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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Stuph To Read
My most recent grocery store book binge identified a couple of good ones. A grand old man of the genre, Clive Cussler, has a new one out, Lost City. It's per the Cussler formula, but good of its kind. I don't know how many books old Clive has left in him. He's trying to hand off part of the franchise to his son, an erstwhile accountant. This story was written with another man, last-named Kemprecos. Several things you can count on with a Clive Cussler story; frantic hair-breadth action, outlandish scenes and situations, a hero and his side kick who absolutely never give up, horrible villains, at least six-hundred pages. Lost City has all of that.
The more interesting volume was Social Crimes. Probably I was more interested in this because of the TV show, So You Want To Be A Hilton. I've seen that program several times and have wondered what's the point. The book makes the point very clear...what's the attraction of life as a New York A-list socialite. It's quite a funny, witty story...clever, original. In spite of the fact that the book details lives of those immensely rich people who lead New York society, and paints a picture of such incredible wealth, comfort and ease that those people seem like mythical beasts, in spite of that, I'm quite satisfied with my niche on the economic ladder. Realizing that characters in the story mirror the lives of real people doing what they really do, I nevertheless left the book feeling that it, like Lost City was a fantasy. Fun to read, though.
A third book, Frozen, by Jay Bonsaninga, was so feverishly, madly, hyperdramatically overwritten as to be a cartoon. It tries to be about mystery, crime, science, history, and the supernatural, ambitious but do-able. The problem is that after a while all that breathlessly melodramatic language makes the story laughable.
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