Fahrenheit 451: A 21st Century Reaction, Upon Rereading

Several thoughts. First, and least serious, is that Clarisse is Guy Montag's Manic Pixie Dream Girl^TM, the youthful, vivacious female archetype whose function as a plot device is to spur a male protagonist's awakening from depression and torpor, as with Trillian and Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Second, Bradbury's breathless, colorful writing competes well for his readers' presumed short attention spans, and might even fare well versus the spectacular domestic entertainment appliance that covers three walls of Mildred Montag's living room. Related, Bradbury's prognostications of said short attention span devices, penned in 1951, not only came true but leapfrogged past the television age into the Internet and virtual reality. He nailed the unwillingness -- or even inability -- of the domestic population to engage civically rather than distract itself with various software and circuses; chillingly, his gloomy predictions have found their full flower in today's seemingly endless cycle of optional wars.

So far, so good, with an A+ for threat recognition; but then Bradbury loses points for the third act's toehold in the academic conceit that the cultural blueprint to reconstitute a post-apocalyptic world can be carried in the heads of classics scholars and their fellow travelers. A room full of white-shirted Isaac Asimov readers taking recreational respite from lab duty might buy that as a nifty parable, but as speculation, it stretches the rubber band beyond the breaking point.

It does, however, give a new meaning to the phrase, "You read me like a book."

Mmmmmm...Bacon!

J.M. Gifford's entertaining debut novel, Bobby Q, serves up the tantalizing prospect that sizzling, aromatic meals will continue to feature prominently (at least for the lucky ones) in humanity's space-based future.

Gifford entices you into his vessel with a whiff of this quirky, somehow reassuring premise, then, once you're aboard, pulls you into a superorbital adventure plot motivated by the protagonist couple's entrepreneurial aspirations, relationships with each other as besties, herding of their fragile beasties, and desperate work to earn their daily feasties.

There's no shortage of pithy banter between the lead twosome. While the story takes the point of view of every-geek Ozzie, I found myself hoping we will see much more of Pele, the plucky, scene-stealing chef extraordinaire, in series sequels.

While easy reading, Bobby Q has meat on the bones. The chapters open with writerly, observational paragraphs worth savoring. The technology speculations regarding energy production, interorbital travel, and massive, biospheric space stations are pure Arthur C. Clarke. Given the book's central culinary conceit, I would like to have heard more speculations from the imagineering author about the animal husbandry and space ranching processes necessary to produce the perfect pulled pork parfait near Pluto.

In sum, there's plenty to carry the story forward, as well as paragraphs that are so good they almost seem out of place in a novel that slathers on the sauce. Ultimately, you either accept the Pigs in Space premise or you don't. If you don't, I must ask: would you rather Gifford had written a book entitled Rendezvous with Ramen?

A Rank Reveal

Ian, Ian, Ian. You were so close to a five-star rating.

In The Black Book, the fifth novel-length installment in your Inspector Rebus mystery series, you've manufactured a rebellious hero with a worthy crime to solve, eight or nine threads of misdirection, and enough stops in the pub to outdo Masterpiece Mysteries' Inspector Morse. Your story has winningly wise-ass sidekicks, frustratingly bureaucratic bosses, and belligerently boastful bad guys. You continue to describe the Edinburgh milieu colorfully with each new Inspector Rebus episode, with most of the colors being browns and grays. Your well-paced plot kept me turning pages through an entire four-day visit to Schenectady (but that's another story).

And then, Mr. Rankin, you do this: you have a hell-raising suspect disclose the final reveal in the form of a narrative, eight-page diary entry -- eight pages! -- written as fully and articulately as you yourself write. Why, it reads as though it could have been an early plot outline that you'd prepared for your editor, or even a short story worthy of inclusion in The Hanging Game.

Such a pity. You were so close. Oh, Ian.

Bob's Best Books of 2013 - The Top Ten, and Then Some

This is a purely personal list of books that I've read, finished (mostly), and enjoyed during 2013, regardless of publication date.  A more complete catalog of books I've read, along with 1-star to 5-star ratings and occasional capsule reviews, is on my Goodreads.com page.

Now, without further ado...the best of 2013!

1. Fisherman's Beach by George Vukelich (1962).  A moving, well-written story of a patriarchal family and way of life in crisis and transition. The Upper Great Lakes setting is visceral and pervasive; the writing is crisp, colorful, and powerful in its simplicity.  Comparable in quality and tone to the German novella, Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse).  I'm astounded that this regional work from the late Wisconsin writer didn't receive wider attention, although an excellent Madison Magazine profile of the author's life and a new edition of his novel may help to rectify that.

2. The Unlikely Secret Agent by Ronnie Kasrils (2012).  In a year that ended with Nelson Mandela's passing, this suspensefully plotted memoir of a young woman's small-scale, clandestine operations against the South African apartheid regime in the 1960s, in concert with the ANC and other revolutionary elements, serves as a testimony to her pluck, persistence, and resourcefulness under the constant threat of capture and harsh treatment.  Written by her admiring husband following her death, the book also serves as an internal snapshot of the organizational and personal alliances the two of them formed in pursuit of their activities.

3. Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey by Karen Wilkin (2009).  I became aware of cartoonist Edward Gorey, the comically morbid heir to Chas. Addams and progenitor to goth-graphic filmmaker Tim Burton, in the 1970s.  The Loathsome Couple (1977), Gorey's illustrated tale of two macabre anti-heros for whom a mundane life gets worse and worse, was a staple of my personal wry humor collection for years.  Elegant Enigmas is a comprehensive, curated survey of Gorey's masterful career -- although I agree with one commenter who suggested that those wholly unfamiliar with his work check out some of his original storybooks first.

4. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965) by John le Carré.  I'm still catching up on the George Smiley series by British espionage master le Carré.  This pair of iconic, acclaimed, literary spy thrillers elevated le Carré from his erstwhile status as part-time mystery writer, whose "detective" happens to be a middle-aged ex-spy, to a recipient of worldwide acclaim as a deep explorer of immorality, deceit, and duplicity by agencies and assassins on an international scale.  His characters' harsh actions are justified, at first, by a sense of patriotic duty.  The further one reads in the Smiley series, however, the harder it is to tell the good guys from the bad.

5. Mortality by Christopher Hitchens (2012).  This short book serves a profound, dual purpose: it is a frank, autobiographical documentary of the grinding, mundane realities of the author's diminishing quality of life as his terminal disease (esophageal cancer) overtakes him; and it is a stark defense of his strident, lifelong atheism.  As a mathematics student, I was once taught the value of testing general propositions under extreme conditions.  By examining his own debunking of faith during episodes of his failing health, an extreme condition that leads some to bargain with one or more deities with whom they haven't previously communicated, Hitchens provides the generous gift of transparency to his readers not presently in such dire straits.  He reaffirms his godless philosophy -- to his own satisfaction, at least.

6. A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone (1964).  Must confess, I haven't finished A Hall of Mirrors just yet.  However, any literary debut that uses colorful description, well-drawn characters, and brilliant dialogue to send up both sleazy, fly-by-night rescue mission preachers and rightist media polemicists in its first 120 pages gives me great hope for the remaining 280.  Set in New Orleans, the book is comparable to John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (completed 1964; published 1981).  One wonders if Stone and Toole had made each other's acquaintance.

7. Hoot (2002) and Chomp (2012) by Carl Hiaasen.  I've accumulated almost a whole shelf of Carl Hiaasen's comedic, ecologically moralistic novels, now stacked on my overburdened books-to-read bookcase and waiting for a scrap of my attention.  So naturally, rather than start on those, I've been reading his books for kids instead.  Same wackiness, same eco-morals, same sticky come-uppances for the defilers of nature; just a bit quicker to read.  Or, in the case of Chomp, to listen to as an audiobook on an overnight Amtrak trip to Schenectady.  Even Hiaasen himself might not have calculated the comically disruptive effect of the repeatedly spoken character name of "Wahoo" on a railroad passenger and his seatmates.

8. The Third Man by Graham Greene (1948).  Conceived originally as the mere outline for the classic suspense movie of the same name, The Third Man is a detective novella with cinematic detail and more literary exposition than one would expect from a text that the author did not imagine the public would see.

9. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (2013).  Touting a book by the ever-popular pop-goth fantacist Neil Gaiman feels a bit like following the herd, but in this case it's a genuine recommendation.  Just as portrait artists who work in oils create self-portraits in their own style, Gaiman has created an artful, fictional self-portrait using nonfictional events and settings from his childhood.  The latest output from the groundbreaking graphic novelist known for the Sandman series, Ocean can also be taken as Gaiman's personal origins story -- or, more simply, as a narrative answer to the one question that plagues all successful authors: "Where do you get your ideas?"

10. Humor in Craft by Brigitte Martin (2012).  Ever since I saw a talented friend throw and carve a cartoonish firehouse mug on a potter's wheel, with a firehose for a handle, I've been intrigued by the ability of artists to create humorous works of high wit.  Humor in Craft is a collection of such works in multiple media from a cross-cultural perspective.  Only two complaints: I wish some of the photographed exhibits were larger, and I wish certain craft techniques were at least introduced so that readers who take inspiration from the collection might be able to follow in the artists' funny footsteps.

Honorable mention:

Six Days of the Condor by James Grady (1974).  One Man Against the Machine Award.

The Odessa File by Frederick Forsythe (1972).  Suspense with Horrifying Historical Elements Award.

Knots and Crosses (1987), Hide and Seek (1990), Tooth and Nail (1992), A Good Hanging (1992), and Strip Jack (1992) by Ian Rankin.  Bob's Found a New Mystery Series Award.

Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith (1992).  Bob's Other Favorite Mystery Series Award. 

Free Country: A Penniless Adventure the Length of Britain by George Mahood (2013).  Light-Hearted Travel E-Book for Settling Down and Trying to Go to Sleep Award.

The Babe and I by Mrs. Babe Ruth (1959).  You May Be Beloved But They Still Won't Make You a Manager Award.

Post Office by Charles Bukowski (1971).  And You Thought Your Job Was Unfulfilling Award.

Goodreads, and My OneNote Wiki Trick, Part II

[See Part 1, posted Oct. 16, 2012.]

As a bucket load of "Best of 2013" book lists is dumped upon us, the tools I've used to make order from the chaos of infinite possibility have continued to serve me well.  Goodreads, now under the Amazon corporate umbrella, is still my go-to web service for tracking books read, books anticipated, and books flung against the wall in disdain (or, more broadly, set aside).  I still cut-'n'-paste lists of fiction and nonfiction works by my favorite authors from their respective Wikipedia pages into Microsoft OneNote.

What's new is the omnipresence of a smartphone in my pocket (oh, grow up!).  I carry a Motorola Photon 4G (MB855), a nifty, if prior generation Android 2.3 unit on Ting, a low-cost MVNO (mobile service reseller) that completes calls over the Sprint network.  I've loaded the Goodreads Android app onto the phone, which allows me to enter new books and reading updates remotely.

However, for my stubby fingers on a medium-sized smartphone in the dim light of a library or at a yard sale, it's still a nuisance to search the Goodreads app for a complete list of an author's works, such as all books in Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series, especially if I need their chronological order.  I want to know quickly: have I read this particular title by Tom Robbins or Tom Sharpe before?  Do I have a copy at home?  Also, as I mainly use Wifi (free, on Ting) instead of 3G/4G (which costs) for mobile data, how can I access my book lists when I'm out and about, and not near a Wifi hotspot?

The solution I've fastened on is to make small notations in my OneNote author lists, which I use to annotate the cut-'n'-pasted Wikipedia pages.  I'll type "Finished" or "Started" by a title.  If I've already purchased, say, the third-from-now Inspector Rebus novel by Ian Rankin and stockpiled it on my overburdened bookcases at home, I'll mark that title with an 'x'.

Crucially, Microsoft OneNote on my Windows 7 PC can sync data with the OneNote Android app on my Photon 4G.  It takes a bit of set-up, but then it syncs the data via Microsoft SkyDrive whenever I'm near a Wifi hotspot and click on the corresponding OneNote folder on my phone.  Voilà: instant mobile access to my reading lists, want-to-read lists, and notes -- including which books I already own so I don't buy duplicates at the ten-cent sale.

In truth, it's not much different than carrying around a small, paper-based diary or notebook of your reading lists, except the OneNote solution scales and organizes free-form lists with your changing whims.  It would take a long time to write out all the book titles by all your favorite authors by hand instead of utilizing the ol' cut-'n'-paste routine.  Also, books are just one category for which you might like quick, remote access; you may also be interested in carrying pages of your CDs, DVDs, sports tickets, or wine cellar inventory.  Do you want to carry a paper diary for each one?

In summary: Yes, OneNote continues to be an excellent list-keeping tool.  Yes, it's now in my pocket.  And yes, I'm happy to see you.

How Many Lanes Must Neil Gaiman Walk Down?

While many readers will take The Ocean at the End of the Lane as a parable for an adult's hazy recollection of the intense feelings and dark fears and fantasies of childhood, a more specific perspective is possible: this is Neil Gaiman's gothic self-portrait, in the sense of a painter who depicts himself looking in a mirror, his bemused image standing out centrally if tentatively, embedded as it is in the composition among his favorite semiotic objects.

Fittingly for a creator and writer of comics, it's also Gaiman's superhero origins story, presenting how a figurative, residual hole in the author's heart from childhood traumatic events has led to his lifelong, genius ability to access his sharp, surrealistic imagination for popular consumption and illumination.

Bank Shot

This second installment of Donald E. Westlake's "Dortmunder" series combines familiar, bumbling criminals, a reluctant, curmudgeonly mastermind, and oblivious members of the constabulary, to lighthearted comedic effect.  This is a Robert Redford caper movie in novel form, with Bugs Bunny dialogue, only slower and with less Mel Blanc-sy voices; in contrast, however, Robert Redford and Bugs Bunny always come out on top.  Here, you get the feeling after each episode falters that John Dortmunder will invariably be back on his home turf, conning moms and widows out of their tens and twenties in his fallback encyclopedia sales scam, shortly after the big bank job that he and his henchmen have conceived, planned, and taken farcical pains to execute washes away, just out of reach.

The second novel in a series is the hardest, so they say.  Westlake succeeds by reducing the degree of difficulty, relative to the series opener, the serial gem heist caper The Hot Rock, while maintaining the same mad, mad sensibility.  It's a comedy writer's version of productivity growth: the same laughs for a simpler book.

The Moose Jaw

Aw, crap.  I had to downgrade this enjoyable nightstand read by Mike Delany from four stars to three stars to protest its hackneyed, supernatural ending.  The occult explanation of events that had been vaguely foretold and lightly foreshadowed was never relinquished, only rationalized.  The characters didn't so much solve the mystery as have the spooky solution revealed unto them. 

Pity, because I'd been engrossed in the adventure.  The novel's first half included several well-written chapters depicting Alaskan outdoorsmanship and backwoods cabin life, among the best I've read.  The third quarter placed the protagonist in more and more danger, but events still lay within the bounds of plausibility.  I was sure that within the denouement we would learn some natural explanation of weird happenings: something in the spring water; some hallucinogenic plant inadvertently consumed; some mental health issue spurring the protagonist's prodigious consumption of alcohol and increasing paranoia.  Some prankster in a bear suit.  Something.

But this magic-laced ending, as ripe as a hunting party after a two-week Alaskan fishing trip?  Aw, crap.

Side note: there's a touch of arrested development in the author's Hefneresque depiction of a relationship with a damsel in distress, a-heh, a-heh.  (Spoiler: goose grease.)

Fire Watch

"Fire Watch", the title story in the 1985 short story collection of the same name, is the departure point for Connie Willis's series of novels featuring time-traveling Oxford historians of the future. For their practicum, the graduate students of the history department are sent back in time to observe and participate in crucial events: in this case, the heroic, yet mundane civil defense efforts by Londoners facing the German firebombing of St. Paul's Cathedral during WWII.

By turns imaginative, speculative, wry, and shocking, "Fire Watch" combines the educational virtues of the historical fiction genre with a futurist's deft treatment of alternative explanations and outcomes. The result is a discourse on the pragmatic role of history and historians and an illustration of the need to overcome the emotional attachment to the one course of events that has actually occurred.

The Dog Stars

Globetrotting author Peter Heller writes adventure, travel, and other non-fiction, often involving dangerous situations.  His first novel, The Dog Stars, is a post-apocalyptic Western set in Colorado, with wonderful, lyrical writing about private piloting, mountain stream fishing, and a beloved canine companion.  Replace the commas with slashes and you have an epic survivalist tale in free verse.

The book includes rich explorations on meanings and purposes in a new, harsh reality (i.e., shoot high-caliber weapons first, explore meanings and purposes later).  Heller's protagonist Hig, a Cessna pilot and outdoorsman turned aerial scout and turf-defender by necessity, has a sliver more heart and hope than his physically and emotionally bunkered neighbor, but you wouldn't know it by his lethal actions against both hostile and non-hostile intruders.  Even so, while his partner tends their airfield arsenal, Hig entertains the notion of a life beyond, fueled by a chance radio reception which leads him to a journey of peril and discovery.

(I've got Olivia Wilde as the doctor; that's probably just me.)

My fellow Dartmouth alumni will appreciate Heller's drop-in references -- he also spent four years in Hanover -- including an impassioned, fitting sidebar on Eastern Establishment condescension toward the West.

I look forward with anticipation to reading more of Peter Heller's adventurous works.  While I'm more of a National Geographic than a Field and Stream fan, anyone who can turn the end of civilization into a nature appreciation treatise while his hero dodges bullets is worth a gander.

Shopgirl

Where the hell is the three-and-a-half stars option?  In this Europeanish relationships fable, Steve Martin's nuanced depictions of his characters' emotions and thought processes and keen eye for decorative detail create from whole cloth a highly credible protagonist, two suitors who could not be more different (rich man, poor man), and a comedically villanous archrival in hot, competitive pursuit of the same affection-givers.

Martin's singular accomplishment in an era of contemporary literary bombast is to depict an introvert as his fully human lead.  Indeed, she's a normal introvert, not someone who's scary, unbalanced, or traumatized, though she does have a depression issue.  A rare, unambitious heroine, Mirabelle is the invisible worker we all pass by daily, in the store or on the street, without stopping to think about their story; Martin provides the story and creates empathy.

Where the book suffers slightly is when he lets his jokey side off the leash and starts to describe bedroom activities to unnecessary degrees of resolution.  Also, I found Mirabelle's source of continuing financial support to stretch credulity; one can almost hear Martin's fellow comedian Judy Tenuta bleating out, "Hey! It could happen!"

Lightning Quick

Lightning: A Novel, a small volume from a new hybrid genre of fictionalized biography, insinuated its way into my towering library borrowings stack.  It was a quick read with an educational payoff.

This is biography as storytelling, a narrative speculation on the life of neurotic, revolutionary inventor Nikola Tesla. The fictionalized specific events, closely based on the history of Tesla's inventions, and the author's speculations into Tesla's emotional state as the picaresque tale of his business dealings unfolds, place the book in the shaded area between historical fiction and popular history; the former is emphasized by the word "novel" on the cover and the use of "Gregor" rather than "Nikola" as the name of the protagonist.

French author Echenoz creates a story arc not through technological developments but through the use of recurring, colorful details as markers: Gregor's fondness for aviary companions; his fastidiousness of dress; his obsessive-compulsive habits. The product is a breezy, accessible introduction to the life of Tesla that could serve as a treatment for a one-man stage play.

My only hesitation in recommending this book, and others from the same author and genre, is that the story framework has the depth of a Wikipedia article; indeed, the sum of the author's background research could have been the Wikipedia article on Tesla.  By calling the book a novel and by emphasizing the subject's mindset over his technological contributions (other than to mention them serially as new examples of his propensity to get cheated), the author seems to be communicating the message: this is a work of narrative art, not history or technology; please don't criticize me for not including citations.

Goodreads, and My OneNote Wiki Trick

The ol' cut-and-paste maneuver has transformed my life, yet again!

First, I started using the Goodreads web site (http://www.goodreads.com) to track my books.  When I say "my" books, I'm not using a strict definition of ownership; my tracking entries include books that have penetrated my gray cells at some point, whether I've owned them, borrowed them from the library, obtained them and later exchanged them at a Little Tiny Library, pre-read and re-gifted them, found them at a yard sale and resold them, donated them in overstuffed bags and collapsing bankers' boxes to some Friends of the Library sale or Goodwill, flung them against the wall after a screamingly bad paragraph and broken their little spines, or used them for fireplace kindling when we've run out of sticks.

The titles, thus entered, are categorized into books I've read, books I'm reading -- several at a time, usually, in various states of perusal --, books I intend to read, and books I've started but set aside, either indefinitely or permanently.  It's way more fun than it sounds; if you include your childhood Dr. Seuss and Hardy Boys treasures, as I do, your personal catalog can be very large indeed.

Why do this?  It's something akin to a line from the movie "Clockwise", spoken by the time-obsessed Headmaster played by John Cleese: "The first step to knowing who you are is to know where you are and when you are!"  To this, I would add: what you've read, seen, listened to, or otherwise experienced.  No doubt, The Baseball Encyclopedia or one of its competitors now has an app where you can track all the games you've attended; recalling and entering that data could keep me occupied for weeks!

Tracking books I've read has been both fun and motivational; I'm eager to recall what I've read and even more eager to finish reading books to expand my list.  It can also be social, if you learn that an acquaintance also has a book-tracking obsession.  (Friends and readers of this blog are welcome to view my collection, such as it is; my current reading list can be found in a sidebar to this blog.)

Still, even with Goodreads, something was missing from this rare instance of semi-obsessive organization on my part: the ability to ascertain at a glance when in a favorite author's career a particular book was written, and in what sequence.  I'm pretty sure Sue Grafton wrote A is for Alibi before B is for Burglar, but I'd have a harder time putting Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy, Tourist Season, and Double Whammy in the right order.  This is oddly important when you find a copy of, say, one of John le Carre's George Smiley spy novels on a thrift store shelf and want to know if he already knows what you know he will know.

Enter Microsoft OneNote and Wikipedia.  I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Carl Hiaasen, scrolled down to his bibliography, highlighted it, and cut-and-pasted it into its own page under an Authors tab in OneNote.  Now, rather than doing a Wikipedia search every time, I click into OneNote on my Windows 7 system tray, and with two more clicks I can see that Tourist Season was Hiaasen's first solo novel.  Easy and quick.

This isn't a patentable idea -- is it?  Surely not, but it's made my reading life more enjoyable and organized.  Now, if I could only keep my bookcases as tidy...

My First Smiley

Call for the Dead, master spywriter John le Carré's first novel (1961), introduces George Smiley, the rumpled, curmudgeonly British operative, to a generation of suspense enthusiasts.  Short and squat, Oxford-educated, shrewd yet scarcely able to defend himself in violent encounters, Smiley is the anti-Bond, a dogged Inaction Hero without a hint of handsome, with only a reluctant, undashing dash of derring-do.

Structured as a simple mystery, with a murder investigation at its core and only tangential reference to geopolitical intrigue, le Carré's story presents Smiley and his surrounding cast in sharp relief, without the shadowy double-crosses and moral murkiness of his later novels.  Accordingly, this book is an easy read, save for a few quid worth of English colloquialisms, with simple exposition, only a handful of characters to follow, and several recapitulations of "what we know" as the unfolding proceeds. 

Invitingly, Call for the Dead draws the reader into the Smiley oeuvre with this initial foray into the world of old-school spycraft.  The beleaguered agent's life will soon become vastly more complicated.

I See What He Did There

I'm through page 73 of For the Win, Cory Doctorow's 21st Century novel of multi-player virtual reality games and their intersection with bands of far-flung, carbon-based humans facing real, increasingly precarious predicaments.

Already, in fewer than 15% of the novel's rapidly readable pages, FTW has called to mind George Orwell's 1984, Norman Jewison's pithy short story, "Rollerball Murder" (later made into the violent future-sports movie, "Rollerball"), and Thomas Friedman's breathless economic globalism treatise, The World is Flat.

Then, without warning, Doctorow executes a perfect educational ambush and explains how financial arbitrage led to the mortgage and banking crisis of 2008, without ever using the words mortgage, banking, or collateralized debt obligations -- without even mentioning the historical events of 2008, in fact. He accomplishes this in only four pages, written at an eighth grade level, using vorpal blades, gaming gold, and other virtual treasure as currency to illustrate.

I'm now fully convinced of the author's powers. I'm hopeful that if I keep reading, I'll learn how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without using the word Jerusalem. I'm pretty sure a vorpal blade will be involved.

The Ryan Braun Story

The Ryan Braun story is a writers' workshop in disguise. Collectively, the media reports of the scandal read like an unfinished novel.

Ever since the confidentiality breach that spilled (leaked? sorry...) Braun's allegedly positive drug test into the public sphere and his appeal that stirred it into an full-blown controversy, sports fans have followed events of the case obsessively. Both prior to and following Braun's successful challenge of the result, we've continued to absorb, scrutinize, and dissect each new report with the fascinated attention usually reserved for NFL replays.

What has been a nightmare for both the player and Major League Baseball officials has become a wonderful exercise for budding writers. Here's your assignment: irrespective of your personal conclusions about Braun's veracity and the test's reliability, take the scenario in toto and create from it a cleverly crafted, multi-threaded work of popular fiction.

Do you choose a wry, comedic tone that divides the characters into good guys and bad guys, mocking the bad guys' motivations while still allowing them a certain integrity of purpose and conviction, à la Carl Hiassen's South Florida novels?

Do you fashion the story as a Stieg Larsson-meets-Patricia Cornwell medical suspense novel, choosing as your protagonist a smart, dragon-tattooed test lab assistant, alone in the world, who fends off dangerous challenges from powerful forces beyond her ken?

Are we witnessing a John le Carré entanglement of morally compromised operatives, their bosses' cynical public proclamations providing a nervous public with a reassuring cover story while concealing organizational machinations of dubious legality?

Is the Braun saga at its core an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, a workplace legal drama leading up to the conclusive scene in which the arbitrator rules for Braun, Tom Cruise receives a salute, and the fuming Marine colonel is taken away in handcuffs?

Is this a Shakespearean tragedy, a King Lear tale in which a powerful Commissioner, nearing the end of his reign, is undone in the end by a confluence of factors of his own devising?

Or is it a Dickensian redemption tale in which Ryan Braun is visited on the bases by three spirits -- the Ghosts of Princes Past, Rickies Present, and Aramises Future -- before being waved home by Ed Sedar?

Of course, you can always ditch the assignment, write a nine-minute beat poem, and major in Interdisciplinary Studies. The choice is yours!

One last tip to conclude our writer's workshop: as in reality, leaving certain details unsaid only heightens the suspense. In the wise words of Mark Harris' fictional pitching ace, Henry "Author" Wiggen, "Half the fight is knowing, and the other half is not telling."

Neverread

Someone else will have to write the definitive review of Neil Gaiman's darkly comic fantasy novel Neverwhere, for I didn't make it past page seventy.

That's not Gaiman's fault. Neverwhere is a perfectly entertaining story, at least so far, with enough colorful whimsy and clever lines to fill a Monty Python movie. There's an Arthur Dent-type urban everyman as protagonist, a mysterious damsel in distress, two Looney Tunes villains whose urbane, Dickensian dialogue only heightens their cartoonish menace, a host of Doctor Dolittle-like transgressions of the animal-human communication barrier, and enough impressionistic descriptions of London proper and the London underground to fill a Fodor's guide.

To be sure, I'm not usually one for the fantasy genre. Fiction is already unreal enough for me; fantasy fiction seems like overegging the pudding. Moreover, having seen "Stardust" on the big screen and a recent, Neil Gaiman-penned "Doctor Who" episode on the small screen, I think I get Gaiman's recurring meme: normal meets fantastical at a mysterious frontier, to both scary and wonderous effect, à la Terry Gilliam. The spooky, semi-occult themes of fantasy lit don't often grab me -- but that's not what stopped me from reading this light, slightly subversive thriller in mid-noir.

Nor can I articulate any particular objection I had to Roy Blount, Jr.'s Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, the noted humorist's personal, crafty, scene-by-scene explication of the Marx Brothers classic flick, "Duck Soup", that kept me from finishing that book; nor can I recall why An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin's amiable novel of the modern art collecting world, failed to capture my eyeballs for more than a couple of chapters, for it too looked promising; as did a fascinating historical treatment of the New York City art world, The Pop Revolution by the late Alice Goldfarb Marquis.

I actually did finish The Year of the Hare, a wry picaresque tale set in Finland that became a touchstone of the 1970s back-to-nature movement. In truth, however, Arto Paasilinna's symbolism-laden allegory was less than 200 pages long and super-simple reading; it's one of those Euro-fables that your foreign language teacher might have assigned to your tenth grade class, were it not already in English. Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou, a starkly riotous and ribald African novel of similar brevity and simplicity, comprising a series of low episodes told to a street-smart Congolese bartender and relayed in his purported diaries, deserved a much better fate in my hands than it received, but halfway through fell victim to my all-too-brief attention span and manic library habits.

Therein lies the tale. Each trip to the public library is a festival of eyes-bigger-than-stomach reading avarice. The ritual begins with the guilt- and sadness-inducing return of a big bag o' books that I haven't even begun to read, despite initial excitement, earnest intentions, one or two online renewals, and a grace period, along with perhaps two or three books that I speed-read through page twenty or fifty in the last hour of their due date, just to get the sense of what I would be missing, before dropping them into the slot. There! Now I can focus on the two or three checked-out books still at home, left behind as it were, a sensibly small number of items awaiting my undivided attention. Naturally, as long as I've already spent the gas money to return the others, I'll just take a quick peek at the New Books section by the front door...and two and a half armloads later, I'm on my way.

Once home, I'm doomed, pile-driven to distraction by a looming, unread stack of erudition and expert storytelling on the oval side table in the living room, the defined check-out period for each item establishing an anxiety-inducing expiration date. There's compound guilt, of course: so long as I'm not reading them, I'm not experiencing the cozy, enlightened life of writerly illumination that I'd imagined they would confer upon me when I checked them out; so long as they're in my possession, I'm preventing another equally delusional County Library cardholder from checking them out with similar earnest intent. The cycle repeats.

Only one way to break this pernicious recurrence, this wretched "Groundhog Day" scenario, this Fortuna-thon: discover a new musical infatuation on YouTube to absorb my restless mental energies, and return all the books. As it turns out, they have CDs at the library, too.

To Say Nothing of Wade Boggs

Once again, the Idiot Spirit has visited us. The following were my seriously sorry entries in last night's trending meme on Twitter, #MLBnovels (MLB = Major League Baseball):

1. A Confederacy of Bunnings
2. The Guns of Ausmus
3. Lonesome Glove
4. 84, Charing Cross Rhodes
5. I, Lopat
6. The House of the Seven Gaedels
7. D'wight Stuff
8. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of Wade Boggs)
9. Midnight in the Garden of Gooden Evil
10. How Stella Got Hargrove Back

Granted, the source material behind 2 and 7 was nonfiction rather than fiction, but when the Idiot Spirit speaks, we do not ask questions.

Hundreds of others had, of course, already plumbed the depths of the obvious, as in The Island of Justin Morneau. The rest of us had to dig a little deeper -- go down the Dusty Rhodes not taken, as it were.

This gives me the opportunity to recommend a terrific web site for baseball fans, especially those who can't quite recall the name of the St. Louis Cardinals' shortstop they saw when their Dad took them to a Brooklyn Dodgers game in 1937. I've lost entire afternoons careening around Baseball-Reference.com, and endorse it wholeheartedly for anyone who loves the game more than they remember it.

(By the way, the Cardinals' shortstop for that 1937 game was either Leo Durocher or Frenchy Bordagaray. Answer found in four clicks.)

Books in 10 Words or LessxxxxFewer

Herewith, My Two Innings presents brief descriptions of well-known books. Based on the recent Twitter meme, #booksin10wordsorless; elevated in status from mere tweets to a full blog entry.

The grammar cops are correct to insist that we amend the title to "10 words or fewer" from "10 words or less". (I'm holding fast to my revolutionary placement of quotation marks, however).

To business:

1. Ethan Frome: The sled, Ethan, the sled. The sudden deceleration. That's life.

2. Gorky Park: Soviet Union has police detective, too. Like yours but better.

3. Jurassic Park: Prehistoric tse-tse's, manufactured beasties, bovine feasties -- hold onto your keisties!

4. Moneyball: Billy Bean boasts best budget ballplayers.

5. Winnie the Pooh: English child's vivid imagination manifests as blissfully stupid animal friends.

The author reserves the right to add to this list, and will do so whenever the Idiot Spirit moves him.

Three Card Wenceslas; or, Tegwar Revisited

Ten years ago at a family reunion, my sister and I started to play a game that we called Three Card Wenceslas. We'd never played it before, but we both picked it up fairly quickly and, before long, became totally absorbed in a spirited contest.

Three Card Wenceslas has no rules. We made it up as we went along.

She would play a pair. I would meld. She would draw from the deck. I would raise. She would knock. I would discard. And so forth. Complete and utter improvisation. Complete and utter nonsense. Even the name of the game was phony. But we played confidently (and loudly!).

Our mom's cousin wandered over. By that time, my sister and I had progressed to Three Card Blind Wenceslas, played with eyes closed. I think I was holding a card to my forehead. The improvisation continued, with plenty of trash-talking between us.

Our cousin took this in for a while. Finally he asked, "How do you know when someone wins?"

"We just did," I said. Ba-da-boom!

A bit of a lowlife prank to pull on a relative, granted, but at least we didn't scam anyone for money (I rationalize). However, it turns out the cosmic joke of the situation has been on me all along, and I've only just realized it.

You see, I've just finished rereading Bang the Drum Slowly, the touching, tragicomic 1950's baseball and mortality novel by Mark Harris. It was the first time since my early teen years, when I was a budding baseball geek, that I'd read the book. Also, by chance, the 1973 movie version starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro was shown the other night on Turner Classic Movies.

Both are terrific, the book moreso than the movie, but that's not important now. What is important is that the fictional ballplayers played a fictional card game to scam unsuspecting bystanders in hotel lobbies out of their fictional spare cash. The ballplayers' card game was called "Tegwar", and it had no rules. The play of the game was eerily familiar, right down to the trash-talking!

Buried like an intelligence mole in the Early 1970's quadrant of my baseball-addled subconscious, "Tegwar" had been lying in Wait (so to speak) for decades. It reemerged ten years ago as "Three Card Wenceslas" -- the T-W letter combination is too improbable to be purely coincidental, don't you think? When I came across the Tegwar bit in Bang the Drum Slowly recently, the realization of what I'd likely done sent chills up my spine. Cue the Twilight Zone tones!

We'll see our cousin again this summer. Hopefully he'll get a good laugh at my expense when I tell him the "Tegwar" story. It still might work out for me in the end, though; I'm pretty sure I can sell my remaining inventory of "Three Card Wenceslas" rulebooks on eBay.