books, books, books
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Finished John Irving's Until I Find You awhile back. A good read to be sure but not one for the novice Irving fan.
Also read Ben Elton's The First Casualty which I also enjoyed but I do like his writing. This was not typical Elton, based during WW1, it throws up some provocative tsituations.
Now back to backtracking Carl Hiaason, and am reading Basket Case
Also read Ben Elton's The First Casualty which I also enjoyed but I do like his writing. This was not typical Elton, based during WW1, it throws up some provocative tsituations.
Now back to backtracking Carl Hiaason, and am reading Basket Case
signed with love and vicious kisses
It may well be Witch Week. I have not read that yet as I am only into the second book of the Chrestomancy series (The Lives of Christopher Chant) and Witch Week is the third.miss buenos aires wrote:Tim(e) - Was it in a book by Diana Wynne Jones where the boy writes in his journal, "I got up, I got up, I GOT UP!"? Where "I got up" is a code for how much he hates school? Is that "Witch Week"? I loved that book to death. Also "A Tale of Time City."
She is a very gifted writer who is able to project vivid imagery through her books, and so it was so strange seeing her interviewed in one of the bits of extra material on the Howl's Moving Castle DVD. She just does not look how you might envisage such a writer to look... none of the trappings of a successful person (a la Rowling) at all or the charisma you might expect (say, like a Vonnegut) - very plain and down to earth... which has made me appreciate her all the more.
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Otis Westinghouse
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Can't recall if anyone's mentioned The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold here. I think it's been a pretty huge seller in the US as it has in the UK, and probably elsewhere. Amazing premise: murdered 14 year old girl narrates the account from heaven of her murder by a psychopath. I'm only 50 pages in, but I can't get it out of my head. She seems to get the sense of time (1973) and place spot on. The pain of her family and details of the event are very vivid. Her previous book 'Lucky' was a memoir recounting how she was raped at Syracuse in a place where another victim was killed, and the police told her she was 'lucky' as she survived. Having recently finished WG Sebald, I'm now wondering if there are any writers called Sebild, Sebeld or Sebuld to move on to.
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
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Otis Westinghouse
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Well there weren't, so I'm now on Philip Roth's Human Stain. I've not got my hands on any of the hugely celebrated Roth titles of the last 10 years (though I did read stuff like Portnoy's Complaint and The Ghost Writer back in the day), but it does seem almost too good to be true that he should be writing with such power in his 70s. I was forgetting that they made a hugely derided film of it a few years ago. Who could want to watch it rather than savour the density, energy and potency of his sentences. It's a UK cliche to view the modern saviours of the novel in English as American men who have matured to perfection, often Jewish and often with a penchant for writitng about academics, like Bellow and Roth, or Updike, who appears to have lost the status he once had, and to view UK writers as often timid and parochial (Amis is very into this one, and of course likes to view himself as very aligned with the Americans), and there's a lot of bollocks in that, with, for example, lots of interesting contemporary British female writers worth checking out, but it's hard not to be blown away by a paragraph or two of Roth.
I had never heard the use of the word 'spook' that cost him his career, and, according to him, his wife, but it's a great concept that one word's unintended meaning could bring about your downfall. And here's the best argument imaginable for loving the immediacy of music you respond to for personal and physical reasons over cerebral ones, from the scene where the narrator visits the widowed Coleman Silk on a Saturday evening to find him hooked on a radioshow playing music from his younger years:
'Oddly, he said, none of the serious stuff he'd been listening to all his adult life put him into emotional motion that way that old swing music now did: "Everything stoical within me unclenches and the wish not to die, never to die, is almost too great to bear. And all this," he explained, "from listening to Vaughn Monroe." Some nights, every line of every song assumed a significance so bizarrely momentous that he'd wind up dancing by himself the shuffling, drifting, repetitious, uninspired yet wonderfully serviceable, mood-making fox trot that he used to dance to with the East Orange High girls on whom he pressed, through his trousers, his first meaningful erections; and while he danced, nothing he was feeling, he told me, was simulated, neither the terror (over extinction) nor the rapture (over "You sigh, the song begins. You speak, and I hear violins.").'
Isn't that just perfect? Now I'm in my 40s, I tend to think when choosing a new book to read of something that I couldn't bear not to have read if I found myself in the near future on my death bed, so I suspect I might be visiting others such as American Pastoral or The Plot Against America before long.
So what y'all been reading?
I had never heard the use of the word 'spook' that cost him his career, and, according to him, his wife, but it's a great concept that one word's unintended meaning could bring about your downfall. And here's the best argument imaginable for loving the immediacy of music you respond to for personal and physical reasons over cerebral ones, from the scene where the narrator visits the widowed Coleman Silk on a Saturday evening to find him hooked on a radioshow playing music from his younger years:
'Oddly, he said, none of the serious stuff he'd been listening to all his adult life put him into emotional motion that way that old swing music now did: "Everything stoical within me unclenches and the wish not to die, never to die, is almost too great to bear. And all this," he explained, "from listening to Vaughn Monroe." Some nights, every line of every song assumed a significance so bizarrely momentous that he'd wind up dancing by himself the shuffling, drifting, repetitious, uninspired yet wonderfully serviceable, mood-making fox trot that he used to dance to with the East Orange High girls on whom he pressed, through his trousers, his first meaningful erections; and while he danced, nothing he was feeling, he told me, was simulated, neither the terror (over extinction) nor the rapture (over "You sigh, the song begins. You speak, and I hear violins.").'
Isn't that just perfect? Now I'm in my 40s, I tend to think when choosing a new book to read of something that I couldn't bear not to have read if I found myself in the near future on my death bed, so I suspect I might be visiting others such as American Pastoral or The Plot Against America before long.
So what y'all been reading?
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
I've been addicted to the British writer Michael Jecks' series of mysteries set in the southwest of England in the 14th century. As mysteries, they aren't that great, but as historical fiction they are highly entertaining. I think there are 20 or so titles in all and I've polished off 14 in the past two months. I have also just ordered 3 of the 33 1/3 series from Amazon, including Armed Forces.
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Boy With A Problem
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Otis wrote:
Speaking of Yates, I re-read "Young Hearts Crying" recently. Yates is one of my all time favorites. Everything he writes is on the depressing side - not living up do one's dreams and ideals. Here is a nice article about him -
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html - "Revolutionary Road" is the place to start with him.
I read two Jonathan Coe novels. "The Closed Circle" was the sequel to "The Rotters Club" and though very readable, wasn't nearly as good. He just seems to wrap things up a bit too neatly. I also read "What a Carve Up" which I really enjoyed. I was close to laughing out loud and crying in a couple of places. Great characters.
On the non fiction side of things I read "Keystone - The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett" by Simon Louvish. The first third of the book was terrific in describing the early early days of Hollywood - just as the pictures were starting up there around 1910. However there just isn't enough information/truths in Sennett's private life to justify a book of this length and it's a very long 300 pages. I also read Peter Bogdanovich's, "Who The Hell's In It", in which he fawns over 25 actors and actresses he feels personfied the "movie star" era of Hollywood. Most of these he has had first hand encounters with and his anecdotle (spelling?) style serves him well. He somehow pulls off the inclusion of Cybil Sheppard and Dorothy Stratton into his vignettes. Though my favorite is Jerry Lewis's reaction to PB's remark that the Nick Tosches book on Dean Martin (Which I really enjoyed) was pretty good - "I called him (Tosches) when I got the book and I said, 'Does a cunt have trouble sleeping at night? You fucking hack!'" - good shit that. He has another one on directors that I'll pick up at some point.
I'm halfway through "It's a Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby....ok so far, amused by the references to Richard Yates and Jonathan Richman (from the American character!)So what y'all been reading?
Speaking of Yates, I re-read "Young Hearts Crying" recently. Yates is one of my all time favorites. Everything he writes is on the depressing side - not living up do one's dreams and ideals. Here is a nice article about him -
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html - "Revolutionary Road" is the place to start with him.
I read two Jonathan Coe novels. "The Closed Circle" was the sequel to "The Rotters Club" and though very readable, wasn't nearly as good. He just seems to wrap things up a bit too neatly. I also read "What a Carve Up" which I really enjoyed. I was close to laughing out loud and crying in a couple of places. Great characters.
On the non fiction side of things I read "Keystone - The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett" by Simon Louvish. The first third of the book was terrific in describing the early early days of Hollywood - just as the pictures were starting up there around 1910. However there just isn't enough information/truths in Sennett's private life to justify a book of this length and it's a very long 300 pages. I also read Peter Bogdanovich's, "Who The Hell's In It", in which he fawns over 25 actors and actresses he feels personfied the "movie star" era of Hollywood. Most of these he has had first hand encounters with and his anecdotle (spelling?) style serves him well. He somehow pulls off the inclusion of Cybil Sheppard and Dorothy Stratton into his vignettes. Though my favorite is Jerry Lewis's reaction to PB's remark that the Nick Tosches book on Dean Martin (Which I really enjoyed) was pretty good - "I called him (Tosches) when I got the book and I said, 'Does a cunt have trouble sleeping at night? You fucking hack!'" - good shit that. He has another one on directors that I'll pick up at some point.
Everyone just needs to fuckin’ relax. Smoke more weed, the world is ending.
Otis, I also recommend "I Married a Communist" from Roth. It's part of his wonderful trilogy which includes Stain and American Pastoral. I am a Roth fan of long standing and had been down on his stuff some time around his middle Zuckerman period: the sour, self-hating, sex obsessed persona had gotten to me.
But starting with Operation Shylock, and particularly "Sabbath's Theater" his work turned a corner for me (and lots of other readers) and his work since then has been nothing short of amazing. As you note, he was always grouped with Bellow and Updike as the three giants of the American novel in the second half of the 20th Century, and, although Bellow at his best was in a category all by himself, I certainly think that Roth's recent work has made his career, seen as a whole, the most interesting, in terms of novels, of the bunch. I have a soft spot for Updike, whose novels are a notch below the other two, but whose writings as essayist, reviewer, art critic, golf nut, film critic and everything else under the sun make him Edmund Wilson's successor as America's supreme man of letters. He's worth reading on any subject, and writes about every subject.
Since you mention the "UK cliche" that considers Bellow/Roth/Updike the giants of the recent novel, I just have to tell you that for me, starting in the mid-80s the most interesting new novels were not the ones being put out at that time by these guys, but instead those put out by relatively young novelists who were either English or associated with England. The guys I was into at that time were Amis, Rushdie, Barnes, Ishiguro, William Boyd, and Graham Swift. The only American writers that interested me to the same extent, other than the old dinosaurs, were T. C. Boyle (a very funny novelist and short story writer), and Mark Halprin. I've been more interested in non-fiction stuff lately and have lost touch with a lot of these guys, but that period struck me as a kind of English renaissance. Rushie has sort of lost his way, hanging out with a ditzy model and going all celebrity, and Amis' teeth problems have gotten more ink than his writings, but I think Barnes has come back with a well-reviewed book I have not read.
But starting with Operation Shylock, and particularly "Sabbath's Theater" his work turned a corner for me (and lots of other readers) and his work since then has been nothing short of amazing. As you note, he was always grouped with Bellow and Updike as the three giants of the American novel in the second half of the 20th Century, and, although Bellow at his best was in a category all by himself, I certainly think that Roth's recent work has made his career, seen as a whole, the most interesting, in terms of novels, of the bunch. I have a soft spot for Updike, whose novels are a notch below the other two, but whose writings as essayist, reviewer, art critic, golf nut, film critic and everything else under the sun make him Edmund Wilson's successor as America's supreme man of letters. He's worth reading on any subject, and writes about every subject.
Since you mention the "UK cliche" that considers Bellow/Roth/Updike the giants of the recent novel, I just have to tell you that for me, starting in the mid-80s the most interesting new novels were not the ones being put out at that time by these guys, but instead those put out by relatively young novelists who were either English or associated with England. The guys I was into at that time were Amis, Rushdie, Barnes, Ishiguro, William Boyd, and Graham Swift. The only American writers that interested me to the same extent, other than the old dinosaurs, were T. C. Boyle (a very funny novelist and short story writer), and Mark Halprin. I've been more interested in non-fiction stuff lately and have lost touch with a lot of these guys, but that period struck me as a kind of English renaissance. Rushie has sort of lost his way, hanging out with a ditzy model and going all celebrity, and Amis' teeth problems have gotten more ink than his writings, but I think Barnes has come back with a well-reviewed book I have not read.
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Mechanical Grace
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Have not read it, MG. Last book I read by him was "last orders". I have been on a non-fiction kick for a few years now (current book, since Otis asked, is the "exciting" "A History of Private Life: from Pagan Rome to Byzantium"). As I get older I feel an increasing pressure to figure out how thinks work and who did what to whom and when, and fiction seems downright unimportant when you are on such a quest. Must be an evolution-based instinct that kicks in as the end approaches. Come to think of it, in our evolutionary relevant past men my age would be kicking the bucket. When my current phase passes, I will catch up with Swift. I've loved all his books, particularly Ever After and Last Orders. Also Waterland. Have you read T.C. Boyle? I recommend his stuff. It's some of the best satire we have.
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Mechanical Grace
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I totally understand the urge for non-fiction, and I tend read much more of it than I do novels. I can't seem to be bothered with short stories at all.
I enjoyed TC Boyle's World's End quite a lot, though I remember being annoyed by the ending. WSS should read that one, as it's all about the Hudson River Valley!
I think my Swift faves are Waterland, a short one called Shuttlecock, and Light of Day. The latter may be because it inspired me, at the time, to get back to writing. But the ones you note are great as well.
A classic mid-century American novel I always mention to people in case they missed it (and I mention it to you cause you like TC Boyle) is Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The beautiful if daunting opening hundred pages-- a suitably meandering description of the rivers in the Pacific Northwest --probably kept this book from getting the audience it deserved. It's moving, hilarious and a fantastic read. The film version with Henry Fonda and Paul Newman ain't bad either, though it lacks the weight of the book.
For some reason I've always remembered a particular phrase from that book (though whether it's Kesey's own or not, I don't know): "slick as cat shit on linoleum". That's that's good stuff!
I enjoyed TC Boyle's World's End quite a lot, though I remember being annoyed by the ending. WSS should read that one, as it's all about the Hudson River Valley!
I think my Swift faves are Waterland, a short one called Shuttlecock, and Light of Day. The latter may be because it inspired me, at the time, to get back to writing. But the ones you note are great as well.
A classic mid-century American novel I always mention to people in case they missed it (and I mention it to you cause you like TC Boyle) is Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. The beautiful if daunting opening hundred pages-- a suitably meandering description of the rivers in the Pacific Northwest --probably kept this book from getting the audience it deserved. It's moving, hilarious and a fantastic read. The film version with Henry Fonda and Paul Newman ain't bad either, though it lacks the weight of the book.
For some reason I've always remembered a particular phrase from that book (though whether it's Kesey's own or not, I don't know): "slick as cat shit on linoleum". That's that's good stuff!
Last edited by Mechanical Grace on Wed May 03, 2006 3:33 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Who Shot Sam?
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Thanks for the tip. Will check that out. I read "East is East" years ago and enjoyed it very much. Have been meaning to read another of his novels.Mechanical Grace wrote:I enjoyed TC Boyle's World's End quite a lot, though I remember being annoyed by the ending. WSS should read that one, as it's all about the Hudson River Valley!
Mother, Moose-Hunter, Maverick
Boyle was born in Peekskill, and though he now lives in California, he comes back to the Beacon/Cold Spring area quite often. I prefer his early books and recommend "Water Music" and "Budding Prospects" as two terrific novels. Also try "If the River was Whiskey", a book of short stories (they are fun, and worth a try, even though like you MG I avoid short stories).
Never read Kesey, MG. Will check him out.
Never read Kesey, MG. Will check him out.
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Otis Westinghouse
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I see where you're coming from, but funnily enough it's almost the opposite of what I feel. Who was it said the novel was a laboratory wherein life could be examined? I don't quite see it that way, but tend to think nothing can tell you more about what life is all about than a good novel, and as a big part of what life is about is how words mediate it, a fantastic writer like Roth seems the perfect companion. Is the trilogy a trilogy in terms of themse and concerns? It doesn't feature Coleman Silk et al in the others, does it?alexv wrote:As I get older I feel an increasing pressure to figure out how thinks work and who did what to whom and when, and fiction seems downright unimportant when you are on such a quest.
I want to read Light of Day soon. I loved the film of Last Orders, must now read it too. Read Watertland in Madrid ages ago, and have been wanting to revisit it now I live in that part of the world and now the scenery. The novel is permanently in my consciousness when I drive out into the fens. I see a tree by a ditch by the roadside, and it puts the novel immediately in mind. How's that for a sense of place?
True that the 80s wave represented something new and exciting from here, but also true that the legacy of these writers is unlikely to measure up to the American titans with their grasp of big themes and full-on prose. Not even sure what the last Barnes book is - I liked him a lot in the 80s and 90s, but he got too obsessed with France! Amis's Yellow Dog was savaged, but I bought it as it was a good offer. Slightly dreading reading it as no doubt it will have amazing sentences, but as a whole will go on too long and not add up to enough. I find him an incredible stylist, but wish his comic vision added up to more than the sum of its parts.
Not read TC Boyle but always heard good things.
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
I liked East is East, but the GF hated it.
I'm reading the 33 1/3 edition of Murmur by REM. This book really sucks. Its the first I've read of the series and I am really disappointed. I am a guitarist with a lot of studio experience and the book is too technical even for me. After that, it is much more about the writer than about the band or the album. Yuck.
I'm reading the 33 1/3 edition of Murmur by REM. This book really sucks. Its the first I've read of the series and I am really disappointed. I am a guitarist with a lot of studio experience and the book is too technical even for me. After that, it is much more about the writer than about the band or the album. Yuck.
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Otis Westinghouse
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Otis, the three books are viewed as a sort of trilogy only in the sense that they deal with "big" american themes of the post-war era: the radicalism of the 60s, the McCarty era, racial relations, 90s political correctness etc.
I Married a Communist is particularly juicy because in it Roth takes his revenge on Claire Bloom who wrote a book after their separation airing some very private issues and making Roth look very bad in the process. She had him, among other things, demanding that she kick her adult daughter out of the house (she was not sophisticated enough). In Roth's novel, a "fictionalized" daughter, and a Claire Bloom stand-in get taken to the woodshed. Real nasty stuff, but fun to read.
I Married a Communist is particularly juicy because in it Roth takes his revenge on Claire Bloom who wrote a book after their separation airing some very private issues and making Roth look very bad in the process. She had him, among other things, demanding that she kick her adult daughter out of the house (she was not sophisticated enough). In Roth's novel, a "fictionalized" daughter, and a Claire Bloom stand-in get taken to the woodshed. Real nasty stuff, but fun to read.
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Otis Westinghouse
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so lacklustre
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Otis Westinghouse
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After knocking back a couple more of the 331/3 series (Kinks- Village Green and EC- Armed Forces, both of which I much, much preferred to the drool-inducing Murmur tome) I decided to keep on the music theme and picked up Azeraad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, a mini-history of American underground music in the 80s. Chapters focus on Black Flag, the Minutemen, Husker Du, Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., Minor Threat, Mudhoney, etc., with special emphasis placed on bands formative years and early struggles.
This is just a fantastic book for me, because as a teen in north Idaho at the time I was on the periphery of all this- outside looking in, wishing I lived someplace where punk bands would come to play and relying on second hand fanzines and battered cassette compilations to stoke my hunger for bands like Black Flag, Fear, and Sonic Youth. Then, playing in bands of my own and experiencing the struggle firsthand, I am amazed to find out that most of these bands that were gods to me were subsisting off of little more than unknown bands were. Compelling as both social and music history, anyone with an interest in the 80s underground that subsequently spawned Nirvana and all of their pale imitators who travelled under the 'alternative' blanket should check this book out.
This is just a fantastic book for me, because as a teen in north Idaho at the time I was on the periphery of all this- outside looking in, wishing I lived someplace where punk bands would come to play and relying on second hand fanzines and battered cassette compilations to stoke my hunger for bands like Black Flag, Fear, and Sonic Youth. Then, playing in bands of my own and experiencing the struggle firsthand, I am amazed to find out that most of these bands that were gods to me were subsisting off of little more than unknown bands were. Compelling as both social and music history, anyone with an interest in the 80s underground that subsequently spawned Nirvana and all of their pale imitators who travelled under the 'alternative' blanket should check this book out.
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Who Shot Sam?
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It's true. Just across the border from that buzzing metropolis of Spokane, WA.-
Mechanical Grace
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Well from the sound of it you were much cooler and less sheltered than I was as a teen, living less than 20 miles from Manhattan! Course, back then, the big new technology was something called FM radio, so the 'burbs had a sheltering effect all their own. Nothing makes a better blindfold than pure mainstream mediocrity.
Annnnyway. I am dying to read a book, almost any book. I am so dog-awful tired from raising my new puppy-- up every day at 5, plus middle-of-the-night accidents, etc., and all waking minutes spent making sure she ain't chewing on something other than the seemingly dozens of sanctioned rawhide, rubber and rope things I've gotten for her, paying special attention to her favorite no-no, my son's ankles.
Okay, I think some of you were talking about books...
Annnnyway. I am dying to read a book, almost any book. I am so dog-awful tired from raising my new puppy-- up every day at 5, plus middle-of-the-night accidents, etc., and all waking minutes spent making sure she ain't chewing on something other than the seemingly dozens of sanctioned rawhide, rubber and rope things I've gotten for her, paying special attention to her favorite no-no, my son's ankles.
Okay, I think some of you were talking about books...
The New York Times is coming out (this will appear in its May 21st print edition) with the result of a survey it did of 125 prominent writers and critics looking for the "Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years."
The winner was Beloved, by Toni Morrison. I"m among the very small group of people who find that book extremely overrated, but the runners-up are some amazing books, by authors we've been talking about recently: Underworld, by DeLillo was second, followed by Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, the Rabbit novels of Updike (judged as one), and American Pastoral, by Roth.
Seventeen other books received multiple votes (McCarthy's Border Trilogy is counted as one), and interestingly, in light of our Roth conversation, FIVE of his books appear on the list (Counterlife (86), Shylock (93), Sabbath's Theater (95), Stain (2000), and Plot Against America (04). That makes SIX novels, all receiving multiple votes for best book of the period. Astonishing, although I would not include The Counterlife on this list, substituting I Married a Communist. The only other writers with multiple books on the list are DeLillo with White Noise and Libra, McCarthy with his trilogy, and Updike with his Rabbit books (the best of his novels).
The additional books on the list are: A Confederancy of Dunces (Toole); Housekeeping (Maryanne Robinson); Winter's Tale (Mark Helprin; a great fantasy of a book by one of my favorite writers); Where I'm Calling From (Carver); The Things They Carried (O'Brien); Mating (Rush; a beautiful, mad book); Jesus' Son (Johnson); Independence Day (Ford); and The Known World (Jones).
The only books on this list that I have read and consider overrated are the Carver and Ford books: for whatever reasons Carver's minimalism never registered with me, and Ford I just don't get at all. Never read the Jones, O'Brien and Robinson books.
The winner was Beloved, by Toni Morrison. I"m among the very small group of people who find that book extremely overrated, but the runners-up are some amazing books, by authors we've been talking about recently: Underworld, by DeLillo was second, followed by Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, the Rabbit novels of Updike (judged as one), and American Pastoral, by Roth.
Seventeen other books received multiple votes (McCarthy's Border Trilogy is counted as one), and interestingly, in light of our Roth conversation, FIVE of his books appear on the list (Counterlife (86), Shylock (93), Sabbath's Theater (95), Stain (2000), and Plot Against America (04). That makes SIX novels, all receiving multiple votes for best book of the period. Astonishing, although I would not include The Counterlife on this list, substituting I Married a Communist. The only other writers with multiple books on the list are DeLillo with White Noise and Libra, McCarthy with his trilogy, and Updike with his Rabbit books (the best of his novels).
The additional books on the list are: A Confederancy of Dunces (Toole); Housekeeping (Maryanne Robinson); Winter's Tale (Mark Helprin; a great fantasy of a book by one of my favorite writers); Where I'm Calling From (Carver); The Things They Carried (O'Brien); Mating (Rush; a beautiful, mad book); Jesus' Son (Johnson); Independence Day (Ford); and The Known World (Jones).
The only books on this list that I have read and consider overrated are the Carver and Ford books: for whatever reasons Carver's minimalism never registered with me, and Ford I just don't get at all. Never read the Jones, O'Brien and Robinson books.