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| 0385491050
| 9780385491051
| 0385491050
| 3.45
| 27,246
| 1972
| Jun 1998
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #64. Wow, has it really been five years since I last took on a Margaret Atwood title for my Great Completist Challenge? That has to change; because the more I read of this fascinating Postmodernist veteran, one of the few to successfully transition into the Sincereism / Wokeism / whatever-you-want-to-call-it times of right now, the more I’m realizing that she’s one of the greatest writers of our generation, the rare treasure who can jump back and forth between the world of academic literary fiction and commercial genre fiction while keeping both audiences happy at the same time. By now here near the end of her career (she’s still alive as of the day I’m writing this, a spritely 84 and the recipient of pretty much every literary award that exists), she’s of course infamously known more for the genre side of her career, and especially the one book she’ll undoubtedly be remembered for the most after her death, 1985’s nearly perfect feminist dystopian science-fiction nightmare The Handmaid’s Tale (which we won’t be getting to in this Completist Challenge for a while); but as we examined last time in her very first novel, 1969’s The Edible Woman (my review), when younger she was pretty much forced to be known exclusively within academic literary-fiction circles, because with few exceptions these were the kinds of books young pretty college-educated women like her were “supposed” to be writing, Peyton Place-style domestic dramas about failed marriages and unfulfilled yearning out in the stultifying suburbs (of Toronto in the case of Atwood, who has made Canadian national identity another running theme of most of her books too). And indeed, in this second novel of hers from 1972, we’re back in the same territory, which is why she was largely thought of at the start of her career in terms of being the next Sylvia Plath, before she started churning out all the dark, violent, conceptually brilliant sci-fi, fantasy and horror books of her middle-aged years. But just like The Edible Woman, in Surfacing we can already see hints of this darker, weirder material, the territory Atwood wanted to wade in from the start but felt at first that she couldn’t, because it wasn’t the kinds of things “proper” women wrote about and therefore she would never find a publisher. It’s the story of a daughter in her late twenties, forced to return to her childhood cabin home in the rural wilderness of a Canadian island in the middle of nowhere, because her elderly estranged father has gone missing; with her is her current boyfriend, who she’s in a drearily unhappy relationship with, and two mutual friends who are a couple themselves, the kind of grating, obnoxiously middle-class mouthbreathers who Atwood displays such piss and vinegar for throughout her entire oeuvre. Like most literary fiction, not much actually happens here -- the foursome spend about a week at her childhood cabin, systematically exhausting all their options for tracking down her father, as the two relationships gently unravel in real time and we get an unvarnished look at all four personalities at their worst under a moment of large stress. But with this being Atwood, there’s more going on here than that, which is why even from the very start of her career as a novelist, she marked herself more than merely an academic MFAer churning out domestic dramas; for as the story continues, our protagonist finds evidence that perhaps points to the fact that her dad went insane out here by himself for so long, but finds compelling counter-evidence that he didn’t, so now must decide whether he’s sane and therefore likely dead and they can all go home (because a sane person wouldn’t be away from shelter and food for so long), or if he’s alive on the island somewhere and they need to keep looking, but is now suffering from dementia and is therefore purposely hiding from them. It’s worth remembering that Atwood was already a celebrated, award-winning academic poet before she ever started writing fiction in the first place, and at the point of writing Surfacing already had something like six books of poetry published; because you can see that quite clearly in the complex, heavily symbolic prose of her early books, and especially here in Surfacing when she discusses our unnamed hero and her complicated relationship with her parents, what it may or may not mean for her dad to perhaps or perhaps not be a raving lunatic currently roaming the Canadian countryside, and whether she may or may not be going crazy herself out there in the wilderness, as she attempts to take the subtlest of clues around here and try to infer her way into a solution to this mystery that’s way over her head. And so in this, the book title Surfacing is as poetically symbolic as The Edible Woman was in the last book, another sign of Atwood’s background as a poet; it refers not only to the prospect of her father hopefully resurfacing into civilization again soon, but also to the fishing trips the foursome regularly take during their week at the cabin, as well as a dizzyingly intense scene where our hero keeps going diving into a deliberately flooded lake, in an increasingly unhinged attempt to see whether there are Native American paintings in a cave now located deeply under the waterline, which if there would mean that her father really had been doing sketches of them in his notebook on behalf of a fellow scientist, or if there are actually no paintings there, meaning that her father had truly gone insane and was now filling notebooks with doodles and gibberish. In none of the books by Atwood I’ve now read in my life (today is my seventh) are the women in the center of our stories particularly heroic, particularly even likable; they’re complicated, contradictory, often infuriating women, who behave in ways that sometimes seem obtuse and obsessive by their friends, dissatisfied with everything around them but with no suggestions for what to replace it with. (Or in other words, Ottessa Moshfegh fans should be reading Atwood’s early novels as soon as they possibly can.) And it’s worth noting as well that another one of Atwood’s well-known running themes in her career is on display even here in her second novel, the same as her first, an element that I personally feel is key to her having such a large and feverous fan base; the idea that the patriarchy actually doesn’t have to do that much for men to perpetually stay in power, because there is seemingly always women willing to stand up and do the work of belittling other women on behalf of the men, here seen mostly plainly in the frisson between our protagonist and her college female friend who’s along on the trip with them, who acts like a goofy tease to the men’s joshingly misogynistic behavior and ultimately goes along with anything they tell her to do, acting like our hero is somehow stuck up for not going along with it too. In other words, despite being an unambiguously feminist author, there are no tidy Sunday school moral tales being told in Atwood’s novels, but rather big and messy stories about a big and messy humanity in which nothing is ever black and white but rather endless shades of gray. We never know how much we’re supposed to be rooting for our protagonist in Surfacing and how much we’re supposed to be shaking our heads and muttering, “You’re goddamned insane and I gotta get the fuck out of here;” and that makes Atwood a fascinating storyteller, and the reason she’s still a household name where a thousand of her fellow, simpler ‘70s feminist authors are now completely forgotten. Although she’s certainly still in Bell Jar territory here, just like her first book, you can even more easily this time see the dark, weird shades that her writing contained even then, and why even in these years she started picking up more and more super-fans who intensely loved her in the way one would love a cult leader (no, seriously). That simply increased more and more with each new book she put out throughout the rest of the ‘70s, where she converted more and more from an academic author to a commercially popular one; next, for example, we’ll be looking at 1976’s Lady Oracle, which very similarly to John Irving’s The World According to Garp from these same years is a metafictional tale, about a popular author whose real life is actually much weirder than the stories they write. I promise, it won’t take another five years next time! Margaret Atwood books being reviewed for this series: The Edible Woman (1969) | Surfacing (1972) | Lady Oracle (1976) | Life Before Man (1979) | Bodily Harm (1981) | The Handmaid's Tale (1985) | Cat's Eye (1988) | The Robber Bride (1993) | Alias Grace (1996) | The Blind Assassin (2000) | Oryx and Cake (2003) | The Penelopiad (2005) | The Year of the Flood (2009) | MaddAddam (2013) | The Heart Goes Last (2015) | Hag-Seed (2016) | The Testaments (2019) ...more |
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Oct 03, 2024
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Oct 03, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0743431707
| 9780743431705
| 0743431707
| 3.73
| 16,609
| 1965
| Feb 26, 2002
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #56. I got behind on my “beach and airport” summer reads this year, because of volunteering to be a judge in a bunch of romance literary contests (which counts as marketing work for my freelance career as a book editor precisely of romance novels and other genres, which is why I’m always glad to do it); so I’m squeezing in a few more here in the waning days of September before moving on to the denser (both intellectually and in page count) books of each autumn, winter and early spring. As long-time friends know, I’m doing duel completist reads these days of both Ian Fleming and John Le Carre as part of each year’s summer reading (earlier this summer, for example, I did what I think is a rather nice write-up of the 1956 James Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever), because they’re such two natural opposite sides of a coin when it comes to metaphorically important genre literature in the Mid-Century Modernist years; both were writing at roughly the same time (although Fleming died long before Le Carre did), both were writing stories about the special branches of Britain’s Military Intelligence department (specifically MI-6, although given fictional names in the various books), and both were former members of special branches themselves during World War Two, which is where the impetus for writing about the subject came from for both. But Fleming wrote rah-rah stories about the derring-do of the unstoppable British forces even in a post-Empire, “Little England” UK, using the always suave yet deadly Bond to serve as the smartest person in the room in a new “jet age” of international treachery and Soviet menace; while Le Carre was interested in the exact opposite, examining the perpetually bumbling British government of the post-war years to paint a damning portrait of a nation in decline, everything made worse by the Fleming-type rah-rahers who used the increasingly aging events of World War Two to try to artificially prop up the old “stiff upper lip” of an empire (oops, I mean Commonwealth) on which the sun never sets. After a couple of warm-ups to start his career, written when young and not yet a full-time author, Le Carre really hit his doom-and-gloom stride with the novel right before today’s, 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (my review), where he thought that he had adequately made the point that a post-war British intelligence complex really didn’t know what it was doing anymore, relying on less resources in a more complex world to solve mysteries over the heads of these aging pipe-smoking eggheads, who were increasingly having to rely on first-hand intel from their big rich beefy cousins over in America’s CIA. So Le Carre was aggravated and disappointed, then, to see a strong part of the British public interpret Cold as exactly the kind of Bond-like rah-rah propaganda for a forever ascendent British as Fleming’s books were; and he decided at that point to write a next novel that not a single person would ever be able to incorrectly interpret again. That led to today’s book, 1965 The Looking Glass War, and he’s not kidding around; virtually every single character in this book is some kind of moral coward or conniving sociopath or doddering pensioner, ironically making the world a much worser place while they think they’re making it better, using endless nostalgia for the war to sink into a worse and worse bureaucracy that results in more and more screwups for the entire British intelligence community. And in this, Le Carre picked a surprising yet excellent (nay, almost perfect) setting for such an unmistakably pessimistic story, which is another one of these Military Intelligence units similar to MI-6 but that is about to finally get shut down for good twenty years after the end of the war, which is when the department was created in the first place. This is something I got interested in several years ago, when first starting the Bond books, why there’s a modern MI-5 and MI-6 that everyone knows about (roughly congruent with the US’s FBI and CIA), but seemingly no other numbers; and it’s because all those Military Intelligence units were started during the two world wars, most of them with these really hyperspecific duties (MI-9, for example, did nothing but debrief escaped prisoners of war), which saw them rapidly get closed in the decade after the war ended, until all that was left was department 5, now handling all domestic threats to Britain, and department 6, now handling all foreign threats. (And in fact, neither department officially calls themselves MI-5 or -6 anymore, but simply acknowledges that a large portion of the public still do, precisely because of things like the Bond novels and subsequent movies.) Le Carre never mentions which MI number the one at the heart of our book is, but it’s quite obviously one of the ones way down on the importance ladder; here in 1965, twenty years after the war, they’re down to a handful of employees in a single decrepit building that everyone has forgotten about, full of aging intellectuals who think the way they did it against the Nazis is still the way to do it now, where the British government clearly thinks it’s best to just let these old fogies retire in a few years without a fuss and then quietly close down the department for good. So when some blurry dark photos come in one day from a forgotten old war resource supposedly showing a warehouse of Russian missiles accidentally spotted in East Germany, the desperate employees of MI-22 or whatever number they are decide to take this as seriously as possible as quickly as possible, despite the numerous red flags that come up over whether any of this information is true or can be trusted. That leads to an ever-cascading series of disasters, each worse than the last, including sending a career desk jockey out into the field for the very first time with no training, partnering him with an aging Polish defector they haven’t worked with since the war, and insisting on using the bulky and finicky suitcase-sized wireless transmitters all these aging administrators had become experts at during the 1940s, too old now to understand the latest generation of better, smaller, more reliable tech, and their department not important enough anymore to be able to successfully requisition it anyway. Le Carre, true to his word, makes his point so obvious here that there’s absolutely no way to misinterpret it; every person we see in this book, from the first page to the last, is incompetent or corrupt or a combination of the two, which brilliantly adds up one small fuck-up at a time in a snowball effect until suddenly they have an international incident on their hands by the book’s climax. This is officially called one of the “George Smiley” novels, named for Le Carre’s most enduring character, one of these aging war-veteran eggheads who’s described in the books as a squat little balding fat man with coke-bottle glasses and a wife who openly cheats on him. But as fans of these books know, some of the nine “Smiley novels” feature little more than a cameo from him, like is the case with this one, where he shows up for only two scenes out of the entire book. Still, though, it’s legitimate to call them Smiley novels, because those two scenes are really key ones for the book’s overall plot, in that Smiley actually works for the main MI-6 (which Le Carre fictionalizes in these books as “the Circus,” named because their headquarters is located in the Cambridge Circus neighborhood of London). When word gets out that this almost shuttered MI-22 or whatever is suddenly requesting cars, weapons, twenty-year-old wireless transmitters, safe houses and plane tickets, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what’s going on; and when he realizes what a fuck-up this MI-22 is going to make of the entire thing, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what MI-6 should do about it. That’s what really ties together all of these Cold War Le Carre novels; Smiley may understand that the system is crumbling around him, resigned to just put up with it for the few years he has left until retiring, dying or both, but he’s still ultimately good at what he does, which gives these books their clever a-ha moments that make them more entertaining than their otherwise relentlessly bleak tones would. That would reach its apex about a decade later, with the novel that’s looking more and more likely will be the one out of all of them that people will remember about Le Carre, 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; but before that, we have 1968’s A Small Town in Germany, a thriller about the rise of neo-Nazis in West Germany’s new capital, Bonn (and the first book of Le Carre’s career to not feature Smiley at all). See you next summer for that one! John Le Carre books being reviewed for this series: Call for the Dead (1961) | The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) | The Looking Glass War (1965) | A Small Town in Germany (1968) | The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) | The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) | Smiley’s People (1979) | The Little Drummer Girl (1983) | A Perfect Spy (1986) | The Russia House (1989) | The Secret Pilgrim (1990) | The Night Manager (1993) | Our Game (1995) | The Tailor of Panama (1996) | Single & Single (1999) | The Constant Gardener (2001) | Absolute Friends (2003) | The Mission Song (2006) | A Most Wanted Man (2008) | Our Kind of Traitor (2010) | A Delicate Truth (2013) | A Legacy of Spies (2017) | Agent Running in the Field (2019) | Silverview (2021) ...more |
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Sep 28, 2024
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Sep 28, 2024
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| 4.08
| 34,788
| Jan 27, 1956
| Mar 08, 2001
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting e
2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to take a chance on it, despite my checkered results of trying to read Clarke in the past. (I’ve read all four of the “Space Odyssey” books, all four of the “Rama” books Clarke had a hand in, and Childhood’s End, but found all nine books lacking in one way or another as good literature.) And alas, that turned out to be the case here too, a book that suffers the exact same problem I found most troubling in these other books too, which is that Clarke struggled profoundly during his career as a fiction author with the basic mechanics of the three-act plot, and thus tended to turn in novels where the first act takes up almost the entirety of the full book, there is no second act at all, and the third act is just blurted out as this gigantic infodump in the last chapter as fast as he could possibly move his fingers over his typewriter. In this case, that’s in service of an admittedly fascinating Gene Wolfe-like “space fantasy” concept; namely, it’s one billion years in the future, Earth has just one single domed city left on the planet’s surface (one so sophisticated that it can literally run, repair and upgrade itself), the people who are still around know that humanity once went out and colonized the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago, and now humans don’t and no one understands (or particularly cares anymore) why, other than vague myths about “invaders” who may or may not have destroyed the Earth’s surface, and who may or may not have agreed to let a single enclosed city of humans still exist as long as they promised never to return to space again. To be honest, the main reason this got my attention is because Tor mentioned that it’s a novel about an AI bot who gains sentience and then promptly goes psychotically insane; but unfortunately, while Clarke does mention this insane AI for a couple of paragraphs in his chapter-long expository monologue at the end of the book about what exactly happened to the human race a billion years ago to land them in the situation they’re now in, the insane AI doesn’t actually have anything to do with the main plot, just another of the dozens of interesting concepts that Clarke just randomly threw into this book willy-nilly with no particular rhyme or reason (cloned babies! Living sidewalks! A computer the size of a city! Robots that can walk up and down stairs!), a guy big on ideas but (I’m coming to realize) woefully short on actual writing skills. Between this and my disappointed reads in recent years of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, it kind of makes me wish I had been a young writer in the 1950s myself, when science-fiction authors could apparently become world-famous just by crapping out whatever barely readable nonsense they wanted, merely because the genre was so new and there weren’t any better books around to unfavorably compare these to. (I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that if you directly line up these ‘50s “classics” next to the average sci-fi novel coming out today, you’ll get a powerful lesson in how three generations now of passionate genre fans have pushed and elevated sci-fi into a level of quality that these ‘50s pioneers only could’ve dreamed of, which is ultimately a good thing despite the reputations of these ‘50s pioneers getting a good sound thrashing as a result.) Sadly, though, until Zorp and his minions finally visit the human race and grant us this ability to travel through time (All Hail Zorp), my dreams of making a killing in the ‘50s sci-fi community will have to remain just that, so let all this serve as the only warning you need about what you’ll be getting into if you decide to pick this up. Glutton for punishment that I am, I’m still thinking of reading more of Clarke’s work in the future -- in order to read this obscure novel, I had to download a torrent containing every fiction book Clarke ever wrote, and having those 33 novels and the four-volume short story omnibus now sitting patiently on my hard drive is a tempting thing indeed -- but for now, I suppose today’s disappointed write-up will have to do. P.S. As the always great Manny Rayner says in his own review of this book, and which I had totally forgotten I was going to write about in my review too, one of the inherent problems in sci-fi -- and why it’s so problematic to write a story set One Million Years In The Future -- is that we generally can’t imagine existence more than a few generations in the future from us, which is why Clarke’s Earth One Billion A.D. here sounds pretty much like 1956 Earth but with better gadgets. This is related to what I was going to mention, how again like my previous reads recently of Asimov and Heinlein, the sheer amount of casual sexism on display here is just head-shakingly astonishing in the 2020s, and such grand irony from writers who otherwise advocated for a more enlightened and liberal future. The fact that Clarke can write here about how sexism will have been entirely eliminated by a billion years in the future, then in the very next chapter state the line (I’m paraphrasing), “Like women have been doing for a billion years now, she couldn’t stop obsessively looking at herself in the mirror,” is just the freaking chef’s kiss of unironically unaware sexism, and gives you a good idea of just how baked into the very fabric of society this casual sexism was back then. ...more |
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1
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Sep 02, 2024
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Sep 02, 2024
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| 0316289361
| 9780316289368
| 0316289361
| 4.32
| 8,341
| 1938
| 1999
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more). Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like. And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again. That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.” This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
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Jun 13, 2024
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| 0142002054
| 9780142002056
| 0142002054
| 3.64
| 23,054
| Mar 26, 1956
| 2003
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #32. It’s summer again here in Chicago, which means it’s time for me to delve back into my usual summer reads, fairly easy-to-read genre titles (often also called “airport and beach reads”) being read to honor ten-year-old Jason, who used to read such books in kid’s form for his public library’s summer reading program every year. Ian Fleming’s original 14 James Bond novels from the 1950s and ‘60s are a great series to add to this, because as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, they turn out to be almost nothing like the bombastic, overly melodramatic movie adaptations that are even more famous by now, but rather are tight little thrillers set much more in the real world than you might expect from this name now so closely associated with expensive action setpieces, futuristic secret weapons, and the gigantic boobs of that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year (or at least if you came of age during the ‘70s Roger Moore era of the Bond films, like I did). And indeed, this fourth book in the series, originally published in 1956, continues that trend, with Bond this time doing a police-style investigation into a black market ring that has risen up among the African diamond industry, and with not a single gadget from Q in sight besides a hidden compartment in Bond’s luggage to hide a gun’s silencer. This time the action is mainly set in the US, and it’s easy to see why so many people consider this book to be the very first time in the series that everything really clicks in a satisfying way; fresh off an excursion to America himself, Fleming gets his across-the-pond setting very, very right here, and also finally balances Bond himself out from the cruel sociopath territory he’s dipped far too much into in the previous books. To remind you, Fleming started the Bond novels in the first place not because he necessarily wanted to write secret agent stories, but rather that he wanted to write stories about gambling, a favorite pastime of his in his personal life (back when gambling was still largely illegal in the UK, part of what made it so thrilling for Fleming), and made the main gambling character a secret agent simply because he thought it’d be more interesting than writing a book about a dentist gambler or a truck-driver gambler. That led to a first book, 1953’s Casino Royale (my review), that got all the details about casinos and the game baccarat exactly right, but gave us a 007 who was unnecessarily mean, openly misogynistic, and who could barely function in normal society. After all, as Fleming explicitly states in that first book, the main reason various members of MI-6 were handpicked to become “00” agents was because they were people no one else at the agency could stand, and so were put in a special division where they basically stayed out in the field 365 days a year so that no one else back at the home office ever had to deal with them. After finding much bigger success with the books than he was expecting, though, Fleming started toning down and rounding out the character in subsequent titles, until we have a Bond here who’s now a regular habituate of the Special Service office in London, with a healthier if not still sexist attitude towards women (in this book he has the closest thing he’s had yet to an actual romantic relationship, making it clearer here that it’s not that he hates women in general, but that he only likes particularly complicated women who happen to come from dark, interesting backgrounds). I mean, sure, he’s still haughty and arrogant (he basically spends the entire book dismissing both the CIA and the American mafia as worthless soft pansies), and he engages in the same casual racism as pretty much every other white male did in the 1950s (get read to hear Bond use the n-word a number of times here, to which his exasperated CIA buddy admonishes him, “Now, James, you can’t use that word in the US anymore -- in fact, you’re no longer even allowed to order a jigger of liquor in a bar, but must call it a ‘jigro,’ ha ha”); but when all is said and done, this is a more enlightened and certainly a more vulnerable Bond than we’ve seen in the previous three books, much to the series’ benefit. What really sells this book over the previous ones, though, is that Fleming picks such interesting milieus in which to set his story, and then writes out these milieus in such exacting, memorable ways, based mostly on him having just finished visiting these places himself in real life a year before writing this. So after first flying in to New York on the brand-new “jumbo jets” of the age, he’s then off to Saratoga Springs for the first major plot point, which Fleming fascinatingly describes as still basically a backwoods village whose one and only thing going for it is its famous racetrack (and if you’ve ever wanted to see James Bond drink Miller High Lifes while having a country-fried steak at a highway-exit diner, then brother, you’ve picked the right book); then he’s off to a pre-gentrified Las Vegas, which as Fleming interestingly reminds us, New York didn’t even have direct flights to in the 1950s, visitors basically having to fly to Los Angeles first and then take a rickety propeller plane from there to Sin City; and then eventually he heads back to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the same luxury ocean liner Fleming himself took during his own trip home from America, where we have basically the most exciting action scene of the entire novel, one that involves Bond climbing around the vertical outer skin of the ship using nothing but a makeshift ladder made out of his cabin’s bedsheets. That’s really what saves these novels, is that the action itself is much more of the realistic Jason Bourne type, versus the “jumping out of helicopters while wearing skis” nonsense of the Hollywood movies; and that combined with the more well-rounded, easier to injure, and easier to root for Bond makes this fourth novel of the series easily the best one yet, and definitely the place to start if you’re going to be only a casual fan of this series and not a completist like me. (That said, get ready for yet more ridiculous descriptions of what British people considered “fine dining” in the 1950s; there is not one but two separate times here, for example, when characters say with a lot of admiration that their dinner beef “was boiled for so long, it can be cut with a fork,” which I guess is something people found pleasurable about red meat in the ‘50s?) Today it becomes the first Bond book of the series to get a full five stars from me, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to the next title, 1957’s From Russia, With Love, come this time next summer. I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
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Jun 11, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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| ||||||||||||||
| 1557091498
| 9781557091499
| 1557091498
| 3.89
| 5,378
| 1928
| Jan 01, 1997
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 044808905X
| 9780448089058
| 044808905X
| 3.93
| 6,611
| 1928
| Jun 2003
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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May 17, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089041
| 9780448089041
| 0448089041
| 3.92
| 7,565
| 1928
| Mar 28, 1962
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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May 17, 2024
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0300093055
| 9780300093056
| 0300093055
| 4.05
| 41,590
| 1956
| Mar 01, 2002
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Dama
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Damascus (my review), then remembering that I had always meant to sit down and read his most famous plays, after doing so a decade ago with his peer Tennessee Williams after my brother moved to New Orleans and I started making regular visits there myself. Written in 1939 but not publicly premiered until 1956, right after his death (thankfully betraying his original wishes to not have it produced until 25 years after his death, in 1978), I'm simply not going to have as much to say about Long Day's Journey Into Night than I did about his other magnum opus, The Iceman Cometh (my review), because there's simply not as much to say; smaller in scope than the other play, it's the story of a single middle-class family over the course of a single 16-hour working day, as they start the morning with the kind of bland, pleasant interactions you would expect from such a family, but by midnight have turned into a bunch of screaming, irrational monsters clawing at each other's throats, greatly fueled by an entire day and evening of substance abuse (alcohol in the case of the father and two grown sons, morphine in the case of the mother). This makes it much clearer than Iceman why O'Neill is considered one of the three founders of American Modernist drama, along with Williams and their mutual peer Arthur Miller; because much like Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miller's Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey primarily concerns itself with a deeply dysfunctional middle-class family, one which will never be able to solve its problems because the family members are incapable of acknowledging that they have a problem in the first place, and are too much of weak moral cowards to ever be able to directly confront their own dysfunctional behavior and bring a stop to it. And all three of these plays came out right in the middle of the post-war Mid-Century-Modernist period of the 1940s and '50s, when an ascendent American military-industrial complex was attempting to sell the idea to a war-weary, shell-shocked American public that the concept of the bland "nuclear family" was actually the pinnacle of enlightened, civilized society, as most notoriously seen in the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, which represented one of these post-war nuclear families in its perfect ur-form. Now, don't get me wrong, decades of data have now conclusively proved that a society full of bland, happy middle-class families really does prevent the rise of radical politics and its inevitable degradation into violent authoritarianism (either fascism from the far-right or communism from the far-left), as we're unfortunately seeing in our own age, when the rapid disappearance of the middle class has left us with a country with no other choices left but the MAGAs or the Wokes, essentially the Hitler and Stalin of our own times; in fact, business guru Peter Drucker was expressly preaching this message in all his early books from these same 1950s years (but for more, see my review of his classic The End of Economic Man), and he turned out to be exactly right, which is what made him such a hugely influential figure in post-war politics and economics. But there are three big problems with this theory, which not by coincidence are the exact three problems addressed in these plays, which is why they were so passionately loved by 1950s audiences: being a bland middle-classer is a soul-killing experience; such a society tends to turn conformity and a rigid adherence to rules into an all-holy religion; and most importantly, sometimes it simply doesn't work, and you can do all the things society tells you to do in order to be happy and prosperous and still end up a miserable failure, the exact subject of Death of a Salesman, which is why Miller's play is far and away the most powerful and successful of all three of these. As much as a post-Holocaust American society wanted to believe in the power of the bland middle-class, they were smart enough to be able to sniff out the bullshit that often lies underneath this pretty fairytale; and that makes it easy to see why they went so crazy for plays like these when they first came out, because all of them take the unspoken anxiety about post-war promises and makes them explicit, a rightly nagging worry that fixing the world after a planet-destroying war was going to be a lot more complicated than simply giving the Beaver a stern talking-to. Like with the other plays, that makes Long Day's Journey much more interesting now as a historical document than as a contemporary piece of drama to be enjoyed for simple pleasure; but as a historical document, it's a fascinating one, a brilliant record of the exact things the entirety of American society was worrying about in these years, which makes it all the more astounding that it's actually an autobiographical play based on the relationships his real family members had with each other during O'Neill's youth in the 1910s (thus explaining why he didn't want the play produced until long after the death of everyone who knew his family). It should be read with this mindset, that it's no longer exactly a powerful story unto itself (like Williams and Miller, there's an awful lot of stagey melodrama and other "THEATAAHHHH!!!!" moments going on here, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five), but rather a powerful reminder of just how shaky American society was in the years after the war, when everyone agreed that they never wanted another Hitler and Stalin again, but didn't quite yet know what would replace them. ...more |
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| ||||||||||||||
| 0300117434
| 9780300117431
| 0300117434
| 3.90
| 9,910
| Jan 01, 1946
| Aug 28, 2006
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) co
2024 reads, #15. I recently had the opportunity to mention Modernist playwright Eugene O'Neill when reviewing Joshua Mohr's similar (in my opinion) contemporary novel Damascus (my review); and that reminded me that I actually got interested in this writer around the same time many years ago that I got interested in his peer Tennessee Williams (after my brother first moved to New Orleans, a city I've now gotten to visit eight or nine times myself), but that I couldn't find any decent filmed versions of his magnum opus The Iceman Cometh (they're too old, or only available on DVD), and that I had always meant to get around to reading the written version someday. Well, that day is here! Originally written in 1939, it wasn't produced until 1946, but it's actually set back in 1912 when O'Neill was in his mid-twenties; so while ostensibly about New York in the years before World War One, O'Neill uses artistic license to also comment on the Great Depression that was in its final years when he wrote this. It's set at a dive bar in Greenwich Village, a place that's supposed to look like an even cheaper and dirtier version of that neighborhood's real-life McSorley's (still open in 2024!). O'Neill explains in the play's introductory notes that it's a Raines Law type of hotel; and yeah, I had to look that up too, and that turned out to be a Victorian-era law originally meant to cut down on public drinking by adding new restrictions to when bars could be open, but with an exception for hotels, who could serve alcohol at any time to their guests, as long as it was in a back room during times when it's illegal to the public. That led to an explosion of ultra-cheap, horribly disgusting "hotels" created on the floor above a bar, roach-infested single-room occupancies, where the rummy inhabitants could drink virtually 24 hours a day, by way of the the bar downstairs running a curtain halfway across the room during closed public hours, and thus counting it as a "back room." It was a destination for the lowest of the low, the "lumpen proletarians" as Marx called them -- the washouts, the violent, the mentally challenged -- which of course was catnip to O'Neill, who is just as well remembered anymore for being a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of an American Communist revolutionary movement right after the successful one in Russia in the 1910s; an early friend of party founder John Reed (and who in fact had an affair with Reed's wife), he was well-known throughout his career for his radical, polemic, far-left plays, which he combined with the relatively new Realist movement (or "social realist" if you like) first seen among people like Anton Chekov and Henrik Ibsen in Europe a few decades previous. Before O'Neill, Broadway theatre simply wasn't set at places like dive bars, full of prostitutes and mob enforcers and sad old former anarchists turned into fatalistic drunken sots (the character O'Neill obviously designed as his stand-in, while writing this a full 20 years after his youthful adventures with the Communist Party); and much like his peers Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, it was only in the "legitimahhte THEATAHHHH" where this kind of boundary-pushing transgression was being allowed during the Mid-Century Modernist years (don't forget, this didn't premiere publicly until after World War Two), so that got O'Neill a tremendous amount of press and prestige simply for being in the right place at the right time, including four different Pulitizers over his career and the Nobel Prize. But as I unfortunately discovered when working my way through the oeuvre of Williams as well, a little less than a decade ago, what was so daring and shocking and naughty at the time has in many cases not aged well at all, and now come across like a lot of stagey, outdated melodramatics that have long fallen out of favor with an audience that's now exclusively trained on naturalistic performances seen in movies and streaming series. That's certainly the case with Iceman, which can no longer traffic in the titillated shock that one of the characters is actually a pimp (!!!), and when stripped of that becomes just an interesting but not great story and overtold and with too many characters and with all of them with their knobs turned up to eleven at all times. Oh, and did I mention too many characters?! 18 of them, as a matter of fact, 16 of which are bar regulars, and are all on stage at the same time for an entire four hours, just basically repeating everyone else's dilemmas but through a slightly different filter, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes to the Super Bowl with like a group of twelve Springfield male regulars, and only a single joke is given to the entire group of 12 throughout the episode and all 12 have to react the exact same way at the exact same time. That's certainly what Iceman feels like: you have not only the spirit-broken anarchist and O'Neill stand-in Larry, but another anarchist from Europe who used to publish a radical newspaper, and some young anarchist whose mom used to hang out with Larry when they were young; then you also have two veterans of the Boer Wars, one from each opposing side, and a Boer War reporter, the three essentially serving the exact same role as the trio of anarchists; and then you also have three prostitutes who don't have any differentiation whatsoever, a mentally challenged bartender who serves as their pimp, and a lothario con man who's the "sure, I'll marry ya, sweetheart" boyfriend of one of the hookers; then on top of that, you have a washed-up alcoholic former cop, a washed-up alcoholic former lawyer, and a washed-up alcoholic former owner of a gambling house, who yet again essentially all serve the same role in this play; and then finally you have the bar's curmudgeonly owner Harry, his brother-in-law, and another bartender. Sheesh, O'Neill! Get this down to six characters and a runtime of two hours, and maybe you'll finally have something then! But of course all of this is skipping over the greatest element of the play, and the reason it had so much power to shock and move people back in the mid-1940s when it first came out; and that's Theodore "Hickey" Hickman, an indelible archetype of Modernism in the same way Arthur Miller's Willy Loman from these same years is, and what saves this play from being just a drab exercise in talky political activism like so many of O'Neill's other plays are. This is one of those moments where I'm glad I never read this until my mid-fifties, when I've had a wide and deep enough education about literary history to deeply understand what was influencing O'Neill when he created this character, and what was going on among the various political strata of American society when this first got written. For example, without this education, I wouldn't have realized that O'Neill describes Hickey so to look exactly like George Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's 1922 Babbitt (written 13 years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman), a sort of portly and perpetually jolly fellow who was basically born to run a car dealership or another type of heavy hands-on sales-heavy business. And indeed, Hickey is a full-time salesman, who at the end of every year-long circuit around the country he does, ends up back at this bar to celebrate the owner's birthday by basically blowing a couple weeks' pay on giving everyone in the SRO an unlimited tab for about three or four days, making it the Wino Christmas that everyone there eagerly looks forward to every year with salivation. It's important to remember that leftist social-realist authors such as O'Neill really didn't like people like Babbitt at all, and in fact didn't even really like Lewis for coming up with the character or writing a book about him. Lewis was sort of the Jonathan Franzen of his time, who wrote witty dramedies about the foibles of the upper-middle-class during the Roaring '20s years, right before the stock market crash and the Great Depression; and socialism-friendly authors like O'Neill rightly saw people like Babbitt as the people who made the country's economy tank in the first place, the very people the socialists and communists were fighting against, which made Lewis a ridiculous timewaster of an author in the eyes of many leftist authors in the '30s, just past his commercial height (Lewis had five national bestsellers in a row in the 1920s, and then none ever again), and it says a lot about what we're supposed to think of Hickey that O'Neill modeled him after this extremely well-known character who by then had become shorthand in society for "comfortably fat middle-classer who caused the economy to crash." But here is where it gets even more interesting; because soon after Hickey shows up again for his annual visit (which happens fairly early in the play, which is why I don't consider it a spoiler), he announces that he's given up drinking and become a new man, and that although he'll still be buying drinks that year, he's determined to get everyone there to eventually see the light and try to walk the straight and narrow path again. And here's another place where I'm glad I didn't get to read this until I'd had a lot of other fundamental books under my belt; because it's only now that I realize that O'Neill makes Hickey talk here almost exactly -- I mean, sometimes word for word -- like Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People, which only came out a mere three years before O'Neill wrote the first draft of Iceman! That's not a coincidence! See, as I learned last year after reading it myself (my review), history has largely forgotten this, but the entire self-help genre and movement (which you might also see called "personal development," as manifested in modern years by people like Tony Robbins) can demonstrably all be traced back to Carnegie's 1936 original and it alone; a salesman who eventually became renowned for the live seminars he put on for sales trainees, he single-handedly invented this genre by basically doing a transcript of one of his live events, which immediately caused a sensation that has since led to a billion-dollar industry almost a century later. And leftist, socialist writers like O'Neill hated Carnegie too; because the self-help, personal-development movement, ultimately coming from a sales mindset like it does, is in a way sort of like elevating free-market capitalism into a form of religion or lifestyle, which you can see fully played out in our late-stage-capitalism times by such "Dale Carnegie on steroids" authors as Tim Ferriss (my review). So that's fascinating, to take this character who looks like Babbitt and give him a Carnegie "Come to Prosperity Jesus" moment, because to contemporary audiences of the first production, these would've been strong signals that there's something incredibly shady about this character. And indeed, there is, and it's such a legitimately unique and shocking moment that I'm going to let it remain a spoiler, even though it's 78 years old; but I can tell you spoiler-free that it's one of those kind of truly memorable endings that elevates the entire story that came before it, and it's a known fact that we mostly remember stories by their endings and not what came before, so it's easy to see why people went so nuts for this play when it first came out. It sounds like literally what it was, if you took a dreary, politically focused social-realist author but weaved in a Crying Game or Sixth Sense-type shocking ending to their latest book, not in a gimmicky way but in one that profoundly helps explain and strengthen what's been said in all the four hours that came before. So yeah, by all means, let's call this one of the three foundational plays of American Modernism, like Wikipedia told me people do, along with Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. All of those legitimately are powerful works, and they're worth celebrating for the stir they caused at the time, which of course eventually led to the Grove Press obscenity trials of the early 1960s and the eventual elimination of "public decency" bans; but we can do that celebrating while also understanding how the world has passed on from these kinds of works in the 50, 75, 100 years since them, and how what was groundbreaking at the time can come off as unintentionally hokey to us anymore. That's not a contradiction for someone like O'Neill, but rather a reason to continue reading and celebrating him, for laying the early, admittedly clunkier groundwork not only for the boozier side of his more sophisticated literary family tree (among people like Charles Bukowski or Joshua Mohr who I mentioned at the beginning of this write-up), but the more academic (like early David Mamet or Sam Shepard). It comes with a warm recommendation in this spirit, even if you should keep your expectations low. ...more |
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| 0345471725
| 9780345471727
| 0345471725
| 4.06
| 11,757
| Sep 01, 1976
| Mar 01, 1995
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liked it
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2024 reads, #7. A freelance client recently reminded me of late newspaper humor columnist Erma Bombeck, who was active between the 1960s and '90s but
2024 reads, #7. A freelance client recently reminded me of late newspaper humor columnist Erma Bombeck, who was active between the 1960s and '90s but hit her popular height in the late '70s and early '80s when I was a kid. I can pretty definitively state that Bombeck was the very first adult writer I ever read on a regular basis, and that I absolutely adored her as a preteen, rightly considering her musings on middle-class suburbia to be the most hilarious stuff I had ever read up to that moment in my life; so when reminded of her again this week, I decided to take a walk down nostalgia lane and pick up one of the two biggest books she had during this period (the other one being 1978's If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, published two years after today's book, both of them massive bestsellers at the time). As I expected, reading it now in my mid-fifties was a disappointing experience, with my fully educated adult mind now able to see that this is mostly just subpar Dave Barry stuff (who himself was a subpar writer to begin with), a lot of easy and obvious observations about subdivisions and station wagons designed specifically for elderly people to cut out and stick on their fridges. What surprised me, though, was how easily I could still see why nine-year-old Jason ate this stuff up with a spoon; and that's because Bombeck was undeniably clever, and this was literally the first time in my entire life I had ever gotten to read any clever writing whatsoever (remember, in my own Gen-X youth of the '70s, the only other stuff for me to read was Encyclopedia Brown books and the Guinness Book of World Records), and so I desperately latched onto it as the only example I'd ever seen up to then of the dark, witty sense of humor I'd been born with. So in this, Bombeck served a hugely important and needed role in my life, essentially being my gateway to more subversive humor columnists like PJ O'Rourke once I was in high school, which then led me down the road to the indie arts where I've now spent the majority of my adult life. So although I doubt I'll ever be revisiting the actual work of Bombeck again, I certainly will keep the flame of my childhood love for her alight and burning, because she was one of the few rare female newspaper columnists of those years who brought anything to her work besides sloppy sentimentality and platitude-riddled moral lessons more appropriate for Sunday School. Although I can't honestly say that you should pick up her old books yourself, I do think she should be continued to be remembered and honored for the legitimate groundbreaking she did in this milieu back at the height of her powers. ...more |
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| 1324006374
| 9781324006374
| 1324006374
| 3.89
| 3,533
| 1926
| May 17, 2022
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2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professio
2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up. And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "Jack!" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's Karen from Will & Grace). Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it. ...more |
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Jan 18, 2024
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| 0310276993
| 9780310276999
| 0310276993
| 3.97
| 279,857
| 2002
| Feb 20, 2007
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2024 reads, #4. DID NOT FINISH. I came across this the other day in one of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood, and I thought I'd read it sim
2024 reads, #4. DID NOT FINISH. I came across this the other day in one of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood, and I thought I'd read it simply because I know it's a popular book that's influenced a lot of people, and I thought I'd see for myself why. Yep, it's pretty much what I expected, 334 pages of "YAY JESUS!!!", which as an atheist was something I could tolerate for only a little bit before reaching my fill. You're getting pretty much exactly what you were expecting beforehand when picking this up, so let that guide your decision whether or not to read it yourself.
...more
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| 0448089548
| 9780448089546
| 0448089548
| 3.78
| 1,406
| Jan 01, 1975
| Jan 01, 1975
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liked it
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2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
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Dec 01, 2023
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089513
| 9780448089515
| B002C1S0Q6
| 3.75
| 1,487
| Jan 01, 1972
| Jan 01, 1997
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liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 01, 2023
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Unknown Binding
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089033
| 9780448089034
| 0448089033
| 3.90
| 8,937
| 1927
| 1990
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089025
| 9780448089027
| 0448089025
| 3.95
| 10,987
| 1927
| 1994
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1557091447
| 9781557091444
| 1557091447
| 3.92
| 18,698
| 1927
| Oct 01, 1991
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0446673781
| 9780446673785
| 0446673781
| 3.71
| 8,853
| Jan 01, 1977
| Sep 01, 1997
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #79. I recently took the time to re-read the novel The Paper Chase (my review) by John Jay Osborn, in honor of his recent passing, and end
2023 reads, #79. I recently took the time to re-read the novel The Paper Chase (my review) by John Jay Osborn, in honor of his recent passing, and ended up enjoying just as much as when I originally read it back in high school; and that got me thinking yet again about legal thriller author Scott Turow's very first book, which for those who don't know is actually a nonfiction memoir about his first year at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s, the exact same setting and years as The Paper Chase too. So I put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and just got done reading that for the first time, and it was interesting too for sure, both because of the ways it mirrored Osborn's novel and the way it differed from it. Turow isn't trying to affix a three-act plot to his manuscript, like Osborn did with The Paper Chase, so he can just tell the story of being at HLS in a very straightforward and factual way, which both adds to his version of the story and takes away from it; for while you get a lot more detail about the experience in Turow's book, in the way you would expect a piece of long-form magazine journalism to talk about the subject as well, it's also drier and less romantic than Osborn's novel, which when all is said and done is not just about the law school itself but this young, confused, often terrified hero at the heart of the story. (Also, if you're like me, you'll be struck by how many incredibly simple things about the law Turow needs to describe here, such as what depositions are, which makes me realize how much more all of us as a society now know about the law in general, because of the endless legal TV shows and movies and thriller novels that have been released to the public in the 50 years since Turow's book first came out.) Although it's getting the maximum 5 out of 5 stars from me today, it's still not being recommended to every person out there; you need to be in the mood for a fairly dry factual look at what the first year of a law school is like if you're going to get any pleasure out of it at all, which is not the case with The Paper Chase, so judge whether to pick it up or not based on what you think your reaction would be to that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 27, 2023
not set
|
Oct 27, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1857984986
| 9781857984989
| 1857984986
| 3.92
| 16,066
| 1961
| Dec 1998
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a
2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a favorite among heavily reading insiders in the know, the kind of books difficult to find in mall stores but that the coolest people at the annual Coniconicon were always seeming to rave about. And now, forty years later, I've finally read my first Stainless Steel Rat novel myself, LOL; and I have to confess that I now deeply regret waiting so long to do so, because at least this first book in the series turned out to be quite amazing, not just for the story itself but because it's turned out to have held up way better than most of the other '50s sci-fi being published by his peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. It's essentially a heist story about an intergalactic con man named James "Slippery Jim" Bolivar diGriz, who lives in a Star Trek-like post-scarcity universe where crime has been virtually eliminated; he himself commits crimes simply for fun, and as a subversive act of rebellion against a tediously clean and optimistic universe, just to prove that he has free will and doesn't have to buy into the Starfleet-like goody-two-shoes attitude about the so-called "dignity of all humankind" and all their other garbage-people nonsense if he doesn't want to. As he explains, back before the invention of skyscrapers (keep in mind that this was written in 1957), rats pretty much ran things in the crumbling old wooden and brick buildings companies used to try to run their businesses out of; but if you want to be a rat in an age of all stainless steel buildings, you have to become a stainless steel rat yourself, a poetic way of explaining the book series' main pleasure, of how diGriz takes the exact futuristic implements of this brave new galaxy and uses them against the happy, shiny people who were under the impression that this tech would turn the entire human race into one big hand-holding family of man, where there would finally be no more war and no more crime and everyone will live in complete tech-enhanced harmony. So in this, you can very much see this as a precursor to and informer of the cyberpunk movement that would begin around 25 years later, in that Harrison's main point in this book is that all the utopian ideals of the Mid-Century Modernist era in which he was living at the time were essentially one big smokescreen, and that all the new inventions and gadgets that were being introduced to a stunned, grateful populace every month in these years are actually double-edged swords, easily able to be used for evil no matter what the perpetual Hugo-winning tech utopians like Asimov and Heinlein had to say about the subject. That's one of the two main reasons this reads so much better 70-odd years later than his peers, because Harrison had the attitude about it all that we here in the 21st century much more commonly have too, that the human race is still shit and always will be, no matter how many doodads we invent, so we might as well sit back, have a drink, enjoy ourselves, and not worry too much about the repercussions. And then the other reason this has aged so much better than books by people like Asimov and Heinlein -- and I admit, the aspect of this I found most refreshing and surprising of all -- is that Harrison had a truly progressive attitude about female characters even back then, not only making a woman the main wily villain of this particular book who always seems one step ahead of diGriz's futile attempts to track her down, but then making her a highly complex, often contradictory, always competent and sometimes kind of insane person, such an astoundingly noticeable change from my recent attempts to re-read Asimov and Heinlein in the modern 2020s, and realizing that pretty much every woman in every story by those two in the '50s (when you see any female characters in them at all) is a secretary or a housewife or some other kind of damsel in distress, and that their one and only character trait tends to be a description of how much most men will want to or not want to have sex with them, more often than not based exclusively on their boob size. It's a shame that we need to celebrate the embrace of female complexity so much in 1950s science-fiction when coming across it, because of it having been so rare in genre fiction at the time to be almost non-existent; but that's unfortunately the world we actually live in, which means that if you're someone who's been interested in exploring the origins of this genre but can't stand the insulting ways everyone but straight white males are treated in most of them, these books are absolutely some of the ones from that period that you can safely read without having to worry about being inadvertently offended every few pages. Ultimately what diGriz discovers over the course of this book is that the skills and attitude that make him such an adept criminal are the same exact skills and attitude that would make him an excellent police investigator of other such criminals, eventually getting recruited into basically a sci-fi version of the dirty-tricks wing of the CIA (again, keep in mind the year this was written); so in this, you can see this book on top of everything else as being a precursor and inspiration for Star Trek's dirty-tricks wing of Starfleet, the infamous Section 31, although in this case with the Section 31 agent being the hero of the story instead of the villain. That tells you everything you need to know to understand whether or not you're going to like this book yourself, that the cynical, world-weary, wisecracking con artist with the contemptuously low regard for the human race is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for; and I'm assuming for now that it's this recruitment into Harrison's version of the Mid-Century Modernist-era CIA that ends up providing the framing device for the eleven other books in the series, written slowly over the remainder of the 20th century. (The second-to-last book of the series was published in 1999, with one final victory-lap novel in 2010 right before Harrison's death.) I'll be reading the rest of them in the coming years with great relish; and if you're a fan of my other book reviews and the way I approach literature in general, you'll surely want to jump into this series without delay yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 22, 2023
not set
|
Oct 22, 2023
|
Mass Market Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.45
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 03, 2024
not set
|
Oct 03, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.73
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 28, 2024
not set
|
Sep 28, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
it was ok
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.32
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 13, 2024
not set
|
Jun 13, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.64
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
really liked it
|
Mar 08, 2024
not set
|
Mar 08, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
Mar 02, 2024
not set
|
Mar 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.06
|
liked it
|
Jan 22, 2024
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
Jan 18, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.97
|
Jan 13, 2024
|
Jan 13, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.78
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.75
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.95
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
liked it
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 27, 2023
not set
|
Oct 27, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 22, 2023
not set
|
Oct 22, 2023
|
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