Fear the dark

I am about 550 pages into my re-read of The Passage and I've noticed some things in the book that relate to the real world (as opposed to a fictional one where banks of lights are used to keep away virals - the name given to infected humans who have turned into sort of superhuman vampiric monsters - and where power outages result in death).

My wife is a police officer and in certain neighborhoods, the police deploy mobile banks of light towers at night.  These panels of high-intensity lights are put in high crime areas and theoretically prevent street crime at night.  Or scare off the bad guys.  (Given the number of robberies in broad daylight, I'm not so sure how well this theory of lights offering protection hold up.)  And a patrol car always has to park under the panel of lights while they are on.  My sweetie has to do this on occasion and we make jokes about the lights and the virals.  But still, in Washington, DC, in neighborhoods not too far from the White House or the Capitol, some streets are so dangerous, lights have to be deployed for fear of attack by marauders.  (I suppose this is an attempt at a high-tech solution but it feels so primitive.)  (And given the epidemic levels of HIV infection in this city - worst in the nation - the viral parallel and the risk of infection is also too close for comfort in another way.)

Hurricane Sandy is about to hit the Washington, DC area.  Or most of the East Coast, including us.  And most media coverage of the storm concerns the prospect of flooding and power outages.  We had an ultra-violent thunderstorm this summer that left much of the Washington area without power for up to a week afterwards and people are nervous about losing power again.  For the most part, nothing bad happened when the power was out.  There were many inconveniences and people were miserable but no one really died.  But the level of hysteria in media coverage of events might lead one to think that there was or could have been loss of life.  Not the case, unlike when a colony only defended by a wall and banks of lights against virals loses power and the lights go out.

The other bit of real world news from my re-reading of The Passage concerns Newsweek magazine.  As you may have heard, Newsweek announced the death of its print edition last week.  On page 583 of my paperback copy of The Passage, Peter Jaxon finds an ancient copy of Newsweek in an abandoned firestation in the California desert, one hundred years or so into the future.  The issue he finds has a photo of a viral on the cover with the headline "Believe It."  When I read The Passage the first time in the summer of 2010, Newsweek was alive.  But by the time of this reread in the fall of 2012, it is about to stop printing (it will live on as a digital edition) and now it won't ever be possible to create a fictional world where somebody will find an old paper copy of Newsweek in the ruins somewhere.

Spillover

Justin Cronin's follow up to The Passage is about to be published.  I read The Passage when it came out in the summer of 2010 and thought it would be fun to re-read it before starting The Twelve.  And so far, I am enjoying the re-read much more than I'd imagined I would.  It is a big, big book with a lot of different characters and stories packed into it and now that I know them all I can relax and enjoy everything more.  And the book retains most of its scariness.

I'm also reading David Quammen's new book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.  Popular Science magazine just ran a nice excerpt.  It is the perfect nonfiction companion to The Passage as Spillover is about how diseases in animals crossover to infect and spread among humans and that some truly horrible epidemics are probably going to occur.  Which is sort of what happens at the start of The Passage - researchers being attacked by bats in the Bolivan jungle.  And then the virus spreads and pretty soon civilization collapses.  The viruses in Spillover mainly limit themselves to killing their hosts and so far it appears none have the potential to turn us into virals.  (As far as we know.)

I am deep into my project of putting many of my books into storage (so far, 63 boxes) and because I've been thinking about diseases and epidemics from The Passage and Spillover, I noticed that I have a ton of books on infectious disease: Malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, Ebola, SARS, influenza, AIDS, anthrax, bubonic plague, BSE and more.  Even textbooks on malaria.  I've packed most of them up for storage but now that I think about it, it must have looked strange to anyone who saw them all.  And it reminds me of a funny story Nick Hornby wrote about in Vanity Fair about when he first saw his brother-in-law-to-be's London apartment - it was crammed full of books on Nazi Germany.  So many books that it looked suspicious and he was worried for his sister.  Turns out the Robert Harris was about to have a massive success with Fatherland.

In Search of Lost Time

I love to read interviews with writers.  One of the standard questions asked concerns what books the writer read as a child.  The answers always fascinate me because for the life of me, I have little to no memory of what I read as a child.  I read all the time.  There were always books in the house.  I had easy access to the public library.  Every time the family went shopping I got to go to a bookstore.  I read during meals.  Even now I still hear stories about how much I read as a child.  But what was it I was reading?  Mystery and science fiction, mostly, I think.  But who or what?  This is both puzzling and embarrassing because I am the kind of person who should have good answers to this sort of question.

There are a few books I vaguely remember and I found one of them at a used bookstore today.

City of Darkness by Ben Bova.  It was published in 1976 and I am fairly certain I read a hardcover library copy. (Why can I recall those details?)  I remembered this story about a teenager visiting New York City during the short time each year when it is open to the public - most of the year it is sealed off from the rest of the country.  When closed, marauding gangs control the place and life is brutal for those trapped inside.  In the book, the kid is visiting on the last day of the season but he gets robbed of his money and ID and is trapped in the city when it closes.  And then he runs around and stuff happens as he tries to get out (I don't recall much more than that). 

I think I read this book before the movie Escape from New York came out in 1981.  Or maybe around the same time.  They are made of similar stuff and I know I enjoyed them both. 

Flash forward 30 years and I am reading the comic DMZ by Brian Wood - which is also kind of similar but perhaps the one I have enjoyed the most.

I bought my new copy for a dollar.  I hope it knocks loose other memories of what I read back then.  Something about a dune buggy.  The one about a kid who gets to be escape Earth and help colonize a new planet, some book where they smoke cigarettes called Merciful Seraphims, the one about the juvenile delinquent who gets caught with a gun because the floor of the smart building he is in can detect a change in his weight.  Real classics, I know.  But they are some of the only fragments I have of what I read when I was young.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

This is the best new novel I have read so far this year.  It is the story of what happens when Bernadette Fox's life goes off the rails at the prospect of a family cruise to Antarctica, as recounted by her daughter Bee through notes, letters, and emails.  I pretty much hate the epistolary novel but here the form works brilliantly.  Satirical, funny, relentlessly entertaining, smart, and even touching.  Maybe I've been reading too many crime novels lately and my senses are warped but I can't remember reading anything this fun in a long time (A Visit from the Goon Squad maybe?)  Even the title of the book and its cover are wonderful.  My wife also read it and while she enjoyed it, she is of the opinion that I have gone overboard in my enthusiasm for this book.  That's okay - everyone thought the same thing about Bernadette, so I am in good company.

Escape from DC

We rented a house in a small town on the shore of the Cheasapeake Bay for Labor Day weekend. I packed a box of books so I would have a good supply of reading material for our vacation but when we got here, we found a bookcase full of good books. I knew the house had a small offering of books and DVDs but was pleasantly surprised by what we found - a really good selection of Scandinavian crime fiction.  (Hakan Nesser, Maj Sjowall&Per Wahloo, Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indridason, Kjell Erickson, Johan Theorin, Karin Fossum, and Lars Kepler.)  If I had been under house arrest and had to stay longer I would've enjoyed reading what was on hand.  Plus, they had two by William Boyd, a Tana French, a Richard Price, and a few other good choices.

I never got around to reading anything from the house library.  Instead, I wound up immersed in entertainment about escaping from prisons.  I started out reading Richard Stark's Breakout.  Our first night we watched Chicken Run (a really great escape movie) on DVD.  After Breakout, I moved on to Donald Westlake's Help I Am Being Held Prisoner.  I also polished off Richard Stark's Nobody Runs Forever and Lawrence Block's Hit Man.

Breakout was published in 2002 and Help I Am Being Held Prisoner was published in 1974 but Westlake used the same name for the prison in each book (Stoneveldt and Stonevelt).  Not a big deal, I realize, but it was strange to encounter the names in back to back books.  I found two cartoons from the Spectator in Breakout.

(Something is going haywire here and I can't format anything the right way.)

It was hard to find a copy of Help I Am Being Held Prisoner.  I wound up buying an ex-library copy without a dust jacket for 17 cents from Atlanta via Canada. (Property of the U.S. Army, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Branch 1 Library)  Very ugly, but I enjoyed reading it.  

Philip K. Dick - Banished!

I spent all day selecting books to put into storage - Bookglutton is going on a diet.  I meant to count all the books going into storage but I forgot to start.  So far, I have nine boxes packed and sealed.  Nine boxes sounds like a lot, and for a normal person, I suppose it is. When Mrs Bookglutton returned home from work, she looked at the nine boxes and remarked that I had yet to make much progress.  (My guess - 600 packed.)

Most of my books I genuinely love.  So it is difficult deciding what makes the cut and what does not.

Philip K. Dick - he did not make the cut.  He had a limitless capacity to invent some really great material but he is, by far, the worst writer of anyone who is a giant in his or her genre.  I can't say his books brought me much pleasure.  They are hard to get through.  (I've never been able to finish Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, either.) See the movie of any PKD book instead of trying to read it.

Someone needs to rewrite all of his books.  I know there are copyright restrictions that would prevent this but someone really should redo all of his books.  He was crazy and on drugs - so very creative but the craft suffered terribly.  There are a bunch of stories about how Gordon Lish massively edited Raymond Carver's work and that reworking is what made Carver great.  I wish someone had done that for Dick.

I found a note written on a bookmark in my copy of VALIS.

Chapter 9 is a long way into a book for it to start to get good.

Even the biography had to go.

Up next:  I tackle books on history.

My assistant saved a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles to add to his personal collection.

Big in Japan

My favorite book of 2011 was Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and after spending three weeks immersed in it, I wanted to read more Japanese fiction.  So I read some more Murakami.  (My wife just bought me the three volume, slip-cased, paperback edition of 1Q84 and I think I am going to re-read it.)  And I rounded up all the Japanese fiction scattered around our place and turned up, among many titles, 2011's other big Japanese novel, Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X. 

Suspect X got a lot of great reviews and was nominated for an Edgar Award for best mystery novel (it lost out to Mo Hayder's Gone - which I find fairly amazing as Gone only makes sense if one has read the two books before it - Skin and Ritual - and as much as I love Mo Hayder, Gone is bonkers - one of the subplots concerns two cops who should be in love with each other, but aren't speaking, independently working to destroy evidence and hide a body from a hit and run one of them is concealing from the book before).  Apparently, Keigo Higashino is the biggest writer in Japan but almost completely unheard of in the west.  I thought I knew a fair amount about contemporary Japanese fiction so this was a big surprise to me.   Suspect X is about a math teacher who helps his neighbor (with whom he is in love - unbeknownst to her) cover up the accidental murder of her ex-husband.  A squad of detectives and a physics professor match wits against this math teacher who has engineered the perfect cover up.  And not to give anything away but there is an incredible twist at the end - I knew something was coming but never would have thought of this in a million years.  The clues were there but most readers would never figure it out.

Just after I finished reading Suspect X, I received a review copy of the upcoming Keigo Higashino novel Salvation of a Saint (thank you MacMillan!).  It turns out that Higashino has written several books and stories with the cops and the physics professor (known as Professor Galileo) from Suspect X.  In Salvation of a Saint, they tackle the case of a mysterious poisoning that appears to be the perfect crime.  The book follows the detectives attempts to unravel a most amazing puzzle.  A wonderful read.  I hope this book is a big hit when it is published this fall.

After reading two of Higashino's books, I needed more.  I found an earlier novel called Naoko.  This appears to be the first book of his to be translated into English.  In it, a mother and daughter are in a deadly bus accident en route to a ski resort and somehow the mother's body dies but her mind/spirit jumps into the body of her 11 year old daughter.   Normally, I would hate this idea but here, well, it works.  When the husband realizes the wife is alive in the daughter, he doesn't tell anyone - and who would believe him anyway?  They return home from the hospital and attempt to rebuild and manage their lives and keep their secret.  Much of the story is how he reconciles that his wife now lives in the body of his daughter.  And this turned out to be a pretty good story.  Moving, even.  The lives of the other people from the bus crash come into play and the book ends with a pretty moving and satisfactory explanation/resolution.

Desperate for more Keigo Higashino, I scoured the web for more about him.  And it is really strange that there is so little written about him.  His American publishers compare him to James Patterson and Dean Koontz (in terms of sales and popularity, I think - Higashino is a much better writer).  He has dozens of untranslated novels [MacMillan - you have a lot of work to do - get cracking!] and many of them look really good.  And there is one oddity.  There may or may not be a book of his that has been translated into English but never published.  Random House seems to have commissioned a translation of something called Malice in 2009.  I have only found one mention of it - the website Fantastic Fiction has a description of the book and a picture of the cover.  The name of the translator is Radhica Capoor. She appears to exist but I can't find much information about her.  And there aren't any copies for sale anywhere - somehow this title gets mixed up with a manga called Chi's Sweet Home.  If this book exists, please publish it.  Or send me an electronic copy (epub or mobi).

I've moved on to Seicho Matsumoto now.  Vertical (which published Keigo Higashino's Naoko) has just released an old Matsumoto novel called Pro Bono.  A long time ago I read Inspector Imanishi Investigates and enjoyed it (even though I have forgotten what it was about - murder and trains?)  Pro Bono is the story of a famous attorney who takes on a case he initially refused when the suspect dies in prison and the attorney feels remorse for not having taken the case.  I'm halfway done with the book and am enjoying it.  I have two other old Matsumoto novels in the stack of Japanese fiction I rounded up and am eager to move on them.  Even though Matsumoto wrote many more novels, it seems only four of his books have been translated into English.

I have another novel and a collection of stories by Matsumoto to read if I am still in the mood after I finish Pro Bono.  Or I may have to ration them.