Author: Goodreads

The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My goal is to read a book a week for the whole year, and even though it’s still only January, I feel like I’m behind. I had to abandon a bad (boring) book after 400 pages, and then another 400 pager took me longer to read than usual. Thank goodness there’s these snappy little Burglar books to get me caught up.

In my review of the previous book to Bogart (Ted Williams) I didn’t have too many good things to say. I liked this one better. Maybe because it was a relief to get back to a straightforward read? Maybe. It had the same old same-old as the previous books: A burglary gone wrong, a slightly contrived plot with a few too many coincidences, a gathering of the players in the end so Bernie can say whodunit.

Or maybe the theme this time was a little more conducive to the “romance” of the gentleman scallywag. Bernie spends half his time at a Bogart film festival, and the novel is laced with quotes and sentiments from the man’s movies– not just Casablanca and The Big Sleep, but some of the obscure ones as well.

It almost reads as an homage (although, full confession, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Bogart film, so I probably don’t know what I’m talking about).

Whatever. In the end I was happy to have read it, to have plowed through it in a day, to have gotten back on track. Here’s looking at me.

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Hush by Karen Robards
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m not much one for reading romance novels, so you’ll have to take everything I write here with a grain of salt. It may be the case that all of the things I plan on complaining about are actually the stuff that draw folks to these kinds of books.

For example, the number of times I had to read what an amazing ass the main character had. The number of times she swooned over how manly her love interest was. The sheer predictability of how and when these two people who didn’t like each other were going to hook up. Who knows, maybe this is de rigueur for romances and I have no business whining. Don’t like it? Don’t read it. Right?

However, there were some things that I’m pretty sure had nothing to do with the genre. Like the time the main character was described sticking to the her man “like jelly on peanut butter.” Or how the main character looked up an ID number, using the internet, and got a hold of CIA personnel file.

The front of the book says “thriller” but the main plot point of the second half of the book was “resolved” in a few sentences. Not very thrilling. A friend, who does read a lot of romance novels, told me that this one was, maybe, phoned in by a writer who otherwise usually delivers.

Just my luck that a mediocre effort was the one I happened to read.

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High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Saw that there’s a movie out based on this book and decided to read it, if only because I rarely get the chance to watch movies anymore, and the book’s always better, right? I’m pretty sure, based on my reading, the movie will be nothing like the book.

That’s speculation, but offered as way to describe how the books seems to work. It’s kind of a horror novel, kind of a sci-fi novel, and while there are visceral scenes and action to be consumed, fit for filming, most of the novel works on a psychological level. Ballard begins by featuring a half-naked man on a balcony eating cooked dog, then jumps back to a civilized beginning to take the reader on a journey that eventually justifies that scene.

And he does so in quantum fits, choosing to show not transition between increasingly disturbing states, but instead the comfort and ease of the characters who dwell in these states. And that’s where the horror lies, in that, given some kind of social decline, people will just be people: adapt, adjust, accept.

Folks will compare High-Rise to Lord of the Flies, which is somewhat apt, and maybe even, dare I say, the madness and decay in that dystopian video game Bioshock. But I don’t think any of that’s the point. I think this is a book that wants to do nothing more than stroke that tenth of a percent of your inner self that enjoys depravity.

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The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wish I had given the previous Bernie book 2.5 stars instead of 2, so I could give this one two stars and not worry that folks will think one’s as good as the other. Cause they’re not. Mondrian is an okay book, but Ted Williams suffers from too much of the same-old same-old, and rests on its own laurels, and is too confusing and convenient.

Too many coincidences, distracting me the whole time, and I was just waiting for it all to explained to me at the end. And when the big explanation does come, it’s so meager and phoned-in. And then a room full of people hear a man confess to murder and they don’t care? Not even the side-character who had nothing to do with the plot whatsoever?

This one was water-thin. Nothing happens in half the book. I mean nothing. I mean there are chapters (plural) with Bernie and Carolyn getting drunk and doing nothing. If it’s supposed to be symbolic of something, fine, but maybe keep it to a few pages, not a quarter of the book.

On the flip side, we only get a few pages dedicated to an idea that could be the basis for a whole novel. It’s just slipped in there, like the writer thought of it at the last second but by then just needed to finish the darn thing and tie up a few loose ends.

Who knows, maybe all of this is because there’s an 11 year-gap between this one and the previous ones. Maybe the next will be better. I sure hope so.

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Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m glad I didn’t read this first novel by Ned Beauman before I read The Teleportation Accident. Not that Boxer, Beetle isn’t good—I just think that Beauman’s style is a little more polished in his later work, and I’m not such a great reader that I would have picked up on his genius in his debut work.

Because Beauman has this way of filling up a novel, so many people and places and silly little events, and yet it comes across very light, easy to digest. I’m guessing there’s more there than meets the eye, too (see above, re: I’m not the best reader) so a subsequent reading may be in order.

Homosexuality is used in the novel as a lens for the reader to consider what it meant to be Jewish back then. We look down our noses at such racism, but any reader today will have living memories of gay men and women being talked about in exactly the same way. There’s my sophomore college thesis statement. Let’s move on.

Like The Transportation Accident, this novel plays on the edges of World War II, without getting right into it, although with this work he’s much closer than in the other. Hitler is mentioned several times, although the book doesn’t touch on the holocaust, leaving that darkness for the reader to remember on his or her own.

This dark edge doesn’t overwhelm them book, however—Beauman manages to keep things just silly enough that one doesn’t get bogged down by lecturing. Part if this accomplished by contextualizing things in a modern-day thriller pastiche, although it’s more of a device than anything else, a means by which to add a “plot” without worrying about, you know, plotting.

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Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m glad I didn’t read this first novel by Ned Beauman before I read The Teleportation Accident. Not that Boxer, Beetle isn’t good—I just think that Beauman’s style is a little more polished in his later work, and I’m not such a great reader that I would have picked up on his genius in his debut work.

Because Beauman has this way of filling up a novel, so many people and places and silly little events, and yet it comes across very light, easy to digest. I’m guessing there’s more there than meets the eye, too (see above, re: I’m not the best reader) so a subsequent reading may be in order.

Homosexuality is used in the novel as a lens for the reader to consider what it meant to be Jewish back then. We look down our noses at such racism, but any reader today will have living memories of gay men and women being talked about in exactly the same way. There’s my sophomore college thesis statement. Let’s move on.

Like The Transportation Accident, this novel plays on the edges of World War II, without getting right into it, although with this work he’s much closer than in the other. Hitler is mentioned several times, although the book doesn’t touch on the holocaust, leaving that darkness for the reader to remember on his or her own.

This dark edge doesn’t overwhelm them book, however—Beauman manages to keep things just silly enough that one doesn’t get bogged down by lecturing. Part if this accomplished by contextualizing things in a modern-day thriller pastiche, although its more of a device than anything else, a means by which to add a “plot” without worrying about, you know, plotting,

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The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian by Lawrence Block
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I do like these Lawrence Block novels and I am willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt, and put my trust in him, even when I think maybe he’s phoning it in. Like how all these Bernie novels have a scene where he gathers everyone in a room and does the big reveal, right?

So I’ll let that go. But not random sex with a chance encounter when Bernie’s burglaring an apartment. Even putting aside the gratuitous side of things, it’s just not believable. At all. And even if you find a way to twist things to fit some kind of scenario where it wasn’t a “chance” encounter, still: Bernie shouldn’t be so stupid.

Otherwise this is just pandering, this is just fantasizing, and I don’t have any patience for it.
That’s my only complaint. The book is what I expected it to be on every other page. Bernie burgles, stumbles on a corpse, then another, the cops think he did, but let him prove he didn’t, he paints some fake pictures, and we get an intriguing title.

Take out the other unbelievable nonsense, and the book would be fine.

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Triple by Ken Follett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Been trying to write a spy novel, and have been struggling, so I figured I’d read a few. Tried some Len Deighton, but that didn’t go well. Tried this here Ken Follett. Went better. At least I finished the book.

Learned some things. Spy novels always have nuclear weapons in them. At, least, so far, all the one’s I’ve read. This time around, Israel’s trying to get ahold of some. Good for them, I guess. Send in their toughest, hardest, most emotionless agent to pull off the impossible.

Oops, he falls in love along the way. I didn’t care for this part- I’m supposed to be okay with him having the hots for a woman more or less his own age, one who has a young daughter, and then when things don’t work out, and the mother’s dead later, and the daughter’s all grown up? No thanks.

But let’s skip that. Because otherwise, there’s lots of fun to be had. There’s three governments involved, and each government has their inner intrigues. There’s daring-do and dead drops, subterfuge, intrigue insubordination, gun fights. You know, spy stuff.

So, all told, not a bad little primer for a wannabe like myself. And for you hard-core spy novel fans. Well, I’m guessing you’ve already read this one. It’s a classic.

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Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Creepy.

There’s your one-word review. And I defy you to find anyone who’s read this book and disagrees. My wife listened to the audio-book version, and that’s the word she kept saying over and over as she was trying to get me to read it. Her sister, too. I do like a good atmospheric piece, a well-wrought tone. So rather than wait for the literally hundreds of people waiting for the book ahead of me at the library, I shelled out ten bucks and tossed it onto my e-reader.

Which ended up being both good and bad. I’m not sure the experience was worth ten bucks. But then I’m glad I didn’t let months of anticipation build up into an even greater disappointment. I plowed through Behind Closed Doors because I wanted to get it over with, and I’m glad it’s over now.

Not just because it’s creepy and made me feel uncomfortable. Rather, I didn’t care of B.A. Paris’s prose style. It contained all of the things we find dull about exposition and managed to achieve that even in dialogue and active description. When the characters spoke it was so structured and wrought, completely unnatural. I understand we readers need to bring a willingness to suspend our disbelief, it was difficult to do so. I was too distracted by the robotic language.

And while I appreciate the need for pacing, the book’s Past/Present device of telling the story in a non-linear fashion meant I knew what was going to happen before I got to the end, which stripped away all pretense of suspense. Again, the whole thing came across as purposefully-built, not organically grown.

All that said, I’ll mention something I did appreciate: there was a character in the novel’s beginning that I couldn’t stand, who ended up being a fairly decent person at the end. So there’s that.

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The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Finished this a few days ago but haven’t been able to think of much to say. Bernie burgles, someone gets murdered, Bernie uses his lockpicking skills to hunt down clues, doesn’t tell the reader anything, gathers everyone in one place and reveals whodunnit.

Its satisfying in its way, neat and tidy, the kind of book that people who devour books can pop in their craw and masticate and move on from. I mean, to keep the food analogy going, Lawrence Block isn’t cooking at The Four Seasons but he’s not slinging hash at a greasy spoon, either. You won’t get a belly ache after reading this book, you’re not going to need any Maalox.

My mom used to read two or three romance novels a day, and if she was a mystery reader, this would be the sort of thing she’d get through. I guess what I’m getting at here is a kind of aesthetic that has nothing to do with the plot of this 4th burglar novel. I mean, who cares what the plot is, right? These books kind of write themselves.

At least they do in the hands of a skilled pensmith. Don’t get me wrong, these are competent reads. Quick, fun, easy. And if I need to say something about this one in particular- the Spinoza stuff? Completely unnecessary. A sprig of parsley on the side of the plate.

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