Reading List 2019

• The Californios
• Rich Habits: The Daily Habits of Wealthy Individuals
• The Chronicles of the Black Company

The Californios

by Louis L’Amour (1974)

4 of 5 Stars

L’Amour novels are always a treat. They’re usually quick reads. You can count on solid, if not slightly underdeveloped characters, decent action sequences, and a straightforward narrative driving through the heart of the story. Good, old-fashioned, grounded storytelling.

The Californios centers on Sean Mulkerin and his Irish mother, the Senora, as they fight to save their land in Malibu, California and a runaway bride-to-be from a cadre of ruthless and unsavory characters. The story takes place in the 1840s. It involves a search for lost gold in the California mountains, a clever bait-and-switch plot to outwit the bad guys, and an overly quick (but typical for a western) climax.

What makes this story interesting is its descent into the mystical and the magical.The Mulkerins are aided in their quest by Juan, a Native American belonging to a now vanished people called the Old Ones. He may be hundreds or even thousands of years old, and his mysterious and magical ways help the Mulkerins outwit and stymie the bad guys. There’s more mystery to Juan’s magic than anything else, but it’s put to good effect and adds a fantastical flavor to the story. L’Amour doesn’t make any pretenses about or spend much time explaining Juan’s origin or powers, which is how any master writer should tackle magical or mystical powers. (Start to explain the origin of magic and you’ve got the thread by which your story will unravel.)

Overall a good, quick read, taking the reader on a mystical journey through the mountains of California.

Rich Habits: The Daily Habits of Wealthy Individuals

by Thomas C. Corley 3 of 5 Stars

I’d taken a long hiatus from business and personal motivation books. This one caught my eye for some reason and, if only to refresh my memory or tune up some old hardware in the back of my mind, I decided to give this book a read.

It’s alright. It’s not bad advice. The price for the paperback is steep, considering that it weighs in at less than 90 pages. So, one star down for that.

And another star down for the fact that 50% of the content of the book is “storytelling.”

The author begins with a handful of stories of people down on their luck. Each of them somehow meets a stranger who, seeing a reflection of themselves, offers the person a free “Rich Habits” seminar with the mysterious J.C. Jobs. Later, we find out that J.C. Jobs was himself in dire straits at one point and had set out on a mission to discover why rich people are successful.

From there, the book launches into the ten daily habits that rich people practice.

The Ten Daily Habits are:

1. Form Good Daily Habits.
2. Set goals – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, long-term
3. Work on Self-Improvement every day
4. Exercise every day
5. Build and nurture relationships
6. Moderation in all things
7. Do it now, no procrastination
8. Think richly
9. Save and invest
10. Exercise control over your thoughts and emotions

Each habit is covered in a few pages.

The book is a quick read, and quite honestly it’s not bad advice. None of the advice is outlandish or difficult to follow. It’s all true, if simplistically so, and will tend to lead someone to success if followed routinely. I enjoyed the author’s concept of “Situational Good Luck,” meaning the type of good luck someone gets when they open themselves up to opportunity and set themselves up for success.

I’d rank Daily Habit # 5 as the most critical or most important. In my experiencing, networking is the backbone of success.

Daily Habit # 6 has me perplexed, because it seems that the Daily Habits themselves are a kind of obsession and that, when it comes to working, successful people seem obsessed and not able to withdraw from the arena. Your average executive works 60 hours per week and often has plenty of engagements outside of work. Where’s the balance and moderation in this? Perhaps this is just living for them. I can completely get on board with moderation, but I suspect that you have to exempt success from the equation, because I don’t think you can be a moderate when it comes to work and be highly successful.

I’d also take issue with his advice for Daily Habit # 4, which is to spend most of your time running to get in shape. I’d place strength training on equal ground with cardiovascular exercise.

Overall, a good primer with a solid backbone for anyone looking to get someone in shape for taking a good ol’ stab at the American Dream.

Chronicles of the Black Company

by Glenn Cook 4 of 5 Stars

This is a review of The Black Company omnibus, which contains the first three novels of the Black Company: The Black Company, Shadows Linger and the White Rose.

The first book of the Black Company sat on my bookshelf for nearly 15 years before I got to it. I had attempted to read the first book, with its compelling cover of a Darth Vader-like figure holding a knife and stabbing a table with a glowing pentagram on it, a couple of times. Glenn Cook’s writing style is not heavy on description or exposition and backstory. He just throws you into the story and you have to swim for a while before things start to make sense. Originally, this was very off putting and led me to reading a dozen pages before I put the book down. However, recently, I picked the book up with the intention of finishing it no matter what, and once I got past the initial disorientation and managed to get my footing in the story, I was extremely impressed.

So, be warned, Glenn Cook has a jarring storytelling style that requires a fair amount of patience. He has a spartan writing style. The sentences and paragraphs are not difficult; they’re lean. But his lack of description and exposition complicate comprehension of the story. Stick with it. Struggle through the first few chapters, and you’ll be rewarded with a compelling story that’s worth the time. The Black Company is a mercenary outfit with a history that dates back hundreds of years. They are unwittingly duped into serving The Lady, a cunning and diabolical sorceress, to put down a rebellion against her in a massive military campaign on a new continent. There is a lot of military fiction told from the gritty perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

In the first book, The Black Company, the story is told first-person from the perspective of Croaker, the Black Company’s annalist and physician. In later books, the narrative is split between third-person and Croaker’s first-person narrative.

That’s another thing to understand about the novels – none of the main characters have a real name. (This is in keeping with a general premise among the sorcerers and wizards of the book that to know someone’s true name is to have power of them.) So, you have characters like The Captain, the Lieutenant, Goblin, One-Eye, Darling, Raven, Soulcatcher, Bonegnasher, the Lady, the Dominator, Tracker, and (my personal favorite) Toadkiller Dog.

There’s a lot of great storytelling in the Black Company, although I would argue that my favorite of the series would be the second book, Shadows Linger. It’s an older fantasy novel (written in the 80s), and so it is absent a lot of the social narratives that have tainted fantasy and science fiction of late, and it definitely has the feel of fiction written in that era. The books are shorter than your typical fantasy novel, owing to Cook’s spartan writing style.

While it is not as graphic as Game of Thrones, there is no doubt that it has a dark and gritty feel. There are no explicit scenes of rape or torture, not much over the top vulgarity, but there is a definite feel of moral grayness, a bleakness to the storyline where the lines between good and evil, between the good guys in a war and the bad guys, cannot be adequately described.

There’s also an undercurrent of political machination that adds a complexity to the “villains” in the story. It’s an interesting play on politics that does not reach Game of Thrones levels, but may give you pause to consider whether similar intrigue might have played out among Sauron and his Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.

This really was a delightful and compelling series to read and quite a surprise to me in the content and quality of the story being told. It probably should be held up as one of the modern classics of fantasy. Considering that it came out around the same time as Terry Books’ Shannara series and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, both of which are credited for breathing life back into Fantasy back in the 80s, I’d put Glenn Cook’s Black Company up there as well. He may not have been as popular as these other two, but I think there are seeds that were planted, a kind of pedigree, that show up in the works of George R.R. Martin (and the other gritty fantasy realists that have followed) and Stephen Erickson.