Month: May 2008

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books

The Ruins

I haven’t read any sci-fi/fantasy/horror yet this year so it’s about time I do so. I saw that my sister read this book and she is a reader par excellence. I asked her about it and even though she didn’t say it was a must-read, she didn’t appear to hate it.

I would like to take this chance to give some props to Shelfari because I wouldn’t have known that she read it if I had not gone through her Shelfari bookshelf. Shelfari is a cool tool.

I’m not sure I have a good definition of the horror genre. For me, horror books have two ingredients; a supernatural evil and gore. This book has both, in abundance. It’s not necessarily in my wheelhouse, but I needed a change of pace.

It was fun, engrossing, tense; but it left me kind of empty. There isn’t much to reflect on as I sit here after the fact. I could sort through the character flaws of the people that got killed and try and figure out what Smith is trying to say about our times. But I won’t. I could think about the evil that pervaded the book and try and draw parallels to evil in the world today. But I won’t. I’m moving on with very little reflection actually.

* PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW *

The evil in this book is a plant – a vine with a thirst for humans and their excretions. So a bunch of young vacationers venture into the Mexican outback in search of a friend, and they end up getting surrounded by this vine. They can actually touch and walk through this vine because it seems the vine really can’t kill them until they get an open wound or let the vine into their body through some orifice. So as long as they are alert, they can survive the vine. However, there’s another problem beyond the vine that surrounds them. Outside of the vine’s perimeter is a tribe of Mayans who will kill them if they try to escape.

Without food and water, their days are numbered. It goes from bleak, to really bleak, to bleaker than you can imagine, to everyone is dead.

Categories
books

The Long Goodbye

We’ve already talked about One Book, One Chicago. My wife just checked it out from the library, unbeknownst to me. She let me read it first. Thanks honey.

The Long Goodbye is private investigator Philip Marlowe’s first person account of his run-in with cops and gangsters after he assists a down-on-his-luck acquaintance, Terry Lennox. Marlowe just gives Lennox a ride to Tijuana, that’s all. But shortly thereafter Marlowe finds out that Lennox’s millionaire wife has been bludgeoned to death with a bronze statue in their guest house. Marlowe suspected nothing less anyhow, oh well.

This is gritty. It’s like sleeping on sandpaper. It makes L.A. Confidential feel like a romantic comedy; makes the City of Angels feel cold and rainy all the time. It’s full of dark jail cells, cops that slug you, and dry, humorless commentary on the state of the justice system in Los Angeles. And paragraphs like this (page 249, chapter 35):

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Just look at that second sentence in the cited passage. It’s huge, but it feels the same now as it did when I first read it. Marlowe could not survive outside of the LA trenches. But in the trenches, he rises above the greed, corruption, lies, and ugliness associated with the city.

Chandler certainly got a load off his chest with this rant. It’s a glimpse into the psyche of Philip Marlowe and probably Chandler also. When I read it Gail was a few feet away and I couldn’t wait to have her to take a look. She was impressed. I really hope she reads it so we can talk about it.

This is such a cool book. The ending rocked. The title makes perfect sense. If you have any affinity for the crime novel, give this one a whirl.

Categories
books

Woe is I

It’s time to revisit the craft – the craft of writing. Yes, I’m a craftsman. Actually, I’m not, I’m a hack. So I’m reading this book to make improvements. In fact, I’m adding Woe is I to the list of books to have around if you want to improve your writing.

Right now, if I look at this little space on my shelf that I keep reference materials, I have:

  • The Elements of Style (aka Strunk and White)
  • The Chicago Manual of Style
  • On Writing Well

I will add this to the shelf because it’s worthy. It’s short and has bulleted hints, tips, and explanations. It has a Strunk and White feel but is more focused on grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation. They’re good complements, I’m glad I have both.

In fact, I may get Strunk and White in hardcover, just because.

I loved the chapter on clichés. In fact, I had a tag line for my business that encapsulated all aspects of Steffen Consulting that I wanted to convey, but the tag line was listed in the cliché chapter as overused. And you know what, O’Conner was right; it is overused and I’m not going to use it (btw, it was “leveling the playing field”).

The question is, how do I use these books in real time while writing? I do most of my writing when they’re outside of my reach, so even though I have questions, I usually just reword the sentence or jump through hoops to avoid the issue. This needs to change. Also, I haven’t gone through the The Chicago Manual of Style yet. Gail seems to think that one encompasses all of the books. Maybe I just haul that one around, but it’s massive.

I need time, time to concentrate. I need to rework things.