Beer 'splosions!

Today, I nearly died.  

Let me explain:

According to the tags on my blog posts, I've been homebrewin' beer for nearly eight years now.  Gotta admit, I've lost enthusiasm for the process - for Goodness' sake, there's so many local craft brews available now, what can I do that's different - and for updating this blog for each batch I've brewed.  But I was still at it, off and on.

The last few batches have been, well, meh.  I've been following the same process and, frankly, to quote the great BB King, the thrill was gone.  But I hung in there, even though the last batch was over-carbonated and dang near un-drinkable.  Homebrew aficionados can weigh in all they want about the myriad of reasons why that happened and I won't care:  I sanitize, I use kits, I follow the instructions with the kits.  To do more would take what's left of the fun in the process and turn it into something awful:  work.

But I choked that batch down.  And recently made a new batch from a different kit.  Same results:  over-carbonation.  I could live with that.

Until today.  Forced to take a sick day due to tummy trouble, I still had manly chores to do and when I dragged bags of garbage to the garbage bins outside the garage, I found the remnants of a beer bottle, the top third of the bottle with the cap intact, on the garage floor.

Gulp.

A bottle of homebrew had exploded.

In all this time, that had never happened before.  Suddenly, my homebrewing world had been turned upside down.  I could trust nothing of what I had brewed.

So, carefully, like in all those scenes in movies where the bomb expert de-fuses the bomb - do I cut the green wire or the yellow wire only there were no wires to cut - I carefully de-capped each bottle of beer I had bottled 10 days ago - a total of 40 or so bottles - and sweated the outcome of each and every one.  The tension was nightmarish.  

I don't know if it was the tummy trouble or the stress of de-fusing 40 potential bombs, but when I was through, I was sweat soaked and about ready to collapse from nervous exhaustion.  But I was alive!  By golly, I was alive!

If I want to continue this hobby, it's clear it's time to replace my bottles and re-think my process.  But I'm a different man than I was eight years ago and while I don't doubt the urges of my younger self to, by gosh, brew my own beer, that fire has died.  Why not just go into my local liquor store and choose a six pack from a local brewery and be happy?

It's good to be alive.  

Beautiful Endings

I haven't read a lot of short stories or novels but I've managed to read a few and I'm often struck by how many of those I've read have such beautiful endings and how much I love them for their shear beauty alone.  (Yes, my favorite remains Ernest Hemingway, who may be master of the dying fade - could you end your novel better than "Yes," I said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" or "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." or "He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."?  But this isn't a post about Hemingway.)

The 'net is full of posts listing the top 10 or 20 or 30 final lines of literature.  I could argue against a few of them but what's the point?  You have your favorites; I have mine.  Let us live together in beautiful story ending peace.

But I bring this up because as part of a free trial of audible books, I downloaded and listened to Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It.  While there are many beautiful passages that caught my ear - as well as a nice aside about the use of the word "beautiful" and how the father uses the word to describe the younger brother - I started thinking about beautiful endings to stories and novels that I love most.  I have room for only a few so let me start with what's probably the indisputable loveliest ending to a short story:

Yes, the news­pa­pers were right: snow was gen­eral all over Ire­land. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, fur­ther west­wards, softly falling into the dark muti­nous Shan­non waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely church­yard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and head­stones, on the spears of the lit­tle gate, on the bar­ren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the uni­verse and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the liv­ing and the dead.

The Dead

James Joyce

Here's another:

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eyes in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming — Diana and Helen — and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

Goodbye, My Brother

John Cheever

Beautiful, agree?  I thought you would.

But let me get back to the reason for this post in the first place.  Though this isn't an ending, this is a lovely passage from A River Runs Through It and it really hit close to home for me  - never mind why.  It's part of a sermon given by the Presbyterian minister father of the narrator of the story and it's the key to the entire story:

Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Which performs the duel duties of not only being beautiful but pretty much sums up our Christian belief.

But, no, what caught my ear was this: 

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. 

I am haunted by waters.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean

Beautiful, no?  And, c'mon, isn't that enough?  Beauty for the sake of beauty?

Oh, my brothers and sisters, how could you disagree?

(I don't think there's a coincidence that two passages I find beautiful have to do with brothers, or, at least, family members.  Tolstoy was right:  all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.  So it's no wonder that our most powerful stories have to do with our most powerful relationships: those relationships we have with our families.)  

Something Positive About the Christian Faith in Mainstream Media

In my view, Yahoo.com seldom links to anything positive about Christians so I'm thankful they made exception with this story about about how the Christian faith of Stephen Colbert and Vice-President Joseph Biden helped them through terrible personal tragedies.

The story has additional interesting links about Colbert's faith but my favorite is this Catholic throwdown between Colbert and rocker Jack White  (Caution, my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters, the two use naughty language in a way that may not be comfortable to your ears.):

Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

Hey, Look, I'm Posting This From my Kindle

Not that I'll make it a habit - I'm not terribly fond of the virtual keyboard. But it's good to know I can do it should I choose to do so.

A New Year

Another day, another month, another year, and another attempt to dust this blog off and resurrect it again.  Yeah, yeah, I've said that before, but this time, well, I won't say I mean it because I've meant it all those other times before.  Let's just say here's another renewed commitment to tend this blog and let it go at that.  Let's see where the new year takes us.

Defender of the Innocent: The Casebook of Martin Ehfrengraf - Book Review

I wanted to like this one - it's no secret I'm a fan of Lawrence Block and since I knew everyone would be reading his A Walk Among the Tombstones in anticipation of the movie (you've read the book, haven't you?  And seen the excellent move?  No?  Take my advice:  treat yourself to both.), I wanted to try something of his I hadn't read.  I was familiar with this character and may have even read an Ehfrengraf story or two in the dim past so I thought, why not?  Block hasn't let me down yet.

And he hasn't let me down with this book, either, I guess.  It's just not my thing.  Ehfrengraf is a defense attorney who, well, like the title says, defends the innocent.  Even if they're guilty.  And he'll stop at nothing to prove their innocence.  Which is the hook - how will Ehfrengraf be able to prove his client's innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence?  He's no Perry Mason and his methods are unconventional to say the least but after a story or two, you get what this is all about.  While he may come across as dapper and charming, he's a sociopath and I have no desire to read about sociopaths.

Block is skillful as always, keeping the action offstage but telling the stories in a way to keep you interested and so I admired that.  But I have to admit, I found myself trudging to the end and if it weren't for my goal to give the entire book a chance, I wouldn't have given the entire book a chance.  Block is a great writer.  This isn't a great book.

(I bought the Kindle version - I'm not sure there's a print edition - and I'm not sure if I'm pleased with the experience.  It's there on my Kindle if I want to re-read it again but I won't so now what do I do with it?)

Tatiana: Book Review

Tatiana is the latest in the Arkady Renko series written by Martin Cruz Smith.  (I mentioned briefly here the last book I'd read in the series.  To see all of my reviews on this series, click here.  Yeah, I like 'em.)  I liked this one as well as any in the series - no, it can't compare to the first but then none of them can - and you wouldn't do badly if you decided to dip in at this point.  As with all series, the asides and digressions will catch you up on who's who and what's happening but if you've been following the series, you may find these explanations tedious.  I did but then I always find these sections of a series book to be tedious.

Yep, there's a good mystery to be solved at the core and you'll probably figure it out before Renko does but go along for the ride anyway if you want to see the corruption of modern-day Russia and learn something along the way about Kaliningrad and chess and code-breaking and even high-class racing bicycles.  Smith's (Cruz Smith's? - I never know where to look for his books, under the C's or the S's) writing is smooth and swift and the story carries you along to a, well, not very spine-tingling climax but then you really didn't another shoot out did you?  No complaints:  the loose ends are tied up and all the characters accounted for and the pieces left in place for the next Arkady Renko adventure.

I'm looking forward to it.

Books I've Read

According to this blog, it's been well over a year since I've read a book but that presumes a truth to the philosophical question:  if a book review is unposted, does that mean a book hasn't been read?

Ha!  I've read books.  I just haven't posted about them.  Here's a list, in no particular order, of what I've read in the last 16 months or so:

Stephen Hunter's latest Sniper's Honor.  Bob Lee Swagger learns about a Russian, female sniper from World War II which, of course, has modern day repercussions.  Plenty of shooting and sniper lore and a harrowing, surrealistic battle scene between Nazi tanks and Commie tanks.  You haven't read anything like this before.

Lawrence Block's The Thief Who Counted The Spoons.  Delightful, but then the whole series is which meant I had to re-read the other 10 Bernie Rhodenbarr novels in the series to confirm it. and that lead me to re-read A Ticket to the Boneyard, which is anticipation of the upcoming movie of his book, A Walk Among the Tombstones which should be pretty good.  I mean, it's Liam Neeson against the bad guys.  What more could you want?

For some reason I turned back to Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park.  I've blogged here about the rest of the series but you don't really know how good the first was until you go back there and see for yourself what Smith managed to do.  As good as the series is, the first is the best.  

I don't know why I read Robert Harris' The Ghost.  I've like his other stuff:  Fatherland, Enigma, and Pompeii, all of which I must've read before this blog since I don't see where I posted my thoughts on these before.  But I'd blogged about the movie, which I liked, despite many reasons not to, and I read the Kindle version which means I must've gotten a deal on it.  Whatever.  I enjoyed it.  I especially liked the behind-the-scenes look at ghost-writing and the publishing world.  Nice twist at the end, too.

Both volumes of Hemingway's Complete Letters.  (Link goes only to the first volume but you can get to the second volume from there.)  Sorry.  For aficionados only.  

So by my count that's 17 books or a little over a book a month.  Not much of a pace but it'll do.

Blogging

Holy, moly, it's been a lifetime since I've updated here.  Blake was good enough to challenge me for the funny stuff last month and though I'm loathe to disappoint him, looking back over these posts I see there's a disappointing amount of funny and an overwhelming amount of banality.  Sorry, friend Blake.  Let me try to do better.

I started this blog for a reason - I just can't remember what it was.  Oh, right.  Here's the reason.  And here's the first post, six long years ago.  And here's a secret:  I'd actually started this blog way before that first post.  For some reason, I'd deleted the first version and so the first posts are now down the memory hole.

I've title this post "Blogging" and tagged it that way as well, but I see I've used that tag 82 times - 83, now - and I seem to blog a dismayingly amount about not blogging.  Which I'm doing now.  But with Twitter and Facebook, has blogging become obsolete?

Could be.  Those social media platforms offer a lot and I've found myself over there to be far more active than I have been over here.  Why?  I can't rightly say.  Both platforms offer an immediacy, and an audience, that I don't get over here on Blogger but this blog is where I started and I really should either stoke the fires over here or give it up altogether.

Which is all to say, I really need to get back to blogging.  Some things just won't work on Twitter or Facebook.

Hello? Is This Thing On?

I went out to get chocolate malts for everyone and I noticed the Blockbuster next to our local Braums was closed and for good.  I know, I know, the Blockbuster closings happened long ago but the boarded up windows brought the sense of finality home.  And I was struck, too, that this was the end of something more than just an obsolete method of entertainment delivery.  No longer would there be those thrilling days of when you having two little girls race excitedly among the aisle looking for the one - okay, two, all right, three - VHS tapes, and later, DVDs - that would mark the beginning of a long weekend or the threat of a snowstorm or any other reason that would find us in that store.  We'd stopped going there a long time ago and we weren't the only ones who'd stopped going and after a lot of not going the reason for the demise of Blockbuster becomes pretty clear.  And those little girls are grown up now and we get our videos on demand through our cable service so there's a lot that's long, long gone.

And then The Byrds' Turn Turn Turn pops up on Pandora on the way out of the parking lot and pretty much sums up this entire post.  That season is gone.  Time for new seasons.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming - Book Review

Rod Dreher, in his very moving elegy to his sister, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, wants you to know this about her:

A long time ago - I must have been about seven years old, which would have made Ruthie five - I did something rotten to her.  What it was, I can't remember.  I teased her all the time, and she spent much of her childhood whaling the tar out of me for it.  Whatever happened that time, though, must have been awful, because our father told me to go lie down on my bed and wait for him.  The could mean only one thing:  that he was going to deliver one of his rare but highly effective spankings, with his belt.

I cannot recall what my offense was, but I well remember walking down the hallway and climbing onto the bed, knowing full well that I deserve it.  I always did.  Nothing to be done but to stretch out, face down  and take what I had coming.

And then it happened.  Ruthie ran into the bedroom just ahead of Paw and, sobbing, threw herself across me.

"Whip me!" she cried.  "Daddy, whip me!"

Paw gave no spanking that day.  He turned and walked away.  Ruthie left too.  There I sat, on the bed, wondering what had just happened.

Forty years later, I still do.

What follows is the story not only of Ruthie and her Little Way of living a Christ-like life in the face of certain death, but a portrait of Dreher's family, the town - St Francisville, Louisiana - in which he was born, and the people with whom he grew up.  Dreher explores the evolution of his faith and his tendency to over-intellectualize everything and compares it with his sister's simpler, more straightforward approach to hers.  It's the difference between thinking about living a good life and actually living that life.

I was an admirer of Dreher's when he was with National Review but I lost track of him during his Crunchy Con days and when he moved on to write editorials for The Dallas Morning News.  I don't know how I found him again but it was shortly after the death of Ruthie and I've been following the living and the writing of this book since its inception.  Dreher bothers me at times with his intellectualism but there's no doubt of his feelings for his sister or his faith in Christ.  This book is a work of love for both.

You're guaranteed to weep.

The Third Bullet - Book Review

Goodness me, has it really been over four months since I last posted a book review?  I suppose it has, though I must admit to having re-read Stephen Hunter's Soft Target during that time.  Is that all?  I guess so.  But it's more a testament to my inability to find anything worth reading rather than being too busy to read anything.  And if I don't post about it, it didn't happen.  So I'll have to plead guilty and try to do a better job and read more books.

So since the last book I've read was by Stephen Hunter, it seems only appropriate that I've come roaring back with Stephen Hunter's latest, The Third Bullet.  A tale of the Kennedy assassination, Hunter isn't a conspiracy theorist and claims to be an believer in the Warren Commission Report and Bugliosi's and Posner's conspiracy debunking but he takes the set of known facts, looks at them through the eyes of a well-seasoned sniper, twists a motive here, adds a character there, and gives us an entirely plausible new theory to ponder.  Sure, it's fiction, but why couldn't things have happened the way Hunter describes?  (Hunter has some fun with the conspiracy theorists by detailing one theory of how a second shooter came from the future, a plot device right out of Terminator.  And, if you think about it, it's not too far-fetched.  If you believe in time travel.)

But forget all that.  You want to know if Hunter brings the shoot-em-ups and the best writing you're likely to find on guns and ammunition and sniper-ing.  Dang straight he does.  He takes great delight in killing off his first victim - a thriller-writer whose series' main character is a lot like Swagger.  Hmmm.  Who could this be?  (In interviews, Hunter denies any other purpose than to get the plot a'rollin'.  I think he's a bit too self-satisfied with that explanation.)  But most importantly, Hunter brings back Bob Lee Swagger and even for a few lines Swagger's father, Earl.  Fans, like me, of the Swagger mythos will rejoice and believe the ultimate reason why Swagger investigates the assassination:  no, not because of Kennedy but because of another government official who, like Swagger's daddy, was gunned down while doing his duty.

A slam-bang effort at taking another look at a popular myth.  (Okay, not myth - the assassination actually happened - but the events of that dreadful day have reached a near-myth level in this country.)

Time to Link to My "Ten Reasons Why I Should Be Preparing Your Tax Return and Not Turbo-Tax" Post

Yep, it's that time of year.  I don't have anything to add other than to note that with the recently passed tax package, tax returns aren't getting any easier to prepare and won't be in the future.  I can help.

Ten Reasons Why I Should Be Preparing Your Tax Return and Not Turbo-Tax:

Graveyard Special - Book Review

The first line of James Lileks' Graveyard Special is worth the price of admission alone:

I poured the coffee, Dick wrecked the eggs.

I've been a longtime fan of James Lileks and I'd go just about anywhere he'd take me.  Essentially a light mystery, it's really Lileks' fictional remembrance of his college days in late 1980 in Dinky Town in Minneapolis.  Interweaving actual events with his plot-line, Lileks takes us for a nice little tour of this special place and time in his life, casting off memorable one-liners like he does in his columns and blog.  Novelist isn't Lileks primary profession - yes, yes, I know, he's published novels before but that's been a long time and the samples I've ready show he had yet to develop his novelist skills -  and it shows it parts with some lagging action and only mildly confusing plot-age.  The first in a promised series of linked novels, he's bound to improve.  I liked his asides on pop culture - the music of the time, the transition from pinball to video games - and the portrait of his protagonists parents was especially loving.  All this and a smashing climax with a Zamboni.   What else could you ask for?

 (This was second experience with Kindle reading and, like my first Kindle experience, it was equally meh.  I'll blame it on using my iPhone Kindle - after all, thousands of Kindle users can't be wrong, can they? - because who wants to read a book on their phone?  I do, apparently, since I haven't yet sprung for an actual Kindle.  But my limited experiences with this e-reader technology have been underwhelming.  I frankly don't see what the Kindle fuss is all about.  Sure, I got Graveyard Special at a good price and I was able to carry it around with me wherever I carried my phone but it turns out I carry my phone to all the same places I would have carried a dead-tree book.  Now I'm stuck with it.  I can't toss it up in the attic where stacks of other books gather dust or sell it at a discount book store or give it away as a gift to someone.  It just sits there on my phone.  Now what?)

Bob Greene's Quiet Comeback

I was a big fan of Bob Greene's before his fall 10 years ago but I'm glad to see he's quietly making a comeback.  (No, not Oprah's Bob Greene; this Bob Greene.)

Bob Greene thinks a lot these days about the colleagues he has lost — and probably about the career he lost, too.

Ten years ago this week, Greene’s public life crashed and burned on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Readers awoke that Sunday morning in mid-September to the news that he’d been fired after more than three decades as one of the best known and most widely read columnists in America.

A spectacular ride that had taken a kid from Bexley, Ohio, to a starring role at the Sun-Times by age 23, then to the Tribune and syndication in more than 200 newspapers, was suddenly and completely over.

Greene had been fired, according to the Tribune’s version of events, because he had abused his position by engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a girl he met when she came to interview him for her high school newspaper. 

I first came across Greene's columns in the pages of Esquire in the '80s.  I greatly enjoyed his collections of columns from that magazine and his work on the Tribune.  Up to his time of his dismissal, he was a tireless advocate for abused children and his series on the Baby Richard case touched me deeply as an adoptive parent.  I hungrily re-read his Good Morning, Merry Sunshine in those heady first weeks of Rachel's infancy and so his writing remains a part of that very special time.

No doubt, Greene's actions were a serious breech of ethics and terrible lapse of judgement but count me as one of those who thought his punishment was too harsh.  Certainly some kind of reprimand was in order, a lengthy suspension as well would have been called for, but his body of work up to that point was evidence enough that this may have been an isolated occurrence.  Add the fact that his wife passed away four months after his dismissal - her death likely had more to do with her month-long respiratory illness than Greene's crash-and-burn but that probably didn't help - and you're looking at a man who more than paid the price for his transgression.

Since then he's managed to publish four books and now writes a weekly column at CNN.  I guess you'd call it a comeback if you could call 10 years in the wilderness "looking for stories and trying to do the best job I can reporting and writing them" a comeback.  Call it redemption through work.  I guess that's all you can do, the best you can do, and that's enough.  It certainly seems to be the case for Bob Greene.

Hemingway Slept Here

Paul Hendrickson, in his book, Hemingway's Boat, tells us Hemingway's regular stopover place in Miami was this hotel:

  

 Hendrickson says the hotel was 7 blocks from the railroad terminal with a view of Biscayne Bay but gives no address. The image above I found on a postcard auction site and the reverse of the card says its located "Facing beautiful Bayfront Park. Here's a seagull's eye view of Bayfront Park today:

 
View Larger Map

 There's no sign of the Miami Colonial; likely it was elbowed aside by the forest of high-rises that line Biscayne Boulevard across the street from Bayfront Park. (And from this view, Bayfront Park does look beautiful, doesn't it?)

 I'm not opposed to high-rises. They're beautiful in their own way, monuments to the ambition of the human race. But would it have killed developers to leave this lovely old hotel?

First Kindle Experience? Meh.

John Podhoretz recommended Rick Marin's Keep Swinging as a good read and since I had a couple of bucks left on a gift card and a Kindle App on my i-Phone, I thought, well, why not?  I've used the Kindle App before to download samples of books and I found it was all right but it really wasn't a substitute for the real thing - swishing my finger over a glass screen to turn pages just wasn't doing it for me.  Maybe I wasn't giving it a chance.

Well, I gave it a chance with Keep Swinging - a delightful book about fatherhood and sports, by the way, and well worth the couple of bucks - and I was underwhelmed with the whole Kindle experience.  Maybe it was because I was using the i-Phone App - the teeny tiny screen was readable enough and though it isn't any big deal to turn the page, you have to turn a lot of pages to read what I thought was a small amount of text.  Distracting.  And I'm not sure the formatting is the same on Kindle - some passages could have used a paragraph break to better indicate a transition of time but maybe that's how it was edited in the first place.  I don't know.  It just didn't feel right.

Who am I to stand in the way of progress?  E-books are the future and real books are the dusty past.  It'd be nice to have an entire library at my disposal and some of the e-book deals I come across - a buck a throw, even free! - would be hard to pass up.  But for now, I'm content to let this wave of new-newfangledness pass me by.

Soft Target - Book Review

Okay, so Soft Target is the last of the Stephen Hunter I haven't read and the real last of the series. So now I'm really disappointed to be finished - maybe I could start all over again? Nah. No point in treading over places I've already been. Gotta keep moving, reading-wise.

Soft Target is not so much a novel as a novel-length parable told in a feverish style. Hunter is at the top of his game here but it's a lightning quick read - about a hundred pages short of a typical thriller - because Hunter wants to get in, tell his story, make his point, and get the heck out. Ray Cruz carries on the Bob Lee Swagger story. Sure, it's a tired trope, Cruz being an unknown son of Swagger's, and so carries on the family sniper tradition but what're you gonna do? Get past that and Cruz is a great new series character to follow. Stoic, capable, flawed.  Everything you'd like to be.

But back to why Soft Target is more a parable than a story. Hunter thinly disguises his characters and they're obvious stand-ins for current politicians. (Heck, don't take my word for it. Take Hunter's.) His bad guys are the current crop of bad guys - radical Islamists - but there are also other bad guys, namely nihilist gamer youth, and so Hunter has a blast blasting away at what he sees are the biggest threats to civilized society. Don't agree? Write your own book then.

There's plenty of shooting and guns and 'splosions and helicopters to keep you amused and when the smoke clears the good guys are left standing and the bad guys have met their just reward. Can't ask for much more than that, can you?

Soft Target doesn't approach the epic grandeur of Hunter's finest but it'll do until the next one comes along.

Black Light - Book Review

Black Light is the second in Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger series though it's the last one for me and the first one, too. Some years back I'd tried to start the series and had picked up this book but set it aside after a hundred pages or so - at the time, it just wasn't my kinda book. Amazing what time can do.

Having introduced the story of the death of Bob Lee's father in his first book, Hunter now takes up that story in detail and ties it to the present time of the book. (Hunter's prior published book, Dirty White Boys, is also tied to this Black Light, forming a sort of trilogy of Time to Hunt, Dirty White Boys, and Black Light. I've no desire to read Dirty White Boys and there's no need since the essentials of that book are detailed here.) It's a what-happened-years-ago-is-now-very-important-to-the-present-and-must-be-kept-secret-at-all-costs kind of plot. Swagger and his side kick follow the clues and fight the bad guys and there's some gunplay but not on the scale of Hunter's other Swagger books. Justice is delivered and arrangements are made and everybody's ready to move on to the next adventure by the end of the book.

Not Hunter's best and not near the top of the series but a decent enough place holder until the next book. Glad I read it. Glad I'm finished with it.

So that just about finishes my Stephen Hunter reading jag. I've got one more to go - his latest - and than my mild case of reading OCD will allow me to move on. Oh, it's been fun all right but the bad thing about finishing a series is that you're finished with the series. I'll be glad to look for another series but I was perfectly happy with this one.