Silverlock

John Myers Myers book is a true cult classic, often out of print, never widely successful, and yet loved by those who know it. My old paperback includes passionate introductions by Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Structurally, this is familiar stuff. Our hero is shipwrecked and finds himself in a strange new world that he must adventure through. It works perfectly well as straight adventure, rollicking and swift. It also works as Pilgrim's Progress style allegory-- our hero is kind of a jerk when we first meet him, and his adventures allow him to meet people who teach him lessons (in a totally non-teachy way, mind you) about being a decent human being.

You can enjoy the book thoroughly on just those two levels. But for people who love language and literature, there's more. Our hero, A. Clarence Shandon, is stranded in the Commonwealth of Letters, and every character and situation he encounters is an echo of a piece of folklore and literature. You don't have to recognize them all to enjoy it (which is good, because even a heavy-duty liberal arts education is not enough to know all of this), but at the same time, how can anyone not love a scene at Heorot where the death of Grendel is celebrated by a retelling of the Alamo in Nordic verse. Or when our hero sends Don Quixote off to steal babe the Blue Ox.

This is great fantasy adventure in the classic sense, but playing spot the reference creates a whole other layer of post-modern fun.

There's also an edition that comes complete with notations, appreciations, tunes for the songs, and other geekly bonuses. But if you just want to start with the novel itself, this link will take you there.

Silver Pigs

This is the first of a series of detective novels set in first century Rome. And while the historical setting is an interesting and lively feature of the series, what Lindsey Davis has created is a gumshoe detective in another era.

Marcus Didius Falco is hard-boiled, sharp-tongued and not exactly at home in the upper classes. By himself he would be a pretty entertaining character, but Davis surrounds him with a supporting cast that are both moving and hilarious. And while he is nominally the main character and narrator of the series, there is a romantic pairing that unfolds through these novels that makes them a bit more like the Thin Man than Sam Spade.

The mystery itself is a pretty sharp one. Davis provides more than enough understanding of the setting to allow the reader to play along; at the same time, the ancient Roman setting strips our hero of any technological tools and leaves him with nothing to fall back on but friends, brains and elbow grease.

This series is sharp, witty, engaging and entertaining. Davis provides a great supporting cast, but doesn't make the mistake of trying to cram them all onstage for each and every book (yes, Janet Evanovich, I'm looking at you). While the connections may not be obvious, fans of Sue Grafton will enjoy this series as well. Here's where to get started.

Middlesex

This book is much-loved, much-reviewed, and much-awarded. So you can find a wealth of info about it on line. But I promised my daughter I would read it, and so she is entitled to a blurb about it here.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkable smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near, Petosky, Michigan, in August of 1974.

That opening line tells you plenty about Jeffrey Eugenides remarkable novel-- its keen eye for detail, its sense of time and place, and its exceptional story-telling voice.

It is easy, when reading about the novel, to be distracted by the unusual central character-- a hermaphrodite raised as a girl, eventually entering adulthood as a boy. But Cal's value to the book is as a strong voice that unravels for us the tale of three generations of Greek family. There are some nods to history, some vivid portrayals of the city of Detroit.

But this book comes from the tradition of sprawling family sagas. Eugenides achievement is to make these characters vivid, interesting and moving, without resorting to the device of giving them striking quirks instead of actual personalities. The characters portrayed here are so real and the work itself so lacking in literary artifice that you will find it difficult to remember that it is a work of fiction. Cal becomes so real and so immediate that you stop being distracted by the issues of gender and think of Cal as simply human.

It is not just that Eugenides can make the extraordinary seem ordinary, but that he can make the ordinary so vivid and moving. Cal is one of those characters who possesses so much in the way of smarts, heart and voice that you are content to let him talk to you about anything.

So my daughter was right-- this is a really, really good book, and everybody should read it.

Oryx and Crake

Lane Glenn sent this along to me to read, and I didn't finally get to it till the beginning of the summer. Sorry, Lane.

Margaret Atwood writes novels that have a point to make; a little dystopia, a little scary speculation, a dash of red-flag extrapolation. While this novel fits that mold, that's not the reason to read it.

This is a novel where the how of the telling is as involving as the what of the tale. Our narrator was once called Jimmy, and now is Snowman, possibly the last human (as we understand them) on Earth. But as the story unfolds, it turns out the Snowman knows the full story of how the Earth ended up stripped and empty.

It's a story that spins both on the large issues of corporate greed, bureaucratic stupidity, and unrestrained genetic engineering; but also on the very human issues of love, jealousy, loyalty and friendship. And it's Jimmy who was at the center of both, not as a major player, but as friend and lover of both the angry genius Crake and the beautifully damaged Oryx. Snowman is Horatio, long after the last act of a great tragedy, left to draw his breath and tell the tale.

The genius of this book is that you don't need to care about Atwood's politics, don't need to share any alarm about science or society run amuck. Those elements form a backdrop for the novel, but they are not the point of it. It's the characters, their sad story and their human journey that make this a good read.

One caveat-- the ending may strike you as a bit less than finished. But it will not make you sorry you read the book.

In the Heart of the Sea

In February of 1821, a Nantucket whaleship sailing up the Chilean coast came across a whaleboat, oddly weathered and modified. Inside the boat, amidst a litter of human bones, two emaciated men caked with blood and salt lay curled up, clutching bones from which they sucked the marrow.

They were two survivors of the Essex, a whaleship that suffered one of the most stunning and ultimately famous disasters of the whaling period. There would be little trace of this story today, but at the time it attracted the attention of Herman Melville who went on to build the story into a long tale about a great white whale.

It's a tale of human endurance as mind-boggling as the Shackleford expedition; like most tales of natural disaster, the disaster owes as much to human folly as to any forces of nature.

Author Nathaniel Philbrick doesn't have a great deal of source material to work with, so he supplements the Essex record with thorough background research in the practices and tales of the whaling era ("Philbrick" is a good New England name, but his uncle was a professor at Pitt). It creates a clear and compelling picture of both this particular event and the period of which it is so representative.

Nicely written, informative, evocative-- a stunning real life adventure and a vivid picture of a lifestyle in another time. Highly recommended.

Musical Service

I'm going to attempt a review and recommend site for whatever I'm reading, adding the caapability to order the book directly from amazon.com through this site. At this point, I'm mainly experimenting with what I can do with some of these capabilities on line, so we'll start with my book about the band and see what it all works like...