Pickwick the Dodo

Just because it's funny

2007-08-30T11:10:00.001-05:00

Heh. I love Big Brother.

Enjoying the climb

2007-08-13T19:22:00.000-05:00

I've never been much of an outdoorswoman (what with the appreciating the marvels of indoor plumbing and all), but there's something compelling about adventure tales of people exploring and encountering the farthest reaches of our world. Hence the latest pick, Richard Preston's The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring.

As any fourth-grader worth his natural-history salt can tell you, California redwoods are at the pinnacle of tree life - they don't get higher than this. Despite the fact that their imposing size is enough to give even non-acrophobes the heeb, a few hardy students and researchers decided that it would be nifty to climb these things and see what's up there. What they found is a fascinating and entirely unknown ecosystem that still isn't fully explained.

Non-fiction is at its most appealing to me when it's paced like a novel, with a strong narrative thread and clear themes that tie the whole story together. Anyone can pull together a dull recitation of facts (including a fourth-grader doing a report on redwoods), but not every author can make the facts flow and sing. Preston, thankfully, falls into the latter camp - what could have been something on the order of, "and my seventeenth most favorite lichen is...." instead grabs you immediately and pulls you into the narrative of discovery. Perhaps most significantly, it inspires as well - suddenly the wilds of northern California and southern Oregon are much higher on my list of places to visit one day. I kind of like the idea of standing next to something that was alive when Gutenberg first brought us the printed word.

What happened, and why am I in this dumpster?

2007-07-24T21:25:00.000-05:00

As a thread title on one of my favorite message boards devoted to books proclaims, "Christopher Moore is a genius." I reached back into the archives for Bloodsucking Fiends, and I confess that I concur with the assessment.

Jodi has a problem - she's woken up in a dumpster with a burned hand and slowly discovers that she's newly nocturnal with a bloodlust problem. She's a vampire, and while it's done wonders for her hair she's finding normal business hours to be rather inconvenient to her undead life. Enter C. Thomas Flood, a fresh-off-the-turnip-truck arrival in San Francisco, hoping to be a writer but spending his time night-managing/bowling with frozen turkeys at a local grocery store. Jodi spies the perfect new boyfriend (she's a serial monogamist) in Tommy, and Tommy sees, well, an attractive woman giving him the time of day for the first time ever. A perfect match? Mostly, but there's that small matter of Jodi's creator to deal with....

Moore's comic stylings are absolutely note-perfect - he's the absolute master of the unexpected bon mot and witty suckerpunch. I can't get enough of the way he sets up a joke so perfectly and then delivers it just exactly the right way to catch you slightly off-guard. He does nicely with his inversion of the usual formulae - the typical tough guys and giggly girls give way to slacker beta males and gals more than capable of fighting the forces of darkness (if not runs in their pantyhose). Even the bit characters get their moment in the sun - Tommy's five Chinese roommates all hoping to marry him to get their green cards pop up in typically endearing fashion.

I'll definitely be picking up the sequel (You Suck) and will continue to delve into his substantial backlist.

Unknown in Kansas

2007-07-24T20:02:00.000-05:00

On the strength of the Edgar Award nomination, I grabbed Nancy Pickard's latest, the standalone title The Virgin of Small Plains. I read one of her Jenny Cain novels many years ago (the Bionic Mom is a fan), but hadn't turned back to her since.

It's 2004 in the tiny town of Small Plains, Kansas, and things have changed since the night in 1987 that the body of a young Jane Doe is found in the middle of a snowstorm. Never identified, her grave has become a pilgrimage site as believers come in the hopes of experiencing a miracle. Abby Reynolds, only 16 when the body was found, feels that now is the time to give the Virgin back her name and find out once and for all what happened that night. After all, she's emotionally invested - her high school sweetheart, Mitch Newquist, suddenly and mysteriously left town the day after the body was found, with no explanation or contact since. Turning to her longtime friend and current sheriff Rex Shellenberger, Abby blows open the mystery like a Kansas twister.

Pickard's trying something new here, and I think it works - there's a strong Jodi Picoult vibe running throughout, particularly in how the characters are drawn and the significance of their relationships. She also makes excellent use of her native Kansas for her setting - the mercurial moods of Central Plains weather take on a life of their own in her description. My only nitpick is the somewhat obvious mid-twist (the twist before the final one) that sets up the third act - while I give Pickard points for using different clues to cue a common plot point, it was still a bit too easy to guess. Overall, a strong showing - I'd love to see another standalone from her.

Required Reading

2007-07-14T17:02:00.000-05:00

Miss Literacy may love to read, but she also has a soft spot for the dismal science of economics - far from being financial reports and interest rates, the field provides a really fascinating lens through which to view human behavior. Unfortunately, few people seems to share Miss Literacy's view, as so many of our current political debates appear to be predicated on a complete lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

It seems to me that the level of discourse on significant issues would be vastly improved if everyone were required to read Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich are Rich, the Poor are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car. Awesomely noir/comic-book cover styling aside, Harford's insights are a great explanation of how so many of our great political challenges (the environment, illegal immigration, health care, etc.) have their roots in a market failure. Not only that, he also explains with devastating clarity just how ass-backwards some of the proposed solutions are when considered from the perspective of an economist.

Harford's mostly coalescing many of the major theories in economics here, but his writing style does a much better job of presenting the theories to a general audience than the vast majority of economic writing. The little glimmers of British humor sprinkled throughout the text are delightfully endearing, and his frequent use of clarifying examples turns Nobel-winning academic research into a relatable and engaging story.

But perhaps best of all, I know have the perfect book to recommend to anyone interested in viable political problem-solving. Now, to get all of those politicians to read it.....

Followed by a black dog

2007-07-14T16:31:00.000-05:00

The British use the term "black dog" to mean a sense of pervasive melancholy that follows you everywhere, and Stephen Booth picks it up as the title of his debut novel set in the Peak District of Northern England.

To newly-arrived officer Diane Fry, Detective Constable Ben Cooper seems to have it all - when they set out on initial interviews in the case of a missing teenage girl named Laura Vernon, everyone seems to know Cooper's name and speak of his father with reverence. Needless to say it needles Fry, an aggressive up-and-comer eager to use her new appointment as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. However, Cooper's life (like Fry's) is far more than meets the eye - both are trying to escape a past that just can't quite let them go.

As they throw themselves into the Vernon case, the duo find that all of their suspects are something more than they originally appear as well. The dogwalker that found Laura's shoe is oddly cryptic in his interviews and seems to know just how to push the police officers' buttons, but what about Laura's family? Her mother vacillates between heartbroken and coldly unemotional, while her father insists the gardener did it and her brother returns from university seemly for the sole purpose of exposing the family's secrets. As the clues and red herrings pile up, Cooper and Fry clash over their different styles and their mutual need to keep their own secrets....

This one was a recommendation from the Bionic Mom, and I can see why she liked it - Booth does a great job of setting the scene of desolate-yet-beautiful moors and small, insular British farming towns. There's something about an English setting that lends such a different feeling to the same plot set in America. Unfortunately, so many of the plot and character elements feel just as derivative as the setting is distinctive.

I have to confess that the "tortured hero/heroine" shtick is so unbelievably tired to me - honestly, if your only experience with law enforcement is reading mysteries you'd think that losing a beloved family member to crime or being the victim of a violent attack yourself is as obligatory to the job as passing the physical exam. I realize that authors feel the need to give their officer heroes a reason for being in their line of work, but I'd be just as happy with the "I just want to help people" rationale - at least that's somewhat more likely be representative of reality.

Overall, average but nothing special. The Bionic Mom promises that his most recent book is his best - look for that in the near future.

Miss Literacy swats her own hand

2006-08-12T15:32:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the paucity of updates lately - a promotion at work is leaving me much less blogging time. The reading at least is proceeding apace, and I'll give a nod to the following top picks from the last few months:

Passage, by Connie Willis. Probably one of the few books worthy of the new appellation "speculative fiction," as it's not really sci-fi or fantasy but isn't realism either. Unbelievably well-written and an engrossing story about what it might be like to discover what death is like.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson. Wonderfully humorous with a quiet mystery at the core. Atkinson's got a flair for telling a straightforward story while presenting it all out of time. Normally I find flashbacks and flashfowards nothing more than a pretension at style, but Atkinson, in the immortal words of Tim Gunn, "make[s] it work." Besides, who doesn't love a good tale of a train-wreck family that calls to mind the past histories of Loveline callers?

The Game, by Laurie R. King. King blew the rest of her own (already spectacularly good) series out of the water with this entry. Not many mysteries, or even books for that matter, leave me almost breathless at the author's skill, but this one did. The rare book that rises to the level of true art.

Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb. Not only fascinating for the education in Ethiopian history and the role of Islam in it, but Gibb also puts forth one of the best explorations of loss and displacement I've read in a long time. Emotionally fraught and hopeful all at once.

American Prometheus, by Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin. An excellent biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that only gains strength for being read in light of the current political situation here in the U.S. Just goes to show that FBI wiretaps, personal vendettas made political, and pillorying dissenters to militarism are hardly new unAmerican activities.

Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie. I don't read a lot of chicklit as I tend to find the genre lacking in creativity, but Crusie's above the rest. She's got enough humor to put the comedy back in romantic comedy, right where it should be. I never thought I'd laugh so hard at a book where the heroine is an actuary.

The story of women

2006-05-16T09:29:00.000-05:00

On a recommendation from my physical therapist (who rocks, btw), I picked up Anita Diamant's The Red Tent at the library last week. I've been meaning to read this for a good long while, but it never managed to jump from the shelf into my hot little hands until now.

In the novel, Diamant takes the brief sketched story of Dinah from Genesis and fashions it into a full-blown life story. Instead of being a named but voiceless daughter of Jacob, Dinah becomes a part of a rich feminine tradition in ancient Canaan that is slowly losing its power. But in addition to trying to offer an alternative view of biblical history, it's also a deeply felt work on what it means to be female, regardless of place or time. Reading it made for an interesting callback to a college course I took in Judaic Civ - we read a lot of feminist biblical criticism first quarter, and Diamant's book is a nice extension of that.

Not surprisingly, a quick look at the reviews at Amazon shows just how difficult it is to work with biblical stories (or really any religious text) in fiction - there will always be a subset of readers who expect a strict adherence to the text's words and want to see the literature used a vehicle to extend its teachings. While there's certainly a growing market for such work, I don't think that the two need to be mutually exclusive. Part of the joy that comes from fiction is the ability to play with ideas in a freeform setting, and sometimes a different perspective on the familiar is illuminating.

I've talked in this space before about the historical context for the Bible, and how removing it from that context robs us of some of the tools we need to understand it. Even if we could prove definitively that God did in fact hand down his words directly to man and these words are in the Bible, the context still matters. The nature of the original language matters - any student of foreign languages can tell you about the sheer impossibility of literal translation. The historical context of the Bible through time matters too - the King James translation was commissioned by him as a political response to the new translations into English coming out of Geneva at the time. Consider the perils of transcription as well - how many changes were unintentionally introduced by scribes and monks? The New Testament adds further complexity, as Biblical scholars widely believe that the Gospels were written long after the events in question. Basically, I don't think for a second that the Bible sitting on my shelf today is the same as it was when it first appeared in written form, and there's no way for me to tell how much of it has changed. If we ignore context, we cheapen the value of what religious texts can be.

But back to the book. One of the aspects of this book that I really loved was how it dispensed with the Doc-Marten-stomping, men-are-vile attitude that tends seep through in a lot of feminist biblical study. Being a feminist who hates men seems counterproductive in my view - we're in this world together, and knee-jerk excoriation of the XYs is no better than the patronizing little-lady attitudes of chauvinists. Sure, there are some villains in the piece, but there are also men of great tenderness, particularly those that enter in Dinah's later life.

Also noteworthy are the explorations of relationships (both loving and tempestuous) between the women in Dinah's world - Diamant states in the reader's guide that her inspiration for the story was trying to understand the tension between Leah and Rachel mentioned in the Bible, and she uses her questioning to good effect here. Likewise, Dinah's relationships with Re-nefer and Meryt in the book's last third are carefully drawn and a true reflection of the deeper emotions underneath.

Not for the literalists or prudish (OMG! Biblical people had sex, and some of them might have even liked it!) among us, but a worthy read for those who are intrigued by the idea of putting flesh on the bones of a bare biblical story.

I had no idea Australia was so confusing....

2006-05-11T15:09:00.000-05:00

In between my ongoing series projects (Laurie R. King's Russell/Holmes, Anne Perry's Charlotte & Thomas Pitt, and Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody), I took a time out for a selection from the Chicklit.com Book Club - Susan Elderkin's The Voices. I've generally had good success with their picks (particularly in non-fiction), and it's a way for me to explore authors I might have otherwise overlooked.

The Voices traces the life of Billy, a white Australian who becomes immersed in native aboriginal culture from childhood on. Told through several POVs and jumping back and forth in time, Elderkin.... loses me completely. Seriously - I have no idea what the hell this book is about. Most of the neural energy I expended on this took the form of, "Wait... now who's talking? Is this the present or a flashback? Spirit voices again? Oh Lord." I'm thinking that maybe Elderkin is like Faulkner in that she makes a whole lot more sense if you are drunk or not reading very carefully. I've seen other authors use the whole plotless-postmodernism thing to good effect (David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, another Chicklit pick, comes to mind), but Elderkin just seems like she's lost control of her bicycle here. While I think her writing style has a lot of promise, as some of her turns of descriptive phrase are simply gorgeous, I think she needs something more in the way of plot to rein in her more mellifluous tendencies. The PW review dubbed it "erratic," which pretty much tells you all you need to know. Beautiful background is wonderful, but as a writer, you have to make it mean something for the reader to care.

Right book, wrong time

2006-05-04T09:16:00.000-05:00

One of the amazing features of literature is how it manages to intersect with your life - those unexpected concordences between the page and reality. Without meaning to, the books we choose often connect with our current events in surprising ways. Whether this is due to the mysterious workings of fate or the innate human drive to forge links between the meaningless elements of our lives remains unknown, but it happens frequently enough that I have a certain reverence for these experiences.

I bumped up against this phenomenom again yesterday as I finished Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. This first novel (the followup to her excellent Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies) follows the life of young Gogol, the son of immigrant Bengali parents living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lahiri's prose is like what I imagine the weather in India to be - it flows over you like the barest of breezes on a day just this side of stifling, and it works wonderfully for her subject. Gogol butts up against the strictures of cultural traditions that don't connect to his everyday life as a typical American, and his struggle for balance forms the heart of the book. As he weaves through school, career, and myriad love affairs, he vacillates between the steady constancy of his parents' life and the unmoored drifting of his own.

Lying in bed finishing this book last night, with the ever-faithful wag-a-muffin at my side, Lahiri's descriptions of love and longing got to me in a way that I wasn't expecting. Science Guy is out of town this week at a conference, and her prose just ratched up the miss-you quotient by about 100 points. I doubt that I would have had such an emotional reaction to the book at any other time, but on that day it was a huge magnifier. I might have to reread this at a later date to see if my response changes.

Save Our Show

2006-05-01T14:55:00.000-05:00

While I typically don't wander outside the literacy realm, I wanted to take a moment to encourage anyone who hasn't already to check out the exceptionally wonderful Veronica Mars on UPN. The show's in dire straits ratings-wise and there's growing uncertainty about whether the UPN/WB merger network (the CW) will pick up the show for a third season. For those that haven't seen it, it's a whip-smart noir drama filled with complex mystery, crackling dialogue, and some of the finest acting I've ever seen. Kristen Bell's starring work on the series already makes her far more worthy of an Emmy than any of the Desperate Housewives crew, and creator Rob Thomas does more to defy the conventions of mystery than J.J. Abrams could ever dream. Many shows with season-long mysteries let down in their second season (cough Lost cough), but Veronica Mars is better than ever.

If you've already discovered this amazing piece of programming (from UPN! I know!), please go vote in E! Online's Save One Show poll to let the heads of the CW know that you'll support the show if it makes the move. For those that haven't, add the Season 1 DVDs to your Netflix queue, surf over to MarsInvestigations.net and start getting caught up on the greatest show running. The final two new episodes of Season 2 air Tuesdays 9/8c on UPN.

Elementary

2006-05-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

Updates should start coming in more quickly now that I've received a title upgrade to Miss Literacy, MLIS. I look forward to a promising new career and the return of an animal long since thought to be extinct: my social life.

As a graduation present to myself, I decided to take on a series that's been tempting me for some time based on numerous raves I've read over the years - Laurie R. King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes historicals. Mysteries are exceedingly tough to write well, and historicals even more so - mysteries set in the past have to adhere to the accuracy demands for historical fiction in addition to all the standard plotting rules for contemporary (plot must make sense, villain must have a motive, aliens cannot arrive in chapter 13, etc.). Many authors can get one or the other right but not both - I've read "historical" mysteries that would play on Lifetime with only minor changes in costuming and "mysterious" historicals that wait until p.122 of a 200-page book to get around to having an actual mystery to solve.

Thankfully, Ms. King proves equally adept at both aspects and also acquits herself quite admirably at the additional challenge of reinterpreting one of the greatest icons of detective fiction. She kicked off the series in 1994 with The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and has since followed it up with seven others.

Mary Russell could very well be one of my favorite characters of all time - she's intelligent (and of no small ego about it), snappy, reckless, and an ideal foil for the fusty, isolated Holmes. King introduces us to Russell as a tomboyish 15-year-old with a past, and the underlying tension of her difficult life and loneliness provides a perfect impetus for her relationship with Holmes. Meanwhile, Holmes sees in Russell an opportunity to mold a young, unspoiled mind into a keen detecting mind. Russell's apprenticeship begins apace and she soon stands at Holmes' side in investigating the disappearance of an American senator's young daughter (rather hilariously named Jessica Simpson - the dangers of reading books 12 years after initial publication). However, the abduction becomes more than it seems and the case lingers even after Russell takes up studies at Oxford.

Like many first entries in historical mystery series, a fair amount of ground is given to setting up the backstory and developing the relationship between Russell and Holmes. While new mystery writers are frequently (and correctly) admonished to "get to the action," King's facility as a writer allows her to lay the groundwork while still keeping her audience engaged. By the time the main case got underway, I couldn't help but continue forward to see how this new pair would solve it (and how their relationship would change as a result).

A solid first entry into a series that definitely inspires further reading, and a worthy addition to the long-standing Holmes canon. 5/5.

Miss Literacy breaks out her Bics

2006-04-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

I worry about my approach to mysteries lately. Perhaps too many hours spent watching forensics programs on TV have jaded me, but my tolerance for plot contrivances and ham-handed foreshadowing is rapidly decreasing. Poor Ellen Paul and her debut mystery, Corpse de Ballet - she hit me right at the wrong moment. If I were charitable, I would give her a "Romance Writer Switches to Mystery" pass that would allow her a higher-than-normal maximum on cliched writing, but today's just not her day. However, she did inspire me to break out My Little Red Pen, wherein I intend to catalog some of the more egregious instances of a writer moving the plot forward through the clumsy use of cliches and all-too-convenient "coincidences" that drive me to Office Depot for a 12-pack of the classic editor's tool. Someone's got to do it.

1. Instances of vomiting and/or queasiness for a female character between the ages of 15 and 50 are not a subtle sign that said character is pregnant. To anyone that has ever read a book or watched TV before, this is as flagrant as the fakeness of Tara Reid's chest pontoons. Prior offenders for this include Ken Follett and even my beloved Jasper Fforde. And no, male writers do not get an exemption. Clues to pregnancy are many and varied - let's try using some of the other, hmm?

2. May I never again read a mystery wherein the heroine's yeast infection leads her to the crime's solution. Crotch itch as deus ex machina? Delightful. Unfortunately, the creativity of the contrivance doesn't cover the bad plotting that made it necessary.

3. Repeatedly describing a character's consumption of a beverage as a clue to a poisoning isn't so much foreshadowing as beating me over the head with the clue stick. I am reading your words, you know. Mentioning it twice is fine. Pointing it out 6 times in 4 pages makes me wonder if you think I'm a little slow. Or maybe it makes me think you're a little slow.

These little mark-ups are great fun - I smell returning feature!

Tragedy at Triangle

2006-04-24T11:50:00.000-05:00

Normally I'm not much for books set in NYC - they tend to be written by people from NYC, and thus often infused with the subtext of "...and that's why New York City is the most awesome thing ever in the history of the whole entire universe" that I find exceedingly insufferable. I mean, I love my city, but I don't think it's the acme of modern civilization to the exclusion of everything else, you know?

While dealing with a historical subject probably helps matters, David von Drehle's Triangle: The Fire that Changed America manages to avoid this trap and tell the story of one of the greatest workplace tragedies in American history with clear-eyed insight. On March 25, 1911, 146 people (mostly young women) perished in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Fueled by heaps of fabric scraps, the fire quickly spread from a single scrap bin to engulf three floors of the factory. Some lucky workers were able to escape via one set of stairs or the elevators, but others were trapped by locked exit doors or were crushed when the poorly constructed fire escape collapsed. Still others leapt to their deaths rather than face the fire. While the fire department quickly got the blaze extinguished, it still managed to kill a staggering number in the few minutes it raged. The tragedy caused a sensation in New York and eventually led to greater reforms for workplace safety.

von Drehle's story starts slowly as he anchors the fire in its context - rather than simply running with the sensational aspects of the tragedy, he offers insight into the social, political, and economic forces at play in the garment industry at the turn of the century. Seeing these forces at work early helps to explain the events of the book's final third, where reform was slow and punishment lacking despite the public outcry in the fire's wake. Also of note are the diagrams and photographs - I'm terrible at translating directional words into a mental picture, so these were hugely helpful in understanding the events.

Despite the sometimes brutal depictions of the victims' final moments, stripped of their protective contemporary euphemisms, von Drehle handles his subject with great sensitivity. Notably, he makes the extra (substantial) effort to compile what is believed to be the first and only complete list of the dead, along with the small scraps of information available about them. These tiny details, such as a grieving mother identifying her daughter's body based on a "unique darn in her sock," give the story its emotional power.

Overall, very well-done and affecting. 4/5.

Locked rooms, twisted

2006-04-18T11:22:00.000-05:00

While they've become rather passé lately, locked-room mysteries have long been a staple of classic mystery. The form offers interesting opportunities for the ingenious author, but it's been so badly mangled by the less adept that the best of these snappy little puzzles are most often found overseas or wandering friendless in the used-bookstore desert. Thankfully the smarty-pants-wearing folks over at Soho Crime saw fit to reprint some of Patricia Carlon's work in their first US editions. The reclusive Australian author died in 2002, but the gems she wrote in the 1960s are as sharp as ever. Hence, today's twofer of psychological thrillers - Hush, It's a Game and The Whispering Wall.

Carlon takes the traditional mystery setup and turns it neatly on its head - rather than meandering through clues and suspects in pursuit of a tidy denouement, she lays out the villain's identity and the crime immediately and then builds almost unbearable tension and suspense out of a closed environment. In Hush, It's a Game, a parolee returns and murders the ex-girlfriend who put him away, not realizing that she's locked her young babysitting charge in the kitchen. Reading about little Virginia's struggles to understand what's happening and her efforts to break free results in a truly vivid scare because the tension all results from absolutely mundane misunderstandings and miscommunication. The theme of being unable to make other people see the danger emerges in an even more twisted way in The Whispering Wall. Here, Carlon casts the victim of a severe stroke as her heroine. Although she is paralyzed and unable to speak, Sarah Oatland can still hear and comprehend, a fact which she may come to regret as she overhears a murder plot through the thin walls of her home. Using only her wits, Sarah fights to warn the intended victim and protect herself from the plotters. Carlon achieves something of a masterstroke here - in her vivid depictions of Sarah's frustration and anger, she makes a fully realized character out of someone all observers would see as mostly dead if Sarah had existed in life.

Carlon's greatest strength is her ability to use entirely ordinary human behaviors (namely the tendency towards self-involvement and isolation) to create the chills and scares of her plots. It's easy to separate yourself from a typical serial killer novel because you know the odds of such a thing ever happening to you are about a jiggityjillion-to-one. But when the danger is solely due to other people's indifference, the fright becomes much more real. Her writing is creepy, but oh-so-good. Read these in the sun, and don't shut the door behind you.

Black hats and fear

2006-04-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

The sensitivity of animals to their environment is hardly a new observation - from animals in Indonesia and Thailand turning for higher ground ahead of the disasterous tsunami in '04 to my own childhood dog that would dive into an opened kitchen cabinet during a thunderstorm, it's pretty well common knowledge by now. However, the question of why animals are so attuned is still open, but Temple Grandin gives it her best in Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. Grandin is herself autistic, and draws numerous parallels between her own experience and how animals perceive the world around them. While the book would benefit from more extensive footnoting as it's sometimes hard to see Grandin's evidence for her conclusions, her ideas about how to work with animals rather than against them are definitely worthwhile. Understanding how animals think about their world and then using that information to train and handle them properly is far more effective than anthropomorphizing them to the point where you can't get through at all. Grandin theorizes that whereas animals and autistic people tend to think in pictures, normal people tend to think in words. Making these twain meet requires us verbal creatures to make more use of the visual in training and understanding our animal companions.

Probably my favorite part of this book is the heavy emphasis Grandin puts on understanding animal fear. Almost every animal I've ever met is afraid of something, but when fear gets out of control your normally placid pooch can go from zero to apeshit in about .02 seconds flat. Training should be about managing and calming fear, not creating it through aggressive methods. Treats and patience reap far greater rewards than any choke collar ever could.

Familia

2006-04-07T15:37:00.000-05:00

Finished Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo at lunch today, and it was the perfect palate-cleanser after my disappointment with Tartt. Whereas Tartt's prose is removed and cold (rather like that Miss Havisham-style author portrait on the back flap), Cisneros's is like a warm, soft rebozo. Her love for her Mexican culture and family is evident in every turn of phrase, and Caramelo is as perfectly executed as semi-autobiographical fiction can get. Even as she renders the overbearing Awful Grandmother in all her tyranny, the underlying thread is of compassion and love for family even when its members drive you 'round the bend.

I loved the casual manner of Cisneros's style, and the conversations between the "author" (the charming and authentic Celaya Reyes) and her rambunctious family create a deeply intimate portrait with charm and humor. But the novel truly shines in the small details that make up a life: Celaya's unfortunate childhood haircut, father Inocencio holding tacks in his mouth as he upholsters a sofa, great-grandfather Eleuterio's drooping face after his stroke. Cisneros elegantly walks the line between moving the plot along and giving enough detail to bring the characters from black and white to full-blown color. And maybe that's the best way to describe Caramelo - a bold explosion of color that captivates the eye and shows off the passion of the artist.

Bonus: the cover art Vintage chose for this is brilliant - an absolutely perfect choice.

Good writing does not always trump all

2006-04-03T14:00:00.000-05:00

despite what Miss Snark says. I finished Donna Tartt's The Little Friend over the weekend, and while I love the fluidity of the prose, it's not making up for the complete lack of plot. The story advertised on the flap copy makes the book seem like an interesting follow-up to Tartt's far more compelling The Secret History, but the novel in question completely fails to deliver on the promise. While it purports to be about a 12-year-old girl's search for her brother's killer, in reality the "story" meanders so badly that none of its multiple strands find satisfactory resolution anywhere with the 555 pages.

I can now see why this book has been so heavily remaindered everywhere (full disclosure: that's how I got my copy) - it's boring and there's no payoff even if you stick with it. Sometimes it's worth it to slug it out with something that's well-written but slow in hopes that it will pick up, but not so here. Test out a short sample at the library and see if it grabs you, but otherwise, this one's easily skippable.

Now, the only thing left to do is decide what to read....

2006-03-31T15:16:00.000-06:00

Going backwards

2006-03-24T13:32:00.000-06:00

I just closed the cover on Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and I'm finding myself at a bit of a loss. On the one hand I'm thinking, "Yeah, and Audrey Niffenegger did a similar idea much better," but on the other, it has a certain quaint old-timeyness to it that's appealing. The voice is authentically overwrought for Tivoli as a product of turn-of-the-century San Francisco high society, as amply demonstrated by such *thud* lines as (and I shit you not that the following is a quote - see p. 167 of the PB edition) "Reader, she married me." As much as I feel the voice fits the character and the times, it's still annoying as hell to read because it keeps me from connecting to the emotional heart of the story. I can't grasp this grand love affair that's going on between Alice and Max because it sometimes reads like a teleplay soon to appear on the bastard love child of Lifetime and The History Channel. So for all that the writing is tight and everything is just so, there's a hollowness that needs filling, I think. It could be that the hollowness is Alice herself - I mean, I just finished this book 10 minutes ago and I can give you exactly one character trait (free-spirited) that I remember. True, it's from Max's perspective and he doesn't really know her, but damn does that make it hard to root for them to be together when as a reader you don't know her at all.

Greer also frustrates me with his gimmick of Max aging in reverse. It's a fine idea, but it's weird and when you use a bizzaro biological idea you really need to think it through and establish clear rules and boundaries for how that weirdness is going to work. The early parts of the book suffer a lot because I just can't bend my head around what exactly is happening with Max as an old baby. Why is Max capable of remembering his childhood in great detail, when he's only old physically, not mentally? I get the concept, but the execution doesn't pass muster when you start to ponder some of the conflicts.

But in spite of the six dozen things I can find that I didn't like about this book, it still resonates because the theme of being out of sync with your life and feeling like you're missing out on happiness because of circumstance is deeply affecting and real even when the book's artifice gets overwhelming.

I don't have the right scale to rate this one right now - I'll update if I can settle on something.

Posit This.

2006-03-23T11:46:00.000-06:00

As my 1.5 faithful readers know, I'm a library school student by night. My classmates, though diverse, by and large subscribe to the "gosh, books and reading and writing and stuff are nifty!" school of thought. A great many of us (though not me) were English/Literature/History/Humanities majors in college. Typically, one might expect librarians to be smarter than the average bear in the whole Knowledge of the English Language sphere.

However, this appears not to have stopped a classmate of mine from remarking that when I used the word "posited" in a recent recap of a group discussion, I clearly must have meant "posted" because "posited" is not a word.

To wit:

pos·it
tr.v. pos·it·ed, pos·it·ing, pos·its

To assume the existence of; postulate. See Synonyms at presume.
To put forward, as for consideration or study; suggest: “If a book is hard going, it ought to be good. If it posits a complex moral situation, it ought to be even better” (Anthony Burgess).
To place firmly in position.

[From Latin positus, past participle of ponere, to place. See position.]

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

I mean, I know that I'm prone to dime-word syndrome, but please - this word is not a hard one. In fact, as a librarian-to-be, you should have a dictionary at home and you should use it, a lot, because it's basic freakin' reference. Hell, you could take the two seconds I just did to bop on over to Dictionary.com and type it in. Nothing is more embarassing than a librarian who can't be bothered to look something up. After all, that's kind of our whole job description over here.

You know what? You're an asshole!

2006-03-20T14:23:00.000-06:00

...or so says Livia to her famously non-committal boyfriend/companion/whatever, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, star of Italian author Andrea Camilleri's long-running mystery series. Camilleri's books are gradually making their way stateside via translations by Stephen Sartarelli, and they are truly a delight. I recently raced through two of Montalbano's adventures, The Terra-Cotta Dog and The Snack Thief, and both were absolute charmers every step of the way. Montalbano is certainly not the kind of cop you typically find on American TV; he's mercurial, well-read, a gourmet, and will do anything to avoid that terrible fate known as promotion. While he's clearly outsized in every way, Camilleri injects just enough humanity that you forgive Montalbano all his faults. The supporting cast is fantastic as well, including the hot-headed Livia, the showboating colleague Augello, and the frustratingly incompetent Catarella. I think my favorite's probably Adelina, the easily offended housecleaner/cook Montalbano interacts with only through hilariously accented notes.

Camilleri's stories are wonderfully crafted little gems, and ideal for anyone daydreaming about Sicilian seafood spiced with a little madcap comedy.

Forgive the pimping....

2006-03-20T14:09:00.000-06:00

But this really is a good cause! Sars over at Tomato Nation is sponsoring a spring contest in which she hopes to raise $25,000 for NYC public schools via DonorsChoose. Her contest is less than 20% away from reaching the goal as of this writing, and I'd love to see that goal blown out of the water. DonorsChoose is a great organization, and it's my charity of choice because even the small amounts I can afford to give each month really do make a difference. So please, if education matters to you, consider participating.

To check on the status of Sars' challenge, click here.

To get there, don't follow the signs

2005-08-09T10:34:00.000-05:00

Just one of the many lessons learned by Lara McClintoch on the island of Malta, the setting for Lyn Hamilton's second archaelogical mystery, The Maltese Goddess. I read Hamilton primarily for the settings and the historical/archaeological detail thereof; as mysteries they're merely so-so. However, I'm willing to overlook a somewhat contrived murder investigation to get to the smaller details that make the book worthwhile, even if it means that the characters tend to exposit more than talk.

Lara, co-proprietor of an antiquities shop in Toronto, is by turns delighted and nervous as prominent architect Martin Galea sweeps into her shop one day and buys up a healthy grouping of furniture and other pieces for his home in Malta. Galea also wants Lara to fly to Malta post-haste and arrange his many purchases to his exacting standards. Unsure about the deal but unable to walk away from the money, Lara agrees and takes off. However, all is not right at the Galea household - someone is clearly trying to scare Lara off. The worst-case scenario begins to unfold when the furniture finally arrives, complete with Galea's body stuffed into a trunk. Despite the fact that both local and Canadian police are involved in the case, Lara can't help poking her own nose in. Too bad she just might get it cut off.

Hamilton's definitely improved her form from this early outing in the series, as I was much more impressed by one of her more recent entries (The Magyar Venus). But despite the rough edges and somewhat paint-by-numbers plotting, the pace is swift and the characters are agreeably engaging. A good choice for someone who's into archaeology or the local history of often-overlooked settings, but otherwise skippable.

To live and die in L.A.

2005-08-05T14:28:00.000-05:00

Updates galore, y'all - get 'em while they're hot.

Next up is Iain Pears' The Bernini Bust, another in his delightful Jonathan Argyll/Flavia di Stefano series. I've raved about Pears a lot here, and his books are a constant source of delight for me. In this entry the scene shifts from Rome to L.A., where Jonathan is negotiating the final details for one of the biggest sales of his (admittedly less than spectacular) career - the Moresby Museum has agreed to purchase a small Titian at a very favorable price. If Jonathan makes the sale, his boss has promised him a promotion that will bring him back to London (much to Flavia's consternation).

But as is to be expected, all does not go according to plan - Arthur Moresby, the museum's benefactor, is murdered during a party celebrating the announcement of the museum's enormous expansion project. What's worse, the prime suspect, a Spanish art dealer named Hector di Salvo, has vanished without a trace. The icing on this disaster-cake? A valuable bust of Pius XI by Bernini has likewise disappeared. Unable to resist a bit of poking about, Jonathan collaborates with the local P.D. to find out what happened, with a little help from his beautiful Italian copper "friend."

I love Pears because he's one of the few authors that can shift from dark, serious work to lighthearted genre fiction easily and naturally without losing his edge. His non-series work is much loved by critics (and rightly so) but I find these little petit four mysteries a delight as well. Definitely recommended to anyone with an interest in Italian art who appreciates a light hand and engaging characters.

The power of the written word

2005-08-04T09:32:00.000-05:00

Today's update is for Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, a beautifully written children's book translated from the German about the magic and power of reading. Sounds familiar, right? While I appreciate everything the omnipresent Ms. Rowling has done to draw attention to the high-quality kids' fiction coming out of Europe these days, it makes it difficult for other talented authors to avoid comparisons. While the fantastical elements of Funke's book invariably call to mind a certain boy wizard turned media hero, Inkheart deserves to stand on its own as a deeply enriching contribution to childrens' fiction.

The book stars a young girl named Meggie and her father Mo, a book restorer and storyteller. Mo has passed on his love of books and reading to his precocious daughter, but Meggie learned to read on her own. For reasons unknown, Mo has never read aloud to her. One day a mysterious stranger comes to town and explains to a befuddled Meggie why - when Mo reads aloud, he conjures the characters off the page and into reality. Mo learned a painful lesson about his ability when he read an evil villain and his henchman out of the titular book, and read his beloved wife into it. Ever since, Mo has never read aloud for fear of losing his daughter.

However, the stranger comes with dire news - Capricorn, the novel's villian, is looking for Mo to read aloud for him and conjure up something great and terrifying. Mo grabs Meggie and goes into hiding at Meggie's Aunt Elinor's, but Capricorn will not be denied. As the family gets sucked into the villain's web, only their ingenuity and and cunning will save them and set things right again.

First of all, many thanks to my mom for her excellent recommendation on this one. Inkheart is an absolute delight and a must-read for anyone who loves books and reading, adult or child. Funke's way with words comes through beautifully even in translation, and her characters are wonderfully vivid and engaging. I confess that I saw more than a little of myself in Elinor, the hermit-like aunt whose very world is her book collection. The plot is delightfully twisty with action, adventure, and humor, and the pace will keep the pages zipping along. And not surprisingly, this story would make a delightful read-aloud or shared-reading experience for parents and their children and might be just the thing for great entertainment on that summer road trip.

If you've already had the pleasure of reading Inkheart, you'll be pleased to know that the sequel, Inkspell, is due to hit store shelves October 1.

What is the "update" of which you speak?

2005-08-02T13:59:00.000-05:00

Shocking, eh? I'm actually posting a real review for the first time in ages - you can thank the fine people who set my graduate school class schedule, as they've seen fit to give me a three-week hiatus from academic life. I love my program, but after writing 40+ pages of library science babble over a 2 week span, I'm ready for a holiday.

Last night I finished up Robert Wilson's The Blind Man of Seville. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but somehow it just left me cold. It's got all the elements that normally grab my attention: foreign setting (the titular city), complex mystery, past events coming to bear on the present, the struggle for creative genius, and a tortured hero. For the all the flash and bang of the opening, the book never seems to reach the promise set by those early pages.

We open with the murder victim's view of his final moments - bound to a dining room chair in his home, he is forced to watch unspeakable horrors unfold on his TV screen by an unknown assailant. His eyelids have been removed, and he has no escape from the images that flash before him. Finally, he escapes this nightmare by bashing his own head in against the back of the chair.

Javier Falcon, a detective in the Sevillian police force, is called to investigate the brutal killing. However, this is no garden-variety murder and the clues left behind indicate that the story may strike uncomfortably close to home and force Falcon to delve into his life's biggest mystery - the shadowy past of his own father.

Sounds good, right? While the premise certainly captured my attention initially, the book drags heavily until the final 100 pages or so. Considering that this book is 400+ pages, it makes for a substantial amount of slugging. Maybe I simply wasn't in the right frame of mind for this - Wilson's writing style tends towards a slow burn rather than fireworks, which made it tough to stay connected to it. Unfortunately, this slower pace defuses the dramatic tension of the revelations throughout the story, to the point where even the most shocking moments have all the power of my old beater Mitsubishi. By the time the story comes to a close, so much of what has gone before is tossed away as irrelevant and nearly every B-plot is abandonned like an old shoe on the side of the road.

One aspect of Wilson's book that does work is the historical thread, based on the journals of Javier's father Francisco. This well-researched look into the Spanish Civil War and the post-war life of the legionnaires who fought is the only truly compelling part of the book, and I can't help but wish that Wilson had dropped his modern A-plot altogether and written the much better historical novel lurking in the journal excerpts.

I'll give this one 3/5 - it doesn't suck, but it didn't send me either. With so much else out there to read, I doubt I'll return to Wilson anytime soon. At least I only spent $3 on this.

Ack.

2005-04-11T13:58:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the incredible paucity of updates recently - library school is demanding all of my writing will, despite the fact that I'd much rather review books than write about theories of information leadership.

I just wanted to stop by to plug a great site for readers - www.chicklit.com. I've found my people, and ideas for new authors that I must resist until I finish my degree. Otherwise, my to-be-read stack will only continue to mushroom out of control. It's hard to play "look, but don't touch."

Stories of my people

2005-01-31T13:00:00.000-06:00

As any reader of my blog knows, I'm a determined bibliophile who can't get enough of the written word. That goes some distance to explaining my love of books-about-books, and especially Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone. They're book people in the truest sense of the word, and they also happen to be rather amusing authors themselves. I finished Slightly Chipped over the weekend and it's more of the same - a lighthearted look at the world of book collecting. I've never been much of a collector (limited funds will do that to you), but reading about the collector's world is fascinating stuff. Everyone likes to think that they'll be the one to find that rare first edition at a garage sale for $2, right? I know I don't know enough about book collecting to ever hope of making a find like that, so I have to live vicariously.

The book's pretty short so there's not a ton to say about it, but the Goldstone oeuvre is definitely recommended reading for book lovers. They've got a new book coming out here in a couple of months - a review for that should show up in the not-too-distant future.

Full-contact croquet and the fate of the world

2005-01-28T08:41:00.000-06:00

As a treat to myself, I decided to pick up a book I've been wanting to read for a while - Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten. Fforde is quite possibly my favorite author of all time, and his latest entry in the Thursday Next series pretty much confirms that view. I'll do my best to describe it, but it's almost impossible to do his work justice.

Exhausted after two long years policing the inner world of books, Jusifiction head Thursday Next is eager to hang up her hat and take her son Friday back to the real world. She's bound and determined to get her husband Landen Parke-Laine back from the mists of time - the evil Goliath Corp. eradicated him from memory as punishment. Unable to stand it any longer, Thursday returns to Swindon and her old job at Spec-Ops 27 (Literary Detection) to reunite her family.

Of course, Thursday quickly finds that there's major trouble brewing in the real world. Yorrick Kaine, an obscure fictional character of unknown origin, is running for President on a platform of anti-Danish sentiment and threatens to turn England into a police state. Goliath Corp. is attempting to transform itself into a religion to avoid all those pesky corporate rules and regulations. And she still can't find reliable child care for Friday.

As she reconnects with old friends and allies, Thursday embarks on a wild race through England and Wales to find her husband and put a stop to evil scheming. Too bad Swindon has to win the Superhoop croquet championship to do it....

Fforde's books are wild and imaginative, and I think that's why I like them so much. It's almost impossible to compare him to anyone else, because he's created a fictional world that's so different from almost any other I've encountered. Fforde's work is so chock-full of literary humor and punchy one-liners that you can't help but giggle as you read. But most of all he knows how to put together a good story. I'm eagerly awaiting Thursday's next outing.

"I will tell him the truth."

2005-01-23T17:16:00.000-06:00

My posts are likely to remain sporadic for quite a while longer, so bear with me. I'm taking a heavy load of classes this semester and I'm swamped with course-related reading, assignments, lectures, and papers to deal with. My reading-for-fun has largely been curtailed to time spent on the bus coming home from work/the gym and the odd half-hour before bedtime, so I doubt I'll have much to contribute until, oh, say, April 2006.

I did manage to finish a quick little spy novel this week, Daniel Silva's A Death in Vienna. I picked this book largely because I knew I could finish it sometime before winter ends, and it didn't disappoint. Silva's books aren't particularly deep, but they're satisfying little thrillers that are perfect for an overloaded mind. A Death in Vienna is the latest entry in a now three-part series featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli intelligence officer and assassin who spends his downtime restoring famous works of art in Italy. Allon is ambivalent about his role in Israeli policy and maintains a lengthy detachment from the less savory applications of his prodigious skills. But try as he might to remove himself from the web of his past associations, when Ari Shamron (Israeli's deposed but highly influential former head of intelligence) calls, he is compelled to answer.

Shamron's latest assignment for Allon is one that takes Gabriel back to his least favorite place - Vienna. Site of the car bombing that killed his child and left his wife catatonic, Gabriel is reluctant to investigate the bombing of the Wartime Claims and Inquiries Office, an outfit dedicated to bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Gabriel's investigations quickly lead him to a former concentration camp officer living under an assumed name, and the crimes this man is hiding will blow Gabriel's past wide open.

Silva's becoming one of my favorite authors, largely because he writes intelligent, swiftly-paced thrillers that actually attempt to teach me some history instead of focusing on filling my head with nonsensical plots and poorly written sex scenes. His work is definitely a cut above most others in the genre, and that's why I stick with him throughout the numerous twists and turns of his plots. Now that I've finished his Allon trilogy, at some point I'll delve into his non-series backlist. I imagine that should happen around 2009 or thereabouts, so stay tuned for that.

The League of the Golden Key

2005-01-17T20:50:00.000-06:00

I've finally managed to finish another book, so I finally have an update for the blog. The latest is Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and though it's a pretty long book it's one of the best novels I've ever read. I picked up this book on the strength of the general sense that "they" liked it, and a guy at the book fair where I bought it saw it in my hands and told me I had to read it. Over six months later, I finally got to it, and he was right. Bare none, this book is awesome.

Part of what I love about Chabon is his inexplicable ability to make me care about a topic I have absolutely no interest in - comic books. But inside his book, he creates this unbelievable world that just sucks you in completely. The book centers around two cousins, Sammy Clay and Josef (Joe) Kavalier, and the relationship between them as they create a series of memorable comic book characters in pre-WWII New York. Joe is a recent emigre, smuggled to the U.S. in a coffin to escape the German army as it marches on Prague. Eventually arriving at his cousin's home, the two embark on an odyssey through the then-nascent world of comic books with Sammy as writer and Joe as illustrator. The characters they create express the feelings that can find no other outlet - rage against the German occupation that severed Joe from his family, the love for a passionate Surrealist artist, the fear of the unknown as seen by an immigrant.

Chabon absolutely knocks this one out of the park - his writing is by turns humorous, exciting, and poigniant. The relationships between the characters are engaging without being a deliberately manipulative roller coaster of emotions, and the rich evocation of pre-war NYC is completely compelling. I'm having a hard time putting the superlatives into words; this book is just that good.

And best of all, he had this cute little snippet about my chosen profession (now earmarked in my copy for posterity): "Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks forever marred by the cruelty of a pair of big black glasses!"

My New Year's resolution...

2005-01-08T18:23:00.000-06:00

... is to stop ignoring my blog for a change. I've let a lot of stuff slip since I got married and I'm trying to reform. We'll see how long that lasts.

Anyway, I'm starting fresh with a journal of all the books I read for fun in 2005. I doubt anyone wants to know what I thought of such scintillating tomes as Level Three Leadership: Getting Below the Surface and The Leader's Companion, both of which are required texts for my Information Leadership course. These definitely don't fall into the category of "fun books."

First up for the new year is Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Seville Communion. Perez-Reverte is a Spanish author that's finally starting to gain a following in the States, despite the fact that he's been one of Spain's most popular authors for about 10 years now. His debut novel, The Flanders Panel, remains my gold standard for literary mysteries, mostly because I can understand it without aid of a Latin dictionary (yes, Umberto Eco, I'm looking at you). The Seville Communion won't change my top pick for the genre, but it's still an enjoyable novel for fans of highbrow mystery.

The novel follows Father Lorenzo Quart, a Vatican insider whose main role for Mother Church has been to investigate all manner of mysterious happenings while keeping it completely quiet to prevent a scandal. Quart's latest assignment begins when a hacker breaks into the Pope's personal computer to leave him a message regarding a crumbling, almost forgotten church in Seville known as Our Lady of Tears. Two men involved with the church have died in what appear to be accidents, but the anonymous hacker indicates there might be more to the story. Intrigued by the hacker's ingenuity, the Pope sends Quart to Seville to investigate and make a full report. What Quart finds is a church in ruins, with a group of devotees eager to restore the building to its former glory. Viewed with skepticism as an outsider, Quart struggles to learn the truth behind this unusual church without breaking his vows or getting himself killed in the process.

The Seville Communion is much less of a mystery than Perez-Reverte's other novels, but his ruminations on the Catholic Church and its relationship to religious faith make the book a worthwhile read. Perez-Reverte is a wonderfully lyrical storyteller, and while I'm sure his works are more powerful in the original much of that feeling comes across even through the somewhat grimy lens of translation. His characters are complicated, imperfect people, and Perez-Reverte is definitely skilled at making you feel a connection to them in spite (or perhaps because of) their flaws. Unfortunately, said characters are also a little stock - guy with gambling problem looking to make one big score, disaffected housewife, bumbling criminals, etc. While the book is very good, it's not up to Perez-Reverte's standards. You can safely skip this one, but don't miss The Flanders Panel and The Nautical Chart - both of these will give you a much better sense of just how good he is.

I've also got some reviews coming up over at The Mystery Reader - look for my comments on Priscilla Royal's Tyrant of the Mind (the sophomore outing from a Poisoned Pen Press author) and Ashley Gardner's The Glass House soon.

My poor, neglected, lonely blog.....

2004-11-14T17:03:00.000-06:00

Yeah, that's my fault. Post-wedding life is overwhelming me these days, and while I'm still reading avidly I haven't had as much time to make it over here as I would like. In an effort to redeem myself, I'll give a brief rundown of what I can remember reading since I was last here:

Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers: I'm not a big fan of military history, but I got interested in this story after watching repeats of the HBO mini-series on The History Channel. Overall I enjoyed it - Ambrose does a nice job of making the complex hierarchy of the military accessible to the Army-ignorant such as myself. Nicely written - 4 stars.

Emily Brightwell's Mrs. Jeffries Pleads Her Case: Full review available at The Mystery Reader.

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four: A literary thriller in the vein of Dan Brown and Iain Pears. Doesn't show the same polish as vintage Pears, but an enjoyable read none the less. It ended up being the perfect choice for the day I started it - it kept me quite entertained while I spent two and a half hours at the Social Security office getting my name change processed. It's also the opening selection for a new book club some friends and I are starting.

Margaret Coel's Wife of Moon: Another review book for The Mystery Reader. I was skeptical about this one given that my mom had nothing nice to say about Coel's first book. I guess she's improved since then, because I really enjoyed this one. My mom can take comfort in the fact that her SFE (signed first edition) Coel's debut is highly collectible these days.

John Dunning's Cliff Janeway series, which includes Booked to Die, The Bookman's Wake, and The Bookman's Promise. A great mystery series for book lovers - Janeway is a cop turned used bookstore owner. Definitely a good pickup if you like noir with a softer edge - Janeway's got the typical noir protagonist issues but he's a bit smoother around the edges.

Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex: This was the choice for the November meeting of my young alumni book club. I didn't end up going to the meeting (the weather was absolutely horrid that day), but I enjoyed the book. I was worried that it would be one of those weird books that everyone feels compelled to say that they liked even though they didn't really get it. Thankfully, it's actually pretty good in spite of the unusual subject matter.

Pauline Gedge's Lady of the Reeds: I've had this book since I was in high school and only just recently got around to actually reading it. An interesting piece of Egyptian history with a protagonist who manages to compell your attention even as you're thinking that she deserves everything that's coming to her.

Mary Roach's Stiff: A must-read for, well, anyone really. An absolutely fascinating look at the many roles played by human cadaevars. Written with incredible sensitivity and wonderful humor, it's not to be missed. Easily the best book I've read this year, and it'll begin making the rounds of everyone I know soon.

Daniel Silva's The Confessor: Another one for those suffering from Dan Brown withdrawl, but with the added twist of an jaded Israeli spy turned art restorer as hero. I'm slowly working my way through Silva's backlist and haven't hit a bad one yet. Silva appeals to the bargain-hunter in me - his publisher tends to vastly overprint his books so they're easy to nab off the remainder table at Borders. It amuses me to get the hardcover cheaper than the paperback.

Simon Worrall's The Poet and The Murderer: A look at the life of a famous forger of Mormon documents and that of Emily Dickinson. The connection between the two tales isn't as strong as the title would suggest, but Worrall's a good writer with an eye for what's interesting about his subject matter.

I think that's it - happy reading!

I Love the '90s... Maybe.

2004-09-29T15:50:00.000-05:00

Last catch-up review - this time it's Nora Kelly's My Sister's Keeper. I needed something relatively short after my honeymoon reading, and this one fit the bill quite nicely.

Gillian Adams, head of the history department at the University of the Pacific Northwest in Canada, is once again separated from her Scotland Yard investigator boyfriend Edward as she starts her fifth term as head. As she falls into her usual patterns, an old UPNW tradition rises again: the annual engineers' Triumph Day parade, complete with prostitutes hired to ride as female slaves in a cart. This time, however, it's different. Feminist sentiment has been brewing on campus and the newly-formed Feminist Union (derisively known as the Eff Yous) stages a protest of the parade, and the clash between feminists and engineers turns aggressive. Almost immediately a tape of the incident is released to the local media, and the war of sexual politics is on.

Gillian is reluctant to get involved in spite of her support for the feminist cause, but when Feminist Union leader Rita asks for her help in winning an endowment for a new women's studies department using money that would traditionally be bestowed on the engineers, Gillian can't stay on the sidelines. However, it quickly becomes clear that someone is dead-set against allowing that to happen. What starts as pranks like smashed pumpkins and mooning quickly escalates to murder, and against her better judgment Gillian draws on all her resources to find out who's responsible.

My Sister's Keeper was originally published in the early 1990's, and the theme and force of the story reflects that. The fight for women's equality in academia seems almost quaint now, and the idea of such blatant sexism appears unreal. Not to say that it doesn't still happen, it's just a lot more subtle these days. The book makes for an interesting 'time capsule' sort of a read, and it's edifying just for that. It also happens to be well-plotted and smartly written, always useful pluses. Nora Kelly's created a winning character in Gillian Adams - she's likeable without seeming artificial, and the frank treatment of her flaws helps make her imminently believeable. Overall, well-done and a quick treat for fans of British mystery.

The jet-setter's reading list

2004-09-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

I'm finally getting around to catching up on the blog after a fantastic two-week honeymoon in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. My other blog covers all the relevant details of the journey, so no need to bore you here with that stuff.

We travelled around by train a fair amount while we were over there, so I was able to get quite a lot of reading done. I'd specially selected three BFBs (big fat books) for the trip. The books had to meet stringent standards: more than 700 pages long, dense enough prose so that I don't speed through it too fast, books I'd feel OK abandoning on a train or in a hotel once they were done, and mass-market paperbacks only, please. We backpacked through the trip with smallish (think slightly bigger than a typical school backpack) bags, so I had no interest in lugging heavy, space-hogging hardbacks all over Bavaria and Tirol. The books that made the cut were: Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, James Michener's The Source, and Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness. Since I'm so far behind, I'm doing the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of my normal reviews.

I started the trip with The Pillars of the Earth, after my maid of honor gave me her fierce endorsement. It's a fictionalized account of the building of one of the first "soaring cathedrals" in England. It follows the lives of the various people involved in the project, including the local prior, the mason, the major landholder, and a forest-dwelling family of unknown origin. It turned out to be a great read for the first part of our trip, as we were visiting a number of castles and other historic sites. I'd never really thought about how these types of buildings were constructed without all the modern tools and equipment we have today, and the book was entertaining from that perspective. It's also quite action-packed which keeps the plot humming swiftly. My one gripe with the writing is a common flaw among male authors - not knowing how to write the woman in a romantic scene. I actually groaned a couple of times reading his descriptions. Some male authors get it right, but by and large, it seems to take one to know one.

After polishing off the last chapters in the medieval walled city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany, I started in on Michener's historical epic The Source. The book traces the development of Judaic civilization from the beginnings of monotheistic worship through to the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, using an archaelogical dig in the 1960's as a framework. Like all of Michener's work, it's a very dense and very long book that attempts to encompass more than you'd think was possible. As a result it's slow in places and the sheer breadth of the book of can becoming overwhelming. Overall it's an interesting book, but it really helps if you have some background in Judaic civ., which, because I am a huge dork, I do. Not bad, but not great either.

After abandoning The Source on the Salzburg-Munich inter-city train, I started in Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness. It's a historical mystery involving the abduction of the Spanish ambassador's infant daughter just as tensions between the Americans and the Spanish are heating up as they move towards the rather uncreatively named Spanish-American war. The crack team of investigators on the case includes a child psychologist (or alienist, as they called them then), a reformed child thief, a pair of brother cops, a strong-but-silent black butler, and a staunchly feminist reformer turned private investigator. The team quickly learns that the abduction may be part of a far more sinister plot and the young girl's life is likely in jeopardy. With few leads, they use their broad range of skills to capture the perpetrator. The book reads as though it's the novelization of CSI: The Victorian Era - lots of forensics, a breakneck plot, and multiple threads coming together at the last possible second. It entertains, sure, but it's not the highbrow fare that the artfully designed cover would have you believe. Perfect for a long plane ride home though - it really doesn't matter if you fall asleep in the middle.

The Vikings are coming! The Vikings are coming!

2004-08-30T09:03:00.000-05:00

Every time I think about Vikings, I can't help but giggle at the memory of watching The Vikings (starring Tony Curtis!) in 10th grade English. There's something so amusing about watching campy actors fight with obviously fake swords, singing ludicrous songs, and toss "boulders" that bounce at each other. If ever a movie deserved the Mystery Science Theater treatment, it's this one.

Yeah, so back to the topic. I just finished The Funeral Boat by Kate Ellis - a well-done British mystery set in Devon. There are several plot threads running through the novel: the discovery of an ancient Viking burial on local land (hence the titular boat), a series of bold farmhouse robberies, and the unusual disappearance of a Danish tourist named Ingeborg Larson. Local coppers Wesley Peterson and Gerry Heffernan work to untangle the mysteries while trying to resolve personal issues - Wesley struggles to find a balance between his work and his responsibilities to his wife and infant son, while Gerry tries to reconnect with his son after losing his wife.

Whenever I read mysteries by British authors, I'm amazed at the difference in quality between British and American writers. For some unknown reason, British mystery writers have a knack for avoiding the slap-dash, stereotypical plots that American writers cling to so desperately. They feel comfortable introducing a large cast of characters quickly, knowing that readers will be able to keep them straight. But perhaps most importantly, British writers assume a higher level of intelligence for their readership, and they trust that the clever twists and turns of their plots won't go sailing over readers' heads. I think that's why British mysteries appeal to me in a way that American ones never seem to do - I enjoy it when someone assumes that I'm smart. The ego boost is gratifying.

I'll definitely be checking out more of Ellis' books in the future - I'm pretty sure that my mom can dig some up out of her gigantic library.

Didn't your mother ever tell you sugar is bad for your teeth?

2004-08-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Clearly someone dropped the ball in telling Mitch Albom that. He should seriously think about finding a new dentist, because it's a wonder that he's not scary denture guy with the saccharine stuff he writes. I just finished his most recent book, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, and I came dangerously close to a diabetic coma. I realize I'm supposed to find his book morally uplifting and charming, but I guess I haven't quite let go of the rebellious teenager in me who says, "Oh, gross."

The plot (such as it is) follows an amusement park maintenance worker named Eddie after he dies attempting to save a young girl from a collapsing ride. Eddie moves through heaven, meeting the titular five people who help him come to terms with his life and death. Interspersed throughout are small vignettes of various birthdays Eddie celebrated (or not) during his life.

I think part of why I found this book so ham-handed is that if you're going to consider the weighty issues of regret and the search for life's meaning, you need to treat them with some depth, not a glossed-over, self-help-style surface analysis that fails to reach even 200 pages. I must admit, however, that I would have given up in disgust if it had run very much longer. So much of the book is obvious from a mile off, and the big revelation at the end takes the form of "Well, duh!" to any reader that paid any attention whatsoever. The emotional payoff amounts to nothing more than the statement that love is powerful and good. With this level of depth, I'm fulling expecting Albom's next book to feature such shocking pronouncements as "War is bad," "Puppies are cute," and "2 + 2 = 4".

As my friend Babs said to me recently, "I like reading books where I learned something. It makes me feel like I got something out of it." I heartily concur, and that's why I'm forced to denounce this particular tome. I learned nothing, and I almost vomited from all the sugar.

Reporters do not have strong do-it-yourself skills

2004-08-27T16:01:00.000-05:00

Or so Eliot Arnold informs in the funniest mystery I've ever read, Dave Barry's Big Trouble. Eliot is a former newspaper reporter struggling to make ends meet at his advertising company, a job which largely consists of licking the boots of the Client From Hell. His son Matt is engrossed in a high-school game of Killer (known as Hitman where I grew up), particularly since his squirt-gun target happens to be the pretty and popular Jenny Herk. Jenny's mother is married to Arthur, an abusive drunk who happens to have made himself quite unpopular by stealing from his employer. Added to the mix are a pair of professional whack artists (Harry and Leonard), a lovable bum named Puggy, incompetent thieves, and a pair of Russian arms dealers running the worst bar in Miami. With a cast of characters more colorful than your typical Rainbow Brite and a slapstick botched murder plot, Barry has all the right ingredients for a hilarious first novel.

I'll freely admit that I love Dave Barry. When I read his columns, I can hear the deadpan delivery that makes me laugh until incontinence becomes an issue of concern. Big Trouble is no exception - I haven't laughed this hard reading a book in quite a while. Barry's descriptions of a dog named Roger ("the product of many generations of hasty, irresponsible dog sex") and his twin obsessions, food and his mortal foe The Enemy Toad, had me laughing so hard that my own dog was afraid to sit on the couch with me. The guy is potentially a nutcase, but he's also a nutcase that needs to write more books.

Book or movie script? You make the call.

2004-08-27T15:18:00.000-05:00

I'm reading at a fast and furious pace right now - I'm trying to finish as many of the books I borrowed from my mom as possible before she comes into town for the wedding next weekend. I'm averaging about one a day, which is pretty good considering that I'm doing other stuff most of the time.

This time it's Harlan Coben's Tell No One, which is pretty much a textbook thriller. Dr. David Beck is still reeling from the murder of his wife Elizabeth nearly eight years ago. On a visit to the remote lake where they played as children, Elizabeth was abducted and David was left for dead. When Elizabeth's body turned up by the side of the road three days later bearing the telltale mark of a serial killer, David's world turned upside down. The murderer known as Killroy was eventually caught and sentenced to life in prison.

David attempts to get on with his life by burying himself in his work as an inner-city physician, but he has yet to move on from his wife's death. Suddenly, David's world is thrown off kilter yet again as he receives a mysterious email linking him to a webcam that appears to show his wife alive and well. David follows the clues, not knowing that they will lead him into danger as one of the city's major power players will stop at nothing to keep the truth from being revealed.

Amazon.com picked Tell No One as one of their best of 2001, but I can't say that I agree with that assessment. It's a decent enough story, but I'm not sure why Coben didn't skip the intermediate step of writing a book and move right on to what seems to be his primary aim - turning his story into a summer blockbuster. The plot would work very well on the big screen, but on paper it seriously lacks the depth necessary to keep me engaged. The characters are stock on almost every level - you've got your doctors who want nothing more than to help the indigent, man-eating lawyers, sassy African-American women (as if there were any other kind in popular media), and truth-loving cops who refuse to be swayed by planted evidence. With characters this trite, the plot twists practically announce themselves with flashing neon signs and mylar balloons.

Probably the most frustrating thing about the entire book is the fact that in the hands of a more capable writer, the story really could have reached "Best of the Year" status. Sadly, Coben fails to live up to his story's promise. That said, the book isn't utterly without merit. I'll give it a 3/5 since I'm feeling generous today.

The fine line between life and death

2004-08-24T19:58:00.000-05:00

In an effort to keep pace with my reading a little better, I'm adding this review right away. I've always enjoyed Jodi Picoult's books (she's one of my favorite authors), and Second Glance is no exception. While it drifts away from her usual fare somewhat, the deeply moving prose is unchanged.

After the tragic death of his fiancee Aimee in a car accident, Ross Wakeman tries everything possible to escape the world, but he can't seem to succeed. Failing in several suicide attempts, Ross becomes a paranormal investigator, hoping to make contact with Aimee to ease his pain. Eventually Ross finds himself in Comtosook, Vermont, where his sister lives with her son, who suffers from a rare disease that causes him to burn severely upon exposure to sunlight.

Acceding to his sister's urging, Ross begins a new investigation into the paranormal activity swirling around Comtosook. Rose petals fall like rain, houses rebuild themselves, and a baby cries out in the night. The townspeople believe that the cause is a planned strip mall in an area reputed to be an Abenaki burial ground - they suspect that the construction work is disturbing the souls of those long dead.

Digging deeper into the mystery, Ross uncovers the town's shameful past and help the mysterious woman he encounters find her way in the world.

My mom is a huge fan of Picoult's work, so I've been able to borrow just about everything she's written from her. Picoult has carved a unique niche for herself as an author whose books always feature a thorny moral issue at their center, and her ability to handle such issues with sensitivity while still remaining honest never ceases to amaze me. While Second Glance doesn't quite match the level of her best work (Keeping Faith and Plain Truth), it's still a delight for me as a longtime Picoult fan. Her books read at the pace of a popular beach book, but the moral depth of the plots raises her work far above the typical mass-market fare. Her books are always exhaustively researched, so I invariably come away from them feeling as though I've learned something.

Picoult has somehow managed to avoid being tapped for Oprah's Book Club or something similar, so she's still somewhat under the popular radar. While I wish Picoult nothing but success and I'm sure she'd benefit from greater exposure for her work, I can't help enjoying the fact that she's still something of a hidden gem. As long as she keeps turning out great books, she'll always have a place on my shelves.

Green is for envy

2004-08-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

My last catch-up review is Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener by M.C. Beaton - another recommendation from Babs. Beaton is known for her English cozies, and this is just one of her prodigious output.

In her third outing, Agatha returns from a long holiday to find her comfortable country life upset by a new arrival in town - Mary Fortune, a slim, fashionably dressed woman who's quickly gotten cozy with Agatha's neighbor, James Lacey. The green-eyed monster swiftly comes to the fore as Agatha undertakes a mission to win James' heart away from Mary, starting by outshining the newcomer at her chosen pasttime - gardening. Agatha can't tell a rose from a dandelion, but she's determined to take the town's gardening prize if it means she can stick it to the unpleasant Mary. Unfortunately, it looks as though Agatha isn't the only one Mary rubbed the wrong way - she soon turns up dead, head-first in a flowerpot full of dirt. Eager to show off her detective skills, Agatha jumps on the case and sets out to find a killer.

This is the first Agatha Raisin I've read, and I definitely got a kick out of it. It's not high art, but it's an enjoyable little trifle that's easily polished off in an afternoon. Agatha is quite endearing in spite of her many faults, probably because I see a certain amount of myself in her. She's fiercly competitive and loves to show off her skills - definite shades of me there. But what I really found fun about the book was Beaton's pitch-perfect depiction of English country life. As someone who'd dearly love to eventually make her home in the UK, I can't help but love it. Until I can convince the Sureshot fiance to pick up stakes and move to the land of tea and crumpets, I'll have to live vicariously through Beaton's work. Well, it could be worse.

Since everyone else is doing it....

2004-08-23T19:38:00.000-05:00

I too have succumbed to the pressure and read Dan Brown's massive bestseller The Da Vinci Code. I read it for my book club, which happens to be meeting right now without my participation. After looking over my list of to-dos to accomplish before classes start tomorrow, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that 3 hours of coffee and critiquing with my fellow young alumni wasn't an option. Since I was planning to read the book anyway, it's not a huge loss. Still, I hate being 'that girl who only shows up sometimes.'

For the one person still living under a rock in an abandoned cave in the middle of the Rocky Mountains that hasn't yet heard about this publisher's wet dream, a brief synopsis. Symbologist Robert Langdon, still reeling from the roller-coaster that was Angels and Demons, receives that dreaded late-night phone call that never indicates that you've just won a million dollars in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. This time he's awakened at his hotel in Paris to discover that the Louvre curator he was scheduled to meet earlier that evening in fact did not stand him up, but rather had the misfortune of being dead. Murdered, to be exact. The murder has a heavy ritualistic overtone, and the French police contact Langdon for help. Unfortunately for him, it quickly becomes apparent that he's the primary suspect in the murder. With the help of the murdered curator's granddaughter, Langdon races against time to find the true culprit. Add to this already potent mix a centuries-old struggle over documents that could prove the existence of direct blood descendants of Jesus Christ and you've got a breakneck plot sure to spin Langdon's life wildly out of control.

It's hard to say whether The Da Vinci Code is worthy of the hype that surrounds it or not. While I certainly enjoyed it, I have the feeling that my opinion would probably be higher if it weren't colored by the fact that no book could possibly live up to the expectations that come along with this one. I think the book struck a huge chord with readers because it gives you the sense that you're terribly clever for figuring out the rather by-the-numbers plot. By making the choice to write about Vatican-centered conspiracy theories instead of a ludicrous Bond-esque Spy vs. Spy bullshit, Brown manages to convince readers that they're reading something edifying instead of the latest potboiler. It's a neat trick.

For some reason there's a deep-seated part of me that's convinced that anything that's popular is by definition crap, even though I know that's not always the case (see also - the Harry Potters). I think it's my latent hipster, who loves nothing more than to bandy about the names of bands and authors no normal person has ever heard of. Hey, I'm not proud of it, but acknowledging my problem is the first step to overcoming it, right? I try not to be an asshole about it - I pretty much keep my derision towards other people's tastes to myself. Or at least I was until just now. Whoops.

So I'm behind. Sue me.

2004-08-22T16:10:00.000-05:00

Thankfully, being oh, say, several books behind on a review blog is not a crime. At least not yet, anyway. I don't see it letting up any time soon either considering that I can't seem to help ordering the "Here, Have A Few Billion More Things To Do" blue-plate special for every meal. Tasty, but it kind of leaves me a massive food coma most of the time. Hopefully some well-earned r&r in Germany (two weeks! woo!) will get me back on track.

First up is another recommendation from my bestest book buddy ever (waves hi to Babs). I love it when I find someone who has the same taste in books because it allows me to keep my book budget somewhat in check for a change. Of course, the money I'm going to spend sending books-in-trade to her after she moves to Portland, ME probably makes it a wash.

Anyway, she offered me a shot at Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which traces the story of six disaffected classics students at a fictitious East Coast college and the slow disintegration of the group into fractured, broken people. The novel follows a certain stereotype about affluent and smart white kids - as is to be expected by anyone who watches CSI, they of course turn out to be drug-taking, drink-taking, shiftless, lazy, cold-hearted killers. I guess I should expect to go homicidal any minute now. Clock's ticking - I'm already 23 and probably due to lose my baby-faced innocence momentarily. Tartt manages to lift her book out of the sensational quagmire of her subject matter in some places with good writing, but there's something unsatisfying about books where all the major players are morally bankrupt. On some level it's untrue to the human experience - we're not all saints, but we're not all irredeemable sinners either. Tartt's characters are ultimately revealed to be little more than empty shells with little or no connection to anything, human or otherwise.

The Secret History is a tough book for me. I want to like it for the lyrical nature of the prose, but the more I ponder the plot and characters the more I find myself vaguely annoyed, particularly when I think about the different directions the story could have taken to provide the reader with at least some sense of satisfaction upon reading the conclusion. It's becoming an all-too-common problem in modern literature that well-intentioned authors want to move away from trite, Hollywood, wrap-it-all-up-with-a-silver-bow endings, but they fail to offer much in place of such an ending. There's no moral lesson, no takehome point. All the reader is left with is a depressing sense that the world sucks, and sucks unchangeably to boot. I'm not exactly an optimist, but even I'm aware that in spite of every tragedy that happens in our world, there is some good in life. Saying otherwise is of course terribly post-modern and tragically hip, but it also doesn't happen to be true.

Macabre massacres

2004-08-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

Once again I'm chiding myself for not getting my reviews up in a timely manner. Then I remind myself that it's not as if anyone is actually reading these anyway, and then I feel better.

My latest review, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a recommendation from my mom, who read it for her book club. She enjoyed the book a lot, but allowed as how it's not the best choice for a book club where not all the participants finish the book before the meeting. She's right in her assessment that your opinion of the various characters shifts rather dramatically through the course of the book, right up until the very end.

The novel is framed as a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian to her estranged husband, Franklin. Two years before the novel opens, Eva and Franklin's son Kevin killed nine people at his high school and is currently serving time in a juvenile detention facility. Eva struggles to cope with the aftermath of "Thursday," as she refers to it, and uses her letters as a way to put all her socially uncensored feelings to paper. Not surprisingly, Eva feels responsible for Kevin's actions and guilty about her own role in Kevin's disaffection. Getting no answers from her bitter, cynical son, Eva retraces her life in an effort to understand how it all went so wrong.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a tough book to read because it strips away all the happy societal whitewash we paint over motherhood and family. In some ways it's really rather depressing to think that it's possible that our love for those near and dear to us may be an affection on some level - a fiction we create because we know society expects us to love them. That said, there's something meaningful in that level of candor, that ability to embrace the less socially acceptable feelings we all have. In another writer's hands Shriver's subject could easily become a Hollywood schlock-fest, but in hers it's a deeply insightful portrait of what we all try to ignore in ourselves.

Definitely a worthwhile read and a great choice to discuss in a book club (but only if everyone promises on their mothers to finish it before the meeting).

Ambigrams to the rescue!

2004-07-27T15:45:00.000-05:00

Last review for today - as promised, it's Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. Brown has made a huge splash over the last year with his phenomenally successful The Da Vinci Code, and while that one is still awaiting my attention, if it's up to the level of this one it's sure to be a good read. My mother reviewed Angels and Demons for The Mystery Reader when it was just going to press, and ever since she's been badgering me to read it. I would have gotten to it sooner but she kept lending it out to other people! She's not a big fan of this type of book but she loved it - knowing that I love this sort of thing, she's been pushing me to read it.

While the plot is much too dense to fully recount here, here's a brief synopsis: A scientist at CERN, a Swiss research facility, is murdered and one of his inventions is stolen. That invention? Antimatter, which has the destructive capability to level a large city. The head of CERN calls in Robert Langdon, an American symbology professor, to investigate the murder. Why? The inventor's body is branded with the ancient symbol for the Illuminati, an order dedicated to the destruction of the Catholic Church. Landgon joins forces with the murdered scientist's daughter and travels to Rome to retrieve the antimatter and save the Church from ruin. Oh, and did I mention that all the cardinals have convened for the conclave to elect the new Pope?

The book obviously requires a significant suspension of disbelief, but it's a testament to Brown's talent that he's able to keep you engaged even at the plot grows more and more outlandish. It's true escapist fodder - the literary equivalent of a smartly done summer movie. I don't care that it can't happen; I just care that I'm entertained. I devoured the book in about a day and found it to be the perfect summer brain candy. Not every book needs to be highbrow fare - who among us hasn't struggled through a "modern classic" for a college course and wondered how anyone ever managed to finish it, much less decide that it's deeply worthwhile? Give me a swashbuckling, wild-and-crazy thriller any day - at least I'm having fun.

Southern Pickins

2004-07-27T13:40:00.000-05:00

Second up today is another recommendation from my friend Barbara - this time it's Mary Kay Andrew's Savannah Blues. I'm not ordinary a fan of fluffy chick lit, but this one was worth the time I spent on it for the info on antiques that suffuses its pages. Mary Kay Andrews is a pseudonym for Kathy Trochek, a noted mystery who's one of my mom's favorites. I can see why my mom enjoys her work - she writes with a clever, breezy style that's instantly appealing.

Savannah Blues follows Eloise "Weezy" Foley in the aftermath of her divorce from upper-crust Savannahan Talmadge Evans III. As a result of their breakup, Weezy is exiled from the townhome she loving restored to the carriage house in the backyard while Tal lives it up in the main house with his new fiancee, Caroline Santos. Needless to say there's ill will between Weezy and Caroline, but Weezy is slowly adapting to single life. She's immersed herself in her antiques-picking business and she adopts a lovable dog with a delightful habit of piddling on Tal and Caroline's flowers.

Unfortunately, things go south for Weezy at an important estate sale just outside Savannah. When she sneaks into the estate the night before for a bathroom break and a "sneak preview" of the goods, she makes a gruesome discovery - Caroline's dead body stuffed in a closet. Soon Weezy's the prime suspect in her murder, and she enlists the help of her uncle, the closeted ex-Catholic priest/lawyer and her best friend, restauranteur Be-be. To further complicate things, an old flame is back in town and wants to give it another try with Weezy.

Overall, it's an enjoyable read and perfect for summer - enough tidbits of info to be interested but still appropriate for the beach. Good light-hearted fun.

Oh Mozart, you little scamp you!

2004-07-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

I'm so far behind on my posts lately it's not even funny. Hey, you try juggling wedding planning, two jobs, your masters, and review writing and see how well you do! Sorry - I'm a little edgy these days. Stress is at an all-time high right now, but thankfully the world of fiction provides a much needed escape. The new season of The Amazing Race also helps, but that's only on once a week.

First up today is a book a good friend loaned me, Harrison Gradwell Slater's Night Music, which introduces Mozart musicologist Matthew Pierce. After purchasing a bundle of documents at an auction in Venice that he believes to be the work of a young Mozart, Pierce is mysteriously summoned to La Favorite, an enclave owned by Vicomte Ren that is devoted to the study of all things Mozart. However, our hero soon finds himself embroiled in a deeper mystery as other members of the enclave are attacked and murdered. Fearing that his possession of the Mozart diaries makes him a target, Pierce throws himself headlong into solving the crimes and authenticating his documents. With an enormous cast of characters that could be suspects, Pierce has a long and difficult road ahead of him.

Night Music is clearly in the vein of Dan Brown's hugely popular The Da Vinci Code (which I have not read, but look for my review of his preceding book, Angels and Demons, later today), as it spans multiple countries in a frantic race to unravel a historical mystery with ties to modern murders. While the premise is intriguing and the historical details well-researched, it lacks the polish and sophistication of the better books in the genre. I certainly enjoyed the book, but it probably could have benefited from being edited more aggressively. While Slater tries very hard to make his protagonist likeable, it's hard to do when you're reading his lascivious thoughts about every single woman in the book, with the exception of the wizened grandmother with narcolepsy.

Slater also has a tendency to let his story run away from him, allowing sections of the book to dead-end without satisfactory resolution of the plot thread. It's not a huge flaw, but a judicious edit here or there would have made for a much tighter, more cohesive story. In the same vein, Slater would be well-served to exercise more restraint with the number of characters as well - it quickly becomes tiresome to try and keep the endless parade of attractive young women straight.

Overall, a decent first effort, but Slater definitely needs some tough love from his editor before his next book makes it to print.

Forgot to mention...

2004-07-17T09:04:00.000-05:00

In my odyssey to get to the courthouse yesterday, I happened to go by an independent bookstore that I didn't even know existed - Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park, IL. While I didn't have a chance to go inside, their website is now linked in the sidebar.

I'm not a hooker, I'm following the Messiah!

2004-07-16T17:43:00.000-05:00

While having to schlep my ass out to the 'burbs to do my jury duty was not how I'd hoped I'd be spending my day, it at least gave me a chance to finish my latest book, Margaret George's Mary, Called Magdalene. At least I didn't need to be there the whole day (since they dismissed everyone at 11:30am, yay!), so I have some time to post my review before the fiance gets home from another long day assisting gyne surgeries.

I'm a big fan of Margaret George's books - she's carved out a niche for herself as the grand mistress of hefty fictional biographies of historic figures. Past subjects have included Cleopatra, Henry VIII, and Mary, Queen of Scots, weighty figures all. In her latest she turns her attention to a famous figure whose life is virtually unknown - Mary Magdalene, one of the first followers of Jesus. She's only mentioned a handful of times in the Bible, although there is a gospel attributed to her in the Apocrypha, a group of writings that for various reasons were not included in the Bible proper.

Despite being over 600 pages long, the book reads quite fast and the story is engaging. It follows Mary's life from her early years through to her death in Ephesus at the age of 90, covering a wide range of events in that span. Most formation among them includes Mary's possession by demons, an affliction which is only lifted when Mary meets Jesus in the desert and he drives them out. From that point forward, Mary becomes his loyal disciple, following on his inevitable course to crucifixion, a decision that forces her to give up everything she's ever known and loved, including her young daughter Elisheba.

I certainly won't claim to be a biblical scholar, but I definitely find reading about the genesis of a religion fascinating. I think that a large part of how religions can be misinterpreted is found in the lack of consideration for the historical context the religion was born into. As much as a great many people believe that the Bible is the word of God, it's worth remembering that the Bible as we know it is at best a distillation of the word of God through human hands, and those human hands are guided by the prevailing opinions and attitudes of their owners. When the first Christians put the teachings of their most holy man into writing, they did so with a particular intent to accomplish a particular end - the dissemination of Jesus' words. That intent introduces a slant into the text that could be positive or negative depending upon your perspective. It's not unreasonable to assume that the authors did some editing and made changes, even if the changes were merely aesthetic. Translations of the text also have a huge effect - the King James version of the Bible was a translation commissioned with the express purpose of producing a Bible that supported monarchy, in direct opposition to the more "democratic" versions then emerging from Switzerland and Germany. (For more on that subject, I definitely recommend Alistair McGrath's In The Beginning).

Anyway, back to the book. A huge part of why the story seems so resonant and believable is George's depiction of the society in which Jesus and Mary lived. Having that perspective goes a long way towards enriching our understanding of the religious teachings that emerged from that time. George also does an amazing job of giving life, feeling, and attitudes to those that are only known to us through religion. Like any believer today, Jesus' followers were not abstract, idyllically holy beings, but rather humans tied to the human world by human emotions and human trappings, like material goods and family. Religion is a human product, and books like George's serve as a reverent but pointed reminder of that fact.

A Lifetime movie with an identity crisis

2004-07-11T22:15:00.000-05:00

Pretty much my latest review book in a nutshell. I guess it was inevitable that I'd run across my first stinker for The Mystery Reader, and P.B. Ryan's Murder in a Mill Town is it. It reads like a bad Lifetime movie starring Valerie Bertinelli, but now with 100% more hoop skirts! Yuck. Complete and utter drivel - I feel like I need to go read something terribly educational to clean my brain.

Yeah, so look for my eviseration (or review, depending on your take) over there soon.

The "My mom was a failed writer and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" Club

2004-07-09T15:50:00.000-05:00

What? I can't resist the snarky titles.

My final review of the day is for Carol Goodman's The Seduction of Water. I'm a big fan of her previous book, The Lake of Dead Languages, so it's only fitting that I see how she does in her sophomore outing.

The novel centers around Iris Greenfeder, the daughter of a Catskills hotel manager father and a writer mother who never published the final book in a planned trilogy of fantasy novels. Iris's mother Kay died when Iris was just a small child, killed in a fire at the Dreamland Hotel in Coney Island. However, the circumstances of her death were mysterious: Kay checked in to the hotel as another man's wife, and the body of that man was never recovered from the remains of the blaze. As is to be expected, Iris still suffers from the strain of not knowing what her mother was doing in that hotel, and why she never completed the book that would have cemented her reputation.

Many years later, Iris is living a mediocre existence, working a variety of odd teaching jobs to support herself, including teaching writing in English to recent immigrants and working with convicts at a nearby prison. Her love life isn't much better, as she coasts along with a rigid schedule of Wednesday/Friday/Sunday dates with her artist boyfriend. But all of that changes when Iris assigns a project about fairy tales to her classes, and she's inspired to find out the truth about what happened to her mother and reshape her own destiny.

While not quite up to the level of her previous work, The Seduction of Water is still a well-written and evocative book. The ending has a heavy-handed, swelling-violin-music feeling to it, but otherwise it's a solid effort. I got sucked into the story almost immediately and it moves along at a swift clip. It's good reading for summer - deep enough to be interesting, but not so intense that you can't overcome sunshine-induced ADD long enough to get into it. 4 stars from me.

Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here

2004-07-09T15:05:00.000-05:00

My senior English teacher in high school wanted to paint this phrase over the door of her classroom, but she could never decide if it should be on the inside or the outside. In her shoes, I doubt if I could either. As Joss Whedon so elegantly proved in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, high school really is hell.

Anyway, this well-known quote comes from Dante's Inferno, the tale of the author's journey through the afterlife with the poet Virgil as his guide. Dante wrote one of the most brutal depictions of Hell and its miseries to ever see publication, and he made no bones about describing the suffering of his enemies in great detail.

The Inferno is the jumping-off point for Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a mystery about the real-life Dante Club, a group of writers and poets who undertook the first American translation of Dante in the late 1860s. The group included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Lowell, among others. The mystery begins when a prominent judge is found murdered and covered with maggots and flies. Soon after a priest is discovered buried upside-down in a vertical grave with his feet charred to a crisp. The Dante Club quickly realizes that the murders are horrific reenactments of the punishments doled out by Dante and they spring into action to try and bring an end to a vicious murder's killing spree.

I've had my eye on this book for a while, and I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint. Pearl's style is tough to get into at first because of his historian's devotion to preserving the tone of the era he writes about, but after 50 pages or so you don't even notice. Red herrings abound to keep the action interesting - I for one didn't figure out the whodunit but believed it when it was revealed. The historical depth and accuracy are truly astounding and are definitely a model worth emulating for historical writers everywhere. I'm very picky when it comes to anachronisms, but my critical nature found nothing of note in that regard, which is always a good thing in my opinion.

The Dante Club is a fine entry into the burgeoning genre of literary mysteries and Pearl definitely deserves to take his place amongst Umberto Eco, Arturo Perez-Reverte, and Iain Pears as a leading light in the category.

Self-help that's actually kind of helpful

2004-07-09T14:27:00.000-05:00

I'm really really behind in my reviews, so you're getting a three-fer today. I was away at my fiance's family reunion over the weekend and got a bunch of reading done in the car on the way. Thankfully we didn't get grilled with a ton of questions about why our wedding is so small, when are we having kids, why are you having the wedding in Chicago, etc. But in the spirit of familial improvement we gave my future brother-in-law a Queer Eye-style makeover that he desperately needed. He's looking so much better it's sick. He still needs to fix that unibrow though - I'm afraid that the only one who can get away with that is Bert from Sesame Street.

Anyway, it leads me to a nice segue for my first review today - Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, which is the selection for my alumni book club this month. It's one of the first self-help books ever published, with the first edition appearing in the late 1930s. As an elder statesman in the genre, it's become something of a classic and is often imitated.

I'm not the type of person who reads self-help/advice books, generally speaking. The only book on my shelves at the moment that would even remotely qualify for the category is Jeanne Martinet's Artful Dodging (which happens to be a personal favorite of mine). Books in this genre strike me as so fuzzy and nebulous that trying to live your life in line with these books is a lot like letting your life be dictated by your horoscope.

This book, however, really does have some genuinely useful tips for making a success of your life. It comes at an opportune time for me, considering that I'm job-hunting and I've gotten the big goose-egg in results so far. The core of the book is centered around the idea that if you don't believe you can succeed, you probably won't. Being a person who discourages easily, the constant admonitions of confidence, persistance, and faith are the type of thing I need to hear these days.

Some of Hill's theories are a little loopy (the most sucessful people have strong sublimated sex drives?), but overall his arguments are solid. I don't think it's the type of book that would change your life overnight, but it would definitely serve as a good swift kick in the ass as needed.

Sticking it to your husband's mistress, and other lessons

2004-06-30T23:17:00.000-05:00

My posting is more and more intermittent these days - with the wedding less than two months away and my job hunt in full force, I haven't had an overabundance of free time.

Anyway, my latest entry is Isabel Allende's Portrait in Sepia. I enjoyed it, but I have to admit that it didn't make much of an impression on me. It's not one I'll be rushing out to recommend to all and sundry but it's pleasant enough company for a while. Considering it was a bargain buy, I probably ended up getting my money's worth out of it.

The novel traces the story of Aurora Del Valle, the illegitimate daughter of a well-to-do second-generation Chilean in San Francisco and a half-Chinese beauty from the burgeoning middle class. As so often happens in these types of stories, Aurora ends up being passed from hand to hand, first living with her Chinese grandfather and then her Chilean grandmother after his death. She's been traumatized by some unknown event surpressed deep in her unconscious, but she finds an outlet in photography. Aurora relates the story of her life intertwined with that of that wacky cast of characters otherwise known as family.

I wish I could come up with more of a critique for this one, but I'm struggling to come up with anything that stood out for any reason, good or bad. It's beige. It's the bland, inoffensive music that's piped into stores and doctor's offices around the country. Not good, not bad, just kind of there. A bland book is the hardest kind to review because you just can't think of anything to say about it. At least with a crummy book I can have some fun snarking on it as I review. No such luck here though.

At least I should have more to say about my latest book for The Mystery Reader - this one is Will Thomas' Some Danger Involved. It's pretty clear this is a debut novel; the style lacks the polish of an established writer. That said, the story is twisty, clever, and eminently believable. Anyway, I won't spoil the fun of the full review. It should go live this weekend.

Let's get on with it

2004-06-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

Just finished up Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs - flat out wonderful. I should send a thank-you note to my editor over at The Mystery Reader for sending this one to me. My full review should pop up over there by the weekend, but in the meantime I can't stress enough how much you need to read this book. This book is the kick-off for a new mystery series set in London between the two world wars, and I'm looking forward to eagerly devouring further entries as they're published.

Growing up and growing old

2004-06-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the paucity of updates lately - it took me the better part of a week to finish Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. I'd heard a lot of really great things about this book, so when I saw it in the bargain bin for $6.99 I thought I'd give it a whirl. It doesn't really have a plot per se - it's more a series of vignettes following the five members of the Lambert family as they make their way towards 'one last Christmas' together at the family home in St. Jude, a typical Midwestern town. Father Alfred is suffering from Parkinson's and is utterly dependent on his social-propriety-obsessed wife Enid to survive as his body betrays him. Their children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, are all so wrapped up in their own lives and issues that they actively try to avoid their depressing/uncool/juvenile/irritating parents as much as humanly possible. Gary struggles with his marriage as his children become the weapons he and his wife Caroline use to manipulate and control each other. Chip, recently fired from his faculty position at an unnamed university for having an inappropriate relationship with a student, dabbles in writing a terrible screenplay and borrowing huge amounts of money from his sister to support his shiftless existence. Denise appears to be a highly successful restaurant chef, but her immaculate cooking hides a women careening from one bad relationship to another, a trajectory leading towards a breakdown of everything she values. As this highly dysfunctional group tries to survive that most familial of holidays, they eventually come to understand, at least modestly, what drives the people they've been running away from all this time.

In some ways this book is a typical Oprah choice (I'll save my rant about that for another post) - dysfunctional family, suffering, depression, pathos, etc. Thankfully for the reader, Franzen infuses the book with a generous helping of humor that prevents it from sliding into full-on suicide-inducing Oprah territory. Some parts of the book are genuinely touching, while others leave you with a palpable sense of disgust. It's hard to come away from the end really appreciating any of the characters as people. That said, in many ways it's a realistic view on how people relate to their families. We may share DNA with these people, but it doesn't mean that we understand them, respect them, or even like them all that much. Franzen's satirization of the Lambert children's self-obsessed worldview is the true delight of the book - he skewers the "me-me-me-me-me" ethos of 21st-century life with aplomb.

Overall, I'm not quite sure that The Corrections lives up to the massive swirl of hype surrounding it (Yann Martel's The Life of Pi does a much better job there), but it's a worthwhile read all the same.

Survival and loss

2004-06-10T22:36:00.000-05:00

Forgot to post yesterday to give my review of Nicholas Basbanes' A Splendor of Letters. I'm a huge fan of all of his books, and it's particularly fitting that I was in the middle of it when I got accepted to library school. He specializes in 'books about books,' that genre so near and dear to bibliophiles everywhere. This latest follows in the same vein as his previous works in this three-part series, A Gentle Madness, which focuses on book collecting, and Patience & Fortitude, which focuses on the the meeting between collectors and libraries. In A Splendor of Letters, Basbanes talks about how some books have managed to survive to today, while others fell victim to changing tastes, political and religious struggle, and the inevitable assault of time. It's a loose series of vignettes about various books and their history (he touches lightly on Michael Servetus, the subject of the previously reviewed Out of the Flames), and they're all quite compelling.

However, what I really love about Basbanes' work is how he acknowledges the changing world of books and publishing that has resulted from new technology but still makes a compelling argument for the continued endurance of the delightfully low-tech book. I'm prone to scoffing at those who say that the book as we know it will cease to exist in ten years. I don't see it happening for the simple reason that I have yet to see any reason why e-books or Internet publishing (for anything other than academic journals) is appreciably better than what I'm using now. Books don't make my eyes hurt from staring at a screen for too long. They don't depend on batteries that require frequent recharging; can you imagine the battery crapping out on your book just as you get to the good part? They're cheap, readily available, easy to transport, they don't crash, and they won't be destroyed if you accidently drop them. Until a tech company can convince me that their product is better suited for the task, I'll stick with my old standby.

Finally, I've got a new review forthcoming for The Mystery Reader here in the next few days. This one's for Ann McMillan's Chickahominy Fever, a Civil War mystery set in Confederate Richmond in 1862. I'll own that this is not my favorite subject matter, but issues with the story trump those objections. I'm officially giving it three stars, but I'd rather give it 2 1/2. Keep an eye open for my full review soon.

Squeeeeeeeee!

2004-06-08T22:20:00.000-05:00

Just got an awesome piece of news and I am completely unable to keep it to myself. I just found out that I've been accepted to FSU's masters' program for library science, which is huge. I've been waiting on pins and needles to see if I'd get in and to know for sure that I'll be able to get my degree at a solid school is a huge weight off my shoulders. I finally feel like my vision for my future is starting to take hold and become reality.

I'll see y'all again in a couple of days with my latest review - sorry for the slow-pokiness, but life is busy these days.

Requires supervision

2004-06-05T16:55:00.006-05:00

It's all the Sureshot fiance's fault - he knew that if he sent me to a book fair unsupervised with a credit card it would all end in tragedy. The only thing that limited me was my arm strength, which has gotten fairly prodigious lately thanks to yoga. I ended up coming home with 8 books for myself, 2 for my mom, and 1 for my dad. One of my dad's favorite authors, Henning Mankell, gave a talk and I got one of his (The White Lioness) signed for him for Father's Day. I got my mom a signed first of Peter Robinson's Blood at the Root and a signed copy of Tomie de Paola's Strega Nona - both should be hits.

Reviews of the books I picked up for myself will emerge eventually - right now my to-be-read stack stands 35 strong so I've got a lot of work to do! Much to my delight, I did manage to snag a signed first of Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots from Booked for Murder, a mystery bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin. Since a friend of mine is moving up there here soon (her going away party is tonight, in fact), I'll have an excuse to go to their store. I also had good luck at the stall for St. Louis' Big Sleep Books - they had a great selection of signed mystery firsts and the proprietors (a mother/daughter team) are very friendly and really know their stuff. I've added links to both stores in my sidebar.

As the t-shirt of one of the vendors at the fair proclaimed, "Friends don't let friends shop at chain bookstores." Support your local independents - they have great selection and true 'book people' for staff. Yeah, they may not be as cheap as some of the big chains, but they often have stock you'll never see at Borders or Barnes & Noble. Part of what's so enjoyable about reading is the wonderful community that readers build, and independents are a huge part of that. But they can't survive without our support. One of my all-time favorite independents, John Rollins Books in Kalamazoo, Michigan, recently went under because it couldn't compete with the B&N just down the road. It's a shame, and the loss has prompted me to support independents whenever I can. It's not always possible, but it's worth making the effort. When you're traveling, make a point to pick up the phone book in your hotel room and see where the independents are in the area. Swing by - you just might discover a hidden gem. For those of us who can't travel as much as we'd like (such as myself), more and more independents are taking advantage of the Web to expand their reach. As I discover more of these stores, I'll add links to them so you'll be able to check them out for yourself.

Well, it's time to sign off and see if Smarty Jones can pull off the Triple Crown today. Belmont has proved to be too much for a lot of great horses. Will Smarty break the trend? We'll just have to wait and see.....

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

2004-06-03T22:25:00.000-05:00

Perhaps a bit too comedic a subject line considering the book, but I couldn't resist. I finished up Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone's Out of the Flames tonight. It's about Michael Servetus, a 16th-century Spanish doctor/philosopher/theologian who was burned at the stake in Calvin's Geneva for heresy. Servetus is now regarded as one of the founding lights of Unitarianism, but at the time he was writing his ideas were about as heretical as you could find. Classic case of a genius who was ahead of his time - not only was he an accomplished theologian before he hit 20, he was also the first person to explain in print the basics of pulmonary circulation. He's pretty much forgotten these days, but the story is a fascinating one. Only three copies of his seminal work survive in modern times - one each in Vienna, Paris, and Edinburgh. The rest were burned along with him.

I think this marks the first book by the Goldstones that makes a significant venture out of the book business. While the book has its roots in the book trade, it's not the focus here as it is in their other work. They're accomplished writers with a clear grasp of their subject matter - the research they've done is more than evident. I love their style as well; the little tidbits of humor they sneak in are quite amusing. It's sad to say that I laughed more reading this book than I did with the first 190 pages of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

Man, I really loathed that book. I literally could not finish it. I've had so many people tell me that it's so great, but I thought it was terrible. I never cracked a smile. I guess I'm just not amused by grotesque people.

Anyway, topic. I have a big fondness for books like Out of the Flames. It's a genre I like to call "the history of the obscure," where an author devotes a whole book to some small historical topic and shows how it had a much broader impact than it might appear on the surface. Notable books in this category that I happened to like include Simon Garfield's Mauve, Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky's Salt, and Dava Sobel's Longitude. For some reason this genre really appeals to me. I guess I just dig the notion that even the seemingly small or inconsequential can have a huge impact.

And now for something completely different, I've also just submitted my latest review to The Mystery Reader. This one's Lyn Hamilton's The Magyar Venus. Should be up for your perusal in a few days, depending on my editor's schedule.

Finally, the Printer's Row Book Fair is coming up this weekend, so I'll be off checking that out on Saturday. One of my dad's favorite authors, Henning Mankell, will be there so I'm going to try and get him some signed copies for Father's Day. If you're in Chicago this weekend you should definitely check it out - should be good fun.

Dry country, dry wit

2004-05-30T21:15:00.000-05:00

A two-fer today - I'm atoning for my blog-slacking sins here. I just finished up Alexander McCall Smith's The Full Cupboard of Life, the latest in his series chronicling the adventures of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The Botswana-set series has caught fire around the country and deservedly so. The books beautifully capture the beauty of their setting while quietly sneaking in a wonderful dry wit and subtle charm. I've never had much desire to go to Africa, but McCall Smith manages to make me consider adding Botswana to my already lengthy list of places to visit before I die.

I'm really rather surprised at how much I enjoy McCall Smith's books. I'd kicked around the idea of trying out the series but wasn't sure I'd like it. My mom, who's my go-to authority on all things mystery, wasn't too sure about it either but bought the first one on the strength of the reviews. It sat on her shelf collecting dust for several months until I borrowed it on one of my trips home. I figure if I'm already heading back to Chicago with 20 books under my arm one more isn't going to kill me. I eventually got around to reading it and discovered a rather nice little gem. I don't typically go for 'cozy' mysteries, but these have a seductive appeal all their own. He's obviously a great writer - I don't think I would have gotten past page 15 of the first book if he wasn't. My advice? If you've thought about reading the series but aren't sure, give it a try. Borrow the first one (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) from a friend (if you have friends who read, one of them is bound to have a copy) and give it a whirl. You just might be pleasantly surprised.

But I didn't review this particular book, you say? Piffle. If you've already read the rest of the series, you'll buy this book anyway because you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you need to start at the beginning anyway. Go over to Amazon.com and bother them instead. My blog, my rules. Now scram. Your books miss you.

Looking up

2004-05-30T20:47:00.000-05:00

I've gotten a little behind in updates, as you can probably tell. There's a lot of turmoil at the office lately and I'm just now starting to get a handle on things. Thank god I have the day off tomorrow - it's such a welcome relief I can't even say.

First up for my new reviews is Ross King's Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, the story of the two great men behind one of the world's great artistic masterpieces, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I must admit a penchant for books about artists and the creative process, despite the fact that my own talents in this area are strictly limiting to stick figures, smilie faces, and the occasional Mondrian-inspired canvas. King's book is certainly a fine example of the genre and he does an excellent job of showing the true granduer of Michelangelo's achievement while still recognizing that the artist was often hampered by his suspicious nature. Interesting tidbits about in the book - I didn't realize that the Sistine Chapel was the first fresco Michelangelo executed since his student days. Even given his prodigious talent, Michelangelo was severely hampered by his lack of knowledge about how to work in this notoriously tricky medium. Also rather surprising is the fact that unlike so many artists, Michelangelo actually managed to get paid what he was owed for his work. Considering the numerous wars his patron Pope Julius II fought during the 4 years it took Michelangelo to complete the ceiling, getting what he was owed is a testament to both his tremendous creation and his forceful personality.

While King's previous entry into the genre, Brunelleschi's Dome, has been widely praised, if I were to only recommend one book of his I'd choose this one. Brunelleschi's Dome is very heavy on physics, which while a necessary requirement to adequately explain the magnitude of the achievement, it's tough slugging for readers like myself who aren't really physics people. Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling has the advantage in being a far less technical subject that makes for an easier and more enjoyable read. I'd give both books 4 stars based on the quality of the writing and the obviously thorough research that they're grounded in.

If you're curious, King has also made an excellent foray into Iain Pears territory with his literary mystery Ex Libris. Definitely worth spending some time on if you like richly detailed, intricately plotted, and slightly quirky literary mysteries.

Bottoms up, Londinium style

2004-05-25T21:15:00.000-05:00

I finished Lindsey Davis' The Jupiter Myth last night. Solid, well-written, and rather funny to boot. I'll definitely be checking out more of the Marcus Didius Falco series in the future if this book is any indication of their quality. My full review should pop up over at The Mystery Reader here in the next week or so.

Well look at that!

2004-05-24T08:40:00.000-05:00

Just had my first review published - pop on over to The Mystery Reader (link in the sidebar) and check out my critique of Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Ghosts of Netley. Look for more reviews from me on the site going forward - I'll mostly be reviewing historical mysteries.

Theft, forgery, and little old ladies in Rome

2004-05-22T18:35:00.000-05:00

Since the Sureshot fiance was off studying for his board exams today, I took the opportunity to squeeze another book into my schedule. This one's Iain Pears' Death and Restoration, one in his Jonathan Argyll/Flavia di Stefano series of art history mysteries. While the series hasn't received the same level of praise as Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost (which happens to be excellent, BTW), they're more lighthearted and a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Pears' "serious novels" certainly deserve the praise they get, but his work in this series is perhaps unfairly derided for not being of the same intellectual caliber. Personally, I rather appreciate a good author that can write "down-market" while still keeping the neat plots and excellent characterizations. I'd much rather read Pears' so-called lesser work than some of the fawned-over excuses for literature that too often dominate the best-seller lists.

Death and Restoration again follows our recently engaged art-theft-fighting duo embroiled in yet another unusual case. The Art Theft Squad has received a tip that the monastery of San Giovanni is due to be relieved of one of its art works. The tip seems dubious - there's not much of value in this monastery committed to poverty excepted an enormous (and thus difficult to make off with) painting attributed to Caravaggio. Add in the fact that said Carvaggio is currently under restoration and you've got the makings of a useless tip-off, but Flavia decides to check it out anyway. No sooner than Flavia begins to look into the matter, one of the fathers at the monastery is attacked and a small icon of the Virgin goes missing. The theft is confounding and the recent arrival of a known art thief (readers of the series will recognize an old friend here) in Rome sends Jonathan and Flavia deep into a new investigation. The mystery follows a variety of twists and turns as numerous suspects (the thief! the art restorer! the dealer!) are investigated and eliminated. As always, with Flavia's police work and Jonathan's research skills, the couple manages to unravel the mystery behind the icon and its disappearance.

Part of why I love this series is how Pears manages to craft his stories in such a way that even when the perpetrator is known, there's still more to the story. Rather than making the who the focus of his plots, Pears gets you thinking about the why also. Motive matters in a mystery, and Pears heads that axiom far better than most writers in the genre. He also avoids the common trap of not devoting enough time to the denouement of his story. The mystery doesn't slam to a halt when the villian is caught - we get to see how all the players in the story come together to set things right again, in so much as they're able. The decided lack of loose ends always makes a Pears book satisfying.

Definitely worth the time to read if you're interested in art history or Rome generally. I'd put this installment at 4 stars.

Finally, something for the topic

2004-05-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

Just finished Penelope Lively's Spiderweb. She's a British novelist who won a Booker prize for one of her earlier works. She's not big into plots per se - she makes heavy use of barely delineated flashbacks in the life of her protagonist to tell the story (roughly) of Stella Brentwood, a retired social anthropologist recently removed to a small town in Somerset. After years of living a solitary, itinerant life studying various cultures around the world from a scholarly distance, she's suddenly finding herself trying to figure out how to live in the world, rather than alongside it. Aided by the widower of a college friend, Stella slowly anchors into this new world.

Parallel to this 'plot' is a contemporary thread following a deeply disturbed family whose property neighbors Stella's. In spite of all her training and expertise in understanding kinship structures in foreign societies, Stella fails to recognize the slow implosion taking place just over her property line.

Lively's a tough author for me to love, but I do like her work. Her way with words is well-honed and wonderfully descriptive, but it's often hard to grasp what it is that she's trying to say. Her books are rather intensely British - much less action-driven and more towards the realm of loose character study. Spiderweb is a true 'library book' - best read in that quiet, contemplative environment. I'll give it 3 stars out of 5 - pleasant enough, but not a sock-knocker in terms of quality.

Now that I have your attention

2004-05-22T00:28:00.000-05:00

Or not. But I don't care. You're trapped in this meeting with me for the next hour. You're going to listen to what I have to say and you're going to like it. Got me? Good.

The Sureshot fiance pointed me over to this site - he seems to think that others would find my musings interesting. Awww. Boys are so cute when they're silly.

Ostensibly this blog is supposed to be about sharing my rather esoteric taste in books with the world for the greater good of humanity (right) but I imagine that my ramblings will only sometimes be on topic. Thankfully there's no velvet hammer of Miss Alli (check out her hysterical Apprentice/Survivor/Amazing Race recaps at www.televisionwithoutpity.com - you'll thank me later) to moderate me into oblivion when I wander.

A little background on me for your edification: I'm 23, live in Chicago, work as a receptionist for what has to be the most drama-laden 10-person office in the history of the universe, and I'm gearing up for taking the leap into married life on 9/4/04. I'm also an avid reader and I'm currently applying to a slew of graduate schools with the hopes of getting my master's in library science starting this fall. I have the most adorable little dog in the whole world - a black and grey cockapoo named Bunsen. He is a cute and cuddly furbaby that I love to pieces. Owning a dog is what it must be like to be a rock star - it's hard to imagine that any other living thing could be that excited to hear you come home from work.

That's about it for now. Your homework assignment - if you haven't already, read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. Best damn book I've read in five years, easy. If your sense of humor runs to the absurd, it's definitely your cup of tea. With a good British scone. Not that you can get those in the US. Damn it.

Is this thing on? thump

2004-05-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

Yeah, so anyway, there was this blog, right, and there was this chick that wrote it, but she wasn't sure how to use this blogging stuff, right, and, uh, yeah.