This trilogy is packaged in a single book, so I kind of spaced on reviewing them separately. My bad. Anyway, Berlin Noir consists of three novels, March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem, all of which deal with World War Two Germany, Nazism, and collective social responsibility (and guilt).

For some reason, I can remember exactly where I was when I first read this book, which doesn’t happen very often. I was on a bus from New York City to Vermont on my way to college, and I remember that the bus driver happened to live in the same town my college was in, so she gave me a ride from the bus depot to my dorm, which was very sweet. Alas, I have forgotten her name, but her act of kindness lives on.

At any rate, March Violets takes place before the war, and introduces us to Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman working as a private detective. He’s plunged into a search for a missing necklace during the Olympiad, watching the German government slowly crack down on Jewish people, and navigating what turns out to be a complex web of conspiracy. The “March Violets” are people who joined the Nazi Party early, trying to get a leg up with their enthusiasm, and Gunther appears to be in a growing state of disgust with what’s going on.

In A Pale Criminal, he’s tapped to solve a series of brutal murders which turn out to be a conspiracy to incite hatred against the Jews, and he’s brought back into the police force, setting him up for the events of the war. All sorts of tidbits about life in Berlin during this period are dropped, including the information that Nazis frowned on psychoanalysis.

We meet Gunther again in 1947, living in Occupied Berlin and struggling to make a living. He’s asked to assist an old acquaintance who is on trial for murder in Vienna, and, of couse, nothing is what it seems in the tangled plot he’s dragged into. Nazis who escaped justice, Russian spies masquerading as American spies, and, of course, a girl. (Two, actually. Well, three, counting his wife.)

It’s certainly an interesting trilogy, and a great take on the classic noir detective novel. Germany in the 1930s-1940s was a pretty noir place, so why not set a few novels there?

Demographics:

Berlin Noir: March Biolets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem, by Philip Kerr. Published 1989/1990/1991, 835 pages. Fiction.

Hey, it’s November! That means it’s time for National Blog Posting Month (hereafter NaBloPoMo) again. And, as usual, I am participating. Not much will be different around here, since I update every day (and have been doing so for almost three years), but I’m hoping to see a few new faces in the comments. And, for NaBloPoMo’ers visiting the site, I hope you enjoy poking around, and please pop into the comments and say hello! Since there are new readers, before I plunge into the October Book Project Report, I thought that I should explain what the Book Project is. Old hands can skip the next paragraph.

In 2008, I’m writing about every single book I read, and keeping statistics on my reading habits. I was curious to know what I was reading, and how much I was reading, and that’s why I started the Book Project. As an aside, I’ve also pledged to read everything recommended/sent by readers, within their power, and I have been introduced to a lot of great books that way. (And some not-so-great ones.) So, now you know. This site isn’t just about politics (although you might think so from what’s on the front page right now…I actually don’t talk about politics that much the rest of the time, I swear).

We’re on the home stretch of the year, and the Book Project. And, I have to say, as much as I am loving the Book Project, I am also ready for it to be over. It’s hard to write about every book I read. Sometimes, I honestly don’t have that much to say about a book. So I have to cast about for something to say, and I note a lot of repeat phrases (”crisp writing” “interesting” and so on) in my book reviews.

That said, October was a pretty prolific month, reading-wise. I read 44 books, almost one and a half a day, and 15,352 pages (495/day). I still haven’t beaten the July record of 46 books, but it was a fairly solid month. I note that I read a lot of young adult/teen fiction, along with a number of apocalypse related books, which I thought was an interesting pattern.

The best book I read, I think, was The Cure for Death by Lightning, recommended by Lara. I also read some really crappy books. Some of which were highly recommended. I loved re-reading And the Band Played On, a great history of the early years of the AIDS crisis, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Another piece of new fiction, The Brief History of the Dead, something I randomly pulled off the shelf, turned out to be pretty good too.

Alas, my library holds are taking forever again for no apparent reason, so I don’t have a nice stack of new books to read through this wet weather. Looks like a weekend of re-reading is in store.

This little novella is an expansion on Brown’s books about the Hunsenmeir sisters, Julia and Louise. It’s set in the 1950s, on a day when the sisters head to the beach with Julia’s child and Louise’s grandchild, and it meanders through the building of a sandcastle, a lunch at a crab shack, and an event back at the beach which I won’t got into because I don’t want to spoil it for you.

The big problem with this book is that it didn’t remain consistent to the series, which kind of irritated me. I mean, as an author, I’d think that you would want to keep track of your characters, their names, and what happens to them so that in future books, you can get the details right. The flipping around of important details made it hard for me to follow the story, because I kept going “wait what?” So boo to that.

But it was an interesting glimpse of 1950s life, a brief little vignette about sisters, life, and unexpected events.

Demographics:

The Sand Castle, by Rita Mae Brown. Published 2008, 103 pages. Fiction.

House of Sand and Fog is a good book, but it’s also an eerily prescient book. It’s a book about cultural clashes between Americans and Iranians, written two years before Americans grew afraid of everyone from the Middle East. And it’s a book about what happens when your house is taken away, and events spiral out of your control, penned nine years before people’s houses were being taken away in epic numbers.

We get three points of view in this book. An Iranian man who buys a house at auction, sensing that it could be an opportunity for his family. The woman who used to own the house, and the sheriff’s deputy who initially assists with her eviction, and ends up setting off a crazy chain of events which ends in three deaths and two imprisonments. As the story unfolds, the characters end up being almost frogmarched down an inevitable path, even as the reader goes “no, stop!”

Dubus has a nice way with language, and he gives each character a distinct voice, a crisp and clear identity. He has a great way of describing scenes, often coming at them sideways rather than head on, and providing vague sketches so that you can fill in the blanks with additional information.

I think it was a great book when it came out, and it’s a great book to be reading now.

Demographics:

House of Sand and Fog, by Andre Dubus III. Published 1999, 365 pages. Fiction.

I figure if I’m reading books about disaffected youths, I should be reading the classic in the genre. King Dork, one of my earlier books, was a sendup of Catcher, and it was nice to read Catcher to get some perspective. I have to say, I think that The Catcher in the Rye is a classic for a reason, and it’s one of the few “classics” I’ve read this year which seems worthy about the title.

It’s a book about a particular moment in time, which makes it distinctive, and also a particular time in one’s life. Everyone’s been that age, and confused, and disaffected, and everyone’s struggled with identity and emotional issues, though not all of us have been kicked out of a string of prep schools.

I can see why people love this book. The language is great, and Salinger has a great way to turn a phrase, to paint a scene. I can smell and feel and almost touch the scenery in this book, it feels so intensely alive. I think that people who were unhappy as youths can read this book and identify with it, and people who were part of the “phonies” can read it and imagine that they aren’t part of the phonies, and identify with the story as well.

Should this book be idolized to the level that it is? I don’t know. I mean, it’s good, and I like it, and there’s a lot to get from it, but I think it just happened to hit the right note at the right moment, and that’s why it became so famous. At least it’s good, unlike a lot of other famous books. It’s also an interesting historical document, because it’s more about self loathing and struggling with self identity, turning things in on oneself, unlike contemporary books, which seem to be all about lashing out at others to cope with your own pain.

Demographics:

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Published 1945, 277 pages. Fiction.

This book reminded me in a lot of ways of The Power of the Dog. These are both subtle books, with the undercurrents of a story running below the real story, although this one is more overtly perverse. You get the sense that many of the characters in this book are actively, commit to the insane asylum crazy, and the whole book has a very spooky, kind of creepy feel.

I ended up reading this book in one setting, because I felt so pulled along by the story. There were parts of the book that totally horrified and disgusted me, and others that had a simple, aching beauty. I loved that even as this horrible story was unfolding, the characters went through the motions of their daily lives. While I was consumed by the story, they weren’t: they still had work to do, chores to finish, cows to milk.

It’s an interesting take on the Coyote myth, and a fascinating slice of life in rural Canada during the Second World War. This might just be the book of the month, because it was just that good, and I suspect that I will be reading it again in a few days to pull even more out of it.

Demographics:

The Cure for Death By Lightning, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. Published 1996, 294 pages. Fiction.

A nerdfighter, a road trip, a tampon string factory. Seriously, what more could you need.

This book is…awesome. It’s a smart, funny, skillfully crafted young adult book, and it should be required reading for everyone under the age of 20. I love that one of the protagonists is Muslim, that the book is filled with math jokes, references in foreign languages, and witty, sharp, realistic characters. Reading this book totally makes me feel like I am ambling through the lives of the characters.

Green has a clear, crisp writing style which is really suited to this sort of work. And there are quiet lessons and subtle discussions of serious issues, couched in such a way that you just kind of absorb them and then realize later that he’s sneakily infiltrated your brain. Every time I read this book, I notice more fun things about it.

I can’t wait to read Paper Towns, which I just ordered. At some point I should probably check out Looking for Alaska, too.

Demographics:

An Abundance of  Katherines, by John Green. Published 2006, 228 pages. Fiction.

Every time I read this fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe’s life, I struggle with it. I do that a lot with Oates, actually, I start reading her and then remember why she frustrates me, and then I forget and start reading her again. For an author this prolific, I guess it’s not surprising that some of her books are less good than others, but this one is positively schizophrenic.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I really hate narrative devices in which language gets all truncated and weird to make a point. I’m fine with playing with language, but mangling it is just annoying. And there are huge chunks of this book that ramble in a really nonsensical way, and make it really hard to follow or get into the story. I think I’m turning into a literary conservative. I might not have liked Wuthering Heights, but at least the language was good.

It’s always interesting to read fictionalized accounts of people’s lives, because it’s hard to tell where truth and fiction blur, and how many liberties were taken. Monroe herself is such an enigmatic and tragic figure in a lot of ways that I think Oates was really able to play with her a lot more than she could have with other real life people. And I wonder what the legalities are there, with fictionalizing lives.

Monroe is always portrayed as broken and crazed, and she had plenty of reasons to be. But what if she wasn’t? What if she got into drinking and drugs because that’s what everyone else did, not because she was some kind of profoundly flawed person? I find that unlikely, but I wish authors would play around with that more. I think it’s easy to write truncated wannabe surrealist language to make characters seem all crazy-style, but it would be nice to see an author actually use language well, to portray a high-functioning crazy person with great language and no bad grammar and awful punctuation and cutesy misspellings.

Demographics:

Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates. Published 2000, 738 pages. Fiction.

Man, was this book ever a pile of crap. I read it a few years ago, and must have thought that it had some redeeming qualities, because I kept it, but I don’t know what those qualities might have been, because, my god. Seriously. This book reads like an adolescent fantasy.

It’s about a frustrated author working in sales, and a conference he attends at a fancy resort. Maybe it’s supposed to be a satire, lampooning the lives of the wealthy and frivolous, but it ends up just being stupid. The narrator criticizes other people for being snobby, but he’s the biggest snob of all, obsessed with brand names, money, cars, how people look and act and dress and where they live. It’s unbelievable. In the same paragraph, we can see him sneering at his boorish boss for being a snob, and then mocking the shirts his boss wears.

He’s a sycophantic sellout with no self-integrity.

The narrator is, I think, supposed to be enlightened and above it all, but he’s just as bad as the people he makes fun of. He’s stupid and self-involved. He has a series of sexual encounters with fantasy women who of course feed his ego, making stupid statements about how “all women are bitches.” His wife, Rose, is portrayed as a whiny, self-involved woman, but I’d be curious to see her side of the story, what with her husband’s raging misogyny. I swear to God, this book reads like it was written by a 16 year old boy who had never seen a naked woman before, all fantasies of silk slips and big cocks and a variety of other topics which I, quite frankly, find totally dull.

Maybe that’s the whole point. We’re supposed to hate the narrator and think he’s a dolt, because the book is some kind of “statement” on American society. But I don’t read it that way. I don’t think that Robertson wants us to hate the narrator. Hell, the book practically reads like hero-worship.

Definitely putting this on the top ten list of bad books this year, and wondering why it’s been lingering on my shelves for so long.

Demographics:

A Posturing of Fools, by Brewster Milton Robertson. Published 2004, 408 pages. Fiction.

The last in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, I might add, the creepiest. The entire book basically hinges around two 12 year olds getting it on, and I still think that’s really weird. Discussing this recently with Tristan, I learned that not everyone reads this book that way, and maybe that’s why it became so popular, because people could pretend that isn’t what happened, but, I mean…come on. What happens is pretty obvious, it’s not like Pullman tries to hide it with slippery language at all.

Anyway, that aside, it’s an interesting concept. Our child heroes have to find a way to release ghosts from the Land of the Dead, track down their daemons, do a bit of growing up, and deal with very adult issues, all while meeting interesting denizens from a multitude of worlds.

This book gets a little repetitious at times, and sometimes the metaphor is extremely heavy-handed, but I think that it’s fundamentally an interesting and compelling story. Many readers, I suspect, like the idea that thousands of worlds are only a fingertip away, if only they knew how to reach them, and I suspect that’s why books like these, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potters become so popular. It’s not just that the story is good, but that there’s a sense of magic and wonder, a hint that there’s a mystical world which ordinary people have the ability to touch and be touched by.

The vision of God as a decrepit old angel at the end is awesome, as is the idea that the powers in Heaven are conflicted, and don’t agree on the best thing for mankind (or themselves). Good, in this case, is represented by knowledge, while evil is expressed as the desire to suppress knowledge, and I think that’s a great way to divide good and evil, and to illustrate that in order to do evil, you must have the knowledge to know that you are doing it.

I’m a bit disappointed that Lyra’s fundamentally evil mother is given a redemptive scene at the end, although there is some gratification in the fact that she is consistently portrayed as greedy and repugnant to the end. Personally, I believe that some people cannot be redeemed, but maybe Pullman and I will just have to agree to disagree on that one.

Demographics:

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman. Published 2000, 518 pages. Fiction.