Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher (3 stars)

A book by Princess Leia?  Sure, why not.  Fisher is of course used to being characterised by her role in Star Wars:

...I am not only this Princess Leia creature but also several-sized dolls, various T-shirts and posters, some cleansing items, and a bunch of other merchandise.  It turns out I was even a kind of pin-up - a fantasy that geeky teenage boys across the globe jerked off to me with some frequency.

The book is based on an autobiographical stage show she began performing in 2006, and reads exactly like a stand-up routine.  It is surprisingly funny, and I mean laugh-out-loud funny, which is a pretty rare thing.

She has a biting, sarcastic wit, which she uses to attack her father on a number of occasions.  Here she describes how her father Eddie rushed to Liz Taylor's side after the death of her husband:

He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, then he consoled her with flowers, and he ultimately consoled her with his penis.  Now this made marriage to my mother awkward, so he was gone within the week.

Fisher is very up front about her drug addictions, failed relationships and bipolar diagnosis (she even appears in an 'Abnormal Psychology' textbook under 'bipolar').

The book is tiny - lots of pictures and huge font, you can probably read it in less than an hour.  Not exactly deep, but entertaining.

3 stars

Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2 stars)

This is my 9th Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It seems that when reading a Pulitzer Prize winner you are guaranteed excellent writing, but excellent plot, as in this case, is optional.

Russo creates excellent characters, and gave me a real sense of knowing Empire Falls, a dying small town in Maine that lost its spirit with the closure of various mills owned by the Whiting family. Russo's skillful depiction of Miles' inability to escape from the dying town, the simultaneous death of his mother and her dream for him to go to college, and the constant bullying of John Voss, all made for quite a depressing read.

Unfortunately the skill of the writing and good character development doesn't make up for the plodding pace (483 pages in small font) and lack of interesting plot for most of the book. There is a flurry of excitement towards the end, and quite a good climax, but it seems rushed after the slow pace of the rest of the novel.

The book was made into a 2-part HBO miniseries, which I intend to watch. It could be quite good, since with only two parts most of the boring set-up can be condensed. If it flowed at the same pace of the book it would probably have to be a 26-part series...

2 stars.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (4.5 stars)

Ever since I read The Road, Cormac McCarthy's other works have been on my list. It had been some time since I'd seen the movie when I picked up this book, but the image of Chigurh walking around with that gas cylinder brought it back.

I loved this book, but it is definitely not easy reading. The dialogue is frequently confusing - it is often difficult to determine who is saying what without any 'he-said' 'she-said'. This sparse, but emotion-loaded dialogue reminded me a lot of The Road. Chigurh is a great character; he is ruthless, true to his word, and a great philosopher and student of human emotion and behaviour.

I love the charged emotion in this scene where an unwitting gas station attendant finds himself flipping a coin for his life:

You know what date is on this coin?

No.

It's nineteen fifty-eight. It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it's here. And I'm here. And I've got my hand over it. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say. Call it.

I don't know what it is I stand to win.

In the blue light the man's face was beaded thinly with sweat. He licked his upper lip.

You stand to win everything, Chigurh said. Everything.

Sheriff Bell has a brilliant, world-weary, beaten down sense of humour:

It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?
If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.

Moss, despite some obvious very bad choices, is a smart guy. The way he hides and later retrieves the satchel from the airconditioning duct in the hotel is ingenious. I was surprised McCarthy chose to leave Moss's fate to a retrospective look from Sheriff Bell. I would have thought the encounter between Moss and Chigurh after so much cat-and-mouse would have been the climax.

A great read.  Now I need to read Blood Meridian.

4.5 stars

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (4.5 stars)

I've read quite a few books about Iraq lately, so it was with some reluctance I picked up another, however I was intrigued given this book was the basis for the movie Green Zone. I'm glad I did - this is one of the best accounts of the war and reconstruction I have read. It takes a different tack and focuses not on the military aspects, but on the reconstruction efforts of the 'Coalition Provisional Authority' (CPA).

The narrative is characterised by the CPA's incompetence, cultural insensitivity, and cronyism. Every one of the staffers appointed to the CPA was vetted for their loyalty to the President and the Republican Party - answers to questions such as "Where do you stand on Roe vs. Wade?" were deemed much more important than experience in post-war reconstruction, or indeed any experience, since staffers in their early to mid 20s were handed hugely complex tasks, such as rebuilding the stock exchange.

John Agresto was handed the daunting task of of rehabilitating Iraq's university system (375,000 students, 22 campuses), he:

...had no background in post-conflict reconstruction and no experience in the Middle East. The institution he ran, St. John's College in Santa Fe, had fewer than five hundred students. But Agresto was connected: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's wife had been on the St. John's board...

This is particularly appalling since the US had a vast talent pool to draw from - many Arab experts, post-conflict experts and experienced diplomats from the State Department were ignored. In fact, State was seen as the enemy since it was inhabited by too many Democrats.

Little cultural sensitivity or desire to involve Iraqis in their countries' reconstruction was shown by the CPA. Hundreds of Iraqi secretaries and translators were forced to eat in the dining hall, which was:

a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner.

CPA staffers mistakenly took their translators, who had good paying jobs with the CPA and plenty of good things to say about the occupation, as being representative of all Iraqis. Staffers lived in their own world inside the Green Zone where the power was reliable, the buffet full of American comfort food, and drinking was the main after-work activity:

Scores of CPA staffers, including women who had had the foresight to pack hot pants and four-inch heels, danced on an illuminated Baath Party star embedded in the floor.

The CPA made some major mistakes: Overzealous De-Baathification removed most of the educated and experienced people in Iraq from their jobs, including thousands of teachers. Standing down the army made thousands of trained soldiers instantly unemployed, which quickly resulted in the creation of a disenfranchised insurgent army. And a general approach of focusing on the minutae (such as a traffic code and patent law), when basic needs for safety, electricity, food and water had not been met, was greeted with understandable incredulity from the Iraqis.

I'm not sure how you go about making this book into an action movie with Matt Damon, but I'll let you know once I have seen it.

4.5 stars.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (5 stars)

What's it going to be then, eh?

Back in 2008 when I was trying to think of a name for this blog, I decided it should be the first line from one of my favourite books. After some deliberation I settled on this one, a question asked by Alex at the start of each of the three sections of the book, not only because I liked the book, but because it seemed appropriate for a book review blog.

The main reason I love this book is for its ingenious language. Burgess invents a slang language he calls nadsat for his teenage characters that consists of around 200 words, based mostly on Russian:

Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything.

After reading this I feel like govoreeting my horrorshow slovos to my droogs :)

The violence in the book is horrendous, which is the main reason I've never seen Kubrick's film adaptation. Alex's deep, ingrained love of 'the ultra-violence' and the advent of psychological conditioning as a 'cure' lead Burgess to pose the question:

Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Burgess makes it clear that he thinks Alex must be allowed to choose to be good. In the final (21st) chapter, Alex makes a startling turn-around. This chapter has become infamous because it was excluded from the US published version, and Kubrick also elected to leave it out of the film.

Some seem to think the final chapter is a cop out, but I disagree. I think it is a better ending - an enduring lifetime of unending violence seems unlikely for anyone, even a monster like Alex.

5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to giving the movie a viddy, and while it is a faithful adaptation of the book, I just don't think it is anywhere near as good. The crime and the city seemed much less apocalyptic than I imagined from the book, the nadsat slang was toned down, and I felt the whole thing should have just been...darker.

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (2.5 stars)

In Heat, Buford provides an interesting insight into life in a 3-star restaurant in Manhattan, and takes in a variety of prima-donna celebrity chefs and crazy kitchen characters.  The book begins with the author becoming a kitchen slave in Babbo, an Italian restaurant owned by Mario Batali.  Batali is one of the most famous chefs in the US: he had his own show Malto Mario on the food network, and was one of the regular competitors on Iron Chef America.

You first get a taste for the craziness that is to come when Buford describes the behaviour of Marco Pierre White, one of Batali's mentors:

Patrons ("fat ugly bastards") who ordered meat well done were an insult to the kitchen, and on two occasions Marco ordered them to leave his restaurant before they completed their meals...When someone ordered fried potatoes he was so insulted he prepared them himself and charged five hundred dollars.

Buford struggles with the heat and stress of the kitchen, injures himself fairly frequently, and comes home with hands so stinky that even after the Lady Macbeth treatment their odour wakes up his wife like smelling salts.

I found this early part of the book interesting, but it lost my attention as the author began to wander down some fairly boring paths.  I really don't care exactly when people starting using eggs to make pasta, and Buford's hunt through 15th and 16th century cookbooks was tedious.

I thought the book finished strongly with the mad Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini, who is the craziest and most interesting character Buford encounters.  I loved the descriptions of him dining in restaurants and blasting chefs for not sticking to the Tuscan letter of the law:

"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"

and his general attitude towards customers that deviates from the standard 'the customer is always right':

Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick.

I thought Buford did a reasonable job of writing a food book without making a verbal recipe book, but it failed to hold my attention for a significant portion of the story.

2.5 stars.

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta (1 star)

After reading the epic that is Shantaram, I was drawn to books about Mumbai, and encouraged by some glowing reviews.  Chandra and Mehta have both produced massive epic tomes, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them, although Maximum City is much, much better than Sacred Games.

Mehta starts out very strongly, with fascinating insight into what it is like to live in the 'Country of the No'.

India is the Country of the No.  That 'no' is your test.  You have to get past it.  It is India's Great Wall; it keeps out foreign invaders.  Pursuing it energetically and vanquishing it is your challenge.

Mehta is experiencing reverse culture shock by moving his family back to Mumbai after a number of years living in New York (note this is $US!!).

Coming from New York, I am a pauper in Bombay.  The going rate for a nice apartment in the part of south Bombay where I grew up in is $3,000 a month, plus $200,000 as a deposit, interest-free and returnable in rupees.

Mehta also reinforced the impression I got from Shantaram of the slums:

We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery.  What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community...A greater horror than open gutters and filthy toilets, to the people of Jogeshwari, is an empty room in the big city.

There are some brilliant insights into Indian life and politics, like when Mehta follows a local politician on the campaign trail.  The politician visits only the slums, because the rich don't vote:

From the wealthy section of Malabar Hill, the legal residents of the district, the turnout is twelve per cent; from the squatters in the slum colonies, for whom the issue of who comes into power means the difference between living in four walls or on the street, it's eighty-eight per cent...This is the biggest difference between the world's two largest democracies: in India, the poor vote.

Mehta's description of the systemic problems caused by the Rent Act is fascinating.  The Rent Act was introduced immediately after World War II to provide affordable housing and prevent price gouging by fixing rent at a court appointed rate.  As long as the tenant pays rent, they cannot be evicted, and the lease can be transferred to the tenants' heirs.  This law is now politically impossible to repeal, because there will always be more tenants than landlords, and the 2.5 million tenants in Bombay are the most powerful political lobby in the city.  The result is:

Some of the richest people in the city live in rent-controlled bungalows all around Malabar Hill, inherited from their grandparents and great-grandparents...The Greater Bombay region has an annual deficit of 45,000 homes a year...There are also 400,000 empty residences in the city, empty because the owners are afraid of losing them to tenants if they rent them out.

The section of the book that follows senior police officer Ajay Lal is also interesting and scary.  The justice system is broken and corruption is a way of life.  The courts are useless; there are no costs associated with filing lawsuits so the majority are frivolous and have created a huge backlog, which at the current rate will take 350 years to clear.  In this climate, the police kill criminals in 'encounters' as a fast form of justice.

For ordinary Mumbaikers, the only form of real justice available is from the gangsters, the bhais themselves:

The sense that justice can be obtained from the underworld is so pervasive that the phenomenon has reached its logical conclusion: in November 1999, a senior judge in Bombay himself approached Shakeel [a bhai] for his assistance in recovering forty lakhs that he was owed in a 'chit fund', an informal savings scheme.

As Mehta continues his fascination with the gangster 'shooters' and police 'encounter specialists' I began to lose interest.  Mehta seems to want to romanticize these dangerous characters and maintains a huge amount of reverence for them.  However, I do need to concede that a large part of that reverence would have been motivated by fear of what his words could mean for his family's safety, and I respect Mehta has been very brave in writing this book.

The introduction to the dancer 'Monalisa' is brilliant:

On a good night a dancer in a Bombay bar can make twice as much as a high class stripper in a New York bar.  The difference is that the dancer in Bombay doesn't have to sleep with the customers, is forbidden to touch them in the bar, and wears more clothes on her body than the average Bombay secretary does on the broad public street.

Unfortunately, this is the point the book really falls apart.  The 'Pleasure' chapter begins well, but soon starts to drag.  There is little interesting development, and the story degenerates into a boring verbose journalistic description of Monalisa's life.

Mehta goes on to treat interesting subjects (such as Bollywood) but just drags each subject out for too long.  The final chapter is the least connected to the others, and should have been dropped.

Overall, there are some brilliant sections in this book, and I learned a lot about Mumbai.  However, it is a horrendous read, and should have been at least 200 pages shorter.  What is it with unedited rambles about Mumbai?

1 star