RABBIT, RUN by John Updike

 Finished We 9/28/21

I originally finished this on We 3/7/18 and read it again on We 9/28/21 after I unsuccessfully tried to get a Covid booster shot at the Walgreens and CVS in the neighborhood. 

26 year old Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom leaves his pregnant wife Janice and three year old son, Nelson. He becomes involved with Ruth, an unmarried woman who is not above taking a few dollars for her sexual services. Harry met this woman through his old high school basketball coach, Mr. Tethero.

Harry drops Ruth and goes back to his family for the birth of his daughter, Rebecca June. Janice's drinking is out of control and she accidently drowns the baby. Harry runs away from his family again during the funeral...."I didn't kill her, you did". 

He tries to get back with Ruth after he learns that she is also pregnant, but she's had enough.

Interesting quote:

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price".

The books page at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit,_Run

I have always loved this novel and I have the Rabbit Trilogy in one volume and I'll soon reread the other two.

RAIN DOGS by Sean Doolittle

 Finished Tu 9/21/21

This is a paperback that I bought at Overstock Book Sale on Fr 3/28/08. I think that this was a place that sold books near the governor's mansion along 4th St. 

It's about a former reporter who inherits a ramshackle camp ground that rents canoes during the summer. There are crooked cops and a low-level meth lab operation vie for the readers' attention. 

The novel is set in The Nebraska Sandhills which is located near the Nebraska/ South Dakota border.

From Google Books:

"It was one hell of an inheritance for former Chicago reporter Tom Coleman: a broken-down pickup truck, ramshackle campground, a canoe livery—and one pot-smoking, barely working employee he doesn’t need, doesn’t want, and can’t afford. But the truth is, after losing a child and a marriage, Tom doesn’t really care."

I read somewhere that the book is named after the Tom Waits album 'RAIN DOGS' and according to Wikipedia the album's general theme is about 'the urban dispossessed'. I didn't see any connection. 

It's a forgettable story with too many characters.

Although I finished the novel in a few sessions, it was hardly worth the effort. 

PERSONAL FREEDOM by Arthur Deikman

 Finished Mo 9/20/21

This is an ancient hardback (pub. 1976) that I found during the 'book clean-up'. I have few 'self-help' books and I decided to give this one a shot.

Basically, he rails against 'Dependency' that he describes as a false adherence to ideas that are no longer relevent or true. Your 'parents' and 'elders' are in your head far after you become an adult and their ideas or biases form a kind of 'psychological shell' around the personality and prevent it from growing. 

A couple of user reviews at Amazon:

"In this short and inspiring book, Deikman seemingly allows his themes to emerge and wander through human emotion and spirituality, our tendency to prefer 'action' to 'receptivity', psychotherapy and meditative practices, and following a learning path. He borrows liberally from the wisdom of others though quotes, and offers a couple of simple practices to help you on your way. I found much to reflect on with every page, and yet Deikman himself describes the 'truths about the human world' that he describes as 'perishable answers' - they carry us just so far, and are not enough. Which is true."

"If you've come to a notion something like, "I think I may have been trained, taught, conditioned, socialized, habituated, accustomed and normalized to believing in all sorts of cultural beliefs, values, ideas, ideals, assumptions, convictions, rules and requirements that don't always square with the way thing really are," Deikman's little gem may be just the ticket out of his buddy, Charlie Tart's "consensus consciousness." (Or, more obtusely, "consensus trance.") Authors like Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Eric Hoffer could see the Problem, but few before Tart and Deikman so adequately described the Solution. A solution that has since become -- in somewhat diluted (and more politically correct) form -- the bedrock of the modern mindfulness movement advanced by mass market authors like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron and Eckhardt Tolle... as well as the modern-day giants of psychotherapy like Marsha Linehan, Mark Williams, Stanley Block and Stephen Hayes."

I skimmed through the book in a couple of days. No new ground broken, but not entirely a complete waste of time. 

BODIES ELECTRIC by Colin Harrison

 Finished Fr 9/17/21 in bed. This is a hardback that I received on We 6/16/21 from Amazon. I love this author and I'd read anything he puts out.

It was published in 1993 and has a lot of speculation about the role of  'media giants' in the future. In the early 90's the internet was barely 'a thing' and it really demonstrates how little was known about what it would become. Harrison misses the whole phenomenon of  'social media', but I don't think anyone got that one right. 

A favorite passage: 

"There is something self-evidently false about focusing on particular instants of a life, as opposed to the confluence of patterns that causes events to transpire, but one must find a beginning somewhere when talking about the past.

I felt that neither the man or his lover are entirely right or wrong. Another melodramtic storyline, but the characters seemed 'true to themselves' and all of the action seemed entirely believeable.

Janny and Joe are to stop by this afternoon (Sa 9/18/21) and I want to let her read this novel and I'm rushing to get the notes in the blog.  

From the review at KIRKUS:

"Harrison (Break and Enter, 1990) returns with the story of a 35-year-old widower who takes in a fleeing wife and her four-year- old daughter—at the same time that he's fighting for survival at the top of a communications conglomerate. Jack Whitman's rise to the near-top of a Time-Warneresque corporation was swift and well-rewarded. His personal life was equally successful until his pregnant wife was shot and killed by a drug dealer aiming at nearby rivals. Alone in his big Park Slope brownstone, Whitman now nurses his reflux-ravaged esophagus through the night, and protects his career from attacks on all sides during the day. His company is poised to merge with a German-Japanese conglomerate, an alliance that may take Jack to corporate nirvana or put him on the street. Taking the subway home one night, he meets a beautiful but exhausted woman who, with her little daughter, may be homeless—and after several days, a very tentative Dolores and her much less tentative daughter Maria enter his life. Dolores, a Dominican, has fled her Puerto Rican husband—she's not looking for a relationship, she just needs to stay off the streets. But Jack is clearly and powerfully attracted to her. When the husband picks up Dolores' trail and begins to threaten Jack, Jack hides her and the girl in his house, where she begins to carve out a home for the three of them. Meanwhile, Jack's professional life gets more and more frightening. He's been assigned the suicidal task of convincing the corporation's powerful chairman of the wisdom and inevitability of the megamerger, and the chairman is quite as dangerous as the maniacally vengeful husband.... Intelligent and totally absorbing. What might have been a routine corporate-basher becomes, in the hands of the very skillful, wisely observant, and profoundly moral author, a novel to remember. Walt Whitman haunts the story throughout and to great effect." 

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy

 Mo 9/13/21

A trade paperback that I saved from 'the big blue can'. According to the flyleaf I got the book in early December, 2007 and finished it the first time Fr 12/21/07 during a five day Xmas break from work. 

McCarthy employs a spare writing style, yet very compelling. 

The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. 

From the review in Kirkus:

"Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

I tried to stream the film, but according to Reelgood it's not available. I will get the Netflix disc. 

MIDNIGHT by Dean R. Koontz

 Finished Sa 9/11/21

This is an ancient hardback that I saved from 'the big blue can'. There is no indication on the flyleaf whether I had read it or when I bought the book. 

This is a great contemporary horror story that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire novel. 

Project Moonhawk evolves from a few sessions with 'Cactus Candy'

From Goodreads:

"The citizens of Moonlight Cove are changing. Some are losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely terrified—if not brutally murdered in the dead of night. Enter the shocking world of Moonlight Cove, where four unlikely survivors confront the darkest realms of human nature..." 

From a review at Publishers Weekly:

" A horror story with science fiction underpinnings, it concerns a brilliant, insane inventor, Theodore Shaddack, who uses the sleepy California town of Moonlight Cove as an outsize lab for a bizarre experiment that ultimately turns the community into a charnel house. He has devised a solution of microchips which, when injected into the (usually unwilling) subject, endows them with immense mental powers over their own bodies, leaving them, however, emotionally lobotomized. As a result, almost all the ``New People'' regress to animal form, to experience again primal sensationsand in animal form, they kill. The story is told from the points of view of four people who perceive that something horrible is happening in Moonlight Cove, and that if they do not act fast, it will happen to them. It is also related from the point of view of Sheriff Loman Watkins, himself a ``New Person,'' but who retains enough moral sense to be disturbed by what is happening around him and in him. Despite some paper-thin characterizations and a predilection for the maudlin, Koontz's sense of pace and the dramatic are sure, and there are a number of memorable moments." 

HOW TO TALK DIRTY AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by Lenny Bruce

 Finished Tu 9/7/21

This is a trade paperback that I bought in San Francisco at The City Lights Bookstore Sa 9/2/21 and I began reading it on the flight back to St. Louis on 9/3/21.

A wild read and some of it was hard to believe, but very true.

The Father Mathias Foundation

He wanted his wife, Honey to stop striping, but he needed money. He devised a scam to solicit aid for a leper colony in British Guiana. He legally chartered the name (Father Mathias befriended Babe Ruth when he was a young child) and actually paid taxes for the organization. He made $8,000 in three weeks and gave $2,500 to the leper colony and kept the rest for 'expenses'. 

Religion, Inc.

Lenny was hoping that people would begin leaving the church and go back to god. 

Clearly targeted by the authorities for the crime of using 'bad' words. Ridiculous. Thanks, American Taliban.

RISING SUN by Michael Crichton

Finished Th 9/2/21

This is one of my ancient hardbacks that I saved from 'the big blue can'. 

A murder of a high-class hooker during a gala party at a Japanese conglomerate in downtown Los Angeles requires two detectives that work as 'foreign liasons' to solve the killing. 

A fairly convoluted plot, yet lots of information about how Japanese practices are vastly different from the American way of doing business.  

The book's review at Kirkus:

"The Yellow Menace returns in Crichton's shocking, didactic, enormously clever new mystery-thriller—only now he wears a three-piece suit and aims to dominate America through force of finance, not arms. "The Japanese can be tough," says one character here. "They say 'business is war,' and they mean it." How much they mean it Lt. Peter J. Smith, LAPD, learns when he's assigned to the murder of an American call-girl at the gala opening of the L.A. high-rise headquarters of the Japanese conglomerate Nakamoto. There, Smith butts heads with men whose alien mannerisms he can't interpret and who insist on their own "private inquiry." Fortunately, he's joined by legendary Japan-savvy cop John Connor, the real hero here, a Holmes to narrator Smith's Watson. At the crime scene and thereafter, Connor, whose love/hate for the Japanese stems from years lived in their land, interprets Japanese ways to Smith: "Control your gestures. Keep your hands at your sides. The Japanese find big arm movements threatening..." Connor's commentary is always fascinating but, as the serpentine case coils on, numerous instances of Japanese financial dirty dealing are cited by characters who disparage the Japanese sufficiently ("The Japanese don't believe in fair trade at all"; "Japanese corporations in America...think they're surrounded by savages") to bathe Smith—and the novel—in xenophobic paranoia: It's not by chance that the only likable Japanese here is a crippled beauty who fled to America because "to the Japanese, deformity is shameful." Crichton's coup is to preach within a breathtakingly supple plot hinging on doctored Nakamoto security videotapes that caught the killer at work, the deciphering of which takes place in lab-set scenes as technologically riveting as the best in Jurassic Park. And as suspenseful—for as Smith closes in on the killer and the huge-money stakes behind the crime, Nakamoto agents threaten his family, his career, and his life. Brilliantly calculated Japan-bashing that's bound, for better or for worse, to attract controversy and a huge readership."

Since 1992 when the book was relesed things have changed. China is now the world power in the east and I'd like to read a novel about China's adverairial business practices.