Tana French's novel, Broken Harbor, is a crime procedural wrapped inside a portrait of insanity balanced atop a real estate crisis —and it's hard to remember when the real estate bubble popped, because it has reinflated, but it was less than two decades ago.
The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
Tana French is The Bomb
I just finished The Trespasser by Irish-American mystery writer Tana French-- this is the sixth book in her "Dublin Murder Squad" series-- but each book is from the perspective of a different detective, so she does away with that whole "Sherlock Holmes genius detective trope" and instead focuses on how each case affects (and is affected by) the particular detective working the murder . . . and while I've read her books in no particular order (I also read Faithful Place and In the Woods in the Murder Squad series and her stand-alone novels The Wych Elm and The Searcher and I just started Broken Harbor) I am realizing that she is perhaps the best living mystery writer-- she is definitely a cut above Ruth Ware, although I love a Ruth Ware thriller-- so if you haven't read a Tana French novel, pick one at random and give it a shot, I doubt you'll be disappointed.
Let's Move It Along
Yesterday, I finished my first (and perhaps last) P.D. James mystery novel, A Taste for Death, and while I enjoyed the central mystery and grisly murder, the book became a bit of a bombastic slog in the middle-- too much furniture and interior description, too many interviews, too many characters-- I guess I enjoy my crime fiction a little less realistic, a little more meta, and much faster paced . . . because I am certainly not going to crack the case, so I don't want to spend forever reading about it.
Il Gattopardo
This Novel Has Got It All!
If you're a sucker for dinosaurs and charismatic megafauna, and you are curious about the legal and political ramifications of time travel, then Clifford D. Simak's sci-fi novel Mastodonia is the book for you.
No Way, El Rey
If you're looking for some wild, hard-boiled crime fiction, where regular old psychopaths figure out how to navigate this lonely planet as best they know how, then check out Jim Thompson-- otherwise known as "The Dime-Store Dostoevsky"-- I read my first two Jim Thompson novels a few weeks ago: Pop. 1280 and The Getaway and I am a changed man, ready to do whatever is necessary to survive and thrive-- just like Nick Corey, the shaper-than-he-seems sherriff of Pottsville-- and if my schemes and ruses don't work out, then I'm ready to go on the lam, like Doc McCoy and Carol . . . although I hope I don't end up bankrupt and betrayed in the kingdom of El Rey (this mythical criminal sanctuary is also alluded to in the film Dusk to Dawn).
Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig johnson
Identity and Alcoholism, Sci-fi Style
Unintentionally Dry January (But Not Sand Island Dry)
Which Wych Elm?
Lord of the Flies is Lame (No Tanks)
If you think Lord of the Flies is a bit tame and you want a book where the kids really go bonkers then check out Cixin Liu's Supernova Era . . . a supernova eight light-years away unleashes a pulse of radiation that hits the Earth with delayed but deadly consequence-- leaving only children under thirteen immune to the eventual (9 months or so) chromosomal decay and death-- so as adults face imminent death, they race against time to train the kids to take over the planet-- and then the adults die and the kids act just like kids and utilize none of the wisdom passed to down to them and instead squander time and resources and engage in insane war games in a globally warmed Antarctica and then things get really batshit wild and the book addresses one of the truly unfair things about human life on planet earth-- the fact that where we are born very likely determines our destiny.
If You Don't Think Everything Sucks, You are the Victim of an Illusion
Go To Hell (Novelistically)
A Head Full of Choices (and Ghosts)
Spenser Being Spenser
Robert B. Parker's fourth Spenser novel, Promised Land, is more about relationships than crime, and I should warn you: there's quite a bit of romance between Spenser and Susan Silverman (blech) which makes me think something terrible is going to happen to her later in the series, and-- far more fun-- we learn about Spenser's complicated connection to Hawk, a gangster adjacent black dude who Spenser knows from back in his boxing days . . . anyway, this isn't my favorite Spenser book, but it still has its moments; here are some highlights from my Kindle notes:
Spenser on radical feminism . . .
“No,” I said. “Annoyed, maybe, if you push me. But not at her, at all the silliness in the world. I’m sick of movements. I’m sick of people who think that a new system will take care of everything. I’m sick of people who put the cause ahead of the person. And I am sick of people, whatever sex, who dump the kids and run off: to work, to booze, to sex, to success. It’s irresponsible.”
Susan Silverman on Spenser . . .
“More than maybe,” Susan said. “It’s autonomy. You are the most autonomous person I’ve ever seen and you don’t let anything into that. Sometimes I think the muscle you’ve built is like a shield, like armor, and you keep yourself private and alone inside there. The integrity complete, unviolated, impervious, safe even from love.”
Spenser on human nature and belief . . .Spenser and Pam on the city in the distance . . .
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t that make a difference? I mean you just let him go.”
“I’ve known him a long time,” I said.
Hawk on Spenser . . .
Hawk shrugged. “Me and your old man there are a lot alike. I told you that already. There ain’t all that many of us left, guys like old Spenser and me. He was gone there’d be one less. I’d have missed him. And I owed him one from this morning.”
A Mystery with a Curveball
Mortal Stakes-- the third book in Robert B. Parker's Spenser series-- is about things I love: athletics, the ethics of sports, a conflict between ethical systems, the seedy underworld of 1970s prostitution and pornography, and-- of course-- ingenious blackmailing schemes.
The 1970s . . . Characterized by Four Crime Novels
70s Crime, Boston Style
Robert B. Parker's first two Spenser mysteries-- The Godwulf Manuscript and God Save the Child-- will give you a perspective on crime in the 1970s in both inner city Boston and the surrounding suburbs . . . and the counter-culture of the 1960s is starting to permeate both locales.
Waiting for Joe Pike
Dave's Book List: 2018
It's really hard to recommend a good book. Reading-- real reading-- is deeply personal. In the end, it's what you think about the words that makes the book good for you or not. Not that I subscribe to relative aesthetic ethics . . . I think some sentences are written far better than others. But once a book reaches a certain level of competence, then it's really up to the reader to appreciate and make sense of it. And if it sounds like "hillbilly gibberish," as Darryl McDaniels categorized the lyrics to "Walk This Way"-- then even if you sing it like you mean it, it still might not mean much to you at all (even if everyone else loves it).
So skip the list if you want, but grant me one sincere, universal, sure-fire recommendation. A list of one. I would trade all the books on my list for #39. Boom. Literally.
I'm talking about Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson is so passionate about his subject matter that it doesn't matter if you're a Thunder/Flaming Lips fan, or a tornado junkie, or a history buff who wants to know more about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889-- which Anderson says should either be called "Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town" or "Reckoning of the Doom Settlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie-- none of that matters, as the book races along at EF5 speed towards the inevitable explosion.
Read it.
- The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander
- White Tears by Hari Kunzru
- The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield
- The Night Market by Jonathan Moore
- Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth
- The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
- The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
- The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
- Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky
- Beartown by Fredrik Backman
- Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky
- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson
- The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
- Drown by Junot Diaz
- The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga
- When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt
- The Changeling by Joy Williams
- The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom
- Florida by Laura Groff
- Ask the Dust by John Fante
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
- Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
- The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler
- Calypso by David Sedaris
- World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
- The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum
- Borne by Jeff Vandermeer
- The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky
- A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron
- Authority by Jeff Vandermeer
- Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
- The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
- The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
- Vox by Christina Dalcher
- Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
- Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson
- Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data Andrew Wheeler
- American Prison by Shane Bauer
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven JohnsonFarsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson