I #Read26Indy! (Books 24-26)

I know you were on the edge of your seat wondering - would I be able to finish all 26 books this year. It was down to the wire, and I still had a book to go. But I dug down deep, and read for hours and at the last minute, aka midnight last night, managed to finish my last book. Victory is mine. (Note: After writing this post and going to write out my full list of books, I noticed that I am terrible at math and actually read 27. Still, I thought I was about to hit that magical 26 number up until 5 minutes ago.)

It really seemed like a modest goal to read 26 books in a year. I'm a book person. I'll be honest, I've probably bought over 26 books this year, which is why I can't go into Half Price Books without a chaperone. And I've toned down my book-buying since I moved earlier this year and remembered just how heavy books are when you put a bunch of them in boxes. But life is busy - we're all so busy all the time and often I look back and can't remember just why I was so busy. It's easy to forget to read. Reading has always been important to me, ever since I was a little kid. It's a great way to exercise your imagination, and to put new information directly into your brain. It's like The Matrix, only, well, not.

So without further ado, here are the last three books I read for #Read26Indy:

24. The Immortal Class by Travis Hugh Culley

The longer you work out here, the sooner you begin to see yourself as somehow different, somehow exempt from the so-called universal laws of life and death. You become part of a class that, in order to continue, must believe itself unstoppable. This heightened feeling gives the messenger a confidence, a speed, and an agility of almost metaphysical proportions. 

This is one of those books that I bought a long time ago and always intended to read, but never cracked open. I bought it because I have all these ideas for stories and characters in my head, and one of them is a bike messenger, so I thought hey, I should read about bike messengers.

The Immortal Class is a memoir of Culley's journey from being a struggling worker in the art world, to being injured riding his bike, to becoming a bike messenger and sometime cycling activist, and eventually giving up messengering but keeping his passion for cycling. He observes the people he passes on the street and the city of Chicago as its own entity:

The city that once seemed so chaotic and wild to me now seems like a perfectly choreographed ballroom dance. I have learned to see in the city a distinct sense of order, a special geometry, a realm of necessity behind each unplanned lunge and skid. 

I alternately enjoyed and rolled my eyes at Culley's writing style. He is certainly the hero of his own story, and sometimes it was hard for me to see past his ego. He is always right. He painstakingly explains why it is totally fine for bike messengers to break all traffic laws, because their jobs would not be profitable if they had to stop like everyone else. He then gets furious with drivers for any perceived slight (though of course, any cyclist knows that some drivers are crazy so I will give him that). He explains that he was the top grossing bike messenger at his company, even with a bad knee, and tells the story of a messenger bike race that he won even against cyclists that are competitive the world over. It took me out of his storytelling sometimes and I wanted to tell him that yes, yes, you're the best, but that's not the interesting part of your story. That said, you must need a healthy dose of ego to make it as a bike messenger in a city like Chicago. I'm sure it would eat me alive.

25. Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked--and still get no further ahead. 

I totally hated this book. I'll just start with that. It was chosen for my book group, and the only reason I even made it halfway through was because I love the discussions we have, even when I dislike the book we've read. Sadly, the meeting date got changed at the last minute and I couldn't go to the new one. But I'd made it more than halfway through, and it was close to the end of the year with my 26 book goal bearing down on me, so I was determined to finish it. It's not a long book, but it felt like it.

This book is built around the concept of observing a man's life in reverse. The narrator is somehow transported into a man's mind (we never know how or why, its not important), a man he has never met, and he watches as the man lives his life backward. He starts as an old man, and slowly gets younger as the book progresses. Instead of clipping his fingernails, he retrieves clippings from the trash and magically reattaches them to his fingernails with the clippers. You don't want to know how he eats. Conversations are had in reverse, which made the reading drag. The words of a sentence are spelled out in proper order, but the sequence of sentences is backward, so to understand what's being said, the reader has to read the conversation twice, once forward, and once backward. It gets frustrating because once in a while the narrator seems to be aware that he's observing this life going backward, but most of the time, even after observing this man for many years, the narrator still notes offhand the strange way that people return food to the store and receive payment from the cashier, as though he still doesn't get it. It's obnoxious - if your reader gets it, most of the time your narrator who is seeing the exact same thing should be able to get it too. I wanted to get up and yell - yes, we get it, get on with the story already!

The unfortunate thing is that the book is incredibly boring. Minor spoiler here: the man is eventually revealed to be an Nazi doctor. This should be a big reveal, but there was no big moment of revelation. It was more of an, oh. We watch holocaust victims come backward out of the gas showers and it should be horrific, or invoke some emotion, but it just feels flat and at a far distance. The author wrote, in the afterward, that it had been his goal to write a novel about a man's life in reverse, that he only later decided to apply this idea to a story around the Holocaust, and that showed in the novel. He didn't really care about the man's story, only about the plot device. I'm fine with a writer using some unusual approach to write a novel, but the novel also has to be interesting. This one, well, it was not. It didn't offer any insights, we don't feel anything really for or against the man we're watching, other than mild dislike. I needed more.

26. World of Trouble by Ben Winters

I can't solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can't end with the crime unsolved, that's all there is to it, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember. 

Here it is: number 26. It's appropriate that it's the third in the Last Policeman trilogy written by Ben Winters, since his class was the first writing class I took in years, back just last winter. I started #Read26Indy by reading the first in this trilogy, and I think they really get better as they go along.

It's impossible to write about the third in a trilogy without giving some things away, so if you're planning on reading this trilogy and you want to be completely surprised, you should probably close your web page now, even though I won't give away the ending of this particular novel.

We're back with our protagonist and hero, Hank Palace, who was a young policeman promoted up to detective after it was announced that an asteroid is going to hit the earth and probably will kill everyone on it. That's what makes the book unique - it's a micro-level tale. It's not about stopping the asteroid and saving the planet, though the book hints about that just enough to make you think that maybe it's going to change course and become some action hero Armageddon story. It's about Palace, who has been let go from his job along with many others, dealing with the impending catastrophe by trying to impose some sort of order, in some small way. Palace's little sister Nico is part of an underground group that believes they are privy to secret information about a way to stop the asteroid. Palace thinks the idea is idiotic, but he loves his sister. This third installment in the trilogy has Palace trying to find his sister, with less than a week until impact. He has two sidekicks - a little dog and a thief named Cortez.

This is the book where I realized that Palace is just as lost as everyone else. Before it seemed like he was being noble, trying to solve crimes when no one else cared. But in this book it becomes clear that everything is falling apart around him and the only thing keeping him sane is to follow the clues to find his sister. He has no real plans about what he'll do once he finds her. It's the journey that keeps him going.

I won't talk about the ending, but it felt right. I worried that at the last minute Winters would throw in some big hollywood ending, but he stayed true to his character. This was the first one of the three books that had me reading late into the night when I should have been asleep, and thus it was a fitting finish to my year of reading. I recommend reading this trilogy, and I think the kindle version of the first novel is on sale at Amazon right now though I don't know for how long - or support local and go get the books from Indy Reads Books instead.

That's it for my year of reading, but I feel happy about hitting that arbitrary 26 book goal. Finishing a goal right before the deadline, that's the stuff. Happy New Year everyone.