On Books: September

You know how I always write about all the books I read the previous month? Remember how I'm usually well into the next month before it actually appears? Check this out - we're still in single digits in October and I whipped this bad boy right out. The book reviews, I mean. I whipped the book reviews out.

Daniel Hecht: Skull Session
I read a lot. And I think the more you read, the fewer of those I’ve gotta get someplace where I can read more of this book moments you have. Reading is, therefore, like binge drinking. The more I read, the harder it is to impress me. The more creepy books I read, the creepier the story has to be to achieve creepification. Follow me? Anyway, Hecht manage to hook me almost immediately with Skull Session and, despite the fact that its no horror or ghost story, he creeped me out in the process. I don’t like to recount plots. You can go to Amazon for that. I will say that Hecht writes a compelling, intense story peopled with well-rounded, well-drawn characters. And somehow, throughout all 400+ pages of the novel, Hecht keeps an underlying tension, a sense of unease which forces you to read on yet become slightly afraid of what you might find when you turn the page.

David Schickler: Sweet and Vicious
Schickler’s debut was a collection of subtly intertwined stories called Kissing in Manhattan. It was a good effort and I remember recommending it to a few people at the time. Let me put it this way, bottom-line it for you – I eagerly awaited Sweet and Vicious but I wasn’t about to pay for the hardback version. And I’m glad I didn’t. It was utterly forgettable. As a matter of fact, I’m sitting here having a really hard time remembering exactly what it was about. There was a guy, a girl, some diamonds and some bad guys chasing them across the country. But that’s it. Like I said – completely and utterly forgettable. On the plus side, its short with big type and doesn’t take long to get through. Man, I bet every author loves to hear that. Hey, your book was short and had big type – loved it!

Al Franken: Lies…
Last month I expressed supreme disappointment with Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country. The karmic gods of political snarkyness heard me and rewarded me in the form of Al Franken. Not Al Franken personally. That would have been strange. Anyhoo, Lies is wonderful. Where Moore is occasionally obnoxious and spiteful, Franken is incisive and witty. The book is well researched (which will come from having a team of Harvard students working from you) and pulls no punches.

Ken Bruen: The Guards
Crime fiction gets a bad rap. Lots of people scoff and maintain that its not literature, that its pulp, a guilty pleasure. Sometimes, those people are correct. Lee Child, John Sanford, Jeffrey Deaver – they’re all fine authors but they’re no Hemingways. Ken Bruen, on the other hand, proves those doubters wrong. The Guards is written in brutally spare prose. It’s rhythmic, almost poetic. The story becomes less about a crime and more about the narrator, someone you’re not sure you like but find yourself pulling for nonetheless. Like Sweet and Vicious, this is a short book with reasonably large type. And yet it packs hundreds of times more story and emotion than Sweet and Vicious.

Carl Hiaasen: Skin Tight and Skinny Dip
Carl Hiaasen’s novels remind me of Elmore Leonard’s…with the key difference being that Hiaasen’s are actually good. Both of these novels revolve around the same main character yet, like all of Hiaasen’s work, the star is Florida. These are gonzo novels – the characters are all tragically or comically flawed, stereotypes abound, wackiness ensues. They’re entertaining. They do, however, reveal an odd personality quirk – stuff like this doesn’t make me laugh. Sure, give me David Sedaris or another Al Franken book and I’ll be cracking up. But, as much as you’d think I’d laugh out loud at something like this, I don’t. I find books like this amusing. I chuckle a little. But that’s it.

Thomas Beller: How To Be A Man
A few years ago, I picked up Beller’s The Pickup Artist. I didn’t like it all that much. But I saw How To Be A Man on a table of new releases and it promised to be good. A collection of non-fiction, it said hey, look, I’m struggling with being a guy and getting a little older so I might know where you’re coming from…pick me up. So I did. And I started reading. Now, I don’t go for fratboy, guyhood shit which says you have to watch football and crush beer cans on your forehead at Hooters on Sunday afternoons to be a man. That’s bullshit. And Beller, thankfully, didn’t extol the virtues of any such behavior. Of course, as I saw it, he was off-topic most of the time anyway. Beller cleverly collected essays that were previously published in various magazines. Then, in a stroke of genius, he put the age at which he wrote each piece under the titles of each piece, labeled the collection “Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood” and shipped it off to publishers. It’s like being sold a case of imported lager only to discover its comprised solely of various brands of cheap light beer. He’s an okay writer although he takes himself a little seriously and its apparent, at times, he’s labored over a particular sentence to make it sound as literary as possible. I read a book by Rachel Cusk a couple years ago that had the same effect on me - made me feel like I was being belittled while reading. Both Cusk and Beller seem to try so hard to prove how good they are that they sacrifice something genuine in the process.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m over-thinking things. But I feel like I was promised something I didn’t get. Settle down with a good Nick Hornby or Jonathan Tropper novel instead. They’re funnier and, oddly, more insightful.

Charlie Huston: Caught Stealing
This is, truly, one of the most brutal books I’ve read in a long, long time. It is intense, often disorienting and really quite good. It's what being at the wrong place at the wrong time is all about. This really isn't for the faint of heart. It is, however, for someone who wants something a bit different, something original.