Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks

 

This has been sitting n my shelf for a while, I figured I'd read it. The author is a professor at Georgetown Law, and she went through a program the Washington DC Metro Police (hereafter MPD) have that allows people who are probably (at least arguably) old enough to know better to become unpaid part-time police officers. The author eventually ends up being certified to operate alone, which apparently is kinda a big deal. She brings, well, not exactly a gimlet eye to things, but she has a background (professional and as it happens personal) that gives her a distinctly outsider POV on what goes on in the MPD, both during training and on the job. She has a clear sense of the broader structural flaws and of how the individual police officers think about--and rationalize--what they do, what their jobs are. There are some officers who come off not entirely well, here, they'd plausibly recognize themselves, though the author has anonymized them, but the book portrays the larger problems as systemic, a combination of mixed and perverse incentives alongside (maybe, at least in the now) unintended consequences. There's a thread about the author's family, especially her mom, being skeptical about the police thing, but that at least seems to have worked out more or less all right for everyone. Interesting and pretty informative.

Bad News by Donald E. Westlake

 

I finally found a couple of Westlake's Dortmunders. This one is a fricking blast: While there are complications and suchlike that emerge later on, there's really just the one bad decision and everything follows that. There are criminals of varying degrees of competence, Dortmunder (and his small handful of friendly acquaintances--maybe even friends) on the high end, the would-be grifters who rope Dortmunder, et al., into their scheme very much not so smart as they think they are. Westlake's prose cracks wise at just about every opportunity, but I never had the sense that either he or the characters weren't taking things seriously; that's not an easy tightrope to walk, Block walks it, Hiaasen walks it, it's rare. The characters are pretty believable and distinguishable, the pacing hums along nicely, the events all make sense within the context of the novel. A new pleasure has opened to me. Huzzah.

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

 

This is Bradbury writing at his most beautiful, his most nostalgic. It's a paean to his childhood: As the introduction makes clear, the difference between Green Town, Illinois (the town in the novel) and Waukegan, Illinois (where Bradbury grew up) is not all that big, even with one of them being fictional. There are hints of weirdness, there's arguably a thesis that magic (good and bad) is objectively real for children in ways it isn't for adults (though there are adults who at least seem to be interacting with magic). There are threads that get woven throughout, but this is a very episodic novel; I don't think it's quite a fix-up, but I do think I've seen some of the vignettes collected elsewhere. The pacing is a little on the languid side, but the characters feel pretty real, and the incidents feel lived. The voice ... Bradbury's prose is fricking magic. I can see drinking from this vintage repeatedly, and I regret that I somehow haven't tasted it before now.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

 

One of the interesting things about reading a novel that's foundational to a (sub)genre is that often it's hard to see it with eyes that don't have like all of what's come since. There's a lot that's interesting in this novel: you can see things that were almost certainly innovations, or at least unique spins, that have since become tropes; you can see the casual cruelty that could get published in the mainstream in the 1920s; you can see that cluttered and noisy and serpentine plots have been a part of Noir from the start. Someone even slips Spade a mickey. And everyone drinks like a fricking fish. It's interesting that the physical description of Spade is so little like Bogart, but casting is weird like that sometimes, and Bogart certainly was a fine choice to play Spade. The plot is tangled and borders on jumbled, there's so much unreliable information (characters are lying, the narrator is not) that it's kinda hard to see past the near-century between then and now to catch whatever hints there might be who's lying (well, given that everyone is lying, who's lying more--and when). The characters are plausible enough, the prose and dialogue are more than solid.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

 

Another instance--like the Spufford--where it's interesting to see such a Serious Writer write something so thoroughly genre: In this case, Chabon is riffing on pretty classic sword-and-sorcery fiction by authors such as Lieber and Howard and Moorcock (but completely without anything more magical than some amazingly effective knockout rags); he does so rather well, it's clear he knows the genre and even though there's some vaguely contrarian impulse (based on his afterword) to choosing Jewish main characters and a Jewish empire (that really existed around the end of the first millennium) as well as some more real-world points to make, after a brief time that all ceases to matter, the story just kinda goes. It's a very picaresque story, in a more old-fashioned way than just "episodic," these "Gentlemen of the Road" are occasionally altruistic scoundrels, the story focuses on a stretch of such occasions. It's witty and funny, and Chabon uses indirect dialogue to some devastatingly humorous effect; the characters are all more or less believable, there's even differences among them visible in the dialogue, which isn't as common as it could be. While the narrative doesn't follow much of a traditional arc, there is a sense of the stakes gradually being raised before Chabon wraps up the arc of the novel. A fun and relatively light read.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

 

I am the weird horror fan who doesn't like slasher movies; Stephen Graham Jones fucking adores them, and this novel is book one of a three-part paean to slasher movies. It's written just fine, the characters are believable and the prose works pretty well--he even handles nicely a stark register change between the mainline narration and the main character's journals (or whatever). The story's pacing kinda drags, though, and that's not helped by the fact Jones is basically the whole time mining slasher movies for the tropes he's going to deploy (and his POV is as huge a fan as he is, so she knows them) but slasher movies--including the various precursors Jones references--are movies (kinda stupid movies, but movies) and movies have different strengths and weaknesses and needs than novels, and I'm not convinced that novels are the right medium to try to tell slasher stories. Basically this book felt kinda like something of a category error to me. I'll see how book two goes, I might not bother with book three.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

 

It's interesting to see a writer as serious (and as Serious) as Spufford write something so like Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not so much in the shape of the story (as I remember Clarke's novel) but more in the weird specifics of the premise--magic is real in ways with the historic practices and writings, and England is under threat. The magic is less explicitly Fey than in the Clarke, and the threat is Nazi Germany, but the larger pictures are very similar. The POV character is a woman, and sexism is a large part of her experience: she plays against it as something of a "bad girl" and then working to make her life better as much as she can with in the constraints she lives under. There is a sense of the magic of the world revealing itself to the POV character, but there's a misunderstanding of the nature of that magic, and at the end the main character seems to have fixed something important from her youth at the price of losing much of who she is. There's another novel coming, which will probably solve (or resolve) that. The writing here is of course very good, on just about all levels, and I'll read whatever that other novel is once Spufford publishes it; I'll probably reread this shortly before that, which is fine, I won't mind.