Pirate Latitudes – Michael Crichton, 2009 ★

Dead Captain, Leaky Vessel

Did Michael Crichton even read Pirate Latitudes, at least in the form we have it today? I wonder. He died more than a year before the book saw publication, and it reads like an outline for a novel rather than a fleshed-out example of one.

The storycraft is patchy, the typical Crichton invention uneven. Perhaps he worked on this as an exercise between more serious efforts, thinking he'd have time to give it the fresher perspective it needed. 

Alas, death has a habit of catching one unawares.

Papa Hemingway – A. E. Hotchner, 1966 ★★★★½

The Legend and the Man

Ernest Hemingway is probably at least as well known for who he was as for what he wrote. He's not the only writer you can say that about, but he's certainly one of the most pronounced examples of that species known as Literanius Leonicus.

A. E. Hotchner, a frequent travelling companion during Hemingway's latter days, brings you inside the lion's den in this engaging, subjective memoir.

At its root, Papa Hemingway forms a kind of final testament on the writer's calling, as lived and observed by one of the most famous exemplars of that calling in our time. Hemingway talks a lot about writing as an art and craft, and the importance of sticking with it even when one feels empty or distraught.

Gerald's Game – Stephen King, 1992 ★

Recalling a Forgotten King

Ever notice how so many fresh-looking but aged Stephen King hardcovers fill shelves at consignment shops?

It's fascinating, if you are a fan of King's like me, to note which novels they are. I never see the ones people talk about, like It or Misery. What I always see are those books he wrote between the late 1980s, when he was supposedly churning out manuscripts in a drug-induced frenzy, and 1999, when getting run over put him out of action for a while.

They are the King books Time forgot, books that cumulatively topped the best-seller lists for months but didn't become popular movies and which no one remembers outside of a few of his most loyal Constant Readers. Books like Gerald's Game.