What books are you reading?

I am currently reading Six Four, by Hideo Yokoyama. It is a fictional mystery novel that could only be written in Japan. The protagonist is a former police detective who now functions as a regional police equivalent of a White House press secretary. (Like a Jen Psaki or a Sarah Huckabee Sanders, only on behalf of the police.) He and his wife (who is retired from the force) have a teenage daughter who ran away from home three months before the start of the story, because she was unhappy that she looked more like her father than her attractive mother. There is one year left before the statute of limitations expires on his biggest unsolved murder case, and the national police commissioner wants to do a press conference with the surviving father of the victim. Meanwhile, the press corps is revolting because our protagonist is following orders and withholding the name of the driver in a collision that killed a pedestrian. All of this is established in the first two chapters, but it is written well and does not feel like a massive infodump. I am struggling a little because of all the Japanese names, but there is a helpful guide to the characters at the front of the book.

The writing is lean and effective, using minimal language to establish characters, locations, facts, memories, emotions. Even so, the English translation that I am reading clocks in at 564 pages, a challenging read for my library's three-week checkout schedule. The story is a classic Japanese tale in a modern setting, about an existential clash between duty and honor. 120 pages in, this has been a sour read, as the hero is undermined and overwhelmed at every turn, though he continues to display grit and resourcefulness. In some respects, this feels more like a workplace drama than a cop story, which makes it almost universally relatable. I am hanging in there because Yokoyama has made me care about this character, and I am hoping against odds that everything ends well.

I am halfway through Possum Kingdom, by Larry Yoke. I believe that the writing is objectively bad, with a remarkably stiff dialogue that reminds me of bad internet fanfic. The reason that I am sticking with it for now is that the book is apparently a fairplay murder mystery, where a clever reader can potentially figure out the murderer before the reveal. Unfortunately, the prologue made it fairly clear that the murderer is from a specific country, and only two living characters are from the country. Most of the named characters are remarkably fit, and both the chief medical examiner and a homicide detective are attractive female MMA fighters.

Here's a sample of dialogue, between two drug cartel members who have worked together for many years:

"Raul, I have gotten you a room at the hotel I am staying at with an open-ended stay period. I did not know how long you would be here, so I set it up to accommodate your flexible schedule," Jorge stated politely, "Is this okay, Amigo?"

"Yes, quite fine Jorge. My plan is to get to the bottom of this quickly per your father's orders. Jorge, you should know your father is not handling this very well, and I totally sympathize with his loss, but he is not the same these days. So it is very important that I find the person who did this and eliminate them as quickly as possible, Raul spoke in a non-expressive way.

Bad punctuation, awkward phrasing, and really stiff, almost inhuman dialogue. I might not be able to finish this book, even with just 140 pages to go.

Wow. Who is the co-author? Chat GPT?

I enjoyed THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy. Not one for florid prose if you need a palate cleanser after that mishmash above. Not his best stuff; he leaves whole massive plot threads just hanging out with no resolution. But he writes like no one else I have ever read. The simplest stuff, spoken by fools, with the most arcane words peppering the descriptions. It’s wild.

The structural premise of it reminds me a little of Linklater's film "Waking Life." It's mostly a series of metaphysical or deep-science interviews/dialog at restaurants and cafe tables, interspersed with highly bizarre, vaudevillian conversations with a character's schizophrenic hallucinations (which start to cross over & intrude in unexpected places in the end), all tinged with the outlook that we've come to expect from Cormac. And yeah, lots of lacunae & threads that are viciously dropped in a style similar to Gene Wolfe. The narrative framing around it is pretty compelling (I won't spoil it since piecing it together is part of the fun). The end is crushing & beautiful, and I now want to read the companion book Stella Maris.

I loved WAKING LIFE when it came out -- still do, really -- but I totally forgot that Alex Jones was in it. I guess he was just seen as an obscure nutjob, and Linklater had no idea he'd actually become famous enough to get his followers to harass parents of murdered kids (alongside many other deplorable behaviors).

I'm currently struggling through Naomi Novik's A DEADLY EDUCATION. I really liked her Temeraire books (although they got a bit repetitive for me). But this is just a slog. It's her spin on the "boarding school for magical kids" genre, and I don't know what the deal is with it. Boring characters, the school is apparently horrifically deadly ALL THE TIME -- like every day, demons are pouring through the woodwork in the cafeteria and eating kids -- and no one can figure out how to do anything about it.

God damnit, I can imagine exactly who Alex Jones played, too. But I just talked it over with Des and we aren't canceling Waking Life.

I'm about a third of the way through The Wager by David Grann. It's non-fiction about the survivors of a shipwreck in the 1700s. There's a lot more to it than that, but it's tough to summarize quickly. Anyway, the harrowing details of sailing around Cape Horn in those large ships is both fascinating and frightening. I don't how people did it.

Thanks to a routine tire rotation that turned into a brake job, I finished Possum Kingdom. The quality of the writing improved slightly over the course of the book, so maybe this was a first time effort. The murderer turned out to be someone became my prime suspect immediately after she was introduced, roughly halfway through the book.

Now I am reading Prefecture D, a collection of novellas by Hideo Yokoyama set in the same police precinct as Six Four. The first story, Season of Shadows, was compelling despite the fact that the protagonist works in human resources and is struggling to get an old police officer to retire. A police captain abused his authority in order to bilk a landscaper, so HR needs to shuffle people around in the organization to take away his authority without tipping off the press that the captain did something wrong. Unfortunately, the elaborate plan requires an elderly but highly respected police official to gracefully retire. He refuses to retire, so the HR guy starts digging to find out why. The answer to this little mystery is interesting, and the resolution is unsettling but satisfactory. If this story was told by an American, there would have been a car chase and a shootout, but this story ends in a quiet suicide.

As in Six Four, Season of Shadows is a very Japanese story. Duty, honor, loyalty, pride, and obsession are all crucial motivations for the characters, and interesting things happen when those values collide. I look forward to reading the other three novellas, and I hope that Yokoyama manages to sneak in at least one character or reference to show some actual overlap with Six Four. Yokoyama was a reporter for many years, and it seems likely that he covered the police beat, and probably spent many evenings buying drinks for cops in hopes of getting stories. Yokoyama became a novelist after he had a heart attack while working for 72 consecutive hours without sleeping. His protagonists display a similar level of dogged determination, but I hope that Yokoyama has adopted a more comfortable pace to his work.

Finished MEXICAN GOTHIC, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It worked surprisingly well and I really enjoyed it. It had the typical gothic tropes of the creepy and isolated manor, the decrepit blue-blood family who's fallen from their past glories, the dangerous-yet-compelling man, and the unsettling deference of everyone from servants to the townsfolk. But it also has the lush romanticism of Mexican culture, the legacy of colonialism, the fusion of Catholicism with the old ways, the vibrant colors and aromas and flavors swirling around sun-baked adobe....

A real treat. I'll be getting more from the author for sure.

I just finished reading Star Wars: Thrawn by Timothy Zahn, based on advice here and hearing the name Thrawn bandied about for years. Seeing as it's one of the most popular and well-regarded SW novels it's no surprise to say it quickly pulled me in and got me hooked. It was a fun read with interesting characters and believable - and surprising - arcs played out over many years. I greatly enjoyed it and already have the sequel cued up.

About halfway through the book I began to think how crazy and borderline arrogant it was for Disney to throw out all this Extended Universe stuff. They're rushing half-baked stories through to series trying, and generally failing, to reinvent the wheel when they have a trove of excellent, well-thought material on hand they could adapt. It's crazy.

That Disney doesn't have an Andor-style Thrawn series in the works is mad to me.

With its two main stories split between action-style episodic adventures and another of political manoeuvring and cunning with both connecting into a grander arc and with the added bonus of a male and a female protagonist respectively, it's absolutely bonkers that they're ignoring it in favour of churning out the dross they are.

It seems that the Ahsoka trailer shows the back of Thrawn’s head and that he will be featured in content moving forward.

I'll hope for the best. The trailer looks decent.

Still, I'd prefer a straight-up adaptation of his story instead of having him guesting in another character's story. The book's so good and Thrawn so interesting that it still feels like a waste.

Hopefully, it leads to a Thrawn series. t'd be cool to see a story set inside the Empire that has little to do with Jedi and lightsabers.

I am currently reading House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's a challenging read, because the author decided to go bananas with footnotes in an effort to add a sense of realism to his fictional work. Also, the book is actually telling a story within a story within a story. There is documentary by a photographer who moved into a strange house, with commentary by a mysterious blind man, with further commentary by the neighbor who inherited the blind man's possessions after he died. This gimmick should ultimately ruin an otherwise promising horror story, by creating layers between the reader and the horror, but it sometimes work quite well due to the quality of the writing. The paragraphs and pages of rampant footnotes lend a Scully-like authenticity that makes the horror that much stronger when it breaks through. But I am only 60 pages into this 700-page book, so it remains to be seen if the author will pull this off.

Odd footnote of my own: Mark Danielewski has a sister named Anne who used play music as Poe. I am a big fan of her first album, Hello, which came out in 1995. I look forward to giving her second album Haunted (2000) a try soon, despite the creepy angle of incorporating vocal samples from her deceased father. Poe used to edit Mark's writing, and helped him get House of Leaves published. Her own promising career got derailed for a decade by record company machinations, and we never got a third album.

What book am I NOT reading? Stalking the Nightmare, by Harlan Ellison. My copy is missing, and replacing it has been a hassle.

From my mid-teens through my 20s, I bought a lot of books. I was a compulsive reader, and I sometimes enjoyed re-reading my favorite books, so I bought them. My friends thought that I was being foolish, that I could just check books out from the library, but I think they just resented the many boxes of books to handle every time I moved. In the long run, buying great books when I was young paid off. Books in a book case are a respectable way to decorate your living space, and all those favorite books did get re-read at least twice over the years. The books were free entertainment and comfort in times of unemployment or illness. And it turns out that libraries don't necessarily keep every single book in stock over the years. Books that pass through many hands tend to wear out over time, and libraries apparently will replace them with newer books by newer authors unless maybe a given book is a classic.

At some point during my last two moves, one of my book boxes went missing. I'm not entirely sure what all was in the box, but it did include several of my Harlan Ellison books, including Strange Wine, Deathbird Stories, and Stalking the Nightmare. That last was a particular favorite of mine, because it included my favorite modern fairy tale and an entertaining essay, The 3 Most Important Things in Life, which you can read here:

harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm

Maybe 15 years ago, I made friends with an interesting married couple. The wife is goth and the husband is punk, though they are now middle-aged and two of their three kids are adults. I knew the wife was into science-fiction and horror because we sometimes talked books, but I only recently learned that the husband is a big Harlan Ellison fan who hasn't read Stalking the Nightmare. His birthday is this Saturday, so I was hoping to give him Stalking the Nightmare, ideally after re-reading a few favorite stories. But after an extensive search, I was certain that it was in the box of books that went missing.

None of the bookstores near me have a copy, either new or used. In fact, it seems that Stalking the Nightmare has gone out of print. Some online booksellers have used copies, but only one was willing to deliver fast enough to get here before my friend's birthday. I placed my order, and then they responded with a partial refund on shipping because they actually can't get it to me sooner than next week. I decided to keep that order going, so I could have my own copy at some point. But I am still hoping to pick up a copy for my friend before Saturday. Fortunately, there are two great genre fiction bookstores about 10 miles from me, and they are probably the two most likely bookstores in the state to carry Harlan Ellison books. But crime has gotten worse in Minneapolis in recent years, and there is a labor shortage, so both stores close at 6 PM every day of the week. So I will roll the dice on Saturday and hopefully come up with a copy before the party at 7 PM.