Journal of No. 118

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 18:54:24 GMT

Turtles all the way down is a young adultish novel that I picked up at the Enigma book swap a while back.

Part young romance, part teen buddies mystery solving, our main character is also distinguished by obtrusive thoughts and other OCD symptoms that get in the way of her life. Apparently the author (probably best known for The Fault in Our Stars) also suffers from OCD, so the descriptive elements ring true to life and are fairly terrifying. I wonder whether people with OCD would be helped by reading a sympathetic treatment or harmed by echoing their own difficulties in a feedback loop.
Well-drawn characters and interaction, but even if the mystery was not really the reason for the book (the real treasure was the friends we made along the way!) the resolution of the mystery was pretty lackluster.

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City of Strife & Dr. No (not that one)

Tue, 09 May 2023 03:48:45 GMT

City of Strife, by Claudie Arseneault

This was a pick of the Enigma book club -- I've been idly hanging out on the Enigma Discord server seeing what the younger generation are up to. I didn't manage to get to the discussion, but earlier I went to their bookswap and managed to unload a bin's worth of antiquated books on them. Anyway, the book is an easy read, and the author has a good sense of characters bumping into each other in various combinations. What it reminds me most of is more of a larp. Characters are created and there are reasons for them to come into conflict or conspiracy. So I guess I'm not surprised that (as I understand it) the novel developed from a D&D campaign. At the same time, what the book is missing (like a larp) is any sense of a larger world of NPCs inhabiting the space. It's almost eerie. Apart from a guard or two and a waif, there is really nothing other than people with PC glow. And in book that centers in part on political intrigue, it's just very strange. There's no sense of a real place. And (also as in RPGs and larps) there's something of a lack of plausible reactions to extreme situations. Oh Bob's just done an arson; surely the townsfolk will be enraged at his faction. But with no townsfolk, there's no reaction. My good pal Brenda has casually announced that she kills people for money. But we need a third hand for card games (because there are no other people in this allegedly crowded hostel other than those of us with PC glow.) So, like I said, there was some snappy writing, but I found it really unsatisfying in the realism of the world. Even fake fantasy 'realism'. All the characters are queer in some way, and this fact enhances the story as much as this fact enhances my review.

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Dr. No, by Percival Everett

A very quirky read. I liked it, but I didn't love it. Obviously, the author is making a huge nod and wink at the world of James Bond. In brief, a supervillain attempts to enlist the aid of a mathematician who has devoted his life to nothing. Not zero, not a lack of ambition, but the serious study of nothingness. And our villain wishes to weaponize it. This allows the author a lot of opportunity to make equivocal use of the word 'nothing'.

As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”

This happens perhaps a mite too often. But again, all in good fun and nice to see many Bond tropes through the funhouse mirror. FWIW, the plot such as it is borrows much more from Goldfinger than Dr. No. Almost all the characters are African American, and this fact enhances the story somewhat more than this fact enhances my review.

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Sun, 11 Sep 2022 05:52:50 GMT

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: Time Travelers Strictly Cash is their policy. Lay your money on the bar, name your poison, step up to the line drawn on the barroom floor, and after drinking make a toast and throw the glass into the fireplace.

/steps to the line

I tried to retrieve a memory worthy of retelling, but all I could see was my mental image of Shawn. A quick grin, a ready smile, a glorious mane of hair. Others spoke eloquently and accurately of his generosity and love for mankind. I could not and would not take a particle from those accurate praises.

But on my dime and with sazerac in hand...

I give you... Shawn's hair!

/crash

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Killer in the Rain, by Raymond Chandler

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 23:27:06 GMT

Kind of a neat anthology of some of Chandler's original stories from the pulps. These were largely suppressed by Chandler for anthologization, because these were reworked into his novels. So obviously, in some ways these stories are old (well, if you've read the novels), but lots of details are different, and some of them come to different endings than the interpolated versions.

So, it's interesting to meet Carmen from the Big Sleep, but her dad isn't General Sternwood, but a Serbian steelworker by the name of Dravec who works as cheap muscle.

And of course, I can't help enjoying reading about bits of Los Angeles I know well.

Chandler: "We were in the day captain's room at the West los Angeles Police Station, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, near Sawtelle."

Me: The police station is on Butler.

Chandler: Near Sawtelle.

Also a nice introduction, which had a bit that struck me, though it may read a bit different with a modern context than it did in 1964:

"The thematic difference between what Chandler called the standard detective story and his own stories is that his hero was motivated less by the desire to solve the mystery of a murder than by the compelling necessity to right social wrongs. There is murder in these stories, to be sure, but the detective risked his life and reputation to correct social injustices of any nature: to protect the weak, to establish ethical standards, to ease pain, or to salvage whatever might be left in fragile human beings."

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