Category: Editor’s pick

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle.

Now, lets get flush. A few small and weary ancestors hammered away at a short list of ideas. They are museum quality, priceless, with some entertainment value.

But you don’t want to get behind an idea. Not in heavy traffic. It is all over the road. It is in your face. In the right lane. In the left lane. In the right lane. Then, suddenly, without warning, it stops. In the middle of the road. Miles in front of the light. Sitting pretty on some double line, any double line.

For ideas, substitute patterns. Pro cogito ordo est.

Lou the autistic works for a company that makes weapons systems and other good stuff. He spends thousands of hours in front of a computer screen recognizing mathematically gross patterns within data fields. Patterns take the place of knowing how to think.

Lou sees patterns, Lou makes patterns, Lou is patterns.

28% of Lou’s patterns span Margot: a very pretty normal he talks to when he goes fencing at Tom’s house every Wednesday. 5% span shopping for groceries (Tuesday), 5% span driving to work (8:02 -8:25), 1% span cleaning his car (Saturday), 7% span going to Church (Sunday morning).

This is a monstrous book. A brilliant book. A good book.

It shows us inter alia that normality depends on the undaunted recognition of patterns: social signals, facial expressions, vocal tones, and on the order and organization of appropriate reactions to such patterns….

Maybe.

I just looked up “undaunted” to see whether it means the same as dauntless. The OED reads: undaunted: not daunted. No! You think? We autistics protest. Why don’t normals say what they mean? Why don’t words mean exactly? Why should mathematically coherent, numerically aligned, literal, pattern-recognizing beings kowtow to semantic ninniness. Aarrrrgh.

But we do.

Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz read by

A book for a long inside day waiting for a hurricane or a war…. about a
man wired by a dream not necessarily of being a cop but of being the good
guy in the uniform, a hacker-ette, and a dog….. and about dainty compassionate
dinner hour executions by Roy, your average, everyday, pre-hysterical,
mild mannered, FBI psychopath, who may, at any moment, shriek or squeal
or giggle or break into some shower scene, and kill his mother, his kindergarden
teacher, the nice little old lady next door…
Far from being a horrorist, K is a very very smart and funny New Englander
or the prototype of what a New Englander would be if he could write his
own language and grin. At the same time. Heald sounds like every crazy
on every highway on every rainy night. The reading is relentlessly funny,
deadpan, narcotic. The real question is: why, and how, Koontz turns suspense
into hope, and human faults into mating calls.

CHORUS:”Never lie to the dog”

Best Scene: Chinese Restaurant

Message: Hope comes from the difference between a government and a people.

Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith

It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre read by FRANK MULLER. An Original.

How did Muller know that the text could sound like this? How could he make words talk like this? And yet he does. Muller turns them up and over and around so that each one cries out: Me, look! Listen to me! Hear me. And having been read in such a way, by such a voice, a word, a text, remains unspeakable by any other voice.
One listens half-crouched, head tilted, just a little, toward the machine, the voice, because it is inconceivable or almost inconceivable that this is English. For how can one even open one’s mouth when there is someone who makes English like this, makes English sound like this….

Call For the Dead by John Le Carre Narrated by Frank Muller(!)

Smiley receives a letter from his ex, reads (“I want to make you an offer which no gentleman could accept. I want to come back to you. I’m staying at the Baur au Lac in Zurich till the end of the month. Let me know.”) and thinks:

“That was Ann. Let me know. Redeem your life. See whether it can be lived again and let me know. I have wearied my lover, my lover has wearied me. Let me shatter your world again, my own bores me. I want to come back to you…..” Let me know.

Posted By:  ()  Date: 02/11/2005 1:05 pm   Status: Open

DOLL by Ed McBain read by

Ed McBain’s DOLL  (Pouty D, drag the O, tongue heavy on the

L.)  is bedtime reading.

The warped, lusty, utterly female voice of this slut-goddess kicks you in
the groin, cuffs you to the radiator, and feeds you sex and ham sandwiches. You, or rather Steve Carella, who rarely gets tangled up with beautiful women who are not his wife.
“You belong to me, D-o-l-l” she says to Steve Carella. And you do. Or want to. As does Steve Carella, detective and good guy of the 87th precinct.
Because this dom, this pungent and powerful crook, and girlfriend of crook, tortures him,
addicts him to heroine and milks him for information. Incredible unequalled performance by a doll.

A Certain Justice by P.D. James read by Simon Prebble

It is rare to hear the barely conscious memories of a powerful woman reconnoitring the dimensions of a frustrated girlhood. The wooden, joyless father, the servile, fearful, nervous mother, the rules, the order, the manners, the placements, the positions, the positionings of the dinner table, extended to the smallest sensations of everyday life. The monstrous, unending oppression.

Is it an English oppression? Perhaps. There is the painful, unhappy education of a displaced intelligence, a displaced sex, a displaced class; the oblivion of a female among the ritual insensibilities of English law, the infinite isolation of a woman, divorced, middle-aged, groomed.

And there are the small contradictions of a rational woman, uncertain in the face of her irrationality, her daughter.

The Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake Read by William Dufris

 

‘…This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature… metallic, shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve with just a hint of not-maroon….’

Thinks Kelp, not-thinking, not-talking to himself in a kind of not-Bronx, not-Queens, not-Staten Island, in-your-front-lawn five-borough accent while looking for a car to steal in Long Term Parking at JFK. Specifically, a car with an MD plate, cause doctors know about cars you can survive.

This is a book for New Yorkers over 40 who remember Mayor Lindsay and the Bronx before Co-op city and Queens before Balkanization.

Be prepared to laugh unstoppably in the middle of supermarkets. While waiting in line for plywood, ready for the next hurricane. With a mouthful of anything beginning with the letter B.

WILLIAM DUFRIS doing 5 ex-cons planning the kidnapping-that would-go-wrong at bowling alley volume is gut-funny, rib-funny, crotch-funny. A book to be not-read, not-spoken but laughed out loud.

Remarkable.

Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon by Donna Andrews read by Bernadette Dunne

Geek gaming firm with mascots (wounded buzzard, psychopathic dog) sets up shop in small Western town but needs a Wendy to clean up and organize the Peter Pans. Enter Californian Meg Lanslow to clean up their books – and before she finds out whats going on everybody’s least favorite programmer is murdered…. Is it the shrink with a radio show who gives advice to lovesick husbands? Is it the nasty capitalist landlord? Is it one of the temps? Funny, witty and perfectly read by the singular voice of Bernadette Dunne.