Book of the Week

Michigan-born author Zev Chafets investigated the racial complexities of pre-riot and post-riot Detroit in his 1990 book Devil's Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit. It was one of the few books about Detroit that I found to be worth reading even if Chafets leaned a bit much upon personal anecdotes in order to make a point sometimes.

Of course, in the wake of recent events, some might argue that Chafets tried a bit too hard to end his book on a happy note. But I know many Detroiters who would beg to differ.

Then again, one of the reasons I chose to buy this book back in 1990 was because the author name-dropped the name of a Detroit journalist to whom my favorite first cousin was then married so perhaps I'm not the most objective critic this book could have.

Book of the Week

It is tempting to recommend Natalie Haynes's book The Ancient Guide to Modern Life if for no other reason that it is that rarity of rarities -- a historical book that manages to make a better case for the Internet than most of the pro-Internet puff pieces in existence. But it is also a great history book as well. Not many historians can write prose as accessible as Ms. Haynes. Not every historian tries. And while I must admit to having a slight bias in favor of this book due to its emphasis on classical history, I have yet to come across a recent book that does such a good job of relating such history to modern times. (Well, Will and Ariel Durant did a good job but their work is not exactly recent.)

Of course, there could be some budding history major out there at this very moment who is aiming to prove me wrong about all this. Then again stumbling across such a writer would hardly be the worst experience of my life.

Book of the Week

Believe it or not, there was a time when writer Ed Morales was capable of writing in plain English. But nowadays he seems more prone to write in culturebabble...

Perhaps it's better to remember his best books of yesteryear rather than kvetch about the dubious stuff he writes today. And of all the books of his that I have the good fortune to read, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America is the one that I like the best.

Book of the Week

Apparently Debbie Tung is not the only writer out there who knows me...

Book of the Week

Just when I'm ready to give up on Ben Elton, he goes and writes an excellent alternative history novel like Time and Time Again. Kinda takes all the fun out of dissing him...

Book of the Week

I probably should resist the urge to comment on this book, given the fact that I've held enough blue-collar jobs in my lifetime to qualify as a blue collar intellectual in my own right, but I must admit that I liked it anyway. I kinda wished it went into more detail on certain subjects but it still delivered what it promised.

Book of the Week

It's like Ms. Tung knows me. Personality-wise, at least. Gender-wise, of course, is another issue.

Book of the Week

I always had a soft spot for both horror novels and books about Spanish history and while the late Les Daniel's novel The Black Castle was not exactly the ideal combination of both, it was certainly a more memorable read than I expected.

The novel introduced a Spanish vampire named Don Sebastian de Villanueva, who, for reasons of his own, helped out his own clergyman brother Diego. Eventually Don Sebastian turned against his brother -- again for reasons of his own. The results weren't exactly heroic but then again Sebastian's brother was not the type of clergyman most modern-day Christians would wish to root for.

One of the various editions of the Don Sebastian de Villanueva books described him as the vampire who is horrified by man. And indeed, there was much emphasis on real-life historical horror in the Villanueva books. To be fair, there were many moments of supernatural horror as well. However, the main point of the Villanueva books was obviously that mankind already produced enough demons without the aid of the supernatural. And it's hard to watch the daily news and argue with that statement.

Book of the Week

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's first and best attempt at writing the ultimate first Spanish werewolf novel -- and I don't just say that because this novel is one of the many unofficial inspirations for one of my odder attempts to write a fantasy novel. Ms. Yarbro really knows her Spanish history and it shows. The story isn't bad either.

Book of the Week

Writer Christopher Buckley -- son of the late William F. Buckley -- is no longer writing novels about contemporary political issues -- perhaps because it is increasingly hard for a humorist like Buckley to outdo the humor of real life politics. Instead, he has taken to writing historical novels -- or, if you prefer, novels of alternative history that read like conventional historical novels -- the latest of which is The Judge Hunter.

Like most good novels, The Judge Hunter is too good to spoil so I won't say too much about it. Suffice it to say that the bulk of the story takes place in colonial America during the 1660s and contains a lot of dark humor. As you might guess, little of the plot concerns itself with contemporary political issues though there is one rather obvious Donald Trump reference. Granted, many of the points it makes about colonial America aren't exactly new but to Mr. Buckley's credit, they don't seem stale either.

I also liked Mr. Buckley's previous foray into alternative history -- The Relic Master -- and I look forward to his next novel as well.

Book of the Week

Hey, it's a book of film essays written by an actual Latina. And yet she refers to her Peruvian ancestry only once. Almost as if she were a regular film critic. Or a film philosopher.

A Latina film philosopher... What a concept!

Seriously, I found this book quite interesting. I look forward to reading more of Ms. Chocano's work in the future.

Edited to Add:

If there's one major problem with this book, it's the way Ms. Chocano's writing makes me want to think twice about my review of Lars and the Real Girl. And that's hardly a bad problem to have.

Book of the Week

I have long enjoyed the writing of Stephanie Elizondo Griest but I would like to think that her latest book -- All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands -- is her best book yet -- perhaps because it was so ambitious but more likely because it was so angry. I found it hard to read the book without finding at least one item to be angry about -- and no, I'm not talking about bad grammar or misspelled words, I'm talking about the events Ms. Griest described in the book when writing during her various visits to the Mexican and Canadian border country. She wrote about a lot of things worth getting angry about -- ethnic discrimination, environmental racism, illegal drugs, unsolved murders, and so forth. As you might guess, she also wrote quite a bit about illegal immigration but even there she had a different take on the issue than most Hispanic apologists. As you might guess, she was not overly fond of our current president but she also didn't pretend that all the problems on our southern border began on January 20, 2017.

My biggest problem with the book is that it made me want to hulk out and hit somebody -- preferably one of the many people responsible for the problems she described in her book. And as you might guess, that's not exactly a very productive strategy.

However, the book did teach me a lot I didn't know about the Mexican and Canadian borders. And the parallels Ms. Griest drew between the two borders I found most fascinating. In any event, knowing about a problem is all too often the first step in solving it.

Book of the Week

As you all might have guessed by now, I have a bit of a soft spot for the literary work of Matt Ruff. However, with this latest novel of his, it seems like others are liking his work as well. In fact, I just read that it has been chosen to become the inspiration for an upcoming HBO TV series.

Even if you aren't into HBO, the book makes for an interesting read. After all, critics have been justly dissing H. P. Lovecraft for his racism for years but Matt Ruff seemed to be one of the few writers who have dared to make literary lemonade from Lovecraft's sour prejudices. And he tells a good story too -- so good I dare not tell you too much for fear of spoilers.

Book of the Week

When I first read the review for Jim Geraghty's novel The Weed Agency in The National Review, I thought the book critic was exaggerating its merits. But then I had a chance to read the novel and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I ended up liking it.

On paper, it seemed like a pointless attempt at recreating the wheel. After all, the classic British TV series Yes Minister had covered the same subject thoroughly many years ago and while I have always wondered what an American version of that TV show would be like, I had little hope that a novel on that theme would be all that entertaining. To my amazement, it was.

Of course, it might be argued that part of the reason the novel worked so well was that author Jim Geraghty was not content to create a simple straw man designed to stand in for all things bureaucratical. His version of Sir Humphrey Appleby had his own reasons for acting as he did and some of them were surprisingly sympathetic. Nor was Geraghty content to just skew government bureaucrats. He also included a subplot that dealt with some of the most outrageous aspects of the private sector as well.

I must confess that the need to downsize the federal bureaucracy will not strike many people as the most apt subject for a comic novel at this time but I suspect many people will enjoy this book far more than they might admit. And not of all of them will necessarily be conservatives.

Book of the Week

This was the first book by Michele Serros that I ever read. She wrote one previous to this one called Chicano Falsa: And Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard that I would read later on but this was the first one that introduced me to Ms. Serros' style. A style that was serious and yet not so serious. A style that did not so much intend to follow in the pen strokes of other Chicano writers as to blaze a path for those readers who are not usually thought of by most literary types.

I wish I had thought to mention this book way earlier but I suspect that I feared my words would not be able to do justice to it. And yet there are times when it is better to risk saying the wrong thing than to say nothing at all.

Book of the Week

As I noted before, my real-life surname is actually Mendoza but somehow I doubt that this novel is about me or any of my paternal relatives. However, it would be nice to think so!

Book of the Week

This book has been out for over three decades yet I have yet to encounter a more recent anthology that is so full of scary stories. Not only does Dark Forces showcase a lot of great writers of horror stories -- for example, Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and of course, Stephen King -- but it also shows many of them at their very best.

The original idea behind this book was to create a dark fantasy equivalent of the classic science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions -- a book that had revolutionized the science fiction genre back in the 1960s. I can't say for sure how well it met that goal as far as the average horror story reader is concerned but I do know that I liked it very much the first time I read it. Moreover, while I have read many anthologies that had the potential to top it -- especially books that were part of Stephen Jones' Best New Horror series -- I have yet to encounter a book in the dark fantasy field that really tops it.

Of course, someone could release a book tomorrow that could prove me wrong. But until then...

Book of the Week

I was hoping to feature a book that was more in the Halloween spirit as this week's book of the week, but in light of recent events, this book -- Connie Willis' novel Doomsday Book -- seemed more appropriate. After all, Connie Willis' account of a young female time traveler who finds herself accidentally stranded at an English manor that has been afflicted by the Black Plague manages to be both depressing and inspiring, scary and yet hopeful. And given the news one so often sees on TV as of late, one can't ask for more than that.

I once read the novel for my science fiction reading group back around the year 2000 and such is the power of its story that every few years, I return to it. Moreover, there is something all too timely about Ms. Willis' vision of the plague years. In her view, it was not necessarily the most noble or most courageous who survived the plague; all too often, it was merely the most cowardly and the most selfish who survived. Not that Ms. Willis had any intention of encouraging us to identify with the knaves and the cowards of Plague-Era England; indeed, she makes it quite obvious that she identifies with the doomed but goodhearted far more than she does the selfish survivors. But she is as much a realist as she is a romantic and it is the very fact that she is not afraid to give her heroes and heroines flaws that helps make her novel so readable.

Given the fact that we live in an age where all too many people think it is witty to send e-mails that suggest that the best cure for the Ebola virus is a M-4 rifle, I would like to think we need all the people like Ms. Willis that we can get.

Book of the Week

Well, it is October and I have been feeling kinda lonesome. So what could be more appropriate than Roger Zelazny's novel A Night in the Lonesome October?

Besides, this is one of author Roger Zelazny's most popular novels and it is so appropriate to the Halloween season that I am surprised that they haven't made a movie out of it. Then again, after seeing what happens to many of my favorite books when Hollywood adapts them into my movies, that is probably a good thing.

Plus, the title was inspired by a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. No, seriously.