A book about Vegas, “Beneath the Neon”
The most impressive thing about “Beneath the Neon” is how compelling it is. It pulls you in and holds you until the end. The basic premise makes that sound impossible. The book is about storm drains in Las Vegas. This isn’t the Paris sewers, the Roman catacombs, the buried underground of Seattle. These are concrete waterways built in the last decade or two. Is there anyway this could be interesting, compelling, or suspenseful? No, I figured. But the author (and I suspect some help from a particular editor along the way) pulls it off. He starts with a compelling story, a felon on the run, and keeps the pressure up. In the end, it was a journey I enjoyed. The author does a great job taking the reader with him as he hikes along blackened drains that run under the Strip. To give you an idea of some of the ventures, he starts not too far from the Orleans and works his way to near Hard Rock, going under I-15 and the casinos on the Strip in the process.
I finally read a book by Anne Perry
Anne Perry writes best sellers. They’re very long books. They’re set in Victorian England. She had been on my TBR list for some time and I had never set the priority to take one on. I finally did. It was “Belgrave Square”. I’m not sure I’ll read another. Not that she’s a bad writer, but that she doesn’t write the type of book I want to read.
I sometimes sense that it’s a gender issue. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but that’s the feeling I get as I’m crawling my way through the book. The book, to me, is tedious. It’s full of detail – detail that seems trivial and unimportant. For example, there’s a long scene in the book of a character attending an operetta. Every greeting, every muscle twitch, every gaze of several characters is listed and scrutinized. By the end of the book, I still don’t know the purpose of the scene. That may be one of the big problems for me. I can’t track all characters and relationships and events. Since every little thing seems sacred and important, everything becomes unimportant.
The author can’t give a line of dialog without two paragraphs of exposition to support it. The exposition could be descriptions of small gestures. It could be internal dialog of the character. It could be description of physical items in the scene, a teapot, a fireplace end iron, clothing, anything.
After Anne Perry, I went with the other end of the spectrum and went with two Lee Child books. These books move. There’s not much that’s extra in the books. It’s a barebones non-stop flight until it’s over. It’s why I like it.
First, “The Hard Way”. Then I read, “Running Blind”
In “The Hard Way”, Jack Reacher accidental gets involved in solving a kidnapping. I running Blind, Jack Reacher accidental gets involved in finding a serial killer. “Accidentally” meaning he’s hanging somewhere (in both cases, New York city) when events unfold around him and he inserts himself into the evolving plot.
I enjoyed them both, and I think Lee Child was more on his game than in the previous Jack Reacher book I read “The Killing Floor”. A nice things about both of these books is that Reacher is not always right in his deductions. Reacher makes mistakes. Second, Lee Child was pretty good laying a trail of what was happening so the reader knows the path as well or better than the characters. I’m not a fan of the big surprise ending where you think, I never saw that coming, how could that have happened. For me, the bigger the surprise at the end, the less probable the explanation. With these two, it was more wondering why the characters were not catching on as quickly as the reader. Granted, with “Running Blind”, Child changes his point of view a few times to the villain. It gives the reader inside knowledge that Reacher and others didn’t have. I’m not sure if that helped the book or not. Knowing some of the facts because of the villain’s point of view, certain conclusions are obvious. It would have been more curious and confusing to see the facts from the point of view of only law enforcement (Reacher, et. al.). I think the head scratching on the reader’s part might have been more interesting. In a recent John Sandford book, there was a fact of a crime that was hard to explain. There were complicated theories trying to explain it. The final answer, which the protagonist figured out, was rather simple. The confusion is a nice McGuffin.
Next on the list was a book by James Lee Burke, Swan Peak.
I don’t know where the “Swan” comes in – the book takes place in Montana. Are there swans there?
I wish I were smart enough to get all that one should from a James Lee Burke book. The man is a serious writer. I’ve read previous Burke books, all but one feature his main protagonist, Dave Robicheaux. Two were turned into unsuccessful movies.
It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books (first read him 20 years ago). This is my favorite book of his, by far. It works on a simple level, so it appeals to a limited brain like mine. Some pretty complex characters, all with histories, coming together in ways that are not compatible. At the same time I occasionally get a sense of seriousness. One theme of the book is about redemption. Not in a big way, but more so in small personal ways. Characters have trapped themselves by their own past and there’s always a chance to walk away from it but they never seem to.
There’s a lot of good and evil too – plenty of societal commentary, ongoing discussions/observations about poverty and ecological destruction.
As I wrote above, I wish I were smart enough to reach and see the full depth of Burke’s writing. Burke stands in contrast, for me, to Anne Perry. Where Perry’s book had the intellectual, emotional, and physical weight of a cotton ball, Burke is substantial. Perry hits me as a pre-teen girl’s fantasy frolic. Burke’s book is not a complicated event. It’s a simple event, but it’s like a sumo wrestling match. Each step shakes the audience with its weight. Burke assembles his words to that mood creeps through them and to the reader. Dread, hope, fear, suspense descend upon the reader like a fog settling along a coast.
I’m going to have to go back and catch up with the Robicheaux’s I’ve missed. There’s a number of them.
From Swan Peak and Montana, I go to Shark River in Florida.
This is a Doc Ford book by Randy Wayne White.
I’ve read a number of the Doc Ford books, not in the correct order, though I did read the first book first. There were really good things about Shark River and one stupid thing. The stupid thing is a running subplot about a character’s impotence, or ED as all the ads say on television. A good thing is we get a lot of backstory about Doc Ford. The plot is very simple, doesn’t even require much action on the part of the protagonist after the big opening gambit. Doc Ford goes home and the villains come to him. I appreciate White’s writing when he has Doc Ford talk about marine biology. It sounds authentic, it defines the character. I like how Doc Ford is complicated. He lives in his head. He’s thoughtful and considerate and moral. But he’ll do great violence without guilt.
Like Swan Peak, redemption is a piece of this book, but in this book, one character provides it to another. With Burke, each character has to find it themselves. There’s a couple of lines in the book which I think the book should have been about. Doc’s friend, Tomlinson, is feeling great guilt for his involvement in a death many years before. Tomlinson gets the idea to invite the widow of the person killed to apologize and explain. Ford observes that it doesn’t seem right to dredge up all that misery from long ago to assuage one’s own guilt. To me, that’s a good story: how much of apologies are about ourselves, our self interest, and not about the person harmed.
Future reading:
I don’t know how many books I’ll get to soon. Work is in full swing again, and it has me writing a lot. When I write a lot, I tend to read less. I’m trying to get caught up with magazines (I probably subscribe to too many, but I can never figure out which ones to give up). And I’ve got two technical books going that I don’t think I’ll share since I doubt there is much interest.
I picked up some Clive Cusslers recently, and I’m awaiting the newest Lucas Davenport (author: John Sandford) to be available at my library. I’ve also bought a few history books recently and would like to get to some of those before too long.
The most impressive thing about “Beneath the Neon” is how compelling it is. It pulls you in and holds you until the end. The basic premise makes that sound impossible. The book is about storm drains in Las Vegas. This isn’t the Paris sewers, the Roman catacombs, the buried underground of Seattle. These are concrete waterways built in the last decade or two. Is there anyway this could be interesting, compelling, or suspenseful? No, I figured. But the author (and I suspect some help from a particular editor along the way) pulls it off. He starts with a compelling story, a felon on the run, and keeps the pressure up. In the end, it was a journey I enjoyed. The author does a great job taking the reader with him as he hikes along blackened drains that run under the Strip. To give you an idea of some of the ventures, he starts not too far from the Orleans and works his way to near Hard Rock, going under I-15 and the casinos on the Strip in the process.
I finally read a book by Anne Perry
Anne Perry writes best sellers. They’re very long books. They’re set in Victorian England. She had been on my TBR list for some time and I had never set the priority to take one on. I finally did. It was “Belgrave Square”. I’m not sure I’ll read another. Not that she’s a bad writer, but that she doesn’t write the type of book I want to read.
I sometimes sense that it’s a gender issue. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but that’s the feeling I get as I’m crawling my way through the book. The book, to me, is tedious. It’s full of detail – detail that seems trivial and unimportant. For example, there’s a long scene in the book of a character attending an operetta. Every greeting, every muscle twitch, every gaze of several characters is listed and scrutinized. By the end of the book, I still don’t know the purpose of the scene. That may be one of the big problems for me. I can’t track all characters and relationships and events. Since every little thing seems sacred and important, everything becomes unimportant.
The author can’t give a line of dialog without two paragraphs of exposition to support it. The exposition could be descriptions of small gestures. It could be internal dialog of the character. It could be description of physical items in the scene, a teapot, a fireplace end iron, clothing, anything.
After Anne Perry, I went with the other end of the spectrum and went with two Lee Child books. These books move. There’s not much that’s extra in the books. It’s a barebones non-stop flight until it’s over. It’s why I like it.
First, “The Hard Way”. Then I read, “Running Blind”
In “The Hard Way”, Jack Reacher accidental gets involved in solving a kidnapping. I running Blind, Jack Reacher accidental gets involved in finding a serial killer. “Accidentally” meaning he’s hanging somewhere (in both cases, New York city) when events unfold around him and he inserts himself into the evolving plot.
I enjoyed them both, and I think Lee Child was more on his game than in the previous Jack Reacher book I read “The Killing Floor”. A nice things about both of these books is that Reacher is not always right in his deductions. Reacher makes mistakes. Second, Lee Child was pretty good laying a trail of what was happening so the reader knows the path as well or better than the characters. I’m not a fan of the big surprise ending where you think, I never saw that coming, how could that have happened. For me, the bigger the surprise at the end, the less probable the explanation. With these two, it was more wondering why the characters were not catching on as quickly as the reader. Granted, with “Running Blind”, Child changes his point of view a few times to the villain. It gives the reader inside knowledge that Reacher and others didn’t have. I’m not sure if that helped the book or not. Knowing some of the facts because of the villain’s point of view, certain conclusions are obvious. It would have been more curious and confusing to see the facts from the point of view of only law enforcement (Reacher, et. al.). I think the head scratching on the reader’s part might have been more interesting. In a recent John Sandford book, there was a fact of a crime that was hard to explain. There were complicated theories trying to explain it. The final answer, which the protagonist figured out, was rather simple. The confusion is a nice McGuffin.
Next on the list was a book by James Lee Burke, Swan Peak.
I don’t know where the “Swan” comes in – the book takes place in Montana. Are there swans there?
I wish I were smart enough to get all that one should from a James Lee Burke book. The man is a serious writer. I’ve read previous Burke books, all but one feature his main protagonist, Dave Robicheaux. Two were turned into unsuccessful movies.
It’s been years since I’ve read one of his books (first read him 20 years ago). This is my favorite book of his, by far. It works on a simple level, so it appeals to a limited brain like mine. Some pretty complex characters, all with histories, coming together in ways that are not compatible. At the same time I occasionally get a sense of seriousness. One theme of the book is about redemption. Not in a big way, but more so in small personal ways. Characters have trapped themselves by their own past and there’s always a chance to walk away from it but they never seem to.
There’s a lot of good and evil too – plenty of societal commentary, ongoing discussions/observations about poverty and ecological destruction.
As I wrote above, I wish I were smart enough to reach and see the full depth of Burke’s writing. Burke stands in contrast, for me, to Anne Perry. Where Perry’s book had the intellectual, emotional, and physical weight of a cotton ball, Burke is substantial. Perry hits me as a pre-teen girl’s fantasy frolic. Burke’s book is not a complicated event. It’s a simple event, but it’s like a sumo wrestling match. Each step shakes the audience with its weight. Burke assembles his words to that mood creeps through them and to the reader. Dread, hope, fear, suspense descend upon the reader like a fog settling along a coast.
I’m going to have to go back and catch up with the Robicheaux’s I’ve missed. There’s a number of them.
From Swan Peak and Montana, I go to Shark River in Florida.
This is a Doc Ford book by Randy Wayne White.
I’ve read a number of the Doc Ford books, not in the correct order, though I did read the first book first. There were really good things about Shark River and one stupid thing. The stupid thing is a running subplot about a character’s impotence, or ED as all the ads say on television. A good thing is we get a lot of backstory about Doc Ford. The plot is very simple, doesn’t even require much action on the part of the protagonist after the big opening gambit. Doc Ford goes home and the villains come to him. I appreciate White’s writing when he has Doc Ford talk about marine biology. It sounds authentic, it defines the character. I like how Doc Ford is complicated. He lives in his head. He’s thoughtful and considerate and moral. But he’ll do great violence without guilt.
Like Swan Peak, redemption is a piece of this book, but in this book, one character provides it to another. With Burke, each character has to find it themselves. There’s a couple of lines in the book which I think the book should have been about. Doc’s friend, Tomlinson, is feeling great guilt for his involvement in a death many years before. Tomlinson gets the idea to invite the widow of the person killed to apologize and explain. Ford observes that it doesn’t seem right to dredge up all that misery from long ago to assuage one’s own guilt. To me, that’s a good story: how much of apologies are about ourselves, our self interest, and not about the person harmed.
Future reading:
I don’t know how many books I’ll get to soon. Work is in full swing again, and it has me writing a lot. When I write a lot, I tend to read less. I’m trying to get caught up with magazines (I probably subscribe to too many, but I can never figure out which ones to give up). And I’ve got two technical books going that I don’t think I’ll share since I doubt there is much interest.
I picked up some Clive Cusslers recently, and I’m awaiting the newest Lucas Davenport (author: John Sandford) to be available at my library. I’ve also bought a few history books recently and would like to get to some of those before too long.
