Word Herd Leader

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2012-02-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

I go downstairs wearing a thick Christian smile. Living at home, whenever I want to leave Longleaf, I have to ask Mother if I can borrow her car. Which means she'll ask me where I'm going. Which means I have to lie to her on a daily basis, which is in itself enjoyable but a little degrading at the same time.

-The Help

As snobby as it sounds, I must admit that I've grown wary of bestsellers. For every Kite Runner, worthy of the good word of mouth, it seems that there are three treacly tales full of trite, mediocre writing. (I'll be kind and avoid naming names.) Thus it took me a while to get to The Help--and indeed I wasn't convinced I should read it until the movie started getting good buzz as well.

The Help centers on the lives of women living in Jackson, Mississippi in the throes of the civil rights movement. One of them, Skeeter Phelan, is an aspiring writer in search of a worthy subject. She hits upon an idea: interview the women who work in the homes of her upper-class white peers. It's a good idea, but a dangerous one. The Help chronicles Skeeter's journey to interview these women, as well as the lives of two women who will become her most important contributors: Aibileen and Minnie. Strong, thoughtful Aibileen has weathered the death of her only son, and has grown weary of the injustice she's seen in her life. Headstrong Minnie is more reluctant to talk to Skeeter, but her story of sweet revenge becomes essential to the book. Together, the three women offer a compelling look into another world, a world that would be almost unbelievable if it hadn't actually existed.

Perhaps because it seems both so familiar and so alien, I find that chapter in American history to be fascinating. I became utterly absorbed in the stories of Skeeter, Aibilieen, and Minnie, and had a hard time putting The Help down. I recently watched the film as well, and while it (unsurprisingly) had to sacrifice some of the novel's detail to achieve a workable running time, it was still quite enjoyable. A pleasant surprise in every way.

Up next: After a couple of false starts with other books, I'm currently enjoying Deadwood.

World War Z by Max Brooks

2012-01-07T13:46:00.000-05:00

I then told him about the outbreak and listened as he made some joke about the hygiene habits of hillbillies. I tried to chuckle along but continued that I thought the incident might be significant. Almost reluctantly he asked me what the symptoms were. I told him everything: the bites, the fever, the boy, the arm...his face suddenly stiffened. His smile died.

He asked me to show him the infected. I went back into the meeting hall and waved the phone's camera over each of the patients. He asked me to move the camera closer to some of the wounds themselves. I did so and when I brought the screen back to my face, I saw that his video image had been cut.

"Stay where you are," he said, just a distant, removed voice now. "Take the names of all who have had contact with the infected. Restrain those already infected. If any have passed into coma, vacate the room and secure the exit."

-World War Z

I think we can all agree that being the doctor asked to treat Patient Zero in a zombie apocalypse would have to rank pretty high in terms of bad situations to find oneself in. Of course, dealing with Patient One Hundred wouldn't be any picnic either. Or Patient One Thousand. Or Patient Oh-My-God-I've-Lost-Count-Because-There-Are-So-Many-Damned-Zombies. A zombie apocalypse, in general, just does not seem like a pleasant place to be.

So why is it so entertaining to watch and read about one? I quite enjoyed Zombieland, am a regular viewer of The Walking Dead, and now World War Z. It's no news flash that zombies are enjoying a cultural moment right now, like vampires before them, and pirates before that, &c, &c. I'm sure a sociologist could wax philosophical about how our interest in zombies reflects our fears about society at the moment--but I'm not a sociologist. I do know zombies are pretty scary, though.

World War Z is imagined as a collection of interviews conducted seven years after a zombie apocalypse. The interviews trace the spread of the contagion, the way rumors flew and people scrambled to react; the actual battles waged against Zach (as zombies are called by the military) and the struggle to survive on a daily basis; and glimpses of the slow recovery. Along the way, we meet people from around the world, from all walks of life (though it is skewed toward military personnel), giving a broad view of the conflict.

It was a pretty interesting read, although (unsurprisingly, given the title) it was a little military-heavy for my taste. I think I would have preferred a book that focused more on regular people, with fewer paragraphs describing anti-zombie weaponry. For arms buffs, I'm sure that was fun, but I tended to zone out at times when confronted with the denser military sections.

I also would have enjoyed if Brooks had chosen to follow more individual stories throughout the duration of the war. I think it would have been interesting to see how people, as individuals, were affected by various stages of the war, rather than getting more of a societal view. Brooks does revisit a few of his characters at the end of the story, but people mostly pop up to share their perspectives on specific parts of the war and then disappear.

I know that a movie adaptation is underway, and I will be curious to see how much of the story makes it to the screen. It seems like there is potential for a pretty intense film, though I'm curious to see how any worthy zombie picture can possibly be rated PG-13.

Up next: The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2012-01-01T12:01:00.000-05:00

Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasn't an idiot--she knew the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends she'd made when she first came to New York; a set of goals she'd scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:

Find a band to manage

Understand the news

Study Japanese

Practice the harp

-A Visit from the Goon Squad

It now seems appropriate that I procrastinated for a week on writing this review, as Sasha's set of goals up there looks not unlike a list of resolutions. Also gives my blog that classy--albeit slightly dated--touch to start the year with 2010's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, dontcha think?

A Visit from the Goon Squad tells the story of--well, what exactly? A bunch of people, a city, an era, their music. It encompasses a lot, really. Egan spends each chapter with a different character, and these characters weave their way in and out of each other's stories; this method that must have involved a heck of a lot of notes, I'd imagine. The bulk of the story takes place in the first decade of the 21st century, but jumps back as far as the 60's and forward into the near future. It's a pretty impressive feat.

It's also a pretty easy story to get wrapped up in, and I found myself regretting that I hadn't saved it for my recent travels--I finished it sitting in an airplane right before takeoff, actually. There's something about the world that Egan creates that really draws the reader in, even though I wouldn't describe it as a particularly warm book. There wasn't a character I really loved, but the format of the book helped to engender sympathy with all of them, which is a pretty nifty trick. It's not necessarily a book I see myself returning to--although having said that, a reread probably would allow me to make connections between characters I'd missed the first time around. It's a bit hard to imagine rereading anything right now, with more new books on my shelves than ever. Lucky me!

Up next: World War Z, which I just finished yesterday and hopefully will be back to post about relatively soon.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

2011-12-26T18:30:00.000-05:00

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

2011-12-03T12:26:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-13T10:55:00.000-05:00

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

2011-10-30T11:41:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-28T20:05:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-22T08:59:00.000-04:00

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

2011-09-20T17:17:00.001-04:00

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

2011-09-06T19:25:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-24T19:18:00.000-04:00

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

2011-08-23T19:35:00.001-04:00

"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

2011-08-07T17:12:00.000-04:00

"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

2011-08-06T09:21:00.005-04:00

"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

2011-07-31T09:46:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-06T21:17:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-05T22:20:00.000-04:00

"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

2011-06-29T22:34:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-25T10:12:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-19T00:20:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-11T21:12:00.000-04:00

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

2011-06-08T22:52:00.001-04:00

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

2011-05-24T18:30:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-17T22:09:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-10T10:44:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-02T18:17:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-23T12:25:00.001-04:00

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"

2011-04-13T18:14:00.001-04:00

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.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

2011-04-11T16:47:00.000-04:00

At all events, Coleridge treasured the memory of his father's eager demonstration of the stars and planets overhead, and the possibility of other worlds: 'I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery -- & he told me the names of the stars -- and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world -- and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had world rolling round them -- & when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc -- my mind had been habituated to the Vast.'

-The Age of Wonder

I find it pretty remarkable to think that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, some 200 years ago, thought his mind "habituated to the Vast." What hope, then, do we in the 21st century have to experience wonder, when so much more of the world has been discovered and analyzed and explained? Luckily for us, we also have books like The Age of Wonder to help us to consider the world around us in a new light.

If I were to try to sum up The Age of Wonder in one sentence, I might say something like, "It's about the monumental discoveries that were made in every scientific discipline in the late 18th and early 19th centuries." Even with that "monumental" in there, though, I suspect that that sounds rather dry. (Also, passive voice. Badly done.) Imagine this instead: A Scotsman exploring an area of Africa that cartographers have left blank. A German immigrant building the largest telescope in England...and promptly discovering a new planet. A wealthy young English botanist going native in Tahiti. A 20-year-old who spent considerable time experimenting with the effects of nitrous oxide, to which he became addicted, before going on to discover elements like calcium. The Age of Wonder covers all of these stories and many more. If you've guessed that it's ambitious in scope, you would be correct.

It's amazing how much we know of science dates from this time-- even the word scientist itself didn't come into usage until the 1820s. Richard Holmes has quite a lot of territory to cover. He juggles his stories in a way that makes it look quite easy, but I can't imagine how much time must have gone into researching this book. His voice is clear and he sometimes manages to work in some very clever asides--I would definitely be interested in looking into other books of his. (He seems to have primarily written about the Romantic poets, who flit in and out of The Age of Wonder.)

It did take me a little while to get into the book, but before long I was utterly absorbed in the Tahitian adventures of Joseph Banks. On the whole, it's a very interesting book. I particularly loved the parts about astronomy (because if anything can inspire wonder, I really think it's the stars) and the dramatic tale of the adventurer Mungo Park, the first European to find the Niger River. I was less enchanted with the story of Humphry Davy, but that may have been in part because he just didn't come across as a particularly likable fellow. Overall, I feel much better informed about this era than I did prior to reading this book, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

Up next: Using Joseph Banks as a jumping off point, I'm on to Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes, in which he retraces the travels of Captain Cook. I loved the other two Horwitz books I read, so I have high hopes.

The Infinities by John Banville

2011-03-27T11:21:00.000-04:00

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What a silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. Many of them sleep on, of course, careless of our cousin Aurora's charming matutinal trick, but there are always the insomniacs, the restless ill, the lovelorn tossing on their solitary beds, or just the early-risers, the busy ones, with their knee-bends and their cold showers and their fussy little cups of black ambrosia. Yes, all who witness it greet the dawn with joy, more or less, except of course the condemned man, for whom first light will be the last, on earth.

-The Infinities

When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. I read it cover to cover, over and over again. I didn't grow up with organized religion, so while other children learned Bible stories, I knew the tale of Persephone by heart. Even though the Greek gods seemed both formidable and alarmingly capricious, I was secretly disappointed that they went unworshipped in modern times.

All that is to say, I have a particular affection for Greek mythology, so when I heard about John Banville's The Infinities, I was intrigued. A story about Greek gods meddling in the affairs of an Irish family--what could be better? I had been watching Battlestar Galactica, in which Greek mythology plays an important part, so I was especially ready to enjoy some Zeus & Hermes action. Unfortunately, while I found the prose of The Infinities to be beautiful, its story left me cold.

The Infinities is a fairly short novel--less than 300 pages--so I anticipated that I would finish it quite quickly. The story, which takes place over the course of a single day, never really drew me in, though. Patriarch Adam Godley is in a coma, and his family has gathered around him to ready themselves for his presumably incipient death. The day's events are narrated (for the most part) by Hermes, who makes note of his father's lusty advances (shock!) toward a woman in the house, as well as his own mischievous interference. The story is short on plot and long on description, unsurprisingly given the parameters of the novel, with Banville particularly seeming to relish a certain earthiness that I could have done without. I was intrigued by some of his characters (fragile daughter Petra and her would-be beau Roddy, to name two), but I found the gods themselves to be surprisingly...human. And while, as I noted above, the Greek gods have always had human traits writ large, never before have I found that that made them common or boring, as unfortunately I did here.

The Infinities is quite an admired book--made a number of top book lists last year, as I recall--and it does seem like the kind of book that would benefit from a deeper reading. (Maybe then I would better understand the ending, which seemed to come out of nowhere.) I believe, though, that the best books are those that can be enjoyed purely from a story standpoint. You might want to find the deeper meanings if the story is good, but you shouldn't have to do so to enjoy the book. That is probably essentially why I was not an English major, right there.

Up next: Another critically-acclaimed book, The Age of Wonder, which thankfully I'm enjoying much more so far!

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

2011-03-06T11:03:00.001-05:00

The distinctive thing about so many nerds I've met is their willingness to pursue a dream version of their lives even when that dream isn't a plausible aspiration. Playing Sir Guillaume doesn't have anything to do with reinventing yourself through ambition. It has no careerist or pragmatic component. It's imitating the thing you most want to be, and that only, with no hope of the world outside your own head and your own group of friends coming round to accept it as the truest version of who you are.

-American Nerd

In American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent sets out to investigate the origins of the idea of a nerd and to explore how nerdiness manifests in culture today. He also establishes his own nerd cred quickly, and returns to ruminate over his transition out of nerdiness in the strongest parts of the book.

I found aspects of the evolution of the concept of a nerd (or, as it was once spelled, nurd) interesting, but the early part of the book was not quite as absorbing as I had hoped. Although American Nerd is a short book, I didn't read it as quickly as I anticipated, simply because I found it a little dry at first. I did appreciate Nugent's explaining the relation between anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic sentiment at the turn of century and the low rung nerds still occupy on the social ladder, which I'd never considered before. Still, I found myself eager to move on to Nugent's exploration of modern nerd culture.

I was slightly disappointed that Nugent mostly looks at aspects of nerd culture that I don't really have any interest in, like video games and anime. Still, it can be fascinating to see how people can be obsessed with something that I wouldn't give two seconds' thought to. After all, I have plenty of my own geeky obsessions (currently Battlestar Galactica, which ought to get me plenty of nerd cred). I think I would have liked this section of the book to be a bit more substantial--more nerdy subcultures profiled, and more depth in each one.

Throughout the book, Nugent references his own childhood nerdiness, which included plenty of Dungeons and Dragons and video games. At some point he consciously decided to leave behind childish things, breaking ties with his former roleplaying buddies and finding a home in any group that would have him--any group but the nerds, that is. American Nerd gave him the opportunity to consider this decision, and he talks with several of his childhood friends about what nerd culture meant to them. It turns out to be a lot deeper than you might expect, a true safe haven for friends who were doing their best to survive in very unstable households. It's emotionally affecting, and I wouldn't have minded seeing more reflections from men (and women, who are pretty underrepresented in the book) on how their nerdy habits affected their lives.

So overall, American Nerd has some interesting parts, but it wasn't quite as compelling as I had hoped. No worries.

Up next: The Infinities by John Banville. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, what what.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

2011-02-25T18:13:00.001-05:00

At Sotheby's, she started to look at paintings differently. She became an efficient computer of values. The endless stream of pictures that passed through the auction house helped her develop a calculus of worth. Auction records were available in the Sotheby's library, and when a picture of note came in, she diligently searched the Art Price Index to see if it had auction history. She factored in condition, size, and subject matter. A Renoir of a young girl, she had witnessed, was worth more than one of an old woman. An American western picture with five tepees was worth more than a painting with one tepee. If a picture had been on the market recently without a sale, she knew it would be less desirable. A deserted painting scared buyers. Why did no one want it? In the trade, it was known as being "burned." Once a picture was burned, the owner either had to drastically reduce the price or sit on it for another seven years until it faded from memory. When Lacey began these computations, her toe crossed ground from which it is difficult to return: she started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.

-An Object of Beauty

Man, did I need a book like this one. I've had a steady string of good, but not great books in the last six weeks--I don't think I've read one I found truly absorbing since Mockingjay. An Object of Beauty came along at precisely the right time.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting to like it so much. I read Steve Martin's novella Shopgirl and felt that, while it was technically good, something about it left me cold. It was an aloof sort of book, if that makes sense. An Object of Beauty is similar in a sense. Lacey Yeager, the character whom we follow as she climbs the social and corporate ladder of the New York art world, is ambitious and cunning, not particularly easy to warm up to. But it doesn't really matter--you don't need to like Lacey to enjoy the story. Because while Lacey is the chief personage we get to know in An Object of Beauty, she's not the book's true main character. Art is.

And art--well, that I love. I studied Art History in college, but now it would be a rare day indeed when someone asked me my opinion on Joseph Beuys, or even Picasso. But this story is full of people with opinions on these and other artists, and spending time with them was like getting to know people with whom I have mutual friends. It doesn't matter if I like them or not (and I would not choose to spend time with a Lacey in real life), but we do have something in common. Martin is clearly extremely well versed in modern art, and his tale of Lacey's rise from lowly Sotheby's drudge to gallery scenester is note perfect. There's a vicarious thrill in getting access to this world, and as little as I truly sympathize with Lacey, I absolutely understand the power that a painting can hold over a person.

Story time: When I was just about to graduate from college, I applied for an internship at a very prestigious art gallery in Manhattan. The time came to schedule an interview, and I panicked--I didn't have the money to fly to New York from an interview, much less to live there on a meager stipend. But it's one of the moments that makes one wonder, what if? When I did finally move to New York, my parents most thoughtfully gave me the gift of a membership to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, probably my favorite place in New York City. (Central Park is a close second. These places are iconic for a reason.) I've lost track of the number of times I've visited the Met. At least twenty. Over time, there were certain paintings that I began to identify as "mine." I sought them out every visit, filled each time with the sense of joy that comes with seeing an old friend. They once temporarily removed a favorite Monet* and I was quite incensed. That was my Monet, didn't they understand? I felt like I loved it more than anyone in the world could, and, selfishly, I would have taken it with me if it had been offered. So yes, all that is a way of saying that I suppose I do understand part of the way that Lacey appreciates art. But, going back to the excerpt I chose, I never made the transition that Lacey did--I don't see paintings as objects of (monetary) value. And for that I'm glad.

Would one like An Object of Beauty if one doesn't care about art? I wondered that as I read. I've certainly read my fair share of books that involved subjects that I had little interest in or knowledge about. In this case, I think an appreciation for art would certainly heighten one's enjoyment of the book. I mean, Martin includes little reproductions of some of the paintings under discussion. If that's the kind of detail that makes your heart go pitter-patter (or at least spares you a trip to Google), then I think this book would be a winner. But even if that idea provokes an overwhelming meh, I think that it's worth a try all the same. It's a pretty classic tale of the pleasure and pain inherit in gaining access to the most elite part of society, when it comes down to it. Joyce Carol Oates has compared it to an Edith Wharton novel (specifically, The Age of Innocence, which I haven't read); I myself thought of Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp. I was surprised to see there were very mixed critical reviews, as I (obviously) thought it was quite good, and could even see myself rereading it in the future.

Up next: American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent. Dang, there goes the title for my autobiography.

*And yeah: I'm a huge fan of art, but I'm definitely no snob. I love Monet.

A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell

2011-02-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

My eyes darted to the words under the photograph that had called to me. Fished from the water by a sightseeing boat the morning of Saturday, May 30, 1931--the day before yesterday. Apparent cause of death: stab wound to the heart. Under distinguishing characteristics they listed a heart-shaped tattoo on his lower back that said "Father." No identification present.

I needed none. I knew the face as well as my own, or my sister Ursula's, with our square jaws and cleft chins. I wore my dark blond hair cut short into a bob, but he wore his long, like our mother, like any woman of a certain age, although he was neither a woman nor of a certain age. He was my baby brother, Ernst.

-A Trace of Smoke

Hannah Vogel is a reporter operating out of 1931 Berlin. She's seen some terrible things while writing stories about the city's criminal element, but nothing could prepare her for the nasty shock of seeing her brother's face among those cataloged in the police department's Hall of the Unnamed Dead. In some ways, it was unsurprising: Ernst had lived an unconventional, uncompromising life that had put him in contact with some unsavory men. Even so, Hannah is naturally aghast.

Worse still, Hannah can't report her brother's death to anyone. She lent her and Ernst's identity papers to Jewish friends fleeing the country in light of the growing influence of the Nazi party. If Hannah identifies Ernst, she could put her friends in jeopardy. The truth of the matter is simple and frightening: if Hannah wants Ernst's killer to be punished, she's going to have to find him herself.

It's more difficult, and more dangerous, than she possibly could have imagined. Matters are further complicated when a little boy shows up on her doorstep. He claims that Ernst was his father--and Hannah his mother. Hannah takes the boy under her wing and does her best to take care of him in the face of an increasingly menacing threat from persons unknown.

I had some mixed feelings about this one. Hannah I liked well enough, although she didn't strike me as a terribly distinctive heroine. She was so forward-thinking as to be boring, if that makes sense. When I read historical fiction, it's not because I want to read about people who would react just as modern people would. While I was reading, I couldn't help but think that the story might have been more interesting from the point of view of Hannah's friend Bettina, a policeman's wife, who seemed a more traditional German woman of that era.

The mystery itself held my interest, and I found the milieu interesting. I confess I don't know much about the pre-WWII era in Germany, so I learned a few things. I did find the inclusion of a prominent real-life Nazi as a character to be a bit odd. It's certainly fairly popular to include real people in historical fiction, but it's not the easiest thing to pull off. Again, I can't pretend to have a comprehensive knowledge of the figures of that era, but for some reason it took me out of the story. Sometimes including a real figure only reminds the reader that the rest of the story is made up, making it hard to suspend one's disbelief. I would have preferred that Cantrell had made up a fictional Nazi with a similar background and position of influence. I don't think it would have lessened the impact of this character's role in the story.

All in all, I can't see myself continuing with this series at this point, though I definitely think that this story could appeal to a wide audience--mystery fans, history fans, &c. Not one I feel compelled to spend more time on myself. There are just so many books out there, you know?

Up next: I've already begun Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, which is off to a strong start.

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

2011-02-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

Krishnan has raised the idea of going back to India to visit and perhaps adopt another child, but Somer has resisted. She seems intent on preserving Asha in the little cocoon they have woven around her. It's not the way he sees family, as a precious thing that needs to be protected. For him, family is a wild sprawling thing, a strong thing that withstands years, miles, even mistakes. For as long as he can remember, there have been minor transgressions and major feuds erupting among his big clan, and it doesn't affect the endurance of their family's bond.

-Secret Daughter

In Secret Daughter, Shilpi Somaya Gowda traces the story of two families. There is the story of Jasu and Kavita, living in poverty in rural India. In 1984, Kavita gives birth to a daughter. As female babies are considered less than desirable, she makes the difficult journey to an orphanage in Mumbai. Losing her baby that way, while incredibly painful, is better than the other possible outcome: she's already seen one of her daughters killed shortly after birth.

There is also the story of Krishnan and Somer. Krishnan, from India, meets Somer when studying at medical school in America. He falls in love with her and with his new country, and they begin to make a life there together. When Somer discovers she is infertile, Krishnan hits upon an idea: to adopt a child from India. Somer is reluctant at first, but eventually they make arrangements and travel to Mumbai in 1985. They adopt a young girl: Kavita's daughter.

Gowda shows us how these two families weather the next twenty years. Kavita and Jasu decide to try for a better life in Mumbai, only to discover that it will be far more difficult than they ever imagined. Somer and Krishnan gradually grow apart as their daughter grows up, their relationship in part weakened by Somer's inability to accept the importance India has in her husband's and daughter's lives--and thus in her own life as well.

This really is a character-driven novel, and luckily I liked most of them. Things got off to a bit of a slow start, but after that I became invested, mostly in Kavita and Jasu. Krishnan I liked as well, though not much of the story is told from his point of view. The problem is Somer. While I was sympathetic to her early difficulties in becoming pregnant, once she traveled to India she managed to burn through a lot of goodwill very quickly. She's breathtakingly narrow-minded--I really hope her lack of understanding of Indian culture and her complete unwillingness to share in any of it reflects only on her character and is not representative of Americans in the 1980's, because that would be really sad. It was very frustrating to watch Somer handle things so poorly, though I appreciated that Gowda was able to tie up her story fairly well. I think overall Gowda provided the happiest ending she could within the bounds of realism, but the book was somewhat on the sad side. Interesting, though.

Up next: A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell

More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

2011-02-03T12:26:00.000-05:00

[Tales of the City spoilers ahead]

She was not moving back to Cleveland. She was not running home to Mommy and Daddy. She knew that much, anyway. For all her trials, she loved it here in San Francisco, and she loved her makeshift family at Mrs. Madrigal's comfy old apartment house on Barbary Lane.

So what if she was still a secretary?

So what if she had not met Mr. Right...or even Mr. Adequate?

So what if Norman Neal Williams, the one semi-romance of her first six months in the city, had turned out to be a private eye moonlighting as a child pornographer who eventually fell to his death off a seaside cliff on Christmas Eve?

-More Tales of the City

When I was reading More Tales of the City, words to describe it kept popping into my head: soapy, fizzy, fun, &c. Although the book has its share of dramatic moments, they're all so overblown that I can only describe this as a light read--and a thoroughly enjoyable one.

More Tales of the City picks up just weeks after the events of Tales of the City. All of our favorite characters are ready to embark upon new (and often exciting) adventures. Some friendships and relationships blossom, while others are tested. Mary Ann Singleton and Michael Tolliver go on a Mexican cruise, courtesy of her late boss, Edgar Halcyon. Edgar's widow Franny is struggling to find herself after his death, and their daughter DeDe tries to cope with her thoroughly jerky husband Beauchamp and the imminent arrival of her twins (not Beauchamp's, naturally). Meanwhile, Mona Ramsey goes to Winnemucca, Nevada to find herself, leaving behind landlady Anna Madigral, whose mysterious past is finally starting to come to light.

There is quite a lot of plot, and if you took it terribly seriously, it would never be plausible--amnesia! Sudden paralysis! Being drafted to work as a receptionist in a whorehouse for a week! When you put it all together, it doesn't sound at all likely, but that's really beside the point. More Tales of the City is a fast and engaging read because you can't wait to see what happens next--and really, experience has shown it could be anything.

Up next: Still have a lot of choices here. I will probably go with Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, which ought to be a change of pace.

The Night Villa by Carol Goodman

2011-01-31T14:43:00.000-05:00

Once, when Ely had locked himself in his study to meditate and chant, I pressed my ear to the door to listen to what he was chanting. At first all I heard was a low rhythmic hum and then, when I realized when there were actual words beneath the hum, I couldn't recognize their language. I thought for a moment that he'd added speaking in tongues to his repertoire of miracles, but as I listened I realized he was chanting three repeated lines of Greek hexameter verse. It took me another hour to transcribe and translate the three lines. I don't know what I was expecting. A summoning of Satan? A prayer for help? An invocation to the dead. Certainly not these three questions:

Where did I go wrong today?

What did I accomplish?

What obligation did I not perform?

-The Night Villa

I've read several books by Carol Goodman, though The Night Villa is the first I've read since beginning this blog. Her books, which I've usually enjoyed, tend to have similar elements: a connection to the past, an exploration of mother/daughter relationships, a strong elemental presence (usually fire or water), a main character who is a scholar or an artist, a super-dramatic denouement. With The Night Villa, Goodman continues to stick closely to these familiar ideas. I didn't find it to be her most successful outing, but it still had its moments.

The Night Villa tells the story of Sophie Chase, a UT Classics professor who is recruited to join an excavation at Herculaneum after an unexpected tragedy almost derails the project. Sophie is hoping to learn more about 1st century slave Iusta, the subject of her thesis, who once lived in the villa that was buried by the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius. Scrolls have been discovered at the site that promise to shed new light on Iusta's life, and, despite some misgivings, Sophie can't resist their siren call. Why misgivings? The project seems troubled from the start, but she's more concerned with the man she'll be working with: her former professor and former paramour (always a winning combination), Elgin* Lawrence.

If Lawrence's presence weren't enough to make the situation difficult, Sophie discovers that the project has a connection to the Tetratkys cult, which is devoted to the worship of Pythagorean principles. Her own ex-boyfriend left her to live with the cult a few years back, and when she starts to receive mysterious coded messages in Italy, she wonders if Ely could be behind them. Things are even further complicated when Lawrence confides that one of the members of the team--which also includes Sophie's student, the fragile Agnes; artist Simon; Christian scholar Maria; tech-wizard George; and the excavation's financial backer, John Lyros--is a member of the Tetraktys cult.

I actually liked the plot of the book well enough, and the characters, too. My problem with the book was largely one of exposition. There is a lot of information that Goodman wants to convey, mostly about mythology and history, to her readers. The issue is that in order to do so, she sometimes makes her characters, who are well versed in these subjects, talk in a manner that I found clunky and unrealistic. Example:

"Well," Agnes says, taking a deep gulp of air and refastening her ponytail, "for one thing, the newly excavated frescoes haven't been photographed yet, but, most important, they've also found charred papyrus rolls in the villa. The little taggie things on them--"

"Sillyboi," I suggest, providing the Greek term for the tags that ancient librarians used to identify papyrus rolls.

"Um, yeah." She giggles nervously. "I guess I should use the Greek term, but it always makes me laugh..."

I don't know about you, but that whole passage could have replaced with a dictionary definition of sillyboi and it would have been about as subtle. Either use the word or don't, in my opinion. There's nothing wrong with sending your reader to a dictionary or Google, as long as we're not having to put the book down every other line. I think if Goodman had trusted the reader a little more, she wouldn't have had to be so long-winded and unnatural with the exposition in general.

Similarly, the supposed passages from the ancient texts they uncover at the site strike me as unusually candid--and again, exposition-heavy. But since Goodman has studied classics and I have not, I will assume she has a better ear for this sort of thing than I do, and maybe that is how people wrote at the time. She does make one reference to how remarkably open the author seemed in his writing, which does help to make the passages seem somewhat less glaringly modern. After a while, I got over how unlikely these passages seemed, and tried to just focus on the story, which made the book more enjoyable.

In short, not my favorite of her books, but I've read enough that I would still be interested in looking into her next one. (Just checked Amazon and discovered I'm actually one behind; Arcadia Falls comes out in paperback February 8th and sounds quite promising. )

Up next: More Tales of the City

*You'd think I might be tempted to go off on names again, but I was actually rather charmed when the back story for Elgin's name was revealed. Also I was terribly pleased that there was a minor character named Sam Tyler, a name shared by the main character on Life on Mars.

Jane by April Lindner

2011-01-21T14:45:00.017-05:00

"So. Passing as a sex symbol. Can I?"

I weighed my words carefully. "You might not be movie-star handsome," I said finally, "but you're good-looking for a rock star."

Mr. Rathburn's eyes widened. "That's three times you've hurt my feelings in one conversation," he said a bit gruffly.

-Jane

Spoilers for Jane Eyre (& thus Jane) ahead.

Retellings of classic novels have become so popular that it's almost surprising that it took this long to get a modern take on Jane Eyre. April Lindner admits in her author's note for Jane that there were some challenges in imagining the story in our times; it doesn't lend itself to the modern day quite as easily as something like Pride and Prejudice, for instance. Lindner figured out a way around these problems, though, and by and large I think she wrote a successful adaptation.

In Lindner's story, Jane Moore applies for a position as a nanny after her parents die in a car accident, leaving her financially destitute and forced to drop out of college. The agency finds that her complete lack of pop culture savvy makes her the perfect candidate for one of their plum positions: nanny to reclusive rock star Nico Rathburn*. She accepts, then pours over old tabloid stories to learn about her new employer. Rathburn is a legendary musician with a notorious history of drug use and womanizing, including an ill-fated marriage to a drug-addicted model. She's a bit taken aback, but nonetheless soon finds herself at his secluded estate outside of New York City, wondering if she's made the right choice.

Lindner hits many of the same beats that Jane Eyre does: the roadside run-in with her boss (far less plausible here, though she does try to explain her lack of recognition of this man whom she's seen in dozens of pictures), the "Do you think me handsome, Jane?" bit (the excerpt above), the guests coming to Thornfield, etc. I enjoyed seeing the parallels.

I found Lindner's handling of Rathburn's secret to be among the most interesting parts of the adaptation. In some ways, the news should come as less of a surprise to Jane Moore than it did to Jane Eyre: JM knows a lot more about her employer's past than JE ever did, which is one reason why the rock star twist on Rochester didn't quite work for me. JM knew Rathburn was once married, at least. It's been a while since I read Jane Eyre, but I don't think JE finds that out that until the whole crazy story comes out. Still, you don't expect to find people holed up in attics nowadays any more than you did in Charlotte Bronte's time. JM's reaction is, unsurprisingly, similar to JE's, and though it does seem extreme, she does eventually come to realize that she didn't handle it terribly well.

I enjoyed Jane Moore as a character, but oddly I didn't care much for Nico Rathburn. I love Rochester**, so perhaps it was inevitable that his modern update would seem like a pale imitation. On the other hand, I enjoy both Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy and Helen Fielding's Mark Darcy, so I don't think that's exactly it. Part of what made Rochester so interesting was that he had a hidden dark part. He alluded to it when talking with Jane, and even confessed to some parts of it. However, it wasn't like Jane could look him up on Wikipedia or something to get more information. Nico Rathburn, despite the fact that he's supposed to have been out of the media spotlight for some time, is just not mysterious enough. Also, he's a middle-aged guy with earrings, which, let's face it, is a hard look to pull off, even for a rock star.

Even with those reservations about Mr. Rathburn, though, I sped through Jane in a day. I couldn't really see reading it again, but it was pretty enjoyable. It didn't quite pack the punch of Jane Eyre, though; it definitely lacks that dark, Gothic tone that makes Jane Eyre so captivating. I'm interested in rereading some of those classics with a weird bent (The Turn of the Screw, Rebecca), and maybe I'll add Jane Eyre to the list--or at least make sure I see the upcoming film adaptation, which looks great.

Up next: The Night Villa by Carol Goodman, set in my new hometown of Austin and my beloved Italy, which bodes well.

*I just can't with that name. When I was in middle school, I had a book called Building Believable Characters. In that book, the author mentions the importance of matching a character's first and last names (and then provided long lists of names by ethnic heritage, which was probably my main motivation in buying the book. I'm fascinated by names.). Nico is a great first name for a rock star: kind of quirky, kind of edgy. Rathburn sounds super posh (it makes me think of Basil Rathbone, for one) and, while it works well as a name that sort of evokes Rochester without being Rochester, it clashes horribly with Nico to my ears. Just so fake sounding, you know? Anyway. End tangent.

**When I was in high school, my friends and I used to go blazer bowling on a semi-regular basis. I found a favorite ball at the lanes, a pinkish one with a slight lump on it. Being a weird sort (surprising, I know), I named the ball Hurricane Rochester. (Hurricane was the brand of the ball). True, super dorky story.

Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum

2011-01-19T15:51:00.001-05:00

"I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions, all in equal measure, so that, although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible of full corroboration."

-William James, Ghost Hunters

As a child I, like many other children, was equally fascinated and terrified by tales of the supernatural. I'd ask my mom to buy the 99-cent collections of ghost stories sold in our grocery store's checkout line. I visited New Orleans and bought a book of bayou-centric ghost stories (I can still remember the pale pink cover), but at some point decided it was ill-advised to sleep in the same room with it. I believed, in one way or another, in just about everything: ghosts, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, the Anna Anderson story, etc.

I grew more skeptical as I got older, but, I have to say, I still enjoy learning about things that can't be explained easily. Last Halloween, I discovered Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures, and was immediately taken with the show's mix of goofy charm, bravado, and a dash of the unexplained. When I stumbled upon Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof for Life After Death, I thought it might be an interesting complement to my recent viewing.

I must say, I'm not overly fond of scientific explanations of paranormal things, however logical they may be. I feel like they suck the fun out of things, to be honest. What I found interesting about the premise of Blum's book was that William James and his fellow scientists experienced things in the course of what they called their psychical research that they could not explain. James is remembered now as the father of psychology, and some of his colleagues would go on to win Nobel Prizes or be awarded knighthoods. These were very upright, very scientifically-minded men, in other words--not the type who would be taken in without good evidence.

The research of these men coincided with the height of the Spiritualism movement. Mediums were springing up all over the place in the United States (where James lived) as well as Europe (home to many of his fellow researchers). The scientific establishment had, on the whole, rejected even research into psychical phenomena as worthless. Nevertheless, these men--James, Henry Sidgwick, Fred Myers, and Edmund Gurney, among many others--were each drawn in for their own reasons. The latter three were among the scientists that formed the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882, an organization that still exists today. Through the SPR they explored many aspects of paranormal activity, though Blum especially focuses on their efforts to document the phenomenon of the "crisis apparition" (the vision of a loved one at the time of his death) and to explore the capabilities of mediums.

They were able to debunk many instances of apparent psychical phenomena that they witnessed--and yet not everything. Their investigations seriously jeopardized their reputations as legitimate scientists, but they could not dismiss what they'd seen. James was among those who was fascinated by the American medium Leonora Piper, whose abilities, although inconsistent, had produced some very compelling evidence for either telepathy (a term coined by an SPR member) or life after death. Late in the book, Blum recounts a story of cross-correspondence--that is, different mediums in different parts of the world getting similar specific messages alleged to be from the same spirits--that certainly left me puzzled. James and his fellow researchers were often left in the state of uncertainty that he describes in the passage I excerpted above. In a time when science was constantly uncovering new things, is it any wonder that these men thought they might be on the verge of a similar breakthrough? That the concrete evidence they sought seemed to always be just beyond their grasp must have been hugely frustrating, yet it motivated them ever onward.

Blum packs a lot of information into her book, as you can probably tell from my blathering. I won't lie: with the exception of James, whom I was already familiar with, and Richard Hodgson, who for whatever reason made a big enough impression, I found it rather difficult to keep all of the scientists straight. It wasn't quite as lively a read as I might have hoped--not really a pageturner, that is--but it certainly gave me some interesting insight into an era I confess I'm less acquainted with than perhaps I should be. I admire the passion and the commitment of these researchers to the cause they believed in, and I appreciate that, even though they never proved their case, their work certainly left even the modern reader with some things to think about.*

Up next: I really have a wealth of books to choose from right now. I'm going to go with Jane, a modern update of Jane Eyre.

*Although this is only tangentially related to the research angle, I can't help but think about the famous Fox sisters. As teenagers, they became some of the best-known mediums in the early days of the Spiritualism movement, claiming to communicate with the spirit of a peddler who'd been killed in their home years before they had moved there. The sisters fell on hard times in their later years and one confessed it had all been a hoax, though she later recanted the confession. Several years after their deaths, a skeleton was found entombed in their cellar. Now, say what you will about their abilities, but that's a bit odd, don't you think?

In Medias Res: Ghost Hunters

2011-01-12T19:02:00.001-05:00

So I was reading Ghost Hunters, which I'm enjoying so far, when I stumbled upon this passage concerning a trip the psychologist William James took to see his brother Henry, the novelist, in England:

William relaxed into the visit. He spent afternoons in conversation at his brother's clubs, surrounded by an aromatic fog of tobacco smoke. He made occasional calls on scientists. He walked the sooty streets, enjoying Henry's company. Then he found himself suddenly alone. Back in America, Henry James Sr. was dying. Their mother had died of bronchitis earlier that year, and their sister, faced with this second impending death, felt overwhelmed. She asked Henry Jr. to come home.

William--the more high-maintenance brother--was to stay in England. "All insist William shall not come," his sister telegraphed. William debated returning home anyway, despite his nervous state, but had to admit he probably wouldn't be an ideal deathbed companion.

Interesting family dynamic they had going there.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

2011-01-09T17:54:00.000-05:00

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

-Mockingjay

I knew I was going to read Mockingjay fast. It's no surprise, really, given how quickly I read the other two books in the trilogy. But really I knew I couldn't linger over Mockingjay because it's the last part of a dystopian story, and past experience has taught that Suzanne Collins doesn't pull punches. I knew Bad Things were going to happen.

And they do, of course. Terrible, unbearable things, because that's what happens when you're at war. And Katniss Everdeen, newly whisked away to the underground bunkers of District 13, has undoubtedly found herself in the middle of one. The Hunger Games are over, and yet they continue, as Katniss realizes: it's just that now they're all players. Everyone from her sister, finding her place as a much-needed healer, to Gale, who's becoming slightly too good at planning death. From Haymitch, who Katniss can't help but reluctantly trust, to President Coin, newly introduced as the calculating leader of 13. There they all are in 13, ready to rally behind Katniss, the face of the rebellion. Their mockingjay.

It's not easy for Katniss to step up and do what the others ask of her. There's already been so much devastation, and Katniss is left reeling. Mentally disoriented, as the plastic bracelet on her wrist says. She'd rather curl up in an out-of-the-way supply closet than get made up for propaganda videos. But she can't hide away forever. Plus there's Peeta to consider.

I don't think I realized until this book just how much I liked Peeta. Poor Peeta, left behind in the Arena when Katniss was rescued by District 13. Left to the devices of President Snow. Poor, poor Peeta. Katniss can't just hide away and hope for the best when it comes to him. Their relationship has never been easy, often simply because Katniss is just not good with people, but Mockingjay complicates things even further. I found it one of the most compelling parts of the book, and, without revealing too much, I must say whichever actor ends up playing Peeta in the upcoming films certainly has his work cut out for him.

So yes, it was a hard book, but it wrapped up the trilogy very well. I'm glad I got over my initial reservations about reading The Hunger Games, as the stories have provided me with both entertainment and the opportunity for some reflection. I'm very eager to see what will come of the films, as there is an opportunity to make some excellent ones here. Casting, of course, is crucial, especially for Katniss, who remains the best young heroine I know of in contemporary literature at the moment. I'm getting a kick out of reading speculation on the subject, and I'm hoping for good things. It would be a shame to do disservice to these books.

Up next: I've definitely been too long without a non-fiction book. Just started Ghost Hunters, by Deborah Blum, about the rise of the Spiritualism movement in the 19th century.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2011-01-09T16:06:00.000-05:00

To-day Harker is out following up his clue, and Art and Quincey are looking after horses. Godalming thinks that it will be well to have horses always in readiness, for when we get the information which we seek there will be no time to lose. We must sterilise all the imported earth between sunrise and sunset; we shall thus catch the Count at his weakest, and without a refuge to fly to. Van Helsing is off to the British Museum looking up some authorities on ancient medicine. The old physicians took account of things which their followers do not accept, and the Professor is searching for witch and demon cures which may be useful to us later.

I sometimes think we must all be mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

-Dracula

So, as you may have heard, vampires are pretty popular right now. Charismatic, pale, brooding sorts who can't seem to help loving those human women. They're conflicted about these relationships. They have A History, you see (often a very long one). Sometimes when they go out into the sun, they burn. And sometimes they sparkle.

Dracula, I hate to break it to you, is not one of those sexy, tortured vamps. He has a unibrow. Hair grows on his palms. He reeks. He's kind of gross, you guys.

No matter! Dracula remains a compelling read, even 100-plus years after its initial publication. This marks the third time I've read it, though the last time was in high school, I imagine--I only remembered bits and pieces. I was spurred on to reread by having recently seen the 1992 film adaptation, which seemed quite different from what I did remember. Guess what, I was right.

In the book, intrepid young law clerk Jonathan Harker ventures to Transylvania to help close a real estate deal with the mysterious Count Dracula. Things go from bad (Wolves. Lots of wolves.) to worse (The count slithering down the side of his castle, for one, which just doesn't bode well at all). As Jonathan fights to escape, we also meet some of the people he's left behind: his fiancee, Mina Murray, for one; Mina's friend Lucy Westernra, and Lucy's three suitors, which include Dr. John Seward, head of a local asylum. Mina is concerned over Jonathan's continued absence; Lucy puzzles over her own sleepwalking; and Dr. Seward recounts his interactions with patient Renfield, who has a theory about absorbing life from insects. Their story is told through their diary entries, which begin to weave together into the story of the damage wrought by a very old monster. He starts so small, this monster. Just those two, tiny ragged holes on Lucy's neck...

I'll admit, it can be frustrating as a modern reader that the gang doesn't catch on to things a little more quickly. We're so well-versed in vampire lore today--even a child knows about the holes in the neck, the stake and the garlic--that you really have to step back and try to imagine what it would be like to hear about vampires for the first time--in a situation in which you are actually dealing with one, no less, not just listening to old folk tales. Even with the narrative bumpiness that can result from their ignorance, Dracula remains a creepy, engaging story. It's also incredibly cinematic, which makes the lack of a faithful film adaptation all the more frustrating. Heck, sexy Dracula up a bit, sharpen Mina's character to make her a slightly anachronistic badass--I'd be fine with that. Just don't, say, paint Dracula as an epic love story between the titular vampire and Mina, the seeming reincarnation of his true love from many centuries earlier. I mean, wha? (Francis Ford Coppola's ears are burning, I reckon.) I hold out hope that one day someone will see the dramatic potential of this story on its own, without ridiculous romantic embellishments. Until then, the book can stand for itself.

Up next: Had Mockingjay. Read Mockingjay. Will review Mockingjay forthwith.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell

2010-12-30T15:21:00.000-05:00

In the beginning, everything was just a fog.

Or perhaps it was like a thick-flowing sea where all was white and silent. The landscape of death. It was also the first thought that came to Kurt Wallander as he slowly began rising back to the surface. That he was already dead. He had reached twenty-one years of age, no more. A young policeman, barely an adult. And then a stranger had rushed up to him with a knife and he had not had time to throw himself out of harm's way.

Afterward there was only the white fog. And the silence.

-The Pyramid

When readers first met Kurt Wallander in Faceless Killers, he was already middle-aged and divorced, well on his way to becoming the sad sack that we know and love. Glimpses of his past have always been interesting, but few and far between. With The Pyramid, a collection of short stories by Henning Mankell, we finally get a better look at how Wallander became the detective and the man that he is.

In the first story, which I excerpted above, Wallander is still a beat cop in the very early stages of honing his instincts when he stumbles upon his first homicide investigation. By the last, he's within a month of embarking upon the Faceless Killers case. Needless to say, there's a lot that goes on in the meantime. As a pretty big fan of the series, I found it utterly absorbing to watch the way he grew, both as a person and as a detective. He makes mistakes--big mistakes, potentially fatal mistakes--and both learns and doesn't learn from them. I think that by reading these stories, I really began to appreciate the continuity in Mankell's work. Both Wallander's flaws and strengths were apparent pretty early on, and it's neat to see the way Mankell returns to and builds upon them, especially given what we already know of Wallander from the novels. I am more eager than ever to read the novels that I've missed so far.

I particularly found the evolution of Wallander's relationship with his father fascinating. In seeing the progression of his father's dementia from Wallander's point of view, we share his anger and frustration, but also his fears. This is captured especially well in the title story, in which Wallander's father fulfills the dream of a lifetime in going to Egypt, which has unexpected ramifications in Wallander's life as well as in the development of his case. I think I will be more tuned in to their relationship as I continue to read the series based on what I now know of their history.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the events in this book proceed all other Wallander stories chronologically, I think it is best enjoyed after having at least one of the novels. This is not meant to be an introduction to the character; it's more of a reflection, with themes that will most resonate with readers who are already familiar with the series. I do think Mankell perhaps went a little heavy on emphasizing the Swedish anxiety theme--which he also makes a note about in the forward--but I can't actually disagree with him as to its importance to the character and the series. I could have probably done with one fewer pointed aside from Wallander or another character on the subject, though. That having been said, I enjoyed this book thoroughly and accordingly raced through it pretty darn fast. I have a lot of books in the lineup now, but surely another Wallander book will have to pop up in the near future.

Up next: Finally tracked down Dracula, which has been an interesting reread so far.

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

2010-12-23T16:48:00.001-05:00

If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that impossible. Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, it is the Capitol's way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate. Not only are we in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol's power each year, we are forced to celebrate it. And this year, I am one of the stars of the show. I will have to travel from district to district, to stand before the cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look down into the faces of the families whose children I have killed...

-Catching Fire

Remembering how well The Hunger Games served me on my trip over the Thanksgiving holiday, I was delighted when Catching Fire came off the library's hold list just in time for my most recent travels. And the book lived up to my expectations perfectly--to the extent that I raced through the whole thing in just a few hours.

When we left Katniss Everdeen at the end of The Hunger Games, things were really going as well as she could have imagined. Placed in a terrible situation, Katniss outmaneuvered the Gamemakers and saved both herself and fellow tribute Peeta Mellark. She had no idea what ramifications her victory would have.

On the eve of her Victory Tour (as described above), Katniss learns that unrest has been brewing in some districts of Panem. The decidedly evil President Snow is furious with Katniss, as her act of defiance in the arena is perceived as the root cause of the recent troubles. He threatens her in no uncertain terms: if she doesn't stay in line on the Victory Tour, she's putting her life and the lives of her family and friends at risk. It's a sobering reminder for Katniss of how, even as a victor, she will never be able to put the Games behind her.

In Catching Fire, Katniss not only grapples with how to survive in the increasingly draconian District 12; she also struggles with her relationships with Peeta and Gale and starts to understand just how necessary the rebellion she inadvertently touched off may be. There's also the Quarter Quell, about which I won't say a word. Part of the reason Suzanne Collins's writing is so engaging is that she is able to surprise the reader. There are definitely times when the reader is ahead of Katniss, of course--even after President Snow's visit, she is slow to realize just how much impact she had during the Hunger Games, for instance. Katniss is an amazing heroine, though--brave and resourceful, not to mention still quite adept with a bow and arrow. She's not always so quick to understand people, but it would be pretty boring if she could do everything. Besides, she's a teenage girl growing up in a world in which she has been left ignorant of what we would consider common knowledge (she's vaguely familiar with the concept of a jungle, for instance). I'll cut her some slack.

Catching Fire ends on a helluva cliffhanger, so I am eager to read the third book of the trilogy, Mockingjay. I've become invested in so many of the characters--besides Peeta and Kaniss, of course, I'm intrigued to see what lies in store for the complex Haymitch, kindly Madge, and even new characters like Finnick. If Collins can keep up the same level of quality she's maintained throughout the first two books (fingers crossed!), it's bound to be quite a ride.

Up next: I've been looking all over my house for Dracula, as I recently watched the 1992 film adaptation and wanted to see just how far astray it wandered. If it's nowhere to be found, I have a book of Wallander short stories that wants reading, for sure.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

2010-12-22T19:39:00.000-05:00

The Halcyon-Day courtship had been whirlwind. DeDe and Beauchamp were married in June 1973 on the sunlit slopes of Halcyon Hill, the bride's family estate in Hillsborough. At her own insistence, the bride was barefoot. She wore a peasant dress by Adolfo of Saks Fifth Avenue. Her maid of honor and Bennington roommate, Muffy van Wyck, recited selections from Kahlil Gibran, while a string quartet played the theme from Elvira Madigan.

After the wedding, the bride's mother, Frannie Halcyon, told reporters: "We're so proud of our DeDe. She's always been such an individualist."

-Tales of the City

(I don't know about you, but now I'm picturing Frannie Halcyon as Helen Morgendorffer from Daria.)

In Tales of the City, author Armistead Maupin weaves together the lives of a number of quirky characters living in San Francisco in the 1970s. Central to this cast is Mary Ann Singleton, a naive Cleveland transplant who is bowled over by the more colorful aspects of life in her new home. She finds an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, where she meets hippie landlady Anna Madrigal (she thoughtfully leaves a joint for each new tenant), strong-willed Mona, playboy Brian, and flamboyant Michael. Each in turn has his or her own coworkers, friends, and lovers, and gradually their lives begin to intersect in many different ways.

Tales of the City is often light and soapy, and also pretty darn enjoyable. Maupin has divided the book into many short chapters, making it easy for the reader to get sucked into reading just a few more pages...then a few more after that. There's enough suspense to keep the reader invested as well—one character's mysterious past, another's affair, another's shadowy motives, etc. None of the characters is particularly multidimensional, but they're mostly likable all the same. It's no wonder that Maupin's written a series to follow Tales of the City; it seems like almost all of these characters still have plenty of story in them. They certainly haven't worn out their welcomes yet.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to get invested in the series quite yet, but I enjoyed Tales of the City enough that I could see picking up the next book in the future. It's perfect for when you're in the mood for something fun and frothy--brilliant beach reading, I'd imagine.

Up next: Finished Catching Fire in a day, so I suppose I will be back to review that soon!

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

2010-12-14T11:38:00.000-05:00

The Woodward-Bernstein book became a famous and successful film. I saw it at my local neighborhood theatre and it seemed very much to resemble what I'd done; of course there were changes but there are always changes. There was a lot of ad-libbing, scenes were placed in different locations, that kind of thing. But the structure of the piece remained unchanged. And it also seemed, with what objectivity I could bring to it, to be well directed and acted, especially by the stars. It won a bunch of Oscars and numberless other awards besides.

And if you were to ask me "What would you change if you had your movie life to live over?" I'd tell you that I'd have written exactly the screenplays I've written.

Only I wouldn't have come near All the President's Men....

-Adventures in the Screen Trade

William Goldman is the writer behind two movies that I love, The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. If he'd never done anything else, that would be a pretty amazing legacy to leave behind. But Goldman has logged plenty of time behind the scenes in Hollywood. In Adventures in the Screen Trade, he pulls back the curtain and shows the reader how movies get made.

Adventures in the Screen Trade is divided into several parts. First Goldman offers his perspective on different players on the scene (agents, producers, etc.) and what they actually do. He also dives into the process of working on each of the films he's been involved with*, even if his screenplay ended up not being used. Some editions apparently contain the entire screenplay of Butch Cassidy with Goldman's commentary--mine did not. Either that or I somehow managed to forget reading an entire screenplay, which seems...unlikely, don't you think? Anyway, Goldman concludes the book with an inside look at the process of writing a screenplay; he provides a short story of his own, his proposed screen adaptation, and comments from various production people (cinematographer, composer, etc.) on how they would handle it. It's really quite fascinating.

Goldman is an incredibly lively storyteller, as you might imagine if you've seen any of his films. I particularly enjoyed some of his opinions on how different actors worked. He clearly loved Paul Newman, who comes across as someone entirely uninterested in the politics of being a movie star**. Robert Redford does not come off quite as well—professional and talented, to be sure, but decidedly more invested in his movie star image, especially once his career takes off post-Butch Cassidy. Goldman's not just in it to dish, but he doesn't pull punches either: a story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man left me wincing.

As someone who is interested in film, I found Adventures in the Screen Trade to be pretty absorbing at points, particularly as Goldman got into his experience with individual films (you might have guessed from the excerpt above that All The President's Men was especially dramatic). I imagine this would be an invaluable source for someone interested in pursuing screenwriting, particularly the last section. (I especially loved the way director George Roy Hill tore apart the screenplay. He did not mince words. Wow.) I've never read anything that explained filmmaking in such a way. It reminds me of when I took a film class in college and for the first time really began to appreciate the technical elements of film, not just the acting and the story.

Also, it really made me want to watch Butch Cassidy again, and that can't be a bad thing.

Up next: Tales of the City, for real this time.

*Current as of the writing of this book. The sequel, Which Lie Did I Tell? covers his later work. For whatever reason, I read that one first, years ago, and I remember enjoying it thoroughly.

**I love Paul Newman as well, so I was happy to read this. Also excited to add Harper to my Netflix queue, as it sounded quite interesting based on what Goldman described.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2010-11-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy. How little chance we would stand of surviving another rebellion. Whatever words they use, the real message is clear. "Look how we take your children and sacrifice them and there's nothing you can do. If you lift a finger, we will destroy every last one of you. Just as we did in District Thirteen."

To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others. The last tribute alive receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food. All year, the Capitol will show the winning district gifts of grain and oil and even delicacies like sugar while the rest of us battle starvation.

"It is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks," intones the mayor.

-The Hunger Games

First, a programming note: I hadn't intended to step away from this blog for so long. I gave up on the collection of mystery short stories because they proved to be too hard-boiled for my taste. The next book I picked up, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, also proved to be slow going. While batting out on the reading front, I was also working on my own NaNoWriMo project, which meant my free time was devoted to writing, not reading. All in all, not a combination that encourages posts here.

Luckily, I had The Hunger Games in tow as I traveled last week.For the first time in weeks, I had a page-turner in front of me instead of a slow slog. It was a breath of fresh air.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is set some time in the future, when the country has been divided into twelve districts (there were thirteen—see the excerpt), under the totalitarian rule of the Capitol. The exact circumstances that took North America to Panem, as it is now known, are unclear, though both natural disasters and war are mentioned. We see Panem through the eyes of Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old girl living in District 12. Katniss has seen enough poverty and despair to be wary of the government, though she is too smart to say anything aloud. In District 12, you never know who might be listening.

Katniss, an able huntress, has provided for her family since the death of her father in a mining accident some years earlier. Technically hunting is illegal, but even officials are willing to turn a blind eye to the activities of Katniss and her partner Gale in exchange for some much-needed meat. Daily living is a struggle, but Katniss is a survivor.

Then comes the annual drawing for the Hunger Games. Each district picks two representatives between the ages of 12 and 18. These 24 tributes will be brought together to the Capitol in order to fight to the death. Katniss braces herself to hear her name, but she never expected the name that is actually called: Primrose Everdeen, her younger sister.

Katniss volunteers to take her sister's place and soon she, along with fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark, are whisked away to the Capitol. What they encounter there is a strange mix of vulgar overindulgence (the rich foods, the elaborate costumes) and what soon becomes a bitter fight for survival. Along the way, Katniss tries to make sense of the people around her. Aside from Peeta, whose motivations Katniss cannot fathom, there's her drunken mentor Haymitch, the only living Hunger Games winner from District 12; her perceptive costumer, Cinna; and the many other tributes, including the sprightly Rue and the bellicose Cato.

Honestly, when I first heard about The Hunger Games, I didn't think it was for me. The "fight to the death" angle seemed much too bleak for me to get any enjoyment from it. However, I kept hearing good things, and I'm so glad I read it. Katniss is about the best heroine for an adventure story you can imagine, and Suzanne Collins keeps things going at a brisk pace. I could have easily finished the book in one day, but I didn't want to be stranded without any reading material. I just put sequel Catching Fire on hold at the library. I anticipate it's going to be a long wait, but I'm very excited to keep reading about this world.

Up next: Good question! I have a few magazines laying around. Maybe Tales of the City?

Born Round by Frank Bruni

2010-10-30T11:54:00.001-04:00

I have neither a therapist's diagnosis nor any scientific literature to support the following claim, and I can't back it up with more than a cursory level of detail. So you're just going to have to go with me on this: I was a baby bulimic.

Maybe not baby—toddler bulimic is more like it, though I didn't so much toddle as wobble, given the roundness of my expanding form. I had been a plump infant and was on my way to becoming an even plumper child, a ravenous machine determined to devour anything in its sights. My parents would later tell me, my friends and anyone else willing to listen that they'd never seen a kid eat the way I ate or react the way I reacted when I was denied more food. What I did in those circumstances was throw up.

I have no independent memory of this. But according to my mother, it began when I was about eighteen months old. It went on for no more than a year. And I'd congratulate myself here for stopping such an evidently compulsive behavior without the benefit of an intervention or the ability to read a self-help book except I wasn't so much stopping as pausing. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

-Born Round

"Born round, you don't die square." So believes Frank Bruni's grandmother: that kind of change isn't possible in a lifetime. What does that mean for Bruni, though? He's a born eater, a self-professed baby bulimic who has struggled with food issues his entire life. At the beginning of the book, he's working in Rome as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. After a rough period during which he covered the 2000 election campaign of George W. Bush and piled on the pounds, he finally seems to have his weight under control. A life-changing opportunity comes his way: the position of Times food critic is open, and he's up for consideration. But can he handle the intense commitment to food that the job requires without falling back into his old habits?

Having posed the question, Bruni travels back to the beginning of things. He details a childhood filled with food and love, with the former seen as an appropriate way to express the latter. His beloved grandmother, born in Italy, never makes anything short of a feast for her family, and Bruni is happy to partake. He does notice that his appetite outstrips that of his siblings, and even at a young age he's bigger than his older brother. His mother begins to devise diets for the two of them to try, but it breaks his heart to turn down one of his grandmother's fritti.

Bruni is able to (temporarily) leave diets behind when he finds he has a natural affinity for swimming. His rigorous practice schedule keeps his weight in check, although he still finds himself eating more than anyone around him. When he goes off to college and quits swimming, he scrambles to prevent his overeating from affecting his weight, eventually turning to bulimia. Although he manages to recover from that, his weight problems continue to plague him. He's intensely self-conscious about his weight, going so far as to repeatedly postpone dates so that he can lose just a few more pounds before he's seen. It may come as no surprise that these dates often never happen.

Things change for Bruni, but slowly, and they get worse before they get better. Born Round is not only a very personal account of his struggle with weight, but also a moving story of his family life and the sweetness of his professional success. He really lays himself bare before his reader. It breaks my heart to think back to one story he tells, of a family gathering when he was at his heaviest. The siblings are sniping at one another, and one of his brothers calls him fat. It's everything he fears and hates about himself, and he flees the room, finding an out-of-the-way place where he can cry. It's hard not to be drawn in by a writer who is willing to show such vulnerability.

I very much enjoyed Born Round. I spent awhile reading it, but I could easily see how someone could delve in and read for hours. Bruni is a very likable narrator, and in addition to all of the personal stories, he also has some good inside dirt about being a food critic. I think it would be an excellent book to travel with. I would love to read more by him—maybe I'll dig up some old reviews, if I can find them. I'm pretty jealous of his facility with words, I must say. His prose seems effortless. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist before he was thirty, and you can see why. Pretty remarkable.

Up next: The Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos (Wire shout-out!).

Lit by Mary Karr

2010-10-20T11:55:00.001-04:00

That's pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes.

At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn't get public grants, but this guy really can't do anything else.

When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back.

I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I'd not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad.

-Lit

Lit is author Mary Karr's third memoir, following her hugely successful account of her childhood, The Liars' Club, and Cherry, in which she recalled her teenage years. I haven't read either of those books, and it did occur to me before picking up Lit that it might not be ideal to drop into the middle of Karr's story. Although Lit might have more resonance in some places for readers who are more aware of the particulars of Karr's background, I found that it worked extremely well as a standalone book as well.

I stumbled upon Lit at the library, where it was shelved opposite Stephen King's On Writing. I had been craving some high-quality nonfiction and, based on some dimly-recalled reviews, I thought that Lit would fit the bill. In Lit, Karr picks up her story on the cusp of a sea change in her life: college. It's a big step for her, a decision she grapples with, and one that will help set her on the winding path to becoming a bestselling writer and award-winning poet (Guggenheim Fellowship!). It's a tumultuous journey in which she is both buoyed by love for her husband (and later her son) and dragged further and further down into the murky depths of alcoholism. The latter takes a wrecking ball to the fragile stability she'd wrought with the former, as you might imagine. Recovery is a slow, halting process.

William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Karr's past pops up continually, from the ongoing drama of her relationship with her parents (Mother and Daddy, as she calls them) to her unease at fitting in with her husband's patrician family to her concern about righting the wrongs of her childhood in raising her own son. The glimpses of her childhood that we get in Lit are traumatic, not the kind of thing that it's easy to make peace with. Karr struggles long and hard, and, surprisingly (to herself most of all), begins to find solace in prayer. She's cynical at first, refusing even to get to her knees as she mutters two sentences of gratitude. Through contemplation and discussion with many people around her, particularly those she's gotten to know through AA, her thoughts on religion begin to change. This can be a tricky subject to address without becoming overly preachy; luckily, Karr is an adept writer who always maintains a humanizing, almost self-deprecating element when recounting her conversion.

Karr's training as a poet is evident throughout Lit. She has a gift for finding the perfect word, and her choices often recall her hardscrabble childhood (people tend to holler instead of yell or shout, for example, as you can see in the excerpt above). It wasn't a difficult read in terms of language, but it was intense, which makes me think I'll wait a bit before picking up The Liars' Club. Based on Lit, though, I know I'll want to read it at some point.

Up next: Continuing the memoir streak with Born Round by Frank Bruni.

On Writing by Stephen King

2010-10-14T12:09:00.001-04:00

[B]ooks are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laudromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

-On Writing

When I was about 15, I went through a Stephen King phase. It was summer, I remember, and I'd picked up a sheet from the public library with spaces to record everything I read (a habit I picked back up in college, and basically just expanded upon when starting this blog). The Stand, Thinner, The Shining—just a fraction of King's bibliography, but a pretty good run. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided his books were too scary for me and moved on to other things (I think this was also around the same time of my ill-fated foray into Oprah's Book Club books, oddly enough). On Writing is the first Stephen King book I've read since, and I'm glad I finally got around to it.

On Writing is subtitled A Memoir of the Craft, which tidily sums up the different sections of the book. In the first section, C.V., King lays out his history and details how he got from the four-page stories he wrote as a kid to nailing rejection slips to his wall to publishing his first big success, Carrie. King has a special talent for developing an instant rapport with his reader, and I was with him immediately. He's plain-spoken but clever, honest about criticism he's received, and, heck, he just seems like a cool guy. It's hard not to be in his corner.

In the second section, On Writing, King gets into advice for aspiring writers. He covers everything from grammar to dialogue to editing, with some nifty examples included. His biggest piece of advice is simple but undoubtedly true: if you want to be a writer, you need to read a lot and write a lot. (I don't have the book with me right now, but I believe King stated he read 50-60 books a year; a list of his reading in the years he was working on this book is included at the end). I first heard the advice about reading more to write better from my 9th grade English teacher. As a voracious reader since childhood, I could always handle the "read a lot" part. "Write a lot" is harder. King recommends at least 1000 words a day (he himself writes 2000 daily). Whew. While not impossible in the least (you have to average 1700 words a day to make it through NaNoWriMo), it's a definite commitment. Which is good, really—you should be committed to something if you want to get better at it. But coming up with the words yourself is harder than reading them, that's for sure.*

The third section of On Writing is the most affecting. In it, King covers the 1999 accident in which he was hit by an out-of-control van. As someone who has been in the hospital pretty recently, I was wincing in sympathy. The extent of his injuries is actually difficult for me to fathom. I know how awful it is to break your leg in one place. King broke his in nine places; his doctors seriously considered amputation. Plus there was the broken hip, broken ribs, collapsed lung, etc. Really horrifying.

King was in the midst of writing On Writing when the accident occurred, and—unsurprisingly—it took him a while to get back to it. Thank goodness he was able to. I enjoyed On Writing thoroughly. It even left me open to idea of trying a little more of his scarier works in the future—Misery, for one, sounds pretty gripping. It might be a good Halloween-y sort of read...

Up next: Continuing on the memoir kick: Lit by Mary Karr, whose book The Liars' Club is said to have started the memoir craze.

*This entry (minus the excerpt and this aside) is 610 words, just as a point of comparison, and took me a good hour to write.

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

2010-10-10T23:53:00.001-04:00

June 17, 1972. Nine o'clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone. Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in?

-All the President's Men

When I was in college, I took a course on the coming of the Civil War. The professor of that course always emphasized how different the war was to the people who lived it. Today we are able to keep the outcome of the war in mind even when we're talking about Fort Sumter, and it's easy to view everything with the advantage of hindsight. But no one in 1861 said, "Alright boys, it's time for the Civil War. We expect to be at it for the next four years. Those of you in the gray coats...don't get too excited."

Similarly, Bob Woodward had no idea that that phone call he received the morning of June 19th would help to set into motion an investigation that would eventually lead to the resignation of the president. In retrospect: well, that's a pretty momentous phone call.

Everything in All the President's Men is like this, and with good reason. The book was published in June of 74; Nixon didn't resign until August. Even at the end of the book, at that time, it must have been difficult to believe that it would come to that. I can see why—it's really hard for me to imagine a presidency falling apart like that (even remembering back to the '98 scandal).

It's such a gradual process. There's about a billion people involved—the robbers, the people who paid them, the people who approved the payments, the people who covered that up, the people who hired the people who covered that up, etc. Thankfully Woodward & Bernstein provide a handy list of characters to refer back to, as well as photos of some of the key players. As someone who had a astonishingly poor grasp of Watergate* prior to reading the book, I must say that was pretty helpful.

All the President's Men wasn't the quickest read, but I think it was a pretty important one. Coming into this book, I only had very basic facts at my disposal: there was a break-in, Nixon had some incriminating tapes, he resigned. I had no sense of the timeline. (Look back up there if you're not so familiar with this point in history: The break-in was in June of '72, Nixon resigned in August of '74—that is a long time for that whole thing to play out). I think I learned a lot. It says something to me that those incriminating tapes, one of the few bits of the period I was aware of, were not even mentioned until the last ten pages of the book—that's how much was going on and that's how long it took to really get Nixon implicated in things. Crazy story. You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Up next: Stephen King's memoir On Writing, which is very enjoyable so far.

*I only just recently learned, for instance, that Spiro Agnew resigned from the vice-presidency for reasons unrelated to Watergate. D'oh.

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs

2010-09-23T19:11:00.000-04:00

After Julie and I watched the John Adams miniseries on HBO, I had two reactions. The first was unsettling: if I'd been alive in Colonial times, I would not have been on the side of the patriots. This is an unpleasant epiphany for someone who's always considered himself moderately patriotic. But I'm convinced of it.

I wouldn't be a king-loving Loyalist, mind you. I'd be somewhere in the middle. John Adams estimated that a third of the country was patriots, a third loyalist, and a third neutral. That'd be me: neutral.

I don't have a revolutionary nature. I'm not confrontational enough. I'd probably grumble about the tax on tea, but in the end, I'd cough up the money rather than putting on a feathered headdress and storming a ship. I mean, I've shelled out $3.45 for a tall pumpkin latte without declaring war on Starbucks. That's truly intolerable.

-The Guinea Pig Diaries

So I was doing a little research on The Guinea Pig Diaries, for my own personal edification—or perhaps because I was having trouble getting started with this entry—and I stumbled across a couple of interesting pieces of information. 1) In paperback, this book has a new name: it's now called My Life as as Experiment. I've Googled the reason for this change without success. (Frustrating! It's so stupid, yet I must know.) 2) Jack Black's production company has bought the rights to turn The Guinea Pig Diaries/My Life as an Experiment into a TV show. Intriguing.

Anyway, what's this book all about? Anyone who's read A.J. Jacobs' previous books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, knows that he is game to completely reorder his life around a certain goal or idea. (Perhaps that's why the title changed. My Life as an Experiment does sum that up pretty nicely). His latest book includes nine essays that cover some of the other projects he has taken on, from living his life according to George Washington's principles to outsourcing everything he does to India. Naturally, there are consequences to all of these decisions: some funny, some aggravating, and some that actually lead to lasting change.

The Guinea Pig Diaries is a quick, funny read, but it's ultimately less satisfying than either of Jacobs' previous books. Because each experiment is short, it can never be as absorbing as one of his longer projects—for either him or the reader. I'm not sure that any of these projects could have been sustained for that length—so good for Jacobs for not trying to stretch something that shouldn't have been—but I am eager to see him get back to such a project. Jacobs really excels at taking things on that benefit from in-depth exploration, and making those projects both informative and funny. The Year of Living Biblically even had an unexpected profundity, when Jacobs realized how his challenge to himself had changed his life. (In The Guinea Pig Diaries, he notes that he still is devoted to the concept of thanksgiving, which he first practiced in the previous book.) I did enjoy The Guinea Pig Diaries, but I don't expect to return to it the way I have with The Know-It-All, or the way I feel I could with The Year of Living Biblically.

Up next: Watching Frost/Nixon, I discovered I have some serious gaps in my 70s American history knowledge. Thus, All The President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein.

Faithful Place by Tana French

2010-09-21T22:58:00.001-04:00

I had spent my whole life growing around a scar shaped like Rosie Daly's absence. The thought of that lump of scar tissue vanishing had sent me so light-headed and off balance that I ended up doing gobsmackingly moronic things like getting hammered with my siblings, a concept that just two days earlier would have sent me running screaming for the hills. I felt it would be a good idea to get my bearings back before I did something dumb enough to end in amputation.

-Faithful Place

Readers first met Frank Mackey in Tana French's novel The Likeness, where he was introduced as an Undercover detective and former mentor of our heroine, Cassie Maddox. In Faithful Place, the story becomes Frank's when he's called back to his childhood home in inner-city Dublin, a place he long ago fled. The reason he returns? A forlorn blue suitcase, shoved up the chimney in an abandoned house more than twenty years earlier, only recently rediscovered. It once belonged to Frank's first love, Rosie Daly.

After dating secretly for months, they decided to run off together, Frank and Rosie, away from the hardscrabble Faithful Place. Frank waited hours on the night they were supposed to meet, eventually finding an unaddressed note from Rosie in which she said she'd gone to England. Frank assumed it was for him, that she'd decided to leave on her own. He didn't go home, though. He went ahead, not to return to Faithful Place until the suitcase brought him back. He'd never thought that Rosie might have met a bad end. It's a shattering idea.

Frank begins sniffing around the old neighborhood, asking the questions he'd never thought to ask: who might have known he was dating Rosie? Who could have seen her that night? He can't be part of an official investigation, of course. But he's soon drawn back into the rhythm of Faithful Place, where every resident knows exactly what's going on in every other home and is pleased as punch to keep that information from the pigs. His own home is worse: his brothers and sisters never got out, his alcoholic father still has everyone walking on eggshells.

It's a pretty grim situation for Frank, but very well realized by Tana French. Her characters, from Frank's sharp Ma to his sly brother Shay to a chavvy old friend of Rosie's, are vividly drawn. I think her writing is up to the caliber she's maintained in previous books, certainly. All the same, I found Faithful Place slightly less satisfying than I did In The Woods or The Likeness. Partly, to be fair, because I hoped for an update on Cassie and/or Rob when none was forthcoming; that was a bit disappointing. However, I wasn't entirely happy with the resolution to the mystery. I can't put my finger on it exactly, I just didn't care for it. I'm still quite curious to see what French tackles next, though. This book only came out in July, so I suppose I'm in for a bit of a wait. (Still hoping for a book from Sam's point of view!)

Up next: The Guinea Pig Diaries, a collection of essays by A.J. Jacobs, who has written two excellent non-fiction books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically.

Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis

2010-09-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

To play competitive Scrabble, one has to get over the conceit of refusing to acknowledge certain words as real and accept that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility. In the living room, Scrabble is about who has a better working vocabulary. It's a sort of crossword puzzle in reverse. But in the tournament room, Scrabble has nothing to do with vocabulary. If it did, I – an Ivy league-educated professional journalist, for crying out loud – would rule. But I can only dream of competing with the champions. No, Scrabble isn't about words. It's about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.

-Word Freak

I love Scrabble. I've played it since I was kid and I consider myself to be a decent living room player. But I'll never play at the same level at Stefan Fatsis and, honestly, I wouldn't want to—I get hung up on the whole "real word" thing he discusses in the passage above. Nevertheless I love love love Word Freak.

Word Freak chronicles journalist Stefan Fatsis's journey into the world of competitive Scrabble. It's a weird place, populated by all varieties of social miscreants. Stefan begins at the bottom of the heap, playing the blue hairs—and not always winning, either. He begins studying words, which means memorization, and lots of it. Can you imagine memorizing a list of two-letter words that are valid in Scrabble? And then, when you've finished that, three-letter words? And four, five, etc. There are more words on each list, naturally. It's a Sisyphean struggle for Stefan, although he does make slow progress.

Word Freak is not all about words, though there are certainly plenty of them. Let's get back to those social miscreants, the real heart of the story. It takes a special kind of person to be an expert Scrabble player. Dedicated would be one word for it. Experts could doubtless think of many more, a fair amount of which might be less flattering. But while Stefan's new Scrabble friends may be single-minded in their devotion to the game, they're also pretty fascinating. There's the friendly but ever-ailing "G.I" Joel Sherman (the G.I stands for "gastrointestinal"). There's the funny, hot-headed Matt Graham, who takes smart pills by the handful in order to boost his performance. Matt's friend, Marlon Hill, a smart, temperamental player out of inner-city Baltimore who is working on a book about race in America. And there's Joe Edley, who has mystical approach to Scrabble and coaches Stefan on the psychological aspect of the game.*

There's many more, besides. Some of them, to be fair, seem perfectly well adjusted — but they also get less face time in Word Freak. Stefan is not condescending, although he is honest about the weirdness level, as are many of players. As time wears on, though, and his obsessiveness about the game grows, he finds he has more and more in common with his Scrabble comrades. It might have been a frightening realization to have, but Stefan often finds himself happy with this crowd, playing Anagrams and rehashing games past. They love the game, they truly do.

And I love this book. I enjoy spending time with people who are happy and successful in a way that might not make sense to the rest of the world. Good for them. And I especially love that this revolves around language, even if many tournament players might not know (or care about) the definitions of the words they play. There is something exciting about finding the perfect word — be it in writing or, when the universe smiles upon upon you, in the mishmash of tiles on your Scrabble rack. I enjoyed celebrating that in Word Freak. It also really, really made me want to play a game of Scrabble.

Up next: For whatever reason, this entry took me forever to write, so I've already finished Tana French's Faithful Place; I imagine I'll be back to write about it soon. I'm planning on starting The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs later this evening.

*If you're curious to see these players in action, the documentary Word Wars covers at least part of the same time period and features many of the same people.

Moonshine by Alaya Johnson

2010-09-15T16:38:00.001-04:00

So I'd been on my bicycle all day and my tailbone felt like someone had been smashing it with a mallet and I had a dead boy—the kind you're never supposed to let turn, if you're an ignorant Other-phobe like Troy—who could double as a vampire pincushion draped across my neck, and damn if I wasn't getting some odd looks as I huffed my way through the busy Canal Street intersection. Why did things like this always happen to me?

I had to laugh, and saw my breath float away in the glare of the electric lamps. Because I'm certifiable.

-Moonshine

Meet Zephyr Hollis, resident of Prohibition-era New York City. She's an all-around do-gooder: night school teacher, blood bank volunteer, champion of women's and Others' rights. Others, of course, being vampires and other such fantastic beasties. They call her the Vampire Suffragette.

Zephyr hails from Montana, the daughter of a renowned vampire hunter (known as a Defender). She was a promising Defender herself, until she decided that Others deserved tolerance, not death. She's a progressive girl, our Zephyr; she's also a vegetarian.

As a night school teacher, Zephyr meets a lot of interesting characters. One of them, the smoldering, mysterious Amir, offers her a proposition: 200 dollars to locate the notorious vampire Rinaldo, overseer of much of New York's fang-friendly underworld. Zephyr's intrigued by Amir, and, generous as she is, she's always hard up for cash. She accepts.

Life, unsurprisingly, gets a lot more dangerous quite quickly for Zephyr. With some trepidation, she works on infiltrating the Turn Boys gang, a group of young vampires who, under Rinaldo's supervision, is responsible for turning children (such as the boy mentioned in the passage above). It's her best bet at getting to Rinaldo, but it's a risky move, particularly once a new vampire intoxicant known as Faust floods the market. Young, volatile vampires? Bad. Young, volatile, drunk vampires? Well, it's certainly not better. And time is running short, as it tends to do in these situations.

Alaya Johnson has created a wonderful world for her characters to inhabit. There's the period itself, which allows for flapper dresses, speakeasies, and some delightful slang. The fact that it's New York makes it doubly fun to me, and I enjoyed envisioning where Zephyr went. (Johnson helpfully includes a map of lower Manhattan if you're less familiar with the area.) What I really liked, though, was the conceit that vampires are just there: no secrecy, no mention of coming out. They're a persecuted, feared minority to be sure, but no one doubts their existence. Considering how commonplace vampire/human stories have been in recent fantasy, this is a nice way of shaking things up.

I thoroughly enjoyed this and would have undoubtedly finished it a lot sooner had I not been in the midst of moving. (I also stretched it out knowing I had no other new books at my disposal). I love Zephyr and I feel that the ending is open-ended enough that a sequel would be welcome. Here's hoping!

Up next: Almost finished with my reread of Word Freak, one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction. And I just received the new Tana French from Amazon today, hooray!

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

2010-08-30T12:08:00.001-04:00

Call me crazy, call me idealistic, but you know what I believe? I believe that when you're making hamburger for human consumption, you should at no time deem it necessary or desirable to treat its ingredients in ammonia. Or any cleaning product, for that matter.

I don't think that's asking a lot—and I don't ask a lot for my fellow burger-eaters. Only that whatever it is that you're putting in my hamburger? That laid out on a table or cutting board prior to grinding, it at least resembles something that your average American might recognize as "meat."

Recall, please, that this is me talking. I've eaten the extremities of feculent Southern warthog, every variety of gut, ear, and snout of bush meat. I've eaten raw seal, guinea pig. I've eaten bat. In every case, they were at least identifiable as coming from an animal—closer (even at their worst) to "tastes like chicken" than space-age polymer.

-Medium Raw

I recently moved halfway across the country and—perhaps this goes without saying—it's been stressful. The day before I flew out, I was looking for the perfect book to accompany me on my trip. It needed to be light and entertaining but also totally absorbing—something that would take my mind off of what I was doing. I stumbled across Medium Raw and was relieved immediately: I couldn't have asked for a book that better fit the bill.

Medium Raw is Anthony Bourdain's followup to the bestselling Kitchen Confidential. Since that book's publication, he's gone from a journeyman chef to a household name. In that time he's been on about a million international adventures, divorced and remarried, and reconsidered that whole "no fish on Monday" thing. (His new rule is to use your discretion, keeping the chef in mind: you're fine at Le Bernardin; think twice at TGI Friday's.) Medium Raw is discursive, touching on everything from the consideration of meat (as in the excerpt above) to a slightly terrifying encounter with Sandra Lee.

I read the bulk of the book in the airport and in flight; I was definitely disappointed when it came to a close. Bourdain is a devilishly good travel companion, funny and knowledgeable, but self-deprecating at the same time. I would have picked up another book of his immediately had I had one in my possession at the time. Instead I read New York magazine, which was fine, of course, but not particularly informative about Vietnamese cuisine, Top Chef, or the art of cutting fish*. Sigh.

Up next: Moonshine by Alaya Johnson, a vampire novel set in Prohibition-era New York City. Great so far!

*I'm once again forced to lament the passing of Gourmet magazine, gone before I ever got to snag an issue on the newsstand. Thank goodness for back issues!

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

2010-08-26T16:35:00.002-04:00

Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype-the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain.

-Eat, Pray, Love

It took me a long time to get to Eat, Pray, Love, and I picked it up with some misgivings. I was concerned that it seemed a bit New Agey, perhaps a little treacly, like some other bestsellers that I've found underwhelming in the past few years. I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, however, and found it pretty enjoyable, so I thought I'd give the book a fair shot.

I think most people are familiar with the premise of the book by this point: an American woman travels around the world in order to learn how to live a balanced life. It's a lot more entertaining than that little summary suggests, though (which I guess explains why it's been so popular, yeah?). Writer Elizabeth Gilbert starts her story at home in New York, where her marriage is falling apart and she's coping—well, not at all, really. She quickly finds herself in another relationship, but that, too, turns sour before long. She falls into a depression, finding comfort only in reading words from an Italian dictionary.

The comfort of these words becomes part of her inspiration to travel around the world. She begins in Italy, to discover the art of pleasure. This was my favorite part of the book, simply because I cannot get enough of all things Italian. (I really want to read this, by the way.) There are a lot of descriptions of amazing food, as well as many tales of how Italians live. After Italy, Liz moves onto India to learn how to live a spiritual life. There are some entertaining anecdotes in this section (I love anything with Richard from Texas) as well as some thought-provoking ideas. Sometimes she lost me entirely, particularly in describing her most successful meditation sessions—but she herself acknowledges how difficult it is to relay such an experience and how she had trouble reading accounts until she'd experienced it herself. It was interesting, regardless.

Liz finishes her journey in Bali, where she tries to achieve balance between a life of pleasure and one of devotion. She listens to a wise (and often entertaining) medicine man named Ketut and makes local friends. (As she does everywhere she goes, by the way. Quite a talent.) One of these is a divorced Brazilian man named Felipe; despite her best intentions, the book ends with Liz once again in a relationship. It's not a bad ending—it also marked the beginning for her more recent book Committed—but for whatever reason I found the Balinese section of the book to be the least engrossing of the three.

Overall, though, I really liked the book. Liz has a great voice and the ability to make you feel like you're a pal along for the trip. I even laughed out loud a few times, which is always lovely (unless you're in public, so fair warning, I suppose). Although Committed received somewhat lukewarm reviews, I think I'd be interested in reading it as well simply because I enjoyed her writing style that much.

Up next: Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain. Love me some Tony! Speaking of Italy, I recently saw his No Reservations episode from Rome and it was awesome. Made cacio e pepe with la mia mamma the next night!

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

2010-08-24T16:48:00.002-04:00

I love spring for all the obvious reasons. I love the flowers blooming (which happens early here in Louisiana); I love the birds twittering; I love the squirrels scampering across my yard.

I love the sound of werewolves howling in the distance.

No, just kidding.

-Dead in the Family

I'm finally caught up with the Sookie Stackhouse series. It's been a good ride, so I'm a little sad things are at an end (for now). Luckily, Dead in the Family is just as enjoyable as any of the previous books in the series.

I was a little overwhelmed at the start of the story, I'll admit, since it had been a few months since I finished the previous book (and I've been watching True Blood, so my time line is all mixed up). Suddenly I found myself inundated with names—particularly those of fairies—which it sometimes took me a minute to place. After a few short chapters that served as a refresher in Sookie-ology, though, the story ran smoothly.

So let's see, what's Our Sookie up to? Well, for one thing, she's still dealing with the aftermath of the Fae War, which left her injured and in mourning. Although the fairies supposedly left the human world at the close of battle, it seems that a few were left behind—and at least one of them has no love lost for Sookie. She's still getting used to the commitment she made—albeit unknowingly—to Eric. And since that's not enough to deal with, the Weres come back to the forefront in a big way. Hello, Alcide! Although his halo's been tarnished a bit, I still like having him around.

Speaking of Alcide, I do wonder where Charlaine Harris is going to go with Sookie's men/supernaturals. I like Eric, but I liked him better in small doses, in all honesty. He adds more spark when he's there for a couple of intense scenes than when he's lecturing Sookie on vampire politics. Bill is probably still my favorite, despite his past behavior. Even though he didn't get too much face time in Dead in the Family, he shared in a couple of the most powerful moments of the book. (I especially liked the subplot with the family bible). I'll be very curious to see what the next story brings.

Up next: Eat, Pray, Love, which I am enjoying way more than I expected.

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

2010-08-19T17:38:00.002-04:00

The room was now bathed in blue pre-dawn light filtered through the french doors and two small windows set deep in the adobe wall. Through the glass of the doors was a view of the Three Graces (as he had once named the three tall saguaro cactus in a letter to her) and a yard full of ground-hugging prickly pear, scrubby wildflowers and hard-packed earth. In the distance, beyond the long dirt drive, was the wash, a fugitive river that ran only after the heaviest rains. Its banks were edged by cottonwoods with the mountains looming behind them, black against the purple sky. It was a dramatic landscape, harsh and vivid. She did not find the desert beautiful.

-The Wood Wife

After being faced with a panoply of choices for my next book to read, I chose a favorite of my mom's, The Wood Wife. I always like to try people's favorites—just like I appreciate when other people try things I've recommended—although I go in with the understanding that I very well may have a different experience.*

I probably wouldn't have picked The Wood Wife out on my own, simply because I don't read much fantasy that isn't YA (or Sookie Stackhouse, which falls in is its own category to me). I'm also not particularly drawn to books set in the Southwest, but that turned out to be an asset in this case. Maggie Black isn't a desert girl either. She comes to Tuscon after the death of her mentor, the poet Davis Cooper. Though she'd exchanged scores of letters with Cooper over the years, the two had never actually met; thus Maggie is surprised to find that she is the recipient of his home and its contents according to the terms of his will. Maggie is a writer herself—though she hasn't written poetry in many years—and she hopes this will be an opportunity to begin a biography of Cooper, as she's long hoped to do.

As Maggie settles into Cooper's house, though, she begins to notice something unusual is going on. The objects that keep disappearing. The locked room. The cryptic letter Cooper wrote her the night of his mysterious death—did I mention he drowned in the desert? It slowly becomes clear that there's more happening out there than Maggie ever anticipated.

You have to take a bit of a leap with this one, I admit. Anytime you don't invest in the reality of the fantasy, as it were, it's going to come across as silly. You can maintain some skepticism—Maggie does for quite awhile—but at a certain point you need to suspend your disbelief or you're not going to enjoy it. If the creatures Maggie encounters (spirits, fairies, or whatever you want to call them) had been all-knowing and benevolent, I might have scoffed, but their amorality kept things unpredictable and, consequently, more interesting. Although I thought the story got off to a bit of a slow start, I did find myself more invested as things continued, and I thought that the climactic implementation of the spiral path concept was pretty neat. Some of the dialogue rang a little false to my ear, but Windling did a great job describing the desert (giving me, who's never been, a pretty clear mental picture). I think it might not be a bad idea to read more western-oriented books, particularly as I'm gearing up to move further west myself.

Up next: The most recent Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead in the Family. Woo!

*The one downside of recommending things is that it's a bummer if someone doesn't enjoy something you loved. A little disheartening, isn't it?

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

2010-08-10T17:38:00.000-04:00

Each spring for a period of weeks the imperial gardens were filled with prize tulips (Turkish, Dutch, Iranian), all of them shown to their best advantage. Tulips whose petals had flexed too wide were held shut with fine threads hand-tied. Most of the bulbs had been grown in place, but these were supplemented by thousands of cut stems held in glass bottles; the scale of the display was further compounded by mirrors placed strategically around the garden. Each variety was marked with a label made from silver filigree. In place of every fourth flower a candle, its wick trimmed to tulip height, was set into the ground. Songbirds in gilded cages supplied the music, and hundreds of giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs lumbered through the gardens, further illuminating the display. [...] The whole scene was repeated every night for as long as the tulips were in bloom, for as long as Sultan Ahmed managed to cling to his throne.

-The Botany of Desire

A pretty scene, isn't it? (Well, I'm not sure if the giant tortoises would agree.) There's something so magical about a beauty that transcends time, something boiled down to the essentials of color, shape, and light. The beauty of a tulip bathed in the radiance of candles as opposed to that of, say, some shiny new high-tech device, however nice its contours or its color. Of course, I'm a former art history student, so I tend to get a bit excited over color and light.

I also get excited about books about food. The Botany of Desire is a little different than other food books I've read, because it mostly focuses on the development of plants; specifically, how they have evolved to fulfill certain human desires. Pollan looks at apples (sweetness), tulips (beauty), marijuana (intoxication), and potatoes (control). Each plant/desire leads him in a different direction, some of which I found more interesting than others.

We begin with the apple. How can you not? Adam and Eve, Johnny Appleseed—the apple is so woven into our mythology. Even so, I found this to be the driest section, although I did appreciate the look into the importance of biodiversity of the species (also addressed in the potato section).

Pollan then moves on to the tulip, with a look at the tulipomania that struck the Netherlands in the 17th century. Again, I didn't find this particularly compelling—but luckily things pick up once Pollan starts in on marijuana. He shares his own pot-growing high jinks, but also considers why/if the plant encourages intoxication.Throughout, Pollan speculates on plants developing in ways that would encourage people to grow them. With the discussion of marijuana, I thought this became more interesting, possibly because the idea of intoxication itself merits a lot of attention—thus scientists continuing to look into how marijuana works on the brain.

And then we came to the potato.

The toxin, which is produced by a bacterium that occurs naturally in the soil, is generally thought to be safe for humans, yet the Bt [Bacillus thuringiensis] in genetically modified crops is behaving a little differently from the ordinary Bt that farmers have been spraying on their crops for years. Instead of quickly breaking down in nature, as it usually does, genetically modified Bt toxin seems to be building up in the soil. This may be insignificant; we don't know. (We don't really know what Bt is doing in soil in the first place.) We also don't know what effect all this new Bt in the environment may have on the insects we don't want to kill, though there are reasons to be concerned. In laboratory experiments scientists have found that the pollen from Bt corn is lethal to monarch butterflies. Monarchs don't eat corn pollen, but they do eat, exclusively, the leaves of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), a weed that is common in American cornfields. When monarch caterpillars eat milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen, they sicken and die. Will this happen in the field? And how serious will the problem be if it does? We don't know.

I can't lie, the potato was my favorite chapter. Pollan looks into the development of potatoes that are resistant to the potato bugs—not because of anything sprayed upon them, but because of their genetic makeup, as designed by chemical giant Monsanto. It's a fascinating, troubling look at the difficulties facing farmers today. Some of the issues addressed came up during the tail end of Food, Inc., when the topic turned to the burgeoning field of patents on particular varieties of corn—once again, designed by Monsanto. I certainly imagine you can't help but look at the potato differently after reading this chapter—I know I'll be thinking hard about where the next potato I buy comes from and what might be in it.

Overall, I didn't enjoy this one as much as In Defense of Food, but I still found it to be a worthwhile read. I'd also be interested in checking out the television documentary of the same name (currently streaming on Netflix!).

Up next: Good question! There must be something lying around....

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø

2010-08-01T11:51:00.003-04:00

She half turned without seeing him and wrinkled her nose as if there was a potent smell coming from somewhere, which was a possibility Harry could not completely exclude. She asked the checkout girl for a pack of 20 Prince Mild cigarettes.

'Thought you were trying to give them up.'

Vibeke turned round in surprise, scrutinised him and gave him three different smiles. The first one, fleeting, automatic. Then one of recognition. Then, after she had paid, one of curiosity.

'And you're going to have a party, I see.'

She put her purchases into a plastic bag.

'Something like that,' Harry mumbled, reciprocating her smile.

-The Devil's Star

Harry Hole is in a bad way. As we saw in The Redbreast and Nemesis, Harry's struggle with his demons is unending. By the beginning of The Devil's Star, Harry has given up the fight.

We don't know why at first, but the result couldn't be clearer: we meet Harry in the midst of an epic bender. His supervisor kindly put him on leave four weeks earlier, when Harry just stopped showing up for work. But a police officer can't be on leave indefinitely, and he's finally called in to a crime scene. A woman has been murdered; her index finger ritualistically severed. Harry's partnered up with Tom Waaler, whom he loathes. It comes as no surprise that things get off to a rocky start.

'One of the officers at the crime scene threatened to write a report on you. He says you were visibly intoxicated when you arrived [...] Were you intoxicated, Harry?'

'Of course I wasn't, boss.'

'Are you absolutely positive you're telling me the truth right now, Harry?'

'Are you absolutely positive that you want to know?'

Harry heard Møller's groan at the other end.

Soon enough, a woman has disappeared, and it isn't long before the two cases are connected. As usual, Nesbø has engineered a remarkably clever mystery that requires a serious amount of effort to untangle. The Devil's Star is complex without becoming overly convoluted; Nesbø seems to have become somewhat more judicious with his twists. (I did have a bit of trouble picturing some of the logistics of the gruesome climax. Perhaps that was just a self-preservation instinct.) Overall, I consider it the strongest of Nesbø's novels to date.

Aside from his crackerjack plots, Nesbø's greatest strength as an author is the shape he gives to the damaged, driven Harry*. There is no romanticizing of Harry's problems here—Nesbø never shies away from showing exactly how low Harry can fall. I was wincing at points, because at his core Harry is wonderful—smart, resourceful, caring, funny—and as a reader I can't help but hope for better for him. Harry's behavior, in this book more than any other, has realistic and potentially far-reaching consequences. I am very interested to see where things lie at the start of the next book, The Redeemer. I'm not sure when it will be out in the US, but I see that it's already available in paperback from amazon.co.uk. Oh, so tempting....

Up next: I'm picking up The Botany of Desire again. Good so far, but I can't exactly call it a page-turner.

*And all of his characters, really. I'm consistently impressed to how much depth he gives to characters who might only be around for a few pages.

I Want To Read: Deadwood

2010-07-30T15:55:00.000-04:00

Summer is in full swing, and I think we all know the effect that has on good television: for the most part, it's gone. I unashamedly love TV*, but I appreciate getting a breather from watching a series on a weekly basis. Instead, summer is the time to...turn off the idiot box? Nah. Summer is the time to catch up on DVDs!

And I have had more time than usual to catch up this summer, given that I've been laid up with my broken leg rather than run ragged at summer camp. The best discovery I've made, by far, is Deadwood.

I've almost finished the second season of the HBO series, which ran from 2004 until its abrupt end in 2006. I was immediately enthralled with the Wild West in a way I'd never been before, drawn in by vivid, complicated, yet sympathetic characters** and by the day-to-day realities of a world I was wholly unfamiliar with. It's maybe hard to say, given that I haven't finished watching yet, but right now I'd call Deadwood my second favorite show ever. (It's hard to beat The Wire.)

I'm already looking toward the end of the series and realizing that it's not going to last long enough to suit me. I was excited to find that Pete Dexter's novel Deadwood covers the same period of the town's history. A little research informs me that despite having many of the same characters, there are a fair amount of dissimilarities between the book and the show. All the same, I know I'm going to want to spend a little more time in the town of Deadwood once I'm done watching. Although I have many, many books on my to-read list, I'm hoping I can get a hold of a copy of Deadwood sharpish. Until then, I'm happily devouring Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star. Bookstore gift cards are the best, no?

*Though I do love books more, naturally.

**I've amused myself by trying to order my top 5 Deadwood characters. It's tough. As of this moment I'd go: 1. Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif) 2. Calamity Jane (Robin Weigart) 3. Sol Star (John Hawkes) 4. Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) 5. Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant). But then what about Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens)? Or the characters I love to hate, like the slimy E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) and the sociopathic yet dapper Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt)?

A Touch of Dead by Charlaine Harris

2010-07-22T19:20:00.004-04:00

"Have you ever seen It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown?"

I stopped in my tracks. "Sure," I said. "Have you?'

"Oh, yes," Pam said calmly. "Many times." She gave me a minute to absorb that. "Eric is like that on Dracula Night."

-A Touch of Dead

A Touch of Dead is a small collection of short stories by Charlaine Harris, all centered around her most famous heroine, Sookie Stackhouse. These stories fill in gaps in Harris's novels, providing us with background information and some important plot detail, along with a fair amount of fluff.

There are only five stories, which makes this quite a quick read. In "Fairy Dust," we learn more about the fairy siblings Claude and Claudine as Sookie is brought in to investigate their triplet Claudette's death. "Dracula Night," which I quoted from above, describes Fangtasia's annual celebration of Dracula's birth. The third story of the collection, "One Word Answer," was the most interesting one in terms of its impact on Sookie. In my review of Definitely Dead, I wondered if there was a story that dealt with Sookie learning of the death of her cousin, Hadley, as well as her introduction to Queen Sophie-Ann Leclerq. "One Word Answer" is that story.

"Lucky" gives Sookie a chance to team up with her witchy roommate Amelia to solve a mystery, and "Gift Wrap" details an interesting Christmastime adventure for Sookie. Both stories are amusing, and the latter provides more insight into the supernatural world—for us, though interestingly not for Sookie.

In general, the stories are diverting, and worth reading for a Sookie Stackhouse fan—particularly "One Word Answer." I think it would probably be best to read them in between the novels in the order they were written —Harris indicates the proper sequence in her introduction—but I assume most readers, like me, will read these stories after finishing the rest of the series (save one, in my case). In any case, they're enjoyable, but I didn't get quite the satisfaction I've gotten from the novels, probably because there simply isn't so much space for dramatic arcs or character development in this format. Still, it was a pleasant way to spend an hour or so.

Up next: I think The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, but that could change.

Kraken by China Miéville

2010-07-20T13:30:00.005-04:00

"Now, Mr. Harrow," Baron said. He shook his head, friendly. "I told you. All those whys is not a helpful way of looking at things. And blimey, there's plenty of stuff you've not even seen yet. How could you possibly understand what's going on? If you even wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot.

"So. Rather than trying to get to grips with things you can't possibly, I'd just say wait. Wait and see. Because you will see. There's more to come. Good-bye now."

-Kraken

A few months ago I went to the Museum of Natural History in New York, which is home to Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. One of the most dramatic dioramas in the hall portrays a struggle between a giant squid and a sperm whale. That so little is known about the giant squid certainly makes it more compelling, and I would guess that this diorama has captured the imagination of many an impressionable visitor.

In Kraken, China Miéville takes the mystery of the giant squid a step further: what if it were worshiped as a god? What if a giant squid, something holy to its worshipers, were pickled and put on display at a natural history museum? And what if one day it just...disappeared?

Such is the mystery faced by Billy Harrow, a curator at London's Natural History Museum. Billy is the man who worked most closely on the preservation of the squid, and he is the one who finds it missing. It's not as if a giant squid in a tank can up and vanish, leaving behind not a shred of evidence—except that's exactly what this one did.

Billy is soon embroiled in events that involve a number of players from a magical side of London hitherto unknown to him. There's the krakenists, of course, those devout worshipers of Architeuthis dux. The FSRC, a police force dedicated to crimes that are out of the ordinary. The Londonmancers, able to tap into the magic of London and—more interestingly to some—to predict the future. The Tattoo, who is as dangerous as he sounds; Goss and Subby, who are far, far worse.

It's a scary, complicated world out there, and Billy has a steep learning curve. With all of those factions and their various, often inscrutable, motivations, it can be difficult to keep up. Miéville, as I learned when reading his novel Un Lun Dun, is fantastically creative. Kraken, if anything, is packed with too many characters and ideas. Good characters and ideas, all of them, but there are just so many that the story became slightly overstuffed. I have to flat-out admit that I'm not sure I understand everything that happened. I do appreciate a story in which not everything is laid out for you, but it can be a fine line. On the plus side, I do look forward to discussing Kraken...once I've found someone else who's read it. I'm also planning on delving further in Miéville's back catalog, as he is certainly one of the most interesting authors I've become familiar with in the last few years.

Up next: A Touch of Dead, the collection of Sookie Stackhouse stories, which I imagine I'll race through pretty quickly.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

2010-07-09T13:50:00.013-04:00

"Since the schoolyard," Naehring said, "I would bet neither of you has ever walked away from physical conflict. That's not to suggest you enjoyed it, only that retreat wasn't something you considered an option. Yes?"

Teddy looked over at Chuck. Chuck gave him a small smile, slightly abashed.

Chuck said, "Wasn't raised to run, Doc."

"Ah, yes—raised. And who did raise you?"

"Bears," Teddy said.

-Shutter Island

I saw the film adaptation of Shutter Island back in February. I was reeled in by the moody, atmospheric ads that promised a satisfying level of creepiness. I read some mixed reviews, most of which took the trouble to note a plot twist. No particulars, just that there was one.

I love plot twists. I think they're dandy. I just don't like knowing about plot twists. I think it spoils half the fun. If you go into a movie, or a book, knowing there will be a twist, it's only natural to speculate on what it could be—and in many cases you'll uncover it. No fun.*

So I walked into the movie with a fair idea of where it was going to go, which I thought made it a weaker film than it could have been, but I mostly enjoyed it all the same. And obviously I then began reading the book with a fairly thorough grounding in the plot, though I'd forgotten some of the particulars in the intervening months. I was hoping that in reading the book, I'd clarify some of the more ambiguous points in the film and gain a better understanding of the characters' motivations. On both points, the book was very helpful. It's also a pretty absorbing read.

The plot, you say? Oh yes, there's plenty of that. Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, are federal marshals assigned to an unusual case on Shutter Island, a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. A woman named Rachel Solando has disappeared without a trace, which is quite a feat in a place crawling with guards and orderlies. As the marshals investigate the case, they run into more and more peculiarities, all the while battling the effects of a developing hurricane that has cut them off from the outside world.

Poor Teddy. I probably thought that a thousand times while reading. Chuck doesn't have a great time of it either, but Teddy is different. Not only is he our protagonist, Teddy is also a man with a Past. The kind of past that you wouldn't wish on anyone. The kind of past you just can't get past, as it were. He's enormously sympathetic, even though his own behavior is not beyond reproach—far from it. You just want things to start going right for him. That's not really how this kind of book works, though. Poor Teddy.

Poor Teddy, indeed.

In the film, Teddy was played by Leonardo DiCaprio, whom I couldn't help but picture while reading the book. His acting in Shutter Island is among his best work, and I think he was the best part of the film as well. His Teddy was both devastated and utterly devastating, which made the end of the film (quite true to the book) hit even harder. Shout-out to Mark Ruffalo as well for his flawless portrayal of Chuck, whom I also pictured quite clearly when I read. On the whole, it was a visually striking film, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that I relied on Scorcese's vision of the island while reading.

All in all, fairly entertaining, and if you've seen (and enjoyed) the film I'd definitely recommend it, just to help you tie up any loose ends.

Up next: Kraken by China Miéville, which I'm very excited about!

*In fact, I certainly wouldn't mention the twist in Shutter Island unless I were sure that it was already a pretty widely known idea among people who keep up with that sort of thing. (A Google search of "Shutter Island" and "twist" returns almost 300,000 results.)

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

2010-07-05T15:32:00.004-04:00

Catherine groped blindly. The reins whipped in the wind, but she found them, took them in her hands. The carriage rocked in the pitted field, but she held on. Her foolish cloak was streaming in the wind, choking her, and she ripped it from her neck and it flew out behind, a momentary ghost in the swirling snow.

She knew enough to let the horses run. She knew enough to hope in their natural instincts. Her strength was no match for the terror she felt pulsing from the horses' black rumps. She held on. She did the only thing she could.

The horses raced on in a frenzy. They galloped down a small bank, skimmed onto the frozen river, the carriage arcing dangerously, so that the horses were spun in a circle, leaving crazy black trails on the powdered ice, really frightened now, aware, suddenly, of how far they were from safety. One of the horses slipped, lost its footing and collapsed onto the ice, which cracked and shimmered but held. Catherine sat mute with fear, with the idea of death in the frigid water, drowning, tangled in dying horses.

The river held.

-A Reliable Wife

In the interview with author Robert Goolrick included in my edition of A Reliable Wife, he states, "These characters are not good people. They have lived mistaken and cruel lives, done despicable things."

He's speaking of Ralph Truitt, for one, a wealthy man of industry living in rural Wisconsin just after the turn of the century. As a young man, Ralph reveled in luxury, first in the city and later abroad, spending his father's money on the finest of everything: wines, wares, and women. His first marriage ended tragically, and he's spent twenty years in sober, gut-wrenching loneliness. He places a discreet ad in the newspaper, in search of the titular reliable wife.

The ad brings Catherine Land to him. Catherine has known her fair share of debauchery as well, but she's left that life behind her. She tells Ralph that she is a missionary's daughter. It's not remotely the truth, but it's the part she's chosen to play. Catherine has a plan, you see, a plan that hinges on an absolute semblance of propriety. That, and a tiny blue bottle of arsenic.

Goolrick slowly reveals what drives these characters: the man haunted by his past and terrified by the prospect of his eternal damnation; the woman who has gotten more that she could have ever imagined, and yet is not quite done. They do things that it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to sympathize with. Yet they remain vulnerable and, despite their behavior, Goolrick keeps the reader from turning on his flawed, struggling characters. I've certainly read stories with characters to whom I could relate far better, but I never ended up disliking Ralph or Catherine, even when I stopped understanding them.

In the same interview I mentioned above, Goolrick mentions his interest in following the characters' chances of redemption. I certainly can understand his interest, but I find it somewhat hard to reconcile with the melodramatic denouement. Still, the book was interesting enough that I couldn't help but mentally cast a potential movie while I was reading. I never came up with a definitive cast, but the complicated characters and the cinematic nature of the book seem to ensure a film adaptation (indeed, Sony already has the rights). I'll be very intrigued to see how it comes out.

Next up: I'm thinking Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.

Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

2010-07-02T14:10:00.002-04:00

The train rolled past Thirty-fourth Street, where tourist families with fanny packs and matching smiles piled into the car. Their blond children held on to the poles, swaying this way and that, thrilled by every jolt and bump of the train. Celia thought for a moment how strange it felt to simply live—to work, and go to the gym, and buy groceries, and wait for trains—in a place where so many people were visiting and in awe of their surroundings.

-Commencement

Commencement, as its name suggests, is a novel about beginnings. One beginning is the first day at Smith College for four young women: headstrong Celia, radical April, sheltered Bree, and seemingly flawless Sally. They form the kind of friendships it seems you can only form when you're young, when you can devote all your spare time to getting to know people. They go to wild parties and get their hearts broken and sing into their hairbrushes. They become each other's family.

Much of the action of Commencement takes place four years after their graduation. Graduation, of course, is an end and beginning unto itself, but that entire post-college period is marked by the possibility of many beginnings. (I should know, I'm still in the thick of it.) It's a time of finding your footing in the world, and the women of Commencement choose different paths. Celia lives in Brooklyn and dreams of being a writer. April is ready to embark on a dangerous endeavor to bring awareness to women in need. Bree is wrestling with the end of a long-term relationship. And Sally's getting married, which provides the perfect excuse to get the four of them back together—although they soon discover that picking up where they left off isn't as easy as they would like.

I didn't particularly identify with any one character in Commencement, but I think J. Courtney Sullivan created four realistic young women. It seems clear that Sullivan, a Smith alumna herself, has drawn on her own experience in writing. It's certainly interesting to take a peek behind the curtain of a women's college, a place which seems subject to so much speculation and stereotyping. Although the college experience of the women of Commencement was fairly dissimilar from my own, I couldn't help but feel a touch nostalgic.

I also keenly understood the transitional period that the women were in, four years after graduation. Commencement really came at a great time for me, since I am navigating my own transition right now, one that is far more complicated than anticipated. It certainly helped me to understand what the characters were going through, even though their individual circumstances were different from my own. I also appreciated that, although Commencement dealt with very serious issues, Sullivan wrote with a deftly light touch that prevented the book from getting too dense or preachy. It would be a fantastic beach or traveling read.

Up next: I have many choices at my disposal right now, but I think I'm going to go with A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell

2010-06-26T08:48:00.004-04:00

The sky seemed close; the stars shone brightly that night. I can see the surface, she thought. There is a connection, thin threads intertwining with one another. But what lay behind it all? What was the motive for killing nineteen people in the north of Sweden, and also putting an end to a family in the Nevada desert? Probably no more than the usual: revenge, greed, jealousy. But what injustice could require such drastic revenge? Who could gain financially by murdering a number of pensioners in a northern hamlet who were already well on their way to death? Who could possibly be jealous of them?

-The Man from Beijing

Whew. I started The Man from Beijing quite awhile ago and, under normal circumstances, I would have finished awhile ago as well. However, I broke my leg two weeks ago, and in the early days of my recovery, I found the novel didn't suit my mood at all. I almost put it down entirely, as I was in the middle of a grim and seemingly interminable flashback section. But I persevered, and here we are.

In The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell grabs the reader with an intriguing (if grisly) premise: 19 savage murders, killing almost the entire population of a little Swedish village in one fell swoop. We're drawn into the police investigation, but our true protagonist emerges a bit later. Her name is Birgitta Roslin, and she's a judge with no professional connection to the case. She discovers, though, that she has a personal one, and before she knows it, Birgitta has developed her own independent line of inquiry.

The police are dismissive, but Birgitta keeps investigating, ensnaring herself in a situation that is far more dangerous that she could have imagined. The story she eventually pieces together spans four continents and relies on events that transpired more than 150 years ago. Despite this, I wouldn't call The Man from Beijing overly complicated, though Mankell does get bogged down in history at some points. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel he kicks things into high gear in a manner that should leave fans of suspense happy.

Overall, I didn't find The Man from Beijing quite as absorbing as I would have hoped. I found Birgitta to be a likable protagonist, and I appreciated that she was an amateur detective, which is fairly unusual in mysteries nowadays. I was less interested, though, when Mankell veered away from her story and delved into geopolitical concerns. My disinterest might have also stemmed from my mood, of course, as I really wanted something much lighter in tone* (Sookie Stackhouse, where art thou?). Still, I think international thrillers just aren't my cup of tea. I'd be much more excited to read another of Mankell's Wallander stories as opposed to another stand-alone novel.

Up next: Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

*I've been simultaneously rereading Naked by David Sedaris, which was really the type of book I needed. I find that Sedaris is pretty much indispensable during any trying times.

Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris

2010-06-09T16:57:00.005-04:00

I couldn't decide if I was surprised or angry. "Why are you being so mean, Jason? I don't need you arguing with me or saying bad things about Niall. You don't know him. You don't...Hey, you're part fairy, remember!" I had an awful feeling that some of what he'd said was absolutely true, but it sure wasn't the time to have this discussion.

Jason looked grim, every plane of his face tense. "I'm not claiming kin to any fairy," he said. "He don't want me; I don't want him. And if I see that crazy half-and-half again, I'll kill the son of a bitch."

-Dead and Gone

I have reached the end of my Sookie Stackhouse reading extravaganza—not to be confused with my Sookie Stackhouse tv extravaganza, which I hope to begin later this month. I wouldn't call this my favorite of the three books I've read recently, but I certainly could not have asked for a more eventful story.

Dead and Gone is also the most suspenseful of the recent books in Charlaine Harris's series. The level of danger has definitely been ratcheted up a notch. A long-simmering feud between fairies has finally reached a breaking point, leaving our Sookie in peril. Sookie, whose great-grandfather Niall is a fairy prince, is a prime target for the fairies who oppose him. Also, the were community has finally made itself known to the world at large; perhaps unsurprisingly, reactions from the general population have been decidedly mixed. A body shows up in the parking lot of Merlotte's: a werepanther. She was crucified.

With that whodunnit at the beginning of the story, Dead and Gone reminded me of an older Sookie Stackhouse story like Living Dead in Dallas, if in the latter story Sookie had seemed more invested in solving the murder. This death is much better integrated into the story as a whole, perhaps because the various supernatural elements of Sookie's world have become so intertwined with the rest of her life.

Probably because I'm gearing up for True Blood, I noticed a couple of scenes in Dead and Gone that struck me as particularly vivid and easily adaptable to Sookie's televised universe. One was the first conversation Sookie and her brother Jason have had in months, ever since she had to stand in for him in a werepanther ritual. It was just so easy to picture the Sookie leaving her house on a cool, sunny day to meet the unusually somber Jason, bedecked in dark sunglasses and sitting on her chaise longue.

I also really liked a scene toward the end of the book, which I'll take care not to spoil, in which a vulnerable Bill steps up to protect Sookie. Hugely dramatic moment, and it really sealed my growing affection for Bill - whom I liked initially, for sure, but it took a long time for him to win me back after Living Dead in Dallas and Club Dead. I really do love his courtliness, though, and I love that he truly loves Sookie.

Well, I've finally just about caught up in this series! The newest book came out last month, so I reckon it will be a while before I get my hands on it. I think there's also a book of short stories out there. But for now, I think I'll take a bit of a break from Sookie. She really has become one of my very favorite heroines, though. Props to Charlaine Harris for creating a woman so spunky and resilient, but also so funny and so interested doing the right thing. After everything she's had to do to defend herself, Sookie worries a lot about the state of her soul in this book - I have to say, I think she's golden.

Up next: The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

2010-06-07T18:40:00.003-04:00

"There is much you don't know about Sookie," Bill said. It was the first time he'd spoken since Madden had entered. "Know this: I will die for her. If you harm her, I'll kill you." Bill turned his dark eyes on Eric. "Can you say the same?"

Eric plainly wouldn't, which put him behind in the "Who Loves Sookie More?" stakes. At the moment, that wasn't so relevant.

-From Dead to Worse

Well, I've learned that one difficulty of reading Sookie Stackhouse books back to back is that it makes it a little trickier to keep the storylines straight when it comes time to write about one. Each flows so well into the next - and I'm currently in the middle of Dead and Gone, which follows From Dead to Worse - that it's getting a little harder to remember each individual story. Nevertheless, I'll press on.

Big things are happening in From Dead to Worse. Sookie is recovering from the tumult at the end of All Together Dead. The vampire community of Louisiana, already weakened after Katrina, is incredibly vulnerable after this latest blow, setting the stage for a possible coup. Meanwhile, local weres are grappling with the aftermath of the regime change from a couple books back, which seems to have led to a recent spate of were killings. Oh, and Sookie meets her great-grandfather: he just happens to be a fairy prince. It's a very eventful book, though slightly peculiar in that most of the climactic events are done when we're still 100 pages out, and then there's just a lot of smaller stories to tie up. All the same, I was utterly absorbed, which seems to be happening more and more with these books as the series progresses. Well played, Charlaine Harris.

One thing that I think works particularly well in the Sookie Stackhouse books is how complex her universe has gotten, and thus how many storylines are going at any particular point. Harris can move something aside for one novel, then weave it right back into the next. It's really no surprise this series has worked so well on television; there's just so much for the True Blood team to work with. Speaking of, I can't wait to start watching Season 2 (yes, I'm a season behind). I barely remember what happened that far back in the books at this point. Well, I suppose I can go back and check my blog post (handy!).

Up next: Dead and Gone

All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris

2010-06-03T19:18:00.005-04:00

Here was the truth of it: I'd had so little chance of having the kind of life my classmates had achieved - the kind of life I'd grown up thinking was the ideal - that any other life I could shape for myself seemed interesting. If I couldn't have a husband and children, worry about what I was going to take to the church potluck and if our house needed another coat of paint, then I'd worry about what three-inch heels would do to my sense of balance when I was wearing several extra pounds in sequins.

-All Together Dead

Gosh, I love Charlaine Harris.

The story of All Together Dead begins at a difficult point in recent American history, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Our Sookie is not so directly affected, living in northern Louisiana, but in Harris's world the disaster had a dramatic impact on the supernatural community. It may seem silly to think about the ramifications a real-life event like Katrina would have in fantasy fiction, but Harris has made New Orleans so central to her vampire world that it would seem far weirder to ignore it. She handles it with appropriate gravitas and her approach never seems exploitative. It's simple and matter of fact: this happened, it was terrible, and here's how we're coping.

So, given that background, the political state of vampire Louisiana is pretty much a shambles when we pick up the story. The Queen of Louisiana, Sophie-Anne Leclerq, who featured heavily in the previous book, is suddenly vulnerable in the wake of Katrina and her ill-fated marriage to the King of Alabama. The latter, you may remember, came to an inauspicious end with his sudden death in Definitely Dead. Sophie-Anne has hired our favorite barmaid to accompany her to a vampire summit in Rhodes, where she hopes to use Sookie's telepathic powers to her advantage.

The whole merry gang - Sookie, Queen Sophie-Anne, Eric, Bill, Pam, and assorted other hangers-on - treks to Rhodes via the vampire-friendly Anubis Airlines, hoping to reestablish some of Louisiana's former power. Of course, readers of this series learned long ago that Sookie can't go anywhere without troubles being close on her heels. Things in Rhodes quickly get very, very dangerous for our heroine and her vampire pals. In addition, Sookie has to cope with an interesting development in her relationship with Eric, which I loved. It definitely drew me in more than any part of her relationship with weretiger Quinn has.

I found All Together Dead to be, in terms of plot, one of the more complicated and interesting Sookie Stackhouse outings. Although Harris was a bit heavy handed in some of her foreshadowing, I remain impressed by her ability to create such a rich, exciting, and often just plain fun world. While on some occasions I have been perfectly happy to allow some time to pass between reading books in this series, in this instance I was very glad to have From Dead to Worse at my disposal.

Up next: From Dead to Worse, clearly.

Nemesis by Jo Nesbø

2010-05-29T15:53:00.008-04:00

Harry rubbed the palm of his hand over his unshaven chin, reflecting on what Aune had said about drugs simply emphasising latent tendencies. He didn't know if he found that reassuring. Isolated details were beginning to emerge. A black dress. Anna had been wearing a black dress. And he was lying on the stairs. A woman helped him up. With half a face. Like one of Anna's portraits.

'I always have blackouts,' Harry said. 'This is no worse than any of the others.'

'And your eye?'

'Probably bumped into a kitchen cupboard when I came home or some such thing.'

'I don't want to worry you, Harry, but it looks like something more serious than a kitchen cupboard.'

'Well,' Harry said, taking the cup of coffee with both hands. 'Do I look bothered?'

-Nemesis

Inspector Harry Hole has had a lousy night, as you might have guessed from the passage above. The semi-recovering alcoholic made the questionable choice of having dinner with a former flame and woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and no memory of the previous evening. The day is not off to a promising start, and things get worse when a call comes in: a woman found dead in her flat, an apparent suicide. Harry isn't so sure. The woman is Anna, his date from the night before.

In Nemesis, poor Harry already had his hands pretty full before this most recent development. His girlfriend's in Moscow, locked in a bitter custody dispute with her ex-husband. He's working a tough case, that of a robber, nicknamed The Expeditor, who killed a bank teller in the course of a heist. And he's still doggedly pursuing any wisp of a lead he uncovers in the case of a fellow officer's murder. On top of all of this, he gets an e-mail.

Shall we play? Let's imagine you've been to dinner with a woman and the next day she's found dead. What do you do?

What does Harry do? He doesn't tell his girlfriend, for one. Nor does he inform the police of his ties to Anna. Instead he puts his head down and gets to work, using every connection he has in order to try to tease out answers in his cases, both of which are becoming increasingly complicated. His investigation takes him everywhere from gypsy caravans in Oslo to the criminal underground in Brazil. Did I mention it gets complicated?

Jo Nesbø excels in telling smart, twisty tales, and Nemesis is just as satisfying as The Redbreast, its predecessor in the Harry Hole series. Harry's a very compelling character and, in addition to his new travails, Nesbø has also set up an intriguing ongoing case with the investigation of the murdered officer. I hesitate to say too much about that aspect of the book, since it was a pivotal plot point in The Redbreast, and I think surprise is an important element in this series. As readers, we know more than Harry about the officer's death and the related corruption in the police department; I cannot wait to see what happens when he puts it all together. He'll either wreak vengeance or utterly collapse - and possibly both. You can see why it's going to be difficult to resist the siren call of The Devil's Star, the third book in the series, currently only available in hardcover (it was released in March). Let's hope that the library hold list is moving at a brisk pace, shall we?

Up next: Thanks to my pal Robin, I do have the next two books in another enjoyable (although entirely different) series, Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books. I'm already digging in to All Together Dead.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

2010-05-22T09:35:00.004-04:00

In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless - whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning - is that what magic was? - was everywhere here. The place was crawling with it. Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn't heal from, ever. But now he felt like Pinocchio, a wooden boy who was made real. Or maybe it was the other way around, he'd been turned from a real boy into something else? Either way the change was for the better.

-The Magicians

I've not read every review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't refer to Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. The Magicians, a coming-of-age story featuring the moody Quentin Coldwater, draws heavily from both sources. Like Harry, Quentin is plucked from his ordinary life and sent to a school for magic - though Quentin, who was set to interview for Princeton, is significantly older. And what is our hero obsessed with? The fictional land of Fillory, as detailed in the series Fillory and Further, which chronicles the adventures of the Chatwin children. The oldest Chatwin, Martin, discovers a portal to Fillory in a grandfather clock. I think it's pretty clear that Grossman isn't trying hard to hide his influences.

But the story of Quentin Coldwater is very different. For one, it's absolutely not a children's story. It's really not even a fantasy, primarily. Or it's the most realistic fantasy ever. Grossman's magic is very much grounded in the real world, and a lot of that probably has to do with Quentin himself. Upon arriving at the magical school of Brakebills, Quentin discovers learning spells is tedious work. He's surrounded by competitive overachievers like himself, and it takes him a long time to make friends. Unlike Harry Potter, Quentin never really delights in magic. There's none of that euphoric sense of wonder that in Rowling's universe can be found in everything from Chocolate Frogs to Quidditch. Despite the passage I quoted above, Quentin is often desperately unhappy.

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it?

And then he graduates. Imagine the world of Harry Potter if there had been no Voldemort. Sounds idyllic, perhaps, but magic often requires epic, good-versus-evil confrontation. In Quentin's world there are too many magicians and not enough monsters. Quentin encountered one, known only as the Beast*, during a classroom spell gone awry. But after Brakebills, cushioned by a private fund set aside for young magicians, Quentin is aimless. He joins some other Brakebills alums in New York City, then spends his nights spiraling out of control and his days recovering. His unhappiness, never long absent, begins to engulf him.

The world shifts again. Quentin gets proof that, against all odds, Fillory is real. Surely, this will be it: the one thing that can really make him happy. But Fillory, it turns out, is nothing like Quentin imagined.

Quentin is a difficult character. I often found him unsympathetic, but I also found him to be quite realistic in his reactions to the world around him. And one afternoon, feeling grumpy after a long day at work, I pulled out The Magicians and sympathized with Quentin immensely. So perhaps it just depends on your mood. It's really not a happy novel, though. Well-realized? Yes. Clever? Absolutely. Happy? Not in the slightest. Bear that in mind.

I realize I haven't touched at all on the other characters in the novel. I thought Grossman assembled an interesting bunch, particularly brainy, quiet Alice and arch, oft-drunken Eliot. I sometimes wondered how the story might have played from their perspectives.

I am someone who, after disliking Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on first read, rediscovered it after loving the film adaptation; I then complained when the follow-up film wasn't dark enough to suit me**. In other words, after a rough transition to Rowling's darker world, I preferred it that way, and found the early gee-whiz aspect a bit childish. (No real complaint, though, they are children's books, and I love them.) I thought I would love a darker, more adult twist on Potter. Instead, though I did like The Magicians, I gained a new appreciation of Rowling's sense of whimsy. Interesting book, in the end, and certainly one that left me thinking afterward.

Up next: So excited to have Nemesis, Jo Nesbø's follow-up to The Redbreast!

*It's worth noting that The Beast is insanely terrifying and one of the best aspects of the book. Scary stuff.

**See, I'm a sucker for muddying the Potter world up a bit. Like this video, which is a montage of clips from the films set to "The Funeral" by Band of Horses. Oh so nerdy, and I love it - especially when the drums kick in and it all goes to hell.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James

2010-05-16T15:33:00.006-04:00

Settings, particularly landscapes, are often most effectively described when the writer uses a place with which he is intimately familiar. If we want to know what it is like to be a detective in twenty-first-century Edinburgh we can learn more from Ian Rankin's Rebus novels than we can from any official guidebook, as we move with Rebus down the roads and alleyways of the city and into its pubs and its public and private buildings. Ruth Rendell has used East Anglia and London, both places with which she is familiar, for some of her most admired novels written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists: the remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away by the tides of centuries and imagine that we hear the bells of ancient churches buried under the sea.

-Talking About Detective Fiction

When I was a teenager I read a fair amount of Agatha Christie, starting with the twisty, clever And Then There Were None. At one point, I thought maybe I could write a detective story too. I looked over all of the books of Christie's that I owned in an attempt develop a sort of formula for writing mysteries. I remember being particularly concerned with how many suspects I would need. Nothing came of it, of course, except me dreaming up character names (always amusing), but it's certainly illustrative of why I would pick up a book like Talking About Detective Fiction.

P.D. James, grande dame of modern mysteries, is (unsurprisingly) a big fan of detective novels. In Talking About Detective Fiction, she traces the history of the genre (hello, Wilkie Collins!), delves into some points of to consider while writing (such as setting, above), then takes a moment to consider detective fiction today. It's a quick read, and a great overview of what is possibly my favorite genre of fiction.

I especially enjoyed reading James's thoughts on mystery authors over the years, many of whom I was familar with (Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie; also Rendell and Rankin, to a lesser extent). I am eager to try out some of the authors I've never read before, like Dorothy L. Sayers and some of the other Golden Age novelists. She also mentions Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series, which I've wanted to try for some time now solely because I think the name Dalziel is so wonderful.

One other point that James makes that I thought was interesting is on the modern convention of the flawed detective. Although Sherlock Holmes would fit in well with some of the more psychologically complex detectives today — indeed, James notes that his seeming modernity is probably part of why that series has remained so popular — many detectives from years gone by had much more stable lives.

But are we in danger of reducing the fictional police officer to a stereotype - solitary, divorced, hard-drinking, psychologically flawed and disillusioned? Real-life senior detectives are not stereotypes. Would anyone, I wonder, create a fictional detective who enjoys his work, gets on well with his colleagues, is happily married, has a couple of attractive, well-behaved children who cause him no trouble, reads the lesson in his parish church and spends his few free hours playing the cello in his amateur string quartet? I doubt whether readers would find him wholly credible, but he would certainly be an original.*

I have to confess that I wonder how interesting this detective would be. Perhaps that's unfair. I'd probably give it a try if the premise seemed engaging, but I do enjoy those damaged detectives.

Up next: Surprisingly, not a mystery, although that would have been a nice segue. I've started The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Fingers crossed.

*Yes, this excerpt is from the same page on which she discusses Kurt Wallander, who ticks all of the boxes pretty nicely, although he's not particularly hard-drinking — compared with a Harry Hole or a McNulty, at least — and generally seems to go for junk food more than alcohol.

PS - My 100th post, just one day shy of the one-year anniversary of this blog. Neat.

Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

2010-05-13T19:08:00.004-04:00

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry play chess - Cambridge, 1980

The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs, and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle-class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else's. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

-Moab Is My Washpot

When I wrote about Jude Law's Hamlet, I mentioned that I had first come to notice him when I rented Wilde as a teenager. Wilde was also where I first came across Stephen Fry. I find it funny in retrospect that I have known of him for so long, whereas I only discovered his comedy partner Hugh Laurie, now much more famous here in America, about five years ago. * I assume, after House, it's much more common now to discover them the other way round.

Anyway, I've long liked Fry. If he'd done nothing but Jeeves and Wooster, he'd be in my good books, but that's only one of his many accomplishments. He's immensely, almost unbelievably clever, in a way that makes one despair about one's own education. To read Moab Is My Washpot, Fry's account of his youth and coming of age, is to delight in the company of someone who loves language and plays ever so nicely with it. The man can wield a word. It's actually quite difficult to carry on about well he writes without noticing that my own writing looks so lumpish and ungainly put next to his. Oh, difficulties.

Fry, in addition to being a clever-clogs - he wrote an epic poem in his teenage years in which he rhymed "Hitleresquely bad" with "picturesquely had" - is also disarmingly frank. His life story doesn't play entirely as one might expect. Oh, some of it does, yes - the public school**, the house in the countryside he takes care to describe as not too "Bridesheady." And even his schoolboy penchant for nicking pence from the pockets of his classmates might not seem too out of the ordinary. It starts to become evident, though, as time goes on, that things are starting to go awry - and this is long before he tries swiping credit cards, though it does come to that.

Clearly I have no idea how honest Fry is being in his account, but it certainly feels quite heartfelt. The shame he recalls at some points just radiates off the page - as does the love he feels for one of his classmates, the beautiful Matthew Osborne. Fry's love for Osborne (a pseudonym) was the all-consuming passion of his teenage years - and, in his recollection, possibly fuel for his increasingly reckless behavior.*** In any case, it's hard for a reader to stay indifferent in the face of any of it - even if you were otherwise totally unfamiliar with Fry, I don't see how you could come away unsympathetic.

I met Fry once, at a book signing last year - a little different from meeting him at a cocktail party, of course, but still exciting for me. As with every author signing I've been to, I found it a rather intimidating experience. He was very kind, though, and all the fans I saw walked away from meeting him with their signed books clutched tightly to their chests and smiles on their faces. Just another reminder of how lucky we are to have him around.

Up next: P.D. James's Talking About Detective Fiction, which I suspect I will breeze through quite quickly.

*Heck, I even knew about their fellow Cambridge Footlights member Tony Slattery, little known here, before I'd ever heard the name Hugh Laurie; I was a huge devotee of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (UK) during my senior year of high school. Tony Slattery in any Party Quirks sketch was always the best - especially the one where Rory Bremner plays Tony Slattery.

**It's amazing to me how much of Harry Potter is really true, minus the magic - just swap in double Maths for double Potions and rugby for Quidditch.

***Although his late-in-book spending spree, for instance, is classic manic behavior, and Fry has been diagnosed with manic depression. (He actually made a documentary about manic depression that I should seek out, as it sounded interesting. Quite interesting, even.)

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

2010-05-06T18:44:00.002-04:00

That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and, I think, destructive idea - destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. Indeed, no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do - and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obesession with healthy eating.

The scientists haven't tested the hypothesis yet, but I'm willing to bet that when they do they'll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their overall health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so-called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by American nutritionists, who can't fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and blithely eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than we do on our elaborately engineered low-fat diets. Maybe it's time we confronted the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.

-In Defense of Food

It's possible that, in lieu of a review, I could just post seven words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

That's Michael Pollan's oft-quoted mantra, the heart of his argument in In Defense of Food. Anyone who's been paying attention to food news in the last few years may also be familiar with some other pieces of Pollan's work: the idea that you shouldn't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize, for example, or anything with more than five ingredients in it. Still, even if they're not new to you, these are easy-to-remember points that could really stick in people's minds and affect how they eat. Pollan elaborates quite a bit, and provides a lot of useful information about how our relationship with food has changed over time, how it's hurting us now, and what we need to change. It's a matter of spreading awareness and education, and helping people believe that they are capable of achieving better health.

It's not quite so easy, of course. Pollan admits that good food - actual food, that is, as opposed to processed food products - is likely to be more expensive and, in some areas, less available than the junk. Still, it's a matter of people who do have the luxury of making these choices doing so. Individual choices add up, and can gradually change the culture.

It's really easy to be snookered by food. I spent years eating veggie burgers, thinking that they were both tasty and healthy. In retrospect: the soy. The hexane (recently in the news). The ingredient list that runs way longer than five. More and more, I'm reevaluating everything. And continuing to read books like In Defense of Food only reinforces the aversion that I'm developing toward processed foods.*

I'm biased, for sure. I think everyone should read In Defense of Food and Fast Food Nation, and watch Food, Inc. and Super Size Me. Or just pick one - In Defense of Food would be an excellent place to start.

As for me, I'm going to be leafing through back issues of Gourmet, looking for something I could cook this weekend. One of the great side effects of avoiding processed food is that I'm becoming a more adventurous cook. More work? Sure. But it's awfully nice to really know what went into you're eating - and that there was no soy lecithin or high fructose corn syrup required to turn it into "food."

Up next: Stephen Fry's autobiography, Moab is My Washpot.

*Replacing my aversion to blueberries, which I am in the process of dismantling, hooray.

The Likeness by Tana French

2010-05-02T18:01:00.005-04:00

He froze the frame on Lexie, head turned over her shoulder to say something, eyes bright and mouth half open in a smile. I looked at her, soft-edged and flickering like she might fly off the screen at any second, and I thought: I used to be like that. Sure-footed and invulnerable , up for anything that came along. Just a few months ago, I used to be like that.

"Cassie," Frank said softly. "Your call."

For what seemed like a long time, I thought about saying no. Back to DV: the standard Monday crop of the weekend's aftermath, too many bruises and high-necked sweaters and sunglasses indoors, the regulars filing charges on their boyfriends and withdrawing them by Tuesday night, Maher sitting beside me like a big pink ham in a sweater and sniggering predictably every time we pulled a case with foreign names.

If I went back there the next morning I would never leave. I knew it as solid as a fist in my stomach. This girl was like a dare, flung hard and deadly accurate straight at me: a once-off chance, and catch it if you can [...]

"Tell me this woman smoked," I said.

-The Likeness

The Likeness picks up six months after the events of In The Woods (see the previous post), and I'm going to do my best to tell you about the former without revealing too much about the latter. A bit tricky for a sequel, but here goes.

The Likeness, by Tana French, is not a particularly conventional sequel, anyway. In The Woods covered a Murder investigation led by detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, told from Rob's point of view. Cassie tells the story of The Likeness, leaving Rob mostly out of the picture. Still recovering from the outcome of her last case in Murder, Cassie has arranged for a transfer to Domestic Violence. One day she gets called to a crime scene by Murder detective Sam O'Neill. There's a body she needs to see.

The dead girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Cassie, and they share more than that. Her college ID shows that she went by the name of Lexie Madison - the same name Cassie used when she was working undercover years earlier. Cassie's boss from undercover, Frank Mackey, is at the scene as well, and he has a crazy idea: What if the detectives pretended that Lexie had pulled through, and stuck Cassie back into her life to suss out the killer? "We've got the chance to investigate a murder from the inside," Frank says with a grin.

Cassie's resistant at first, but Frank gradually wears her down, and after feverishly studying everything from local geography to subtle body language (luckily Lexie left a cache of videos on her phone), Cassie's walking up to Whitethorn House, her new home - and possibly the home of Lexie's killer.

Lexie lived with a tightly knit group of doctoral students - Daniel, serious and aloof; skittish Justin; beautiful Rafe, with the quick temper; and warm, motherly Abby. They were each other's family. Cassie's job is to live with them for a few weeks and pick up as much as she can about who Lexie Madison really was and who might have had it in for her.

It's an unusual premise for a mystery, and though I missed Rob a bit*, I quickly became just as absorbed in The Likeness as I was with In The Woods. Like Cassie, the reader is drawn in to Lexie's weirdly close group of friends (a little Googling reveals I am not the first to see a comparison to The Secret History) and wants to know what secrets they are keeping. The undercover angle ratchets up the suspense, and the more we learn, the more dangerous the situation seems. It ends more neatly than In the Woods did, but certainly leaves the door open for further adventures with the Dublin crew. Maybe Sam will get a story? That just occurred to me, and I love the idea. Fingers crossed.

Up next: At long last, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Very much looking forward to it.

*Okay, a lot - I'm very curious about what he's up to.

In the Woods by Tana French

2010-04-30T19:49:00.009-04:00

I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives knew each other's every thought as surely as ballet partners in a pas de deux. I never knew and never will know whether either Cassie or I was a great detective, though I suspect not, but I know this: we made a team worthy of bard-songs and history books. This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

-In the Woods

Readers of In the Woods will soon discover that Detective Rob Ryan never should have taken the Katy Devlin case. Katy, an aspiring ballerina from the town of Knocknaree in Ireland, is found dead at a local archeological dig. She was murdered, and rookie Murder detective Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox are the only ones around when the call comes in. There's a brief window of time when Rob could have taken his supervisor aside, explained the unusual circumstances, and passed the case on to someone else. He didn't.

And as much as we realize the potential fallout of this decision, it's easy to understand why Rob felt he had to take the case. For Detective Ryan, now working in Dublin, grew up in Knocknaree - and he didn't always go by Rob. Twenty years earlier, long before he ever could have imagined becoming a detective, he was called Adam. He spent many a happy day in Knocknaree, roaming the countryside with his two best mates, Jamie and Peter. And then one day, the merry trio went into the woods and didn't come back in time for tea. Their parents waited, and worried, and finally they called the police. Adam was eventually found, catatonic, with no memory of his time in the woods - and little memory of anything before it, for that matter. His shoes were filled with blood that didn't match his blood type. Jamie and Peter were never found. Adam was quickly sent to boarding school, where he acquired a posh new English accent and began to go by his middle name. He left Knocknaree behind and became a detective, working his way up to the Murder squad. "I have serious trouble with murdered children," he confesses, to no one's surprise.

"I'm fine with [the case]," Rob tells Cassie - "Just kick me if I get too moody." Of course, it's not quite so simple as that. After all, as more than one person reasons, what are the odds of two child killers haunting the tiny Knocknaree? I don't think I'm spoiling things if I note that Rob doesn't handle it nearly as well as he had hoped, and he has more and more trouble with his detective work. Cassie is left to worry and persevere with the third detective assigned to the case, the dogged yet seemingly naive Sam O'Neill.

I initially had little interest in reading In the Woods because - like Rob - I don't like cases in which children are killed. However, my aunt sent me the sequel, and it looked good enough that I felt I should go back and read the first book. I'm so glad I did. I found myself completely spellbound - it took a lot of effort to pull myself off the train each morning and not just ride to the end of the line and back again until I finished. I actually finished it Wednesday afternoon and would have written a lot sooner had I not gotten caught up in Hamlet.

So what made it so captivating? I think part of it, certainly, was the idea of the cold case being connected to the new one, which often makes for a good premise. And, of course, it always ups the ante when the detective has a personal stake in a case - especially when you become invested in that detective's well-being, as I was with the increasingly tortured Rob. Combine that with Tana French's excellent writing - occasionally a little too cutesy for me, but in general I found it quite good - and you can begin to see how I couldn't put it down.

French doesn't tie things up too neatly - which, while it can be frustrating, I appreciate for its realism. It is helpful that she appears to be envisioning Rob and Cassie's stories as a series - sequel The Likeness focuses on Cassie, but I've read that French has said she's not done with Rob. It's great news, as I feel there's a lot more of his story to tell. I've skimmed some reviews and found that quite a few find Rob unlikeable. I would be a bit kinder and add him to the list of damaged detectives. I don't mind a hero who makes mistakes - even big mistakes - if they make sense for the character. In this instance, at least, it certainly makes for a thoroughly engrossing story.

Up next: Reading The Likeness, of course!

Adaptation: The RSC's Hamlet

2010-04-29T18:51:00.006-04:00

I have of late - but wherefore

I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy,
the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why,
it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
delights not me - no, nor woman neither, though by
your smiling you seem to say so.

-Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

Have there even been any more beautiful lines written on melancholy? And look at that poor, melancholy face above - that melancholy face and that awesome t-shirt*. Alas, poor Hamlet.

I've been finding it difficult to gather my thoughts on last night's Hamlet. By yesterday evening I had wound myself into quite a state of anticipation, which was coupled with my exhaustion at the end of an overlong day. As a result, when I remembered Hamlet today, I almost felt as though I had dreamt it. It would have been an excellent dream, as it was a most excellent adaptation.

I've actually been surprised to not see more press coverage. Most of what I've seen has focused on the nerdtastic casting element - David Tennant, formerly of Doctor Who, as Hamlet, and Patrick Stewart, aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek, as the dastardly Claudius. Which is, admittedly, cool. But I guess I tend to overestimate Tennant's celebrity on this side of the pond, because I expected a bit more. The only recent mention of Tennant in The New York Times was a story on the new series of Doctor Who, wherein his former uniform of a suit and Chuck Taylors was described as "profoundly irritating." And here I was finding it dashing and quirky all this time.

Anyway, while watching this adaptation, I couldn't help but spend a fair amount of my time comparing it with the version I saw on Broadway last fall. I think the biggest difference - and this is almost too obvious to note, but I felt it significantly - was the lack of immediacy in watching on television versus in the theater. I loved Tennant's take on Hamlet. His craziness seemed more put-on than Law's, and yet he seemed more understated as well. While Law was all kinetic energy, Tennant - although absolutely dynamic, don't get me wrong - excelled in his quieter moments. This is a man who in his most iconic role was perhaps most consistently described as "manic,"** but he can also do a lot when doing very little . Indeed, I'd say I was taken by how often Hamlet was found lounging:

Words, words, words.

Tennant, tall and lanky, turns out to do amazing work sprawled across the floor. Also, barefoot. I know that probably sounds like rubbish, but I'm still overtired and these moments of repose - again, not without energy (witness the photo above) - have stood out in my mind. Make of that what you will, I suppose. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about a modern dress Hamlet***, incidentally, but I don't see how you can argue against that shirt, blue jeans, and bare feet. I mean, you could, but why be such a spoilsport?

Although it was really Tennant's show - and Hamlet is really why I love Hamlet, truly - he had an excellent supporting cast. Actually, I hesitate to even call Stewart supporting, as he has such a presence. He played an interesting dual role as both the Ghost and Claudius, and he was fearsome in both parts. One clearly got the sense that Hamlet not only felt he had to seek revenge because of the injustice of his father's murder, but also because he was terrified of what the Ghost would do if his nerve failed him. It made me really think about what Hamlet's relationship was like with his parents prior to his father's death.

I enjoyed the rest of the cast as well, though, as I've noticed in other adaptations, I found it difficult to connect to Ophelia and thought Polonius got to steal quite a few scenes - and I picked the moment when he said "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral" as the exact moment where I figured it was fine for Hamlet to kill him. Oh yes, I am quite cruel.

In short, I enjoyed seeing this performance, no doubt. I'm still left wishing, though, that I could have seen it in the theater, where I think it would have been tremendous. On the other hand, one benefit of seeing Hamlet on television is that one can be so much closer to the performers, in a sense - the "To be or not to be" soliloquy was shot almost entirely in closeup. And Tennant has a marvelously expressive face - Stewart, too. You still lack that certain charge that comes with being in the room, though.

The Guardian called Tennant "the greatest Hamlet of his generation." I would find it difficult to think of another actor - an actor known to me, at least - whom I could think of to rival him. Law I loved, absolutely, but I think Tennant has him beat, if I had to choose. Well played.

Also, if you missed last night's presentation, you're in luck: it's streaming now at pbs.org. If your computer is as resistant to long videos as mine is, you can also check your local listings. Hamlet is being rebroadcast in the NYC area on Sunday at 12:30 on Channel 13.

All images from the amazingly comprehensive david-tennant.com.

*As Entertainment Weekly noted, " Hamlet is literally wearing a costume of masculine strength. Amazing!"

** A Google search of "David Tennant" and "manic" turns up over 80,000 results. I'm just saying.

***Technically the Broadway Hamlet was modern dress as well, I suppose, but it seemed less obviously so.

Coming Up: David Tennant in Hamlet

2010-04-27T17:41:00.002-04:00

It seems like only yesterday that I saw Hamlet on Broadway. I was so excited to see what I viewed as a very accomplished production, yet I knew there was another worthy adaptation waiting in the wings, one that I might like even more. And finally, the long-awaited day is here! David Tennant's Hamlet airs tomorrow night on PBS at 8 o'clock as part of their Great Performances series. I am beyond psyched. I mean, Tennant. Hamlet. I consider it basically an early birthday present from the universe.*

I recommend watching the clip below if you have an interest whatsoever. I've viewed it a dozen times, easy. (I told you, beyond psyched.)

PBS.org: Hamlet preview

*Now, if I were to be greedy, I would ask that someone think to film John Simm's Hamlet as well....

The Private Patient by P.D. James

2010-04-25T16:17:00.004-04:00

On November the twenty-first, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon, and there in a consulting room designed, so it appeared, to inspire confidence and allay apprehension, made the decision which would lead inexorably to her death.

-The Private Patient

That's one helluva opening line, don't you think? If you're a mystery fan, I can't imagine how you could read a line like that and not want to delve in.

Of course, it's the first line of a P.D. James novel, so one is inclined to assume a certain level of whodunit excellence from the start. The Private Patient is James's 14th novel featuring Adam Dalgliesh - her first was published in 1962, this most recent one in 2008, when James was 88. That is hardcore.

Dalgliesh goes into this case knowing it may be his last before the dissolution of his unit. It's a doozy. Rhoda Gradwyn checks into a private country clinic to have surgery on a facial scar, the remnant of a traumatic childhood injury. The surgery goes well, but she's found dead the next morning - strangled, and it looks like an inside job. Gradwyn was an investigative journalist, and her stories had made a fair amount of people unhappy over the years. Dalgliesh and his team must uncover who Gradwyn could have angered so strongly as to provoke her murder. They discover that the workers at the clinic have a number of secrets, naturally. And then another body shows up...

I've lost track of how many Dalgliesh novels I've read over the years. I do know I've read them out of sequence, which doesn't affect one's understanding of the mystery in the slightest, but probably left me less invested in the personal lives of Dalgliesh and his team than readers more committed to this series would be. I do find Dalgliesh to be an interesting detective, mostly because he seems to be so together. Kurt Wallander has his sleepless nights, Harry Hole his lost weekends. Dalgliesh, on the other hand, is engaged to a professor and is a published poet. It makes Dalgliesh distinctive in the world of literary detectives, and I wonder if it actually makes him slightly less relatable. I can understand why a detective in a murder inquiry, after spending a day soaking up the worst humanity has to offer, might need to come home to a beer or six. To be able to channel that into poetry is, I would imagine, an unusual gift among detectives, and it's not particularly easy to relate to. I think James is an excellent writer, and Dalgliesh certainly an admirable detective, but I definitely read James's stories more for the plot than for my investment in the character.

Up next: Another mystery, In the Woods by Tana French. Hopefully I like it, because I already have the sequel sitting on my shelf.

Poem: "Digging"

2010-04-24T18:30:00.005-04:00

Pavilion Garden VI at the University of Virginia

"Digging" by Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite poems. I read Heaney's Poems, 1965-1975 right before I graduated from college and, as soon as I finished, I started again from the beginning. "Digging" reminds me of a spring day, sitting in the most beautiful of the university gardens, looking up now and again at the 15th century spire nearby*. Oh, happy days; oh happy, happy days, to paraphrase Keats.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

*The photo above is my own, and I'm glad I had the forethought to take it, as photos of the gardens are surprisingly scarce online. The spire was a gift from Oxford, incidentally, originally part of a chapel there.