81.
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford. The idea behind this book: Buford, a successful writer and editor for the New Yorker, decides to quit his day job and work in Mario Batali's restaurant Babbo. HIs experiences, both in the kitchen and in Italy (he travels there to learn the arts of pasta making and charcuterie) are entertaining and engaging, even if it's hard, as a reader, to view the entire journey as something that anyone but a dilettante could afford to undertake. Buford combines tales of the kitchen with biographical looks at many of the cast of characters. It's a fascinating book for anyone with a love of food or restaurants, and Buford is every bit as talented a writer as Batali is a chef*. Highly recommended.
82.
The Worst Team Money Could Buy: The Collapse of the New York Mets, by Bob Klapisch and John Harper. Although this book is primarily a chronicle of the debacle that was the 1992 Mets, it casts its net as far back as 1986, and is very much a history of the assorted peccadilloes of the team as a whole. Ron Darling and David Cone participating in foursomes? You got it. Kevin Elster scoring with an opposing player's girlfriend in the middle of a game? Check. Jeff Kent throwing a tantrum when he undergoes the traditional rookie hazing (even having witnessed Ryan Thompson undergo the same treatment)? It's in there. Jeff Torborg showing the worst managerial instincts in baseball history? Yep. "Born-Again" Tom Herr sexually harassing female reporters? Sure. It goes on and on. In the hands of lesser writers, this would be nothing more than a tell-all cheapie. But Klapisch and Harper do a masterful job of making most of the characters human, and of bringing us behind the scenes not only of a crippled baseball organization (Mcilvane, Cashen, and Harazin are every bit at fault for most of what goes on), but of the relationship between baseball journalists and the game they cover. Highly recommended for any baseball fan.
83.
Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear. Bear is a sneaky author. This book (which takes about twenty pages to really get going for me) starts out innocuously enough, appearing to be your standard Oppressed Alien Race Adventure Novel, with a little magic tossed into the sci-fi mix. But then she sneaks off and brings quantum physics into the mix, and throws some alien biology and sociology into the mix that catches me completely off-guard (and, for the first time in a long, long time, actually makes me want more POV from an alien race). The characters themselves aren't quite as engaging as in Bear's other novels (they start as archetypes, but they never evolve enough past that stage for me to really care who lives and who dies), but the plot and world-building here are more than enough to keep me going. Highly recommended.
84.
Cold Caller, by Jason Starr. The publicity folks must have had it in for Starr, tossing comparisons to both Jim Thompson
and Patricia Highsmith onto the cover. That's a but like comparing a new playwright to Ibsen and Marlowe, and expecting audiences to like him. In fairness, Starr is clearly influenced by both authors, although Bret Easton Ellis seems to be the primary source.
Cold Caller follows Bill Moss, a former ad exec, in his down-on-his luck days as a telemarketer. He's not quite a full sociopath or psychopath, but has elements of both, and eventually gets caught up in a heat-of-the-moment murder. The book is certain fun, but the pacing suffers a lot, and the characters just never pull me in. Still, it's a good plane (one coast only -- you'll need a bigger book if you're traveling cross-country) or beach read. Mildly recommended.
85.
The Intruders, by Michael Marshall (Smith). Short review: It's a novel by Michael Marshall Smith, and therefore good. Longer review: As with the previous books Smith published under his semi-pseudonymous "Michael Marshall" name, this isn't a tenth as good as any of his actual sci-fi works, but is still better than 99% of the similar works on the shelves. Once again, we've got an ordinary man sucked into a conspiracy that dates back centuries, but there's a more overt supernatural element throughout. The characters are all engaging, and the plot itself is tight. There's an unfortunate slight overlap with the mythology of
100 Bullets, something not helped by the presence of an enforcer named Shepherd, but there's more than enough divergence here to make that a minor issue. Less minor, of course, is the fact that even the best conspiracy thrillers (and this is one of those) are slumming compared to works like
Only Forward and
Spares. Highly Recommended, but still disappointing.
*Having eaten at Babbo years ago, I can safely say that this is NOT a backhanded complement. Batali is a superb chef.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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