People, you've got to check this one out! Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is the first published novel by Bay Area writer S. G. Browne. I know, I know - you are SO over zombies. But trust me on this one, this is different. For one, the zombies are the good guys in this story of Andy, who reanimated through no fault of his own after a fatal car accident.
Andy's new not-quite-life includes residing in the wine cellar of his parents' house, with his mom in complete denial and his father angry about the inconvenience his son is causing, Animal Control picking him up and depositing him in an SPCA kennel when he causes trouble, and a support group for the undead where he meets Rita and falls in love.
The back cover bills it as a romantic zombie comedy: a rom-zom-com. I like this label. I like this book. I like the Santa Cruz setting. I like that you can follow Andy's diary and be a part of the community at Undead Anonymous. And I like that FOX Searchlight has bought the film rights, with producers Mason Novick and Diablo Cody.
What are you waiting for? Go out and buy a copy already. Or if you're Bay Area local, meet the author at a signing in California in May or June, or at Comic-Con in July.
PS: Oh yeah. Hat tips to Shannon Page, Cliff Brooks, and the Commander in Chief who all mentioned "Breathers". All of us can't be wrong ... well - we could. But we aren't. So go on and read "Breathers" already.
Wait, am I really all caught up with Repairman Jack? Man oh man, what a cliffhanger to end Bloodline!
Oh. Alright. The wonderful web site Stop, You're Killing Me! lists thrillers by author, series, and characters (and locations, jobs of the characters, and a historical index - it's really a fantastic site!) and lets me know that there is one more published Repairman Jack novel following Bloodline. But it's only out in hardcover so far, and I usually wait for the paperback.
Anyway. Bloodline. This one left a few loose ends that bother me. What is up with the mysterious author who knows so much about the Repairman and his past? Why didn't we see more of Gina and Vicky? And what's going to become of the pregnant girl who is carrying the bloodline carrier, so much like Rosemary's Baby? In some respects, this seemed like half a novel.
And the showdown keeps approaching and approaching without ever getting there. I want it to be here already, just to get it over with. I feel in limbo.
I suppose this is a nice problem to have for a reader.
Finally, Barry Eisler's new book is here! After finding the John Rain series three years ago, catching up and getting a new novel once a year, almost like clockwork, I'd been waiting patiently almost two years for Fault Line.
I get my fix by hanging out on Barry's Discussion Boards with all his friends and hardcore fans, and I read his blog, but there's nothing like a whole novel. Speaking of hardcore fans, I am a big fan, but I can't hold a candle to Rayna or Jewel:
I'll gladly stay in my place as Barry's No. 47 fan or so. But enough about Barry, and back to Fault Line ... well, actually, I do have to tell about the signing. I went to Barry's book signing at the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto. They were hosting the signing because they feature in the book: someone gets killed in the hotel parking garage. No, I'm not telling who, you just have to read it for yourself.
There was a large contingent of local Rainiacs (that's what we John Rain fans started calling each other on the Discussion Boards), and several out-of-towners who had come in from elsewhere: Pam from Idaho, Cheryl from New York State, and Rayna all the way from New Zealand! Barry read the hotel garage scene, answered lots of questions, and signed books. I had him sign my copy, and then I went around and asked Barry's wife and all my Rainiac friends to sign it too. I bet I have the wordiest copy of Fault Line anywhere. :-)
Started reading it that night, and liked it a lot. A couple of bonuses for me: part of it is set in the Silicon Valley high-tech world. It's the story of Alex Treven, a patent lawyer, whose client is developing a network encryption software. Right before the big meeting with the venture capitalists, someone kills him. Then the patent examiner dies. And then someone breaks into Alex's house and tries to kill him too. He contacts his estranged brother Ben, who does secret nasty things for the military, figuring that Ben is the only one who can help him in get out of this mess. Ben shows up, but he's pissed that his little brother expects yet another bailout. Not such a happy family.
Oh, and then there's a beautiful woman. And several factions of ruthless assassins. Martial arts. Cover-ups. Local scenery. Spycraft.
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel was fascinating. I wish everybody had read it, so I could discuss it with all my friends.
The book is subtitled "The Fates of Human Societies", and examines how some cultures came to dominate others - for example, why the Spanish defeated the locals in their exploration of the Americas. Why didn't this happen the other way around? asks Diamond. I sort of did a double-take at the question, inwardly going, "Duh - because the Spanish were more advanced in their technology", but he must have heard me, because he acknowledges my answer and asks how that fact came about - why wasn't American technology as advanced as European technology?
Turns out it all comes down to settling down, growing plants and raising animals.
Wait, what? No, really. But I can't explain it nearly as well as Diamond does. Go ahead, just read it already, so we can talk about it.
I really wasn't going to buy anything that time. Then why did I walk into the bookstore? If I recall correctly, I had time to kill before the movie started. Or some other equally lame excuse. Anyway, Stephen King's Duma Key was grinning evilly at me. How was I to resist?
I liked the story well enough (I wasn't all that scared, actually), but I loved the language and the characterizations. In my humble opinion, King is one of the finest American writers. Too bad he keeps getting short shrift, just because he writes genre.
The movie "Revolutionary Road" kept going around in my head, and a few days later I found myself in a bookstore, looking for the Richard Yates novel the film was based on. There was an omnibus containing two novels ("Revolutionary Road" and "The Easter Parade") as well as a set of short stories ("Eleven Kinds of Loneliness"). I sat down in one of those easy chairs with the book, picked a couple of bits from Revolutionary Road, read the first short story, and was sold on Yates' prose.
Occasionally I say that I really go for well-expressed despair. And I was going to add that that fits the bill here, but on second thought, that's not exactly true - Yates depicts bleak, resigned hopelessness that doesn't even have enough energy left for despair.
Why do I do this to myself? Because it rings true. (But I'm still not ready to read Cormac McCarthy until the height of summer. And I will not read The Easter Parade until I've had a buffer of a couple of thrillers, chick lit volumes, or at the very least non-fiction in between.)
I like Sharyn McCrumb's lightheartedness and banter. Highland Laddie's Gone is a screwball comedy set at a Scottish Highland Festival in West Virginia, with a murder or two plopped right in the middle. Not much to sink my teeth into, just a good snack.
"Reacher said nothing" must be the most frequent line in Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. I read, I think, the first three in the series, then I stopped, because the bad guys were so inordinately cruel that I couldn't stomach them. It seemed to me that maybe the author made the bad guys out to be so excessive cruel and sadistic to set them apart from Reacher, who kills without hesitation or remorse, but follows a soldier's sense of honor.
Then, a few weeks ago, I came across the latest Reacher thriller, Bad Luck and Trouble, at a bookstore's sales table, and went, Oh hell, why not. It left me wondering about the same questions that the protagonist himself ponders. Several of his friends and former colleagues from the Military Police get killed, and Reacher wonders how he will fare against the bad guys - his colleagues were just as good as he is. If they got killed, what's going to keep him alive? As a reader, of course, you expect that the serial hero will survive, sometimes through skill, sometimes just through dumb luck. Kind of a good setup, actually. Good ride.
David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous is one of those books that I should read about once a year, just to refresh my understanding of "The Power Of The New Digital Disorder", as the book is subtitled. It's one of the books that illuminates what I kind of already know, and expresses it much more clearly. What do I mean? Consider what Weinberger says about order and space.
When you clean up your kitchen, you put each thing in a place. It will be in this place, in this place only, and not in any other place.
If you have a lot of things, you might group them according to what kind they are, and assign them particular places so you can find them easily. If one thing fits several possible places, you might make a list of what is where, like the card catalog in a library. You can look for a book by its name, by topic, or by its author's name. The actual book will still be in just one place though, and if you want to find it again, you must make sure that you put it back in that same physical place. Once you move the book, you're not going to find it again.
Online, you can put the same one thing in all the places you want to - since it's digital, not a physical item, you don't have to pick just one place. You can put David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous on a page at amazon.com that lists books by David Weinberger, another page of books with the word "miscellaneous" in the title, yet another page of books about the internet, and a reader's list of favorites. I can put it in my blog. You can put it in a list of future reading for yourself. You can put a link to it on a photo of the cover.
Online, you don't even need to care where a thing is. All you care about is
that you can find it. You just need to know some
part of the information associated with it, and you can search for it.
That film had Bruce Campbell in it. This book was written by David
Weinberger. That recipe had lemongrass for an ingredient. (Even better,
if you want a recipe that has lemongrass as an ingredient, you don't
need to know that there is one - you can find out serendipitously if there is one, and be led to other, related things that you were never aware of.)
If you spend any time on a computer and/or the internet (and you probably do if you're reading my blog entry), read this. You won't be sorry.
I didn't really make any New Year's resolutions, but I want to read more "substantial" fiction and more non-fiction this year, not just thrillers. So how do I start reaching toward this lofty goal? With two charming slim volumes about cats, both courtesy of my housemate Anna and her boyfriend Mike. Purry Logic, a collection of cat art with aphorisms and cat wisdom, was a Christmas gift from them, and Mike let me read Cat and Gnome after he'd told me about how cute and silly it was. Together, these two took me, oh, probably an hour to read. I mean, "read". But yes, I still get to count them. Anathem is sitting on my bookshelf, fat and happy with its 1,000 pages, and I'll get to count that as only one book. It all evens out in the end.