Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

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

Men didn't deserve women.

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

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

-Started Early, Took My Dog 

So, first off, the big news is this:

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

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

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

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

Spoiled by Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

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

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

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

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

-Spoiled

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bossypants by Tina Fey

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

-Bossypants 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

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

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

-The Thirteenth Tale 

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

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

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

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

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

Masquerade by Melissa de la Cruz

 

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

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

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

-Masquerade

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

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

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

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

Blue Bloods by Melissa de la Cruz

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

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

"You should be dead," she whispered. 

-Blue Bloods


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

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

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

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

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

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

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

-A Brief History of Time 

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

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

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

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

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

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

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

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

-The Last Olympian 


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

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

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

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

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

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

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

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

Coraline went through the door.

-Coraline 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Romantics by Daisy Hay

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

-Young Romantics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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