Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report

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Just a reading report today. Two books (one of which I finished), that I don’t think require full reviews.

The first was another Dick Francis, Straight. Reviewing Francis is kind of a redundancy. The details differ, and provide a lot of interest (don’t get me wrong), but in general the things you can say about one apply to all of them. However, Straight did displease me in two minor ways, which I shall elucidate:

First, an extramarital affair (actually two of them) was treated more sympathetically than I like. But hey, we all know I’m a prig.

Second, the hero, a jockey, starts out the story with a broken ankle. And he steadfastly refuses to let a doctor put a cast on it, even though the bad guys keep re-injuring it—often on purpose—throughout the story. If you just tape it up, apparently, you don’t lose muscle tone, and you can race again sooner. All I could think about that was, “Hey kid, you’re not young forever.” Eventually age will bring pains, and this guy was asking to be crippled at sixty.

The second book is an obscure one, The Geronimo Breach, by Russell Blake. I got it free for Kindle, and thought it might be an amusing light thriller. I think it’s meant to be comic, but I couldn’t be sure, because We Were Not Amused. The main character is a drunken, slightly corrupt diplomat in Panama, who agrees to help smuggle a Colombian citizen out of the country, not knowing the CIA is after him. I plowed through a lot of scenes of drinking and vomiting, and a fair number of scenes of violence committed by evil American agents, before I gave up on the thing. Not a likeable character in the heap.

I generally feel guilty cutting a book loose before it’s done, but knowing I didn’t pay for it helps.

Fiction, Reviews

The Flatey Enigma, by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

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It’s my judgment as a translator in a different Scandinavian language that the English title of Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson’s Icelandic novel The Flatey Enigma was poorly chosen. The Flatey Riddle or The Flatey Puzzle would have better expressed the idea (I found much, frankly, to criticize in the translation in general). On top of this, the use of the name “Enigma” in World War II codebreaking suggests to the reader that this book is probably some kind of thriller. But that’s not what it is at all.

It’s actually hard to assign The Flatey Enigma to a category. It seems to resemble the “Cozy” school of mysteries, but that’s misleading. Cozies are generally set, as the name implies, in comfortable settings. Middle or upper class homes, tea in the afternoon, that sort of thing. The setting for this book, on the other hand, is what we Americans would call “hardscrabble.” It’s the Icelandic island of Flatey, in the Breidafjord (I think I saw it from a distance on my one visit to Iceland), only a little more than a mile long, where the locals eked out a meager existence in the early 1960s (the time of the story) by fishing, hunting seals, gathering eiderdown, and anything else they could do to get by. Radio service was limited and electrical power almost unknown.

When a skeletonized body is found on a nearby islet, Kjartan, the hero (so to speak) of the book is sent to investigate. He’s not actually a policeman of any kind. He’s an assistant to the district magistrate, a summer job he took because he’s a law student and wants experience with legal documents. In fact he’s extremely shy with people, and dreads going around asking lots of questions of strangers. Continue reading The Flatey Enigma, by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson →

Writing

What’s Natural Doesn’t Have To Integrate

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Jeffrey Overstreet writes about his distaste for talk of integrating one’s faith with one’s art. “If you are a Christian, and your art does not reflect that, the problem is not primarily with your art but with your faith — because true faith transforms what we are and do.”

I heard Mark Noll say something like this in an interview. He didn’t like the word “integration” because it lightly assumed the things being integrated were essentially different, but if the Bible is right, if it describes real life, then work, art, and play are naturally Christian for the one who follows Christ Jesus. We don’t add our faith to these things in an effort to Christianize them.

Fiction

Worst Movie Gadgets

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There was an awards show the other day, wasn’t there? I must have been making another mediocre omelet again. I tell you, ever since I watched videos of Julia Childs and Jacques Pepin making omelettes, I have tried to make my omelettes better than ever. I’ve succeeded in part, but I usually make only a decent one, sometimes a flavorless one. My egg and cheese bagel this morning was pretty good, despite the smoky scent all over the bagel. I know. You hate it for me.

Anyway, lists like this on worst gadgets ever used in movies strangely appeal to me. Here’s their take on the main character of The Terminator movies, the robot itself: “Now we know what you’re thinking. That the Terminator is actually an incredibly cool ‘gadget.’ But look: he shouldn’t even be in his own films. Kyle Reese clearly says that ‘things with moving parts’ cannot be sent back through time, in order to explain why he doesn’t have a ray gun, and why the robots don’t just send a big bomb back through time to kill John Connor. So how did the Terminator get back to the present day? ‘He’s covered in human skin.’ So why not just cover a ray gun in human skin? Do these people/cyborgs take us for fools?”

Fiction

“The source of these outrages is known…”

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Nothing in my head tonight, so I’ll just share one of my favorite snarky passages from the Sherlock Holmes stories. This is the opening of The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger:

When one considers that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years, and that during seventeen of these I was allowed to cooperate with him and to keep notes of his doings, it will be clear that I have a mass of material at my command. The problem has always been not to find but to choose. There is the long row of year-books which fill a shelf, and there are the dispatch-cases filled with documents, a perfect quarry for the student not only of crime but of the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era. Concerning these latter, I may say that the writers of agonized letters, who beg that the honour of their families or the reputation of famous forebears may not be touched, have nothing to fear. The discretion and high sense of professional honour which have always distinguished my friend are still at work in the choice of these memoirs, and no confidence will be abused. I deprecate, however, in the strongest way the attempts which have been made lately to get at and to destroy these papers. The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes’s authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.

Fiction, Writing

Opening strong

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Picture credit: Bidgee.



I’m going to write this very carefully. Because it involves a real book, written by a real human being, with feelings, and I don’t want to cause that person any kind of embarrassment. I’m going to use the neutral but awkward pronoun “them” when referring to them, so that not even the gender of the writer will be apparent. You will not, I hope, be able to identify them by what I write.

A little while back, this person contacted me about a novel they’d e-published. It was a Christian novel (I won’t say what genre), and the author seemed to know their business, having been published in the non-fiction field. So I started the book with some hope.

Alas.

Although this person knows how to spell and cast a sentence, they don’t know the craft of fiction, which is a different thing from the craft of non-fiction. Their approach to the story was wrong. It was static. It lacked life and drama.

What this person doesn’t understand is that in fiction, you don’t just tell a story. You stage a story. You dramatize a story.

I’m going to show what this person did wrong, and then show how it could be done better. The first little narrative nugget below is not what that person wrote. The characters are different, the situation is different, the genre is different. Only the technique is (more or less) the same. Then I’ll fix it, to demonstrate how to make it work. Continue reading Opening strong →

Fiction, Reviews

Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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The good news—almost wonderful news, except for the One Problem that I’ll detail at the end of this review– is that the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s delightful Toby Peters novels are being released for Kindle by Mysterious Press. I downloaded the very first book of the series, Bullet for a Star, and read it with pleasure.

The Toby Peters novels, if you’re not familiar with them, are light mysteries set in Hollywood. Toby is a very small-time P.I. who nevertheless keeps getting hired for cases involving famous movie stars (and a few other notables) of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In this story, an executive at Warner Brothers (which fired Toby as a security man some time earlier) asks him to look into a blackmail scheme. Someone has sent them a print of a photo of Errol Flynn in a compromising position with a very young girl. Flynn admits the accusation isn’t out of the question, but in this case he’s never met the girl. The studio wants Toby to make arrangements to pay the blackmail anyway.

But instead of a simple exchange, there’s a fight, and Toby gets knocked out, and somebody gets dead, and then the action takes off. Continue reading Bullet for a Star, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Writing

It’s All Derivative to Some Degree

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Poet Eric Weinstein writes about things he wished he had always known. One point opposes originality as often defined: “All writing is collage. The more and wider ranging influences you have, the more connections and juxtapositions you can create in your own work.”