Walking on the Moon

Between Redshirts and the Collapsing Empire trilogy I’ve quote enjoyed the Scalzi I’ve read. Starter Villain was a good read as well. I think it’s a lighter story than either of the others I mentioned, but it is great fun.

We’ve got a sympathetic character thrown into a crazy scenario that pushes a ton of pop culture buttons and we never really stop to take a breath. The dialog is snappy and we can pull for the good guys and hiss the villains with glee. (Villain being a relative term here, I did see the title.) There’s some earned warmth and a nice ending.

Recommended.

I was surprised by how charmed I was by Murder on the Orient Express. I know Christie’s reputation and her work is popular enough that I know some of the plots, so I know what I’m getting into. At some point, admittedly late in the game, I realized “oh, this is the one where…”. And I still was more charmed than I can defend.

I just finished writing a review of The Thin Man where I lamented that I wasn’t lit up by Hammett a writer who does so many things I generally love in writing and here I am being charmed by Christie who is doing so many things I generally don’t love.

I feel like the characters are all comparatively thin. Stereotypes are doing a lot of lifting here. And the plot is contrived to make the puzzle. It seems like this should irk me to death.

But.

In the middle of a plot that at several points seems to scream “look: a clue”, Christie snuck several genuine clues right past me. In the midst of stereotypes who were sticking to the script remarkably well, she slipped one into another and caught me off guard. And when she has Poirot lead characters by the nose as if to say “I’m better at this than you think I am” I get the feeling she’s saying that to me as a reader about her writing. And she’s right.

She turns contrivances into comfort while never letting you take anything for granted. She moves her characters along the chessboard with finesse and panache. It’s all in the service of a puzzle, but the craftsmanship is so exquisite that it can’t help but charm.

Strongly Recommended.

I wish I liked Dashiell Hammett’s work more.

I see the clever plotting and the realistic characters. I like the dialog that sounds just clever enough that a wise guy would use it. I like the moral ambiguity of his world. I like the plots that are just twisty enough to be confounding without being unbelievable.

And I recognize that he’s part of a genuine sea change in detective and crime fiction. I read Murder on the Orient Express after I read The Thin Man and there are a couple times where Nora suggests Poirot’s techniques and Nick directly says “that doesn’t work.” You could say these are works in conversation, but Hammett’s giving a lecture. I respect that. And I take his point that many earlier mysteries are just candy crush before there were screens and he’s writing stories about characters in settings.

But it doesn’t all gel for me somehow. I know this is a de gustibus thing for me. I think that if you like detective stories at all, you should check out Hammett. He’s an excellent writer and broke plenty of new ground in the genre. I really like the movies made from the books. But I don’t light up when I read him.

Strongly Recommended.

This is a Jack Reacher novel. The first one, in fact. I picked it up because my Dad has been entertaining himself with these and recommended them. He knows he’s not recommending great literature.

I did roll through it and it was fun. I had the feel of an 80’s action movie. Or maybe more like an 80’s action TV series, where a drifter moves from town to town and gets sucked into their problems. It had pretty much all the good and bad of that genre.

I think Child did a better than average job putting building Reacher as a protagonist who is believable enough to not break suspension of disbelief. Reacher does some things that run that risk, but Child moves things along and keeps twists coming in ways that kept me along for the ride.

But it is an 80’s actioner. For guys. The female characters are just prizes and items to defend.

Well built, but not my favorite.

I am a sucker for conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality art. I’m willing to die on the hill that conspiracy-draws-character-to-the-meaning-of-reality is a genre based on the number of works that fit the bill that I’ve read.

This is Chesterton’s take on it, set in the early 1900’s. I mention the time, because like so many of these, he draws the reader into the web by using plenty of contemporaneous references that slowly melt into universal tropes. Since I didn’t live in the nineteen aughts, these are historical references to me. I like the feeling that Chesterton was pulling his readers in with pop star references.

Because this kind of book is deliberately twisty to make the reader look at reality differently, I won’t try to explain much of the plot. It’s a good run at the genre and has some nice revelations. I think it’s probably sound enough that it would read and confound modern readers of this era’s fiction.

Recommended.