Bookpusher

This book caught my eye not because of the wicked kewl cover that looks like something from a roleplaying supplement from White Wolf circa 1995, but it was one of the few genre books that made the Publishers Weekly book of the year list. Now that I’ve read it, I completely agree with them.

This sucker reads like a combination of Shirley Jackson and an early Stephen King short story (without the cocaine.) The novel takes place in a nameless Midwestern town on Halloween Night in 1963. The teenagers of the town are locked up for five days with no nourishment except for water. They are released at sundown on Halloween, armed with baseball bats and borrowed axes, to hunt the October Boy, a mythical scarecrow-like being with the head of a glowing pumpkin and its insides stuffed with candy that rises from the corn fields from outside of town. The Boy has to make it though the gauntlet to reach the church at the center of town by the stroke of midnight. This has happened every year since anyone can remember. The winner gets the candy, respect from the community, and gets to leave the dead-end town to go on to a better life.

This year, of course, things turn out differently.

Dark Harvest is marketed as a horror novel, but there’s surprisingly little horror to be found here – there’s a bit of violence, certainly, but it’s not graphic or extreme in nature. It’s more horror in mood and feel, a dying town surrounded by dry cornstalks with Something Strange lurking in them. This is an amazingly fresh story, told in a bold voice, nibbling at the edge of American Myth itself. I knew these characters even as the story introduced them: the bad seed with the muscle car, the outsider from the poor family who longs for a better life, the strange new girl from another town who carries a secret, the police officer who rules by fear and intimidation.

Seek this one out. It’s a slim volume that reads at a breackneck pace and leaves you as satisfied as if you just ate Thanksgiving dinner. It’ll be worth it.

Medlineplus.gov- it’s like WebMD, but reputable!

Plus, no ads for boner pills.

I picked this book up on a whim, just looking for something to read during my lunch hour. I had good memories of a previous book of his, “Fatherland”, so I figured he would be a safe bet. I ended up reading an amazing historical novel about the quest for and the use of power – Imperium – during the height of republican Rome, told through the lens of one of its most famous senators, Cicero.

Harris has researched the era thoroughly and uses historical documents to build the framework of his novel, taking Cicero from a freshly-minted, stuttering senator loathed by the nobles into one of the most powerful people in the empire. It’s an ancient story but with modern sensibilities – this is a book about politics, but it reads like a courtroom thriller. The tale is told through the recollection of Tiro, Cicero’s slave and closest assistant, as Cicero trains himself to become a excellent speaker and lawyer, and starts to climb the ladder of fame and respect.

Cicero comes into contact with other notables like Crassus, Pompey, and even a scheming newcomer named Caesar. The novel reaches its height when Cicero unravels a plan by other senators to grab power and ends with Cicero at the height of his career, achieving the previously-unthinkable rank of consul. It’s all absorbing stuff. Harris knows his history and is an excellent writer, filling courtroom scenes with real tension, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

Somewhat in the same vein, I hope you all have seen the trailer for 300, the film adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel about the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. It looks amazing, and captures Miller’s images and feel perfectly, just like Sin City did. The battle at Thermopylae has always been one of my favorite stories in history: a small group of Greek soldiers holds off the largest army the world had yet seen in order to buy time for its nation to quit squabbling and get its act together or else face extermination. The fate of Western civilization was at stake, and even though the Greeks fell, they inspired the nation to eventually defeat the Persians and keep the flame of democracy and philosophy alive. With all that going for it, I really hope the film doesn’t suck. It’s a story worth telling well.

(Incidentally, if you haven’t read “Gates of Fire“, Steven Pressfield’s amazing fictional account of the battle, please do so. Breathtaking. It was so good, I forgave Pressfield for writing “The Legend of Bagger Vance”.)

As mentioned earlier, I’m a huge fan of Raymond Chandler. My mom bought me five Chandler paperbacks for my birthday when I was twelve. They were some of the first mysteries I had ever read, and to this day, I consider them some of the best ever written.  Philip Marlowe is not only a character, not only an archetype, but the very definition of an entire literary genre. That, and he could totally kick Sam Spade’s ass in a fight.

So when I come across an article talking about a new movie adaptation, I sit up and take notice. Even though Hollywood has made millions of dollars aping the works of Chandler, it’s odd that they have not yet to get the character of Philip Marlowe right. Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, James Garner, Robert Mitchum, even Humphrey freakin’ Bogart – none have been particularly memorable or even very good. Except for maybe Bogart, and his Marlowe was more Bogart than anything else. And the less said about Elliott Gould, the better.

Around the time my mom gave me those books, we watched a short-lived HBO series starring Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe. Boothe got it all right: the toughness, the world-weariness, the intelligence, and the compassion. He was a bit broader in the chest than Bogart, who was always thin as a reed, completely unfit for mixing it up with the LA underworld. Nope. I absolutely dug Powers Boothe, and when I read and re-read those Chandler paperbacks, it was Boothe’s face that I pictured under the fedora.

But now I read that none other than Clive Owen will play Marlowe in an upcoming project that hasn’t been officially announced yet, so in all likelihood it’ll fall apart as soon as I post this. But I don’t know what to think – Owen’s certainly a good actor who deserves his shot at the role, I’m a bit uneasy. If his movies show nothing else, it’s that the man can’t hide his British accent for crap, and I can’t picture Marlowe with a Brit accent.

Am I wrong? Am I being nitpicky? Will someone reassure me that this will go fine?

Snagged from the always-amazing Cinematical:

Top 10 mano-a-mano film fights of all time.

(I wonder what my buddy sdemory will think of this list….)

Been in a bit of a funk the past week – you’d think that having school cancelled and the promise of a glorious three-day weekend would fill my heart with joy, but for some reason it didn’t. 806 got pushed back to the end of the month, so I had to play for that glorious three-day weekend with a complete disruption to my delicately-balanced spring school schedule. Now I only have one Saturday free of work or school for the next two freaking months.

Wow. Look at me bitch and moan! Again, not feeling myself this week. Seasonal Affective Disorder? Global warming? Iraq war escalation? Who the hell knows. But since nothing’s more boring to read than blogger ennui, here’s what I’ve been reading recently:

Graphic Novels: even though everyone and their dog have recommended Kurt Busiek’s Astro City for me for what seems like years, aside from an issue or two, I’ve never really gotten around to reading them. My library recently got four of the graphic novels in, so I tore right into them. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. Busiek takes everything that was both cheesy and sublime about Silver Age superheroes and weaves them into some amazing stories – his creations riff off the Fantastic Four, Superman and Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and Dr. Strange. It’s not that he just rips them off and uses their influences, but he takes what is familiar with the genre and takes a new and completely different angle.

For example, a ten-year-old girl raised in a Fantastic Four-like cosmos-hopping super-scientific family finds the normalness of learning how to play hopscotch on the playground to be an amazing adventure. A powerful Superman-like hero who is aware of almost everything around him lives his life in between ticks of a second. A old man made out of living metal gets out of prison, attempts to find redemption, and ends up saving the city. Astro City is amazing stuff, well-crafted stories all, and I only wish there were more graphic novels to read.

Next: Rome!

My second semester of grad school starts this weekend. The first semester went smashingly well, however my classes were mostly of the getting-your-feet-wet variety, while the roster I’m facing now all have a bit more bite to them. And they have even more impressive-sounding names: 805 is Organization Theories for Administering Information Agencies, 806 is Global Information Infrastructure, and 813 is Basic Print and Electronic Information Sources. Okay, maybe that last one sounds a bit more non-threatening.

First up this weekend is 806. It terrifies me the most because it only meets this weekend – the rest of the class will be online, and with my almost superhuman ability to procrastinate, I won’t have that looming second weekend to kick me in the ass. Also it is taught by one of the faculty higherups, so I’m sure there will be no coddling. (All of a sudden I’m getting an image in my head of Tom Hanks in a mortarboard screaming, “There’s no coddling! There’s no coddling in grad school!”)

Add all THAT to the chance of some freezing-ass weather that’s coming Emporia’s way, and it all makes for some start-of-the-semester jitters. Blah.

(Stupid president, who’s stupid address last night knocked off Knights of Prosperity from my TIVO’s recording schedule.)

Have you ever seen the film “Let it Ride” starring Richard Dreyfuss as a down-on-his-luck taxicab driver who gets lucky at the horse track? Great flick – one of the forgotten gems from the 1980s. Anyway, there’s this one scene where Dreyfuss’ character is sitting in this absolute dump of a bar and looks at all the lowlifes around him, and he realizes that he has become one of the losers he hates. He runs to a stall in the men’s room, kneels down in front of the toilet, and prays that just once he gets lucky, to win the money to get him out of there, that he doesn’t belong in a bar full of losers at ten in the morning. It’s the promise that alcoholics and addicts all around the world make. Just once, he says, just once, and it will change my life forever.

That’s exactly what I feel like as a Kansas City Chiefs fan. We’ve managed to squeak into the playoffs this year by some sort of miracle and we’re playing one of the best teams in the division in the Indianapolis Colts, the team that beat us the two out of the last three times we were in the playoffs. All week long the local sports shows have talked about how lousy Indy’s run defense is and how great our running offense is, but it’s the talk of people who are trying to convince themselves of something that won’t happen. The Colts are playoff juggernauts, year after year, while we’re just happy to be there.

But I’m still wishing. Kansas City shouldn’t be among the Arizona Cardinals and Houston Texans of the world. Just once, we could win, and we could have some hope and respect and a taste of a football victory that truly matters. It’s the wish that addicts make, but it’s the only one I have.

Just once.

I haven’t updated in a while. It’s because I’ve been blazing my way through Naomi Novik’s excellent Temeraire series (of which “His Majesty’s Dragon” was only the first,) and working my way thorugh the first season of “The West Wing” on DVD. Having missed the show the first time around but a fan of anything Aaron Sorkin (“Studio 60″, “SportsNight”,) I’m clearly enjoying the hell out of it, however I can’t help but wish that John Amos really could be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

If you happen to be anywhere near a television this evening, I urge you to catch the premiere of “The Knights of Prosperity”, a soon-to-be-canceled half-hour comedy I enjoyed at local tv critic Aaron Barnhart’s fall premiere several months ago (his review here) and a show that is certainly destined to be jerked around by the network; judging by their advertisements, clearly they have no idea how to properly promote the thing. If you like non sequitur humor in shows like Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, and Scrubs, you’ll like Knights. And it’s got a lot of heart, which is difficult to explain when the show is about robbing a celebrity’s house, but you’ll know what I mean once you see it.