#FridayReads, Jan. 18–“God Save the Mark,” Donald E. Westlake and “Going Clear,” Lawrence Wright

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Westlake#FridayReads, Jan. 18–God Save the Mark, a wise-cracking mystery novel by the peerless Donald E. Westlake, featuring a naive young man who inherits a fortune from an uncle he never even knew of, and then tries to keep his hands on it, and away from the lurking no-goodniks who want to fleece him of his windfall. Westlake’s dialogue is street-wise, funny, and real.

Also, just starting to read Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief,Lawrence Wright’s careful dissection and, as the flap copy reads, “deep penetration” of a modern cult. One case Wright reports on is that of Kyle Brennan, a 20-year old whose tragic suicide may have been preceded by his father’s acquiescence to a Scientologist bigwig’s instruction to withhold from the young man medicine prescribed for him by a psychiatrist. The NY Times has already released a review of the book that will appear in this coming Sunday’s Book Review, by Michael Kinsley, who calls it “essential reading.” Should make for revelatory reading this weekend. Going Clear

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#FridayReads, Jan. 11–“Zero” by Collinson Owen & “The Troubled Man” by Henning Mankell

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#FridayReads, Jan. 11–“Zero” by Collinson Owen. Enjoyed this engrossing late-Edwardian (1927) potboiler about a novelist who welcomes the opportunity dealt him by a train wreck that leads his wife and friends to believe he’s been killed. Notwithstanding a new life under a nom de plume that shoots his career as a writer to new heights, he discovers a powerful urge to somehow go home again. It has lots of London publishing and theatre world material. According to the inside, Owen wrote at least 5 other books: The Adventure of Antoine; The Rockingham Diamond; The Battle of London (as “Hugh Addison”); C.O’s Cameos; and Salonica and After, a travel narrative. It’s easy to see why this was a popular entertainment in its day. I (gently as possible) reread my 1927 copy (it’s mostly disbound).Zero insideZero

Have moved on to The Troubled Man, another Kurt Wallander police procedural novel in my recent binge of books by Henning Mankell. This is one of the last of his Wallander novels, with the taciturn detective investigating the inexplicable disappearance of his in-laws. This book also features his daughter Linda, a police captain herself. It is the father and mother of her beau that have gone missing. I know from the sequence of these novels that Wallander is going to retire soon, plagued as he is by diabetes and terminal ennui, a fear that he’s wasting his life in futile pursuit of lawbreakers. I love these books for Mankell’s loyalty to his characters.Troubled ManMankell

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Beate Sirota Gordon, an Exemplary Life

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For more than five years, from 1992-97, I worked for Kodansha America, the U.S. division of what was then the largest Japanese publisher, and for the last few years of my tenure was Editor-in-Chief of KA, as we called it. We had a sister company, based in Tokyo, Kodansha International, known as KI. KA published an excellent general list, with a minor emphasis on books about Japan and Asia, while KI published almost exclusively on Japanese and Asian subjects. Among KI’s books was The Only Woman in the Room, Beate Sirota Gordon’s memoir chronicling how she came to play a central role in drafting the sections of Japan’s postwar constitution on the rights of women. As the above referenced obituary in the NY Times makes clear, Ms. Gordon led a remarkable and exemplary life, and her book is also very good.

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#FridayReads, Dec. 14–“The Man Who Smiled,” a Wallander novel by Henning Mankell

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#FridayReads, Dec. 14–“The Man Who Smiled,” a Wallander novel by Henning Mankell. With so much unexplained crime in our midst such as the mass shooting in Newtown, CT today, it’s somehow sustaining to enter into Kurt Wallander’s world as he tries to riddle out the source of evil in Ystad, the small Swedish city that is his realm.

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Teasing “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

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Update: One day after I published the post below about “The Hobbit,” the NY Times published this interesting piece today about the Tolkien archive, which is housed in the US, at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Also, please note an earlier blog post of mine, J.R.R. Tolkien Renounced Racial Politics in 1938 Letter to a German Publisher.
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Some readers of this blog may recall that I happen to share a birthday with J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbit protagonists Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, having written about that literary link in a piece on this site labeled Personal History. Since my teens I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s work and then enjoyed Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy. My wife and son and I already have tickets to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” when it opens late next week. I’ve seen a trailer or two for the film but have steered clear of reading much about it, not wanting to have the element of surprise hijacked by reading details I don’t need to know yet.  Still, I crossed paths today with a very encouraging Hobbit teaser on Nerdist.com, the website of Chris Hardwick, ebullient host of “The Talking Dead” fan show that is boradcast on AMC TV after the zombie-apocalypse program “The Walking Dead.”

What’s good for the book is also good for the film–a sense of humor. Though some of LOTR‘s self-importance is being retroactively returned to the tale, Bilbo is simply a much more fun reluctant-hero than Frodo, whose dewy-eyed earnestness was way too goody-goody at times. Martin Freeman [cast as Bilbo] also played Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that character–quite correctly–shares spiritual DNA with this Hobbit, who wants to live out the simplest pleasures of the countryside, but gets whisked into something bigger, and complains all the time. It also feels like the themes here are more tangible for kids to relate to than abstract ultimate-good versus ultimate-evil, such as the benefits of going outside and making friends instead of sitting around the house (granted, LOTR had a team of friends too, but it broke up rather quickly. This group stays together).

I greatly enjoyed the 2005 film version of Douglas Adams’ modern SF classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, directed by Garth Jennings, which featured not only the aforementioned Martin Freeman, but also Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, and the voice of Alan Rickman. So, if Peter Jackson’s new Hobbit film can conjure up some of that cinematic pleasure, then we’re in for a treat.

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#FridayReads, Dec. 7–“Sidetracked,” a Kurt Wallander novel

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#FridayReads, Dec. 7–Sidetracked, a Kurt Wallander novel by Henning Mankell. In finishing this gripping novel which features a serial killer taking revenge for harm done to his vulnerable sister I’ve completed a binge of three Mankell books read over the past several weeks.

The others were The Dogs of Riga (originally pub’d in 1992, it’s set in Latvia as the Eastern Bloc was on the verge of collapse) and The White Lioness (first out in ’95, it’s set amid the end of apartheid in South Africa, with a terrifyingly plausible plot on the life of Nelson Mandela). The cases become more engrossing and Wallander more believable and sympathetic the deeper you read in to the series. Last year, I read Faceless Killers, One Step Behind, and Firewall, so I think there’s only one I haven’t read, The Fifth Woman.

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