Bookpusher

On the mystery listservs where I lurk there’s been almost universal praise for this debut thriller from Chicago author Marcus Sakey. After finishing his novel, I’m happy to report that it lives up to the hype. So often these kinds of things don’t work out, which is always a risk when you’re dealing with listserv folks who only read books that feature mystery-solving dachshunds. Talking mystery-solving dachshunds.

Back to the book. Two lower-class kids from an Irish neighborhood, Evan and Danny, were best friends from childhood and began dabbling in petty theft in their teen years. One night they decide to step up their efforts and a crime of opportunity goes horribly, horribly wrong. Evan goes to prison while Danny escapes and uses the survivor’s guilt to walk the straight and narrow. Years later, Danny has a great job and a steady relationship. But Evan gets out of prison and quickly wants to look up his old friend. It’s a simple story, really, of frienship and the choices we make when one person has something to live for and the other one doesn’t. In Sakey’s hands the plot races forward, unfolding into a taut ethical thriller that seems destined for Hollywood; if a promising young screenwriter can’t make a major motion picture out of this I may have to do it myself.

Marcus Sakey is from Chicago, and it shows on every page. His words demonstrate a great feel for the city, from the middle-class tourist-friendly neighborhoods of Wrigleyville to the seedier ethnic neighborhoods and bars of the South Side. The Blade Itself is a novel of place, and the Chicago streets become as familiar to the reader as it is to the characters. Some reviewers have claimed that Sakey is Lehane-esque – I wouldn’t go quite that far, as Lehane occupies some serious literary territory, but Sakey does that sense of place thing for Chicago that Lehane does with Boston, and the story of the two friends who turn out very differently given similar circumstances is a close parallel to the characters in Lehane’s Mystic River, so I see where that comes from.

The Blade Itself is an worthy ethical thriller and worth the read.

(I’m thinking Ryan Gosling for Danny, perhaps, and Ben Foster for Evan. Can Ben Foster do a Chicago accent? Someone get me his agent.)

To some people, baby photos are the most boring thing in the world, but I have some more sonogram pics over at my neglected flickr account for those who are interested in that sort of thing.

Thanks for all the well wishes! You guys are a supportive bunch.

Hey, everyone. My wife and I have something to show you:

The pic is a little fuzzy, but I do believe there’s a baby in there. This photo was taken at fifteen weeks, which was just under two weeks ago. Mom is doing fine, despite some throwing up when she first wakes up in the morning.

So: yeah. I’m going to be a dad.

I’m so excited. And a bit scared. But mostly excited.

A dizzying, dazzling first novel that comes across like a season of Veronica Mars if written by Vladimir Nabokov, “Special Topics” is an absolute literary feast and easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. Marisha Pessl has written what you start off thinking is a smart, overly-literate coming-of-age-novel that evolves into a whodunit mystery; all the details of plot and character you previously thought were superficial and stylish become clues to a intricate, glittering puzzle, as late-book revelations call into question all we previously knew, Usual Suspects style.

Wait. I’m getting too excited. Let me back up.

“Special Topics” is narrated by a precocious girl, Blue Van Meer, who’s father is an itinerant college professor, too educated and impatient to teach anywhere for long. The Van Meers settle in a small North Carolina town for Blue’s senior year at a prestigious private school before entering Harvard. There, the socially awkward Blue falls in with the upper-crust crowd, the Bluebloods, who gather at the house of Hannah Schneider, a part-time teacher at the school who treats this group of teens like members of a literary salon. A death occurs in the circle which is the initial thread which Blue starts to tug that brings the scaffolding of her tidy and completely unquestioned life down around her.

The majority of the book is the unraveling of Blue’s year – the outsider who falls in with the right crowd and observes and comments on their larger-than-life drama. Author  Pessl wonderfully captures Blue’s voice, and the novel itself is written like a term paper as Blue will cite details and put them in parenthesis, like the author, year, and edition of a book someone’s reading. This sounds distracting and obnoxious, but it makes absolute sense in the context of the novel. Characters are memorable and three-dimensional, and even though we sense that there may be more to this book as it originally seems, we go along with Blue’s narration and follow her reasoning.

It’s not a perfect book, by any means. There are giant weaknesses, all of which are either understandable or charming. This is a first novel, and like many first novels by literary types (Michael Chabon, I’m looking at you,) ”Special Topics” goes out of its way to break the record of number of soaring metaphors per line, and minor details like the way someone’s dressed might get an entire page and a half of text where Pessl makes the literary, historical, film, and pop-culture references rain like dollar bills at a strip club after the Source Awards. And the book is a long one. Unless you possess superhuman ability, this isn’t a read you dash off at the beach in a weekend.

But: the book works. And it sings. It’s like a rich chocolate cake, to eaten slowly and savored, not to be gulped and consumed. If this sounds like your type of book, give it a hundred pages. And if that doesn’t do it for you, give it a hundred more.

I’ve recently stumbled across goodreads, which seems exactly like librarything except slicker and you can post and rate as many books as you like for free. Anybody else out there on it? I’m still entering info on it, but friend me and let me know what you’re reading.

Congratulations, Jericho fans. Your strategy of sending thousands of pounds of nuts to CBS offices has convinced the network to save your show from the chopping block and will bring it back next season. Your hard work, passion, and utter devotion to the post-apocalyptic network drama made the network reverse gears. I applaud you; you’ve all done the impossible.

And you’ve screwed it all up for the rest of us.

I’ve been a veteran of more canceled shows than I can count. I’ve been through the “save our show” marathon blog postings (Firefly), the letter-writing campaigns (Cupid), and the suffer-in-silence-embarrassed-to-admit-you-watched-the-show moments (Once and Again). Every season some show I love gets the axe due to incompetent network executives who didn’t give the show a proper chance to find its audience. It’s become almost routine. But still: every year I write the letters, I sign the petitions, I do what I do out of love, in the hopes that the one time out of a hundred the governor is going to make the call a minute before midnight to stay the execution.

When Veronica Mars died this season, I accepted it because it was a niche show – the writing was over the heads of the younger audiences and the older crowd thought it was a kid show. I wrote no letters, signed no petitions. Veronica Mars was brilliant, granted, but it was a show that was not going to find a wider audience.

Jericho, likewise, is a niche show. It’s not the kind of show that’s going to pull in any more viewers that it already has. Even with all the publicity it’s gotten, people just aren’t going to tune in to a show about post-nuclear-war flyspeck western Kansas town with Skeet Ulrich as your lead. It’s just not. The triumphant return will sputter along for a few episodes, languishing in the Nielsen basement, and will die quietly. Someone will start sending more nuts to CBS, but this time it just won’t work.

And Jericho’s failure is going to be any network’s ultimate one-word response to any canceled critical darling that never found its audience. No matter how many petitions we sign, no matter how many letters or Mars Bars or peanuts we send, all the network has to do is say the word “Jericho” to remind us of the rescued show that still failed. So instead of the one-in-a-hundred shot, we’ll have no shot at all.

I really hope I’m wrong.

According to CBS’s website, Monday’s episode of How I Met Your Mother is the famous “Robin Sparkles/Slap Bet” episode, which is nothing less brilliant and an excellent jumping-on point for those who haven’t ever give this often-overlooked half hour sitcom a chance.

And if you actually have a life and have something to do on Monday evenings, and you don’t have a TiVo, you can always see the episode on the show’s myspace for free.

I’ve done little this week except to eagerly plow through Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics“, one of those novels that’s so amazingly rich I have to set it aside every so often and read something light and fluffy to clear my mind a bit – kind of like when you order double fudge chocolate cake for dessert and you have to take small bites or else you get sick of it.

In other news, I can’t believe I missed Paris Hilton’s jail adventures on Friday. I was at work and didn’t even check the gossip and/or news blogs, and I went out to dinner with my wife immediately afterward, so I completely missed the whole thing. Thank god my TiVo saw fit to record Countdown with Keith Olbermann for me, who gave the moment the proper recap it deserved.

I really, really wanted to like Knocked Up, and perhaps that’s why I left the theater with a small grin on my face instead of giggling hysterically like I did when I left Judd Apatow’s last film, 40-Year Old Virgin. It seemed like Apatow was a little self-congratulatory here, possessed with the feeling that he could do no wrong, like a best-selling novelist who is so convinced of his own talent and success he feels like he doesn’t need to listen to an editor. This movie is more concerned with hanging out with Seth Rogen’s stoner crew of friends than with plot. We know that co-star Katherine Heigl can act, given her talent on display over at “Grey’s Anatomy”, but her character here feels underdeveloped and a bit of an afterthought. Knocked Up is a good movie and has brilliant moments, but ultimately, the film ambled when it could have sprinted. But still, good stuff. Just not all that.

Waitress is an oddly satisfying movie, written and directed by late actress Adrienne Shelley. It’s a story about an waitress at a southern diner who hates her husband and her life and desperately wants to leave and pursue her dream of making award-winning pies, but she discovers she is pregnant, further trapping her. It’s one of those films that takes about ten minutes or so before you figure out its rhythm – it’s difficult to tell whether it’s supposed to be a comedy, tragedy, or satire, and if the exaggerated corn-pone accents everyone throws around are supposed to be taken seriously or not – but once you settle in, you find that you’re hooked. Kari Russell turns in an excellent performance as the pie-making waitress and Nathan Fillion likewise does well as her ob/gyn she falls in love with. Excellent film, worthy of the praise it’s gotten.

Oh: and after watching this movie, I dare you to not go for coffee and pie afterwards.

Maybe it’s because school has let out and kids are flooding the library, but I’ve been reading mostly lit for the teen set this week.

“Twisted” by Laurie Halse Anderson is a coming-of-age story about a geeky teen who Did A Bad Thing on the last day of school and had to work a tough landscaping job over the summer for punishment; he comes back to school in the fall with a newfound set of muscles and a dangerous reputation, attracting all sorts of attention, especially from the cutest girl in school. His throughly dysfunctional parents put enormous pressure on him, and he has to grow up in this unknown territory without much help from those around him who all think he’s someone other than who he really is. “Twisted” is an excellent read and Anderson does a good job of getting us into the main character’s head without being patronizing or ever resorting to (too much) cliche.

Similarly, her novel “Speak” about a high-school girl who struggles to communicate is a bit more serious in tone and subject matter – both books deal with Serious Issues and aren’t for the small fry – and is similarly well-written. I eagerly recommend both.

Scott Westerfeld’s take on the vampire novel, “Peeps“,  took me pleasantly by surprise. Expecting an ennui-laced blood-and-roses novel, I got a stylish, smart, science-based thriller with engaging characters and a original take on the vampire mythos. Like Charlie Huston’s “Already Dead” which I reviewed a few months ago, it treats vampirism as more like a disease. In this case, main character Cal is a carrier, a rare example of a person who has the superhuman abilities of a vampire but doesn’t have the need for blood. He’s in NYC, working for a centuries-old organization which tracks down and captures those with the full-blown disease. His search for the mysterious woman who originally infected him quickly spirals out of control and soon becomes a race to safe the city. My favorite thing about the novel is that Westerfeld sneaks in some excellent science into the fray, with small chapters devoted to examples of parasites that exist in nature and how they relate back to the story. (Yes, he even talks about the dreaded penisfish.) “Peeps” is extremely well done, and I’d be surprised if Hollywood eventually doesn’t take a crack at it.