Conspicuous Consumption

Readers of the old blog, Only a Blockhead, will know that I've been making my way through the never ending, and I think still growing, series of crime novels by Michael Connelly featuring Detective Harry Bosch. I'm glad that there is no end in sight, because though one would think an author would be getting stale by the fourteenth entry in a series, Nine Dragons seems to me one of the best so far. One is aware of Connelly's efforts to keep things fresh—the hard-bitten LA cop visits Hong Kong in this volume, and a major recurring character dies—but one doesn't object because his efforts are successful, not desperate.  The detective, Harry Bosch, is aging in real time. There are several novels in the series after this one, and apparently Bosch is in his seventies in the later volumes. It'll be nice to see, when I get that far, what a geriatric and presumably retired LA cop gets up to

  All travel books are nostalgic: They record memories of a trip that is past, and more than a few lament the way the place they are writing about has changed since an earlier generation of travelers visited, was continuing to change while they were there, and has changed even further since they started writing. The past is another country—one that is always elusive. Roumeli , Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his wanders in Northern Greece, was published in 1966, so the Greece he writes about from the years before 1966 is long gone for those of us reading Roumeli more than half a century after it appeared. And yet, the book lives. What brings it alive is Leigh obvious affection for the Greeks he writes about and for the landscape through which he moves. Add to that the pleasure of Leigh Fermor's prose. It's hard to think of a writer with a finer style. His beautifully written account will make you want to visit this remembered Northern Greece, to walk the trails he walked...

   Professional reviewers like Mark Lawson at the Guardian , along with the hordes of amateurs at Goodreads and Amazon, in commenting on Hideo Yokoyama's police procedural  Six Four , have all remarked on one thing: how illuminating the book is about Japanese society.    Six Four makes the obvious clear: the police force is a bureaucracy. In focusing on how the pieces of that bureaucracy move (and grind against each other) in solving a crime—the disappearance of a young girl—we see the slow turning of bureaucratic wheels and also the rigid hierarchies that are certainly present in Japanese organizations.  One suspects, however, that bureaucracies the world over, especially in quasi-military organizations like the police, are similar. So yes, the book is illuminating about Japanese society, but are the workings of Japanese bureaucracies so different from the workings of bureaucracies elsewhere? Since I haven't lived elsewhere for a long time, I'll leave tha...