20. Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust*

My friend Adam Sugerman's father, Arthur Sugerman, passed away about a year and a half ago.  Earlier this summer Adam went to Princeton to help pack up his belongings and he came across a collection of science fiction and mystery novels that he kindly decided to send up to me.  Many of the books that I will be reading during the remainder of the year will be from this collection, this is the first of those books, this and future books will be marked with an asterisk to show their source.

This book is a classic disaster story about a tourist sight seeing ship on the moon that gets buried as a result of an earthquake and subsequent avalanche.  The majority of the story is about what takes place after the earthquake on the ship, among the moon's bureaucrats, among the scientists who are trying to figure out where the ship is located and among the reporters who are going to great lengths to secure special access to the rescuers and the scene of the rescue.

Arthur C. Clarke always puts forward very polished and well thought out science fiction.  I am always struck by his attention to detail and sometimes struck by how accurately he depicts the future (the book was published in 1963 and is set in the mid-twenty first century).  Having said that I found this book to be a little like Chriton's Andromeda Strain where the story and suspense are almost too polished and where the author builds a great platform but then fails to capitalize on the story.  Clarke begins the story by describing the voyage of the ship and alluding to an event that will happen that is going to change the world/moon for ever.  When I was reading this I was getting really psyched because I thought that the moon was going to blow up or some cataclysmic event of that magnitude was going to occur.  I was a little disappointed that it turned out to be just a traditional disaster-rescue story.  This book is well written, it feels more like a good paperback that one should take on vacation.

19. Georges Simenon, The Bar on the Seine

This Maigret novel is about how the renowned detective solves a double murder committed by one of the members of a group of happy go lucky weekenders who make a bar on the Seine just outside Paris their local haunt.  It is a great exploration of how the lives of seemingly clean cut Parisian professionals becomes very dark just under the surface.

18. Brian Aldiss, Hothouse

This book is set six millennia in the future when, because the sun has begun to go super nova and its solar radiation has increased, vegetation has climbed to the top of the life form hierarchy.  The ascendancy of the vegetable world began with a battle amongst the trees which began to grow very quickly because of the increased heat.  Ultimately the Banyan tree won and a single enormous Banyan tree now covers the entire sunny side of the planet.  Different kinds of mostly predatory vegetable life forms live on different levels of the Banyan tree.

As the solar radiation was increasing human skulls began to shrink and then human bodies themselves began to shrink too.  It was actually discovered that humans were comprised of the humans themselves and morel mushrooms which acted as the humans' brains and the increased radiation killed the morel mushrooms which resulted in the changes to the human form.  Consequently, in this world humans are no more than a few inches tall and are dumb as doors.

This book is the story of a particular tribe of humans which is forced to split up and the journey of the members of the tribe after the split.  A group of them end up on the moon and prepare for an attack on the earth, another group faces attacks from all kinds of predatory creatures, and the final group adventures all around the earth after some of them have been occupied by morel mushrooms.

The book uses the cover of an almost childish theme to discuss some fairly sophisticated ideas.  The tenuous ascendancy of humans is obviously front and center, however, the author deals with the violent tendencies of the morel mushrooms and the implications of gender reversal as women take on a very different role in this world than men.  This is a very imaginative piece of science fiction which is well worth a read even though it is not as fast paced as one would like it to be.

17. Jack London, The Iron Heel

Jack London's forays into science fiction are subtle, tastefully written stories that almost present themselves as rather boring slow moving affairs.  But after I have read them I have looked back on them and realized how excellent they are.  The Iron Heel is a manuscript written by Avis Everhard (you have to excuse the porn star name) describing the socialist revolutionary movement in North America between about 1912 and 1920.  The manuscript had been hidden in a great oak tree and was found some 700 years later.

The story begins by tracing the early years of Ernest Everhard (Avis' soon to be husband) as a revolutionary thinker preaching socialism in the Bay Area around 1912.  Ernest's preaching gains greater momentum and is joined by a network of national and international socialists all of whom want to overthrow the current capitalist regimes in their respective countries.  The European socialists achieve the earliest success by staging a global general strike which overthrows the German monarchy and prevents a war with the United States (presumably World War I).

The North American socialists, however, meet with far less success.  In the United States the all powerful trusts (big monopolist corporations) form a powerful oligarchy that ends up taking over the Canadian, US, Mexican and Cuban governments.  This oligarchy is the Iron Heel which stamps out the labor movement and engages in a prolonged cold and hot war with the socialists.  Once the Iron Heel has firmly put itself in power it raises a mercenary army to fight the socialists who engage in a number of all out revolts to try to overthrow the Oligarchy.  The introduction, written by the person who found the manuscript, suggests that the socialists are eventually successful but not until they have tried four or five times and have been rebuffed each time.

The narrative is initially rather polemical but is graphic when it turns to describing the great socialist prison break, the stamping out of the Grange party and the labor movement and the first revolution known as the Chicago Commune.

16. Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music

This book was recommended to me by my friend Adam Sugerman.  The story takes place in a freaky interpretation of the near future when everyone is taking government approved drugs, when genetic experiments have sprinkled the human population with evolved animals who walk on their hind legs and speak English and freaky 'baby heads' who have failed to grow physically but have grown mentally, and when the government dispenses the news primarily in musical form as opposed to spoken word.

The story centers around the murder of a prominent physician, the Office's (that's the name of the central bureaucracy) corrupt and ham-fisted solution to the case, and one hard boiled private investigator's search for the truth of the matter.  The book is filled with unexpected twists and turns and even a deftly written love story sub-plot.  I found the hard boiled writing style, a la Raymond Chandler, a little contrived and slightly annoying but it did not over power the quality of the rest of the book.  I would highly recommend this book.

15. Graham Greene, No Man's Land

This is a recently uncovered Graham Greene story about a British spy who crosses into the Russian controlled zone of Germany to complete a mission.  Once he crosses the border he discovers a strange group of Catholic zealots who believe that the virgin mary appeared in a cave in the mountains.  Upon visiting the cave he falls in love with a beautiful woman and discovers that she works in his captor's jail.  This is a great old cold war spy story.

14. Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year

This story takes place in and around the year 2055 when the world is allied with the heartless people of Lilistar in an all out inter-planetary war against the reegs.  The world's capital is located in Cheyenne, WY and the world's leader, the UN Secretary, is a guy who goes by the nickname the Mole.  The story follows the lives of Virgil Ackerman, the vein older wartime profiteer;  Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, the kind man and the shrill woman caught in a loveless marriage;  and the Mole, the calculating but misunderstood good leader of the world.

The Lilstar spies who have posted themselves throughout the world begin to introduce a potent drug, intended to be a weapon to be used against the reegs, called JJ-180 to selected humans.  Kathy is one of their victims.  Once taken, the drug transports the user either backwards, forwards or laterally in time and, after the high is over, unless the user takes another dose it slowly shuts down the user's liver until he dies.  In this way it is instantaneously addictive.  Kathy takes the drug one night and is blackmailed to join her husband, who by now has become one of the surgeons taking care of the Mole, in order to spy on both her husband and the Mole.

Desperate to feed her habit, Kathy shows up in Cheyenne and drops a JJ-180 pill in her husband's water and gets him addicted to the drug.  He then secures a supply of the drug for Kathy and returns her to the west coast and then sets off to find the antidote for the drug by taking the drug, traveling into the future and buying the cure.  In the mean time he discovers that the Mole has been prolonging his rule over the people by traveling laterally in time using JJ-180 and bringing other Moles back with him to replace him each time he dies in the current time line.

The story is made more complex by both Eric's search for a peaceful end to the war as he bounces back and forth in time and the Mole's complex strategy of staying in power using his counterparts from other time lines.

In this short book Philip K. Dick weaves a futuristic war time political thriller and a psychological drama together with a group of diverse and eccentric characters into one coherent story line.  Then he adds a lot of depth to all of the characters, even the minor ones, by, for example, giving them telepathic or pre-cognitive skills.  It is this complex weave which makes this one of the better PKD stories that I have read.  I urge you to pick it up as soon as you can.

13. Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

A&E recently aired a made for TV remake of the Andromeda Strain that was broadcast over two nights.  My wife, who is not a fan of science fiction, really enjoyed the first night of the series - she missed the second night - which is why I decided to pick up this book.  I got an old 1969 edition of the book in pretty good condition along with tear out advertising in the middle, anyone want a 20 week subscription to Time magazine for $2.67?

This is a mass market science fiction story with a happy ending.  A secret experimental satellite lands in a small town in Arizona and when the town doctor opens up the casing all but two of the town's residents die.  The overseers of the program send their team in to find the satellite and the team is also instantaneously killed when they open their van's doors in the town's main street.  The leader of the program decides to activate Wildfire, a secret government contingency plan designed to try to deal with extraterrestrial bacteria that are brought back to earth.

The Wildfire team assembles in a secret underground lab and tries to first identify and then cure the bacteria that killed the residents of Piedmont.  They go through the usual steps to do this and then they discover that the bacteria first mutates into something that destroys plastic and then mutates into something entirely benign.  There are some obvious tense moments in the Wildfire lab with potential breaches of seals letting the disease out through the lab and things like that.

The book has an awesome premise, it is amazingly well researched and Crichton's prose is fluid and easy to follow but it is a mass market story and it epitomizes why I tend to stay away from authors like Crichton:  they take an idea that has so much potential and then they dumb it down to the point that it is entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying.

Padding My Stats

Every night around 8 I sit down with my young daughter and read her a story.  Sometimes I read a few pages from the book that I am reading and other times I read stories about Grufallos, naughty mice or some other appropriate theme.  I want to know if I can count these books as part of my reading for 2008 because with these books I would be reading fifty books per month!

12. Georges Simenon, Tropic Moon

This is another one of Georges Simenon's roman durs.  It is the story of a young Frenchman, Timar, from La Rochelle who uses his politically well placed uncle's connections to get a job at a French company's colonial outpost in Gabon.  When he gets there to report for duty he finds that the only launch that can take him to his post in the interior is broken and, even if it worked, the guy who is currently in the post refuses to leave and has threatened to shoot anyone who tries to come and replace him.  With that plan on the shelf for now he checks into a local ex-pat hotel run by the beautiful Adele and her husband.  One morning Adele comes to him in his room and starts a tormented love affair that eventually drives him insane.

After their first morning together Adele withholds her tenderness which makes him increasingly wanting and insecure.  He wears his emotions on his sleeve and becomes the butt of the jokes of the more rugged ex-pat loggers who live in the hotel.  One night Adele's husband succumbs to an indigenous virus and dies the next day.  On the same day the police chief calls Timar in to question him about the shooting of a native which has caused a lot of tension among the native population.  Shortly after Adele's husband's death, the two recommence their love affair in a more bona fide manner and Adele, manipulative temptress that she is, convinces him to buy a logging concession in the interior.  After getting themselves organized the two of them set off for the interior.

Things go poorly from the start.  They first stop at a small native village and Adele mysteriously heads into one of the huts and comes out fifteen minutes later but refuses to say what she was doing in there.  This begins to drive Timar crazy which, compounded with the infection that he has picked up, makes him attack the boat's captain as they are pulling into their concession's dock.  Timar spends the next few days with a high fever, hearing things and behaving erratically towards Adele.  In these three days he figures out that Adele was the person who killed the native man in the city and that she hid the murder weapon in the hut that she went into on their way up here.  Before he is fully recovered, Adele is called back to the city to appear as a witness in the framed person's trial.  On hearing this, Timar canoes back to the city partially because he cannot bear to be without her and partially because he wants to tell the truth.

He shows up at the trial and after hours of testimony he screams that Adele is the real culprit and not the poor black man who's on trial.  Adele ends up in jail, though it's not entirely clear as the book leaves a lot to the reader's imagination at this point, and he ends up on a steamer back to France having gone insane and muttering "it isn't real," over and over again as he walks up and down the ship.

This is a murder story that is tightly tied up with a tortured love story.  It is excellent.

11. Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

This book is so much better than the movie!  Where the movie is a superficial, pleasant, happy ending show this is a dark, angry, sad ending book.  The book is set after the end of a war, maybe a nuclear war though the author never says so.  The chemical weapons used in the war have released some kind of germ which turns people into vampires.  Because of the nuclear winter-like dust storms the germs are quickly transported throughout the world and they turn almost everyone into vampires except Robert Neville.

After his wife and daughter turn into vampires, Neville turns into a hermit drunk spending most days drinking from the morning till the night until he starts doing research on the germ which becomes an all consuming project for him.  He is joyous one day when he finds a dog that hasn't turned into a vampire already but he crashes a few nights later when the dog returns as a vampire.  At the same time as he is trying to find a cure for the vampire germ the vampires themselves are evolving and the story hits its climax over a physical and emotional battle between Neville and the advanced vampires.

This is nicely told but short story.

10. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

To my surprise I never read this rite of passage book when all my friends were reading it in high school.  What a great and sad story.  I am sure that my paltry audience of three or four has read this book so I won't bother summarizing the story for you.  The ending didn't come as a surprise, you knew that the bitch nurse was going to lobotomize him from about halfway through the book, but it still left me saddened that the tortured good guy lost his life.

We all have a lot of unread books on our shelves but this strikes me as one of those books that is worth re-reading.

9. Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad

Pulling out the big guns for the ninth book of the year!  I don't remember where I heard about this book, it could have been a book review somewhere, it caught my eye because it is the story of a tough Chechen fighter's interaction with his Russian adversaries.

Hadji Murad is the tough fighter and his former superior, Shamil, feeling threatened by Murad's courage and success has taken Murad's family hostage and has sent Murad into exile.  Murad turns to the Russians and gives himself up with the promise to fight on their behalf as long as the Russians give him his personal Cossack guard.  The Russians agree and Murad returns to Chechnya to fight Shamil.

This passage from the book could apply today just as well as it did 100 years ago:

No one spoke of hatred of the Russians.  The feeling experience by all Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate.  It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them - like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves - was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.

8. Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

This is a book of short stories published after KV's death.  Most of them are stories about the goings on in POW camps towards the end of WWII, others are about the havoc that followed the allied victory and there are a couple of other random ones about different subjects.

The stories are all quite sarcastic in the traditional KV style.  I particularly enjoyed the title story which is about an institute that is set up on Oklahoma to proove that people are crazy because they are possessed by the devil.  The institute is backed by a rich oil magnate who pours his entire wealth into the thing and the "scientists" there conduct experiments - and one large scale clinical trial - with devices that are supposed to rid the body of the devil.  One device is a headset that shoots a low intensity current between the person's ears.

There is some controversy about how finished these stories actually were when they were found and how much work the author's son, Mark, put into finishing them.

7. John Christopher, The World in Winter

This is a PA love story (better reviewed by the Mount Benson Report and Olman's 50).  A sudden reduction in solar radiation results in a significant cooling of the northern hemisphere and the emergence of a new ice age.  The story centers around Andrew, David and their wives.  Andrew produces a television show and David is a mid-level civil servant.  They are introduced to one another at a cocktail party.  Andrew's wife subsequently leaves him for David and David's timid wife begins a loving relationship with Andrew even though it lacks intimacy.

As the weather gets colder, critical supplies begin to dwindle and violence increases.  The government gives up most of the country and establishes "green zones" around key cities leaving most of the population outside the zones to fend for themselves.  Carol, Andrew's ex-wife, leaves with their children and moves to Nigeria and soon afterwards Andrew and David's ex-wife move to Nigeria as well on the promise that David will follow them soon.  There is subtle social commentary throughout the book focused on racism in the west, this commentary is magnified when the elite white's move to Nigeria and find that they are the underclass and are forced into doing menial low paying jobs for their black task masters.

In Nigeria, after a dark false start, Andrew manages to land another television production job and begins to lead a good life for himself and David's ex.  At the same time his ex-wife becomes a live in prostitute for a wealthy Nigerian business man.  The Nigerian authorities concoct a plan to invade England and Andrew joins the mission and returns to London where he finds David's ex-wife who had left Andrew and moved back to England in order to be with David.

I have not described the soap opera aspects of this book in as much detail as I could but I think that you catch the drift.  It's a good book and a quick read.

6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

In a word this book is gruesome, for example:

Two thick ropes of blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire.  The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree.  They were skewered through the cords of their heels with the sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and their brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.  Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.

Blood Meridian is the story of the wild west in the 1870s as told through the eyes of a 24 year old always referred to as the kid.  The kid joins up with a division of the army who doesn't want to give up fighting the Apaches even though the American-Mexican war is officially over.  The division wanders down into a valley and is promptly slaughtered by the Apaches.  The kid gets away and joins a band of protection for hire thugs who provide protection to, at this time, Mexican villages and towns and are paid by the number of scalps that they bring in.  The band does reasonably well, if you can call it that, indiscriminately killing whomever crosses their path - Apaches or otherwise - however, it meets its end when one day it is attacked by the Yumas.

As with his other books the writing is so light and fluid that one does not ever feel absorbed by the book.  Nevertheless, it is a great story that is well put together and nicely told.

5. Barbara Smit, Sneaker Wars

The subtitle - the enemy brothers who founded adidas and puma and the family feud that forever changed the business of sport - says a lot about what the book's about.  Adi (short for Adolf) and Rudi (short for Rudolf) Dasler founded a shoe company in the town of Herzegonaurach in what became West Germany.  At first the outfit can best be described as a cobbler's shop where Adi made custom sports shoes and Rudi went out team to team and tried to sell the shoes.  As the business grew the brothers and their wives began to feud until shortly after WWII they decided to split the company into two.  Adi came away with the manufacturing side of the business and Rudi came away with the sales side of the business.  Adi named his company Adidas (short for Adi Dasler).  Rudi was going to name his company Rudas (short for Rudi Dasler) but felt that the name was unwieldy and changed it to Puma instead.

The book recounts the early years of the sports shoe and apparel business, the competition between the two brothers' companies, the emergence of Nike and later Reebok, the decline of both Adidas and Puma and the re-emergence of both companies in their current form.  The most interesting part of the story takes place in the earlier years:  the fight between the two brothers and the transformation of the sports business from an 'amateur' enterprise to the big money business that it is today.  After that the book is not so interesting.

4. Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Underwater

I've lost track where this book falls in the Ripley series but I think that it falls immediately after Ripley's Game.  In this story two inquisitive Americans move into Ripley's suburban village and start making uncomfortably invasive inquiries about Ripley's life.  It later becomes clear that the Americans are on a mission to out Ripley.  I have to say that the suspense is a little more flat in this one and the ending is a little weaker.  Nevertheless it is an enjoyable book.

One, Two and Three

Cabeza de Vaca, The Shipwrecked Man

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver

Michael E. Porter, Competitive Analysis

The Shipwrecked Man was given to me by Kate and Jason and since I really enjoy reading about Spain's colonial adventures in Southern and Central America I quickly got into it.  Admittedly at 145 pages or so it was a quick read.  This is the story of a mission to explore Florida and Mexico gone horribly wrong.  Led by an incompetent Governor the explorers land somewhere in southern Florida, their group is divided and the ones that remain on land slowly die from various diseases.  One man, the narrator, survives the ordeal and recounts his point of view in this book.  "They perished one after the other.  The survivors sliced the dead for meat...."

Simenon is my new Dick Francis.  His Maigret novels are simple yet suspenseful.  This tells the story of Maigret's assignment in a rural French farming town where a beautiful young girl's boyfriend has been murdered.  I really can't say more without spoiling the story.

Porter is an Harvard Business School professor who specializes in the theory of competition.  His books, which date back to the 1970s, have formed the backbone of this field and he is widely renowned as a great business theorist.  As with many business books they are more common sense than anything else.  This one lays out a framework for analyzing your own company's competitive position and applying the framework to your industry as well as the competitors in your industry.  Once you have done that then you will be in a strong position to further analyze and change your competitive stance in a way that will increase your chance of success.  Anyone involved in business should read this.

I Am Back!

I took a long break from reading and blogging.  I was just getting bored of it all and couldn't find anything to keep me motivated.  Then, earlier this year, I picked up a Patricia Highsmith book.  I chose it because the Ripley series are always an easy and entertaining read and are good to get you back in the game.  It did the trick.  I ploughed through it.  Then I turned to a Maigret mystery for the same reason and I killed it and now I am onto a couple of new books that I am enjoying.  I will blog about all of these in the next few days.  Right now, you should just be happy that I am back.