aged British man gets caught up in international intrigue through his waning and misfiring libido. I read the description on the back of the book, and it still didn’t raise any alarm bells; it talks about “a page-turning love story from the grandmaster of spy thrillers,” and goes on to describe… well… a love story. But again, I figured it was a love story within the context of a spy thriller.

Turns out… no, it’s just a love story. I got, oh, I don’t know, 100 or 150 pages into the book and made the mistake of looking it up on Wikipedia, and found that actually, this book was a departure for le Carré, the first non-spy-thriller he wrote. Dagnabit. After a while I got tired of it, and set it aside to read Because the Night instead. But then I picked it back up, because although I’m not really much of a one for love stories, le Carré is a good writer, regardless of the genre he’s tackling.

But then it turned out that the love story—which the back cover had indicated was between Aldo and a couple (Shamus and Helen)—is really more about Aldo and Shamus. And I found I just couldn’t get interested when I couldn’t relate to the characters, so I ended up putting it down. Now, I only got halfway through the book, so it’s quite possible that Helen finds her way back into the story, but I don’t think that would be enough to get me interested again. So, with apologies to le Carré, I didn’t end up finishing this book.

I did, however, pick up quite a number of quotes that I found interesting. As I say, le Carré is a good writer, regardless of the genre.

Because the Night

2011-09-19T08:55:00.001-04:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

I’ve done it again! I’ve read another Ellroy novel that turns out to be part of a trilogy, and I’ve read it in the wrong order. Because the Night is part two of the “Lloyd Hopkins trilogy,” part one being Blood on the Moon and part three being Suicide Hill. (People call it the “Lloyd Hopkins trilogy” because of the name of the main protagonist.) I’m not sure why I don’t research every Ellroy book before I read it, since this keeps happening to me. The most frustrating part is that I rarely see an Ellroy on the shelf, other than Black Dahlia, so I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to pick up Blood on the Moon or Suicide Hill.

And I do want to pick them up, because Because the Night was a great read (if a little short). Ellroy isn’t using the style of prose he’d been using for the “Underworld USA” trilogy, which makes the book easier to read, and it takes place in more modern times, which makes the slang more contemporary. (Except… I’m not sure if it’s 100% contemporary; in 1984, did people call alcoholics “juiceheads”? Some of the slang was more redolent of the Ellroy books which take place in the 50s.)

In any event, Blood on the Moon and Suicide Hill will now go on my to-do list, so that I can finish the trilogy.

I don’t have any quotes to put here, since I’ve started putting quotes on my new “quote blog.” So quotes for this book can be found there.

Careless in Red

2011-09-06T10:18:00.001-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George

The first Elizabeth George book I read was What Came Before He Shot Her, and I liked it so much that I keep mentioning it pretty much every time I mention a subsequent George book. I’m mentioning it again, but for good reason: The woman who was shot in WCBHSH turns out to have been the wife of Inspector Lynley, the main detective in all of the George murder mysteries I’ve been reading. (Everyone else knew that all along. It’s only because I read these books out of order that this is news to me; at the time I read WCBHSH, not having read any other books by George, the name “Lynley” wouldn’t have meant anything to me.) Careless in Red takes place after that murder, with Lynley trying to come to terms with what has happened, and the seeming senselessness of it all. (Oh, and he also gets pulled into investigating a murder.)

If I have a problem with Elizabeth George novels it’s usually the psychology of it; there will be something a character (or set of characters) will do that doesn’t seem realistic to me. This book had no such problem; she wrote a very intricate story, with lots of characters, each of whom had separate, realistic lives, and intertwined them well. Although... truth be told, I saw no reason why the murderer needed to have the police involved when he shared with the father of the victim why he’d done it. That is, the murderer informs the father of the victim in such a way that it’s not an actual confession (although, seriously, in real life I’m sure it would be close enough to a confession to convict), so that the father will know who did it, and live with the knowledge that the murderer will never be punished—but does so with the police there. Why? Why not just tell it to the father of the victim directly? Sure it’s a shortcut for the writer, since the loose ends are being tied up, but it still seems like a big risk to take to “confess” in front of the police (even if you do think the “confession” is not actually a confession and you won’t get arrested) when you could simply do it to the father of the victim—the person you want to know—and forget about the risk. However, this is a small point, from a long, well-written book.

The Street Lawyer

2011-09-02T10:36:00.000-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: John Grisham

I don’t feel like I actually have too much to say about The Street Lawyer. It didn’t feel like it was drawing me in like other books do, and yet it obviously did since I read it very quickly. In some ways it’s a typical Grisham novel: a plot about a young idealistic lawyer; good, easy-to-read writing. But it did feel a bit shallow compared to other books. The plot was maybe too straightforward—the main character would keep assuming how things would turn out, with a bad habit of being right. In a novel you kind of want some twists and turns; you don’t want everything to be so straightforward. When he says, “I knew what was going on in their boardroom, and I knew what their next move would be,” as a reader you kind of expect that their next move will not be what he thought, but something unanticipated.

In some ways this is more realistic, and I’m usually very much in favour of realism. But at the same time it makes for a less exciting read.

Nausea

2011-08-29T08:54:00.000-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Jean-Paul Sarte

First of all, note that I’m giving the title as Nausea, not La Nausée. My French isn’t good enough to have read this in the original French; I read it in English, so I’m giving the English title. It’s pompous enough to be reading Sartre at all in this day and age, I’m not going to go even worse and start throwing French around...

Unfortunately, I didn’t like the book. It’s mostly about a guy who’s so caught up with details and minutiae that he can’t see the whole; he’ll spend a paragraph describing a mustache and two nostrils and skin, but he won’t actually see a face. Which we all do sometimes; if you stare at anything long enough you start to lose the sense of it—but to read an entire novel of it gets old quick. Or rather, half a novel—I put it down halfway through, and decided not to bother with the rest. (Ironic, since in my last post I was going off about not giving up on things as quick as my wife? Not really; I read half the novel before finally giving up. A good 50 pages or so more than I should have read.)

People who call themselves existentialists (whether they understand the term or not) will jump on me and say that I don’t get existentialism. And I won’t argue with them; maybe I don’t. (Or maybe I do, and it’s ridiculous.) Either way, it doesn’t make this piece of crap novel any better.

Barney's Version

2011-08-27T16:28:00.001-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Mordecai Richler

When I first started reading this book I told my wife that I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, and she told me that that meant I didn’t. I don’t give up on things as quick as she does, though, so I stuck with it and ended up loving it.

One of my problems was that it became apparent pretty quickly that Barney—the narrator and central character of the book—was a sexist, cantankerous a-hole. But as it turns out... well, yes, he was a sexist, cantankerous a-hole. So the book was written accurately from the point of view of an a-hole. Takes some guts to write a book from the point of view of an a-hole. (Although he may or may not end up being likable to the reader, simply because he was the narrator. I liked him.)

The book is Barney’s memoirs, written in response to—and to spite—another writer he’d once been friends with. This other writer had written things in his memoirs about Barney that Barney didn’t like, so Barney’s Version is his response.

The book is well written. I found myself smiling or laughing quite a bit (sometimes in spite of myself), and Barney’s life was interesting enough to make the book interesting. (I know, I know, he’s a fictional character — of course his life was interesting.) Unfortunately, the part of the book that I liked the best was stolen away from me, in the very last paragraph of the book: Barney has been accused (and acquitted) of murdering an old friend (one of the few he kept), and it’s a central theme of the book. Barney alludes to it many times early in the book, until he finally works his way up to telling us the story. He avows his innocence the entire book through, but in a way that would allow the reader to believe that, well, maybe he might have done it. (There are numerous times in which Barney’s version of a story will differ from someone else’s telling, and the impulse is always to believe Barney’s version—until you remember that he’s a liar by nature, not to mention a jerk, forcing you to remind yourself that the other person’s version of the story is probably right. But it’s just so hard not to believe the narrator of a novel. But I digress...) Of course there is one thing missing, that’s usually present after a murder: a body. Richler gives us a clue as to what really happened—actually a two part clue, with one piece given early on in the book, and another piece given much later—and has the guts to not let his characters figure it out. Not even Barney himself, who never figures it out. I was very impressed with this decision; especially later on in the book when the body is found, leading Barney’s children to second guess him, and wonder if maybe he did kill his friend. I loved that choice by Richler!

Unfortunately, in the very last paragraph of the book his son figures it out, which was a minor disappointment. Why do writers, especially in North America, always feel they need to wrap everything up? If he’d left it with Barney’s kids not having figured things out, not only would it have been a gutsy choice, but it would have allowed the reader to feel really smart. (I did.)

Richler made another fun choice, which was to give Barney Alzheimer’s. (You did read the thing above that says there are spoilers in this blog, right?) So often, during the course of the book, he can’t remember something or remembers it incorrectly, in which case the facts are corrected in footnotes written by Barney’s son, who edits the book after Barney is too far gone to do it himself. This is something I’d be tempted to do as a writer, except I doubt I would have thought of a device such as this to allow me to do it. But I’d love to be able to have characters say things that are incorrect (and even have other characters follow along with it like in real life), and show something in the footnotes to indicate to the reader that although the character is incorrect, the author knows it. Of course that’s just me being gutless myself; it would take real guts as a writer not to correct it.

2011-08-22T09:21:00.000-04:00

I don’t usually just post quotes, but this one tickled my fancy:

Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend.
- Stephen King

A Short History of Modern Philosophy

2011-08-19T22:40:00.000-04:00

Full Title: A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein (Second Edition)
Subject: Philosophy
Author: Roger Scruton

I was in the bookstore recently, and I wanted something new. I have numerous P.D. James and Elizabeth George books on the “to do” shelf, not to mention a James Ellroy and maybe even a le Carré, so I didn’t want to pick up another book by any of them and simply add to the pile. So I pulled out my smart phone and came to the blog to look at my TODO list, and decided to head up to the philosophy section to find Shop Class as Soulcraft. And then I thought, well, while I’m here, I don’t really know anything about philosophy—why not learn? I picked the first book I could find that seemed like a general book on philosophy. In retrospect, I would have gotten one that started with Plato and Aristotle, instead of starting with just “modern” philosophy, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for, so I don’t blame myself.

Unfortunately, when you’re reading a book that’s trying to introduce you to philosophy you really need to be able to pay attention, and not have any outside distractions, so you can really think about what each philosopher was trying to say. The bus and subway are not ideal places to do that, so I didn’t get a lot out of the book. From time to time I thought I might be disagreeing with something some philosopher or another was saying, but without devoting enough brainpower to actually think about it, I couldn’t say for sure.

Sometimes I could be sure, though. Like this for instance:

In a famous essay, and again in the first Inquiry, Hume also mounted an argument, of which he was particularly proud, despite the fact that it had been anticipated by Spinoza, to show that belief in miracles is always irrational. The very laws of nature which suffice to summarise our knowledge of reality constitute the strongest possible evidence against the testimony of those who bear witness to miracles. For a miracle is, by definition, a violation of a law of nature, and is therefore ruled out by the rest of our scientific knowledge. (p. 135)

So Hume is saying (and apparently Spinoza said before him) that miracles are impossible, because a miracle would violate a law of nature. But… that’s exactly what the definition of a miracle is; something that happens which should be impossible. Hume’s argument amounts to: a miracle is impossible because if one were to happen it would be a miracle. Well… duh, Hume.

The only other two quotes I jotted down were ones that… well, seemed amusing to me, as somebody who doesn’t study philosophy on a regular basis.

In talking about Frege, and a particular issue Frege had written about (I forget which), he says this:

It is no mean achievement to have created an irresolvable philosophical problem from something which every child can understand.

It’s unfair of me to quote that without any context, I admit, but at the same time, for those of us who don’t study philosophy, let’s be honest: we sort of assume that’s what’s going on all the time. We “regular folk” have a perfectly serviceable idea of how the world works, and then philosophers start over thinking things and come up with complex, nonsensical theories claiming that we don’t actually understand things, we just think we do.

And what if we do want to start studying philosophy? My advice, based on this next paragraph, is not to start with Heidegger!

It is impossible to summarise Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely. In the next chapter I shall give reasons for thinking that it may be unintelligible, from the very nature of the phenomenological ‘method’ which it employs. Its language, like that of the later Husserl, is metaphorical and contorted to the point almost of incomprehensibility; the reader has the impression that never before have so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible.

Yikes. Maybe, in retrospect, I shouldn’t feel to dumb if I didn’t always follow what was going on…

Original Sin

2011-08-09T21:37:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: P.D. James

And yet again, another novel in which the murder doesn’t take place for a good 150 pages. I don’t know why I’ve hit this streak of novels that are like this, but... I have.

In terms of the writing, it was another great James murder mystery novel. In terms of the physical book itself, it was very uncomfortable to hold—especially one-handed, and especially on a moving subway car or bus. It was very thick, and the words went close to the edges of the page so that you had to open it very wide, but it was too stiff to do so comfortably. If the story hadn’t pulled me in I might not have bothered to finish it.

But the story did pull me in, and kept me guessing right up to the end—and it was a good ending, I thought. I think my favourite part of the book—and again, I don’t always, but I should remind the reader of the constant alert of spoilers on this blog—was the very end. Daniel knows the truth, and is following the murderer, not to catch him but to warn him that the truth has been found out. The murders are, after all, completely justified in his eyes. Yet as he’s chasing the murderer he doesn’t even realize that there has been yet another murder, nor does he realize that there is a woman bound and gagged in the murderer’s back seat! (Or, as they say in England, the cummerbund.) It added a bit of suspense after the point where no suspense should have been possible anymore; the reader knew the murderer’s identity, and had a pretty good idea what was going to happen next, yet that little car chase did add a bit of suspense.

The Che Handbook

2011-08-06T12:15:00.000-04:00

Subject: History/Biography
Authors: Hilda Barrio, Gareth Jenkins

I had read enough of P.D. James and Elizabeth George for a while, and although I had some John le Carré and James Ellroy on the shelf I wasn't in the mood to go back to those wells yet either. So I decided it had been too long since I've read any non-fiction.

This book has bee on the shelf forever, and I'd been meaning to read it for a while, because I knew absolutely nothing about Che Guevara. And this was the perfect book to read on the subject, because it was as much photograph as text--I wasn't needing an in-depth study of the man, I was just curious about the basics, and that's what I got.

The drawback is that there seems to have been a bit of controversy about his later days, when he left Cuba--did some people feel that he'd abandoned Castro? did Castro feel that?--and the book only glossed over those parts. Also, the book covers both of Che's wives, but doesn't really cover how (or if?) his first marriage ended--all the more puzzling because later on in life both wives (and all of the children) seemed to be in Che's life. But that's okay; as I say, I wasn't looking for anything deep or covering all of Che's life, I was just looking for the basics, and that's what I got.

In the Presence of the Enemy

2011-08-04T09:25:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George

Like The Private Patient, this book didn’t start out with a murder right away. Instead it starts out with a kidnapping—with the prerequisite plot point on why the parents of the kidnapped child cannot call the police (which must be part of any fictional kidnapping story)—and we get quite a way into the book before the child is killed, the kidnapping becomes a murder, and Inspector Lynley is called in to investigate. It’s odd how I encounter these little coincidences; two books in a row with a long prelude to the murder, and in both cases done well.

This was another good book by George, with the exception of a couple of psychological problems, which seemed fairly glaring to me. But to get to that, I need to give a bit of a synopsis of the plot:

Ten years ago at a political conference a virulently right-wing journalist met a virulently left-wing journalist, and despite their obvious animosity toward each other they ended up having a torrid sexual affair for the duration of the conference. (I say “sexual affair” instead of “love affair” since both of the characters would have insisted upon that.)
The virulently right-wing journalist—the female of the duo—got pregnant, and decided to keep the child, but made it quite clear to the father that he was not to be a part of their lives.
The mother ended up going into politics, and used her pregnancy to her advantage rather than letting it be something to be held against her; “I made a mistake, but I did the right thing and had the child, and am raising her according to respectable family values” type of thing. (The book takes place in Britain, but right- and left-wing politics seem similar there to anywhere else.)
The father remained in journalism, and ended up the editor of a notoriously left-wing newspaper.
Now, in present day, the child has been kidnapped, and the father and mother are sent anonymous notes saying that the father must publish in his paper the parentage of the daughter.

Now here’s the first glaring psychological problem with the book: The mother has a pathological hatred of the father, and is convinced that he is behind the kidnapping, doing it to expose her in his paper in an attempt to ruin/discredit her. And to a certain extent I’m almost on board with her character believing this; she obviously hates him, and it’s a natural reaction for her to have. I did think that the hate was a bit overdone, or even a lot overdone, but that’s secondary to my main point. My problem is this: if this were the case, and the father was doing this in order to expose the mother, then why would he bother with the kidnapping at all? Why not simply publish the story?!? There is a plausible reason given as to why he might have waited this long before doing so, the political climate is right, but even given that the timing is finally right and he had a reason for waiting ten years, why bother with a fake kidnapping? He could have published the story straight off and been done with it. He could have stretched the story out over a week, to build readership. He could have done a million things, but it would make absolutely no sense for him to stage a kidnapping when all he has to do is do it. Various characters in the novel have various feelings about whether or not the father might be behind the kidnapping, but this rather obvious point doesn’t seem to occur to anyone.

I also have a minor problem with the idea that publishing the story would have ruined the mother’s political career. The fact that the affair happened and she got pregnant and had the child are already known; the fact that the father of the child was a political enemy seems, to me, embarrassing at worst. But I don’t live in that world, so I’ll let that lie; I could be wrong about what the repercussions would be.

So that’s the first psychological problem. A bit more of the plot, and I’ll get to the second:

After the father and mother are informed of the kidnapping, since the mother is adamantly believing that the father has kidnapped the child (and therefore feels that she has no real reason to worry), she refuses to let anyone call the police, and states that she’ll use her position to actively block an investigation if one is called. She does relent to cooperate with some amateurs who are brought in to search for the child, though.

These amateurs are actually recurring characters in George’s novels, and friends of Lynley.

The amateur sleuths really want to call the police, but the mother still refuses, believing that it’s what the father wants them to do so that he can publish the story, so they go along with her, and take on the investigation without police involvement.
As mentioned, the child is killed by the kidnapper. (You read the thing above about spoiler alerts, right?)
The amateur sleuths are guilt stricken.
Lynley is called in, and finds out that they were investigating this and didn’t call the police.
There is a scene in which he castigates his friends for not calling the police, and tells them that because they didn’t a child is now dead.

My second psychological problem with the book comes after this scene, when it’s pretty universally understood by every character in the book (including Lynley himself) that he was out of line in berating his friends, and that in speaking out of anger he behaved boorishly. He spends the rest of the book feeling guilty for his outburst, and practically begging for the forgiveness of the other characters. But... why would he be sorry for it? He’s right! A child is dead because those people didn’t call the police! He not only had every right to berate those people for not calling the police, they needed to hear it. They did something inexcusable, a child died, and then they got mad at Lynley for getting angry and pointing it out to them. Sure, if the police had been called in they still might not have found the child; it wouldn’t be a guarantee. But it would be a much greater chance of success than the amateur sleuthing that was going on. The police have immense resources at their disposal—especially for a prominent politician’s child—and would have a much greater chance of finding the child than three people playing at detective.

Unfortunately the ending sort of disappointed me too, from a plot perspective, but after both of these glaring psychological problems it didn’t even bother me that much because I was still thinking about these two things; they really bothered me. Especially the thing about the father publishing the story; it seems so blatantly obvious to me that he would have no reason to stage a kidnapping when he could just do it.

After all of this ranting it seems odd when I say that, overall, I enjoyed the book anyway. But it’s true, I did.

The Private Patient

2011-08-04T09:15:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: P.D. James

Another excellent P.D. James novel, with a very interesting beginning: the murder doesn’t happen for a good 100 pages or so. There’s a very large section of the book at the beginning in which we follow the victim’s life (and that of one or two other characters) before we ever get to her death. It’s a great way to make the reader really feel the impact of the murder—even though James doesn’t make the victim herself all that likable. But, likable or not, it gives James the opportunity to really explain why she’s not so likable, where it came from, and we at least feel some sympathy for her.

It’s always interesting, to me anyway, when an author plays around with the format a bit, and having such a large section of the book devoted to the last few weeks of the victim’s life, before she becomes a victim, was a great choice.

A Great Deliverance

2011-08-04T09:11:00.001-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George

I’m now realizing that George, like so many other mystery novelists, has a set of recurring characters she uses for her books, mainly the main detectives: Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. (Lynley also has some friends who come up in the books from time to time.) Of course I’m following my usual method of reading books in the wrong order; when I read Well-Schooled in Murder Lynley and Havers had a great working relationship, but A Great Deliverance is the book where they first meet, and the working relationship starts out rocky. I’m sure, as usual, I’ll read George’s books in a very strange pattern, often reading books that take place after books I haven’t yet read.

I really liked the book, although I found that Lynley’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend was a bit distracting; I thought that less would have been more, for that plot point. It should definitely have been included, since it helps to round out Lynley’s character, but I think if George had put a bit less of a focus on it, it might have been more impactful. I also thought she went a bit overboard with Havers’ acerbic personality. It is a key aspect of the relationship between herself and Lynley, but again, I thought it would have been more impactful if it was slightly less emphasized/exaggerated.

Trapped

2011-07-19T16:27:00.000-04:00

Formerly Released As: 24 Hours
Subject: Thriller
Author: Greg Iles

The book itself is a typical (meaning good) Iles book; a family’s daughter is held hostage for ransom, using a clever setup that pretty much precludes the family ever calling in the police (even after the fact), and the girl’s father and mother try to figure out a way to save her without causing the kidnappers to kill her. As mentioned above, the book was previously released under the title 24 Hours, and it seems that when they made it into a movie and named the movie Trapped they decided to update the title of the book as well.

I watched the trailer for the movie, and was surprised at how closely it seems to follow the plot of the book (which isn’t always the case), but I noticed that some details were different—and I couldn’t for the life of me think why they would bother to change those details. For example, in the book the kidnappers say that they’ve done this five times before, so this is therefore the sixth time they’ve executed this plan, whereas in the movie trailer they mention that they’ve done it four times before. Is that detail really worth changing for the sake of the movie? Even more bizarre to me is that everyone’s name in the movie seems to be the same as their name in the book with the exception of one kidnapper, whose name inexplicably changes from Huey to Marvin. Some changed details make sense: the daughter in the book has diabetes but in the movie has asthma because another movie was being released around the same time with a girl who had diabetes; the story takes place in the South in the book and in Seattle in the movie. I get why these types of details would change between the book and the movie. But what possible reason would they have to change the name Huey to Marvin?

Call for the Dead

2011-07-19T12:26:00.000-04:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: John le Carré

This was actually included along with A Murder of Quality; the two books were packaged together. Fortunately or unfortunately, this wasn’t a murder mystery, though, it was a “normal” spy novel featuring George Smiley. (I only say “unfortunately” because it had been such a fun change of pace for to me to read the previous murder mystery; not that I don’t like spy novels.)

An interesting point on this book is that it gave a lot of insight into Smiley’s character—perhaps too much. But again, though, it’s a problem for me because I’m reading the book out of order; Call for the Dead is actually the first novel le Carré ever published. In this book le Carré is introducing a character who, in my mind, has already been mythologized!

I do have a question, however: Call for the Dead is le Carré’s first novel, and A Murder of Quality is his second. So why, when the publishers put out this edition containing both novels, did they put them in the opposite order?!?

A Murder of Quality

2011-07-19T12:17:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: John le Carré

Now this was an interesting book; le Carré took one of the classic characters from his spy novels, George Smiley, and put him in a book which is not a spy novel at all, it’s a classic whodunit-style murder mystery! As someone who reads a lot of murder mysteries and loves spy novels, it was really interesting to see the crossover between the two genres.

Of course, I’m reading this book from the perspective of someone who has read and loved a whole bunch of le Carré’s spy novels, a number of which include Smiley, whereas this was only the second novel he ever wrote. It’s not like he wrote the book recently, with the intent of “re-purposing” his classic character.

That being said, Smiley is a perfect candidate to be a detective; almost a cross between Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. It was a treat to come across this book, and if le Carré were to start writing more whodunits featuring Smiley, I’d be sure to continue buying them.

Well-Schooled in Murder

2011-07-19T12:08:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Elizabeth George

When I read What Came Before He Shot Her I was very impressed with the book. Now that I’ve read Well-Schooled in Murder, I’m even more impressed with the work that George accomplished in What Came Before He Shot Her, because I can see that she completely changed up her writing style for that book; Well-Schooled in Murder is a classic whodunit murder mystery, while What Came Before He Shot Her is a very different type of a novel; more of a family drama, if I were to characterize it.

Anyway, this post isn’t about What Came Before He Shot Her, it’s about Well-Schooled in Murder. Of which I have not much to say; it’s an excellent murder mystery, with some well-executed plot twists and turns, the mandatory clever detective(s), and was good enough that the last time I was in a used bookstore I took the opportunity to scoop up a whole bag full of more Elizabeth George novels.

The only downside to the book is that I wasn’t raised in England, and certainly didn’t go to a private boys school there, so I feel I might not have got some of the intricacies of private school life, and this book seems pretty heavily focused on that. But I think I got the vast majority of it, and enjoyed it regardless.

Doubting

2011-07-19T11:50:00.001-04:00

Full Title: Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Faith
Subject: Doubt, in a Christian context
Author: Alister McGrath

If I remember correctly—which I might not—this was a book that was lent to us by our pastor. And it was good, scripturally-based and solid, but for some reason it just didn’t grab me. Partially because, with all of the problems I have, doubt isn’t one that I typically struggle with. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing—doubt can help strengthen one’s faith—it’s just how I am.

I did like that the preface starts with my favourite verse from the Bible (which is also quoted one or two other places in the book):

“I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)

Although doubt isn’t typically one my my personal problems, this verse, to me, just seems to be such a good summary verse of how the Christian is to live their life in relation to God.

Generous Justice

2011-07-05T13:36:00.000-04:00

Full Title: Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just
Subject: Christianity; Justice
Author: Timothy Keller

I remember having a conversation with my pastor once (if not more than once) about the fact that Christian authors—and Christians in general, I suppose—tend to be from one of two extremes:

As Christians we should be concerned with social justice. The Bible is all well and good for what it is, but Jesus’ real message was that we should help the poor and less fortunate. It doesn’t matter what people believe, as long as they do good for society. Spend less time in your comfy churches preaching, and get out there and do something!
As Christians our only concern is with the Word of God and evangelism. People don’t need bread from us, they need the Bread of Life, so stop trying to take my money and giving it to people who will go and spend it on booze instead of something worthwhile. (Frankly, the poor should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get jobs.)

Neither of these two extremes are really “Christian,” they’re both off the mark. But there aren’t too many people writing books from the centred, Christian perspective, that the Word of God is true, and people need to hear it (and will end up in Hell for eternity if they don’t), and because this Word is true, and we’ve been saved by the Son of God, we will also care about social justice and helping the poor. (Not we “should,” but we “will.”)

This book fell in that sweet spot, of adhering to the Word of God, and really paying attention to its meaning, which clearly leads in the direction of a desire for justice.

Justice Includes Generosity
Many readers may be asking at this point why we are calling private giving to the poor “justice.” Some Christians believe that justice is strictly mishpat [defined earlier as “giving people what they are due, whether punishment or protection or care”]—the punishment of wrongdoing, period. This does not mean that they think that believers should be indifferent to the plight of the poor, but they would insist that helping the needy through generous giving should be called mercy, compassion, or charity, not justice. In English, however, the word “charity” conveys a good but optional activity. Charity cannot be a requirement, for then it would not be charity. But this view does not fit in with the strength or balance of the Biblical teaching.

In the Scripture, gifts to the poor are called “acts of righteousness,” as in Matthew 6:1–2. Not giving generously, then, is not stinginess, but unrighteousness, a violation of God’s law. Also, we looked at Job’s description of all the things he was doing in order to live a just and righteous life in Job 31. He calls every failure to help the poor a sin, offensive to God’s splendor (verse 23) and deserving of judgement and punishment (verse 28). Remarkably, Job is asserting that it would be a sin against God to think of his goods as belonging to himself alone. To not “share his bread” and his assets with the poor would be unrighteous, a sin against God, and therefore by definition a violation of God’s justice.

Another passage, from the prophecy of Ezekiel, makes a very similar list to the one we have in Job 31.
Suppose there is a righteous man [tzaddiq] who does what is just [mishpat] and right [tzadeqah]. He does not … oppress anyone, but returns what he took in pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked. He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest.
Ezekiel 18:5,7–8a
This just man does not use his economic position to exploit people who are in a weaker financial position. Most interesting is how the text pairs “he does not commit robbery” with the explanatory clause that he actively gives food and clothing to the poor. The implication is that if you do not actively and generously share your resources with the poor, you are a robber. You are not living justly. This connection of generosity and care with mishpat is not confined to this text. Each of the following texts calls those who do justice to share their resources with the needy, because God does:
He defends the cause [mishpat] of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:18–19
Is this not the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked to clothe him... ?
Isaiah 58:6–7
Despite the effort to draw a line between “justice” as legal fairness and sharing as “charity,” Ezekiel and Job make radical generosity one of the marks of living justly. The just person lives a life of honesty, equity, and generosity in every aspect of his or her life.

As we continue our study, we will see there are valid reasons why many become concerned when they hear Christians talk about “doing justice.” Often that term is just a slogan being used to recruit listeners to jump on some political bandwagon. Nevertheless, if you are trying to live a life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to justice are inescapable. We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs, but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable. This kind of life reflects the character of God. It consists of a broad range of activities, from simple fair and honest dealings with people in daily life, to regular, radically generous giving of your time and resources, to activism that seeks to end particular forms of injustice, violence, and oppression.

That was a lengthy quote, but I decided to include the whole thing since I hadn’t included any others.

The book is actually quite short, and I got through it much quicker than I’d anticipated. Not a bad thing, I suppose.

White Jazz

2011-07-05T09:29:00.000-04:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

There isn’t much to say about this novel, except that I can already see Ellroy starting to develop the writing style which I mentioned when writing about The Cold Six Thousand. Which makes sense, because he’d said that he’d started developing that style in White Jazz—so here we are.

The thing that surprised me in this book was the appearance of Dudley Smith. of the books in the “L.A. Quartet” I hadn’t read L.A. Confidential, because I’d already seen the movie—but in the movie Smith dies, and apparently he doesn’t die in the book because here he is as a major character in White Jazz. Which means that I’ll now probably want to read the book—and once again, I’ll be reading an Ellroy series out of order.

I’m also noticing that Ellroy has a real penchant for writing about grizzly murders. Not even mass murders, necessarily, but murders in which the perpetrators have bizarre psychological problems, which they act out by killing people in brutal, insane, strange ways. He got out of that when he moved on to the “Underworld USA Trilogy”, but in the “L.A. Quartet” he definitely keeps it up.

The Big Nowhere

2011-07-05T09:20:00.000-04:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

Once again I was in a bookstore, saw a whole bunch of Ellroy novels on the shelf, and decided to pick up a few. But this time I was smart and did a bit of research before reading any of them, so as not to end up accidentally reading a series in reverse or something (as I did with the “Underworld USA Trilogy”), which I’m glad I did because it turns out that two of the books I’d picked up, along with The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential, are actually part of a different series, called the “L.A. Quartet”:

The Black Dahlia
The Big Nowhere
L.A. Confidential
White Jazz

Since I now had both The Big Nowhere and White Jazz on the shelf, I decided to read The Big Nowhere first, and stick with the storyline (for once). Not that there’s much of a continuing storyline anyway, the books are pretty disconnected, just some recurring characters.

There’s not much to say, except that I liked the fact that Upshaw ends up dying. I always love it when a writer has the courage to let a main character die, and when it happens in the middle of the novel even better.

It’s also fun to read about rampant anti-Communism in a book that takes place in the 50s. It might seem weird to the next generation though; I’m Generation X, exactly the right generation to be able to read something like that with an ironic smile on my face but also remember when people really were afraid of Communists. What will the next generation make of books like this?

Voodoo Histories

2011-07-04T13:25:00.000-04:00

Full Title: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
Subject: Politics; History
Author: David Aaronovitch

There would be little to say on this subject, were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it.

(That’s a quote of a quote of a quote which I found in the book and seems, to me, to be a great summary.)

This was a book I’d seen featured very positively on The Daily Show, and it looked interesting to me. It looks at conspiracy theories: Why are they popular? Why do people believe them, if they’re so... absurd? What is the history behind them, and, if possible, what is the truth behind some of these theories?

On the whole, it was a good book. There were some interesting facts learned, and some interesting histories given behind some of these theories, their rise to popularity, and the consequences that came out of them. For example, the first chapter, “The Uncanny Note of Prophecy,” gives the history behind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (that link is to Wikipedia, in case you’re not familiar with this particular conspiracy theory), and how directly this fraudulent document fed into the beginnings of World War II, and especially to the Holocaust.

Some of the chapters were kind of dry, some were gripping. One of the questions Aaronovitch is trying to answer—why people believe these theories, especially when they’re often so much more absurd and unlikely than the actual truth—he doesn’t really come up with a conclusive answer for. He does a much better job documenting the fact that yes, people do believe these theories, but doesn’t always theorize why. And not just stupid or gullible people, either; Aaronovitch goes out of his way to show that intelligent, educated people will sometimes believe these theories too. To cite a modern day example, it’s not just crackpots who are joining the 9/11 “Truth Movement” it’s also very educated people.

Take this example, from the chapter concerning conspiracies around Princess Diana’s death. Because of so much public speculation about her death being murder, British authorities put together an exhaustive investigation and then wrote the Stevens Report, which tried to answer as many as possible of the “facts” and speculations which had led to the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the Stevens Report didn’t seem to quell the conspiracy theories:

It was not wholly unexpected that the conclusions of the Stevens Report failed to satisfy Mr. Al Fayed [the main proponent, at the time, of the theory that Diana’s death was murder, rather than an accident], though its 832 pages, written in agonising forensic detail, answered and countered almost every aspect of the main conspiracy claims from motive to aftermath, its failure to get around to the Order of the Solar Temple notwithstanding. Nevertheless, it might have been anticipated that Stevens had shown to any reasonable and intelligent observer that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Sadly, this was not so. The day after publication of the report, the Independent newspaper, founded in 1986 to be an impartial journal of record, declared itself unhappy with Stevens’s conclusions. “No one,” its editorial began, “likes to be labeled a conspiracy theorist” and therefore to be associated with the kind of people “who believe the world is run by aliens disguised as humans,” but the newspaper was concerned that too officious a desire to avoid such a label might impair its capacity to ask questions. “Skepticism,” it pointed out, “can be a healthy instinct.”

This proposition is, in abstract terms at least, undeniable. But where would such skepticism lead one in the case of the Stevens Report? There were, concluded the Independent, a number of awkward questions that had not been resolved. For example, there was the issue of the white Fiat Uno belonging to a conveniently dead French paparazzo, which might just have been the one clipped by the princess’s Merc in the Paris underpass. There was also the problem of “all of the closed circuit television cameras monitoring the underpass [which] inexplicably failed to record the incident.” In addition, said the newspaper, “the question of whether anyone had the motive to murder the couple remains unresolved. The report says there is no reason to believe Diana and Mr. Fayed were preparing to marry. Mr. Fayed’s father maintains that there was.”

These observations came close to being perverse. In fact, Stevens, in exhaustive detail, showed both that the Fiat Uno in question could not conceivably have been the one in the Paris tunnel, and revealed, camera by camera, that almost all the CCTV installations en route were trained on the entrances of the buildings to which they belonged. Furthermore, Stevens established that everybody in whom Diana had regularly confided did not believe that she was planning marriage, and some said that she had explicitly ruled it out. In fact, only Mohamed Al Fayed, owner of the Mercedes that crashed and employer of the man who was driving the car at the time, testified to having been told that there was to be a wedding.

It wasn’t clear whether the writer of the Independent editorial had plowed his or her way through the Stevens Report or not, but in any case, the newspaper allowed itself two tangential arguments that by now be familiar to readers of this book. The first was that the absence of complete certainty (“We should beware the assumption that all the circumstances of this case have been fully explained and all the loose ends neatly tied up”) somehow permitted an almost impossible explanation to be regarded as being as true, if not truer than a likely one. The second was that the prevalence of an opinion somehow conferred a degree of truth upon it. “According to a recent poll,” said the Independent, “a third of the British public believe what happened to Diana was not an accident. This cannot be written off as a fringe belief.”

Of course, there probably isn’t a concise answer as to why people believe these theories; the reasons are as complex as the theories themselves. Aaronovitch does have some suggestions, though, along the way. For example:

When people adhere to an ideological system and that system seems to be failing them the conspiracy theories might explain why their system is failing. “We weren’t wrong—‘they’ simply interfered!”
It sometimes helps us to think that there are forces controlling the world, and that things don’t just randomly happen.

Related to this, if there are people who are secretly controlling the world, and I know about it, it makes me an insider.

If the conspiracy theories are really true, at least it means that there’s a greater meaning; that life isn’t random. Things seem to make more sense if shadowy forces conspired to kill Princess Diana (for example), and less sense if it was a simple, tragic accident that took her life.

I did have a couple of problems with how Aaronovitch approached this book, however. A minor problem is the way he tends to see the Jewish angle to some of these theories more than maybe it’s necessary. Some of the theories—such as the aforementioned Protocols of the Elders of Zion—are obviously conspiracy theories about Jews trying to take over the world, but others, such as the 9/11 conspiracy theories or theories about Princess Diana’s death, don’t really seem to be centred around Jews. The thing is, there are a lot of anti-semites out there who will bring Jews into everything, assuming that Jews are behind any conspiracies, and Aaronovitch tends to include these aspects of the theories, even if they’re just fringe. (Yes, I said “fringe” about conspiracy theories, which are already on the fringe...) Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of conspiracy theories that involve Jewish plots to take over the world (which is why this wasn’t a major problem, in my mind, with the book), but not all conspiracy theories are about that.

More importantly, the other problem I had was the way that Aaronovitch sometimes seems to lump valid concerns in with conspiracy theories, subtly making them seem silly and trivial without actually taking them on full-force.

For example, see this excerpt:

An agreeably simple and often cui bono? [who benefits?] sentiment was formulated by the late George Seldes, an American muckraking journalist. “If you look for the social-economic motive,” Seldes wrote, “you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth.” The problem with this seductive proposition is that it is hopelessly reductionist, completely failing to appreciate that people act from many other motives. It rejects the accidental, the complex, the unforeseen or the ideological, substituting an unpredictable economic outcome as the test of a subjective intention.

So, who plotted the First World War? Not those people who danced in the streets of Vienna, London, Berlin, and Paris in August 1914; they couldn’t benefit because they weren’t rich and were too likely to suffer in one way or another. Not the German kaiser, the Russian tsar, or the Austro-Hungarian emperor, because they all lost their thrones in the end. Not the American administration, because it obviously entered the war too late and too reluctantly to be considered a prime mover. But who emerged, secretly smiling, from the hecatomb? The armaments manufacturers, the war profiteers, and, behind them, the bankers. And, for those inclined to ask the extra question, what religion did many of the bankers profess?

That is where over-schematizing gets you. A further problem with the cui bono? line is that it assumes the supposed protagonist knows at the outset what is going to happen. In other words, it falls prey to the historian’s fallacy.

In general, I agree with Aaronovitch: there are typically a number of interconnected, complex causes for any major world events. Simply looking at “who benefits” and using that as the basis for your conspiracy theory (or using it to prop up an existing theory) isn’t really valid. Especially since multiple people usually benefit, and the conspiracy theorists only focus on the benefiting people who are particular to their particular theory. (To go back to the Jewish issue: there will always be people who will claim that the Jews benefit from anything that happens in the world, and therefore that they must have been behind it.)

However... it’s not invalid to question who benefits from a war, and it’s not invalid to notice that in fact armament manufacturers and war profiteers—and the bankers behind them, and Wall Street investors, etc.—do profit from war. Can we say that, therefore, the armament manufacturers/profiteers/bankers caused World War II? No, it’s more complicated than that. But can we say that they would have been in favour of it? Of course. Can we say that they might have tried to sway public opinion in that direction? Yes, I think we can, if they had the means to do it. Can we say that current armament manufacturers/profiteers/bankers/stock traders would be in favour of American being embroiled in wars currently? Of course. It’s self-evident; if a company makes money from war in some manner, then that company will be in favour of war. That’s not even a conspiracy, it’s just basic economics. Could we take this further, and wonder if at least part of the reason America is so constantly at war is because so much of its economy is driven by the manufacture of implements of war, coupled with the overwhelming power of lobbying in American politics? Could we wonder if the corporations who make so much money from war might also be trying to sway public opinion in that direction?

I think we need to draw the line between conspiracy theories and valid concerns with regard to the complexities of politics. Do I think that American armament manufacturers are causing America to go to war? No. Do I think they are a powerful force influencing American politics (and the American public), with a lot of money behind them? I think it would be silly to argue otherwise. We can debate how much influence they have, but it should be evident that they have some, at least.

I use this particular example because Aaronovitch mentions it a number of times in the book. Never directly, but a number of times he brings up war profiteering in such a way as to sort of lump it in with conspiracy theories, and give it that emotional tinge in the minds of the readers, but not actually call it one.

Those are my thoughts; now some more quotes.

First, another one that talks about how complex causes often are, but also talks about the “historian’s fallacy” (in which we sometimes assume that historical figures knew what the outcomes of their actions would be, even though they couldn’t have known the future any more than we can). This is from the chapter on the 9/11 “Truth Movement”:

… In one very clear example, David Ray Griffin took the North American Aerospace Defense Command to task for its suspicious tardiness. He demanded to know “why, if NORAD had been told at 9:24 [a.m.] that Flight 77 appeared to be headed back toward Washington, the Pentagon was not evacuated. In 13 minutes, it seems, virtually everyone could have gotten out. The strike would not have caused the death of 125 people working in the Pentagon.” Griffin knew, as did we all, that Flight 77 was supposed to have struck the Pentagon. That’s because we saw the damage to the Pentagon and were told that a plane had flown into it. But thirteen minutes earlier, the Pentagon was not the only target that Flight 77 could have been heading for. It could just as easily have been bound for the Capitol or the White House or the CIA headquarters at Langley, or have been a hijacking aimed at securing the release of prisoners. Griffin never suggests that all of these other places should also have been evacuated or other possibilities entertained, because he assumes a prior knowledge of the target.

...

One radical academic wary of falling into Griffin’s error was the great linguist and veteran campaigner Noam Chomsky. In constant e-mail contact with his public, Chomsky found himself under some pressure to join the Truth movement. In 2002, taxed with some of Gore Vidal’s “disturbing questions” and asked whether they didn’t add up to a government plot, Chomsky replied, “The world is full of unexplained data. Intelligence agencies and military forces are deluged with low-quality information which may, in retrospect, seem significant, but cannot seriously be evaluated … It would be quite mad, in my opinion, for any government to try something like what [Vidal] suggested.”

Another example very nicely illustrates the conspiracy theorist’s willingness to believe unlikely theories rather than likely truth, and also illustrates Aaronovitch’s deft ability to mock—and, let’s be honest, Aaronovitch is at his best when he’s mocking the silliness of the conspiracy theorists, so this is a good quote to end on:

With the scientist missing, a police communications mast was placed in the garden of the Kelly house. An anonymous chief constable subsequently told Baker that such a mast would usually only be fifteen feet tall, but this one was considerably higher. Aha! Clear evidence of a plot here. And yet the Oxfordshire police explained to Baker that the mast needed to be tall because the garden was in a “communication blackspot.” Baker didn’t accept this explanation. “What was the purpose of this very high mast? It seems clear that normal police communications would not require such a structure.” Then he adds this suggestion: “It might, however, have been required if it were thought necessary to contact an aircraft in the sky a very long way away, such as the one at the time carrying the Prime Minister to Washington.” There is much to admire in this argument. Having dismissed a perfectly testable explanation for no given reason, Baker reaches instead for a rationalization based on no evidence whatsoever.

The Bourne Objective

2011-06-23T15:12:00.000-04:00

Full Title: Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Objective
Subject: Spy Novel
Author: Eric Van Lustbader

I saw a review for this book on Amazon that was less than stellar, and I have to agree, it wasn’t as good as the other Bourne books I’ve read from Van Lustbader. (Ironically, however, it’s still better than the last couple of Bourne books from Ludlum himself...)

In a sense, Bourne becomes a secondary character in this book, with characters like Soraya, Arkadin and others taking more of the spotlight. As well, the plotline is also no longer centred around Bourne, but in this case is instead about a shadowy, ill-defined world-wide organization looking to uncover the secrets of King Solomon’s gold. (Wait... seriously? King Solomon’s gold? Yes, seriously, that is what the organization is after.) In a sense, it’s less a Bourne book than it is like so many of Ludlum’s other books. In addition to the main plotline there are a couple of other plotlines too, but there just isn’t enough room in the book for them to be developed properly, and/or wrapped back into the main plot.

It seems like Van Lustbader has created a problem for himself with the Bourne series. In the course of these books he has created so many characters (and given them all such rich detail) that he now has to continue including them in all of the Bourne books, but there is just no time to fit them all in. plus a plot, plus (possibly) secondary plots.

All Around the Town

2011-06-23T15:08:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Mary Higgins Clark

After having read While My Pretty One Sleeps and Loves Music, Loves to Dance, I knew there was going to be a surprise ending in this book. And when the murder was committed by a girl with multiple personalities, who didn’t quite remember the murder but all of the circumstantial evidence pointed at her being the one... well, I figured I knew what that surprise ending would be. (I even had an idea who the real killer would be, although it was only a hunch—not strong enough that I can say “I knew who did it.”)

However, that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book; I did. Higgins Clark brought us through the story very well, and did a good job bringing the book to a satisfactory end. That’s not a small feat, when the reader knows that there’s going to be a surprise ending.

Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy

2011-06-01T22:02:00.000-04:00

Subject: Politics, Espionage
Author: Eamon Javers

I first heard about this book on The Daily Show, and figured it was right up my alley. I love spy novels, so why not read about real-life spies? I was expecting to have a bunch of quotes, and enjoy reading what the life of a spy is like in the modern age—or, at the very least, get some interesting war stories.

As it turned out, the book was... kind of boring. Not nearly as interesting as I’d been expecting it to be.

Oh well. You win some you lose some. I did get a couple of quotes out of it, though...

From the introduction:

The question of right and wrong, though, has haunted private intelligence operatives and their clients since the dawn of the industry in the 1850s. In fact, Allan Pinkerton, the man acklowledged to be the inventor of the private intelligence business, set down the first industry code of conduce in the mid-nineteenth century in order to ensure that such work would remain the “high and honorable” calling he felt certain it was. Pinkerton outlined basic rules for his agents. They would not work for defendants in criminal cases, and they would not investigate jurors, public officials, or union members. They would not work for “vice crusaders,” and they would work only for flat fees, not for a percentage of the spoils. Moreover, they would never investigate the “morals of a woman”, nor would they handle divorces or other cases of a “scandalous nature.”

As the 1850s dawned, that was the bright ethical line of the private intelligence industry. But the line didn’t hold. Many of Pinkerton’s modern-day counterparts routinely violate every one of his gentlemanly commandments. The ethical line vanished so quickly, in fact, that Pinkerton’s own agency became known as one of the best union-busting tools of America’s corporate elite. By then, Pinkerton’s sons controlled the company he had founded. Sons don’t bear the sins of their fathers, it’s true. But history teaches that sons don’t bear their virtues either.

And later on I found this interesting:

BIA was founded by a small group of CIA veterans, including Phil Houston, one of the CIA’s top interrogators. According to a former CEO of the company, the founding group left the CIA with a feeling of disgust over the Bush administration’s policy on torture after 9/11. The group of CIA veterans (some of whom had been with the CIA for more than 20 years) felt that the administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” betrayed everything they stood for as officers—not because torture was morally wrong, they told this former CEO, but because it produced bad intelligence. For a CIA officer who’s proud of his work, there’s nothing worse than an inferior product.

Loves Music, Loves to Dance

2011-06-01T21:56:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Mary Higgins Clark

I’ve often said that the three things that can make a book worth reading are good/believable characters, a good plot, and good writing. Any one of those three can make a book worthwhile, two or more and it’s a great read. I’m starting to think that I like Mary Higgins Clark’s writing style; this is the second book I’ve read of hers, and I’m looking forward to the third.

She’s pretty good at the plots, too, except that the surprise ending in this book felt kind of tacked on. The surprise ending for While My Pretty One Sleeps was great, but in Loves Music, Loves to Dance, as I say, it felt tacked on; like that’s how she ends all of her books, so she needed a surprise.

While My Pretty One Sleeps

2011-06-01T21:54:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Mary Higgins Clark

I hadn’t read anything by Mary Higgins Clark before, but this book was on my mom’s bookshelf, so I pilfered it. There are actually three novels in this one book, so there will be three reviews of her books in the near future.

There isn’t much to say about the book, however. It was good; I liked it. The surprise ending was good (and would have been even better if I hadn’t read the foreward, and gotten advance notice of what it would be).

I imagine I’ll read more of her stuff.

All the President’s Men

2011-06-01T21:52:00.000-04:00

Subject: Real-Life Historical Political Drama
Authors: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

I’ve seen the movie All the President’s Men a couple of times, which details Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting of events starting in 1972 with the break-in at the Watergate hotel and ending in Richard Nixon’s resignation, and always liked it.

It’s one of those “boring but interesting at the same time” kind of movies; who cares about a movie about a couple of reporters reporting on a story, and where the central crime is nothing but a break-in at a hotel? Well, okay, a break-in that was perpetrated by people working for the President of the United States. (Or his reelection committee, anyway.) And, well, okay, it turns out that the reelection committee—appropriately named, and I am not making this up, the “Committee to Re-Elect the President,” or CREEP—happens to have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around in an illegal slush fund. And, sure, it turns out that the slush fund was used to fund the break-in. Oh, and did I mention that the break-in was at the Democratic national headquarters, so that CREEP could spy on the Democrats? Oh, and it turns out that there’s a whole slew of illegal wiretapping that’s been going on, not only to spy on the Democrats to keep tabs on them before the election, but also trying to find out who leaked the Pentagon Papers (ask your parents). And sure, yes, it turns out that the people involved go higher than the people working for CREEP, there might be some people who actually work for the President. Well… and it turns out that some of them might even be in his inner circle.

This is why the movie (and now the book) was interesting to me, because of the way it built. The reporters were finding out more and more, and it was leading to bigger and bigger things, and also leading higher and higher up the food chain. In the end, the events Woodward and Bernstein reported on ended not only in Nixon’s resignation, as mentioned, but also eventually led to him uttering the famous “when the president does it it’s not illegal” quote in the Frost/Nixon interviews, in which he states the belief that the President is above the law (in certain situations). Here’s a quote (from a larger excerpt on the Guardian website):

David Frost: Would you say that there are certain situations - and the Huston Plan was one of them - where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?

Richard Nixon: Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

Frost: By definition.

Nixon: Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.

Frost: The point is: the dividing line is the president's judgment?

Nixon: Yes, and, so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate. We also have to have in mind that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress. We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the CIA's covert operations are concerned, as far as the FBI's covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.

American Tabloid

2011-06-01T21:45:00.000-04:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

I finally got around to finishing the Ellroy trilogy which starts with American Tabloid. (Which I’d accidentally been reading in reverse—meaning that I’ve finally read the first book in the trilogy.)

By this point, I have to be honest, the books were starting to wear me down. It might be because I read the trilogy backwards, but I think it’s also the writing style, the themes, and the fact that I’m just getting tired of the time period. Who really killed JFK? (Or, for that matter, MLK?) What was Hoover really like? Or, for that matter, Howard Hughes? How was the CIA involved in Cuba? How was the FBI involved in… well, everything? How were the FBI, the CIA, the mafia, and hate groups in the Southern States all interconnected?

I’ve just been so saturated lately with books and movies and articles on JFK, and Cuba, and that whole time period that I have to admit to being overwhelmed. As well, the writing style (mentioned in the post on The Cold Six Thousand) is so punchy and in your face that I think that might also have been wearing me down a bit. Not to mention the constant blatant racism in… well, almost all of the characters. Probably fairly realistic for the time, but also hard to take over long periods.

This doesn’t mean I’m off Ellroy. I’ve got another book of his on my “to do” shelf, that I just bought last week. I can’t remember which one, but it takes place in the 50’s, and I think I’ll enjoy going back to the 50’s with Ellroy. I definitely enjoyed Clandestine and The Black Dahlia, so hopefully I’ll enjoy the next one too. Er… whatever it was.

The Savage Detectives

2011-04-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Roberto Bolaño

I had previously read 2666, so when I saw this book on the shelf I thought I’d pick it up and give it a try. Again, as with 2666, I loved Bolaño’s style of writing; the fact that he just lets himself write, and doesn’t feel the need to tighten things up. The way he approached this book was interesting, too; according to Wikipedia:

The novel tells the story of the search for a female Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two other poets, the Chilean Arturo Belano and the Mexican Ulises Lima.

But Arturuo Belano and Ulises Lima only occasionally appear in the text, while the narration is given by numerous others. (The first section of the book is one character’s diary, while the next section consists of a series of interviews with other characters, and the final section goes back to the diary.)

Now you may be wondering why I bothered to quote Wikipedia for such a simple summation of the book. The short answer is: I didn’t get to finish reading it; I accidentally forgot the book on a plane when I was around halfway through. By that point, it wasn’t even clear that Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima were searching for Cesárea Tinajero, or that it was a focal point of the book.

So I had a decision to make: Was I enjoying the book so much that it was worth buying it again? I eventually decided that no, it wasn’t worth it—but still, I was enjoying the writing. Maybe if I ever get my hands on another copy I’ll finish it.

The Blue Last

2011-04-15T18:33:00.002-04:00

Subject: Mystery
Author: Martha Grimes

I had never read anything by Grimes before—I don’t even remember how I got my hands on this book—but I was looking for something new to read, so I picked it up.

I had mixed opinions about the book. For the most part, Grimes kept me interested, and kept me wanting to read further, which is obviously very important. On the other hand, there were some parts of the story that just had nothing to do with anything (like the trip to Italy regarding the painting), and that always annoys me. I also didn’t feel that she tied the plot together very well at the end; the conclusion seemed somewhat slapped together.

And then, balancing against the negatives, she killed off the main character—who seems to have been a recurring one, for her—and I always admire a writer who does that. The death scene was fairly realistic, too, which means that it pulled me in, and made me feel it more.

There was enough good and enough bad to leave me not knowing if I actually liked the book or not, but I think if I find another Martha Grimes book lying around I’ll give it a shot.

Player One

2011-04-02T14:38:00.002-04:00

Full Title: Player One: What is to Become of Us?
Subject: Novel / Philosophy?
Author: Douglas Coupland

The premise of this novel is interesting enough. Set in a bar near the airport right here in Toronto, four disparate characters (and one disembodied voice named Player One—who gets entirely too much play—from inside one of the character’s brain) end up having a drink during the end of the world. Except that the characters aren’t that disparate; all of them are given to musing on the meaning of life (or lack thereof) at the slightest provocation. Or… just during a pause in the conversation.

Then, all of a sudden, society as we know it ends. Now… I’m torn on this part. If this is meant to be a novel, then this is a sore point with me, because society goes from zero to “end of the world” in about thirty seconds in this book; the price of oil goes up to $250 a barrel, and within minutes—literally minutes—there is a mushroom cloud over Toronto, some kind of toxic dust is raining down on people so thick you can barely see, and there are snipers out shooting people at random. I fully agree that the price of oil going up so high so fast would adversely impact society—but apocalypse in less than an hour? Surely it would take at least a day before there was a mushroom cloud over the city, wouldn’t it? (Incidentally, Coupland takes pains to have one of the characters notice that the mushroom cloud isn’t from a nuclear blast; the toxic dust is never explained, though.)

But if Player One isn’t meant to be a novel, but rather as a means for Coupland to expound on philosophy, then I guess I can let it slide. The plot—or even character development—doesn’t seem to be nearly as important to him as letting his characters pontificate. As one reviewer noted:

Coupland seems less interested in creating plausible characters than vehicles for his ramblings. The novel, based on a series of the author’s lectures, forsakes narrative for disquisition. Worse, all the characters are similar to the disembodied Player One. They are more like computer avatars than people—colourful and briefly entertaining, but two-dimensional.

Isle of DoGs

2011-03-30T19:46:00.002-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Patricia Cornwell

Normally for these posts I try to stay away from simply talking about whether I liked a given book or not. I’ll talk about how the book impacted me, or quote large sections that moved me, or agree or disagree with the authors; I’ll even talk about parts I liked and didn’t like. But I try to make this blog more than just, “I liked it” and “I didn’t like it.”

So this might come a little out of the blue: This is possibly the worst book I have ever read. The worst written, the worst plot (was there a plot?), the worst characters, everything about this book was… bad. If this book had been written by a high school student for a creative writing class, I would have failed her—how did Cornwell get this published? (I wish this were an exaggeration, by the way, but it’s not; the level of writing in this book is below high school level.)

Even the title!

Why was it named Isle of DoGs? Is that a reference to something? I don’t remember seeing that phrase in the book. (Maybe it was, and we can chalk this up to my faulty memory.)
Why on earth is the G in DoGs capitalized?!? On the cover art it doesn’t seem to be, but inside the book it is, and I wracked my brain trying to come up with a reason. (I failed.)

From the very beginning when I started reading this book, I knew it was terrible. By the second or third chapter I knew it wasn’t going to get any better; the only reason I finished it is that I was on a business trip, and didn’t have anything else to read.

To mention everything that I hated about this book would take a long, long time. So I’ll just focus in on the thing that bugged me the most: the animals. Cornwell took the concept of anthropomorphism to a whole other level; the animals aren’t just like humans, they basically are humans, just shorter and on all fours. Some of my favourite examples (meaning the ones that made me grit my teeth in almost physical pain):

One of the main characters has had her dog kidnapped, and, even though the dog was kidnapped before the beginning of the novel, it seems to have a better grasp of what’s going on in the story than anyone else does. (More on this wonder dog in a minute.)
There is a scene in which a family has bought some live crabs and a trout, and the cook is getting ready to cook them. They don’t want to be cooked, so the crabs decide to form a human pyramid, to try and escape out of the sink.
It is eventually decided that they won’t be cooked; they’re thrown into a buck of water, and someone brings them out to try and sell them. They talk amongst themselves—yes, you heard me, the crabs and the fish talk amongst themselves—and decide to play dead, so that nobody will want to buy them, which works, and they get thrown into the sea, whereupon they stop playing dead, their mission having been accomplished. (Later on, one of these same crabs grabs an old coin from a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, and somehow manages to throw it into a boat for the benefit of a human in the boat.)
There is a scene with that same dog that I mentioned earlier, in which it’s listening to a human trying to decide whether he should take a particular course of action. The dog—I kid you not—runs out of the room, grabs a pencil, comes back into the room, and uses the pencil to type the words “just do it” on a nearby computer’s keyboard. I guess Cornwell felt that this would be more realistic than having the dog write with the pencil…

As I say, there are numerous other examples of bad writing. (Really, if you just open the book to any page you’re sure to find at least one example.)

People will say that I’m being unnecessarily harsh with this post, but those people didn’t read the book. Another reviewer did, and was even more harsh:

Who is this book for?
I’m sorry, I just can’t answer this question. An enemy? Someone requiring a doorstop or some kindling? Whoever wrote the reviews for the San Fran Examiner and USA Today?
If you like this book, you would also like…
Being really bored. Why don’t you just stare at that blank wall for a couple of hours?

That reviewer didn’t actually read the entire book; I envy her.

The Christian Mind

2011-03-29T23:12:00.002-04:00

Full Title: The Christian Mind: How should a Christian think?
Subject: Christianity
Author: Harry Blamires

This is an old book, but it was recommended to me by my pastor, so I thought I’d give it a read. One could almost call this a book which is fighting post-modernism, except that when it was written post-modernism wasn’t yet a “thing;” when Blamires wrote this book he still would have been concerned about the dangers of modernism. However, the points raised are not only still valid, they are more valid than they were when the book was written. The Christian Church has, if I may overgeneralize, lost the ability to think.

Instead of thinkers, the Church now has scholars—which are very different:

Of course, the Church apart, it is a feature of our culture generally that as we are rich in scholars so we are poor in thinkers. Occasionally, very occasionally, a man may be both a first-rate scholar and a first-rate thinker. But the nature of our modern educational system is such that this happy combination arises ever more rarely. Potential thinkers are being turned into mere scholars by the pressures of conformity so strong both in the educational world and in society at large. The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms quite justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist.
Since the lot of the thinker in the secular world is so unattractive and frustrating, it is not surprising that we lack thinkers. But the Church cannot do without thinkers—or prophets, as she is wont somewhat pompously to call them. She cannot afford to ape the secular world in suppressing the thinker, in trying to replace him by the scholar. She destroys herself in doing so. For the secular world is true to itself in rejecting the thinker. It serves the laws of its own preservation in rejecting him. But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself.
The scholar and the thinker are in some ways mutually antithetical types. Scholarship cannot endure exaggeration. Thinking cannot thrive without it. There is no thinking without exaggeration. As Ortega y Gasset puts it—
To think is, whether you want or no, to exaggerate. If you prefer not to exaggerate, you must remain silent; or, rather, you must paralyse your intellect and find some way of becoming an idiot.
(The reader will note that I am more indulgent than Gasset in that I allow the scholar as well as the idiot to eschew exaggeration.) The scholar evades decisiveness; he hesitates to praise or condemn; he balances conclusion against competing conclusion so as to cancel out conclusiveness; he is tentative, sceptical, uncommitted. The thinker hates indecision and confusion; he firmly distinguishes right from wrong, good from evil; he is at home in a world of clearly demarcated categories and proven conclusions; he is dogmatic and committed; he works towards decisive action.
To typify the extremes in this way is useful, but most not be taken too literally. For the scholar, as thus characterized, is not the only man who studies: and the thinker, as thus characterized, is not the only man who thinks. Obviously there is no scholar who does not think; and there is no thinker who is quite devoid of scholarship. Nevertheless the distinction between Scholarship and Thinking is a fruitful one to ponder, and at least it will serve to indicate that just as there is a dearth of Christian thinking in the Church, so in our secular culture there is a dearth of pure thinking as opposed to that recording, commenting, and elucidating, which constitute scholarship. Thus our complaint against the education through which our priests and bishops are prepared for their duties might justly be widened into a complaint against the bias of our educational system in general. It is not geared to the production of thinkers. It is geared to their obliteration.

To round the post out (although I realize I haven’t actually said much), another quote, this time on the subject of Truth. (Yes, I purposely decided to capitalize it.) I was tempted to quote this entire chapter, but I decided to settle for a few paragraphs instead.

There is no subtler perversion of the Christian Faith than to treat it as a mere means to a worldly end, however admirable that end in itself may be. The Christian Faith is important because it is true. What it happens to achieve, in ourselves or in others, is another and, strictly speaking, secondary matter. For the Christian Faith will remain true whether we who profess it turn into heroic saints or into even more miserable sinners. We must insist that we worship God because he is God, not because we want something out of him. What a mean blasphemy it would be, to go through magnificent acts of public worship always with the dominant intention at the back of the mind—“This is really going to make a better chap of me!” What arrogance and presumption, to treat eternal God, throned in glory, as a visual aid to moral self-improvement.
To think christianly is to think in terms of Revelation. For the secularist, God and theology are the playthings of the mind. For the Christian, God is real, and Christian theology describes his truth revealed to us. For the secular mind, religion is essentially a matter of theory; for the Christian mind, Christianity is a matter of acts and facts. The acts and facts which are the basis of our faith are recorded in the Bible. They have been interpreted and illuminated in the long history of the Church. The Christian mind is inescapably and unbrokenly conscious of the hard, factual quality of the Christian Faith. The Christian mind is alert to the solid, God-given, authoritative factualness of the Christian Faith and the Christian Church. Christianity has been called the most materialistic religion in history. That is an illuminating point. For Christianity is so much more than a mere moral code, a recipe for virtue, a system of comfortable idealistic thought. It is a religion of acts and facts. Its God is not an abstraction, but a Person—with a right arm and a voice. Its God has moved among us. How wonderful are thy works! That is a persistent biblical theme. Not, how interesting are thy theories. Not, how intense is thy being. Not even, how unanswerable are thy arguments. But, how wonderful are thy works. For Christianity is a religion of things that have happened—a Baby born in Bethlehem, a body nailed up on a cross. It is a religion of continuing daily action, centred around solid things like fonts and altars, bread and wine.
The secular mind will not have this. And, worse still, secularism has eaten away from the Christian mind that sense of Revelation’s rocklike quality without which the Christian mind is no longer Christian. Hence the tendency in the modern world to treat the Christian Faith as though it were simply a series of interesting speculations, and Christian practice a matter of interesting experiments, all devised and made by men as part of their search for God and their pursuit of virtue. When secularism gives this debased status to the Christian Faith we have no cause to be surprised; but when professing Christians begin to accept the Christian Faith and the Christian Church at the valuation of secularism, then there is cause for alarm.
The popular modern unwillingness to reckon with the authoritative, God-given nature of the Christian Faith is bred of the anti-supernaturalist bias which dominates contemporary thinking, and is indeed native and natural to secularism.It is also nourished by the popular misconception of the nature of truth. Our culture is bedevilled by the it’s-all-a-matter-of-opinion code. In the sphere of religious and moral thinking we are rapidly heading for a state of intellectual anarchy in which the difference between truth and falsehood will no longer be recognized. Indeed it would seem possible that the words true and false will eventually (and logically) be replaced by the words likeable and dislikeable. I have known educated people, professing Christians, who purposely gathered together for religious discussion men and women representing the widest possible varieties of religious conviction. This was fair enough. But unfortunately their aim, as they put it, was to get everyone to make his “individual contribution” (how fraught with error this phrase can be) so that collectively they might arrive at the truth. Now there is much to be said, socially and intellectually, for bringing together people of different outlooks and beliefs; but there is no rational basis for the notion that by mixing a number of conflicting views you are likely to arrive at the truth. You cannot construct truth from a mass of dissonant and disparate material. you cannot construct truth at all: you can only discover it. And the more noisily opinionated people intervene with their contributions, the less likely you are to discover it.
Yet, within the Church as well as outside it, this perverted notion persists. Truth is conceived on a quantitative basis—no doubt under the influence of statistical reasoning and public opinion polls. It is being assumed that the more people there are with different opinions to contribute, the greater “truth” will emerge from the mixing of these opinions in the melting-pot. Truth is regarded as a kind of pudding, or brew, which you concoct from human opinions. (This false notion of truth has done damage at some levels to the ecumenical movement.) But truth is more like a rock than a pudding—a rock which you lay bare by scraping away the soil. And the soil is largely compounded of human prejudice and passion.
Let us clear away a bit of soil here and now. Two opinions are rarely better than one. If A thinks rationally on a given matter and B thinks irrationally on the same matter, then neither A nor the world in general will benefit from having A’s view adulterated with B’s. Again, as someone wisely put it, if schoolboy X has got the right answer to a sum, and his eleven companions have got various wrong answers, then X would be a fool to compromise by accepting a figure averaged out from the twelve exercise books.
Christian truth is objective, four-square, unshakable. It is not built of men’s opinions. It is not something fabricated either by scholars or by men in the street, still less something assembled from a million answers, Yes, No, and Don’t know, obtained from a cross-section of the human race. Christian truth is something given, revealed, laid open to the eye of the patient, self-forgetful inquirer. You do not make the truth. You reside in the truth. A suitable image for truth would be that of a lighthouse lashed by the elemantal fury of undisciplined error. Those who have come to reside in the truth must stay there. It is not their business to go back into error for the purpose of joining their drowning fellows with the pretence that, inside or outside, the conditions are pretty much the same. It is their duty to draw others within the shelter of the truth. For truth is most certainly a shelter. And it is inviolable. If we start to dismantle it and give it away in bits to those outside, there will be nothing left to protect our own heads—and no refuge in which to receive the other, should they at length grow weary of error.

Again, in this case Blamires is writing about people in the age of modernism, who are trying to discover truth; it is even more critical to read about truth in the age of post-modernism, when people don’t believe there is such a thing as truth.

Murder on the Orient Express

2011-03-29T08:47:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Agatha Christie

I must have been feeling a bit nostalgic, but somewhere I came across an old, battered copy of Murder on the Orient Express, and I figured I’d read it again. I read a lot of Agatha Christie novels when I was a kid (or maybe a teenager). My mom loved murder mysteries (and still does), so she had a whole shelf of Agatha Christies, and I remember spending one summer reading them all.

And Murder on the Orient Express is one the most classic Agatha Christie novels. Featuring her detective, Hercule Poirot, exercising his little grey cells, and with an ending that is a classic in the murder mystery world (for once I won’t give a spoiler), this novel has definitely become a classic. Although… I just didn’t get into it, as I reread it.

I did laugh, though, when I read this excerpt on the inside of the book, intended as a teaser for the reader:

“Me, I suspect everybody till the last minute,” he said. “All the same, I must admit that I cannot see this sober, long-headed MacQueen losing his head and stabbing his victim twelve or fourteen times. It is not in accord with his psychology—not at all.”
“No,” said M. Bouc thoughtfully. “That is the act of a man driven almost crazy with a frenzied hate—or else it suggests—a woman.”

I see this a lot in murder mysteries, even up to the present day—how women kill in passion, while men kill in cold blood. Someone has been stabbed repeatedly? Then it’s probably a woman! Or, in more modern times, a gay man! (Or a “foreigner.” The excerpt quoted above was actually a scaled-down version of the text in the actual book itself, in which M. Bouc suggests that it’s probably either a woman or a man of latin temperament.)

The Cold Six Thousand

2011-03-29T08:30:00.001-04:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

I had three books by Ellroy on my bookshelf; Blood’s a Rover (which I already read, and wrote about), The Cold Six Thousand, and American Tabloid. Unfortunately, not having looked into it ahead of time, it turns out that these books are sort of a trilogy—and, having read Blood’s a Rover and now The Cold Six Thousand, I’ve been reading it in the wrong order.

I was struck by the language in Blood’s a Rover. (Meaning the writing style, not that my delicate sensibilities were offended by the bad words.) As they mentioned on Wikipedia:

The highly stylized prose used in the main chapters builds upon the style used in American Tabloid (and, to a certain extent, White Jazz). Of the novel’s style, Ellroy noted:

The style I developed for The Cold Six Thousand is a direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that’s declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards. It was appropriate for that book, and that book only, because it’s the 1960s. It’s largely the story of reactionaries in America during that time, largely a novel of racism and thus the racial invective, and the overall bluntness and ugliness of the language.

The thing is, although these novels are packed with action and death and drug use and all sorts of attention-grabbing things, I find that they also make me sleepy for some reason. I can’t explain it, but as soon as I’d pick up The Cold Six Thousand and start reading, my eyes would start to get droopy and I’d be ready to nod off. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been travelling so much lately and doing so much of my reading on the plane, or if it’s that my brain can’t take so much action and wants to shut down in self defense. But it’s not a slur on the books themselves, because I’m very into them. When I work myself up to it, I’ll be reading American Tabloid, too, and I’m looking forward to it.

Mortal Fear

2011-02-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

Subject: Thriller
Author: Greg Iles

Well, sex and murder both sell, so Iles combined them together in one book. Women who visit a certain online erotic chatroom are being murdered by a serial killer! You could probably come up with a more titillating concept if you tried, but it would be difficult.

But as usual, it’s a great book. Nice and long, allowing Iles to get into things and make it nice and complex. Of course, the problem with a long book is that sometimes the author can lose steam by the end, which seems to happen in this case. A killer who had been hyperintelligent and ahead of the FBI the whole book, suddenly at the end is just a weird pervert who doesn’t understand people at all. Especially the whole, “let’s have the wife of the protagonist stand naked in front of the window, to put the killer in awe and draw him out to gaze on the perfect female form” bit; Iles tried so hard to work up to that, and make it believable, but it didn’t work, and ended up making the killer seem more like a ten-year-old boy than a grown, intelligent man.

But, like I keep saying, Iles is a good writer, and with a book this long he has a lot of time to let that writing shine, so even if there are parts I don’t like, I always know I’m in for something good when I pick up one of his books.

A Painted House

2011-02-11T20:10:00.003-05:00

Subject: Novel
Author: John Grisham

As is so often the case when a book is good but there’s nothing that really jumps out at me, I don’t have much to say about A Painted House. It’s one of those books that doesn’t have a page-turning plot; it just takes us through a summer in the life of a family running a cotton farm. There is some exciting stuff that happens, of course, or it wouldn’t be a book, but it’s not a murder mystery or a thriller.

It takes place in the South, and, accordingly, the book is slow paced and relaxed. (I should point out that I don’t mean slow paced in a bad way. It’s leisurely, and that’s part of what I liked about it.) Grisham writes in the first person from the point of view of a seven-year-old kid, and I think he mostly does a pretty convincing job of it.

The Catcher in the Rye

2011-02-05T17:53:00.003-05:00

Subject: Novel
Author: J.D. Salinger

I never read Catcher in the Rye in school. I can’t even remember where I got this copy of the book; it doesn’t have a back cover, which means that a publisher would probably tell me it’s stolen, and I should turn myself in at the nearest police station.

Anyway, not the point.

I don’t know if I liked it or not—but I think I did.

I’d been tempted to try and write this post in the style of Caulfield, but I finished reading it too long ago, and I’m not in the right frame of mind anymore.

Blood’s A Rover

2011-02-04T16:39:00.000-05:00

Subject: Crime Drama
Author: James Ellroy

I don’t even know what to say about this book. It’s so long and complicated that I don’t know where to begin, yet I want to sing its praises because it’s thoroughly enjoyable (for those who like crime fiction).

There are so many characters, with so many individual story lines, all of which are intertwined—and yet not at first; the reader gradually becomes aware of the connections—that it’s hard to say what “the plot” is. We know that there is a woman named Joan; she seems to keep appearing in the storylines. There’s a story of a hijacked truck which comes right at the beginning and then seems to be forgotten—until it starts making its way back into the book again, from time to time. We know that there seem to be connections to Haiti (and eventually, people start going there and dying). There’s just so much going on.

It’s the type of book I’d want to go back and reread, now that I know some of the interconnected plots, just to see if I’d enjoy it more, or get some of the nuances I didn’t get the first time, because I couldn’t possibly have gotten them.

A Small Town In Germany

2011-02-04T16:27:00.000-05:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: John le Carré

Rather than starting off this post with just the usual “another great book by le Carré” I’ll simply start where the book does; I’ll quote the first section of the book in its entirety. Probably a huge copyright infringement. There is no title or section heading; the book simply charges straight into the following text:

Ten minutes to midnight; a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black and guarded by policemen. Their leather coats glistened in the lamplight, the black flags hung over them like birds. It was if all but they had heard the alarm and fled. Now a car, now a pedestrian hurried past, and the silence that followed was like a wake. A tram sounded, but far away. In the grocer’s shop, from a pyramid of tins, the hand-written notice advertised the emergency: ‘Lay in your store now!’ Among the crumbs, marzipan pigs like hairless mice proclaimed the forgotten Saint’s Day.
Only the posters spoke. From trees and lanterns they fought their futile war, each at the same height as if that were the regulation; they were printed in radiant paint, mounted on hardboard, and draped in thin streamers of black bunting, and they rose at him vividly as he hastened past. ‘Send the Foreign Workers Home!’ ‘Rid us of the Whore Bonn!’ ‘Unite Germany First, Europe Second!’ And the largest was set above them, in a tall streamer right across the street: ‘Open the road East, the road West has failed’. His dark eyes paid them no attention. A policeman stamped his boots and grimaced at him, making a hard joke of the weather; another challenged him but without conviction; and one called ‘Guten Abend’ but he offered no reply; for he had no mind for any but the plumper figure a hundred paces ahead of him who trotted hurriedly down the wide avenue, entering the shadow of a black flag, emerging as the tallow lamplight took him back.
The dark had made no ceremony of coming nor the dark grey day of leaving, but the night was crisp for once and smelt of winter. For most months, Bonn is not a place of seasons; the climate is all indoors,a climate of headaches, warm and flat like bottled water, a climate of waiting, of bitter tastes taken from the slow river, of fatigue and reluctant growth, and the air is an exhausted wind fallen on the plain, and the dusk when it comes is nothing but a darkening of the day’s mist, a lighting of tube lamps in the howling streets. But on that spring night the winter had come back to visit, slipping up the Rhine valley under cover of the predatory darkness, and it quickened them as they went, hurt them with its unexpected chill. The eyes of the smaller man, straining ahead of him,shed tears of cold.
The avenue curved, taking them past the yellow walls of the University. ‘Democrats! Hang the Press Baron!’ ‘The World belongs to the Young!’ ‘Let the English Lordlings beg!’ ‘Alex Springer to the gallows!’ ‘Long Live Axel Springer!’ ‘Protest is Freedom’. These posters were done in woodcut on a student press. Overhead the young foliage glittered in a fragmented canopy of green glass. The lights were brighter here, the police fewer. The men strode on, neither faster nor slower; the first busily, with a beadle’s flurry. His stride though swift was stagy and awkward, as if he had stepped down from somewhere grander; a walk replete with a German burgher’s dignity. His arms swung shortly at his sides and his back was straight. Did he know he was being followed? His head was held stiff in authority, but authority became him poorly. A man drawn forward by what he saw? Or driven by what lay behind? Was it fear that prevented him from turning? A man of substance does not move his head. The second man stepped lightly in his wake. A sprite, weightless as the dark, slipping through the shadows as if they were a net; a clown stalking a courtier.
They entered the narrow alley; the air was filled with the smells of sour food. Once more the walls cried to them, now in the tell-tale liturgy of German advertising: ‘Strong Men Drink Beer!’ ‘Knowledge is Power, Read Molden Books!’ Here for the first time the echo of their footsteps mingled in unmistakeable challenge; here for the first time the man of substance seemed to waken, sensing the danger behind. It was no more than a slur, a tiny imperfection in the determined rhythm of his portly march; but it took him to the edge of the pavement, away from the darkness of the walls, and he seemed to find comfort in the brighter places, where the lamplight and the policemen could protect him. Yet his pursuer did not relent. ‘Meet us in Hanover!’ the poster cried. ‘Karfield speaks in Hanover!’ ‘Meet us in Hanover on Sunday!’
An empty tram rolled past, its windows protected with adhesive mesh. A single church bell began its monotonous chime, a dirge for Christian virtue in an empty city. They were walking again, closer together, but still the man in front did not look back. They rounded another corner; ahead of them, the great spire of the Minster was cut like thin metal against the empty sky. Reluctantly the first chimes were answered by others, until all over the town there rose a slow cacophony of uncertain peals. An Angelus? An air raid? A young policeman, standing in the doorway of a sports shop, bared his head. In the Cathedral porch, a candle burned in a bowl of red glass; to one side stood a religious bookshop. The plump man paused, leaned forward as if to examine something in the window; glanced down the road; and in that moment the light from the window shone full upon his features. The smaller man ran forward; stopped; ran forward again; and was too late.
The limousine had drawn up, an Opel Rekord driven by a pale man hidden in the smoked glass. Its back door opened and closed; ponderously it gathered speed, indifferent to the one sharp cry, a cry of fury and of accusation, of total loss and total bitterness which, drawn as if by force from the breast of him who uttered it, rang abruptly down the empty street and,as abruptly, died. The policeman spun around, shone his torch. Held in its beam, the small man did not move; he was staring after the limousine. Shaking over the cobble, skidding on the wet tramlines, disregarding the traffic lights, it had vanished westward towards the illuminated hills.
‘Who are you?’
The beam rested on the coat of English tweed, too hairy for such a little man, the fine, neat shoes grey with mud, the dark, unblinking eyes.
‘Who are you?’ the policeman repeated; for the bells were everywhere now, and their echoes persisted eerily.
One small hand disappeared into the folds of the coat and emerged with a leather holder. The policeman accepted it gingerly, unfastened the catch while he juggled with his torch and the black pistol he clutched inexpertly in his left hand.
‘What was it?’ the policeman asked, as he handed back the wallet. ‘Why did you call out?’
The small man gave no answer. He had walked a few paces along the pavement.
‘You never saw him before?’ he asked, still looking after the car. ‘You don’t know who he was?’ He spoke softly, as if there were children sleeping upstairs; a vulnerable voice, respectful of silence.
‘No.’
The sharp, lined face broke into a conciliatory smile. ‘Forgive me. I made a silly mistake. I thought I recognized him.’ His accent was neither wholly English nor wholly German, but a privately elected no-man’s land, picked and set between the two. And he would move it, he seemed to say, a little in either direction, if it chanced to inconvenience the listener.
‘It’s the season,’ the small man said, determined to make conversation. ‘The sudden cold, one looks at people more.’ He had opened a tin of small Dutch cigars and was offering them to the policeman. The policeman declined so he lit one for himself.
‘It’s the riots,’ the policeman answered slowly, ‘The flags, the slogans. We’re all nervous these days. This week Hanover, last week Frankfurt. It upsets the natural order.’ He was a young man and had studied for his appointment. ‘They should forbid them more,’ he added, using the common dictum. ‘Like the Communists.’
He saluted loosely, once more the stranger smiled, a last affecting smile, dependent, hinting at friendship, dwindling reluctantly. And was gone. Remaining where he was, the policeman listened attentively to the fading footfall. Now it stopped; to be resumed again, more quickly—was it his imagination?—with greater conviction than before. For a moment he pondered.
‘In Bonn,’ he said to himself with an inward sigh, recalling the stranger’s weightless tread, ‘even the flies are official.’
Taking out his notebook, he carefully wrote down the time and place and nature of the incident. He was not a fast-thinking man, but admired for his thoroughness. This done, he added the number of the motor-car, which for some reason had remained in his mind. Suddenly he stopped; and stared at what he had written; at the name and the car number; and he thought of the plump man and the long, marching stride, and his heart began beating very fast. He thought of the secret instruction he had read on the recreation-room noticeboard, and the little muffled photograph from long ago. The notebook still in his hand, he ran off for the telephone kiosk as fast as his boots would carry him.

To me, this is a pretty masterful piece of writing. His descriptive prose always delights, and (as strange as it seems to say something like this), I love that he’s not afraid of the semicolon.

Later on in the book comes a chapter called Guilty Thursday, in which the protagonist is trying to get inside the head of the missing man, and we see what’s happening in his mind, complete with distractions.

As usual, le Carré avoids making anything too simplistic; the protagonist is simply that—the protagonist. He’s not the hero, nor is he the villain. He’s a man, and, like all men, has his complications. Similarly with the plot, we know from the beginning that something odd is going on, that not all is quite what it seems, but le Carré lets the story unfold naturally, without spoonfeeding us the plot points.

Making Software

2011-02-04T14:54:00.001-05:00

Full Title: Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
Subject: Software Development
Edited By: Andy Oram, Greg Wilson

I tend to love books about software development (or, if you’re full of yourself, “software engineering,” although I think the field is too nascent, and hasn’t earned the “engineering” designation yet). This promised to be another good one; a book on various things we believe about what works and what doesn’t work, along with studies done to back up (or disprove) the beliefs. Unfortunately, it turns out that reading about studies is pretty durned boring, even if you’re intensely interested in what the study is about. Does pair programming work? I really want to know, but reading about the studies that were done about it—including tables and charts and graphs of figures—is just plain tedious.

The most interesting chapter for me was Chapter 11, on Conway’s Corollary. The chapter defines the corollary as:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

Whatever the org chart for your software development team looks like, the design (or at least architecture) of the system you’re developing will probably be similar. Conversely, and maybe more importantly, the studies show that the closer your system’s architecture does match your org chart, the better your project will probably do. There are various reasons given for this and case studies and examples, but the net result is that if you try to make the communication structure of your team work similar to the architecture of your team—if the people building the components communicate similarly to how the components themselves will communicate—you’ll have a better chance of success in your project.

Chapter 13, on why there aren’t more women in computer science, also caught my eye, but it just didn’t quite ring true to me. The studies done didn’t feel as solid as some of the other studies, which made the chapter seem too much like generalizations rather than findings—but that could be because there are already so many sweeping generalizations about male vs. female issues of all types that it’s hard to really get down to science sometimes.

I didn’t end up enjoying the book, but not because of the book itself—it’s a good book, and we need more like it—just because I find it hard to pay attention when confronted with too many statistics. I’m… what’s the word? Lazy.

London Bridges

2010-12-24T13:24:00.000-05:00

Subject: Suspense/Thriller
Author: James Patterson

Wow. Talk about a disappointment. Bad writing, characters I didn't care about, a plot that jumped around so much it just felt formulaic... I think I've got other unread Pattersons on the shelf, and now I have to decide if I want to bother.

Need examples? Sure. We'll start with Chapter 92--yes, you heard me, Chapter 92; every chapter was a couple of pages long--where we get a plot twist that's so out of the blue I actually got confused. It centres around the following sentence:

My second day back, the analyst Monnie Donnelley and I made a paper connection that interested me enough to drive all the way out to Lexington, Virginia.

This kicks off the protagonist interviewing the suspect, and getting a confession. But... what was the paper connection?!? What did he discover? Why did he drive out to Lexington, to confront the suspect? Patterson doesn't even bother to make something up. "It's been a couple of pages since there was a plot twist; I'll throw one in here." This is some of the laziest writing I've ever seen. (And that's saying something, considering that I've read one of Dan Brown's books...)

Another example is some typically bad dialogue, between the protagonist and his "girlfriend," Jamilla:

The Kingfish, as it turned out, was a totally democratic restaurant: no reservations, but we were seated quickly at a nice table along the wall. We ordered drinks and food, but mostly we were there to hold hands and talk about everything that was going on in our lives.

"This thing with Little Alex," I told Jamilla about mid-way through dinner, it's the worst thing for me. Goes against who I am, everything I learned from Nana. I can't stand to leave him there."

Jamilla frowned and seemed angry. "Doesn't she treat him well?"

"Oh no, no, Christine is a good mother. It's the separation that kills me. I love that little boy, and I miss him so much every day I'm away from him. I miss the way he talks, walks, thinks, tells bad jokes, listens to mine. We're pals, Jam."

"And so," Jamilla said, holding my eyes with hers, "you escape into your work."

"And so"--I nodded--"I do. But that's a whole 'nother story. Hey, let's get out of here."

"What do you have in mind, Agent Cross?"

"Nothing illegal, Inspector Hughes."

"Hmmm. Really? Well, that's a shame."

Do you buy that dialogue? Does it sound realistic, or natural? Or does it sound to your ears (as it does to mine) like a writer struggling to show intimacy between two people, and failing?

I don't usually write these posts and just trash the writer, but wow, how did Patterson get so popular? (Answer to rhetorical question: some books are better than others. Looking back through this blog, this is the third book I've read from him, and so far he's 1 for 3.)

The Broker

2010-11-21T08:21:00.000-05:00

Subject: Spy Thriller
Author: John Grisham

I’ve only read a few of Grisham’s books, and mostly the “lawyer thriller” ones; books like The Firm, and A Time to Kill. So it was interesting to read The Broker, which turned out to be more of a spy thriller.

I always say that one of the things I like about John le Carré’s novels is that they feel realistic and accurate; I felt the same for The Broker, except that it was (of course) realistic and accurate from an American perspective, whereas le Carré writes from a British perspective.

An advantage of not having read a Grisham novel in a while was that I was out of his style, and I really didn’t know, up to the end, whether Backman would live or not. I don’t usually get that kind of suspense from a book, because usually an author won’t let a main character die; le Carré will, and I wondered whether Grisham would. Of course, he wrapped everything up a little too perfectly, but he waited until the very last end of the book to do it, so the suspense was kept up until then. So I—

Oh no! But what about the Tin Man! Backman’s still in danger!

Earth (The Book)

2010-11-20T13:55:00.000-05:00

Full Title: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race
Subject: Humour
Author: Jon Stewart and other writers of The Daily Show

Having read America (The Book), I was anticipating reading Earth (The Book). Unfortunately, the results weren’t as spectacular. Like America, Earth was really well laid out, and a lot of thought was put into the presentation; I just felt that the humour didn’t carry through as consistently as it did in America.

As a typical example of the writing, take this passage from p.46, which is from the chapter on Man (meaning humans, not males):

Appearance
The superiority of inner beauty to outward good looks was a pervasive cultural theme in our society, especially among the less outwardly good looking. We often spoke of our admiration for intelligence, honesty and humor as traits we wanted in a mate. When we did so, our genitals would sigh and roll their eyes.

As I say, this is a fairly typical example of the writing, and it’ll be familiar to anyone who watches The Daily Show since it’s very much their style of humour. But for some reason, overall, I found the book somewhat disappointing.

Oh well. I still have the show.

Clandestine

2010-10-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: James Ellroy

Ever since reading The Black Dahlia I’ve been looking for other books by Ellroy, but he doesn’t seem to be that popular here in Canada. If I ever see him on the shelf it’s only Black Dahlia, nothing else. But we happened to be in the States recently, and when I went into a bookstore there I found a bunch of Ellroy’s books—and promptly bought four of them, including Clandestine.

I’ll do my best not to read them all right after each other, so that I don’t Ellroy myself to death.

I’m happy to say, though, that I enjoyed Clandestine as much as I enjoyed Black Dahlia. It was a shorter book—328 pages, with large type—which allowed me to read most of it during a 10 hour car ride back from the States. (I was finishing off A Most Wanted Man at the outset of the ride, or I might have read all of Clandestine in one sitting.)

As with The Black Dahlia, we are given imperfect but likable characters in Clandestine. Ellroy’s Los Angeles is alive with crime, crooked cops (and some not-so-crooked ones), and promiscuous sex. As the protagonist, Fred Underhill, states it in the opening paragraphs of the novel:

During the dark, cold winter of 1951 I worked Wilshire Patrol, played a lot of golf, and sought out the company of lonely women for one-night stands.
Nostalgia victimizes the unknowing by instilling in them a desire for a simplicity and innocence they can never achieve. The fifties weren’t a more innocent time. The dark salients that govern life today were there then, only they were harder to find. That was why I was a cop, and why I chased women. Golf was no more than an island of purity, something I did exceedingly well. I could drive a golf ball three hundred yards. Golf was breathtaking cleanliness and simplicity.
My patrol partner was Wacky Walker. He was five years my senior, with the same amount of time in the department. We first bumped into each other in the muster room of Wilshire Station, each of us lugging a golf bag. We both broke into huge grins and knew each other instantly—and completely.
With Wacky it was poetry, wonder, and golf; with me it was women, wonder, and golf. “Wonder” meant the same thing to both of us: the job, the streets, the people, and the mutable ethos of we who had to deal daily with drunks, hopheads, gunsels, wienie-waggers, hookers, reefer smokers, burglars, and the unnamed lonely detritus of the human race. We became the closest of friends, and later partners on day watch.

I was going to stop the quote after the first couple of paragraphs, and then decided that it was important to include Freddy’s description of “the wonder,” since it’s such a large part of the ethos of the novel. Freddy became a cop because of his fascination with the underbelly of society. This sets him apart from other fictional cops; he’s not a crusader out for justice, and neither is he a crooked cop out only out for himself—he’s simply a guy who is fascinated with the people of Los Angeles, and the things they do (legal and illegal). In a sense, I’m a kindred spirit, so maybe that’s why I liked his character. (Of course, not being a cop, I’ll never see much of the wonder first-hand.)

You’ll also notice that Freddy’s way of talking is a bit different than we talk nowadays; we don’t speak of “hopheads” (heroin or opium addicts) or “gunsels” anymore. (In fact, I had to look up “gunsel,” which either means a criminal who carries a gun or a homosexual. Which meaning Ellroy intended I have no idea.) The only way I could get into the writing, at first, was to put myself in mind of the movie L.A. Confidential, which happens to be based on another Ellroy book. And, appropriately enough, Clandestine introduces the characters of Dudley Smith, Mike Breuning and Dick Carlisle, who play large roles in L.A. Confidential. My only issue with The Black Dahlia had been that I’d already seen the movie, and so all of the characters had the voices of the actors from the movie; it was similar with Dudley Smith in Clandestine, who had James Cromwell’s voice in my head. But he was only one character, and not prevalent throughout the book anyway, so it wasn’t a major hurdle.

I think what I like most about Ellroy’s writing is that he manages to work in some intricate plots. One might think, only knowing the genre and nothing else, that these books would be nonstop sex and violence, but the mystery that Underhill is trying to untangle in this book is a complex one, and it carries with it an intricate story. I now have three more Ellroy books on the shelf, and I’m looking forward to biting into the next one.

A Most Wanted Man

2010-10-23T14:22:00.002-04:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: John le Carré

I tend to like le Carré’s spy novels because of their realism. There are no 007-esque heroes in these novels, screeching around Europe in expensive cars with guns a-blazin, and the occasional sexual respite in the arms of a girl who’s too sexy to be human. Instead, you have the bureaucracies of intelligence organizations, at each other’s throats, vying for supremacy not over villainy and terrorism, but over each other. (You also have good writing, and good, intricate plots.)

A Most Wanted Man is another good example. Written in a post-9/11 world, set in Germany, the book examines the hunt for a man who could be an Islamic terrorist—but might not be. Enter Issa, who is introduced in the first couple of pages:

A Turkish heavyweight boxing champion sauntering down a Hamburg street with his mother on his arm can scarcely be blamed for failing to notice that he is being shadowed by a skinny boy in a black coat.
Big Melik, as he was known to his admiring neighbourhood, was a giant of a fellow, shaggy, unkempt and genial, with a broad natural grin and black hair bound back in a ponytail and a rolling, free-and-easy gait that, even without his mother, took up half the pavement. At the age of twenty he was in his own small world a celebrity, and not only for his prowess in the boxing ring: elected youth representative of his Islamic sports club, three times runner-up in the North German Championship hundred-metre butterfly stroke and, as if all that weren’t enough, star goalkeeper of his Saturday soccer team.
Like most very large people, he was also more accustomed to being looked at than looking, which is another reason why the skinny boy got away with shadowing him for three successive days and nights.
The two men first made eye contact as Melik and his mother Leyla emerged from the al-Umma Travel Shop, fresh from buying air tickets for Melik’s sister’s wedding in their home village outside Ankara. Melik felt someone’s gaze fixed on him, glanced round, and came face to face with a tall, desperately thin boy of his own height with a straggly beard, eyes reddened and deep-set, and a long black coat that could have held three magicians. He had a black-and-white keffiyeh round his neck and a tourist’s camelskin saddlebag slung over his shoulder. He stared at Melik, never blinking, but appealing to him with his fiery, sunken eyes.
Yet the boy’s air of desperation need not have troubled Melik all that much since the travel shop was situated at the edge of the main railway station concourse, where every variety of lost soul—German vagrants, Asians, Arabs, Africans, or Turkish like himself but less fortunate—hung around all day long, not to mention legless men on electric carts, drug-sellers and their customers, beggars and their dogs, and a seventy-year-old cowboy in a Stetson and silver-studded leather riding breeches. Few had work, and a sprinkling had no business standing on German soil at all, but were at best tolerated under a deliberate policy of destitution, pending their summary deportation, usually at dawn. Only new arrivals or the willfully foolhardy took the risk. Cannier illegals gave the station a wide berth.
A further good reason to ignore the boy was the classical music which the station authorities boom at full blast over this section of the concourse from a battery of well-aimed loudspeakers. Its purpose, far from spreading feelings of peace and wellbeing among its listeners, is to send them packing.
Despite these impediments the skinny boy’s face imprinted itself on Melik’s consciousness and for a fleeting moment he felt embarrassed by his own happiness. Why on earth should he? Something splendid had just occurred, and he couldn’t wait to phone his sister and tell her that their mother Leyla, after six months of tending her dying husband, and a year of mourning her heart out for him, was bubbling over with pleasure at the prospect of attending her daughter’s wedding, and fussing about what to wear, and whether the dowry was big enough, and the room as handsome as everybody, including Melik’s sister, said he was.
So why shouldn’t Melik chatter along with his own mother?—which he did, enthusiastically, all the way home. It was the skinny boy’s stillness, he decided later. Those lines of age in a face as young as mine. His look of winter on a lovely spring day.

I tend to savour le Carré’s writing, which is why I let myself quote such long passages.

On the other side of the law are Günther Bachmann and Erna Frey, who work for one of Germany’s intelligence agencies. (There are numerous, and, as mentioned, they’re all fighting for supremacy.) We get the impression right from the start that Günther is good at what he does; a veteran of the intelligence game from the Cold War days, with good instincts. However, the world is not the same as it was in the Cold War days; one of the main problems is that it is so difficult to infiltrate Islamic groups, and, hence, so difficult to get good intelligence. When Günther hears about Issa, he feels this may finally be his chance.

But in le Carré’s world—which closely mirrors our own—there are myriad intelligence groups who all have their own ideas about how to handle the situation, and most people’s preference is to surround Issa in a squeal of dozens of police cars, making a loud arrest, as an example to other Muslims. (In le Carré’s world—again, as in our own—the line between an Islamic Terrorist and a Muslim is fuzzy, if not nonexistent, in most people’s minds.)

And so the “protectors”—some type of oversight committee, overseeing all of Germany’s intelligence agencies—are calling a meeting.

Günther Bachmann was at first annoyed, then alarmed, to be summarily bidden to the ample presence of Herr Arnold Mohr, head of the protectors’ Hamburg Station, at midday on a Sunday when Mohr, an ostentatious Christian, should by rights have been parading his family at one of the city’s best churches. Bachmann had spent the night ploughing through background files on Chechen jihadis, prepared for him by Erna Frey who, in a rare burst of self-indulgence, had taken herself off to Hanover for a niece’s wedding. His reading complete, he had been thinking of flying up to Copenhagen and having a couple of beers with the Danish Security crowd, whom he liked; and, if they let him, a word with the good-brother lorry driver who had smuggled Issa to Hamburg and made him a present of his overcoat. He had gone so far as to call his connection there: no problem, Günther, we’ll send you a car to the airport.
Instead of which, he now found himself apprehensively prowling his office in the stables while Erna Frey, still in her festive clothes, sat primly at her desk labouring at a monthly summary of costings she was preparing for Berlin.
‘Keller’s here,’ she informed him without lifting her head.
‘Keller? Which Keller?’ Bachmann retorted irritably. ‘Hans Keller from Moscow? Paul Keller from Amman?’
‘Dr. Otto Keller, the most protective of all protectors, flew in from Cologne one hour ago. Look out of the window and you can admire his helicopter cluttering up the car park.’
Bachmann looked as he was told and let out an exclamation of disgust. ‘What the hell does Uncle Otto want from us this time? Have we jumped another traffic light? Bugged his mother?’
‘The meeting is top secret, operational and terribly urgent,’ Erna Frey replied, calmly continuing with her work. ‘That’s all I can winkle out of them.’
Bachmann’s heart sank. ‘Meaning, they’ve found my boy?’
‘If by your boy you mean Issa Karpov, rumour has it that they’re warm.’
Bachmann clapped a hand to his brow in despair. ‘They can’t have arrested him. Arni swore the police wouldn’t do that without consulting us first. Your case, Günther. Your case, old boy, but we confer. That was the pact.’ A different thought occurred to him, an even more appalling one: ‘Don’t tell me the police arrested him just to show Arni who was boss!’
Erna Frey remained unmoved. ‘My Deep Throat—in the form of one very bad tennis player in Arni’s very incompetent counter-espionage section—assures me that the protectors are warm. That’s the entire sum of her message. She’ll never forgive me for beating her six-love in two straight sets, so she brings me gifts of gossip from the canteen. Then she tells me I mustn’t tell you, so naturally I’m telling you,’ she said and, watched by Bachmann, again returned to her calculations.
‘Why so sour this morning?’ he demanded of her back. ‘That’s my job.’
‘I loathe weddings. I consider them unnatural and insulting. Every time I attend one, I see another good woman go to the wall.’
‘How about the poor bloody groom?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, the poor bloody groom is the wall. Keller wishes the meeting to be principals only. You, Mohr, Keller.’
‘No policemen?’
‘None advertised.’
Mollified, Bachmann resumed his study of the courtyard. ‘Then it’s two against one. The shining-white protectors versus one excommunicated black sheep.’
‘Well just remember you’re all fighting the same enemy,’ said Erna Frey tartly. ‘One another.’
Her scepticism shocked him, since it was much like his own.
‘And you’re coming with me,’ he retorted.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I detest Keller. Keller detests me. I shall be a liability and speak out of turn.’
But under his unflinching eye she was already closing down her computer.

Again, a long passage so that you can savour le Carré’s writing along with me.

There are a few things I like about this passage:

The way le Carré takes his time about getting to where he’s going. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but he seems to enjoy the act of writing itself—and again, this is what sets him apart from other spy novelists. They usually write in the same manner that action happens in their plots: fast-paced, with snappy adjectives and adverbs, in a rush to get to the next plot point (or sex scene, or murder). But le Carré simply writes, and lets the story take care of itself.
For some reason, I like the fact that he always refers to Erna Frey using her full name. In this scene Günther Bachmann is sometimes Günther, sometimes Bachmann, sometimes Günther Bachmann, but Erna Frey is always Erna Frey. It’s such a subtle point, and yet it gives us a bit of a glimpse into Günther’s relationship with her, without le Carré having to spell anything out. Any time a writer is able to let the reader come to understand something, without spelling it out for her, he has done his job well.
I just plain like the mischievousness of Günther and Erna deciding that she should attend the meeting with him, even though she shouldn’t, and the banter between the two of them. I especially like Erna’s line: “‘Well just remember you’re all fighting the same enemy,’ said Erna Frey tartly. ‘One another.’”

As is so often the case, of course, the novel ends badly for all involved, and leaves one with a sense that the world is a horrible place, and the people who are running it should not be. Knowing le Carré’s writing by now, as soon as I saw the Americans get involved, I had a general idea of how things would turn out. Incisive? Pessimistic? You say potato, I say potato.

One other point I should make, about le Carré’s writing: when it comes to a middle-aged man falling for a younger woman, and the delusions that man can let himself succumb to, nobody (that I know of) does it better than John le Carré. In this particular case, the man and woman in question may or may not actually end up together at the end of the book—in my mind there’s some ambiguity, although others might not question it at all—but during the course of the book itself, seeing things from the man’s point of view, le Carré is very realistic. The mix of hopelessness, misguided optimism, joy, and melancholy, all thrown together in the man’s view of the situation, are, I assume, how it would probably be. I hope never to find out for myself.

The Bourne Deception

2010-10-22T12:23:00.002-04:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: Eric Van Lustbader

Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series has been going on without him, and, as mentioned before, I kind of like the books written by Van Lustbader even better than Ludlum’s books (other than the original, The Bourne Identity.)

As mentioned on the Bourne Betrayal post, Van Lustbader is no longer dwelling on Bourne’s age, as Ludlum was in his last Bourne books. This gives Bourne more of a timeless quality, almost like James Bond. Now that Bourne doesn’t get winded every time he runs up a flight of stairs, it makes it more believable that there can be book after book in the series, without him having to carry a walker with him, or fight international terrorism from an old folks home. (Maybe “believable” is the wrong word; it’s actually more realistic to do it Ludlum’s way, and have Bourne age, and I’m usually a big fan of realism. But I still like it better when we ignore Bourne’s age.)

Unfortunately, as I have a tendency to do, I missed some of the books in the series. This is the seventh in the Bourne books; there were:

The Bourne Identity (Ludlum)
The Bourne Supremacy (Ludlum)
The Bourne Ultimatum (Ludlum)
The Bourne Sanction (Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Betrayal (Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Legacy (Van Lustbader)
The Bourne Deception (Van Lustbader)

I’ve read the three Ludlum books, and I’ve read Betrayal and Deception (this one), which means that I’ve missed Sanction and Legacy. Part of my problem is that I keep seeing the new ones when they come out, but refusing to buy them in hardcover, and waiting for the paperback—but by that point, when I see them on the shelf, I can’t remember which ones I’ve read and which I haven’t.

The other odd note about this book was that Van Lustbader introduced a hint of mysticism into the story, which felt out of place. I’m not sure why he did it, and I find myself hoping that the Bourne books I missed—which I shall surely read, at some point—don’t have it.

The Devil’s Punchbowl

2010-10-22T11:53:00.001-04:00

Subject: Suspense
Author: Greg Iles

Yes, another book by Iles. Get used to it, I like him.

As usual, though, I don’t have much to say about this book. As is almost always the case, Iles’ writing pulled me in immediately, and it was hard to put the book down. Luckily I was reading it on vacation, so that wasn’t a problem.

One thing that Iles seems to have lost, that I used to absolutely gush about on this blog, was his knack for taking on deep or controversial topics in his books. Lately, his books have been more straightforward thrillers or mysteries. Not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, since Iles does it so well, but it used to be very interesting to pick up one of his books and wonder what new topic he was going to cover. But he always does a good job of making his books realistic, and mostly following the conventions for this genre of fiction.

My only issue was that I seem to have missed the book which came before this one. Not normally a problem—and not really a problem even now—but it was obvious because Iles based this book in the same location that he’s used so often (Natchez), and used some of the same characters, so there was some major character development in the last book that this book built on. It will only become a problem when I read that previous book—whatever it is—and have a knowledge in the back of my mind as to what is going to happen.

The Art of Deception

2010-10-22T11:35:00.003-04:00

Full Title: The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
Subject: Social Engineering
Author: Kevin D. Mitnick & William L. Simon

This is a book I had meant to read for a long time, and finally picked up. If you’re not familiar with him, Mitnick is one of the most well known computer hackers/crackers, so it’s interesting to get his take on how he did what he did, although the book is framed more as a way of preventing social engineering attacks, not as a how-to manual. (That being said, after reading the book, I’m left with a sense that you really can’t prevent social engineering attacks; there will always be con artists, and there will always be people who fall for con artists—not necessarily even stupid or gullible people.)

I mentioned the term “social engineering,” so I should give a definition. Or, better yet, simply copy it from Wikipedia:

Social engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information, rather than by breaking in or using technical cracking techniques; essentially a fancier, more technical way of lying. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access; in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim.

In other words social engineering is really a way of conning information out of people. To use a common example, if you want to break into a system, instead of writing a fancy program to crack it, why not call someone who already has access to the system, pretend to be from the IT department, and ask that user for her username and password? Then you can simply log into the system at your leisure. (Note: There is never, ever, ever a valid reason for someone—even someone in your IT department—to ask you for your password. If someone is asking for your password, there’s a good chance the person is trying to break into your system(s).) Social engineering was Mitnick’s preferred approach to gaining access into a system; instead of firing up a computer and typing madly on the keyboard (as always tends to happen in the movies—I wonder what the heck they’re supposed to be typing?!?), he would get on the phone and start calling people, and conning them into revealing the information he needed.

I like the way the book was structured. Mitnick (and Simon) give various examples of social engineering attacks, which usually involve interactions with multiple people, whereby the attacker gains more and more sensitive information with each interaction. The examples usually start off with a series of phone calls, and then finish with a description of what has transpired.

For example, here’s a description of the first attack described in the book:

A private investigator wants to get private financial information about someone, and plans to use a credit checking agency (CreditChex) to get it, but that agency only gives out that kind of information to certain organizations—like a bank.
The PI calls the bank’s customer service line, and, pretending to be working on a book on private investigations, gets a Customer Service Representative to confirm that when they use CreditChex for information on clients they use something called a Merchant ID to identify themselves. The fact that it’s called a “Merchant ID” isn’t all that important on its own, but it does give the attacker the confidence to start using that lingo in subsequent conversations.
The attacker calls the bank’s number again, getting a different CSR (which is fairly likely), and then pretends to be calling from CreditChex, and doing a survey. By using the lingo picked up in the previous conversation, he is able to fool the new CSR into believing he’s legitimate, and in the midst of all of the innocuous-sounding questions, also asks something like, “And can you confirm your Merchant ID with me?” and later on, “And can you confirm which 1-800 number you call when requesting information on a client?”
Finally, the attacker is able to call the 1-800 number provided, pretend to be calling from the bank (by providing their Merchant ID), and requesting all of the information he wishes about the person he wants to know about.

This is typical of a social engineering attack in that the attacker starts out by getting seemingly unimportant information, and then in subsequent interactions parlaying that information into more and more important information.

The book ends with some chapters on recommended security training and security policies that organizations should think about adopting. (To the great surprise of noone, Mitnick now works as a computer security consultant, even though he’s not actually allowed to access a computer.) I didn’t bother reading these chapters, however, because… well, they were boring, and I’m not in charge of implementing security policies anywhere.

As mentioned, the purported aim of the book is to raise awareness of social engineering techniques, to better allow organizations and individuals to protect against them. However, as also mentioned, I left the book with more of a sense that you can’t protect against social engineering—con artists are good at what they do, and for many of the attacks mentioned in the book, the information being sought is so unimportant that most people probably would give it up. (By the time the attacker is going after really sensitive information, s/he usually has so much knowledge already that s/he really sounds legitimate.)

Would I myself be able to keep information private from a social engineer? Having just recently read this book, probably. Six months from now, or a year from now, once the book has fallen way off my radar? Maybe, maybe not.

War and Remembrance

2010-10-22T10:48:00.003-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Herman Wouk

I read The Winds of War a while ago, and immediately started on War and Remembrance, but what with one thing and another it took me a while to get through, and then I finished it while I was on vacation and therefore couldn’t post about it for a while. (I’ve got a stack of five other books to post about, too.)

This book continues on where The Winds of War left off, and continues to follow the characters through the war. (No new major characters are introduced.) I don’t have much to say about it specifically; it is, after all, a continuation of the work that was already begun in the first book. It was realistic of Wouk to let Warren die in combat, although, of all the Henrys, Warren was the one who was given the least attention in the first book, so it wasn’t completely unexpected. (It would have taken more courage for Wouk to kill off a character to whom the reader had grown more attached.) Interestingly, I felt a stronger pang when Leslie was killed then I did when Warren was killed, even though such detail was given to Warren’s death.

Pug and Rhoda’s marriage, already in question in the first book, finally dissolves by the end of the second book, allowing Pug to marry Pamela and Rho to marry… some minor character who was introduced for her to have someone to marry. (Wouk continues painting Pug in a more sympathetic light than Rho, and one leaves the book feeling that Pug has been able to attain the happiness he earned, while Rhoda has made her bed and has to lie in it. Something tells me that if I had known Pug and Rhoda in real life, this might not have been my attitude, but it’s normal for people to view cheating women with a harsher opinion than cheating men. (Wouk hedges his bets, of course, by not having Pug and Pamela actually have sex while Pug is still married.)

And then, at the end of a book that goes into painstaking detail over so many aspects of the war, a scant page or so is devoted to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that page is mostly looking at a “pros and cons” list of whether or not the bombs were necessary. (Actually, I take that back; the page is devoted only to Hiroshima—Nagasaki isn’t even mentioned.) It’s a very American way of looking at it.

But for Wouk’s unapologetic American-centredness, he does a good job of getting the mood of various peoples at various times. Consider this passage, which takes place around Christmas time:

The root of Dr. Kirby’s mood, however, was the war. He had been touring a land legally a belligerent, yet paralyzed by frivolity, indecision, lack of leadership—and above all, by Christmas, Christmas, Christmas! This whoop-dee-do of buying, selling, decorating, gorging, and guzzling, to the endless crooning of Bing Crosby’s inescapable gooey voice, this annual solstice jamboree faking honor to the Christ child, this annual midwinter madness was possessing the country as though Hitler did not exist, as though Pearl Harbor were untouched, as though Wake Island were not falling. The Lucky Strike ads showed jolly red-cheeked old Santa Claus wearing a tin soldier hat, cutely tilted. In one sickening image, that was the national attitude.
Kirby had found some sense of war on the West Coast; hysterical air raid alarms, brief panics, spotty blackouts, confused and contradictory orders from the Army and from Civil Defense, rumors of submarines shelling San Francisco, fear of the Japanese mixed with inexplicable cocksureness that America would win the war. Eastward even this shallow awareness dimmed. By Chicago the war had faded to a topic for talk over drinks, or a new angle for making money. The thought of defeat entered few people’s minds. Who could beat America? As for the Armageddon swirling before Moscow, the terrific counterstrokes of the Red Army against the Wehrmacht hordes—to most Americans Santa Claus in a tin hat was considerably more real.

Sound familiar? At the time I wrote this, America was embroiled in two wars—although with talks of “combat missions being over” she was trying to pretend she was down to one—and the scene was much the same.

Contrast that with this brief passage which shows the flip side; the allies are meeting to discuss strategy, and Pug (as usual) happens to be there:

Inside the British legation a few armed soldiers walked about the gardens, and civilians in little knots chatted in the sunshine. This was a much smaller and quieter establishment. Pug paused to take thought under a tree shedding golden leaves. Where to find her? How to ask for her? He was able to grin wryly as his own pettiness. An earth-shaking event was happening here, yet on this peak of high history, what excited him was not the sight of three world giants, but the prospect of laying eyes on a woman he saw once or twice a year by the chances of war.

I think it’s very realistic that even at obviously historic moments, people will be much more consumed with thoughts of a new lover than with world events going on around them.

The Winds of War

2010-08-09T11:13:00.001-04:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Herman Wouk

This is one of those novels I re-read from time to time. (The Winds of War and War and Remembrance are really two parts of one larger work, with The Winds of War starting about six months before the war starts and ending with the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and War and Remembrance taking off from there. I’ll be reading War and Remembrance next, but I figured that I’d post about The Winds of War now instead of doing both at once.)

The scope of the work is amazing. Wouk covers one family, the Henry family, throughout World War II, and does it in such a way that he is able to go into every aspect of the war:

Victor “Pug” Henry, the father: Pug is in the Navy, but is sent on special mission as naval attaché to Germany, right before the outbreak of the war. In his role as naval attaché, is is able to meet Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Mussolini (I may or may not be leaving out other world leaders he meets in this role). He then moves on to go back to the sea, his first love, although the book ends with the bombing of Pearl Harbour, before he actually gets command of his own ship.

Pug begins a very believable love affair with a girl named Pamela Tudsbury, a minor-ish character, although they don’t “consummate” the affair during the course of the book. Pug has big reservations about the affair, and how to carry it out (if at all), and whether or not he should “shack up” with Pam, again, very believable given the time period.
Rhoda Henry, Pug’s wife (Pug calls her “Rho”): Rhoda accompanies Pug to some of his locations, and stays behind in some situations. Rhoda also begins a very believable (for the time period) love affair, while Pug is gone, although by the end of the book, we’re still not sure if she will leave Pug for her new man or not.
Rho’s lover is a man named Palmer Kirby, who happens to be working on the Manhattan Project, which allows Wouk to introduce this subject, although, by the close of Winds of War, there is still not much being made of it.
Warren Henry, the oldest son, is also in the Navy, and stationed at Pearl Harbour. By the close of the book Japan hasn’t played a large part in the novel, but Warren being stationed in the Pacific sets us up for the action that will take part in War and Remembrance.
Byron “Briny” Henry, the other son, is sort of loafing around Europe at the beginning of the book, developing a crush on Natalie Jastrow (a Jew), and they both end up in Poland right at the moment that Hitler invades. They are actually in Warsaw when it gets invaded.
- Along with Leslie Slote, another minor-ish character, who works for the Department of State and is Natalie’s ex-boyfriend. Leslie, it turns out, is kind of a coward when it comes to physical danger, but does his best to work around his cowardice, likening it to a physical deformity—or allergies, or something like that—that one simply has to endure and work around as best as one can. Ironically, Leslie is not only in Warsaw when it gets bombed, but later on in the book also ends up in Moscow, when the Germans are on their way there!
After his stint in Warsaw, Byron ends up in the Navy, working in a submarine, which also sets him up for action in the Pacific, in War and Remembrance.
The aforementioned Natalie ends up stuck in Europe, and, as a Jew, is having a lot of problems escaping the Nazi grip. If I remember correctly, this is going to set her up to be sent to the concentration camps, in War and Remembrance.
Madeline Henry, the daughter, ends up in New York, working on a radio program, but is sort of a minor-ish character throughout the book. I can’t remember if she has a stronger presence in War and Remembrance.

I addition, Wouk adds another literary device: Interspersed with the action of the characters are chapters from a supposed book written by a German officer, and translated by Pug into English after the war. This not only gives some insight into the German viewpoint of the war, but, more importantly, sometimes serves to set the action in its context. I thought this was a great device for Wouk to use. (I can’t remember if he carries it on in War and Remembrance; I’ll find out soon enough.)

Not only is the scope of the book large, but to the best of my knowledge it is also very historically accurate. Even more interesting to me, the range of opinions held by characters in the book—minor and major—rings very true. People’s opinions on Hitler, for and against, before and during the war; the apathy toward the Jews; Americans’ opinions on whether or not America should join the war… it’s all very realistic. Especially interesting are people’s divided opinions on Roosevelt, trying to get America into the war when his people obviously don’t want to be in it, along with their dismissal when rumours start to appear about the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews. (Especially realistic, to me, was one character who says that the reports are obviously exaggerations—after all, they had said much the same things about the Germans during World War I, but it was just propaganda; it’s probably propaganda again this time. If I’d been in his shoes, I would have probably believed much the same thing.)

This is one of those books that just pulls me in. (It didn’t pull me in right away; it took me a while to get into it. I think it was mostly trying to get myself back into a 1940’s mindset, which is written realistically—Wouk doesn’t have people living in the 1940’s but thinking like people in the 1970’s (when this book was written). But once I was in, I was in.) I’m definitely looking forward to War and Remembrance—although not to the parts that take place in the concentration camps. I guess I have my own cowardice to deal with. Wouk has created characters I care about, and I even find myself empathizing with Pug and his “affair of the heart” with Pam, or Rhoda and her affair with Palmer; it’s not something one would ever condone, of course, but it’s just such a natural progression for both of them. (More so for Pug than for Rhoda, but that’s partially because Wouk seems to be writing Pug more empathetically than Rhoda.)

Death of an Expert Witness

2010-08-05T20:47:00.001-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: P.D. James

Another good murder mystery from James, featuring Adam Dalgleish, but not much to say about it. As is so often the case, James wrote from a lot of different characters’ points of view, which always makes things interesting, and the sheer breadth of characters in this one seemed more than usual, unless I’m just misremembering.

Our Game

2010-07-21T17:11:00.001-04:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: John le Carré

When I saw this book in the bookstore the title looked familiar, but based on the description on the cover I was pretty sure I hadn’t read it. It must have been on my John le Carré “to do list”, rather than one I’d already read. As it turns out, I had already read it—but it was an enjoyable read anyway, so I didn’t mind reading it twice.

Incidentally, please heed the warning above that indicates this blog contains spoilers—because this post contains a[t least one] big one.

I love the way this novel unfolds. When you first begin reading, you have no idea who Emma is. You do get a pretty good idea of Tim and Larry’s relationship from pretty early on, but it was a while before I started to suspect that Tim had killed Larry, and even longer before le Carré finally came out and told us. It comes as no surprise whatsoever when we discover that Emma and Larry have ended up together, but it was never intended to take us by surprise; Tim’s character is built up so perfectly that it just seems natural. Of course his woman would leave him for Larry—what else would she do? Tim doesn’t seem surprised by this, and neither is the reader.

I have to say, though, that I was a bit disappointed when Larry turned out to have survived his “murder.” The way it was put together, it just didn’t seem possible; Tim struck him, assumed he was dead, and threw him in the lake. So… what? Was Larry unconscious, or playing dead? (But why would he play dead?) Once he was thrown in the lake, why did he not drown? And if he got out of the lake quickly enough to avoid drowning, wouldn’t Tim have seen him? It’s not just the annoyance that a character who was killed suddenly comes alive again; it’s the sheer logistics of the thing. People cannot breathe under water, and therefore Larry couldn’t be alive. (le Carré tried to smooth this out by making Tim’s memory of the event fuzzy, but it’s not enough to convince me it was possible.)

And finally, I have mixed opinions about the ending of the book. When Tim picks up a gun and follows whats-is-name—the Russian—it leads us to believe that he’s taken up the fight that Larry had been fighting. Which would be, to me, a completely ridiculous end to the book. Tim’s character was too well done for us to buy that; in order for him to have taken after Larry, he’d have had to have had a big change in heart (and personality), and that didn’t come out. Unless he’s just simply lost, and has nowhere to go, and is only hoping that whats-is-name will help him get back to England, in which case it would be true to his character, and thus believable.

And that, my friends, is the danger of making a character too well rounded, in a novel. The more realistic you make a character, the better you let the reader get to know that character, the less believable it becomes when you try to have that character do something uncharacteristic. It doesn’t work.

Luckily, I love le Carré’s writing so much that these come off in my mind seeming like minor quibbles, and don’t steal from my enjoyment of the book.

Second Wind

2010-07-10T14:44:00.001-04:00

Subject: Mystery
Author: Dick Francis

This was an interesting book. Different than the typical whodunit type of mystery, Francis gives us a mystery in which we—along with the protagonist—really have no idea what is going on. Perry is going to be travelling through a hurricane in a plane, along with his friend Kris, who’s a pilot. To do so, they’re going to borrow a plane from an acquaintance—but why is this person lending them his plane? Oh, and on the way, he wants them to stop on an island—but why? And when they get there the island is deserted—but why?

On and on it goes, and you don’t really get a sense of what the plot actually is until, I don’t know, maybe halfway through the book? Somewhere around there.

I don’t read a lot of stuff by Francis—I’ve currently only got one other book by him mentioned on this blog—but he’s a good writer, and I should probably read more of his stuff.

True Evil

2010-07-10T14:24:00.002-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Greg Iles

It took me a long time to get through The Gagging of God, for obvious reasons, and it took me a long time to get through The Aquitaine Progression, too, for reasons having to do both with the book (and Ludlum’s writing) as well as how busy my life was at the time. As usual with Iles’ writing, however, when I picked up True Evil I was pulled in immediately, and it didn’t matter how busy I was, I finished it in a couple of days.

Like the last Iles book I read, The Quiet Game, this is a pretty straightforward murder mystery novel. Iles simply brings his talent to the book, and makes it a great read. Is Alex right that people are killing their spouses, rather than going through divorce proceedings? It’s a novel, and she’s one of the main protagonists, so you’d think it would be a no-brainer that of course she’s right, but Iles makes it very possible that she’s deluded, based on everything that’s going on in her life. Better yet, is Thora really trying to kill Chris? Again, since this is a novel, you’d think it would be a no-brainer: of course she is, or there wouldn’t be a book. But because I was already questioning Alex’ hypothesis—and because of the scenes between Chris and Thora—I really did question it. (Of course, I only questioned all of this in the first place because I like Iles’ writing. I wouldn’t put it past him to make these kinds of plot twists, because he’s not afraid to go outside of what you’d expect.)

For once, for an Iles book, I did have a problem with a plot point: why did Thora want to kill Chris? Some hints are given—maybe money, or maybe because of an affair she’s having (although it’s presented in a way that nobody, not even Thora, could believe it’s a lasting affair)—but none of it is compelling. Especially since Chris himself makes the case, rather compellingly, that she wouldn’t need to kill him, that he would give her a no-contest divorce, if it ever came to it, and she already has more money than he does. So it’s a rare occasion when I felt a plot point from Iles wasn’t realistic.

On the flip side of the realism coin, though, it also seems that Iles once again did his research. He comes up with a very realistic way of purposely giving people terminal, quick-acting cancer, that makes me believe he talked to some people who knew what they were talking about.

The Gagging of God

2010-06-30T11:36:00.002-04:00

Full Title: The Gagging of God; Christianity Confronts Pluralism
Subject: Christianity, Pluralism, Postmodernism, Deconstructionism
Author: D.A. Carson

A small group of us at church had been listening to some sermons/talks by D.A. Carson on postmodernism/pluralism and I found them very interesting. So my pastor suggested this book, and I took him up on it. He warned me that it would be long, and he wasn’t kidding. Numerous times in the book Carson would go off on a tangent, and say something along the lines of “I don’t have time to go into this properly,” but still talk about it for 10 pages. (That’s a minor exaggeration—let’s say 10 paragraphs, instead of 10 pages.)

In any event, the books is great, for a few reasons. First of all, it’s solidly based on biblical theology. Maybe that seems like an obvious thing to say about a Christian book, but sadly enough in this day and age it’s worth mentioning. Carson knows his Bible, and, maybe more importantly, knows the Bible’s story line (which is mentioned numerous times in the book).

Secondly, Carson is very even-handed and fair when talking about… well, when talking about anything. Perhaps that’s why the book is so long, since he’s looking at all sides of every issue. He starts the book off talking about what pluralism is, and what’s good about pluralism vs. what’s bad about pluralism, and frames the conversation properly, before talking about the forms of pluralism that he’s going to discuss throughout the rest of the book. The book isn’t a diatribe against postmodernism or pluralism, it’s a thoughtful look at the issue(s), and what it means for Christians.

More importantly, as he’s looking at every side of an issue (that he can think of), he’s doing it from a biblical standpoint—if he didn’t, he’d be falling into the same dangers of postmodernism that he’s writing about in the book.

Now, I should be starting out the list of long quotes—you knew there would be a list of long quotes, right?—with some definitions of what Carson means by “postmodernism” and “pluralism” and “deconstructionism.” Unfortunately, I didn’t capture a succinct paragraph with those definitions. At their highest levels, though, it’s something like this:

pluralism: Well, there are actually a few different meanings for the term “pluralism,” which is why Carson devotes a chapter or so to talking about the word. Looking at the Google definition page, I see:
- the doctrine that reality consists of several basic substances or elements
- the acknowledgment of diversity
- the belief that politics and decision making is located mostly in the governmental framework, but many non-governmental groups are using their resources to exert influence
- the name of entirely unrelated positions in opposition to monism in metaphysics and epistemology
- a term used when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, and whose values and practices are accepted by the wider culture
- a social system based on mutual respect for each other’s cultures among various groups that make up a society
- a system or philosophy, which, in the name of respect for diversity, acknowledges the existence of different political opinions, moral and religious beliefs, and cultural and social behaviour
Carson discusses a number of these meanings of pluralism, but the main one he’s concerned with in this book is something akin to the last one; the belief that there are many competing views/philosophies of life, not to mention religions, none of which are any better (or more true) than any of the others. Among other things, this leads some to believe that all paths lead to God. (Even though some worldviews hold that there is no God—so even something as benign as this is still in contradiction to some worldviews. The pluralist doesn’t pick sides in something like this.)
postmodernism: A reaction to modernism (a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice), postmodernism is basically a belief that there’s no such thing as “truth.” (I’m vastly oversimplifying.)
deconstructionism: When it comes to hermeneutics (the study or theory of the methodical interpretation of text, especially holy texts), postmodernism is very related to deconstructionism, whereby it is believed that a text has no inherent meaning, it only has meaning in the context of a reader’s reading of the text.

So why is pluralism a problem, from a Christian perspective? Well, one is that people just don’t know what to believe; when they start to believe that no viewpoints are inherently superior to others, what will they believe? As it turns out, they can start to perform doublethink pretty well, and start to believe things that are incompatible, or believe that it doesn’t matter what you believe. Carson writes about our “culture of disbelief,” and says:

In this environment, it is not surprising that pollsters turn up all sorts of contradictory evidence. Thus while 74 percent of Americans strongly agree that “there is only one true God, who is holy and perfect, and who created the world and rules it today,” fully 64 percent strongly agree or agree somewhat with the assertion that “there is no such thing as absolute truth.”
In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation’s grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and societal ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thought; they have not only be relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized. As a guest on a talk who dealing with pornography put it, “The great thing about our society is that you can have your opinion and I can have mine.”
pp. 23–24

This also leads to the people who believe that God is love—a harmless enough phrase, and therefore safe to use even in a pluralistic culture—but don’t believe anything else about Him. It’s true—God is love (1 John 4:8), but He is more than that, too, and to just believe He is love without knowing His other attributes is to misrepresent him—and to try and universally extend that love equally to everyone belittles Him.

In a section called “The Love of God,” Carson says:

Part of what must be said in this section is what the love of God is not. Put more positively, we must see that what the Bible says about the love of God is much richer and more complex than the reductionistic appeal to God’s love sometimes found in pluralist literature and in popular polemic (e.g., “I can’t believe in a God who gets angry; I believe in a God of love”).
…
First, by way of clearing the air, it is not clear to me that a God who loves everyone and everything in exactly the same way—boa constrictors, Mother Teresa, Hitler, fleas, Michael the archangel, Augustine, the aurora borealis, Genghis Khan—loves anyone or anything at all. Or if he does, this singularly undiscriminating love is remarkably amoral. This sounds rather more like blind, impersonal benevolence. In fact, I am not even sure what “benevolence” might mean in such a sentence.
pp. 238–239

But this is about laypeople. What about people whose job it is to study the Word of God, to mine it for truth, and deliver that truth to others? How does the Christian preacher handle this new pluralistic society? A few years ago, North American preachers could count on their listeners having, at the very least, some basis in Christian theology, but now they can’t count on that at all—they have no idea what the people in the pews will know about the Bible, about Jesus, about sin, about… anything! What this means is that not only do they not have a basis for starting the conversation, but what they do say will be misconstrued—the hearers will think the preacher means one thing, when he actually means something quite different.

As Carson writes, in a section on New Age Theosophy:

There are at least two important implications for the preacher of the gospel. The first is that a person who is largely biblically illiterate but who has absorbed substantial doses of New Age theosophy will hear us to be saying things we do not really mean. If we talk about God, Spirit, new birth, power, abundant life, peace, joy, love, family life, conscience, faith, trust, and a host of other topics, they will all be nicely slotted into a New Age framework. Even words like “sin” will be read as “bad things” or perhaps “bad karma”—but not at all as something whose badness derives from its offensiveness to the God who has made us and to whom we must give an account. The entire structure of thought of such a person guarantees that he or she will hear us quite differently from what we intend to say, what we think we are saying. “Sin” is a snicker word—that is, it conveys nothing of odium, but makes people snicker. Millions of men and women fornicate without the slightest qualms of conscience.
The second implication is that many ostensible believers inside our churches—some of whom are genuine believers and some of whom are not—have inevitably picked up some of the surrounding chatter and, being poorly grounded in Scripture and theology, have incorporated into their understanding of Christianity some frankly incompatible elements. Remarkably smarmy notions of “spirituality” abound; very few ask, for instance, what a “spiritual” life looks like according to the New Testament documents. In this framework there is going on, as Tinker puts it, a battle for the mind, even though many have not perceived the nature of the fight.
pp. 41–42

But it’s not just laypeople who will start to incorporate pluralism or postmodernism into their way of thinking; there is also the deconstructionist (the definition was mentioned above) way of studying the Bible, in which postmodernism is actually brought to the Word—to the effect that the person reading the text can decide it means… well, whatever they want to decide it means.

Carson had an interesting conversation with a deconstructionist doctoral student:

A few years ago I was teaching an evening course on hermeneutics, a course jointly offered by several of the seminaries in the Chicago area. Not very successfully, I was trying to set out both what could be learned from the new hermeneutic, and where the discipline was likely to lead one astray. In particular, I was insisting that true knowledge is possible, even to finite, culture-bound creatures. A doctoral student from another seminary waited patiently through two or three hours of lectures, and then quietly protested that she did not think I was escaping from the dreaded positivism of the nineteenth century. Deeper appreciation of the ambiguities of language, the limits of our understanding, the uniqueness of each individual, and the social nature of knowledge would surely drive me to a more positive assessment of the new hermeneutic. I tried to defend my position, but I was quite unable to persuade her.
Finally, in a moment of sheer intellectual perversity on my part, I joyfully exclaimed, “Ah, now I think I see what you are saying. You are using delicious irony to affirm the objectivity of truth.” The lady was not amused. “That is exactly what I am not saying,” she protested with some heat, and she laid out her position again. I clasped my hands in enthusiasm and told her how delighted I was to find someone using irony so cleverly in order to affirm the possibility of objective knowledge. Her answer was more heated, but along the same lines as her first reply. I believe she also accused me of twisting what she was saying. I told her I thought it was marvelous that she should add emotion to her irony, all to the purpose of exposing the futility of extreme relativism, thereby affirming truth’s objectivity. Not surprisingly, she exploded in real anger, and accused me of a lot of unmentionable things.
When she finally cooled down, I sad, rather quietly, “But this is how I am reading you.”
Of course she saw what I was getting at immediately, and sputtered out like a spent candle. She simply did not know what to say. My example was artificial, of course, since I only pretended to read her in a certain way, but what I said was sufficient to prove the point I was trying to make to her. “You are a deconstructionist,” I told her, “but you expect me to interpret your words aright. More precisely, you are upset because I seem to be divorcing the meaning I claim to see in your words from your intent. Thus, implicitly you affirm the link between text and authorial intent. I have never read a deconstructionist who would be pleased if a reviewer misinterpreted his or her work; thus in practice deconstructionists implicitly link their own texts with their own intentions. I simply want the same courtesy extended to Paul.”
My point, then, is that in the real world, for all the difficulties there are in communication from person to person and from culture to culture, we still expect people to say more or less what they mean (and if they don’t, we chide them for it), and we expect mature people to understand what others say, and represent it fairly. The understanding is doubtless never absolutely exhaustive and perfect, but that does not mean the only alternative is to dissociate text from speaker, and then locate all meaning in the reader or hearer. True knowledge of the meaning of a text and even of the thoughts of the author who wrote it is possible, even if perfect and exhaustive knowledge is not. That is the way things are in the real world—and that in turn suggests that any theory that flies in the face of these realities needs to be examined again.
pp. 102–103

Just to play devil’s advocate, did she have a point, when she talked about “the ambiguities of language, the limits of our understanding, the uniqueness of each individual, and the social nature of knowledge”? Can we properly understand the writings of, say, Paul in the New Testament, since we’re no longer in his context? Can we, for that matter, understand anything of God Himself, who is so beyond our understanding? Carson’s response to that is that just because you don’t understand something completely, it doesn’t mean that your understanding is incorrect.

The point of all such models [of approaching texts that glean the best from the new hermeneutic, but do not destroy all possibility of objective truth] is that although none of us ever knows any complicated thing exhaustively, we can know some things truly. Our confidence in what we know may not enjoy the certainty of Omniscience, but it is not condemned to futility. Even a child may believe and understand the truth of the proposition “God loves the world,” even when the child’s knowledge of God, love, and the world is minimal, and her grasp of Johannine theology still less (John 3:16). With patient study and increased learning and rising experience, a believer may come to understand a great deal more about the proposition “God loves the world” than does the child. The diligent student of John’s gospel soon learns that the “world” in John is usually a term that describes the moral order; human beings in rebellion against God. God’s love is wonderful, in John 3:16, not because the world is so big, but because the world is so bad. Further study would show that God’s love for the world is declared in a context that affirms his wrath upon the world (3:36), and this will lead to serious study of God, and of atonement passages in the Johannine corpus (e.g., 1 John 2:2). But would it not be incorrect to say that the child misunderstands the proposition? The proposition as John gave it, I would argue, is true; as grasped by the child, it is truly understood, even if not exhaustively understood. The child may have (and probably has) adopted some false associations along with her understanding—associating love, perhaps, with a good cuddle, or with a kind parent. But the heart of the matter is nevertheless rightly said to be understood, even if there is further explanation (and demonstration!) of God’s love to come in the child’s experience. The asymptote will draw closer to the axis. The child who grows to become a thoughtful and serious reader will learn distanciation and the fusion os horizons.
pp. 121–122

So… it is what it is. We’re currently living in a postmodern world (even if I do happen to assume that postmodernity will be short-lived, because of its internal inconsistencies). In some ways, that actually makes our situation much like it was for the 1^st Century Christians; for a while we in the West have been used to living in a world where Christianity was the “default” religion, even if not everyone actually believed, but now we’re in a world like the one that Paul lived in, preaching the Gospel to people who belive a wide variety of things, some of which are so dissimilar to Christianity that our message won’t even make sense to them, without a lot of groundwork. It’s incumbent upon us, however, to realize this and act accordingly—not just bemoan what we’ve lost.

The locus of the new covenant community was no longer a nation (as was the old covenant community) but a transnational fellowship seeking to live out the life imparted by the Spirit in a world that could not be expected to share its values. Moreover, this world, politically speaking, was not a democracy in which ordinary citizens could have much direct say in the organization and direction of the Empire. It is impossible to draw straight lines from their circumstances to ours. Nevertheless it is impossible not to recognize that in the current unravelling of Western culture our drift toward pluralism is casting up many parallels to the situation Christians faced in the first century. More precisely, we find in our culture two opposing hermeneutical effects. At one level our culture is departing from the heritage of Judeo-Christian values that so long sustained it, and so we are removing ourselves from the worldview of New Testament writers. At another level we are returning, through no virtue of our own, to something analogous to the pluralistic world the earliest Christians had to confront, and so in this sense the New Testament can be applied to us and our culture more directly than was possible fifty years ago. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the modern rush toward pluralism owes a great deal to the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past century or two, while the church in the first century carried no such burden. Moreover, the earliest Christians confronted their world from the position of the underdog; we are inclined to confront our world from the position of the once favored mascot who has recently become or is in the process of becoming the neighborhood cur, and expend too much of our energy on howls of protesting outrage. Even so, we shall be less morbid and despairing if we read the Scriptures today and recognize that the challenges of pluralism are not entirely new.
p. 272

More than this, but it behooves us to understand the pluralist’s worldview, so that we can explain Christianity in a way that will make sense to them.

… The pluralist must explain the Christian, and will doubtless conclude that the Christian is too tightly bound by tradition, naive in the area of epistemology, intolerant of other views, and so forth. The Christian response, while striving to address the pluralist’s agenda in a responsible fashion, must also articulate how the pluralist will be perceived in the Christian’s worldview. The pluralist is an idolater, worshiping the created world more than the Creator. He or she so relativizes God’s truth that God’s own Son becomes an incidental on the religious landscape, and his sacrificial death and miraculous resurrection become insignificant and unbelievable respectively. Pluralists are inconsistent in that they want to be understood univocally while insisting that ancient authors, let alone God himself, cannot be. They may have many religious experiences, but none of them deals with the heart of the human problem, the sin that is so deeply a part of our nature. In short, we must deal with massively clashing worldviews, and part of our responsibility is to explain competing worldviews from our vantage point. We cannot possibly engage at that level unless we ourselves have thoroughly grasped the biblical story-line and its entailed theology.
p. 278

Just a couple more quotes, to finish the post off.

Carson has a problem with people who hold views which don’t adhere to the Bible’s story line, but still try to prove those points using biblical texts. In a section titled, “More generally, it is entirely improper to attempt to destroy the Bible’s exclusivism by admitting selective biblical evidence displaced from its location in the Bible’s story-line”—and how’s that for a title for a section?—Carson temporarily sets aside arguing from a “purely Christian” standpoint, to argue from a “purely logical” standpoint (my phraseology, not his): If you believe that some parts of the Bible prove your point, and others can be safely ignored, then by what criteria did you decide which parts are true/worthy and which parts aren’t?

My point, however, is not that one must take all of the Bible or none of it, but that if one holds that only some parts of the Bible are worthy of our allegiance, one must articulate the criteria by which the decisions are made, and the grounds for holding that those parts deserve our allegiance. The Christian who holds that God has disclosed himself in the Bible must of course offer a defense of that position—something I briefly took up in chapter 4. But if someone steps back from that position, I want to know the basis on which that person tries to defend his or her theological position by appealing to parts of the Bible. For example, if you can prove anything from the Bible (Harpur), why on earth does he think his position is correct, and try to convince others of it? If his position in reality depends on extrabiblical outlook or reasoning, then I want to know the grounds on which he concludes that God is the kind of being he envisages. Or again, what finally authorizes the synthetic pastiche of Watson? Transparently, it is not the biblical story-line. How does he know the picture he paints is the way things are? What is the principle by which he selects bits of text and theological reasoning so as to compose this particular picture? How do Paul’s “central encompassing images” relate to the entire Bible, and to reality? [Another example from an author named Boring elided.]
In each case my point is the same. Why do these writers think that God is the sort of being they describe? The more one presses this sort of question, the more one is driven to the conclusion that the dominating influence is not respect for the texts, or evenhanded hermeneutics, or reverent submission to revelation, but unqualified commitment to some form of pluralism or “hard” inclusivism. And how could one possibly know that such a position is right? How could one possibly reform it? Even if someone were to come back from the dead to challenge our presuppositions, some would still not believe.
p. 284

What I mean by “purely Christian” vs. “purely logical” is that obviously Carson believes that the Bible should be taken as a whole, and if your philosophy differs from the Bible, than on that point it’s incorrect. But for the sake of argument, he’s saying, well, if you are going to just believe certain parts, then which parts will you choose—and what’s your basis for that choice?

And finally, for no reason other than that this tickled my fancy, here’s a final quote from a section titled “Panikkar, Fox, and the Cosmic Christ”:

But one of the most intriguing developments is the takeover of the “cosmic Christ” category to serve the purposes of “green” and “Gaia” theology. The premier exponent is doubtless Matthew Fox. In his earlier books Fox had scathingly attacked orthodox Christianity as guilty of matricide—the killing of Mother Earth. The charge is renewed here, and if Western culture in general and the church in particular is guilty of matricide, it is no less guilty “of ecocide, geocide, suicide and even deicide.” The religious language of the Christian heritage is taken over: “We have begun to put our hands in her [i.e., Mother Earth’s] lanced side and in her crucified hands and feet” (16). Mother Earth is “very aware and sensitive” (18), while the church is “matricidal” and “sado-masochistic” (28). Conservative (“fundamentalist”) Christianity is nothing but “Christofascism,” and is charged with “a reptilian kind of energy and hatred” (40). This is one very angry man.
p. 329

I should mention that for all of these quotes, the emphasis is in the original text, I didn’t add it. Also, Carson puts a lot of footnotes into his writing, which I haven’t included here.

The Aquitaine Progression

2010-06-26T12:25:00.002-04:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: Robert Ludlum

The last time I wrote about a Ludlum book I said I wasn’t going to read any more Ludlum for a while. And here I am, two scant books later, writing about one. What can I say? My shelf of “to read” books wasn’t too full, so I picked up another one.

As with Apocalypse Watch, though, it took me a long time to get through The Aquitaine Progression. That’s part of the reason it’s been so long since I’ve written here; this book just got stuck in my queue, and it took me forever to get through it. I liked Aquitaine better than Apocalypse Watch, though; the story was tighter (even though it’s very, very complex), the main character was a lot more likable, and the length (698 pages) gave Ludlum time to really develop the story, so that, although complex in retrospect, it didn’t seem like he was trying ot jam in a bunch of serpentine changes to the plot every couple of pages. It just naturally evolved.

So the only things I had against it were the usual problems I have with a Ludlum novel; the romance felt tacked on (which is really saying something, since the romance was between a man and his ex-wife!), and the dialog sometimes felt forced. (In previous Ludlum novels it’s always the “my darling my darling!” stuff that sounds so over the top; in this one, it was people constantly saying something quasi-lawyerly every couple of pages, and having the non-lawyer in the scene saying “I don’t understand all that lawyer stuff, bud.” It would have been fine once or twice, but it was all through the book, so it became very repetitive.)

I don’t have any more Ludlums on my “to read” shelf, so hopefully it will be a while before I read another one. But… I’ve said that before, haven’t I?

A Mind to Murder

2010-03-25T13:44:00.000-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: P.D. James

Another Adam Dalgliesh mystery from James. Unfortunately, this was kind of a lackluster one—and it seemed that even the author felt that. Inspector Dalgliesh is just sort of plodding through this one, worried about his own lack of skill to solve the murder, even as the reader is waiting for a little soul to enter into the narrative. I was a little disappointed with the ending, too; it seemed to come out of left field. I was left trying to remember if James has ended a novel like this before—“Oh, it turns out she was killed by someone who wasn’t even really in the story”—but as usual my feeble memory failed me.

I did like one particular passage, though. Dalgliesh is interviewing one of the doctors—the murder happens at a mental health clinic—and the following takes place:

… “You’ve heard of Burge, I expect. He wrote that interesting novel The Souls of the Righteous, a quite brilliant exposure of the sexual conflicts concealed beneath the conventionality of a respectable English suburb. But I’m forgetting. Naturally you have interviewed Mr. Burges.”
Dalgliesh had indeed. The experience had been tedious and not unenlightening. He had also heard of Mr. Burge’s book, an opus of some two hundred thousand words in which the scabrous episodes are inserted with such meticulous deliberation that it only requires an exercise in simple arithmetic to calculate on what page the next will occur. Dalgliesh did not suspect Burge of any part in the murder. A writer who could produce such a hotchpotch of sex and sadism was probably impotent and certainly timid. But he was not necessarily a liar. …

Apocalypse Watch

2010-02-27T15:00:00.001-05:00

Subject: Spy Novel
Author: Robert Ludlum

It’s been a long time since I wrote here; I was reading over a manuscript for a friend, which took a while, and then it took me forever to get through this Ludlum novel. Partially because it’s a long-ish one for him—751 pages—but also because the book just didn’t do it for me. It has all of the elements that a spy novel should have, but it felt formulaic.

Add to that the fact that I just didn’t like the main character, coupled with the ridiculous ending, and… well, let’s just say I didn’t enjoy the book at all. I’ve got another Ludlum sitting on the shelf waiting to be read, but I think I’ll leave it for a bit, before picking it up. I’ll probably like it, I usually like his books, but I just need to read something different before picking him up again.

The Quiet Game

2009-12-29T11:32:00.000-05:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Greg Iles

I’m a bit behind. I actually read this back in November, and am just now posting about it. So I’m struggling to remember what happened, meaning that this will be a short post. (You’re welcome—although there will be spoilers in here, so be aware of that.)

I imagine I’ll grow tired of Iles’ writing at some point, but for now, he’s still got me enthralled. I like the way that he writes. This is what I’d call just a typical murder mystery (although above I simply classified it as “novel”), but he writes it well. There wasn’t anything in here that I thought he was taking a chance on, the way he did with previous books:

Blood Memory, where he tackles the topic of childhood sexual abuse
Black Cross, where he did a historical drama, forcing him to have real, historical figures as characters in his story
The Footprints of God, where he tackles the subject of religion
Turning Angel, where he takes on both inappropriate sexual relationships with minors and race relations in the South

The Quiet Game is just a straightforward good book, with an interesting plot and believable characters. Because a book like this has to have romance, Iles introduced two women into Penn’s life—a new girl, Caitlin, and an old flame, Livy—and I like that he makes it plausible for Penn to end up with either one. (Of course, we’re believing from the beginning that Penn will end up with Caitlin, so it’s no surprise when he does, but still, there are various points in the story where it really would be believable for him to end up with Livy.)

It was also interesting to read this book right after having read Blood Memory, because there was a point when Penn began to believe that Livy might have been sexually abused by her father. And he had some pretty convincing evidence to support this theory, which drew me in, too. (Again, especially after having read The Quiet Game not long before.) I was getting to the point where I was thinking, “oh no, he’s not going to that well again, is he?” before Iles pulled the rug out from under Penn (and I), and disabused us of that notion.

At Risk

2009-11-21T14:48:00.001-05:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Patricia Cornwell

I’ve got a few Cornwell books on this blog so far; most of them are Kay Scarpetta mysteries, but this one involves a different set of characters.

Unfortunately, having grown tired of the characters in the Scarpetta series, I find that Cornwell wasn’t able to make these new characters interesting, either. The funny thing is, I think the problem with At Risk is that it’s just too short. At 289 pages, Cornwell just didn’t have time to write; she had a plot she needed to get through, and the book feels like she’s just rushing from plot point to plot point; “okay, I need this person to do this, then I need that person do do that, and then I need to have this happen, and then…” etc. etc. The result is that she can’t get deeply into anything, and everything feels shallow. The characters, the plot, the mood… it’s all too shallow to get into.

Going back over my previous posts about Cornwell books, I have to wonder if I’ll read any more of them. I’ve gone from very pleased to very disappointed.

The Time Machine Did It

2009-11-18T08:35:00.001-05:00

Subject: Humour/mystery
Author: John Swartzwelder

I didn’t feel like reading anything heavy, after 2666, so I decided to reread something by Swartzwelder. (The writer, as noted on the cover, of many Simpsons episodes.) If you’re a fan of the Simpsons, then you’ll probably like Swartzwelder’s books.

That being said, I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time around. Maybe I just wasn’t in a Swartzwelder frame of mind?

I’ll finish with some quotes. First, appropriately enough, I’ll start at the beginning; here are the first two paragraphs of the book:

Frank Burly is my name. Okay, it’s not my name. I lied about that. My name is Edward R. Torgeson Jr. I changed it for the business. You’ve got to have a tough sounding name if you want people to hire you as a private detective out of a phone book. I chose one that would give prospective clients the idea that I was a burly kind of man, the kind of man who would have the strength and endurance to solve their cases for them, and who would be frank with them at all times. Hence the name.
As my exciting story opens, I am being punched in the stomach. But I guess a lot of stories start that way. Most of mine do anyway. The guy who was punching me was a lot burlier than I was, so it hurt plenty. But I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me at all, that I actually liked it. It was hard to do this convincingly, because he had kind of knocked the wind out of my there, so all I could do was smile and wink and give him the thumbs up while I waited to be able to breath again. He thought I was making fun of him and started punching me in the stomach harder. Meanwhile, I’m not any closer to getting my breath back. Some days are like that.

There’s something about that line, “As my exciting story opens, I am being punched in the stomach,” that cracks me up.

And another typical example of his writing:

The criminals came into my apartment. One was very tall, the other was very small. Actually, they were both about average height. I was using artistic license there. I’m told this is the thing to do, as it makes the story more interesting. If one guy is the size of a refrigerator and the other one is the size of a thumbtack, this conjures up a vivid picture in the mind. It’s like you can see the one guy being smaller than the other, and this interests you. Readers get bored if everybody’s the same size. Anyway, these two guys came into the room in their various sizes and looked around. I hadn’t expected visitors, so the room wasn’t looking its best.

2666

2009-11-13T09:09:00.003-05:00

Subject: Novel
Author: Roberto Bolaño

As usual, this post contains spoilers.

This is an interesting one; I’m not sure what to do with this post. I first heard about the enigmatically titled 2666—the title is never explained, nor does the number 2666 ever appear in the book—from a review in Harper’s magazine. It’s a large, sweeping, grandiose novel (about 900 pages, in the English edition), written by a good writer. But… it’s the murders that get me. A central plot point in the novel is a series of hundreds of murders of young women taking place in Mexico, in a town called Santa Teresa—which is actually based on a real set of murders in a town called Ciudad Juárez.

But let me go back and talk about the novel first, then I can revisit my misgivings. The book is actually broken down into five almost unrelated books, or “parts,” called The Part about the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi. (Don’t let the name of the third part fool you; it’s about a character named Oscar Fate.) I loved the sweeping nature of the book; that Bolaño could devote so much time and attention to each part—to the point that he had actually intended for his heirs to publish them as five separate books—gives the book a real epic feel. As mentioned in the review on The Nation:

Either way, 2666 isn’t for the faint of heart. The book is nearly 900 pages long, and charting its locations would yield something like an airline flight map, red dots marking landings in Argentina, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Prussia, Romania, Russia, Spain and the United States. As if such globe-trotting wasn’t enough, the novel also contains scores of characters and covers almost an entire century of history.
Bolaño once wrote that in the Americas, all modern fiction springs from two sources: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. The Savage Detectives, with its carousing characters, is Bolaño’s novel of friendship and adventure. 2666 chases the white whale. For Bolaño, Melville’s novel held the key to writing about “the land of evil”; and like Melville’s saga, 2666 can be stunning or soporific, depending on your taste for the slow burn. I’ve read it three times, and I find it to be dense, brilliant and horrifying, with scattered scenes of cleverness and fun.

In fact, let me be clear: I loved the book. Aside from the fact that most of Bolaño’s female characters seem kind of shallow—although, to be fair, I guess his male characters aren’t that much deeper; it’s just that a lot more attention is paid to them—I did love his writing style. As mentioned, I loved the fact that he let himself dive deeply into unrelated tangents. That he simply let himself write, and didn’t reign himself in where other writers might have. (Or maybe it’s not the writer, maybe it’s the style of editing? Maybe it’s just that his publisher let the book be, where a North American publisher might have cut out the “unnecessary parts” and hacked the book down to 400 pages, for fear of losing their audience?) I loved the fact that a character who showed up in one part would show up again in another part; that sometimes a minor character in one part would become a major character in another, or that a major character in one part would have a “guest appearance” in another. It was a really enjoyable read.

Except… the murders. A central theme which occurs, to varying degrees, throughout the book—barely mentioned in the first part, more and more important in in the next two parts, the main theme in the fourth part, and then much less central again in the last part. You could picture the importance of the murders to each part sort of like this:

Especially The Part About the Crimes; as the name implies, this entire part is focused on the murders of the women in Santa Teresa. There are actually a few stories happening here—as is usually the case, in 2666—with the murders interspersed. But the way the murders are covered in the fourth book is too… titillating? I don’t know. It was structured similar to the following:

There would be a bare-bones, cut-and-dried description of the finding of a woman’s body. It was found in such and such a place, by such and such a person; it was determined that she was anally and vaginally raped; the body had such and such clothes on; the identity was or was not discovered; she was killed by strangulation or stabbing or both.
There would be another bare-bones, cut-and-dried description of the finding of another woman’s body. It was found in such and such a place, by such and such a person; it was determined that she was anally and vaginally raped; the body had such and such clothes on; the identity was or was not discovered; she was killed by strangulation or stabbing or both.
There would be a description of a woman who was killed by a husband or boyfriend, not matching the other murders in terms of modus operandi.
There would be a section about one of the policemen involved in trying to solve the crimes.
There would be another bare-bones, cut-and-dried description of the finding of another woman’s body. It was found in such and such a place, by such and such a person; it was determined that she was anally and vaginally raped; the body had such and such clothes on; the identity was or was not discovered; she was killed by strangulation or stabbing or both.

etc. etc. Many, many descriptions of the finding of women’s bodies, interspersed with little pieces of stories. The descriptions of the finding the women’s bodies weren’t all exactly the same, as I’m showing them above, but they almost all had the same basic facts (what she was wearing; whether or not her identity was discovered; how she was killed; whether or not there were signs of rape; where she was found; a bit about her physical appearance), sometimes omitting a detail or two, often changing the order in which the facts were presented, but almost always very distant, very clinical. Obviously Bolaño was doing this on purpose; he was going for something. (If I were more clever, I’d tell you what it was. All I have so far is that the novel—all of 2666, I mean, not just The Part About the Crimes—has death as a major theme, and the murders at Santa Teresa gave Bolaño a way of bringing that to the forefront.) I’ll quote the review from The Nation again, actually:

…. “The Part About the Crimes” opens in January 1993 with the description of the corpse of a 13-year-old girl and ends 108 bodies later during Christmas 1997. Each one of these forensic discoveries is clinically detailed—at 284 pages, the section is the longest in the book—and the resulting chronicle of death is braided through with the narratives of four detectives, one reporter, the chief suspect in the crimes and various ancillary characters. In Bolaño’s hands, this collage produces terrific fugue-like sequences and damning repetitions. (“The case was soon closed” becomes a haunting refrain.) Bolaño lightens these grim story lines with flashes of gallows humor and the occasional tender subplot. Overall, however, reading “The Part About the Crimes” feels like staring into the abyss. Strangling, shooting, stabbing, burning, rape, whipping, mutilation, bribery and treachery are all detailed in deadpan prose….

When I was getting close to the end of The Part About the Crimes, I remember Andrea asking me if I liked 2666 or not, and I told her I couldn’t make up my mind yet. It depended on how Bolaño tied everything together, because, in my mind, he needed to have a real good reason to be using the murders of these women in his book. He needed to tie things together in such a way that he was making a statement, that would make it worthy of having murder after murder paraded in his book in this fashion. (I’m assuming the women mentioned in the book are not real murder victims from Ciudad Juárez, but they are representative of the hundreds of real murders that happened there.) And there was good reason to believe that he would tie things together, because there were various things happening that might have brought it all together; e.g. in The Part About Amalfitano, when Amalfitano begins hearing the strange, disembodied voice, I was very much wondering if it would turn out that this voice was somehow involved in the murders. (Especially when not all of the murders seemed to completely match each other; I was wondering if Bolaño would make it that there was some other force driving men to kill women in Santa Teresa—and, in turn, if that would somehow relate to Archimboldi, who definitely haunted the first and last parts, even if he didn’t necessarily appear in the other three.) There was also the appearance of the FBI profiler, at the end of The Part About the Crimes, which Bolaño seemed to leave hanging, leaving me to wonder if that would also be tied in later.

But Bolaño didn’t tie it together, he left many things hanging. Who, or what, was that disembodied voice that Amalfitano heard? What would the FBI profiler have said about the crimes? How was Archimboldi’s life tied up with the murders—aside from the fact that his son may or may not have been involved (although it’s sure that he wasn’t involved in most of them)? Things don’t come together, because Bolaño purposely doesn’t want the loose ends tied up. At least, that’s how it seems to me. He wants us to leave the book beaten down with thoughts of death, and of the barbarism of the world in which we live.

And let’s be clear: The murders in Santa Teresa, as gruesome (and many) as they are, aren’t the only barbarism in the novel. It’s rampant throughout, from the beating of a London taxi driver in The Part About the Critics to the parts of the story taking place during World War II in The Part About Archimboldi—which, in fact, describes the decimation of about 500 Jews by a man who’s just doing his job (to whom the Jews were sent by accident, during the turbulent days as the war was drawing to a close), so a number of deaths even higher than the Santa Teresa murders—barbarism is rampant throughout the novel.

Interestingly, Bolaño also mixes in a healthy dose of sexism, especially in The Part About the Crimes. There are policemen who are diligent, and who want to solve the crimes, and there are policemen who just don’t seem to care; who are more concerned with making jokes about a woman’s place being chained to the stove than in seeing justice done. When there is a large series of crimes, like the ones under consideration here, one has to wonder: Why aren’t they being solved? Bolaño’s answer seems to be twofold:

Humans are barbaric, and this is the type of thing we’ve always done to each other, and
If the authorities don’t care about the crimes, then they won’t put as many resources into solving them

Again, we can compare the crimes in Santa Teresa to the man who kills his wife in The Part About Archimboldi—the whole town knows that he’s done it, but nothing is done. In this world, sometimes men kill their wives. I thought this was a good choice for Bolaño to make, and like the other choices he made, he doesn’t beat the reader over the head with it. He simply weaves together the different pieces of story—murder, murder, scene with policemen acting sexist; murder; scene with diligent policeman who’s afraid to push too hard for fear of what might happen; murder; murder—and leaves the reader to puzzle it all out.

I was wondering, literally right up until the last page of the book, whether Bolaño was going to clear up the murders. He didn’t, and I can see why he made that choice. But because he didn’t, I’m now left with discomfort at his sensationalist material of the murders. I was hoping, until the last second, that he would do something clever, which would make the constant parade of murders worth it. But since he didn’t, I have to wonder if he could have made his point in a less sensationalistic way.

I would have unreservedly loved 2666, but I was left uncomfortable at the constant parade of dead women in The Part About the Crimes, which began to feel almost like a textual snuff film. Ironically, if Bolaño had put in less detail about the murders—for example, if he had mentioned larger groupings of women at once, instead of going one by one, and if he had put less detail each time—it might have been more impactful. Instead, I found myself constantly wondering in the back of my mind, “if I were the type of man to watch snuff films, would this material be titillating?” And when you’re asking yourself questions like that, how can you enjoy a book properly?

Incidentally, all of the reviews I’ve seen for this book have been glowing, so obviously others didn’t have the same problem with the murders that I did. So if anyone (other than myself) reads this, don’t let my squeamishness stop you from reading the book. (But if the murders do bother you, don’t say I didn’t warn you, either…)

Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest

2009-11-11T15:52:00.001-05:00

Full Title: The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest
Subject: Comic

Knowing that I’m a big Simpsons fan, my mom often tries to get me Simpson-related things for Christmas, so this past Christmas she got me this Treehouse of Horror comic. Unfortunately, as much as I continue to love the Simpsons TV show, it just doesn’t seem to translate well to a comic.

Or maybe the problem is the writers? A large part of the reason that the TV show is so good is that they have a large team of writers, crafting and re-crafting every line of dialogue, honing the timing of every joke, until it’s perfect. In the comic, there were a large series of guest writers. So it’s possible that the comic could have been just as funny as the show, if they’d had the same large number of clever writers honing every joke in the same way. But whatever the reason, I found myself very bored, and simply forcing myself to finish reading—which is never a good thing.

Blood Memory

2009-09-27T21:36:00.002-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Greg Iles

Another great book by Iles. And as usual he takes a risk with this one, this time by writing about childhood sexual abuse, and the effects that abuse can have on a person’s entire life. In this case, there are actually two separate murder mysteries happening, and the main character (the first person narrator) is involved with them both.

I think the way Iles deals with the topic of abuse is well done. I say “think” because I haven’t been abused, but it seems to be well done. I was a bit uncomfortable with the rape scene near the end of the book, but I don’t think it was badly done. I was impressed that he didn’t make it titillating; it seemed realistic, but not sensationalistic, either. In fact, unfortunately, I think it was very realistic to be included where it was, so again, Iles just followed his risky story where it took him.

Compulsion

2009-09-27T21:23:00.002-04:00

Subject: Murder Mystery
Author: Jonathan Kellerman

Another good murder mystery from Kellerman. Unfortunately, although I’m just getting around to posting this now, I read this book a while ago, so I don’t remember anything specific to write about it. I liked it, and am going to make a point of reading more Kellerman books, but other than that, it’s pretty much a blur.

I really need to write these posts sooner after I read the books, so that I can remember more detail to include.