Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors by John Densmore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
[...]"
(Break On Through (To The Other Side) lyrics, by The Doors)

I clearly remember that magical moment from over 51 years ago. My senior year in high school in September or October 1967. Along with three classmates I am sitting on the floor in an apartment in the Wola district of Warsaw, Poland, listening to Light My Fire by The Doors. This is the first time I hear the song and I am totally overwhelmed and enraptured by the music. It was clear to me at that moment that I had never before heard music so powerful, so new, so captivating. The memory is vivid in my mind to the extent that I can visualize my exact position in the room.

I have read John Densmore's Riders on the Storm (1990) (in Polish translation) and in one of the passages he mentions how many people have personal stories related to Light My Fire: making love for the first time, first time smoking a joint, first record bought. To me this is one of the best songs of the 20th century, a song which could well serve as a symbol for the entire generation that grew up in the 1960s, the most interesting decade that I have lived through.

The subtitle of Mr. Densmore's book is My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors; the author who was the drummer of the band, indeed focuses more on Morrison, the vocalist, than on the band as a whole. In a sort of Prologue John Densmore relates how he and Robby Krieger, the guitarist, visit Jim Morrison's grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in 1975. Then he recollects his last phone conversation with Morrison, three weeks before his death.

The book follows Mr. Densmore's childhood and youth and then, almost chronologically, relates the history of Jim Morrison and The Doors. In fact I find the these parts of the book the most interesting. The author's childhood experiments with drumming, his musical growth that leads to fascination with John Coltrane and incomparable Elvin Jones, Coltrane's drummer. All that plus the captivating images of Los Angeles in the early-to-mid 1960s, read much better than the somewhat pretentious pathos of the Prologue.

Then come the years with the band, from playing small local clubs, through their big break - getting hired by the Whiskey a Go-Go club, to opening for more popular bands and finally their own fame. In the late 1960s The Doors were one of the most popular bands in the world. Their phenomenal success was mainly due to Jim Morrison: his handsome boy physique, charismatic personality, riveting stage performances, unforgettable singing voice, and accomplished writing of lyrics to their songs. Morrison created the band and Morrison slowly destroyed it by gradually increasing the range of his excesses, both in substance abuse and in unconventional behavior. Along with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones, Morrison is a member of the "27 club," that includes the great rock musicians who died at 27 years of age, at the peak of their fame, mainly due to heavy substance abuse.

I found one sad passage in the later part of the book particularly memorable. Mr. Densmore recounts how he and his bandmates, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek - not being able to reach Jim Morrison at that time - sold the permission to use Light My Fire in a Buick commercial. Morrison never forgave them that the icons of the 1960s hippie counterculture turned into businessmen.

Very readable book and my major complaint is that it could have been edited more thoroughly: from the Acknowledgments it is clear that the book was co-written by Mr. Cousineau - as a professional writer he could have tightened and generally improved the prose in many places.

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Timothy's Game by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Streets of the financial district are crowded; everyone scurries, the pursuit of the Great Simoleon continuing with vigor and determination."

Another purely recreational (a euphemism for 'silly') read. Although I found the previous installment of Lawrence Sanders' Timothy series (The Timothy Files ) disappointing, devoid of the charm of the McNally series, the down-to-earth Timothy will have to do while I am waiting for copies of the last two installments of debonair Archy's adventures.

Timothy's Game (1988) is again a set of three novellas written in the third-person narration about professional adventures of one Timothy Cone, an investigator for the 'financial intelligence' company, Haldering & Co. In my view, the first story is by far the best, mostly because it transcends the clichés of the other two novellas. The main character of Run, Sally, Run! is Sally Steiner, the daughter of the owner of Steiner Waste Control Company. Sally is also the chief accountant, the vice-president, the office manager, and truck dispatcher for the company. When the "bentnoses" who control the entire New York territory increase the "tax" that the Steiners have to pay for the right to collect garbage, Sally decides to take things into her own hands. The plot is interesting, the action is fast, and Sally reads a bit more than a caricature of a character. Nice ending too. The reader will also find occasional glimpses of the McNally Sanders' prose:

"He is clad in a three-piece, dove gray flannel suit of such surpassing softness that it could have been woven from the webs of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant spiders."

The second novella begins with the Chairman and CEO of a large company getting assassinated in his limousine. The acting CEO specifically requests that Mr. Cone conducts the investigation, thanks to his reputation of doggedness and unconventional methods. Alas, the plot is so bland that having read the book just a few days ago I completely forgot what it was about. I just remember the clever word play on the title, A Case of the Shorts.

In the third novella, One from Column A, Timothy Cone is hired by Mr. Lee, the elderly CEO of a corporation that processes and markets a variety of Chinese foods. Mr. Lee wants to find the reasons why the corporation's stock is suddenly trading at higher price and increased volume. Again, I do not remember much of the plot other than a shooting (ugh) and Mr. Cone's cooperation with a cliché of an FBI agent.

The plot is occasionally interrupted by scenes of Timothy Cone's carnal couplings with Samantha Whatley, his supervisor. Alas, the prose is over the top and not in a good way, like in McNally's novels, but overwrought and pretentious:

"Their bodies join in a curve as convoluted as a Möbius strip. [...] Curses are muffled, oaths gritted, and when they finally come to a sweated juncture, each believes it a selfish victory and is beamy and content."

I also take exception to the overabundance of periphrases. It is jarring when one has to repeatedly read about "Wall Street dick" instead of Timothy Cone, "city bull" instead of detective Davenport, and "the oldster" or "the septuagenarian" instead of Mr. Lee. All this does not help allay the suspicion that Lawrence Sanders who writes the good prose of the McNally's series is a different person.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.


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Solar by Ian McEwan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"She was an objectivist, in that she believed the world existed independently of the language that described it; she spoke in praise of reductionist analysis; she was an empiricist, and, by her own proud admission, an 'Enlightenment rationalist', which was [...] a tad regressive, if not hegemonic, after all."

Solar (2010) is the seventh book by Ian McEwan that I am reviewing on Goodreads and it might well be relegated to the seventh place in my personal ranking of the writer's works. I did read the book with some interest, finished reading not that long ago, but now I have to strain my memory to remember what the novel was all about. It felt like the author was doing an exercise in plot building: he collected the requisite components, assembled them into a complex enough story, but what resulted is just an empty structure that does not affect the reader in any particular way. Sort of like a literary equivalent of "elevator music," pleasant, inoffensive, listenable, yet devoid of any impact whatsoever.

The first part of the plot takes place in 2000. Michael Beard, a world-famous quantum physicist, is deeply unhappy: his marriage (fifth for him) to a much younger and beautiful woman is disintegrating. She discovered his infidelity and seems to enjoy it as a pretext to engage in her own extramarital affair. Dr. Beard is also bitter about turning 53 and not having been able to achieve anything important in his research since that youthful explosion of mathematical genius that yielded the Beard-Einstein Conflation theory. The theory brought him the Nobel Prize on which he has since been coasting: teaching, giving speeches, chairing various committees, and being a titular head of physics research centers.

One of his postdocs, totally devoted to environmental issues like the climate change, works on revolutionary ways of harnessing the solar energy. Dr. Beard is too busy with the marriage crisis and participation in a celebrity trip to the North Pole to help the young researcher with his work. Dramatic events that involve Dr. Beard and the postdoc happen when he comes back from the trip: the events set up the second part of the novel that takes place 2005. The third part takes us to the vicinity of Lordsburg, New Mexico, where a conference on solar energy is taking place and a demonstration of new technologies is under preparation.

In addition to the marital/sexual thread the plot also contains a criminal story as well as a legal thread that concerns the intellectual property rights. All these motifs are sort of cleverly superimposed on trendy topics like global warming and renewable sources of energy. I write "sort of cleverly" because I seemed to like the plot while reading the book but just a few days later I was finding it hollow and superficial: it was a short-lived reading pleasure.

I only remember a few scenes: the eating of crisps on a train and the consequent passages about attributing events that actually happened to "urban legends" - very funny in my opinion. I also remember - as predictable and thus not very funny - Dr. Beard's adventures with low temperatures during the North Pole trip. I also appreciate the author's fascination with the concept of "narrative," within the narrative of his novel (wow, how postmodern, insert a smiley). But even these goodies are not enough to recommend this overwrought, awkward, and ultimately empty novel. It would be good for a long train ride or maybe a flight to the North Pole. And then - for a coaster under the coffee mug.

Two stars.


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Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"What came through the line was a noise like no other Jude had ever heard before, alien and dreadful, a noise like the hum of flies, amplified a hundred times, and the punch and squeal of machinery, a steam press that banged and seethed. [...] it was possible to hear words in all that fly hum, inhuman voices calling for Mother, calling for it to stop."

Before I begin the review proper I have a question: what is the typical speed of ghosts? The protagonists in this novel try to escape from ghosts by driving very fast and I am trying to figure out how fast should one drive to outrun a ghost. Will Subaru be enough? If not, maybe Porsche? Or maybe one would need a jet plane?

I had never liked horror movies but kept watching them in hope that maybe one day... And in the case of movies such day did come, I watched the Swedish horror/vampire film Let The Right One In and fell in love with it because it was so completely different and almost free of the unbearably tired clichés of the genre. In the same way I have been trying all my life to find a good horror book. No luck so far but having heard relatively positive opinions from my friends I picked up Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box (2007), in hopes that maybe this time... But no! I kept reading to the very end not only because I usually try to give the authors a chance to redeem themselves but also because the plot is so extremely silly that it granted me an opportunity to bask in a feel of superiority and laugh out loud.

Jude, short for Judas Coyne, which is a pseudonym of one Justin Cowzynski (in actual Polish it would be spelled Kałużynski), is a retired rock star of the band Jude's Hammer and a collector of "grotesque and bizarre" artifacts. At an online auction he buys a suit which is said to have the spirit of the dead owner attached to it. Well, when the suit arrives, neatly packed in a black heart-shaped box, the trouble begins. The suit is indeed accompanied by a spirit/ghost. What's more, Jude learns that his buying the suit was not exactly an act of free will, but it is connected to some events from the past.

The readers learn a lot about the deceased owner of the suit and about his experiences with the occult. There is a quite well presented scene of a Ouija Board séance. Yet the few interesting passages are drowned in the sea of idiocy about the spirit/ghost following Jude and his girlfriend. What is most irritating is that the speed of the spirit/ghost precisely follows the narrative rhythm: the appearance of the spirit/ghost is slow or fast exactly when needed by the plot. Maybe the spirit is busy with other customers? Maybe there were no tickets on the special ghost flight?

To me this is a typical horror novel in that it contains quite a few inept, over-the-top scenes, particularly in the later parts of the book. The dramatic confrontation in Jessica's house reads like an entry in a contest for most laughably bad scene ever written. But the top honors go to a passage where - I am avoiding spoilers - bad things happen to a certain Martin. My memory is likely not what it used to be 50 years ago, but I seem to remember that orgasm was quite a pleasant experience; having read the passage I am not so sure any more.

I find it sad that the author who clearly can write very well, as evidenced by eloquent, captivating, and often even lyrical prose that can be found in many places of the novel, wastes his talent by employing such a dud of a plot. And I still hope that there are great horror novels, like Let the Right One In is a great horror movie, only I have not found them yet.

One and a half stars.


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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 by Amy Stewart
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The Arctic is shouldering the wounds of the world, wounds that aren't healing. Long ago we exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, with its seven billion humans all longing for some semblance of First World comforts. The burgeoning population is incompatible with the natural economy of biological and ecological systems."

A major disappointment! I liked and recommended here two earlier installments of the series, The Best American Science Writing 2006 and The Best American Science Writing 2005 , but the publisher decided to "improve" the series and added 'nature' to 'science' in the title. Alas, the title is quite misleading. Not much science remains in the book that supposedly features the best American essays in the field written in 2016. In fact, the book does not contain a single essay from the basic science area. Do the publishers really think that science is too hard for people to read about? More whining later, now about some good stuff.

The main theme of the collection is, of course, the destruction of our environment, the climate change, and the fate of the planet whose inhabitants happily ignore the crisis that may now be unavoidable. Rotten Ice is probably the most interesting essay in the set: we learn how the climate change affects Greenland and the lives of its people. Their livelihood depends on the thickness of ice. An essay about an environmental manager of a coalfield in India is pretty grim: we are told that

"India's carbon output [...] is growing faster than any other country's."

On the other hand, a piece about Germany's successes in converting to energy from renewable sources is somewhat optimistic, despite the obvious obstacles and growing pains.

One of the environmental essays is sort of close to science: we learn about bark beetles that have killed billions of trees, but the author presents a hypothesis that the beetles and the trees have mutually adapted to the climate change. The passages about symbiosis between beetles and fungus sound actually like science. On the other hand, in an essay that begins very promisingly with the story of how individual wolves migrated from Oregon to Northern California where their offspring can now be found, the tone suddenly changes and we have to read about celebrities and their dogs. I really am unable to understand why writing about nature and science has to be polluted by names like Christina Aguillera or Renee Zellweger.

I was happy to find a piece about mathematics (even if math is obviously not a science): an essay about rewriting the so-called "enormous theorem" in the finite simple group theory. For a text about math it is relatively accessible. Some readers may be interested in an article ridiculing the "non-scientific gospel" of the 12-steps philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous and criticizing the abstinence-only approach. Others may be amused by a piece that calls prescribing bed rest for pregnant women a hoax. An article about burning the bodies of victims of Ebola pandemic in Liberia is interesting at the beginning before it degenerates into pornography of death.

The very first piece, Back to the Land is truly bad: it hits the reader with histrionic, pompous, stilted writing. The Modern Moose is unfortunately similar: the author tries to convey lyricism and ends up with silly and pretentious stuff. In contrast with these two failures we find a deeply moving piece by Oliver Sacks, who was close to death at the time of this writing. My Periodic Table illustrates the obvious truth that some people can write well while others - like the authors of the two previously mentioned pieces and also this reviewer - can't.

Two stars.


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Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[He] was tied to a wall, his skin removed in strips, and then he was disemboweled while he was still alive."

Another dark crime novel by Dennis Lehane and another disappointment! Mr. Lehane can write masterful prose and even so-called "serious writers" could learn from him how to compose sentences that flow beautifully in paragraphs and how to evoke vivid images. Yet he devalues and destroys his own work by reducing the plot to the lowest possible denominator of tired clichés. Even worse, he attempts to capture the reader's attention through gratuitously portraying extreme violence, pain and suffering. Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) is a major contributor to the "pornography of torture" subgenre of the noir.

This is another installment in the Kenzie/Gennaro series. Diandra Warren, a psychiatrist and a professor at Bryce University, hires the detectives to stop the harassment she has recently been subject to. Her son is being followed and she received his picture in the mail. There are indications that the harassment may be connected with the Irish mafia in Boston. When Mr. Kenzie begins the investigation he himself is threatened by anonymous calls. What's worse, the woman who Kenzie is in love with and her daughter may be in danger as well.

The plot explodes in complications and the focus shifts to a gruesome murder of a young woman. The author goes full throttle into the horror of pain and torture. The orgy of violence continues throughout the entire plot. Even the funny passages are stained with the motif of pain:

"'[...] I tried pulling the tooth myself last night with some pliers and the sumbitch only come out like so far and then it wouldn't budge. Plus, them pliers got all slippery cause of all the blood [...]'"

Tired clichés of the genre abound like in the following passage:

"'Maybe he even wants to be caught, which means all these deaths are some sort of message, and he's going to keep killing until we figure out what it is.'"

Bubba Rogowski is the biggest cliché of all, almighty and invincible. How convenient for the author to have such a character to rely on! And how utterly boring to have that omnipotent persona in every novel!

The binge of violence continues and - even if it does not seem possible - intensifies in the denouement. The author ratchets the tension to the extreme yet all he achieves is that the prose reads way, way, way over the top. Histrionic, implausible dialogues towards the end of the plot seem to come straight from B-movies. I would not be so angry at the novel were it written by an author with a lesser talent. But Mr. Lehane has a great gift of prose, evidenced by beautiful, lyrical passages occasionally appearing in the novel. This could have been a very good book, yet I just felt distaste after I finished reading.

Two stars.

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Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time."
(From a Steven Wright's stand-up routine)

It is quite depressing to read a nineteen-year-old book that focuses on one of the things that are obviously wrong with our civilization and realize that the problem has gotten much worse since the publication. James Gleick's Faster was published in 1999 and its subtitle - The Acceleration of Just About Everything - aptly describes the topic. Mr. Gleick is the author of the wonderful Chaos: Making of a New Science, where the mathematical chaos theory is explained in a way accessible to general audience. I am also planning to re-read and review his Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. While Faster is not on the same stellar level as the two other books, it is well written, absorbing, and readable. And of course the main thesis of the book - that we want to do things too fast for no reason whatsoever - is even more relevant today, in the age of Twitter.

The book starts slowly: in the first 80 or so pages the author focuses on various topics related to time, like time standardization, time travel, watch technology and watch fashion (here he predicts the arrival of smart watches), slow-motion film and stroboscopic photography, but the only item that stands out for me is the critique of multi-tasking. These days people take pride in multi-tasking even more than in 1999, but at least today studies are available which unequivocally show that multi-tasking either does not save us any time or that the tasks that have been executed simultaneously with others are not executed as well as they would have been if we focused on one task at a time.

Things get really interesting when the author begins discussing the Internet. It is nice that in a book that is almost 20 years old the observations about the Web revolution - these were its early days - do not sound dated at all. But it is a pity that the author could not talk about one of the most idiotic things that our civilization has ever produced - Twitter - as it was created in 2006. Twitter, the perfect embodiment of our "religion of speed," allows short (140 characters) messages, which transform any actual, potentially worthwhile content into superficial and worthless "sound bites." The author offers quite an interesting perspective on the psychological and sociological ramifications of sound bites, which supports the contrarian point of view - one to which I wholeheartedly subscribe - that if anything can be said in a short sentence, it is not worth saying at all.

Further chapters in the book focus on the issues related to "saving time." Mr. Gleick points out the illusory nature of time savings obtained by reading faster, cooking faster, and eating faster. He ridicules the time-saving-driven attempts to measure how much time we spend for all kinds of activities and perversely asks "How much time can a person devote to time-saving?" The passages that satirize the self-help genre of books like 365 Ways To Save Time are hilarious.

One of the more interesting chapters is devoted to "hand-held antiboredom devices" like the remote. Mr. Gleick quotes Saul Bellow who saw a modern human's mental state "an unbearable state of distraction:"

"Remote control switches permit us to jump back and forth, mix up beginnings, middles and ends. Nothing happens in any sort of order... Distraction catches us all in the end and makes mental mincemeat of us."

While Faster is not a great book in that it contains too much peripheral stuff and lacks cohesion, it is a really worthy read that may cause one to pause and think "Wait, do I really need to hurry?"

Three and a quarter stars.


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Sullivan's Sting by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] we have an exclusive source of supply that's liable to dry up any minute [...] Now's the time to get in on the greatest money-making opportunity we've ever offered. Here is the chance of a lifetime, but you've got to get in on it NOW! Tomorrow may be too late [...] you're going to be rich, rich, RICH!"

The above fragment of a yak's spiel to mutts (or mooches) is one of the very few things that stand out in Lawrence Sanders' Sullivan's Sting (1990). The you-must-do-it-now tactic used by financial advisors who earn their living conning their clients over the phone is the most common high-pressure sales tool used by all businesses. It works because it appeals to one of the most fundamental human instincts - greed. Mr. Sanders describes how the salespeople con their clients, how smarter salespeople con the less smart ones, how the law enforcement people try to con the con men and how they get conned back. The con is on! It drives business. And business is America's business!

We meet Rita Angela Sullivan, an officer of an independent and virtually secret law enforcement agency that fights financial crime in Florida. We also meet David Rathbone, ostensibly an investment advisor and financial planner, who devises an elaborate scheme to get a rich widow to entrust him with her money. Rathbone is Ms. Sullivan's target. Her job is to con the con man using whatever means she needs; in this case the means mean her physical allure and sex. Ms. Sullivan helps uncover a large network of con men and women and the plot is relatively interesting if not for the extremely crude nature of most of the business cons and the glaring naiveté of the victims. One could only hope that most people are not really that stupid, even if they want to MAKE MONEY FAST.

The reader gets a few sex scenes, as usual rather tactfully shown by Mr. Sanders. One involves a bed adorned with a layer of currency so that the happy couple have even more reasons to get excited. Not the best effort by Mr. Sanders but a readable story that casts further doubt on the idea of the human species being the crown of creation.

Two stars.


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The Solid Mandala by Patrick White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Waldo was leading his brother Arthur, as how many times, out of the brown gloom of the kitchen. The cold light, the kitchen smells, had set almost solid in it. Yet, here they were, the two human creatures, depending on habit for substance, as they drifted through. If habit lent them substance, it was more than habit, Waldo conceded bitterly, which made them one."

If I am having difficulties with completing my Goodreads challenge to read 100 books in 2018 it may be Patrick White's fault. After the phenomenal The Aunt's Story comes another great book by the Australian author, The Solid Mandala (1966). No five stars this time as I am very stingy with that rating but it is another novel that shows a master of the English language at work. Another novel in which I savored so many sentences and fragments on so many pages. It took me the entire week to read the 300-page novel. Sometimes I spent almost five minutes to read one page - so delightful the prose is. What amazing writing! Maybe only Nabokov could write such an utterly magnificent passage as:

"As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces."

Waldo and Arthur are twin brothers who spend their entire life together. Waldo is the "clever twin," and "the one who takes the lead;" Arthur is "the backward one," simple and slow. But while Waldo is interested in words, Arthur is the twin more interested in people. They are so different yet they are one.

The pace of the novel is extremely slow: an impatient reader will be right to say that not much is going on. One does not read a book like this for the story; the depth of the psychological study, the richness of psychological detail, the amazing insights of the nature of Waldo and Arthur's "twinness" far outweigh the scarcity of plot events.

I love the structure of the novel: the longer first part that focuses on Waldo is followed by much shorter second part where Arthur is the primary focus. The two "halves" are bracketed by short chapters ostensibly written about other participants of the story; they serve as prologue and epilogue for the plot. I love the passages describing the brothers walking along the Barranugli Road, while the events from their past move by like on an old newsreel. One of the climaxes of the novel is the unforgettable, stunning scene of Arthur "dancing the mandala":

"He danced the sleep of people in a wooden house, groaning under the pressure of sleep, their secrets locked prudently up, safe, until their spoken thoughts, or farts, gave them away. He danced the moon, anaesthetized by bottled cestrum. He danced the disc of the orange sun above icebergs, which was in a sense his beginning, and should perhaps be his end."

Magnificent! There is one thing I do not like in the novel: the author seems to be explaining the meaning of the title, writing (in italics! rather a lame affectation)

"The Mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the 'dwelling of the god'. [...]"

A beautiful, desperately sad, and difficult book that reveals many truths about what it is to be human.

Four-and-a-half stars


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