Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I love you too, I wanted to say with as much hurtful sarcasm as I could muster, but she hadn't seen me, and I kept quiet. I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street. Which she wouldn't be, anyway; walking is for poor people.

-Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children


If you were to flip through a copy of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, it's the photographs that would catch your eye*.  The photographs are all rather, well, peculiar: photographs of children apparently levitating and lifting boulders and standing covered in bees. These unusual children are the focus of Ransom Riggs's book.

Although I was intrigued by the photos, I was also concerned that they might be nothing more than a gimmick; the story just a way to string one photograph to the next. Luckily, there's more to Miss Peregrine's Home than that.

The story centers on Jacob, a teenager living in Florida and filling his days with increasingly byzantine attempts to get fired from his job at a drugstore. (It will never happen, as his family owns the chain). His life is privileged but otherwise mundane--nothing peculiar about it at all.

That is until something quite pivotal happens, something that divides his life into Before and After, as Jacob puts it.  It's traumatic, but it has implications beyond the post-incident nightmares and therapy sessions: it convinces Jacob that the stories he heard as a child--fantastic stories his mysterious grandfather told about his own childhood, stories that centered around the photographs scattered throughout the book--might actually be true.

This realization prompts Jacob to seek out the place in England where his grandfather spent part of his childhood, under the care of the elusive Miss Peregrine. It's a rich world, populated by characters who do the book's strange photographs justice. There's adventure to be had there, certainly, but it's also a place where Jacob wrestles with some thorny emotional issues--issues that I'm loath to bring up without spoiling the story, but ones that I found it interesting to mull over.

The end of the story sets up Riggs quite nicely to continue the story in a sequel (or series).  I'm most certainly on board to continue the journey with Jacob whenever the next book is released.

Up next: The prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (which I've actually already finished--behind once again!).

*Though the design of the pages themselves, I might add, is also quite striking.

The Complaints by Ian Rankin

He had wound his window down. He could smell and hear the sea. There wasn't another soul about. He wondered: did it bother him that the world wasn't entirely fair? That justice was seldom sufficient? There would always be people ready to pocket a wad of banknotes in exchange for a favor. There would always be people who played the system and wrung out every penny. Some people--lots of people--would keep getting away with it.

"But you're not one of them," he told himself.

-The Complaints 

If you'd given me the passage above out of context, I would have sworn up and down that it sounded like the musings of one Kurt Wallander. Malcolm Fox, the protagonist of The Complaints, is not quite the iconic detective Wallander is, but you can see why he's interesting company for the length of a book.

Fox is a cop working for (wait for it) the Complaints, the department that checks up on cases of possible corruption within the police force. It's not a terribly well-liked branch, as you might imagine. Fox's latest case is a troubling one: he's assigned to look in on a rising star in the force who's suspected of an interest in child pornography. Things get more complicated when that same detective, Jamie Breck, begins investigating the apparent murder of Fox's sister's no-good boyfriend. But in case that wasn't complicated enough, the whole thing spirals into a massive case of corruption that has apparently swept up Fox and Breck in its wake, and the two of them must team up to try and get to the bottom of things.

I must admit, I'm not wild about police corruption as a driving plot line. It's not terribly compelling to me, and I often find it hard to follow, as I did here. I had painful flashbacks to trying to decipher Red Riding Trilogy, which combined police corruption with jumps in time and unintelligible Yorkshire accents. Fox, as I mentioned, is a pretty good detective, but not really charismatic enough that I'd need to follow any further adventures, were Rankin to begin writing them. I enjoyed the Edinburgh setting, but I can't say it was a real page turner. I don't want to undersell the story--Rankin is clearly a talented writer--but a week after having finished The Complaints, not that much has stuck with me.

Up next: Tried starting the latest Blue Bloods book, but I'm having a hard time getting sucked in. So for now I've put that down in favor of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman--madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror--that thing on the doorstep.

-"The Thing on the Doorstep," from The Dunwich Horror and Others 

November is the hardest month for me to update the blog, since I'm trying to conserve all my word power for NaNoWriMo. This year I'm pretty far behind, but that's all the more reason that I feel like I shouldn't have time to update here. But my book is inspired by the work of one H.P. Lovecraft, and The Dunwich Horror and Others is too great of a book to go so long neglected.

My mom sent me The Dunwich Horror for All Hallows Read, which was quite the fun surprise. Although I'm sure it would be absorbing any time of year, it was a particularly good fit for October, of course. I'm sure it goes without saying, but Lovecraft was just a master of horror.

I had only read one story of his prior to starting this book, which happened to be the first story in this collection, "In the Vault." It's marvelously creepy stuff, and interestingly one of the few stories in this book that does not deal with Lovecraft's mythology. Oh yes, the crazy, awesome Cthulhu* mythology.

It turns out I love the mythology angle, which I guess shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Things just get bananas in these stories.  I mean, the end of "The Rats in the Walls"? Whoa. The end of "The Thing on the Doorstep"? Whoa. Lovecraft doesn't do twist endings, but he does have the habit of offering one last piece of information right at the end of the story, and that information is usually crazy. That's why "In the Vault" made such an impression on me when I first read it, years ago.**

Prior to reading this entire book, in fact, I would have named "In the Vault" as the scariest story I'd ever read, simple as it is--but now it has some stiff competition. Definitely looking forward to reading some more Lovecraft in the future. For now, I'll just happily rip him off for NaNoWriMo. Not sure exactly what's going to happen, except there's something lurking at my character's house. Something very, very old, living somewhere very, very deep.

Up next: Finally caught up on blog entries! Currently reading The Complaints by Ian Rankin.

*How cool is it that spell check recognizes Cthulhu? Very cool, my friends.

**Oddly enough, I just checked the book's table of contents to make sure I was capitalizing the title correctly, and the story's not in the table of contents, it's just there. Creeeeepy.

Dark World by Zak Bagans

I had a thousand questions, mostly of a physical nature. How could an ethereal being have physical properties? How could a dead person make sound and create force? Does she sleep? Is she bored? Is she mischievous? Does she know she's dead? How did she know my name? Does she know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? I wanted to know if life is just rock, soil, air, water, and fire--or if there is more. Are there spiritual aspects that people ignore?

-Dark World 

I should begin this post by noting that I am a huge, unabashed fan of the show Ghost Adventures. In terms of television, there are few things I find more enjoyable than watching Zak, Nick, and Aaron stumble around in the dark, making me laugh and, moments later, capturing evidence that I find genuinely terrifying. That shadow moving through the background of last week's episode at Letchworth Village, for example, left me peeking at the screen from behind my hands. I really don't know what more one could ask for from a tv show.

Naturally, when I heard that lead investigator Zak Bagans had a book coming out, I was all in.  Especially being that it's October, it seemed like the perfect time for a spooky read. I was also hoping to learn a bit more about Zak, whom I really find so endearing and just plain likeable. Dark World does deliver on both these counts, but I was surprised to discover that it is primarily a book about the science of paranormal investigation.

I will be honest, the scientific angle is not a particularly compelling one for me. I appreciate that the Ghost Adventures crew uses a variety of equipment in order to try to document paranormal phenomena--it certainly has made for some very interesting television. But I don't really need these things to be explained. I like that there are things in this world that could be unknowable; I like a little mystery. However, I understand that if paranormal investigation were your profession, you would be motivated to gather data that would give you more credibility in the scientific community.

It's a tough row to hoe, and I do admire Zak's passion for this aspect of his work. Personally, I don't find it as interesting to read about as a behind-the-scenes account of what went down at Poveglia (I'm still curious about that experience) or a list of the weird stuff that's happened at Zak's home in Vegas. And one of my favorite parts of the book was his recounting of his early years, because it's interesting to see how exactly one does get into this line of work. When I was a teenager, I was a devoted fan of The X-Files, and I recall announcing at one point that I wanted to major in psychology and minor in parapsychology. Obviously that didn't happen, but I've never lost that interest in things weird and otherworldly.

I know it's easy to be skeptical about shows like Ghost Adventures.  I'm sure a lot of people watch and scoff, dismantling all of their evidence as tricks of the light, wishful thinking, and perhaps straight-out charlatanry. But I don't see how one could read Dark World and see Zak as anything but deeply earnest about documenting evidence of life after death. Maybe I'm gullible, but I can't imagine how Zak would dare fake anything, knowing how badly it could discredit his work. It might sound silly, but I really would be deeply disappointed if I discovered anything to the contrary.

I would welcome another Ghost Adventures book--perhaps an episode guide with commentary from all three guys? I'm not sure how many directions they could go in with books, but I appreciated that this one (written with Kelly Crigger) certainly did a good job of capturing Zak's voice. For now, though, I'm happy to just keep watching the show.

Up next: More spooky stuff! The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft.

In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff

What Joe did not know was that I had come here this past May in search of a quieter existence with fewer reminders of Hannah, a victim of last year's General Slocum steamship tragedy. I was not alone in my grief; nearly every family in my Lower East Side neighborhood had lost someone that awful day--June 15, 1904. For almost a full year following Hannah's death, she haunted me, particularly in cases where other young women met tragic, violent ends. I had planned to marry Hannah and build a life with her--but I had no desire to live with a ghost.

-In the Shadow of Gotham 

With that passage, narrator Simon Ziele lays out a fair chunk of the premise of In The Shadow of Gotham. Ziele, a detective, had hoped to escape those tragic young women after leaving the city for the small town of Dobson, New York. But homicide is not confined to the island of Manhattan, of course, and Ziele is soon brought in on a case just as brutal as any he handled in the city. Sarah Wingate, a graduate student in mathematics, is killed at her aunt's home, and the police are left with a horrifying crime scene and very little in the way of leads. That is until a Columbia University criminologist named Alistair Sinclair shows up and insists that he knows exactly who the killer is: the subject of his own research, a man named Michael Fromley. Unable to ignore the evidence Sinclair puts before him, Ziele sets off to track down Fromley, using both psychological research and good old-fashioned detective know-how to aid him along the way.

I enjoyed the setting of the novel, and Ziele was a likeable enough detective. I wouldn't say the mystery itself was particularly compelling--though, again, setting it at the turn of century in New York City helps a lot. I was more put off by a certain clunkiness in the exposition. On the whole, Pinkoff did a nice job of pacing the story, which kept me absorbed despite not being particularly captivated by the plot. So it was all the more glaring when characters' dialogue was suddenly laden with exposition so forced as to take me out of the story entirely. It's very similar to the problem I had with The Night Villa--I'm not quite sure why an author would think so little of her readers to believe that they wouldn't look up a reference they didn't understand. At the worst, they'd just move past it and perhaps not get the full import of what a character was saying, but I'd prefer taking that risk than having my characters reduced to speaking in completely unbelievable ways. I guess it turns out that that might be a particular pet peeve of mine--it just seems so easy to avoid.* I have the sequel to In the Shadow of Gotham sitting on my shelf, but I can't say I'm terribly inclined to pick it up at the moment.

Up next: Still catching up! Need to write up Dark World  by Zak Bagans.
 
*What makes this all the more annoying is that the General Slocum disaster--to which most of Pintoff's exposition refers--is not particularly obscure. In fact, it's one of the worst disasters in New York history. I'd certainly heard of it before, although that could be because I felt it important to read up on potentially haunted places in the vicinity of New York City. While I would not categorize it as common knowledge, I would think that the General Slocum would be familiar to a fair amount of readers inclined to read historical fiction, and the rest can easily look it up.

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Lord Lefford frowned. "I saw that great hairy one today, the one who insisted that he must have two battleaxes, the heavy black steel ones with twin crescent blades."

"Shagga likes to kill with either hand," Tyrion said as a trencher of steaming pork was laid in front of him.

"He still had that wood-axe of his strapped to his back."

"Shagga is of the opinion that three axes are even better than two."

-A Game of Thrones 

First off, I've waited to two weeks to write this post, clearly a huge mistake just considering the scope of A Game of Thrones, which has enough characters to make Dickens look like a minimalist. But I'm not in possession of any wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey know-how, so I suppose I'll have to make do. Here goes.

Winter is coming. Not lovely, sit by the fire and enjoy a cup of cocoa while looking out on falling snow winter, but a far nastier sort. The sort of winter that might let all kinds of dread beasties out to play, creatures long believed to be stuff of legend. Winter--true winter, because it's already plenty cold up north--only comes every so often to the Seven Kingdoms, and in this case it's been nine long years since winter last fell. The longer the summer is, people know, the worse the winter--and in this case it's shaping up to be quite hellish indeed.

This is the point at which we meet our principal cast--quite a few of them, as I mentioned above. Chief among the players is Ned Stark, lord of the northern kingdom of Winterfell. Ned's chosen by his old friend, Robert Baratheon, the king, to serve as his most trusted advisor, and reluctantly--it's not a job you can really turn down--he heads south to a world of political intrigue.

But Ned is only one of eight characters whose viewpoint is presented in the novel. We also follow his wife, Catelyn, and four of his children--princess-in-training Sansa, rebellious Arya, young Bran, and his bastard son, Jon. Additionally, we spend time with Tyrion Lannister, the king's brother-in-law, a dwarf whose tongue gets him in trouble; and Daenerys Targaryen, daughter of the former king. It's a lot to keep track of at first, but once you've settled in to the rhythm of the novel (and have started remembering names), it's enjoyable to see the differing points of view. This is especially true of the last one hundred and fifty or so pages, at which point the book has built a tremendous momentum and a great deal of suspense can be wrung out of the limited information a character has and acts upon, compared with what we as omniscient readers know.

It took me a while to read this one, because it is rather long (800 densely packed pages in my mass market paperback edition) and it was a little slow before I got to know the characters. I did end up getting quite absorbed, though, and I would definitely be interested in the next book. I'm also very keen to see the HBO series, as I've sneaked a peek at the casting and it looks like they did an excellent job.

Up next: I'm terribly far behind, as I've already finished two other books. The first I need to come back and write about (hopefully soon) is The Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff. 

The Minotaur by Barbara Vine

She seemed to be considering whether to say more, then impulsively said, "There's madness in the family." The expression was old-fashioned then if not yet politically incorrect, but she repeated it. "Yes, madness in the family." When people say this, phrasing it in various ways, they always sound pleased about this particular genetic inheritance. Cancer or arthritis "in the family" is spoken of quite differently.

-The Minotaur

The Minotaur by Barbara Vine--pseudonym for acclaimed crime writer Ruth Rendell--is not a murder mystery, per se. There's a fair amount of mystery and a bit of murder, but it's more in the style of Gothic literature: lots of semi-deranged characters haunting their decaying manor home and one poor interloper struggling to make sense of it all.

The interloper is Kerstin Kvist, hired by the eccentric Cosway family to care for John, the middle-aged son who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. When Kerstin arrives, she's somewhat perplexed by what she needs to do: John is so sedated by the strong medication that he takes that he is easily managed by his mother and sisters. As she gets to know the family, she begins to realize that their relationship with John is a complicated one and, alarmingly, he doesn't seem to need the sedatives his family insists that he takes. In fact, although John does seem to have his issues, Kerstin doubts that he's schizophrenic at all--but why treat him as if he is? Kerstin tries to protect John while she figures that out, but in the meantime finds herself drawn into another family tragedy.

The story is set in the 1960s, but told from older Kerstin's perspective as she looks back decades later. The word for John's true condition, for instance--Asperger's syndrome--was something she didn't hear until long after her time as his aide ended. Structuring a novel in this way can be a useful device for an author, although in this case I felt that Vine relied a little too heavily on it--rather too many hints about how certain objects/people/events would influence the course of the mysterious tragedy for my taste.

The strongest parts of the book were those that involved John and the protective love that Kerstin develops for him. The rest of the Cosway family is not terribly likable--matriarch Julia is pretty easy to loathe, actually--so I found myself less involved in the parts of the story that were more about them. John, though remote by nature, is still much easier to warm to--more human than anyone around him, Kerstin excepted. Although The Minotaur is a fictional account, it's sad to think that so many people like John really have been misunderstood and in some cases mistreated, especially before people became aware of autism. I imagine that aspect of the book, if nothing else, will stick with me.

Up next: It's finally happening! A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

The Van Alen Legacy by Melissa de la Cruz

When she woke up that morning, the first thing that came to mind was that the bright white shutters looked familiar. Why did they look familiar? No. That wasn't right. That wasn't the right question to ask. She was getting ahead of herself again. It happened. But now she had to concentrate. Every day she had to ask herself three very important questions, and that wasn't one of them.

The first question she had to ask herself was, What is my name?

She couldn't remember. 

-The Van Alen Legacy 

Well, I definitely made a mistake here in not reviewing this book immediately after reading it, as now it's been a week and the books are starting to blur together. Let's see: Schuyler and Oliver are on the run from the Venators, who believe she's responsible for a recent murder; Bliss is having a seriously unfortunate identity crisis/extended possession; and Mimi is down in Brazil with the redeemed Kingsley Martin, searching for any lead in the disappearance of Bliss's little sister, Jordan. Plot-wise, things are hopping.

At this point, though, I feel like I'm running out of things to say about the series. Bliss's story was headed in quite a strange direction, though the events of this book mean things should change fairly substantially. Schuyler's, as always, was not quite as engaging as it should be--she's just not that dynamic of a character. I am, however, growing more invested in Mimi. She's certainly become more nuanced as a character, and her relationship with Kingsley vs. her relationship with Jack leaves me curious to see what she will do going forward. I'll definitely be back for the next book, but for now I'm taking a bit of a breather.

Up next: The Minotaur by Barbara Vine

Revelations by Melissa de la Cruz

She had almost dropped off to sleep when there was a shadow on the terrace.

Schuyler looked up expectantly, feeling a mixture of anticipation and a deep and abiding sadness. Her heart was racing a million miles a minute. Even if she saw him every day, it would always be like the first time.

"Hey, you," a voice said. And a boy appeared from the shadows.

But he was not the one she was waiting for.

-Revelations 

I'll admit that at times reading the Blue Bloods books seems a bit like eating candy for breakfast*--a sweet, guilty pleasure in the moment, but not something you'd want to make a habit of. Still, after Little Dorrit I was in need a of a sugar rush, so I picked up Revelations, the third book in Melissa de la Cruz's series.

What's happening with Schuyler Van Alen this time around? Well, there are nefarious Silver Blood happenings afoot, of course, particularly tied to the reappearance of the troubled Dylan Ward. But Schuyler for the most part is consumed with more mundane problems; specifically, how to choose between the two loves of her life. There's Oliver Hazard-Perry, the human who's been her long-time best friend, not to mention the only person with whom she's performed the Sacred Kiss (otherwise known as sucking blood). And then there's Jack Force, the handsome vampire she can't help but feel drawn to despite the fact that he's promised to another. Decisions, decisions.

I can't say that Revelations was the most compelling of books, but I must admit that whenever I was reading it, I wasn't particularly inclined to stop. The book did offer up one unexpected twist**, but I'm not exactly sure what I think of it--we'll see, I suppose.

Up next: Reading the next Blue Bloods book, The Van Alen Legacy.

*Full disclosure--I'm not sure I have actually ever eaten candy for breakfast, though I recall getting into some pretty early on more than one Christmas morning.

**Well, unexpected to the series as a whole; it was pretty well telegraphed within the book itself. 

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

"If Miss Amy Dorrit will direct her own attention to, and will accept of my poor assistance in, the formation of a surface, Mr. Dorrit will have no further cause of anxiety. May I take this opportunity of remarking, as an instance in point, that it is scarcely delicate to look at vagrants with the attention which I have seen bestowed upon them, by a very dear young friend of mine? They should not be looked at. Nothing disagreeable should ever be looked at. Apart from such a habit standing in the way of that graceful equanimity of surface which is so expressive of good breeding, it hardly seems compatible with refinement of mind. A truly refined mind will seem to be ignorant of the existence of anything that is not perfectly proper, placid, and pleasant."

-Little Dorrit 

Well, this has been a long time coming. Little Dorrit--which clocks in at over 800 pages--is no quick read, that's for sure. And while I'd hoped to become absorbed in the world Dickens created, much as I was with Bleak House, I found Little Dorrit to be mostly a slog.

The titular character in Little Dorrit is a timid seamstress, christened Amy, who has grown up in Marshalsea Prison. Her father is incarcerated as a debtor, and she's spent little time outside of the prison that she considers a home. She does leave Marshalsea to do her sewing work, primarily at the residence of the cold and businesslike Mrs. Clennam. Her simple, sheltered life changes when Mrs. Clennam's son, Arthur, returns home to London after an extended stay in Japan. Arthur takes an interest in her affairs, primarily because he worries that his own family's business might have been one that Mr. Dorrit owed money to so many years ago. This sense of responsibility motivates Arthur to help Amy, though he cannot foresee, of course, just how great the ramifications of his aid will be.

I've mentioned only four characters, but since it's Dickens you can rest assured there are easily fifty--few of them, sadly, are terribly compelling. Arthur is sympathetic, though it's hard to find his patronizing relationship with Amy as romantic as I suspect we are intended to. He calls her Little Dorrit, for one, which I have a hard time getting past--she is a grown woman, after all, even if he's twice her age. Amy herself, unfortunately, is a bit of a drip. She's kind, sure, but she possesses none of the spark that made Esther Summerson, a similarly good-hearted character, much more likable in Bleak House. In short, you know something's wrong with the characters when I didn't even find the (random) French murderer interesting.

That being said, Dickens threw in a couple of good reversals of fortune, so the second half of the book moves along more quickly than the first. Normally I'm not one to gripe about this when it comes to Dickens, but I think the problem is really one of length. Cut down the first half by 200 pages, remove a subplot or five--I think there is an interesting story in there, he just didn't quite tell it. It's why I still plan to see the miniseries at some point--I think that, with some editing, I might like this story a good deal better. Certainly no rush to see it at the moment, though.

Up next: Already finished the third Blue Bloods book, Revelations.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

"Boys will be boys," he heard Kitty Winfield murmur as the two women walked away.

Men didn't deserve women.

"We don't deserve them," he said to Ian Winfield as they rolled their way to the bar.

"Oh God no," he said. "They're far superior to us. Wouldn't want to be one, though."

-Started Early, Took My Dog 

So, first off, the big news is this:

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jackson Brodie, as portrayed by Jason Isaacs in the new BBC adaptation of Case Histories. I must say, my imagination has done me a great disservice in never conjuring up Jason Isaacs as Jackson prior to now, because it's pretty brilliant casting. Here's the trailer, in case you might need to watch it a million times before the show airs on PBS (starting October 16th!).  (The Johnny Cash is a great detail. Jackson would approve).

So I read Started Early, Took My Dog with that casting in mind, which was just the cherry on top of another wonderful book by Kate Atkinson. In this latest installment, Jackson has left Edinburgh for his old stomping ground of Yorkshire. He's attempting to trace the origins of a client in New Zealand whose birth and subsequent adoption, some thirty-odd years earlier, were accompanied by a telling lack of legitimate documentation. Atkinson also weaves in the story of Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police superintendent who makes a very rash decision in a mall parking lot and whose experience as a rookie in a murder case in 1975 may tie her to Jackson's client. Atkinson jumps back and forth and time to tell these stories as well as to explore the 1975 case and the corruption in the Yorkshire police department at that time that caused so much unnecessary heartache.

Atkinson is brilliant. I really don't know what else to say. I can't imagine having the talent to bring these stories together; it seems like magic to me. When I was looking over my review of When Will There Be Good News?, I noted that at that point I considered it to be my favorite in the series, but its position may have just been usurped. I think I'd like to go back and read from the beginning again, actually, because at this point I've lost track of some things about Jackson (forgot he was from Yorkshire, for one) and just because it is an excellent set of stories. I loved Tracy, and I relished contemplating the moral quandary that came of her actions--always nice when a book makes you think, isn't it? I did miss Louise, though, and I am hoping she'll be back in a future book.Whatever turn Jackson's life takes next, I'm looking forward to reading about it.

Up next: Back to Little Dorrit, which finally seems to be picking up the pace a bit.

Spoiled by Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

"As least she's got better taste than the last underclassman you hired," Arugula noted. "Remember those Hot Topic coupons?"

"I know," Brooke shuddered. "As if I shop at the mall, much less the store that costumed my dad's zombie eating-disorder movie."

"Was Chew any good? I couldn't bring myself to see it."

"Don't," Brooke confided. "Daddy dumped the lead actress in the middle of filming and you can totally tell. She stops purging with conviction halfway through the second act. So disrespectful."

-Spoiled

I've been reading the work of Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan since both were recappers on Television Without Pity--heck, that might have been back when it was still called Mighty Big TV. They moved on to found their own blog, Go Fug Yourself, which is basically the best fashion blog around (if you have a sense of humor, at least, which is pretty useful in the world of fashion). When they started talking about the YA book they were writing, it was pretty obvious to me that it was going to be a must-read.

Spoiled tells the story of Molly Dix, a sunny Midwestern high-school student whose life is turned upside-down in the wake of her mother's death. Molly is left not only to grieve her mother's death, but to cope with her death-bed confession: she lied about the identity of Molly's real father. He's not a long-dead military man, as Molly always believed, but instead the world-famous action star Brick Berlin. What's more, Molly's mother makes a last request--she wants Molly to move to L.A. and let Brick take her in.

Molly, naturally, is floored. And while Brick is as warm and loving as she could have hoped (though unsurprisingly busy), she's anxious about another new addition to her family: Brick's daughter, Brooke. As well she should be, it turns out, because queen bee Brooke has no stake in making the transition to L.A. easy for Molly--in fact she'd be perfectly pleased if Molly took the next flight home. And if she can do anything to encourage that, well....

Spoiled is a lot of frothy fun. It reminded me of Mean Girls meets Clueless meets 90210 (original awesome version), and how much better can YA get than that? (Unless it has wizards or a dystopian death game, but that's apples and oranges, I think). There is definitely a lot of room for a sequel, which is exciting--especially because I think we need the introduction of the resident Bad Boy--either a jackass (Clueless's Elton) or a poor little rich boy (90210's Dylan) would work for me.

And we're going to get a movie, right? Or a TV show? Someone needs to make that happen, pronto.

Up next: This post is embarrassingly late. Seriously, I started it a solid two weeks ago. Anyway, I've already finished  finished Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, which I loved.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Why is this book called Bossypants? One, because the name Two and a Half Men was already taken. And two, because ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me, "Is it hard for you, being the boss?" and "Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?" You know, in that same way they say, "Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?" I can't answer for Mr. Trump, but in my case it is not. I've learned a lot over the past ten years about what it means to be the boss of people. In most cases being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way. In other cases, to get the best work out of people you may have to pretend you are not their boss and let them treat someone else like the boss, and then that person whispers to you behind a fake wall and you tell them what to tell the first person. Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, "I am the boss! I am the boss!"

-Bossypants 

So I decided I needed to take a bit of a breather from Little Dorrit, which I hate to admit is fairly slow going so far. I'm nearly halfway through, and I'm hoping things will kick into high gear soon. In the weeks I've been reading it, a dozen books from various sources have piled up on my shelf, and I thought it might be better to take a break and read a couple of those. Thus, Bossypants, a birthday present from my most excellent brother.

I've loved (and identified with) Tina Fey since she first came into the spotlight as co-anchor of Weekend Update. I always have solidarity with ladies who wear glasses, but beyond that she seemed both funny and incisive, which is about the best you can ask for in a comedian. Also, she went to my alma mater, which means I was lucky enough to see her perform on stage with a touring company of Second City during my time there.

All of this led me to believe that I would be a great fan of Bossypants, and I was absolutely right. Tina (I feel like I can call her Tina, right?) starts with a self-deprecating look at her nerdy childhood, which is always a good start in my book. She covers everything from her college years* to her time running 30 Rock, with enough room in between to share the story of a honeymoon cruise gone wrong and the travails of working at the YMCA. Tina has that enviable talent of a great writer to take a fairly mundane situation and make it both funny and engrossing--you just want her to tell you about everything. 

It's a very quick read--ideal for bringing along on a plane trip or to the beach if you don't mind risking looking a bit crazy while stifling laughter in public. I'm quite pleased to have a copy, as I can definitely see both rereading it and lending it out in the future.

Up next: I am quite behind in blog posts, so I've already finished Spoiled by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.

*I was pleased when she took a line to explain a bit of the terminology we use at Mr. Jefferson's University. It's absolutely pretentious of us and I love it so.Wahoowa!

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

A letter. For me. That was something of an event. The crisp-cornered envelope, puffed up with its thickly folded contents, was addressed in a hand that must have given the postman a certain amount of trouble. Although the style of the writing was old-fashioned, with its heavily embellished capitals and curly flourishes, my first impression was that it had been written by a child. The letters seemed untrained. Their uneven strokes either faded into nothing or were heavily etched into the paper. There was no sense of flow in the letters that spelled out my name. Each had been undertaken separately--M A R G A R E T L E A--as a new and daunting enterprise. But I knew no children. That is when I thought, It is the hand of an invalid.

It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person--some stranger--had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a thing?

-The Thirteenth Tale 

Margaret Lea, the heroine of The Thirteenth Tale, receives a mysterious letter. The sender, to Margaret's surprise, is one of England's most beloved authors: the reclusive Vida Winter. Vida has long prided herself on obfuscating her past in interviews, using her gifts as a novelist to invent her own history, each version more colorful than the last. Finally she is ready to tell her true story, and she's plucked Margaret from obscurity to be her biographer.

Margaret is reluctant at first. She's never even read a book by Vida Winter, for a start--she's not one for contemporary fiction. And while she has written some biographical accounts, they weren't about living people. She doesn't have much use for living people in general, really. She spends her days in her father's antiquarian bookshop, happily surrounded by books. But she overcomes her reservations and makes the trip to Yorkshire, then sets to sharpening her pencils. Vida's story awaits her.

Everyone has a story, Vida says, and hers is a doozy.  It's every bit as Gothic as the 19th century novels Margaret holds so dear--there's incest, and illegitimate children, and plenty of intrigue. Oh, and murder--of course there's murder. Margaret finds herself more and more pulled into the story, especially when it becomes apparent that even in Vida's most honest retelling, there's much that's being left unsaid.

The Thirteenth Tale is a great, absorbing read. I read the bulk of it traveling to and from Chicago recently, and I couldn't have asked for a better book to pass the time. In fact, I finished slightly before the end of the flight, so I lingered over the Reader's Guide, which I often pass over. I quite enjoyed the interview with Diane Setterfield, whom I identified with--especially when she talked about the panicky sensation one can get if one needs a book and doesn't have it at the ready. A terrible problem, to be sure, though one I'm unlikely to have in the near future, given the number of unread books currently piling up in my apartment.

Up next: What's better in the summertime than a nice, fat Dickens novel? I'm about 80 pages into Little Dorrit--that is to say, a little less than a tenth of the way through. Excellent.

Masquerade by Melissa de la Cruz

 

"Aduivo Amicus Specialis. Nihilum cello. Meus victus est tui manus." I come to you for aid as a secret, special friend. I have nothing to hide. My life is in your hands.

He looked into her eyes with an icy stare that could only belong to Schuyler's kind, and her words faded into silence.

"Dormio," he ordered, and with a wave of his hand, she felt the darkness come upon her as she fainted.

-Masquerade

If you were to pick a city a vampire might haunt, Venice would have to be among your top prospects. So it comes as no surprise that that's where we find Schuyler Van Alen at the outset of Masquerade, the second Blue Bloods book by Melissa de la Cruz. Schuyler has come to Venice in search of her grandfather, a man whom she has never met. Nevertheless, he's her last hope to learn more about the Silver Bloods, the corrupted vampires believed to be behind a recent string of attacks in New York.

It's gotten dangerous out there for the Blue Bloods, and things are particularly difficult for Schuyler and her friend Bliss. Both girls have been dealing with mysterious blackouts--and things only get more complicated when they consider taking their first human blood...

Okay, it can sound a little silly at times. But once you get wrapped up in the Blue Bloods world, Masquerade becomes a pretty good pageturner. I certainly read it quite quickly, and I'm sure I'll be getting to the third one before long. 

Up next: I've already finished The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, and I'm looking forward to coming back and writing about it. 

Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz

Across the street, Schuyler saw a cab pull up to the curb, and a tall blond guy stepped out of it. Just as he emerged, another cab barreled down the street on the opposite side. It was swerving recklessly, and at first it looked like it would miss him, but at the last moment, the boy threw himself in its path and disappeared underneath its wheels. [...]

Schuyler ran across the street, fully expecting to see a dead body, but the boy was standing right in front of her, counting the change in his wallet. He slammed the door shut and sent his taxi on its way. He was whole and unhurt.

"You should be dead," she whispered. 

-Blue Bloods


Schuyler Van Alen has a fairly ordinary sort of life--well, by Manhattan standards, at least. She's grown up with her grandmother in a dusty mansion on Riverside Drive and attends school across town at the tony Duchesne. For fun, she enjoys nothing more than hanging out with her best friend Oliver and reading magazines. Every Sunday, she goes to the hospital to visit her mother, who has spent the last fifteen years in a coma--okay, that's a little out of the ordinary.

Things change when Schuyler's classmate Aggie Carondolet is found dead of an apparent drug overdose. One of the most popular girls in school, Aggie was often in the company of Duchesne queen bee Mimi Force, who has never had any use for the offbeat Schuyler. So Schuyler is surprised when Mimi's equally popular twin brother, Jack, approaches her with a theory: Aggie Carondolet didn't just die--she was murdered.

Thus begins Schuyler's initiation into the world of the Blue Bloods--those who are not only the world's most wealthy and influential citizens, but also something far older and more powerful: vampires. Needless to say, life is no longer remotely ordinary for Schuyler.

Melissa de la Cruz has a breezy style that made Blue Bloods an enjoyable light read. Her mythology for vampires is interesting--there is a reincarnation angle that I haven't seen explored before. I did find her penchant for explaining what every character is wearing--down to the brand--somewhat amusing, but I guess it's not totally unexpected for a book set on the label-conscious Upper East Side. All in all, a fun read, and I'm sure I'll be reading more.

Up next: In fact, I've already read the second book in the series, Masquerade. I hope to be back to blog about it before heading out of town for a few days.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. [...] We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe!

-A Brief History of Time 

Well. Sometimes I get these fancy ideas about what I should be reading. Reading Age of Wonder* reminded me of how much I enjoyed learning about astronomy in college, and it seemed time to delve back into that field. I also thought of how much I like Doctor Who and figured it might be interesting to learn some of the science behind, say, time travel. I remembered hearing about A Brief History of Time, which looked slim and fairly unintimidating when I picked it up from the library. What I didn't take into consideration was that even a layman's guide to astronomy would be way over my head.

Stephen Hawking makes a valiant effort to present things as plainly as possible, but the fact remains that you can only make something like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle so simple--it's a pretty abstract concept for a layperson, as are many of the concepts in discussed in A Brief History of Time. Hawking peppers the text with jokey asides (and has an endearing fondness for exclamation points), but my head was still swimming a lot of the time. There were some concepts that he illustrated pretty clearly: I thought using the ping pong game on a train to talk about relativity was very clear, and I liked his use of the Earth's surface to help explain the boundaries (or lack thereof) in the universe. But when he talked about gluons and the spin of antiparticles and what color a certain quark was, my eyes had a tendency to glaze over.

Still, I don't feel entirely defeated. I'm wondering if there's some other book out there that might be even more simplistic. Or perhaps if I read the same ideas again, a few more of them would click. I'm not by any means a science person, but I'm willing to try--it reminds me of the early days in my AP Physics class in high school, when I optimistically thought I might be good at physics. I think it lasted 3 weeks, tops. After that, things went downhill--aside from the unit on something to do with the moon (I'm hazy on the particulars), which I inexplicably understood quite well. So there's that.

Up next: Already finished Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz, which was quite a change of pace. 

*There's that book again! The book that launched a thousand books, it seems. 

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

The palace was as big as the city on Mount Olympus, with wide courtyards, gardens, and columned pavilions. The gardens were sculpted with coral colonies and glowing sea plants. Twenty or thirty buildings were made of abalone, white but gleaming with rainbow colors. Fish and octopi darted in and out of the windows. The paths were lined with glowing pearls like Christmas lights. 

The main courtyard was filled with warriors--mermen with fish tails from the waist down and human bodies from the waist up, except their skin was blue, which I'd never known before. Some were tending the wounded. Some were sharpening spears and swords. One passed us, swimming in a hurry. His eyes were bright green, like that stuff they put in glo-sticks, and his teeth were shark teeth. They don't show you stuff like that in The Little Mermaid.

-The Last Olympian 


I am getting to this entry a wee bit belatedly, since I finished the book about a week ago, but we'll see what I can do, shall we? The Last Olympian is the final book in Rick Riordan's series about the adventures of Percy Jackson, teenage demigod. In The Last Olympian, Percy, a son of Poseidon, has come to his greatest challenge yet: he must take on the vengeful Titans, those whose power was usurped by the Olympians so long ago.

Things aren't looking so good for the Olympians at the moment. One Titan has escaped his prison in Mount Saint Helens and is merrily making his way east, wreaking havoc among the human population as he goes--and even Zeus himself can barely slow him down. Meanwhile, Kronos is heading straight to New York City, home of Mount Olympus, where Percy and his fellow campers are the last--and only--line of defense. With infighting among the gods and demigods and the presence of a spy among them, a happy outcome begins to seem like a dim prospect. Percy has to go to Hades and back--again--to have any chance of saving life as he knows it.

As always, I found that this series is a blend of some truly intriguing, creative ideas and a sensibility that is designed to appeal almost exclusively to younger readers--and, fair enough, it is YA. But there's just something about Percy's voice that is much more teenager-y to me than, say, Harry Potter's. I don't know if it's an American vs. British thing, or because Riordan was a teenage boy himself at one point; because Percy is just not as mature as Harry or perhaps because he had a more normal childhood--for whatever reason, The Last Olympian and other books in this series feel more like books strictly aimed at children than the Harry Potter ones do. I can't say it's a bad thing--again, these are books written for children--but it does dampen my own enthusiasm somewhat.

That having been said, I'm glad I stuck with the series. I found some of the strands of the story to be pretty compelling--I especially liked the resolution to the Percy/Annabeth/Rachel triangle. The treatment of the secondary gods like Hestia was interesting, and I couldn't help but smile at Riordan's characterization of Persephone and Demeter. The spy thing had me turning pages pretty quickly at a certain point (though I thought the resolution was a little rushed). It's a likeable series and I wish it had been more successful as a film venture, as the books seem as though they would have lent themselves very well to adaptation. As it stands, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend these books to a child--I just might not suggest them to an adult.

Up next: Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Yeah. Well, it seemed like a good idea at some point...

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone as if they'd never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

-Coraline 

First things first: Coraline is a genuinely scary book. I thought, having seen the movie, that I would be fairly well prepared for any spooky bits, but as it turned out that did not help so much at all. It turns out my imagination is even better than a (very good!) film. Yay?

I probably ought to back things up for a moment: plot. In Neil Gaiman's story, British schoolgirl Coraline Jones moves to a new home one summer with her mother and father. Coraline's parents mean well, but they're busy, and Coraline often has to amuse herself. She's often bored, and she's also grown tired of picking at dinners she finds inedible and buying the drabbest of school uniforms. She's looking for adventure.

Then she finds the door described in the passage above. It leads to adventure, to be sure--a whole new world, actually. There Coraline finds another mother and father that at first glance seem just like her own--except dinner there is tastier, and her clothes are nicer, and her parents are ready to drop everything to keep her amused. She could live in this world forever, her other mother tells her, if she'd just do one tiny thing....

Like any place where everything seems perfect, this other world is actually rotten to the core. It's also, Coraline discovers, not so easy to escape. She finds herself in extraordinary danger as she attempts to regain the life she once found so boring.

I've given some thought as to why I found Coraline so scary, and I think it's a mix of a couple of things. One is the way that Gaiman takes what should be Coraline's safe haven (her home, her family) and twists it into the stuff of nightmares. I don't wish to spoil the story, but there's a bit toward the end with the other father--just unbelievably creepy to me. I also think that the fact that Coraline is essentially on her own in this other world makes things quite scary. In the film, at least, she has her friend Wybie, but in the book she's quite alone with the exception of a mysterious, unnamed cat. If I were all alone in that place as an adult I'd be petrified, so it's difficult for me to imagine the terror of encountering this other world as a child. Shiver. Well done, Mr. Gaiman.

Up next: Still lagging a bit behind in updating this blog, so I've already finished Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian.

Young Romantics by Daisy Hay

Meanwhile, the goings-on at Diodati were a fertile topic for gossip and speculation. The local hotelier did a brisk trade in sailing trips on the lake during which shocked English visitors could inspect the washing drying outside Byron's villa for evidence of female inhabitants--telescopes were thoughtfully included in the ticket price.

-Young Romantics

I'd fully intended to read Young Romantics some time ago--in April, even, for National Poetry Month. I checked it out of the library after reading of Age of Wonder and realizing that, despite my love of Keats, my knowledge of poetry from that era was still pretty lacking. But then I discovered Inspector Lynley, and I wanted to read Blue Latitudes while Age of Wonder was still fresh in my mind...and well, here we are. Better late than never.

I picked out Young Romantics because I thought it would give me a nice overview of Shelley, Byron, and Keats and further my understanding of the relationships they had with one another and with others in their circle. I discovered as I began to read, though, that Daisy Hay's focus was clearly on Shelley and Leigh Hunt, the poet and critic.* If I'd read the book jacket a bit more carefully, I would have already known this, but it turned out to be fine. I missed Keats, who was absent for long sections of the book, but I did already read a comprehensive account of his life. Byron figured somewhat more prominently. He also came off like a big ole jerk.

I had kind of a sketchy idea of Byron as a ladies' (and gents', to be fair) man; someone talented and charismatic and a bit of a rogue. I did not, however, know that he spent some time fumbling toward ecstasy with his own half-sister. Nor was I aware of his cruel streak--the way he treated Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley's stepsister), the mother of his illegitimate child, was pretty terrible. 

And while Shelley comes off better than Byron, he still could be remarkably callous, especially in his treatment of women. I did enjoy getting to learn more about his relationship with Mary, which had more scandalous origins than I had realized, and I liked Mary quite a lot in general. It was because of that, I think, that I still found the account of Shelley's death quite moving, even though I hadn't particularly warmed to him. It was just so sudden, and so senseless, and he was just so young.

It can be difficult to learn about artists--once you've discovered something negative about someone, be it merely unpleasant or truly awful, it can be hard to divorce that from your appreciation of an artist's work. Perhaps I'm judging Byron unfairly, even.For the moment, I will say that Young Romantics has definitely influenced my opinion of him as a person, but I can't deny that he wrote beautifully.  As for Shelley, I now know more of his life than I do of his works, so I shall have to remedy that at some point in the future. Neither seems likely to replace Keats as my favorite Romantic poet--and not just because Keats seems by far the pleasantest of the bunch (though it doesn't hurt).

I feel as though I'm giving short shrift to the women in the book, which is unfortunate. The treatment of Mary Shelley and Claire Claremont, in particular, is a great credit to Daisy Hay. I feel as though I got a true sense of the place of these women in the literary circle of their day--they often weren't considered equals of the poets whose company they kept, but they certainly had their smarts and a fair degree of influence on the men. I don't know that I ever would have thought to explore the further works of Mary Shelley before, but I have to say I'm now intrigued. Much like Age of Wonder, I have a feeling Young Romantics will be leading me to more books before long.

Up next: Already finished Coraline, so I just need to come back to write it up.

*Hay mentions in passing that Hunt was the basis for the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. It makes so much sense--oh, that elderly child.

Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris

He was not the first person to ask me that. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me, that I hadn't felt the need to rush over to Monroe to watch guys take off their clothes.

"No. I've seen Claude naked. I've never come over to watch him do his thing professionally. I hear he's good."

"He's naked? At your house?"

"Modesty is not one of Claude's priorities," I said.

-Dead Reckoning 


I forgot to remark upon it in my last post, but I've now been writing this blog for 2 years. It's been such a pleasant exercise for me--my only regret is that I didn't start it sooner. Some 150 posts later, one character in particular has writ herself large on this blog: Sookie Stackhouse.

Dead Reckoning is the 12th book in Charlaine Harris's series* and thus the 12th Sookie Stackhouse book I've read in the last two years. I'm pleased to say that it is yet another great installment. As always, Sookie has quite a lot on her plate. She's troubled by a mysterious strain in the relationship between Eric and Pam, which she knows bodes ill. She's still being pursued by the decidedly murderous Sandra Pelt. Even her decision to clean out her attic has ramifications that could dramatically change her life. She deals with vampires, werewolves, shifters, witches, faeries, demons, and, oh yeah, an elf. Just another day in the life of Sookie Stackhouse.

While the plot overall is pretty enjoyable, I'm particularly pleased with the developments in Sookie's romantic life. (Not to mention terribly curious to see how it continues!) Between that and the rumblings in the world of the fae (which I imagine will figure largely in the next book), Harris leaves us in quite a bit of suspense at the end of the story. As usual, I can't wait for more, but I guess for now I'll have to content myself with waiting for the next season of True Blood.

Up next: Back to Young Romantics--you just have to drop everything for a new Sookie Stackhouse, am I right?

*including the book of short stories

Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Shoenberger

And finally, no interview could be complete until it touched on Le Scandale. "Well, I must say that everyone seems to have quieted down," Richard said. "Good lord, the reputations we had! I mean, I was a bestial wife-stealer, and Elizabeth was a scheming home-breaker...We've been through a lot of fire together, Elizabeth and I. You'd think we were out to destroy Western Civilization or something."

-Furious Love

Where to start with Furious Love? I'm finding that it's hard to review a book about the epic romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton because it's just so, well, big*. Both Taylor and Burton were brilliant and complicated--when they came together, their relationship marked the beginning of celebrity culture as we know it today (much to their own dismay). After all, Federico Fellini coined the term paparazzi after watching the press swarm the pair while they were filming Cleopatra. Today the tabloid culture loves to build up a celebrity couple of the moment and document the (oft-imagined) highs and lows of their relationship, but Brangelina can't hold a candle to the phenomenon that was Lizandick**.

Although I love classic movies, I've only seen a handful of films starring Taylor and/or Burton. I had a vague idea that their relationship had been dramatic, but until reading Furious Love I had no idea how turbulent it actually was. They were quite the match. Elizabeth had virtually grown up in the spotlight, making her screen debut at the age of 10. When she encountered Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra--actually their second meeting--she was already on her fourth marriage. Richard, the son of a coal miner, was considered the next great stage actor; although married, he was also well known as an inveterate womanizer. Sparks flew.

They lived a life of extravagance that is hard for most of us to imagine: they made millions of dollars and spent it accordingly (jewels were a particular passion of Elizabeth's), drank to excess, and jetted around the world with a coterie of family, pets, and hangers-on. Despite this, the couple come off as surprisingly sympathetic in Furious Love. Elizabeth shows an endearing adoration for the ordinary life, and it's hard not to admire her moxie. Richard comes across as an often tragic character: talented beyond measure, but ultimately consumed by his demons. Kashner and Shoenberger had access to his journals--the entries they've included, particularly those in which he tries to understand his own worst behavior, are often heartbreaking.

Furious Love is absorbing from the start--I read 100 pages within a day of picking it up. I would definitely enjoy reading more Hollywood biographies with a similar tone, as it was juicy without seeming lowbrow. It's also clear that I need to bone up on the Taylor/Burton filmography, which I hope to get started on soon.

Up next: Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, a nonfiction book about the circle that included Keats, Shelley, and Byron.

* Though I allow that it would be much more difficult to write the book itself.

**Turns out celebrity portmanteaus are nothing new either. 

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George

They were at the table, with the items from Joy Sinclair's shoulder bag spread out before them. The tape recorder was playing yet another time, Joy's voice rising and falling with the broken messages that Barbara had long ago memorised. Hearing it now, she realised that the recording had begun to take on the quality of a recurring nightmare, and Lynley the quality of a man obsessed. His were not quantum leaps of intuition in which the misty image of crime-motive-perpetrator took recognizable shape. Rather, they bore the appearance of contrivance, of an attempt to find and assess guilt where only by the wildest stretching of the imagination could it possibly exist. For the first time in that endless harrowing day, Barbara began to feel uneasy. In the long months of their partnership, she had come to realise that, for all his exterior gloss and sophistication, for all his trappings of upper-class splendour that she so mightily despised, Lynley was still the finest DI she had ever worked with. Yet Barbara knew intuitively that the case he was building now was wrong, founded on sand. She sat down and reached restlessly for the book of matches from Joy Sinclair's bag, brooding upon it.

-Payment in Blood 

It's interesting reading the Lynley books having already made my way through a substantial part of the television series. I've been enjoying the show quite a lot, which means that I've come into the books with fairly high expectations. In the case of Payment in Blood, the story wasn't quite as engaging as I would have hoped.

In Payment in Blood, Lynley and Havers are assigned to a case in Scotland, quite a bit outside the usual purview of the Metropolitan Police.  A playwright has been murdered while on retreat with the cast about to stage a production of her latest work; circumstances indicate that she was almost certainly killed by one of them. Among the guests of the house, to Lynley's dismay, is his great friend Lady Helen Clyde, invited to stay by the play's director. While Helen is never a suspect, her presence wreaks havoc on Lynley's detective work, as his newly awoken jealousy provokes him to narrow his field of suspects far too hastily. As Havers notes in the excerpt above, he's not seeing the case clearly, but unfortunately her objections to his line of inquiry fall on deaf ears.

As George tells the story, it becomes more and more convoluted, involving a large pool of suspects that even I, having already seen the televised adaptation, had trouble keeping track of. The story goes on to encompass a 15-year-old case of suicide and involvement from MI-5--one of which, perhaps, would have been enough to keep the reader guessing, as there were already plenty of motives to pick from. (The television adaptation streamlined the case substantially, and neither subplot was used.) 

The trouble with having so much plot and so many characters, I found, was that I felt I didn't get to spend much time getting to know either Lynley or Havers any better. I like both characters enough that I felt rather disappointed to be taken away from their inner thoughts so often. I'm still interested in continuing to read the series, so I'm hoping this was more of an aberration than a trend for future stories.

Up next: Already pretty far into Furious Love, a juicy account of the love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz

The warriors taunted and threatened the English, but only rarely did they follow the haka with a sustained attack. Before long, the crewmen responded in kind. When a warrior waved his naked backside at the English, which William Monkhouse termed "the usual sign of contempt" among fishmongers in London, the surgeon decided to "retort the compliment" by baring his ass as well. This so enraged a warrior that he hurled a lance. The English replied with small shot, frightening the Maori--but only for a moment. "They felt the sting of our laughing at them," Monkhouse wrote, and resumed shouting and waving spears and paddles. Thus ended a fairly typical encounter, which reads today rather like a skirmish between soccer hooligans in Europe. 

-Blue Latitudes 

Blue Latitudes had been on my maybe-read list for a while. I knew Tony Horwitz was a gifted writer, since I'd thoroughly enjoyed two of his other books, Confederates in the Attic and A Voyage Long and Strange. Even so, I wasn't hooked by the premise of Blue Latitudes initially. I'd never had any particular interest in Captain Cook, so I had trouble mustering up a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of Horwitz retracing his voyages around the world.

Then, of course, I read Age of Wonder and became familiar with Joseph Banks, the scientist (and ladykiller) who accompanied Cook on his first voyage. Banks was quite a character, and he sparked my interest to the extent that I found myself considering Blue Latitudes with new enthusiasm. I'm glad I did.

In Blue Latitudes, Horwitz travels around the world just as Cook did, although he does have the advantages of airplanes and GPS, not to mention Dramamine when he does take to a boat. He journeys to everywhere from Alaska to New Zealand, and not a few places in between, ending his trip as Cook did in Hawaii, although his own journey comes to a close on a decidedly less bloody note.  Everywhere he goes, Horwitz investigates how Cook is remembered. Today Cook has become a complicated figure. Depending on whom you talk to, you might hear Cook described as an intrepid adventurer or a harbinger of doom. As someone who didn't know much about Cook, I found it interesting to see the many sides of the man. I also appreciated Horwitz's forays into other aspects of history I was wholly unfamiliar with. To wit:

The Aleutian Islands became American territory following William Seward's famous purchase of Alaska in 1867, and for seventy-five years the remote Aleuts survived in a state of benign neglect. Then came World War II, when the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and seized several islands farther out along the Aleutian chain, the first occupation of American soil by a foreign army since the War of 1812. The inhabitants of the occupied islands were taken to camps in Japan, where only twenty-five survived. The United States evacuated the rest of the Aleuts, ostensibly for their own protection, interning them at wretched camps in southeastern Alaska, where many of them also died. Because of wartime censorship, the Aleuts' plight remained unknown to the American public. Not until 1988 did the U.S. government formally apologize to the Aleuts and pay compensation of $12,000 to each of the camps' few hundred survivors.

I certainly don't remember that ever coming up in any of my history classes. It's amazing how much is still left unsaid when it comes to recent history.

Horwitz is a smart, compelling writer, and I certainly feel better informed for having read this book. That said, I still prefer the other books of his I've read. I'm also quite excited for his next book, which is about the abolitionist John Brown and his famous raid on Harper's Ferry.

Up next: Back to Inspector Lynley with Payment in Blood.

A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George

She left the room and stalked down the corridor towards the lift. Was there anyone in all of New Scotland Yard whom she hated more than she hated Lynley? He was a miraculous combination of every single thing she thoroughly despised: educated at Eton, a first in history at Oxford, a public school voice, and a bloody family tree that had its roots somewhere just this side of the Battle of Hastings. Upper class. Bright. And so damnably charming that she couldn't understand why every criminal in the city simply didn't surrender to accommodate him.

-A Great Deliverance 

These are the thoughts of DS Barbara Havers, of late a uniformed cop working for the Metropolitan Police. Havers has the chops to make it as a detective, but her difficult personality has won her few friends in the department. When her superior officer assigns her to a thorny murder case in Yorkshire, she might have been pleased to have another shot--except for the fact that he partners her up with DI Thomas Lynley. Havers, as you may have gleaned from the passage above, has no love lost for Lynley. She considers the assignment to be a form of punishment, a cruel joke--why else would you pair up the working-class Havers with Lynley, better known in some circles as the eighth earl of Asherford?

Yes, Havers has a wee bit of a chip on her shoulder when it comes to class. And while everything she thinks about Lynley in the passage I quoted is true enough, it quickly becomes clear that there's much more to him than meets the eye. A Great Deliverance is as much a story of the two detectives groping toward a working relationship as it is the story of the (rather lurid) case that they've joined forces to investigate.

I first became acquainted with Lynley and Havers by watching the Masterpiece Mystery adaptations of Elizabeth George's stories starring Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small--I'm currently in the middle of the third season. I was immediately charmed by Lynley--as Havers notes, it's difficult not to be--and I was quite fond of his prickly partner from the outset as well.  I feel as though the television adaptation honed this story well--I could have done without some of the more histrionic moments in the book, or the oddly two-dimensional ugly American character*. Still, I read the book in two days, which certainly reflects how caught up I became in the story. One thing I particularly enjoyed was the chance to get a window into the thoughts of both Lynley and Havers, which gave me some new insight into how they viewed one another at the start of their partnership. I would be lying if I pretended I was anything else but hugely invested in seeing how that relationship develops on the page, as it certainly has been pretty engrossing on screen.

On the whole, it was a good read, and it was refreshing to have a book that I became so absorbed in after a pretty uneven run of books in the last few months. I'll definitely be seeking out the next book in the series.

Up next: Getting back to Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes, which I'm about halfway through.

*Particularly considering that George herself is American.

Poem: "Stanzas Written In Passing The Ambracian Gulf"

Cleopatra (Lyndsey Marshal) and Antony (James Purefoy) on HBO's Rome*

 It's April once again (I note belatedly), which means that it's also National Poetry Month. Last year at this time I was on a Keats kick and, after having read The Age of Wonder, I thought it would be good to revisit the Romantics. This time I selected Byron. 

I've long been familiar with Byron's libertine reputation, but I don't think I'd ever read any of his poetry until recently. I was pleasantly surprised with how readable it was, and how witty. I was charmed from the first poem I read, which I've decided to highlight in this post.  

Stanzas Written In Passing The Ambracian Gulf

Through cloudless skies, in silvery sheen,

Full beams the moon on Actium's coast:

And on these waves for Egypt's queen

The ancient world was won and lost.

And now upon the scene I look,

The azure grave of many a Roman;

Where stern Ambition once forsook

His wavering crown to follow woman.

Florence! whom I will love as well

As ever yet was said or sung

(Since Orpheus sang his spouse from hell),

Whilst thou art fair and I am young;

Sweet Florence! those were pleasant times,

When worlds were staked for ladies' eyes:

Had bards as many realms as rhymes,

Thy charms might rise new Antonies.

Though Fate forbids such things to be,

Yet, by thine eyes and ringlets curl'd!

I cannot lose a world for thee,

But I would not lose thee for a world.

That last couplet, am I right? Also, I'm a sucker for Roman history: he had me at Actium.

*I suppose I could have used any number of pictures to illustrate this post, but James Purefoy's performance as Antony is brilliant. Love him; love the crazy, twisted soap opera that was Rome.