Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever

There was nothing about this book that was even really good, let alone the best ever. It's a collection of short stories that I found completely unmoving and forgettable. The characters, like the stories are sort of aimless.

I like to think I don't require a connection to the characters in order for me to like them or the book. Maybe if I were a twenty-something hipster, I would have been able to relate more to the drug use and the pansexual experiences. I couldn't, though, and couldn't care less about the characters or what happened to them. There's no doubt Justin Taylor can write, though, and being short stories, it was a quick read and not a waste of my life. Not an awful book but not one I would recommend.

Eleven

Eleven has become my most favorite fictional book I have read this year. What a terrific book. I finished it and really wanted to just go right back to the beginning and start again. I have recommended it to several people, a couple whom have read it and enjoyed it as well (the others haven't read it yet to my knowledge).

Eleven is about the unusually named Xavier Ireland, nee Chris Cotswold, a native Australian living in London where he works as a late night radio talk show host with his co-host, the stammering Murray. Xavier lives a quiet, lonely life outside of work, indulging in a traditional weekend Scrabble tournament, and tries to steer clear of deep involvement with people's personal lives, even as he dispenses advice on his talk show.

The title Eleven comes from the eleven lives that are influenced by a non-decision Xavier makes early in the book. A young child is being bullied by a bunch of schoolmates. Xavier makes a half-hearted attempt to break it up but ultimately leaves the kid to his own fate. This starts a chain of events that concludes with a very unexpected yet appropriate and moving ending.

This concept could easily be done in a very ham-handed way with "fate" being forced down the reader's throats and coincidences that are just too far-fetched to swallow. Mark Watson, though, does it with a tremendous elegance, creating a literary "butterfly effect". If you're not familiar with the theory, it is the idea that the breeze that a butterfly stirs with its wings in one part of the world, has an influence on the air currents and weather patterns in other parts of the world in ways we cannot fathom. So it is with this novel.

The story can really be summed up by one line in it, a line that seems like a throwaway line about two-thirds of the way through the book:

Everything has a chance of mattering.

Action or an absence of action has impacts in ways we cannot possibly fathom as Watson shows how the smallest things can escalate then ebb. A minor irritation makes us grumpy and our snappish comment to a stranger may in turn set off other events.

Beyond the study of fate and the influence of one person on another, this book is great because of Watson's characters. They are charmingly flawed starting with Xavier Ireland. We eventually find why Ireland has left Australia and changed his name and why he seems so set on being uninvolved. There's Murray (whoever heard of a stammering radio DJ?). The love interest, Pippa, who Xavier meets at a speed dating event and initially hires to clean his apartment. She is a former Olympic caliber athlete who now struggles to care for her recently impregnated sister. There's the neighbors; an upstairs couple who endlessly quarrel and seem abusive, and the downstairs single mother with the ultra-hyperactive toddler. The folks from Ireland's past. The depressed regular caller to Ireland's show. The restaurant reviewer who is the mother of the aforementioned bullied child. The realtor with bad breath.

The book is primarily about Ireland but these other characters flit in and out of the story, each with their own lives that don't seem to have anything to do with Xavier's but each doing or not doing something that impacts someone else.

I loved this book. I found it inspirational in an odd way. I think it is exquisitely crafted and well thought out. Even the ending, which is shocking and emotional, is perfect. The characters are human and modern. I honestly cannot think of a single negative thing to say about this book. Please read it.

The War Magician

Not too long ago I came across an interview with Michael Chabon's (one of my favorite writers) wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, in which she mentioned that the two of them are working on a show for HBO called Hobgoblin which will be about a group of magicians and con men in World War II. That in itself sounded cool to me. Chabon has written comics and has done the screenplays for some superhero movies so I expect that this show will be entertaining.

However, the most intriguing item in the interview came when Waldman was asked if the show would be based on Jasper Maskelyne. "Who on earth is Jasper Maskelyne?", I wondered. Waldman denied it would be based on any particular person but I still wanted to find out more about this Maskelyne fellow.

He was a British magician, one of a long line of magicians in his family, who, when World War II came about, felt that he could apply his skills in deception and misdirection to military problems. It took some time to convince the military brass that this was true but once he did, it appears he made quite an impact, at least on the war effort against Rommel in Northern Africa.

Along the way in my research I discovered that a book had been written on Maskelyne, the one I'm reviewing here. I requested it via Interlibrary Loan. It was pretty fascinating, highly entertaining, but, despite the dustjacket claim that it was "exhaustively researched", I really had my doubts on that regard.

One of the main reasons I had my doubts was because of the sheer number of conversations between people that were re-created in the book. If you're going to have an abundance of quotes, let me know where they're from; reconstituted journal entries, interviews, creative non-fiction. There's nothing, though. Not a footnote to be found in this exhaustively researched book.

I'm not the only one with concerns about the accuracy of the book. There is a website about Maskelyne which breaks down War Magician and Maskelyne's ghosted biography.

Even the author's webpage at MacMillan publishing (and some of you might recognize Fisher's name from his sport books, particularly his co-writing Ron Luciano's books) now calls War Magician a novel. So, questioning the level of factual information in this book seems valid. And it makes sense. I think if Maskelyne really pulled off as much as the book claims, he'd be much more recognized than he is.

War Magician is entertaining. Maskelyne leads a group of ragtag soldiers who are in charge of coming up with ideas to deceive the Germans. The most successful of these efforts are the creation of wooden shells designed to make tanks look like trucks. A lot of ingenuity is shown. When a bunch of green tanks are shipped to Africa for desert warfare and no paint can be found to camoflauge them, Maskelyne and his gang make their own paint out of spoiled Worcestershire sauce and camel dung.

Ultimately, the book is too long and too filled with meaningless discussions and efforts to flesh out the players in the story for me to recommend it. That, plus it not being what it initially purported itself to be, a well-researched biography of Maskelyne. But if you have an interest in World War II and want to learn something unusual, at least check out the Maskelyne website I linked to. Learning about Maskelyne makes me even more interested in Chabon's Hobgoblins.

This is a riot

http://www.27bslash6.com/f26a.html

Savages

Even working at a library, you can't always get the books you want when you want them. Take our library system. There are seventeen libraries in the system, ranging from some really large ones to some really small ones. But seventeen....you would think that most books that get reviewed places would end up being purchased by one or more of them.

I had read a review of Savages and it sounded like it was a fast-paced, oddly written book, much like the much-loved-by-me Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. I wanted to read it. Only one library in the system had it. Libraries in the system won't ship new books to the patrons of other libraries. You can either drive to the owning library, hope the book is on the shelf, and sign it out, or you can wait for the six month restricted period for new books to end and then request it be shipped.

I opted for the wait. And on the exact day it came off, I requested it.

Worth the wait. I knew the book was going to be different when I started the book. You know how you always hear the advice to writers that your first line should be powerful, drawing the reader into the book? Well, the first line of Savages is the first chapter of Savages. It reads, in it's entirety, "Fuck you".

So, yeah, that grabbed me. Especially since that was the whole chapter.

The book is about two young guys who are marijuana dealers in sunny California. Chon is a former Navy SEAL who brought back some high quality marijuana seeds when he was fighting overseas. His buddy Ben is a botanist who figures out how to create some nice blends with these seeds to create highly desired designer marijuana. The two share a girlfriend named Ophelia.

A Mexican drug cartel decides that they want to expand their operations into So-Cal and they go tell Ben and Chon that they are taking over their business. Naturally, the two are opposed to the idea. The cartel kidnaps Ophelia. A drug war begins.

This is another book with some really nicely developed characters with multiple points of views. Chapters (which are mostly really short and brisk) move from perspective to perspective.

But profanity, drug wars, seedy folks, violence. Not a big chance for a happy ending and no one really to root for (gee, I hope that Chon and Ben get Ophelia back so they can have another threesome and then sell some more weed! By the way, fuck you!). That keeps this from being a two star book for me. It's well-written, powerful, with a driving style that I liked. I'd put it more James Ellary than Toby Barlow in terms of style, which isn't bad. Well worth it if you don't mind amoral characters in your novels.

The Cross-Time Engineer

You know one of the reasons I love books? Real books, those made of paper and glue or stitching. Maybe with a dustjacket or maybe an old battered paperback. Not a downloaded file or something on a computer screen. A real, live, honest-to-goodness book. Want to know why?

Because they can be passed along from person to person. The Cross-Time Engineer is a case in point. I first started this series as a kid, probably in high school if memory serves. The book is about a fellow named Conrad Schwartz who is an engineer in Poland. He is on vacation, hiking through the mountains of his home country, and stops by some fancy schmancy place that cultivates seeds. The saleswoman is a hot redhead who leads Conrad to believe that she will meet him at a nearby inn later. Conrad buys lots of seeds. Conrad gets stood up, gets drunk, stumbles his way to the bathroom and passes out on the way back.

Turns out where Conrad passed out is used as a portal for time travel. He wakes up in the Middle Ages where he meets a friar who befriends him. Conrad takes the last name Stargard, the town of his birthplace, because of fear of his German sounding last name being held against him. Conrad is a big man, well over six foot, good looking and bright, too. He catches the fancy of a Count Lambert and proceeds to lead Poland into a technological revolution.

The series continues (I believe five or six books in all) with Conrad eventually developing Poland into a superpower and taking on the Mongols. It's a really fun series. Right up there with Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back as far as good time travel story (and Audrey Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife would be below last on the list (don't ask me how. If we can travel through time, we can put things after last)).

Getting back to the physical book itself, I encouraged my mother, a former science teacher, to read them, once I went to college. She enjoyed them and they stayed at her house for a long time. When I moved back to the area and was visiting, I reclaimed them. Then, when my oldest son was looking for stuff to read a few years back, I gave them to him to read. He absconded with them and they have been in his bedroom.

He grabbed The Cross-Time Engineer to re-read it and I think to encourage his younger brother to read it (don't think he's quite there yet as there are some adult topics). Nonetheless, the book found its way to the living room where I, one night upon crashing into a recliner, picked it up and re-read it myself.

How would you do that with an e-book? Maybe if it was a pdf on a thumb drive you could finagle it. But would I have had a pdf of this book, or a thumb drive, some twenty years ago? Of course not. At best it might have been written as a FORTRAN program on a series of 5.25 inch floppy disks.

Books are where it's at. And if you can find this series of books by Leo Frankowski, you should check them out. They're a lot of fun and are quick reads.

The Imperfectionists

I wanted to read The Imperfectionists from the moment I heard about it yet I never got around to doing so. Finally, someone returned a copy belonging to another library at my library and so I thought it was time.

Well worth the wait. I enjoyed this book immensely. This is another one of those books (it's almost becoming gimmicky) told by a multitude of characters with each chapter being told by one of the characters. It ends up being a collection of short stories in a sense but unlike in, say, A Visit From the Goon Squad, the stories are much more interrelated.

The story is about a dying, once great, European newspaper. Each chapter is from someone having to do with the paper ranging from editors, writers, human resources, to a reader. Interspersed between the chapters is a page or three about the history of the paper.

Rachman does a great job developing the personalities of the characters. Beyond that, he also showed how certain characters were misjudged by those who interacted with them. You see how certain characters view others but then you reach that characters' story and you see that there is more than meets the eye. So even though you only get a character's perspective for one chapter, they continue to be fleshed out in ensuing chapters (or are hinted at before their chapter is reached).

Rachman is a former journalist and he seems to have covered all the bases in this novel from the highest supervisor down to a guy trying to catch on with the paper as a stringer. I thought it was a well done book from beginning to end and one I could see myself re-reading some day.