Yesterday I finished Robert B. Parker’s 1980 crime novel, Looking for Rachel Wallace, in which private eye Spenser is hired to act as bodyguard for a radical feminist lesbian writer. Spenser is surprisingly enlightened for his times as to gay rights. When Wallace is kidnapped he has to find her, which he’s able to do a bit more easily than I found plausible. There are also several clues which are never followed up on - when a letter comes from the kidnapper(s), for instance, no one says anything about checking it for fingerprints. There are some nice scenes with Spenser and his girlfriend Susan, though, and overall, it’s a decent Spenser book.
I’m now reading Robert A. Heinlein’s 1953 novel Starman Jones, about a farmboy who wrangles a billet on a huge starship liner. So far I’m digging it.
Next up: a return to Amity Shlaes’s Coolidge, and then I hope to get to Joe Haldeman’s sf novel Worlds Enough and Time (last of the Worlds trilogy) and Brian Steel Wills’s George Henry Thomas: As True As Steel, a bio of a Civil War general and hero of mine.
Finished Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, by William Craig. Considered the definitive history of the WWII battle, this is very good, but Criminy! What an especially horrific episode in what was already a brutal war. Makes my First World problems seem very small indeed. As you may recall, a couple of months ago I read Disaster at Stalingrad, by Peter Tsouras, an alternate history in which the Germans win the battle. I understand Tsouras has a big fan base, but that was easily the worst book I’ve read in a good long while. It was like reading the telephone book, what with his endless lists of numbers of this and that. But it got me to thinking I really did not know much about the battle, and I knew Enemy at the Gates was supposed to be the best book on the subject, so I picked up a copy. Glad I did too. Recommended.
An interesting side note: A 2001 film of the same name focused exclusively on a fictionalized account of the contest between legendary Russian supersniper Vassili Zaitsev (played by Jude Law) and Germany’s own legendary Major Erwin Koenig (Ed Harris). Of the 411 pages in the book, this contest took up only three pages. Zaitsev’s love interest in the film was his sniper student Tania Chernova (Rachel Weisz). The characters really were lovers. But at the end of the film, he’s visiting her in the hospital, and it looks like they’ll go on to live happily ever after. In real life, she actually was in the hospital from severe injuries incurred when a fellow sniper stepped on a mine next to her. And while there, word reached her that Zaitsev had died in an explosion during the final weeks of battle. This news plunged her into a profound depression from which she never fully recovered. But then, decades later in 1969, still clinging to her love for him, she suddenly discovered Zaitsev did not die in the explosion after all but recovered and had married someone else. What a surprise! No word on whether they ever met again.
Tomato Girl. While it’s well-written, the premise is essentially “let’s give the main character a rotten life and just pile awful thing upon awful thing on her, and that’ll be the plot.” So I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you like a downer of a book.
Nonfiction:
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Endurance. This talked about physiology and the brain, and how the affect perceived human limits. It’s a fascinating book, heavy on controlled studies and experiments, but with plenty of anecdotes to keep things interesting as well. Recommended.
T is for Transformation, written by Shaun T of Insanity fame. It’s a decent book for having been written by someone who’s a fitness instructor rather than a writer. It’s supposed to be motivational, so it can get hokey at times, but was interesting to read the personal background of the guy who has made me miserable with sweat and fatigue so many times.
Just finished The Marriage of Meggotta by Edith Pargeter; who also wrote as Ellis Peters – most famous for the “Brother Cadfael” historical mystery novels. (An extremely prolific author – dates 1913 - 95 – wrote fiction of various kinds: some with medieval, some with 20th-century, settings.) “Meggotta” is set in the England of Henry III – a monarch about whom I’d known almost nothing: in this book, he comes across as a prize twit. On a “Romeo and Juliet-ish, with differences” theme: I found it extremely sad and poignant.
Finished Recipe for Disaster by Stacey Ballis. It was okay, but tended toward cliches.
Now I’m reading The Mystery of Three Quarters by Sophie Hannah. She’s taken over writing Hercule Poirot novels, with the permission of the Agatha Christie Trust.
Finished Camino Island, by John Grisham. A departure from his usual legal thriller, it’s a straight-up heist yarn set in the world of rare books and manuscripts. In the opening, a team straight out of a classic 1950s French heist film, or maybe even Ocean’s Eleven, steals F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original, handwritten manuscripts to all five of his novels from their home in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. The owner of a popular independent bookstore on Florida’s Camino Island, off the coast near Jacksonville, is suspected of having obtained them by a sophisticated private detective agency hired by the manuscripts’ insurer. The agency presses into service a beautiful, young and struggling author with a history on the island to help get them back. Meanwhile, the leader of the heist team, who dumped the manuscripts on the black market for a rip-off price after he got spooked when two of his team were arrested, now wants them back to sell for a real profit and is willing to kill for them. This is perhaps my favorite Grisham book to date. An excellent read.
Next up is Dark Sacred Night, by Michael Connelly, his newest novel, featuring Harry Bosch along with Renee Ballard, who was introduced in his The Late Show last year. The book went on sale just yesterday, and the wife and I made a special trip to Barnes and Noble to buy it. Connelly is one of the few authors I will buy the hardcover.