This is the greatest book ever by the greatest hockey player ever to lace them up.

I got this book from a few people as a gift, which just goes to show there was a pretty good chance I’d like it. Once I got done returning the extra copies, I sat down with this book as if it were delivered in the form of a burning bush. Or stone tablets. Let’s go with the stone tablets analogy, because otherwise I’m going to keep picturing myself in flames in a nice comfy chair, which isn’t how I want to go out.

So I lugged out the stone tablets, settled in on the couch, since the comfy chair was burned to cinders because of the burning bush experience, and began to read. Bobby is more than just a hockey player, as if you didn’t know. He was of my parents era, as a player, but he was an integral part of growing up a sports fan in New England. I got to shake his hand at the opening ceremonies of the Bay State Games in the late eighties, early nineties because one of his sponsors, Bay Bank, played a large part in putting on the competition. He was on television, despite having been out of the game for ten years, every time we watched those bruising Bruins of the 80s my parents would reminisce about Number Four, Bobby Orr as if hockey had been forever ruined by seeing that one fleeting glimpse of how the game might be played in its purest form.

Mr. Orr reflects on his storied career and even a little bit on his downfall, but you get the sense that he’s uncomfortable with all the attention. He maintains the attitude that nothing that he did was remarkable — sure, some of the physical feats may have been, but his approach to the game he loved and, to a lesser extent, life in general, is simply based on a healthy respect for others and hard work.

And that’s the key lesson, here, that he wishes to deliver from the mountaintop: be humble, work hard, parents, let your kids be kids. They’ll figure it out.

I got the sense, just about the time I lost all feeling in my legs, due to the heavy burden of the tablets, that this is the same book Bobby Orr would have written if he went on to become the greatest plumber of all time (maybe a few less stories about the Boston Bruins and Don Cherry, though). He gives himself a little less credit than he deserves, because he obviously had a passion for his sport that I’ve rarely seen in people, and that perhaps kids could do with a bit more pushing (our kids would sit on the couch all day, reading books or watching TV if they weren’t encouraged to get out and play — I don’t see either of them leaping out to go play hockey on the bay, unasked), but I agree with his general principle. While most kids won’t have the talent and ability, like he had, it’s no fun learning systems at too early an age (says the guy who, at 14, was signed by the Boston Bruins). You learn a lot more from a sport than simply how to perform like a professional. And while he may not have been the greatest writer who ever lived, he’s written a lovely book that took me down memory lane and given me a few things to think about, as a coach of youth sports in my spare time.

And if you get the stone tablet edition and leave it on your legs for too long you can feel the pain he likely felt for most of his years on the ice.

I really enjoyed this book. God, she just writes so well, such a gripping story, with great characters. It’d make you jealous.

At any rate, she uses the setting, a bleak and burned out husk of Ireland after the recession, well. Though perhaps, for me, anyway, I felt it was hammered home down the home stretch again and again and again. The characters are great, for the most part, and the plot devices almost Sherlockian (I couldn’t help think of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, and expected the furry invader of the Spain’s house to be a snake of some sort). For the first two thirds of the book it flew along, I was desperate to turn the pages and follow the Murder Squad’s investigation. It started to drag, a little, well… to avoid spoiling anything, about two thirds of the way through. But overall, she kept the suspense up (it could have gotten uglier than it did, and she really picked it up again for the ending).

Of the books of hers that I’ve read this one is up there with Faithful Place for me. A great read.

My son (8) got this book for Christmas, from me. I couldn’t remember having read it before, but James Thurber is a fantastic, wry story teller, and from a quick flick I thought he’d enjoy the story.

Well, he brought it to school and began reading it during their reading time. And one day he brought it home to me. He wanted me to read it, too. “You’ll see when the scary part comes up,” he said.

So I sat down with it one night and blazed through it in a sitting. It’s a lovely, quick read. Quirky and funny the way James Thurber can be — it reads like he’s having so much fun telling the story and the backstory from the introduction makes it all the sweeter. He maybe overindulges himself sometimes, but you can forgive it, because it sort of fits with his theme of over-the-top villainy and the tenuous nature of the Golux’s solutions and plans for the prince.

It’s the sort of book you want to read out loud. It’s fairy tale-esque, complete with daring, head-spinning leaps from one moment to the next, a sort of propulsion by a water cannon with a kink in the hose. Worth a few hours of your time.

I found this copy in the shelves of my old room at my parent’s house. From the cover, which looks like a couple of kids, one of whom isn’t wearing a shirt, possibly isn’t wearing any pants, either, watching a bunch of turkeys, I thought, “Sure, why not?” figuring the odd cover a harbinger of odd stories inside.

The introduction tells you, right up front, that these stories, this Polish fantasy, is chiefly, if not exclusively, about the Devil, in all his forms. And in the intro the translator and editor Wiesiek Powaga compares one of the stories to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and I’m always a sucker for a Flann O’Brien comparison.

The collection starts off so well, too. “Co-Existence” by Slawomir Mrozek is a great funny little story about the devil coming to visit a vicar. On the merit of this story, alone, I took the book back with me and dove in. It’s not the only good, if not great story, but there certainly a lot of stories that drag. I really enjoyed Marek S. Hyberath’s “The Greater Punishment,” Stefan Grabinski’s “The Grey Room,” Kornel Makuszynski’s “The Gentleman with a Goatee,” “The Legs of Isolda Morgan” by Bruno Jasienski, “The White Worms” by Wiktor Woroszylski, and “Dragon” by Andrzej Bursa.

They offered good, crisp story telling and funny little twists on some familiar themes of love, longing, and punishment. Where some of the other stories didn’t do it for me (like "Dinner at Countess Kotlubay’s by Witold Combrowicz) they seemed like stories which could have been told by anyone, and didn’t necessarily have an interesting Polish twist or too much in the way of originality. Where the editor raved about the vision of “The Golden Galley,” the final story in the collection, I found it a bit boring, overly enamored with its own vision of the future/alternate universe.

So you’ll certainly find some gems in here, but you’ll also find yourself bogged down in some fairly pedestrian stories (NB. this isn’t The Best of Polish Fantasy, it’s The Dedalus Book of Polish Fantasy for a reason), like a deal with the devil where maybe the more ineffective stories are like penance for the brilliant ones.

This was a beautiful book. Murakami seems to write hyperfiction without the links and nodes and all the rest. However, I may be biased in reading him this way, since I discovered him through a hyperfictioneer (like a Mousketeer without the benefit of the cool hat).

But this book has all the elegiac tones I tend to associate with hyperfiction, and is funny and imaginative and is a real trip.

I loved his characters, especially the main character, who, from the very start, was entertaining, different, and the situations into which he was thrust a great ride.

The main problem with this book is that it may become too popular, inspiring a zany, Pynchon-esque singles club on the west tower of the Brooklyn Bridge where couples meet up and jaunt around the city and its environs for a day before… well, no spoilers. But before doing something else.

I don’t know that this is the sort of book I’d normally read, but I’m glad I did. It’s well written, and a nice character study of two pretty broken people near the end of their tethers. The switching perspectives between Henry and Christa worked well to move the story along and set the mood of being inside a person’s head who is committed to throwing themselves off a bridge and all that that entails. Which can obviously be a mood-dampener.

About halfway through I did get the feeling that I’d read something similar to this before, not the paean to New York City (though certainly there have been enough books, and there’s enough room for all of them, that are essentially love letters to New York), but the tale of suicide caught at the brink. It’s a little similar to (though less crowded than) Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, the point at which I decided to give Nick Hornby a break for a bit. But I enjoyed the book. I’m not 100% sold on the entire plot and how the characters ended up after their one day reprieve, but I did clamp down my willing suspension of disbelief and enjoyed wondering how it was going to end for both of them for pretty much the whole story, as I knew nothing of the author’s prior work and didn’t know whether she’d twist a sadistic knife at the end or have them fly off on clouds of cotton candy and unicorns at the end.

If you read only one story about incest, whaling, keeping crows as pets, and lost parents this year, read this one!

Janice Clark has compiled a monster of a history of the Rathbones family. I loved the voice in which she wrote — awash in the sea and longing and plenty of humor. The line she has when the second set of seven suitors arrive — “The men must have expected a more formal interview.” — is excellent and probably is funnier in context.

Well worth your time.

I was given a review copy of this book. Joe Lansdale gave it a plug on Facebook, asking people to drop the publisher a line to help get this book the attention it deserved. So I dropped them a line and got my copy. This is the first book by Neal Barrett, Jr. that I’ve read.

So the book starts out a little like 50 Shades of Grey for Men. I say this having not read* 50 Shades of Grey.

But it’s what I imagine 50 Shades of Grey would be like, were it told from the point of view of a man.

But (like that’s off-putting, for some reason, and for some people it may be), Doug Hoover, the protagonist, has got a great voice. A great, authentic Texan/Oklahoman voice. Now, I’ve got to warn you, I’ve only accidentally been to Texas before, and that only on the inside of an airport, a hermetically sealed airport.** So I have no idea if this is a true authentic Texan/Oklahoman voice. But it was to me. Doug’s having trouble with his wife, Erlene and her unfortunate lineage (though that may only be a part of the problem), and that part of the story, the unraveling marriage, is interesting enough, and understandable enough, given Doug’s proclivities, but the journey just sizzles, along the way. In particular I enjoyed the part in chapter 6 in the bar where they start discussing Cherokee Indians and new black Stetson hat. In Kindle terms, and I have no idea what this really means***, it’s at location 522 or so.

I loved the little anecdotes like that one, and when a particular habit of Doug’s involving the rich Texas soil is revealed as the secret to his youthful glow the story gets even more interesting.

It soars, however, when Doug meets Royce, the young boy at the Hanging Judge Barbecue #7 and stumbles upon James McArthur Dean Hill, the possible cautionary tale, and finally Sue Jean, his perfect little package

I like the history of the Old West and feel like a complete ignoramus compared to the vast knowledge that Neal Barrett, Jr. slops out there without a second thought, along with a good heaping of World War fighter plane battle history, but I enjoyed the quick lessons through osmosis.

I suppose I won’t go into the second half of the book for fear of ruining it for you, but it was my favorite part, by far. Barrett captures Doug’s disorientation as his life falls just a little bit apart and I love the humor and imagination and tenderness with which he handles the aftermath. The basketball-playing (or obsession with it) and tennis games in the latter half of the book had me laughing out loud.

I hadn’t expected much from this book, to be honest, even though the recommendation came from Mr. Lansdale. But, in the end, this was a great read, and I’m glad it’s getting new life as an ebook. This is the second zombie ebook I’ve read this year where an older, out of print book that simply faded away, the first time around gets a second chance (the first being Michael Joyce’s amazing “Going the Distance”), and I’m very glad I got the chance.

* I swear.
** I also swear.
*** I really do swear, and I swear that this is the first time I’ve ever had a book crash on me, when I was reading this on a borrowed Kindle Paperwhite. The future!

I listened to Jim Gaffigan read his own book, “Dad is Fat.”

I really like Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up routines. I bought his Mr. Universe special during the spate of $5 stand-up comics doing that sort of thing.

But this book… this book.

It’s not as sharp as his stand-up, and a lot of it isn’t particularly funny or new. There are a lot of parents vs. kids jokes, seeing as he has five he’s probably earned them. But the stories and observations are just so… flat that it’s a wonder that it’s the same guy who sparkles on stage (in a literal sense, in that his skin tone reflects the bright spotlights to blinding effect and in a figurative sense).

If you’re looking for Jim Gaffigan at his best, I would spend the $5 at his site and download Mr. Universe over going for this book, which will someday be a nice keepsake for his kids, and that’s what this book boils down to: it feels like a vanity-published/iPhoto published book cobbled together from funny (to his family, perhaps) stories about their life.

Wow.

Wow wow wow.

I lived through the late nineties Silicon Alley phenomenon when it felt like it was falling apart (my first company changed from a Systems to a Solutions to a Razorfish in the span of a year), and Pynchon did an excellent job of capturing it. The book was people with the usual Pynchon-esque conspiracies, bagfuls of characters, genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, and touching come downs, as well.

I actually enjoyed Pynchon’s take on 11 September, as well as the craziness of some of those Silicon Alley days, but it’s just how Pynchon writes so effortlessly, I love lines like:

“Scrutinizing, as if for evidence of occupancy, a cheese danish he has impulsively bought.”

“If you were doing something in secret and didn’t want the attention, what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than bring in a few Californian elements?”

Some of the lines are cheesy, like “Maxine could run workshops in Conquering Eyeroll,” but even in those you get the sense of a man completely happy in what he’s doing, which is writing a breathtaking novel which speeds along through the Upper West Side and a changing New York City.

At any rate, I loved this book, laughed out loud a lot while I was reading it, and enjoyed Mr. Pynchon’s take on early 2000s New York City.