Recent Light Reading
Private eyes and Floridians and kaiju, oh my!
Some kind of heavy stuff earlier in the week, so let’s head into the weekend with something lighter. Specifically, some quick comments on a few of the books I’ve been reading to unwind…
The Monkey’s Raincoat by Robert Crais: This is the first book in the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, which was recommended by my mother after my recent flurry of Harlan Coben books. She reads a lot of this stuff, and they had the first one in paperback at B&N when I stopped in a couple of weeks ago, so I gave it a shot.
This is a private eye novel set in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Elvis Cole, the narrator, is a Vietnam vet who runs a small detective agency with his partner Joe Pike, who is rarely present, preferring to run a gun shop elsewhere, but who can be counted on when heavy firepower is called for. He’s hired by a woman whose husband and young son have disappeared, and of course digging into it reveals a lot of squalid and violent crime-novel-in-LA stuff. It moves along briskly, and Cole’s patter is very enjoyable. I’ll definitely read more of these, and may in fact make another bookstore run soon.
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen: Another one I picked up on that B&N run. when I started reading it, some aspects seemed familiar, but then again, they were mostly stuff that was described in the cover copy. I was about halfway through before I said “No, this is more than just a vague familiarity” and thought to check the Chateau Steelypips library where, sure enough, I found the hardcover copy I bought back when this first came out.
(This, by the way, marks me as very much my mother’s son. She’s famous in the family for reading books really fast, but also tends not to remember whether she’s read a given book before. Way back when I was walking to school in the snow dodging woolly mammoths, our local library had a system where each patron had a code number that they would write on the card when they checked it out, so when she’d find a book that looked interesting, she’d first have to check the card to make sure she hadn’t already read it. When they switched to a bar-code system, and dropped the code numbers, it wreaked havoc.)
In the end, other than feeling like a dumbass, this wasn’t a major problem, because I didn’t remember the plot in any great detail. And you don’t read Hiaasen novels for the intricate plotting, anyway— they’re really about texture as much as anything else, just a series of setpieces where zany Floridians meet messy ends in quirky ways. This is just as satisfying on a re-read as the first time through.
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi: Scalzi’s latest, out just last week, which was instantly delivered to my phone, breaking my string of reading on paper. Which I think is probably going to resume, because I really was strikingly more distracted while reading this than reading the previous two— it’s really hard to resist the temptation to swipe over and check my Twitter notifications when it’s right there. I may be investing in a cheap e-ink reader in the very near future.
This follows the adventures of one Jamie Grey, who we meet being fired from a tech-industry job as the Covid-19 pandemic starts. Some gig economy work introduces Jamie to a guy who needs to hire someone on very short notice to “lift heavy things” as part of a field-work project involving “large animals.” It pays extremely well, so Jamie signs on, and as you will have guessed from the title, ends up on a parallel Earth as part of a project to study kaiju. And then, as they say, hijinx ensue.
This was fun, but kind of slight, which is pretty understandable in terms of reasons that Scalzi explains in a detailed afterword. That slightness also, unfortunately, makes some of Scalzi’s authorial tics a little harder to ignore than they might be in a book with a bit more meat on the bone, as it were. The contemporary satirical elements were also a little too on-the-nose for me, but then I’m exceptionally picky on that score, so season to taste.
On the plus side, slightness is actually a bit of a positive feature for my current reading purposes. And this is a book whose title promises a secretive organization dedicated to the study and protection of toothy and tentacled organisms the size of office buildings, and it 100% delivers on that. So if that sounds like a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy this.
And that’s what I’ve been reading to unwind. Here are some buttons:
And if you have thoughts on any of these, or recommendations of novels in the Coben/Crais/Hiaasen vein, the comments will be open (and I’ll try putting a more prominent comment link here, to see if that generates more of a response…)
I really prefer reading on my Kindle paperwhite (light reading, not technical books). Keeps me from getting "notification distraction" and the screen is big enough so that I don't feel ridiculous reading with large enough type for my old eyes. Looking forward to the new Scalzi book in particular.
Crais is fabulous ... but the biggest payoff comes with the later books. Envious that you are only now beginning.