48, NG21, M43, E47, / WG27, F5, MF0, D1, Frz0, NA0, B4, C1

Lawrence Block, Tanner's Tiger (Evan Tanner Book 5)

Wie Tanner es in dieser Geschichte schafft, in Kanada ein Attentat auf die Queen zu verhindern, ohne das irgendjemand etwas davon mitbekommt - am wenigsten die Attentäter selber - obwohl er eigentlich nur die Expo besuchen wollte, ist wieder höchst unterhaltsam und spannend zu lesen.

At that age hardly anyone really worries about death. I certainly hadn't. I had known that the possibility of my dying existed, and when I was in actual front-line combat and watched men catch bullets on either side of me, I was certainly scared, but I don't think I ever honestly conceived of the idea of my own personal death. It was something that happened to other people; I was eighteen years old and I was going to live forever, or to be fifty, anyway, which at that age amounts to the same thing.
.
I sleep not at all, having lost the habit forever when a shard of North Korean shrapnel performed random brain surgery and knocked out something called the sleep center. I have been awake ever since. My disability pay is $ 112 per month, and I don't have to spend a cent of it on pajamas.
.
(Lawrence Block, Tanner's Tiger, 1967)

39, NG12, M34, E38, / WG27, F5, MF0, D1, Frz0, NA0, B4, C1

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in the Rye

Auch hier geht es wieder um einen litarischen Klassiker oder eher um den öffentlichkeitsscheuen Autor und obwohl ich 'The Catcher in the Rye' nie gelesen habe, tat das dem Genuß keinen Abbruch. Sehr gelungen auch das Paddington Hotel und der verwickelte Tathergang in der Mordnacht, und die Lösung, die Bernie findet um alle glücklich zu machen, inklusive ihn selbst. So viele Serien werden schwächer, je länger sie dauern, aber bei Block ist es meistens andersherum. Hier hat er anscheinend noch viel zu sagen.
.
.
'And you wanted the letters back.'
'I wanted them to disappear, to cease to exist.'
'Why?'
'Because I don't want people pawing over them and finding little glimpses of me in them. It's the same reason I live my life the way I do.'
'Yet people find you in everything you write.'
'They find the part I'm willing to show,' he said. He looked off into the distance. 'It's fiction,' he said, 'and I get to make it the way I want it to be, with a clay factory relocated from Huntingdon to Peru, say, if that's where I want it to be. I don't care who reads my fiction, or what they think they find there.'
'I see.'
'Do you?' His eyes probed mine.'Say you're having a conversation with somebody. You don't mind if he can hear the sentences you're speaking, do you?'
'If I minded, I wouldn't sa them in the first place.'
'Exactly. But suppose, while he was listening to you, he was also reading your mind. Picking up the unvoiced thoughts buzzing around in your brain. How would you like that?'
'I get it.'
'The fiction I write is my conversation with the world. My private life is private, an unspoken conversation with myself, and I don't want any mind-readers eavesdropping on it.'
'So it doesn't matter who gets the letters,' I said. 'A collector or a scholar or a university library, or even Alice Cottrell. It's the same invasion of privacy wherever the letters wind up.'
.
(Lawerence Block, The Burglar in the Rye, 1999)

38, NG11, M33, E37, / WG27, F5, MF0, D1, Frz0, NA0, B4, C1

Lawrence Block, The Burglar in the Library

Hier schafft Block eine Variation des klassischen englischen Kriminalromans, der aber dann doch wie ein Chandler oder Hammett endet, die beiden Wegbereiter, um die es in der Nebenhandlung auch geht. Die Auflösung ist wie immer ziemlich verzwickt und bis zum Ende sehr überraschend.
.

'... Just because he wrote the book didn't mean he knew who killed the chauffeur. And we'll never know who killed the cook. Just like Raymond Chandler.'
There was a long silence. 'I don't know,' she said at length. 'The English mysteries may be a lot less realistic, what with people getting killed with tropical fish and all, but there's something awfully satisfying in the way it all works out in the end. If a cook dies, by the end of the book you always know who killed her.'
'And it's generally the butler,' I said, 'whereas the real world is a lot less certain, and there are things you never do find out. I realize it's frustrating, but you can live with it, can't you?'
'What the hell,' she said. 'I guess I'll have to.'
.
(Lawrence Block, The Burglar in the Library, 1997)

17, WG15, M14, E16, / NG2, F3, MF0, D1, Frz0, B1, NA0, C0

Stephen King, Elevation

Diese Novelle wartete auch schon eine ganze Weile darauf wiedergelesen zu werden. Am besten gefiel mir hier das Turkey-Trot Rennen, immer wieder schön zu lesen. Und natürlich der Schluß, auch wenn es ein bisschen nervt, das King alles offen lässt. Aber wie hätte er es sonst machen sollen?

As if I do, Scott thought. Time is invisible. Unlike weight.
Ah, but maybe that wasn't true. You could feel weight, yes - when you were carrying to much, it made you ploddy - but wasn't it, like time, basically just a human construct? Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren't they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality?
.
Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.
.
(Stephen King, Elevation, 2018

12, WG12, M10, E11, / NG0, F2, MF0, D1, Frz0, B1, NA0, C0

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Dieser Discworld, einer meiner ersten Discworldbände überhaupt, rangiert auch ziemlich weit oben bei meinen Favoriten, und trotzdem entdeckte ich bei diesem Wiederlesen immer noch neues, oder fand Stellen, die ich vergessen hatte. Z.B. wie wirklich gruselig die Heimstätte der Tooth Fairy ist. Irgendwann schaffe ich es auch mal, das Buch zur Weihnachtszeit zu lesen, wie es sich gehört.
.
'He's right, though,' said Susan. 'Gods don't die. Never completely die...'
There's always somewhere, she told herself. Inside some stone, perhaps, or the words of a song, or riding the mind of some animal, or maybe in a whisper on the wind. They never entirely go, they hang on to the world by the tip of a fingernail, always fighting to find a way back. Once a god, always a god. Dead, perhaps, but only like the world in winter-
.
It really was a crummy room, the sort rented by someone who probably took it never intending to stay long, the sort where walking across the floor in the middle of the night would be accompanied by the crack of cockroaches in a death flamenco. It was amazing how many people spent their whole lives in places where they never intended to stay.
.
When you were grown up, you only feared, well, logical things. Poverty. Illness. Being found out. At least you weren't mad with terror because of something under the stairs. The world wasn't full of arbitrary light and shade. The wonderful world of childhood? Well, it wasn't a cutdown version of the adult one, that was certain. It was more like the adult one written in big heavy letters. Everything was ... more. More everything.
.
(Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, 1996)

8, WG8, M6, E7, / NG0, F2, MF0, D1, Frz0, NA0, C0, B0

Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

Der dritte Death-Band der Discworldreihe und zugleich der erste Band um Susan Sto-Helit rangiert auch irgendwo in den Top Ten bei mir - nicht nur, aber auch weil Pratchett hier permanent aus Blues Brothers zitiert. Und das Wesen, oder eben die Seele der Rockmusik aka Music with Rocks in so genial auf den Punkt bringt. Das letzte Wiederlesen war wirklich zu lange her.
.
This was music that had not only escaped but had robbed a bank on the way out. It was music with its sleeves rolled up and its top button undone, raising its hat and grinning and stealing the silver.
It was music that went down to the feet by way of the pelvis without paying a call on Mr Brain.
.
Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song, a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossil echoes, the very first sounds.
There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of everything.
But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the frozen echoes in ammonites and amber, sewar they can detect some tiny sounds before that.
It sounded, they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.
The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.
When they asked him what it was, he said: 'It sounds like One, Two.'
.
'Hah! Well, he'll be sorry later on,' said Glod. 'Later on, people'll talk to him and he'll say: I left, you know, before they became famous.'
.
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
.
(Terry Pratchett, Soul Music, 1994)

7, WG7, M5, E6, / NG0, F2, MF0, D1, Frz0, NA0, C0, B0

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Weiter geht's mit der Death-Serie der Discworldbücher. Bei diesem Band ist es noch länger her, dass ich ihn das letzte Mal las, und seltsamerweise hatte ich die ganze Sache mit den Schneekugeln und Einkaufswagen in einem anderen Band verortet, aber abgesehen davon konnte ich mich ziemlich gut an das Buch erinnern. Vor allem die Teile mit Death aka Bill Door und Miss Flitworth sind immer wieder schön.
.
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.
People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the sequence is, first object, then belief. In fact, it works the other way.
.
His business was to the separation of the wheatgerm of the soul from the chaff of the mortal body, and that was usually concluded long before any of the rites associated with, when you got right down to it, a reverential form of garbage disposal.
.
It was, indeed, on a skeletal horse. Blue flame crackled over the creature's bones as it trotted forward; Miss Flitworth found herself wondering whether it was a real skeleton, animated in some way, something that had once been the inside of a horse, or a skeletal creature in its own right. It was a ridiculous chain of thought to follow, but it was better than dwelling on the ghastly reality that was approaching.
Did it get rubbed down, or just given a good polish?
.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
.
(Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man, 1991)