Never Let Me Go

Where to begin with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go?  Is this 2005 book to be considered a literary coming-of-age novel or one that falls within the confines of genre fiction?  And if we settle on genre fiction as its most suitable home, exactly which genre are we going to tag it with: science fiction, dystopian science fiction, horror?  Whatever we end up calling it, Never Let Me Go most certainly was a huge success for its author, even to being shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award.  Then in 2010 it was turned into a major motion picture with particular appeal, I suppose, to the young adult audience.

The book centers around three main characters that have literally known one another for their entire lives: Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth.  As the story begins, Kathy, the narrator, is telling about her role as carer to several donors who are at various stages in the process of making the four donations they expect to make during their lifetimes.  During this early part of her story, Kathy expands neither on her duties as carer nor on the nature of the donations being made by those for whom she looks after. 

Kathy has been a carer for almost twelve years now, an extraordinarily long time for someone in that role, and she is finally becoming so bored with the job that she looks forward to being relieved of it when she completes her twelfth year as a carer.   She is so good at what she does, that authorities have taken to allowing Kathy to choose which donors she wants to work with, a privilege that marks her as special to everyone who hears of it.  While this has given Kathy some relief from the boredom she must deal with, it also results in her spending all her free time speculating about what happened at Hailsham, the boarding school she, Tommy, and Ruth grew up in. 

Kazuo Ishiguro

Hailsham, you see, is no ordinary boarding school.  The instructors there are known as guardians rather than as teachers, and in addition to the regular classes, there is a very strong emphasis on art and keeping oneself healthy at all times.  The students, who all leave Hailsham during the year they turn sixteen, come to know each other extremely well over the years as they learn bit-by-bit what they are and what is expected of them.  Surprisingly, despite what they learn about their limited futures, the guardians do such a thorough job of acclimation to the concept that every single student is ready and willing to play his/her assigned role.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s approach to Never Let Me Go is not one in which he explores the ethics of human cloning or the morality of a society that would take this approach to extend the life expectancies of those who can afford to purchase replacement organs for themselves.  Rather, the author is more interested in the clones themselves and how easily they can be convinced to accept their fates.  His focus is on the humanness of Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, and by having his readers watch these young people achieve maturity, he hammers that point home.  Never Let Me Go leaves its readers with a lot to contemplate – especially if they are willing to fill in a few of the blanks themselves.

The Crossing

Harry Bosch has a lot of time on his hands these days, and now he’s getting bored.  That is not a good combination for Bosh – and it’s especially not a good one for the bad guys out there, be they bad cops or the more common every day varieties of predators who might catch Bosh’s eye. 

It wasn’t Bosh’s idea to turn in his LAPD badge to spend his days rebuilding a vintage motorcycle, but what’s an old cop to do with his time after being forced out of the department on overblown charges stemming from a minor departmental rules violation?  Steamed as he is – and Harry has even filed a lawsuit against the department for wrongful termination – he never imagined that he might end up changing sides, working to prove the innocence of an almost certainly guilty murder suspect.  Doing that goes against every instinct Harry has about law enforcement, and it is such a repudiation of a cop’s purpose in life that he knows every policeman in the city will consider him a turncoat – and treat him like one.  He has done it to other retired cops, himself.  But when his half-brother, Mickey Haller (aka The Lincoln Lawyer), catches Harry in a weak moment, that is exactly what he agrees to do. 

Michael Connelly

More to shut Mickey up than for any other reason, Harry lets himself be talked into reviewing the case file pertaining to the vicious murder/rape Mickey’s client is charged with committing.  He figures that the case against the accused man is probably so solid that reviewing the file notes will allow him to turn down Mickey’s job offer in good faith.  But Harry still has the knack for yanking on loose thread ends to see what they lead to on the other end…and when he finds what appears to be just such a thread in the murder file, he can’t resist yanking on it.  Before he knows it, Harry is sucked into a one-man crime investigation calling for all his old skills and, not coincidentally, even a little help from inside the LAPD.  And if he’s lucky enough to survive, Harry is going to prove that he’s still one of the best investigators in Los Angeles – even if the LAPD brass don’t agree with him.

Not unexpectedly, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller make a good team, and fans of both characters are going to love The Crossing and hope it’s not the last time the pair works together.  For Harry, it seems there is life after the LAPD, a life every bit as rewarding and dangerous as the one he knew inside the department.  For Mickey, it’s a chance to show his brother that criminal defense lawyers are not always the bad guys despite what Harry’s lifetime of law enforcement instinct tells him. 

Harry and Mickey, opposites in so many ways, spend their lives working to achieve the same thing: justice.  And this time they just might find it.

Movies for Readers: Indignation

This weeks "Movie for Readers" is Indignation, based on the 2008 novel of the same name by Philip Roth.  The novel is set in 1951 and involves the main character's Korean War experience, but it is difficult to tell (especially from this trailer) just how closely the film follows the novel's plot.  The book focuses on the main character's sophomore year in college and it appears that the movie does the same. 

Hey, it's Philip Roth, and for fans of Philip Roth that's all we need to know.  It's a movie for adults...and those are getting harder and harder to find.




Indignation is scheduled for a July 29, 2016 release.

(Movies for Readers No. 25)

These Heroic, Happy Dead

Not all casualties of war happen on the battlefield – or even inside a war zone, for that matter.  Thousands occur long after soldiers return to what should be the safe havens of their homes and families.  It is only then that these young men and women finally succumb to the pressures they lived under for so many months while serving as repeated targets for Islamist extremists in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.  And when they finally crack, the results are tragic for them and everyone close to them.

Luke Mogelson, in his debut short story collection These Heroic, Happy Dead, offers ten stories about men and women who survived “the war” only to be undone by “the peace” to which they came home.  Each brought the worst of what they saw and did in the Middle East home with them, and each is paying a heavy price for having done so.  What makes the stories in the collection so effective is that they are presented first and foremost as character studies of people finding it near impossible to cope with the modern world.  They may be jobless, estranged from their wives and children, homeless, suicidal, victims of addictions, or prone to violent outbursts, but what they all have in common is that they are casualties of war.  Remarkably, however, the tone of Mogelson’s ten stories is not particularly anti-war, something that makes them all the more powerful.

The book’s overall tone is solidly set by its first story, “To the Lake,” in which two veterans, one a double-amputee, meet in the holding tank of a remote county jail.  Mentally and physically fragile as both men are, it still remains for the amputee to come to the rescue of his more able-bodied comrade.  But now it might be up to the rescued vet to save the life of the man who just bailed him out of jail. 

Luke Mogelson

Not all victims of war ever were soldiers.  Some of them are the parents of soldiers, some are the spouses of soldiers, and some are the children of soldiers – and Mogelson includes stories about them, too.  “Visitors” tells of a mother who drives long hours every Wednesday to visit her veteran son in prison  - where he’s paying the price for killing a man in a bar fight that happened just two months after he came home from what was supposed to be his real war.  “Sea Bass” is a boy’s account of how difficult his father found it to hold a job after returning from war, and what happened on the last day he ever saw him.   And in perhaps the most perplexing story of the entire collection, there is “Kids,” the story of a boy in Afghanistan who was either trying to steer an American patrol away from or toward a booby-trapped room.  Without a translator, no one could be certain, and whatever the boy intended, it could not have been what ended up actually happening.

These Heroic, Happy Dead is a remarkable short story compilation, and it marks Luke Mogelson as someone to watch for in future.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Are Big Books Worth the Reading Time They Take? Really?

Believe me, I'm reading as fast as I can.

I've been reading long enough now to understand that over a given period of time (say a week or two) I'm going to average the same old 40 pages an hour I always average.  Sure, there will be short periods during which I read at a higher rate, but they are always offset by times that I slow way down...so 40 pages per hour average, it is.

That got me to thinking about how many "chunksters," books of at least 500 pages in length, I want to work into my reading schedule these days.  I'm looking at a chunkster from one of my favorite authors right now, Elizabeth George, and feeling reluctant about beginning it even though it's the next volume in one of my favorite current detective series.  A Banquet of Consequences is some 573 pages long and that equates to approximately 14.5 hours of my reading time - reading time that might be better spent reading two books totaling 600 pages.

It's that "opportunity cost" of reading long books that has me limiting them more these days than ever before in my life. It seems that the older I get, the better I understand just how precious my remaining reading time is.  Do I waste those hours on bloated novels from the likes of Stephen King who never seems to know when to quit, or do I aim to read more books from more authors?  Do I toss aside books after 30 or 40 pages if they don't click with me or do I give them a little more time?  My 40-page rule has served me well for the last ten years or so, but maybe it's time to drop that number to 30.  

As for chunksters like A Banquet of Consequences, I'm sure that I'll still read some of them - but they are going to have to be books that are "important" to me (this one certainly qualifies), books that continue to nag at me until I do read them.  But I suspect there won't be all that many of them in my future.

Too many books, too many authors, too many translated titles from around the world, too many e-books at my finger tips, too many ARCs...man, I love my life right now.

Mr. Smith Goes to Prison

Jeff Smith messed up big-time.  He was a young man, who with a little more time in the Missouri state legislature behind him in 2009, would have likely been ready to make a run for a seat in Congress to represent his state.  Instead, here he was headed to Manchester FCI, a prison in rural Kentucky, convicted of lying to federal agents about a political dirty trick he pulled during his first (failed) run for political office.  For the next year and a day, Jeff Smith would be just like any other prison inmate trying to blend into the prison population well enough to survive his sentence with as little physical and mental damage as possible.

And it’s not like Smith didn’t stick out in prison like a sore thumb.  For starters, he was white and he was short, two physical attributes that put him at a distinct disadvantage in a prison predominately populated by blacks and Hispanics heavily into weightlifting and physical intimidation as a means of judging each other – and themselves.  Just as importantly, for almost all the other inmates, Manchester was what they hoped would be their final stop in a long line of prisons they had served time in for crimes a whole lot more serious than underhanded political trickery.  Prison has a language and a culture all its own, and for Smith it was like moving to a foreign country he knew nothing about.  One wrong word or gesture could lead to conflict before he even suspected he might have offended someone.  Everyone was a native in prison-land but him. 

In Mr. Smith Goes to Prison, Smith tells what it was like suddenly to be one of the people locked up instead of being one of those responsible for setting prison and sentencing policy in his home state.  He learned the hard way that seating for meals was divided along racial lines and that crossing over would not be tolerated; how to smuggle little extras out of the prison food warehouse (where he worked) that could be bartered for personal favors and protection; how not to signal inadvertently to some prison Romeo that he was sexually available; why weightlifting was the most important social activity in prison; and that prison officials saw him simply as a meal ticket, not as someone with past or a future.

Even though Smith would not be allowed to use his teaching and coaching experience in prison to help other inmates, the year he spent behind bars would not be a wasted one.  His eyes were firmly opened regarding the relationship between keeping millions of men locked up in prison and a healthy American economy.  Thousands and thousands of jobs are dependent on the need to build more prisons; to staff those prisons with guards and service people; to produce, package, and deliver the amount of food necessary to feed millions; and to provide all the bedding and clothing required for people who can’t do it for themselves. 

Jeff Smith was appalled at the waste involved in the process, especially the wasted potential of the prisoners themselves who were so often deliberately left unprepared for life outside prison walls.  Smith is now a public-policy professor, and he has filled Mr. Smith Goes to Prison with ideas and solutions to help solve the problems he observed firsthand in Manchester FCI.  Maybe, just maybe, going to prison was one of the best things that ever happened to Jeff Smith.