Used Books Blog

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a slim, but satisfying mystery as well as an insightful examination and extension of a beloved fictional character. The story revolves around Linus Steinman, a nine year old mute, who escaped Nazi Germany with an African gray parrot named Bruno. Bruno’s past associations coupled with his numerical utterances bring the greedy and amoral to his lodging house.

The New York Times Book Review says The Final Solution is “On par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon’s last novel, the marvelous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” I’m not the NYT, but I’d beg to differ. I’m a huge Kavalier & Clay fan, and while The Final Solution is good, it simply doesn’t bristle with passion and power of the former. And I guess Chabon’s Summerland doesn’t count as a novel?

Instead, The Final Solution is a bit aloof like the unnamed detective who works to solve the mystery. So while the tight plot is enjoyable, the only character that truly jumps off the page is the aged Sherlock Holmes. And even then we’re never told it is that famous detective. So it reads more like a great cover band, or maybe Sammy Hagar as the front man for Van Halen. The ’story’ stands on it’s own, but is certainly given considerably more weight given Chabon’s literary history.

I found some of the P.S. features very interesting. The NPR interview in particular revealed Chabon’s admiration for David Mitchell and Cynthia Ozick. I’m a huge Mitchell fan and immediately picked up an Ozick title. I find the relationships between authors, most often exposed in the acknowledgments, to be a fascinating and valuable tool in finding other great reading.

For example, in Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, he acknowledges Neal Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. Similarly, Susanna Clarke acknowledges Neil Gaiman in the fabulous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’d be extremely interested in a LibraryThing like interface that exposed these connections to readers.

So, pick up The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and then cross your fingers and hope that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union returns Chabon to his Kavalier & Clay form.

That’s right, the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has shed approximately 16,000 hyphens. The headline caught my eye right away and immediately makes me think about Jasper Fforde’s unique Book World as described in his Thursday Next series of novels, including The Well of Lost Plots.

The move was made based on the evolution of the written word, which … does make sense. We’re not speaking Shakespearean English these days! The written word has a certain fluidity. The hyphens removed were most often from compound nouns. Here’s the rub. (Ha, Shakespearean English!) The removal of the hyphens wasn’t uniform. Instead, we have single word or split words. But how to know which is which? Here’s a quick sample list:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

• fig leaf
• hobby horse
• ice cream
• pin money
• pot belly
• test tube
• water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

• bumblebee
• chickpea
• crybaby
• leapfrog
• logjam
• lowlife
• pigeonhole
• touchline
• waterborne

I don’t know, I think I might miss some of these hyphens. RIP.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a condensed, fast-paced, insightful romp that walks the line between gritty literary realism and surreal science-fiction. I’ve been waiting for the next Ruff novel for quite a while and Bad Monkeys will hold me over until I get my next fix.

Bad Monkeys revolves around Jane Charlotte as she converses with a psychologist and explains how and why she’s now arrested for murder. The explanation is, as you’d expect from a Ruff novel, a whopper! Jane details two secret societies locked in a battle of good and evil.

She explains how, as a child rejected by her mother, she found herself in central California on the trail of a serial pedophile and murderer dubbed The Angel of Death. It’s here that she first encounters the ‘organization’ and uses an NC gun to fend off and kill the The Angel of Death. What’s an NC gun? Come now, it’s a gun that kills by Natural Causes. Quintessential, inventive Ruff!

As you may have realized, the topics covered by Ruff aren’t shallow or glitzy in an Elmore Leonard way. Like Set This House In Order, he’s dealing with serious issues that fracture the lives of people. Bad Monkeys covers some of the same ground as Set This House In Order, and nearly feels like a mash-up of that novel and Sewer, Gas & Electric.

But Ruff makes it different enough and keeps you guessing as to whether Jane is just a very troubled woman who’s built a fantastic and bizarre world as a coping mechanism, or if she’s on the level and is on the front lines in the war against evil. Just when you think you know which way it will go, that’s when the plot twist(s) make you doubt yourself.

I read Bad Monkeys in two round-trip BART rides. It’s a rather short novel, particularly for the usually Homeric Ruff. So part of me wishes he’d taken one more year and written another 200 pages to fully explore the fantastic framework he established. Another is happy that the next novel is that much closer.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a good read and Fool On The Hill is required reading. Extra credit? The Matt Ruff home page.

The New York Times reports that Amazon and Google are entering the eBook market, the former with Kindle, a new eBook device that will compete with the Sony Reader and the latter through a paid online service. I recently spoke to Fine Books & Collectibles about my view of the eBook market. In a nutshell, I’m not bullish on eBooks.

Here is a quick recap of why I feel eBooks are still a long way off from going mainstream:

• Reading is an active rather than a passive activity like music. It’s time intensive and less repeatable.
• There is no intrinsic advance in books or reading like there has been in music or movies. Books have been portable for quite a while.
• There is limited pent-up demand for eBooks. You can’t burn your shelf copy of Player Piano to your reader.
• Entrenchment and inertia within the publishing and retailing industries. What to do with lots of huge Barnes and Noble stores?

As the Lifestyle editor for Vizu, I ran a poll across a cross section of 50 websites to find out the level of interest in eBooks. The question?

On a scale of 1 to 5, how interested are you in eBooks?

The 5 point scale used ‘1′ for very interested, ‘3′ as neutral and ‘5′ as not interested. The results? Out of 677 responses, 37.5% were not interested, while 19.4% were very interested. A normal way to view a 5 point scale is % above neutral versus % below neutral. In this way we find that 32% score above while 49.2% score below.

So, 1 out of 3 have a favorable interest in eBooks. That doesn’t sound too bad until you factor in that an Internet audience is the prime market for this product, both in terms of technology, level of education and the propensity to read. Analyzed with this knowledge, these figures paint a less than rosy picture for eBooks in the short-term.

Th1rte3n by Richard K. Morgan is a satisfying blend of his previous novels, equal parts of his hard-boiled Kovacs series and Market Forces, his recent Road Warrior meets Halliburton social treatise. If Andrew Vachss wrote science-fiction, this is what he’d write.

As with all of Morgan’s work, you’ll get a healthy dose of pulse-pounding action sequences and grisly crime descriptions. I’m not a horror buff and I don’t generally like gore. However, Morgan makes it accessible by delivering these sequences without the giddy glee or overly dramatic flair others employ. It’s a very straight-forward factual description - a nearly academic deconstruction of the brutality of what he’s envisioning. You’ll understand the appeal if you like CSI or Criminal Minds.

Th1rte3n continues Morgan’s science-fiction detective genre and delivers Carl Marsalis, a ‘Thirteen’, or genetically altered human who works as a hard-case bounty hunter. The back cover of the uncorrected proofs I obtained calls Marsalis “a hit man who has lost his desire to kill.” This, frankly, isn’t accurate. Marsalis is a genetically-modified soldier with increased aggression and machismo. He’s built to kill, is damn good at it, and doesn’t mind doing so for profit or revenge. It’s not a perfect life, but it’s the hand he’s been dealt and he’s a realist.

Marsalis is hired by agents of the governing body of Mars after one of their spaceships is ‘compromised’ by another Thirteen. The ship splashes into the ocean, filled with the remains of the other passengers, eaten by the renegade Thirteen. Using genetic trace the team has linked the escaped Thirteen to numerous seemingly unrelated murders across the country. Marsalis is the necessary evil they turn to as the body count rises without any further progress on capturing their suspect.

There’s a bit of rote material, necessary for the full plot, in which Marsalis bonds with his new ‘partner’, Sevgi Ertekin. It’s a satisfying tale of sleuth as the two follow the tangents, misdirection and clues to arrive at a final epiphany. In the end, the whole crime feels a little bit like a stretch, but the rest of the novel is strong enough to overcome this obstacle.

The world Morgan creates is a future fractured by racism and religion. Unlike his Kovacs novels, Morgan’s dialog is often a direct discussion of the topics he wishes to analyze and present to readers. Th1rte3n isn’t for you if you’re turned off by topics like the nature of man, of how society evolved, of Fundamentalism, of nature versus nurture and the corrupting influence of power. These direct miniature essays are peppered within the dialog, bringing introspection and intelligence to the inventive future world and hard-edge action sequences.

I recommend Richard K. Morgan’s Th1rte3n as a good way to introduce yourself to Morgan’s work. If you’re entertained and provoked, you’ll have plenty of great reading ahead of you by delving into his prior work.

Barnes and Noble has changed its mind and will sell O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It. A lot of you will say this is just a crass business decision in the vein of Gordon Gekko. Thing is, Barnes and Noble is very serious (aka batty) about customer service. So, while I’m certain that money had a hand in the decision, I actually believe that they’re responding to customer demand. The demand is interesting and is contrary to the poll conducted previously on this topic.

I’m not sure what to make of this, other than an assumption that the Internet audience differs from the total population and that … people aren’t always honest about their intentions. I’m not saying they’re lying! I’m saying they might change their mind. I’m saying that you might pick up the tabloid magazine for a few moments while waiting to buy your groceries.

Me? I’m not buying and I hope most of the 125,000 copies wind up with a black stripe, sitting in a $1 bin gathering dust.