Tag Archives: Books

Get Me the Slow Horses

If you like spy novels and you’re not reading Mick Herron’s Slough House series, what’s wrong with you? Are you consumed with self-loathing? Are you mean to children? Not obnoxious children. I have no problem with that. I’m referring to nice children. Do you enjoy treating nice children badly?

This isn’t me asking. It’s my neighbor. She loves this series, and she has excellent taste. I love the series too, but my taste is suspect.

Spook Street is the fourth installment in the series. It brings back Jackson Lamb, the delightfully acerbic and misanthropic head of the slow horses, a group of British MI5 spies who’ve fairly or unfairly been relegated to Slough House because they’re misfits, losers, or nuisances. Slough House is “where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.” When there’s an emergency and national security is at risk, no one yells “Get me the slow horses.”

Still, national emergencies happen in Britain and somehow the slow horse get tangled up in them. Much to the reader’s relief, that’s what happens once again in Spook Street. The story opens with a bomb going off in a London mall on January 1st. Forty people are killed including the suicide bomber. It should be a straightforward investigation for the real spies at MI5, but it looks like a group secretly funded by a MI5 legend, who’s now retired and has dementia, might be involved. Slough House is pulled in because the MI5 legend is the grandfather of a slow horse.

The slow horses are now on Spook Street, and “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.” These are things the slow horses aren’t good at, and MI5 desperately wants to keep all of this a secret. But here’s the “First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

Spook Street is another fast paced installment in the Slough House series, and it’s a pleasure to read. But beware, these stories have a body count, and Mick Herron has no problem sending slow horses out to pasture with a bullet.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

It Just Got Hotter in Texas

Being a reputable media outlet, this journal frequently focuses on news that’s intended to make readers angry. Hey, whatever it takes to get those precious clicks. Well, not today – because we’re bringing you a feel-good story where common sense prevails.

On June 12, 2023, Texas passed the READER Act, which stands for Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designed Educational Resources. It requires book vendors selling to Texas public schools to rate books based on sexual content. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/business/texas-sexually-explicit-books-law/index. Now it will be much easier to find sexually explicit material in school books. I must confess: This news gave me a joy boner.

Per the law vendors must first determine whether a book has sexual content. Easy peasy. If so, they must then label that content as either “patently offensive” (aka the good stuff) or just “sexually relevant” (aka missionary position). Simple pimple, because everyone knows what “patently offensive” means. Is it offensive? Do you have a patent for it?

But how will I know how hot the “patently offensive” stuff is? I don’t want to waste my money here. Not to worry. Texas thought of that too. A committee will assign anywhere from 1 (that’s different) to 4 (need a new pair of underwear) erect eggplant emojis to books with patently offensive material. It will assign 1 (after school TV special) to 4 (is that your grandfather?) withered eggplant emojis to books with boring sexually relevant material.

All I can say is: Thank you, Texas. Now, if only Goodreads would do the same.

Tengo Leche, Patently Offensive Editor

Nobel Prize Winner Has a Foot Fetish

Part-time writer and full-time foot fetishist, Olga Tokarczuk, won the Nobel Prize for Literature (Silly Languages Category) in 2018. Having never heard of her (and unable to find anything about her on TMZ.com), we concluded she does not exist.

However, we stumbled across her book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones, in Book No Further, which is not the worst book shop in Roanoke. According to the book’s cover, Ms. Tokarczuk is from Poland and inexplicably writes in Polish, which explains why we and TMZ never heard of her. As an aside, writing in Polish seems to be a poor marketing decision – one that she should reconsider if she hopes to have any success.

As made clear in Drive Your Plow, Ms. Tokarczuk loves feet and William Blake – for many of the same reasons. Early on the narrator confesses that she must wash her feet thoroughly before going to bed. Perhaps this is because “[i]t is in the feet that all knowledge of Mankind lies hidden; the body sends them a weighty sense of who we really are and how we relate to the earth.” But if you need more proof of her fanaticism for feet, Big Foot is the name of the first character to die in this fantastical murder mystery. (Spoiler alert).

So according to Ms. Tokarczuk (and by extension, all of Poland), feet are not weird and disgusting. What is weird and disgusting is our concept of reality. The narrator argues that humans are programmed to reject reality; that the “human psyche evolved in order to defend us against seeing the truth . . . The psyche is our defense system – it makes sure we’ll never understand what’s going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.” Major theme alert: don’t trust your brain, trust your feet. So that’s weird.

Drive Your Plow is a wonderfully unusual murder mystery. At times the reader is swept away with philosophical discussions on animal rights, astrology, feet, Blake’s poetry, and feet. Then the reader remembers that the body count is now up to three and each death has been grisly. According to the narrator, an older woman who lives alone, free will does not exist. Instead, our lives are controlled by the stars and planets, with the most powerful being Uranus. And this is undoubtedly true – just think of how you fear the whims of Uranus every single day.

For this odd and unreliable narrator, human rights and animal rights are indistinguishable. In fact, animals may have the better claim to Earth. Certainly the Polish winter in this book would be cruel and inhospitable to any person, as we are not born with any practical protections against its harshness. Accordingly, we are fools to believe this world was created for us – so perhaps it was created for the animals. This strident belief drives the narrator and the entire story to a conclusion that probably will not surprise the observant reader. But the joy is in the travel, and at the end the reader is thankful for the Czech Republic. Name one other instance when that has ever happened.

A final word about William Blake. At one time people apparently read him. Ms. Tokarczuk is the only person who still does. There are wonderful quotes and references to Blake throughout the story, and they enrich it. Ms. Tokarczuk is so enthralled with Blake that she compels one of her characters to become a translator of Blake’s poetry into Polish – thereby condemning him to a life of poverty, futility, and anonymity. In a book crammed with horrors, this may be the most horrific of all.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor