Books Read: 24 - 27 of 52 in '08

I put this at #24, even though I finished it last, because I started it first.  I was so enjoying it.  Then I buried it under a pile, and lost it for a while.

I am most certainly gonna go find more by Bernard.  I found his account of his American childhood enthralling - more interesting, if not as funny, as Bill Bryant's Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. 

His father is a divorce lawyer, his mother is just strange.  He loves boys, not girls.  He is quite different from everyone around him. 

From the cover:  in a memoir at once poignant, witty, and dead-on accurate, Bernard Cooper reinvents memory - from the Day-Glo yellow shirt that attracted a swarm of insects to his experience with a psychiatrist who mainlined him with a truth-telling cocktail intended to "reduce the frequency and intensity" of the author's sexual fantasies about men.  Learning to live with love, loss and disaffection, Bernard Cooper calls back impressions of a Los Angeles boyhood as he excavates our own landscape of identity and memory.

Written almost as a series of short stories rather than long, rambling chapters, I loved everything about this book.  9/10.

When Dick Francis' wife died, and it took him 6 years to put out another novel, much weight was given to the rumour that his wife had actually written his books in his name.

Then he published Under Orders in 2006, and now comes Dead Heat, which I have borrowed from BF.

Gotta say, much as I have read and enjoyed every Francis book to date, I am getting a little tired of his style.  The books scurry along at their usual cracking pace, the plot works, the characters are defined and believable and the denouement never leaves me feeling Meh - that could have gone better.  But somehow, the spark seems to have gone for me.

From the cover:  Max Moreton is a rising culinary star and his Newmarket restaurant, The Hay Net, has brought him great acclaim and a widening circle of admirers. But when nearly all the guests who enjoyed one of his meals at a private catered affair fall victim to severe food poisoning, his kitchen is shuttered and his reputation takes a hit. Scrambling to meet his next obligation, an exclusive luncheon for forty in the glass-fronted private boxes at the Two Thousand Guineas, Max must overcome the previous evening's disaster and provide the new American sponsors of the year's first classic race with a day to remember.

Then a bomb blast rips through the private boxes, killing some of Max's trusted staff as well as many of the guests. As survivors are rushed to the hospital, Max is left to survey the ruins of the grandstand-and of his career. Two close calls are too close for comfort, and Max vows to protect his name-and himself-before it's too late.

6/10.  Disappointingly. 

Greg Bear can be very hard to read.  His science fiction is often dense and science based, which can be hard going.  This, however, I found both dense and gripping, the story making me think and leaving me little space to do that thinking is, as I just wanted to know what happens next!

From the cover: Los Angeles 2047, a city on the eve of the Binary Millennium.  Public Defender Mary Choy faces her toughest assignment: to bring back Emanual Goldsmith - acclaimed poet turned mass killer - from the heart of a Caribbean island about to explode in revolution.

But there are other interested in Goldsmith: the sinister Selectors, who use hellcrowns to exact ultimate retribution; Goldsmith's best friend, Richard Fettle, driven to literary inspiration and the edge of madness by the murders; and psychologist Martin Burke, who will journey into Goldsmith's Country of the Mind to find the origins of human evil.

Far away, circling Alpha Centauri, a complex artificial thinker pilots a scientific probe, intent on finding signs of life, coming to grips with loneliness.

This book explores crime and punishment, and society's need for it.  Why do we punish, what do we want to achieve through that punishment, and who should decide - all in here.  Recommended - 8/10
 
Vowing to reach the other side of the world without jet lag, Theroux began his odyssey in London.  He traveled by train across Europe, through the vast underbelly of Asia, and into the heart of Russia. But the crown jewel of his journey was China itself. Here is a magnificent land and an extraordinary people as you have never before known them: China by rail, as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of one of the most intrepid and insightful travel writers of our time


From the book:  My idea was to take a train in London, go to Paris, keep going, head for Germany and Poland, maybe stop in Moscow, take the Trans-Siberian, get off in Irkutsk, take the Trans-Mongolian, and spend May Day in Ulaanbaatar.  Essentially the way to China was the train to Mongolia.  It was travelling slowly across Asia's wide forehead and then down into one of it's eyes, Peking.

It was not that simple.  It never is.  I was not alone - perhaps that is why.  I joined a tour in London - twenty-odd people, old and young.  I thought "I'll be invisible, just slip into this crowd of people" and off we'd go, smiling and chatting quietly as the sleet hit the windows.  I had not had much experience of tours.  I did not know the most elementary things - that the English go on tours to save money, and elderly couples like the Cathcarts would say "We had ever such a nice time going overland to India last year, and in Eye-ran we'd make cups of tea in the back of the bus".  I did not know that English youths went to places like the Bratsk Hydroelectric Dam on package tours in order to get drunk on cheap vodka, and that eastern Europe was uproarious with nurses from Birmingham.

Americans took these tours to meet other people, and showed me snapshots from other trips. 

Americans also went on these tours to shop.  Shopping seemed to be the whole point of their travel.  I honestly had not known that.  It seemed as good a reason as anything else, and much better than going to Russia to get drunk.  And there were Australians, but wherever you see Australians in the world, they always seem to be on their way home.

There is much, more more in this book - it is well written and delightful, and the images gained will stay with me for a long time. 

Added to my growing collection of Theroux, though this is the first non-fiction I have by him, and boy, have I been missing out!

Highly recommended  9/10