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.

Coincidence and Weekend Entertainment

Two coincidences today, September 18.

I needed a book to take with me while walking the dog and I grabbed a nice Faber paperback copy of Paul Auster's Oracle Night.  (The UK paperback looks so much cooler than the American.)  Why do I need to take a book to walk the dog?  Because sometimes we sit by the statue of Samuel Hahnemann and he watches the traffic.  (I can't believe that we visit this statue so much because Hahnemann is the inventor of homeopathy and I hate nonsense like that.  I should boycott that statue based on principle alone.  And even worse, Hahnemann once had a theory that coffee was a major cause of disease.  Those are fighting words.  But he has a very nice statue in a nice little park so I overlook all of that.)

Coincidence is usually a major element in Auster's work.  I only had time to read 25 pages of Oracle Night so I don't know what part coincidence will play in this book, but that didn't matter because I already had my coincidence:  an important part of the book occurs on September 18.  (Okay, September 18, 1982.)  Auster uses footnotes in this novel so that's how I know the date.  I realize that this is a relatively minor coincidence.  Its only fun because its Auster.

Later on in the day I watched the first episode of the BBC television adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  And to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed it.  Typically I cannot watch adaptations of books I have read but I happily made it through the first episode.  (I watched the UK version of it.  The American version was cut down to six episodes.  No way I'm going to watch a butchered version of it.)  I've read about how hard it was to follow and I know I would've been lost if I had not just read the book.  I know the movie version of the book was released this weekend but it will not open in the US until December 9.  That hardly seems fair but at least it gives me time to watch the entire tv series first.

After TTSS, I decided to watch some of a BBC documentary series called the 7 Ages of Rock.  I watched the first episode, The Birth of Rock.  It was awesome and almost entirely devoted to Jimi Hendrix.  (The version broadcast in America was, I read, substantially different because the filmmakers didn't have the American rights to much of the Hendrix music and film used in the British version and couldn't show it in the US.  What a load of crap that is.)  Hendrix's career was relatively short and he died at age 27 on September 18, 1970 - my second September 18 coincidence of the day.

I also read a volume of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack this weekend.  And the long-awaited issue no. 12 of Optic Nerve.  The first half of Optic Nerve was so-so.  It is the story of a gardener who struggles to convince the world of the greatness of his new art form, hortisculpture.  The second story was much better - Amber Sweet is the story of a woman who is constantly mistaken for a porn star because of her likeness the pictures on the starlet's website, a terrible, Auster-like coincidence.

20th Century Boys & More

The hurricane is long gone but I am still reading The Honourable Schoolboy.   Parts of it are great but other parts are irritating - like some of the nonsense we have to read about life in Hong Kong and in Italy. Can a thriller turn into a slow read?  This one has but on the whole I still find it greatly enjoyable.

I also started one of fall's most anticipated new releases, Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers.  I finally got around to reading 2007's The Abstinence Teacher in August (there is a monstrous backlog of stuff to read here) and enjoyed it tremendously.  Over the past few years I seem to have gone overboard reading mysteries and thrillers and it was nice to read some plain fiction.

I can't wait for the new Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84 to come out in October.  The New Yorker ran an excerpt from the book last week called Town of Cats.  And the story featured an illustration from Adrian Tomine - someone whose work I have been reading lately as well.  (Tomine also did the illustration for the New York Times Book Review of The Leftovers.  He's everywhere. I'm supposed to get issue #12 of Tomine's comic Optic Nerve sometime in September - the pub date seems to keep changing.)  Apparently anticipation for 1Q84 is so great that fans have been translating bits of it into English from Japanese.  And the Guardian ran a story over the weekend claiming that bookshops in the US will open at midnight to sell copies of it on publication day just like they did for the Harry Potter books.  As much as I would love to live in a world where this could happen, I have to call bullshit on the Guardian's story.  It would have been nice to name a single store with plans to do so.  Maybe a few places in New York and San Francisco will do this but I cannot see this happening anywhere else.

Continuing with the Japan theme, I started reading Naoki Urasawa's 20th Century Boys.  I've already finished volumes 1 and 2.  I have all of them through number 9 from the library except number 4, which I had to order online.  I had been reading Osamu Tezukas series Black Jack - which I enjoyed - but I wanted something with a long and complicated plot, so I gave 20th Century Boys a try and was knocked out.  I shouldn't over praise it based on two volumes but it is thrillingly entertaining so far.  And in a nice bit of coincidence, Marc Bolan and T Rex are on the cover of the new issue of Uncut so I've been reading about them and listening to Electric Warrior and the other stuff I have in iTunes.  (I have a BBC 4 documentary on Bolan that I've been meaning to watch, too.)

I looked at some scanlation copies of 20th Century Boys and opted to stick with the books - Viz seems to have done a very nice job.   Except Viz refuses to sell 20CBs via their app - I would love to read it on my iPad.  That's frustrating.  And I noticed they haven't finished publishing these books yet - so I will end up finished with what is in print before the final few volumes are published.  Will I have to read illegitimate online copies?  I have also taken a look at Urasawa's new series Billy Bat via scanlation copies.  It looks fantastic but as far as I can tell there is no timetable yet set for an American edition.

One other thing I recently read that was utterly fantastic was the graphic novel David Boring by Daniel Clowes.  I grabbed several of his books from the library and quite frankly, thought David Boring was going to be the worst of the lot.  (Perhaps something to do with the title?)  I'm not even sure how to describe it.  Like something David Lynch would create - but more accessible.  A great, great book.