Sunday Book Review Double Feature

Two for the price of one today! What a bargain for you, as Eddie Murphy used to say….

I confess, they just happen to be the two books I read in the last two days. We tired of relying on the local Panda Express for our Asian take-home food, and got a recommendation for Golden Chopsticks in Pleasanton, conveniently on my way home from the office. Suffice to say it was so much better than Panda Express that my wife requested it again tonight, and I was happy to oblige.

I was happier to oblige than usual because both yesterday and today I stopped by an excellent used bookstore on the way to the restaurant so I’d have something to read while they cooked the food. Being a book addict had nothing to do with it, of course.

Today I picked up Robert Parker’s newest Spenser novel, School Days. I’ve written about Parker as a moral influence in my life before. But I have to admit that one other thing I like about Parker’s writing is its Hemingway-esque spareness. Simply put, Parker always makes for a quick read: I finished School Days in a few hours. While I wouldn’t say it’s the best Spenser novel since Early Autumn, as the blurb from the Washington Post claimed, it is one of his best. The high-concept line would be “Spenser and the Columbine kids.” For Spenser aficionados, there’s no Hawk and minimal Susan, but lots of Pearl. For everyone else, there’s a return to the well-crafted Spenser novels of the early eighties. With his recent stuff Parker’s sometimes seemed to be going through the motions, but this novel shows him back in top form.

Friday’s book purchase took longer to read. I started reading at the restaurant, read through dinner, kept going until I fell asleep, then started again this morning and finished it about ten am today. As a result I got to the office for some weekend work much later than I wanted — but it was well worth it for Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.

I’ve liked Crichton’s novels the most when they’re chock-full of footnotes and mini-lectures on this or that aspect of science or history — The Great Train Robbery is an excellent example — and State of Fear pushes this to an extreme. It’s a polemic disguised as a novel, and that’s a good thing in my opinion as Crichton’s message certainly was more widely read as a novel than if it had been published as a white paper or one of his speeches. (Check his speeches out, by the way — they’re quite good.) The plot of State of Fear is pretty much a throwaway — during the course of helping to stop an ecoterrorist plot to create massive environmental disasters for fundraising purposes our hero learns the truth about the “human-induced catastrophic global warming” concept — this aspect of the book in particular was consistently ridiculed by critics, and justifiably so, although it’s no worse than most recent thrillers. It’s well-written, though, and moves along smartly. I didn’t want to put it down.

There are a couple of useful essays at the end (including one pointing out the similarities between global warming and the similarly “scientific” eugenics movement) — and the annotated bibliography is simply wonderful. Crichton’s always been at his best making connections between wildly separated areas of intellectual inquiry — as a modern Renaissance scientist, if you will — and the bibliography does not disappoint. The delightful commentary by Crichton on most of the works cited is simply a bonus. If you haven’t read this book yet, you should.