The Books We Want for the Holidays: Angelmaker

The paperback
is available now.

So sometimes you want to read a book that's just bad ass in the best ways.  You want some adventure, you want some sexy times, you want some gangsters, and you want, say, a doomsday machine that a hapless hero accidentally activates and must figure out how to destroy before it destroys the world.  If you can throw in some killer elephants, a serial killer, a geriatric granny spy, and an army of militant monks standing in the hero's path, all the better.

The hardcover jacket
has a hidden code to
decipher, because it's
cool like that.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway.  Nick is spy novel master John LeCarre's son (daddy wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among many other books), and his exposure to great thriller plotting is evident.  What I love about Harkaway's writing, though, is that he's hilarious, he's outrageous, and yet he's completely engrossing.  Sometimes I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Choke, and sometimes I'm reminded of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and sometimes I'm reminded of the new wave of snarky movie heroes like Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man.  But really, Nick Harkaway is a riot, and an original.  No one is writing books quite so entertaining right now.  

Come on--clockwork bees are going to destroy the world?  How can you resist?

Operation Chuck: Choke

Come to the Damned event
at Lemuria!

We're less than a week away from the big Damned event hosted by Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson!  ....And I'm a bit behind in my reading.  I'm picking up the pace in this home stretch.  The books are piled on my coffee table, Zorro's in my lap and his furry little behind makes a great book rest, and I'm cross-eyed and cussing like a Tourettic sailor.  Go ahead, question my sanity.  I'm learning many, many ways to kill people.

The newest addition to the "finished" pile is Choke, arguably Chuck Palahniuk's second most famous book, after Fight Club.  It's the story of Victor Mancini, sex addict, son of a crazy anarchist and (possibly) the big J.C., and habitual choking victim.  Victor is a scoundrel, but rather likable.  He's Sam Rockwell in the movie version.

Choke is a morality tale debating what it means to be a good person, a productive member of society.  On the one hand, Victor scams his restaurant saviors by falsely taking their sympathy and accepting gifts after their near-death interactions.  On the other, he allows these people to feel better about their lives, making them heroes.  Likewise Victor allows all of the old ladies in the nursing home to use him as a target for all the wrongs in their lives.  Molested by a brother seventy years earlier?  Victor will accept responsibility as that brother for the addled lady in the wheelchair.  It's his Christian duty.

Some genuinely funny scenes occur in Choke.  Victor's mother is paranoid about avoiding disasters and peppered throughout the book are codes for fires, deaths, disasters, etc, at stores and hospitals and such.  How to avoid a hijacked plane?  Know the code words.  Gianna and I have a safe word, but it's not exactly the same thing.

I also hereby name Choke the best novel liberally using "Dude" in guy dialogue.

Next: Haunted.  Five days until the event.