Punch and Judy Book Club (VI)
Kind of like the Richard and Judy book club... except not on TV, and nobody paid me to say anything nice if I don't want to.
It may look like it’s been quiet on the book front recently but no… it’s been busy with the kind of books there’s not a lot to speak about. Michael Connelly came back on my radar and I chewed up his Ballard/Bosch series over a few weeks.
Like I said, nothing to tell here aside from top quality cops and robbers… if you’ve followed Harry Bosch for the last twenty years (or however long it’s been), you know what you’re in for. I’ve had quite a few years away from him so it was good to catch up - but it still annoys the hell out of me that all crime book covers look the same.
But I have found books worth diving harder into as well. This week, let’s shine a torch on The Correspondence by J.D. Daniels.
In prose wound as tight as a copper spring, Daniels takes us from the highways of his native Kentucky to the Balearic Islands and from the Pampas of Brazil to the rarefied precincts of Cambridge, Massachusetts. His travelling companions include psychotic kindergarten teachers, Israeli sailors, and Southern Baptists on fire for Christ. In each dispatch, Daniels takes risks - not just literary (voice, tone, form) but also more immediate, such as spending two years on a Brazilian jiu-jitsu team (this one is my favourite) or participating in group psychoanalysis (where he goes temporarily insane).
This came out sometime in 2017, so it’s not new (thus, plenty of paperback bargains to be had) but it is fantastic. If you don’t believe me, here’s something he wrote for The Paris Review about being the last man on earth. I like this guy a lot but if you need two good reasons:
He doesn’t have a website or indeed any web presence at all that I can find which means he is cool as hell and doesn’t care.
He wrote the lines “What makes sense to me is man who would rather do his work and eat a jar of mustard than interrupt himself with a trip to the grocery.”
Stylistically, it reminds me of One More Thing by that Novak guy…
…which is also worth picking up, if for no other reason than he could be bothered - actually bothered - to make a trailer for the book. Remember when that was almost a thing? Then it turned out not to be because it is actually, quite a lot of work that publishers can’t be bothered to get involved with because it chips away at your fine margins.
One day the world will do what I want it to all the time and then, everything will be fine. This came out back in (maybe) 2013, so again, if you’re a cheapskate, you’ll probably find a copy at one of those online book depositories. You know the place - it’s where publishers send their books to be sold off cheaply if they haven’t sold a million copies within quarter of an hour or their release.