H is for Homicide by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The problem with real life is there's no musical score. In movies, you know you're in danger because there's an ominous chord underlining the scene, [...] Real life is dead quiet, so you're never quite sure if there's trouble coming up. A possible exception is stepping into a strange apartment full of guys in hairnets."

In my Re-read Early Grafton project I skipped H and read I instead, the weakest installment of the series so far (see I Is for Innocent). Finally I got hold of the missing tome and am happy to report that H is OK. As usual with Grafton's novels and most other mysteries and crime dramas, the book reads better at the beginning than toward the end, but at least the quality drop is not so steep here. What distinguishes the novel from all its predecessors in the series is the change of the overall story concept: it is markedly different in H than what the readers got accustomed to in A through G. Naturally, I love it when the author goes against the readers' expectations.

In the setup of the plot, our intrepid PI, Kinsey Millhone, has finished a job in San Diego and is returning to her office, which she rents from an insurance company. She finds the building a center of police activity. A claim adjuster from the company, whom Kinsey knew well, has been shot dead.

Kinsey's current job is to prove insurance fraud by a woman named Bibianna Diaz. She pretends to befriend Bibianna and the reader is treated to best passages of the novel that happen in a "lowlife bar":

"This was where the C- singles came to hunt. There were no yuppies, no preppies, no slumming execs, no middle-class, white-bread college types. This was a hard-core pickup place for bikers and hamburger hookers, who'd screw anyone for a meal."

Ms. Grafton's descriptions of human mating behavior are priceless, to me way better than the crime thread. Kinsey meets an ex-cop whom she knew during her years on the Santa Teresa police force. And then...

And then the pace of the plot speeds up tenfold and dramatic events happen. The publisher probably divulges the whole thing on the cover of the book, but I do not believe in providing spoilers. Anyway, we have an unexpected bonding episode between Kinsey and Bibianna and whole lot of other goings-on.

There are many good things in the novel. Night driving around the Greater Los Angeles Area is described vividly and in nice prose. How about the scene in a doctor's waiting room where all the patients smoke? Ah, beautiful memories of the times where I needed to inhale two long unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes during the 10-minute break between two lectures that I was giving! These were the days! And we learn a lot - a lot! - about how auto accident insurance scams work.

I find the denouement rather implausible but it is told in quite a cinematic fashion. Overall, I like the novel, mainly because of the change in the story pattern and the scenes in the Meat Locker bar.

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] I know all kids sooner or later reach a point in their lives where they realize that their dads aren't actually superheroes. [...] I just wish for it to take as long as possible. [...] Scared of the day when I lose my place in your life. [...] That feeling of being left out. The awkwardness. The loneliness."

Fredrik Backman's Things My Son Needs to Know about the World comes highly recommended by my Goodreads friend, Bozena Pruska (note the similarity of last names, what a coincidence!), who rated the book with her rare 5 stars. Although in real life I agree with almost everything she says and does (I better do or else...), I will allow myself to have a slightly differing opinion here. Let me try to explain, thus avoiding Ms. Pruska's wrath.

True, it is a charming and sweet book about being a father of a very young son. It is full of non-trivial wisdom about life. One can find poignant, deeply moving passages such as the one whose fragments are shown above in the epigraph. I remember my fear when many, many years ago I realized that I would lose my place in my daughter's life. I believe that everybody who has ever been a parent of a young child will relate to at least some of Mr. Backman's writing, and most parents will relate to a lot of it.

Yet to me, the book has too many "paint-by-numbers" fragments, jokes with easy targets, "low-hanging comedic fruit" like

"Your grandpa was here over the weekend and he installed those little child safety locks all over the kitchen.
The result is that it now takes you about fifteen seconds to get into a cupboard. And it takes me half an hour."

The whole thing has a little of that soap-opera kind of feeling, where we expect to hear canned laughter after each fragment. Only just a little, though; there is enough seriousness, enough mature psychological content that transcends anything that one can ever see on TV.

I totally love the chapter titled What You Need to Know about Being a Man. Despite the macho title it is really a study on generational continuity, on how the author's father's generation is different from his own and how this fact never changes, from generation to generation. Almost like a companion to Heraclitus' famous quote that "the only constant in life is change." Here we have something to the effect "Things change in unchanging ways."

Most of the book is beautifully written and well translated too, from Swedish. The beginning, the first two pages, where the author apologizes to his son for "everything [he's] going to do over the next eighteen or so years" is deeply moving as is the passage from which I extracted snippets for the epigraph. These two passages alone are worth the price of the book. Many parents will shed tears reading these passages.

Four stars.

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Fatal Flaw by Frank Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'I know it can't change what happened, but I've changed. They helped me in there -- they really did. There was this psychiatrist who used to come once a week...'"

A remarkably unremarkable novel!

Frank Smith's Fatal Flaw (1996) begins with a man pleading for forgiveness for something terrible that he had done to a woman. Then we read about a burglary, where, curiously, nothing seems to be missing. A man is assaulted after leaving a pub. The three seemingly unrelated events are probably designed to pique the reader's curiosity.

The actual setup of the plot appears to have no connection with these events. On Christmas Day, Monica, a 17-year-old student of a Thornton Hill School for Girls is found dead of apparent suicide. While all other girls have gone home for the Christmas break, the victim had to stay on school grounds because her mother was abroad on government business.

Detective Chief Inspector Neil Paget, helped by Detective Sergeant Tregalles, leads the investigation. (I have now discovered that this is the first novel in the DCI Paget series.) Not much is learned during the first days other than that Monica was unhappy and generally unpopular girl. While at the outset it seems that her death had to have something in common with her visit to the nearby stables, the lead does not bring any progress, and suicide seems to be the obvious conclusion.

On a seemingly lighter note one of the threads involves Paget's romantic interest in Andrea, a local doctor. Yet the lightness does not last as the author hints at some dark secrets in Andrea's past.

This procedural/psychological crime novel is as British as they come! Shropshire county is the location, social class plays a significant role in everything that happens, and there is even a hunt event organized at the stables - I wish it were described in greater detail. DCI Paget is very British in his reserve and general demeanor. Yet for me everything is a bit too cliché: the plot, the situations, and characterizations. The detectives, the school personnel - particularly the headmistress and the housemistress - and the stables crowd feel like characters in a crime novel rather than real people.

Alas, the writing is average too, pedestrian and uninspired. I have found only one short passage in the entire novel that made me go "Wow! Nice!":

"For a moment she had the strangest feeling that the walls of the room had vanished; that there was nothing; she was alone in the universe.
The feeling passed, and she just felt empty."

Yes, I know the feeling. Marginal recommendation.

Two-and-a-half stars.



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Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa by Pauline Butcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] no one had played his records on the radio and yet over twenty years, he'd sold enough records to make him a rich man. Even John Lennon, when he visited Frank, had been deferential. 'I may be popular, but he is the real thing.'"

Yes, Frank Zappa was the real thing in music. He was also a man of many contradictions so it probably is not astonishing that while most of his life he wanted to make "serious" music he built most of his fame and made most of his money in the "unserious" rock genre. He was, or at least tried to be, a real artist, yet many people know him only for outrageous, shocking performances, associations with various "freaks", and occasionally puerile behavior and offensive sense of humor.

Pauline Butcher's FREAK OUT! My life with Frank Zappa (2011) is a very good read: unpretentious, not gossipy, and, in fact, quite serious. It begins in 1967 when Ms. Butcher, 21 years old at the time, was hired as a temp to type some lyrics for Frank Zappa when he was visiting London. Not only did he tremendously impress her when they met, but he liked her too. It is quite possible that he liked her exactly for what she says he did: she was a straight-laced, forthright, prim young woman: a marked contrast with people who usually surrounded him - his "entourage of freaks."

I do not like the misleading publisher's trick on the back cover: one sentence of the blurb is emphasized in big font:

"'Do you think if we f**ked, you could still work for me as my secretary?' - Frank Zappa"

thus implying that there is a lot about sex in the book. Blessedly that's not true! A reader who is looking for salacious details of freak orgies will be severely disappointed. Yes, there is a bit about Cynthia the Plaster Caster (Wikipedia has a nice article about her), but that's basically it.

Ms. Butcher worked as Frank Zappa's secretary from 1968 to 1972, and lived with Zappa family and his entourage in the famous Log Cabin in Hollywood Hills for most of that period. The reader gets a glance into the everyday life of the admittedly strange group of people occupying the residence, of which Mr. Zappa and Ms. Butcher seem to be the most "normal", whatever the word may mean.

This is really a good read - I am repeating myself - the writing is refreshingly amateurish (in a good way!) and the descriptions of events and characters quite believable, even such details as Ms. Butcher's tribulations with hearing the f-word and resisting its use herself. I have learned a lot of new things about Frank Zappa even though I have already read several books about him including a great biography that I reviewed here on Goodreads Zappa. A Biography (other titles of books on Zappa are included in that review). Ms. Butcher's great characterization of Frank Zappa is included below the rating

Three-and-a-half stars.

"He could delight in ribald tales of travels with the band, but complain with the coldest cynicism about their performance. He welcomed people into the house, and then groused when they hung around. He could be a sympathetic listener, or a mocking tease who ripped at your beliefs and enjoyed the flap. He collected people and then behaved like they were not around. He voiced libertarianism but ruled his band with an iron rod. He feted the disenfranchised and outcasts, yet coveted a capitalist's lifestyle for himself. He scorned the American people for their ignorance while criticising the establishment for treating them like children. He stood in judgement on almost anyone in the outside world - and yet I knew no other man more unassuming, humble or compassionate."

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The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] black ribbons uncurled and stretched themselves across the white expanse, extending from top to bottom, from left to right, forming a random rectangular grid. Then one of the enclosed spaces of white blushed and reddened, and another spontaneously took on a faint sky tint that deepened all the way to a rich cobalt blue, and another red square began to bleed in on the lower right, and --
By God, my mind was painting me a Mondrian."

Three months ago I reviewed here The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling by Lawrence Block, and in the review I wrote:

"[...] there are some similarities between Bernie R[hodenbarr]. and Archie G[oodwin]. (I wish someone could write a story that would allow them to meet)."

and look what happens! On page 38 of my hardcopy edition of The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983), we read

"'Archie,' she said. 'They've kidnapped Archie Goodwin.'"

I feel prescient! Also, what a contrast: I did not much care about the Kipling book while I very much like the Mondrian one!

Anyway, about the plot. Archie Goodwin is not really the Archie Goodwin but still, the current installment of the Burglar series starts strongly: Bernie has an interesting day in his used book shop. A customer tries to sell a book that belongs to a library while another customer reads poetry aloud from a tome she is buying. Later Bernie visits the apartment of another customer who hired him to appraise his book collection. Yet... Bernie has his set of burglar tools with him! Then a lot happens: kidnapping, murder, and more. Piet Mondrian's paintings provide anchors to fix the narrative axis of the plot. Mondrian's paintings disappear, reappear, and get stolen to order.

Wonderful, light, delightful prose! Bernie and his friend, Wally, run in Central Park and do 9:20 miles. Well, at their age, I could do a 7:15 mile! The account of a brief affair between Bernie and Andrea is totally charming. As are further passages dedicated to sexual attraction:

"'Especially since you'd like to verb her again.'
'Well ---'
'And why not? She's got a nifty pair of nouns.'"

(By the way, I have just found out that these cute phrases are now a part of the contemporary Urban Dictionary. Did the Dictionary take it from Mr. Block? Or the other way around?) And what about the following hilarious fragment:

"'Performance art,' Denise was saying. 'First you paint a picture and then you destroy it. Now all we need is Christo to wrap it in aluminum foil. Shall I wrap it up or will you eat it here?'
'Neither,' I said, and began removing my clothes."

Mondrian is a very funny book, in altogether higher class than the Kipling installment. If not for the extremely lame denouement setting, where all suspects are gathered in one place, and the murderer is exposed, I would've give the novel a four-star rating. Even with the lame ending it is a great read!

Three-and-a-half stars.

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Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance."

I love reading works by Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's top physicists, and - in my view - the best ever popularizer of modern physics. Statements like the one I used in the epigraph, about human infinite ignorance, resonate with me. I teach mathematics at a university, I have quite an extensive exposure to classical physics, yet my ignorance about modern physics is certainly limitless. (By the way, there is no better way to understand the vastness of one's ignorance than being a professor.)

While I will not rate this book by Dr. Rovelli as a masterpiece like Seven Brief Lessons on Physics , it is still a great read and I have learned a lot from it - not only about my lack of knowledge. The author begins with a story about Anaximander of Miletus (450 BCE) whose work contributed to the foundations of Western science and philosophy.

"The Milesians understand that by shrewdly using observation and reason, rather than searching for answers in fantasy, ancient myths, or religion - and above all by using critical thought in a discriminating way - it is possible to repeatedly correct our worldview and to discover new aspects of reality that are hidden to the common view."

Progressing through time, we read about Democritus, then through Copernicus, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, we follow the evolution of human models of reality. Then come Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac - fathers of the modern physics - and we arrive at the "two pillars of twentieth-century physics - general relativity and quantum mechanics." General relativity is "a simple and coherent vision of gravity, space, and time." Quantum mechanics unveils the three aspects of reality: "granularity, indeterminism, and relationality."

Part Three, Quantum Space and Relational Time is to me the most fascinating part of the book. General relativity and quantum mechanics, "the two jewels that the twentieth century has left us," seem to contradict each other. "They cannot both be true, at least not in their present forms." Chapters 5 through 7 provide an introduction to the loop quantum gravity theory in whose development the author has played one of the key roles.

"[...] the world described by the theory is far from the one we are familiar with. There is no longer space that "contains" the world, and no longer time "during the course of which" events occur."

Part Four, Beyond Space and Time, discusses such aspects of cosmology as Big Bang and black holes. I found the chapter Information the most illuminating. Information is defined as the number of possible alternatives, connections to Boltzmann's statistical mechanics are shown, and the author presents yet another crucial idea - thermal time and its connection with the concept of irreversibility. The author's succinct summary is stunning:

"Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is the information we don't have. Time is our ignorance."

I absolutely love the powerful final chapter, Mystery, with its convincing argument why nothing but science can be reliable:

"The answers given by science [...] are not reliable because they are definitive. They are reliable because they are not definitive.

This is the most powerful argument I have ever heard against all kinds of mumbo-jumbo that ignores science, which is particularly important in the times of a pandemic.

The author provides two fascinating historical vignettes: the first about a "race" to formalize Einstein's theory between David Hilbert, one of the most famous mathematicians in history, and Albert Einstein. The other vignette is about a little known Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, who showed that both Einstein in his skepticism about the expansion of the universe as well as pope Pius XII in his declaration that the Big Bang confirms the account of Creation given in Genesis were wrong.

Fascinating read!

Four-and-a-quarter stars.

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I is for Innocent by Sue Grafton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The sun wasn't quite down yet, but the light was gray. The days were marked by this protracted twilight, darker shadows gathering among the trees while the sky remained the color of polished aluminum. When the sun finally set, the clouds would turn purple and blue and the last rays of sun would pierce the gloom with shafts of red."

Uh-oh! I am unable to recommend Sue Grafton's I Is For Innocent (1992). In the entire 330-page volume of the paperback I could find only one nice fragment of prose - about the colors of California twilight - that would be suitable for the epigraph. So I am now quite hesitant to continue my "Re-read Sue Grafton's Opus" project. I more or less liked installments from "A" to "G" (all are reviewed here on Goodreads), missed "H" (will find it soon), but "I" was a clear disappointment. I read it just a few weeks ago, did not find time to write the review then, and now I completely forgot what it was about. (Yes, I am old, but I do remember good books that I read even a few years ago!)

Kinsey Millhone is hired by Mr. Voigt, the ex-husband of a woman who had been murdered. The suspected killer, the woman's next husband, had been acquitted, yet Mr. Voigt is absolutely sure of the man's guilt and is suing him for wrongful death in a civil suit. Kinsey is supposed to collect evidence to support their case.

First 50 or 60 pages are quite readable; I like Kinsey and her one-of-a-kind perspective on things. Yet Ms. Grafton's writing soon begins to irritate me. There are too many words, too many sentences that do not convey any value: they do not move the plot, they do not contribute toward characterizations. They have no literary value, unlike the descriptions of nature or landscapes. They are just empty filler stuff. I do not want to copy the empty passages but, say, on page 177 of the paperback we have an almost half-a-page description of how a fast-food worker hands out the order to a customer. On page 224 we have a half-a-page discussion of soup variations.

There is a comedy thread that involves two of the series supporting characters: Henry's (Kinsey's landlord) brother, William, and Rosie (the Hungarian restaurant owner) are having a romantic affair. I find the humor a bit strained. The denouement, with the standoff and shooting, is extremely silly. Ughhhh. My rating should not really be as high as it is, but I like Kinsey so much that I am grudgingly assigning a mercy rating of

Two stars.

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