Tag: Books

( #StephenKing )

I finished up my “holiday reading” choice last night around 3:00 AM. I had “11/22/63” by Stephen King sitting on the shelf for a month and decided it was time to knock it out. The story centers around a teacher that finds a time portal to 1958. He quickly decides to stick around in the past for a few years to stop the Kennedy assassination.

Once you accept the time portal as a plot device, the book falls into a steady pace. The first half sets up the main character (Jake) and how he operates in the past. King develops rules about time travel, essentially cosmic forces push back when someone attempts to alter time. For example if you are trying to stop someone from getting shot, the road you are taking may be blocked by an overturned truck. Jake also opts to take on a few smaller side missions, averting tragedies that happened to friends or children he read about. Failure means Jake would have to go back into the time portal which hits the reset button every time (so he has to do each thing over again and it becomes harder).

The book slows down considerably when Jake hits Texas. He establishes a life for himself and bunkers down for the three years while he waits for Oswald to arrive in Dallas. Life in small town Texas and the friendships Jake develops reads well, but when the plot shifts back to stopping Lee Harvey, something doesn’t feel right. The tone of the book never recovers. Without giving too much away, the cosmic forces start to push back and the crazy commences. King does such a good job foreshadowing these threads, they never come off as shocking. Since you know it is coming, it just feels like you are flipping pages until the next thing happens.

Without giving the big plot point away, Jake being in the past for 5 years changes things, which cause some “Back to the Future Part 2” kind of problem at the end of the story. King introduces characters/concepts at the end of the book that feel like they may be part of another King story, but I haven’t read it (King has a cameo featuring “It” characters in the first part of the book). He offers a little more information about the time portal which was nice, but unnecessary.

Even though the “11/22/63” drags in the middle, I liked this book. If for nothing else, King does a great job of painting life in the 1960s. My friends and I often sit around and talk about our zombie survival plans, I feel like people who grew up during the Kennedy era probably had similar conversations about “if you could go back in time, how would you stop the Kennedy assassination”. This is how Stephen King would do it – I can respect that.

( #TheNightCircus, #ErinMorgenstern )

I just finished reading Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus” and I found myself liking it more than I thought I would. The book is about a mysterious traveling circus that (if you can’t figure it out by the title), opens only at night. This circus is essentially the best ever because there are a few members of the crew who can actually do “real magic.” Morgenstern hints that the “magic” is more like science but never gets to deep into the technical details.

The story revolves around a bet made by two old rivals. They train young children (the more villainous of the two uses his own daughter) to engage in a decades-long competition that neither student know the rules to. The circus becomes their battleground as each one tries to out-do each other with attractions and optical illusions. Neither student can interfere or tamper with the other’s work. Of course as the children get older and find out each other’s identities, they fall in love (snore).

The best part of the book is that Morgenstern doesn’t give the reader a hint about how the ending. Neither character “goes dark” or tries to take advantage of the other, and Morgenstern plays by the rules she created for her universe. The romantic aspects of the book are weak and feels like “Water for Elephants” – the “I love you but I can’t be with you” nonsense, but Morgenstern wisely leverages her secondary characters to add atmosphere and back story so the primary plot of the love story utilizes the least amount of pages possible.

“The Night Circus” works because the plot moves along at a good pace and the writer did an excellent job of keeping reader interest high. I won’t say it is a great book, but it is good and I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

( #MichaelChabon )

Michael Chabon has a well documented love affair with comic books. He wrote the script for the first Spiderman movie, he has written his own comics, and he wrote “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” which may be one of the finest books about the funny pages in recent memory (if not all time).

This book might as well be a history of the comic industry. The plot focuses on two cousins that write comics right before World War II. Sammy Clay is a struggling writer who discovers his cousin Joe, who just escaped Nazi Germany, is an excellent artist. Together they invent a character named “The Escapist” that is able to fulfill fantasies that they could never manage in the real world. As the situation in Germany becomes increasingly dire, “The Escapist” comics become more politically charged as the hero regularly fights Nazis.

The cool thing about this book is that it parallels the origins of Superman. Superman was created by two Jewish kids that were frustrated with the situation in Germany and had the man of steel regularly beat the hell of out the Nazis back in the 40’s to drum up support for the war effort. The book touches on women’s rights, the whole comic code being introduced, and the accusation that the introduction of sidekicks promoted homosexual activity (and how many real life artists found themselves being interrogated by police and media because of the fad) and the eventual decline in popularity (due in some part to the comic code).

“The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” is an outstanding book. Chabon used real stories of the comic industry to paint a picture of life during WWII and what it is like to be an immigrant during that time. It won the Pulitzer Prize when it was released, which I think was well deserved. I highly recommend this book.

( #MichaelChabon )

Over the years Michael Chabon has cemented himself as one of my favorite writers. His recent (and under-appreciated) book of essays “Manhood for Amateurs” resonated with me deeply. Chabon’s fictional work is equally outstanding and almost always extremely quirky.

Quirky is the word that I would use to describe “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union“. This is an alternative history story that presents a world where Israel was never created after WWII. Instead, a section of Alaska is set aside (essentially like a Native American reservation) for Jewish Holocaust survivors. All of this is the background of a strange murder investigation by (of course) a Yiddish Policeman.

Like most of Chabon’s characters, Meyer Landsman is a semi-broken man that yearns for former lovers, has a career that is badly damaged, and has substance abuse issues. As Meyer pushes deeper into his investigation, a larger plot about the fate of the entire Alaskan reservation is uncovered that puts Meyer’s life in danger as well.

I liked this book because it was a good ride, but it falls apart at the end. Once “YPU” links the murder plot into a larger mystery about fate of Sitka District (the name of the “city”), it loses focus. There is a whole situation with a missile that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit with the gritty snowy-noir vibe that Chabon spends the entire book creating.

Even with a nutty conclusion I like the book for the characters, the alternative history (I am a sucker for alt history books), and the interesting blend of genres and location.