Slaughterhouse Five

I missed this book when I was working my way through Vonnegut's works a few years ago. I'm not really sure how or why I skipped his signature novel, but I did. Anyway, I saw that it was available at the library and I checked it out burning with anticipation.
I expected to be blown away by Vonnegut's satirical wit as he commented on the petty horrors of the Dresden Firebombing. When I was finished I felt underwhelmed by the book. It has all of Vonnegut's hallmarks, but it felt flat. Billy Pilgrim was not just feckless, but also bland. I couldn't like hime, dislike him, or even pitty him. He was just a blank. Maybe that was the whole point of him. He is an everyman, but I'd like to at least feel something for everyman.
The time traveling didn't really work for me either. I get that Billy is fractured and I get that his time traveling is supposed to also offer some lesson to us stuck in time folk. Don't be too concerned about things because time is meaningless.
Maybe I'm just simply in a bad mood about time travel lately. It has been overdone. I could also be down on symbolism. Or I could just be tired lately. So it goes.
Anyway, I didn't think that Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's best work. I preferred Cat's Cradle, Hocus Pocus, Breakfast of Champions, and Player Piano more. The later works have more coherence to them. Vonnegut seems to have worked out his mythology a little better. Or maybe the Dresden Bombing was just too much to write about.
So it goes.

We Can Build You

"We Can Build You" by Philip K. Dick is an odd duck of a book. (I know a Dick book that is odd is perfectly normal.) Like most of Dick's books it deals with identity and what make a person human. It starts off with a piano salesman being thrown off of his game when his partner makes simulacra of Edwin Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. It twists through a decent into a twisted love triangle, a decent into madness, and finally a recovery of the self through the reassertion of personal will.
The novel is full of doubles.
There is the fact that the Rosen piano company is in two parts: the manufacturing arm and the sales arm. They make two products: a spinet that is popular and an electric organ that is not. They make two simulacra: Stanton and Lincoln. There becomes two teams: the Rosen team and the Barrows team. There seem to be only two mental states: sane and crazy. The story even has two distinct parts: the simulacra story and the Rosen and Pris story.
The simulacra story focuses more on the question of what make a person a human. On the one side you have the simulacra: Stanton is cold and efficient, Lincoln is melancholy and insightful. Both are morally upstanding and loyal. On the other side you have Pris and Sam K. Barrows. Pris is cold and introverted and schizophrenic. Barrows is a charming slumlord. Both are willing to betray people to achieve their ends. Who is more human in this equation? The simulacra are at least as human as anyone else in the story.
The Rosen and Pris story deals with Rosen's descent and recovery from insanity. His love for the cold, crazy Pris drives him to the brink. His actions become less rational and his eventually lands in the care of a mental institution. (I find the test used to determine mental illness pleasingly insane.) To cure Rosen's insanity, the doctor pumps Rosen full of hallucinogenic drugs. Durring these fugue states Rosen lives a fantasy life with Pris. It is not until the real Pris tells Rosen to assert his own will power that Rosen is recovered. (This is the only warm thing Pris does for Rosen). In the end we are left to wonder if Rosen was every really crazy.
I didn't find "We Can Build You" to be the best work Dick did. It was, however, an above average book. Dick's prose and plotting is controlled. His subject matter is deep and handled well. The only off putting bit was the lack of resolution for the simulacra story line. I sort of want to know what becomes of Stanton and Lincoln.

Palm Sunday

I'm a long time fan of Kurt Vonnegut. When he is on, his work is sublime. When he is off, his work is still pretty good. He somehow managed to combine humor, sci-fi, and social commentary. At times he is too cute and sometimes his prose comes off as sloppy. Still he is a member of the last generation of great American novelists.
I borrowed Palm Sunday, one of Vonnegut's memiors, from the library last week. I find Vonnegut's non-fiction more problematical than his fiction. He is a convicted humanist and his forthrightness often makes his prose stilted. The humor comes through, but it can be obvious that it is a thin finish on strongly held and long considered positions.
I'm personally fond of his expositions on the value of human life and the importance of reading. These are ideas that are not given enough coverage. The book is a good reminder that we are all flawed, but still valuable, creatures. We need to laugh at ourselves and act in ways that make the world a happy place.

Too Many Books?

One of my favorite features of the Boston Public Library's e-book system is that you can add yourself to the waiting list for a book. When your turn in the list comes up, the system sends you an e-mail and gives you five days to check out the book. I've used it more than a few times since the books I gravitate to are either popular or in short supply.
All was well until this week. I was on the waiting list for two books and they both became available with in days of each other. Why was this a problem? It's not like one can ever have too much to read....
Well, it happens that I've been very busy as of late and my time for reading is tight. On top of this, the lending period for an e-book is 14 days with no obvious renewal option other than checking the book out again. So, I have two books I want to read that I can borrow, but if I cannot get through one of them I'll have to add myself to the bottom of the list and wait to finish it.
An abundance of riches is a lovely problem to have:)
I still think the waiting list feature is great. I think from now on I'll only put myself on one waiting list at a time.

Outliers

I first heard about Outliers this past summer. The coach mentioned it during a BCU three star training. He told us that Gladwell claims that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. The idea of a book that explores what it takes to be excellent really intrigued me.
It didn't intrigue me enough to want to plop hard cover cash on it. If it turned out to be a vacant self-helpish trope, I'd be upset to have payed prime price. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait very long because Boston Public Library had Outliers available in ePub.
The book starts off strong. The stories and characters are interesting. They propel the material along and makes what could be tedious flow. The stories also makes up for the fact that Gladwell tends to ramble on and repeat his points.
The first part of the book that explores the lucky bits that influence success is the stronger of the two sections. It is interesting to see how something a simple as a birthday can impact a persons chance of succeeding. Some of the stories do make it seem that luck and skill are the key ingredients to being successful. It is not just talent, but the combination of luck and talent.
The last sections of the book are thin on characters but deal with more complicated ideas. They also propose ways to make opportunities for success. I particularly enjoyed the chapter about how the reason poor children don't do well in school has very little to do with their lack of ability in school. It is a strong argument for extended school years.
The lack of strong characters and stories makes the back half of the book drag. That plus the fact the Gladwell starts repeating himself. The chapter on airline crashes seems endless. The final chapter is equally boring and seems gratuitous.
Overall, it is very interesting read. At some level what Gladwell points out feels like it should be common knowledge. However, it isn't. There were several ah-ha moments. Who knew that a guy with a 200+ IQ wouldn't end up as a super star academic?

The Strain

I'm a fan of Gillarmo del Torro's movies, so I had high hopes for his first book. I was not disappointed. The writing is excellent, the characters are generally compelling, and the plot is tight.
The book pays homage to the traditions of the genre. It has the hero scientist with family problems, a mysterious powerful business man who doesn't care about the consequences of his actions, feckless government officials, an extintion level pandemic, and a remorseless and unstoppable villian. It has all of the elements of a romping ScyFy movie.
While it hews to the traditions of the genre, The Strain takes the Vampire mythology in an interesting direction. I like the way the book updates the mythology to play on our modern fear of pandemics. Like the newer takes on zombies, del Toro brings vampires into the 21st century.
He does it without making them sensitive emo-wienies. These vampires are truly horrible. There evolution is as scary as there final form is awsome.

Shadow Command

I got this out of the library to tide me over while I waited for "The Strain" to be available. I figured it would be a quick and moderately interesting read. It was a quick read. The plot was ridiculous and packed full of cold war stereotypes, the dialog tritely predictable, and the ending implausible.
If you are a fan of the genre it is probably decent. But despite the cool space planes, it is not for sci-fi fans.

Heat Wave

I love the ABC show "Castle". When I saw that ABC had commissioned a real book to match the one written in the season one story arc of the show, I felt compelled to read it. Fortunately, it was available from the Boston Public Library as an e-book, so it didn't cost me more than a little computer time. I'm not sure I would have felt good about spending money for "Heat Wave", but I probably would have done it anyway.
I don't have a lot (or any) experience with the modern detective genre, so I was not sure what to expect. I hoped that the sexual tension and goofy humor from the TV show would carry through to the book. What I found was that it was a tightly written mystery that made for a quick, enjoyable read.
The sexual tension was there, but almost laid on too thick. The humor was there as well, but it wasn't quite as goofy. One thing that I like about books is that it lets you go deeper into the character's heads, but in this case I found it distracting. The slight differences between the books protagonists, Nikki Heat and Jameason Rook, and the TV show protagonists, Castle and Beckett, was unsettling. Castle is more goofy than Rook and Beckett is less serious than Heat.
Aside from the tension between the characters I know and the ones on the page, the book was good. The plot moved pretty quickly. The mystery was complex without being crazy. The dialog was a little stinted, but I imagine that is par for the genre.
Overall, it was a fun read. Since I got it for free, I have no guilt. Since it was e-book, the only evidence that I read it is this blog entry. My bookshelf at home stays pretentiously highbrow and sci-fi heavy.

Breathers: A Zombies Lament

It is pretty obvious that I'm a zombie fan, so this book piqued my interest when I saw it was available at the library. I was also a little afraid because it looked like it would be one of those social commentary, woe is me, weepy sort of books. It was that, but done in such a way to make it a fun zombie book as well.
S. G. Browne does an excellent job of making his zombie characters fully fleshed out. The narrator is just a regular guy who happens to have reanimated after his death. You can really feel the torment he goes through having lost his place in the world, but the narrative never slips into melodrama. Browne keeps things moving with snappy dialog and clever use of zombie folklore.
Using zombies also takes a little of the edge off of the truly terrible things that happen to the zombie cast. There is something funny about a zombie putting on make-up to fit in, or a zombie wearing a sign protesting that zombies are people too.
I hear they are making a movie out of the book. That usually scares me since it is hard to make most good books into films, but I think "Breathers" has a good shot of surviving the translation. The book is dialog and character driven, so a good scriptwriter should be able to make it work. The danger is having the movie slip off into camp or horror. "Breathers" is not horror.
I highly recommend this to both zombie and non-zombie fans. It has something for everyone.

Electronic Library Books

One of the big draws for purchasing the Sony eReader was it's ability to work with e-books from the library. I love the idea of the library, but I'm terrible at returning things in any semblance of on time. Borrowing a book that automatically expires is a huge boon.
The two questions I had were: what was the selection like? how hard was the process?
I use the Boston Public Library and the answers are positive.
The selection is decent. It is heavily weighted towards romance novels, but the full gamut of genres are represented. Even current best sellers are availible.
Searching the catalog is easy. Using the advanced search feature makes it simple to find books that can be checked out immediately. You can also search for books using all of the normal criteria. If a book is in the catalog but not available for check out, the library tells you how many people are on the waiting list. Adding yourself to the waiting list is a simple click. When your turn for the book comes up, the library e-mails you.
The actual check out process is simple. You add the books to your cart and then click check out. Links to each of the books download to your computer. When you open the links the books download striaght into the Sony software. The book has a annotation that tells you the number of days before the book expires.
Getting the books onto the reader is as simple as drag and drop. On the reader, library books are denoted by a clock symbol.
After the two week lending period is over, the book will no longer open. You can then delete it. If the book is an ePub format book you an also return the book early.