Reading is fundamental - just read my stuff first.

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Seven Seconds or Less

Seven Seconds or Less by Jack McCallum

Anyone who likes basketball probably has a soft spot for the Phoenix Suns, whether he or she's a fan of them or not. The subtitle on the cover above is a perfect description of this team -- they run mercilessly, they bomb 3-pointers all night long, and they often have the flashiest offense in the NBA. I often find myself simultaneously horrified and thrilled at the prospect of my Lakers facing the Suns in the playoffs; horrified because, when the Suns are on their game, they are capable of stomping anyone into the ground, and thrilled because they look so damn good doing it.

This book came about a couple of years ago because McCallum wanted to get an inside look at the Suns, a team whose style fascinated him to no end because it was a throwback to the NBA of the 1980s, when every team ran the court. (Not coincidentally, the '80s were by far the best for the NBA in terms of domestic popularity and overall quality of play.) What made this team tick? How did they deal with the ups and downs of the NBA season?

The 2005-06 season was a particularly dramatic one for the Suns. Early in the year, they lost one of their best players, Amare Stoudemire, for the whole year due to a knee injury that required microfracture surgery. In a decision that's actually kind of brilliant, McCallum intensifies the drama by warping past the regular season and going straight to the playoffs, where the Suns had to tough it out against some good teams throughout the postseason. I liked reading about how the coaches interacted with the players following epic wins and horrible defeats; the Suns are a laid back team, but they are nonetheless focused on winning. There is a good amount of focus on the assistant coaches, which is interesting because you never hear much from them around the NBA, unless you're watching a local sports broadcast.

In between series recaps, McCallum recalls various points in the regular season to highlight certain players so that the reader gets to know them better. It's an interesting way to construct the narrative, and it works pretty well. These little vignettes provide a nice look at how certain players got to where they were, how they approach the game, and how they help the team. Overall, the Suns come off as a likable bunch of guys, even with the occasional ego and paranoia that plagues nearly everyone on the planet. For instance, as a Laker fan, I despise Raja Bell because he is the type of player every fan finds annoying -- he plays tough defense, he hits shots when he needs to, and he does it against your team. But he actually comes across as an OK guy in the book, except when he's committing retarded flagrant fouls against Kobe Bryant.

One thing that I didn't like, though, is that the book is a little too biased toward the Suns. I can definitely understand a bit of bias -- as much as McCallum wants to remain even-handed, he spent an entire year with these guys, talking to them and sharing in their victories and defeats, so he's built relationships with them, for better or worse. However, while he's not afraid to point out their shortcomings, nearly every bit of information about opposing teams is filtered through the Suns' point of view. It seems like every time an observation is made about another team, the observation is pretty negative and made to contrast with the Suns, who are obviously a model organization. This isn't enough to make me not enjoy the book, but it does get kind of grating after a while.

This is a fun book overall. It's filled with funny stories, interesting looks behind the scenes of an NBA team, and it made me remember some good and not so good things about the 2005-06 playoffs. (How could the Lakers blow a 3-1 series lead?? How?? I will never get over this.) The book's a light read, so it's good if you just want to kick back and lose yourself in sports for a few hours.

Absent in the Spring (and other novels)

Absent in the Spring (and other novels) by Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott

My two all-time favorite authors are Haruki Murakami and Agatha Christie. While I'm always happy to sing the praises of Christie's mysteries, her non-mystery novels (originally published under a pseudonym) are arguably her best work. They've been repackaged in two collections, each of which contains three standalone novels. I read the first collection late last year and enjoyed it, but Absent in the Spring etc. left a much stronger impression on me. Every single one of the novels included in it is equally powerful, equally devastating, and reminded me just how brilliant and underrated a writer Christie is.

Absent in the Spring

A complacently well-to-do middle-aged woman gets stranded between trains on her way back to England from the Middle East. After running out of reading material and ways to amuse herself, she finds it harder and harder not to think about the uncomfortable truths that she's spent most of her adult life avoiding. Which sounds incredibly dull, right? But it's more suspenseful than most of Christie's whodunits--remarkable, considering that most of the story takes place in the protagonist's head via flashbacks.

One of Christie's greatest talents is how merciless, accurate and convincing she is when it comes to portraying characters whose conceptions of themselves go totally at odds with what they are really like. You can find examples of them in almost all her books, including the following two, but the main character of Absent in the Spring takes the grand prize as far as I'm concerned. There is an almost savage--yet disciplined--thoroughness in how Christie makes her unwittingly expose herself to the reader. Personally, I put her on suicide watch pretty early on, but the denouement Christie goes for is less sensational, and more believable for it.

Giant's Bread

Quite a few of Christie's mysteries include artist characters, usually in side roles (although she has few rivals when it comes to sketching a fully realized personality in a few plainspoken sentences). The male protagonist of Giant's Bread, however, is not just a composer but a genius, a revolutionary, the kind of person who gives meaning to the idea of being ahead of one's time. Structurally, both Giant's Bread and Yew Tree (below) are novels where the prologue gives away the end. This is a tired device, but Christie does right by it. In both cases, the structure is key and ultimately feels more active and important than a simple choice to arrange the story one way or another. And again in both cases, its full significance does not become clear until the final chapter (which is of course not the chronological endpoint)--perhaps not even until the final line.

The Rose and the Yew Tree

Christie goes some pretty dark places in her mysteries, but always with a clean, sensible, very British touch. None of her famous detectives are especially interested in Justice with a capital J. They solve mysteries because they enjoy being good at it or because they find murder distasteful. For her criminals, she favors petty motives--petty money, petty jealousy, emotions that everyone experiences once in a while, things that everyone would like to get a hold of. This book is different; it focuses on rarer kinds of passion and rage.

Unlike the other two novels in the collection, The Rose and the Yew Tree has a first-person narrator, a decent if somewhat self-centered man who was crippled in an accident. He serves as our navigator through dark waters. The story itself revolves around a man he hates, an opportunistic first-time politician, and a young woman named Isabella who is one of the most unusual, fascinating and opaque female characters in the Christie canon. The darkness of emotion shown here is more striking because it doesn't lead to murder.

When I finished Absent in the Spring, I thought, "Man, she isn't going to be able to top that." Then I finished Giant's Bread and thought, "Man, that was just as stunning in a different way, but there's no way she can do it for the third time in a row." Then I got to the ending of The Rose and the Yew Tree and was left pretty much speechless. You can probably tell by now that I'm a huge Christie fangirl. I've tried to keep the proselytizing somewhat restrained here, because these really are damn good books and don't need her name to support them. Reading up to the end of each one was like getting punched in the stomach (in a good way!). Doing that three times in a row in one day... well, I think I need to go watch some mindless anime or something...

Death of a Red Heroine

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong

One of my friends recently took a class on ethnography and detective fiction (while I got waitlisted--curses!). Ever since, she's been recommending all kinds of mystery series to me. Fair enough; it's long past time that I start expanding my horizons beyond Agatha Christie...

Clocking in at 464 well-packed pages, Death of a Red Heroine is a fairly massive novel, at least as far as mysteries go. One shouldn't dive into it expecting a tight-knit whodunit-type plot or constant suspense. The pacing is leisurely, but this is one of Red Heroine's biggest strengths, because where it really shines is in its detailed, fascinating depiction of early-1990s Chinese life and political intrigue.

The protagonist is Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai police department. Despite his youth, he's a rising star in the Communist bureaucracy, but he first became a police officer almost by accident and continues to have mixed feelings about his job. He's an academic at heart: he spends his spare time writing modernist poetry and translates Western poems and detective novels for extra cash. Chen's cultural literacy adds an extra dimension to the richness of Red Heroine's narrative--many of the situations he encounters bring him to recall a line or two of classic Chinese verse. (This makes Red Heroine reminiscent of traditional Chinese and Japanese literature like The Tale of Genji, whose characters frequently quote poetry).

However, Red Heroine is totally accessible even if you know very little about China, past or present. The only part of it that tripped me up were some of the government position titles and other vocabulary, but I got used to it pretty quickly. The victim of the murder case Chen is investigating is Guan Hongying, a national role-model worker. Her death has instant political implications, due to her position as a widely known Party symbol. Eventually, Chen finds himself trapped between the pressure to solve this high-profile case and the pressure not to solve it. The truth could cast the Party in an undesirable light at a delicate political time.

I would definitely recommend Death of a Red Heroine to people who enjoy books that immerse them in another place or culture. At times the mystery takes a backseat to the flow of the characters' everyday lives (it's in third person but takes a variety of viewpoints). Food often becomes a point of emphasis, and the descriptions of meals--plain and exotic--are mouthwatering. Qiu Xiaolong's writing style is straightforward and restrained but evocative nonetheless, and from time to time he uses startlingly resonant images.

I typically read books in quick gulps, but I spread Red Heroine out over several weeks, a few chapters at a time. It's one of the few novels I've encountered that invited that kind of unhurried exploration while still being interesting enough to keep me going. Although it's standalone, the author has written other mysteries with the same main character, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of him.

Preacher

Preacher by Garth Ennis, with artwork by Steve Dillon

Comic books have always been the one area of geekery I was never into very much. I loved Batman and liked Spider-Man, but that was about it. However, the wonders of the Internet (and the ol' local library) have introduced me to many comic series I've enjoyed greatly. My favorite of the lot is the most beloved series of the 1990s, Preacher.

Preacher follows Jesse Custer, a small-town Texas preacher who isn't the biggest fan of God these days. While delivering a sermon, Jesse is accidentally possessed by a creature called Genesis, which is the spawn of an unnatural affair between an angel and a demon. The main side effect of this possession is the Word of God, a power enabling Jesse to give absolute commands to anyone or anything, living or dead. Using this power, he learns God abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was conceived, and thus Jesse makes it his mission to find God and demand to know why he's let the world go to hell. He's joined on this journey by his ex-girlfriend, Tulip O'Hare, and a hard-drinking Irishman named Cassidy, who has some dark secrets up his sleeve.

The story is kind of weird and convoluted, but it really isn't what makes Preacher great. What really makes the series so wonderful is that it's the perfect example of the type of balls to the wall serial storytelling that the best comic books are known for. I read the series via the trade paperbacks, and I was STILL gasping and mouthing, "Holy shit, I wonder what's going to happen next??" whenever I got to the end of an issue. Mind, this is when I could literally turn the page in a second and immediately find out the conclusion of a certain storyline. I can't imagine what it must have been like getting to the end of an issue and having to wait another month to resolve a particularly brutal cliffhanger. The closest I can muster is having to wait to get through the wild cliffhangers Lost throws at people every week.

What also makes Preacher a ton of fun is that it's a heartfelt tribute to a dying genre: the western. Lots of people poo poo westerns, but I've always had a soft spot for them. The rugged, barren settings; the bizarre mixing of black and white morality and shades of gray morality; the larger-than-life heroes and villains; and so on. I also like that the series unapologetically lets its heroes be ass kicking machines. That's not to say they're boring, untouchable Gary Stu/Mary Sue-type - they definitely take their lumps and get grinded into the ground enough to where you say, "Man ... that's horrible." But when they make their comebacks, well, let's just say they don't fuck around. It's fantastic.

And the villains, wow. In Garth Ennis' words, the villains are "a bunch of shits." There's absolutely no good in any of them - they're all evil, hateful bastards. Watching these people do their thing reminds me how much fun it is to root against a truly slimy, horrible villain. Weirdly enough, though, the best of them, The Saint of Killers, isn't someone I actively rooted against, at least not as much as I did some of the more horrible of the lot. He's more someone I was in awe of the whole story. Essentially, the Saint is Clint Eastwood from the final 20 minutes of Unforgiven transformed into a comic book character. That's a winning formula in my book.

My only problem with the series is Vol. 7, which is basically a filler arc (and not one that's as fun or interesting as the side stories in Vol. 4). There are some good moments, and Jesse is as kickass as always, but the main villain is my least favorite in the series. That doesn't take away from the series as a whole, however. The story moves at a lightning pace and never stops being fun or shocking the reader with fantastic plot twists and great character turns. Preacher is amazingly violent, sexual, and darker than black (*wink*).

Really, if you enjoy comics and haven't read Preacher, then you should stop wasting your time here and get on that. Even if you're not a comic fan, though, this might be the series to convert you - or it might just be the diamond in a bucket of shit. Who knows, really.

A Year at the Movies

Yo, everyone who I added to the guest posters list for this world - you are all able to post, correct? Just want to make sure I added you all in correctly ... if I do something wrong, I'm pretty sure this place will explode.

Anyway! Second entry to the library. Excitement!

A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy

After Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended, and before the advent of Rifftrax, the most immediate way to get a fix of the MST3K crew was through the books they released. Before this, I'd read both of Michael J. Nelson's books - Mind Over Matters is pretty funny, while Movie Megacheese is really disappointing. My expectations of this were similar to the types of books Mike Nelson was writing, but what I got was something totally different and much more interesting and affecting.

The basic premise of the book is that Kevin Murphy watches at least one movie a day for an entire year, sticking mainly to movie theaters though he does have portable projectors in a pinch. Kevin's purpose with this experiment is to rediscover his love of movies and to find out what really makes the theater experience, from the largest multiplexes in America to the smallest places in the most out of the way regions in the world. It's a journey to find what he believes was lost in the film industry long ago: The magic of the theater experience.

This could easily devolve into some bizarre, publicity-seeking stunt, but it's much more than that (though Kevin's achievement was mentioned on Ripley's Believe It or Not). The stories he finds everywhere are fascinating, and the love of movies he unearths wherever he goes is a ton of fun to read about. Many of the best chapters concern the smallest, most rundown places in the middle of nowhere, where dedicated groups of people watch movies for the sheer love of it. There are groups of people in Minneapolis who gather every Saturday to watch Hong Kong action films; the world's most friendly, outgoing film festival, located at Sodankyla, Finland; a tin-roofed, rain-soaked theater at the Cook Islands in the South Pacific; and a lot more interesting stuff.

How Kevin's view of the moviegoing experience evolves throughout the book is just as interesting as the places he goes. Going in, you should know that calling him a film snob is an understatement. He's seen tons of movies, has a more complete knowledge of film history than I could ever hope to achieve, and is prone to writing intellectually in a way that is a bit annoying at times. But his love of the movies is so infectious that the smile on my face grew to Grinch-like proportions by the time I finished the book. When you read about him sitting down to watch movies outside on an old film projector with family and friends in Venice, it's difficult to not feel the utter joy the experience brought him.

It's sort of disappointing that Kevin doesn't talk more about the movies he's seen (I was dying for his thoughts on Mulholland Drive, among others), but that's not what this book is about. Although there are a couple of chapters dedicated to this, he's not writing this book to rip on bad movies - it's not MST3K2. I've read reviews online where people are legitimately annoyed that Kevin doesn't spend the whole book reviewing the movies he saw. I don't say this much because it smacks of pretension, but those people totally misunderstood the point of the book. This is a journey about why people love the movies and how they express that love. It's not a super hilarious ripfest, but that isn't what the book is trying to be.

A Year at the Movies is one of the best books about the movies you'll read. Give it a shot. For me.