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The Ghost Brigades

As you may recall, I was completely clueless during Gibson’s Neuromancer. Since then, my only visits to the land of sci-fi have been with Scalzi. This guy writes some really cool stuff and it gives me hope that there is other good sci-fi out there that I’ll enjoy.

This is book two of a trilogy. It’s a follow-up to Old Man’s War but revolves around some new characters, so I think you can get away without reading book one, but I wouldn’t suggest it.

It’s roughly the same setting as Old Man’s War. The Colonial Defense Force is protecting the human race from all sorts of non-humans, but the non-humans are getting more organized and pose a more immediate threat than ever before, especially since they are assisted by a treasonous human. To combat this situation, the Colonial Defense Force calls in the Special Forces.

It’s a lot of military sci-fi after that, but also a fair amount of social commentary. Remember that Old Man’s War had a lot of commentary on the horrors of war. This book’s social commentary relates more to governments, their subjects, the choices that each make, and the amount of free will that the common person actually has.

It’s just great, fun sci-fi. Scalzi is a genius.

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The Road

Who is this Cormac McCarthy guy? I often get him mixed up with that Larry McMurtry guy. This confusion of artists seems to happen to me a lot. However, I’m not confused by the fact that this is the first book I’ve read by either. It’s also the second Oprah book I’ve read; the other one was Night by Elie Wiesel. I’m just stating facts and I’m not necessarily proud or embarrassed by them, I just think this context could be interesting years down the road when I reflect on this year in books.

It was dark and depressing, but The Road was also an ultra cool read. Picture a Mad Max-like burned-out world, but fewer people, less food, and more darkness. A man and his son attempt to navigate this world in their efforts to find the coast.

They are unnamed, referred to throughout the book mostly as “the man” and “the boy.” They have a shopping cart and each other, along with a pistol. They keep to the road but make occasional deviations to find food or avoid bad guys.

It’s short and straightforward. McCarthy’s writing is very spare in this book. He uses little punctuation and no quote marks in the dialogue. There are no chapters, but plenty of breaks. There is no picture on the cover and the only other colors besides black and white used on the jacket are some brown/gold tones (including the Oprah seal). It all fits with the sparseness of the book’s landscape.

But the emotions between the boy and the man are not sparse. They are deep and moving. I think the haunting details of their journey will stay with me for a long time. And I think I’m going to investigate how others interpreted the ending.

I’ve compared the scenery to Mad Max, but the feeling I had during the book was more like what I felt when I read Cold Mountain. I wonder if McCarthy was influenced at all by Frazier. They both tell of a journey through a somewhat mountainous landscape where hope and hopelessness are constantly present. The endings also have some parallels.

I also wonder if McCarthy’s landscape is the eastern or western United States. Did I miss something that would give this away?

Man it was good.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

Here’s my mantra:

Balance is more respectable than focus. Anyone can put their mind to something and achieve it using a combination of ability and hard work; but true achievement is to get there without allowing family, friends, body, and soul to notice.

This is out-of-whack with the whole self-help genre that pushes the idea of focusing on goals (written in pen and reviewed regularly, of course) and envisioning success. I don’t set goals, I don’t have a lot of focus, and I don’t do a lot of envisioning; which has probably resigned me to a life of rampant mediocrity that I construe as balance in my own, warped mind. So be it.

Continue reading “The 4-Hour Workweek”
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A Death in Belmont

Chock one up for the “stranger than fiction” genre. In June of 1962, Anna Slesers was found raped and strangled in her Boston home. Over the next 18 months, another eleven (or twelve) Boston area women were victims of roughly the same heinous crime. Most of these crimes were eventually attributed to a person known as the Boston Strangler, who kept Boston and the surrounding suburbs in a constant state of fear for years.

About nine months into this reign of terror, in March of 1963, Bessie Goldberg of Belmont, MA was raped and murdered, also in her own home. This had many ingredients of a Boston Strangler slaying and was particularly surprising because until then, Belmont had been a quiet, quaint, murder-free town. Upon hearing of the murder, Ellen Junger, a young mother living not far from Bessie Goldberg in Belmont, came home with one-year old Sebastian in tow and described the horrific crime to a carpenter named Al DeSalvo. DeSalvo was around Junger’s house often because he was assisting on construction of an addition to Junger’s home.

DeSalvo and the Jungers play important parts in this story. Al DeSalvo would eventually confess to eleven of the Boston Strangler murders. Sebastian Junger would eventually become a world-famous author and write a bestseller about the strange circumstances surrounding his mother, his home, the Boston Strangler, Al DeSalvo, and a man named Roy Smith.

Wait a second, who was Roy Smith? Well, Roy Smith was convicted for the murder of Bessie Goldberg.

What?

Yeah, the Goldberg rape and slaying would never be attributed to the Boston Strangler because there appeared to be overwhelming evidence that a petty criminal named Roy Smith was the perpetrator. Smith had admittedly been at the Goldberg home that day on a cleaning assignment and was seen by many exiting the Goldberg’s home shortly after the murder would have taken place. It appeared to be an open-and-shut case and Smith was eventually found guilty, but authorities couldn’t pin any of the other Strangler crimes on him.

The Strangler crimes continued and eventually DeSalvo confessed to the murders, except for Bessie Goldberg’s, after being indicted on several rape charges. Smith was already locked up at this time. The Roy Smith trial and the Al DeSalvo confession are the central parts of the book. Did Roy Smith kill Bessie Goldberg? Was Al DeSalvo really the Boston Strangler or a just a sick, serial rapist who read about the Strangler in the papers?

Junger delves into all of this stuff with a zeal of someone who was actually there but still can’t believe it happened. Here’s how he sums it up:

The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile – unknown to anyone – a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder.

He goes on to say:

As I did my research I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what had actually happened in the Goldberg house that day. Without DNA evidence Smith’s guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo’s possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture, and I would never know for sure how close I had come to losing my mother.

Both Al DeSalvo and Roy Smith are dead. DeSalvo was killed in prison in November 1973 after being stabbed in the chest 16 times. He was a bad man and remained a bad man in prison. Smith, however, was a model prisoner. He never got in to any trouble, supervised the prison kitchen, and completed a college degree. His sentence was commuted in August 1976, but he wasn’t able to enjoy his freedom long because he died from cancer a few days after he left prison.

Riveting stuff. Junger digs deep into all aspects of this tragedy. He’s a curious guy and goes off on interesting tangents. He brings to light the racial situation at the time. He tries to capture the effect of the Kennedy assassination (it occurred during the Roy Smith trial). He describes in detail the legal differences between homicide, murder, manslaughter and all the permutations thereof. He digs into the American prison system, the death sentence, and the insanity defense. He throws in some interesting history on Boston, Belmont, and Oxford, Mississippi. It’s just an endless stream of well-researched, important information that I wish I could retain more of. It’s a lot to pack in to 266 pages. Reading it is well worth the time.

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A Hike for Mike

This is the story of Jeff and Beth Alt, a young couple who hiked the John Muir trail (JMT) in California to increase depression awareness after Beth’s brother committed suicide. They did it back in 2003 and you could follow along via the website, but it looks like they’ve since taken it down and replaced it with marketing content. Jeff, the narrator, takes you through every step of the 211 mile journey with a good mix of seriousness and humor.

This book has been on my list of books to read for a long time but I don’t have any idea how it got there. Beth is from Chicago and the local Chicago papers gave it some pub, so I may have heard about it that way. They both live in Cincinnati and Jeff has family in Toledo, so I may have seen or heard about when I was home visiting (my hometown is Findlay, Ohio). Or I could have stumbled upon it in the the book reviews of Outside Magazine, which I grab occasionally when wandering through airports.

I harbor a near-secret desire to hike the Appalachian Trail someday, so I was drawn to this book (Jeff did the AT prior to this book and wrote about it). I’ve been on a few backpacking trips and have the pictures to prove it, but backpacking never took hold with Gail. I eventually sold all of my backpacking gear.

The John Muir trail is a big undertaking because of the altitude. You regularly hike above the tree line (around 10,000 feet) and instances of altitude sickness are common even among the very fit. There are plenty of tree-less mountain passes that are especially rigorous and dangerous. By comparison, I think the Appalachian trail maxes out at maybe 6,000 feet above sea level. But with the difficulty of the JMT comes the reward of some of the most remote and beautiful wilderness in the US. I’ve never been there, but my dad has preached of Yosemite’s beauty and Jeff the narrator certainly describes it with awe.

This is a cool book. It’s self-published (I think) so there are typos (at least in my version). It’s a very folksy look at a serious adventure for a good cause. It was a lot of fun for me. At some point I will do an extended backpacking trip, mark my words.

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Purple Cow

I read Godin’s blog regularly and I like his take on things. This book is about creating remarkable products and services. In fact, the subtitle is “Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.”

According to Godin, we are past the age of the TV-industrial complex. This is Godin’s term for the “symbiotic relationship between consumer demand, TV advertising, and ever-growing companies that were built around investments in ever-increasing marketing expenditures.”

You can’t win this way any longer. We are too smart to be fooled by advertising nowadays. You have to be better at marketing than thinking of catchy slogans or funny commercials. Godin’s solution is to do some remarkable marketing. That is “the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.”

So he has 145 pages in a sort of stream-of-consciousness presentation of how to do remarkable things. I learned a lot of very useful concepts from it.

One great concept that he brings up often is that of otaku. It’s a Japanese word that’s used to describe something that is “more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession.” He gives examples, but for me, otaku is getting up at 4:30am and driving two and a half hours into Wisconsin to play a golf course that I heard was something special and driving back the same day. This is not obsessive, but it does show a keen appreciation for the game of golf. I have golf otaku. About this, Godin says:

Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is that some markets have more otaku-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets – regardless of relative size.

Ahh, I like otaku. I think I need to make it a regular part of my vocabulary. It ranks up there with another fine Japanese phrase; hara hachi bu, which means “eat only until you are 80% full.” That’s from Okinawa. I’m also a heavy user of Mizuno products. I need to make a visit to Japan because I think I would fit in well there. But I digress.

Godin has case studies and examples to illustrate all of his points. Sometimes he treads dangerously close to oversimplification and hyperbole. He says things like it’s “so popular, no one goes there anymore.” Or “marketers no longer: now we’re designers.” He does back these up though with examples and thoughtful discussion so you can filter out his bias and get the point.

I thought it was a great book and a ton of fun to read. I strongly suggest that you at least subscribe to his blog, if you don’t buy one of his books, so you can get a feel for how he thinks through things. He is certainly a thought leader in the the area of marketing.

I’m gong to finish this take with one of the last paragraphs in his book. He says:

Remember, it’s not about being weird. It’s about being irresistible to a tiny group of easily reached sneezers with otaku. Irresistible isn’t the same a ridiculous. Irresistible (for the right niche) is just remarkable.

I don’t know, with my web presence, I wonder if I’m thought of as weird. What’s that damn fool finance guy doing writing about food, books, golf, and weight loss? Eventually, I will pour out my takes on finance and controllership at my consulting site, but first, I have a lot of stuff to get off my chest.

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The Kite Runner

Did you ever finish a book in one day? My wife does it all the time but I rarely do. I know I’ve done it before, but I can’t recall the last book I did it with. It happened just the other day though. On Saturday, I got up, started reading The Kite Runner, and was done by the time I sat down for dinner. I was on vacation, so that made it easier. But even if it had been just a regular Saturday at home, this still might have happened. I just got sucked in and I couldn’t put it down.

It’s the story of a man named Amir, a man with demons – demons that weighed on him beginning at age 12. Amir grew up in a wealthy Kabul neighborhood in the late sixties and early seventies. His childhood was relatively normal except that his best friend was Hassan, the son of the family servant. It was uncommon for a rich kid in Afghanistan to become such close friends with the family servant, even more uncommon considering that each of them came from different Islamic denominations, Amir is a Sunni and Hassan is a Shi’a. This book is a first person narrative from the point of view Amir. It’s the story of his life.

That’s all I’m going to tell you. Often, with classic lit, I’ll reveal some plot killers for sake of discussion, but this isn’t classic lit. This book is current and you owe it to yourself to read it. I’m not messing around, you have to read it. You see people reading it in airports all the time. There’s a reason for that, it’s a great book. Stop wondering what the book is about and read it.

It’s written in plain, simple language and it’s a fast read. It will grab you from the beginning and you won’t be bored for a moment. I’m sure you know someone who’s read it, just borrow it. Or you can usually pick it up in the three-for-the-price-of-two rack at Borders. Just frickin’ read it, dude.

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The Pearl

This was quite an emotional rollercoaster packed into a small book. Steinbeck crammed a lot of life into a mere 118 pages. I came across this book when I was at home a few weekends ago. The Pearl, in tattered old paperback form, was sitting on the family room coffee table. My mom was reading it. I asked her how the book was and she said something like, “It’s good, but kind of depressing.”

Ahh, I love classic lit that’s short and “kind of depressing.” It’s right in my wheelhouse – reference Where Angels Fear to Tread.

WARNING: PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW

This is the story of Kino, an impoverished pearl diver living near a small coastal town in Bolivia. His home is a grass shack, which he shares with his wife Juana and newborn son Coyotito.

Good people, these. Kino appreciates the small things in life, like the morning sun and the sound of his baby awakening. They fill him with joy. Sure, his life could be better if he had a little more disposable income. In fact, it would allow him to afford a doctor to treat the nasty scorpion bite on his son’s shoulder. Other than that, he seems to be doing okay with what he has.

Then, shortly after the obese town doctor rejects Kino’s request to assist his ailing son, Kino finds a massive pearl during his first dive of the day. He screams out in victory at its discovery, and the fortunes of Kino and the small town surrounding him change forever. About the town, Steinbeck says:

The news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld. The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it.

But that only describes how the town changed with news of the pearl. The changes in Kino were just as riveting. When asked what he plans to do with all of the riches bestowed upon him by the pearl, he speaks of getting a proper wedding and making sure that his son can read. And lastly, he says that he wants to buy a rifle. Steinbeck explores the rifle:

It was the rifle that broke down the barriers. This was an impossibility, and if he could think of having a rifle whole horizons were burst and he could rush on. For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.

These two passages occur early on and the sense of doom never leaves you. The rest of the book is an exploration of how a man can change when one moment he is poor and the next moment he is rich. Steinbeck’s study is gender specific to the man. The only significant digression into how his wife Juana is dealing with the situation occurs after she is beaten by Kino when he finds her attempting to throw the pearl back into the sea. From the book:

Juana dragged herself up from the rocks on the edge of the water. Her face was a dull pain and her side ached. She steadied herself on her knees for a while and her wet skirt clung to her. There was no anger in her for Kino. He had said, “I am a man,” and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman’s soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. … Sometimes the quality of a woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino’s manness and save them all. She climbed painfully to her feet, and she dipped her cupped palms in the little waves and washed her bruised face with the stinging salt water, and then she went creeping up the beach after Kino.

That’s intense. But nothing compared what’s coming. Juana leaves the beach to find that Kino has killed a man who tried to steal the pearl. With this, they have to flee the town.

Despite all of Kino’s precautions, three men pursue them – a man with a rifle on horseback and two trackers. Kino is boxed into a corner and he figures that his only option is to get his wife and child to higher ground and take the pursuers down.

With his wife and son hiding in close proximity, Kino goes on the attack. In one furious and stunning moment, Kino plunges his knife into the rifleman’s throat, wrests the rifle from his hands, crushes the skull of a second man, and shoots the third man as he is scrambling away. The third man was only injured, so Kino walks up to him and sends a bullet between his eyes. For a brief moment, Kino probably thinks he has triumphed. However, he soon discovers that his shot that winged the third man, also found his son’s skull.

It was a horrible tragedy. In the aftermath, Kino and Juana walk back to town and throw the pearl back into the sea. That’s how it ended.

It makes you think. Am I satisfied with what I have?

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The Enemy

I did some air travel earlier this month so I grabbed another Lee Child paperback on my way out the door. All of Child’s books have the same main character (Reacher) and I’m reading them in order. You can read about my last Child experience here.

As you may know, I like to travel with pop-fiction paperbacks like those written by Child, but I also grabbed this because I needed some release from the Barack Obama book that I started mid-June. The Obama book is good, but it’s like work, so I needed some trash fiction to offset it.

Man, it really ended up being a slow reading month. I got about half way through the Obama book and I barely finished this Reacher book before the self-imposed June 30 deadline (for the timestamp on this post). Reading books has taken a back seat to work and summer lately, each of which has diverted my attention from sitting down with a good book.

The Enemy was a departure for Child. It’s set back in time during the early 1990s when Reacher was still an MP. I was expecting just another modern-day thriller. Instead, I got a military thriller set during the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was also a relatively touching side story about Reacher’s dying mother and how Reacher and his brother dealt with it. If you don’t know, Reacher’s brother dies in the very first Reacher book, so this was another curveball.

Child may have some darn good artistic reasons for throwing this out-of-sequence novel at me and I feel bad that I didn’t embrace it. I’m not sure if it was my fault or his fault. I needed something mindless and I just wanted this book to be the “next” story in Reacher’s life. It wasn’t. I got bored. It took forever to read.

I remember when Hillerman broke from his normal genre and wrote Finding Moon. That turned out to be one of my favorites books of all time. Was Finding Moon more compelling than The Enemy? Or did I just read it during a particularly relaxed and focused time? I don’t know. But I do know that I should pay attention to things like this when assessing how much I like a book.

Well, in conclusion, I’m blaming Child for my lack of enjoyment of this book. It was my least favorite Reacher book yet. The evil-doer didn’t give me a particular feeling of trepidation, the mystery felt like a failed attempt at plausibility, and I got this story confused with a back-story from a previous book that featured Reacher recounting a past case. I only recommend this book if you are reading the whole series and are just as neurotic as me when it comes to sticking to the plan.

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The Neon Rain

This is the start of another crime/thriller series with one main character, a genre that is my most reliable source of pop fiction. I start at book one and follow the character through each novel in succession. It’s probably my number one outlet for non-organized, brainless, leisure time. If I have a break, and it’s not long enough to think about what I should I do next, I just crack open a book like this.

The main character in this series is a New Orleans homicide detective named Dave Robicheaux and so far he is the main character in 16 books. In this book, Robicheaux is investigating the murder of a prostitute and stumbles upon a shady network of arms dealers and drug traffickers. He gets embroiled in their world and has to end up kicking some ass to extract himself from it.

It’s quite dramatic and over the top. A little too much so, that’s why I say the jury is still out on this series. Robicheaux encounters just about every possible bad guy in this book; a dirty cop that happens to be his partner, a retired general that still thinks he’s fighting a war, a Columbian drug lord, a Mafia kingpin, an ex-marine killer, an ex-CIA killer. You name it. At the same time, he falls in love with a woman he meets while escaping from two dirty cops (other than his partner), his brother gets shot in the head, and he revisits his alcoholism by going on a bender to end all benders. Wow.

It’s a good story though, but I didn’t read it under the best of circumstances. It took me a few weeks to read because I’ve been really busy lately. When this happens, I get confused and lost sometimes. I didn’t give the book much of a chance. But I will read the next few and decide if I’m going to press onward with the series.

The thing that will keep me in the series, in the short term at least, is that it has a lot of New Orleans character. This is important to me in the same way that Hillerman’s novels reflect the character of the Navajo reservation and Grafton’s novels capture the spirit of California’s central coast. I like the way Burke describes Robicheaux’s meals, all of which have a New Orleans flare. Descriptions of food always stick with me. Burke takes you to Cafe du Monde, out for oysters, and to a shack for a po’ boy sandwich, among other things. He paints New Orleans as a unique and beautiful place, albeit somewhat troubled and riddled with corruption. But it is Robicheaux’s home, and through his first person descriptions you get a feeling for the beauty and peace of the city.