The Twelve and Re-reading

 

In my preview of new books for 2012, I omitted the one book I am most eager to get my hands on – Justin Cronin’s sequel to The Passage.  The March 16 issue of Entertainment Weekly reports that The Twelve will be released in the U.S. on October 16.  It also has a passage from the second chapter of the new book.  (This isn’t the first peek at the new book - the paperback edition of The Passage had a preview of The Twelve in it.)  (By the way, this American cover is pretty lame.  Looks more like a heart-wrenching tale about farmers at harvest time than the horrors of life long after a vampire apocalypse.  The UK cover is much better.)

I haven’t read either of these early excerpts because I fail to see the point in sampling a few hundred words when I still have months to wait for the next 600 pages.  (And for a book that is only part two of a trilogy.) And its not like I need a sample to ascertain whether or not I will want to read the book – I already know I do.  News of the impending arrival of The Twelve has me considering whether or not to re-read The Passage.  I probably will re-read The Passage by October – just to familiarize myself with the large cast of characters in it.  I rarely re-read anything anymore – it is hard to justify spending the time on something old when there is so much new to read. I used to reread Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss every few years.  Haven’t done that for a long time now. 

This past week I found myself re-reading Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels and enjoying it even more the second time around.   The Rebel Angels is volume one of The Cornish Trilogy – three books about the legacy of Francis Cornish, a Canadian art collector.  (Davies has a thing for trilogies – most famously The Deptford Trilogy as well as The Salterton Trilogy.)  In the first book, a cast of scholars at a Canadian college scheme to gain control of the estate of the recently deceased Francis Cornish.  This is a terrible simplification of a very rich and entertaining book whose subject matter runs from medieval history, mythology, folklore, gypsy culture, paleo-psychology, cultural fossils, art history, Rabelais, Renaissance manuscripts, academic satire, excrement, christianity, and murder.  These are, mostly, subjects I would run from - but from Davies the result is akin to the longest and most entertaining story you've ever heard (the book is very talky - lots of lengthy dialogue).

   

Uncovering the Past

We got a bar to do chin-ups and other exercises and had to hang it on a door frame.  Which meant I had to move two giant stacks of books which framed the door frame.  And that then meant that I had to move a bookcase in to a gap between some other bookcases.  But in order to do that I had to move a bureau just a few inches.  But in order to that I had to move all of the books piled on top of the bureau.  (I played a lot with Legos as a kid and I guess I developed a mania for stacking things.)  So I had to move a ton of books today.

But in doing all this work, I uncovered a lot of books that I had not seen in ages.  It was like a great and free day of shopping.  I found firsts of Mystic River, a bunch of Philip Kerr hardcovers, and various Edgar winners from the mid-90s.  For a few minutes I had a first edition of The Heart of the Matter.  But then I discovered it was a book club edition.  Must have been why it didn't live on my Graham Greene shelf.  I found a first edition of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch.  I must have bought it as soon as it was published in August of 1992 as I found a lottery ticket from September of 1992 in it as a bookmark.  I also turned up a bunch of books on Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman.  And I found two Ross Thomas hardcover first editions I thought I had given away, Out on the Rim and Twilight at Mac's Place.  You can't tell from these photos but much of the rest of what I rearranged was all the literary fiction I must have spent the 90s reading.

The dog helped out by guarding the stacks of books I put around his bed.  I think he was annoyed with all of the commotion.

As a result of the reshuffling of the books, he's now reading Kent Anderson's Night Dogs and Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog.  I also gave him some non-fiction - No Dogs & Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943 by Frances Wood.  Shih tzus are from China so I guess its appropriate.  (If you look real close you can see he also has a copy of The Cat in the Hat.  Go figure.)

I uncovered a bunch of Detective Book Club 3 in 1 editions.  I remember buying them because they had  Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret in them - this was back when I was trying to acquire all of his books.  Turns out, these books have some interesting things in them that I was not aware of back then.  There is a Brian Garfield novel in one and a Margaret Millar in another.  When I got the Simenons in regular editions I must have covered these books up.  A normal person would have got rid of them, I know.

Found some Household in the household:

This is what I would have been reading had I not spent the day on this project:

For the record, I pretty much knew everything that I had.  I found a few books that I had no memory of.    But there was a lot of stuff that I had not seen in a long time that was nice to be reunited with.

The Stieg Larsson Rule

I am on vacation at a posh resort in the Caribbean, courtesy of my sweetie. She works nights so we are down here to replenish her body's supply of vitamin D. I think this resort has a policy that all guests may only read Stieg Larsson books beside the pool or on the beach. Everyone has a copy of his books. I didn't think there were this many people left who had not read these books. I brought some Henning Mankell novels and so far they have allowed me to keep them. I guess it's because Mankell is a Swede, too. Kindles are very nice for indoor reading. But not so good during tropical downpours. I'm glad I brought paperbacks along with the Kindle as we spent half the day huddled under a beach umbrella reading in the rain. Also, Cuban cigars really hurt your throat. And everyone here is drunk. Except me, of course.

Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise, Vic Mackey & Me, Justified

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal there was a story about the upcoming Jack Reacher movie One Shot.  I love Lee Child’s books.  I was a latecomer to reading the series but once I started, I fell hard.  The books are ferociously entertaining and the later installments in the series are superbly written.  I am always interested in following the process of books being made into movies (its like watching sausage being made) and there has been a considerable amount of consternation over the casting of Tom Cruise to play the 6 feet 5 inches 250 pounds Jack Reacher.  It is hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures, Reacher and Cruise, and the Journal reports that once Child even cracked that Cruise would be the worst choice for the part. Given that Tom Cruise is only 5’8” his choice to play the part seems somewhat of a stretch.  The physicality of the role is such that it is hard to imagine a normal guy playing such a giant.  I know it is a movie and it is made up and that great acting can bring about miraculous transformations and special effects and clever camera angles can mask other shortcomings, but still.   Apparently, Lee Child is happy with the results even though he once told the Birmingham Post that Cruise was too short to play the part.  At least that is what he tells the Wall Street Journal. 

On a related note, I got the complete box set DVD edition of The Shield for Christmas.  I was a latecomer to The Shield, as well.  One Christmas Eve several years ago, we were at my sister’s house for dinner and presents and my brother-in-law had a DVD of The Shield playing on his Reacheresque widescreen TV.  If you’ve never seen the show before, it is very gritty, violent and loud.  While we were opening presents, we had to watch this episode about enslaved Asian teen prostitutes. (Or something like that - I was trying hard to block it out and have yet to see the offending episode on DVD.)   It was the most un-Christmas thing imaginable.  And that experience soured me on The Shield, which I had never seen before, for a long time.  The show would not go away and I kept hearing about how good it was from sources I usually trust and value for entertainment recommendations.  (Like in Sylvia Nasr’s book A Beuatiful Mind about the mentally-ill mathmatician John Nash –played so memorably in the movie by Russell Crowe – who, incidentally, Lee Child fancied for the role of Reacher – when he was asked why he listened to the crazy things the voices in his head were telling him said that those were the same voices who gave him his insights into mathamatics.  So I decided to listen and give The Shield another try.)  The second time around, my wife and I enjoyed the show.  But we had this problem where she kept falling asleep during each episode and she fell behind in our viewing and then we would have to return the DVDs and we petered out somewhere in season four.  Now we own the complete series and are re-watching season three.  And after watching all these episodes, I realized that I look a lot like Vic Mackey.  Or if Vic Mackey had a brother who was a real-bad ass librarian with glasses instead of a dirty cop, that would be me.   (Or I look way more like Vic Mackey than Tom Cruise does Jack Reacher.)  In Richard Stark's Parker novels, I have no problem enjoying the exploits of a career criminal.  Same goes for watching the Sopranos.  But I still feel conflicted about watching and liking Vic Mackey on the Shield.  He does do good but at times he's done what should be unforgivable things.  I suppose the show is meant to be a searing indictment on how everything has been corrupted but Vic kills a fellow cop in the pilot episode and yet we keep watching. 

Update:  I started this post about a week ago and since then, the Wall Street Journal has had another  good story on books being filmed - this time on Elmore Leonard and Justified.  Leonard really likes the TV adaptation of his Raylan Givens stories.  It is nice to hear a writer who's happy with what has been done to his work.  (Though Leonard is not happy with the hat Givens wears on screen.)  Season three of Justified starts on Tuesday and I keep hearing good things about this show.  First from here (several good posts here) and I heard this review today.  I really need to catch up with this show.

What I'm Looking Forward to in 2012

Even though I still have a bunch* of new books from 2011 to read, these are some of the books of 2012 that I cannot wait to get: 

The Devil's Beat by Robert Edric, March 1
This is supposed to be what the book is about:

'We must prise opinion from fact, belief from supposition and guesswork from whatever evidence must exist...' It is surely a simple case of hysteria. Four young women allegedly witness a terrifying apparition while walking in the woods. Has the devil really revealed himself to them? Are they genuine victims of demonic possession? Or, as most suspect, is their purpose in claiming all of this considerably more prosaic? The eyes of the country turn to a small Nottinghamshire town, where an inquiry is to be held. Everyone there is living through hard, uncertain times. The king is recently dead. It is a new century - a new world looking to the future. But here, in the ancient heart of England, an old beast stirs...Four men must examine the substance of the girls' tales and decide their fate: a minister, a doctor, a magistrate, and Merritt, an investigator - a seemingly perfect blend of the rational, the sacred and the judicial. And yet, as the feverish excitement all around them grows ever more widespread and infectious, there is both doubt and conflict among the members of this panel. The "Devil's Beat" explores the unforeseeable and unstoppable outcome of this inquiry - an alarming and unsettling time during which the whole of that small world seems in turmoil as one after another hitherto dependable natural checks and balances, beliefs and superstitions are challenged and then lost.

That sound's pretty good, right?  But if you were looking at the synopsis of the Australian edition of the book, published by Random House Books Australia, the story sounds very different:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large ego must be in want of a woman to cut him down to size...Sharp, witty Jasmin Field has her own column in a national magazine and has just landed the coveted role of Elizabeth Bennet in a one-off fundraising adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Better yet, the play's director, Hollywood heart-throb and Oscar-winner, Harry Noble, is every bit as obnoxious as she could have hoped. Which means a lot of material for her column. And a lot of fun in rehearsals.And then disaster strikes. Jazz's best friend abandons her for a man not worthy to buy her chocolate, her family starts to crumble before her eyes and her award-winning column hits the skids. Worse still, Harry Noble keeps staring at her.As the lights dim, the audience hush and Jazz awaits her cue, she realises two very important things, one: she can't remember her lines, and two: Harry Noble looks amazing in breeches...

To me, this version doesn't sound as good.

Skios by Michael Frayn, May 3
I will automatically buy and read almost anything Frayn writes.  Okay, I skipped his recent book on philsophy.  And I still have to get his memoir about his father.


Capital by John Lanchester, March 1
In many ways, Lanchester reminds me of Frayn.  Lanchester's book on the financial crisis (Whoops or I.O.U. depending on where it was published) was terrific and this new novel is what he was planning to write when he got caught up researching and following the crisis.  There is an excerpt of it in this week's issue of the New Yorker magazine (for subscribers only) and it is great.  Can't wait for this book.


Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd, February 16
Boyd is another automatic selection.


The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey, April 5
Sometimes I like Carey, sometimes I don't.  This one feels like a like.


Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale, May 10
This I can already tell I will buy but not read for a few years.  But that's more about me than the book.


The Passage of Power by Robert Caro, May 1
This is the fourth volume in Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson.  The first three books are extraordinary.  LBJ was one of our most complicated presidents.  He waged a terrible war in Vietnam but lead a great fight for equality and civil rights and against poverty in the US.  He was vulgar and crude.  And his rise to power was incredibly unlikely.  An unbelievably captivating figure.  Caro's books are political biography at its best.  And they are great to read, too.  Most of the reviews that will be published about this book will gush about how great Robert Caro is and they will all be right.



Watergate by Thomas Mallon, February 21
This is getting good advance notice.  Like this:

“Mallon, astute and nimble, continues his scintillating, morally inquisitive journey through crises great and absurd in American politics by taking on Watergate…Mallon himself is deliciously witty. But it is his political fluency and unstinting empathy that transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow.” –Booklist, starred review

And I kind of know the writer (in a neighborly way) and chatted with him about the book as he was writing it so I guess that makes me biased.  But I think this book will be a hit (certainly in this town it will).


Good Bait by John Harvey, January 5
John Harvey is another automatic selection for me.  An English Pelecanos?  (Or maybe Pelecanos is an American Harvey.) Crime writing with a social conscience.  And a great stylist as well.

The Comedy is Finished by Donald Westlake, February 21
We are so lucky that there have been a few new (or old or lost) Westlakes since his death.  And they have been good books, too.  Not unfinished crap.  I hope there are still a few more books somewhere. 



*Leftover from 2011

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin
The Affair by Lee Child
The Drop by Michael Connelly
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt
Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder
The End of the Wasp Season by Denise Mina
Some of these I am saving for vacation in February.  And it has been hard to not read them but to be on vacation without good books to read would be a ruin the whole trip.  Even preparing for the trip would be difficult.

The Three Books of 2011

I looked over the books I read in 2011 and there were three books that stood out.

The best old book I read was John le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  I had no idea how wonderful the book was going to be.  I sort of knew a lot about it and John le Carre but had never read a single word of his.  Le Carre is such an interesting fellow that every time he a new book out there are always lots of reviews and interviews to read and listen to that I always felt familiar with him without ever reading him. (Slight exaggeration: I started and abandoned The Tailor of Panama when it was published - thought it was awful.)  Reading TTSS was like the first taste of lobster after only eating fish sticks.  Amazing.

The best new book I read was Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.  Like le Carre, Murakami is a darling of journalists and critics.  I have read and enjoyed his stories in the New Yorker over the years but for some unknown reason, never attempted to read any of his novels.  Clearly a mistake, I now know.  1Q84 is a novel about writing, a love story, a chase story, a revenge novel, a fantasy/alternate reality novel - it is a bunch of things, really, but all in one simple package.  It completely captured my attention and I did not want it to end.

The book that had the greatest impact on my life was Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog.  As I read it, I started to want a dog.  While I was reading it I found myself doing Google searches for dogs.  And a month or two later, out of nowhere, I found myself with the chance to get a dog. (Yes, I know people get dogs all the time but such a thing had been completely unthinkable for me.)  And now I have one.

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize for Literature is to be awarded this week.  I generally enjoy the run up to the prize more than the awarding of it.  It is great fun to sort through the contenders but then it becomes not so fun when a strange foreigner whose work is not widely available wins.

This year, the top contenders are thought to be:

	Adonis 4/1
		Tomas Transtromer	6/1 Susp.
		Haruki Murakami	8/1 Susp.
		Peter Nadas	10/1 Susp.
		Assia Djebar	12/1 Susp.
		Ko Un	14/1 Susp.
		Les Murray	16/1 Susp.
		Thomas Pynchon	18/1 Susp.
		Philip Roth	20/1 Susp.
		Nuruddin Farah	20/1 Susp.
		Mircea Cartarescu	25/1 Susp.
		Cormac McCarthy	25/1 Susp.
		John Banville	25/1 Susp.
		Joyce Carol Oates	25/1 Susp.
		Amos Oz	25/1 Susp.
		Antonio Lobo Antunes	25/1 Susp.
		Bob Dylan	25/1 Susp.
		K. Satchidanandan	33/1 Susp.
		Colm Toibin	33/1 Susp.
		Don DeLillo	33/1 Susp.
		Claudio Magris	33/1 Susp.
		Adam Zagajewski	33/1 Susp.
		Antonio Tabucchi	33/1 Susp.
		Alice Munro	33/1 Susp.
		A.S. Byatt	33/1 Susp.
		Milan Kundera	33/1 Susp.
		Cees Nooteboom	33/1 Susp.
		Ismail Kadare	33/1 Susp.
		Ngugi wa Thiong'o	33/1 Susp.
		Rajendra Bhandari	40/1 Susp.
		Christa Wolf	40/1 Susp.
		Maya Angelou	40/1 Susp.
		E.L Doctorow	40/1 Susp.
		Margaret Atwood	40/1 Susp.
		Ernesto Cardenal	40/1 Susp.
		Juan Marse	40/1 Susp.
		Bei Dao	40/1 Susp.
		Patrick Modiano	40/1 Susp.
		Vaclav Havel	40/1 Susp.
		Yves Bonnefoy	50/1 Susp.
		Michel Tournier	50/1 Susp.
		Viktor Pelevin	66/1 Susp.
		Ian McEwan	50/1 Susp.
		Salman Rushdie	50/1 Susp.
		Javier Marias	50/1 Susp.
		Carlos Fuentes	50/1 Susp.
		Umberto Eco	50/1 Susp.
		Elias Khoury	50/1 Susp.
		Louise Gluck	50/1 Susp.
		Samih al-Qasim	50/1 Susp.
		Peter Handke	66/1 Susp.
		Gitta Sereny	66/1 Susp.
		William Trevor	50/1 Susp.
		Shlomo Kalo	66/1 Susp.
		Chinua Achebe	66/1 Susp.
		Anne Carson	66/1 Susp.
		A.B Yehoshua	66/1 Susp.
		Juan Goytisolo	66/1 Susp.
		Luis Goytisolo	80/1 Susp.
		David Malouf	80/1 Susp.
		Paul Auster	80/1 Susp.
		Per Petterson	80/1 Susp.
		Jonathan Littell	80/1 Susp.
		Jon Fosse	80/1 Susp.
		Mahasweta Devi	80/1 Susp.
		Peter Carey	80/1 Susp.
		Marge Piercy	80/1 Susp.
		Mary Gordon	80/1 Susp.
		William H. Gass	80/1 Susp.
		Yevgeny Yevtushenko	80/1 Susp.
		Vassilis Alexakis	80/1 Susp.
		Eeva Kilpi	100/1 Susp.
		Michael Ondaatje	100/1 Susp.
		Kjell Askildsen	100/1 Susp.
		Julian Barnes	100/1 Susp.
		Atiq Rahimi	100/1 Susp.
		F. Sionil Jose	100/1

I got this list from Ladbrokes, the English oddsmakers.  Apparently, they give odds on anything.

I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about literature and I still don't recognize maybe 40 percent of these writers.  And some of the names I only know because I've seen them before on other lists of Nobel contenders.  I admit to having a western bias and only reading in English so I know a huge chunk of the world is beyond my purview.  But it is weird to have a Syrian poet and a Swedish poet top the list.  Even if they are richly deserving of it.  Which they very well may be.

Of the names on this list, my clear favorite is the Irish novelist and short story writer William Trevor.  His only serious competition should be from Philip Roth - but Roth is said to have alienated some of the Swedes who award the prize so he is unlikely to win even though he deserves to. 

I am also rooting for A.S. Byatt, Alice Munro, and Don DeLillo.  I've already ordered Haruki Murakami's new book so it would be nice if he were to win.  I like Paul Auster and Ian McEwan and have read most all of what they have written but I just don't see it happening for them.  And now that John Banville writes crime novels in addition to the serious (and difficult to read) fiction that made him famous, he would be a fun choice.  It would be great to have Benjamin Black show up in Stockholm to accept the prize.

As far as names not being mentioned by Ladbrokes but still meriting consideration?  John le Carre would be a nice choice (I've only recently started to read him but I suspect many would recognize that he is a great writer who happens to write about espionage and is not just a writer of spy novels).  Mavis Gallant, the Canadian short story writer - I think she's worthy.  My 'I know it is crazy to even suggest it' choice would be Stan Lee.  His body of work is simply amazing and I suppose there are other writers of comics who write better dialogue but the fecundity of Lee's imagination trumps all in my view.  Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, the Hulk, X-Men, Daredevil, Thor, Iron Man and so many others.  Really, just Spider-Man alone should be enough.  I know he hasn't written everything these characters have done and that Jack Kirby probably has an equal share in many of them.  Still, to be a major creator of what (in another one of my crazy, best not said aloud theories) is our modern equivalent of the mythology of Greece and Rome, I think that deserves the Nobel.