Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

1959. Love it or hate it, Achebe’s tale of a flawed tribal patriarch is a powerful and important contribution to twentieth century literature.

Think back to 1959. Liberation from colonial masters had not yet swept the African continent when this book appeared, but the pressures were building. The US civil rights movement had not yet erupted, but the forces were in motion. Communism and capitalism were fighting a pitched battle for control of hearts and minds, for bodies and land, around the world. Africans would suffer under the proxy wars waged there to keep the Cold War cold.

Achebe tells the tale of Okonkwo, a young man of some fame throughout the nine villages and beyond, for his wrestling prowess. He is a product of his land, his culture, his religion, and his people. He represents a way of life which admires and rewards strength, loyalty, hard work, a strong hand, and strict adherence to a social code.

He builds his life, takes wives, works his land, produces boys and girls to honor and carry on his legacy. When duty to the tribe makes demands, he must respond even if that response requires great personal sacrifice.

You can’t read this book through the prism of your own experience. Part of the mystery of fiction from cultures far afield from your own is the chance it affords to consider how men and women of a certain time and place grappled with the very human issue of living within an exotic social group.

Consider your own social group, and imagine how you would explain your daily and exceptional actions to someone from another religion, from another country, from another language group, from another generation, from another century. Where would you start? Perhaps by considering how you spend a normal day, then how you arrived at the great choices that formed your life. That’s a helluva task to set yourself. In my humble opinion, that was the task Achebe set for himself in writing this book.

 

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan

2006. NY Times Book Review One of the 10 Best Books of the Year.

We eat every day of our lives but we don’t often give much thought to what we put in  our bodies. If we are what we eat, then when it comes to meat, we are what the animal eats; and when it comes to produce, we are what the plant’s grown in.

There’s a food chain that extends around the world and throughout evolutionary history from the beginning of man to the present. Michael Pollan takes us on a tour of that chain and in the process gives any thinking, eating, person a new, often disturbing, view of what he/she consumes.

Organized in three sections to illuminate industrial food (corn), pastoral food (grass), and personal food (the forest), Pollan’s narrative builds toward meals made as nearly as possible with ingredients and methods from each of these categories.

I double-dog-dare anyone to read this book and walk through a modern supermarket without viewing  each item of food differently.  And if you’re like me, take your glasses, because the real information about what we buy and eat is in the small print, written in code, to disguise as much as possible what we truly consume.

The central area of the supermarket is processed food. Good luck figuring that out. (When you can’t determine the identity of fifteen out of eighteen ingredients on that package of processed whatever – chances are high what you’re reading – and eating – are corn derivatives.)

Around the walls, where we find the produce, meat, and fish, it would seem that the information describing the food would be more straight-forward. Good luck figuring that out, too. (Chances are every formerly living item was nourished or fertilized with corn or corn derivatives.)

Unless you plan to follow a steer or a chicken through its life cycle to see how the animal lives, and dies, and becomes the food on your plate, you have to rely on someone like Pollan to take that trip for you, document his findings, and present it as he does here.

I’ve read about food my entire life and tried to keep up on healthy eating without succumbing to fads.  I’ve never encountered such an intelligent, entertaining, and practical guide to the state of food in America today as The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Read it and eat.

The Watchman (Joe Pike, #1), by Robert Crais

2007. Robert Crais is a master craftsman who delivers on his promise.

There are alot of variations on the LA private eye story. And lots of good practitioners of the genre. Crais is among the best. His two characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, in my book, belong among the best LA literary sleuths.

This is Joe Pike’s novel, but Elvis Cole is his buddy and of course he makes more than a cameo. Pike relies on Cole to provide key backup.

Pike is a damaged soul from childhood, but he’s a tough survivor who has beaten back his demons in a way that makes him stronger than anyone else. He lives by a code that prizes loyalty above all else. He protects and serves whether as a member of LAPD or as an independent. He hates bullies in any shape, and he never walks out on a friend.

You can read elsewhere for plot summary. I’m only going to tell you that Pike and his buddy Cole are worth spending time with. Their relationship lifts this story above the standard gumshoe narrative, as do the relationships these men develop with other key people they meet over the course of their cases. The bonds of family and friendship are tested through secondary characters that provide further depth.

Crais knows his police procedural stuff, his ballistics, his forensics, his terrain, and police groupthink. But he knows his characters even better, and that’s why I’ll keep coming back for more.

FREE Day on Kindle. Sunday, April 15. What You Got to Lose?

Former Number One at Kindle Action and Adventure.

Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

Free all day Sunday. Load up a great summer read.

The Best Choice in 2012, March 15, 2012 By Cat mom (LI NY) – This book is different from my usual Kindle choices…. It was absolutely outstanding. I found the African setting interesting. The father’s search for his son drove the exciting plot. The novel was worth many stars.*

I loved this book, March 12, 2012 By Jim Brumm – I can’t believe that this wonderful book is as inexpensive as it is. It is a great read of a father’s quest to find his son in Africa to deliver a letter from the boy’s dying mother. But it’s so much more than that. It is a saga of cultures clashing, of regret, redemption, and adventure, all told with great writing. There aren’t enough good books that are set in Africa. This is one of the best. I would have been happy to pay $10 for this book.

Captivating! March 5, 2012 By BookAddict (FL) – I was engrossed in this story from beginning to end. The plot is multi-layered, with mystery, suspense, drama and adventure. The characters are unique and have many dimensions. They made me care and I wanted to crawl inside the story with them. The dialogue is realistic. The ease of the descriptions immersed me in African countries and cultures. I did not simply read this story. I experienced it.

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, by Lee Smolin

2006.  Whoa. Not for the faint of heart. You gotta love your fermions and your gluons. And you need to appreciate a good brane.

It took me two months to work my way through this book. Pecking away. I’m not a scientist, by far, and I plodded through determined to see what I could learn. I’m glad I did.

It was good to read that the world of physics is just as screwy as any other corporate grouping.  Suffering from groupthink, careerists, and ladder-climbers, just like everywhere I ever worked. Apparently, just because you’re a math genius or a theoretical visionary doesn’t mean you get ahead, get grants, or get jobs at institutions of higher learning. White men hire other white men that remind them of younger versions of themselves. No big surprise there.

But before you get to those juicy assertions about the world of physics, you have to read through the history of String Theory and a weighty defense of all that hasn’t happened since that theory took precedence within the physics community. That’s the difficult part of the book and the most rewarding. Not that I can explain what I just read, but I know it was important and I must have learned something that will some day come in handy.

I also know now that when I see a NOVA Special on String Theory that it’s just a bunch of dumbed down drivel. String Theory isn’t the next big thing. It’s just generally accepted by the physics establishment.

Smolin attacks the underlying assumptions of String Theory and, lo and behold, he shows that these assumptions have never been proven. Just assumed. Oh, well. Back to the white board.

Worthy read. Important book. Enjoy it slowly.

FREE Days on Kindle. Friday, March 30 & Saturday, March 31.

Former Number One at Kindle Action and Adventure.

Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa  Get it here!

FREE Friday and Saturday, March 30 & 31. Load up a great summer read.

The Best Choice in 2012, March 15, 2012 By Cat mom (LI NY) – This book is different from my usual Kindle choices…. It was absolutely outstanding. I found the African setting interesting. The father’s search for his son drove the exciting plot. The novel was worth many stars.*

I loved this book, March 12, 2012 By Jim Brumm – I can’t believe that this wonderful book is as inexpensive as it is. It is a great read of a father’s quest to find his son in Africa to deliver a letter from the boy’s dying mother. But it’s so much more than that. It is a saga of cultures clashing, of regret, redemption, and adventure, all told with great writing. There aren’t enough good books that are set in Africa. This is one of the best. I would have been happy to pay $10 for this book.

Captivating! March 5, 2012 By BookAddict (FL) – I was engrossed in this story from beginning to end. The plot is multi-layered, with mystery, suspense, drama and adventure. The characters are unique and have many dimensions. They made me care and I wanted to crawl inside the story with them. The dialogue is realistic. The ease of the descriptions immersed me in African countries and cultures. I did not simply read this story. I experienced it.

My First Amazon FREE Day! Sunday, February 19

Rush over to Amazon for my first free promo on KDP Select. Load your Kindle with a wild journey through the African countryside.

Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa

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And thank you for making the trip.

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick

1969. Written five years before PKD experienced his 2-3-74 vision which he then spent the rest of his life exploring, researching, recording, challenging, buttressing, re-examining, and relating to his body of work.

Ubik–you’ll have to read the book to get the meaning of the term–unspools in a future (1992)Dickian world where corporations are interplanetary, the government is global, communication is by fixed-line vidphones, and telepaths, inertials, and precogs read telepathic aura. Oh, and time is fungible.

When Glen Runciter of the Runciter organization is wakened in the middle of the night due to the sudden disappearance of yet another of his telepaths, he is concerned enough to “consult his dead wife” in Switzerland. And we enter PKD-land.

A ruthless competitor prompts Runciter to assemble a team of inertials for a project on Luna, and then….

But I don’t want to lay out the plot. Too much is going on in Dick’s world. The story is enjoyable and you need to read carefully, flip back and forth sometimes to keep it all straight. Life and death, time and space, forward and backward, energy and entropy are slippery concepts in Dick’s hands. Of course no one is what they seem, but neither is the entire tale what it seems. That’s what I like and admire about Dick’s novels and stories: they take up residence in my pea brain and bug me long after I’ve finished them.

And trying to explain what Ubik is about I feel is only a subjective retelling of the bones of the story, a retelling which can’t do justice to the reading/thinking/puzzling experience. A retelling which reduces a story to just a story. Or more likely, I’m just not up to the task. I can’t tell you with great confidence what the story is about because I believe the story is so expertly told that it will have a different meaning for a different reader.

In Exegesis by PKD, he talks alot about Ubik, (Ubik the book and Ubik the term). He talks alot about Runciter. The novel is one of the several works which figures prominently in his exegetical exercise. In a way, he seems to believe that his body of work, of which Ubik is an important waystation, presaged his 2-3-74 vision. His work became clearer to him after he saw through to the informational underpinning of the universe. That sound crazy to you? Well Dick wasn’t crazy and he wrote more than a half million published words (who knows how many unpublished) after 2-3-74 in pursuit of an understanding of that vision.

Ubik by itself stands as an entertaining read, a sci-fi tale that challenges our concepts of reality, life, death, and the big one: why are we here? Serious topics explored in a whimsical, playful, smart narrative with oddball characters at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid.  Misfits like Dick up against the man, trying like hell to make some sense out of this life down here on earth.

Ubik is more than a fun sojourn into PKD-land. But if that’s all you get out of it, it’ll work that way too. Me: I can’t get it out of my mind.

Follower Love Giveaway Hop

A father’s enduring love for his estranged son propels him on a mission to West Africa.

The trip misery piles up but nothing can deter Matt Reiser from finding his son.  Except his son.

Use this code: RD36Z at this site for a free copy of Facing the Son, A Novel of Africa.

Or for a 99 cent copy click Kindle.

Back to the hop here.

A Darker Domain, by Val McDermid

2008. A cold missing persons case in a Scottish mining town reopens an unsolved twenty-two year old kidnapping and murder and leads Detective Inspector Karen Pirie to a pair of “unrelated” disappearances which together unravel the complex relationship between the miners and the most powerful man in Scotland.

If that sounds like a huge story, it is. We’ve got: Class warfare. Gender warfare. Abuse of power. Press connivance. Provincialism. Nationalism. Union busters and scabs. Art versus commerce versus love. Marital infidelity and betrayal. Families versus families versus neighbors and friends. Murder, robbery, conspiracy. And the 1984 miners strike in Great Britain.

Plus, to set the clock ticking, a young child is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant from his missing father.

I admire Val McDermid and so do alot of other people. She’s won a shelf of awards and has had her characters and novels brought to life in acclaimed TV programs and serials. She doesn’t need me to write a few words about anything she’s done as journalist or novelist. Her place is secure. My two stars will twinkle in the nighttime sky unseen by anyone but me.

But I barely got through this book. Which made me wonder why we like one book and not another. What makes us connect to a character, say, or a voice? Why do we fall deeply into one story and not care about another? It isn’t simply that one book is well-written and another one isn’t. McDermid writes expertly. She is a master of her craft. I have read other work by her and been blown away.

I like the genre. I lived in London–not Scotland, I admit–and traveled the novel’s terrain. I remember the time and the history of the miners strike.

But reading this book was a chore. So why didn’t I just chuck it and move on to something else? No one forced me to keep reading. That’s what puzzles me.

I kept reading even though I felt led along by made-up characters purposefully created to bring out the class warfare etc as listed above. The plot was overly complex and over the course of four hundred pages it unfolded backwards, as any good mystery does, at a snail’s pace. It didn’t help that nothing was much of a surprise. It didn’t help that nearly all the characters were unlikeable, with the exception of the protag, DI Pirie. It didn’t help that–without giving anything away–a key character explained everything he did in a fifteen page letter, the epistolary equivalent of a drawing room confession, making that character utterly despicable in the process.

McDermid’s fans will probably tell me to get stuffed. Even though the author has deep heartfelt passion for the community of miners, that’s not enough to make for a great or even a good book. Her passion is genuine. The well-crafted book though is a failure. It is flat. It is predictable. It is paint-by-the-numbers.

I guess I’m getting to the reasons why I don’t like this book. But does that translate to why we don’t like one book over another? Do we need to believe, to be surprised, if not wowed, by either story, voice, or character? Do we need to be transported somehow somewhere? Do we need to be more than entertained? Do we need to look up from the book and consider our world a bit differently? What makes a story work, resonate, remain with us?

Don’t have those answers yet. Will keep trying.

Looking on the bright side though, if someone with McDermid’s talent can turn out an occasional clunker, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. We might just turn the tables on the writing muses and toss off the odd winner.