Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in Mhbook Log's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, December 25th, 2002
11:35 am	NIGHT SOLDIERS, by Alan Furst I've praised Furst in this little booklog before. He has yet to produce anything that isn't readable, informative, and gripping. His books are short enough to qualify as airplane books, but are a good deal more intelligent than most books of that ilk. Night Soldiers is another story of a Soviet operative betrayed during the Great Purges who escapes to become part of the great struggle against Fascism. In fact, there are several Soviet operatives, although one of them is the main character. His name is Khristo Stoianev, a Bulgarian who is recruited by the Soviets after his brother is killed by the local quasi-fascists. His idealistic view of the Soviets is quickly destroyed by contact with Soviet reality, but he ends up fighting for the Soviets against Franco (and, more importantly to the Soviets, against non-communist leftists and anarchists among the Republican forces) until the Soviets decide he is a "traitor." He ends up hiding for several years and becoming part of the French Resistance under the tutelage of the American OSS. Furst's writings have not, to date, touched much on this organization, but we get a good look at how they operated. The OSS agent Khristo ends up working with is a good stand-in for US intelligence, period, and the author clearly intends him as such. I'm looking for more Furst. Hopefully, he'll keep writing these. I look forward to them the way I look forward to Steven Saylor's chronicles of Gordianus the Finder.
Friday, December 13th, 2002
1:40 pm	ALL THE RAGE, by F. Paul Wilson. Wilson's anarcho-libertarian hero Repariman Jack deals with a new designer drug that turns it users into raving psychopaths, but gives them a huge high doing it. Jack soons find out that the drug is connected to a supernatural menace he fought in the past. And he has to deal with an angry Serbian crook who has ticked off one of Jack's clients. Good stuff, as Repairman Jack always is. I'd like to see a novel where he isn't dealing with supernatural threats, but I think I'll dissappointed there for a wihle.
1:33 pm	KINGDOM OF CAGES, by Sarah Zettel. Humanity has reached a crisis. The various colony worlds are failing, and an attempt to gain help from Earth led to the outbreak of a horrific plague on Earth, which now refuses to deal with the colonies. One colony, Pandora, a world run by an authoritarian environmentalist government, is not having problems. The other colonists ask Pandora for help, and, when they are refused, use force to get that help. Three people on a space station are thrown into this: the Trust family, consisting of two girls, Chena and Teal, and their mother. The Pandroans, very offended when it comes to the breach of their rights, show no heistation in running roughshod over the rights of the Teals as part of their plan to save the other colonies..or to destroy them. This was the first Sarah Zettel book I read. After finishing it, I wanted to read everything she's ever written.
1:30 pm	JUPITER, by Ben Bova This book is set in a depressing future, where quasi-fundamentalists (the New Morality in the US, with Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists winning out elsewhere) have come to dominate the world. The book's hero, Grant Archer, is a believer in the New Morality, but also a scientist, and the book deals with the struggles he has when he is sent to a station orbiting Jupiter as a spy to see if the scientists there have made discoveries that the New Morality doesn't want made...like intelligent life that isn't human. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
1:09 pm	STAMBOUL TRAIN, by Graham Greene The Orient Express-one cannot write that without thinking of mystery and intrigue. Whether it's in Christie's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS or in the movie FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, everyone knows that the Orient Express consists of naught but cloak and dagger. And it's even running again nowadays. There's lots of intrigue in STAMBOUL TRAIN, all revolving around an exiled Commuist poltiician coming back to his native land. BUt there's also a subplot about a domineering female journalist and the woman who is euphemistically called her companion, as was the fashion in those days. The journalist is quite the stereotype, a vicious and jealous woman who is willing to see a man murdered out of spite because her lover is ditching her. I was also surprised b ythe level of casual anti-Semitism in this book. ONe of the major characters is continually referred to as "the Jew," again, common in those days, but rather shocking to our modern ear. This is another airplane book from the era before air travel was common. I'm making it a pasttime to find more.
Tuesday, November 5th, 2002
7:31 pm	Paperbacks Thank God for the local paperback exchange: I'd have used up much more of my meager funds to buy books if it weren't around. First off is Phillip Margolis' THE BURNING MAN. This is the story of a spoiled rotten punk who finally ticks off his rich father so much that he is banished from the family law firm to a small town. There, he meets a mentally challenged man, and becomes a much better person in the course of defending that man's life when the man is accussed of murder. Next is Edgar Rice Burroughs LOST ON VENUS. The hero of this series, Carson Napier (who is pretty much the same character as every Rice hero sans Tarzan..a two fisted man of SCIENCE! who would not be out of place in 50s B-movies) is lost on Venus with Duare, the daugher of a King who he has fallen in love with. Fun stuff, although it does have some nasty moments. Rice was never as much of a racist as most men of his time, but he does praise a civilization Napier encounters who run on eugenic principles. These charming characters murder those who don't meet their definitions of genetic fitness..and they are presented as (mostly) good guys. Still, fun reading. Next is Ramsey Campbell's THE NAMELESS. Very creepy book about a sinister cult which belives psychotic killers are actually acting under the influence of some outside force. They wish to fulfill the wishes of this force..the ones that lead people to kill in horrible ways. Barbara Waugh, the heroine, has lived through the experience of having her daughter kidnapped and apaprently murdered. Years afterward, her daughter calls her on the phone... This is the start of an investigation that slowly leads Barbara to believe her daughter has been kidnapped by this cult. I was quite surprised by this book, which seemed to be going one direction, but then went in another, which, on reflection, made much more sense based on what I had known than the direction I had thought it was going. Word of warning: this book is not for the faint of stomach. Ah, now we come to a quandry. A book by an author I hate: BURR, by Gore Vidal. I loathe and despise Gore Vidal. His pretentiousness, his oh-so-righteous talk, his self-hating Americanness, the way he is still, even to this day, pretending that al-Qaida was not behind the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that, by my count, al-Qaida members have confessed at least 4 times, publically, to their responsiblity, as of this date (can't ruin his conspiracy theories with mere *FACTS, can we?), his anti-Semitic comments, and the way he postures as the tribune of the common man when its convenient to him, and expreses contempt for the masses when it suits him..all of these make me regard him as a slinking disease in the shape of a man. He is, however, a damn good writer when he does not let his political prejudices get in the way of his writing. BURR (and all but the last few pages of LINCOLN) sees him rising above his prejudices and presenting a pro-Burr biography. Very difficult, given the man's reputation, and even more impressive because Vidal loves Thomas Jefferson, one of Burr's archfoes. The Aaron Burr of this book is a likeable rogue...albeit one you'd be ill-advised to trust with your money, among other things. Too bad his most recent book, THE GOLDEN AGE, wasn't anywhere near his two previous pieces of quasi-fictional biography. Last but not least: COLDHEART CANYON, by Clive Barker. A washed-up Hollywood leading man wanders into a part of Hollywood seen by many famous stars..the Devil's Country. Before it's all over, there will be Hell to pay. Literally. There's a lot of the Barker formula in this: Clive is starting to suffer from Ann Rice syndrome, where a very talented author becomes famous and, in the process, slowly becomes an unreadable hack. (Anyone who disagreees with my description is invited to compare INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE with PANDORA.) I also can't help but thinking that the contempt Clive shows for Hollywood here is somehow related to his not doing as well there as he wanted to. Still, I enjoyed it. Warning for those who may not like it: there are a lot of *very* kinky sexual themes in this book.
Sunday, November 3rd, 2002
12:56 pm	THE BUREAU AND THE MOLE Reading books like these always makes my blood boil. Someone trusted commits treason, and practically has to turn themselves in to get caught. And the reasons have more to do with ineptitude on the part of the organization doing the investigating, and enabling by various people. Robert Phillip Hanssen, family man, member in good standing of Catholic arch-conservative semi-secret society Opus Dei, and longtime FBI counterintelligence agent turned out to be a Soviet-later Russian-spy. He took some fairly elaborate countermeasures against detection (not letting the Soviets know who he was, for instance, so as to prevent his exposure by a future defector), but also made some big mistakes: his wife caught him in the act (but she forgave all after they went to an Opus Dei preist, who in turn forgave Hanssen after he turned over the money he got from the Soviets to charity...Opus Dei charity, of course), and his brother in law, a fellow FBI agent, became suspicious and reported him...which report was ignored by the FBI. His family man act was a little thin, judging by his frequent infidelity to his wife, as well as his posts to the alt.sex.stories newsgroup about his sexual fantasies regarding her. To say nothing of the way he installed a secret camera so a friend of his could watch Hanssen and his wife have sex..without telling his wife. Reading this book will give a quick sense of why the FBI gets called Famous But Incompetent by its detractors. It's also a sad story about someone who overcame a lot of barriers to make an impression in the world, and then peed it all away because of his arrogance. Hanssen thought he should be in a better position than he was, and had a lot of resentment towards the way the FBI was run. That I can understand. But I would think quitting would be the proper response there, not treason. Lest anyone think that Hanssen's treason did not affect them, there is a strong possibilty that software he provided to the Soviets made it into the hands of Ossama bin Laden. That's leaving alone the fact that he was giving away information that could, in the event of war, led to millions of deaths. And the spies he exposed who were executed.* *Soviet "traitors" don't bother me the way ones from democracies do, for the simple reason that they were acting against one of the nastier tyrannies in human history.
Monday, October 28th, 2002
12:12 pm	George R.R. Martin's Fantasy Series This is, so far, an unnamed series. The whole thing revolves aroudn a fantasy kingdom with a disputed succession and fading magic. The dynastic struggles (and the disputes over succession) have revived, while supernatural menace (and magic, thanks to the return of dragons, who are tied in with magic somehow) are waxing again. Interesting stuff, although the seriees has the same problem as Chung Kuo: very few characters who aren't utter jerks. But, some of the characters stay constant (Tyrion, the dwarf scion of the loathsome Lanniseter dynasty, is heroic and moral thoroughout..although not moral to the point of being suicidal, unlike some other characters). And one character, set up to be a real rat bastard (and who commits a despicable assault early in the series) manages to redeem himself. I'll read the fourth book in the series, although I do think it shows signs of flagging. (Again, a disease which affected Chung Kuo.)
11:59 am	Alan Folsom's DAY OF CONFESSION I read Folsom's earlier novel, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, which was a good read despite its having the same plot as a certain famous b-movie. (The title of which will be disclosed after he rest of my comments to avoid spoiling people...I need to figure out how to do livejournal snippets. That's a project for later, though.) DAY OF CONFESSION is a much better book. It concerns Harry Addison , a Hollywood entertainment lawyer whose brother is apparently killed in the bombing of a tourist bus going to Assissi. Harry goes to pick up the body, and finds out that his estranged brother was not only close to a Vatican power player, but is also the chief suspect in the recent assassination of a Cardinal. Pretty soon, he's embroiled in the usual thriller web of intrigue, involving Thomas Kind, a Carlos the Jackal-esque terrorist for hire, some people within the Vatican, and a scheme to engage in terrorism on a grand scale for the purpose of recreating the Holy Roman Empire in a very surprising place for that project. (The book cover jacket tells you as much as I just did, so I don't consider it spoilerage.) Pretty good read, with only a few moments that failed to suspend my disbelief, and some really creepy moments as the mass murder of hundreds of thousands (who will all be martyrs, so we don't have to worry about their deaths, according to the fiends who are planning this) is planned. Spoilers for THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW follow. Spoilers. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW is, to a large degree, a much higher class rehash of the schlock movie classic THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN.
Sunday, October 27th, 2002
12:08 pm	The works of Alan Furst. I'll move this over to my book log later on. Alan Furst is a recent discovery of mine. He writes tight espionage thrillers set during and just before WWII. Very good stuff. I've read three of his novels so far: DARK STAR, THE POLISH OFFICER, and THE WORLD AT NIGHT. DARK STAR is the story of Andre Szara, a correspondent for Pravda who becomes an agent of the NKVD (what would later be called the KGB), and a pawn in a complicated struggle between pro and anti-Stalin factions within the Soviet government. The book also puts the events of the 1930s in a slightly different light. It's also given me a future .signature, a Russian proverb. "Power is like a high cliff: only reptiles and eagles can ascend to it." THE WORLD AT NIGHT is the story of Jean Casson, a hedonistic French film producer who has his spirits crushed by the German conquest of his country. Slowly but surely, he joins the Resistance. THE POLISH OFFICER tells ofthe travels of Captain Alexander de Milja, who starts off by saving the Polish gold reserves from the advancing Germans. He makes his way to France to join the Polsih forces there, only to have to go underground after the German conquest. Furst tries to convey the point of view of the nation his hero belongs to in each of his books. THE POLISH OFFICER really does a great job of this, IMHO. De Milja is very talented, cynical, daring, brave as all get out...and a firm patriot.. He is an embodient of Poland's ideals, and Furst did a good job of expressing how the Poles feel about themselves. (Full disclosure: I am very partial to the Poles. :) I haven't had the chance to read all of Furst's books, but I am determined to do so after having read these three.
Tuesday, August 6th, 2002
7:02 am	William Casey's THE SECRET WAR AGAINST HITLER This book is all about former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Casey's World War II service as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an eclectic group usually described as the forerunner of the CIA..although, IMHO, it would be more accurate to describe the OSS (and Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE)) as the forerunners of the various Special Forces groups worldwide. Most of it is interesting stuff, although not unfamiliar to anyone who has more than a barebones knowledge of the secret operations of the war. The really interesting bit about this book is Casey's belief that the Allied unconditional surrender policy was wrong, since there were people among the Germans who tried to overthrow HItler, and who would have surrendered to us if they had done so. I've heard this point of view expressed many times. And I still think it's wrong..I'd use a stronger word, but I try to keep this little booklog decorous. I've never heard anyone make this argument about the Japanese. It's always the German who get portrayed as this poor little nation with those nasty Nazis grafted onto them, somehow. I have a hard time explaining this except in terms of racism. Herman Wouk, in his wonderful books on the war (WAR AND REMEMBRANCE and THE WINDS OF WAR), refers to the Germans who would have overthrown Hitler as (and I am paraphrasing) "those people who suddenly noticed Hitler was an evil madman right when he started losing the war." Erwin Rommel is the example par excellence of that type of person. Enthusiastic about HItler right up until the war started getting lost, and against atrocities..unless, of course, you count all the Jews murdered in Tunisia while he was in command of the area. Sorry, but St. Erwin he wasn't, despite all the popular hagiography of the man. The thinking behind the unconditional surrender policy was expressed best by Black Jack Pershing, at the end of WW1. He was against the signing of the Armistice that ended the war, because he felt that the German population hadn't really become cognizant of its defeat. "Another few weeks and they would have known they were beaten" was what he said. Horrible, some people said at the time. You want more people to be killed when we could have a peace now? You bad man! Well, he was a lot less worse than the idiots who wanted to leave things in a position where the German could delude themselves that they hadn't really lost the war, but had been sold out by Jews and socialists. Which was worse..a few more weeks of WW1, which would have killed thousands..or WWII, which killed (and this is a conservative estimate) 60 million? And many commentators at the time where quite aware of what would happen..Teddy Roosevelt, Pershing, Walter Lippman, and Toynbee, to name a few. Knowledge of this was part of what motivated FDR to push the unconditional surrender policy. There was also the desire not to let the people who had been big cheerleaders and supporters of Hitler (right up until he started losing) keep a share in power in Germany, which also had happened after WWI, when Germany lost the Kaiser but kept all the bezerkers, sycophants, warlords, and yes-men who had administered his mad dreams of conquest in positions of influence. Unsurprisingly, they proved willing and able to start trying to put those dreams back into place. (FDR was also thinking in terms from the American Civil War, when an unconditional surrender policy was adopted by the Union. There are similarities between WWII and the American Civil War (like, say, a battle in which a compromise peace will be the same as losing the war), but I think the WWI experience was far more influential.) As it was, far too many of the fair-weather Nazis stayed in positions of influence for my tastes, even after the de-Nazification program was done, but the push the Allies made in reconstructing German society has, to the present, worked. Fighting the war to a finish was necessary to avoid another one, and I regard arguments that we could have just let the fair-weather Fuehrers walk after they gave us Hitler as immoral and dangerous. Casey's willingness to give the lackeys of evil a slap on the wrist probably explains a lot about his activities as DCI.
Sunday, August 4th, 2002
1:23 pm	Christopher Hyde's The Second Assassin More airplane reading. A sinister conspiracy involving Nazis, "America FIrst" isolationists, the IRA and Democratic Party stalwarts who will be sidelined if FDR runs for a third-term plot to assassinate the King and Queen of England during their 1939 visit to the US (the first time a British monarch set foot on US soil). Everyone in the plot has their own agenda, of course, but they all want it to go off to further their own schemes. For the IRA, the chance to strike a blow at the British is great temptation. The America Firsters want to keep the US out of the coming war. The Nazis want to keep the US out of the coming war. And the Democratic Party stalwarts have hopes of becoming the President themselves. The author claims this is non-fiction, but at any rate, it was entertaining, especially because the people who work to foil this plot are second-stringers. The British government refuses to believe that Herr Hitler would ever stoop to assassination, so they assign one man to the job. The FBI arrests an IRA contact in the US..but he gets freed after they fail to find any evidence. so the FBI steps away form the case, leaving a few people in the US to deal with it. The end is pretty suspenseful...one of the blurbs describes it as "Frederick Forsyth meets Caleb Carr!," but I would put it in the tradition of things like THE EAGLE HAS LANDED.
12:19 pm	Hellooo Been a while since I updated the old book log, but here's my first shot in a while. More will follow. Two crime novels in a continuing series: Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware series, and John Sandford's "Prey" series. Alex Delaware is a shrink who sometimes consults for the LAPD, especially when his pal, conflicted gay cop Milo Sturgis, has a tough case. Milo refers a woman named Lucy to Alex, and slowly the secrets of Lucy's father come unraveled.. Lucy's dad is Buck Lowell, a kind of amalgamation of the worst qualities Hemingway, Norman Mailer, WIlliam S. Burroughs, and J.D. Salinger. At one point, he was acting as mentor to a convict turned author (much like Norman Mailer did), and Lucy's problems bring the whole sordid truth about that relationship to light. This was rather entertaining, but it is airport reading. The Delaware books are starting to get a little too formulaic for my tastes. Sandford's book, on the other hand, is up there with the best of his books. His protaganist, Lucas Davenport, is a detective in Minneapolis who specializies in dealing with psychos, and who is fully aware of how close he may be to becoming one of them. Davenport has mellowed quite a bit as the series has progressed. He still has a dark side, however, and it nearly cost him the love of his life when he manipulated events to ensure that a criminal would be killed in a confrontation. His gf *knew* that he had manipulated things that way, and, for a while, she couldn't deal with his doing that and the joy Davenport got out of doing the man in. Davenport and her have come to terms with their problems, and their relationship is much better. Davenport also seems to have wrestled his dark side down. He deals with an art professor and amateur erotic photographer gone really wrong, and gets to see someone else making the same mistakes he once made. Pretty good stuff, but not for the weak of stomach. The art professor is *not* a nice man, and, hardened veteran though I am of crime novels, the methoids he used to get his goals were pretty sickening. Still, excellent book. I'll be putting some more books into this, clearing up backlog, etc, over the next week or so.
Sunday, May 5th, 2002
6:20 pm	Martin Cruz Smith, HAVANA BAY It's always hard to read part of a series when you've never read the other books in the series. HAVAN BAY has as its main character Arkady Renko, who was the hero of GORKY PARK. He's still a detective, although the Russia he lives in has changed a lot since GORKY PARK. One of his friends, an unreconstructed old school Communist, has gotten himself posted to Cuba out of some kind of Bolshevik nostalgia: he thinks Cuba is the one place left where people still abide by the old ideals he had. When his friend's corpse is dragged from Havana Bay, where he apparently was fishing from a tire in the fashion popular among impoverished Cuban fishermen (i.e, the vast majority of Cuban fishermen), Arkady comes by to identify the corpse, and he ends up getting snared in an elaborate plot by some really shady characters, including a former American radical, a crooked American businessman who has managed to ingratiate himself with Castro, and a police officer who is a member of mystical semi-voodoo cult..and he finds out in great detail how exactly his friend ended up in the bay. He also finds a Cuban detective who he goes to bed with. I learned quite a bit from this book: I didn't realize that Cubans are not exactly happy with the Russians for leaving Cuba, and that Cuban government propaganda blames the Americans *AND* the Russians for the "Special Period" the island is undergoing. I'd also never heard of Abakua, the Santeria-esque cult one of the characters belongs to. The Cuban police tried ot inflitrate it, according to the Cuban detective, but he Abakua infiltrated the police instead. Castro is not painted very well in this book, which is not recommended reading for those who wish to delude themselves as to the nature of the regime the man runs.
5:59 pm	Caroline Stevermer's WHEN THE KING COMES HOME Good King Julian IV of Aravis has been dead for two hundred years, but everyone in his kingdom still wants him back. One of the people in his kingdom is an apprenetice artist named Hail Rosmer. One day while wandering, she comes upon a guy who looks a lot like the medallion of King Julian she's been casting.... Very entertaining book, set in a fantasy world that is kind of like ours, with the Aravis being next door to Austria. The really neat touch in this is that Hail idolizes an artist named Maspero..who used to hang out with King Julian, and from the mysterious fellow she meets, she finds out that Maspero, from from being a hoighty-toighty artiste, was a drunken rogue, the kind of guy who no one should loan money to. I was entertained by this.
5:39 pm	Eric Ambler's A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS Eric Ambler used to be a major writer of thrillers: Dimitrios was his most popular character. This book was made into a movie called THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, with Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet. Dimitrios is a slimebag with his finger in just about every criminal pie you can think of. Prostitution, espionage, drugs..you name it, Dimitrios is in on it. An English writer named Latimer hears of Dimitrios after the Turkish police show him the corpse of the infamous crook. He thinks he smells a great story, and starts out to examine the life of Dimitrios...which leads him to meet a rather large cast of characters, including Dimitrios, who is not really dead. It was interesting. I was amsued to find out that airplane reading existed well before there was airplane travel: maybe people read this kind of stuff on train rides.
Monday, April 22nd, 2002
11:57 am	Melanie Rawn's Exiles, Vol I: The Ruins of Ambrai You know, it's quite rare that you get a fictional villain who is as loathsome as one of the main creeps in this book. How loathsome is she? She's willing to see her sisters raped, forcibly impregnated, and then murdered after they have enough kids. Jennifer Shafiri in the whole BEGGARS trilogy wasn't this bad. This story is set on a world where those who have magical powers (the Mageborn) have left what I think is Earth for the planet Lenfell. Once there, they split into two factions, the Mage Guardians, and the Malerris. What, exactly, the Mage Guardians believe, I'm not sure: they're fairly standard fantasy nice guys, although they are apparently forbidden to take any offensive action. They appear purely reactive, and several characters comment on this. (they can, however, be fairly ruthless: several characters are "warded" to forgot things about their past, which means they get headaches or faint when certain people's names are mentioned, or when they accidentally see the sister that the Mage Guardians deemed it wise for them not to meet.) The Malerris, on the other hand, believe that life should be strictly regulated and run by mages. They seem to be firm believers in the theory Milovan Djilas ascribed to Joe Stalin: it's perfectly fine to kill 90% of the human race if the remaining 10% is happy. The war between the two factions devastates the land, causes birth defects (leading to a social hierarchy where those free of birth defects become the aristocracy) and leaves a lingering distrust of the Mageborn by everyone else. Years after wards, one of the Mage Guardians, Auvry Feiran, betrays his faction, taking his daughter Glenin with him, and devastating his home town of Ambrai. His other two daughters become major figures in the resistance to the Malerris conspiracy, called the Rising. It's a typical guerrilla thing: with a structure similar to Chinese triads. Members know very little about the organization as a whole, limiting the amount of people they can betray to the authorities to 4. They also have a neat code based on flowers: who would suspect that flower bouquet carries a message? The book is basically about the three sisters and their friends (especially the bard, a former slave who becomes the lover of one of the sisters) and the faction fight. The most interesting thing about it is the world they're in, IMHO, and the magic in it. There are spells like "Stain on my shirt" and "I left something at home!" to keep people away from important things: come to close to it, and the spell makes you go away. Pretty subtle magic, but effective. They also have magic gateways known as "ladders," leftovers from before the first wars between mageborn. No one knows where they all are, but they have a nursery rhyme that tells them some things, and theories about the rhyme and where it indicates ladders are form a part of the plot. The way the world is ordered is interesting: it's a mild matriarchy, with the birth defect free operating as an aristocracy. The Mage Guardians want to change things: they're still somewhat female chauvnistic, but they do want to make it possible for men to inherit property, among other things. (It is, as always, slightly amusing to see the arguments people make in defense of patriarchy turned on their head: at one point, one of the characters grouses because she has to do some of the work that everyone knows *men* are suppsoed to do...) One of the more interesting parts of the book is where one of the characters expainsto a Rising member that the common people don't give a damn about the Rising. Very good conversation. I'll be looking for the sequels to this: the book was good enough to grab my attention and keep it for a few days.
Thursday, April 11th, 2002
8:25 pm	The purpose The purpose of this whole thing is to provide a book log for moi. First off: HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, by George Orwell. Basically, this is all about Orwell's time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and his service with one of the left-wing militias there. Pretty interesting: Orwell was one brave individual, although he constantly downplays his bravery. The latter half of the book is all about the vicious political infighting that the anti-Franco forces degenerated into, mainly due to Communist influence. Orwell rightly suspects that the USSR was behind this..he didn't know it for sure, but we now have access to most of the Soviet Archives from that time, and it is plain that they murdered a good deal of their political opponents, and cared more about defeating the "Trotskyists" in Spain than they did about anything else. Orwell concludes with a warning to the British people about what is to come...one that seemed utterly sad to me, because he was totally right. Next book: TEN LITTLE INDIANS by Agatha Christie. It orginally had a far less polite title, but modern editors are thankfully decorous. 10 people go to a remote island, and are all accused of murder by an unknown host. And then they start to die, one by one.... I've got a far amount of appreciation for Christie, and this is one of her best. I actually was surprised by who the killer was. Next on my list was THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER, by Lawrence Block. This is the happier, jokey Lawrence Block..not the grim author of the Matt Scudder* and Keller novels. This is the guy who wanted to entitle one of his novels, which was set in Lithuania, LETTS FALL IN LOVE. (*Titles include 8 MILLIONS WAYS TO DIE, A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN, A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD, and the most recent book in the series, EVERYBODY DIES. All of them excellent. All of them really grim.) THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER has as its main character Chip Harrison, who works for a guy, Leo Haig, who has modeled himself on Nero Wolfe. I've read one or two other books in the series (Block is one of my favorite authors), and they're great fun: both parody of the Wolfe books and loving homage. They're a little more fun if you've read the Wolfe books, but it's not really necessary to know those to enjoy Chip Harrison. Chip is sent by Leo Haig to help out a topless dancer/icthyologist named Tulip, a poor lass whose prize fish have been murdered by some rat. Then *people* start getting killed, and Chip's life becomes hard indeed... Next was C.S Friedman's THIS ALIEN SHORE. Interesting little SF novel set in a world where hyperdrive had the side effect of causing genetic damage, and Terra reacted with xenophobic stupidity, leaving the colonies to fend for themselves. One group of the human mutants (called Variants) has managed to restore interstellar travel, but has maintained a monopoly. The main character of the book is the subject of an experiment by a ruthless Earth corporation who has multiple personality disorder as a result of the experience. The main character didn't really grab me much, but the world of the novel (especially the political manuvering amongst the Variants who monopolize interstellar travel) was real fun to read about. One depressing thing: even in the far future, there is an "Aryan" racist group. After that came Alastair MacLean's WHERE EAGLES DARE. MacLean, for those of you unfamiliar with him, was kind of the Tom Clancy of his day. He wrote a lot about WWII commandos (having been involved with that himself), but also covered stuff that would not be out of place in today's technothrillers: THE SATAN BUG, one of his novels, was about a biological weapon so deadly that it could kill all human beings within 24 hours...and what happens when it gets stolen by a man who threatens to use it. One of his novels was made into the GUNS OF NAVARONE. THE SATAN BUG and WHERE EAGLES DARE were also turned into films. WHERE EAGLES DARE concerns a commando mission to rescue a captured US general from the Germans before they can interrogate him and learn the secrets of an upcoming operation he knows about...OPERATION OVERLORD, the invasion of Normandy, to be precise. It was an excellent movie...and a crappy book. Too many trite and predictable doublecrosses, wooden characters, and a British counterintelligence operation that is so dense it must be made out of osmium. In real life, the Brits managed to turn every German agent into a double-agent within a matter of weeks after the start of WWII, something which was publicly known when MacLean wrote. In this book, they're still in the dark about enemy agents in Britain in 1944. And there is one point that really stretches credulity: the German double agents know the identities of *all* other double agents in Britain. This made my jaw drop. No intelligence agency run by anyone with an IQ greater than the average temperature in Boston for the month of October would ever let people who were had a good chance of being captured and interrogated know that much information. I won't even get into the stupidity of letting suspected double agents parachute into enemy territory, where they might get away, and where they can directly give their information to the enemy. Next up was PYRATES, by George MacDonald Fraser. Fraser is a fairly famous author (the excellent FLASHMAN series being his main claim to fame), and this book is really good. It's set in a world where a lot of the movie cliches about pirates are true. Fraser is a fan of the old Errol Flynn pirate films, and an intense student of the real era of piracy, and the humor in this book is all the stronger for it. This is kind of like THE TOPLESS TULIP CAPER, in that it is parody written by someone who really loves what they're parodying. The main character was fun (he is every inch the heroic cliche from movies like CAPTAIN BLOOD and THE SEA HAWK), but the anti-hero is really fun. He is Colonel Blood, based on a real individual (who tried to steal the Crown Jewels, failed, and was not only pardoned by the King, but rewarded, leading some to speculate that the King had put him up to it so that the Crown Jewels could be sold to cover the King's debts....). And he is just so cheerfully corrupt. When the pirates capture the hero and Colonel Blood, they offer the hero a chance to join them before they kill him. The hero nobly refuses...while Blood begins enthusiatically enquiring about the health benefits the pirate company offers. And that's it for now..sorry for the truncated summaries, but I just started this log, and was not able to give the individual books the attention they should get. Next time, I promise, more attention will be paid to the book I report on.