More LibraryThing Book Notes

David Grann, The Lost City of Z -- This makes for a decently absorbing read while you are going along, but is finally a weak effort, because there are no new revelations and the significance of the story is not clear. Percy Fawcett's 1925 expedition into the Amazon was an old-fashioned, underfunded, under-equipped fiasco with an unscientific goal. The "lost city" theory was unworthy of a man of intelligence, but fits in perfectly, as Grann does admit, with Fawcett's spurious spiritualism. So to me this came across more as a tale of stupidity than a tale of bravery.

There is a frisson of uneasiness to be had from the notion of the jungle swallowing so many explorers, both Fawcett's party and many of the subsequent expeditions that tried to find him. But as a functional modern magazine writer, Grann brings no sense of poetry or awe to the narrative. The chapters that describe his own adventures are especially blah and reveal him as an inadequate researcher. He gets all worked up over seeing a supposedly inaccessible document that was already available in English translation and that you or I could have found. He offers a very sketchy summary of some interesting modern scholarship concerning the Amazon region in the last chapter that seems meant to vindicate poor Fawcett, and to justify Grann's own superfluous trek into the jungle, but it does not accomplish either task convincingly, and so brings the book to a flat conclusion.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City -- This best-seller has a surefire double subject (a World's Fair and a serial killer!) and is quite absorbing; but I think that by historians' standards, Larson cheats (which is to say, makes stuff up, including dialogue and descriptions of people's observations and thought processes) in the interest of providing a novelistic narrative. So although I enjoyed the book reasonably well, I do not respect the author's journalistic integrity. He takes the easy way out time and again.

There is a kind of social capital to be had from reading this sort of non-fiction bestseller because others will have read them or at least heard of them. But there is an enormous variability in their quality, and this is at best one of the middling ones.

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End -- I persisted to the end of this long novel despite wanting to give up every few pages. I can't say that I was rewarded for my efforts, although I will admit that Ferris's ending is graceful. Long before that, however, all the authorial tricks have worn out their welcome: the first person plural narration, the quirky-but-flat characters, the half-hearted nods at magical realism (such as the business with the totem pole, or the adult who sits in a McDonald's play pit), the sentimental mid-section about cancer. I wish I had been more ruthless and stopped reading.

Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker -- This is the first book in a long while that I have decided not to continue. I read through page 81 of the 349-page paperback edition, and nothing about the novel was commanding my interest. Since I am usually a very persistent reader and a fairly easy reader to please, I only abandon a book with reluctance. But I am also sensitive to my time being wasted, and there are books I persisted through that I wish I had ditched, such as Joshua Ferris's overrated Then We Came to the End. When you are always reading classic novels, as I am, sometimes the contemporary novels you pick up seem quite weak by comparison (whether that is fair or not). You would like to ask the author, Why are you trying to re-invent the wheel? What you are doing has been done much better already. As it happens, I started Hermann Hesse's bewitching Demian while I was struggling with Native Speaker. Both are first-person novels of reminiscence, and yet what a world of difference! Demian is electrifying, but Native Speaker is dull and aimless. Even the briefest portraits in Demian are sharp and memorable, while all the characters in Native Speaker are lifeless and unengaging.

The saddest part is, I am unlikely to try any other books by the acclaimed Chang-Rae Lee; there are just too many other writers I need to attend to.

Donald E. Westlake, Memory -- One of the finest existential novels in any language, and a truly great (albeit upsetting) reading experience. It is sobering to think that this manuscript couldn't find a publisher in the Sixties and that we only have it in front of us now because of the persistence of Westlake's friend Lawrence Block in bringing it to light after his death. This is the best book that Hard Case Crime will ever publish.

David J. Schow, Gun Work -- Despite a Mexican setting, which I generally like, I found this hyper-violent, rather unbelievable crime novel not very much to my taste, and I wish I hadn't wasted my time finishing it. I enjoy what one Amazon reviewer wrote, that the book is for "gun aficionados who enjoy tales of extreme violence unencumbered by character development or coherent plotting....One would really have to have an in depth knowledge of armaments in order to fully appreciate or even care about the detailed specs given each and every time a new weapon is introduced."

Suzanne Simons, Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War -- Erik Prince's conservative, militaristic, Navy SEAL man-of-action persona is so extremely remote from mine that he has a certain fascination for me, and this informative account of his life and dealings satisfied my curiosity. It does not sledgehammer him by any means, but it is still a skeptical take.

Brett Halliday, Murder Is My Business -- I have seen episodes of the Michael Shayne television show, but this is the first Shayne novel I have read. I greatly enjoyed it for its crispness and clever plotting, and will certainly want to read more books in the series. (The original "Brett Halliday," Davis Dresser, wrote the first 28 titles, including this one.) Shayne is a manly, blunt, red-headed detective, not given to irony or angst; and Halliday's prose style is similarly efficient and unfancy. This story is set in El Paso, and I liked the Texan and Mexican local color.

Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment -- A typical example of Modern Academic Style -- impotent, equivocal, non-committal; everything is "problematic." It has some potential although unpleasurable use as an indication of the current state of academic debates concerning the Enlightenment (although on that score, it will go out of date fast), and it can point one in the direction of some better books, such as Albion W. Small's The Cameralists, an interesting, confident 1909 study that can still be read with pleasure and profit one hundred years after publication -- because of that very confidence (as well as the depth of Small's research). The mousiness of Outram's text is, by contrast, extremely unattractive.

POSTSCRIPT: Bits of this material have appeared at PMD before, but there is no harm in the occasional re-run.