Reading 2008

Some months ago my father sent me a box of books, mostly historical fiction, and in that box was Alan Furst’s Dark Voyage, of which I have already written on this site. I learned some time later that it was part of a series, a later part, bound together more by theme and setting in time than by characters and situations. The series is called “Night Soldiers”, named for its first volume. I’ve made it my business to acquire the other books (all now except two), with the intention of reading them in order. This is the first of them. I confess that I could never quite get used to the structure of this book. It mostly follows Khristo, a young Bulgarian from along the Danube who, during the rise of European Fascism, gets sucked into the world of espionage, specifically with the NKVD, the Soviet agency that would eventually… Continue Reading →

This is my first Richard Ford novel. I had wanted to start with The Sportswriter, but it has two sequels, and I don’t like to start a series, even one as loose as the Frank Bascombe novels, unless I intend to finish it. Not knowing much about Ford beyond his reputation, I thought it would be better to start with something that stood on its own. Besides, I could only afford to buy one book. I’m not so sure anymore just how Ford earned his reputation. Wildlife isn’t a bad book by any means (I keep wanting to call it Wildfire, partly because of the forest fire that rages through the whole of the book—and it’s the only thing that rages, really—and partly because of the excellent abstract oil painting used on the cover of my edition, a picture of which I could not find anywhere online), but neither is… Continue Reading →

I’ve wanted to read this book for more than a decade. I doubt there’s many people left who don’t know David Simon—or at least who don’t know his work. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was adapted into the award winning NBC police procedural called Homicide: Life on the Street, and on which Simon worked as a writer and (I believe) eventually as a producer as well. It’s also, in my opinion, the finest police procedural ever to air on North American television, and is my favourite television series of all time. This book was also mined quite heavily (by Simon himself) for HBO’s The Wire, the second best police procedural in all of North American television. The premise for this book, the first work of non-fiction I’ve read in something like a year, is simply this: it is the chronicle of a single year, in this case 1988,… Continue Reading →

I apologize for the lack of updates over the last five weeks or so, but I knew this book would require considerable amounts of both time and concentration. I considered taking notes, but I don’t review in a professional capacity on this site, and nor do I wish to go into academic levels of detail. And really, whoa, this book has a lot of avenues to explore. It’s essentially a satirical exploration of all kinds of fakes and forgeries, from the world of art, currency and religious artifacts to the most fundamental ways in which people live their lives. Ostensibly the main thread of the plot follows Wyatt Gwyon as he goes from being a talented artist working in an antiquated style to a master forger unable to separate himself from his fantasies about a past that never truly existed. I say “ostensibly” because the majority of the book has… Continue Reading →

The prose in this book was as compact and exciting as it has been for all the previous books, but Fleming was pretty obviously losing steam. The idea of dressing him up as a Japanese miner (including skin dye!) and training him in Japanese customs and then expecting him to pass muster in less than a week is patently ridiculous. The Japanese culture is incredibly nuanced, and at the time Fleming wrote this novel, the influence of the West had not extended so far into their culture as it has now, making Bond’s transformation even less believable. I suppose the only consolation is that it doesn’t work. Bond is found out very quickly by almost every Japanese person he meets. I won’t comment on the Euro-centric attitudes that border on racism; I’ve already mentioned how poorly Fleming fares with non-European cultures when reviewing previous Bond novels. All that should be… Continue Reading →