Two best sellers, and comment about gore-porn.

     Dan Brown. Deception Point (2001) Adolescent power-trip fantasy, larded with gee-whiz technologies, which all, according to a prefatory note, exist, plus dollops of gore porn, though not as nasty as some other authors indulge in. I stopped reading about one quarter of the way in, sampled a few passges later in the book, and conclude it would have been a much better one at one half its length. I suppose it’s “good of its kind”, but it’s an obnoxious kind. Zero

     Jeffery Deaver. The Vanished Man (2003) The conceit is that a serial killer used magic tricks to both perpetrate his murders and hide his tracks. The fist victim is done in by The Lazy Hangman, an escape trick. The cops not only found no trace of the killer, but what they thought was his hidey hole has no second exit. The janitor hasn’t seen anyone come or go in the last half hour. And so on. Pretty obvious killer, if you ask me, but I didn’t feel any need to discover his name, nor how many other victims he had on his list. The sleuth is a quadriplegic with a faithful retainer, consulted by the police when they can see no way ahead. The death scene signals a book indulging in the nastier kind of gore-porn, so I gave up on it. Zero.

     Best sellers and gore-porn. I first came across the nastier examples of this sub-genre of crime fiction in Patricia Cornwell’s books. I read a few of them because they’re well plotted, and Kate Scarpetta is a sympathetic character, the kind for whom we wish a good life and happy endings. But I eventually tired of the gore.
     Obvious question: why do so many best sellers these days indulge in extreme gore and violence, detailed descriptions of psychopathic torture, and the like? What is it about imagined nastiness that attracts so many readers? I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill horror, which leaves a good deal up to the reader’s imagination. I mean the clinically detailed descriptions of death-dealing, complete with the victim’s terror and pain. Why have gory death scenes become so common? It used to be a book had to have more-or-less explicit sex-fantasies, now it’s rather-more-than-less explicit murder fantasies. Something dark is at work here: I think it’s related to the free-floating anxiety about “them taking over”, which has been exacerbated since 9/11, and the paranoia that fuels so much politics.

Greg McDonell. The History of Canadian Railroads (1985)

     Greg McDonell. The History of Canadian Railroads (1985) An ambitious title for what is essentially a picture book. McDonell has assembled a good collection of illustrations, and as far as I can tell his text is accurate enough. A pleasant read, and a good introduction to the subject. At folio size, a bit large as a reference book. One irritating thing: many of the captions refer to parts of the picture that have been cropped off to make the picture fit or to emphasise the main subject. That is one of the hazards of off-shore editing and printing. ** (2008)

Klaus J. Vetter. Die Eisenbahn in Österreich (2007)

     Klaus J. Vetter.  Die Eisenbahn in Österreich (2007) My cousin sent me this for my birthday last January, I looked through it twice then, and now for the 3rd time. This time, I read more of the captions, and some of the text. Interesting tidbits that I didn’t know before, especially clarification of some of the locomotive classes, and a clearer account of the sequence of line construction. The book is clearly aimed at an audience outside Austria. My cousin included an errata list that he had made up, thus making the book more authoritative. Excellent photo reproduction, and clearly the older pictures have all been rescanned for this book. I’m glad to have it.
      Austrian locomotive design was idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, and the earlier examples often look ungainly, even ugly. Even the 310, reputed to be the masterwork of Austrian locomotive design, has unpleasant proportions, with a cab that’s too small, huge driving wheels, a stack that’s in the wrong place, and a smoke-box that’s too long. The 93 class (2-8-2T) is a better proportioned machine in my eyes. The 310 was very successful in purely engineering terms, but not aesthetically. The electrics were on the whole much better designed I think. *** (2008)

Ross MacDonald. The Instant Enemy (1968)

     Ross MacDonald. The Instant Enemy (1968) The Sebastians hire Lew Archer to find their runaway daughter. He does, and also finds a mess of murder, multiple marriages, fraud, and impersonation. Well done, even though the plot is more tangled than it needs to be, and MacDonald doesn’t play as fair as he usually does. **½ (2008)

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web (1988)

    

 

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Tangled Web (1988) The twist in this tale is that the victim claimed to be pregnant when she wasn’t, just to see how people would react. One of the people she was testing reacted by killing her. Burley delivers his usual well crafted police procedural laced with his mildly ironic bemusement at the foibles of humankind. In many ways his light tone doesn’t carry the weight of his motifs. After all, a clever schoolgirl who finds humans interesting as specimens, and dies when she miscalculates, isn’t exactly comic fare. **½ (2008)

Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005)

     Paul Love et al. Beginning Unix (2005) A nicely laid out and easy to follow introduction to the OS that will perhaps eventually displace Windows. Surprising fun, too. I can’t judge the accuracy etc, but it seems authoritative to me. Three years is a long time in computing, so some of the information is already out of date: Linux is maturing rapidly, with several easy-to-install and easy-to-use distributions, so that the kind of hands-on familiarity with Unix taught in this text is no longer necessary. Recommended. *** (2008)
     Update 2013: Unix has not displaced Windows, in fact, in many places Windows Server has replaced *nix servers. Linux has slowly gained in overall  numbers, but has hardly moved in market share. Android a derivative of Linux, operates over half the cellphones in the world.
     Update 2016: Not much change. Ubuntu and Mint  have both been made to look'n'feel like the de facto standard Windows/Mac GUI, and have gained some ground. But the OS wars are pretty well over. Most people have no idea what an OS is, and have a hard time caring enough to find out. Computers have become "devices", people have come to expect them to just work. Many people now own two or more devices, and wireless connections (with or without a network) is taken for granted. Security and privacy-protection skills are now more important than understanding an OS. The pace of technical innovation and change has accelerated: this book is now a museum piece.

Alison Gordon Striking Out (1995)

     Alison Gordon Striking Out (1995) It’s 1994, and the baseball strike has just started. Kate Henry, sportswriter, is at loose ends, but she has enough stuff to do that she doesn’t miss her work. Then her partner Andy, a homicide detective, is shot and nearly killed while attending a home to interview a witness. It gets complicated when a homeless woman who’s taken up residence in the back alley disappears. Then a handless body is found stuffed in a garbage bag. Other casual acquaintances are drawn into the circle of suspicion, a nicely complicated knot unravels plausibly and loose ends are tied up.
     Gordon writes well. The dialogue is in the wisecrack romantic comedy mode of old movies, and works very well. Plot moves forward, characters reveal themselves, additional information and red herrings drop into conversations, relationships strain but don’t buckle, and anyone who knows Toronto will recognise the settings. The narrative’s structured like a TV show, which does it no harm at all. A well-done entertainment, not the kind of crime story that prompts musing about justice and human frailty. The relationships have the ring of truth: Gordon is a sharp observer. **½