BOOKS & TRUCKS

A few Year End/New Year odds and ends:

First of all, as in past years I've kept track of the books I read in 2017, for anybody who might be interested (as always this doesn't include articles, reviews, comics, blogs, poems, graffiti, menus, shopping lists, subtitles, skywriting etc etc): 

 
Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The Night Stalker by Jeff Rice

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron

The Adventures of M. de Mailly by David Lindsay

Smilin’ Jack and the Daredevil Girl Pilot by Zack Mosley

Crotchet Castle by Thomas Love Peacock

Death in the Air by Agatha Christie

Iceworld by Hal Clement

The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Beyonders by Manly Wade Wellman

Finders Keepers by Stephen King

Liner Notes by Loudon Wainwright III

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix

Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy

The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross MacDonald

The Vegetable by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 2017 I said a wistful farewell to a longtime companion: My green Toyota Tacoma pickup, which I bought new in 2000.

For financial reasons I asked the dealer for the most stripped-down, amenity-free Tacoma I could get, and I sometimes wondered if I bought the last new motor vehicle in America with hand-cranked windows. I found that I liked her low-tech charm. I spent more years driving this truck than I spent in high school and college put together, than I've spent living in any one home, than I've spent at any single job I've ever had. Her bed moved pianos and framed movie posters and dogs suspected of having bedbugs, and her cab transported, in addition to countless friends and family, celebrities including the late Richard Jeni, the late Mitch Hedburg and the late Ralphie May.

Sometime in 2003 or 2004 I got rear-ended in Avondale, and thrown forward into the car ahead of me. This resulted in the loss of the front bumper. A few years later her catalytic converter was stolen out of the parking lot of our condo in Phoenix and I had to replace it with an after-market part, with the result that the engine light was on constantly. Every two years my mechanic friend Pablo would shut it off long enough to get it through inspections (which it always passed) and a few hours later the light would come back on. Even so, based on the struggles I'd had with earlier vehicles I regarded her as close to trouble-free.

Her back gate became a gallery of odd bumper stickers, so that she looked like an old steamer trunk. But she didn't get to travel much outside of Maricopa County, just a few trips to Tucson and environs, once to Silver City, New Mexico and once to Vegas. Even so, I put hundreds of thousands of miles on her, and slept in her cab more than once.

I never gave her a name, like you're supposed to do with vehicles. But I certainly thought of her, and will remember her, as a good, reliable friend.

Simply because their maddening and clearly very effective radio jingle stuck in my head, I donated her to KARS-4-KIDS; it was only later that I learned that the organization gets a one-star "poor" rating from Charity Navigator. Oh well. Godspeed, old pal.

Over the Christmas holiday I acquired this guy...

...from Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers at Metro Center. The net proceeds from his purchase benefit area animal shelters (there may still be some available at your local Cane's if you want one; they're $8.99). His name is Kevin, and his name and attire were inspired by the character of Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), not from the 1990 favorite Home Alone, but rather from the oxymoronically-titled 1992 sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The plush dog is part of the chain's perplexing promotion to celebrate Home Alone 2's 25th anniversary. I didn't care for that film when it came out, and I like it even less now, because Our Current President appears in it (as himself). But I have to admit, this is a cute little guy.

Two of the books on my list above were ripping yarns I'd never gotten around to by a lifelong favorite author of mine, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Monster Men and Synthetic Men of Mars.

Both involved Frankenstein-ish efforts to synthesize human beings, and in both cases the results are, to say the least, uneven. So...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...for the first honoree of 2018 here's the product of an industrial accident in the Synthetic man manufacturing facility on Mars:

"When I reached No. 4 the sight that met my eyes was one of the most horrible I have ever looked upon. Something had evidently gone wrong with the culture medium, and instead of individual hormads being formed, there was a single huge mass of animal tissue emerging from the vat and rolling out over the floor.

Various internal and external human parts and organs grew out of it without any relation to other parts, a leg here, a hand there, a head somewhere else; and the heads were mouthing and screaming, which only added to the horror of the scene."

(Very helpful of Burroughs to have his narrator note the mouthing and screaming of the heads "only added to the horror of the scene," we might not have realized that otherwise.)

Here's an illustration for Synthetic Men by ERB's son John Coleman Burroughs...

...but really, can it compete with the old man's descriptions?