Pope Francis: Life and Revolution (Elisabetta Piqué, 2014)

We're about three and a half years into the Pope Francis era and there is no shortage of literature on His Holiness. I recall back in March 2013 clearing off the Benedict XVI display, heavily laden with the voluminous Ratzinger bibliography, and replacing it with the single book I could find by the former Jorge Bergoglio, and trying to beef it up with whatever magazine covers I could track down. Nowadays the display is about as heavy as it was in 2012 and I don't even need the magazines anymore.

This particular book came out about two years ago, and it's already starting to show its age. When it was recommended to me, it was considerably more fresh, but have a gigantic prioritized reading list doesn't exactly help with keeping up with current events. So that's on me. However, the writing style, perhaps due to the author being a journalist, is a little crazy for narrating historical events. The chronology is quite jumpy, with the first half shifting between Francis's earlier career and the 2013 conclave. Furthermore, almost everything is told in present tense, which is a pet peeve of mine.

On the other hand, the author's credentials are impeccable (Argentinian and Italian - perfecto!). If you really want to dig into Pope Francis's first 18 months, you could do worse than this book. I will agree that it really capture's the character of Pope Francis and that an understanding of his pre-papal career makes his actions as Pope no surprise at all.

Perhaps due to the limited coverage of Francis's papacy and the somewhat minor publishing house (Loyola Press), this book may not be readily available from the nearest public library. It would make a good fit in a parish library (even a non-Catholic one), and I got my copy from my own library.

Happy Hour In Hell (Tad Williams, 2013)

Has it really been four years since I read the first book in the Bobby Dollar series, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I really jumped on that one, but by the time I got around to the second, the whole series was finished.

The Bobby Dollar series is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it's not high fantasy like the awesome Memory Sorrow and Thorn books or the lackluster Shadowmarch series. And it isn't science fiction like Otherland. It's in that ill-defined genre probably best called "urban fantasy" where you find your Jim Butchers and Neil Gaimans. Second, the books (at least the first two) are not gigantic, each around 400 pages. Finally, from what I've seen, for the first time, Tad Williams managed to write a trilogy that stayed a trilogy! Sure, I've got the 1200+ page To Green Angel Tower, originally a concluding book 3, but now repackaged as a third and fourth book (Siege and Storm). Supposedly no paperback binding could hold it in one volume!

Last time I met the angel Doloriel (street name: Bobby Dollar), he was bouncing around the streets of the fictional San Judas. If you live anywhere between San Francisco and San Jose, you may be quick to notice that it is a parallel-universe conglomeration of pretty much everything between San Carlos and Mountain View, with Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Atherton being name-checked as "districts" and "downtown" is pretty much Redwood City. It was both cool (because I could relate), and distracting (because I kept trying to figure out if such-and-such bar was some place I actually knew). For about the first 100 pages or so, the San Judas action continues in this book. While, for the aforementioned reasons, I'm not too disappointed with San Judas, it felt like Tad Williams was punting a little in the world-building department, something he did very well (world building, not punting) in the Memory Sorrow and Thorn and Otherland books (Shadowmarch....let us not speak any more of this series). Well, things went straight to Hell right after that, and I mean that in the best possible way. Hell, which was the setting for almost the entire rest of the book, is a truly diabolical experience. Williams created a Hell that would make Hieronymus Bosch run for the exits and it has about a million more levels than Dante's Inferno. Even "high-class" Hell is horrific by Earth standards, and the lowest levels are beyond comprehension.

While Tad gets an A for world-building in this one, way improved over the first book, unfortunately it is a lot of fancy bunting for a meh love story. Maybe I'm not as passionate a person as Bobby Dollar, but it seemed like the whole trip to Hell, as wild a ride for the reader as it was, may not have been wholly necessary. I won't even tread near "the twist" -- and there is always one of those -- but once I was allowed to come back up for air in San Judas near the end of the novel, I had to suppress a shrug. You did all of that just to get that? Oh well, there is always book 3, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day. Be sure to look for my review of this final book of the series in 2019!

This book is pretty easy to find at public libraries. A lot of people I know are big on collecting (as in actually buying) the books, because they have pretty artwork, and you can meet the author and get them autographed, and so forth, but I kind of felt burned by Shadowmarch and demoted Tad to library-only and so far I've been fine with the decision. If you mostly know Tad from his other series, be advised that this one likes to toss in more robust sex and language in addition to the violence, so I would think before buying these as presents for your under-15 family member, especially if they've never watched an R-rated movie.

Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)

Slaughterhouse-Five neatly falls into the Venn diagram middle of "books that are classics" and "books I genuinely want to read"...and maybe throw in another circle of "books I really should have read in high school."

I discovered Vonnegut through the science fiction path. His early works up through Cat's Cradle easily qualify, putting him alongside unlikely folks like John Updike (and Jonathan Lethem I suppose) as authors who committed acts of science fiction in their career that are not regarded as science fiction authors. Before now I've read the aforementioned Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, and the perhaps not-so-SF God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. More importantly, I also have read the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House, which holds a tone closest to this book, and also includes the important libertarian-SF classic "Harrison Bergeron".

If anything this may be a step back toward SF from God Bless, although if you want scientific explanations for things like time travel, you will be disappointed. It's just a fact here that Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly through time, everywhere from his childhood to his deathbed, and, critically, his war experience, which includes the fire-bombing of Dresden.

The book owes a fair bit to its predecessors, with characters like Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater making appearances. Also, in an almost Michener-esque way, the book doesn't even begin properly until the second chapter, as the first is devoted the conception of the novel by Vonnegut's alter ego...his non-Trout one, to be clear.

Finally, I'm not one for trigger-warnings, but if you are unable to process a horrorific scene of animal cruelty, you may wish to proceed with caution with this book. Make no mistake, the reward of reading a classic outweighs this single scene, but it remains burned into my mind's eye and still makes me shudder to imagine. Also, it was around this time that books other than Catcher in the Rye could use salty language (and quite frequently), so bear this is mind as well if you were thinking of suggesting this for younger readers. Any mature adult shouldn't have a problem with this, though.

I picked up a mangled old copy of this book from the public library that, while probably isn't a first edition, has pretty much the same layout and pagination. Since this is a pretty regularly assigned required reading book (accepting the aforementioned caution), it isn't hard to locate paperback copies on the cheap.

'Salem's Lot (Stephen King, 1975)

This is a repost from Under the Tome, my insane noble Stephen King reading project. Please feel free to follow along and I work my way from Carrie to End of Watch (or whatever the last thing King has published when I get there).

Over the past two weeks I heartily enjoyed sinking my teeth into Stephen King's second novel, 'Salem's Lot. Unlike Carrie, the subject matter cuts much closer to King's interests as a developing writer. While the first book pivoted between publication and the circular file before finally leaning to the former, this book had been brewing for quite some time.

This book is about vampires. I'm not sure if that was supposed to be a huge surprise for the first readers. On the other hand I have the advantage of forty years of hindsight, as the book (and most of King's early books) is firmly entrenched in the zeitgeist of American fiction, so it is hard to escape the easy labeling of the book as his "vampire novel". Also, this is the first book that feeds into the Stephen King Megaverse, anchored by the Dark Tower series, so it's a generally-known fact through this connection that there is going to be a supernatural angle.

That is something I've had to get used to with this project. Stephen King isn't (primarily) a mystery author, he does horror and suspense. This means there isn't a reason for the destruction of Jerusalem's Lot that is grounded in reality. It's the same kind of adjustment that needs to be made if watching a later episode of Scooby-Doo and learning that the monster is not just some crank wearing a mask, but a real monster. This makes the more obvious explanation ("Barlow is a vampire") the correct one, rather than something surprising ("Barlow really is just a kindly antiques vendor and somebody innocent-looking is actually infecting the town with flu because he's mad about something"). The fun, therefore is not in the discovery of the truth, but in what the protagonists plan to do about it, and if they will survive.

Given where I work, I found the religious aspects of the novel to be interesting. Although I mentioned a little bit of flawed theology in the "progress report" post, I was surprised by how much religion played into the battle against the vampires. Father Callahan is a tortured guy, living in the decade immediately following Vatican II and clearly struggling to accept the modernization of Catholicism. Yet he has more than enough personal demons to battle, all of which fall in line when confronted by the vampire threat. More than any classic vampire weapons, crosses and holy water were the most fundamental and effective tools against Barlow, so much so they even glowed with power (bestowed on them through prayer and absolution, no less). There is also considerable discussion about faith among the characters, as well as the differences of spiritual experience among the denominations present in the town (Catholic, Lutheran, Mormon, and maybe another I'm missing).

As I was reading I thought of some of the other famous works of vampire fiction and how much (or little) they owe to each other. In his 1999 introduction to 'Salem's Lot, included in my version, King credits Bram Stoker's Dracula as an early inspiration, it did not serve as the template. Rather, his vampires come from the comic book type, the ones that are a lot nastier and commonplace than the one-off Count Dracula. The weapons and weaknesses are fairly standard: wooden stakes, crosses and holy water (definitely), sunlight, silver (maybe), and garlic (not really, more of an allergic reaction). Vampire victims typically become vampires themselves, but more zombie-like with only limited cunning and confined to the town. Unlike Stoker's world, they are not charming, except if you are dumb enough to stare into their eyes. I had to remind myself that Anne Rice only jumped into the genre the following year, so if anything, she owes King, not the other way around, for any similarities. More likely, though, they were both drawing from the same inspiration and also trying to differentiate from Stoker. Although Barlow alludes to being far older than the Church, King doesn't delve into "vampires spanning time" the way that Rice does. Her vampires are also better looking, if you take the movie into account anyway. About 25 years later, Charlaine Harris would get in on the act with the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series, and when her novels were adapted by HBO as True Blood, it seemed like another wave of vampire mania was upon us. Harris plays far more off of Rice's innovations (sexy vampires spanning time), and both are guilty of cranking out endless books in their respective series, both of diminishing quality.

Stephen King, unlike Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris, never wrote a proper sequel to 'Salem's Lot, although some plot elements would be worked into his later novels. Though not actually novels, this book has a prequel ("Jerusalem's Lot") and a sequel ("One For the Road") which were both published in King's first story collection, Night Shift. More about those when I get there!

'Salem's Lot has never enjoyed a theatrical release, but it has had two two-part miniseries adaptations, from 1979 and 2004. This probably has something to do with the "slow boil" plot that, if rushed into a 100-minute format, would make the climax all the weaker. However, this didn't stop an ill-advised sequel, A Return to 'Salem's Lot, from reaching the big screen in limited release in 1987. Just like with The Rage: Carrie 2, I think I've got more important things to watch!

Built to Last (James C. Collins & Jerry I. Porras, 1994)

For those not familiar with the towering epics of business literature by Jim Collins, here's a quick overview. Built to Last came out in 1994 and made a moderate splash. In 2001, he wrote a sequel of sorts called Good to Great, which completely overshadowed its counterpart, so much so that even the author himself suggests reading the "sequel" first. Although the definitions and methodology are all around in Built to Last, he articulates the distinction between the "great" companies (the profiled ones) and the merely "good" ones (the comparison companies) in Good to Great.

Part of the popularity (or detraction) of the book is the anecdotal format. Methodology is largely held to the front matter and the appendix. It is solid methodology, very scientific and quantitative, but the meat of the book is the stories about the different companies, both the enduring companies and their comparisons. It is interesting to read about how Philip Morris started as a London smoke shop, and Marriott was a root beer cart at its beginning. Although the book firmly disavows CEO personality as a factor in the endurance of a company, there is a lot of wisdom spooned out from the leaders of these companies. I recall when reading this interrupting my wife from whatever she was reading to say "did you know...?" about some company and/or its leaders and founders.

Where the detractors may get some credit is that the anecdotes, while fun to read, sort of mar the practical aspects of the book. I can't really think of the anything I read in the book that made me think "a-ha! I will use this at work!". Perhaps the very notion of the enduring company is hard to "implement", even though the authors stress that one need not own a company, let alone a famous one, to learn from the book. So, if anything, I walked away from this book learning more about these companies from their birth to the present day and those factoids are now in my toolbox and may prove useful at unexpected times in the future.

My copy (cover pictured here) was the old hardcover edition, so there was no whisper of Good to Great here. I think later editions, only mildly different, may suggest practical connections for readers between the two books.