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.