We are talking one bad book here. This was a road trip audio book, selected to keep my sister and I company as we drove to Boston.

Oh, it was bad. Really, really bad. So bad that we could not turn it off because its very high degree of badness was both amazing and entertaining. We ended up shouting at the CD player when something improbable, impossible or just really stupid happened. And the writing matched the plotting.

In this book, the fourth in the Holly Barker series, Ms. Barker gets pulled early out of her CIA training and suddenly is directing the effort to catch serial killer Teddy Fay, a former CIA agent himself. It’s difficult to say just how awful this was — Barker’s CIA mentor is intent on giving Barker management experience, seeming to forget that she commanded a regiment in the Army. Barker has all the good ideas, but has an awesomely large brain fart when Teddy Fay shows up at the opera. And the ending stinks, too.

This book did, however, raise an important question: is the author really this bad or so contemptuous of his readers that he doesn’t believe they will notice how bad his book is? This is the second Stuart Woods book I’ve read and I deeply regret them both.

A new pandemic is inevitable — viruses can mutate faster than we can defeat them.

The first book offered for your consideration is The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry.

The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague In History

John M. Barry, Barry, John M.; Viking Adult 2004

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The second book is a novel — Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day.

The Given Day: a novel

Dennis Lehane; William Morrow & Co

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In Spenser’s latest adventure, “Rough Weather,” Susan Silverman is doing her supportive Susan Silverman thing while, of course, eating very little.

She even gets rescued. Spenser takes her to the very fancy wedding of the daughter of the much-married Heidi Bradshaw. He must save the lovely Dr. Silverman from peril when a bunch of killer goons, led by the infamous Gray Man who almost killed our hero once upon a time, show up and kidnap the bride.

Spenser’s pride and honor are stung because the kidnapping happened on his watch. He sets off in pursuit of the case, with Susan handily analyzing his motives, character and code of conduct in case we couldn’t figure them out.

This is Parker’s 36th Spenser adventure. They can’t be taken very seriously, but they sure are fun to read. Parker remains king of smart-ass dialog. But I wish Susan Silverman would get drunk one night and eat an entire hamburger and order of fries.

– Former President George W. Bush, discussing the book he is going to write

Indeed.

Dishwasher Pete is about travel, freedom, irresponsibility a bit of a lack of manners and life up to the elbows of water in the sinks of this great nation.

Warning — if you care to maintain your illusions and delusions about restaurant cleanliness, do not read this book. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Pete Jordan is a guy who grew up knowing police were there to harass him and, while avoiding the drugs and prison that claimed many of his friends, did not develop a real interest in anything the suit-and-tie world could offer him, either. This is not to say that Pete was without ambition — Pete wanted to was dishes in every state in the union.

So he started to travel. From the heat of Louisiana to the traffic of New York, on the west coast and in the midwest, Pete washed dishes. The jobs were mostly ridiculously easy to get because of the ridiculously high turnover and absolute unattractiveness of the duties involved. The fringe benefits were few — beer (mostly stolen) and food (often taken off of plates coming back to the kitchen area to be washed). The hours were long, the work arduous. Yet, Pete kept dishing because it paid the few bills he had and allowed him to keep moving.

For more than a decade, as his hair and his youth slipped away, Pete Jordan chased his dreams and the next dishwashing job. Jordan’s tale of the chase is funny and affirming (dish dog friends for life!).

Parents — give this book to your children so they understand the kind of dead-end, back-breaking labor that awaits them if they don’t get an education (or in this economy, even if they do get an educaion).

Parents — don’t give this book to your children lest you ignite an undeniable passion for rootless, eat-the-leftovers-off-the-plate wanderings

This longish book is the kind that gives you the waking quakes — how did we let this happen? Author Jeremy Scahill takes readers on an in-depth tour of the growing empire of Blackwater, the Bush-favored mercenary corporation that is best known for its military roles in Iraq and  post-Katrina New Orleans.

Blackwater, according to Scahill, is willing to go where the money is: war, peace-keeping, spying, financial cover for grasping bureaucrats. Blackwater is a very handy corporation to have around. It allows the government to go places it could not go with conventional forces and do things it could not do — some of which might be considered immoral or illegal to the average voter — with the regular military. Blackwater happily recruits its for-hire soldiers from veteran forces of some of the most human-rights abusing regimes on earth.

Blackwater is everywhere these days, according to Scahill’s book, which was updated last year. Residents of a small California town defeated the company’s efforts to open a “Blackwater West” in their community, but “Blackwater already annually trains more than 25,000 military and state, federal, and local law enforcement personnel at its Moyock (North Carolina) headquarters. It also successfully established ‘Blackwater North’ in Illinois.”

These days, Blackwater is manufacturing military hardware, spying for corporate America, gathering intelligence for the government and fighting our wars, all without the oversight that would accompany more traditional performance of those duties.

Blackwater and other private military companies have made themselves a very important part of the defense establishment. Scahill’s book makes clear just how dependent the Pentagon has become on its for-hire proxies. It will be interesting to see if President Obama will try to rein them in, or whether Blackwater and its ilk already more powerful than the commander in chief.

Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers

I’m not even too many years behind on this one. It was published in October.

Marcia Muller is a mystery writer I’ve been reading since the early 1990s when her detective, Sharon McCone, was in her thirties. Now, 18 years later, she is somewhere around 40, if memory serves. Why can’t we all age like that?

In this particular adventure, Sharon is depressed….soooooo sad. So she flies the plane she owns with her wonderful husband to the ranch she owns with her wonderful husband to take a long vacation, ponder what to do with her successful detective agency, and feel sorry for herself.

Very, very irritating. Hey, McCone! Get your head out of your navel! Other people have real problems!

Fortunately, a few people get murdered and McCone comes out of her blues. It wasn’t really clear to me why McCone came out of her blues, if her exit was connected to her investigation or not. It seems like one day she was moping about and the next day she had her life pretty well figured out.

The truth is I’ve been reading Marcia Muller books out of habit for a long time now, reluctant to give up on a series I’ve followed for so long (sort of the same reason I still buy every Sprinsteen album). There are better mystery plotters than Muller and better mystery writers as well. It’s fun, though, to watch McCone detect her way through the decades, changing but semi-ageless. I sure hope she’s done feeling sorry for herself, though.

Reading "Lolita" in Tehran

Azar Nafisi; Fourth Estate 2004

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I delayed, afraid of one of those well-reviewed books that nobody actually finished. It is, after all, a book about books (sort of) by an Iranian college professor of English lit.

God, the dullness danger was high.

But I got sucked in pretty early and stayed there til the end. Author Azar Nafisi combines literature — Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Invitation to a Beheading and other towering works — and memoir to tell the story of her life in Iran during and after the revolution. She writes of oppression and morality police and the eight-year Iran / Iraq war and her children and her inability to accept the place established for women by the authorities. It is a stunningly well-written story and treatise.

To some, though, the book is politically incorrect.

From Wikepidia:

Nafisi’s book has earned some criticism by Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi who sees the book as basically being propaganda for the Bush administration to attack countries like Iran and Iraq. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2006) Dabashi wrote a critical essay in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English weekly Al-Ahram. In it, he used the late literary scholar Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to critique Nafisi’s memoir as evidenced in this quote: “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.’ Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.”

Wow. Wonder what Nafisi did to Dabashi to deserve that.

The Washington Post in 2004 ran a piece that said the then-new book already was outdated and was not widely read by Iranians.

The problem, several Iranians said in interviews, is that Nafisi left Tehran seven years ago. Her highly personal account of 18 years living under the mullahs is as absorbing a history as might be found of this place in that time. But it ends precisely at what most people here call the dawn of a new era in Iran, the 1997 landslide election of Mohammad Khatami as president….

In the end, Khatami failed to change the structure of Iran’s government, which today remains dominated by clerics who answer only to themselves. But his election, and the landslides that followed for reformists, represented titanic public rejection of the suffocation Nafisi made so vivid in Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. She used 343 pages and uncommon eloquence to describe the intrusion of the state (using the justification of religion) into every element of daily life.

But, but, but… “Reading Lolita” is and always has been a history, not current events. History doesn’t get outdated. It gets memorialized. And Nafisi does tha beautifully.