Death of a beach bunny

another baby boomer icon gone.
RIP Annette Funicello!

Review of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the orld by Hauki Murakami

Call this Inception by way of The Wizard of Oz.  In fact, readers that loved either of those movies should embrace Murakami’s work which mixes a stylized reality with a dream world populated by people from the “reality.” The protagonist is a "calcutec," a human data processor perhaps inspired by William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic.

The book slipstreams between science fiction, hardboiled noir, cyberpunk, horror, and literary fiction.  (There’s definitely a little Franz Kafka here.)  It's a dazzling, dizzying bit of writing that fits nicely into the "new weird" typified by China Mieville’s The City and the City, where two different worlds exist simultaneously in the same place.

Murakami is working with a palette that includes ambiguity, consciousness, and self.  In both sections of the book, the hero (an unnamed Narrator) is an outsider who’s being kept off-balance and trying to fit in. 

Perhaps the best way to read the book is to see it as a spy story in the Bourne Identity mold.  The Calcutec is a pawn in the info-war going on between the System and the Factory, and he ends up in End of the World severed from his shadow, the repository of memory.  The scenes where the narrator tries to help the librarian remember are filled with a delicate emotion that could be intense in performance.  (This material could easily be adapted into a play, with the different locations indicated by differing lighting.)

This novel is literate, adult entertainment with an edge of magic and a veneer of science fiction; a romp through the tropes of pop culture, and cross-culturally (and self-consciously) hip, in an almost cinematic way. In the end, this is a brilliant book.

Two Thumbs Way Down--roger Ebert is dead

RIP Roger Ebert

Somewhere in a box in my office is a photograph of my best friend Connie posing with Roger Ebert at the first Sundance film festival we went to. It's a terrible picture. ((I took it.) The lighting was bad and people were jostling around us and though Ebert was very gracious, it was clear he had other places to be and other things to do. The picture was taken before the cancer that took Ebert's jaw and then his voice and now his life. I am so glad that picture exists.
 I never missed watching Ebert and his much-missed colleague Gene Siskel on their show. After Siskel died, it just wasn't the same, no matter how many guest co-hosts they tried out or whoever ended up sitting across the aisle from Ebert eventually. I loved reading Ebert's witty tweets and the journal entries he began posting when he lost his voice. People are posting some of their favorites of these essays--the one he wrote about being an alcoholic, the one he wrote about loneliness and the Internet--and rereading them, I am newly filled with admiration for his clean, clear prose and thoughtful insights.  Vaya con Dios Roger.

Attention Bookies--L.A. Times Festival of Books this weekend!

The annual festival takes place this weekend, April 20-21. As always, admission is free. And as always, "books are just the beginning."  This year the festival is located on the USC Campus. Writers and others who'll be attending/performing include Paul Anka, Margaret Atwood, Philip Kerr (The Berlin Noir trilogy), Elinor Lipman, and Eric Van Lustbader. See all the details here.

Could you pass a US Citizenship Test?

That's a question the Christian Science Monitor is asking today and they've posted the test here.  Considering the heat of rhetoric surrounding the issue of immigration reform, it's a nice reality check.

Atomic Noir--

Somehow it seems like the time is right to pick up a copy of Atomic Noir, a collection of crime stories set in a time steeped in paranoia and suspicion when school kids practiced duck and cover drills and new homes came with fall-out shelters. Presented by Out of the Gutter books and Lou Boxer of Noir Con and featuring a roster of names you know, Atomic Noir features stories short enough to read by the battery-powered flashlight you keep in your emergency kit.(You do have an emergency kid don't you?)

Charlotte E. English wants to give you books!

charlotte E. English, one of my co-conspirators in the Drifting Isle Chronicles, is celebrating spring with discounts and giveaways of her books. Check it out here.