I've been a nerd about books since even before I was a nerd about music, and even as busy as I am these days, I still read all the time. We were talking at the office recently about how I used to write long reviews of every book I read, but have recently gotten out of the habit, and Tony suggested that I start doing that again, for the website. I'm not sure he knew what he was getting into with that request, but I've decided to give it a shot.
It's a good thing that this idea was brought up now instead of two or three months ago, because I spent most of this past winter almost entirely unable to finish a book. There's a huge stack of books I stopped somewhere in the middle of sitting on one of my bookshelves, and I keep finding others scattered around my room with bookmarks at page 14, or 86, or 157. There are at least a dozen--some of which I'm sure I'll come back to when I'm more in the mood for them, some of which I'll probably never get back to. Scott Smith's A Simple Plan is almost certainly one of the latter--a crime novel about a normal guy, his good-for-nothing brother, and his brother's equally good-for-nothing best friend finding a bag containing several million dollars cash next to a corpse, A Simple Plan gets very dark very quickly, and by halfway through, I just couldn't take the thought of the further existential horrors that awaited the book's not-all-that-likable narrator.
So that's one of the ones I'm not sure if I'll ever finish, and I actually took a picture of most of the others to show you guys, but it's not here because the day after I took it (and a bunch of shots of the other books that I'll be writing about this month), my camera's memory card died and took all those pix with it. So you get generic photos for now, plus a column header photo that's several years out of date--not only do I have a beard now, all of my books are actually on bookshelves these days! Well, almost all of them... anyway, let's talk about what I read last month.
Stairway To Hell by Chuck Eddy
This one's been sitting in my bathroom all month (what? Like you don't have a book or two sitting on the back of your toilet. Please), and I've got about 25 pages left in it. Published in early 1991, just before the Nirvana thing happened and the entire musical landscape changed, Stairway To Hell was ostensibly a book counting down the 500 best heavy metal albums of all time. I'm sure Chuck Eddy got that book contract because he was a leading rock critic at the time and hair-metal was at its peak, but getting Chuck Eddy to write a book like this is asking for trouble. If I were to compare him to a currently well-known writer, Eddy is most similar to another Chuck--Chuck Klosterman, the extremely polarizing author of Sex, Drugs, And Cocoa Puffs. However, Eddy had less delusions of grandeur than Chuck K, and for the most part stuck to music throughout his career. There wasn't any internet in the way we think of it now back in 91 (though BBSes were a thing--ask your dad), but Chuck Eddy was a classic troll, and this book was his attempt to troll the entire heavy metal fan community. When it came out, I was 15, and I remember the howls of outrage at the fact that Eddy had, most egregiously, placed Teena Marie (an R&B also-ran songstress of the era, now most famous for her association with Rick James) at #9. As a kid, the idea pissed me off, as did some of Eddy's contemporaneous exploits as a reviewer for Rolling Stone--my very first fanzine, published a year after Stairway To Hell, featured a page-long diatribe in response to Eddy's poor review of an early Superchunk album. I sure hope the 15 people who ever got a copy of that zine enjoyed that.
Anyway, when I finally decided a couple months ago to order a used copy of Stairway To Hell off the internet (20-plus years of morbid curiosity is my only excuse), I knew what I was getting into and started reading with the goal of taking the whole thing with a huge grain of salt. And it's a good thing, because any book that gives a second-rate R&B singer a spot in a top 10 list of metal albums is clearly going to do a lot more things to fuck with its readership than just that. Sure enough, things only get goofier from there, as Eddy concocts bizarre rationales to include groups like Funkadelic (three albums in the top 50 alone), The Jimmy Castor Bunch, Last Exit, The Osmonds (as in Donny & Marie), Flipper, and Public Enemy in high places on his chart. Meanwhile, groups now universally considered to be metal touchstones, such as Slayer, Anthrax, and Iron Maiden, fare poorly--Maiden don't place on the list at all, which is fucking ridiculous even if I am refusing to take this book seriously, while Anthrax's joke rap EP I'm The Man is their only contribution to the list. Meanwhile Slayer's highest spot on the chart is for their contribution of an Iron Butterfly cover to the Less Than Zero soundtrack--Reign In Blood is their highest-placing album at #472. God, I can't imagine how pissed off metal fans who bought this the week it came out were.
If I were to make a list right now of the 500 best metal albums, I'm sure I could do so without running out of albums I honestly love--especially if I stretched the boundaries of the genre even half as far as Eddy stretches them in this book. But 1991 was a long time ago, and there were a lot fewer metal albums in the world back then. Maybe that's a decent explanation for the fact that, by #300 or so, he's mostly giving backhanded compliments to the records he's writing about, if he's got anything positive to say about them at all. A lot of "I only like two or three songs on this" type of situations arise, as do reviews in which he spends 90% of the time saying that the record's stupid, and the other 10% saying that its stupidity is why it's worth hearing. Fair enough, I suppose, and I will admit that the rhetoric he uses to put down a lot of these records has made me want to hear a good many of the ones I haven't already heard.
But probably my favorite parts of this book are the frequent, and often hilarious, reminders of how much the music scene has changed over the past 22 years since it was published. Writing about pre-Pearl Jam/Mudhoney group Green River (their Dry As A Bone EP--which is certainly not my idea of a metal record--gets #400 on the list), he says "'Unwind''s the closest [singer Mark] Arm or any of his compatriots will come to cohesion," which cracks me up in light of how cohesive (and popular) a statement Pearl Jam's Ten, released less than a year after this book came out, turned out to be. Furthermore, Eddy never fails to praise hardcore bands now regarded as scene pioneers for their least-respected late-career "sellout" albums, and tends on balance to love now-forgotten glam/hair bands much more than the heavier bands who've had a lot more influence (and success) in the years since this book came out. But he does give a lot of insight into the 70s boogie scene, now being rediscovered and touted under the revisionist genre name "proto-metal"--as Eddy makes clear, they sure thought it was metal at the time. So if what you really want is a book that'll school you about bands like Budgie and the Pink Fairies, you could do worse than Stairway To Hell. If nothing else, there's never a dull moment.
The Ghost Brigades& The Last Colony by John Scalzi
These are the second and third novels in an ongoing science fiction series set in a future-world where humans have colonized the galaxy and now battle with other galactic races for dominance and such. The narrative hook the series is built around is the idea that soldiers in the galactic army have genetically engineered bodies that the consciousness of a normal human is transferred into for the duration of one's military service. So you're much stronger, faster, and more capable of performing a soldier's duties than you would be in your unmodified body, but the military owns your actual physical body lock, stock, and barrel. When you leave the service, you get downloaded back into a different body than the one they took you out of when you joined up--specifically a vat-grown clone of your original body. It's a good concept, and Scalzi is the first sci-fi author to ever explain the idea of immortality through transferring consciousness from one body to another in a way that I did not immediately call bullshit on, so I have to give him credit for that. I enjoyed the first novel in this series, Old Man's War, when I read it several years ago, and had been saving the other three novels in the series for a rainy day, so to speak. After spending the winter completely unable to enjoy anything I was reading, these seemed like a good way to get back into reading books that I liked enough to finish.
It worked, too. The Ghost Brigades was great, and I blasted through it. In the world of this series, military bodies that are cloned and grown for people who end up not surviving long enough to be transferred into said body are turned into new soldiers who basically spend the first few months of their lives in boot camp and are fighting in wars by the time they're six months old or so. This book follows the life of one of these soldiers, who is actually the clone of a traitor to the cause of humanity, though he doesn't know it. There's a military sci-fi adventure story happening most of the time that keeps the book interesting and action-packed, but the undercurrent of questioning the governmental status quo makes it a book that requires more thought than you might expect from a novel in this genre. I used to read John Scalzi's blog, and he and I tend to agree on questions of politics (which is refreshingly unusual where sci-fi authors are concerned), so a lot of the issues he's raising in this book are ones that I also think need to be discussed more regularly where issues surrounding war are concerned. One of the best parts of science fiction is the way its fictional narratives about events in the future can point to issues that matter in our current time, and Ghost Brigades pulls this off well, in addition to telling an interesting and entertaining story.
The Last Colony didn't quite rise to the level Ghost Brigades reached, though I did still enjoy it. It's funny--when I started Ghost Brigades, I figured I'd probably go ahead and read through all three of the books left in this series. By the time I finished Last Colony, though, I had decided to put off the third book (Zoe's Tale) for a while longer. Part of that was no doubt the effect created by having Scalzi's main character from Old Man's War, John Perry, also be the main character in Last Colony. The character is basically an authorial stand-in, and he has a few of the traits that kind of bugged me when I used to read Scalzi's blog--overt self-satisfaction being the main one. John Perry as a character has a similar trait, and it makes him less than completely likable as a protagonist. I still liked him enough to root for him, but by the end of this book, I was tired of his narrative voice, and by extension, a little tired of Scalzi.
The Last Colony is a story about human colonists and their government attempting to defy the will of what basically amounts to a galactic UN-type organization and continue to colonize the galaxy. There's a threat of having the colony wiped out by military forces, so a bunch of trickery is used to try and outsmart the galactic organization, and that stuff is interesting I suppose, though I would have enjoyed it a little more if there'd been more focus on what the colonists had to go through on the planet they were attempting to colonize. An interesting plotline is introduced along those lines, but then very little is actually done with it. I still liked The Last Colony on the whole, but there were a few less-than-awesome elements to it, which contributed to my finding it a step down from Ghost Brigades.
Donald Westlake, a longtime prolific crime novelist who passed away at the end of 2008, is best-known these days for the work he did under the pseudonym Richard Stark. His novels under that name concerned a tough, cold-blooded, unstoppable gangster named Parker. There's a movie out right now in which Jason Statham plays Parker, and while it's the first time the Stark novels have been adapted using the character's real name, Parker's been portrayed in past films, under such names as Porter, McClain, Walker, and others, by such actors as Mel Gibson, Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, and even French nouvelle vague starlet Anna Karina. Westlake's books under his own name are known for being funnier and more lighthearted than the relentlessly dark and downbeat Richard Stark novels, but that is definitely not true of Memory. Published posthumously by throwback imprint Hard Case Crime (who divide their schedule between reissues and modern novels with a old-school pulp-crime vibe), Memory was written in the 60s, but Westlake was unable to sell it at the time. Having read it, I can kind of see why. It is one colossal fucking bummer of a book.
The main character is named Paul Cole, and the book begins with him getting beat up so badly that he suffers brain damage, which affects his memory. An actor by trade, Cole is kicked out of the touring company he's been traveling with due to his weeks-long hospitalizaiton. After he's released from the hospital, he's run out of town by an angry cop, but is unable to afford a bus ticket back to his hometown of New York. Instead, he goes as far east as he can get, winding up stuck in a small town and trying to get a job so he can afford to buy a bus ticket to go the rest of the way home. All the time this is going on, he's trying and mostly failing to remember important details of his life. He has to leave notes to himself around the rooms where he stays so he won't forget to go to work, or what bills he needs to pay, or important details like where he lives and what he normally does for a living. It's a frustrating existence to read about, and Cole does struggle with feelings of frustration a lot. But soon he settles into a mundane and boring existence out of sheer inertia--and because he doesn't really remember much of his life before whatever day he's currently living through. And that's when the cops show up.
This book bills itself as a crime novel, but one thing I've learned from reading Hard Case Crime's reprints of classic pulp novels that were published as cheap, throwaway garbage a half-century ago is that a lot of stuff that was billed as crime fiction in the mid-20th century really only had the loosest link to any sort of crime. Instead, a lot of it was just fiction about life on the fringes of society--existential chronicles of working-class people trying to keep their head above water and often failing. No wonder the French loved that whole pulp noir thing so much. While books like Memory wouldn't seem to have much in common with the work of Camus or Sartre--and really, on a narrative level, they don't--they share a similar mindset and worldview, one that would ring true both to philosophy students and to the sort of people who, 50 years ago, could only afford to spend a quarter on a cheap paperback. And hell, it rings true to me right now, which might be why this book scared and depressed the hell out of me. A lot happens to Paul Cole after the parts that I've told you about, much of it thoroughly downbeat in nature, and the way this novel ends is fucking crushing. It's a well-written book that kept my attention throughout, and I'm glad I read it, but I don't want to read it again. It's just too fucking dark. Ugh.
Scottish author Ian Rankin has written 18 novels about Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Edinburgh, Scotland police force, and Hide And Seek is the second of them, though it's at least the sixth I've read (I've skipped around in the series). I tend to enjoy and relate to the sort of crime novels that focus on people who end up running afoul of the law due to hard times, but I also enjoy the kind of books Rankin writes, which could probably fall into a large subgenre of "dark, tortured police detective" novels. In recent years, a bunch of Scandinavian authors occupying similar territory have gotten quite popular within the mystery world--the mainstream success of Steig Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series was just the most visible incident of this phenomenon, which also includes authors like Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason, among quite a few others. People have made the educated guess that the reason so many writers with a dark, existential air around their crime fiction are coming out of Scandinavia is because it's so far north that it spends huge amounts of every year getting very little sunlight. Well, if that's true of Scandinavia, it's also true of Scotland, where Ian Rankin lives, works, and sets his novels, so I suppose that's also a good explanation for the depressing air surrounding the Rebus novels.
The existential edge of Rankin's work is much more easily detectable in more recent Rebus novels, which also tend to be longer and to focus more on the detective's personal life and the way that life crosses over with his work. The first few Rebus novels are short and focus mainly on the cases he's solving. Hide And Seek conforms to this template, and is barely over 200 pages in length, but it's still quite dark by nature of the crime being investigated. The body of a dead junkie is found in a decaying squat, spread-eagled below a painting of a pentagram on a wall, inbetween two candles that had been left burning. Most of the police who come upon the tableau dismiss it as coincidence, but Rebus is convinced something more is going on here, and his investigations lead him to mingle with all classes and walks of life, from Edinburgh's gay male prostitutes, many of whom, like the initial victim, are junkie squatters; all the way up to local gentry and elected officials. Everyone's got something to hide, it seems, and there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.
I won't lie--the later Rebus novels that I've read had a lot more to offer on an intellectual level than Hide And Seek does. While still quite dark (which I regard as a positive factor where crime novels are concerned), Hide And Seek is missing some of the angst that shows up in the books that introduced me to the series, such as The Hanging Garden and Dead Souls (the fact that Rankin named his books after songs by Joy Division and The Cure was part of what drew me in initially). But Rankin tells a good story and keeps the plot multifarious, intriguing, and unpredictable enough that my interest never flagged. I got through this book in a day and a half, and not just because it was short. It's a gripping read. I still own at least half a dozen other unread Rankin novels that I picked up during my 12 years working at bookstores, and as with the Scalzi novels discussed earlier, they're always a good bet at times when nothing seems able to sustain my interest. I'm going to wait a while before I jump into another one, though--I wouldn't want to burn through all of them too quickly.
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OK, that's all for this month--next month, Shakespeare, more sci-fi, and a literary novel about straight-edge hardcore, among other things. And maybe I'll figure out how to fix my camera! Stay tuned.