Book Details
| Title: |
|
Shoedog |
| Author: |
|
George Pelecanos |
| Times Read: |
|
1 |
| Last Read: |
|
12.05.06 |
Other Books Read By This Author (16)
- The Big Blowdown
- The Cut
- Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go
- Drama City
- A Firing Offense
- Hard Revolution
- King Suckerman
- The Man Who Came Uptown
- The Martini Shot
- Nick's Trip
- The Night Gardener
- Shame the Devil
- The Sweet Forever
- The Turnaround
- The Way Home
- What it Was
Notes History
| Date Read |
Note |
| 12.05.06 | Since I've generally enjoyed this guy's books more and more as he puts them out, I kinda thought it was just him getting better as a writer. After reading this book I'm starting to think it just took three or four books to really get into his groove and now that I am I'll enjoy all of his earlier stuff. Guess I'll find out. In any case, this short book was much better than I thought it'd be, although it does have a few problems. The biggest one is the title. It refers to the nickname of a secondary character... generally makes no sense. The guy who sells shoes is in it but he's not the main character. It's really about this drifter named Constantine. It's clear that Pelecanos likes the name because he weites it out like 80,000 times in 286 pages. There's this great epic 40-page chapter though where it details exactly what happens when a character "sees the world" for 17 years. and I really like how Pelecanos pays just as much attention to the downtime of criminal's behavior as he does to the actual crimes. Here, a Reservoir Dogs-esque group of people come together to knock over two liquor stores in a coordinated job hoping to spread the cops thin and take off with a huge score of cash. There's an interesting bit about how liquor stores are actually ghetto banks... but then the guys go out for a night of drinking and the majority of the book is Constantine going places and waiting for the time to come to rob these places. A really interesting choice I thought, especially since it proves to be just as interesting as when the crime and violence occur. I dunno, I'm not officially a fan. |
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