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Picks of the Week

  • Adam Thirlwell: Politics: A Novel (P.S.)

    Adam Thirlwell: Politics: A Novel (P.S.)
    One would think this book is about sex, And while it is, since the characters have so much about it, some of it is kinky, and threesomes play a big role in the narrative. mostly POLITICS is about everything else: the mechanics, the logistics, the emotional minefields, the awkward questions, the moral dilemmas, and, well, the politics of what it is to be with someone you love or someone you don't, and how an act that should be simple is anything but. Thirlwell was disgustingly young when he wrote this but he absolutely understands that to make this book work, there must be an underlying sweetness and sincerity to the entire story. Now I want to see what he's up to more recently. Amazon | Indiebound | B & N | Borders | Powell’s

  • Jennifer Mascia: Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir

    Jennifer Mascia: Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir
    Years ago I was blown away by Mascia's Modern Love piece describing her parents' secret past: her father was a mobbed-up convicted murderer, and her mother not only knew all about it, but aided and abetted her husband when life required being a fugitive, selling drugs, and living at great highs and crushing lows. Mascia's book tells a more whole story about her peripatetic life, and even with every new shocking revelation what remained consistent was how much she loved her parents, no matter how deep those lows went, and how much she misses them now that they are gone. Unconditional love never goes away, no matter if those who receive it deserve it. Indiebound | Amazon | Borders | B & N | Powell’s

  • Juli Zeh: In Free Fall

    Juli Zeh: In Free Fall
    Give me a novel of ideas and if the story is good and the characters are believable and entertain me, I am there. Give me a crime novel of ideas, where two physics professors, friends and rivals, opposites but startlingly similar, do emotional battle on an intellectual canvas, raise the stakes through betrayal, the possible kidnapping of a child, and embroil a romantic-leaning police detective in the complicated machinations of quantum theory, and holy hell, I think I have myself one of my favorite books of the year. Powell’s | Indiebound | Amazon | Borders | B & N

  • Simon Lelic: A Thousand Cuts

    Simon Lelic: A Thousand Cuts
    It appears to be a crime with an easy solution: a disgruntled schoolteacher shoots up his place of employment and kills several students in the process. But really, Lelic's novel is about the catastrophic consequences of bullying, and how this act is hardly limited to kids turning on other kids, but burrows deeply into adult relationships as well. He evokes empathy for the killer and sympathy for Lucia, the investigating officer who has to fight for every scrap of dignity as she pieces together the far more complex truth of what really happened at the school. Powell’s | Amazon | Borders | Indiebound | B & N

  • William Lindsay Gresham: Nightmare Alley

    William Lindsay Gresham: Nightmare Alley
    I cannot stop raving about this book to people. The circular narrative structure, the demented feel of a traveling carny troupe, and the extraordinary rise and precipitous fall of Stan Carlisle give off the persistent, raging feeling that hell is always with us, and success is basically a sucker's game. No matter what the biographical evidence on Gresham's state of mind leading up to and after the book's bestseller (and movie basis) status in 1946, I don't think we can really know what demons plagued him to produce this marvelous noir gem. B & N | Indiebound | Amazon | Borders | Powell’s

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August 24, 2004

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Comments

Bill Crider

Dang. That explains a lot about my high school years.

Rebecca

No way. ANY man who reads Terry Pratchett's Discworld has something going for him...like the ability to recognize a genius. (Granted, I broke up with the guy who introduced me to Discworld, in college, but not because of that.) And I find that it's easier to communicate with someone who likes GOOD fantasy (defined by what I like) because we share reference points. I'm neutral on classics, although a tendency to dismiss Jane Austen as "chick lit" or an excessive admiration of the Brontes might be a deal breaker for me. But fantasy/sf readers have been wronged! If they are otherwise desirable (i.e. not on the build of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons) their reading habits are a plus.

Gerald So

'They usually are so immersed in the world they're experiencing through their book, they forget about real life.'

My all-time favorite book? Don Quixote.

Sarah

Rebecca, I have to agree--SF/F is really getting a bad rap in the above article, because let's see, all of the nice guys I know who are in stable relationships either spent their youth reading that genre and still have their collection or keep reading and stay current with their beloved authors. In other words, they are geeks. And that is often a good thing to be:

http://www.neystadt.org/john/humor/Girls-Guide-To-Geek-Guys.htm

Aldo

Damn,
Well, I read the classics, Tolkien, Ludlum, comics and still couldn't get a date in high school. I don't understand????? Now college was a different story....

Dave White

Damn, I knew the Harry Potter thing would come back to bite me in the ass.

ron

Yes, Sarah, but the women they polled don't want STABLE relationships, no matter how much they say they want them. They want DRAMATIC relationships, even when those relationships subsequently blow up in their faces.

Megan

Yet more evidence that I'm not a real woman....

John Rickards

I'm still struggling to think of a book-inspired chat up line. Especially for crime...

"Is that your ninhydrin fingerprint testing kit in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?..."

"Hey baby, you wanna know how to estimate time of death?..."

;*)


I like the guide to geeks, too. Very cool. :-D

Rebecca

Gerald: LOL. Do you think Don Quijote marks you as a sensitive mature reader of classics or as a fantasy nut? (DQ is sort of the ultimate geek in that he ignores his balding/aging condition as much as the Star Trek guys. The nice thing about him is that he just imagines himself a Deanna or Bev, without actually forcing a real woman to live up to that standard.)

Sarah, thanks for the geek guide giggle, but it's a bit unfair too. Of the IT people I worked with one was a jazz musician in his time off, another wrote and illustrated children's books and others...oops, a bunch of others were rather bright attractive women. I guess they got carried away with that whole "pretend to be interested" thing.

John, obviously the better chat up line is "Hey baby, can I check your vital signs?" (Or alternately some version of the very brilliant Scottish musical "Stiff"....Donna, if you can get me the lyrics to that, you will have my eternal gratitude, possibly expressed in buying you a drink the next time you're here to pick up your Nevermores.) ;-)

Fiona

Hell, if I spotted someone reading Pratchett, like Rebecca I would be IMPRESSED. In my world, the only author whose name is a synonym for genius is Terry Pratchett.

Jim Winter

Let's see. I married my wife because, at the time, I was a Trekkie. I also liked Lord of the Rings a lot, enough so that her repeated viewings of the 17-hour extended versions of each movie did little to dampen my appreciation for it.

That said, if I'd only started reading Spenser in the 10th grade, along with Estleman and Valin, I could have dated several of these women who wanted trendy, dramatic relationships.

But I don't have one of those. We don't fight. We're perfectly comfortable being separated. We're not jealous of each other. Hmm... If I'm ever single again, remind me to make sure I don't date any women who read chick lit. Or anything I write.

Gerald

Rebecca, I guess I'm a bit of both. Other favorite classics include Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, Prometheus Bound, and that great granddad of detective fiction, Oedipus Rex.

I'm also a Trek and Star Wars (Eps. 4-6) fan, but have never dressed the parts, nor read the spinoff books.

The best of all possible worlds? Those episodes where Picard played 1940s PI Dixon Hill, and the one where he played Robin Hood to Q's Sheriff of Nottingham.

And I have to mention the episode of "Quantum Leap" where Sam plays an understudy in a Syracuse production of Man of La Mancha.

Donna

Now, had you posted this yesterday Sarah, I might have said "Actually, I wouldn't mind what anyone was reading, it's nice to see people reading any book", but today, I'm not so sure. I think the man sitting next to me on the bus on the way home should have read this article in the Record. Then he might have thought twice about his reading material. I always check out what people are reading (not with the intention of chatting them up, I hasten to add). So I took a sneaky look at the title of his book "Inside the Mind of The Serial Killer". It wouldn't have been so bad, but his lips were moving as he read it. I might have imagined the outline of the carving knife in his jacket pocket, but he was definitely creepy. So I think true crime and The Racing Post would be the only things that would make me think twice :o) Or something really dull like The Financial Times. Or "How to Cure yourself of Syphilis". Or "The Autopsy - A Scratch and Sniff Book"...

And Rebecca, i will keep my eyes open. In the meantime: "Stuffing a stiff, gives me a lift, it's thrilling, exciting, quite simply, it makes my skin go goose pimply..."

Tata,

Donna

Sarah

Donna, what is up with the 62 bus? Freaks everywhere. Although that guy reminds me of the time, early in my Partners & Crime days, when a guy walked in and asked if there were any how-to guides about being a hitman. I politely said he should look elsewhere and hoped he would leave, fast. Luckily, he did.

John, those lines are bloody awful. Although come to think of it, every time my forensic background comes up, guys either get a) ridiculously interested or b) look very confused, so maybe with a little modification...

And as for Don Quixote, it is a wonderful piece of fiction. And so too is its more contemporary cousin, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, which has one of the most bizarre and funniest relationships ever described in fiction.

John Rickards

Sarah said: "John, those lines are bloody awful. Although come to think of it, every time my forensic background comes up, guys either get a) ridiculously interested or b) look very confused, so maybe with a little modification..."

I thank you. :-D

Although now I've had longer to think about it, it's possible to scale the heights of cheese with 'lines inspired by crime fiction'.

"Are you one of those cops who hunts down escaped felons? 'Cos you've sure captured my heart..."

"I'm investigating a mystery. I'm trying to deduce how come you and I aren't together..."

I'm still trying to come up with one that has "murder" in it somewhere.


...


Hmm...

Looking at those, it's probably for the best that I'm not in the habit of asking out every girl I meet*. The combination of the black eyes I'd receive and people vomiting over me would get tiring very quickly...

;-)

* And in my defence, in reality I wouldn't touch chat up lines with a ten-foot pole. Honest. With quality like that, can you blame me?

Arcane Gazebo

Not terribly surprising--I suspect that the Comic Book Guy type was in the minds of more than a few of those respondents who were put off by sci-fi. The CBGs are a small minority, but they give the genre a bad reputation...

If I have any literary turn-offs they're mostly limited to the LEFT BEHIND series, which is fortunately not very popular among Berkeley women.

Jim Winter

LEFT BEHIND not popular? You mean you don't find the idea of a male model being the Antichrist and monumentally oblivious to everything happening around him (despite being the omnipotent son of the Devil) intriguing?

Ah, screw it. Randall Flag was a way cooler incarnation of evil. I mean he quoted the Rolling Stones and took over Vegas in THE STAND. Now that was Armageddon done right.

John Rickards

Well, it's late, and I'm tired, but I figure one last batch of crime chat up lines and then I really will stop and seek professional help... :-)

"I'm here to help you avoid a murder charge. 'Cos if I can't be with you, I might just die of a broken heart..."

"I've gotta admit, I'm a thief. And I'm hoping to steal a kiss..."

"I'm looking for a partner to commit a crime of passion, and you're perfect for the job..."

"I'm studying the science of predictive forensics, and I predict in a few minutes' time my fingerprints are going to be all over you..."


Enough, enough. Very definitely. :-)

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