Tag: I Read Everything

Already Dead by Charlie Huston

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Already Dead

Author: Charlie Huston

Why Did I Read This Book: I had put this book on my Amazon Wishlist at some point, probably because it is about vampires, which are always relevant to my interests, and my very good friend Arafat sent it to me. I wanted to read it because the Washington Post had this to say in its review: “(t)his book’s core audience is among the young, the cool, the hip, and the unshockable.” And this folks, is why I review books myself and seldom pay attention to anything any established reviewer says anymore because as a middle-aged, uncool, really unhip woman I can tell you that this book ain’t all that shocking, in a pearl-clutching sort of way. Unless you have spent your life reading Jane Austen with a little Nicholas Sparks thrown in for modern relevance, this book is simply a well-told, nicely updated vampire/detective riff.

Availability: Published by Del Ray in 2005, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This is a book that should have annoyed me but it didn’t because Huston incorporates infuriating writing habits, cliched characters and plot devices in a such a way that they seem fresh and interesting. Moreover, he blends and recreates genre in a way that others have tried and mostly failed to pull off.

For example, I loathe hard boiled detective novels. I find the old school Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane novels to be emotionally flat, unengaging and tiresome but Huston takes this genre and makes it work in a manner I could not have expected before reading this book. Joe Pitt, a vampire private detective, is the main character in this novel and he embodies the sort of emotionally flat, badass, private detective who has a soft spot in his heart for the sweet but damaged Everygirl but gets sucked into a web by a gorgeous, icy, double-crossing dame. Except we understand why Joe is remote and somewhat tortured – he’s a vampire and as demonstrated in the book, one break-in to his refrigerator can cause his death. The sweet but damaged Everygirl has AIDS, and his vampirism makes a relationship hard, all the harder because he can give her eternal life if he wants but has no idea, in the way these sorts of emotionally stunted men can be, of going about it. And the icy dame is icy, to be sure, but also has a Chinatown-style problem that telegraphs to the reader that this is going to be bad news and will not end well, but forces us to want Joe to help her anyway.

I also loathe novels that refuse to use proper quotation punctuation, mainly because it has been my miserable experience that when authors do this, it is the only “innovation” in the novel because they are trying to show their indie cred by eschewing rules instead of relying on good writing. Not gonna lie, this book irritated me in sections because in passages filled with large chunks of dialogue, using em-dashes solely to indicate speech got tiresome and I lost the thread of back and forth. But it was not as intrusive as I initially feared. I would have infinitely preferred traditional dialogue markers not because I am a norm helplessly clinging to the old ways, but because it’s easier to read.

So in a sense, this book had a lot stacked against it from the beginning. But I read it quickly, enjoying it more than the parts of its sum should have allowed.

This is what I think I was looking for when I picked up the Ellen Datlow-edited modern vampire story collection that I panned. This is a modern take on the vampire tale, and zombies are handled in a way that makes sense to me (I am not a big zombie fan either – zombies themselves are seldom interesting to me, though certainly that is not always the case). In the novel, a virus causes vampirism, a need to drink blood to feed the “vyrus” that both holds the victims in thrall to their need for blood, but keeps them stronger and healthier when they do drink. The “Vampyres” in this novel have set up their own society in New York, each clan having inviolable perimeters and Joe refuses to join any clan, remaining a free agent who bumps around in the world of upper class Vampyres, radical rogues and absolute criminals.

When he is hired by a clan called the Coalition to find a missing girl who is attracted to gothic and Vampyre culture, Joe is forced to deal with “shamblers,” people who become zombies due to a bacterial infection that is transmitted a number of ways, including sexually. He also finds himself in a world of intrigue, where he is, of course, double crossed on a dime, and has to make uneasy alliances with humans and Vampyres if he wants to find the girl, deliver her to real safety and get out alive.

I think one of the things that won me over is that Huston gets goth culture right, or at least what I recognize as goth culture from my own experiences. Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box was not a bad novel, but his characterization of goth and death metal culture were way off (yo, they are two totally different things and really don’t cross over as much as one might think – the culture that gave us Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus is far different from the culture that lead us to Death and Cannibal Corpse). Writers mischaracterize these subcultures more often than they hit the nail on the head.

Amanda, the goth-kiddie runaway Joe Pitt is tasked with finding has the gothic emotional-nihilism-as-a-mask-for-vulnerability-down. The street kids Pitt deals with are more gutter punk, and have the wardrobes and musical references (Skinny Puppy for the win) to prove it. Having once spent years living in gutter punk or drag rat enclaves, I immediately recognized some of the kids in this book. It was a very good thing indeed to see subcultures represented so accurately.

While I have seen this book described as edgy or like a Tarantino film, I didn’t see that myself. While this is definitely not a typical pulp horror story or a sparkling take on vampires, the edginess in this novel does not come from hip pop culture references or hard core violence. I realize my take here may be rendered somewhat questionable because I am steeped in transgressive literature in a way that casual horror readers may not be, but the real edginess comes into play because Huston manages to weave a Spillane-type detective into a new version of the vampire (and zombie) mythos, creating a wholly new and well-conceived merging of genre. Perhaps the true edginess is that Huston made me like a protagonist I knew I wanted to hate, uses dialogue punctuation in a way that would ordinarily make me snert, yet gets so much right in this intricately plotted book that I loved it in spite of the ways I suspected it should annoy me. His characterization, plot management and eye to renewing the old in horror left me with much to commend and with so many writers attempting to recreate genre and failing, perhaps any sense of edginess in this book comes simply from doing it right. I will definitely read more of Huston’s work in the future. His novel Six Bad Things sounds particularly good. It is always fun to come across a novelist I know I am going to like and realizing he or she has a body of work already waiting for me.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling, Ph.D.

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

Author: Sam Gosling, Ph.D.

Why Did I Read This Book: Because the premise seemed interesting – what do my possessions say about me, and more interestingly, what do other people’s possessions say about them? So when I saw a signed copy of this book on clearance at BookPeople, I got it.

Availability: Published in 2008 by Basic Books, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I wanted this book to be something it isn’t and that is not the book’s fault. It is mine. I am… well, weak at applying science and this book uses a lot of methodology behind discussing the wheres and wherefores of why we have stuff in our homes and offices and how it reflects the images we want to project, the sense of self we want others to deduce. I found myself getting bogged down at times in the Snooping Field Guide, wondering how it is that the final decision was made on what traits people should actually use to denote factual information. Some of the ways we use to judge agreeableness, for example, are pleasant voice and extensive smiling when really we need to use soft facial lineaments and friendly expressions. This part of the book, and when Gosling analyzed two news anchors using pictures of their offices, are the sections I read in the sort of mental black out that I use when I am not interested.

However, other elements of the book did interest me greatly. The premise that a person sends very tangible social clues and cues by simple things, like the placement of art and personal photos in their office, intrigued me. That I never once did anything to any work space when I had a day job, like put up pictures of loved ones, bring plants, hang posters, etc. sent a very tangible message to my employers: I am not invested in this place enough to stamp my personality on my surroundings. And that was, in fact, the message I was sending, however subconsciously I sent it.

In fact, I still have not hung up anything in my office or bedroom, or bathroom or kitchen despite having lived in this house for over two years. I have ideas of how I want my office arranged, ideas that involve a red sofa bed that I have yet to find, that exists only in my head evidently. I have the side tables picked out, an area rug, lamps, but nothing will be finished until I get the couch and until then, why put up art work and pictures if I may need to rearrange them. Clearly, my environment is meant to suit me and no one else, but it also implies a level of perfectionism that is unpleasantly unyielding and suspicious of making do. I have few knick knacks or items that exude what I am about, aside from books, and I have so many books that I suspect that books are the objects by which I identify myself. That and my cats, who are not objects, but certainly social signifiers of a sort.

Reading this book ensures you will never look at a desk the same way. You will find yourself looking at a family photograph, the way it is angled, and realize that the picture exists to show you, perhaps, that the person behind the desk is family-oriented, likes hiking with loved ones, or enjoys nature. Or, if it is angled towards the person behind the desk, you realize the picture is likely there to bolster the person who sits there, an attempt to place close at hand visual memories of beloved people and good times to raise their spirits and ground them emotionally at work.

It’s a neat parlor trick that allows you to know, in a sense, a lot about a person before you ever even get to know them. From purses, to cars, to offices, to simply the contents of your refrigerator, we show ourselves clearly even if we don’t know how to interpret these signals ourselves. Gosling’s own remembrances of why he has a fridge stocked with beverages was touching and illuminating about some of my own behaviors – Mom, if you are reading this, my own pantry is always stuffed! My mother is a good cook in the Southern tradition, and shows love by food. When she was in better health, she cooked rich, hearty meals and her pantry was always full, sometimes overly full. Her mindfulness was centered on food delivery, not on the economy of cooking, and often she would needlessly duplicate items, but some of my fondest memories center around her cooking. My own pantry shows some duplication and I too exhibit love via food, as my pantry shows, as do my collection of cookie cutters and other cookie ephemera. My mother cooked hearty casseroles, I make cookies, and we both have too much of something in our pantries – tomato sauce was a common problem for her, and brown sugar is the item I seem to overbuy. Both overpurchases show very clearly what we are about, I think, if you look close enough into our pantries.

While I don’t suspect this is a book I will read again, it was quite interesting, the semiotics of personal possessions, what a stack of cluttered papers really means, how people interpret the symbols you put out there about yourself. While no one can be completely pigeon-holed, I think that this book raises and answers important questions about social identity and the conscious symbols we use to show who we are and the unconscious symbols that give us away. Like a tidy desk surface but tangles of unorganized cords underneath. Like a faceless work cubicle. Or like a house with empty walls but a wealth of brown sugar in the pantry.

Sick Girl by Amy Silverstein

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Sick Girl

Author: Amy Silverstein

Type of Book: Memoir

Why Did I Read This Book: I find stories of medical drama to be compelling reading, but to be honest, I bought this because I was distracted and reaching for a book about a Munchhausen by Proxy survivor and grabbed this instead and did not notice until later.

Availability: Published in 2007 by Grove Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I frequently buy books in error or in haste but this is a book I think I was supposed to read, in a mystical fate sort of way. I’ve had health issues before and have become miserably depressed because of them. I also, despite my time as a comparatively mildly sick girl, still neglect my health something fierce. Reading this book made me realize what a whining sack of crap I can be at times (relativism here – all suffering is relative, truly, but sometimes reading other people’s pain can really help you put your own into perspective). It also made me take some steps to take better care of myself and my spouse. I don’t like being that person, the one is who inspired. It seems cliched behavior, in a sense, to be that breathless and impressionable. I can go so far as to say that I resent being inspired. But this book did inspire me as it infuriated and upset me.

So strong was my reaction to Silverstein’s memoir of her heart transplant, I had a morbid need to make sure she is still alive. She is, but in discovering this, I found online jerkwaddery of the worst sort. Silverstein is beyond a doubt the model heart transplant patient. The average amount of time allotted to a heart transplant recipient is around a decade and Silverstein is, by the timeline in the book, looking at year 21. She is a difficult woman and patient, in that she questions doctors’ advice, knowledge, intent and demeanor, but she also never misses the numerous pills she must take, she eats an exemplary diet, does not drink, and keeps herself in good physical condition by running. But she also makes no apology for her anger and at times irrational outbursts. She speaks openly of her odd and visceral reactions to something as mild as taking Prednisone. She does not hide her bafflement, her sadness and her unreasoning fury and I loved her for it.

But some walked away angry after reading this memoir of a woman showing her reality and rising above some of the worst pain and misery a person can endure. They said that because Silverstein expressed the frustration and pain that comes from being a transplant recipient, she might in some way discourage people from donating their organs. They thought she seemed too unappreciative. Evidently to be worthy of a heart transplant, doing everything to stay alive is not enough. Evidently one must be slavishly grateful to the point that one never expresses a negative thought. Who knew? I tell you what. I’m a donor and I want my organs, should I die and they be worth a dime, to go to someone like Silverstein, someone who may be irascible at times but willing to do whatever she must to make the most of my sacrifice.

Silverstein, who was initially told she had a virus in her heart in her early 20s, documents her time in the bowels of the medical system, a system that is not wholly honest, is willing to shunt off a patient to another doctor when she asks questions and one that is not willing to be open about what a patient can expect. One doctor repeatedly refused to tell Silverstein if there was any way she could manage to give birth to a child. He told her the truth later, that she should not do it, and gave a patronizing excuse as to why he saw fit to deny her this opinion for years, as if she was a child and needed to be shielded from the truth of her life.

The worst parts are the medical mishaps she lived through. Her primary care physician missed the early signs of her condition and responded to her chronically low blood pressure by telling her to eat more salt. A year later, she was on the transplant list. Silverstein experienced a heart specialist who likely would have killed her had she continued listening to his advice. He told her to get up daily and move around while she was waiting for a heart so that she would be in better shape when she recovered. The problem with this advice is that any exertion led Silverstein to v-fib, requiring her to be shocked with a defibrillator in order to get her heart beat back under control. After a couple of days of being subject to the paddles on her chest every time she got out of bed and yet still being told she must continue getting up, Silverstein simply did what she had to do – she stayed in bed against doctors orders, sometimes not even changing her underwear or brushing her hair because the exertion was such a strain on her heart.

Though her family was close and good to her, though she had a loyal fiance who stood by her side through it all, Silverstein writes of the fear, the loneliness, and the sense of otherness that a sick person feels. Moreover, when she interacted with her fellow transplant patients, the sense of otherness was still acute. She followed the rules – she took her meds as required, immunosuppresive meds that made a pregnancy risky, so she adopteda little boy. She eschewed alcohol. She kept up with her health carefully while watching women in similar straits have children and require second hearts, drink wine with meals and die young. Even as stubborn and brave as she is, something many of us dream of doing – running with the bulls in Pamplona – became akin to a torture march for Silverstein. Even watching her adored child play soccer could evoke a sense of alienation and bitterness for what her body had dealt her.

But she still got up every day and did what she had to do. Even when she was so tired she wanted to lie down and just die.

There were moments in the book when I think perhaps Silverstein did not recognize her grace. Her husband is very deferential to doctors and can become disappointed when she becomes angry and rude with doctors who frustrate her. She also described at times too how once she had her transplant and seemed healthy, her husband and others tired of knowing about her condition and the impact it had on her. I don’t know how I would deal with that, the sense that no matter what, I may not have someone solidly in my psychological corner. But she sees her husband, who is actually mostly described in glowing terms in the book, as a counterbalance to her understandable anger and fatigue. In the end, she cuts people a lot more slack than she seems to give herself credit for.

The scene when Amy realized she could not have children and began to sob in a cab bothered me to no end. Her father and stepmother were in the cab with her and her father declared, perhaps under stress, that he did not have to listen to it all, and got out of the cab when it came to a light, his flight forcing her stepmother to leave the cab, too. Silverstein does not carry the anger and resentment such a scene would have imbued in me. When it is later revealed Silverstein had a genetic heart malfunction, a condition is looks like might be plaguing her sister, and not the virus she was initially told, she told her stepmother. Her stepmother’s response was to shut down, to refuse to hear it, to insist it was a virus and Amy was wrong. Again, I have no idea how I would have dealt with this but I suspect anger instead of retreat would have been my path.

I, like many others, thought that once a heart patient gets a transplant, their troubles are over if they don’t reject their heart. I had no idea the number of biopsies they must endure, the number of doctor appointments for the rest of their lives, the constant fear of conditions transplant patients develop. The description of how the severed cardiac nerves in a transplant patient results in delayed heart reaction stunned me in its obviousness and as something I doubt anyone without a heart transplant ever considers. For example, if someone startles you, you feel the cardiac reaction of increased heart beat and quickness of breath minutes later because all you have left to control such reactions is your adrenal system which does not respond as quickly as your cardiac nerves.

But the worst of all of Silverstein’s tale is that the baffled medical community seems to cloak ignorance, understandable though it is, as arrogance. I felt my own blood pressure rise as I read Silverstein’s attempts to maintain her sense of dignity while placing her life in the hands of men who hated admitting they did not have all the answers. When her condition baffled a doctor who had seen her many times, she watched as the curtain went down over his face when he was confronted with the inexplicable. Because her body did not respond as it should (actually, this was good – her body unexpectedly and without known cause reversed artery damage), the doctor’s friendly demeanor left him and Amy felt abandoned as she watched him leave the room.

This was a compelling, frank, naked book. It was not an easy read at times. But I am glad I read it, mistake though it initially seemed to be. This raw memoir of a woman who is happy to be alive but not always grateful for what life entails discusses deep issues of what it means to be sick, how constant pain and fear will affect even the strongest will and how we as a society need to ask ourselves why we are so sold on the cheap, easy inspiration of Hallmark Movies of the Week that we want the chronically ill to be mindlessly grateful for every moment of peace they achieve.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Author: Stieg Larsson

Type of Book: Fiction, thriller, mystery

Why Did I Read This Book: I read this book because I am a narcissist. You see, while I am not THE girl with the dragon tattoo, I am A girl with a dragon tattoo. The title sucked me in. Then I flipped through the pages and saw that a character had my own name. I have not read a book with an Anita in it since the book Anita and Me by Meera Syal. Those reasons were reason enough for the likes of me.

Availability: Published by Vintage Crime, is is widely available. You can get a copy here:

Comments: It’s been a while since I have been this enthralled by a best-seller. This is a seriously good book on many levels and I think that you should read it. I feel this way for a variety of reasons.

Larsson’s ability to write a multi-layered mystery with so many characters is in itself amazing. Generally, books with more than one sub-plot can become tiresome, with too much competing for the reader’s attention. Larsson’s tale has several sub-plots neatly woven together so tightly and interdependent on one another that the book is near seamless.

I will not attempt to summarize the plots more than this: Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired by wealthy man to try to solve the decades-old mystery of his niece’s disappearance. He meets Lisabeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, because she had been hired by a security company to investigate Blomkvist. When he reads her dossier on him, her abilities as an investigator and a hacker impress him and he engages her to work with him to find the missing heiress. Together they uncover far more than just a missing girl, but rather many missing and dead girls, whose disappearances all lead to a shocking and dreadful conclusion.

The carefully laid plot is worth the price of admission, so to speak, but really, the reason this book is so captivating is because of the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisabeth, and her intriguing, sad, maddening life.

I read some reviews of this book after I finished it and was puzzled by some of the words people used to describe Lisabeth Salander. Words like spunky. Fiesty. She is not fiesty. She is not spunky. She is not plucky. Those words describe a character in a Reese Witherspoon movie. There were those who think she is a deliberate outsider, choosing to live as she does because she’s some sort of personal agent provocateur. She is not a charming loser, a female Cool Hand Luke. Then there was a discussion online as to whether or not she had Asperger’s Syndrome, which does not even seem reasonable to me, but several felt that she did have the condition. It beggars belief that people found her personality spanning so many characterizations, from a plucky heroine who lives by her wits to a funky anarchist whose tattoos and hacking are a rage against the machine to a computer savant whose interpersonal relationships are limited because she has a psychological or behavioral condition.

How could so many people leave this book with such different conclusions about Lisabeth, though wrong most of them are in my eyes? Because in Lisabeth, Stieg Larsson managed to create a character wholly unique. So unique in fact that she is hard to pin down and even my attempt may be a shoddy representation of her.

But I think I got her right and I think she is one of the most interesting and complex anti-heroines I have read in mainstream literature.

Eulogy for Adolph Cat, 1992(?) – 2010

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

I don’t discuss my personal life in my review journals outside of how my own life affects my reviews to some degree. But I felt the need to eulogize my cat Adolph, who died on 2/19/10. So if you come here for the books and only the books, that’s cool, just give this a miss. It is long, wordy and extremely picture heavy, but he was with me for almost 15 years and, frankly, writing these things out helps me put things in perspective.

Adolph was a cat larger than life. He was the first animal who lived with me, and I was 24 when he came into my life. I will be 40 this year – my entire adult life was spent with that incredible cat. I am not one to anthropomorphize my cats – they are cats, pets, and not my babies or friends or relatives. My relationship with them does not need honorary human status for it to be very special. Nothing wrong with either approach to animal companions – it’s just how I interact with my cats.

Not so with Adolph. He was not our pet. He was our peer. He was our gross roommate who refused to get a job. He was amazingly intelligent, knew us inside and out and understood that we were flawed and loved us regardless because he knew we loved him in spite of his flaws. He was insistent, needy, imperious, a bully, weird, gross and intrusive. He was empathetic, loving, caring, smart, adorable, silly, and loved all humans – all of them, big, small, scary, cute. There was no sensible person he could not charm, even when he acted up.

When he first experienced renal failure and had to spend a couple of days at the vet, they gave up keeping him in a cage during the day. He upset his water bowl several times and howled and howled, so they let him out during the day, letting him have the run of the place. He mocked the dogs in the dog run, greeted people at the front desk. Several people asked if he was up for adoption, he was so funny and interesting. So while I am biased, I know others saw his roguish charms and gave into them, too.

First pic ever
This is the first picture I ever took of Adolph. I don’t have many pics of his early days. No dig cams then and I was very broke. Film was a luxury that I now wish I had spent more money on since I have so few pics of our early days. It was 1995 and he was around 2 years old.

Here’s Adolph’s life, what I can think of telling right now. He was truly an amazing cat.

The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

Author: Diane West (not linking to her – if I created a link to her and her web stats increased even by one as a result, the terrorists have won)

Type of Book: Non-fiction, sociology, politics, utter pants

Why Did I Read This Book: This would be better entitled, “Why Did I Buy This Book” for reasons that will be clear below. I bought it knowing nothing about it because it was selling cheap, remaindered, at a local bookstore. I like a good political or sociological screed, even if I know I may disagree with it, so I got it.

Availability: You want to read this mess, you find a copy yourself. Not even the lure of being an Amazon Affiliate will make me be directly responsible for putting a dime in this author’s pocket.

Comments: I said in another review a few months ago that in the last decade, I have only encountered one book so bad that I had to stop reading it. I jinxed myself, because I then found The Death of the Grown-Up and encountered so many logical fallacies and uncited assertions that by page 20 I could not go on. The horror is, despite the fact that I knew I was going to disagree with the book’s main premise – that multiculturalism is destroying America – I still wanted to read this book after purchasing it. I like reading ideas contrary to mine. But I disagreed with the premise even more when I later understood that the author uses the term “multiculturalism” to mean “cultural relativism.” I think the technical term for all the problems in this book is “hot mess.”

I read in good faith so it may seem like dirty pool that I am reviewing a book I could not finish. So be it. I’ll take my lumps, if any come. But since I read in good faith, I expect people to write in good faith. When they don’t write in good faith, creating a book to bolster their pre-existing arguments instead of researching, thinking, and at least doing the most minimal due diligence to create a coherent thought, I get to take off my gloves as a polite reviewer. This is not going to be a polite review. My spouse refers to this form of writing as “killing gnats with a machine gun.” He may be right but I’m loading my critical gun right now.

This is not a book written in good faith or even using common sense. It makes illogical assertions, exists almost solely in the realm of post hoc ergo propter hoc, and West shows a complete inability to see that the world she grew up in is not the world I grew up in, or the world you grew up in, universalizing her experiences into a bizarre mish mash of fallacies wherein everything she experienced was good and any other perception of childhood and modern culture is bad.

So yeah, I’m going to review the first 20 or so pages in this book and it may seem unkind. Or, I suspect West would say, “childish.”

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D.T. Max

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery

Author: D.T. Max

Type of Book: Non-fiction, diseases

Why Did I Read This Book: As a chronic insomniac, the title caught my eye. In a quick read of the synopsis, I realized it really was far beyond my little, “I can’t sleep,” problem, and it seemed extremely interesting. I had never heard of prion diseases before buying this book.

Availability: Published by Random House in 2006, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I will be the first to admit that while I find disease fascinating, I am not strong in science. So elements of this book required me to reread sections to understand fully how it is that prion diseases destroy the brain, what sort of substance prions really are, etc. However, as a person with an imperfect understanding of some science, I can say that D.T. Max does a very good job of making science accessible to a person like me.

The family that could not sleep is a family in Italy that suffers from a disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia. There are several other families in the world affected by the condition, so it is extremely rare. It is a condition that strikes family members generally in late middle age and causes them to begin to lose physical control of their bodies as they stop sleeping. They sweat, they develop a very distinct pinprick appearance to the pupils in their eyes, they stop sleeping, and in end stages, have virtually no control over their bodies. In many cases, those who suffered from it were assumed to be either crazy or chronic alcoholics, and there is not a thing that can be done to help them. So few people suffer from the condition, and a cure would be so expensive to find that there is little incentive for drug companies even to research the condition.

FFI is a genetically dominant, hereditary disease. As a person with the gene that causes the condition ages, something triggers prions, a mostly protein infectious agent, to cause the proteins in the brain to mis-fold. Proteins in the brain fold in a particular pattern – when that pattern is altered, it causes neurological damage, resulting in death. Suffers are generally dead within two years of showing symptoms and their ends are terrifying. Since the brain no longer works correctly, the pain and mental anguish sufferers experience cannot be controlled pharmaceutically. Some painkillers and sedatives actually make the symptoms worse. While FFI is a prion disease that is genetic, there are many other prion diseases out there that are contagious and this book explores how those disease became zootrophic – meaning jumping from animals to humans. It discusses in very accessible language how prions were discovered, the scientists who discovered the prion diseases, and the lives of those who became infected with prion diseases.

Max discusses in detail how one of the first recorded prion diseases, scrapie, evidently became the scourge of England when sheep began to be bred for meat yield. In the process of breeding for size, the sheep became bred to develop scrapie, a communicable prion disease that caused the animals to lose neurological function and die. Autopsied sheep show brains filled with holes where the mis-folding proteins destroy the tissue. Land where scrapie infected sheep lived and grazed has been left fallow for a decade or more, only to find the prion disease is still there. Once land is infected with scrapie, it seems unlikely it will ever disappear entirely, but luckily there are sheep that are still genetically immune to the condition and are not infected.

Prions are a tricky substance. They are not really alive – they are a protein but a protein is not a living substance. A thing that is not alive cannot really be killed, so as of now, there is no way to combat prions. Nothing can get rid of them. Some studies show that using quantities of bleach may be effective in controlling them but even those studies were largely inconclusive. Prion disease has been found when stainless steel surgical instruments were used on an infected patient, then completely sterilized afterward.

Prions are truly one of the most frightening, indestructible substances ever.

The Postcard Killer by Vance McLaughlin, Ph.D.

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: The Postcard Killer: The True Story of J. Frank Hickey

Author: Vance McLaughlin, Ph.D.

Type of Book: Non-fiction, true crime

Why Did I Read This Book: I have a weakness for true crime. There was once a time when I could have told you the name and victim count of every serial killer from recorded time to present but I have since lost that ability as serial and mass murder became sort of commonplace in the Internet and on television and I lost interest via excessive immersion. However, I still appreciate a good true crime yarn, especially about a killer I have never heard of before.

Availability: Published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2006, you can get a copy here:

Comments: The case of J. Frank Hickey was a fascinating read. Though I disagree with the assertion the author makes, that Hickey was the first man ever captured as a result of profiling, that does not render this book any the less absorbing and hard to put down.

Because I discuss books in depth, there is no way for me to discuss elements of this book that would not spoil elements of it for some readers. I think this is a book worth reading, and if you think my many words will ruin aspects of the book, stop reading now. Just go buy the book. It’s not going to be a book that inspires a lot of thought or cause much internal contemplation – it is simply telling the tale of a sadistic man who killed 100 years ago, and as true crime goes, it is better than most.

J. Frank Hickey was a man who confessed to three murders, and if contemporary knowledge of serial killers is of any use, then it is very likely he killed far more than those he confessed to. As a young man, he killed an older drunk whom he feared might take his job, and a couple of decades later, he killed a newsboy. The book focuses, however, mainly on the murder of Joey Joseph in Lackawanna, New York. In 1911, Hickey lured the seven-year-old boy with a trip to a candy store, then took him into a multi-seat outhouse outside a saloon and strangled and raped the child. He then threw the boy’s body down one of the outhouse seats into the latrine below and went back into the saloon and drank. No one ever suspected him and he very well might have gotten away with the murder had he not overplayed his hand: He began to send taunting postcards to the family.

This is where I contend that Hickey was not caught by profiling. He was caught because newspapers ran copies of the postcards he sent in the hopes that someone would recognize the handwriting, which is exactly what happened. Two separate men recognized Hickey’s handwriting and it was downhill for the police from there. It was a capture due to police exercising certain procedural discretion, not because of profiling.

Three things stand out the most for me in this book. First is that Hickey, likely needing the thrill that finding the body would cause, became frustrated when the local police chief failed to find the boy. He sent a postcard to the chief of police telling him point blank that Joey Joseph was in a cesspit, giving the exact location. He did this within a month of the murder. The police chief sent a couple of cops to check out the outhouse and they peered into the filth below, unable to see much. They did not drain the cesspit, they just looked. Had the police performed even the most casual due-diligence, Joey’s body would have been found sooner. But the chief of police patted himself on the back, finding a silver lining in his cloud of incompetence: Had they found Joey’s body sooner, Hickey would not have written more postcards and they might not have caught him. It took over a year for Joey’s body to be recovered once the police finally pumped the cesspit and found him.

Second is how Hickey toyed with the family. Not even Jack the Ripper or the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, letter writers both, taunted directly the victims of their killings. Neither did the Zodiac Killer, who remains uncaught to this day. But Hickey did. His postcards were not as horrific as the letters sent by Albert Fish to the family of his victim, Grace Budd, whom he tortured and then ate, but they were upsetting enough. He said that since Joey’s mother was known as a nervous, unstable woman, he could not bear the torture she was undergoing and hoped his letters to the family, confessing the murder, would lead to finding the boy’s body. More likely, he did not receive the catharsis he needed when Joey’s body failed to be retrieved from the muck and needed some release via upsetting the Joseph family. However, if that was his goal, it backfired for a long while as the elder Joseph did not initially turn the letters over to the police, hoping against hope the letters were hoaxes and his son was alive somewhere. But he also sat on the letters because he feared that if the police knew his son was murdered, they might stop looking for the boy.

Third, I had no idea the life of a newsboy was as horrible as it was until I read this book. Young children in urban areas, sent out to sell papers by families barely scraping by, were of course open prey for pedophiles. Some even became prostitutes, selling themselves for meals and sometimes just the price for admission to a cinema, to be in out of the cold. Joey Joseph was not a newsboy but one of Hickey’s admitted victims was, and reading about the terrible life these children faced, the poverty, the potential victimization and similar, has made me want to read more about the topic. Newsboys seem a romanticized part of history in many large American cities and it was appalling and interesting to see how that romance crumbles under the most casual scrutiny. It seems to me, on many levels, that kids selling the news have always been natural victims. From newsboys to boys abducted as they delivered newspapers on their bike routes in more modern times, it seems odd that the technological advance that so many fear imperils children helped stopped one of the perils – the lone child peddling the news.

All in all, a very interesting, well-written book.

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Title: Last Night at the Lobster

Author: Stewart O’Nan

Type of Book: Fiction

Why Did I Read This Book: I read O’Nan’s The Night Country twice and loved it immoderately. When I saw Last Night at the Lobster on clearance, I snapped it up. I prefer not to buy remaindered books as I like for authors to make money off the books I buy, but I was a very impecunious reader for about a year. But given the blue-collar atmosphere described in the book, I’m sure O’Nan would understand.

Availability: Published by Viking, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This book was the perfect palate cleanser after reading Mary Gordon’s Pearl. Word economy, action, people behaving in a manner that made sense… I discuss a comparison between the two IN A COMPLETELY UNRELATED REVIEW over at I Read Odd Books, making it clear that perhaps I identify more with working class characters. This book was the perfect hot dog and beer after the salty steak and red wine offered in Pearl.

Last Night at the Lobster is a day in the life of Manny DeLeon, the manager of a Red Lobster that is being closed down days before Christmas. Manny’s life is that of a hard-working man, a man who does a very difficult job (god bless and overtip every person who ever waits in you in a restaurant) and wants to do it well. He is a man who hates to see others lose their job when the restaurant closes, even employees whose work ethic may not merit such loyalty.

But Manny is not a caricature of a virtuous Working Everyman, for despite his work ethic, loyalty and his sense of pride in a job well-done, Manny is all too human. He has a pregnant girlfriend but also carried on an affair with a coworker, Jacquie, a girl who also had a boyfriend. When the Red Lobster closed, Manny was offered an assistant manager job at an Olive Garden and can take five employees with him and wanted to take Jacquie. But Jacquie has a better sense of reality – Manny has a pregnant girlfriend and she can see that their love affair has no future. But Manny pines for her anyway, service-sector star-crossed lovers that they are.

It is very easy to get lost in a book of fantasy, or a book about the rich. Intoxicating other worlds have fueled certain genres for a long while and Danielle Steel would not be one of the best selling authors of all time if tales of money, sex, and intrigue did not serve as excellent escapism from the daily grind. Even Stephen King, who writes of blue collar people more than most authors, has them often set against a backdrop of horror or intensity that makes you forget that his characters don’t have a key to the executive washroom.

Last Night at the Lobster is also no epic tale of poverty, with no Steinbeckian-overtones to give extra-special nobility to Manny. Manny is just an American guy who works his ass off, whose personal life is messy, who is probably going to marry a woman he doesn’t love because she is carrying his child, and who will never be rich, famous or otherwise renown. So why care about him? Well, for me, it is because the stories of people like Manny so seldom get told outside of Barbara Ehrenreich exposés. I like reading about working class people. So often, people who are not rich in novels, who occupy a sort of underclass like Manny, are criminals or addicts or both. I like reading about people whose lives and work I can relate to so easily but whose stories are not told with sentimentality about the “working man.” Whose stories are important and amazing in their own right without needing the sanctification of people romanticizing what it is like to be young, hardworking and broke.

But if you are not me, if you could care less about the working man who brings you your meals when you eat at chain restaurants, then you should read this book because of the writing. The characterization is spot on and even wrestling with salting the snow seems interesting. As Manny hopes and prays his staff comes in for their last day of work and struggles with a terrible snow storm, the minutia of his day is never boring.

O’Nan really is a fabulous writer.

Candy from Strangers by Mark Coggins

This post originally appeared on I Read Everything

Book: Candy from Strangers

Author: Mark Coggins

Type of Book: Fiction, Mystery

Why Did I Read This Book: A couple of reasons. One, the cover is sexy, featuring the torso and neck of a shapely woman in various poses. Second, the premise of the book – women getting harmed as a result of “cam-whoring” (my term, not the author’s) – was a new one, something I could imagine Andrew Vachss writing about, and it intrigued me.

Availability: Published by Bleak House Books in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I am a voracious and indiscriminate reader, and buy books for a variety of reasons and seldom think twice when the urge to buy a book hits me, so were I less a book whore, I would have read the blurbs closer and realized I was reading the third book in a series. August Riordan, the private investigator in this book, is featured in two other other books by Coggins, but thankfully, the plot for the third novel stands independently from the other two. There are small elements that clearly are set up in previous novels, like Riordan’s relationships with women, his friendship with an old jazz and blues performer, and similar, but ultimately, no one would get lost reading this book before the others.

This book is a bag of potato chips. It really offers nothing new, but as you eat, you don’t really think, “My god, I am eating potato chips for the thousandth time in my life. I really need to get some of those wasabi rice crackers and mix it up a little.” For snack food is snack food and regardless of the form it takes, you enjoy it and sort of forget about it until the next time you need a snack. This is no slam of this book, calling it snack food. I would never turn up my nose at a competent mystery, and this is a competent mystery. There is a lot going on in this book, so much that it is almost impossible for me to give one of my regular, encompassing synopses, but here’s the lowdown:

A disgraced cop’s daughter goes missing. Her mother contacts Riordan to find her, and in the process of the investigation, he discovers the girl has a shared camgirl site with another girl, a fellow art school student. Much happens and Riordan solves the case, and in the process, plays a jazz gig or two, finds a dead body, annoys the denizens of an art school, interacts with and punishes a skeevy psychiatrist (best scenes of the book, in my opinion) and engages in pulp detective clichés that I ordinarily would snert at, but he does it competently enough that I don’t in this case.

Here’s one of the clichés in the book: In one of the side stories, the grandson of a famous but impecunious musician steals his grandfather’s bass, an instrument that has a lot of sentimental value. Riordan helps get the bass back and in the process finds out the grandson has musical talent and is a hoot on the old horn. So Riordan gets him a place in a gig and the misunderstood, strung out youth accepts and BOOM! It all seems right in the world. Jazz gigs, not drugs, kids. Just say blow (on the horn, not up your nose, yo!).

But this snert aside, a book doesn’t have to necessarily have something new under the sun. It is, at times, enough for a book to be entertaining. This book was entertaining. The characters, though at times caricatures (like the flamboyant cross-dressing Chris), engage the reader. At no point did any character bore me or alienate me and sometimes this is all I need from a good thriller. Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series used to be a lot of fun until Scarpetta became more strident, brittle and preachy as the plots became more and more outrageous. Neither of these are problems with Candy from Strangers. The plot makes sense, the characters are believable and likable, even Riordan’s snaptastic sarcastic rejoinders ring true when you read them. Riordan also has a good sense of humor, or at least his sense of humor resonated with me.

The only real unrealistic plot element in the book was this: The book involves female characters getting huge tattoos on their bodies. One of the women is an art model and when the photographer for whom she is a muse discovers she got the tattoo, he asks her to remove it and she does. The way the tattoo is described is that it is very large. Not only would it take several sessions to get such a tattoo, to remove it would be expensive as well and would take a long, long time and would leave scarring, even with the best laser technology. The time frame in the book does not allow this character the time she would need to get the tattoo and to later get it removed. One wonders where she, a struggling camgirl and student, would get the money for the extremely expensive laser treatments. And even if all of that were not problematic, traces of the original tattoo or the resulting scarring would remain and mar her nude photographs. Laser removal does not work like an eraser on the flesh. Small plot point but the only real issue I had with the book.

So know this book for what it is, common snack food for the mystery reader, and you’ll enjoy it well enough. If I ever see any of Coggins’ other works, I would be tempted to buy them. I might not seek him out actively, but I would definitely buy the two preceding August Riordan books if I stumble across them in a book store.