Reading for July -- and the Switch

July

33. Jim Butcher: Fool Moon
34. Christopher Moore: Fool
35. Daniel Wallace: Friends Like These
36. Kim Harrison: For a Few Demons More

Started A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle; stopped because of the Sign.

Fool Moon

Pick:
I wanted to grab up my next Vine choice, since it sounds really interesting, but the last one was a wee bit of a slog, so I wanted something more fun, more casual, that I wouldn't have to worry terribly about reviewing -- because that last review was a real bitch to get right. So I went for the Simon R. Green Nightside book I just picked up -- I have three to read now, books 5-7 in the series -- but I wanted to check the ending of the previous book, which I read last year, because I remembered being pissed at the last line of book #4. I read it again, and then realized I didn't remember the background leading up to that line, so I looked back through the book a little. And realized I remembered almost nothing about the plot, even though it revealed quite a few things about the main character. And I said, "I'm going to have to read this again." At which point the wind wailed past the house, and the trees groaned like tortured souls; the sky turned black and I heard scrabbling in the wall like rats or locusts or the fingernails of the damned. And Toni turned to me with shocked eyes and said, "No! You can't! Dusty, don't do it -- you'll doom us all! NOOOOOOOO!!!!? and then ran from the room.

And I said, "Okay, fine, I won't read these then. Geez." And all the noises and portents stopped.

Then Toni, calm and serene once again, said, "Why don't you read a Harry Dresden book instead?"

So that's what I did.

True story.

Story:
Fool Moon might be the only Dresden book that isn't better than the one before it -- though that judgment will have to wait until I finish the series to become codified and definitive. It's a good book, but it's too damned busy.

There's that great scene near the beginning, when Harry and Murphy realize they are dealing with werewolves, and Harry asks Bob about them. It's great because Bob gives a wonderful answer, one that shows Butcher's imagination: there are several different kinds of werewolves. There are werewolves, who learn to transform themselves into wolves with magic; there are Hexenwulfs (Nice German usage, there), which are people who gain a magical talisman of some kind that allows them to transform into wolves; there are lycanthropes, which are people with the souls of beasts, who don't transform at all, but who can commit acts that might seem wolfish and who have some of the attributes of classic werewolves -- rapid healing, pack mentality, lose control around the full moon -- but are actually more like Viking berserkers; then there is the loup-garou, the most dangerous kind of werewolf, which is someone who has been cursed to turn into a wolf-like monster every full moon.

That's a great answer, which makes the old werewolf trope seem far more interesting and realistic than having werewolves adhere to the stereotypes. Butcher does the same thing with vampires, giving them three different breeds that each take on some, but not all, of the standard vampire attributes. The problem with the book is, every single kind of werewolf makes an appearance, along with one other kind that Bob doesn't mention: a wolf who has the mystical ability to transform into a human. Which is also damned clever.

But the sheer variety of werewolves is too much. It's like Butcher had a checklist and he made sure to hit every one: werewolves, Hexenwulfs, lycanthropes, loup-garou. Check, check, and double-check. It made it so there were too many bad guys -- especially since Gentleman Johnny Marcone is also involved -- too much danger, and it muddied up the waters and made it hard to enjoy. It also meant that things that would have made a great villain/enemy -- specifically the lycanthrope street gang -- get shorted, because there's not enough room in the story to really deal with them. The same goes for the werewolves, the Alphas, though at least they come back in subsequent books. The novel would have been better if he could have found a way to stick with the Hexenwulfs and the loup-garou.


Thoughts:
On the plus side, it's still a fun book and a good read. It was a nice break from Vine books, and I think I'll read the next one soon.


Fool

Pick:
Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday from Toni here's the newest book by your favorite author, Happy Birthday to Me!

And many moooooooooooooore!

Was it serendipity that I finished the Jim Butcher book on the morning of my birthday, when Toni gave me the newest book by Christopher Moore -- a story based on one of my all-time favorite literary characters, the Fool from King Lear? Or was it destiny? The will of the gods? Nah.
"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

Story:
The book is brilliant, of course. The writing is hilarious -- right up there with Lamb and Dirty Job, much better than You Suck; this is one of Moore's best -- and the story is the right kind of multi-layered satire he does so well when he finds something he can sink his teeth into.

He said in his Author's note that he wanted to write about a jester because he loves writing rascals; when he asked his agent if he should do any random Fool or the Fool from Lear, she said, "Definitely Lear." I'm sure any fool would have worked fine, but I love that this one was based on the Shakespeare play. I won't say that Moore is anywhere near as good a writer as the Bard, but he has many of the same strengths: he can write a funny scene that has a touching undercurrent; he can switch from personal to universal from sentence to sentence and make them both work; he truly knows how to make a story his own. This is King Lear, but it's also not -- because it's Christopher Moore's King Lear, not William Shakespeare's.

Pocket is a wonderful character. I loved that we heard his entire life story, in flashback and out of order, because it all connects: his childhood and upbringing do much to explain the way he is and the way the other characters treat him; in addition, the way that Pocket's life has been intertwined with Lear's since before his birth gives a great view of the two sides of Lear: he is a cruel tyrant who deserves what he gets, and he is also a foolish old man who makes what would be an innocent mistake in anyone younger, but is either insanity or stupidity in him. I always felt that way about Shakespeare's Lear, and the character of Pocket gives a new lens to see Lear through, without changing the basic character of the king.

The other characters have been largely replaced with Moore's own: the women are classic Moore, smarter, wiser, more mature and much sexier than the men, except for the villainesses, who are still smarter than most of the men, but are cold and self-serving as well. The men are generally bumbling children, except for Pocket, and Kent, the one loyal man in the kingdom. Drool is a hilarious character, an excellent sidekick for Pocket, and Edmund makes a decent villain, though he could use some more fleshing out. The real villain, though, is Lear, and he is perfectly done -- and interestingly enough, he's not played humorously, even in this comic novel. Lear remains the same tragic, flawed fool he is in Shakespeare's play; this is much of what creates the multiple layers in the book, with the humor coming from the general cast, the serious notes from Lear and Cordelia, and Pocket working as the bridge between the two.

Exactly what a Fool should be.

Thoughts:
Great book. I loved it, I loved that it was the story of Lear with the right hero and the right ending. I do want to read Lear again, I think -- and I know I'll want to read this a second time, and a third, and probably more after that.



Friends Like These

Pick:
The last Vine Voice book I've got right now -- one apparently got lost in the mail. But I picked this one because I liked the idea, and because I looked up the author on Amazon UK and found that he has five bestselling books in Britain, including Yes Man (which the movie is based on). I love the concept, and I love that this guy started his own cult -- I'm going to have to look for that book now, too.

Amazon Review:

I'm sure that after reading this book, most people will want to imitate the author, and try to reconnect with old friends. I don't. I want to be Danny Wallace's friend, and have him come find me. Hopefully wearing a giant bunny head and a t-shirt with my face on it. And we'll say, "Potaaaatooooo!"

Wallace makes an excellent case for reconnecting with childhood friends. He has twelve that he seeks out, and though he does not have a joyous reunion with each and every one of them, he does have just such a reunion with most -- and the ones that don't work out quite so well are still a source of valuable insight. If I may simply list adjectives: the whole story is funny, poignant, and sweet, and heart-warming and thought-provoking as well. In fact, it is hard to say what is the most inspiring and fascinating part of this book: it could be the boundless optimism that informs both Wallace's actions and his writing; it could be the humor, which is simply wonderful -- there are many moments that made me smile, chortle, and even laugh out loud (a rarity when I read), but I think my favorite is Wallace's impression of a ten-year-old British boy's image of America. Apparently we all have guns, say things like "Hold the rye!" and use "a$$" in every sentence; the example given is the insult, "A$$ off!" Which I'm now going to start saying, of course. But the most fascinating part of the book could also be the insight into growing up and being a man. It is never preachy or artificial; it feels very much like a peek into someone else's mind as he goes through the watershed moment when he decides that he is ready to be a grownup, that he will not abandon his childish ways, but is ready to stop clinging to them. It's very sweet, and thoughtful, and, yes, inspiring.

The book is also a fantastic reminiscence about the 1980's and early 1990's, although the difference between a British boy's experience of youth and pop culture and my own American memories made it a little less than perfect, for me. But still: I remember the first time I heard Michael Jackson's music (It was "Billie Jean," in my case -- and I thought that light-up sidewalk was totally cool), and I remember being obsessed with "Ghostbusters," and I remember the Atari 2600 era and the rise of Nintendo, so there was a lot for me in this book. Even more than popular culture, though, the book is simply a tour through childhood and friendship, and those memories are universal. Anyone who has been a child, who had those short-lived but perfect friendships, with people who then disappeared from your life, should read this book. Anyone who worries about growing up, either too quickly or not quickly enough, should read this book. And really, anyone who likes a sweet, funny trip through the life of a bright, sensitive, quirky person -- you should read it, too.


Thoughts:
It didn't really make me want to track down my old friends. Partly because I have already looked up some of my old friends (Shoutout to Hotpants!), partly because I was never as social or as friend-oriented as this man seems to be. But it did make me want to reminisce with my old friends, to try to rebuild the memories of myself and of them at that age, and it gave me a clue (or maybe even an answer) to the question I've always had about memories: I don't recall very many specifics about my own childhood, and so many other people seem to remember more about their own lives than I know about my own. Maybe the details, the real specifics, need to be remembered through collaborators.

I also wondered, after reading this, why I didn't have the same crisis of confidence that Danny Wallace has just before his 30th birthday. Almost every person in the book has the same sort of issue with growing up and looking back at that same age, but I didn't. But then I remembered: I turned 30 in 2004. Which was the year I got married, after watching my wife go through more than a year of agonizing pain culminating in major abdominal surgery, and also the year we moved from California to Oregon, after our house in Escondido flooded when the pipes burst. My 29th year, when Wallace goes through his quest, was also when the 2003 San Diego wildfires happened, with fifty-foot-high flames within half a mile of my house. So maybe I was a little distracted.


For a Few Demons More

Pick:
Wanted to get back into my beloved fantasy books after reading a memoir, and I want to get through this series and finish reading the new one. Only one more book left to re-read.

Story:
This one has a strong story. Rachel has an incredibly powerful and turbulent artifact, and everybody comes after it, and her. Newt is the first to appear, and she shows Rachel (and the readers) that demons are much more than we might have thought, that many of the things we think they can't do, are simply things they don't do -- and Newt does them. After Rachel manages to get out of that pickle, with the help of Minias -- an interesting character, but I don't like that they played up Rachel's attraction to him. I know, she's attracted to dangerous men, but this is not a man, this is a demon: the association with Al and Newt should be enough to cool her ardor before the thought even crosses her mind. Is anybody really that much ruled by their gonads?

Oh, wait. Rachel wants to find a blood balance with Ivy, and even though she has not an inkling of homosexuality, she decides in this one that maybe a gay relationship, y'know, wouldn't be all bad. So apparently Rachel is completely ruled by her id, by her desire for complete and total pleasure. She's totally a Sim with the pleasure aspiration -- which would explain why she can be exasperating, just like Sims with the pleasure aspiration.

Anyway, there's the storyline with Trent's wedding, which is a hoot, especially the way it wraps up with Rachel coming to the wedding on a city bus, and not for the expected reasons; I'm extremely happy with how the Piscary storyline wraps up, but not for the events with Kisten. It annoys me that Kisten is so absent from this book, even with the explanation for it. I sort of think Harrison didn't know what to do with the relationship between Rachel and Kisten, because Rachel is not supposed to be seriously involved -- pleasure, not commitment -- but Kisten is too perfect for her in too many ways, just because of the way the character was written. So I wonder if she went this way with it to get out of the corner she wrote herself into. The mystery will be solved in the new book, when I get to that one -- so we'll just wait for that.

Thoughts:
This one was better than the last, except I don't like Rachel's confusion from kissing Ivy -- I think her sexuality should be pretty straightforward, since she is old enough and experienced enough, and adventurous enough, to know if she has interest in women, and I don't think any kiss no matter how good can overcome one's natural inclinations -- and I'm not happy with the Kisten story yet. Though reading this when I know the ending showed me that Harrison did an excellent job of writing Rachel's mental block concerning what happened.




When it's time to change, then it's time to change!

Going to a new system here. My goal now is to read all of the unread books I currently own, before I go out and buy any more. Exceptions will include the Wheel of Time, new installments on favorite series, maybe a graphic novel or two. I will also continue the re-reads I started on Butcher and Harrison, leading up to the new books.

But from here, I won't be numbering from the beginning of the year. I will be numbering from the Sign, the day my bookshelf collapsed under the weight of the books that I kept accumulating faster than I could read them -- a habit I always criticized my mother for, when she did the same with newspapers that she would save to look through, which ended up in six-foot piles of moldering yellow fire hazard. Well, I'm not going to do the same with my books. I'm going to read what I've got before I get more, and I'm going to get rid of all of the ones I don't finish. I am going to include the unfinished ones in the count, because now I'm trying to count just how many unread books I bought before I did this. But for the sake of my sanity and in order to not overcomplicate this, I'm going to keep the total for the year count in parentheses with the ones I finish.

So:

1. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Unfinished)


Pick:
The story sounded interesting when I picked this one up, and it was very popular when it was new, so I've always wanted to read it. I've had it for probably two years without touching it until now because it is a massive tome: 800 pages in hardback, small print. I picked it first because it was the heaviest book on the shelf.

Story:
Too heavy. Too slow. 200 pages in four or five days, and I hadn't gotten to the main story line yet. I looked at the dust jacket again, and the story still sounded interesting, but the description of the book called it "exquisitely detailed" and "magisterial." Yeah. Sounds riveting, doesn't it? Enough already.

Thoughts:
The author was too self- indulgent. I think of long backstories for my characters, too -- but they stay in my notes, where they belong. The stuff that gets into the book is the stuff that is necessary for the story I'm telling, not a cycle of stories like a complete mythology of a time and a place. She picked scenes to include as if she was creating an entire world, but the story line is just a story line. Or maybe the problem is that the place she is creating is just too fucking boring all by itself -- high society 19th century England not being the hotbed of action-packed excitement. A whole lot of visiting and etiquette, fashion and frippery. This thing made the Silmarillion seem like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

2. Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye 7/21 (37)

Pick:
I stopped reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell because it was too dense and slow and boring, so I wanted to go for something easy and fun and light. Hey, how about a book about where bad kids go when they die?

Story:
Milton and Marlo Fauster. Milton because John Milton wrote Paradise Lost about Lucifer's fall from Heaven, Marlo because Christopher Marlowe wrote a famous version of Johann Goethe's Faust, about a man who sells his soul to the devil; Faustus because of same. These are cheesy names. They are not good names. They are not good because a large number of people wouldn't get the references, and cheesy because the people who do get the references don't think these names are clever. Anyone who does think these names are clever had it ruined when the author included a small ferret named Lucky as the pet of Milton, and who had Lucky wear a collar that had a small set of dice hanging from it, and who had Lucky lose that collar solely so that he could have Milton post a sign that said, "Milton's Pair of Dice: Lost."

That is a bad pun. It isn't clever, it's totally labored, and it isn't funny. It also repeats the same joke made by choosing this kid's name. And that's the best example I can give of this book.

The concept is wonderful. The adventure story isn't too bad, really, though there's some things that make no sense whatsoever, and there's far too much time spent on poop. But the writing is not good, and the humor is terrible: dull, cliche, lame, reliant on gross-outs that aren't too terribly gross and puns and references as irritating as the names of the two main characters and Lucky's collar.

Another example: the idea here is that these two kids die, and because they are bad kids, they get darned to Heck, a piece of Limbo a step short of Purgatory, where bad kids go to pay for their sins. Actually, only Marlo is a bad kid; Milton gets dragged down with her because she made him her unknowing, unwilling accomplice. Beggar the fact that even the Old Testament God wouldn't have damned the kid for that, it happens. And we could live with that -- except Marlo thinks it's funny, and Milton is vaguely annoyed with her for a page before he forgets about it. No, I don;'t think so. If my sibling got me killed (Also Marlo's fault, largely) and sent to an afterlife of torture, I wouldn't think it was funny, and I wouldn't just let it go. Which makes these characters unrealistic, and since we are already suspending our disbelief for the sake of accepting the existence of Heck, there's very little left in this book that we can believe in, now that we've lost both the setting and the characters. Oh, and the plot doesn't work either, but I don't want to give that away. Anyway, the pun I was going to describe is the name of the demon in charge of Heck, which is ostensibly a school (though that makes no sense and isn't well handled in the book, either), and thus she is the principal. Her name is Bea "Elsa" Bubb. Get it? Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, one of the chief lieutenants of Hell or another name for Satan himself, depending on your source? Well, if you didn't get it, don't worry -- the full name, Bea "Elsa" Bubb, is repeated throughout the novel. I must have been forced to read that awkward phrase fifty times. Rarely Principal Bubb, never Elsa; over and over again, Bea "Elsa" Bubb. A joke that wasn't that good the first time and was annoying every time after that, repeated fifty times in a two-hundred page book. I felt like I was in Heck. And I wanted out.

Thoughts:
As Toni said, so I repeat: this is a great idea, I just wish someone else had written it, because this guy sucks. We'll try reading the second installment and see if he has taken any writing classes in the meantime.


3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon 7/23 (38)

Pick:
After a pair of clunkers, I had to read something good. So I went for a book that I was sure would be well-written; luckily for me, this time I was right.

Story:
Christopher John Francis Boone hates metaphors, because they are a kind of lie. He doesn't like lies or people who tell them. So for his sake, I will try to refrain from reporting anything about this book but the facts.

Christopher is special. It is never spelled out in the novel, but I believe he is autistic. His symptoms and behaviors match that diagnosis, to the best of my knowledge. I do not know if he has Asperger's Syndrome or one of the other autism spectrum disorders that have been recently described, because I do not know very much about autism. I do not believe that autism has increased in frequency lately; I think the diagnosis is more common now than it used to be, but the syndrome does not occur in a greater percentage of the population than it ever has. That is my opinion. It is also a tangent, because it is not the main purpose of this writing.

Christopher's neighbor had a dog named Wellington. Wellington was murdered, stabbed with a garden fork. Christopher discovered the body. Because Christopher admires policemen and Sherlock Holmes, and because he likes dogs more than people in most cases, Christopher decides to investigate the dog's killing. In the course of his investigation, he discovers many things other than who killed Wellington (He also discovers who killed Wellington.). Some of the things he discovers are very surprising, because they are not expected. Some of them are very sad, because the things that happen make Christopher very upset, and that made me upset when I read this book, because I liked Christopher. It made me feel sad for him. Some of the things that Christopher discovers are not so sad, and some turn out to be very happy. I should say that things that happen make me happy, because the events themselves are not happy or sad, they are simply a series of occurrences.

It is a very fun book to read, and a very good look at an unusual mind. I enjoyed it very much.

Thoughts:
It's not easy to write like that and make it come out right, and I'm sure I screwed it up. But Mark Haddon didn't, so I really did like this book. I even liked the maths. Though I hated both of Christopher's parents, the big idiots. I liked Siobhan, though -- but what really matters is, I really liked Christopher.


** The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison (re-read) (39)

Pick:
Last one before I read the new book, which I'm excited about -- and I have to get off the TBR shelf. I also want to finish this series and get it out of the way, and move on to other books I want to read. Oh yeah: and I do like Rachel and Jenks and Al and Ceri and Quen -- but not Trent, the big dipstick -- and I wanted to read about all of them again.

Story:
I wrote this up just last year, so I don't have a lot to add. It was easier to follow having the rest of the series fresh in my mind; I remember finding the Kisten subplot a little annoying in this one because I didn't like how everything that Rachel and Ivy did revolved around Kisten's death. I know how much it affects your life when somebody close to you dies (especially today) but the problem with this one is that they don't make any progress. They don't decide to deal with it, they don't come to terms with it, and while Rachel recovers one vague memory -- and finds out that she probably doesn't want to try the spell that will bring back other memories (Pandora Charm -- good name) -- and Ivy tries to investigate throughout the book, it doesn't go anywhere. At the end of the book we're as much in the dark as to what happened to Kisten, and what they will do about it, as we were at the beginning. It does make sense to me this way, because this book deals with all the other loose ends: the elves get what they want, Rachel has (presumably) come to a final settlement with Al, and we find out what seems to be the final solution to the puzzle of witches and demons and Rachel's blood disease. Now that all that's handled, I know from Toni that the next book deals with Kisten's death, which is completely resolved by the end. But in the process of dealing with this stuff, the Kisten stuff kept coming up over and over and over again, and it made me irritated with their grief. Not a good feeling.

Thoughts:
I did like this one more than the two before it; I hate the one with the almighty Piscary doing anything he wants, with absolutely no repercussions. I thought Rynn Cormel's appearance here was interesting; it was good to find out the limitation on undead vampires -- glad to know they actually have a limitation -- and I do like their need for love and inability to create it. That makes sense. But otherwise, the vampires are still way overpowered here. Ah, well. These things seem to get dealt with, after all. I wonder: after she's whacked Piscary, dealt with Kisten's killer and come to terms with Al, who's going to be the major villain?

Newt, anyone?


** School of Fear by Gitty Daneshvari 7/31 (39)

Pick:
Vine choice; I liked the cover and the concept. Short and simple after a long read.

Amazon review:
I picked this book out because I liked the cover art (That's right -- I judge books by their covers. What's it to ya?) and I decided to read it because I very much liked the concept: I thought a lot could be done with the idea of getting a group of children to get over their fears. I was hoping to see some basic psychoanalysis, some exploration of where phobias come from, and some depictions of various ways to get over them. I was hoping that, since this is a children's/YA book, the exploration of phobias and their treatments would be basic enough for me to understand, and also fictionalized and imaginative enough to keep me interested.

Unfortunately, what the author seemed to want to do was show, over and over and over again, how strange and quirky someone can be when he or she has a severe phobia and lives in an imagined world. Two-thirds of this book was descriptions of the characters' quirks, their strange behavior and appearance and obsessions based on their pathologies; unfortunately, each character is fairly flat and simplified, and so the descriptions of their eccentricities become very repetitive, very fast. The worst part is that when the phobias were insufficient to make the characters wacky enough, they were simply given wacky and eccentric traits, just because.

There are eight main characters if you count the dog (and I do). Four of them are the kids with their phobias: Madeleine is afraid of bugs, Lulu is claustrophobic, Garrison is afraid of drowning, and Theo is afraid of death. Then there are the three adults in charge of the School of Fear: Mrs. Wellington, the headmistress; Schmidty, her handyman and major domo; and Munchauser, her lawyer. Mrs. Wellington's beloved bulldog, Macaroni, is the most likable of all of these, mainly because he's just a dog who eats too much. With the rest of them, it got extremely tiresome to read about Madeleine's constant overuse of bug spray, and Garrison's copious sweating (inserted presumably because he could not freak out about large bodies of water at all times), and Lulu's annoying sarcasm and eye-rolling (Again, her claustrophobia is not general enough for her to be dealing with that all the time, so instead she says "Whatever" in almost every conversation. and yes, that is like many teenagers, but these are not realistic characters, and if you want to include one example of verisimilitude -- why that one? Whatever.). The worst, though, were Theo and Mrs. Wellington: Theo because he is made obnoxious in every way, whiny and weak and also precocious and very, very precious. He's a 17th century fop reduced in height and given a morbid fascination with death, and he is the most vocal and therefore the central linchpin of the phobic students. And all he does is whine, whine, whine.

The reason Mrs. Wellington was equally obnoxious as a character is that she stood in my mind for everything wrong with the School of Fear itself. Because she was obsessed with beauty pageants. Not fear, not dealing with fear, not teaching children, not even the money she is paid for her services: beauty pageants. And Casu Fragizu -- maggot cheese -- which she loves so much that she insists that every piece of food she eats be flavored with maggot cheese. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either, but there's that wackiness for the sake of wackiness. She calls the kids "contestants," and makes every piece of advice connect to being a beauty queen. She wears prodigious amounts of makeup, yet she allows Schmidty to put it on her for no good reason other than a vague joke about the old man's poor eyesight, and because it makes Mrs. Wellington quirkier. You'd think a woman obsessed with her own beauty, and a lifetime of beauty pageant experience, would wear makeup well, but apparently she's too quirky. Munchauser suffers the same fate: he is shown in the beginning of the book as the scariest, most ruthless lawyer imaginable -- it is he who keeps the School of Fear secret, by threatening legal action against anyone who whispers a word of it in public. But when he appears, he is a destitute compulsive gambler who talks about nothing but betting and trying to wheedle his way into Mrs. Wellington's fortune.

Oh, and then there's Abernathy. Mrs. Wellington's sole failure, the one child she could not make better (Apparently psychoanalysis with a beauty pageant theme couldn't reach this one child. All the others, though -- works perfectly.). That's all I can say about him, because even though he appears twice in the book and is talked about several times in very ominous tones, there is nothing else that happens concerning him. He's her failure. That's it.

So much time is spent on the characters that the plot suffers; there's a weak twist at the end, but the resolution of the phobias is a thorough letdown. Really the most interesting part of the book was that every chapter starts with the official name of a phobia, and after reading this book, I'm glad to know that I have hydrophobia and mottephobia. And that's all I'm glad about.

After all of that, I must add that some people will probably think the characters are funny, and in that case, they will probably like the book, because the characters are almost the only thing in it. So if you like reading about wacky characters in wacky situations, maybe you'll enjoy this one more than I did.

Thoughts:
Yeah, it was crap. First Vine book I didn't like. Had to happen, I guess.


4. Bigfoot: I Not Dead by Graham Roumieu 7/31 (40)

Pick:
I wanted something simple and mindless to read, because yesterday was a very hard day.

Story:
This book is a sort of comic strip: every two-page spread is a single stand-alone bit, combining art and writing to show a vignette about Bigfoot. Bigfoot is a savage man-animal, who has become a celebrity; the humor of the book is in the combination of animal traits and Hollywood sellout values. Bigfoot advises other forest beasts not to give their work away for free, because he regrets now the video of him "shaking his junk" on the internet from his youth; he also gives us the inside scoop on the other animals of the forest, because Bigfoot knows all the dirt -- apparently Danny, the Eastern Gray Squirrel, is a fuckwit. There's not an actual plot, just a collection of Bigfoot's musings and advice and memories. But of all the celebrity memoirs that get published every year, this is probably the only one I'll ever read -- and I have not doubt that it's the cream of the crop.


Thoughts:
It's pretty damn funny, though there are some poop jokes that are pretty dumb and some very uncomfortable off-color images -- I have no idea why the songbird Bigfoot interviews for his Action News segment has a large human penis, but it does. Hey, it probably seemed funny at the time. My favorite part? The off-Broadway musical based on Bigfoot's life. The wolverine neighbor was funny, too. And really, Bigfoot gives some good advice. My favorite piece of advice is this:
"Well, if want truth, Bigfoot have bad days too. Not always feel like rainbow and sparkle inside. When feeling blue always find good belly laugh and beat something to death brighten day. Just pick weakest in pack, stalk mercilessly, catch and bash all me blues into they face. Think, not so much helpless victim; rather, Moist Towelette For The Soul.
(Note: no eat thing after therapy kill, it now be full of evil spirit. Evil spirit taste like artificial watermelon. Nobody likes this.)"

The Rest of June (And a few hours of July)

I dunno why I started the count over; I think I remembered all of the books I've read that I missed a proper write-up for, so I've gone back to what should be the correct total number. The Magicians is #32 for the year. Here's the last four for June, including the one I finished today, the first of July. Hey, I read most of it in June.

A Fistful of Charms
by Kim Harrison

Pick:
Wanted to knock another book off my TBR list, wanted to read something a little sweeter than all the horrible mangled bloody death of Anita Blake. Maybe not the best choice. Heh

Story:
Toni says this is her least favorite book in the series, and I can see why. Rachel gets pretty damned annoying, pretty damned fast. The opening scene, when she gets jumped by the Weres because she is David's Alpha, starts off the annoyance, though the Weres are the annoying part of that one. What the hell is their problem? Why can't David do what he wants? Why do they have to take it out on Rachel? Smug bastards. From there we go to Rachel and Kisten, and Rachel is immediately annoying because she teases Kisten by mixing their scents; more of that whole need-danger-for-sexy-feeling thing of Rachel's, combined with her unconditional demand that everyone around her have all of the willpower she apparently doesn't have, so they can take up the slack and keep her safe from her own stupidity. Then it's Jenks being pissy over the whole Trent-elf-secret thing. Then it's Rachel freaking out about the smut on her soul from twisting the curses for herself and Jenks.

Then the book is good for a while. I like the part when Jenks is learning how to be big, when they rescue Jax and find his new kitty cat, and when they go after the Weres on the island and Rachel wins the fight against their Alpha.

But then Ivy shows up. Which is fine at first, until she and Rachel fool around with Rachel's blood. That scene, and the aftermath, are just totally obnoxious. But not as obnoxious as DeLavine (Whose name I hate, because it reminds me too much of Laverne and Shirley, and that just isn't intimidating and vampire-y) with his arrogant attempt to claim Rachel simply because he's more powerful than Ivy. You know, I understand that the undead vampires are utterly inhuman because they are dead, and they are also very powerful. But nobody can get away with being that in-your-face obnoxious, not and expect to live a thousand years. Not when you're unconscious and trapped inside during the day. None of these fuckers would be alive, because all of their underlings would have turned on them. Like Piscary -- who also has a terrible and non-intimidating name -- and how much he fucks with Ivy. Tell me somebody wouldn't have staked his undead ass. So on one level, it's good, because clearly the characters that are supposed to bother me do so quite successfully. On another level, I hate those goddamn vampires and I want them all dead. Which doesn't fit well with Ivy and Kisten being sympathetic characters. Anyway, then Rachel starts whining about killing Peter (and this is after a good amount of whining about taking Brimstone even though it's more medicine than drug and she needs it if she's going to share blood), the living vampire who has agreed to take Nick's place in the fake accident, even though it was his choice to do this and it isn't freaking up to her, and screw all that "You have so much to live for!" jazz. This coming from a young, healthy, independent woman in a loving relationship with very dear friends. Yeah, YOU'VE got plenty to live for. Doesn't mean Peter does, ya twit.

But then I like the death hoax and I like when Jenks comes back to the firm. So it ended okay.

Thoughts:
I may skip this one next time I read through all of these. Probably why I wrote so much.



Sandman Slim
by Richard Kadrey

Pick:
Vine Voice choice, picked because it sounded badass.

Amazon Review:
Sandman Slim is metal. By that I mean: he is equal parts destructive rage, self-loathing melancholy, stubborn stick-it-to-the-man rebellion -- always willing to fight despite the futility of it, just to spit out a tooth and see blood on his knuckles -- and ironic amused nihilism. It wasn't always the most pleasant book to read, but Judas Priest, it was METTULL.

First impression: the writing is brilliant. The ideas are fantastic, original and intriguing and yet close enough to known mythology/religion/fantasy concepts to be tangible. Slim is a former magician named Stark who was sent to Hell where he becomes an arena fighter for the amusement of the damned. He survives, which nobody expected, and so graduates from gladiator to goon: he goes to work for Azazel, one of Lucifer's generals, killing Azazel's enemies for him. Azazel gives him the best tool an assassin could have: the key to the Room of Thirteen Doors, which can open to anywhere in the universe that Stark needs to go. Stark eventually turns on his master, moving from hellhound to loose cannon, and he escapes from what he calls Downtown, going to an even worse place -- Los Angeles. There he begins work on his own pet project: the murder of the people who sent him to Hell, and killed his lost love. And all of that is background.

Second impression: the characters are generally excellent, particularly the bit players. Stark has one friend still around, an alchemist named Vidocq, and he meets a few more, including Carlos, his new favorite bartender, and Allegra, his employee and supernatural intern. The villains are not so interesting, though Stark's unique perspective makes enemies out of those who should be allies and vice-versa; but the main bad guys, the true enemies that Stark spends the book hunting, are a bit of a letdown. They're either too bad or not bad enough. But the reason for that is:

Third impression: the story is stuck in a bit of limbo. On one level, it seemed the author was trying to trying to begin a series, and so some things happen to lay down a foundation for an ongoing story; on another level, the author tried to make this book a full-speed head-on train wreck of an action scene. So at times the book moved slowly, establishing Stark's character and motives, giving him time to ponder things and explore the world around him and his place in it -- and at times he was going from fight to fight, each time against bigger and badder monsters, until the final fight scene takes place (figuratively) on the field called Armageddon. The problem with this is that the two levels didn't mesh: the enemies and the specific problem are too big, and the characters' lives are too small. Either level would have worked just fine, because both are done well, but it was hard to reconcile Stark driving around smoking and eating donuts, getting crushes on every punk rock girl he sees (Hey, he's been in Hell for eleven years), with the end of the world. The resolution, which does leave room for a sequel, can't help but be an anti-climax.

Final impression: Great idea, good characters, great writing -- okay story. If this becomes a series and Sandman Slim finds his niche, watch out.

Thoughts:
Like I said: stuck between two different kinds of book, occasionally annoying to read, but generally pretty good. It wraps up really well apart from the anti-climax with Stark's main enemy. The fight scenes are excellent, especially the last one. The author really should have kept it small -- I keep thinking of the first Harry Dresden book, which introduces all of these large elements and enemies, the White Council, Johnny Marcone, and so forth -- but only resolves the conflict with this one little guy, the Shadowman, and solves one problem of Dresden's, the Doom of Damocles. To build a good setup for a series, you have to keep it small in the first book. Sandman Slim doesn't.


Dead and Gone
by Charlaine Harris

Pick:
I needed Sookie. I love these books, and it's the new one and we've had it for like a month and I hadn't read it yet. Of course, I still haven't read the new Rachel Morgan or the new Harry Dresden, and I have a hundred other books to read, not counting all my new Vine Voice books with their fast turnaround time. Don't care. Wanted Sookie.

Story:
Wow, this one got pretty damned bleak. I mean, you have Arlene finally leaving the bar because of her racism; you've got a crucifixion; you've got three important characters dying and one at death's door, and you've got the main character being horribly, brutally tortured -- and now, methinks, brought right to the edge of being a vampire. That comment at the end makes me think that if Sookie dies, she won't stay dead for long.

I like that the Weres are out; I look forward to seeing how it works from here. I like that Sookie has to deal with her growing renown, though I fear for her ability to keep her small happy life. I like that her little cousin is starting to need her -- I love that he told his father's girlfriend that he knew she didn't really like him, and she should stop picturing his daddy without any clothes on -- and I'm really looking forward to that storyline picking up in the next book. I like the revelation we got about Sookie's past, and I like how the Faerie stuff gets resolved in this book. I wonder how much of this book's action was the author's reaction to the criticism from the last book about the Were war fizzling out with a minimum of violence. Because this book had all the violence you could need. Though I'm sure that people will now complain about that. And even though he pisses me off -- stupid high-handed vampire with his little knife ceremony! -- I'm actually very glad that Sookie is moving forward with Eric. Quinn needs to get over it and move on. Yeah, I understand that Sookie's the best -- but she doesn't want you, dude. Find somebody else. Pouting and begging? Not going to win fair maiden's heart.

Thoughts:
Yay Sookie!


The Magicians
by Lev Grossman

Pick:
Amazon Vine book, picked at the same time as Sandman Slim. I read this one second because it was more daunting, but I read it now because I want to knock off my Vine choices -- I need to have 75% of them reviewed before I can order more, so the more I review, the more new things I can pick off of the newsletters, and after I picked these two books it turns out that you can also pick incredibly cool electronics and such, stuff like digital cameras and MP3 players, but I couldn't because I already had two books waiting to review and only two done. So now I will have reviewed four Vine books, and I've got two more to go -- and then I'll be able to pick three items, because even if I have two waiting, I'll have reviewed six out of eight, and when the new newsletter comes, I'll be able to pick. So I want to get through these. Plus this one still sounds very interesting.

Amazon Review:
Stop thinking this is a fantasy book. I know, I know, it's called The Magicians, the plot synopsis references all three of the most famous fantasy series and describes a handful of familiar fantasy tropes, including the school of magic and the fairy tale land come to actual life. But forget all of that. I have read more fantasy books than I can remember -- I'm named for a character in perhaps the most famous fantasy series of all time -- and I'm telling you: The Magicians is not a fantasy.

It has fantastic elements, yes. There is magic; there is a school for magic, where the characters learn to cast spells, using hand gestures and arcane language and strange mystical components -- Ziploc bag full of mutton fat, anyone? -- and there is a voyage from this world to another, a land of naiads and fauns and magical speaking animals, gods and demons, kings and queens, quests and wishes. But this book is something very different from the usual fantasy novel: in The Magicians, Lev Grossman has done something unusual, and remarkable, perhaps even unique: this is a grown-up fantasy. This book is to fantasy what The Grapes of Wrath is to travel books, what The Metamorphosis is to self-help: so much more depressing and visceral and funny and horrifying, and genuine, and fascinating, and hard to read and therefore valuable, that it doesn't belong in the same category despite sharing some central traits. The setting is imagined, and there are supernatural things that happen, but make no mistake: this is a serious novel.

Where most fantasy books provide an escape from our reality, this book does not: the characters are too close to plain old humanity, flawed, contradictory, foolish and foolhardy, to stand in as idealized versions of ourselves. In point of fact, the moral of this book is that escape is not only impossible, but dangerous and harmful to attempt. The hero, Quentin Coldwater, attempts to escape every serious situation he faces, and every time, he ends up worse off than he would have been if he had just been able to deal with it, honestly and sincerely. But his response to his worsened circumstances is to try to escape again -- with predictable results. Every step Quentin takes is the wrong one, and every step sinks him deeper and deeper into a quagmire. The book gets hard to read: not because the writing is anything less than excellent, as it is top notch from first page to last, but because the urge to reach into the page and slap, shake, and eventually throttle the main character becomes overwhelming. But that desire, that feeling, should be familiar to every adult who has thought back on his or her life, and shook his or her head, thinking, "Why did I do that? How could I be that stupid?" That desire to smack Quentin is no different from the desire to smack our younger selves.

The real triumph of this book, however, is that it is not only a serious novel, despite what I have been saying. Grossman is able to describe a world of wonder and imagination, and populate it with characters who are utterly unworthy of the magic all around them, who appreciate nothing, who completely flub their great chance -- just like I would have done if I lived through this experience, just as most of us do with our great chances in our real, mundane, unfantastic lives, which are also as full of wonder as any dreamed by a teller of tales. And because the characters are so real, so easy to relate to, it makes the fantasy seem just as real -- which makes the real world just as fantastic. Brakebills reminded me of my own college experience, and yet it is a magical place. Fillory is indeed a fairy tale land come to life in this book, and I found myself wishing that I could believe I would have handled Fillory better than Quentin does -- but knowing that I would have done almost precisely the same things, made the same choices and the same mistakes.

I won't say that this is a great book, on par with Of Mice and Men and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, but I will say that it is closer to those than it is to The Hobbit or the Xanth books. If you are a fan of literature, of thinking about your reading, then you must get this book, especially if you enjoy fantasy. If you are just looking for an escape, look elsewhere -- because this is not a fantasy. Or at least, it isn't only a fantasy. It's a wonder.

Thoughts:
I actually started to despise Quentin, and the reason is quite clear: I made many of the same choices in my own life, for many of the same reasons, and with many of the same results. Up until the point when there was a situation that Quentin got wrong, that I got right: because I knew it when I met the woman of my dreams, and I made sure I never screwed it up. I wanted that to be one of a hundred things that Quentin gets wrong that I got right, or that I would have gotten right if I were in the same situation, but it was maybe the only thing. Stupid kid. Stupid book, making me think about stuff, think about myself and my life and my shortcomings. Stupid brilliant author. Oh, one funny note: I'm reading this, and I'm thinking it's a fabulous idea and the writing is really wonderful (this was before it got annoying, of course), and at first I was thinking, Dammit, why can't I write like that? Then I looked on the back of the book: Lev Grossman is a senior editor and the chief book critic for Time magazine, and the man holds degrees in comparative literature from Yale AND Harvard.

Then I thought, Oh. That's why I can't write like that.

It's been a while

This is to make up for, and explain, the lack of a post since April 4. Here's what I have for the months of April and May, and part of June; the rest of June -- which is shaping up to be the best reading month so far this year -- will come at the end of the month, as before.

Booklist 2009 (After The Fall)

Our computer melted, and destroyed our hard drive and everything we had saved. Including the books I had been writing up, though I confess I was weeks behind when the whole thing went kerplooey. Toni suffered much worse than I, since mine were online. But here's my attempt to reconstruct what I had before, and to take the thread back up now that the new computer is installed and I'm ready to get rolling again.


Back Before the Fall:
(These are the ones that I meant to write up but hadn't -- other than the Amazon reviews. This is the best I could do.)


The Good, the Bad, and the Undead by Kim Harrison

I liked the book, I love Algaliarept, and Jenks, and Trent and his cronies. This time through I like Ivy more, and Rachel a little bit less -- I like the way she pouts, but she does it a little too much, and I still have trouble relating to the danger-loving adrenaline junkie thing. Makes me feel like she's just stupid, and that's no good.

Tales of Terror from the Black Freighter by Chris Priestly

Great kid's book of scary stories. Really creepy. I reviewed it on Amazon.

When Skateboards Will Be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Best thing about the book is the guy's name. The rest of it was fair-to-cruddy. Reviewed this one, too, though it made everyone hate me.

American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent

Love the title and the concept, but the book was a little overly concerned with the origin of the term nerd and the development of the popular image of same. I wanted more sociology and history, more analysis of famous nerds. But has some great insights into nerdishness, and made me reminisce about my own nerdy childhood. And my nerdy teenage years. Young adulthood, too -- oh yeah, and every other part of the last 34 (almost 35) years. I dug it, overall.

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

I had a student who was reading this leave it in my class after a Philosophy Club meeting; I've always wondered about Bukowski's writing, since he's such a cult icon in the literature world, so, after the student recommended it highly, I gave it a shot. And the end result: Bukowski was indeed a truly wonderful writer, but holy shit: what a depressing book. I think this is another one I can check off my lifetime list, and call it good.



After the Fall:

1. Kim Harrison: Every Which Way But Dead
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson's Essays
3. Carrie Vaughn: Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
4. Vivian Vande Velde: Stolen
5. Jamila Gavin: See No Evil
6. Julia Gregson: East of the Sun
7. Charlaine Harris: From Dead to Worse
8. Dale Peck: Sprout
9. Laurell K. Hamilton: Skin Trade

I will try to get back to my old method of analyzing the books, but for now, it's early, and I want to play Sims. So:

Every Which Way But Dead
I like this one, because I like the character of Lee and how everything turns out. I find Ceri fascinating as well, and Kisten's okay in this one. I still have trouble with the vampires: too much strength, not enough detractions apart from being really, really, whiny and self-absorbed, and Ivy's still a pain in the ass. I didn't like David, what with all his judging of Rachel. But I love the ending.

Emerson's Essays
Yeah: by the time I finished this, I felt like I had run an intellectual marathon, and the last ten miles I had two broken ankles. Way too hard to actually follow everything Emerson said. But it helped when the introduction talked about how Emerson is not meant to be grasped as a whole, the his real genius was at the level of the sentence, and so you need to sift through looking for the gems. There were gems in all of the essays, and I plan to go back and read them again, with more depth. Just not all of them. And I'm glad I read it.


Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
This was a nice one. I thought she did an excellent job getting Kitty out of her comfort zone and yet still keeping the character the same; I liked the bad guys, particularly the ones who weren't so bad -- Ben's bounty hunter friends and the "king" of Las Vegas. I thought the Babylonian thing was cool, especially when they managed to take out so many of the weres who served Tiamat -- but somebody just stepped up to take their place and continue it on. Shades of the Long Game. I like that these are getting deeper and more serious in some ways, and yet still Kitty is a talk show host who does a pretty goofy show, really, and who has a somewhat troubled relationship with her now-husband, who she maybe doesn't know all that well. These are good books.



Stolen by Vivian Vande Velde

Pick:
Jaime asked me to give a quick read to a pair of little YA books she had just finished herself; sadly, since I am still not in heavy reading mode, those two quick little books took me, mm, three weeks? Maybe only two and a half. I went for this one first because it has the more interesting cover, by which I judged the book.

Story:
Stolen is about a girl who wakes up running through the woods, being chased by dogs. She "wakes up" because she has no memory, none at all -- she remembers running through the woods, being chased by dogs. She is treed and lightly mauled by the dogs, but is rescued by their owner, who hears them barking wildly -- as excited as if they had tracked down quarry that had long eluded them. The man, a farmer named Browley, takes the girl home so his wife, Avis, can treat her wounds. There the girl meets their granddaughter, Ravyn, and her dog, Hercules Turnip -- and the only reason I included their names is so I could write that one, it's so good.

The family does not know the girl, but they take her in, hoping that her amnesia will be temporary and she will remember her name and where she came from, and why she was running through empty woods near a village where she does not live. Once word of the girl reaches town, there seems to be an answer: Mady and her husband Frayne had lost their daughter Isabelle six years before, when the witch who lived in the woods apparently stole her. Isabelle would be the same age as this girl is now, so Mady comes to see -- and is overjoyed to find that her daughter is returned at last!

Maybe. Despite Mady's assurances, her face and voice, and the name Isabelle, and the reminiscences she showers on the girl, do not spark a single memory from her. But since Mady seems so sure, the girl goes home with her, hoping that seeing the farmhouse where she may have been raised will ring a bell.

That doesn't do it either, though the situation quickly raises suspicions once the girl meets Mady's oldest daughter, the spoiled and self-centered Honey, and Mady's aunt, the wealthy and cantankerous Isabelle -- for whom the girl, if she is indeed the stolen daughter, was named. But Mady coaches the girl before she meets the aunt, telling her fond memories of the missing Isabelle's childhood so she can react as if she remembers for herself. It becomes clear that Mady tried very hard to place her daughter to become Aunt Isabelle's heir, and despite differences in appearance and the continued lack of true memories, she is determined to put this girl right back in Isabelle's place.

And as it turns out, she succeeds, though not in a way she had ever imagined.

Thoughts:
It's a nice little book, with an outstanding twist at the end. I expected a surprise, but never the actual solution, which comes complete with several surprises. There is a tease in the first chapter of the book that led me down the wrong path, as the author intended, and that was very nicely resolved in the end. I didn't think there was enough comeuppance for the villains, but justice is served, nonetheless -- and how can you go wrong when there's a dog named Hercules Turnip? It was a fast but satisfying read.



See No Evil by Jamila Gavin

Pick:
This was the second of the books Jaime asked me to glance over. This one was tougher to get through, because it sucked more.

Story:
Everybody knows the classic surprise princess story, the one about the girl who dreams that she is a princess, with a fairy tale life, whose real parents are loving and wonderful people who will whisk her away from the terror and squalor of her present meager circumstances and give her everything she ever wanted -- and in the end, it turns out that reality is just as she had dreamed it. But what if the story went the other way? What if a girl was a princess, with a fairy tale life, complete with swimming pools and movie stars and ponies, maids and chauffeurs and personal chefs and everything she could ever want, including two parents who are so sweet and loving that no child could ever be happier? And what if it turned out that the reality was something rather different, and far more horrible, than the girl ever imagined?

That would make a good story. And if that was the only story told in See No Evil, it would be a great book. Where the book focuses on that story, it is a nice one: Jamila Gavin writes it well, giving a realistic and touching portrait of the princess-who-is-not, Nettie Roberts; Nettie is sympathetic and genuine, and a lovely character in an interesting and poignant story. But that story is somewhat hard to read, because Gavin apparently didn't feel that telling one good story was enough.

This book also tells the story of a young girl, isolated by wealth and privilege, who has no friends, until a tutor comes to educate her, and the two of them bond, quickly and completely -- and then the tutor vanishes, without a reason, without a trace, without a goodbye. Nettie is despondent, and desperately wishes for an explanation -- especially when she sees someone who looks like her missing tutor, and her mother lies about what happened to her, and Nettie finds a hidden clue in her tutor's former rooms.

It also tells the story of a young girl who has no friends, isolated by wealth and privilege, until she meets the Boy: a young man, whom she had thought to be a ghost, who sneaks through the hidden passages and doorways of her palatial home, exploring the world that he only touches upon from his and his father's basement apartment: his father is the night doorman for the lonely girl's father, and the boy knows a secret that the girl must hear -- but his father has taught him that in order to survive, they must follow the rule of the three monkeys: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.

It also tells the story of a young girl who loves to dance, and her aged and failing great-aunt, who was once the greatest ballet dancer in the world: beloved and sought after by wealthy suitors across the globe. When the old woman comes to live with the young girl -- who is lonely, without friends, isolated by wealth and privilege -- the girl is at first intimidated and confused by the old woman's behavior. But once the girl sees her dance, she can't help but ask for lessons; and once the old woman sees the girl dance, and recognizes her potential, she can't help but begin to mold her great-niece into her successor. And Nettie will dance Swan Lake some day.

The book also tells the story of a desperate and hopeless young immigrant, deceived by the man who said he would help her, dumped alone and pregnant and lost on the shores of England. She is picked up by a man who, mysteriously, knows her name and everything about her, and who offers her a ride . . .

This book tells all of those stories. And more: there is the mysterious hint that the girl's father is nicknamed Vlad the Impaler; there is Nettie's first trip on the London Underground; there is her first day at school and the development of her first real school friend -- and oh, so much more. Unfortunately, since it is a young adult book -- and therefore tends to avoid overly complex and lengthy expositions -- and since it is only 200 pages long, it cannot tell all of these stories well. They run into and over each other, and threads get dropped and lost from every one. The mystery man who picks up the pregnant immigrant, for example, is never explained: who he is, how he knows all about her, why he was driving down that empty road at night, why he picked her up, why he left her unconscious in a ditch -- I dunno. The book never says. By the time the climactic moment arrives, it seems like small potatoes, because one event simply cannot tie up all of these tales -- and it seems terribly false and manufactured, because too much of the book leading up to that moment was dedicated to exploring the other plotlines, and the main story was never completely developed.

Thoughts:
Because the story was too full of ideas, and because those ideas are all fairly shallow, I didn't like the book. It was hard to get into, and then once the third or fourth plot line came up, I just wanted to get through it. The author does write well, and Nettie is nicely characterized and very sympathetic -- but there were just too many stories here. Since I am not the target audience, however, the book may be very successful for those who like complicated stories, simply told, that involve wealth and privilege, and friendship, and dark hidden secrets. I hope people like that exist, so that they can enjoy this book more than I did.


East of the Sun by Julia Gregson

Pick:
My very first Vine Voice book! Amazon invited me to join the Vine program, when they send out books and various other goods before they are released to the public in order to get advance reviews; my first newsletter had maybe a dozen books I was interested in reviewing, and this was one. It wasn't my first choice, but my first several choices were already taken -- those book people jump on free books faster than Charlie pouncing on something disgusting and edible -- and it sounded good.

Review for Amazon:
When you look at this book, what do you see? You see a historical novel, a romance, a tale of adventure and excitement, of upright and proper young women who are given a chance to spread their wings and fly, and they seize it. You see a story of a tumultuous and fascinating place, at a pivotal moment in history, as depicted through the very human eyes of people who were immersed in it, but whose lives were not controlled by it. You see a narrative rich in color and texture, noise and scent, that approaches sensory overload for the reader, much like the lives of the characters in that place at that time. You see an excellent reading experience.

"East of the Sun" is like an onion. Or maybe a cake would be a better metaphor -- or parfait. Everybody likes parfait. (Forgive the completely inappropriate Shrek reference.) At any rate, it has many layers, and thus offers readers not only a pleasant way to pass the time, but also a series of surprises that adds excitement to the otherwise mellow reading experience. In that, the experience of reading the book resembles the book's plot: in "East of the Sun," a controlled, stoic, even staid group of characters are taken out of their normal circumstances and given a chance to jaunt off on a bit of a wild ride. Perhaps the book is like an onion parfait: sweet and tasty, and also pungent; definitely not what one would expect, and sometimes, maybe a bad mix of flavors -- those onions are just a little too strong.

Enough of the metaphors. The story revolves around three young women: one already engaged, one seeking to become engaged, and one who has not a shred of interest in becoming engaged, but who wishes to find herself, to be herself, free from the weight of others' expectations and perceptions. These three characters are the book's best feature: every reader should be able to find a reflection of himself or herself in one or all of them, from the naive and ever-pleasant Rose, to the foolish and courageous Tor (Short for Victoria, not named for the obscure word for a rocky hilltop, more's the pity), to the mysterious and wounded Viva. The characters are both genuine and universal, and so the reader not only identifies with them, but wishes them all the best: as if they were friends, or past selves, glimpsed through a crystal ball, and we find it all too easy to imagine ourselves in their places, shaking our heads at their foolishness, smiling fondly at their successes.

The book is a great piece of writing, though without real brilliance; the shine is in the story and the characters, rather than the wordsmithing. The plot drags in the middle; none of the three characters receives short shrift, and so the book is lengthy, and all three of them go through their darkest times just before the dawn at the same point in the narrative, which made it a little hard to keep on reading. But the dawn comes and the story ends well, without absurdity. A great book for those fond of romantic fiction (Not of the pirate/sheik/viking bodice-ripper kind) and/or historical fiction set in the last hundred years.

Thoughts:
It really is a good book for people who like what I said, romance and history. I liked it fine. I identified with Viva, of course, the would-be writer who doesn't trust herself in a romance, but I also liked Tor, who falls head over heels for the one who ends up being her soulmate. And though I didn't think a whole lot of Rose, having almost no personal connection to her story, I liked the realistic glimpse of a life that isn't mine, a family that isn't like my own.


From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

Pick:
I wanted to read something light and fun after that big serious novel and the end of the school year. This is one book back in the Sookie series, so that I can refresh my memory before reading the newest one. Yay Sookie!

Story:
I read this one last year and it's on my list in greater depth -- I think. Yep, looked good to me. I'll leave it at that.

Thoughts:
Perfect book to read at this point: finished it in about a day, had a wonderful time reading it. Gotta love Sookie.



Sprout by Dale Peck

Pick:
The second book I have read which I ordered from Amazon Vine, but the first I chose. Young adult, and I like the cover -- a picture of a boy's hair and scalp, the hair dyed bright green. I wasn't totally clear what the book was about when I picked it; I didn't realize until I checked the other reviews on Amazon that it was about a gay teenager -- I thought the main character would be younger. But sometimes those random choices work out.

Amazon Review:

I've read a fair number of young adult books. I've read a larger number of books about people who don't quite fit in, outsiders and outcasts and outlandish outlaws, the out-of-the-way, the outrageous, and the outre. That sentence was a lot of fun to write. Turns out we have quite a few words in English that begin with "out." And I looked them up in my pocket dictionary, which the main character of Sprout would fully appreciate. The fact that the main character in this book is gay is totally coincidental to this out-of-sync monologue; I actually had no idea that homosexuality was an element of this book when I picked it -- out. And none of this matters because the point is: I loved Sprout.

The place I meant to go before I got caught on my own words was this: out of all the YA fiction I've read, this book came closest to my own experience. The character was extraordinary, fascinating and insightful and brilliant, and also completely, miserably blind about himself and his life and his interactions with those around him. Just as I was, just as thousands or millions or maybe only two other teenagers are. Those two teenagers should get this book and read it.

The story was poignant and heartbreaking and difficult, just as the teen years always are; it starts in one place, goes somewhere unexpected, jumps around in several directions, landing on spots you would never think would hold weight, and yet they do. The narration was utterly brilliant: sharp and witty, hilarious and beautiful, and dorky and self-conscious, all at the same time. This is an engaging and powerful book, both fun and necessary. Dale Peck has won a fan.

Thoughts:
Yup, I liked it. Sweet and funny and everything a good novel should be, including easy and fun to read. Highly recommended, especially to people who are or were sensitive teenagers.


Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton

Pick:
I read a book for Amazon -- a sweet, funny, young adult coming-of-age type book -- so I had to read one for myself, and it had to be evil and dirty and horrifying. So that would be Anita Blake, then. Mwahahahaha.

Story:
So what are the major complaints people have about Anita Blake? First, that she is too powerful: there are constant rumors that this character is a Mary Sue, an idealized version of the author herself, and thus the author cannot stand to have the character lose or fail because that would hurt the author's ego too much. Personally, I have no idea how they got this idea -- every time Anita starts listing her scars, a list that is seemingly increased with every book and was brutally long to begin with, it seems to me that this character loses quite a lot -- but it is a common complaint. The second is that Anita Blake's sexual prowess is overdone: that it takes over too much of the storyline, and that her abilities which focus around sex give her too much power. These two seem the main complaints. There are others, of course -- the writing and/or editing is subpar; the character and/or the author. and/or fans of the book are too fascinated by bondage, violent sex, rape, and pedophilia; the male characters are too weak and too whiny and also too beautiful and sexy to be realistic; none of the important characters ever die -- but all of these complaints are stupid. Well, no: they're stupid, facile, simplistic, spurious lumps of bullshit that show the ignorance and self-righteous arrogance of the would-be critics of the series, who have found themselves unable to show genuine flaws in these books beyond the first two (Anita's power and the preponderance of sex in the books), and thus have turned to, basically, making shit up and then screaming at the top of their lungs that it's true, absolutely true, a position they defend mainly by being so shitty to anyone who disagrees with them that their opponents give up in disgust -- which action they take as further proof that their "criticisms" are valid.

If we may ignore (and I do) the bullshit arguments, this book addresses the first two problems quite well. Though there is sex (as there has to be -- Anita is a succubus, after all, who feeds on lust; without sex she quite literally would die, after killing Nathaniel and Damian and maybe several others), it doesn't happen until the last hundred or so pages of the book, and even then it isn't over the top (though it certainly is steamy, like all of Laurell Hamilton's visceral scenes, as describing things that are sexy and/or violent being one of the author's strengths) and doesn't take over the story as it has in past books. And though Anita is certainly powerful, as she has many natural advantages and gifts that have allowed her to gain power over the course of the series, her power is not the story here. The story here is her vulnerability, and her self-doubt.

This book is about Anita being in trouble. She is in trouble because she is losing control in her relationships -- not something that is necessarily a threat, but something that the control-obsessed Anita is certainly troubled by -- and so she reacts badly, as this character often does when threatened, and she runs away from her family to be on her own and try to regain the life she has very nearly left behind. It works about as well as running away always does: her problems follow her, and she gains a few new ones on top of it -- most notably Jean-Claude's anger and attempted manipulation by the weretiger queen and then by a powerful vampire. She is also in trouble because the ardeur and her need to feed, along with her reputation and the inevitable change in her feelings about her job as the Executioner, now that she is in love with several of the monsters and has become one herself by almost any definition, have begun to inhibit her ability to be an effective vampire hunter. She spends much of the book questioning whether she is, in fact, still able to hunt monsters effectively -- and if she is not, whether she should give up the career that has defined her and made her who she is. Finally, she is in trouble because she is the target: not only of the villain in this book, Vittorio the serial killing vampire, but also of the Mother of All Darkness, who still seeks to possess Anita and thus escape her own decrepit and much-hunted body, as well as the lovely and personable Olaf, who decides in this book that he not only wants to hunt Anita, but wants to be her steady boyfriend in the most mundane sense -- and that he is jealous of anyone else who has a claim on her. Which means he is really, really, jealous. Which, since he is a highly trained assassin and a violent sexual sadist and serial killer who hates women and targets women who look like Anita, is, y'know, really bad.

So the point is this: there is very little sex in this book, all of it at the end, though Anita has to deal with the consequences of her sex life before that. Anita is far more powerless than powerful in this book: she is scared and flustered by Olaf, she is nearly overpowered by the weretiger queen and is entirely overpowered by the vampiric villains, and she kills -- nothing. She actually saves the lives of ten vampires who were victimized by the true villain, Vittorio. Of course, some see that as a flaw as well, because they share the bigoted view of Sheriff Shaw (the main non-supernatural adversary that Anita faces in this book) that Anita is a slut who will have sex with anyone, and also share Shaw's blindness to any evidence that might contradict their conclusion -- like the number of men who express an interest in Anita who she DOESN'T sleep with, a fairly frequent occurrence -- and so think that Anita should be killing every vampire she sees because they are monsters and nothing more, ever. Fortunately, Anita has evolved, something these people seem incapable of doing, and she recognizes vampires as no different from people: some are monsters like Olaf, some are good people like the innocent stripper Brianna in this book, and some are in between, like Edward, Bernardo, herself, and the SWAT operative Cannibal, a very nice little mirror for Anita.

This book is, in some ways, a response to the criticisms against Anita Blake, and I hope it satisfies those non-idiot critics who have voiced genuine concerns with the books. I also hope it drives the idiots to distraction with the intentional pushing of their buttons: Anita sleeps with a 16-year-old, who then becomes infatuated with her; as I said, she kills nothing but does have sex; she uses her sexual powers to defeat the villain. This also seems to me an intentional response to the overblown and almost insane criticism of these books on the part of Laurell Hamilton, and I congratulate her for her courage in doing so. Give 'em hell, Laurell and Anita!

Thoughts:
I loved this book as I have loved the others: imperfectly, but pretty damned deeply. It was slow at first, I was annoyed by some minor things (like Jean-Claude throwing a hissy-fit about Anita not being his servant -- like that's freaking news, JC!), but I very quickly got wrapped up in it and read almost all of it in 24 hours. The ending was too abrupt, and felt like it was done to appease a deadline, but I am hopeful that later books will continue the apparently-ended story lines, especially the MOAD, who can't end up like that. Just can't. But the main characters were outstanding as always, I liked the new complications and concepts for the most part -- specifically, I liked the Wiccans and the black dog, Michael, and the experience he shared with Anita, but the blue tiger is completely lame -- and I look forward to reading the next book. Now I just have to decide if I want to put this on Amazon and get into a fight. Nah, probably not worth it. We'll just throw it on the book blog and if any of the haters want to comment, bring it on, jerkass!

The Reading Marches On!

I'm still reading slowly -- damn those Sims! (No, I don't mean that. I love my Sims. I'm going to go play with them right now.) and I fell behind in writing these books up, so I forgot the exact dates I finished them. Ah, well. I'll try to be better in the springtime.

11. Carrie Vaughn: Kitty and the Silver Bullet 3/6
12. Gahan Wilson: The Cleft and Other Odd Tales 3/I dunno
13. Jim Butcher: Storm Front (Sometime in March)
14. Kate Wilhelm: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang 3/27
(Started White Witch, Black Curse. Stopped to re-read the series, as I couldn't remember enough of the past plotlines.)
(Started The Joyluck Club, for school. Stopped because it was boring.)

Kitty and the Silver Bullet

Pick:
As much as I enjoyed reading Travels with Charley, it was still tough to get into -- mainly because of the twin pressures of work and Sim temptation, but still. So I wanted something fantastical and light, and here's this Kitty book that Toni liked so much, and I've enjoyed the first three in the series immensely, so what the heck?

Story:
This was a very nice book. I like how these books start out so seemingly light and end up very serious, at least in the paranormal plotlines; like the first book ends with a pair of murders, the second ends with Kitty changing on national television, the third ends with Cormac going to jail for killing the bad person -- and then there's this one, which ends with a pair of righteous killings. The difference was that this book pretty much starts out heavy and stays that way; the only light plotline is when Kitty is picked to reveal on The Midnight Hour that a certain very successful stage actress is actually a vampire -- and that plotline didn't stay light for long, as the vampire is revealed to be evil. Seriously evil. A bitch that needs a good staking, and I'm not making a sexual innuendo there. Where's Buffy when you need her?

I liked the war between Kitty and Carl, though Toni's right that the vampire war was a little too brief. The biggest problem there was that the old master's vampires just went along with the new guy being in charge, as far as we know. But I think the point is that we don't get to see a whole lot of the vampire politics, and after Arturo gives up and Ricardo takes over, they go back into the shadows and we're left looking at Kitty. But that's okay, because I'm not reading these books for the vampires, and I don't think the author is writing them for the vampires, either. The vampire war just made for a nice excuse to force Kitty into fighting -- though now that I think about it, what forced her into fighting was her mother's illness and the latest victim of the current pack leader. Rick doesn't really do much for her, in the end -- so why even include the vamps? Meh.

Thoughts:
Anyway, I liked the book, I like how it ended up, I love the concept of the Long Game, and I'm pissed that Carrie Vaughn is taking my ghoul idea of having a bar/safe haven for supernaturals. That's okay -- seeing as they made the reference to Casablanca for me, I'm already aware that the idea is not a new one, for me or for Vaughn. And mine will be -- not exactly what it seems. So that's okay.


The Cleft and Other Odd Tales

Pick:
I have had this one for quite a while; it was one of those fortuitous finds at a book sale. I got it because I have fond memories of reading Gahan Wilson's cartoons -- for those who don't know, Gahan Wilson has been drawing those single-panel cartoons, like political cartoons but not political in this case, that grace the pages of The New Yorker and Playboy, for what, forty years? -- in compilation books that my childhood friend Benjy Grossman had. So when I saw a collection of odd tales by the man who drew the original Addams Family strips, I couldn't pass it up. As for reading it right now, if it is not too much information, I thought it would make good bathroom reading -- short stories, strange but not too involved -- but halfway through the first story, I decided I just wanted to read the book. So I did.

Stories:
There were many that were odd, some that were utterly fascinating, and none that were bad. Now that's a good collection of short stories. The title one, The Cleft, is about a monastery in Tibet that can only be reached by climbing up through a chimney in the mountain atop which the monastery sits; the chimney -- the Cleft -- is so narrow that only one person can go up or down at a time, so the monks have designed a simple system to let someone know if there is already someone going up or down the cleft. The simple ritual becomes more and more complex, until it takes so much time and effort to walk up or down -- one must stop and pray at multiple shrines, while playing various musical instruments and carrying huge amounts of ritual material, and so on -- that one day, a monk finally snaps and makes a rope ladder. He unfurls the ladder down the side of the mountain, climbs down and walks away, never to return. The rest of the monks decide his statement shows unique wisdom -- and they immediately begin gilding the rope ladder in his honor, thus starting the cycle over again. It's one of the finest criticisms of organized religion I've ever seen, and yet it's only a few pages long, and funny to boot.

Most of the stories were gruesome and disturbing; some were even gratuitous, which can be fun. The Casino Mirago is a brilliant idea -- about a casino that only opens for a few weeks a year, and in which you can gamble whatever you wish, including your health, your youth, your status, etc. The Manuscript of Dr. Arness has a wonderful interpretation of immortality -- the Doctor discovers how to halt the aging process, but by so doing, he slows down his own reaction time so much that he appears to be a statue, forever young. Sea Gulls is an exquisitely written murder tale, and Them Bleaks has an outstanding twist. But the best two for me were The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be and Mister Ice Cold. The first is about a group of party people who run into the Walrus and the Carpenter from Through the Looking Glass, and Wilson manages to show all of the horror in that original poem by recreating it here; the second is just a fantastic, lyrical description of an ice cream man who carries more than ice cream in his truck. Mwa ha ha ha. I don't read a lot of short stories, being more of a novel man myself, but these are probably the best I've read since Stephen King.

Thoughts:
They were wonderful: great ideas, outstanding writing, some with a purpose, some just as vignettes. They span almost thirty years, so I'm not sure that Gahan Wilson has other books of short stories out, but this one is absolutely worth having and reading, and keeping and re-reading, which I will do, too.


Storm Front

Pick:
I decided to re-read the Dresden Files this year, as this still holds the top spot as my favorite paranormal series, yet I think I've only read the books once -- clearly this situation cannot stand! I love the way Butcher writes; I admire his ability to keep two series in two different genres going at once and make both of them excellent in their own way. Harry is also a great character, complex and honest and genuine, and I would love to go back through and find more details of his personality, hints and allegations that I'm sure Butcher snuck in there.

Story:
This one's pretty well-known, I would think, since the two people that I'm sure read this have both read these books and seen the Sci-Fi series based on them, which used this storyline as a season finale. For Hotpants, though, here's the basics: Harry Dresden is a wizard, a strong but still young and inexperienced caster of spells and concocter of potions. Being the brash and rebellious type, he has defied the usual expectations of secrecy and hung out a shingle in Chicago -- as a wizard. It says it on his door, it says it in his Yellow Pages ad. (Is that reference now dead, by the way? Does anyone under 20 still use a phonebook? Have any idea of the difference between white pages and yellow pages? If not: no great loss. I always hated phonebooks, for everything except laughing at the goofy names -- a pleasure I get now from my class roll sheets and the birth announcements in our local paper. Hey folks: stop naming your fucking kids Michaela, or Makayla, or Mickayla, or McKayla, or any of the other horrific variations on a bad theme I have seen over the past few years.) Harry does not get a lot of business, though, most of his calls being along the lines of either, "Do you do kids' parties?" or "Are you for real?" The answers, respectively, are no, and yes. But Harry does work for the police, who have recently formed a unit intended to solve the strange and incomprehensible crimes that sometimes pop up in a city the size of Chicago.

Like the crime that opens the book: two people, while in the throes of passion, suddenly had their hearts explode out of their chests. Both were in perfect health, and nobody else was in the hotel room at the time. So how did it happen? Magic, of course. So Harry is called in to investigate, and while he is investigating, he is himself under suspicion, because Harry has a rather checkered past in the wizarding community, having broken the First Law of Magic: thou shalt not use magic to kill. So Harry has to track down a powerful and immoral magician-murderer, while dodging the powerful and closed-minded authorities of the mages' White Council. Oh, and since the two people who died were a high-priced call girl, who worked for a vampiress named Bianca, and a mafia hitman who worked for the boss of the Chicago rackets, the issue gets pretty tangled, and odds end up looking pretty grim. Fortunately, Harry has help: a spirit living in a human skull, who has a perfect memory and centuries of experience working with human magicians, and so who knows more about magic than Harry ever will. His name is Bob. He is a lech. He and Harry are two of the best characters I have encountered in fantasy/paranormal literature.

Thoughts:
I liked this book even more the second time around, and I can't wait to read the rest of the series. Well, I can, since I have a few other books to read too -- but these are going to be my happy relaxing books for this year, I think. I'm so glad there are so many of them, with a new one coming out! Yay Harry!


Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Pick:
I've been looking for a book to teach my Credit Recovery class. I was going to go with the Joy Luck Club, but I started reading it over Spring Break, and found out: it's a lovely work, but it's also pretty danged boring. I had looked into this book, Kate Wilhelm's Hugo-winning sci-fi novel, when I first got to St. Helens, because there are fifty or so copies in the textbook room, and I was looking for class novels then, too. But since the first page says "shit," and around about twenty pages in there is a -- "graphic" is the wrong word; perhaps "clear and indisputable" -- sex scene, between two cousins, I didn't feel comfortable teaching the book to ninth graders for my very first year at this new, fairly conservative, school. But hey, the class I'm looking for now is all juniors and seniors, and I'm more willing to be edgy now that my job is secure and all, so what the heck? I'd love to teach something a little more challenging.

Story:
It's challenging, all right. Not because it's so terribly shocking -- it is to some extent, as the incest theme intensifies rather than fading away -- but because the book is so dense. It starts with a large extended family in Virginia who are pulling in to the valley where they originated, like the fronds of a sea anemone when touched by a human hand. They are pulling in to the center because they can see the signs: the world is falling apart, through environmental disasters and societal breakdown accelerated by plague and famine worldwide. The family has been hugely successful, spawning doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs, and with their great resources and knowledge, they create an enclave that will survive the coming collapse. So right at the beginning you have themes of environmentalism, and social order, and isolationism, in addition to the question of love: two of the members of the family, who grew up together in this valley, have been in love all of their lives -- but because they are cousins, this is a love that can never be realized, and they know it. The woman, Celia, leaves home to study in South America, at least partially to avoid the heartbreak of seeing David every day, feeling as she does for him.

She has gone at exactly the wrong time: the impending collapse arrives, and Celia is lost in South American turmoil for three years. Meanwhile, David, who is a biologist, has been recruited to help his family build laboratories for genetic studies, so that the clan will be prepared for any diseases or blights that make it into their valley. Celia manages to come home, though she has suffered a near-fatal illness, and she and David at last consummate their relationship, since the end of the world tends to make former taboos moot. They are partially forgiven by the fact that there will be no children: not only is Celia ailing, her heart damaged by the virus she survived, but David has been studying the family, and has realized something: every man in the valley is now sterile. The women who were pregnant before the plague have miscarried or had stillbirths. There will be no more children, for anyone, perhaps ever again.

But the family is undaunted, because they have the knowledge and the technology to clone animals for livestock -- and David and his relatives set about trying to clone humans. They do succeed, and soon there are newer, younger versions of David, and his uncle Walt, and even Celia running around, often in multiples of two and three. But there is a problem: the clones are not reliably fertile, and past the third generation (the copy of a copy of a copy) they are deformed and genetically non-viable. So it looks as though the end of the human race has only been delayed, not averted. David continues to work, though, and to hope, and after a time he is assisted by -- himself, and himself, and himself again. And so we have the issue of cloning, both as a moral question and as a particularly freaky image.

Then things get even stranger: the clones, it turns out, are not exactly individuals. They have a sort of collective consciousness, a hive mind, with a quasi-telepathic bond similar to the well-known twin bond. And they recognize that their progenitors, the sexually reproduced and full-born humans, do not; therefore, the clones consider themselves different, albeit related, and when it comes down to it, they stage a coup and take over the valley, intending to reproduce themselves, solve the fertility and cloning problems, and repopulate the Earth with their species, not ours.

And that's just Book One.

Thoughts:
It is an interesting novel. The writing is quite lovely, particularly in the pathos of the various characters who take center stage, and the plot is intriguing and imaginative, to say the least. I think the book will be even better as a center of discussion than as an individual read, and I look forward to teaching it.

Though my students are going to suffer one major case of the wiggins. Heh. That just makes it more fun for me.

Geez, I didn't know anyone actually read this.

This one's for Hotpants.

FEBRUARY
7. Douglas Adams: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe 2/3
8. Augusten Burroughs: Dry 2/6
9. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman: Bones of the Dragon 2/15
10. John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley: In Search of America 2/26


The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Pick:
I picked this because I needed to read a good book. I needed to read a short book, too. I needed to read a short book that I absolutely positively knew would be good, and light-hearted, and well-written. So I went with a book I've read before but not for many years, in my massive Douglas Adams compendium.

Story:
This and Hitchhiker's Guide are the two of Adams's books that I've read several times before, so there weren't a whole lot of surprises for me. But it was as enjoyable as I remembered, and there were a few things that I was able to enjoy even more now, at my advanced age and with my sage-like wisdom. Mainly the man who rules the universe: I get now that he is a nihilist, questioning even the reality around him and the evidence of his own senses -- maybe a Cartesian extremist would be a kinder term than nihilist, because he's extremely happy in his imagined real world. I agree with Adams that a man like that would be the best choice for ruler of the universe, since the one man you don't want for the job is the man who wants to do the job. So naturally, you should look for the man who doesn't even believe the job exists.

I also got to be more horrified this time by the people trapped on the delayed airliner for 900 years waiting for lemon-soaked paper napkins, who are woken from their stasis sleep once a year to have a cookie -- and who wake screaming. Made me think of the Stephen King story "The Jaunt," and the whole column I wrote about that. I had greater dislike for Zarniwoop and so I liked what happened to him, and the Dish of the Day cracked me up, though I wish there could have been more of the End of the Universe show. I loved the host. I also appreciated the message of the Golfrincham freighter, its goal, and the end result: when you try to simply get rid of the people you don't like, it turns out you needed them after all.

Thoughts:
This is a wonderful book in more ways than I thought, because it is not only hilarious, it is very smart and even sometimes very wise. I will definitely be reading the others in my compendium -- though I need to focus on the TBR shelf for a while first.


Dry

Pick:
I found this one at the Scappoose Library book sale, my favorite semi-annual event -- or is it three times a year? How do you say a third of a year? Triennial is three years, not four months. . . . Anyway, I read Running with Scissors and thought it was decent but not great -- a little too disturbing and a little lacking in purpose apart from, "Wow, what a fucked up life." I already knew some people shouldn't have children, and I would think that the moral, ":Don't give your kids away to your wacko psychologist just because you're too narcissistic and shallow to handle them" was a gimme. But this one seemed more adult in nature, and the back says wonderful things about Burroughs's use of humor to describe his brutal experiences. Plus it was fifty cents, so what the heck?

Story:
The book is about Burroughs's attempt to get sober. It starts with him as a drunk, and good lord, what a drunk that guy was. The first chapter is completely denial, as he spends every night utterly pickled and then tries to act like nothing's out of the ordinary at work the next day -- he works in advertising. But the guy drinks so much that he sweats alcohol: he has to go to a client meeting the first morning after, but he ends up staying out the entire night before and only dozing briefly before he goes. So he showers, shaves, puts on clean clothes, douses himself with cologne and sprays some on his tongue, and throws down a handful of BreathAssure to prevent any fumes from coming out of the depths. But what happens when he meets his ad writing partner and the clients? She chews him out for smelling like a distillery because she can smell the alcohol coming out of his pores. So he goes home that night and drinks himself into oblivion, and misses the meeting the next morning.

So his coworkers have an intervention and convince him to go to rehab. The rehab actually works, surprisingly enough, and he comes back after thirty days totally sober. He signs up for therapy, both individual and group, and he starts going to AA meetings. Everybody he knows compliments him on how good he looks, a friend from rehab comes to New York and moves in with him so they can support each other in staying dry -- all is well.

But then things start to go wrong, just a little bit, and then a little bit more. One of the best things about this book, and about Burroughs's writing, is that he builds the mood perfectly. When he is downing ten or twelve martinis a night, and then topping it off with half a liter of scotch and some hard cider before bed, he doesn't act like it's any big deal, which only emphasizes how big a deal it is. You know that his plans for covering up his alcohol breath are not going to work because he's still drunk. But it seems like a big joke, which is how it felt to him: no big deal. Everybody drinks, he thinks. He's young, in his mid-twenties; he's supposed to party a lot. What's the big deal? And that's how it reads. Then when he goes to rehab, it seems utterly absurd and stupid at first -- they have this ritual where they give a pair of stuffed animals, named Monkey Wunky and Blue Blue Kitten (These are grown-ups, remember. Grown-ups with chemical dependencies and real problems and terrible lives.) to whoever needs them most, so that person can sleep with them for the night. You feel his horror and deep, deep discomfort. And then, as things start to come together in rehab, you start to realize as Burroughs does in the story that there's something to this, that the counselors here are good at what they do, and that there is a real need for Burroughs to be there. During the drinking chapters he doesn't give the whole story -- he's concealing it from us as he concealed it from himself -- and the whole story is pretty appalling. Not only does he drink more than a human being should be able to live through, but he has to take seriously high doses of Benadryl to do it -- because he's allergic to alcohol. Plus he never throws out his liquor bottles, and so there are, literally, hundreds of empty, unwashed Dewar's bottles all over his apartment, covered in a layer of dead fruit flies. Horrifying. And wonderfully well written.

So when he gets out and things are going well, he stops going to AA meetings, and you're thinking, "Yeah, that's okay. He's doing great, not having any real problems staying sober and dealing with the problems he does have. Those meetings do seem pretty stupid." And then her has a problem at work, with a feud with a coworker -- who leaves a bottle of gin in his office, and then soaks his carpet with scotch in order to get him in trouble; what a scumbag -- and a difficult client. He meets and develops a serious crush on a member of his therapy group (and he absolutely cannot date anyone in his therapy group) who is a recovering crack addict with an abusive boyfriend, and yet the man is wonderful, and Burroughs starts falling for him. Then his best friend, who has been living with AIDS, suddenly takes a turn for the worse for some completely unfathomable reason -- he starts hiccuping and can't stop -- and things fall apart. Burroughs finally starts the relationship with Foster, the wonderful man from his group, and then Foster starts using again. His friend has to go to the hospital, and then comes home to die. And he isn't going to AA, and he's ended his therapy.

So he falls off the wagon. Hard. And there is a brutal but riveting few chapters when he sinks as low as he can go, using crack himself, losing his job and staying in his apartment for months on end, doing nothing but drinking, all day every day. Until he finally hits rock bottom, with a thud, and starts to build himself up again. The book skips ahead a year into his new, more serious sobriety, when he is helping his former drinking buddy to sober up, too, and then it ends.

Thoughts:
Burroughs is an outstanding writer, truly, but the books are almost too real, too easy to fall into. It was all right with this one, because his first drunk stage is almost funny, and then the sober parts are hopeful -- but that last drunk stage was very hard to read. His first book, about his childhood, was just ridiculously sad and disturbing. So I think in future, I will only read his books if the subject matter has at least some ray of hope in it.


Bones of the Dragon

Pick:
Jaime brought this one to my classroom -- a special delivery book! -- I think because she read my review of the last pile of hogsnot I read for her, that Magician's Apprentice hooey. I was much more excited about this one because I've read Weis and Hickman; I got four books or so into the Death Gate cycle before I got tired of trying to find the next one in time to read it before I forgot the last ones; that was before I had easy access to new books. This is the first in a new series, and it's got dragons, vikings, and dead gods in it -- who could ask for anything more?

Story:
I read some of the criticism of this book on Amazon, and I was trying to think of problems I saw, flaws I could pinpoint, but I couldn't do it. I also can't rave about the book, because there is something missing, some intangible element that would make this a great book, which it isn't. The basic theme is an interesting one: what would you do if your gods abandoned you? Perhaps even -- died? The story is played out in a character several reviewers had trouble with: Skylan Ivorson. I had trouble with him, too, but only for the reason I was supposed to: Skylan is an idiot. He is a beautiful young man with flowing golden locks and piercing blue eyes; he is the son of the chief of his tribe of the Vindras people, and their war chief, as he is the greatest warrior. Skylan has been blessed by the gods, and he knows it. So throughout the first half of the book, Skylan assumes he can do anything, have anything he wants, and his patron deity, Torval, will help him to get it, since he honors Torval with every conquest, every victory (all of which -- coincidentally, of course -- honor Skylan as well). So Skylan, who is one of the point of view characters (and a very well-written one, since he is a fool but not a bad guy and that is how his narrative voice sounds), has very little patience with people who want to do things differently, who want to think instead of charge ahead, who want to negotiate instead of fight. He has especially little patience for the woman he loves, because she keeps being coy -- because she is actually in love with his best friend, Garn, the smart one; an open secret which everyone in the village has figured out. Except Skylan.

So when ogres invade, telling the Vindrasi that their gods have lost a war in heaven and died, Skylan wants to kill them all, and eventually he gets his wish -- though that, of course, is the question: do the Vindrasi succeed in driving off the ogres because their gods are not dead, but supporting them in their struggle? Or is it the greater fighting ability of the Vindrasi, combined with the might of the dragon who takes their side? We are not sure.

This is really only the beginning of the story; the Chief of Chiefs of the Vindrasi is an atheist, and (coincidentally, I'm sure) an incredible scumbag who betrays his people for the sake of his cowardice; he is dealt with in a very surprising way, and it leads to a whole new plot line that I wasn't expecting. I suppose if I had an issue with this book it was there: I didn't really like the direction Skylan went, or the choices he makes. But that can't be a criticism of the book, since I wasn't supposed to like either one. I did really enjoy the magical creatures in the book, the druids and the Fey and the giants, especially -- though I didn't care for the dragons, which was certainly a problem, as they are rather important to a book called "Bones of the Dragon," first in the Dragonships series. They seemed too pat, too easy, almost too mythical; their origin story and their reasons for helping the Vindrasi are less interesting than if they had simply been left as a question mark, their motives and history mysterious. I would also criticize the women in the book, who are shallow and silly and evil, except that I liked the Owl Woman character enormously, and the girl Aylaen, whom Skylan loves, is great, except for the way she and Garn deal with their love triangle problem, and for the way she acts at the end of the book.

Thoughts:
I liked the book, but not really enough to want to read an entire series on the same story line. Especially not one that delves deeper into the dragons' story. In all honesty, after all the years I've been reading fantasy, I think dragons are pretty well played out. The most interesting dragon story I've read recently has been Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and the most interesting thing about it is how the dragons are taken out of a traditional fantasy setting and plopped into the Napoleonic Wars. But Eragon? Yech. This book is far better than Paolini's, but still not good enough to make me want to read three more just like it.


Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Pick:
I wanted to read a good book, and I was also thinking I might write an example essay for my seniors, since they have a new alternative book assignment. They have to compare two similar books -- similar inasmuch as the two books have to be of the same genre. Since I want to encourage non-fiction reading for pleasure -- and I want to do more of it myself -- I decided I would write an essay, if I do one, on two non-fiction books -- Dry, and this one,. which I was very excited to find at Goodwill because John Steinbeck is one of my great literary heroes, and this book seems right up my alley -- plus his dog has a good name. So I've been looking forward to reading this one, on some level, for years.

Story:
It didn't disappoint. In fact, this book was so good that I'm going to keep it and read it again, probably more than once -- well, I'm going to buy a new copy of it that wasn't written in by a college student who was almost, but not quite, as smart as the dog. Though I found the George-and-Lenny comparison between Steinbeck and his commentator often amusing and strangely appropriate, considering it was Steinbeck who wrote Of Mice and Men.

The book follows John Steinbeck on his drive across America and back at the age of 58, accompanied only by his ten-year-old standard poodle, Charley. He started at his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and drove up to Maine and then across just under the Great Lakes through Montana to Washington, and then down through California and the Mojave to Texas, and then back again through Louisiana and Mississippi, Arkansas and the Virginias. The whole trip was made in a custom-built camper truck that Steinbeck named Rocinante, because he was a genius.

There are too many good parts of this book to set down here, since I'd like to keep these reviews a little shorter, this time, except for the Advaced Reader's Copies Jaime gives me. That's why I want to read it again. He had incredible insights and observations about people, though I think the America he goes in search of, as well as the one he finds, are both dead now. Still, I'd like to make my own trip like this, though I'd rather bring Toni than my Charlie -- or maybe both. But a part of me is afraid that it would be just too depressing to see what has been made of this once-beautiful land.

Thoughts:
I will read this one again.