From my position in the hallway — on my ass, head pressed against the door frame, legs drawn up with my gun held two-handed against my sternum — I try to recall the layout of the room: three sets of bunk beds, four corpses sprawled across bloodied sheets, my partner, shot three times, lying motionless next to the nearest bunk, and, somewhere in there, one lunatic, a screaming infant in one hand and a semiautomatic pivot in the other. The last time I sneaked a look around the open doorway, he fired at me, the bullet knocking a crater in the wall opposite. He followed up by threatening to shoot the baby and then himself.

I’ve been a cop for five months, one week, and nine and a half hours.

Sure is a fine way to kick off a police procedural.

December 15, 2018 (permalink)

Brilliant, vivid, indispensable. This book is destined for the shelf which The Souls Of Black Folk has so long had to itself.

December 23, 2018 (permalink)

Everything you need to know — and more — about the history of Jewish humor, with a special emphasis on the 20th century US. When you were in the writers’s room, the whole world was Jewish.

December 15, 2018 (permalink)

Amy Bloom explores to weird and moderately wonderful half-sisters, daughters of a minor con artist, making their way together through the America of the second world war. Iris is glamorous, Eva works hard and learns fast. Amy Bloom can create interesting characters at will, but I’m not entirely certain why she chose these particular people.

August 13, 2018 (permalink)

A delightful collection of interviews with truckers, bargemen, and railroad engineers.

July 20, 2018 (permalink)

Pulitzer-award winner, this is a novel about 49-year-old Arthur Less, a man whose long-time partner has just decided to marry someone else. When the wedding invitation arrives, Arthur does the only thing possible: he accepts every invitation to read, speak, retreat, or interview he can find, just as long as they get him out of the country. The chronicle of Arthur’s jaunt around the world is a delight from “Less at First” to “Less at Last.”

June 17, 2018 (permalink)

A top-drawer debut mystery. Aaron Falk, a Melbourne-based Federal Agent specializing in financial investigations, returns to the small Australian town from which he and his father fled twenty years ago. Back then, a girl from the high school had drowned and the townspeople had decided that either Aaron or his dad had something to do with it. Now, Aaron’s best mate from those years has shot his family and himself. The local cop has been on the job for a week; Aaron is persuaded to lend a hand. Fine sense of place, good minor characters, good plotting.


May 25, 2018 (permalink)

The narrator of this Hugo-nominated novella is a construct — a cyborg security agent. He works for the company, and (though he doesn’t know it) he owes a lot to Hammett’s Continental Op. He doesn’t like his work: he calls himself “murderbot”. He doesn’t like the company, and he certainly didn’t like the way the company could control him through his governor module. So, he disconnected it.

Most android stories follow Pinocchio in assuming that a nearly-human construct would want to be human, and want people to accept them as human. Murderbot doesn't. He doesn’t like people: his clients are stupid and stubborn, they tell him what to do, they inconvenience him by getting into danger when he’d really much rather be watching episode 297 of Sanctuary Moon. He doesn’t want to be more human; he wants humans to leave him alone.

Very well done, and pertinent to my Hypertext 2018 paper on “As We May Hear: our slaves of steel II” which explores some new questions on how we treat computational agents and environments.

May 18, 2018 (permalink)

After reading in Draft Number 4 how McPhee puts things together, it seemed a really good idea to go back and look at the practice. A wonderful book, the epitome of the New Yorker profile that talks at considerable length about a subject of no particular interest, written with such wit and craft that it’s enthralling. Terrible Terry Harmon and Dirty Shirt George Price: McPhee draws amazing portraits in short gestural strokes. McPhee is not afraid of repetition:

Lead-in and Dirty Shirt and Terrible Terry — they did not back off from anyone. I learned from them to maintain a gulf between yourself and the other officers. I learned, Never cross that gulf. I learned, Don’t act like the other officers, dress like them, or socialize with them. I learned, Don’t be like them. Whatever they are, be different. Never waver in your dealings with them. Don’t vacillate. I learned, Never chastise people in public, even if they have earned it. I learned, Don’t alibi, don’t complain.

May 18, 2018 (permalink)

A contemporary LA Noir thriller, as experienced by a dolt.

The 21st-century procedural mystery has two core concerns. First, the range of protagonists has expanded greatly, both in terms of the characters themselves and in terms of their vocations. Second, where once a flawed but unquestionably good and capable knight strolled down these mean streets, recent writers have increasingly explored the flaws and the unreliability of the protagonist.

Here, Maggie Silver is a PR agent, specializing in damage control. She’s drifted into this profession because she is herself so damaged, and because from her high school days to he nearly middle-aged present she has always believed that befriending glamorous people will make her glamorous. She’s an expert at rare perfumes, for which she scours eBay and LA thrift stores in time stolen from a 24/7 job and a lonely mother whom, recovering from breast cancer, has moved into Maggie’s little house.

Everyone plays Maggie. She has the street smarts of a fire hydrant, and the question is not whether she will be betrayed, but how often.

April 26, 2018 (permalink)

Our latest visit with Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito does not disappoint. The leader of an outdoor enrichment program for troubled kids has vanished in the rugged, volcanic malpais between Zuni and Acoma, on the day Manuelito was supposed to give a talk to the kids. A small mystery and a small book, but one in which real people face real problems.

April 28, 2018 (permalink)