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Wednesday, October 03, 2012
The Haj
Title: The Haj
Author: Leon Uris
Bookmark: Panera receipt
I picked this up for free at a bookstore only because I recognized the author's name and figured it was high time I introduce myself. (and yes, because it was free) I didn't even get to it for a couple months--but I'm glad I did.
Our narrator, Ishmael, is the youngest son of Haj Ibrahim al-Soukori al-Wahabbi (an early chapter includes some interesting information on Arab naming conventions). His voice gives us the story of his family's life following the end of World War Two and the creation of Israel from formerly Arab lands. This is a little like saying the Star Wars trilogy is "about a farmboy."
Uris's work is obviously highly researched and thickly detailed. Reading it felt immersive and educational, but I was always a little curious how accurate the depictions of life and culture described in the book really were. Although the bulk of the 566 pages covers the span of Ishmael's life, the book opens with his father becoming muktar (mayor/tribal leader, essentially) of their village after the death of his father, and continues to give a thorough recounting of the years leading up to Ishmael's birth, including WWII from the Arab perspective (white folks fighting in Europe, with a brief incursion into the desert). We get Ibrahim's entire back story, and later, that of his friend Gideon Asch, a Jewish "desert rat" and later British officer and leader of Shemesh Kibbutz (a Jewish village, or kibbutz, established near Ibrahim's village of Tabah). Ibrahim and Asch share a complicated friendship, often confiding in each other things they could never tell someone else--especially someone else of their own faith--despite maintaining a charade of constant animosity between their villages.
Ishmael, as the youngest son, is destined to be the family goatherd, but his mother has other plans for him. Manipulating both him and his father, she manages to move him to a favored spot among the Haj's four sons, and he goes on to finagle himself an education. His new place at his father's side gives us a detailed view of the manipulations forcing Ibrahim's path. Ishmael tells us that his world is often Arab against Arab, and that nobody can be trusted. His father likes to say that if you have one hundred friends, you should get rid of 99--and be wary of the last. Leaders in the Arab world, realizing the strategic importance of Tabah's location, begin to make deals with Ibrahim to restore Arab power and drive out the Jews, but Ibrahim realizes that for all their talk of brotherhood, he is himself being forced out.
The village is abandoned, and the family separated from the people the Haj has led his entire adult life. Without a home, without power, they become refugees, spending years in camps near Jerusalem, and finding their own ways to survive in a world that has become constant turmoil and infighting. I was almost halfway through the book before I realized that the title didn't refer to the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, but to Ibrahim, who was able to add Haj to his name after he made the pilgrimage himself. He then spent the rest of his life leading his family through the Arab world, trying desperately to save both, and bring Arabs into a modern age of accord and peace while maintaining his traditional values.
The story is deeply involving, though it was written in 1984, before political correctness, and certain aspects may be offensive to Jews, Moslems, Arabs, and/or women. I'm not a member of any of those groups, so I found some of the more objectionable passages a point of curiosity. I was curious about the accuracy of depictions of life in Tabah, Arab and Moslem culture, and the history of Israel. I wondered a lot about what modern Jews and Moslems would think about the book, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the current situation in the Middle East, the animosity towards Westerners, and how, despite what many news networks will tell you, nothing has really changed in the past 50 years. The weapons and faces are different, but they're still fueled by old hatreds. The book was both illuminating and ... pretty scary. But very good.Labels: historical fiction, terrorism, war
posted by reyn at
1:19 PM
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Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Jack Bauer-esque
Title: The Overlook
Author: Michael Connelly
Bookmark: I finished it in two days; I really just tucked handy items inside while I got up to make dinner and do other chores.
Harry Bosch is a pretty great, if less well-known, literary detective. He doesn't have quite the hang-ups of so many others, and isn't over-the-top with a narrow field of brilliance, like the ones who eventually end up with TV shows these days. Bosch is determined, and maybe narrow-minded. Rather, he's focused.
When a body found on the Mulholland Drive overlook is discovered to have access to radiologic materials used in hospitals, the FBI becomes interested in Bosch's case. Then a large quantity of cesium is discovered missing, and the FBI quietly bulldozes Bosch out of his case, demanding access to everything he finds while sharing nothing they have. This makes Bosch rather... uncooperative. And who could blame him? The federales are so consumed with tracking down the cesium before it finds its way into a dirty bomb that they keep all their information from Bosch, who still wants to find the man's killer. He has a job to do, and whether the FBI likes it or not, nobody stops Harry Bosch from doing his job.
A few days ago I was at a bookstore and was disheartened to find that while there were only single copies of two or three books each by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, there were entire shelves full of modern tripe by James Patterson and Janet Evanovich. I'll be fair: while I know that both authors are ridiculously popular, I've never read any Evanovich, so I'm in no position to judge her, but I've read a lot of Patterson, and I've never been impressed. Chandler and Hammett may not have been as prolific, but they were founders and masters of the craft, and some credit is due. At the risk of disproportionate praise, I'd like to see more shelf space dedicated to Connelly. The man knows how to write a good mystery, and as I'm finding in my own recent efforts, it's much harder than I ever realized. The characters are solid, with long shared histories and distinct personalities, and the plot, which covers only about twelve straight hours, is taut, well-executed, and all too believable.Labels: murder, mystery/detective, terrorism
posted by reyn at
6:29 AM
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Thursday, May 12, 2011
double-oh-jerk
Title: Casino Royale
Author: Ian Fleming
The James Bond of the movies, as anyone who has read any of the books knows, has surprisingly little in common with the Bond of the books. Movie Bond is a suave, smooth ladies' man, ever cool and unflappable. Book Bond is... kind of a douchebag. Harder-edged, with no regard for anyone else. At least, he is in this first book. I've read a couple of the later Bond books, and he softens a little from what I remember, but in this... still an ass.
However, I have to give the Daniel Craig version (there have been at least three other Casino Royale movies, one of them entirely unauthorized, another a farce/parody) credit: it follows the source material almost exactly, right up to the line "The bitch is dead," but BookBond really means it. MovieBond seems to try to hide throwing up a wall and using his hard edges as a defense against any pain he might otherwise feel at Vesper's betrayal. That, and there's no sinking Venetian building scene.Labels: hunky armed forces or government operatives, series, terrorism
posted by reyn at
11:08 AM
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Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Mice make me Cross
Title: Four Blind Mice
Author: James Patterson
Bookmark: business card from the used book store where I got the book
I walked into the book store with the intent to find something to keep me entertained on my grossly overpriced Thanksgiving flights, and in that I guess I succeeded. It gave me something to do, and I finished it a day or so after arriving at Dad's place. I wasn't satisfied or impressed, but I was occupied.
Alex Cross is the protagonist of a lot of Patterson's books (in the latest, he even makes it into the title), and two movies (Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider). I figured it was about time for me to check it out--the movies were decent, as I remember, and I dig a good thriller. The downside of the movies is that it took me a few chapters to not hear the first-person narrative in Morgan Freeman's voice. Later on, I tried to get that back because at least then I'd get to listen to Morgan Freeman. The man could read a tax form and make it sound good.
Cross is aksed by a friend to look into the case of an old army buddy accused of murder. The timing is awful, because he asks him after the trial is over and the man's on death row. They eventually uncover an even larger plot and more veterans who were set up for horrific crimes and sentenced to death, confront the trio of assassins hired to frame the men, and try to find out who the mastermind behind it all really is.
It's entertaining enough to read, but Patterson has a habit of overplaying the "suspense" triggers, trying to build moments bigger than they really are, and makes his villains seem even more despicable than they need to be (I hated them long before they started killing hookers for fun, but that doesn't stop him from setting them loose on various other random victims). It's a little like reading a Dan Brown book, but without all the interesting tidbits on religion, art, and iconology. Then he randomly throws in saccharine family scenes and lovey bits with a character leftove from a previous novel. It's not that I mind the protagonist having a personal life, but the scenes are out of joint with the rest of the book, and--like the rest of the book--overplayed. It feels like he wrote two completely different stories and then alternated chapters to build the final novel. The good news is, I no longer feel compelled to read any more Patterson, so I'll save some money, but the bad news is, I feel like this should have been much better considering how much praise he gets.Labels: hunky armed forces or government operatives, murder, terrorism
posted by reyn at
9:01 PM
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Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Yo Quiero Better Writing
Title: Edge of Battle
Author: Dale "no, not Dan" Brown
Bookmark: the doorknob tag that told me my oven had been fixed. Again.
Have you ever been flipping through channels late at night and found some awful SciFi original movie--not something they adapted from a book, or some half-assed sequel to something with a real production budget, but something truly their own--with a name like Alligator! or Horror Mountain? I've been there. In the first 30 picoseconds, you figure, "hell, it has some horrific beast with lots of teeth and some sort of mutagenic origin, and that shapely paleocryptoxenobiologist isn't bad for ogling when she's not phoning in her stilted lines. I'll give it a shot," and by the time five seconds are past, you've already decided that it has stolen vital moments of your lifetime from you, and not only will you never, ever get those moments back, but you're also sober enough that you're forced to remember it all.
This book is like that. Except it took me longer to realize how awful it was (I'm not a super-fast reader), and yet... I kept reading. However, I only kept reading so I could loudly pan it in this space. I only hope my harsh criticism will do it justice.
The damn thing starts with several pages of ... let's call it glossary. First, a wide cast of characters, which was strange only because it names some characters who exist for only a paragraph or two, and omits a couple that turn out to be comparably important. Plus, any reasonably intelligent person should be able to figure out who's who by reading the damn book. On the other hand, a reasonably intelligent person wouldn't have read the whole book. Next is a list of technologies and weapons, many of them invented by the author, and finally a glossary of various abbreviations. This was somewhat useful, but again everything I didn't already know was defined in the context of the book anyway, so... why?
The second glossary got me interested. It promised lots of high-tech weaponry, and some sort of robotic exosuit used by the good guys. I thought with ten-foot robot warriors going after terrorists, there had to be something awesome. By the end of the book, I hated the damned robots. It takes a lot to make me hate robots, especially ones used by the good guys. I became an engineer largely because of R2-D2.
The plot, mangled convoluted mess that it is, centers on rising hostilities between the US and Mexico over immigration law. Eventually we find out that a lot of it is being orchestrated for... some reason never fully specified, and there's also some Russian terrorist mastermind who seems to be leftover from a previous book. The thought that there is more than one book in this series scares me more than the Russian terrorists. I'm also unsettled that I could never figure out whether the author sides witht he extremist right-wing, or was satirizing them. Was he playing as Rush Limbaugh, or Stephen Colbert on meth?? I couldn't tell!!
Every chapter is riddled with inconsistencies--the robots keep changing size, they fold in ways that would make even Michael Bay call "bullshit", people suddenly appear in one place after reporting in from another, weapons disappear right out of their hands, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the Spanish was improperly translated--and the dialog made me want to burn things. Usually after finishing a book I don't need to keep (or return to the library), I'd stick it in a box and ship it to Cleveland or DC, but I think I'd rather tear this one in half and stuff it in the recycling. It's not just terrible writing, it's politically offensive terrible writing.Labels: politics, shit, terrorism
posted by reyn at
6:26 PM
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Saturday, November 15, 2008
Still Awesome.
Secret Asset
by Stella Rimington
Sequel to At Risk. Liz is on the trail of a mole in MI-6 this time. Plenty of betrayal, plus a valid (and semi-related) terrorist threat, and despite some false starts she figures out who's behind the whole thing. Really, I'd rather say less about the book and just get you all to read it.
Also, are we starting to sense a theme in the books I'm really enjoying these days? And yet I saw Quantum of Solace last night and was rather disappointed. Maybe they need a girl-power version...Labels: action, conspiracy, Ireland, strong female author, terrorism, vengeance
posted by ket at
12:28 PM
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