Mediocre summer reading

I treasure my reading time, because I don’t have too damned much of it. Two small kids, full time job, and two blogs eat up most of my waking hours. Which is fine.

When I do sneak in some reading time, it’s either on the streetcar, on the odd lunch break not spent at my desk, or just before bed. So when I pick a novel to start reading, I try to select something fast paced, portable, and digestible in erratic chunks. And I try to pick something really good, because I might be stuck with it for a long time.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve gone back to buying books instead of borrowing them. Anything I read is going to be with me for the long haul, and end up battered beyond recognition. I used to be fussy about keeping my books pristine - as my sister likes to remind me, as a child I once charged her 10 cents for every white crease she put in the spine of a borrowed book. Nowadays, I’m happy to give them away when I’m finished, if they are in one piece. I won’t be getting around to rereading them.

So, quality is the general rule. But this summer, I tried an experiment: mediocre books that have languished on my bookshelf for the “when I get around to it” read that I never get around to.

You know those books, right? The one you picked up on a whim at a charity book sale, the birthday present from someone who doesn’t know you that well, the one you grabbed from a colleague emptying out her office, the less-known second book by the author of something good, or the marginally intriguing item from your wife’s book club?

Well, those were on my hit list this summer. Cleaning out the closet, so to speak.

Of the dozen or so most likely candidates, I chose these four to tackle:

- Ecstasy Club, by Douglas Rushkoff (free, comp book from a CBC Radio show)

- The Trade Mission, by Andrew Pyper ($3.00, at a silent auction at my daughter’s school)

- Baa Baa Black Sheep, by Gregory Boyington (50 cents at a used book sale at Geneva Park Lodge - the alternatives being 100 Robert Ludlum titles or 1,000 Danielle Steeles)

- Virtual Light, by William Gibson ($1.00, CBC charity book sale)

That’s 1,377 pages for $4.50 - not too shabby!

Seeing as how I invested a few weeks of my life in these books, here’s a quickie review of each, in the order I read them. I’m not going to knock myself out here - you can get better reviews of them using something called Google.

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Ecstasy Club

Rushkoff is a smart fella. I like his columns and nonfiction stuff, and his new comic looks really interesting.

I’ll even forgive the hand-on-chin pose on his site, because it’s a cartoon. Besides, I’m off that kick now. Ian Tracey pulls it off on Intelligence (good show, BTW), so I’ll let it go.

What about Ecstasy Club? Well, the story is set in a similar time period as The Trade Mission, though in an utterly different location. It takes place in the early 90s in San Francisco, at the height of the birth of rave culture. A group of smart young people establish a sort of raver commune/cult off the grid, tapping into a number of counterculture movements at once.

But their enormous, drug-fuelled parties are only the cover for a strange electronic quest to break the limitations of time and space. The book really turns trippy and paranoid as the ravers discover a world run by religious leaders and government operatives that have already figured things out.

I quite enjoyed this story - the characters were believable and well-developed, the setting was interesting, and I enjoy an X-Files-ish uncertainty about who to believe and what is and isn’t real. Reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick’s Valis, an almost unreadable book that cracks your head open like a melon and mashes up the soft parts with a fork.

Recommendation: Not a bad read, and I’d read Rushkoff any time. You can probably do better than this one, though. Not terribly rewarding.
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The Trade Mission

I saw Andrew Pyper read a short story in a smoky bar years ago, and I was impressed. I had heard he was a good novelist, though this was not the novel being discussed.

The Trade Mission is about a couple of young dot-com entrepreneurs who get stuck in an ugly fight for survival in the rainforests of Brazil. The scenery is lush (and nasty) and having lived through the dot-com era, I recognized the characters. I hadn’t seen that era as a book setting before, and it was interesting - far enough behind us to seem anachronistic, but still fresh.

The story is gripping, to be sure, though it’s exactly what you’d expect. Take three parts Heart of Darkness, add a splash of Deliverance and Mosquito Coast, plus pages 97-139 of your first year anthropology textbook on the Yanomamo, and there you have it.

The story is OK, I guess, though I wasn’t thrilled with the ending. I won’t give it away, but it had a few… issues. A colleague who says he knows Pyper told me the book was written shortly after his break-up with Leah Mclaren, and that puts it in a whole new light.

Recommendation: Pyper writes very well, but pick one of his other books. Lost Girls is supposedly much better, and I may read it some day.

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Baa Baa Black Sheep

I bought Baa Baa Black Sheep for the sole reason that I remember fondly the NBC TV series with Robert Conrad that aired after school when I was a kid.

My buddy Brady and I would watch it, then zoom around pretending we were Zeros and Corsairs, making rat-a-tat-tat noises as we swooped off the sofa. Even at the time I recognized that the show seemed to have about five minutes of actual airplane footage that was recycled through every episode, but we didn’t care. Hell, The Mighty Hercules had about 30 seconds of footage, and Spiderman wasn’t much better.

The real Pappy Boyington isn’t much of a writer, but he lived hard and crammed a lot into his years. The book is really just a series of anecdotes strung together to illustrate his war years - but what years they were! He was an unofficial combatant in China with the Flying Tigers, then an ace in the Pacific, then a prisoner of war in Japan. In between, there’s plenty of fightin’ and whorin’ and drinkin’ to last several lifetimes, so it makes for an entertaining read.

Perhaps most entertaining is the utter political incorrectness of the thing - it was written in that period of the 50s and 60s when you called everyone by their racial epithet, treated women like sex objects, authorities like the enemy, and America like the promised land. More than once I found myself uncomfortably shielding the book from people sitting beside me on the streetcar as Boyington talked about the Japs and the hookers and whatnot.

Still, it’s highly amusing, and easy to read. And I’m a total sucker for air combat, so it didn’t have to be that good. The book did bog down a bit in Boyington’s post-war descent into alcoholism and self-loathing, but that’s a mercifully short section, and one of his points in writing the book was to talk about what war does to people. Fair enough.

Recommendation: Fun for war buffs, but nobody else.

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Virtual Light

I read the seminal cyberpunk book Neuromancer, and it left a strong impression. But the more I think about it, the more I think that for all his vision, Gibson just isn’t all that good a writer. Idoru was just OK, and Virtual Light is distinctly mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing is really clean, engaging and interesting. His settings for the future are believable and eerie, and there are some fascinating elements to this one (set, like Ecstacy Club, in San Francisco. I’m going to have to visit there again, after all this.)

Virtual Light is the story of an out-of-work rent-a-cop and a bicycle courier who find a petty theft turning into a run from the law (and from some very unsavory elements that are seemingly above the law.) The street scenes of post-quake California are rich, and there’s one location that blows my mind: the disused Golden Gate Bridge, turned into a lengthy squatters town that spans the water, makeshift rooms lashed onto its struts and supports. Reminds me of the 18th Century London Bridge as depicted in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books - a dangerous and freeform makeshift community that accretes and decays like a living organism.

Sadly, the great setting and interesting characters are saddle with a really lame plot device. The object that might get them killed is… Wait for it… Spoiler ahead… Ready?… Is… Is… A pair of VR glasses with real estate maps in ‘em. Wowwee!

I thought the ending was building toward an epic takedown of the secret powers that be, a la the Stephen King as Richard Bachman story The Running Man (book, not film - the text was clever and dark, while the Ahhhnold movie was glam, cheese and lame.) But it wasn’t, wrapping up cleverly but not terribly impressively - simply a relief.

Recommendation: As much as a wanted to like this book, it’s nothing more than read for two days on the beach. My copy still looks brand new after whipping through it, so perhaps I can get my dollar back at a garage sale.

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So, what did I learn? Well, none of the books surprised me much - I think I had them pegged from their covers, despite addages to the contrary. That said, I might not have experienced these writers if I had to wait for them to make the cut on a more considered selection process (or one that involved paying, say $10.) I now know what these guys are all about, and I wouldn’t shy away from reading their better works in the future.

Still, summer’s over, and the experiment ends here, not to be repeated. The remaining stack of not-quite-good-enough books will be making its way to a donation box near you.

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Coda: So, tell me about your mediocre reads - were they worth the effort? How picky should we be about what we read? And don’t forget to cast your vote in my new sidebar poll on the subject. Thanks!

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-20-2006 | 01:10 PM
Posted in: Blather