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What book is everyone reading at the moment? Part 2.

alfaniner said:
Huh. I can get at least the first book (The Hot Rock) for free with my Kindle Unlimited subscription. I'll check it out, thanks!
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Into it now. From the cover design of the series I thought it was a recent offereing. But the first one was written about 1970. Hence my wondering why the story was so familiar until I realized I'd seen the movie with Robert Redford.

Nice, easy, summer read, written in a breezy style. I see there are at least fourteen books in the series. I have to wonder if it will go the way of the Fast and Furious franchise and become increasingly ridiculous. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
If you like Westlake, you might also like Richard Stark. Westlake and Stark are equally good, but the books they wrote are quite different.
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I don't think anyone has pointed out that "Richard Stark" is one of the pen names under which Westlake wrote. This might account for some of the similarlty.
 
xterra said:
I don't think anyone has pointed out that "Richard Stark" is one of the pen names under which Westlake wrote. This might account for some of the similarlty.
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:cool:
Wudang said:
You do know Stark is Westlake's pseudonym?
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W.D.Clinger said:
I must qualify what I wrote in the spoiler by admitting Westlake wrote a few books, such as 361 and The Ax, that Stark would have been proud to write.

There is of course some evidence that Westlake was influenced by Stark, most obviously in Jimmy the Kid. (Judging by The Grifters and Drowned Hopes, I'd say Westlake was also aware of Jim Thompson, although that connection is considerably more distant.)

While I'm at it, let me put in a good word for a third author, Sam Holt, who published only four books during his short career.
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I'm reading another comic novel by Donald Westlake, God Save the Mark ("a novel of crime and confusion"). Published in 1967, it won the 1968 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. (Westlake's first Dortmunder novel was published in 1970.)

The spoiler quotes the opening paragraph of Chapter 2.
I suppose it all began twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from my first day of kindergarten without my trousers. I did have the rather vague notion they'd been traded to some classmate, but I couldn't remember what had been given to me in exchange, nor did I seem to have anything in my possession that hadn't already belonged to me when I'd left for school, a younger and happier child, at nine that morning. Nor was I sure of the identity of the con infant who had done me in, so that neither he nor my trousers were ever found.​
 
“If we can win here, we can win everywhere...the world is a fine place and worth the fighting for, and I hate very much to leave it...”

I've finished with For Whom the Bell Tolls last night. Took some time and felt like a long book from time to time. The last quarter of the book though were very good...and the ending oh boy. It really moved me and I guess it will take some days before I stop thinking about it.

I will continue with some other books I've started with and try to finish them.
After them I'm curious about John Steinbeck and also Dumas musketeers.
 
I'm reading some of the first few of the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain (a pen name of Evan Hunter). There are something like 50 books in the series written over about 50 years, starting in the mid 1950s.

I read the first three a couple of years ago then I switched to something else for a while, then got back to them last week. I just finished the "The Con Man" (fourth book in the series) and "Killer's Payoff" (sixth in the series). Somehow I skipped the fifth book, I'll read that next.

The books follow the detectives of the 87th precinct in Isola, a fictionalized version of New York. So far they're all fairly short and easy to read. Written and based in the 1950s, there are references that seem pretty old fashioned now, and some bigotry concerning race, women, gays, etc. But the main characters don't seem to fall into it much and sometimes even speak and act against it. Still it's obvious it was accepted much more at the time.

These are fun to read, but you would have to be at least somewhat a fan of police procedurals. Part of the fun for me are the huge differences in how things were done then compared to now based on the technology available. Fingerprints, IDing a photo, even IDing a body in a strictly paper-based non-digital world is pretty interesting. But they do it, and get their man or woman in the end. Another thing that comes through sometimes is the kind of "pulpish" nature of the books. I swear some of the dialog could have come straight from a Dragnet episode. But I liked Dragnet, so what the heck.

The most frequent central character is Steve Carella, one of the detectives at the precinct. In the first book he meets and then marries a deaf woman who also does not speak, and their relationship is shown in later books. She is a great character and even plays a role in catching one of the bad guys in "The Con Man".

Try them if you like police and detective stories.
 
JimOfAllTrades said:
Written and based in the 1950s, there are references that seem pretty old fashioned now, and some bigotry concerning race, women, gays, etc. But the main characters don't seem to fall into it much and sometimes even speak and act against it. Still it's obvious it was accepted much more at the time.
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As an aside, I noticed something similar when I was completing my collection of (reprinted) EC science fiction and horror comics from the 1950s. Women were generally secondary characters at best and the protagonists, particularly in the science fiction stories, were "beefy white guys in jumpsuits", to quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there was no racism to be seen. I shouldn't be surprised, considering their most famous science fiction story, "Judgment Day", involved a depiction of racism between robots on an alien planet and featured a black astronaut, although that was the twist at the end (and caused problems when it was reprinted shortly after the Comics Code went into effect).
Even their horror comics were limited to the occasional stereotypical depiction of African witch doctors or Caribbean Voodoo priests as villains, with nothing I recall that would really be considered racist these days.
 
Armitage72 said:
As an aside, I noticed something similar when I was completing my collection of (reprinted) EC science fiction and horror comics from the 1950s. Women were generally secondary characters at best and the protagonists, particularly in the science fiction stories, were "beefy white guys in jumpsuits", to quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there was no racism to be seen. I shouldn't be surprised, considering their most famous science fiction story, "Judgment Day", involved a depiction of racism between robots on an alien planet and featured a black astronaut, although that was the twist at the end (and caused problems when it was reprinted shortly after the Comics Code went into effect).
Even their horror comics were limited to the occasional stereotypical depiction of African witch doctors or Caribbean Voodoo priests as villains, with nothing I recall that would really be considered racist these days.
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It's true that the casual dismissal of women's abilities and roles is probably the most common thing that jumps out at me. It's definitely more frequent than the other things, probably because there are more women than minorities or LGBTQ people in the stories.

In one of the books I just read there were a couple of paragraphs of dialog between one of the detectives and a woman about how she should protect herself. When the woman mentions she has a gun and can use it the detective lectures her about a woman should have a hammer instead of a gun because women are so excitable that they aren't capable of shooting straight when attacked. Actually I think this is probably true of the vast majority of men and women, but the detective lays the blame solely on women's excitability.

On the other hand some of the detectives are married or in long term relationships and are generally portrayed as being loving and having respect for their partners, so it's not all bad.

On the racial and gay fronts, one of the detectives is black and is called ****** on occasion, mostly by characters shown as ignorant or just bad, but it's treated as pretty normal even by the black detective. Gay men (I don't think I've seen any gay women or other LBGTQ characters yet) are tolerated by the detectives for the most part, but called perverts and just about every other name by others.

I like these stories but it is off-putting to read these parts, and even worse to think that it was normal then. But I think they reflect what the general mindset actually was, and certainly even clean it up from the reality of the time. But it was that way, and I think it's better to be mindful of that and do what is needed to correct it then pretend it wasn't. So I read them and enjoy the other parts.
 
JimOfAllTrades said:
It's true that the casual dismissal of women's abilities and roles is probably the most common thing that jumps out at me. It's definitely more frequent than the other things, probably because there are more women than minorities or LGBTQ people in the stories.
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One of the EC science fiction stories had a woman getting elected President because women voted for her instead of who their husbands told them to vote for. (Gasp!!) This eventually led to a reversal of gender roles in society, at which point the story degenerated into all of the 1950s TV and movie cliches, but with the male and female roles reversed.

A man flirting with a female police officer to get out of a speeding ticket.
A woman upset that her father-in-law is coming to live with her and her husband.
A man complaining because his wife won't buy him the latest appliances for his kitchen.
A woman calling from her office to let her husband know she's working late, while her male secretary sits on her lap giggling.
 
Armitage72 said:
This eventually led to a reversal of gender roles in society, at which point the story degenerated into all of the 1950s TV and movie cliches, but with the male and female roles reversed.

A man flirting with a female police officer to get out of a speeding ticket.
A woman upset that her father-in-law is coming to live with her and her husband.
A man complaining because his wife won't buy him the latest appliances for his kitchen.
A woman calling from her office to let her husband know she's working late, while her male secretary sits on her lap giggling.
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LOL, I love it!

Weird how the exact same story with the nothing but the roles reversed is seen as something, well, weird.

As another aside, I didn't realize until I just looked it up that the publishers of EC comics was the publisher of Mad Magazine, and because of the censorship issues you mentioned eventually dropped all their comics except Mad.
 
JimOfAllTrades said:
LOL, I love it!

Weird how the exact same story with the nothing but the roles reversed is seen as something, well, weird.

As another aside, I didn't realize until I just looked it up that the publishers of EC comics was the publisher of Mad Magazine, and because of the censorship issues you mentioned eventually dropped all their comics except Mad.
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And later as comedy - as in The Worm That Turned.
 
Picked up another nostalgic freebie from the Kiosk -- The Forgotten Door. One of the earliest sort of sci-fi novels I ever read (and a few times, at that). An alien boy falls through a hidden door and lands on Earth, encountering good and bad people until he can get back to where he landed and his people would come for him. Easy read - I could have finished it in one sitting this time around.

Reading it, I thought it sounded an awful lot like Escape to Witch Mountain. Turns out it was the by same author.
 
Managed to squeeze in Animal Farm between all the books and I very much enjoyed it. I've only read his masterpiece 1984 before.

Animal Farm was an short easy read but very clever... and scary as well.

Now I will continue with Steinbeck's East of Eden.
 
Lennart Hyland said:
Managed to squeeze in Animal Farm between all the books and I very much enjoyed it. I've only read his masterpiece 1984 before.

Animal Farm was an short easy read but very clever... and scary as well.
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Back in 1999 there was an Animal Farm TV movie with a poster (seen on the Wikipedia page) and commercials that made it look like a "Babe"-style movie. Cute talking animals take over their farm and wacky high jinks ensue. My parents, who are not well-read by any stretch of the imagination, watched the movie with that expectation. They didn't enjoy it, to say the least.
 
Lennart Hyland said:
Managed to squeeze in Animal Farm between all the books and I very much enjoyed it. I've only read his masterpiece 1984 before.

Animal Farm was an short easy read but very clever... and scary as well.

Now I will continue with Steinbeck's East of Eden.
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I read 1984 and Animal Farm decades ago and really didn't care for either one. About 15 years ago my younger brother convinced me to try 1984 again, and I still didn't get into it. However, I was reading something a couple of months ago and it mentioned something about Animal Farm and made me want to try it again. I think I'll give it a try in the next few months.
 
The Peripheral - a refresher, prior to picking up the next one in the series.

This is Gibson firing on all themes. The intersection of art and obscene wealth. The intersection of high tech and low life. The emergent autonomy of large and complex organizations. The gutsy female protagonist. The startling integration of familiar human society and entirely novel technologies.

If you miss the good old days of the Sprawl Trilogy, this is a swing back in that direction, after Blue Ant. However, the book struggles to find its center of gravity. The effect of leaping back and forth between perspectives gives you some sympathy for Flynne's increasing "jet lag" as she shuttles between settings. But a side effect is that the settings feel rushed, the world-building extensively sketched out but somehow incomplete. The bones of the story are there, and the flesh, but some connective tissue is missing.

Still, it gets the job done, and well enough to keep me hungry for more from the author.
 
I've picked up Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History as an audiobook for my walks, and I'm once again reminded of just how many people witnessed Lee Harvey Oswald before, during, and after the assassination of President Kennedy.

And yet, people are still talking about random shooters hiding in storm drains and what not.
 
theprestige said:
The Peripheral - a refresher, prior to picking up the next one in the series.
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I loved it! But after the first three or four chapters, I had to go back and start all over again from the beginning. I needed the context to understand what I had been reading. The sequel is great, too, but not as great as the The Peripheral, in my opinion, and you wlll probably ...
... hate the many allusions to Trump.
 
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