#9: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

The third in the insanely popular Harry Potter series, which I am finally coming around to, was the strongest book yet in the saga of a young wizard coming of age at a magical boarding school while evil forces mount against him.

In this installment, a mass-murdering wizard named Sirius Black escapes from the magical prison Azkaban, intent on seeking out Harry Potter. While these gears start moving, drawing Black closer to our young protagonist, Harry continues to deal with typical teen problems, school chums and school enemies and at least one very mysterious teacher (out of a whole lot of odd ones).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban regained some of the dramatic tension I felt was lost in the author's sophomore book, and Rowling has done a good job in re-introducing, and then growing, a vast cast of characters (though this is the first of the three I would say wasn't entirely stand-alone). Rowling is a clever storyteller and spins an enjoyable yarn.

I have been listening to these via audio book one after the next, carried along by an exceptional performance by Jim Dale. I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#8: Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis came in on that wave of British comic book writers (Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan among them) who specialized in "revisionist" comics with dark themes and more mature storytelling. Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol and others were some of the notable titles in that mid-80s-mid-90s heyday. But with DC Comics' Vertigo line and more the taste for this trend has never really died out. Some comic purists have embraced these revisionist stories (me, for instance) and some hate them (my brother, for instance). Ellis' Planetary is, in my mind, his cornerstone work, though I have liked streaks of Authority/Stormwatch and Transmetropolitan, among others.

Crooked Little Vein is Ellis' first novel, a darkly comic (verging on absurdist) take on the hard-boiled PI genre (with a dash of world-spanning espionage chucked in). Our tarnished hero is sent by a shadowy government figure to find the Lost Constitution of the United States, sending him on a sordid--and I do mean sordid--tour of America's underbelly. Ellis takes fairly obvious swipes at big-hatted Texans, la-la Californians, and button-down Midwesterners, but surprises with a number of shocks, leaving no taboo unturned from bestiality to child molesting to a few practices that--suffice to say--are hard to describe.

Although with the strong caveat that Ellis' writing is not for every taste, and at some points wasn't to mine, I enjoyed the humor and energy of the work and found it very readable. I will look forward to more of his fiction.

Having a hard time finding this one, I bought if off of ebay and read it at a pretty good clip.

#7: Dead Street by Mickey Spillane

I have been a big fan of the Hard Case Crime series, and was looking forward to this posthumously published work from Mickey Spillane, whose I, the Jury, when I first read as a teen, got me hungry for this genre. Spillane's huge popularity at one time, and some of his milestone work--which to me includes Kiss Me Deadly and Vengeance is Mine--marked a memorable career that I don't think is always recognized at present for what it once represented.

But Dead Street was written in his waning days (and was polished up my Max Allan Collins at Spillane's request), and lacks the punch of his white-hot years. We find the typical Spillane anti-hero, a retired cop (whose anger-management issues are looked on with vast approval by others, including swooning women) who finds out his supposedly long-dead girlfriend is alive, and is in hiding because of some secrets she carries. Naturally the ex-cop comes to her rescue, trusty .45 in hand.

I liked Spillane's ruminations on aging, but I felt the overall plot (which featured a well-oiled mafia machine and "atomic secrets") clanked fearfully. I think setting it during Spillane's writing heyday might have helped the overall tone of the piece and might have sat more comfortably on Spillane's shoulders. Still, an enjoyable read if not up to the heights Spillane had once reached, sharing the same fate as us all.

I bought this with a gift card to Books A Million that my daughter bought me for Christmas.

Digression

My wife is an English instructor, and she and her office mate decided to challenge each other to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel this year. The list dates back to the turn of the century and thus is fairly hefty. I perused it to see what I had read off of it and found I had only read 11 of them. I would have sworn it was more, and there were many on there I should have read or, even worse, are sitting on the many bookshelves all around my house. But here's what I have read from the list:

2007 The Road by Cormac McCarthy

2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones

2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner

1961 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

All great reads, but I especially recall Ironweed, Lonesome Dove, and Kavalier & Clay.

#6: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling

Having been the last person on earth to read the first Harry Potter book, I decided to catch up to society and immediately begin listening to the second in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, chronicling Harry's next year at the magical school Hogwarts. This time out the school is under seige as several students are attacked, and rumors of a long-lost "Chamber of Secrets" sweeps through the school. Harry comes under suspicion and ends up needing the help of an enchanted car, a magical pet bird, and a raggedy wizard's hat to defeat this latest threat to boarding school education.

I enjoyed this entry in the series, though couldn't help but feel it didn't have quite the dramatic tension of the first one. Any follow-up suffers from having the shine off the apple, and I think the fact that I know a bit of what happens movie-wise in Harry's feud with Lord Valdemort makes much of this one seem a bit tangential.

But Rowling keeps things percolating and brimming with wit, and Jim Dale's reading of this audio book is excellent. I immediately grabbed up the next one in the series when returning this one today to the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana.

#5: Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

Brightly entertaining swashbuckling-style adventure story that writer Michael Chabon (of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay fame) admitted in an afterword that he wanted to title Jews with Swords. The story centers on two philosophical sell-swords who end up doing some inadvertent king-making, with plot twists spinning out from such things as a well-loved hat to an admirable elephant. Wryly-written high adventure in a vein reminiscent of Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste series.

The presentation of the novel is also interesting; it is bound like a Dumas-type novel and features period-style art by Prince Valiant artist Gary Gianni.

Recommended.

I checked this one out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana, and read it at a brisk clip.