Bucky Katt's Big Book of Fun

I got this book from my brother for my birthday, and read it cover-to-cover. It had me laughing out loud often and for a variety of reasons. The characters are loosely based on a cat, a dog, and their "pet parent," Rob Wilco, who indulges his cat and his dog, takes them around to places, and generally treats them pretty well for all the messes they make. Darby Conley draws the cartoon strip "get fuzzy," and this book is a collection of his strips, I think. The cat is appropriately menacing and self-absorbed, the dog is lovably dopy like dogs are, and Rob Wilco is the straight man. It's great comedy, with subtle wit and not-so-subtle interspecies jokes. I like the relationships between the characters and the way they are just slightly exaggerated versions of recognizable cat, dog, and human characteristics. Bravo, Mr. Conley!

The Prince of the City

I got this audiobook from the library and listened to it off and on for about a week. It's an interesting description of Rudy Giuliani's tenure as mayor of New York from a conservative perspective. I have never heard of the author, Fred Siegel, but I know he's conservative based on his frequent expressions of conservatism throughout the book. Siegel gives Giuliani credit for the remarkable turnaround in New York over the 1990s, and he's probably right to give him some of that credit. Better policing helped turn the city around, and Giuliani helped to create that police policy. Giuliani isn't depicted as perfect in the biography -- the author faults Giuliani for the way he handled his personal struggles in his second term, as well as letting small-time feuds get in the way of governance. But he constantly asserts that Giuliani was responsible for the turnaround in the city. The book helps buttress the image of Giuliani as a "strong leader," one of the key aspects Americans look for in a President, according to many polls. It convinced me that the Giuliani years in New York weren't all roses, but that Giuliani got many things right about city government. He bucked the system and won on many fronts, and his calm in the crisis of September 11 made him a national hero. Whether that makes him a leader I can get behind is still up for debate for me.

Perfume

I read this thing through to the end, even though I was disgusted at one point by a certain act of cruelty to animals that made me say, "This book is sick," and throw it across the room. The opening chapter is funny and intriguing, but it's really downhill from there as the infant with no smell, who really may also be without a soul, grows up into a murderer and expert perfumer. He is gifted with an astounding sense of smell, which ultimately leads to his greatest triumph and his undoing. The novel is subtitled "The Story of a Murderer," so readers should not be surprised at the violence in the novel. Still, the artistic conceit of a person with a gifted nose but no human scent doesn't really justify the level of violence in the novel. Toward the end, this fictional conceit overwhelms all sense of decency and the novel really does reach the level of horror, in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Patrick Suskind has done his research on perfuming, and it shows throughout the novel, but the premise on which he has built his fictional world is askew, and I don't think it can hold the weight that Suskind puts on top of it.