bookglutton goes on a diet

I have gone on a diet.  Two diets, actually.  Since August of 2012, I have lost several thousand pounds of books.  (Technically, I still have them - they are in storage.  Also, I now have storage in two states.) And now I am on a real one, the kind where you don't eat.

Last Saturday's New York Times ran a story about the latest diet to sweep the UK, the Fast Diet.  I am a sucker for concepts that feel scientifically based.  And I love the BBC.  And I love books.  So when I read that about how Michael Mosely did an episode of Horizon on intermittent fasting and turned it into a book, I thought this was the diet for me.  I watched the episode of Horizon and saw how he nicely eliminated most of the really difficult parts of fasting and was still able to get results.  And then I got the book and was further moved to believe that I could lose weight simply by restricting myself to 600 calories two days a week while eating normally the rest of the week.  (I particularly enjoyed that  he filmed the program in the US and actually ate the kind of crap that I grew up on.  The researcher in Chicago who convinces him that he can just fast two days a week drives him to a suburban hot dog and hamburger stand and they eat their food in the car.  Me in a nutshell.)

I have always been very interested in reading about food, diet, nutrition, agriculture - all of that stuff.  But I never act on any of what I read. This is a first. It is too soon to tell how this fasting regiment is working.  It is not that hard to do. It is a bit boring, though.  Of the two, I think keeping the books off will prove to be more difficult in the long run.

Bugging the Shower?

I've come across two discussions about bugging devices in two books I've read and I am having a hard time believing what is being said can still be true. Apparently it is common knowledge that you can't bug a shower.  In Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, Nick and Amy Dunne have a conversation in the shower because she is certain he has bugged their house in order to catch her admitting to certain things.  She forces him to have conversations about these certain subjects in the shower with the water on so any electronic recording devices will not be able to pick up what is said.

In Henry Bromell's Little America, Mack Hooper is a CIA operative in 1958 working in the American Embassy in Kurash, a fictional Middle Eastern country.  Through his contacts, he learns that the American Ambassador to Kurash has been covertly photographed having sex with underage boys and Mack has to decide how to handle possible fallout from the situation.  When Mack needs to discuss this predicament with his wife, where do they go to talk?  Of course, to the bathroom with the shower running.

I can believe that bugging technology circa 1958 could be foiled by the sound of running water.  But it less believable that in 2012 when Gone Girl takes place that a shower is an effective way to evade electronic eavesdropping.  Hasn't the technology improved?  Isn't there some algorithm out there that can filter out the water noise and isolated human voices?

(The closest thing to a solution to this dilemma was nearly accomplished by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2.  http://youtu.be/7yatqBQWC0k)

And why anyone would ever think the shower is a safe place to be for anything is beyond me.  I think we all know why.

Menageries

I picked up five weeks of comics tonight: Mara, The Unwritten, Hellboy in Hell, Mud Man, Rachel Rising, B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth, a Lord Baltimore one-shot, Fatale, another Unwritten, Saga, The Massive, B.P.R.D. 1948, and The Walking Dead.  A very nice haul.

And I bought the March issue of Outdoor Life because I realized I had no idea how to survive a Grizzly Bear attack.  (Don't laugh.  It could happen.  I was reading about the same subject in the February issue of Backpacker.)  (Having just read about it in one magazine, you would think I wouldn't need to read about it again but I can never remember what they tell  you to do in these situations.  I should probably carry my folder of clippings with me at all times.)  And the March/April issue of Sports Afield because - well, for no good reason, really.  It just has a lot of stories about hunting in Africa.  Which has absolutely no relevance to my life (except in terms of interior decorating) but is fascinating nonetheless.

And I bought a paperback copy of Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd because I was just in a mood to buy a book and I do not own it.  I started reading a library copy last year but couldn't get into it.  But when I saw it today, I just had to have it.

Earlier in the day I got the new London Review of Books.  And my copy of the New Scientist was in the mailbox when I got home.

Before I left for the day we got four boxes of wall-hangings and decorations we ordered.  So even though I have all this cool stuff to read I won't be able to read anything tonight as I will be trying to hang decorations (and thinking about hunting).

A Happy Highsmith and a Very Unhappy Flynn

Highsmithic books are enjoyable because rooting for people caught up in difficult circumstances and doing very bad things can be fun.  But if you read too many books in this vein, and start to think about it, it can become too grim.  Like the choppping up of bodies which I just read about, at length, in Natuso Kirino's Out. Now I'm reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The New York Times Book Review summarizes Gone Girl as "A woman disappears on the day of her fifth anniversary; is her husband a killer?" Is it Highsmithic?  Maybe.  Many reviews have mentioned Highsmith.  To me it seems more Grand Guignol than Highsmithic.  And invariably (it now seems) we get to a section where two volunteers on a search campaign looking for Amy Dunne (the titular gone girl) casually discuss the most likely way the husband got rid of the body - dumping it in the Mississppi River.  But one argues that you'd have to chop it up first, but then one wonders if the body parts wouldn't get stuck and wash up or how far would they flow before washing up.  And I thought to myself, maybe this is all a bit too much.  We can't always be talk about disposing of bodies like this.  After the detailed and technical discussions of how to dismember a body in Natsuo Kirino's Out, I think I need to read lighter fare.  On the whole, Gone Girl is an amazingly thrilling and venomous book with, perhaps, the world's two most unreliable narrators.  I thought it was a tremendously en
tertaining read and I can see why it was the fourth best-selling book (in print and e-book formats) in the US in 2012.  (Any guesses what the number 1,2,&3 best-selling books were?  For bonus points, what was number 9 and how did it relate to numbers 1,2&3?)

Which brings me to Alys, Always by Harriet Lane.  I read it because I heard good things about it.  This is hard to say without potentially spoiling the book but Francis Thorpe is scheming to insert herself into the Kyte family.  Specifically into the arms and bed of Laurence Kyte, a prominent English literary novelist whose life she enters when she comes to the aide of Kyte's wife, Alys, after a terrible automobile accident.  Part of the suspense is that we don't know what Frances Thorpe will do to do it or to what end this is all for anyway - but Thorpe (stop reading - spoiler) uses her dark deeds for a relatively benign purpose, a sort of nice, mild suprise ending.  Alys, Always ends more like Jane Eyre/Charlotte Bronte than Patricia Highsmith.  Think, Reader, I Married Him instead of Reader, I Dismembered Him (which is where I was worried the story would go).  And you know, it was refreshing and different.  She just wanted a certain life and seized upon an unusual way of achieving it.  And they all lived happily ever after.  And the only death was the car accident which starts the book.  And I went and double-checked, Francis does not cause the accident that starts the books (a would be wicked twist that I had been on the lookout for all along).

Kate Atkinson and Going to the Dogs Again

The last time I started a Kate Atkinson novel, I got a dog.  I just started reading her new novel, Life After Life, and once again, I'm thinking about dogs.  (And food. There is a lot about food in this book.  Strange food, I think: Egyptian pudding, beef collops, scrag-end, ham and pickles, beef tea, picalilli, sweat meats, meat pies, herring roe on toast, bloater paste sandwiches, lemon curd sandwiches, seed cake, pork pie, steak pie, Rose Madder, Jewish dietary restrictions, Hitler and pastries, and a lot of other stuff.  I guess I don't know much about what the English ate in 1910 but I have a hunch the food in this book is not normal.  Or that that way of eating has died out.  Or that it is supposed to tell us something.)

Early on, the Todd family get a dog to live with them at their house, Fox Corner, in the English countryside.  A French mastiff.  So I put down the book (Kindle in this case), and started Googling French mastiffs because I didn't know what they looked like.  Turns out, they are beautiful.

If I didn't live in downtown Washington, this would be the dog for me.  Instead, I will keep this guy:

In a bit of a coincidence, my dog and I watched the second night of the 2013 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show tonight.  We missed the toy dog category (the one with Shih Tzus) but got to see the working dog group and the terrier group.  The French mastiff in the competition - or the Dogue de Bordeaux - was a handsome fella but he did not win his category.  The Portuguese Water Dog did.  I also learned that the Great Pyrenees, another member of the working dog group, was declared the "Royal Dog of France" by Louis XIV in 1675.

I know just the person who could use one of these.

Homeland and Little America

Just as I have innumerable books waiting to be read, I also have several television series that I need to watch.  This past week, I finally started watching Homeland.  I know Homeland is a huge hit now and everyone has seen it so that I should watch it now and write about it is, I realize, well after all the horses have left the barn.  But I knew about the show before it premiered two seasons ago and thought it was going to be something worth watching.  Of course, I never got around to watching it.

What I can't believe was ten years ago, I read a great piece in the LA Weekly by John Powers on the novels of JG Farrell.  (Really - you should go read it.) (Side Note:  I have a bookshelf dedicated to writers with the initials J"X" - I have JG Farrell, JG Ballard, JM Coetzee, JR Ackerley JF Powers, and JF Federspiel.  It amuses me to no end.)  The thrust of the review is that Americans are not very good at writing about empire - which is unfortunate because there is so much material to be expolited.  One notable exception, according to Powers, was a new novel called Little America by Henry Bromell.  At the time I was more concerned with JG Farrell and didn't buy a copy of Little America for a few years and then let it sit unread for a several more years.  But I did start to read about Bromell and found out that he was also a TV writer/producer.  He was one of the producers of Homicide: Life on the Street (or the cop show in Baltimore that David Simon did before The Wire, greatest work of television ever) and a bunch of other shows.  So even though I had not read Little America, I was pretty impressed by Bromell.  And then I heard that he was producing a new series for Showtime called Homeland, and I thought, gee, that should be pretty good, I should watch it.  And with the way things work around here, two years later I am now watching Homeland.

Yes, Homeland is amazing.  So good that I decided to start reading Little America.  It, too, is amazing.  "A remarkably well written and highly original novel.  A thriller at the classiest level." - Los Angeles Times.  I agree.  Little America is the story of CIA involvement in a fictitious Middle Eastern country in the 1950s told through the attempt of the son of a CIA officer to understand what happened to the country (which has vanished) and his family (who were stationed there).  The jacket copy references Graham Greene and John Le Carre.  I would throw in the storytelling chops of William Boyd.  I can't believe this book isn't better known. I hope the success of Homeland spurs some interest in this novel.

I have no idea if it is possible to effective brainwash a person.  I know it is a popular subject in books and movies but I'm skeptical that it could really happen.  Part of Homeland concerns whether or not a captured and tortured US Marine could be turned into a terrorist who would then carry out a mission once back in the US.  So I was thinking about this when I pulled a copy of The Holland Suggestions by John Dunning off the shelf (where it has been patiently waiting for years for the right time to reveal itself to me) to determine whether or not it should go into storage.  John Dunning was a reporter and writer who became a used bookseller and then later wrote some mystery novels about a cop turned used bookseller turned private eye.  Okay, I know that sounds terrible.  Most vocational inspired mystery novels are terrible and completely implausible.  But his first book, Booked to Die, was fantastic.  It was a good crime novel and it was about the book world.  (Um, I can't remember the plot - it came out in 1992 - but I really loved it.  Because I love mystery novels and because I love book collecting.  It worked.)  And the book was a fairly big hit.  At some point I bought an ugly book club edition of one of Dunning's early novels because I wanted more Dunning.  That book was The Holland Suggestions, published in 1975.  Which, of course, I never read. Until now, that is.  Because I realized that the book is some sort of thriller about hypnosis and the power of post-hypnotic suggestion.  When Jim Ryan (Jack Ryan was apparently taken) was in college, he fell in with a rogue professor who experimented on his students.  Something happened and it shattered his life and cost him his wife, leaving him to raise their daughter on his own.  Now, some 15 years later, something is triggering strange actions in Jim Ryan and he is forced to dredge up the past again.  Not helping matters is that his daughter now looks exactly like his wife (and may be secretly communicating with her).  I can't say for sure if this book will be good - it has potential and reads like somewhat of a wordy P.M. Hubbard.  And I probably shouldn't let it distract me from Homeland and Little America, but for some reason I fell compelled to keep reading now.

UPDATE:  Henry Bromell just died.

Highsmithic?

Auctorial descriptives like Dickensian, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian are easily understood literary adjectives - most people know what these words mean even if they have never read Dickens, Kafka, and Orwell.  There are many other good ones - Joycean, Pinteresque, Proustian, and Ballardian.  But two things I've stumbled upon recently have had me thinking about Patricia Highsmith and what the auctorial descriptive for her would be (and what it would mean).

I just finished reading Out by Natuso Kirino and it is very Highsmithian - or Highsmithic.  Out is the story of four Japanese women who work the night shift in a boxed lunch factory.  One abused woman strangles her husband and the other three help to get rid of the body.  By chopping him up and packing him into 53 plastic bags.  And disposing of the parts in and around Tokyo.  Even though Yayoi has a compelling reason to kill her husband, she is a murderer.  And her three friends aid and abet the crime by butchering him in a bathroom.  So we are essentially following or rooting for flawed, guilty, or bad characters - which seems to be a common theme in Patricia Highsmith's books.  Tom Ripley, Guy and Bruno in Strangers on Train, to name a few.

In Out, much is made about how hard it is to dispose of a human body.  Or to do it well, so you don't get caught.  It reminded me of Tom Ripley's troubles getting rid of bodies in Ripley Under Ground.  Ripley kills a visiting American art collector in the wine cellar of his home in France (while he has a houseguest) and almost farcically has to drag the body up the stairs and across his property to bury it.  Then he has to go back and dig it up and dump it in a river.  And later on, Ripley has to dispose of another body in the Austrian countryside.  He tries to burn it.  But he botches the cremation.  The women in Out do a better job but have similarly difficult time.  And I rooted for both to succeed.  While I have not settled on a good definition of Highsmithic (which I prefer to Highsmithian - I like the -mythic sound), I'd say Out is Higmsithic.  There is much more to the story - the butchering and disposal of the abusive husband is just the start of things.  At times, the suspense and horror in Out were nearly unbearable.  An awesome book, I can't believe it took me almost eight years to read it.

There is a TV show on the ABC Family channel called Pretty Little Liars that I also think is somewhat Highsmithic.  (The show is blantantly Hitchcockian - the references to Psycho have all the subtlety of a hand grenade.)  The series follows what happens to four teen girls after their friend Alison is murdered and after a prank blinds another girl. A shadowy figure known as A torments the girls via text messages and dirty tricks.  The girls try to solve the murder of their friend and unmask A.  If I were a teen girl I would probably think this is the greatest thing on TV.  My wife is a big fan of the show and that is how I came to watch it.  We were watching some old episodes to prepare for the start of the show's winter season when I noticed at the start of an episode that Nate is holding and reading a copy of Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer.  Nate  has already stalked and killed Maya (who is Emily's love interest) and is now targeting Emily (one of the titular Pretty Little Liars).  He does so by going after Paige, Emily's new love interest.  I haven't read The Blunderer so I don't know what plot elements the show is using from the book but I bet they are there.

And I guess this is a sign that I should read The Blunderer sometime soon.  Perhaps after I finish Grotesque, Natsuo Kirino's follow up to Out.  And now that I have this idea about the Highsmithic in my head, I wonder what else is out there?