The Fool’s Run – John Sandford (September)
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer – John Markoff (September)
The Hot Kid – Elmore Leonard (August)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling (August)
The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova (July)
The System of the World – Neal Stephenson (June)
The Twelfth Card – Jeffery Deaver (May)
All the Flowers Are Dying – Lawrence Block (February)
The Broker – John Grisham (February)
State of Fear – Michael Crichton (February)
Tag Archives: Lawrence Block
Reading List: 2004
Stab in the Dark, Lawrence Block (December)
Distraction, Bruce Sterling (October)
Florence of Arabia: A Novel, Christopher Buckley (October)
The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (September)
Rain Fall, Barry Eisler (September)
We the Media, Dan Gillmor (August)
R is for Ricochet, Sue Grafton (August)
Skinny Dip, Carl Hiaasen (August)
The Stone Monkey, Jeffery Deaver (July)
Live Bait, P. J. Tracy (July)
Hidden Prey, John Sandford (June)
Note: This post has been predated so that it would appear in 2004. 8/16/05
Turn the page
I’m a long-time fan of the novels of Lawrence Block and have read most of them. From time to time I come across one that had been out of print. Spotted two Matthew Scudder novels yesterday (A Stab In The Dark, and Time To Murder And Create) and snapped them up. Matt Scudder is a New York private investigator (no license) with a serious drinking problem. He’ll go on a bender and then suffer nasty hang-overs. In later novels, Matt joins AA and, finally, gets his act together.
Time To Murder And Create was written in 1976 and Matt is still boozing. When I first read these stories, it was almost painful and certainly depressing to “watch.” Having read all of the later Scudder novels, I know that everything works out for Matt. He gets sober. Meets the perfect woman (for him). And finds some peace.
It’s nice to think that someone is re-reading our stories and knows what happens to us down the road. Our Cosmic Author simply has no way to tell us everything is going to be all right. Or that it isn’t. Or, maybe we aren’t listening. I choose to believe my author prefers happy endings.
Somebody else’s hair
“Nothing gives you the upper hand like knowing the other guy is wearing somebody else’s hair.”
— Lawrence Block’s The Burglar on the Prowl.
Death
One of my first posts was a quote from Lawrence Block’s Everybody Dies:
“When you die, it is said you see your whole life. But you don’t see it minute by minute, like a speeded-up film. It’s like everything you ever did in all your days was a brushstroke, and now you see the whole painting all at once.”
Poet Billy Collins has a different view:
I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.
From The Art of Drowning