This book is a classic among fans of hard-boiled crime fiction. Stephen King called it the hardest of the hard-boiled, and I have to agree with him on that. The plotting is relentless and so is the main character. I’ve never seen a character who so purely embodies animosity and determination.

The story opens with Earl Drake and his partner Bunny robbing a bank in Arizona. Things go awry halfway through the job, and Earl shoots several guards before getting shot himself. To make things worse, their getaway driver loses his nerve just as they’re exiting, and he winds up taking a bullet too.

I’m not sure why this book is called The Beach Girls. It actually takes place at a marina and it’s not really about girls.

The setting is the ramshackle Stebbins Marina in fictional Elihu, Florida, on the Gold Coast just north of Miami. The time is 1959. The owners of most of the boats on D dock live aboard their boats year-round. For various reasons, they have rejected the staid, conventional lifestyle of the middle class in favor of a more carefree bohemian existence that involves lots of drinking and lots of sex.

The Courage to Be Disliked is an introduction to Adlerian psychology in the form of a Socratic dialog. A young man who feels stuck and is unhappy with himself seeks the counsel of an older philosopher. He wants to know how he can find happiness and meaning in world where he never seems to measure up to the expectations of himself or others, a world in which the paths forward seem to both limited and uninviting and may lead to a life he ultimately doesn’t even want.

In 1945, an Egyptian peasant discovered a huge clay jar just beneath the soil near a cliff in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Hoping to find treasure inside, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found nothing but books.

Scholars and theologians had known for centuries of the early Christian Gnostic sects. Surviving letters and manuscripts of early church fathers railed against the beliefs and practices of these “heretics,” decried their “false” scriptures, and eventually succeeded in suppressing and destroying the writings that laid out their faith and described their practices.

Note: This review contains spoilers, outlining most of the plot. But also note that Permutation City is not genre fiction, so the plot is not the point. The value of this book lies in its deep exploration of ideas.

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City is, first and foremost, the product of a brilliant mind. The story opens, more or less, around the year 2050. The rich have taken to scanning their minds before death and then running their digital consciousness as “Copies” inside of computer-generated virtual realities. They can edit their scans as they please, so they are young and vigorous in the virtual world, and they can even edit out the less pleasant parts of their psyches, if they please–for example, removing negative personality traits like resentment, excessive fear, etc.

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. The author, Humphrey Cobb, fought with the Canadian army on the front lines in France in World War I. While he points out that the events of the novel are fiction, much of what he describes is obviously based on what he witnessed in the trenches, and the core of the book’s horrifying plot comes from actual historical events.

The book opens with two soldiers watching the tired march of a bedraggled infantry unit. Duval is fresh out of school and has not yet seen any action on the front lines. He’s excited to blaze a path to glory. Langlois is a veteran who has already served with this unit, the 181st Infantry. He has no illusions about the nature of the war.

Having just read Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot, I found this book to be a difficult slog indeed. The Plot is genre fiction (a thriller), and as such, the author takes care to limit her cast to a manageable number of characters, to delineate those characters clearly, to define where and when scenes take place, to focus the scenes on consequential action and dialog, to build tension and steadily advance a coherent plot.

You’ll find none of that in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and it’s not because he’s a bad writer. It’s by design.

This is an exceedingly clever novel. The inside flap of the dust cover gives three definitions of the word “plot,” and this book is about all three:

1. a sequence of events in a narrative, as in a novel, for example.
2. an immoral or illegal plan
3. a designated section of land for a gravesite

The Tenth Man opens in a German prison near the end of World War II. Thirty or so Frenchmen, civilian prisoners of war from all walks of life, are packed together in a dingy cell. Cut off from the outside world, and with nothing to do, they hang on to an old watch and an alarm clock, reminders of order in a world that has fallen into chaos, while they glumly await the war’s end.

The only information they can glean from the outside world is the noise they can hear through the prison wall. Though they’re in German-occupied territory, behind the lines, every now and then they hear a grenade or a burst of gunfire.

In Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl, sixty-one-year-old author Gerry Andersen has an accident that leaves him bedridden and heavily sedated for three months. Andersen’s young assistant, Victoria, goes on double duty as both secretary and nurse. In the evening a new woman, Aileen, enters the writer’s Baltimore penthouse as night nurse.

Andersen, a successful author of literary fiction, is best known for his novel Dream Girl, which has brought him wealth, fame, and a number of awards. Since its publication, there has been immense speculation about who inspired the book’s main character, Aubrey. Gerry’s friends and readers believe he neither sees nor hears “ordinary” women. He’s only capable of perceiving women as objects of desire. So how could he have gotten this one woman, Aubrey, so right on the page? How could he have seen so deeply into her inner world?