Reading 2011

Previously, I’ve posted lists of books I’ve purchased and/or read, with little or no comment; this year, I’ll try to write something about most of the books I read.

But first – a list! 2011, joined in-progress:

A Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley
Life’s Work, Jonathan Valin
E Is For Evidence, Sue Grafton
The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos
The Heckler, Ed McBain
Last Car To Elysian Fields, James Lee Burke


…and the stack of mass markets on-deck:

Little Scarlet, Walter Mosley
Hollywood Nocturnes, James Ellroy
A Shoot in Cleveland, Les Roberts
Darkness, Take My Hand, Dennis Lehane
Think Fast, Mr. Peters, Stuart Kaminsky
The Murderer Vine, Shepard Rifkin
The Case of the Borrowed Brunette, Erle Stanley Gardner
The Trail To Buddha’s Mirror, Don Winslow
The Deceived, Brett Battles

****

Reading, 2010, Part 1

I was given an entire shelf of Michael Connelly novels back around 2003. I'd never read anything by him. I chose to try Chasing The Dime. I judged it a bad book by a good writer, and boxed all his books up until this past year, when I decided to finally try the Harry Bosch novels, beginning (arbitrarily) with Angels Flight.

Is anyone reading this still awake?

I found Angels Flight ridiculously well-made and exciting, and went on to read another 7 or 8 Michael Connelly novels in 2010. Void Moon, a standalone thriller like Chasing The Dime, is marginally better than that book. The earliest books in the Bosch series are a bit clumsy; Trunk Music, of the ones I've read so far, comes closest to replicating the quality of Angels Flight.

I haven't been able to bring myself to try one of the books narrated in the first-person by Bosch, nor any of the books wherein Bosch meets up with the heroes of other Connelly novels: That last gambit never lived up to the front-cover hype in my Marvel Comics years, and I distrust it and resent it a little, even now.

****

Another writer I've meant to read for years, and finally read in 2010, is Alan Furst, who has already produced a shelf of WWII-era espionage novels. As with Connelly, I felt compelled to break a usual rule, and read a handful of his books nearly back-to-back.

I'm reminded of Ross McDonald's Lew Archer novels, in that McDonald and Furst both seem to be writing the same novel over and over again -- not so much working to a formula (although they are) as trying to perfect a single work, to get that perfect version of the novel in their head down on the page.

I'm also reminded again, by comparison, of how little feels at stake in most thrillers....

*****

Nice Paragraph

Granville Oliver sat at the defense table, wearing an expensive blue suit. He wore non-prescription eyeglasses, a nice touch suggested by (his attorney) Ives, to give him a look of thoughtfulness and intelligence. Underneath the suit he wore a stun-belt, by decree of the court.

---George Pelecanos, Soul Circus

Last-Minute

Snagged off a bookstore shelf yesterday: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard has begun reprinting non-Lew Archer titles by Ross MacDonald for the first time.

A perfect last-minute gift or two for the fan with a complete shelf of Lew Archer...

It's not listed at the publisher's site yet,

but hopefully they'll get around to The Dark Tunnel, his first novel, written while MacDonald was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan in the forties. The setting is a fictionalized Ann Arbor, the hero a professor battling Nazi agents on campus!

A reprint of this title would make happy at last several U of M grad students and PhD candidates I've known, who confessed, after a few pints, to an obsession with the novels of Ross MacDonald of such a degree that they could no longer, in good conscience, write him off as a guilty pleasure; this book would seem to be their lodestone...

And yes, that's all I have, after these many months...for now...

****