This is a book report, I think, based on Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Reportedly, his teacher thought this was great work, but I’m not convinced. I am entertained, though.

From sometime in the mid 90s to the mid 00s, I read (and watched) George Will pretty regularly in the Washington Post. But I haven’t done so for whatever reason as of late. Reading his collected opinion columns on the late Reagan and early Bush 41 years in Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and At Home 1986-1990 was a nice reintroduction to a substantial set of his work, especially so since the timeframe covered is early in my own political awakening. Topics smartly covered are the fall of communism generally and of The Wall specifically, the good and bad of Reagan and Bush 41 (mostly the bad of the latter), the terribleness of the Bork nomination, and a variety of other odds and ends of that time.

I’ve never really had any plans to read any of Joyce Carol Oates’ works. But I was in the Horse’s Mouth, a used bookstore in Buffalo, last month, and We Were the Mulvaneys was just a couple of dollars and I thought Madysen needed it for a school project. Turns out she didn’t need it, so I decided to read it myself. And it makes the second book about the impact of sexual trauma on a young girl on her and her family that I’ve read this month. Comparatively, the narrative here was much bulkier than Alice Sebold’s Them Lovely Bones. Oates’ story is different in that the trauma is only alleged, which causes a whole different set of personal and societal ramifications. The Mulvaneys are no longer who they were in the community–or even in their own family. Too clunky for my tastes, but I understand why Oprah liked it.

I have read all of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s novels, especially enjoying the Blackford Oakes spy novels, but I not as well read on his nonfiction works of which there are many. My latest attempt to close that gap is On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures, which excerpts a number of very interesting debates and exchanges from the first 22 years of the long-running (33 years) Firing Line TV program. Topics include 60s culture, democracy at home and abroad, the Panama Canal, civil liberties, and crime and punishment among others. And with guests like Timothy Leary, Ronald Reagan, Claire Luce Booth, Norman Mailer, John Kenneth Gailbraith, etc., etc., etc. A real pleasure to read, I think, regardless of political leanings. Sadly, not included are any gems from this wonderful debate with Noam Chomsky in 1969:

I received a free ebook copy of Chris Tusa’s new novel, Dirty Little Angels, through LibraryThing. A very short work, packed full of drama and emotions, Hailey is a teenager encased in turmoil in New Orleans. Her mother is depressed having recently lost a pregnancy, her father laid off and tomcatting around, putting his marriage into jeopardy, her older brother making poor decisions on a daily basis, and herself not exactly the picture of reasoned judgment. Yet she’s trying to keep it together without any inclination of how to do so. Meh.

My recollection is that I got a free copy of David Bliss’ The Whiskey Rebels on the Sony Reader store (which, incidentally, is going all ePub tomorrow) when I first got my Reader, but I’m just now getting to it. Another work of historical fiction, but this one more painful for me. And that’s because the story involves the achilles heel of my favorite founder Alexander Hamilton–infidelity for which he was blackmailed–and his plan to solidify the US as a going concern, specifically the creation of the Bank of the United States and the whiskey tax, which caused a rebellion out west. Bliss weaves an interesting story well, though, as he admits, the whiskey rebels were not involved in the very real plan to cripple the US Bank.

Madysen’s a little freaked out that I’ve read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones since it’s the second book I’ve read that she recently read. Kind of like, she and I getting a little too close, maybe? That would be terrible. Anyway, Sebold’s book will be on the big screen this weekend, I think, but I don’t plan on seeing it in the theater. Mostly because the subject matter is rather uncomfortable. Susie, the narrator, is a young teenage girl in suburban Philadelphia who is raped and murdered by a single, quiet neighbor. The police investigate Susie’s disappearance, but her body is never found and the neighbor is never tried nor convicted, all of which causes tremendous difficulty for her surviving family members. We get to observe all of this through the eyes of Susie as she looks down from heaven.

I feel like al of my favorite authors have published new books in the last several months. The latest example, Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, a collection of thirteen previously unpublished essays. They cover topics like why do people answer questions, the impossibility of time travel, whether football is conservate, and the Unabomber, Chris Gaines, and Kurt Cobain and David Koresh. Regardless of subject matter, Klosterman is great because of his voice.

Margaret Atwood’s fiction has been on my to-read list, but I now know that I shouldn’t have started with her latest release, The Year of the Flood. Taking up the story told in Onyx and Crake, Atwood’s tale is set in the future that has reverted towards a state of nature because of various ecological plagues. There is lots going on–a religious group preparing for the waterless flood, CorpSEcorps, the corporate interest which seem to control all aspects of daily life, etc. It is a lonely and thought provoking story.

I’ve long thought that almost anything that Ricky Gervais says is funny. While still largely true, it wasn’t true for enough of the 100 minutes of his latest film The Invention of Lying. It is funny–loser Gervais lives in an alternate universe where no one lies, there isn’t even a word for it, until Gervais tells the first lie to good and bad results. But it wasn’t funny enough for me. So maybe I should have just watched Anchorman again.

I have the feeling that I’m expecting way too much out of movies right now, which is why they’ve largely left me cold as of late. To wit, I ended up watching the last James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, twice. I thought I had missed the plot the first time since I was hooked up to a machine that didn’t really let me move, somewhat distracting, during my first viewing. Turns out, it’s just a movie where the plot is extremely secondary to the action scenes. I used to love Bond films, but this may be the end for me. It’s like reading a Dan Brown novel.

Set in a small village in Britain, Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague tells the story of one village’s attempt to deal with the Plague in 1665-66. The local reverend convinced the villagers to quarantine themselves from the outside world, both in the hope of preventing an outbreak in the village and, if an outbreak occurred, to prevent it from spreading beyond. When the outbreak seemed to pass, about 1 in 3 villagers were dead, leaving terrible emotional scars on the survivors.

Sebastian Junger, author of the tragic The Perfect Storm, puts together a more personal, yet more well known story in A Death in Belmont. In the fall of 1962 and spring of 1963, Junger lived in Belmont, a Boston suburb, as his family had a group of men doing work on their house. At the same time, Boston police were trying to solve a series of murders thought to be perpetrated by the Boston Strangler. When a murder happens in Belmont, somewhat out of the Boston Strangler pattern, a poor, black man with opportunity and a criminal record is convicted. Later, one of the workers at Junger’s home confesses to being the Boston Strangler. Junger compares the murders, looks at the black man’s trial, and questions whether an innocent man was convicted of murder. A quick, interesting read.

As with Coen brothers’ films, I do love me some Nick Hornby novels. His latest, Juliet, Naked, does not disappoint especially for an aging music fan like myself. Duncan, a Brit, loves the music of Tucker Crowe. In fact, Duncan is obsessed with Crowe. Thing is, Crowe disappeared from the music scene decades ago for unknown reasons. So Duncan is part of an online community that obsesses over everything about Crowe, include a pre-release unplugged version of Crowe’s last album. But Duncan’s longtime girlfriend isn’t so enamored with the mystique of Crowe anymore and their relationship is stressed because of it. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot, but I enjoyed it very much.

The latest book I received for free through LibraryThing.com’s Early Reviewers group is Angés Humbert’s Resistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. Humbert was an art historian in Paris in 1940 when Paris fell to the Nazis, where she began to journal her part in the resistance movement. But soon enough he was arrested and spent the next 4 years in prisons in France and Germany facing interrogations, a show trial, isolation, food deprivation, and many other hardships. Through all that, she remained part of an order of prisoner resisters. And then her prison was liberated by U.S. forces in 1945 where she helped restore order and out Nazis. A wonderful story of courage and perseverance.

Not sure how one follows up on the greatness that was The Godfather, but Fools Die is not it. Mario Puzo at least tried to put together a very different story, instead of changing the scenery and title (Dan Brown, are you listening?). Set in the 1960s, three guys meet in Vegas and do very well in just a short run. One can’t handle to success and meets his end. The other two go on to separate lives–one as a somewhat successful writer and small time scammer, the other as an increasingly powerful casino manager–but they remain close. I never got hooked by the story, and the lack of distinct voice in the story was odd and distracting.

There are a number of excellent writers of thrillers currently writing. In my opinion, Dan Brown is not one of them, but he is doing very well financially, so the jokes on us. His latest, The Lost Symbol, set in Washington, D.C. and centered around the mysterious rites and rituals of the Masons, is incredibly formulaic of his last two novels, Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code. Very irritating for me, though I didn’t expect much better. I’m sure it will get optioned as a movie and make Brown lots, lots more money.

On the other hand, John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, O’Hara’s first novel and published in the early 1930s, is a wonderful thing done beautifully. Set in a small town in central Pennsylvania, Julian English makes a poor decision at Christmas party that leads to a series of continuing and escalating personal tragedies. In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoyed it immensely. Add to that a recent article in Vanity Fair about Mad Men, the best show on TV today, reaching its own appointment in Samarra.

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland: Dutch husband and cricket lover/amateur finds himself emotionally lost in New York City following 9/11. His wife goes back to London with their son, while the husband wanders aimlessly. Some resolution occurs. Well written, pretty good read.

Colm Toibin, Brooklyn: The younger of two sisters living in an Irish village gets an opportunity to work and live in 1950s Brooklyn. She experiences Brooklyn and New York City, which is quite a culture shock for her. But when her sister passes, she has to return home to her mother and is forced to choose between her home and Brooklyn. Sounds like a boring book, but I’m not doing it justice. Very good book.

Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History: An advocacy piece looking mostly at the rise of coal use in England and the US, with a short, curt look at China’s emerging utilization of coal. Freese is against coal and seems to suggest that we would have been better off had we never discovered it. Boring and conclusory.