Recently read:
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon
Simon’s account of the year he spent as a “police intern” with Baltimore’s Homicide Division. It’s a pretty amazing book, not least because the Baltimore Police Department actually allowed him to publish it. It’s a clear antecedent to The Wire (and it’s fun to read about some of the real anecdotes which were repurposed for that series), but they’re two very different works: Homicide is journalistic (meaning that what actually happened takes precedence over narrative cohesion—as Simon acknowledges in his afterword), while The Wire is dramatic (and so whatever happens does so purely for narrative purposes).
The Fuller Memorandum and The Revolution Business, by Charles Stross
The third book in the Laundry Files series and book five of the Merchant Princes series, respectively. They are thematically pretty similar, with bad situations progressively deteriorating, though that seems like more of a departure for the former than the latter. The Fuller Memorandum seems to have traded in some of the cheerful cynicism of the earlier books in the series for existential despair. Personally, this seems like a bad trade, though I wonder if this is intended to match the book’s model (for each book in the series, Stross takes stylistic and thematic cues from a classic British spy novelist: Len Deighton for the first book and Ian Fleming for the second, though I don’t know who the model for Fuller was; Le Carré maybe?). That being said, it is rewarding to finally get some more background on the CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN scenario that Stross has pointedly hinted at throughout the series.
As for the apparent direness of the situation in The Revolution Business, this seems entirely natural from a narrative standpoint: being the second-to-last book in the series, things were inevitably going to reach their lowest point in this book (though it’s unfortunate from a reader’s standpoint that the series has been broken up into so many volumes; it seems like half the words in Revolution are devoted to reminding the reader what happened in the earlier books).
The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry
This is one of the blurbs on the back cover: “Imagine P.G. Wodehouse consumed with lust and suffering from a bad hangover, and you have a pretty good idea of the tone of Stephen Fry’s very funny and wickedly irreverent second novel.” This is an obvious comparison, given that Fry played Jeeves in the BBC’s adaptation of Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster novels, but it suffers from the severe defect that it is impossible to imagine P.G. Wodehouse consumed with lust and suffering from a bad hangover. Nonetheless, Fry does share some of Wodehouse’s genius for both dialogue and untrustworthy but charming narrators and the deus ex machina ending is certainly reminiscent of many of Jeeves’ triumphs. In all, it’s a pleasant read.
