lonemagpie

The first of the Travis McGee books. A bit of a curate's egg. A straightforward plot and thorough loathesome villain, and a good thrilling finale. Some of McGee's situation and thoughts as he tries to help a couple of victims of that villain remind me of situations familiar to me. Writer and character are actually trying to be more progressive in the dealings with vulnerable women, and – at first – in the descriptions, which is good... except that because it was written in 1964 it has an air of being, as Arthur Dent might say, almost but not quite entirely unlike being sensible as I'd see it, and so, when it slips, the dissonance seems more creepy than if it was just written as regular 1960s blokiness... But kudos for trying.

CRIME BEAT by Michael Connelly
Not a novel this time – I'm a fan of his crime/detective novels – but a collection of his crime reportage from the late 80s and early 90s in Florida and LA. You can really see the seeds of the Harry Bosch series here (including a couple of plot bunnies that he then used for novels) as well as the evolution of his personal writing style that conveys characters in his books.
Being full of old crime reports it can be a wearing read, at the amount of nastiness in the world, but worth it. More of a downside is the fact that, because of the pieces cover cases through several reporting updates, there's a lot of repetition of basic details in some of them.
OTOH, some of the unsolved-at-the-time ones are so interesting that I may have to Google them and see if they've been solved in the dozen or so years since the book came out...
Interesting if you're a true crime fan, or a Connelly fan looking at his influences.

It's so long since I read the previous two books that I'd forgotten about Better Than Life, and this picks up directly from the end of that. Fortunately it's a good standalone take on some of the classic situations for our characters – who are all spot-on, as you'd expect from the co-creator of the show, and more so than they were in the books (well, the first one, anyway) written by both creators...
This is good fun, with amusing and effective use of some suitable SF ideas, plenty of well-paced hooks and exciting cliffhangers to keep the reader interested, and both familiar enough to be comfortable for fans of the show, and fresh enough to be fun for others, and to keep fans surprised even if they know the episodes. Grant mixes the situational ingredients nicely, providing a solid and satisfying arc, and suitable conclusion (it didn't help production of the book, I suppose, that it was started by both creators, but they split and Doug Naylor wrote a rival third-book-of-the-trilogy, The Last Human, which thoroughly contradicts this one and doesn't follow on from the previous books)
On the downside, there are plenty of proofing errors, and an annoying tendency for the writer to swtich POVs and even writing styles within paragraphs, but never quite enough to work as a flowing range of pastiches; rather the prose in the latter half (especially the wandering Westernisms in the Gunmen of the Apocalypse finale) feels more like lazy standup transcription. Also, it feels a little padded in places- some of the gags that worked best by inference, letting the audience draw the inevitable conclusion in their own time, are laboured here to no real purpose, especially in the Backwards reality. They neither make the gags any funnier, (nor really less so), or even really any more gross, just longer and slower.
There are some incorrect spellings too, and a vast overuse of “span” instead of “spun”, which I found personally annoying; you can use both for a lot of things, but they're not 100% interchangeable, and “Lister span the top off the flask” doesn't work. In fact it's so prevalent that when, at one point, the Cat “spun his guns” back into their holsters, it stands out glaringly – and then a few pages later he “span” thm back. Argh.
But overall, it felt like good Red Dwarf, it flowed, it made sense, the characters were good, and I did enjoy it a lot.

by Stephen Talty
I'd been looking forward to this nonfiction book about Henry Morgan and the pirates and his governorship of Jamaica. It has its moments, and lots of asides to folks and events before and after and tangentially related, and it's fairly conversational, but... There are a lot of big buts, and, contrary to how that sounds, I do not like big buts, and I cannot lie.
The first hit came on page 36, when I stumbled into “Privateering [as opposed to piracy] was invented by Henry VIII” - Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The earliest surviving letter of Marque and Reprisal/Commission to a privateer issued in England was issued by John in 1205. Henry IV issued four surviving ones, in 1400, 1404, 1405, and 1411. Henry V issued a surviving one against Genoa in 1413, and *then* Henry VIII finally put one out against France and Scotland in 1543. It doesn’t survive, but we know Edward III issued at least one set somewhere around 1344-5-ish as well.
This means I can't trust the rest of the book to be any more accurate, since I'm not familiar with this writer and thus don't know if it's just a rare slip. Then he decides to introduce a fictional exemplar of an everyday pirate of the sort who'd be in Morgan's crew – I can see why, but he doesn't integrate this character (called Roderick) into the style well at all, so instead of saying “an everyday pirate would...” he goes “Roderick now does...” at random, which just makes you wonder who the fuck is this Roderick guy again?
For extra shits and giggles, where a primary source (if we're willing to trust any of them) writes something that disagrees with his view of how the lives of the people in the area were – for example Mary Carleton's memoirs that the pirates were all gents to her – he contradicts it with a lecture. Which is fine where there's another contradictory record from the time, but not when it's just how a person felt and there's no evidence otherwise. Then rather than foreshadowing or laying groundwork for stuff that will happen later, he just squeezes bits in at random, without integrating them in a coherent or at least apparently planned manner. (E.g. suddenly diverting to the geology at the end of a chapter on how and why they blew their money the way did, and that financial correlation to social status. It just doesn't work as flow or setup.)
And then there are the footnotes. There is a section of footnotes at the back, for each chapter, all nicely numbered. There are, however, no indications of the footnotes, or numbers to link them, in the actual fucking text. (OK, I've edited history books, this one's probably the fault of the copyeditors not getting the correct documents when the manuscript was delivered, or a fuckup with the formatting, but it's still a major pain in what's
supposed to be educational, and I've been particularly looking forward to.)
And that's a damn shame, cos most of the individual bits are chatty and interesting enough, but really I'm now just so desperate to read something with fewer problems.

Two Kinds Of Truth, by Michael Connelly.

Started the new year with the rarity of a read of a newly released book. Lesley had given me this one for Xmas, and I'm a fan of writer and series, so.... This is the 30th Harry Bosch book,and I was a bit worried that (although I'm up to date with owning them) because I still have to catch up with reading a bunch of the previous ones, I ight get confused with back-references to ones I haven't read, or spoilered for them, but thankfully not. This stands alone perfectly well, and it was good to get reacquainted with Hrry Bosch (and Mickey Haller, who now does Matthew McConaughey impressions, since that's who played him in The Lincoln Lawyer). Plot-wise, the cold case part coming back to bite Bosch in the ass part was more interesting than the current case side, but both were entertaining, page-turning, and well done. Probably not a defining classic of the series, but still in good shape 20 books in...

Ah, reached a suitable chapter end in Pandora's Star where I can hear cliffhanger music, and go read something else for a break... I'll come back to Chapter 12 later...

Of course now I have to decide what to read in between, before taking Pandora's Star to Raglan...

*sigh* That thing where you're struggling with a book, confused by stuff even though it's claiming to be the first of a trilogy, and then discover this is because it's actually the first book of a *sequel* trilogy and you haven't read the previous set... Bollocks.

EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE by LAWRENCE BLOCK: One of the Matt Scudder books, and in this case the one which goes properly full-length (the previous four or so were much shorter) and sets the lead character on a path of actual development. Not bad at all- the plot holds together, the clues are there for the reader to work out what actually happened and why, and as always there's an air of reality to NYC in it for thoseof us who have never been there. Downsides were a few too many repetitive stops at AA meetings, and the fact that the actual killer (even when we've worked out what's going on) is a new character who only appears for the two or three paragraphs of his revelation, and this is a bad trait for a whodunnit to have. Still, very good otherwise.

ALLEGIANCE by Timothy Zahn. A spot of Star Wars, set between Episodes IV and V. Entertaining fun, though felt like generic space opera with added insistence on all the make and model numbers of equipment. Mara Jade's detective element was best – though at this point she's supposed to be 18 and already a superheroine who's just too fair and good to be working so well with Vader and Palpatine – with the Stormtrooper squad also providing fun – they should have done a series with them as the Rainbow Six to her Jack Ryan. The Luke/Han/Leia stuff didn't really sit that well, and I think things would have been tauter without them being in... But still, good fun.

I feel some comics reading coming on next, now that my eyes have recovered enough to handle dialogue balloons on coloured backgrounds again...

MR MID-LIFE CRISIS AND FRIENDS by Jack Collier & Sarah Lawrence. OK, so it's a little novelty thing of few pages that Lesley gave me for Xmas, with a page each on several dubious modern middle-aged Mr Men – Mr Mid-Life Crisis, Mr Shed, Mr Geek, etc – which are quite amusing and fit well with the “official” Mr Men books today. Thankfully I don't seem to fit any of them quite that much, though I do share with Mr Commuter the pleasure in watching others try to find a seat after I've got one. Mind you, the best entry in it is one Lesley wrote on the inside of the back cover...
Normally I wouldn't bother posting about such a short novelty, but I wanted to get more books read and a more regular book log back as early as possible this year, not as a New Year resolution of the “oh, I must get back into the habit of reading more,” but as reaffirmation of being able to read properly again, in the sense of my eyes being able to distinguish normal text on a printed page – because there was a point last April/May when my sight had degraded to the point where I couldn't.
So, anyway, there's the first finishing of 2017. Which really should have been Tess Gerritsen's Gravity, but I'm struggling with that due to it being boring, and also wanted to read something new in the New Year, rather than be slogging through something I started a month ago...