Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace

Usually the rock autobiographies that I read are by really old guys that have been around forever. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout is the first by someone that's younger than me. That sorta makes me feel a bit old. Anyway, I really enjoyed it and the title is pretty accurate - it does feel like the whole book is one long confession by Laura Jane Grace in an attempt to free herself from the burdens of her past. The first half of the book is the standard rock'n'roll story of a small band hitting the big time and falling apart because of drugs, sex and band member conflicts. It isn't until her gender dysphoria takes a central role in her life that the story swerves into new and interesting territory. She doesn't hold anything back and knowing the pain behind some of her music makes me appreciate it more. B+

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Before I say anything about The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands itself let me just comment on the cover... or actually several of the covers this book has had. There are at least four different book covers for this (including the latest printing) that feature an evil looking dark old fashioned train. Now the book does involve a possessed train as a major plot point but it is described as being a sleek pink monorail. So completely opposite of what is on the cover.... Anyway let me also mention now that somehow this book fits in mentions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Catch-22, The Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Watership Down.

Okay... so what did I think of the third installment of this series? I LOVED it. Best in the series so far. Actually it is probably one of my favorite Stephen King novels. The story picks up shortly after the previous book with Roland's ka-tet (group drawn together by destiny) finally starting out towards the Dark Tower. Plus there's finally some explanation of what the Tower is and what is going on here. The members have various adventures that include a giant bear with a satellite dish on its head, a house that tries to eat Jake and a monorail train that is controlled by a crazy artificial intelligence. And it ends on a total cliff hanger! I'll have to give it an A.

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

It seems like whenever I read a new book with lots of great reviews that I always end up disappointed. Did I read the same book as all those people on goodreads that gave this five starts? Dark Matter does have a pretty good plot. It isn't the most intricate story but I'm sure some day it will make a passable movie. It passed the time and I didn't not enjoy reading it. But there isn't much that sticks out as being especially memorable. The writing is flat and style-less and most of the characters are one dimensional.

The plot follows this guy with a happy family life that gets kidnapped and wakes up in a reality that isn't what he knows. He quickly figures out that an alternate universe version of himself has created a box that allows one to travel to alternate realities. This alternate reality version of the guy isn't happy that he followed his career and didn't start a family so he basically switches places with another happier version of himself. It is a nice plot but there's too many plot holes and dead ends to make it a classic. It was enjoyable but forgettable. B

Horror Book # 13 - Misery by Stephen King

So only twenty six years after purchasing a paperback copy of Misery I finally got around to reading it. Progress has been made on my stack of King novels that I purchased as a teenager for the first time in decades! Since I've seen the movie the book didn't have too many surprises except that I think the whole foot hobbling thing is more gruesome in the novel. By reading it well after its release I was able to read about some of the influences on King while writing it (his increasing drug dependence and feelings that his fans only wanted horror novels) and that made the story a bit deeper. As in most books about a writer this one mentioned a lot of list book : The Count of Monte Cristo, The Lord of the Flies, The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Sound and the Fury. This is one of his better works... A-.

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

The first book in The Dark Tower series is kind of weird and has a bit of a dreamlike quality to it. The world the gunslinger finds himself is similar to our own in a few ways but is also completely different. The second book, The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three picks up right after the end of the first book and has Roland the gunslinger finding different portals in his world that open up into our reality (and to the usual Stephen King type characters). I enjoyed it because there's really no way to predict what is coming and I had no clue what would happen. I just hope that the future volumes explain the how/why those magic doors just appear... Also I find it kinda funny that this book does nothing to answer the huge questions of why Roland is going to the Dark Tower in the first place and what exactly the Dark Tower is. By the end he pretty much makes no progress at all. Anyway, I guess I'll say it is an A-. Also, somewhat unexpectedly, the book mentions Gone with the Wind.

Horror Book # 10 - I Am Legend Richard Matheson

Stephen King is quoted somewhere as being highly influenced by Richard Matheson. After reading the short stories that are included in this collection with I Am Legend I can see that there is some similarity in their styles. The main story in the collection, I Am Legend, tells the story of the seemingly last man on Earth after everyone else has been turned into vampires. It has been turned into at least three movies I've seen and none of them are even close to being as good as the book. There's a nice twist at the end and I enjoyed rereading it.  As for the short stories, most of them are pretty good too... I think at least one of them was filmed as a Twilight Zone episode. A.-

Horror Book # 17 - Psycho by Robert Bloch

You can't really read Psycho without constantly comparing it to the film version. For the most part the movie didn't really change too much. Except for the physical description of some characters (Hitchcock changed the female characters to blondes of course and Norman is described as a chubby forty year old), some expansion of Mary/Marion's theft and flight and the delayed introduction of Norman Bates, the film sticks pretty closely to what Bloch created. The film is of course a masterpiece and full of suspenseful sequences... while the book isn't quite as thrilling. It just lacks the tension Hitchcock gave the film... but still I enjoyed it. Let's say a B+. 

Mystery Book # 38 - The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake

So I was at the big central library downtown and I really wanted to check out a specific horror book. But when I found it I discovered that for some reason it was listed as a "reference" book and wasn't available for checkout. At this point I wanted to find something to checkout to have something to show for the effort of going downtown... but they didn't have any of the other horror books I was looking for either... and then time started running out because if I was in the parking garage for more than an hour I'd have to pay an extra four bucks parking! So I took a quick look at my mystery reading list and tried to find something that I figured would be a good short read... Why short? Because a) I have a few other books on hold and want to be able to get to them as soon as they are available and b) for some reason I gave myself a Goodreads reading challenge and even though I know no one else cares, I feel like I have to meet that goal. And I figured I'd read enough long books this year to justify reading something really short... So having checked it out I figured I'd have to read that copy otherwise why did I check it out... but then I wanted to read the book in bed late at night and my daughter is still sleeping in the room with us and I don't want to be the one to wake up a baby with my reading light so I checked if the LAPL had a copy available for the Kindle and they did. So I didn't even read the copy I got from the downtown library. Anyway... So that's how I got around to reading The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake.

About the book... I enjoyed it but I'm sure I'll totally forget about it quickly. Fun in a disposable way. The book is the first in Westlake's Dortmunder series and follows him as he and his crew try and steal a valuable gem. However due to unforeseen circumstances something always goes wrong and they end up having to pull six different heists to steal the gem. Light and fun, B.

The Gunslinger - The Dark Tower I - by Stephen King

Maybe five or six years ago I read the original version of The Gunslinger. When thinking about re-reading it (with the intention that I'd read the whole series), I realized that I barely remembered anything about it. This time I read the revised and expanded version and I enjoyed it as if I had never read it before. The whole book has a very dreamlike quality to it which maybe explains why it had evaporated from my memory. Plus it doesn't help that basically the gunslinger makes very little progress in his quest or that it is never really explained why he's trying to get to the dark tower in the first place.

The book follows Roland Deschain as he pursues "the man in black" across the desert in a weird fantasy world that is sort of like something out of an old Western. Roland meets different people along the way and falls into different types of traps that "the man in black" has left in his way. I enjoyed the individual scenarios that Roland encounters but they don't really add up to much as a whole. Basically it seems like the whole thing is just a build up for the next book. I'll give it a B+.

Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert

That's it... No more Dune books for me. I didn't like the fifth book in the series and this sixth one, Chapterhouse: Dune, is no different. I'm not even sure if this one had any worms in it... and it has only passing references to melange. It doesn't take place on the planet Dune either. And then the characters that were most heavily built up in the previous book were barely used at all here... and this is the direct sequel to that story. Oh yeah... nothing happens for the first two hundred pages either. And then when the story does pick up all of the big events happen off the page. What a waste of time.

If you must know the story... the Bene Gesserit continue their war with the Honored Matres. Why the Honored Matres returned to attack the Bene Gesserit is still not explained here... so it is hard to care too much about it. Did I mention none of the characters are that interesting either? The Bene Gesserit grow a ghola clone of Miles Teg to lead their forces and when they do attack at the end they're somehow defeated... the book doesn't really say how. But then Murbella the Honored Matres turned Bene Gesserit is able to kill the leader of the Honored Matres and take over leadership and merge the two factions. Did this summary mention Duncan or Sheeana the two characters the previous book spent the whole time building up? Nope. Overall it was just super frustrating. C-.

Book # 19 & Sci-Fi Book # 7 - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Next week is Banned Book Week, so hey I figured I'd read Brave New World next. Usually the book is challenged because it has sex, drugs, anti-religious viewpoints and suicide.  I'm guessing that whoever challenges this book never actually reads it since the author's point is that he's against drug use, promiscuity and is pro-religion. I remember reading this back in high school but I'm not sure if it was assigned or not. 

The book is set in a future in which everyone is genetically modified and gestated in a laboratory. As the children are raised they receive subliminal suggestions in their sleep to make them all think alike. And everyone takes the drug soma whenever they're stressed out or need to get away from their problems. There is no marriage or religion anymore either. The plot gets going when Bernard Marx, an Alpha male that gets some grief for not being as physically perfect as most Alpha males, takes a female coworker, Lenina, to visit a "Savage Reservation". This is a small area of the world where the world government decided not to incorporate into all of its future goodness. While there they discover a young man, John, that was actually born to a woman from the "brave new world" society that was accidentally stuck on the reservation. They bring John, "the Savage", back to their society. What follows is total culture shock for the Savage. 

I enjoyed the book and there's a lot to think about in it. Like... if in this future society everyone is so happy most of the time can it really be all that bad? A.

Book # 67 - Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

It seemed like it took me forever to get through Vanity Fair. I started out really enjoying it. The first third was funny and charming... and all of the plot lines were satisfactorily resolved in the last third... but the middle was a bit of a slog. Just a few too many characters.  Still overall I enjoyed it.

The story follows two friends, Rebecca Sharp and Amelia Sedley, as they leave school and begin to make their way into society. Rebecca doesn't have any family or money and isn't the most scrupulous person in getting ahead. Amelia however is the total opposite and is probably way too nice to everyone. Both find husbands and have a child but the circumstances of each are complete opposite. At the mid-point of the story we find one of them at the height of society and the other barely managing to survive... and of course by the end their roles are reversed. It was a nice read but could have just been a tad shorter. A-

Horror Book # 50 - The Bachman Books by Stephen King - Book 1: Rage by Richard Bachman

Way back in the early 90's I went through a bit of a Stephen King phase... or so I thought. Looking back on it now I realize that I only completely finished two of his books at that time. Somehow though I owned maybe ten King books. I think it was maybe 200 pages into The Stand that I just got too busy with other stuff and wouldn't return to King for awhile. Anyway... a couple weeks ago I was reading an article about King that made me want to start in on his Dark Tower series. Plus I watched a new movie based on one of his books, Cell, that got me into looking at his entire bibliography. So then I found a good bunch of my old high school copies that I never read, dusted them off, and added them to my to-be-read shelf. But then I read that one of this books, Rage, was actually out of print. Of course this was one that I didn't own and it being the one book of his that is out of print because of the "sensitive nature" of what it is about only made me want to read it even more. So then I tracked down a used copy of The Bachman Books which contains Rage. So once again I was adding Stephen King books to my to-be-read shelf. Plus I put a library hold on a Kindle copy of the first Dark Tower. So maybe I'll be reading a bunch of Stephen King in the future.... But I also discovered over the last two months that being a parent of a newborn is pretty much all consuming and that finding time to sit down and read for more than two minutes at a time doesn't happen very often.

I think I read somewhere that King wrote the first draft of Rage as a teenager and it is one of his earliest publications. And that's what it reads like... but I mean that in a good way. It feels like a young King channeling his teenage angst into a pretty intense story with a good deal of emotion. Unlike some of his later work this feels like he's really writing from the heart. The story is pretty simple... one day a high school kid snaps, kills a couple of teachers, and takes his class hostage. Apparently there have been a few kids that have read this book and did exactly that... so that's why it is no longer available. I can understand why King would remove the book, it probably weighs on him the influence the book has had on some kids. Still, I enjoyed the book and I'll give it an A-.

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

After seeing Lovecraft Country mentioned a few times in magazines and blogs I figured it sounded interesting and that I should give it a chance. Basically it was advertised as Lovecraftian type horror against the backdrop of 1950's Jim Crow laws... so the characters here have to deal with both weird horror and racism. The book is constructed as several connected episodes of weird events that happen to an African-American family. It starts off promisingly with a story that is a nod to The Shadow over Innsmouth. The rest of the stories were pretty good but nowhere near as weird as something Lovecraft would come up with. Also I'm not sure if it was best that all the stories connected. They could have worked individually and the connecting story line about a wizard trying to gain power over other wizarding lodges was probably the least interesting aspect of the book. And no mentions of Cthulhu either. I guess I'll say it is a B.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts One and Two by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne

I'm not sure yet what to make of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child...  Sure I enjoyed it but it doesn't compare well versus the novels. First off Harry Potter takes a back seat for most of the story... and it turns out that he's a relatively boring adult. A bit of a let down. The story is okay but seems to be in service of finding ways to use characters that have already died (Snape, Cedric Diggory, Voldemort) instead of creating new ones. Just too much of it depends on revisiting scenes from the books. I'll say it gets a B.

Mystery Book # 45 - I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane

I didn't know much about the Mike Hammer series of books by Mickey Spillane beyond having seen the film Kiss Me Deadly (which I'd highly recommend).  The first book in the series, I, the Jury, introduces us to super macho private detective Mike Hammer. Pretty much everything you need to know about him is right there in his name. He literally has the perfect name for his personality. It is so on the nose that it is kind of funny... and that also sums up the book. Basically it takes a Chandler type Marlowe story and makes it even pulpier with more violence and sex. By no means great literature but still kind of fun in a silly non-thinking way. A-

Sci-Fi Book # 6 - The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

Looking at H.G. Wells' bibliography he really started out with a bang... The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, Island of Dr. Moreau ... all within four years! The guy was on fire... but then the list continues with like fifty more books I've never heard of and no one ever discusses. I'm kinda curious about those other books... are they any good? Are they even available? Anyway...

The Time Machine is a fun short read. The story is pretty simple... a guy builds a time machine and travels to the distant future and finds that humans have evolved into two separate species - the Eloi and the Morlocks. He makes friends with the Eloi, the Morlocks hide his machine, he eventually gets it back and returns home only to find that most of his friends don't really believe his story.  Total classic: A

End of Watch by Stephen King

What a disappointment... The first two books in this series were pretty good. End of Watch not so much. Grade C . Also it mentions Frankenstein.

The City & the City by China Miéville

The City & the City has been on my to-read list for years now and I'm glad I finally read it. Right before we started this blog I read a few of Miéville's books and for the most part really enjoyed them. They're usually described as "weird fantasy" and are unlike anything else. So what I liked here was that we're handed a bit of a routine detective type story in a genuinely bizarre fantasy setting... but as the story progresses Miéville continually plays against reader expectations by showing that maybe this isn't a fantasy story in the sense that it could only happen in another reality.

The story starts out as a mystery novel in which Detective Borlu has to find the killer of a young murdered woman. The "fantasy" element here is that it takes place in the city of Beszel which takes up the same physical space as the city of Ul Qoma. They are two completely separate cities but they occupy much of  the same space. While in one city the citizens cannot acknowledge anything they see or hear that belongs to the other city. To do so would be a "breach" and is considered a very serious crime. The cities are so different that the citizens are able to learn to "unsee" those elements around them that aren't a part of their respective city. They are also afraid of the mysterious people of the Breach that will show up to apprehend anyone that commits a "breach". So what is it that actually separates the two cities? I can't really say without giving away spoilers.

The book works on several levels... first the detective story is pretty solid. As a fantasy novel it is different from anything else I've read. And the whole metaphor of citizens "unseeing" what is around them that isn't a part of "their" city  was thought provoking (especially as someone living in Los Angeles, where different sociological/economic groups live in the same space but pretty much in different worlds). I'll give this one an A. (Also, it mentions Harry Potter strangely enough.)

Mystery Book # 91 - The Chill by Ross Macdonald

The Chill is the eleventh book in the Lew Archer mystery series... but having not read the previous ten books in the series wasn't a problem since Lew Archer is the stereotypical private detective in the mold of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Macdonald's pulpy noir style isn't as sublimely ridiculous as Chandler's but it is still effective. The main thing here is a tightly constructed mystery where everything fits together perfectly in the end.

At the start it seems like this will be a missing persons case as Archer is hired to find a runaway bride. But within a few chapters the woman is found quite easily thanks to extremely knowledgeable witnesses... then there's a murder which may or may not have been committed by the woman.  Archer is on the case and we're introduced to quite a few suspects and a whole conspiracy involving previous deaths. In the second to last chapter it all starts coming together as the connections between all the characters are finally revealed. It is almost too much information to keep straight since there are so many characters here... but then on the third to last page the final huge detail is revealed and everything clicks in place beautifully as the last piece of the puzzle is put in place.

It may not be great literature and in time I'll probably have forgotten about most it, but I was entertained and the final reveal of the killer was quite shocking yet made perfect sense. A-

Book # 176 - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Well it only took me two months, but I finally finished reading Infinite Jest. It will probably take another week or so for my brain to digest it a bit further. I'm not completely sure yet how I feel about the "ending" either. Brilliant or incredibly frustrating? I'll probably settle on both. For a book with a word count of 543,709 (we're talking War and Peace territory) you'd expect maybe some kind of resolution to the main plot points. But no... instead you've gotta read through the text again looking for little clues on how it is maybe resolved. Or look on the Internet to see people's theories on what happens next. And after reading these theories there are definitely clues throughout the book on what happens but I don't think quite enough to connect all the dots. I still have no idea where the "master" tape was... but the clues are convincing enough to let me accept that a certain character is the one to have first found it and distributed it... but again for that matter the book barely just hints at that conclusion. So yeah I don't know.

The bulk of the "story" revolves around two different locations in a slightly futuristic Boston. The first is the Enfield Tennis Academy where Hal Incandenza is a student whose parents founded the school. Of course there are a ton of other characters there and there is a lot of discussion about tennis, drugs and growing up. Next is the Ennet House, a recovery house for former drug users. The main character here is Don Gately, a reformed thief and addict that is now on the staff of the house. And yes there are a ton more characters that live here and we get several tragic back stories and endless discussions about drug and alcohol abuse. There's also another story line about a video called "Infinite Jest" that reduces the viewer to a state where all they can do is watch the video endlessly over and over again.

The end-notes are also worth mentioning. There are something like 380 of them. They take up 100 pages and are super tiny print. Some of the notes are 10 pages! Flipping back and forth in the text just makes the book even that much longer to get through. Also Frankenstein and The Brothers Karamazov are mentioned. I guess I have to give it an A. There's a passage somewhere in there (which I probably couldn't find again) about how some books are written so that the reader will question their own reading comprehension abilities but also question whether or not the author is actually putting in all the information that should be there. I'd say that's Wallace's way of saying not to worry about the story... there's so much other stuff here.

The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Like all the other books in Bosch series I've read, The Black Box is a nice quick read that doesn't require too much thinking and delivers a fairly straightforward police procedural. This time Harry Bosch is working a cold case from the 1992 Los Angeles riots. My main qualm with the book is that in comparison to the other books the stakes here are pretty low... and most of the personal trouble for Harry involves a rather tame Internal Affairs investigation. Connelly's/Bosch's style doesn't quite suit what is needed to make a cold case investigation that compelling. Overall it was totally lacking in action up until the last fifty pages or so. It isn't a bad book but I'd recommend any other book in the series I've read over it. C+

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

There's this belief I have that each book has its own specific time frame that a reader should spend consuming a book. Something like War and Peace is meant to be slowly read over months, while The Old Man and the Sea should be read in one sitting. So reading a book either too quickly or too slowly can have a definite impact on the reading experience. We is a book that should probably be read in two or three sittings... but this last week was crazy busy and I stretched out the reading experience to about ten days. So maybe some of the power of the book was diluted for me since I mostly read it in little bits here and there. That being said, I still enjoyed it but maybe not as much as I could have...

The book We is set in a dystopian future and heavily influenced George Orwell when he wrote 1984. Actually he took quite a bit from We it seems. Both are about a guy living in a world run by an oppressive government that controls everything who then meets a new strange woman, starts a secret diary, finds out about some secret rebels and ends up being tortured. It does get points for being original... but it isn't quite as thrilling as 1984. I'll give it an A-.

Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert

While reading Heretics of Dune (which I had previously read maybe 15 years ago) I had three reoccurring thoughts. First - I don't recall any of this plot. Second - I do sorta remember thinking that the growing usage and importance of Duncan Idaho gholas throughout the series is just stupid. And third... I remembered why I stopped reading the Dune series back then with this book. But since the point of rereading the books this time was to get to the end of the series I'll have to soldier on. C+

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut

I had been meaning to read Mother Night for the past fifteen years or so ever since I saw the film version. Eventually I was able to pick up a dirt cheap copy at a used book sale maybe five years ago. And just now I got around to actually reading it. So between purchasing it and reading it I probably read some 200 other books... and that seems weird even to me since it is such a short book and is by one of my favorite all time authors, Kurt Vonnegut. But it was worth the wait because I think current political events colored how I read it.

In the introduction Vonnegut says "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know ... We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." The book then proceeds to be the "confession" of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American living in Germany during WWII that helped spread Nazi propaganda with his radio program. What only a handful of people really know is that Howard is actually using his program to send out coded messages back to the Allies. But of course he can never tell anyone this and after the war he has to live in seclusion and deal with being a white power icon and being hated by most everyone else that knows his history. He continually sees the power his words had on influencing some disturbed people even though he was trying to help his country. So maybe if you have a political voice that can be heard by millions of people and you use it to spread hatred and fear of other racial groups that kind of makes you a racist.

Also, it mentions Don Quixote.  I'll give it an A.

Mystery Book # 17 - The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

The Mask of Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler, follows a mystery writer as he tries to uncover the history of a murdered criminal. Of course that doesn't turn out to be the smartest thing to do since he quickly discovers that other people are also looking for the criminal and he ends up in a dangerous situation. I'd give it an A-. It was a bit different than the usual mystery type book and even though the criminal's history is long and complicated the author was able to always keep everything clear.

So by finishing this book I'm now a quarter of the way through my top mystery books list. Here's how I'd rank them.

1. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

2. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

3. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

4. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

5. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

6. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

7. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

8. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

9. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

10. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

11. The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

12. Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald

13. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

14. A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

15. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

16. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

17. Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake

18. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

19. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

20. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

21. Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

22. The Innocence of Father Brown  by G. K. Chesterton

23. The Steam Pig by James McClure

24. The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

25. The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald

Mystery Book # 57 - The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

The Innocence of Father Brown is the first book in the Father Brown series and is made up of a dozen or so short stories. In each story Father Brown, a Catholic priest, somehow happens upon a murder or mystery and to the surprise of everyone at the scene he is the only one that is able to make sense of what really happened. The stories were okay... nothing really that memorable. I think in general I just have a problem with a mystery series that involves a character that isn't a detective of some sort always just happening upon some type of murder by random chance. It just seems so unlikely that I can never get past it. I know Lucinda loves TV shows of that sort (Murder She Wrote, Hart to Hart) but whenever I watch them I always think that Jessica Fletcher has the worst luck because she can't take a trip somewhere without someone being murdered. B-

Book # 90 - I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I, Claudius, by Robert Graves is written as if it is the autobiography of Roman Emperor Claudius but really for most of the book he's just in the background and giving a history of the Romans though the reign of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. I found most of it fascinating but there is just so much information here that it is a lot to take in. Basically everyone in his family underestimates Claudius his whole life and looks down upon him. And since this is a family where they're always killing each other to become the next emperor this serves him pretty well since by the end most everyone else in his family that could have been emperor is dead and he's the only one left. I'd say the book was entertaining and also educational. I'll have to find out how accurate the information in the book is now. A-.

Book # 2 & Sci-Fi Book # 3- 1984 by George Orwell

Somehow I had forgotten just how dark and bleak 1984 by George Orwell is. I'm sure that as time passes this novel will sadly become more and more relevant. The novel follows Winston Smith in a dystopian future where the government puts people under constant surveillance, changes history to match their goals and attempts to make everyone think in a specific way. He tries to rebel, gets caught and is tortured until he changes his way of thinking.

There are a lot of concepts discussed but the one I found most interesting was doublethink, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. This seems to have become a mainstay of current politics. I could name examples but really all you'd have to do is turn on the news and see someone spout something that totally contradicts itself. Even though it is a bummer, it gets an A+.

Book # 6 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

This is the third time I've read The Grapes of Wrath and I always have the same thought.... what kind of a name is Rose of Sharon? Anyway... the book still remains relevant to our times. Someone once mentioned it to me as the polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged and during this reading it seemed especially true.

The novel follows the Joad family as their Oklahoma farm is taken away from them by a bank and they travel across the country to California to become fruit pickers only to find that the price of labor is kept so artificially low by collusion among farm owners that they barely can make enough money to feed themselves. So it is pretty much a take down of unregulated free market capitalism. Did the scenes where policemen would bust up potential unions remind me a little bit of Wal-Mart... or the bank literally plowing over the Joad's house of the housing market collapse? Yeah a little bit.

Yep, one of my favorite books. A+

So after finishing this book I'm 60% of the way though the initial top 100 list and a third of the way though the top 200. So here's my updated rankings of the top 200 I've read so far.

1. The Lord of the Rings 2. Dune 3. Les Misérables

4. Invisible Man

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6. Don Quixote

7. The Hobbit

8. A Farewell to Arms 9. The Big Sleep 10. The Grapes of Wrath 11. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

12. The Trial 13. The Magic Mountain

14. David Copperfield

15. Great Expectations

16. Harry Potter

17. The Stand

18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

19. Pale Fire

20. The Handmaid's Tale

21. Perfume 22. A Christmas Carol 23. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

24. The Chronicles of Narnia

25. The Name of the Rose

26. The Great Gatsby

27. The Sound and the Fury

28. Frankenstein

29. Pride and Prejudice 30. Lord of the Flies

31. The New York Trilogy 32. The Color Purple

33. Things Fall Apart

34. Tristram Shandy 35. Wind in the Willows

36. Anne of Green Gables

37. Rebecca

38. Lucky Jim 39. Atonement

40. One Hundred Years of Solitude

41. Native Son

42. Anna Karenina

43. Sons and Lovers

44. War and Peace

45. A Passage to India

46. A Prayer for Owen Meany 47. The Kite Runner 48. Watership Down 49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 50. The Count of Monte Cristo

51. The Scarlet Letter

52. Winnie-the-Pooh

53. Emma

54. Charlotte's Web

55. Wuthering Heights 56. The Iliad 57. On the Road

58. Remembrance of Things Past

59. Possession 60. Bleak House

61. His Dark Materials

62. Absalom, Absalom

63. The Ambassadors

64. To the Lighthouse

65. Mrs. Dalloway

66. Gone with the Wind

67. Atlas Shrugged

Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Well I like Sherlock Holmes. And I'm a fan of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar... so a book written about Sherlock's brother by Kareem is something I'd have to read. Mycroft Holmes follows the famous detective's older brother on an adventure early in his life that helps to explain why Mycroft is how he is in the Holmes stories. The main mystery about why children are being killed kind of peters out near the end and involves an easily discovered conspiracy, but still I enjoyed the book. It isn't anything great but it was still a fun read. B-.

Book # 97 - The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

It has been a couple days since I finished reading The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, and it is still sitting there in my brain slowly being digested. Before starting it someone told me that it is one of those books that doesn't directly say what it is really about. The Wikipedia page describes it as "ambiguous" and even the book's introduction says that if you're reading it just for the plot you'll be disappointed and won't get much from the book.

In thinking about "the plot" in order to summarize it, I realize that there is technically a beginning, middle and end, but the "action" never builds to a climax and just like in real life it is just a serious of events with both ups and downs. The book starts somewhere around 1905 with Hans Castorp, a young German man, going to visit his cousin that is staying in a clinic high in the Swiss Alps to treat his tuberculosis. He plans to stay for three weeks but ends up being diagnosed with the same illness and ends up living there for seven years. Finally he leaves to go fight in WWI.

During his time there he meets a variety of characters, makes friends, falls in love, deals with death, discovers new music, ponders his own mortality, has strange dreams, and sees time slowly passing by. The book could be about so many different things every reader will probably interpret it differently. And the Wiki page is right... it is ambiguous. Some parts of it reminded me of my own twenties, and I found the passages about the passing of time especially meaningful. After a few years Hans gets to the point where everyday is just the same for him and distinguishing time becomes difficult and suddenly years have past by.

Even though it is a huge book without an exciting plot I enjoyed it immensely. There may have been a few parts that dragged a bit (mostly the discussions between his friends Settembrini and Naphta) but there is just so much to ponder here and take in. Mann once said that to really understand his book you'd need to read it twice. I guess someday I'll have to pick it up again and hopefully I'll get even more insight into it. A+

Book # 60 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man isn't exactly a page turner... not to say that I didn't enjoy it in some way though. It is written in a stream of consciousness style and tells the story of a young man as he grows up Catholic in Ireland and falls away from the church only to go back to it and then leave it again. It was interesting getting in this guys head and seeing what motivated him but at times I found they style too hard to follow. Also it seems like most of the secondary characters weren't really necessary and weren't interesting. I'd also mention that the book has completely unnecessary maps of walks that the character took... I just don't get it... the maps are pointless. Also it mentions The Count of Monte Cristo.  A-

Book # 17 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Let me start my saying that Pride and Prejudice is Lucinda's all time favorite book... and since she wants to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies this week I figured now would be a good time to re-read the book. I've probably absorbed a good bit of knowledge about the book through osmosis from my wife so the whole book felt pretty familiar while I was reading it (Examples of how that osmosis occurred.... viewing the film version, vising the Jane Austen center in Bath, seeing films like Austenland, playing the P&P board game, etc). It was also interesting seeing how I thought of the book now versus what I thought about it as a teenager when I first read it. As a kid I wasn't really into it, but now I see that it is quite funny and there were several passages that made me laugh. So I can see how it is Lucinda's favorite book... Basically it is just an old-timey romantic comedy in which the boy and girl meet... don't like each other at first... and eventually realize they love each other... Pretty much the synopsis of every Hallmark or Lifetime movie. I'll have to give it an A.

God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

God Emperor of Dune is one of those books that I'm thinking no one that could possibly stumble across this blog would have any interest in my opinion of. Hmmm...Is that sentenced phrased correctly? I'm not sure but I don't feel like taking the time to figure out whether or not it is. I'd love to have a conversation about this book but I'm presuming that no one I know has read it. And if they have it I'd guess the details are likely all scrambled up in their brain because this particular book is the fourth out of the six original books. I'd have to remind them that this one is set 3500 years after the previous book and Leto II has turned into a weird worm creature and rules the galaxy and sets in motion his own assassination. I'll give it an A-.

Book # 58 - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

Maybe nine years ago when I saw Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story I briefly considered reading Tristram Shandy but when I heard it was nine volumes I decided to pass on it. Now that it is on this list I didn't really have much choice and had to eventually get to it. Luckily each of the volumes are quite short. I have to say I greatly admired the structure and tone of the book. The book is quite funny and is all over the place. The narrator is attempting to write his life story but keeps getting side tracked and almost never makes any progress. In the end we hardly know anything at all about his life. In fact he doesn't get around to his birth until about a third of the way through the book. Most of the last third of the book is spent trying to tell a story about his uncle's past that keeps getting sidetracked by digressions. The narrator is pretty informal and is always talking directly to the reader and telling us of his plans on what he plans to write about next (if he gets to it). The only drawback to the book really (and I can't really fault the book itself for it) is that it was very topical to the time period it was written (the 1760's) and a lot of the information just sails way over my head. Still I'll give it an A. (Also it mentions Don Quixote.)

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

I liked the first Alice so much I figured I'd go ahead and read the sequel next. Just like the first one, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, is a fun nonsensical adventure that offers something for both adults and kids. I'd give the edge to the first book but this one is still a lot of fun. Again, the original illustrations are awesome. This one gets an A.

Book # 49 - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

What fun it was to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland! Some of the "children's" books on this list haven't exactly lived up to my expectations (Charlotte's Web, Winnie-the-Pooh), but Alice sure did. The whole book is just one weird imaginative scene after another... I liked how it is geared towards both adults and children and each will find different things to love about it. Really I wish I had read this one a long time ago. I was surprised at how closely the 1951 Disney film actually followed the book (the less said about the 2010 film the better). If you read this be sure to find a copy with the original illustrations... I feel like they're an integral part of the book. A+