More Recent Reading

(I'm calling this one "More" Recent Reading for no particularly good reason aside from the fact that I decided I didn't like having a bunch of entries all named the same thing. This is mostly books I read on flight to, while at, or on the flight home from New York.)

(Also, if you're not into reading, you can also read me watching the Oscars with the other people at TeeVee.org. So you have your choice of flavor: Literary Monty or Pop Culture Monty!)

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

I read this in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, and I felt pretty darn smug while I did it, too. It was largely what I expected: first-rate hard-boiled detective fiction.

It's Only A Game by Charles Schulz

I got this (and the two comic-related books later on) from Forbidden Planet, a big fancy comic book store in Manhattan. I mention that to give local flavor. Well, not "local" exactly, but you sort of see what I mean. This is a collection of sports-related gag strips that Schulz did when it wasn't clear whether Peanuts was going to take off. Almost immediately, somebody else did the art, and that's the gentleman who does commentary. So it's an interesting look at how Schulz worked when he had a collaborator and it's also one of the only things Charles Schulz ever worked on that hasn't been easily available. When combined with his Li'l Folks collection and the new Fantagraphics Peanuts books, it really feeds the completist in me.

It's not the funniest thing I've ever seen, but there are jokes that are reasonably entertaining. Frankly, I thought it was worth it just to see how Schulz drew adults.

The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett

More hard-boiled detective fiction, and frankly, it's hard to get more noir than this. Hammett, of course, is the author of The Maltese Falcon and other seminal pulp novels, and these are, in my opinion, the best short stories of the genre. Great stuff.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists : A Novel by Gideon Defoe

Whee! This was a Christmas present from the very clever Strega, who wisely realized that I would think a story in which pirates, scientists, airhips, and foolishness featured heavily was funny. And I did! I laughed a lot throughout this book.

Once More (With Footnotes) by Terry Pratchett

I've got almost everything Terry Pratchett has written; I don't have some of the extraneous Discworld stuff (like the maps) and I haven't read The Unadulterated Cat because, but other than that, I've got two solid shelves of Pratchett. So naturally, I was pleased to get this collection of ephemera and whatnot. I was pleased with the Discworld short stories, since up to now, they've been scattered around various compilations and occasional convention program books. So it's convenient to have them all in one place.

Not all the stories are solid gold, of course, because some of them come from Pratchett's very earliest days as a writer. That's where the "With Footnotes" part becomes really fun, because he doesn't like some of the stories at all, and it's all he can do to let them be in print without totally rewriting them.

Bizarro World 2

This is a collection of comic book stories that are basically wacky non-canon DC. Bizarro World 1 was largely an excuse to print Kyle Baker's story about Superman's babysitter, but it had some entertaining things in it. I bought it (the first one) because it has several stories in it that were either written or drawn by Evan Dorkin, including one that was drawn by Dorkin and written by a guy I work with.

This one wasn't as funny and it had some pieces that (like the "Fearlessness is the ultimate super power" one) were fairly pointless. There were a few good bits, though.

Bill and Ted's Most Excellent Adventures 1

Speaking of Evan Dorkin, this is a collection of his work on the Bill & Ted comic book. I hadn't read much of these, which is odd, what with me being a fan of both the movie and Dorkin himself. It's funny. But you can certainly tell that it's early in Dorkin's artistic career.

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin

This was good, clean fun. It's basically a mock hard-boiled detective story (yes, another one of those! By the time I finished reading all of these, I was narrating all my actions in my head as I walked around) set in some kind of fairy-tale city, full of talking Jack-in-the-Boxes and whatnot. One of the protagonists is a hard-drinking teddy bear! It's by Robert Rankin, so obviously it's funny; and there's a plot, which makes it (in my opinion) one of his better ones. I wish Rankin were more widely available in this country, because he's really good.

Colony by Rob Grant

Hmm. Yeah, I had high hopes for this, since Rob Grant is half of the guys behind Red Dwarf. But it was kind of, I don't know . . .disjointed, I guess. It took a long time to get going, and once it got there, it was kind of derivative of Red Dwarf, what with the "man comes back to life after thousands of years on a giant space ship" angle. There were entertaining bits, but it didn't knock me down with brilliance or anything.

Incompetence by Rob Grant

Another one by Rob Grant, because a couple days before I went on my trip, I stopped by a store that has lots of import science fiction. I liked this a little better, possibly because it was a send-up of spy novels (not quite hard-boiled detective fiction, but close), but more likely because it just held together better. The plot mostly held together from start to finish and it actually had me guessing at points. Plus, the funny parts were funnier.

The Greedy Bastard Diary by Eric Idle

I bought this during intermission of the first performance of Spamalot on Broadway. It was hard to get up the aisle because people were milling about congratulating other people. And, y'know, I feel odd about shoving past Steve Martin when he's talking to Eric Idle. It's kind of weird. So I got up to the souvenir stand and picked up a special commemorative can of Spam (true!) and this book, which is a collection of diary entries Idle made on his tour around North America while doing stand-up and old Python routines. On my way back to my seat, I had to wait while a few people in my way were getting Mr. Idle to sign Playbills and Spams and whatnot. So I got my copy of the book signed, which I'm pretty pleased about.

Naturally, the book is entertaining. I'd read much of it already on the Pythonline site, but that was awhile ago. In addition to talking about the shows, there's a surprising amount of material about serious topics, like his childhood and his parents.

Juiced by Jose Canseco

I got this for the flight home. It's the hot sports story right now because Canseco claims to have injected Mark McGwire and other players with steroids. The idea that steroids are used in Major League Baseball isn't that controversial, but Canseco has actually named names here, which lets story-hungry sportswriters ask specific people if they ever did steroids. Naturally, they deny it, and the story continues.

It's not a bad book, so I guess I applaud Jose's ghostwriter. The non-steroid chapters are about Canseco's life as a baseball player, and they're pretty interesting. The parts where he complains about racism aren't a hundred percent convincing, though, because frankly, he has it pretty good. When something bad happens to him, like being arrested for having a loaded gun at a school, or having a baseball bounce off his head for a home run, he alleges that if it had been one of the "untouchable" white stars, the media wouldn't have made a big deal out of it. But he never gives any counter-examples of white guys being arrested, and it all comes off as fairly speculative. Besides, as a light-skinned Cuban who grew up speaking English in a middle-class household, he's less "foreign" than Ricky Ricardo. And it's my general rule that if you're white enough to marry Lucille Ball on television in the fifties, you're pretty much white. I'm sure he experienced some racism, but I also think most of the problems he faced were his own damn fault. And that leads to an entertaining life!

On this subject, I see that Canseco has halted his book tour. I don't approve of death threats, but I do find it kind of amusing that they were "submitted through Canseco's Web site". How lazy!

The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs

Another "hot" book, this one from two or three months ago, this is by the senior editor at Esquire, who tries to become more intelligent by reading the Encyclopædia Britannica. And through the entire book, which is littered with anecdotes of people being unimpressed with his goal, he never seems to understand that knowing trivia is not the same thing as being smart. Seriously, every time he says to someone someone, "I'm going to become the smartest person in the world!" and they say, "that's incredibly stupid," he seems shocked. Combine that with his need to include a subplot about he and his wife's attempts to conceive, and it's a fairly annoying read. Also, he keeps describing times he crudely shoved trivia into everyday conversations, and it doesn't really work. What you've basically got is a guy who comes off as both intensely insecure and desperate for approval. Sorry I can't give it to him.

To be fair, I'm annoyed that he was able to leverage his résumé (working at Entertainment Weekly and other magazines) into getting free advertising in the form of "guest columns". And also, I wish I'd thought of the idea first.