Friday Reads: The Finder of Lost Books

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi — I meant to get to this one a long time ago. This is the problem of having a lot of good books available and a lack of impulse control. This book was literally buried under many others and I forgot I had it. When I was doing some shelf organizing last week, I found it again and immediately picked it up. John Scalzi is as famous as a sci-fi writer can get —people literally get on cruise ships to hang out with him— so he doesn’t really need my introduction. But he was very kind to me at the beginning of my career as a novelist, featuring The President’s Vampire on his insanely popular blog. I’ve met him since then at the LA Times Festival of Books, and he’s incredibly nice in person as well. In Redshirts, he wrote what I consider a primer on how to deal with the choices you have to make as a writer, and how you sometimes have to do horrible things to your characters in the name of the story.

KPS is another high-concept amusement park ride: a guy struggling in the gig economy gets a job at what turns out to be a nature preserve for the giant creatures made famous in the Godzilla movies. The kaiju live in a parallel dimension right next to ours, and sometimes they slide over here, which is what inspired all the great Japanese movies, although the United Nations keeps the reality of the monsters secret. The good guys are just trying to keep the monsters alive and on their side of the dimensional barrier, until someone sees the kaiju as a source of big money. Scalzi loads the dialogue with self-aware jokes and snappy comebacks and the prose with just enough pseudoscience to make the whole thing plausible. I loved Godzilla as a kid, and everything that made those campy, rubber-suited movies so irresistible is right here, updated and upgraded for this century. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.

I also finally finished When The Thrill is Gone by Walter Mosley, part of his series about private investigator Leonid McGill. (Also buried under a pile of other books.) Mosley is one of the best writers working today. I can’t really do the whole series justice, so let me just quote some of Mosley’s prose from a passage where Leonid’s father tried to define love for him:

If that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know that anything I could say that would convince you.

I didn’t get as much reading done this week because we had a sick child and I spent a little time on the picket line for the WGA. You can read about that here, if you want. And I had a conversation with my friend Tom about Star Wars for #MayThe4thBeWithYou, just like we did when we were kids. But my stack of books is growing dangerously low, so as always, your suggestions are welcome in the comments.