Two Book Reviews, or Starting the year out right...

I'm starting out the year on a bit of a reading binge, apparently. Since the beginning of the year I've finished two books. Already mentioned in an early post, I finished Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969 (2001, Viking; 422 pages), by William J. Mann, on Friday night.

It is an interesting book, well worth reading despite the fact that there are times when it takes a scorecard to distinguish the players. The problem is that Mann, in an admirable attempt to be comprehensive, tends to throw out names one after another, then refers to them sometimes by first name and sometimes by surname, which becomes confusing at times.

But, he is comprehensive and he isn't engaged in gossip-mongering, which is something I was afraid he might be when I first picked up the book. When he identifies someone active in the entertainment industry as gay, he provides evidence, and when there is no evidence that someone who has been presumed to be gay actually was, he says so. Additionally, he spends very little time on top stars who were either admittedly or rumored to be gay, and instead traces the history of movie-making through all aspects of the industry. He does write about actors, both male and female, but he also writes about directors, writers, producers, editors, art directors, agents, publicists, and all the other people it takes to put a movie on the screen. If Mann had been aiming at a sensationalistic account, he would have spent much more time on the Hollywood names everyone knows.

Along the way, Mann also addresses the ups and downs of the acceptance of open gays and lesbians in Hollywood, and the terms under which they were accepted, when they were. He also points out the essentially conservative nature of the top executives and some of the top stars in the industry, something that blocked the complete acceptance of homosexuals and homosexuality in the industry even when the society as a whole really didn't worry so much about what movie makers did in the privacy of their bedrooms.

The most difficult times for gays in Hollywood, according to Mann, were the years when the Hays Code, the production code that severely limited what themes movies could explore, how those themes could be explored, and what could be said and shown on-screen, and what could not even be hinted at, from about 1930 to 1941, and during the McCarthy era of the late 1940s and 1950s (essentially the first years of the Cold War), when life for gays in all segments of society was especially difficult.

I highly recommend Mann's book for anyone interested in film history or gay history.

After I finished reading Behind the Screen on Friday night, I wasn't ready to go to sleep just yet, so I picked up Faye Kellerman's Gun Games (2012, William Morrow; 375 pages). This is the latest entry in Kellerman's series of novels about LAPD detective Peter Decker and his wife Rina Lazarus. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that this is one of my favorite mystery/police procedural series, by one of my favorite writers in the genre.

In this novel, Decker and Lazarus have taken in a young piano prodigy whose father is a gangster (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and whose physician mother has gone off to Africa to have a baby with another man. At the same time, Decker and his team are looking at the suicides of two high-school students who may or may not be linked and who may or may not have been helped along in their suicides.

I won't say more, as I don't want to provide any spoilers, but I will say that the book is a fast, good read. If I have any quibbles with it, it is that the teenage characters sometimes don't speak much like any of the teenagers I know, sometimes sounding much too adult. It is a minor quibble, however, overshadowed by a plot that moves right along. It certainly kept me turning pages late into the night.

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As an update, I'm now reading The Codex, by Douglas Preston (2004, Tor; 404 pages). I'm only about 60 pages in, and I'm not sure yet that I like it much. I'm going to try to stick with it, however. I started but did not finish way too many books in 2011, and I'm going to try to be better about that in 2012.

Wednesday Update

I've been meaning to update for a couple of days, but I've been getting ready to go out of town and I just keep not getting around to it.

I'm reading two books right now. First of all, I finally found something on the fiction shelves at the library that looked like it might be fun, and so I'm reading Dexter is Delicious (Doubleday, 2010; 350 pages), by Jeff Lindsay. This is the fifth novel in the series by Lindsay and the inspration for the Showtime TV series, "Dexter". In case you aren't familiar, it follows the adventures of Dexter Morgan, a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami-Dade Police Department, who also happens to be a serial murderer. The hitch is, he only murders people who "deserve" it, bad people that society is better off without. I've read the first three books (the fourth wasn't available and this one was, and so far it doesn't seem to matter that I haven't read the fourth yet) and seen the first two seasons of the television series, and I honestly think it is remarkable that Lindsay has been able to take what should be an abhorrent character and make him a likeable, sympathetic character. I think much of this has to do that, both in the books and in the shows, we get to hear Dexter's inner monologue and learn exactly how he ticks.

In this book, Dexter has just become a father, an event that has him very surprised to be feeling what seem to be genuine emotions for the first time in his life. He is even considering giving up his extracurricular murderous activities, based on this new part of himself he has discovered. On the other hand, his brother, also a serial killer (but one who doesn't confine his urges to kill to the bad guys of the world) and presumed dead at the end of the first novel, shows up, likely with evil intent. There's also a crime to solve at work. I'm only about 90 pages in at the moment, but I'm enjoying the book very much so far.

The other book I'm currently reading is Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, A Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets (HarperCollins, 2008; 384 pages), by Barry Siegel. Much more serious reading than the "Dexter" novel, of course, and fairly interesting reading so far. It tells the story of the long quest by the families of some men killed in a military plane crash in 1948 in Waycross, Georgia. The families, of course, wanted to know what had happened to their family members, but the government wouldn't tell them anything, saying that the flight was classified. The families took the issue all the way up to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that the information about the flight was, indeed, classified, a ruling which recognized the state secrets privilge formally for the first time in US history. But, I've gleaned from the flyleaf that the papers related to the crash were eventually made public, revealing that the crash was actually was a result of negligence on the part of military personnel, and the claim of secrecy was made to cover up the mistakes that were made that cost all but four of the flight's crew memberrs their lives.

The interest in reading this book, for me, will be to see how the legal issues involved unfolded and resolved. Knowing the general outcome won't, I don't think, detract from the journey of the story. That this is often the case, espeically in reading non-fiction, is something I've learned over the years, and I think it is an important point. Yes, it's cheating to look ahead to the last chapter or last page of a novel, but in non-fiction, the reader often knows the general outcome of the story the writer is telling in the book and it is how the author gets the reader from the beginning to the end of that story is the real issue.

Reading Update - Saturday

It was a busy week around here, but it didn't completely keep me from reading.

I finished reading Sight Unseen last night. I'll have more to say about that very soon.

I'm still reading Mercy, Mercy Me, and I'm still looking for some good fiction. Is it just me who has trouble these days finding fiction that seems worth reading? I find myself tending to go back to the same writers time and again, and even re-reading novels because very little that is new seems interesting to me.