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HITLER’S DOG, ETERNAL VIGILANCE AND SOLVING COLD CASES

July 12th, 2008

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MARTIN CRUZ SMITH—Arkady Renko

July 11th, 2008

I didn’t read for a few months while finishing up a YA novel, Kidnapped At Bunker Hill, written with coauthor Madeleine Hyde, my daughter. It felt like holding my breath while finishing a race, necessary but not the way I want to live. In the last few weeks I’ve read and reread three novels by Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park, Wolves Eat Dogs, and Stalin’s Ghost. I love MCS’s writing and his protagonist in these three works, investigator Arkady Renko. Reading the novels back-to-back we follow Renko through the latter days of the Soviet Union, to Chernobyl and into Post-Soviet Russia where people long for the good old days (that never were). These are wonderful, well-written and entertaining. Before the summer is out, I plan to ingest some other Renko novels (Polar Star, Red Square, and Havana Bay).

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A Death In the Family by James Agee

April 4th, 2008

This is one of those novels that everybody has heard of and few people have read, people like me until recently. Agee was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this largely autobiographical novel. It is largely told from the point of view of an eight year old boy and covers the hours with his mother and sister after the boy’s father has died in an auto accident. Agee gets inside of the heads of the people he writes about and twists and turns his words until you see the characters in their glorious complexity not as residents of Knoxville in the early Twentieth Century but as spiritual beings trying to grasp a complex and painful reality. The monologues of the boy’s mother are stunning. Also, in one vignette Agee goes into the head of an alcoholic inlaw, the boy’s uncle, who is trying to be present during the “grieving sessions” at the same time he must slip away to find the hidden bottle and replenish the alcohol-driven buzz. The internal monologue of the alcoholic is incredible. I understand that Agee died in his early forties in a cab in New York City en route to a hospital. Too bad for us that this giant didn’t produce more.

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BANGKOK 8 BY JOHN BURDETT—BANGKOK NOIR

April 2nd, 2008

I loved this novel and my hat is off to the author’s deft portrayal of a protagonist who is a believable Bangkok homicide detective, monastery dropout, and son of an American soldier & Thai prostitute. Bravo!!! I found detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep as accessible as Sam Spade and as complex as Dali Lama. Publishers Weekly lauded this complex story that is ”[p]art mystery, part thriller and part exploration of Thai attitudes toward sex.” Sonchai’s Buddhism permeates this novel and helps create what might be called Bangkok Noir. As well, there is a compelling mixing and melting of the present and past, of tragedy and upward mobility. When the author refers to methamphetamine as a poison “whose time has come” to Bangkok I can see the minions of Thai melting in a deluge of Western progress.

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WHAT ARE YOU READING THAT’S GOOD?

February 17th, 2008

It seems that I can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine or turn on the TV without reading or hearing about the declining role of reading in American Society and about the “dumbing down” of America. This is certainly something that worries me. I try to do responsible things to promote reading and literacy, like be a responsible parent, work on literacy-related programs and–by the way–I read a lot of books. I have met novelists in the past few years who tell me they really don’t have time to read. I find this to be pretty pathetic. If a person who writes novels doesn’t have time to read how do we expect other people to do so? I’m not trying to preach and god knows I spent years in the trenches trying cases and watching some novels get dusty. But I guess I’m somewhat “born again” on the topic of reading.

I read because I want to, because I have a lot of good writers that I need to catch up on, and because the more I read the more I want to read. So one of the things I want to talk about here is reading and what is worth reading and why its worth reading. Let me know what you’ve read lately that is good–fiction and nonfiction, crime genre and not.

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HITLER’S DOG, ETERNAL VIGILANCE AND SOLVING COLD CASES

MARTIN CRUZ SMITH—Arkady Renko

A Death In the Family by James Agee

BANGKOK 8 BY JOHN BURDETT—BANGKOK NOIR

WHAT ARE YOU READING THAT’S GOOD?

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