November 2024

There were 2 posts published in November 2024 (this is page 1 of 1).

“The Hunt for Red October” by Tom Clancy

It wasn’t at Barnes & Noble, and the guy behind the counter at Prospero’s Books in Kansas City told me that he hadn’t been able to lay hands on any of the Jack Ryan books in ages. They had vanished, it seems, from the national stacks; disappeared beneath the waves of the literary current.

“I’m on the hunt for ‘The Hunt for Red October,‘” I told him, well aware of how stupid that joke was but committed to telling it anyway. “It’s eluding my radar.”

He shrugged in commiseration.

“There’s that Jack Ryan TV show,” he said. “I think that’s why everyone’s buying it used. Just look for it online.”

“Look ONLINE? For a BOOK? Since when?”

I don’t like buying books online. Yeah, they’re cheaper, and there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t get elsewhere, but I am a huge proponent of supporting bookstores. Usually used bookstores, but at this point I’ll even throw money Barnes & Nobles‘ way if it means having a bookshop in town that isn’t going to go out of business.

It may have taken me longer than I would have thought possible to find “The Hunt for Red October,” #200 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, but it’s my own damned fault. I’ve owned more than one copy of Red October over the years, but have lost those copies in moves or through overzealous loaning practices. (Talking about you, Jerry. Just because we haven’t spoken in 15 years is NO EXCUSE.)

I was able to track down a paperback copy at Half-Priced Books, which really does have some gems now and again, and I managed to get to it before the pot-bellied guy in the “NAVY” hat did, due in part to my natural speed and agility. The navy guy was upset — you could just see his heart sink.

After taking a few days to read Red October again, I honestly don’t know why this series is as popular or as long-lasting as it is.

🎵 Sing it! We all live in a yellow TOP SECRET OBLATE TYPHOON-CLASS ATTACK SUB WITH A SILENT PROPULSION SYSTEM CARRYING A LOAD OF 38 NUCLEAR WARHEADS. 🎵

Published in 1984, Tom Clancy’s debut novel breathed fresh air into submarines. It was initially printed by the US Naval Institute Press, who — no joke — aim to “promote an understanding of sea power and other issues of national defense.” You can see their current publications here: https://www.usni.org/press/books.

They’re really just trying to raise awareness about … naval stuff. Weird! A whole publishing house dedicated to that One Great-Uncle of Yours who talks about Pearl Harbor every Christmas and maintains that internment camps aren’t the same as “prisons.”

Ah, the holidays.

Anywho, the thing that I don’t get about the popularity of Red October isn’t that, as an English major, I turn up my nose at military books, although I do, or that I think most military books are a form of propaganda, although I do. (Ronald Sata…I mean Reagan said Red October was “a heck of a yarn” or some shit. Better than shilling for mexican food in the oval office, I guess.)

It’s just that, well, my first introduction to Red October was the Sean Connery movie. It’s a great movie — I loved when I was a kid and I’ll still watch it now if I see it on a streaming platform. It’s such a great movie that it makes you realize it ought to be a movie — not a book.

“I take my vodka with a side of haggis. And ESPIONAGE!”

It’s paced like a movie, introduces characters like a movie, has movie dialogue, does movie cliffhangers. The final chapters are a series of, swear to God, jump cuts between a bunch of subs and ships. To this day, I’m convinced that Tom Clancy wanted to write a screenplay but was told, “Why don’t you make it a book instead?” To which he said, “No.” He only agreed after the publishing company said they’d mail a copy of the finished manuscript to Sean Connery himself, who was in Vladivostok at the time cultivating his eyebrows.

For what is essentially a spy-thriller in a heavily naval setting, the story is pretty simple. A Russian submarine captain wants to defect to the U.S., taking his ritzy new submarine with him. Will JACK RYAN the AMAZING YET RELUCTANT HERO be able to help him along, or will the submarine end up at the bottom of the ocean, a nuclear toothpick in Poseidon’s maw? There’s lots of boats and missiles and airplanes and helicopters and PINGing radar screens and people shouting, “Conn, sonar!”

You may as well eat buttered popcorn while you’re reading it.

Be sure to share it with your political officer, or face five to seven years in a Siberian gulag!

According to Mustich, the reason for the inclusion of this book on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die isn’t that it’s the best spy novel, or even that it’s the best submarine novel — it’s because it spawned a sprawling assortment of sequels, movies, TV shows, and video games. It’s fair to say that the Jack Ryan books have been impactful, but I consider it to be a dumb basis for picking which books a person ought to read.

Nobody, except maybe that One Great-Uncle of Yours, is going to be on their deathbed whimpering, “If only … I’d read more novels … that inspired crappy first-person shooters … “

I think the relative rush to turn these books into movies attests to how visual they are, how well they lend themselves to a screen of some sort. Who all has played Jack Ryan? Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Randall Park, and Alec Baldwin. Pretty big names, and that’s not including the supporting cast for those movies — James Earl Jones was Grier in a bunch of them.

For this particular read-through, I listened to a lot of the audiobook version of Red October, catching 30 minute snippets between the hours of 1 and 4 AM when anxiety keeps me awake like a malfunctioning alarm clock that’s been glued to my face like a trap in one of the Saw movies.

“Let’s play a game. It’s called ‘How can you hit the snooze button with no fingers?’“

I’ve completely unplugged myself from news and social media since the election — except for over on BlueSky, where I’ve found a bunch of people who throw haikus at one another and are just lovely — and I’ve tried to replace all my doomscrolling with … doomreading?

Whatever you call it, it’s essentially a series of instances in which I reach for my phone, realize I’ve deleted every social media app, and then angrily pick up a book to fume over … er, read. It hasn’t been easy. My mental health has suffered. At the very least, this whole thing has turned my reading of “The Hunt for Red October” into an angrier affair than it ought to be. I don’t know what the equivalent of hate-f*cking a book is, but that’s what it’s felt like.

I suppose anything I decided to read right now would have gotten the same treatment. I’ve just got to remember that I won’t be this angry forever. Even super-secret submarines have to surface eventually. Staying underwater forever is just impossible.

Unless you blow up and radioactive material eats a hole through your hull.

Seriously, though, do you know how dangerous submarines are? I mean, we all read about the billionaires who imploded, and ha-ha-ha, but multiply that little sub by about a hundred, make it radioactive, and stuff it full of nuclear weapons, and then you’ll have a rough idea of what actual submarines are like.

It makes you wonder why the US Naval Institute Press is so anxious to get this sort of stuff out there for mass consumption. It’s hard telling, but be sure to check out some of their other thrilling titles, such as: “We’re F*cking Crazy and SO CAN YOU“, “Radiation Poisoning: A Love Story”, and “Many Ways Through the Back Hatch.”

To order any of these titles from the US Naval Institute Press, simply write your social security number on a $50 bill, put it in a glass bottle, and toss it into the Gulf of Mexico! One of the books (you can’t pick which) will be delivered to you via air-to-surface missile in seven to ten business months.

Or, you know, just look for them online.

“A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines

A Lesson Before Dying

At a time when the whole world seems like it’s going to hell, it’s important to keep one’s spirits up, and I can think of no better way to do so than getting lost for a few days in a bright, uplifting tale of systemic persecution and marginalization of minorities. If you’re like me and look to pile bad thoughts on top of worse ones, “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines (#366 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die) can be found at your local library.

Like a perverse Fight Club, just go to a librarian and ask her to depress you as hard as she can.

“You DON’T TALK IN THE LIBRARY!”

In all seriousness, this book is amazing. While it is well written, the strength of “A Lesson Before Dying” isn’t in its prose as much as it is in the characters. It’s horrible to realize, but each one of them rings true in a way that you wish was impossible.

A black man sent to the electric chair for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? That tracks. A black teacher who hates teaching but can’t find any other work for an educated black man in the South? Yup. A reverend who touts that the true test of being educated is how frequently and well one lies in order to help others? Alright.

You know from the get-go that the book isn’t going to be happy. It doesn’t want to be happy. It waves happiness in your face like a pair of someone else’s panties it found in your glovebox. “These yours?” it asks, to which you can only bluster out some semblance of, “Nuh-uh.”

You go through page upon page knowing that things like this did happen, are happening, and will probably continue to happen.

It’s hard to say why, but this book made me think about death.

Surprise!

There have been a handful of times that I thought I was done for. Not in some philosophical sense of the word, but in the actual, “Welp, I’ve had a good run,” deer-in-the-headlights sense.

One of those times was when I was 24 and I was going into surgery. “I feel like I’m not going to wake up after this,” I said. I was on an operating table and perfectly earnest. Things were bleak — I was vomiting bile and had, for a short time, been convinced I was in hell. I told the doctors, “This is it for me. I’m checking out.”

“Nuh-uh,” said the anesthesiologist.

“You’re paid to say that.”

“And paid well.”

I had the overbearing sense that I needed to do something, to say something. I was knocking at the door of the Kingdom, so to speak, and God was hollering that he’d be there in just a second, damnit, he had a quiche in the oven, and just hold-the-fuck-on, he was coming.

Ultimately, though, what could I say? What could I do? All of these scrubbed-up bastards were waiting on me, and they were busy people. Practical people with automobiles and bank loans and skin-care routines.

So, I counted backwards. I remember making it to 97.

“Careful. It’s hot.”

Another time that I felt like I was dying was when I got food poisoning from a bad panini in Bangkok. I wish it had been from eating something cooler, but here we are. That time, death didn’t seem like such a bad thing. That is to say, I had such a high fever that I wasn’t worried about it.

“At least the pool’s nice and cool,” I said to myself, only realizing later that I’d been sweating so much that I was lying in an actual puddle.

Death is only scary if you’re aware enough to be scared. Otherwise it’s a novelty, this little curiosity, a new trend that everyone’s been talking about. Like fidget spinners. Nobody’s afraid of fidget spinners. If anything, we all think they’re sort of neat.

The hostel we were staying at had a pharmacy under it, so I sent Sarah down to get whatever drugs she could get for food poisoning. “Get the good stuff,” I said. “And make sure you tell them about the pool!”

(Thai pharmacies are strange places filled with medicines most Americans have never heard of. Between that and the language barrier, there was a good chance she’d come back with electric heroin or some other fun madness.)

I’m sure Sarah was more freaked out by the whole situation than I was. We’d just gotten engaged, or were about to be, and here I was hallucinating angels doing jackknifes off our room’s air conditioner. “The water’s fine!” I told them.

They knew already. Angels always do.

Well, butter my biscuits if it isn’t the patron saint of swan dives!

In “A Lesson Before Dying,” Jefferson — the character who is sentenced to death for no good reason — is continually asked to do things for other people. Talk, eat, find Jesus. His perspective is that there’s not much point in doing any of those things. Those are people things, and Jefferson is no longer a person; he’s an animal on the way to slaughter.

He’s been taken over by pessimism, which is easy to understand when you’re on death row. But his godmother, Miss Emma, wants Jefferson to face his end as a man. As if it matters how a man falls down!

“When the fall is all there is, it matters.” (That’s from The Lion in Winter.)

Like any good English major, immediately after reading the title of this book, I said to myself, ‘Who’s going to be the one learning a lesson? I bet it’s the narrator.” Narrators always go around learning things, and in this story, Grant, who is educated enough to be depressed about how dire everything is in the South, has a lot to learn.

There are a couple of ways, though, that you could construe the lesson. None of them are particularly upbeat, and the way I do interpret it isn’t the same as the way you will.

For me, the lesson is that your death isn’t about you. There’s something greater to be served in your final moments. Call it nobility or heroism or essential humanity, your death (and your life, I suppose) can be in service to others. You can show those around you that it’s possible to meet eternity on your own two feet.

Hello, eternity!

It provides and reinforces a sense of hope, which is a feeling that’s in short supply these days, and there’s a good chance that the hope you feel is entirely misplaced. Can death ever be truly noble? I suppose that’s up to you and your own faith.

It’s probably happier to think it’s possible, that there are angels up in heaven scoring perfect 10s even from the East German judges.

Does Ernest J. Gaines think so? Beats me.

The book ends with an endless, lingering feeling of fear, doubt, uncertainty. The feeling you get when you are suffering and you don’t know when it’s going to end. An on-the-floor feeling, when very often a single image will appear to you. A mundane image given new weight by your mind’s willingness to accept its significance.

The swirls in the carpet, an insect on a hill, the particular dance of an auburn leaf moments before freefall. Your whole body turns into a telescope that brings the image into sharp relief, and you suddenly don’t know why you’re looking, why you care. But you know that the image will stick to you, like a painting glued to the inside of your skull. Perhaps it’ll haunt you forever.

Perhaps you’ve seen it already.