Best of 2011, Update 2

Hard as it is for me to believe, the year is already more than one-quarter done so this seems like a good time to update my rankings.  As of today, I've read 24 fiction titles and 10 nonfiction ones - despite my good intentions, the nonfiction titles are coming slow for me again this year.


The best ten fiction books to this point, ranked in order, are these:

1. The Glass Rainbow - James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux series)

2. Dead Man's Walk - Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove series)

3. Nemesis - Philip Roth (novel)

4. Autumn of the Phantoms - Yasmina Khadra (Algerian detective fiction)

5. Standing at the Crossroads - Charles Davis (British novel)

6. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe (classic British novel)

7. To the End of the Land - David Grossman (literary novel from Israel)

8. Resolution - Denise Mina (crime fiction from Scotland)

9. Bad Intentions - Karin Fossum (crime fiction from Norway)

10. The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson - (British novel)

Even though I've only read 10 nonfiction titles so far, I will go ahead and rank them:

1. Wolf: The Lives of Jack London - James L. Haley (biography)

2. Hitch 22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens (memoir)

3. Chinaberry Sidewalks - Rodney Crowell (memoir)

4. We Were Not Orphans - Sherry Matthews (memoirs from a Texas home for neglected children)

5. Lincoln's Men - William C. Davis (Civil War history)

6. The Siege of Washington - John and Charles Lockwood (Civil War history)

7. A Widow's Story - Joyce Carol Oates (memoir)

8. Look Away Dixieland - James B. Twitchell (Civil War History)

9. Scorecasting - Tobias J. Moskowitz, Jon Wortheim (sports)

10.Heart of the City - Ariel Sabar (sociology)

I found last year that making this a "live" list results in a more meaningful (more accurate) list than I've come up with in previous years when I've waited until late December to start the process, so I'll be doing an update once a month or so.

The Renegades

Author T. Jefferson Parker has a theory that outlaws, in the spirit of the old American West, still exist. Parker, in fact, not only contends that outlaws still exist - his theory includes the belief that, just as in gunslinger days, many of today’s most notorious outlaws spend some portion of their lives working as law enforcement officers. In The Renegades, his follow-up to L.A. Outlaws, Parker tells the story of two modern day outlaws, both of whom just happen to be Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs.

Deputy Charlie Hood is one of the good guys. He is somewhat of a loner who prefers to ride the roads at night, even in his off-time, as he grows accustomed to his recent assignment to the county’s Antelope Valley. Charlie would, in fact, be just as happy never to be assigned a partner, but he soon finds himself working with Terry Laws, a man known to his fellow deputies as “Mr. Wonderful.” After Mr. Wonderful is assassinated while he and Charlie are on a routine call, Charlie accepts a transfer to Internal Affairs so that he can get to the bottom of the murder. Perhaps, he thinks, Mr. Wonderful was not really so wonderful after all.

Getting to the truth about his partner’s murder will not be easy – or safe. In the process of figuring out what Mr. Wonderful was up to, Charlie will make some ruthless men on both sides of the border nervous enough to want him dead. And they will do their best to make exactly that happen.

There is a good deal of dramatic action in The Renegades, but Parker has chosen to tell his story in a straightforward manner that offers few real surprises. Once the main characters have been fleshed-out in the minds of readers - and the plotline set in full motion - their ultimate fates are too easily predictable. Part of the fun in reading a police thriller of this type is trying to guess what will happen next as the hero gets into deeper and deeper trouble. Surprisingly, however, that fun is somewhat lessened when, as in this case, the reader always guesses correctly.

The nine-CD audio book version of The Renegades is read to good effect by David Colacci, a man whose voice is likely to sound very familiar to fans of audio books. Colacci’s differentiation of tone, accent, and cadence make the numerous characters relatively easy to follow despite the book’s frequent changes between first and third person perspectives. Not having read L.A. Outlaws, I am uncertain of how wise it is to read this sequel first. Jefferson does make an effort to repeat the key points from the first book to help his readers understand just how Charlie Hood turned into the man he is today, but it is very possible that readers with more background will experience The Renegades very differently than readers coming to it cold.

Rated at: 3.5

Lots of Books, Lots of Numbers

I love LibraryThing - no big surprise there, I'm sure, for most of you, and I'm willing to bet that many of you feel the same way.  (Those of you who are unfamiliar with the site might want to go here. I've been a member there since July 2006 and I can't recommend it enough.)  What makes the site so much fun for me is the way that it blends two of my passions: books and statistics.  My love of books is probably obvious by now.  What might be less obvious, is how much pleasure I take in studying statistics, rankings, lists, and the like.

LibraryThing makes that easy to do.  For instance this is what I learned today in about five minutes of looking at the numbers there:

There are 1,315,207 members, as of this moment. 

Between them, the members have catalogued some 61,322,658 books. That's an average of just under 47 books per user. 

Of those 61 million books, 6,004,201 of them are unique titles. 

Those same members have written a total of 476,510 book reviews and posted them to the site.

Those are the raw numbers. What really intrigues me, is the detail behind some of those numbers.

The Top 10 Most Collected Authors are: 

J.K. Rowling - 397,655 books
Stephen King - 281,299 books
Terry Pratchett - 234,221 books
J.R.R. Tolkien - 189,282 books
Neil Gaiman - 178,120 books
C.S. Lewis - 174,157 books
William Shakespeare - 150,435 books
Nora Roberts - 135,337 books
Jane Austen - 128,463 books
Agatha Christie - 126,783 books

While I'm not surprised by most of the names on the list, I do find it a bit strange to see Nora Roberts bracketed by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It is, indeed, a strange old world in which we live.

One other tidbit worth sharing today: of the Top 10 books most collected, numbers 1-7 are the Harry Potter novels, followed by The Da Vinci Code, The Hobbit, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yes, we as a group, have one heck of a split personality - if not much taste.

Bad Intentions

Bad Intentions is the seventh crime novel in Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series.  I cannot claim to have read all seven of the novels, but the three I have read so far certainly encourage me to seek out the rest of the series.  The books, all of which are set in Norway, are psychological crime novels in which character development and motivation are every bit as important as plot and action.  Those enjoying this type of crime fiction will do well to seek out the work of Karin Fossum.

Alex, Reilly and Jon have been a trio since they were youngsters.  Now that they are young men, Jon is so troubled that he has been confined to a mental health facility for treatment.  Alex and Reilly, hoping to ease their friend’s mind, get permission to bring him with them for a weekend’s outing on remote Dead Water Lake.  When tragedy strikes in the middle of the night, and one of the boys drowns in the lake, the other two wait until morning to report the accident. 

Inspector Sejer, filtering the story about their friend’s supposed suicide through his years of experience, senses that something is wrong.  Things do not quite add up, but there is little he can do to disprove what Alex and Reilly insist happened that night – until the body of another teen associated with Alex, Reilly and Jon floats to the surface.

As Sejer and his assistant, Jacob Skarre, begin to tighten the screws on Alex and Reilly, their best hope is that one of the two will crack long enough to reveal what really happened to the two dead men.  Meanwhile, Fossum carries the reader deep into the minds of several secondary characters that have an interest in the outcome of Sejer’s investigation.

The mothers of the two victims form an unlikely friendship, based at first on nothing but their shared mourning, that surprises both of them with its intensity.  The women see their sons as innocent victims of a world gone mad – but only one of them is right about the innocent part.  Both of them, however, are determined to learn the truth about their sons’ last hours.

Karin Fossum

At the heart of the story is the relationship of Alex and Reilly, a relationship poisoned forever by the loss of Jon.  Alex has always called the shots with Reilly and Jon, and he will tolerate no resistance from Reilly now, just when the wrong move can send both of them to prison for the rest of their lives.  What really happened on the most important two nights in the lives of four young men is slowly revealed as Fossum allows Alex and Reilly to reveal themselves layer by layer. 

Karin Fossum writes rather sparingly (the book is less than 200 pages in length) but she creates such memorable characters, on both sides of the crime equation, that her novels remain with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Weekend Random Thoughts and Happenings

Bonobo Ape

Another weekend, this time a three-day one, has flown by and I'm trying to prepare myself mentally to return to the work-week grind before daybreak tomorrow morning.  It seems more and more often that I approach a weekend with big plans and end it with a bit of a confused whimper because so few of my big plans ever get tackled.

I did manage to get in a good bit of reading- finishing Gringos (Charles Portis) and reading over half of Ape House (Sara Gruen).  The first problem with this weekend's reading is that I found Gringos to be a major disappointment considering how much I enjoyed reading his True Grit a few days ago.  There has been so much hype about the re-release of the man's older novels that I couldn't wait to get my hands on one of them.  Maybe they were out-of-print for a reason?

The second problem with my weekend reading is that I'm finding it hard to believe that the same woman who wrote Water for Elephants wrote Ape House.  This new one started off strongly and I was hooked by the book's first dozen pages; then, it turned into a Romance Novel and the apes became minor, almost forgotten, characters.  Now, some 220 pages into the book, the apes are starting to take center stage again as "stars" of their own reality TV show.  Really, Sara?

Major distractions this weekend included a Saturday morning garage sale at my daughter's house in which she and my granddaughter netted all of $150 in sales.  Those things are always fun (to me, anyway) but it was hot and muggy and everyone involved, including the customers, seemed kind of sluggish.  It was so slow at times that I sneaked in some reading of Ape House while waiting for the next customers to drive or walk up.  Thank goodness I remembered to put my iPad in the car before I drove to my daughter's - my library copy of Ape House resting comfortably on the gadget.

The other major distraction is, of course, the start of baseball season - not that Houstonians will have anything much to cheer about this season, or most likely the next four or five.  Astros fans are enduring a complete rebuild of the team.  It is so bad that my most ambitious hope for the team this year is that it not humiliate itself by losing 100 games.  The Phillies made the Astros look like the Triple A team it really is, defeating us: 5-4, 9-4, and 7-2.  I'm trying to convince myself that I can still enjoy the season by admiring the skills on the opposing teams; after all, the pressure is off Astros fans for the foreseeable future.  Right?  Yeah, sure.

Fortunes of War

Fortunes of War is one of those “what-if” books that will make the reader wish its premise really could happen.  What if it were possible to identify a “power cycle” pattern that can accurately predict when a country’s political corruption is close to reaching the point where regional or world war will become inevitable?  What if a new watchdog organization could recognize those responsible for this level of corruption soon enough to disrupt it all before another war breaks out?

Fortunately, six Berkley students have done just that.  Unfortunately, by the time they announce their findings to the world in June 1938, it is too late to stop the group of greedy German industrialists that is making Adolph Hitler’s aggression possible.  The students, however, might still have time to do the next best thing because, now that the war is going poorly for the Germans, these same amoral businessmen want desperately to move their fortunes out of Germany and into Swiss banks.  Recognizing their opportunity, the Six Sentinels step in with a plan to make sure that these fortunes will never lead the world to war again.

The Sentinels are a varied group, but they have more in common than just their graduate studies at Berkley.  Each of them comes from one of the world’s most powerful and influential families: Mike Stone’s father is head of a huge New York bank; Cecelia Chang is the daughter of one of Hong Kong’s most influential traders; Jacques Roth is heir to the fabulous Roth banking fortune; Claudine Demauraux is the daughter of a powerful Swiss banker; Tony Garibaldi springs from one of Italy’s major wine producing families; and Ian Meyer is the son of the founder of one of London’s major auction houses.  A group like this one brings major weapons to any battle, but whether or not the six are a match for the Germans who are so determined to kill them is another question.

Like most thrillers, Fortunes of War requires the reader to cut its author a little slack.  There are moments when the close calls and near misses begin to get a little predictable but, if one is willing to suspend disbelief for its duration, Fortunes of War can be great fun.  Throw in a little romance (some might say, a lot of romance) along the way, and this one has something for everyone.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)