I’m reading this…and this…and this…and, oh yeah, this too…

As per usual, I’m having a hard time reading one book to the end before picking up another.

Last week, I set aside Slackonomics and Real World, and for some reason started reading David Brin’s The Postman, a science fiction novel from the 80s that was the basis for that Kevin Costner movie, The Postman. It isn’t a very good movie but for some reason I have an attachment to it. Probably because it is of the post-apocalyptic variety, always a favorite of mine. Also, I rarely ever like science fiction novels. Somthing about the writing style of most SF writers doesn’t appeal to me. But I’m always on the look out for one I can get into. That happened this time.

Of course, for me, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the gold standard for this particular genre, if you can all it that. His novel is much darker than Brin’s, and thus much more realistic in my mind. Brin’s novel, while intersting, seems to unwilling to examine closely just how depraved human being can, and likely would, become under such circumstances.

It’s interesting how post-911 this fear has crept back into the  public consciousness. When I was in high school in the 80s, I fretted about nuclear war, as did many of my friends and I’m assuming other people my age. But I wonder if adults back then worried about it as much? I don’t recall anyone stockpiling supplies like water and food etc. Or keeping extra cash in the house. Or having on hand things like emergency packs from the Red Cross and crank-generated radios etc. Now they do, though. I know I do. In fact, I need to re-evaluate my families emergency kits and see what more is needed.

Somehow it seems like it was inevitable that the fears from Generation X’s youth would rear their ugly heads again in our adulthood, but maybe that is just standard GenX cynicism at work.

Anyhoo…back to my reading montage. Today, George Pelecanos’s new novel, The Turnaround, came out, so I’m reading that now too. Pelecanos is one of my favorite writers. For just a plain good story with great chracters, no one does it better. Pelecanos also wrote for the HBO series, The Wire, perhaps the greatest TV show ever!

What I’m reading

I never finished reading White Noise, by Don Dellilo. I could have but just didn’t. I didn’t really lose interest, just patience. I liked it. It was interesting. But there were other things that I wanted to read and it was taking too long to finish Whie Noise. I know when I’m done with a book. Sometimes I’ll persist to the end, but not this time. Sorry.

I’m still reading Slackonomics, and I’m still really digging it. Not only is it intelligent, but it’s funny too. That’s sexy.

I started reading a new novel, Real World, by Natsuo Kirino.

Dig that cover. Very cool.

Kirino is a Japanese author and she’s had two other novels translated into English. She’s writes a kind of noir that focuses on Japanese women. Real World is specifically about teenage girls:

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls become suspicious of a neighbor’s teenage son when his father is found brutally murdered and the young man disappears, unaware that all four of them will become caught up in the crime. (description from library catalog record)

Here’s the product description from Amazon.com, which dubs it feminist noir:

A stunning new work of the feminist noir that Natsuo Kirino defined and made her own in her novels Out and Grotesque.

In a crowded residential suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls indifferently wade their way through a hot, smoggy summer and endless “cram school” sessions meant to ensure entry into good colleges. There’s Toshi, the dependable one; Terauchi, the great student; Yuzan, the sad one, grieving over the death of her mother—and trying to hide her sexual orientation from her friends; and Kirarin, the sweet one, whose late nights and reckless behavior remain a secret from those around her. When Toshi’s next-door neighbor is found brutally murdered, the girls suspect the killer is the neighbor’s son, a high school boy they nickname Worm. But when he flees, taking Toshi’s bike and cell phone with him, the four girls get caught up in a tempest of dangers—dangers they never could have even imagined—that rises from within them as well as from the world around them.

Psychologically intricate and astute, dark and unflinching, Real World is a searing, eye-opening portrait of teenage life in Japan unlike any we have seen before.

I am familiar with her previous novels, but have not read them. I like noir and I like stories about teenagers so I thought I’d give Real World a try. So far I’m digging it. It has a kind of Brett Easton Ellis kind of quality to it. There’s a brutal murder of a woman and the narrator in the first part seem alternately terrified by and indifferent to it.