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| B08RRTT6YL
| 4.12
| 537
| Jan 07, 2021
| Jan 07, 2021
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell. To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0142002054
| 9780142002056
| 0142002054
| 3.64
| 22,715
| Mar 26, 1956
| 2003
|
it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #32. It’s summer again here in Chicago, which means it’s time for me to delve back into my usual summer reads, fairly easy-to-read genre titles (often also called “airport and beach reads”) being read to honor ten-year-old Jason, who used to read such books in kid’s form for his public library’s summer reading program every year. Ian Fleming’s original 14 James Bond novels from the 1950s and ‘60s are a great series to add to this, because as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, they turn out to be almost nothing like the bombastic, overly melodramatic movie adaptations that are even more famous by now, but rather are tight little thrillers set much more in the real world than you might expect from this name now so closely associated with expensive action setpieces, futuristic secret weapons, and the gigantic boobs of that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year (or at least if you came of age during the ‘70s Roger Moore era of the Bond films, like I did). And indeed, this fourth book in the series, originally published in 1956, continues that trend, with Bond this time doing a police-style investigation into a black market ring that has risen up among the African diamond industry, and with not a single gadget from Q in sight besides a hidden compartment in Bond’s luggage to hide a gun’s silencer. This time the action is mainly set in the US, and it’s easy to see why so many people consider this book to be the very first time in the series that everything really clicks in a satisfying way; fresh off an excursion to America himself, Fleming gets his across-the-pond setting very, very right here, and also finally balances Bond himself out from the cruel sociopath territory he’s dipped far too much into in the previous books. To remind you, Fleming started the Bond novels in the first place not because he necessarily wanted to write secret agent stories, but rather that he wanted to write stories about gambling, a favorite pastime of his in his personal life (back when gambling was still largely illegal in the UK, part of what made it so thrilling for Fleming), and made the main gambling character a secret agent simply because he thought it’d be more interesting than writing a book about a dentist gambler or a truck-driver gambler. That led to a first book, 1953’s Casino Royale (my review), that got all the details about casinos and the game baccarat exactly right, but gave us a 007 who was unnecessarily mean, openly misogynistic, and who could barely function in normal society. After all, as Fleming explicitly states in that first book, the main reason various members of MI-6 were handpicked to become “00” agents was because they were people no one else at the agency could stand, and so were put in a special division where they basically stayed out in the field 365 days a year so that no one else back at the home office ever had to deal with them. After finding much bigger success with the books than he was expecting, though, Fleming started toning down and rounding out the character in subsequent titles, until we have a Bond here who’s now a regular habituate of the Special Service office in London, with a healthier if not still sexist attitude towards women (in this book he has the closest thing he’s had yet to an actual romantic relationship, making it clearer here that it’s not that he hates women in general, but that he only likes particularly complicated women who happen to come from dark, interesting backgrounds). I mean, sure, he’s still haughty and arrogant (he basically spends the entire book dismissing both the CIA and the American mafia as worthless soft pansies), and he engages in the same casual racism as pretty much every other white male did in the 1950s (get read to hear Bond use the n-word a number of times here, to which his exasperated CIA buddy admonishes him, “Now, James, you can’t use that word in the US anymore -- in fact, you’re no longer even allowed to order a jigger of liquor in a bar, but must call it a ‘jigro,’ ha ha”); but when all is said and done, this is a more enlightened and certainly a more vulnerable Bond than we’ve seen in the previous three books, much to the series’ benefit. What really sells this book over the previous ones, though, is that Fleming picks such interesting milieus in which to set his story, and then writes out these milieus in such exacting, memorable ways, based mostly on him having just finished visiting these places himself in real life a year before writing this. So after first flying in to New York on the brand-new “jumbo jets” of the age, he’s then off to Saratoga Springs for the first major plot point, which Fleming fascinatingly describes as still basically a backwoods village whose one and only thing going for it is its famous racetrack (and if you’ve ever wanted to see James Bond drink Miller High Lifes while having a country-fried steak at a highway-exit diner, then brother, you’ve picked the right book); then he’s off to a pre-gentrified Las Vegas, which as Fleming interestingly reminds us, New York didn’t even have direct flights to in the 1950s, visitors basically having to fly to Los Angeles first and then take a rickety propeller plane from there to Sin City; and then eventually he heads back to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the same luxury ocean liner Fleming himself took during his own trip home from America, where we have basically the most exciting action scene of the entire novel, one that involves Bond climbing around the vertical outer skin of the ship using nothing but a makeshift ladder made out of his cabin’s bedsheets. That’s really what saves these novels, is that the action itself is much more of the realistic Jason Bourne type, versus the “jumping out of helicopters while wearing skis” nonsense of the Hollywood movies; and that combined with the more well-rounded, easier to injure, and easier to root for Bond makes this fourth novel of the series easily the best one yet, and definitely the place to start if you’re going to be only a casual fan of this series and not a completist like me. (That said, get ready for yet more ridiculous descriptions of what British people considered “fine dining” in the 1950s; there is not one but two separate times here, for example, when characters say with a lot of admiration that their dinner beef “was boiled for so long, it can be cut with a fork,” which I guess is something people found pleasurable about red meat in the ‘50s?) Today it becomes the first Bond book of the series to get a full five stars from me, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to the next title, 1957’s From Russia, With Love, come this time next summer. I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 11, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1557091498
| 9781557091499
| 1557091498
| 3.90
| 5,337
| 1928
| Nov 01, 1997
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 044808905X
| 9780448089058
| 044808905X
| 3.93
| 6,558
| 1928
| Jun 2003
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089041
| 9780448089041
| 0448089041
| 3.92
| 7,512
| 1928
| Mar 28, 1962
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.84
| 774
| Jul 29, 2013
| Aug 07, 2015
|
it was amazing
|
2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances, in this case actually a cozy mystery novel instead of the romance novels that usually take up my time with KU titles. I actually got halfway through this the first time I read it, then got distracted by several other books that came up in my library reserve list, then had to go back and read this one again all the way from the beginning, because I had totally forgotten the storyline by then; but this should be interpreted as a big compliment, because normally I wouldn’t go to nearly this much trouble for one of these disposable KU books I download for free from those KU promotional websites (I think Bookspry in this particular case). That’s entirely because of our delightfully trainwrecky, highly rootable protagonist at the center of our story, the perpetually unemployed and underloved actress Madison Cruz, whose self-sabotaging misadventures in her Seattle hometown are a true delight. That’s a real key to enjoying these kinds of stories, I’ve discovered as I read more and more of them; so many Kindle Unlimited authors use these kinds of main characters as basically Mary Sue stand-ins for themselves, presenting perfectly perfect heroes who never do anything wrong and never have a hair out of place, always saving the day with one hand while serving up another plate of yummy homemade scones with the other; but author Lucy Carol understands that these kinds of protagonists are much more interesting when they mess up big and often, which Madison certainly does, taking two hilarious steps back for every step forward she makes in her debut adventure here when it comes to the men competing for her attention, her strained relationship with her mother, and the constant humiliating situations she finds herself in as an actress who can only find work doing singing telegrams and kids’ parties and the like. It’s within such a milieu, then, that Madison stumbles across an honest-to-God international conspiracy involving missing babies, crooked FBI agents and former Soviet dissidents, the details of which are best left a surprise; what I can tell you without fears of spoilers, however, is that somehow Carol actually makes this an organic part of what’s otherwise a cozy domestic story about a bunch of city-going single twentysomethings, and rather than forcing the international intrigue onto a situation that can’t naturally fit it in, comes up with an extremely clever way to make it seem like such developments are the most natural thing in the world to happen in Madison’s plucky life. (Of course, both her mom and her uncle are FBI agents, so this helps quite a lot.) I have to confess, I was a little in love with Madison myself by the time I finished this extremely engaging story, and if I was someone who actually had a Kindle Unlimited account, I would launch right away into the other half-dozen titles that have now been written in this series. If you’re a KU person, I strongly encourage you to do so yourself, or at the very least read this funny, warm, witty start to it all, which can be found for free at multiple promotional websites for these kinds of books. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
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May 09, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1624301290
| 9781624301292
| B08J3Q5XT6
| 4.40
| 419
| Jan 14, 2021
| Jan 14, 2021
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did not like it
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2024 reads, #10. I recently downloaded 30 free Kindle Unlimited-style cozy mystery novels through one of those promotional marketing websites, because
2024 reads, #10. I recently downloaded 30 free Kindle Unlimited-style cozy mystery novels through one of those promotional marketing websites, because I have a growing amount of freelance clients who write in this same genre and I want to keep on top of the latest trends. But this first one I decided to start with doesn't bode well right from the very beginning, when authors Addison Moore and Bellamy Bloom make a super-beginner's mistake I'm having to constantly warn my clients about, and decide to introduce 13 different characters in just the first chapter alone, guaranteeing that readers start the book hopelessly confused and perhaps never getting caught up even by the end. (Even worse, eight of the characters' names are [and I swear I'm not making this up] Bizzy, Bobbie, Macy, Lacey, Jordy, Georgie, Juni and Emmie. Good luck keeping that straight!) This wouldn't normally bother me as much as it did here, except for the fact that Moore and Bloom have both made either the New York Times or USA Today bestseller lists in the past, and I have to confess that it really disturbs me that two of the biggest selling authors in the cozy mystery genre are writing books this unreadably poor, a trend that just gets worse and worse the farther you get into the book. I mean, I get it, cozy mystery novels are supposed to be cozy; but the moment the psychic main character started psychically communicating with all the other characters' adorable pets, and having all the adorable pets respond with the most schmaltzy one-liners this side of a "Look Who's Talking" movie, that's when I knew that the mere act of trying to finish this short, breezy book was going to be a herculean contest for me, one I eventually finished but that I hated every single minute along the way. This is a very bad sign for this genre in general, that the biggest-selling and most celebrated authors in the genre are pumping out horrible schlock that will instantly make 90 percent of humanity sick to their stomach from its sheer sugary treacle; but that's great news for fellow cozy mystery authors, in that this definitively proves how low the bar is set in this genre, and that merely putting in the tiniest amount of effort to not wallow in the lowest common denominator even possible will result in big, big rewards. Keep it all in mind, whether you're a writer trying to break into this genre or a reader trying to find something good to pick up soon. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 28, 2024
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Jan 28, 2024
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0515133310
| 9780515133318
| 0515133310
| 4.04
| 97,230
| Jun 25, 2001
| Apr 28, 2002
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #6. The last time I finished one of my annual summer reads of a Jack Reacher book, about six months ago with 2000's Running Blind (my review), I mentioned how that, if I could remember it six months later, I thought I'd also start reading a Reacher book once every winter as well, in that I'm currently 25 books behind in this long-running series (with more continuing to be published every year), and I've been having such an unexpectedly great time reading them that I didn't want to have to wait until all the way in my eighties to complete it. And hey, guess who indeed managed to remember all this six months later? I say an "unexpectedly" great time because I honestly wasn't expecting to enjoy Lee Child's laconic literary creation nearly as much as I've ended up doing so; after all, I only started this series after making the decision a few years ago to embrace my inner child and once again participate in summer easy reading challenges like I used to as a kid through my public library, where the whole point is to burn through a bunch of books during the warm weather by specifically concentrating on "beach and airport reads," for lack of a better term. Along with choices like Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series, the Horatio Hornblower novels of CS Forester, and Ian Fleming's original James Bond books, I thought it'd be cheesy and fun to add these perennial occupants of the library's "new release" shelf, an annual series of crime thrillers centered around the most kickass American who's ever Americaned America, the always drifting, forever rule-breaking, increasingly "damn" muttering former military crime investigator Jack Reacher, who eternally roams the American countryside and is constantly getting caught up in other people's dramas against his will, because he's just too good a guy to turn a blind eye to injustice, damnit. Of course, this has been the problem with the Reacher books too; actually created by a British Americanophile named James Grant who writes under the pen name Lee Child, Reacher is the literal manifestation of every childhood fantasy about the U S of A he ever had as a child, and the first couple books of this series unfortunately reflects that rather literally, presenting a cartoon superhero who blows into outrageously trope-filled small American towns once per book, to be confronted by a series of the most cardboard cutout stereotypes this side of the Nickelodeon Central Casting office. Thankfully, once Child actually moved to America himself in the late '90s, and had a chance to spend several years here actually getting to know the country as a local, he then put out the big breakthrough book for this series, third volume Tripwire from 1999 (my review); and that's when Reacher finally became a real person living in the same real world you and I live in, Child getting rid of the all the eye-rolling moments of the first two books to instead show us that he really knows what he's doing as a writer of crime thrillers, giving us a fast and mean genre exercise that delights in a way that needs no Roger Marin asterisk. That's why I was so wary and disappointed at first with today's novel, book #5 from 2001, because it looks at first like a return to the outrageously awful small-town antics of pre-American Child, as our hero ends up in southern Texas and trying to help an abused Mexican-American wife against a group of surly, drooling good ol' boys who might as well be hooking their thumbs into the suspenders of their white suits while boasting about the latest local lynching. But without revealing spoilers, about halfway through this book one of these cardboard cutouts is revealed to be almost the exact opposite kind of person than the one painted with the giant brush by Lee in the first half, a real Gone Girl kind of moment where literally the entire plot of the story flips upside-down by the revelation and suddenly starts going in directions you would've never guessed beforehand it would. That was exciting and great, a moment of flipping my expectations just like Child did in the previous book in this series, using these later Reacher books partly as a way of commenting on the implausibility of the early Reacher books, to deliberately play with conventions and expectations so to deliver a novel that gives you all the thrills you want from an airport crime quickie, but always in a smart and original way that doesn't take its audience for granted. That's why I call Reacher books an unexpectedly great time, because I wasn't expecting any of these kinds of things when I first started this series several years ago; and I think it's fair to say that it's the continued success of these books in my eyes that's partly led me to become a bigger fan in general here in my fifties of genre fiction, embracing categories like crime, fantasy and romance* in a way I simply didn't when I was younger, and getting rid of most of the precious NPR Brooklyn indie-lit character dramas I used to read when younger to make room for all these new genre titles. [*Well, okay, maybe I wouldn't be reading the romance ones if it wasn't for the fact that I get hired regularly now to edit such books, so read them professionally because I want to keep on top of the latest trends in this genre. But still!] I'm reserving moral judgment on all that, and am simply chalking it up these days to changing interests as I get older and my interests just change in general; but as far as that stuff's concerned, the Reacher novels have been a real highlight of the last several years of my reading life, and I recommend anyone looking for a really cracking actioner to pick any of these up (as long as you stick to volume #3 and later, that is). I look forward to my next Reacher read, 2002's Without Fail (OMFG, he saves the freaking Vice President), coming this summer, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by and join me again then. Lee Child "Jack Reacher" books being reviewed for this series: Killing Floor (1997) | Die Trying (1998) | Tripwire (1999) | Running Blind (2000) | Echo Burning (2001) | Without Fail (2002) | Persuader (2003) | The Enemy (2004) | One Shot (2005) | The Hard Way (2006) | Bad Luck and Trouble (2007) | Nothing to Lose (2008) | Gone Tomorrow (2009) | 61 Hours (2010) | Worth Dying For (2010) | The Affair (2011) | A Wanted Man (2012) | Never Go Back (2013) | Personal (2014) | Make Me (2015) | Night School (2016) | The Midnight Line (2017) | Past Tense (2018) | Blue Moon (2019) | The Sentinel (2020) | Better Off Dead (2021) | No Plan B (2022) | The Secret (2023) | In Too Deep (2024) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
Jan 22, 2024
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089548
| 9780448089546
| 0448089548
| 3.78
| 1,401
| Jan 01, 1975
| Jan 01, 1975
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089513
| 9780448089515
| B002C1S0Q6
| 3.75
| 1,480
| Jan 01, 1972
| Jan 01, 1997
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Unknown Binding
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089033
| 9780448089034
| 0448089033
| 3.90
| 8,871
| 1927
| 1990
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 2023
not set
|
Dec 01, 2023
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089025
| 9780448089027
| 0448089025
| 3.95
| 10,890
| 1927
| 1994
|
liked it
|
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
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| 1557091447
| 9781557091444
| 1557091447
| 3.92
| 18,504
| 1927
| Oct 01, 1991
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liked it
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2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so
2023 reads, #91-95. I recently discovered that the first three Hardy Boys books, all of them published in 1927, have passed into the public domain, so I thought as a nostalgic treat I would go ahead and read them, since they can now be legally downloaded for free. I'm sure I don't have to tell any of my fellow middle-aged Generation Xers how large this book series loomed over my life as a kid in the 1970s; it was essentially the de facto gift that boys always gave other boys whenever they'd get invited to a birthday party at the rollerskating rink or Showbiz Pizza, because it was one of the few book series in those years still being released as hardbacks, so was deemed a "more substantial present" than the Judy Blume paperbacks we were all actually reading in those days, instead of these badly dated snoozers (or so they were perceived by us at the time). That makes it an ironic situation, that I owned something like 20 or 25 Hardy Boys books at the height of my childhood, but I don't think I ever read even a single one of them all the way from the front cover to the back; so this was another thing that made me curious about reapproaching the series, to see if I had avoided them back then simply because I wasn't a fan of these kinds of action-adventure stories (a genre I still don't like very much, even now in my mid-fifties), or if they're perhaps terribly written and we've all collectively built up this false memory of them being good. That turned out to be difficult to determine in the case of the first three, which I read almost a hundred years after they were first published, because they can't help but be artifacts of their times by now, and so in many ways are so outdated that it appears ludicrous that the publishing industry was still trying to present these as "contemporary stories" back when I was a kid in the '70s. For those who don't know, the series is centered around two brothers in their late teens named Frank and Joe Hardy who live in the small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport; inspired by their father, a retired New York City detective who's now a renowned private investigator, the two are fascinated by the act of solving mysteries, especially easy to do in their case since the local police force are the most incompetent group of boobs this side of the Keystone Cops. (Leslie McFarlane, who bitterly ghostwrote the first 25 titles of the series, made it clear in his correspondence with friends that part of his aim with these books was to make an entire generation of youth suspicious of authority figures, since he otherwise hated writing these kinds of children's books and wanted to do something in them to please just himself.) The first three books of the series are essentially cookiecutter stories with the same exact plot; namely, some ne'er-do-wells slink into Bayport and set up a criminal operation in an abandoned building "on the edge of town" (shuttered mansions in the first two books, a shuttered mill in the third), which the Hardy brothers accidentally stumble across during their motorcycling adventures in the country with their chums (get ready for a lot of references to "chums" and "pals" and "lads" in these novels), which they're then forced to solve themselves because of the local police force not believing them and Dad off on his own adventure, which invariably leads to the Scooby-Doo-like capture of the criminals ("I would've gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids!") and a huge reward from the wealthy industrialist the criminals had been planning on targeting (all in all, around a quarter-million dollars in today's money when you add up the rewards of the first three books, leading to one of the common complaints this series has received over the decades, that the Hardy Boys can essentially drop everything and travel halfway across the world whenever they want, because of being basically millionaires before they've even graduated high school). That makes the books okay for what they are, and certainly prototypes for the "kids have actual agency" school of thought about children's literature that didn't become the mainstream norm until the 1950s, easily explaining why they were so explosively popular from the moment they began being released (when these were first published, most kids' books were still being written in the Victorian style, in which it was the adults who actually saved the day and children were presented as silent admirers who always deferred to the superior wisdom of "dear Papa"); but they're still a product of their times, including badly outdated slang and technology, a focus on activities no actual teens have been into since your grandparents' times (get ready for a lot of talk about speedboats and ham radios), and clues that by today's standards would be considered cartoonishly obvious (an entire major plot point in the first book, for example, revolves around all of these people being too stupid to understand that a criminal might wear a wig when committing a crime, leading to dozens of pages of teens standing around saying, "But he can't be the robber! HE HAS BLACK HAIR!!!!!!1!!"), making these interesting historical documents but in no way at all fun reading experiences that can be enjoyed in a contemporary way. However, this still didn't answer my question about why I in particular didn't seem to connect with the Hardy Boys books back in my '70s youth, when the latest titles were being written in the contemporary culture; so after finishing these three, I went to the Chicago Public Library and checked out two of the titles written during my own childhood and that I in fact personally owned back in the day, 1972's The Masked Monkey (ghostwritten by Vincent Buranelli) and 1975's The Mysterious Caravan (ghostwritten by Andrew Svenson). They weren't exactly bad, which means that I definitively rejected them at the time mostly because I simply didn't like the action-adventure genre in general (interestingly, both of these titles are from the Hardy Boys' proto-Indiana-Jones "globetrotting years," in which the stories start in Bayport but before they're over take the brothers to such exotic locations as the South American rainforest and the Moroccan desert); but the pre-read assumption I did confirm is that a big part of why I rejected them at the time was simply because in the '70s they were still being written in the stilted, awkward prose of 1950s Mid-Century Modernism (and being illustrated in this outdated style as well), and all of us back then had gotten used by that point* to adults trying to feed us old 1950s crap and telling us it's still great for contemporary times, and us summarily ignoring all this old 1950s crap without ever going back and giving it even a second thought. [*It's surreal and hilarious to me now to think back to my childhood in the 1970s and remember just how incredibly much of it still revolved around popular culture from the 1950s; keep in mind that "children's entertainment" hadn't yet become the trillion-dollar industry it now is, and that at that point the '50s were only twenty years old, so back then we didn't think twice about the idea that the only thing on television on weekday afternoons were reruns of things like The Lone Ranger and George Reeves' Superman and ancient old Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts. Watching those now, another entire 50 years after the fact, it's hard to believe that these kinds of shows were being presented to us as perfectly fine and normal contemporary entertainment, stuff we actual kids just essentially ignored altogether, one of the major reasons Generation X became so obsessed with producing quality children's entertainment once we became adults ourselves.] So all in all, my mini-dive into the world of the Hardy Boys this month was the kind of mixed bag these experiments always tend to be; illuminating from a historical standpoint, sort of nominally worth my time from an entertainment aspect, but not even close to being anymore the actual contemporary stories appropriate for contemporary kids that Simon & Schuster still desperately want to convince you they are. Have fun if you're an oldie like me, reapproaching them for nostalgic reasons; but for God's sake, don't force these badly dated relics anymore on any actual ten-year-old boys in your life. ...more |
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| 1662515111
| 9781662515118
| B0C2F4V6BM
| 4.35
| 71,964
| Nov 01, 2023
| Nov 01, 2023
|
it was ok
|
2023 reads, #88. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen
2023 reads, #88. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen other Prime Reads crime thrillers I've read over the last two years. Usually I spend some time detailing what went wrong in these books, as a way of sharpening my skills as an editor of other people's Kindle Unlimited crime thrillers; but I'm just not feeling it today, so I'm instead just going to post my disappointed score and call it a day.
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 1662506449
| 9781662506444
| B0BVCXCYH4
| 4.17
| 12,058
| Oct 17, 2023
| Dec 01, 2023
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #87. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen
2023 reads, #87. Yet another Amazon "Prime Reads" crime thriller, and yet another disappointment, which has been par for the course with the two dozen other Prime Reads crime thrillers I've read over the last two years. Usually I spend some time detailing what went wrong in these books, as a way of sharpening my skills as an editor of other people's Kindle Unlimited crime thrillers; but I'm just not feeling it today, so I'm instead just going to post my disappointed score and call it a day.
...more
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| 3.49
| 18,282
| Aug 20, 2019
| Sep 05, 2019
|
liked it
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2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the
2023 reads, #85. I recently got interested in seeing just how many alt-history novels now exist that revolve primarily around the what-if idea of the Nazis actually winning World War Two; and that got me thinking again about Robert Harris' 1992 Fatherland, one of the best of them all, a murder mystery set in an alternative Mid-Century-Modernist 1960s where a bunch of skinny-tie Nazis in sharp Kennedy suits are preparing to dually celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the war and Hitler's 75th birthday. And that was a reminder that I read that book years and years before becoming a full-time reviewer (literally picked up for a quarter at a random yard sale 25 years ago), and that I've never looked further into the career of this surprisingly interesting journalist and historian turned thriller author. Out of the 15 books he's now published since then, the one I mostly wanted to read was 2019's The Second Sleep, because that's one of the only ones besides Fatherland that scratches my alt-history speculative itch; namely, it's set about a thousand years after a civilization-destroying apocalypse, in which there's been such a long period where humanity's official policy was "never speak of the Science Years" (plus a complete lack of any historical records from our times, because of all of it originally being digital) that humanity has completely reverted back to a society identical to the beginning of the Medieval period, where they believe that this is how society has always been, with humans living in thatched huts and cowering before an angry and judgmental God before He eventually became vengeful and apparently destroyed this mysterious "Cloud" where all the world's information used to be stored. Unfortunately, though, just like my recent read of Daphne du Maurier's 1972 Rule Britannia (my review), Harris doesn't seem to have been able to come up with an actual compelling story to set within this fascinating universe, attempting to skate by on 300 pages of just concept alone; and let me tell you, once the novelty wears off on a "future humans think it's still the Medieval Age" concept, it simply becomes a historical fiction book, as if it was actually set in the Medieval Age, which is not the book I was wanting to read when I first picked this up. And while Harris tries to save the book the same way he made Fatherland so interesting, wrapping the plot around a mystery that's obvious to us modern readers but constitutes a shocking discovery to its characters (namely, when a '60s murder investigation accidentally reveals the Holocaust from twenty years previous, which had been quietly swept under the rug by the Germans after actually winning the war), here the reveal doesn't nearly spark the imagination, as our filth-covered neo-serfs very, very, very slowly come to realize, "OH MY GOD, HUMANS USED TO OWN COMPUTERS, WHATEVER THOSE ARE!!!!!!!!!!1!!" To be clear, neither of these reveals are supposed to be shocking to the readers themselves (and in neither case are spoilers either, which is why I don't mind divulging the information); but why it works in the case of Fatherland is because it's fascinating to picture a world in which the Nazis manage to completely hide the concentration camps from the public, leaving us a group of people who are certainly hard-right warmongers, but who in history's eyes aren't any worse than Spain's Francisco Franco (who held power for 36 years) or Russia's Joseph Stalin (who ruled for 29 years). If the Nazis hadn't bothered trying to eliminate the Jewish people, would they now not be thought of as The Greatest Monsters In The Entirety Of Human History? That's an interesting question to contemplate! What isn't an interesting question to contemplate, though, is, "What would happen if, a thousand years in the future, a group of people who have entirely lost the history of the 18th through 21st centuries suddenly rediscover it, but without the means, training or intelligence to duplicate any of it?" That's instead simply a gimmick, which like a jump scare in a horror movie is good for only a few seconds of legitimate entertainment before the audience goes, "Okay, what else you got?"; and that's why this book is so flat and disappointing, despite it being just as good in quality as Fatherland from 27 years earlier. That would normally get the book two and a half stars from me, being rounded up to three here at the "no half stars" Goodreads, so take that under advisement when deciding whether or not to pick the book up yourself. ...more |
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| 166251087X
| 9781662510878
| B0BQWWY7W9
| 3.62
| 8,449
| Sep 01, 2023
| Sep 01, 2023
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #73. My 22nd Amazon Prime Reads thriller, and the 22nd one in a row I've disliked. Normally here I would tell you exactly why, but I just
2023 reads, #73. My 22nd Amazon Prime Reads thriller, and the 22nd one in a row I've disliked. Normally here I would tell you exactly why, but I just don't have the heart or the energy for it today, so let me instead simply warn you to skip this. Oh, Amazon's in-house publishing imprints, when will you finally publish a book that's actually good?
...more
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| 1662507070
| 9781662507076
| B0BH96MK41
| 3.81
| 27,452
| Jun 01, 2023
| Jun 01, 2023
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did not like it
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2023 reads, #72. Easily the stupidest Prime Reads crime thriller I've ever read; and I've read 21 Prime Reads crime thrillers and have hated them all,
2023 reads, #72. Easily the stupidest Prime Reads crime thriller I've ever read; and I've read 21 Prime Reads crime thrillers and have hated them all, so that's saying quite a bit. One of those gimmicky books that entirely and completely revolves around answering a single high-concept question (why does a bride think during her wedding ceremony that her husband is a complete stranger, even though literally the entire rest of the church insists he is who he says he is?), basically the 300 pages between this opening question and the final answer are nothing but empty filler, until finally getting to the ridiculously silly answer to the question at the end ((view spoiler)[turns out a jilted ex-lover of her fiance has slowly and methodically hypnotized her against her will and without her knowledge, to make her think she's going crazy (hide spoiler)]). One of those books that feels like it started life by the author saying one day, "Hey, you know what a clever ending for a crime thriller would be?" who then forgot that you have to actually write a compelling story to get us to that ending. Avoid.
...more
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Sep 19, 2023
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Sep 19, 2023
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| 0142002062
| 9780142002063
| 0142002062
| 3.80
| 28,248
| 1955
| Dec 31, 2002
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it was ok
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #67. It's summer, which means among other things that it's time again for another of Ian Fleming's 14 original James Bond novels, which I'm reading in chronological order by publishing date. Regular readers will remember that I added Fleming to my Great Completist Challenge in order to "reclaim" these stories from my 1970s-'80s Generation X childhood, when the only Bond I knew was the silly, hammy, over-the-top Roger Moore Bond of such terribly rotoscoped, cheap-feeling, laurels-skating nonsense as The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. My Baby Boomer father and many other men of his generation loved these stories sincerely, and I thought it'd be a nice reading project to go back and discover why these Mid-Century Modernist males went so nuts for the franchise, before the whole thing became a self-parodying cultural cartoon all about cars and gadgets and Playboy Playmates and Playboy Playmate boobs (speaking of Baby Boomer legacies). I've been so far really satisfied by the results of the first two novels, 1953's Casino Royale (my review) and the next year's Live and Let Die (my review), because they indeed show a leaner and meaner Bond who's actually supposed to exist in the real world, stripped of all the movie regalia and heavy mythos of things like the Q department and the million-dollar sci-fi toys (about the most exotic tool Bond uses in these first stories is simply scuba gear), as well as his suave, womanizing nature. (In the early books, Bond is actually supposed to be kind of a cruel sociopath who no one gets along with, with Fleming intimating that the reason a guy like Bond is made an 00 Secret Service field agent in the first place is because no one else at the agency really wants him around the central office, and that he's so unpleasant that no one would really miss him if he died.) And indeed, this third book of the series, written one year after the last one (an annual schedule Fleming would keep up until his death in 1964), keeps up with the movie mythos deconstructivist demolishing, revealing among other things that Bond's boss is known as M. not as a code word applied to all past and future holders of the office as well, but literally because his first name is "Miles;" and that as of 1955, only three 00 agents are actually still in active service, their numbers surprisingly being 007, 008 and 0011, implying that these numbers are permanently retired after an agent leaves the service. Unlike the first two, though, here the actual story being told just falls flat on its face, in such a surprisingly clunky and terrible way that I'm kind of surprised the franchise even survived a title such as this one. Based on the limited research I've done into the subject at Wikipedia and Goodreads, it's my understanding that Fleming was already thinking about the movie version of Bond even here in the early 1950s, after receiving early interest from producer Alexander Korda; and that the plot of this book had actually started life as Fleming's own attempt at writing a James Bond film, but after realizing that in prose form it would only make up about two-thirds of a small novel, he had tacked on the current first third that infamously feels exactly like a separate story tacked on to the main one just to pad the page count. Namely, just like Casino Royale, Bond spends a hundred pages meeting and getting to know the main villain through a convoluted evening of high-class, high-stakes card gambling, and only about a third of the way in learns that said villain, one Hugo Drax, is actually planning something evil, kicking off the main "Bond-style" story of this book. (And indeed, Fleming basically admitted in later interviews that the entire reason he started writing novels was actually more an attempt to write about card games, with it occurring to him that it'd be randomly interesting to make a secret agent the card player in question; Fleming was obsessed with the subject himself, helpfully explaining in Moonraker's fictional first third that even in real life, gambling in the UK was illegal at the time, but could be gotten away with at the super-rich blue-blood gentlemen's clubs of London, because these clubs were made up of all the rich white dudes who created and enforced the gambling laws in the first place.) That makes this a bizarre, disjointed mess of a story, with a prologue that's an entire third of the book, a proper first act that doesn't even begin until the 33% mark, and a climax that just flies by at the very end in the blink of an eye. This is then further marred by Fleming's strange decision that for this particular novel, he really wanted to play up and emphasize all the fine, wonderful things about England that make it in his opinion The Greatest Country On The Whole Damn Planet, and so decided to set the entire adventure this time within the small confines of just London and Dover, with the globetrotting and exotic locations already present from the first book now entirely gone, and with Fleming's attempts to highlight "the best of British culture" now being so inept and old-fashioned that they often now elicit unintentional laughter. (At a certain point, Bond and his companion order for dinner a Salisbury steak, bone marrow [delivered in actual overcooked bones with accompanying tiny spoon], and a pile of raw pineapple slices, and I was like, "Jesus Christ, Fleming, is this really your ultimate example of the brilliance of British cuisine?!") That I suppose is what makes it ironic that among his contemporary readers of these actual years, Drax was far and away seen by many as Bond's greatest villain, precisely because he seemed the most realistic to 1950s audiences; an amnesiac war orphan who stumbled out of the conflict with no identity and no money, he nonetheless spent the go-go postwar years becoming a rich and powerful innovator of rocket technology, eventually inventing what at the time was the science-fiction concept (but actually invented a few years later) of the intercontinental ballistic missile, the "Moonraker" of the book's title. (And this, by the way, is another huge drawback of this book; for it seems that Fleming rather thought of himself here as a fellow "hard science-fiction" author in the style of his '50s contemporaries like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and here files one of the most overwritten and tediously detailed explanations of how rockets work that I've ever seen, just pages upon pages of badly written pseudoscience babble that you can just entirely skip right over.) This being a James Bond novel, Drax of course turns out to not be what he seems; but what he actually is and what he's actually attempting to do don't get revealed until way far along into the third act, already unusually short because of all the "bridge game for a million pounds? Don't mind if I do, sir!" nonsense of the book's start, which when combined with the blase settings (c'mon, bro, Dover?) leads to just a really lackluster reading experience, one that if I didn't know any better (for example, if I was a contemporary audience member who was reading these as they actually came out) would cause me to think, "Does this guy even know what he's doing?" It's telling, for example, that when the Albert Broccoli money-printing machine did finally start cranking out Bond movies beginning in the Kennedy '60s, they deliberately wrote an entirely new story for the film version of Moonraker, retaining the title and the villain's name but otherwise changing every single other detail, despite Fleming having meant for this to be his first sincere attempt at actually writing a screenplay himself. That kind of tells you how much this isn't working, and now makes me interested in seeing how he managed to save himself from a short and unremembered three-book career with the next novel after this, the hugely popular Diamonds Are Forever (aka the last of the Sean Connery films). I'll see you in Summer 2024 for that one! Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
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Aug 26, 2023
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Aug 26, 2023
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B08K88FMK4
| 4.15
| 7,015
| 1982
| Sep 26, 2020
|
it was amazing
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2023 reads, #60. I read this at the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, who writes thrillers set in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous and t
2023 reads, #60. I read this at the recommendation of one of my freelance clients, who writes thrillers set in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-step program, and who himself is in the middle of a reading project regarding similar "Addiction Fiction" titles. Apparently this is a rather famous one from this genre, in that author Lawrence Block had actually published four novels already featuring this book's main character, private investigator and former NYPD cop Matthew Scudder, and up to here had simply portrayed him as a typical hard-drinking gritty private eye in the mold of a Sam Spade, making it unexpected and welcome to many of his readers to suddenly reveal in the fifth book that Scudder's drinking problem was actually much more serious than he'd let on in the previous volumes, so much so that he begins attending AA meetings in this one, albeit reluctantly at first and never actually participating himself. (Interestingly, this is where Block had planned to end the entire series; but he still owed a Scudder short story to an editor friend, and enjoyed the process so much that he ended up writing another twelve Scudder novels over the course of the following 30 years.) That's an interesting choice for a novel that's otherwise all about the moral decay and financial bottoming-out the city of New York went through in the years this book was written (it was originally published in 1982), which makes this book essentially a look at what Sam Spade would be like if plucked out of the 1930s and dropped into the middle of Taxi Driver. That sets us up for a really dark and bleak story here, in which a prostitute hires Scudder to help her break things off with her pimp and then winds up dead a few days later, but with it almost certain that the pimp himself didn't actually kill her. (Indeed, the pimp ends up hiring Scudder himself to solve the murder so to take the heat off of him, knowing that cops in the '70s wouldn't bother doing any actual investigating about yet another dead whore in a broken-down and dilapidated pre-gentrification Manhattan.) To be sure, this is a procedural through and through, so unlike these endless mediocre contemporary Kindle Unlimited crime novels I'm always choking my way through these days, there's no big gimmick here behind the story, no big action set pieces, just a former cop putting in the legwork to very methodically and slowly solve the case. And unlike those gimmicky mediocre contemporary Kindle Unlimited crime novels, the solution isn't some big surprise that relies on information that was deliberately withheld from the reader, but rather Block in the classic style actually lays in every bit of information you need to know in order to solve the crime yourself before Scudder does, a highly satisfying intellectual game that I think I'm going to start insisting on a little more from the crime novels I read from now on. Meanwhile, Block is totally on target when it comes to the AA meetings he describes and what the people who are there say at them, with I suspect him lifting some of this wholesale from actual AA meetings that were going on in New York at the time; and for a book this old, he does a shockingly great job at presenting a fully rounded, nuanced and complex black pimp as one of the major characters, as well as taking the time to look at all the prostitutes in his ring one at a time in detail, and examining the various reasons each took up hooking and what all of them were getting out of the deal. In fact, there's really only one problem here, but it's a big enough one to knock an entire star off my score, which is that pretty much every single scene in the book is about 25 percent longer than it ideally should be, with Block giving us a 400-page book that in a perfect world should've been more like 300. Other than that, though, I found this to be a real breath of fresh air compared to all the crappy contemporary crime novels I've been reading through the Prime Reads program over the last several years, the very definition of an old-school hardboiled rat-a-tat noir thriller, with of course the big bonus added of it also being one of the first-ever books to take an insider's look at the daily ins-and-outs of the AA sobriety community. Although it can perhaps be skipped by those who aren't naturally crime fans already, those who are will absolutely want to pick this up, a classic of the genre that's now one of the most famous titles of Block's 100 book (and counting!) career. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 27, 2023
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Jul 27, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.12
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it was ok
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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| 3.64
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it was amazing
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Jun 11, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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| 3.90
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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May 17, 2024
not set
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May 17, 2024
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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May 09, 2024
not set
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May 09, 2024
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| 4.40
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did not like it
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Jan 28, 2024
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Jan 28, 2024
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| 4.04
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 3.78
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.75
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.95
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 3.92
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liked it
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Dec 2023
not set
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Dec 01, 2023
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| 4.35
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it was ok
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Nov 11, 2023
not set
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 4.17
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it was ok
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Nov 11, 2023
not set
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 3.49
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liked it
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Nov 11, 2023
not set
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Nov 11, 2023
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| 3.62
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it was ok
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Sep 19, 2023
not set
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Sep 19, 2023
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| 3.81
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did not like it
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Sep 19, 2023
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Sep 19, 2023
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| 3.80
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it was ok
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Aug 26, 2023
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Aug 26, 2023
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Jul 27, 2023
not set
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Jul 27, 2023
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