Wow -- four months in before the first post. I suck.

Elevenses: My Reading in 2011

1. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Completed 3 January.

I got this book for Christmas, and had to read it as soon as I could -- partly because I wanted to use it for a class project, and partly because, c'mon, Richard Dawkins, atheism, great title -- who could resist that? And also because you want to appreciate your presents, you know?

I loved it. It was brilliant and easy to read, gave me new insights, gave me new arguments, gave me -- this was hardest of all, and thus most impressive -- new pride in being an atheist and new reasons to argue for atheism and against religion. Religion is not just something I don't believe in, it is scary and dangerous and antiquated and divisive and, really, nonsensical. And his strongest point was his first: out of all the things we are willing to talk about, and to say to each other -- why is it that religion, and basically only religion, has this privileged position of not being acceptable discussion material? Totally absurd. And wrong, as it gives religion an air of power and glory that it simply doesn't deserve. This is a matter of personal choice, and some people choose one way and some choose another; why is that, then, something we can't criticize? I can call people fools for making bad choices concerning drugs and alcohol, or having sex or dropping out of school or what have you; why can't I criticize them for believing in a bearded white guy who made the universe and cares about my ingrown toenail?

I can. Now I will. Good book, and will read it again.


2. Tyger, Tyger by Kersten Hamilton. Completed approx. 9 January.

I decided to read this because I was in the mood for a nice paranormal teenage book. This was, honestly, a darn fine example of the genre. The Faerie elements were meticulously researched and extremely well-presented; the villains were villainous without being overly cartoonish, and the heroes were heroic without being one-dimensional. It took a surprising turn within the first few chapters, going from a silly-seeming teenage girly book into a much more serious and somber story, which worked very well with the concepts. There were some nice conflicts between good and evil, both between characters and within the main characters themselves, which gave it a depth I'm not used to seeing in similar young adult books. There was a sense of history, here, both because the author brought in ancient Irish mythology and brought it to life, and because the origins of the Faerie creatures were very well-thought out and multi-layered. There were surprising links between the past and the present, and surprising connections between characters, which was great. I do wish that the main villain, the Faerie King, had been more developed or handled differently; I felt he was played up to be too powerful for the rest of the story, though his actual role in the story fit well -- but that just meant it didn't mesh with his reputation. But I was surprised just how scary this author can make cats seem -- and shadows, too. Excellent atmosphere. It ended well, and promises to bring good sequels. Definitely recommended.


3. Gentleman Captain by J.D. Davies. Completed 16 January.

I wanted to read something nautical and hopefully piratey. While this was much more about being a courtier and man of honor, it was a fascinating historical character study nonetheless. The main character is representative of a certain historical type: after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, after Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government fell out of power following the Lord Protector's death, Charles II had a conundrum: his navy ships were commanded, very successfully, by his former enemies. The "tarpaulins," men who had come up through the ranks and thus knew everything about sailing, but had no experience or ability in a courtly society, were pitted against his Cavaliers -- the scions of noble families who had supported their king, followed him into exile, and had every possible noble grace, but utterly no knowledge of ships and sailing. So who to give command of his vessels? The loyal, noble incompetents? Or the formerly traitorous commoners, who could give England power over the waves?

This novel tells the story of one attempt to answer that: Matthew Quinton is most certainly a member of the first group, the noblemen who are placed into positions of authority for which they are grossly unprepared. In Matthew's case, he is given this charge twice -- the second time after he ran his first ship aground in a hard wind, drowning nearly every hand, because his inexperience made him indecisive at a critical moment. He is given this second command, of the HMS Jupiter, because he is to be subordinate to the captain of the HMS Royal Martyr -- commanded by a tarpaulin with the magnificent name of Godsgift Judge. Since Judge will provide the seamanship, Matthew is to provide the loyalty and courtly acumen that the mission will likely need to succeed.

But the story turns out to be far more complicated than that, and by the end, everything is very far away from what was expected: not least so are Matthew's own successes, and his failures, as a King's Captain.

The book starts slow, but the ending is rip-roaring, with excellent intrigue, a good femme fatale, betrayal and justice and vengeance and a fantastic sea battle. Definitely worth the reading.


4. Broke by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe. Completed 24 January

Yep, I read another Glenn Beck book. I have a student who is rabidly anti-Fox News, but whose grandparents are Tea Partiers; his grandfather gave him not only Sarah Palin's autobiography, "Going Rogue," but also this remarkable chunk of verbiage from the Beckster. (Beckinator? I sort of like The Beckoner; it catches that cultish feel of Beck's work with his audience. But it also doesn't sound negative enough. Maybe that's accurate at this point.) Anyway, the kid wanted to read my Dawkins book, and he offered to trade me the Beck book, so sure, I went for it.

This was interesting. I am honestly proud of my open mind after reading this. I know my mind is open because I could feel myself cringing away from accepting some of Beck's ideas and suggestions, but alas, he is right, several times. But for the sake of my sanity, let's start with where he's wrong.

Number one: progressives, Mr. Beck, do not actually want to consolidate power and force the American people into apathetic subjugation. Progressives have a different view of the way the country should work than you do; you think they're wrong, and that's fine, but as a group, they aren't actually evil. Just as conservatives or even Tea Partiers are not inherently, collectively evil. Just you. Number two: this country was not founded by Christians, and while dropping the aside that Benjamin Franklin was a Deist may hint to your average reader that he was in fact a Christian, you and I know perfectly well that Deism was the philosophy that we now would identify as agnosticism, or even weak atheism: the concept was that there was likely a Creator responsible for the universe, but that it had nothing to do with the lives of men, not watching nor judging nor controlling. That ain't your God, Glenn, it's a pre-scientific version of mine. More importantly, whether the Founding Fathers were Christian or not, they were not themselves God: they might, just maybe, have gotten some things wrong. This country was founded on principles, not on a specific document that sets out very specific parameters that in many cases are no longer appropriate. As long as our new interpretation maintains the same principles, it hasn't even gone away from the Founders' ideals -- and hey, maybe some of those ideals were wrong. Capitalism, my friend, has changed. And if there was nothing else that convinced me that your concept of America was dangerous and wrong, your idea that the only way to make capitalism work is by insisting that all people have faith in God and a morality that, you claim, can only come from God -- you really don't understand the freedoms the Founders set out for us, or at least one of them. You also don't understand morality, or the majority of people. Even those who consider themselves nominal Christians, I would wager, do not consider the wrath of God in deciding what to do with themselves. Capitalism hasn't failed because of a lack of faith, capitalism has failed because it is inherently flawed as a guiding principle: you're right that there must be a moral principle behind it, the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith as I understand that concept, but the fact is that there is no invisible hand strong enough to prevent greedy men from abusing the system and destroying the rest of us. The only hope of having any capitalist system at all is to have a government with a very visible hand; one might even say an iron fist shaking under the noses of the capitalists. Then we can start talking about the free market. 'Kay?

Right. Now for where the Beckoner is right. We are too deep in debt. Politicians have handled our money badly, and continue to do so, though I would be more complimentary to President Obama in my overview of his policies so far. As much as I hate the Democrats for taking out the public option, they did it for the sake of the economy, not because it was the right thing to do or even that it was the will of the people -- it wasn't. It might have been the will of the morons who baa after Beck, but they don't actually speak for the rest of us, no matter how loud they bleat "Four legs gooood, two legs baaaaaad!" But at any rate, the budget must be balanced, the national debt must be paid down. I agree with that. I agree that all things must take some kind of cut or restructuring, including Medicare and Social Security. I really do. I don't think privatizing social security is the right way to go, but I can see minimizing the required contributions and expecting people to supplement with their own pensions, or creating some form of government 401K. Or maybe raising the retirement age and putting some kind of limits on who can collect and for how long -- particularly some of the widow and children type benefits. I don't know that my dad deserves SS money, though he'd be in the gray area, since he ain't rich even with his pension, etc. I think Medicare should be done away with and replaced with universal health care, that's what I think. That would be cheaper and more sustainable in the long run, though I know Becky wouldn't think so. But then, his claim that the ability to shop around for medical procedures would reduce costs is completely full of shit: the ones that we can shop around for, we do, and the others are too vital for anyone to haggle over. Nobody cheaps out when it comes to their survival, and that means that the "free market" would not be. Doctors would charge whatever the fuck they feel like, and we'd pay it, and when we couldn't pay it, we'd die, and the doctors would go ahead and fix somebody else who will cough up the dough. No: the way to manage health care costs is to control them. People should go into medicine out of the goodness of their hearts, not out of greed; greed makes plastic surgeons, and more power to them. The desire to help makes good doctors. And if the doctoring profession is no longer the hope of incredible wealth, maybe medical schools will become less expensive and more people will be able to pursue the career without having to worry about a quarter-mil in student loans. We could handle that system, honestly, and it would work out much better.

But I was talking about when Beck was right, wasn't I? Right. There are plenty of programs that could be cut. Taxes should be lowered, and I actually like the idea of a flat income tax; I don't really see the problems with it. I understand that it would create a new burden on the poor, but it would decrease the burden on the middle class and the wealthy, and I see that as a fairly positive trade-off; I can understand the desire to incentivize moving off of welfare, rather than encouraging laziness. I think the bottom tax bracket could survive on less, honestly. I think a lot of their troubles are generally due to other factors than "too little government assistance" or "too much paid in income taxes." Besides, the truly poor would be exempt, as government assistance would not count as income. I think it would behoove us to eliminate loopholes much more than it would harm us to tax the poorer folk.

In addition, I can see the advantages of local control of some things, such as education. I can buy that the Department of Education is a waste of money for almost no value, and should probably be dropped. And of course Beck is lying when he claims that federal housing assistance was responsible for the housing bubble and the collapse into recession, but it was certainly part of it, and the bailout of the large banks was, quite simply, obscene. But that's why we had regulation, not an argument for allowing those banks to collapse. We screwed ourselves by deregulating banking; the bailout was just when the debt was called due.

At any rate, Beck made some good points, and his rhetoric, while it was universally wrong when he used it, was generally absent, and pleasantly so. This wasn't a bad book, though it would have been better if written objectively and without an agenda, and about a third shorter therefore. If nothing else, I think it will inspire me to become a bit more active politically, so for that, Mr. Beck, thank you. Well done.


5. Percy Jackson Book III: The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan. Completed 30 Jan.

This was a lot of fun, which made it probably the wrong book to read right at this moment, because I had to spend almost all of my leisure time grading, rather than reading, which was frustrating. But it was definitely worth the wait, as I got to finish the last two-thirds this weekend, after finishing up my grades. (The book ended better than the class did for most of the students. Alas.)

Honestly, this one wasn't as good as the first two; it felt more like a placeholder, like Riordan didn't have that great an idea for it and just used this one to maneuver other pieces into the spot where he wanted them. I'm not sure why; I suppose because the bad guys had such a small part in this, and yet the things that were talked out amongst the good guys weren't all that useful, in the end. There was certainly as much action as any of the books, and that was great, but, well, the characters just got on my nerves. So it didn't feel like Percy made any progress. We got to disambiguate (I've been looking for a chance to use that word) who the Prophecy is about, which is handy, and Aphrodite was fun -- though I'm not sure whose side she's on. But yeah, my biggest complaint was about how the characters ended up: the new Titan didn't really join the bad side, and the new half-blood didn't join either side; none of the real main characters left or changed or anything. I liked the plot twist about Nico de Angelis, but not the ending. That went totally the wrong way.

Meh. Hopefully the next one will be better.

**After going back to write up the second book, more than a month overdue, I realized what else was missing from this book: the clever modern versions of mythic elements. The big new thing introduced here was Artemis and the Hunters, who were, well, archaic. Same with the Mountain of Despair, which I liked, but was one of those mythic things that was simply transplanted from Ancient Greece to modern America, not part of our world. It was all old stuff, and that's good stuff, but the new ideas are the best part of these books, and this one didn't really have any. Too bad.


6. Plucker by Brom. Completed 30 Jan.

Toni picked this off the shelf and decided to read it, finally -- we've had it for a while, now. Then she told me I had to read it, and I was looking to spend a weekend reading, so sure, I'm in.

Man, that's one creepy book.

It starts out a bit sad, with the Jack in the Box being relegated to the old toys' home of under-the-bed; but Jack doesn't give up, and he makes a new friend, which makes things better.

Until the Plucker comes.

The kid's father brings him back toys and souvenirs from around the world (He's a sea captain, arrrr), and apparently he's also insane, because he brings back a six-armed, big hollow eyed doll from Africa that has freaking NAILS pounded into its forehead. I mean, who thinks that's a good present for a kid? My description can't do it justice, since the book was written and illustrated by one of the more talented and disturbing artists around today; you've got to see the image. Of course, the doll is not nearly as upsetting as what's inside it: that, my friends, would be the Plucker.

The Plucker is an African earth spirit that has been trapped in this doll for two hundred years. He was placed there by a shaman of some sort because he has the unfortunate habit of eating children's souls. And where did it get its name? Why, from its other habit: ripping out eyeballs with its long, wickedly strong fingers. The Plucker is not a nice thing. It's about as horrifying a wee beastie as I've seen or read about, right up there with the Other Mother in Coraline (which this book strongly reminds me of) or the nasty alien slugs from Dreamcatcher.

Jack tries to fight the Plucker, to defend his home and the boy who loved him from its evil demonic ways, but he has trouble: the Plucker can reproduce. And it's stronger than he is. He does have allies, and a true determination, and so what follows is a classic good vs. evil tale, played out between dolls and demons, and all illustrated by Brom.

Great book.


7. Trapped by Michael Northrop. Completed 1 February.

How prophetic that this novel should be published now, when the entire United States west of the Rocky Mountains is buried in unbelievable quantities of snow. Any other year, I might have said this novel's description of a Nor'Easter that stalls over New England and dumps more than fifteen feet of snow on one small town, snow that falls without stopping for days on end, snow that falls so fast that it turns the world into a blank canvas, without light, without feature; a storm so severe that men freeze in minutes once they leave shelter -- I might have called that unrealistic.

But it isn't. It makes this book quite a bit scarier than it might be otherwise.

This book is the story of seven high school students who are trapped at school one day by the worst blizzard in New England's history. They are trapped by the simple fact of what they are: teenagers. On a day when school is cut short by the weather and all the students are sent home, three friends decide to hang out and work on a shop project after school, lying to the teachers about why they don't get on the buses, because they are sure that one young man's father will come and get them when they are ready to go. Another young man stays because he went, without thinking about what it meant that school was canceled, to detention, where he normally goes every day after school. And so on: in typical teenaged fashion, the next thing they know, it is getting dark, the road has literally disappeared, and they have no way to leave the school, and, with power out and phone lines down, and cell reception blocked by the storm raging overhead, no way to contact anyone, either.

They hunker down and try to wait out the storm, and over the next four days, as the school grows colder, as supplies start to dwindle, and as their cabin fever worsens, the kids act -- well, like kids. Though I don't believe that adults would handle this any better; to be honest, adults would probably think they could make it home through the storm and would have left the shelter of the school and perished in the cold outside. But staying inside a school without light or heat, with no way out and no hope that anyone outside knows where you are, with a half-dozen high school freshmen and sophomores? That doesn't sound a whole lot better to me. Nor does it strike the fancy of any of the characters in the book, and that discomfort only makes things worse.

To be honest, I wish this book had gone on for another hundred pages or so; the characters were outstanding, some of the most realistic and genuine teenagers I have seen in a novel, and the descriptions of the storm and how these kids would handle it were also spot on. But the draw here was the idea of being trapped in the school, of watching humans degenerate to Lord of the Flies, or something by Stephen King. I understand why the author wanted to bring it to a close when he did, as the novel is intended for young adults who may not have the patience to go on for another five to ten chapters (As they would not be able to wait out the storm until rescue came), but I would have liked to keep reading. Still, it was well done -- and as I said, most timely. Good book.

8. Frankenstein's Monster by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe. Completed 6 February.

Understand that this book is not happy.

Nobody should think otherwise; if you're curious about this novel, it's probably because you've read the original Mary Shelley novel. If you're coming into this from one of the movies, I can't really help you; I'm a book man myself. If you have read the book, and you enjoyed the angst and dark gothic horror of it, then get this book right away.

Following in the grand literary tradition of John Gardner's "Grendel" and John Clinch's "Finn" and every vampire book written since Dracula (Well, maybe not all of them), this book tries to capture the feel of the original story, which it continues from the point of view of the original antagonist: the monster. This book picks up where Shelley left off, just as Victor Frankenstein succumbs to death, leaving his own body on the ship that found him in his relentless pursuit, and his monster alone on the Arctic ice. The captain of the ship, Robert Walton, determines that Victor Frankenstein was the brother he never had, and in honor of his dead would-be soulmate, Walton will carry out Frankenstein's last wish: he will catch and destroy the monster, at last. But the monster escapes, after disfiguring Walton, and returns to Europe.

The main plot of the novel begins ten years later; the monster has spent all of that time running from Walton, whose obsession now overshadows that of Frankenstein himself. The monster, however, has his own burning need: the need to discover, once and for all, the conclusive answer to the question of his being. Is he, in fact, man or monster? His feelings, his actions, waver back and forth between both extremes; the reactions of others to him, as well. Whatever else he may be, though, the monster is hard to kill, and the pursuit, and the monster's decision to fight back, take up the rest of this dense but action-packed story.

Overall, the book is wonderfully well written; I haven't read "Frankenstein" recently enough to tell you if the narrative voice recaptures that of the original, but it certainly has the pathos, and the horror. And the same inescapable conclusion: that whatever the monster may be -- which is never fully resolved, as it shouldn't be -- the people around him, the everyday humans, are, in fact, as monstrous as he if not more so. (In this book's case, I come down squarely on the "more so." But I already thought that going in.) The book's ending surprised me, though it didn't disappoint; if anything, I would have loved to see how this author continued the story from where she left it, though where it was left was just fine. Good book.


9. Percy Jackson IV: The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan. Completed 10 February.

This one definitely stepped back up after Book III. The Labyrinth was beautifully done, great concept, great description. I liked what became of Nico de Angelis in this, and I loved what we saw of Luke and Kronos and the monsters. I liked the Daedalus character, thought that was well done; I dug the new bad guys who appeared -- the telkhines, Kampe and her chaotic beast-head waist thing, Antaeus was excellent, and so on -- but all you really need to say with this book is: Mrs. O'Leary. That big sweetheart of a hellhound would have made this book if nothing else did.

I'm looking forward to the last one, to getting the resolution of the war and the prophecy (Percy or Nico? Percy or Nico? Or will Thalia come out of immortal retirement?) and of Percy and Annabeth's miserably ambivalent romance. Though I cannot BELIEVE that Annabeth is still holding a damn torch for Luke. You know, when the guy not only betrays you, your family and friends, and everything you hold dear, but allies himself -- gives himself in service to -- the most evil being in the universe, maybe it's time to move on. You think? My god. Hey, if Percy's not her type, so be it -- but forget this Luke guy, will you already? I figure, if it doesn't work out, I liked RED just fine (We all caught those initials, right? Rachel Elizabeth Dare? The clear-sighted human with bright red locks? I like that.)

I loved the part with Pan, even though it was sad. Makes me want to write something with animals, to honor the wild that I can connect to. Maybe something with bunnies . . .


9. Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning. Completed 16 February

The fourth installment in the Fever series gets ugly. Predictable, really, since the third one ended with a gang rape that destroyed the heroine's mind as she was overwhelmed by the empty power of the Unseelie, but this one has her losing still more of her soft, Southern Belle persona as she begins the war in earnest, now that she has learned just how horrible the Fae can be when let loose on the world.

All of humanity learns that in this book: it's a remarkable idea that the Unseelie have broken the walls of their prison and been released, and the entire world is suffering because of it; in every other Fae book I have ever read, they are a secret race, hiding from the conscious attention of humans, even as they may have great power over them. The closest to this is Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series, but even there, the Fae keep themselves hidden for fear of reprisals. But not Moning: oh no, her Fae have wiped out a third of the world's population, and are now the target of groupies and gritty, determined resistance fighters alike.

This book seems to be going one place -- toward a serious fight, when Mac can actually take on the Lord Master and take him down, maybe even with Barrons's help, maybe even with his willing cooperation -- and then it spirals off into something else entirely. I'm glad there's only one book more in the series, because this one very nearly dashed my hopes. It begins with Dani and then Barrons working to save Mac from remaining pri-ya, addicted to Fae sex, following her rape by the Unseelie princes; they pull it off, and Mac becomes a much more interesting and necessarily scary character afterwards -- it did not kill her, so it made her stronger, much stronger. But almost immediately, she and Barrons lose their chance to come to a better place in their relationship, falling back into their cold, aloof distrust. And then almost immediately after that, Mac finds that she may be more powerful, but she isn't nearly powerful enough. And then she discovers that the Lord Master is not so easily eliminated, but even worse, he isn't the most dangerous problem she faces. That may very well be herself.

The ending is excellent, another cliffhanger, which make me very glad we now have all of these books, and Toni assures me the story really comes to an end with the next book. Now that they are all out, I would recommend these to the fans of darker paranormal stories, most definitely.


Unfinished:
The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

I got this one from a student, because though I've been intrigued for a while when I've seen these at Powell's, I've also been pretty dubious of ninja-based fantasy. And I was right to be dubious.

This one wasn't actually horrible, but that's about as strong a recommendation as I can make for it. The good part was the origin of the main character, who seems fated to become the main character of the series, the ninja-like assassin on the cover: Azoth is a street urchin, a member of a Guild -- basically a gang -- working hard to protect his friends and avoid his enemies. But Azoth is targeted by Rat, the bullying second-in-command of his gang, and he must find a new way to escape the larger boy's clutches, before Rat takes over the gang entirely and makes an example of Azoth. Azoth manages this by becoming an assassin's apprentice, though he takes the final steps too late to help his friends. It was a brutal but interesting portrait of life on the streets, which I enjoyed in the Jacky Faber books and the Patrick Rothfuss Kingkiller novel, and others.

But the problem, apart from the names, was the cliches. The names were bad: Azoth and Rat were fine, and there were a few others that were acceptable, but the assassins aren't called assassins -- they're wetboys. Like that's intimidating. And the main one, the scariest guy in the world whom this kid apprentices with? Durzo Blint. Durzo Blint the wetboy. Though my favorite name was Vurgmeister Neph Dada. Real nice. And once the kid becomes an apprentice, we find out that wetboys cannot have relationships with anyone, because they have to get to know their victim so well that they fall in love with them -- and that is the moment when they strike. Yet despite this, Durzo Blint fell in love with a woman who was then killed by the evil empire next door, a woman who was the sister of the head courtesan of the city's underworld, who, as luck would have it, has a heart of gold. And when Blint starts training Azoth, he teaches him to fight with weapons while he keeps up a running monologue about how he must keep his heart cold as ice, while he learns the art of poisoning -- you get the picture. It's every bad ninja movie montage, stretched into 700 pages of mediocre fiction with bad names. Forget it.

Durzo Blint? Vurgmeister Neph Dada? Wetboy? Oh, please.


10. Escape from the Land of Snows by Stephan Talty. Completed 20 February.

This is the second book I've read by Stephan Talty, and I was impressed again. I preferred Empire of Blue Waters because I'm fascinated by pirates, but it was remarkable to me how well Mr. Talty could handle two such disparate subjects: his depiction of pirate life, and especially of the exploits of Henry Morgan, was fascinating and enormous fun to read; this story, of the rise of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his escape from Tibet after China's invasion, was much more poignant and thus not really "fun" to read, but also fascinating and informative.

Both of these books are impressive in their detail and the depth of research that went into them, and both were made more personal and interesting by Mr. Talty's use of a specific point of view character to narrate large and momentous events, bringing it down to a human level. It's much easier to understand the pirate era when you can see it from the perspective of a single average sailor, as we got from the character of Roderick in "Empire of Blue Water," and it was much easier to understand the terrible ordeal that Tibet suffered when you see it through the people who lived it: government officials involved in the military struggle, a resistance fighter trained by the CIA and the agents who handled him, even the younger brother of the Dalai Lama, who is also a lama, or Buddhist teacher. The author interviewed many of the subjects directly, and found an unpublished autobiography of the Tibetan freedom fighter who became a CIA operative bringing in weapons and supplies for the resistance, and who helped the Dalai Lama get out of Tibet when the Chinese army clamped down on the country.

I didn't know much about the Dalai Lama or Tibet, and this was a good introduction to the subject. Talty does not paint China as a pure villain -- though they certainly weren't the heroes of the piece -- and Tibet was not simply a victim. The book gives a good idea of the complete, complex issue, and also quite a bit of good information -- though not too much -- on the Dalai Lama himself. It was a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone curious about the issue. My only problem with the book was the fact that seeing the title always made me think of the opening lines of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," ("I come from the land of the ice and snow"), and so I had the rather incongruous sound of Robert Plant wailing in my head whenever I picked up this book. But that was probably just me.


11. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Completed 23 February.

A classic! I had to give it a shot! It doesn't hurt that there are ten or fifteen books in this series and they're all cheap at Powell's, but mainly, I've always been curious about the original science fiction, the original pulp authors, and Burroughs is certainly master class in that group, no matter how you slice it.

This was a lot of fun to read. I loved the 1900's version of space travel -- the main character, Captain John Carter of Virginia, Southern gentleman and former Confederate soldier, now itinerant prospector and fighter of savage red injuns, falls asleep in a cave filled with a strange mist, and wakes up naked on Mars. Heh. Reminded me of Bellamy's Looking Back, in which the main character enters into a hypnotic trance and stays there for 100 years, because mesmerism stops all bodily processes so apparently you don't age while hypnotized (Wouldn't that be nice?).

But anyway, John Carter gets to Mars, where he finds that he can jump higher, move faster, and perform feats of strength that would be impossible on Earth, because Martian gravity and air pressure are less than Earth's. He quickly finds himself taken prisoner by a race of Martians, though his battle prowess impresses the warlike savages (who are green on Mars, instead of red. Go figure.) and he is soon somewhat accepted as one of them. He learns their language in a matter of days, since it is apparently much simpler than English, and yet it allows him to say things like this: "I do not need ask your forgiveness now, Dejah Thoris. You must know that my fault was of ignorance of your Barsoomian customs. What I failed to do, through implicit belief that my petition would be presumptuous and unwelcome, I do now, Dejah Thoris; I ask you to be my wife, and by all the Virginian fighting blood that flows in my veins you shall be." By the way: Barsoom is what the Martians call Mars (Alas, they do not have a correspondingly amusing name for Earth, even though they have magic televiewing screens that allow them to watch a single human being's life in complete detail, in full color [Well, not magic, but advanced science. Indistinguishable, you know.]), and Dejah Thoris is the most beautiful woman on Mars, who looks just like an Earth woman except her skin is redder and she's WAY hotter, like smokin' magma with jalapenos on top hot, like as hot as my wife except Dejah Thoris, like all Martians, runs around naked, and we don't cotton to that in my household. Too cold. And we have pets. You understand.

That's right: there are hot women on Mars. And they get kidnapped by the alien looking green Martians, and need to be rescued by strapping extramartial Virginians, using a combination of swords and spears and weird alien mounts, and massive guns that fire explosive radioactive bullets hundreds of miles, accurately (How it manages to keep the target still while it travels hundreds of miles at anything under the speed of light is not made clear, but hey, we just woke up on Mars, yo. Where there are hot women.), and flying space boats and stuff. And there are some rollicking good times in this book, many swashes that get buckled and the like. It really was fun to read, though it ends a bit sadly (and creepily: because Dejah Thoris, as a Martian woman, lays eggs. Eww.). These are definitely books I'll continue on with. Maybe I can find some at the Scappoose Library Sale . . .


12. Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt. Completed 24 February.

I wish I had either been stingier with my five-star reviews, or that I could, in special cases, give six stars, because I would give them to this book. How about this: I read this book in one day. Is there any better accolade than that?

This was the most captivating book, with the most interesting and sympathetic character, that I have read in a year or more. (And I read a lot.) I had never read Gary D. Schmidt's books before, but I certainly will now; I got this one because I saw that the author had won several awards (and now I know why), and because I loved the image on the cover and the connection to the work of John James Audubon. What I found inside was a remarkable story of growth, an exploration of what it means to be an artist -- especially in a world that does not accept or admire artists -- and what it feels like to become your own man, even when everything is stacked against you.

There was so much here that it is difficult to pick out favorite moments, the best scenes or motifs; for me, the times when Doug, the main character, gets lost in contemplation of art, and the days he spends learning how to make his own art, were the most inspiring, and the moments when his teachers recognize what is hidden behind Doug's facade were the most inspiring, since I am both a teacher and a former problem student -- though certainly not on Doug's level. It was fantastic to watch Doug succeed, in both small ways and large, though it was painful to see his successes get buried once more in the difficulties that smother him.

The writing was outstanding, the narrative voice perfect for the character and the descriptions beautiful. I was perhaps most impressed with the way Schmidt was able to set up expectations of a character, even a character who had not yet appeared in the story, and then break those expectations in such ways that characters were surprising and endearing from the very first moment we see them; that or the way the characters could surprise with their hidden depths, which they all had, and which I loved. If I have any criticism, it was that the ending was maybe a little unlikely, but it certainly wasn't all happy, so I can't complain too much. I can only recommend this book highly to all readers.


13. Shadowfever by Karen Marie Moning. Completed 28 February.

I wanted to finish a series, and now I have. This was a good ending. I was inordinately pleased to see Mac and Barrons finally get past their crap and have a genuine romantic interlude, I loved the reveal about who was really a bad guy and what Mac's origin actually was, and who killed her sister and why. I liked that not everything was resolved, but enough was that the story could end -- and I loved the final fight(s) (Plural because there was one against the Book, the source of evil power that everyone was pursuing throughout the series, and then another against the Fae who tried to take the book after it was defeated) and how Mac won through in the end.

I liked that despite all of the fantasy and horror elements, this was essentially a romance, and overall a good one. I liked these books. Probably not enough to read again -- I'm also terribly jealous of the bookstore, and in some ways of Jericho Barrons, though I definitely would not want his origin story, even with the immortality it brings -- but I certainly liked them, and especially this one for wrapping it up so well.


14. A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman. Completed 9 March.

I've owned this book for more than ten years now, ever since I took a Composition class at San Jose State. This book and author were held up as a model to emulate, and the writing that came out of that endeavor is still some of my favorite work of mine. But we only read pieces of this book, and it has been one of those books that has sat on my shelf, that makes me think, "Right, I wanted to read that," whenever my eyes caught on it -- but usually, my eyes slide right past it and move on to something more new and exciting.

I'm such a new book fanatic. It's almost a mania, really.

But now, finally, since I'm divesting from Vine books in an attempt to read more off of my own shelf, I decided to read this one. As a symbol of my intent to genuinely attempt to empty my shelf. Also as a way to inspire myself as a writer, as that course that brought this book into my home was unquestionably the best writing instruction I have ever had, and been the single largest influence on my writing other than Stephen King. So even though it was dense, and at times dry and a bit hard to read, I read it. And I'm proud of myself for doing so. Now I'll probably get rid of it.

Don't get me wrong; some of the similes and descriptions were awesome and magical in their imagination and precision; some of the long lists and extended paragraphs were remarkable and inspirational as well. And the subject matter was interesting, too; the quantity of information, both trivial and thought-provoking, was just staggering. But it's hard to read that much about a single sense, how it works, and the myriad ways that it has touched our lives and the foundations of our society. Especially ones that don't mean quite as much to me personally, namely taste and smell -- my sniffer being sub-par and my taster not much better thereby. But I am not a sensualist, so the personal connection with this subject matter was somewhat lacking for me. I'm also jealous as hell of the way this woman has managed to live her life: every chapter features multiple personal adventures, from traveling throughout Europe to visiting Turkey and Africa to sailing to Antarctica. I wish I had been able to do these things, and I intend to be able to do them in future. When I have, I might read this book again.

For now, I'm going to enjoy my time reading about my own ability to interpret the world for my brain -- poor gray matter locked inside my skull, tickled by a thousand electrical impulses but touched by nothing -- and admire the poetry in it; I will read more Diane Ackerman, see if I can't find a subject that is as close to my heart as it is to hers and thereby connect more directly with her remarkably open and clear vision of things; and I will move on to something fun.


Unfinished:
Trolls in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome.

I picked this up because I wanted something cute and light; I had it on the shelf because Toni thought it was passable, though definitely not great, and I like stories that include trolls and illustrators, for my own personal reasons. But about 70 pages in, a second terribly lame thing was added to the first lame thing, and when I told Toni how I felt about these two things, she suggested I put the book down. So I did.

The lame things? The first one was that the troll in the title appears on various rampages in Manhattan, and though the damage is real, apparently nobody can see the troll other than the heroine. Well, maybe they can see the troll, because they keep telling the police that the damage was caused by something that sounds like troll -- a trolley, a train, a troop of truants (no shit). The claim is made that they were trying to say what it really was, but couldn't get it out. That's far too precious, and remarkably lame. The second thing, the backbreaker, was the appearance of the male romantic lead (apparently), with his pat explanation of the entire universe of magical beings, which includes the heroine without her knowledge (She's 34.) because she's a Visualizer. Who has apparently been used by an EG. That's Evil Genius. Whom he opposes as a member of DUE, the Department of Unnatural Events, a British form of secret service created by a magic-sympathetic nobleman with so much money that he created a system to keep track of all people with magical abilities, to help them learn how to deal with them and hide them, and also to promote inbreeding amongst them so that they can keep the powers alive. Such as happened with the heroine's parents, who met at the special academy in England where all the kids from her town go, with a paper-thin cover story about sister cities and scholarships. But the heroine never went, and her parents never said anything about this in her 34 years of life, because that would ruin the surprise when she makes a troll appear out of thin air. And the heroine's response to this deus ex machina-logue is, paraphrasing: "He must be crazy. But I'll keep listening, because his eyes are just so dreamy."

Done.

15. The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan. Completed 17 March.

Ha! Now I've finished another series! Also an excellent ending; after all the guff back and forth in the last three books since Luke went bad, I was glad to see Percy and Annabeth work it out, with both of them making the right choices and Luke coming through in the end. Sort of.

I loved the battle for Olympus: I liked how Percy prepared for it (though I want there to be some consequences for the choice he makes after the battle is over; everyone makes out that he has made a serious decision with a terrible downside, but as far as I can see, all he got was some serious battle prowess.) and I liked how he and Nico de Angelis worked it out; I also liked Hades and his wife and mother-in-law, which was a cute scene. I liked how Percy and the campers handled the army of Kronos, and how humans were kept out of it -- at first. I really liked the number of people who came to the rescue, starting with Percy himself; I enjoyed seeing everyone turn into a hero, one after another; seems like a lot of the fantasy books I read feature a bit too much protagonist hero surrounded by enemies and traitors and helpless dependents. Maybe that's because my most recent fantasy reading includes Karen Marie Moning, who has serious trouble with overpowered heroes saving the day every time (Not that I dislike the character of Jericho Barrons, but come on.) and Captain John Carter of Mars, which is somewhat of the epitome of superhero protagonist. At any rate, I liked seeing the whole team effort thing.

I really liked Percy's final choice, to make the gods more humble. I think when I was a kid I would have taken issue with that choice, but that's because he makes a grown-up choice; one that I believe I have learned to agree with. I like life.

That's a good feeling to walk away from a book with.


16. The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien. Completed 20 March.

I find Tolkien daunting. Ironic, I know, but the fact is that the man was a human computer when it came to languages: he could know not only the language, but the older versions of it, and the cultures that made the language and changed it, and how and why those changes were wrought. And then he set out to create a mythology that did exactly the same thing: resulted in a modern version of a language, which he made up, based on older versions of the language, which he made up, and which reflected the cultures and events that brought about those changes in that language -- which, yep, he also made up. That scares me.

But what's worse for me is, it sometimes bores me too. I dearly love The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but I didn't enjoy the Silmarillion. So when this new book, edited by Tolkien's son and based on Tolkien's unfinished work, was published, it put me on the horns of a dilemma: do I read it in hopes of finding it as enjoyable as The Hobbit? Or do I give it a pass, because I expect it to be like The Silmarillion? I read it, of course, though it took me a few years to get around to it, because I owe Tolkien a chance.

So the answer? Somewhere in the middle. The beginning of the book has the same genealogical problems as the Silmarillion: it traces the heritage of the main character back for a few generations and out along a few branches of the family tree, making reference to other stories that I don't remember (especially the Lay of Luthien, which is in that Silmarillion that gave me so much trouble. And is obviously still haunting me.), and lost me within a page or so. Now this reflects the mythologies that Tolkien studied, which were also oral histories and genealogies of the people who told the tales and listened to them; and the constant repetitions of those genealogies would have been very familiar to that audience, like those recap passages you find in modern fantasy series books, which often use the same phrases or even the same two or three pages to remind the reader of what happened before. An old Middle Earther would have had no trouble with this part, but as a dabbler, I could have done without it.

When the story started, I enjoyed it more; some great swashbuckling and battle, and even better descriptions of a world I admire, one that struggles between desire and necessity, as the Elves try to build homes that please them, while at the same time they have to protect themselves from Morgoth and his Orcs. I like the tension between that, since it feels like real life. I liked the main character, Turin son of Hurin, even though his own pride was his fatal flaw; I liked that despite his pride he had a strong sense of pity and compassion, and those kept him human and mostly good, up until the end.

I hated the end. No, I didn't; it was well done and satisfying, especially Turin's last heroic act. But I hated how incredibly sad it was. Again, I know that fits the mythology that Tolkien lived and breathed and was trying to create anew in his books, but I need a little more joy in my books. Joy is in short enough supply in Tolkien's work, and to have this one end so entirely, irredeemably badly, was a little rough on the old soul. Maybe I need to read something cheery. Something funny! Hey, how about

Unfinished:
Anti-Christ: A Satirical End of Days by Matthew Moses.

Oops. Wrong choice. But how is one to know? Toni bought this for me for our Bookiversary, because people on Amazon recommended it highly, especially for those who enjoyed Lamb -- which is pretty much my favorite book of all time. So even if it's not as good as Christopher Moore, how bad could it be? Surely I'd enjoy the book even if it had flaws.

Surely. Except once you take out the flaws, there was not enough left of the book to enjoy.

It starts with the writing, which is awful. Not only is it overwrought, and badly cliched -- the book opens with "The stars shone like luminous islands in the sea of night. Each triumphantly glimmered as an ethereal jewel out of the reach of man, gems of untold wealth that enriched man's thoughts." -- but it also doesn't make sense much of the time. Pick a damn metaphor, would you? And if those gem/islands are out of man's reach, how do they enrich his thoughts? Don't you have to hold a gem to be enriched by it? Don't worry, though, because he moves on to a new version of the stars: "Humanity once thought those strobing specks were the immortalized memorials of their legendary forebears, heroes who had lived lives of epic proportions and whose images were meant to embolden, guide, and inspire those who came after." So not only do the stars inspire us because they are beautiful and out of reach, but because they represent the lives of heroes who also inspire us. He then goes on to claim that science killed that ability of the stars to inspire, because it made the stars "so numerous as to be worthless." He says, "The stars went from immortal legends to finite gas and fire always on the verge of fading out." Which, first off, is not true, and second, contradicts what he said earlier: if the infinite number of stars isn't inspiring, why was the beauty out of man's reach so inspiring before? If a finite, flawed reality with a hint of immortality or perfection -- even if that hint is only illusory -- is depressing rather than inspiring, then what are the heroes of legend? So before I get through the first page, I am confused about where the book is going. That doesn't get any better, by the way.

Once you get past the writing, you notice the editing. Of which there was none. This man might have had an interesting idea, but he has no idea how to use a comma. Or apostrophes. Or the ellipsis. Or the word "hit." Here, a sample. To set the scene, the main character, Matthew, has led a revolt of overweight people, and has now taken the White House and the President prisoner. He is currently demanding that the President lick his shoe, and has a rotund minion (Note the pleasant and generous term the author uses for said minion, who is, really, supposed to be an object of sympathy in the narrative) leaning on the President to enforce his will. When the President tells Matthew, without thinking, that he can't smoke in the Oval Office:

Matthew tilted his head, a little surprised, not believing this man couldn't realize his current position in life. The fat ass looked to Matthew for permission to give Lucas another hit. Matthew shook his head no much to the fat ass' displeasure. "You're day of giving orders is fast approaching an end," Matthew stated, blowing a plume of smoke. "Congress is right now impeaching you and your entire administration and appointing me as the executive in your stead. Of course, though I am so humble, I will accept the offer."

"Congress would never do that," Lucas replied, his face revealing his utter contempt. "Where do you dream up these fantasies?"

"With the right amount of. . ." Matthew smiled at the fat ass then back at Lucas, "diplomacy, Congress will do anything."

Yep. He used the wrong "your," too. That's not the only time he makes a mistake like that.

Once you get past the editing -- and that was a struggle, believe me, especially for an English teacher and writer -- you notice the humor, which is appalling: Matthew is at one point taken to Heaven by two cherubs, who are treated as midgets for a number of cheap laughs, most notably for me when one of the cherubs headbutts Matthew in the groin -- because the angels of God resort first to violence -- the narrator refers to him as that "dastardly dwarf of nut-butting brutality." What? Don't think midget violence is funny? Don't worry; there are two other scenes featuring it within the next chapter or two. Once they get to Heaven, the author really hits his stride. Because, you see, Heaven is segregated. All the angels are conspicuously Aryan. Which would make a fine satirical comment about how Christianity is deeply elitist and therefore almost inherently racist, except the same author makes a crack about Mexicans sneaking over the border into Heaven. That's right: Mexicans. Not even the somewhat neutral "illegal aliens." Mexicans. And he turns that joke into a running gag later on, when Matthew encounters a pair of rednecks in Purgatory who act as coyotes for the Mexicans. Not offensive enough? Well, how about this: God is in a wheelchair, brain dead, because he had a stroke when he tried to destroy the world after Christ was crucified, even though Christ, in this story, wasn't really God's son, just an angel with delusions of grandeur. Nothing like referring to the Almighty as "meals on wheels." That's funny shit. I didn't even get to the scene making fun of fat people, but I'm sure you can imagine how good that is. One definite advantage of my decision not to finish this book is that I never had to read what this guy thinks of women. Other than his depiction of the protagonist's mother, as an overweight germ-phobic hysterical shrew who is, of course, overprotective of her 22-year-old loser of a son. I'm amazed that the hero wasn't betrayed by some heartless bitch who was beautiful but materialistic and didn't see the main character's inner worth. I'm sure that will come up later.

Once you get past the humor (What, you thought I was done?) you get to the cliches. My god, man. Do you really think you are the first to hear that one about the philosophy final that only asked "why," and the student who answered "because" and got an A? Seriously? Do you think you are sharing something new and fresh and amusing with your audience? Well, since we go from there to midget jokes and Mexican immigrant humor, apparently he does. Oh yeah: there's also a massive bronze statue of Jesus in Heaven that sounds a hell of a lot like the Buddy Christ from Dogma. As do the angels grumbling in their bar about their lost privileges as God's chosen. (Though honestly, I like the gag about angels drinking holy water in the bar. That's clever.)

And then, of course, there's the plot. The main character is chosen, apparently at random (I thought it was because of his oh-so-clever final exam, but no -- it was because of a short scene in which he chases a ghost out of his house with a baseball bat. Yeah. Explain that one.) to confront Jesus in Heaven; he decides not to suffer being told what to do, and refuses to lose the one thing he has going for him -- his privacy. That moment is probably the only piece of genuine writing in this book, when the loser protagonist defends his right to privacy. But the hero then goes out and becomes a demogogue, an incredibly successful one, turning the entire country against corporations, against politicians, against the Catholic church, with nothing more than a few impassioned words. Somehow he manages to crack open and end debates that have raged for decades if not centuries, simply by putting the most common arguments into his own words. Now that's some powerful charisma. Despite being the pathetic failure of an anti-hero he supposedly represents in this "satire." (Though that is explained -- kinda -- because the Devil possesses Matthew and speaks through him. It still doesn't explain how the Devil's use of the same old song and dance is suddenly so effective.)

The truth about this book is that the author has no idea what he is doing. He has no idea of what is funny, relying instead on the lowest common denominator of humor -- Chihuahuas, poop jokes, fat jokes, midget jokes, and constant pain and humiliation. What this turns into is a tirade against everything the author doesn't like, voiced through this character, who manages to lead a revolution and overthrow the government -- and, though I didn't finish the book, I assume Heaven and Hell, as well -- through the simple expedient of stating very obvious and poorly worded arguments, things that any thinking person has already considered. Admittedly, he's not wrong, but he takes down the Catholic church by revealing that several priests were guilty of various crimes (including, OF COURSE, child abuse and pornography) and calling it the oldest form of organized crime, the original heartless, abusive corporation. Excuse me? Are you somehow the first to point this out? Is that what makes you so effective, Martin Luther -- I mean, Matthew Ford?

This book is not a satire. It is not a good story. It isn't funny. It's simply the fantasy of a bitter and angry guy, who doesn't actually like people very much, but who wants to believe that if only people would listen to him, he could change the world. I think this is a personal fantasy, rather than just a bad idea for a story to tell, because the author's name is Matthew. Isn't that interesting.

Too bad the book wasn't.


17. The Shack by William Paul Young. Completed 25 March.

Mom gave me this one. I decided to read it because . . . well, I'm not sure why; I was fairly confident I could get through it, as I had the curiosity born of two students who read it and did book projects on it in the last two years, and the recommendation from my mother. But both my mother and my students are often wrong in their book choices -- it is amazing to me that no matter how much I mock and denigrate and castigate a book, one of my students inevitably asks to read it. "This 'biography' of 50 Cent is one of the worst things I've ever read." "Can I borrow that?" "Can I borrow it after him?" "Sure. Then we're going to read Fahrenheit 451, one of the finest novels ever written." "But that's so boring! OMG, FML!"

Anyway, I read through it, and since it came right after the Anti-Christ debacle, I can now say with confidence that the number-one criterion that grants a book readability is -- the author's ability to write. This book is just as absurd and in many ways more annoying than Anti-Christ, but where Matthew Moses cannot write, William Paul Young can. So though I couldn't abide the story, or the argument posed, I enjoyed the writing enough to stick with it through the end.

I had trouble with the story because it goes too far. The main character, Mack, is a GOOD MAN. The child of an abusive alcoholic, he suffered terribly at his father's hands, until he finally snapped at 13 and ran away, after poisoning his father's liquor. He wanders until he is of military age, and then he joins up -- and becomes a pacifist who will never speak of his military experience. Y'know, like Rambo at the beginning of First Blood, Part II. He meets the perfect wife and mother, and they have five perfect children. Then, while camping with three of his perfect children one day, there is a crisis: his son gets trapped underwater when his canoe rolls in the lake. And so the father dives into the water and saves his boy's life -- unfortunately, while he's off doing that, his young daughter is kidnapped. By a serial killer.

Absurd enough yet? Of course not.

So quite naturally, Mack learns to hate God. Because who wouldn't? Until God drops him a note, and invites him up to spend the weekend in the same shack where his daughter was raped, tortured, and murdered. He goes, of course, and he meets God -- who looks like a large black woman and goes by the name Papa. He also meets Jesus, who looks like a Semitic carpenter, and the Holy Ghost, a semi-spooky Asian woman who claims the name Sarayu.

Mack then spends the weekend in perfect rapture, simply amazed by how magnificent is the Lord, and how wonderful he feels while he is in the presence of the Lord, and how admirable is the relationship between the three aspects of the Trinity, how comfortable and true and deep is their love for each other, and their love for him, and his love for them which is instantly as true and deep and comfortable as their love for each other and their love for him and their love for everything. There's a lot of love. Oh, Mack gets mad, and he questions Papa about why his daughter had to die, but really, it's a pro forma anger and confrontation, because all God really has to say is, "But I'm God. You love me." And then it's all better. Because of course God has a plan. Of course Mack's daughter is actually happy to be dead, and forgives anyone and everyone. And hey look, Mack -- there's your abusive father's ghost, and he's really sorry and wants forgiveness! And won't you please forgive the man who murdered your daughter? You will? That's swell: now you may see Christ in his glory, as the King of all Creation, because really, as God says, it's all about Jesus. Nothing else matters so much as Jesus. Jesus is love. Love, love, love.

So he heads home, happy in every way -- and gets hit by a drunk driver that runs a red light. But wait! He was actually hit on the way TO the shack, because that weekend NEVER REALLY HAPPENED. Dun dun duuuuuuuunnnnn. He forgets most of the details of what he saw, at first, but he knows just how wonderful and happy he feels now, and how much better he feels now that he has forgiven everything and everyone, and loves everyone and everything, and knows that God loves us all and Jesus loves us all and we all love Jesus and all we need to do is rest assured in God's love and our love for Jesus and everything will be fine and beloved in the love that goes beyond all love and fills all Creation with loving loveyness.

There's a lot of love in the book. A whole hell of a lot.

But it never actually explains why we have to suffer in order to experience God's love later on. Sure, it gives us the party line: God wants us to have a choice, and Adam's choice to rebel against God is what made the world into the nasty, brutish place it is; but that doesn't really explain why everything is out of joint. That explains why ADAM doesn't live in paradise, and why Adam has to suffer. Not the rest of us. And not the world. It also seems somewhat unfair to me that people have to make a choice without knowing the truth of both sides. Seems to me that if God loves us and wanted us to love him, he would say so. Y'know, in a way we all could hear. I'm sure if I paid enough attention to the voice deep in my heart I would hear God saying he loves me, but I would think a bigass neon sign would make the point more strongly. And I can't think of a single reason why God wouldn't have a bigass neon sign. Why he relies on a book of dubious origin and a billion people full of faith but without a single logical argument. That's not love: that's a fairy tale, a test of a pea in a stack of mattresses. People that love each other say so, and keep on saying it until the other person hears you. Why isn't God outside my house with a boombox playing Peter Gabriel? Is Lloyd Dobler really a better boyfriend than God?

Anyway. It was interesting, it made me understand the Christian argument a bit better (I have not presented it fairly here), but I remain an atheist.


18. Pale Demon by Kim Harrison. Completed 28 March.

The series continues to improve. Ivy is now fading into the distance, Rachel seems to have gotten her love life in hand -- though there are new storm clouds brewing on the horizon, in the form of attractions to two men she REALLY shouldn't let herself be attracted to -- and Jenks is making his peace with being a widower, an unheard of circumstance for short-lived pixies, which he is no longer. Short-lived, that is; he's still a pixy.

The story line was good, though frustrating (as good story lines often are) because Rachel has to allow herself to be manipulated by Trent, so she can get screwed over by the Witch's Council, and then almost kill herself trying to save the demon world from the newest baddest dude on the block. That was a great bad guy -- though I absolutely love the explanation in this book as to why female demons are more powerful than males, and why, therefore, Rachel is more powerful than other witches: because she's a female demon.

I love this theme in these books, this questioning of not only who you are, but what you are. I think it's something more humans should pursue in their own heads, in their own lives. It's a damn fine question, and if there's an answer, it's an important one. So I like that Rachel is seeking it out, and unwilling to compromise with the answer by lying to herself: rather will she turn everything she knows on its head, in order to live truthfully with herself. I admire that, and I like it in the books. Definitely recommending to those who like paranormal with a bit more normal. Not that these books are short of magic, or action, but that isn't really the main purpose, the building of a magical world and the telling of a thrilling tale; these are very human, very philosophical books, that like all good fantasy, uses magic and mayhem to focus on the real issues.


19. In the Company of Ogres by A. Lee Martinez. Completed 7 April.

This one was fun, but not as fun as it should have been. It was a neat concept: the main character, Never Dead Ned, is MUCH more than he seems -- and yes, those capital letters are called for, even though I never do that because I don't like yelling. The company he leads, Ogre Company in a very Black-Company-like mercenary army (clearly Martinez has read his Glen Cook, and good on him for doing it), is amusing for the most part, and has some good characters, but it has some real clunkers, as well. He got too wrapped up in the love triangle aspect, with the two female officers feuding over Never Dead Ned, and feuding with themselves over the fact that they are fighting for the affections of a man that has nothing whatsoever to recommend him as a lover, apart from the fact that he is entirely indifferent to them. Personally, I hated the whole sexist "Treat 'em like dirt and they'll come crawling" theme, though it was played more for laughs than as a commentary on women.

Still: the real draw here should have been the ogres, the ogres as soldiers. When Martinez focused on the ogres, and the goblins and orcs, the book was much more interesting. So maybe a third to a half of the book was definitely worth reading, and most enjoyable, though never as funny as Jim Hines or Robert Aspirin. I continue to look for a really good orc-themed fantasy series, with Jim Hines's Goblin books the frontrunner at present. Martinez's book did have an incredibly kick-ass fight in the end, and I did like the resolution of Never Dead Ned's conflict. Good ending on a decent book.

20. Doc by Mary Doria Russell. Completed 16 April.

This is a beautiful book. This was the kind of book you hope to find: it was good for savoring and good for leaping into, the kind of book that makes you race from page to page, hoping to reach the end and find out what happens, and also turn back a page, re-read that last passage, in order to stretch it out, make it last longer, hoping the end never comes. This is a fine work of art.

Like all fine works of art, it takes time and effort to absorb, so anyone after a fast-paced Western shootout story should look elsewhere. This is definitely a historical novel, in the best sense of the term: incredibly rich detail; a panoramic, all-encompassing story line; a clear focus on the individual lives of the characters -- the way a historical novel should be written, because that's the only way to understand a specific event, a specific figure, in history: by understanding the world where it happened, where he lived. For those interested in the era, interested in history and the actual people who lived through it (the people for whom it was not history but simply day-to-day life) you could not do better than "Doc."

It's no surprise that a historian would look to John Henry "Doc" Holliday; the man is a near-perfect tragic figure, one of the few in America's short, aristocrat-shy history. Born into a genteel Southern family, extraordinarily well-educated, Mr. Holliday was driven to the West by his tuberculosis, seeking an easier climate than his native Georgia offered during its sultry summers. A dentist by training and a gentleman by nature, he became a professional gambler by necessity, and then a murderer by reputation and association. He died miserable, in obscurity, but was resurrected from history's ash heap by the love of his friends. Come on: who wouldn't want to write that book?

Unfortunately for all those other historical novelists out there, it has now been done. Doc Holliday comes to vivid, remarkable life in this book, which combines biography with sociology with history with mystery with drama with romance, and even with a little good-old gunslingin' action -- though as with all honest depictions of the Old West, there's a whole lot less gunslingin' than the movies show, and a whole lot more drinkin'. But because this novel focuses on an educated man, a man with a good heart -- most importantly, it focuses on a man and not on a legend -- it was an inspiring book to me, and I think it would be to any who read it. Mary Doria Russell shows the humanity of these Wild West legends, and that, I think, is what made them worth remembering, and worth writing about: their humanity. Doc Holliday lived life hard, fought it for every second that he had, and every scrap of joy, and of dignity, that he could wrestle from it -- just as Wyatt Earp fought for every moment of peace he could find, every brief apparition of justice he could tear from the brutal world in which he lived -- and their determination to continue that struggle in the face of impossible odds is what has kept their memory alive to this day. But for us, looking back, we can gain much more from seeing past the legends into the actual lives they lived, and that's what this book does for Doc Holliday. And I thank the author, the artist, for it.

The Rest of 2010. A month late.

81. Capital Offense by Michael Hirsh 11/20

Pick:
I don't understand how Wall Street collapsed, nor what, if anything, has been done about it since. I wanted to.

Review:
A friend of mine is currently reading "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's classic novel about the Great Depression. She just reached a place in the book where she started to feel thankful that her life is not like the Joads'; that she has not had to come "acrost in a jalopy," as she put it, having lost everything she owned and all of her family's roots, having watched members of her family die of loss and heartache, having been treated like dirt by everyone she meets as though her circumstances were her own fault, rather than caused by the caprice of the weather and the callous disregard of wealthy men. And then she realized: while her life differs in degree from that of the Okies in the 1930's, it does not differ in essence. It's depressing to realize that the depressing book you're reading is not any bleaker than the life you face when you put the book down.

That's exactly how I felt after reading "Capital Offense" by Michael Hirsh.

This is not a hatchet job; Hirsh is a reporter of long standing, who has covered the Venn diagram of economics and politics for decades. Fully three-quarters of the major players in the book, everyone from senators and cabinet members to Nobel laureate economists, are subjects of personal interviews by the author, who is able to refer to what the person told him directly. This book does not have a political agenda; the Republicans are not blamed unduly, the Democrats are not excused of their culpability -- if anything, the most desperate criticism in the book comes at the end, in reference to Barack Obama's administration and how it has handled Wall Street and the financial markets. While there is certainly blame to be parceled out, it is not done with a purple face and raised neck tendons; there is a genuine attempt to try to understand the choices people made, to give them their due -- or at least the benefit of the doubt -- in recognizing that they were not evil, they were not trying to ruin our economy and thus much of our strength as a political entity and as a nation of people, they made choices that often seemed right, even if they only seemed right when one is wearing the blinders.

The most culpable and responsible party in this fiasco that continues to stretch out like some malignant taffy (or maybe it is the rack and we are the ones stretching) is the zeitgeist. Though Hirsh identifies people who helped to generate it, going back thirty and forty years, it is the aura of invulnerability itself, the idea that permeated Washington throughout the 1980's and 1990's that nothing could go wrong, that any problems were temporary and would fix themselves, that we were living in the Golden Age that would never, ever end: that is why we are where we are. The upsetting part for me, and what should be upsetting for all of us (but, even more heart-wrenchingly and tooth-grindingly, isn't,) is the fact that the problems were not fixed, that they remain. Wall Street is still not fully regulated, and many of the regulations, while important, miss the mark. We had a chance to have the scales torn from our eyes -- but we clung to them, for fear that we would find the abyss staring back at us. Well, it is, and we seem to be walking right off the brink while still floating in the air, buoyed by ignorance, like an entire economic system purchased by a coyote and stamped Acme.

Forgive me for waxing poetic without giving substance. All I've really got is outrage and frustration, and a keyboard to pound upon. The substance is complicated, and well beyond my purview; I'm just an English teacher who reads a lot. To explain it in greater depth is Hirsh's task, and this book does an admirable job of it, though it does at times remain above my own layman's understanding of economics. It's understandable that the thirty-year veteran of economic reporting would not feel the need to explain just what commerical paper is, but I still sort of wish he had. Otherwise I would recommend the book to anyone trying to understand what happened, and why we are still not on solid ground -- and why the bottom seems to be moving farther and farther away, so many miles below us. I'm glad I read the book, even if I am very afraid of what I suspect is the coming fall.


82. Tros by Talbot Mundy 11/23

Pick:
I picked this because of the names. Talbot Mundy, first of all, which was almost worth the price of admission all by itself; and the the hero, whose full title is Tros! of! Samothrace! (Emphasis added. Duh.) Plus he's all piratey and heroic in the pulp Conan vein (Apparently Mundy was a source of inspiration for Robert Howard, among others), and it's set during Caesar's conquest of Britain, which is sweet.

Thoughts:
Unfortunately, the book was not as good as the names. Very purple and overwrought, so much so that at times I couldn't even follow what was happening, and the action didn't follow the most exciting threads. There was a whole lot of buildup and not very much climax. It wasn't terrible, there were some absolutely beautiful descriptions of the natural world around them, and some of the swashbuckling was first rate -- particularly in the scene when Tros, at the helm of his stolen Roman ship, clips through the anchor lines of Caesar's invasion fleet during a storm at night off the shores of England, laughing his mad titan's laugh all the time -- but I have an actual Robert E. Howard book still to read, along with Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I bet both of them will put this one to shame.

Still. Talbot Mundy. Now that's got class.


83. Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book One: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan 11/25

Pick:
I read this one now because I had a bit of a tough time getting through the prose in Tros, and because I wanted to try authors whose other work I might want to purchase when next we are Powells-bound. This seems like a good series, and Toni recommended it after reading, so here we go.

Thoughts:
She was right, as always. This is an excellent book. The biggest problem I had with it was my own burning envy, because oh, how I wish I had thought of this setup. The idea that the Greek gods actually follow the heart of Western civilization, that they represent the moral center of the age, is absolutely brilliant. Such an outstanding setup for taking these obsolete and almost kitschy archetypes and bringing them into the now without being silly. And look at the fantastic stories it makes possible: this one, as excellent as it is, is really only about parentage, about finding out that your real parents are not who you thought they were, and trying to deal with who they actually are. It runs on themes of being noticed, filial respect and paternal pride, and what makes real family, and what you owe people because of your ties to them, whether they are ties of blood or friendship or a debt owed. The plot itself is so simple; there was a theft in an attempt to foment a divine war. This is the same concept as half of the Greek myths I read. And of course, that means that the same concept can come up again and again through an entire series, because nothing is permanently resolved, here: the bad guys were not killed, the good guys were not fully triumphant.

I really liked it, even if it was a bit young and therefore predictable. Hey, they can't all be Harry Potter. I definitely want to buy Book Two.


84. Half Empty by David Rakoff 11/27

Pick:
A book of pessimistic essays? Sign me up!

Review:
Though I had never heard of David Rakoff (A distinction I share with the porn star Violet Blue, and probably the only one such), I loved the concept of the book: a collection of essays exploring and defending the positive aspects of negative thinking. When I got the book and saw the cover, I was overjoyed with schadenfreudey bliss; I particularly like the fisherman waving as he heads for the waterfall, and the shotgun pointed at the cartoon bunny's joy-swelled head.

But in reading the book, I was surprised. Not that the essays focused on negative views of life and the world, nor that they were well-wrought and sardonic and mordantly witty; I expected all of those things from the description and the blurbs. But because they were so sad. I don't think Mr. Rakoff is unique in his wit and ostensible outlook, viewing the world through angst-colored glasses; this has become almost a literary tradition, it seems to me (Though I am, quite proudly, entirely lacking in cache and really have no idea what is popular and trendy. As long as it isn't me, I'm happier not knowing.). It isn't surprising that this urbane and scintillatingly with-it cultural critic knows more about popular culture than I do. Nor is it surprising that he writes so very well; that is, after all, how he makes his living, and has for years. It was certainly not surprising that he had so much material to draw from in writing essays about negative thinking: whether or not you believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there is certainly ample evidence to support that view -- one has almost too many horrors to choose from in composing a nice triplet to end with a Wizard-of-Oz traditional "Oh my!" Al-Qaeda and jihad and war. Recession, depression and taxes. Korea and tyrants and nukes. Obesity, cancer and AIDS.

No: there is almost too much to choose from in selecting ten subjects for as many negative-thinking essays.

What was surprising was the progression of Rakoff's talents. Beginning with the fact that he knows more than I and writes better than I -- again, unsurprising and also welcome, because it makes the reading more entertaining and informative -- there was then an expansion, a stepping up of an order of magnitude, to the impressive clarity of Rakoff's perceptiveness. He knows more than I do; he sees ten times more than he knows -- and is humble enough to recognize that he doesn't understand everything he sees, even as smart as he is. Though he is also human enough to try, sometimes. And then, what makes this book unique in my eyes is this: yet another step up, yet another order of magnitude, is needed to describe the man's empathy. He knows more; he sees far more than he knows -- and he feels even more than he sees. It made the book sad, and that much more honest and interesting and, well, good.

It makes it a bit tougher to envy the man his gifts and his talents. My life is so much easier to live; if this is what it took to write this book, I don't really want it. Though I definitely enjoyed reading it.


Unfinished: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Well, you can't say I didn't try. The last time I opened this book I never made it past the acknowledgements (In my defense, those acknowledgements go on for thirty or more pages). This time I made it about halfway through before I decided that I just wasn't enjoying it. It wasn't as impossible for me to read as several other books of the same oh-so-literary genre have been, but it was just distasteful. The opening chapter had a frightening level of specificity in describing the author's mother dying of cancer, and I thought it was well done, if horrific; but then after that, he just got on my nerves over and over and over again. Honestly, if I believed he would come to an epiphany at some point, I might have gone ahead and finished the book, but he just seemed too warped, too damaged, and was reveling in it a bit too much. So, pass.


85. The Last King by Michael Curtis Ford 12/5

Pick:
Honestly, I'm not sure why I went to this one after reading depressing essays and then a depressing memoir; I wanted to read something all the way through before I turned to the second Percy Jackson, which I'm quite excited about. And this one's been on the shelf for a long time. And holy Christ, am I glad for Undo: I just highlighted and erased this entire list. I'm going to stop now.

Thoughts:
This was a good book, which taught me quite a bit about the Roman empire pre-Caesar. Mithridates, the Last King, was the king of a country called Pontus, somewhere around the Black Sea/Tigris and Euphrates region, like where Turkey or Iran is now. And it was interesting because he was the perfect epitome of a barbarian king, even though he was highly educated and spoke some ungodly number of languages. But he was the perfect barbarian king anyway, because he was enormous and hugely strong and absolutely god-like in his perfection, very much like Conan, and he liked to eat a lot and laugh loud, and he loved to charge into battle and conquer his enemies, and he fell for an incredibly gorgeous woman who turned into a terribly spoiled and scheming wife, and all of this stuff read a lot like a Conan novel.

It was definitely more historical than a Conan novel, though, because Mithridates, even though he was the one person all of Rome feared, and they play that up quite a bit, still he got his ass kicked. A lot. By almost every Roman he encountered. It was funny, almost, because I kept recognizing the names of the Roman generals he went out to do battle with, and every time he did so, even when the odds were hugely in his favor, the Roman won. It started to seem like a coming-of-age requirement for a Roman general was to kick Mithridates's ass in battle; that's when you know you've arrived.

That would have been fine if I was reading from Rome's perspective, but I wasn't. Rome was the bad guy here, and the bad guy won, over and over and over again. Add in the times when Mithridates's own allies, and even his family members, turned on him, and the suffering that comes down on his own people because of his life-long war with Rome, and the book turned depressing.

Though it did make me want to go read Conan.

86. Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Two: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan 12/9

Pick:
I wanted something fast and fun. Boom.

Thoughts:
This was great: I loved the Olympian magical elements, the sea of monsters, the search for Pan and the Cyclops of Odysseian fame. The use of chain stores as nests and breeding grounds for monsters was absolutely brilliant. Tantalus, Hermes and his magical cellphone, the incredibly creepy idea of Kronos in his golden coffin -- outstanding stuff. Great ending, too. Loved this book.


87. Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy 12/16

Pick:
I'm not sure what made me go for this one, either when I bought it or when I decided to read it. I mean, I read it now because I felt I could read something more serious after the Percy Jackson book, and I bought it because the back said that it was one of the original science fiction books and had inspired a number of "the greatest thinkers of our age," like John Dewey. But why this book instead of one of the other inspirational texts I've got laying around ready to hand. Idunno.

Thoughts:
It was damned interesting, although a wee bit hard to follow: it's written like what it is, a 19th century treatise on government and society thinly disguised as a novel. I mean, this is no more a novel than Plato's Republic, which this greatly resembles. The only novelistic element was the slow budding romance, which was sweet and all, but not the point, and it took too bloody long, what with those Victorian sensibilities.

In terms of what Bellamy had to say about society, this is a danged nice Utopia, and almost certainly as unreachable as any of them. (This makes me want to read the Utopia Hunter series.) It's a Socialist paradise, where nobody has any money, everyone works according to their desire and ability, and everyone is rewarded according to their need, rather than their ability to work the system -- and yes, it did make me waver back towards thinking capitalism is a terrible way to run a society, since it encourages competition, which encourages cheating. I'm writing this book up over a month after I read it (It's been a bad month, all around), and I have since read Glenn Beck's book on capitalism and the American economy, and it says quite a lot to me that the only way to make capitalism work in a civilized society is to insist on the imposition of a religious moral code. Not that I think morality can only come from religion, or even can come wholly from religion, but the fact is that capitalism is untenable without chivalry -- and you know what they say about that stuff. I think I may have to turn this into a blog.

So: this was an interesting read, fairly well written and only a little ridiculous in its proposition; it loses something because Bellamy obviously couldn't have predicted our access to media, nor its effects on us (See Fahrenheit 451 -- and notice that Bradbury didn't get it right either, because his media-saturated dystopia has no computers, no internet, no video games, and no Facebook, though all of those fit right into his groove.), and his scheme of distribution seems a bit unlikely to me (Everyone goes to central stores and picks out what they need, and variety is supplied according to demand -- but that implies that demand can perfectly inform supply, and while I'm no economist, I was under the impression that quite a lot of successful business is in planning for what people will demand in the future, and the key to all advertising is building demand for a supply you already have; and in all cases, success hinges largely on being lucky enough to have your predictions pan out, on not having the public move away from demand for your product, like Betamax or HD-DVD [though let's be honest, that one was doomed by its' acronym], so it's a bit hard to swallow that the socialist paradise could solve the issue. Seems more likely that people will not always get what they want, and you have to rely on them being mature enough to handle disappointment and be satisfied with what they do have. And maybe they would. Maybe.), but I like his central message: a man's right to receive the fruits of society's labor is not determined by his ability to contribute to it, but rather his existence as a fellow member of the society. I like the way Bellamy puts it:

"We require of each that he shall make the same effort; that is, we demand of him the best service it is in his power to give."

"And supposing all do the best they can," I answered, "the amount of the product resulting is twice greater from one man than from another."

"Very true," replied Doctor Leete, "but the amount of the resulting product has nothing whatever to do with the question, which is one of desert [That is, "deserving something." Isn't that a nice word for something we don't have a word to name? What would we use, deservingness? Deservitude? Pah.]. Desert is a moral question, and the amount of the product a material quantity. It would be an extraordinary sort of logic which should try to determine a moral question by a material standard. The amount of the effort alone is pertinent to the question of desert. All men who do their best, do the same. A man's endowments, however godlike, merely fix the measure of his duty. The man of great endowments who does not do all he might, though he may do more than a man of small endowments who does his best, is deemed a less deserving worker than the latter, and dies a debtor to his fellows. The Creator set's men's tasks for them by the faculties he gives them; we simply exact their fulfillment."

The objection, of course, is that it's hard to believe that this logic would really inspire someone to do their best when they could shirk; but you see, the whole concept of wanting to shirk and be lazy is one that comes from competition and capitalism. Our society teaches us to seek out the means of getting the most reward for the least effort: some people focus on the reward and become Bill Gates; most people focus on the least effort and become -- my students. But there is no reason to assume that all men are inherently hardwired to be lazy, nor that the material rewards are the best or only means to inspire someone to put out effort. In fact, thinking so is pretty danged insulting.

Yes. Definitely have to make this into a blog. Oh, and no: it wasn't lost on me that the character who explains the perfect future to the time-traveling narrator is named Doctor 1337. Heh. Just goes to show how awesome the idea is.


88. The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines 12/20

Pick:
Bellamy was good, but a bit hard to read, and so I went for something that would be simpler, I hoped. I also knew we would be heading to Powell's before Christmas, and I wanted to know if this was a series worth pursuing.

Thoughts:
It is. It's a lot like the goblin books that Hines wrote, but a little less funny and a little darker -- which is interesting, considering the lightness of the inspiration, here, the fairy tale theme. Of course, Hines, naturally, goes back to the original fairy tales, when Cinderella's stepsisters tried to cut off parts of their feet to make them fit in the glass slipper, and Cinderella sent her birdy friends back to peck out the eyes of her wicked stepmother at the end of the story.

This book picks up at that point: Cinderella has been the crown princess for a few months now, and suddenly there is a problem: her stepsister shows up one day and tries to kill her. She is saved by the timely intervention of her birdy friends, again, but also by the assistance of two other women, who turn out to be Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Unfortunately, the assassination attempt was not the whole problem, nor is the stepsister the only one trying to kill the princess, nor is her death actually the ultimate goal. It turns out there are wheels within wheels here, and the quest to solve the problem leads the three princesses into the land of the Fae, which was extremely interesting. I think my favorite part of this book was how Hines was able to turn fairy tales into real life stories, with real life people; Sleeping Beauty, for instance, has ninja combat skills: perfect balance and agility and strength and reflexes, because she was granted the ability to dance with perfect grace at her birth (Remember the story? Sleeping Beauty was given all kinds of gifts by the fairies who were invited to her baby shower; it was the jealous ones who weren't invited who cursed her to fall asleep before her 16th birthday.), and what is combat but another kind of dance? That was great.

Good story, good characters, one of the best re-imaginings of the old stories that I have read. Certainly a good series to keep up with.


Unfinished: The Ancient Solitary Reign by Martin Hocke

I wanted this book to be about owls. I wanted it to show me something of how they thought, how they acted; I don't know anything about owls, and I think they're cool. And on some level it probably was about owls -- but the owls acted a whole hell of a lot like people. Taken as a story about people who resemble owls, it was indescribably dull: kid grows up and goes to school, learns to question what his parents taught him, learns that THOSE kinds of people that he's been warned about are not so bad, after all. Hoorah. The races of owl were even described to resemble British social classes: the main character, a barn owl, was a well-educated but non-pragmatic type, so maybe an Oxford student; the tawny owl was a toff, with a high-class accent and "Cheerio, old boy" social manners; the little owl was an immigrant, probably a Gypsy or some such --he talked about how immigrants breed rapidly and steal land from the good old families. That story, I've read before.


89. The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart 12/25

Pick:
Same as the Hines book: I have been very interested in checking out the series, and I wanted to try it before we went to Powell's. Of course, since I didn't get to finish it before we went to Powell's, I didn't buy the next book of the series, but hey -- at least I got to read a good book, and finish it on Christmas Day so I could read my Christmas presents.

Thoughts:
This was a fantastic book. Because smart kids save the world. By being smart. They get drafted into an effort to stop a world domination scheme -- one that was actually fairly realistic, which was also very cool -- by a man who spends all of his time reading, and so because of that is a wonderfully brilliant and kind-hearted man who is willing to do whatever he can to save the world from darkness and despair. He gets these kids involved, all of whom have their own particular genius (which was also very cleverly done, and not something you see very often in these yay-for-smart-people kind of stories -- there was a girl who was a practical genius, who could fix things and build things and was athletic. That was cool.), and together they go to an evil school, which in many ways resembled the school where I work, after they were trained briefly in the school where I would like to work -- the place with all the books, and without the stupid competitive drive and segregation into cliques that the school system encourages, or at least does nothing to prevent.

You know, there's probably another blog there, somewhere. Because we do: we encourage cliques and competition and friction between them, and then we make no serious effort to break down the barriers that the divisions create. Think how much better the lives of our students, not to mention their actual social skills rather than the ones we like to pretend that they are learning, would be if we could teach them to break those lines of acceptance and ostracism, and all the rampant stereotyping that bleeds into everything they do.

So there: one of the nice things about this book was the use they made of the other genius girl, the one whose genius was in refusing to simply accept anything she was told, ever. Because the central theme of this book? What makes someone a genius is the love of truth. That is what really sets these kids, and the adults who train and assist them, apart from the general public. It's what protects them from the evil genius's plot (though even that doesn't work perfectly, of course, because danger is real even for geniuses), and it's what ends up saving the day -- and it's how you know the day is saved. Because the truth wins out, in the end.

I loved the book. I want to be the kid -- I'm most like Reynie Muldoon, the boy whose genius is in problem solving and logic, and leadership. Though there's something to be said for my stubborn insistence on questioning everything, and my ability to annoy others, so maybe I'm really like Constance. That's cool, too.) -- and I want to save the world. Though I guess I'll just read the next book, and write me a few blogs. Like I said: what really matters is love of the truth.


90. Side Jobs by Jim Butcher 12/29

Pick: I got this for Christmas. I had to read it.

Thoughts:
I knew there was a reason why I didn't buy all those compilations and collections, even when they had the name of my favorite paranormal author, Jim Butcher, prominently displayed on the cover. Partly it was because I know those compilations generally include one story I love (usually the shortest), two that are all right, and one that I hate (usually the longest), and therefore are rarely worth the time and effort and money. But it turns out the main reason was so that I could read this book, and enjoy every second of it.

Since I had never read these stories before, this was just a collection of new Harry Dresden material for me, and as such it was a gem. I love the Dresden Files with a passion, and these stories were fantastic little vignettes, giving me a whole novel's worth of the element of the Dresden story that has been missing from the last few novels as the magical war has heated up: the detective stories. As much as I enjoy the magical war -- and I do, because Butcher is one of the best action writers I have ever read, and his mystical world is complex and fascinating and unique -- I missed the detective stories, the little things that Harry does to help people, to find things and right the small wrongs that make up large parts of the average person's life. So this book was great: I got to read about Harry getting hit by love spells and stopping magical riots; defending Mac's wonderful beer, and his bar; beating up on lowlifes both human and monstrous, and even protecting LARPers (to which group I proudly once belonged -- and I even played the vampire game Butcher hints at in the story) from an actual Black Court vampire. In a mall.

Though I was a bit saddened by the last story, which was the original novelette written from Karrin Murphy's point of view, and is set after Changes, the most recent full Dresden novel. This story, while it was as good as anything Butcher has written -- and impressive thereby, because this was the first time I've read Butcher writing a female lead character in the first person, and I think he nailed it, capturing not only Murphy's persona but also that of a strong woman. Well, says a male reader, so maybe a grain of salt there. But it still seemed right. -- it was hard to read because it comes on the heels of the terrible event that ended that last book in a vicious cliffhanger, with Harry himself maybe hanging onto the edge of a cliff, and maybe fallen off (not literally). So the characters are worried, and it seems likely that Harry is dead, and there is no resolution of that because we all have to wait for the novel to come out in the spring and continue the Dresden Files. And all I can say is I am sure the writing will be just as fantastic as has been everything I have read by Mr. Butcher, which now includes short fiction along with paranormal fantasy and epic fantasy (Of course I've read the Codex Alera. Haven't you?) novels, and it bloody well better start with Harry being okay. Because I want to read more Dresden. I'm glad I got to read this.

91. The History of Earth: An Illustrated Chronicle of an Evolving Planet by William K. Hartmann and Ron Miller. January 2011.

Pick:
Even though I finished this in January, I had to put it on the 2010 list, since that's when I read the bulk of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was my bathroom reading. I actually got this book at UCSC (It still has the Baytree Bookstore sticker on it) when I took my one science course there; this book was recommended but not required, so I got it, and always meant to read it. I've carted this thing through five moves, over something like 2000 miles, and I finally read it.

Thoughts:
This was great. It was perfectly understandable, nicely illustrated -- though it took me a couple of chapters to start paying attention to the illustrations, because at first I didn't realize that the authors had done all of the painting and most of the photography involved, and there's a lot in this book -- and it gives the entire history of Earth, from the formation of the solar system to the present day, and a few possibilities of what is still to come. I thought it was a tad idealistic, as their solutions for our modern problems (Which was interesting to me because the book was written almost twenty years ago, and yet it lists global warming, nuclear war, overuse of natural resources, and slow death by apathy as three of the great problems we must face, so, y'know, these guys know their shit.) were largely focused on the space program helping us colonize other worlds and start farming asteroids. I agree that this would be a wonderful solution, but I don't know if it will ever happen now. We've got holy wars to fight, and I'm not sure that our culture will survive and still be advancing afterwards. Man, that's a scary thought. Not that I think the East-West culture wars will wipe out humanity, but I think it highly likely we will end up in something like a Dark Age. I suppose I should take heart in the idea that the Dark Age was not dark for every culture. And also in the perspective this book endorses, which points out that the Earth is more than four billion years old, so what's a few centuries, give or take? Maybe the second Renaissance will be even better than the first.

Coolest thing about this book: it told me about the millions of years before the rise of DNA, when it is possible that RNA lifeforms could have existed. And they might have come from space, from asteroids crashing to Earth with organic molecules on them. And then there is the possibility that there were millions of years of evolution and growth of invertebrate organisms, which were apparently wiped out in an even larger extinction event than the one that killed the dinosaurs, or might have been out-evolved by vertebrates; but in either case, this took millions of years. No, I'm mixing this up: there might have been RNA life, or some other entirely different form of life, in the time before fossils that we can find existed -- the oldest we've found is something like 2.8 billion years old, which leaves almost 2 billion years before that. Then after the rise of DNA and vertebrate life, there was some massive extinction event called the Great Dying at the end of the Permian epoch (era? I dunno) 250 million years ago, which allowed the rise of the dinosaurs after that, until the extinction at 65 million years ago, which allowed the rise of mammals, and then of us. And remembering that first, we have only existed for four million years and look at what we've become and we've done to this planet in that time, and also that any fossil evidence from the earliest times of life would most likely have been destroyed by continental drift and asteroid impacts, if the animals were even solid enough (They might have had no bones, right? Jellyfish and such?) to leave fossils at all, you know what this means? It means there are two different eras when entire classes of creatures could have evolved, spread across the planet, done who knows what kinds of things, built anything up to and including a civilization more advanced than ours, and then died out. It could have happened twice before anything that we can find evidence of.

It means Cthulhu. Big sea-based organism, so alien it would drive us mad, had millions and millions of years to evolve and build who knows what kind of society, which might have been wiped out in some terrible cataclysm and would have left almost no evidence that we could still find and recognize except for perhaps some ruins under the sea somewhere . . . where he lies dreaming.



The End

The reading this year wasn't bad, but I had trouble keeping up with this list, especially once school started in the fall. I'm writing this wrap-up a full month into 2011, because it took me almost that long to review the last five or six books; I still have an unwritten 2011 book in front of me. A Vine book, too. I probably need to rethink the manner and means by which I keep track of my books, here. Maybe go back and re-read some of these.

One thing about this year was that it surprised me, quite often. I was surprised by Vine books, by Glenn Beck, by L.A. Meyer, by the ending of Changes, by the fact that I liked the book about me as a hamster -- it was a shocking year in books for me. Maybe that's why I had trouble writing them up; I'm still reeling. Well, maybe not. I should also note that this was a surprisingly great year for the series: between Jacky Faber and Harry Dresden, with installments from Temeraire and of course the Wheel of Time, this was a fine year for books with numbers on them. I can't say for sure which series I'm looking forward to continuing second most. (Come on. Most is easy: that would be the CONCLUSION OF THE WHEEL OF TIME!!!! That's the only time you'll see me use more than one exclamation point in earnest. Hope you enjoyed it.) At any rate, here are the overall winners.

Best Book of the Year:Once again, I can't turn away from the Wheel of Time. I loved Towers of Midnight; once again it made me tear up, though this one did it more strongly than The Gathering Storm. Once again I am amazed by Robert Jordan and thankful for Brandon Sanderson. And I have no doubt that the best book of 2011 will come out in the late fall/early winter, and it will be called A Memory of Light.

Best Pirate Book:
Black Bartlemy's Treasure, of course!

Worst Book I Finished:
Beat the Reaper

Worst Vine Book:
Blood Ninja

Best Vine Book:
Running the Books

Most Inspiring:
Michael Pollan's two books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma

Least Inspiring:
Simplexity

Most Depressing:
The Road

Most Laugh-Inducing:
Either Bite Me or the Jeeves trio. Maybe Beat the Reaper just for its absurd awfulness.

Worst Letdown:The second half of The Vampire Diaries series. Oy.

Finished. At last.