"Listen here; I fear no man, save myself."
p. 59

"*We* don't try to move in on each other's territories, sir, or poach each other's property; we're not like the Italians or the Russians, killing each other, lying to each other. This is a life thing, and a true family. The Sicilian thing, they're vain, spoiled children."
p. 115

( )

When I think Dewey Decimal I think of the warm embrace of books in a cozy library. Bright sunny windows. Comforting books. Maybe a cat.

This isn't that Dewey Decimal. This Dewey Decimal is a highly skilled but deeply damaged warrior, a veteran of war and a victim of military experimentation, making his way through a New York City that has been debilitated by a series of terrorist bombs.

There is a library. Dewey makes his home in the large cold hulk of the abandoned New York City main branch. His avocation is to organize and catalog the chaos of the remaining books but he frequently finds himself navigating the chaos of politics and power instead, in order to ensure his survival.
Dewey is truly a lone foot soldier. He can't trust anyone or anything, including his own memory. He remembers very little of his past. He doesn’t even remember his real name. Memories bubble up, but are they real or the product of those military experiments? He’s not sure he wants to know.

To cope with the breakdown of society, Dewey has developed his own OCD system. Despite all the quirks of his implementation, the heart of the system is the concept of balance:”If you've got internal balance, you can radiate that balance externally, exercise control over your environment.” Of course, Dewey has some unique ways of maintaining this balance: “Check my left breast: the Beretta under my jacket helps fill out the sunken cavity where my heart used to be. The Sig Sauer achieves the same effect on my right side. Symmetry. That’s the System working for me, people. Watch and learn.”

In The Nervous System, Dewey finds himself soliciting the assistance of the Korean mafia in his battle for truth and survival. The Senator from New York, Clarence Howard, believes Dewey holds material that has been used to blackmail him about a Korean girlfriend and child that were murdered long ago. Howard wields Cyna-corp, a Blackwater-type organization on steroids, as his weapon, threatening not only Dewey but also his beloved library. Events in the conflict force Dewey to reluctantly recall pieces of his past, undermining his continual struggle for self-respect.

The Nervous System is a compelling example of contemporary noir, however I cannot recommend that you run right out and buy it. Start with The Dewey Decimal System, the first book of the series. I don’t feel The Nervous System works as well on its own. Also, there is clearly more to come. The scenario described in the opening chapters is wrapped up in the end but there is no true resolution. The overall story is still mid-arc. I’ll have my eye out for the following book.

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. ( )

Wow. A couple questions kept popping in my head while I read this book. Does anybody edit or read these books before publishing? Did the people who wrote the blurbs on the back cover read the same book I did?

The reviewers describe the book as "credible" and "intellectual." It is hard to take a book with political themes very seriously when the author is obviously confused about some basic facts. State senator does not equal senator who serves in D.C. Senators in D.C. do not represent specific districts within a state.

The main character has a large amount of the previous military experience and an opposing faction is a well armed, well trained private military corporation. Hence, a very significant portion of this book is spent describing armed encounters or stand offs. But sadly the author has less clue about firearms than he does about highschool civics class. I think he just wrote down verbiage that sounded cool in his head or about weapons that are scary without really understanding what he was saying. You can't "rack" a double barrel shotgun, it is highly doubtful professional military operators would carry AR-15 "machine pistols" etc. How hard would it have been to contact a recent veteran or professional and ask them to read a draft make sure everything did not come off as ignorant. Or heck, Wikipedia or some teenager who plays Call of Duty if that seems like to much work.

One of the blurbs described, "the prose is perfect." "It's been rizzle" is not prose. Another reviewer said, "...with writing so crafted, gifted, I long to quote every line." Really?, because I don't quote "poopy-pants scared." Instead I want bleach that term from my mind. Hell, that wasn't even dialogue.

The book is an attempt to blend Chandler-esque crime noir in a very near future soft post-apoc setting with a "urban" main character(yeah, that is code, for African-American). The white author comes off as TRYING WAY TO HARD to talk street while thinly veiling his fears/predijuces/opinions on religion, 2nd amendment, the right, PMCs, etc. Some may find it "gritty" but it really comes off as cheesy.

As pure pulp, the book actually is readable. Cheesy dialogue, over the top caricatures as villains, and excessively twisty plots are par for the course. But as literature, social satire, or though provoking material? FAIL. It is just too ham-fisted to be taken seriously.

PS:
Did I mention the parked hybrid idling? ( )

I found this book compelling. I received it through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I was worried about winning this particular book because I hadn't ever read the first one. All I can say about how well I liked this book is that I definitely want to go and buy the first one now.

[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]

I know, I know, you haven't been seeing very many reviews this year from our buddies at Akashic Books, which is because they simply haven't been sending very many books this year; and that's a shame, because it seems like every time I pick a new one up by them, at the very least it's still okay but much more often some of my favorite reads of the year. Take this most recent double-header, for example, the "soft apocalypse" noir thrillers The Dewey Decimal System and The Nervous System by former Shudder To Think guitarist Nathan Larson, which turns out to contain one of the most inventive post-apocalyptic milieus I've ever come across (and I read a lot of post-apocalyptic novels); two tales concerning a black former soldier with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who has recently moved into the New York Public Library with the goal of manually reshelving all its books, within a Manhattan that after an endless series of coordinated terrorist attacks in the near future has voluntarily emptied to roughly one-tenth the population it once was, like The Yiddish Policeman's Union these use simple crime-novel plots as a sly way to explore this expansive alt-history universe, even while layering in an ultra-slow reveal concerning "Dewey"s actual past, the terrible eugenics experiments performed on him by the US military, and why it is that he can't remember any of it, despite still having an autonomic sense memory of how to speak Korean (for one example) or how to kill a man with his bare hands (for another). Two of the most legitimately exciting novels I've read in a long time, these had the rare ability to completely suck me out of my daily reality while I was in the middle of reading them, something that doesn't happen to me much anymore now that I read 150 books a year; and I always take that as an extremely good sign, taut genre actioners that belie the usual tropes of their genres, and which will undoubtedly be making our Best Of The Year lists come December.

Out of 10: 9.7 ( )