City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate; Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

A Ugandan-Indian Englishman private eye investigating a case for a hooker. It's a decent enough book. Tommy Akhtar does nothing but drink, smoke, and ruminate about his past and the way of post-colonial Britain and in between that he looks into the case he was hired to solve. Then he gets involved in a case he wasn't hired to solve. That sort of thing happens a lot in these sort of books, along with the obligatory run-in with stereotypical obnoxious and stupid authority, and I have to wonder how these PIs finance their escapades. The plot is almost buried in reminiscences about Tommy's life and "how the world works" tangents and the British slang and cricket references leave me in the dark more often than not but it's not bad over all. There's more of a problem with the staccato nature of the prose and the "serious" tacked on to every fifth sentence. Also, for a book with a message running through it about how even "Paki's" (as he puts it) can be real people and something other than their stereotype and which makes fun of those people who judge others based on ethnicity/nationality, the fat-necked/overly tanned/macho "Yank" with bad fashion sense and an inability to "get" English humor comes over as hilarious. And kind of jarring actually.

Tommy has sent some dumb "thug-lite" kid with a chip on his shoulder to go undercover in an organization that brainwashes just that sort of idiot. I'm sure this will end well. Tommy is an interesting character but after he solves the case he was initially paid for he really does very little.

It's a good read, but I wonder how many of my recommendations would still be nice if I was buying books rather than getting them at the library.

This next book I did buy but cheap. Amazon Marketplace is my go-to for all books not in the library. That's where I got Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. A Czech author, this book is about a middle-aged undertaker who finds himself being led a merry chase in what he believes is a hidden camera show. He gets an invitation to a film, only when he arrives there is only one other person in the audience, a woman who's face stays hidden, and the film shows him eating his lunch. In the dark after the show ends he receives another invitation, this time to a bookstore. He decides to outwit his unseen antagonists by not being freaked out or making a fool of himself for their show. He fails if only because he's trying too hard and he's so caught up with being well-mannered that he's too rigid to easily adapt to new situations. The unnamed protagonist ends up moving from one strange situation to the next in the hopes of getting the better of the plot's organizers and of seeing the face of the mysterious woman. The ending was odd. I think I need to consider it a bit more because the whole thing seems to have something to do with life before birth/after death and nothing is ever explained. There's no dialogue either, basically. Only a short conversation with an obstetrician and a few lines exchanged with the extras in the "show".

And I'm back; First Drop by Zoe Sharp

Well, that was remiss of me. I should have written sooner.

Work has been interesting. The students and faculty are checking out books and asking for help with research so I guess things are headed in the right direction. I've created an access database to keep better records of the resources and Populi has upgraded their ILS feature which has made my life a little easier. I can delete resources and change cover pictures now! Very exciting stuff. My boss would be harder to deal with if we worked in the same building but fortunately we don't. She's a driven woman and I believe she's a nice enough person but her idea of management is to criticize every time she sees you. I think it's her way of letting you know she's watching. This would be very depressing if I wasn't getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone else.

My project of "put call numbers on book spines" is going nicely. The only thing I'm really having a little difficulty with is getting more support from the faculty. There are a few full-time staff that are really including me in the academics but without an order from above the rest of them have no incentive to incorporate what I can offer into their lesson plans. I've sent out emails and posted on the Populi news feed but I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. I'll work on it.

Now on to First Drop. Much like the movie Shutter Island seemed to last six hours, First Drop seemed to last about five years. This was not a good book. Now I don't say this because it was badly written or plotted. I say this because Sharp's characters are some of the most obnoxious, flat, and self-absorbed I've ever read. Charlie Fox has her first job as a bodyguard watching out for a fifteen year old Floridian boy named Trey. She got the job from her boyfriend/boss , Sean, the only character who isn't completely unlikable but this may be because he has no personality and is hardly in the book at all. Anyway, Charlie has come over from England for her first American job. The author obviously did some research or took a vacation in Florida or something so that aspect wasn't too terrible. The dialogue though wasn't particularly good and that was rather distracting. All the teenagers sounded like fake Californian valley girls and Ms. Sharp doesn't seem to realize that certain grammatical rules apply even to speech filled with "like" and "totally". The retired CIA agent Walt and his nephew were constantly calling Charlie "missy" and "little lady" which was just inappropriate under the circumstances and just in general most of the dialogue was filled with colloquial American English that would be right in certain cases but that she didn't know how to use properly. There were a few things that were obviously British in-jokes, like having a character named "Randy" and having the teenagers not understand sarcasm (or as she called it, "irony". Here's an interesting post on the difference between the way the two countries look at this topic http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarcasm-and-irony.html) Teenagers are generally the masters of this form of communication. The other thing that stuck out was the plot point wherein Charlie and Trey are on the beach and oh no! they are in trouble because the police are checking everybody's IDs (due to a murder committed nearly 200 miles away) and once the police get to them they'll be finished! They've got to get away! And I'm like, wait, what gives the police the right to randomly demand all beach-goers to present their IDs? Oh, and apparently Ms. Fox and Trey rode the 240 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona on a motorcycle. And not on I-95 which would make sense but on a state road which would lengthen their journey to about 6 hours. They must've needed an alarm clock and smelling salts just to wake their backsides up enough to not fall flat on their faces as soon as they dismounted.

As for Charlie herself. She was utterly unprofessional: She expected the adolescent she was supposed to protect to do her job for her. He's her charge and she should expect nothing from him. She's utterly without the ability to empathize or put herself in another's shoes: When Trey gets upset and storms off during a conversation where it becomes clear that his father may have hired people to kill him she huffs and thinks to herself that she doesn't have time to deal with "a stroppy teenager". She's incompetent: When things started getting dangerous, instead of dragging a fifteen year old around with her while she tries to clear her name she should have driven to another state, dropped him off at a police station and then made her way to the British embassy. Trey would have been protected, fewer people would have died, and things would generally have been less of a mess. She's completely self-absorbed: When Trey, who has understandable trust issues, questions her commitment to protecting him after she uses him as a human meat shield, she gets angry that he would question her ability to do her job.

Charlie Fox is basically a horrible human being. When she gets upset at Trey's inability to deal with all the mayhem she tells him that people died because of him and that she herself killed a man for his sake. That is not cool. She argues the semantics of sex with him and angrily blurts out her gang-rape in the hopes that further traumatizing him might make him think twice before participating in one himself (I have no idea why she thought he might to begin with.) Her feelings are the only ones she allows to be valid. She's always in the right. She's a bad ass fighter who gains fanboys and can pass for a teenager. She's basically a really weird self-insert character.

Anyway, the majority of the characters were horrible people, the main character being the worst. I also have to remark on the female characters. There are only three other females in the book among the multitude of guys. One is a matronly female who makes pancakes. She's of no consequence. The other is a teenager who acts as support to Charlie; buying her supplies, smoothing the mood, and doing a little fangirling. The other is a hard nosed cowardly bitch who acts (badly) as a red herring and is summarily shot. Charlie is not allowed competition.

Okay, I just need to get that off my chest. I don't know why I bothered finishing the book. It was teeth grinding-ly bad. It was so bad I don't think I could make a semi-humorous post about it though I might like to try.

I'm re-charging with other books. I read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, an alternative interpretation of the series. I don't quite like the way he portrayed Watson but for a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper book (something that's been done to death by now) it's quite good.

Can not brain today, I have the dumb

Bah. I have to get up for work tomorrow at 5:30 and then leave early to go to an interview. It's a second interview where I get to sell my talents to the director in the hopes that I can somehow gain a regular salary. If that happens I'll actually have to work. Really, really hard. It's an exciting opportunity; I'd be creating a library and I already have a process in mind to do it but wow. From scratch. So yeah.

I'm getting ahead of myself. It's very possible that someone with more experience will get the position. The only thing I can offer (other than my massive intelligence, of course) is my energy and that I'm cheap.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

So I've finished Night Train by Amis. I don't even know what to think about it. It's difficult to tell exactly what it was supposed to be. Was it a joke? A parody? Noir? It seemed to play the grit straight but it had this attempt at humor running through it and I couldn't tell if it was meant to overturn the street dirt feel or not.

If it was supposed to be a parody he should have set it in a culture he knew well enough to get right. Or made it less rancid. Describing a mindless quiz show the boyfriend is watching, "What do Americans think is America's favorite breakfast? Cereal!... Where do Americans think France is? In Canada!" Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha ha. We get it, Europeans think we're stupid. That's not actually a joke, that's just an insult.

If it was supposed to be noir he should have taken it a bit more seriously; not that noir can't have humor, but his tends to undermine rather than accompany.

The whole thing is very self-conscious. It's like he couldn't forget he was an Englishman trying to write an American story (complete with spelling). You get the distinct feeling of looking at the whole thing with the eyes of an outsider, of watching something foreign. Of the author's unconscious "Those foreigners and their funny ways of doing things" attitude. The slip-ups in dialogue and action become more apparent because of this disconnect between the author's attitude smeared over everything and the story. He uses the slur 'beaners' in reference to Italians, talks about the numerous mafia hits found in rental cars parked in airport lots in what seems to be the Pacific Northwest, and uses the qualifier 'American' in phrases where a native never would. "American juries...American judges..." "Paulie No speaks perfect American..." The main character leaps around from one theory of how and why the victim died to another with no evidence or any hint she should be looking in that direction and goes from speaking like a truck driver to a middle-aged Southern woman.

Put the whole thing together and you get an amateur crime story with bigoted overtones.

Thing is, despite all the (hilarious) badness you can see he's a good author when he isn't pretending to be something he's not. I'll have to try something else by him.

Boy, that was kind of fun. I should read incredibly stupid books more often. It was also interesting. I've read books by American authors set in foreign countries. I should read more books by authors who aren't American that are set in the U.S. just to see what I come across.

I bought liquorice altoids today.

I have no idea who this man is but my grandmother must have known and liked him well enough to keep photos of him for sixty plus years.

Okay, now I want to talk about The Redbreast seriously because it consumed me for a week and I need to get it off my chest.

It's not a bad book. It's a perfectly decent thriller with lots of interconnecting parts and interesting history. I learned a side of WWII that I didn't know about. We didn't learn much about Norway's role in the war in school beyond the fact that it was occupied and the government and royal family fled to England. The whole background about the resistance movement and those who fought for the Germans and the trials and executions afterwards was fascinating. The book has this going for it. It should could have been a lot shorter but I acknowledge my lack of an attention span may play into that particular complaint, on this and other works of fiction. The characters are poorly developed and there isn't much in the way of setting description. That's probably my own preferences coming into play.

However.

The main character's leaps of logic and intuition are informed by authorial omniscience and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a brick. Characters who are supposed to be smart turn as dumb as a box of rocks so the author doesn't have to try very hard to bring certain events around. The Prince, a man who supplies guns to neo-nazis and is supposed to be competent and capable, uses the same phone for orders as he does for his girlfriends. And he leaves it turned on, sitting around. This is basic. If you're involved in illegal activities keep it separate from your personal life. The character that discovers what he's up to, after acknowledging that her life is in danger, leaves the safety of her home to walk to her boyfriend's apartment, picking up cigarettes along the way and then takes a deserted shortcut. This is dumb. To go for that extra cliche, she calls the main character before taking her leisurely stroll only to get his answering machine and instead of saying what she found, only leaves a cryptic message to the effect that she found something important.

While a lot made me roll my eyes there was one thing that greatly bothered me. Every woman in the book that had any impact on the story became a victim. Two were blackmailed into sex and the other two were murdered. This would be less disturbing if there was at least one female character that related to the plot in some way that was not reduced to victim status.

As I said, the book is interesting and I would read more of this author's work if his books weren't all around 500 pages long.

Now I'm reading Night Train by Martin Amis because...I'm not sure. He's supposed to be a good author and I wanted a quick read so I chose the shortest book by him on the shelf. Well, it's apparently his attempt at an American detective story with a modernist twist. I read the first paragraph (which reads like something aimed at 12 year olds) and decided to read the rest as though it's comedy. And it is funny. His American, female cop voice is horrible. The narrative is first person and it's so bad that it is hard to believe this wasn't written as a parody. His main character is the stereotypical American as imagined by a European who's only source of information is bad cop shows. There is moronic philosophical inner monologues on the nature of crime and gender roles, misuse of Yiddish words, weird grammatical constructions, misused speech patterns, and a heavy layer of the word 'fuck'. No matter what the relationship, job, or professional level of attainment, everyone curses a blue streak and uses the word 'ain't'. So this is going to be entertaining.