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And now, the books I've been reading...

The Road To Wellville - TC Boyle My first TC Boyle book (recommended by my father-in-law) and it was quite amusing. Going into it I think, the things I expected to like fell a little flat for me whereas I was surprisingly interested in other aspects. The book is a fictional story taking place in the realy early 20th century sanitarium run by John Harvey Kellogg (father of the Corn Flake) in Battle Creek, Michigan. As a character though, Kellogg is a bit of a bore compared to the fictional characters like Will and Elenaor Lightbody whose marital problems brought on by Kellogg's diet and wellness routines were much more fun to read about.

The Colorado Kid - Stephen KingThe first book published under the Hard Crime imprint which I am soon to be an avid reader of I think. King moves a few feet away from his usual Horror genre with an unexplained mystery. Two senior citizen reporters for a small Maine newspaper tell their 23 year old female intern a story about a dead body, a half-eaten piece of sirloin, a Russian coin and a pack of cigarettes. **SPOILER ALERT** What many people will find frustrating here is that the mystery is not solved at the end. But King has a higher goal than to solve one mystery. He's looking to comment more on what makes a mystery and how to tell the story of one. The reason the two reporters never tell this story is that people need to have answers and need to be able to tie all the pieces up neatly. And sometimes that doesn't always happen.

The one thing that bugged me though is a weird continuity error in which a character goes to a Starbucks in 1982 Denver. King, on his own website, has explained this away by inferring that his stories take place in an alternate universe from ours.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick My first PKD story. This one was an audiobook read and performed brilliantly by Paul Giamatti. The perfect choice for a story that is full of a number of sad-sack, drug-addicted characters. Dick is one of the most famous Science Fiction writers of the 20th century but this book actually is more about 70's drug culture and his own experiences with it even though there are sci-fi elements to it. What appealed to me most about it is the exploration of identity, a common theme for Dick and one that I tend to gravitate towards. A Scanner Darkly is about a drug addict named Bob Arcter who is also an undercover narc named "Fred" who finds himself having to run surveillance on himself. Arcter has been taking a drug called Substance-D which he learns can split the brain into it's two halves leaving them to think and function separately from each other. The book starts out as a down to earth story about hapless druggies and eventually gets weirder and weirder and Arcter loses himself further and further.

The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy A long long time ago I read American Tabloid, which is the previous chapter of this series, Ellroy's exploration of everything unseamly about the 60s: Cuba, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Viet Nam, JFK, RFK, MLK. The Cold Six Thousand brings back some familiar characters from the last book as well as some familiar historical figures. While Tabloid focused on The Bay of Pigs and the lead-in to the JFK assasination, Cold Six focuses on Viet Nam and the lead-up to the RFK and MLK assasinations. It's a long damn book. And Ellroy writes in short sentences. Ellroy like to start his sentences with the character's name. Ellroy does this throughout the book. Ellroy jives on this style. 18 hours of this on the audiobook alternates between sounding like inspired Beat poetry or like an autistic reading a book to me. Actually the narrator on this is amazing because he manages to differentiate dozens of character voices that range from Robert F. Kennedy to a Viet Namese homosexual.

Against All Enemies - Richard Clarke A frightening and infuriating book written by the former Terrorism Czar for both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Clarke's retelling of the morning of 9/11 from within the White House is as terrifying and exciting as any of those kind of military/industrial conferences Hollywood has ever fictionalized. Any sensible person will come out of this book enraged at Bush for not paying attention and for Cheney and Wolfowitz for their Iraq tunnel-vision. Like we need any more excuses to be mad about that.

Posted at August 31, 2006 01:52 PM