Some of these were so good, they made the others look like puke on a page.

52. Dog On It by Spencer Quinn 7/9 (Woot! 52!)

Pick:
We wanted to give this book to my mother-in-law, so I had to read it first to make sure it was acceptable. Since it was my pick for her Book of the Month Club and all.

Thoughts:
This was very cute. The story is that Bernie Small is a private eye, and his best friend and partner, Chet, is a dog. Chet is the narrator, and the hero, of course. It was interesting because Chet is not a superdog; this is not The Unscratchables, with its anthropomorphic animal hero. Chet's just a dog. He's a good dog, strong and capable and fiercely loyal to his person, but no more and no less.

It's an interesting mystery because Chet finds out what's going on much sooner than Bernie does, and the course of the book is Bernie trying to figure out what Chet already knows but can't tell him; we the readers are curious because while Chet knows who's behind all of it, we have no idea why -- human motivations not being Chet's forte. I liked Bernie a lot, because I have trouble accepting that there are still such things as private eyes and they still get work in this day and age, but he seemed realistic to me, and it was fun to read it from the perspective of a dog who was also a partner in a PI firm and loved his job. It was great reading Chet: he barked, he sniffed, he ate anything he could and chewed up everything else; he was not cognizant of his own injuries and such, which I thought was realistic, since my own dog doesn't seem to feel pain, much of the time. So in a scene when Chet is stuck without water for a day or more, he describes simply that his tongue swells up and he feels tired; he doesn't do the human thing of pining for water and wailing about his impending death. Just his tongue swells up and he wants to sleep. I liked that, too: the urge to sleep came on him all of a sudden, in the middle of whatever he was doing, and he was likely to just lie down and snooze. I think it's a good system.

It was a very nice book, and well done. I plan to read the next one.


53. Under the Jolly Roger by L.A. Meyer 7/12

Pick:
Yarrrr! Bloody Jack Faber turns pirate! I had to read this one to get to my birthday present, which is the next book in this series.

Thoughts:
This one was great, though since I'm coming to expect that from Jacky Faber, it was less surprisingly great than the last one -- which was also more impressive because it was not in any way nautical. In this book, Jacky heads back to England, having been betrayed, she thinks, by her best friend at school, Amy Trevelyne. Jacky goes straight to Jaimy's house, where she is entirely spurned by Jaimy's mother, who definitely does not feel this little guttersnipe-turned-ship's-boy-turned-charm-school-dropout is good enough for her son -- a feeling that is only increased by the new book that has become all the rage, which tells the story of Bloody Jack Mary Faber -- the first novel in the series, having been written by Amy Trevelyne based on Jacky's stories during their school days together. It was a nice conceit, to have the books actually coming out during the story. Anyway, Jacky takes it too hard, and goes home to Cheapside; she eventually learns of an opportunity to catch Jaimy and she goes for it -- but sees him kissing another girl and runs away.

Where she runs into a press gang, and being dressed as a boy at the time (in order to sneak up on Jaimy), she gets pressed and dragged off to a Royal Navy ship on duty on the blockade of Napoleon's France. She announces she's a girl -- at which point the captain, who is a remarkably appalling scumbag, decides he's been given a golden opportunity for some depraved ravishing on his own ship, and decides to keep her on board. Though at her request, he does give her the midshipman's rank she earned before, in the first book.

From there, a series of events (All quite realistic, by the way, which was impressive), Jacky ends up taking command of the ship and capturing several smugglers as prizes. One of these she keeps for herself, and turns into a privateer on her own, as the startup of Faber Shipping, Worldwide, her only dream now that she thinks Jaimy is lost to her. Things go well for a while -- until she finds out that the British government has found out that she kept a ship she captured while commanding a British naval vessel, which therefore belonged to the Crown, and she is named a pirate for real, since they retroactively revoke her permission to capture enemy ships. Which sucks. She gets caught, and goes to the Battle of Trafalgar, and takes part in that -- and is then released by her captors in gratitude for her brave assistance during the battle, and their prior admiration for her.

It was a great plot, and a rollicking good pirate story, and Bloody Jack. I loved it.

54. Simplexity by Jeffrey Kluger 7/13

Pick:
I loved the title, and the concept. I actually started reading this before I got the Vine books, Temeraire and Darren Shan; I put it down to read those, and then got caught up in others, like the dog mystery for Jo and my new Bloody Jack book. But I figured hey, why not finish it?

Thoughts:
The main insight here was not terribly insightful. Here's the best part of the book: if you draw an arc of simplicity to complexity, with one end being the most simple possible system and the other end being the most complex possible system, the best system is generally in the middle, halfway between simple and complex. There you go. Now you know everything there is to know about simplexity.

The book touted the new science of studying simplicity and complexity, which sounds real interesting, but the science is, I think, a bit too new to have really reached any major breakthroughs, so there isn't that much to say about it. Basically each chapter talked about a specific artifact of our culture -- modern medicine, how babies learn to speak, economic meltdowns like the Great Depression -- and tried to go through how the causes and forces that run through this thing are either simple, complex, or both, and it isn't always what you'd expect. It was interesting, but the problem is, without some large concept to tie it together, it just seemed like a long list of "Isn't that neato?" kind of observations. Look! The mind of a baby learning to speak is incredibly complex; isn't that neato? Look: the forces that control Wall Street are actually quite simple, largely based on the wisdom, or the madness, of crowds (Which I already read a MUCH better book on); isn't that neato? There wasn't a whole lot of there, there.

But there were some interesting parts, and I liked the analysis of some of his subjects, so it was worth reading. A businessperson might find it more useful, since that was largely his goal, to show how your business plan should try to identify the simple and the complex parts of your intended industry, and treat them both appropriately. For me, for instance, that simplexity arc comes down to this: since I am a writer, the complex side is to do with different offerings I could create and send out, different fields I could try to break into. The shotgun approach, then, at the complex side of the arc. On the simple side of the arc is my single strongest writing approach; I could focus only on that and just keep honing it until I have it just right. The advantage of the complex side is that it gives me the most chances to be noticed, the most opportunities to reach potential readers, who have different tastes and needs; the simple side limits my opportunities to reach my audience, since only the people who want to read modern dark fantasy novels will be within my grasp. On the other hand, if I branch out into short stories and editorials and blogs and reviews and greeting cards and graphic novels and everything else under the sun, I won't be able to hone my craft very much, and my work, while it will reach more people, will not be as good, and won't inspire the ones I reach -- or is less likely to, at least. So the best situation for me would be halfway in between: focusing on a single novel, which gets most of my energy, but also doing several small writing projects in between and around the novel writing, in order to get my words out there and catch people's attention.

But see, I already knew that without knowing it. And that's the problem with this book, and why I say it lacks insight. But it wasn't bad.



55. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home by Joss Whedon & Georges Jeanty 7/14

Pick:
We had to get this because it's Buffy! By Joss Whedon! And we love graphic novels, too! I read it now because Toni pointed out that I should, so we could know whether this series is something we want to pursue, before we head back to Powell's where we could buy more -- or not.

Thoughts:
We'll buy more. This is the show, all the best parts of it, in comic book form. The art is great, excellent demons and nice combat, and the characters look like themselves without being parodies or caricatures. The coolest part was that it sounded like them -- naturally, since it was written by the same guy. That was great fun, though it could sometimes be hard to follow; there are some Buffy-esque conversational tidbits that you really don't get the first time around, which I had forgotten from the show since we've now watched the whole series three or four times.

The tough part about this is that Buffy tends toward the cliffhanger. Whedon always has several story lines going on at the same time, and one of his favorite things to do with a new season is drop us into the middle of them -- look at the third season of Buffy, when we come upon Buffy in the middle of her life as an LA waitress, and the guys back home have been slaying without her, and Willow has been learning to become a witch; and then in short order, Angel comes back from Hell and Faith appears, and then we find out the Mayor is actually a bad guy and has been for more than a century -- all things that were working behind the scenes without us knowing about them. That's Joss Whedon, and that's this comic. But the solution here is to do what we did with the TV show: now that we have cleverly waited until the entire run is out, we just have to get the whole thing and read it all several times, so that we can understand all of the stories and not have to wait anxiously for our answers. Simple. Perfect.

56. In the Belly of the Bloodhound by L. A. Meyer 7/16

Pick:
My birthday book! Bloody Jack! Yay!

Thoughts:
So in this one, Jacky goes back to school in Boston, since she is now wanted in England as a pirate. The story takes a BIG twist when the girls head out on a field trip for the day, to one of the many small islands out in Boston harbor (And reading these books makes me want to go back to Boston and really explore, like I never did while I lived there. Sigh. Stupid missed opportunities. Stupid childhood stupidity.), and they get kidnapped by slavers, who intend to sell them as harem girls in Egypt -- that's the title, because The Bloodhound is the ship that carries them. The story is the girls trying to effect an escape before they reach their destination. It's a hell of a book, again, with a very different plot line and emphasis from the past ones -- and yet, it is still Jacky being resourceful and determined and brave and figuring out how to handle the seemingly impossible situation she finds herself in. And I loved this book, too. I want to read more -- but now I fear the end of the series! Or at least the end of the currently published books. Man, I hate when I hit that wall.

Fantastic birthday book. Loved it.


Unfinished: A Traveler's History of Russia, Third Edition by Peter Neville

Pick & Thoughts:
I got this from the public library, because I'm thinking of doing a unit next school year based on Communist Russia and I don't know jack about it. Besides, Toni wanted to do photo research, and I went along for the ride. I like riding in the car.

I had to put this book down, after getting a little more than halfway through it, because: the author treated the history of the country as a history of the rulers, which was okay but not a great perspective; he seemed to assume that I already knew much of the rest of European history, which I don't -- he'd make passing reference to something that I know nothing about like I had already done my dissertation on the Franco-Prussian war -- and it was getting boring and repetitive. Okay, Russia had a lot of fucked-up rulers; I got it. Can I hear something about how the peasants, the regular folk lived, since that came to play such a major role in the course of Russia's evolution? Guess not.

And then there were the typos, of which there were many -- and normally I don't care too much about typos, except this was a third edition. Shouldn't those have been weeded out by now? And then the biggest problem came when the author made a snide reference to Lincoln freeing the slaves -- pointing out that Lincoln wasn't so very abolitiony, since he only freed the slaves in the Southern states, which people forget (snide snide). Fine and good, except he said that Lincoln freed the slaves with the Gettysburg Address.

Which made me lose faith in his expertise as an historian. So: away with the dull book from the stupid man, and we'll look for something a little more to the point.