When I was a kid I worried that someday, in the distant future, I
would run out of good books to read. Seriously. Thinking back, that
probably speaks more to my innocence and ignorance than to my taste in
books at the time. But I did and now, many, many, MANY moons later, I
have yet to hit that tragic moment. And I highly doubt that I
will. This has little to do with Lawrence
Block‘s books except that they are a new discovery for me and
whenever I find a new author to read I experience a slight feeling of
relief. I haven’t run out yet.

Anyway, these were my first two Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries and already I
have figured out Block writes with a formula. Bernie breaks into
someone’s house after some sort of treasure, something goes wrong, like a
murder, and he has to solve the crime himself or get the rap pinned on
him. A formula book is comforting. You can sit back and watch how the
writer varies it without horrid little surprises coming your way. And
Block is funny, an added bonus. The Mondrian book was a little more
developed than the Closet book. Block had developed additional characters
and expanded Bernie’s social life a bit. He has found his sidekick in
Carolyn, the lesbian owner of a dog washing business. And he has
developed Ray Kirschmann, the cop on the take who somehow always ends up
helping Bernie out of the mess he finds himself in.

These are good books. Not great literature and not really even classics
in the mystery genre. Just plain good reads. And there are lots of them
so I don’t have to worry about running out of good books for awhile. Phew.

Ex Libris
Reviews for November has just been uploaded; it includes
a least a dozen reviews that haven’t appeared here in this web log.
Happy reading!

Ex Libris Reviews
will likely be a day or so late this month; I usually put it together
over the weekend, and what with Halloween and with the 1st of November
falling on a Friday, and travelling at the beginning of the week and
this and that and the other thing, things are moving slowly chez
Duquette. I’ll try to have it out by Saturday evening.

Snit V0.7 is now available on the Snit home page, for
any of you who are Tcl programmers.

I’ve just released V0.6 of Snit, my Tcl/Tk
object framework. Programmers, see Snit for more information.

The October Ex Libris
Reviews is now up.

I didn’t post anything yesterday because I was watching
Monsters, Inc. with Jane instead. It was delightful the first
time I saw it, by myself last December, and it was delightful the second
time I saw it, with my boy David, also last December, and it was
delightful this time on DVD, even if the screen was too small.

The more I consider how much time George Lucas has spent on digital graphics
in the last two Star Wars movies, and to such little effect, the more
impressed I am with Pixar. Their technology is just as cutting edge,
and yet they never forget that the story comes first. And they
consistently do an outstanding job.

This is the story of a young nobleman named Andrej Koscuisko. He’s a member
of the nobility on one of the planets of a star empire called the
Jurisdiction. As the name implies, power in the Jurisdiction is held by
the judiciary rather than by an executive or legislative body. The
Bench’s decisions are enforced by the Fleet. Trial for criminal
wrong-doing is by inquisition, accompanied by torture; the point of the
torture is twofold, to elicit confessions and to deter other criminals.
As a result, the Jurisdiction is always in need of skilled inquisitors.

Due to the practical difficulties involved in using torture as a way of
gathering information, it’s required that all inquisitors have medical
training. It so happens that our hero recently graduated first in his
class from the best medical school in the Jurisdiction. His father (for
reasons that are never explained) has insisted that he go to Fleet
Medical Orientation Station, there to learn how to be an
inquisitor/torturer. The book covers the time he spends in training.

I have mixed feelings about this book. It kept me reading, and there are
many interesting, well-drawn characters; Andrej’s personal development
through the course of the book is particularly well described.

But…. there are many extremely unpleasant scenes. This is not a book
for the squeamish. Only my concern for the characters kept me reading.

But…. The folks in charge of the Orientation Station are portrayed as
being kind, thorough, decent men and women who truly care about their
charges, low and high…and yet they have dedicated their lives to
training torturers. Why?

But…. after chapters of extremely painful material, the book just kind
of ends. There’s no satisfactory resolution; young Andrej simply goes
off to be a torturer.

In short, I fail to see the point of this book. It was undeniably
interesting, but after putting up with all the pain I had hoped for a
better payoff. Matthews is an author to watch, but I can’t recommend
this particular book. Unless, that is, you like to read detailed
descriptions of blood and gore.

This is the other early Heinlein novel I picked up for this trip. It’s
one of Heinlein’s so-called “juveniles”, and I can barely remember having
tried to read it when I was eleven or twelve. The hero is a school kid
named Jimmy Marlowe; he gets treated very badly by the
school’s headmaster, and I found it so unpleasant that I put the book
down and never picked it back up again.

The book is both better plotted and less inclined to lecture than
Beyond This Horizon, which was written seven years earlier;
still, I found it less satisfying. I don’t think it’s just because it’s
a juvenile, either, as many of Heinlein’s juveniles are first rate.
Perhaps the editor’s hand was a little heavier on this one.

All-in-all, I found it interesting mostly as a precursor to
Stranger in a Strange Land. I don’t believe that it’s set in
precisely the same universe, but the Martians we see only from afar in
Stranger in a Strange Land are clearly very much like the ones
we meet up close in Red Planet. It was interesting to get a
closer look at them.

I tend to enjoy long series of novels with complex plots and varied
characters.
Dorothy
Dunnett and Sharon K. Penman’s historical series are
two examples. But 19th century British literature is also full of long,
complex books that can totally wrap themselves around my imagination and
allow me to live in the story while it lasts. This novel is roughly 900
pages long. It ties together the previous novels in the series so tightly
that if you haven’t read them you will miss much of the richness of the
story and the subtle references made to the past. It’s long and involved
and very Victorian.

With that said, I barely could put it down long enough to eat or get some
sleep. The essential storyline revolves around Rev. Josiah Crawley’s
indictment on theft charges for allegedly stealing a check and using it
to pay off bills. Crawley is a perpetual curate in a Hogglestock, a small
village on the periphery of Barsetshire. He and his wife and kids are
near starvation and crushed under the shame of poverty–shame that is
made much, much worse by the fact that he was raised a gentleman and is
highly educated. But he has a fatal flaw. His gentleman’s pride makes him
refuse any help and his personality is so prickly with it that he puts
off anyone wanting to help him. He even refuses a lawyer for the trial
since he doesnÂ’t have the cash to pay for one and won’t take the charity
of his friends. And he has become depressed to the point of being nearly
psychotic.

That’s the skeleton that Trollope fleshes out with the love story of
Grace Crawley and Henry Grantly, the adventures of Conroy Dalrymple and
Clara Van Siever, the broken romance of Lily Dale and Johnny Eames and
the marital relationships of Archdeacon Grantly and his wife and Bishop
Proudie and his wife. Mrs. Proudie is absolutely the best female
character I have read in a long time. She’s an interfering, prideful,
domineering, sneaky woman who so totally overwhelms her husband that she,
in fact, is the real Bishop of Barsetshire and he only a figurehead.
Everyone, including her husband, hates her with a passion. I did too. Her
fate in the end is wonderfully apt. Trollope puts some hysterically funny
episodes in this novel, including a scene where Johnny Eames, a minor
character, has to escape the clutches of an admiring woman on the make
for a husband by crawling out a window because her mother has locked him
in. But when Trollope made Mrs. Proudie, he pulled out all the stops.