At 250+ posts, it was time...and so what that I'm on book 87 of 75, right?

Reviews for books one through twenty-five are over here.

Reviews for books twenty-six through thirty-seven are over here.

Reviews for books thirty-eight through fifty-three are over here.

Reviews for books fifty-four through sixty-eight are over here.

Reviews for books sixty-nine through seventy-three are over here.

Reviews for books seventy-four through eighty-six are over here.

Cool ticker thingie:




Reviews are in post:
(note that touchstones are in the reviews to save me endless touchstone corrections)

87. Dog On It...#2

88. Game of Patience...#11

89. A Treasury of Regrets...#19

90. The Cavalier of the Apocalypse...#25

91. The Hummingbird's Daughter...#60

92. City of Silver...#68

93. A Free Man of Color...#77

94. Household Gods...#83

95. The Revolution Business...#106

96. Bitch Goddess...#110

97. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose...#122

98. Kept Boy...#125

99. Already Dead...#132

100. The Octopus...#136

101. Inkheart...#143

102. The Glass Castle...#155

103. Hell and Earth...#189

104. The Cave of John the Baptist...#194

105. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie...#205

106. The Christmas Oratorio...#211

107. The Great Inflation and its Aftermath...#218

108. Drag Queen...#222

109. The Map of Moments...#227

Message edited by its author, Oct 23, 2009, 9:27pm.

Eighty-seven of seventy-five:

Dog On It by Spencer Quinn

Chet and Bernie. Say it with me, now. Chet and Bernie. Get used to saying it, because once you read this book, you'll be saying it a lot to others who haven't read it yet.

Chet's a dog. Bernie's a schlub. They're a team, crime solving magic of a team. In a mystery world dominated by cat cozies, they're very unusual and very much a pair of guys. This makes them a breath of fresh air at the least, and a cold Alberta Clipper to blow the cobwebs full of cat-dander out of the bookstores. Come back to the fold, gentlemen, there's a voice a lot like the one in your head all ready to talk to you, and it's a dog's!

It's wonderful to read something that's got a new slant on an established trope (read: hoary old cliche), and slants it well enough to keep a cynical old sourpuss like me leaning forward in his seat, eager to see what Chet's going to do next, what Bernie's brain's going to wrest from its depths to help the innocent and land on the wicked with all six feet (four Chet's). Cameling gets all the credit for shoving this book into my awareness. Bless you, dear madam.

Oh yeah...the schlub gets the girl, too. The right girl. Never mind that she's a vegetarian...who among us is without major character flaws?...she loves Chet.

Fetch! Sit! Read!

Wasn't Dog On It a scream? I had such a great time reading it. I'm so glad you enjoyed it too. woof!

You convinced me. Dog On It goes on the wish list. Hope my library has it. However, I must say, you have your nerve giving Stasia a hard time about adding to your TBR pile. You have caused an explosion on mine! But Murder with Peacocks made it worth granting you absolution.

Yea, Richard. You have your nerve :)

I want to say a quick thing about the Sookie Stackhouse books and, since you mentioned it in your review, the True Blood Series.

I really have loved the books, but book 9, the one you reviewed, really irritated me because all it was was non-stop violence. Sookie usually stops to smell the roses, so to speak, but this time it was just a non-thinking frenzy.

I'll still read the series and hope that Harris puts a little bit more thought in her next book. Well, I guess she put thought into it, just took it in a direction I'm not as happy with.

True Blood is simply an abomination if you love the books. I watched 3 episodes and couldn't waste any more time on it. Now I've got this stupid first season on DVD. Maybe I'll sell it on E-bay.

> 2 - Dog On It

The commands barked at me at the end of your terrific review made me do the Sit! Watch me! routine. (If you have trained a dog, you have probably used both of these commands to great effect). Okay, you got my attention, fully.

It got bumped up from TBR to Next Up! in my Collections and is now in the queue on my library reserve list. There is a copy available in one of the out-lying fringes and it will be sent in to civilization (the Main Library branch) for me to conveniently pick up (Fetch!), then Sit! and Read!

Sounds like a really good book. Your review really had me at "Come back to the fold, gentlemen, there's a voice a lot like the one in your head all ready to talk to you, and it's a dog's!" We need ALL kinds of voices and it will be refreshing to enjoy this one. Many women love men and dogs and are eager to hear what they have to share with us. I am on that list ...big time. Thank you Sir Richard for your stellar review. Later gator.

Woofie

>3 Caroline, I am so glad you talked me into this read. You, and the others who praised it, were right! I'm glad I finally listened.

>4 Carolyn, absolution, next to sanctuary, is the best (said in best hunchback of Notre Dame pose).

>5 Stasia, I can't help it. Your Sunday temptation-fest is as nothing compared to a book here, a book there....

>6 Karen, I myself didn't find it gorier than the last two, but I can't claim to be the best interpreter of these things. "True Blood" has only sporadically made it across my TV screen because I don't subscribe to HBO, but there again I haven't seen anything too awful. The transition to screen is always a rough one. I'm always happiest if I simply pretend the characters are accidentally named the same thing as in the book. I'm just glad they're on and enriching Miss Harris. She deserves it!

>7 Woofie, I hope against hope that you'll get the sheer pleasure of the head-snappingly abrupt changes of direction that a dog-narrator offers...and I predict you'll enjoy Bernie's company, he's such a good guy.

#8 richard

"Your Sunday temptation-fest is as nothing compared to a book here, a book there...."

Hmm. Richard, you have a point there. You are merely avoiding gluttony--very admirable. I should work on that one! :-D

Eighty-eight of seventy-five:

Game of Patience by Susanne Alleyn

LT author and French Revolution buff Alleyn's second novel and first mystery is a perfect example of how historical fiction can illuminate history in the most satisfying and intriguing light; simple textbook history doesn't and can't come close to the concerns and needs of the actual people of 1796 Paris, and this book does that job very, very well.

I could end this review here, adding only "read it yourself if you don't believe me," but I want to offer some specifics.

The upheaval of the Revolution was as inevitable as anything in all of history could be. When intolerable abuse is heaped upon enough people for a long enough time, they find a way to make it stop. While there were Royalists in France, like there were Tories in the American Revolution, they lost...so the history is that of the winners.

But what about the average citizen and citizeness? (These were the titles that replaced Monsieur et Madame in those years.) What did life hold for them? Alleyn explores this subject in her novel, and what life held was...well, what it always holds: Love, hate, fear, passion, joy, rejection, redemption (though that last is rare). So Alleyn delves into our human comedy to show us that, mutatis mutandis, Revolutionary Paris's people were just like us, only colder and hungrier.

The story of Aristide Ravel, police spy, and Henri Sanson, executioner, is one of destinies that criss-cross in unpleasant places. Surprisingly, they find themselves friends...okay, friendly acquaintances at first. As a result of the movements of the plot, their most dramatic meeting will cause the friendship to blossom or die; another book will tell that tale. But theirs is the central relationship in this book. It's an odd thing to say, I suppose, but it's true; they each have one half of a very important story in their possession, neither knowing this until the author clangs them into each other so hard that the reader's teeth rattle.

While Sanson is central to the story, he's offstage most of the time. This device worked well enough, though I was a bit overprepared for his eventual appearances by the time they happened.

The principal quality of this book for me was its rhythm. I felt I was there, living by the truly alien Revolutionary calendar of thirty-day months and ten-day weeks. I found myself thinking "isn't it just about decadi, shouldn't stuff be closed?" (That was the Revolutionary Sunday-day-of-rest equivalent.) I wondered where the manservant was more than once while immersed in Aristide's life...he's too poor to have one. (I relate.) I felt myself jolting along in the fiacre with Aristide and his boss (actually just the frost-heaved Long Island roads) to the Hotel de Ville (my village's city hall is nothing like so grand, but it's next to the liberry so the association stuck).

If you are bored by history, try reading this book. It will allow you to experience history more directly than even a conventional historical novel could, since there are such ordinary human stakes in the crime committed and its solution. If you're a mystery fan, the puzzle should keep you going. IIf you're just an old sourpuss, give it a miss. But I hope you aren't, and hope you'll have a great time walking around Paris with Aristide and his crew.

OK, Richard, just for you, I will post every book I read every day, and see if it helps you out!

PS - Your thread is located here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/73817

Message edited by its author, Sep 24, 2009, 7:25pm.

Richard- Great review on Game of Patience! I gotta wishlist it! I'm not familiar with this author.

Wow. Thanks, Richard!
Susanne
(Susanne Alleyn)

Richard

Another sterling review. And miracle of miracles, there are only 4 copies of the book in the entire Central Valley (multi-county) library system and one of them is my itty, bitty local branch. We have a meeting this evening right across the street from the library. It's fate. I'm meant to read this book.

I assume you will kindly read the next two in the series that have been published to see if the quality holds up so we will know if we should get them, too. (My local branch has those, too--which is even more miraculous!)

RD- I think you made another person's day too! See #14!!

> # 11 - Game of Patience Review by Richard Dear -

Well done. What a send up of what sounds like a worthy historical novel. Your ability to write this type of review and offer such a wealth of information to me, the reader, without any spoilers, but filled with many teasers about characters and style are becoming as smooth as a great Scotch whiskey. Brain candy, extraordinaire. Thank you for sharing the fruit of your craft, Sir Richard.

Do you remember the film, "A Fish Called Wanda" and how the character played by Kevin Kline would speak ANY Italian phrase to seduce and heighten love interest in the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis? Parmigiana Romano, fettuccine, Tony Soprano , no, no ,where did THAT come from??? Anyway, your reviews heighten the awareness of a book in a good way, similar, but not exactly like that ploy in the film "Wanda."

I love fiction set in the time of the French Revolution. It was such a righteous time in the country's history. I love Bastille Day parties. I love French bread. Yada ..yada...

I have her (Susanne's) book, A Far Better Rest sitting in front of me as a "wrist rest" while I keyboard this post to you. It may have to flash to the top of my TBR cyber stack after reading your review, as my plan is first things first, and then ... more delight to come in the later novels that follow.

Thank you, Richard. (And, thank you Susanne Alleyn, for writing your novels set in Revolutionary France). Awesome. I'm excited now. Maybe I'll pull an all nighter, tee hee.

Woofie

PS RD - It is later now ... I realized belatedly that this is the first in another series of books by Miz Alleyn. I guess I could actually go ahead and read it as soon as I want. Silly me ...that's always true, of course, the order of choice of reading the books and the "silly me" part. I just enjoy knowing the "history of a series" and the characters going into a book. Oh, well. Mistakes certainly do keep me humble ...and then the next day ... I get humbled again.

Message edited by its author, Sep 25, 2009, 1:18am.

Game of Patience sounds wonderful. Onto the list is goes.

Eighty-nine of seventy-five:

A Treasury of Regrets by Susanne Alleyn

The second Aristide Ravel mystery, set in Revolutionary Paris, leads us deeper into the twisty byways of our sleuth's character and, at the same time, deeper into the vanished Paris that was so influential in the creation of the modern world.

I like series mysteries for reasons I've discussed elsewhere...orderly things, mysteries, and the recurring characters make the world feel a little less random than it actually is...but they come with some hazards. Writers under the pressure of deadlines sometimes make us feel as though they're phoning it in, characterization can dwindle to a series of overused tics (like Miss Silver's cough in all those Patricia Wentworth mysteries) or a catchphrase so overused as to make one want to scream blue murder (Hercule Poirot's "little gray cells" oh clam up already).

Alleyn avoids these pitfalls by enriching our understanding of Revolutionary France and its creators as well as our sleuth. This is a spolier, so stop reading if you're spoiler-averse:

**SPOILER**

Aristide, from the last book, is still mourning his childhood chum Mathieu's death at the hands of the National Convention, which judicially murdered a lot of people belonging to an out-of-power political faction. Aristide dreams of this beloved friend's death at the beginning of this book, and we see him relive the horrible ride to the guillotine that Mathieu took, though I'd think that the presence of a friend there, at that moment, would be a comfort to Mathieu...but the kicker is, as we find out in the course of this murder investigation, that Mathieu was actually In Love with Aristide, who until now was blissfully ignorant of this important fact of his friend's life.

**END SPOILER**

So what does Alleyn do with the major revelation that she gives to not one, but two, of the major characters in this book? Does she grandstand a little and make it a huge stonking Brie wheel of a deal? No. She incorporates the revelations into the actual plot, the real mystery to be solved. It's a very nice touch. It's a reason to keep reading in the series, since this isn't the first time she's done this. It's a marker of a careful, considerate writer, one respectful of her readers, and that kind of writer deserves our dollars.

So, in the end, does this book satisfy? Yes. Are there problems? Yeah...none big...a few scanted red herrings, a little bit of background not quite colored in, that's about all. But history, the living breathing thing history, can never fail to satisfy the discerning reader. Be one of Susanne Alleyn's discerning readers, you won't regret it.

OK, I am definitely going to have to start a hunt for Alleyne's books, which my local library does not have yet. Shame on them!

I lost you... or you hid.. starring

Blast and damn! Who told mckait where this thread was?! C'mon, fess up!

*blink*

Oh hello there, Kath dear! How goes life in ManureShire, or whatever?

;->

you asked for it rdear.....now you just have to wait...

Hmmm... looks like I'm going to have to read some Alleyne! :)

Ninety of seventy-five:

The Cavalier of the Apocalypse by Susanne Alleyn

Wow. In the third in her Aristide Ravel, police spy, mysteries set in Revolutionary Paris, Alleyyn actually takes us to 1786, ten years before the first book (Game of Patience) is set. It is the dying spasm of the ancien regime, the time when the royal government's incompetence and the royal family's political tin ear reached the simultaneous peak of their rise to intolerability. The plot revolves around Aristide's informal induction into the ranks of police informers, and the character Brasseur becomes his mentor in the force.

There is much to like about this book. I am on record elsewhere as admiring Alleyn's ability to set a scene, establish a character, and make a plot revolve like an orrery. This book displays all those characteristics, so...so...why is it I feel just that little bit dissatisfied at the end of it?

Because it's a prequel. Since one of the main reasons I like mysteries is that they're orderly, I like them to appear in order so that I may read them in order. It's the way I want the world to work, this following that which is followed by the other thing. I understand that, sometimes, books in a series appear out of order because publishers make this decision. I don't know if that's the case here, but I gather not since Miss Alleyn is currently writing the fourth book in the series and it's set in 1793.

But really that's a minor point, only of interest to me and my fellow order freaks. The book itself has all the pleasures I've come to associate with Alleyn's writing and I recommend it heartily. Fellow order nuts, read it first!! FIRST!!

Now wait a minute. 4 books that we MUST READ, over the course of 3 days? This is starting to feel like Stasia's thread. Am I in Wonderland?

I have put them all on my wish list and already have from the library the first Alleyn book--your warning came too late, richard!

Luckily, I don't think Richard requires us to read them in 3 days! At least I hope not. :-)

Just dropping in after your teeny tiny minisulk over on Caroline's thread... I've switched off stealth mode, as promised, so:

HERE I AM! VISITING YOUR THREAD! :-D

Roll on 2010 when I can get all you lot starred from the beginning instead of falling into the threads too late without a hope of possibly catching up!

I refuse to look at any of these books right now..
just cannot find anything more to want to read at the minute.

29 - I'm with you. I'm visiting threads, but I'm only skimming reviews until I finally get to sit down and finish Dracula.

>25 - Richard Dear -

Your most recent review caught me just in time to shuffle the order in which I read Susanne Alleyn's books. Thank you for being so steadfast and interested in them yourself and sharing the info so that those of us who prefer, may follow the story in a straight time-line, instead of a "flashback" type of reading experience.

They are all lined up in "my books" sitting there in the cyber stack, waiting to be reserved, ruminated over and slowly read for the pleasure they will provide. A-n-t-i-c-i-p-a-t-i-o-n, as Carly sings so expressively ....

Woofie

>26 Terri, all I can say is, if I wrote reviews faster your TBR pile would implode.

>27 Carolyn, I don't think of reading as a contest, myowself. Bush and Rove competed to see who could read the largest number of books in a year. What's the fun of that? "I need to read 158pp today or Someone Else will win!" Don't get it....

>28 Eleanor Potten...seems to me I've heard that name somewhere before...wasn't she the kindly spinster older sister of a bright, pretty university student, ran a tatty little bookery in an out-of-the-way spot...?

;-P

>29 Uh-oh, the Foul Book Humours have invaded Kath...that is always No Fun.

>30 Finishing Dracula is worth suspending the everlasting trawl for new books.

Richard- You are a reading machine, sir! Wow, I envy that speed! At my plodding pace it would take me hundreds of years to get caught up. All the Susanne Alleyn books sound very compelling and I need to find time to squeeze one in.

Ha, you jest, but 'tis all true! This (ahem) 'kindly' spinster older sister did indeed see her bright, pretty university student sibling flit away back to Liverpool this last week...

And such is our out-of-the-wayness that this weekend we have been hit by a fresh wave of miserable old women squawking 'DIDN'T THIS USED TO BE A CHARITY SHOP??!!!'... nine months after it closed down.

Sigh... back to work. Well, playing around with my 1010 challenge books. And eating toast. :-)

foul book humours? not at all..
I just have a stack to read and dare not add another series to it just now.
I am having storage issues... I have 2 more coming from vine, and one that is a child's book, too.

I have some ghostly reads I am saving for October.. and ther is a whole thread devoted to more that I want to check out. I am a fan of creepy ghostly reads.

Work is kicking my a$$ rdear. the nasty horror of a woman who you nicknamed so well, but I forgot is at her worst this year.. and more from admin. The kids are cute and great and smart.. but difficult.. and very loud. As is the nicknamed one. I find myself involuntarily covering my ears when she speaks more and more often. so loud. so loud

One of our new ( great) kids has autism. He dislikes clapping and singing. So.. she added a new clapping song to our afternoon circle activity. I just...........
Weary, my friend is the word that best describes me after 8 hours..just weary.
And hug deprived.

And of course there is my sisters illness. she is still not doing great.. and partly, it is due to physician stupidity. ( yes, take a pain pill before the test that you stopped taking glucophage for two days ago.. so that when you get there, the tech can tell you they can't do the test. Why? Because you took the pain pill for back pain before, according to dr direction. So.. stay off glucophage 3 more days, watch your numbers rise, and come back in 3 days. Oh and meantime, almost pass out because another dr added a bp med whil in hosp in great pain, and rdered it continued. This made 3 BP meds. Thus screwing up what finally, after 15 yrs was controlled bp, and ... on and on.

And.. I was sick for 2 weeks.. of our 8 kids 6 have been sick and in school.. and! I can't post this in my own thread because the library I started for work...
they wanted specific info logged and LT was the best place to do it so, since I donated so many books.. they have mckait as a person who shares the most books. And anyone in the organization can find my threads if they put their minds to it. ( I would )

so

thank you for loaning me space to rant and whine

#25

Count me in as one of the "fellow order freaks!"

Happy Sunday to you.

Kath, hang in there....

Thanks again, Richard, for the good words!

Oh, yes, the order of the books was strictly the publishers' decision. For a new contract, we (my agent and I) presented SMP with a proposal for a novel that would take place not long after A Treasury of Regrets, plus a list of half a dozen one-sentence "ideas" for more plots, just so they could see that I had plenty of future books in me. Well, they said "We're not too interested in the proposed book, but we'll take the 'necklace novel' (The Cavalier of the Apocalypse) and also the 'headless corpses novel'" (the current work in progress, set 1793) --without caring too much that they were both out of chronological sequence. My original plan was to publish a trilogy set in 1796-97 (Game of Patience, Treasury, and the proposed novel), then perhaps do a trilogy of prequels set 1786-89.

Sigh. Publishers are like that. And you do what they say, because it is a great big thundering dictatorial buyers' market out there.

But order freaks can make sure of the proper sequence by visiting my website: http://www.susannealleyn.com/works.htm

Cheers,
Susanne

How nice to have the author post :) What fun.

R! You are on a reading tear!! I can't keep up with your books, your reviews or your thread.

Kath--Best wishes.

It's great fun to have an author post.

>33 Mark, I am at a loss to understand the differences we all show in reading speeds. It's just weird to me. I know that all people process information in different ways and at different rates, but why should the range of variation be so great, I wonder?

>34 People are such creatures of habit. I went by the site of my late, lamented Odyssey Books the other day by habit...the clothes store ladies were a little puzzled by the large, old man shambling into their ladies' ugly trendy rag-shop and then irritably growling, "Where are the books?!" It's been at least six months.

>35 Dearest! How vile. That noisy nightmare of a goblin's worst fears should be strung up by her thumbs and hosed down with salty hot vinegar.

I am all over the doctor woes. Sending healing to sister-woman. Lots. All the time!

Sick, ewww, but expected at the beginning of a semester, no? It's kind of you to donate books, and you're a complete peach to be willing to give up so much of your privacy to these yahoos, but really! I welcome you to use this thread as your own, no problems or hesitations, but you need a room of your own, Virginia. I suggest you start a free account that will give you the separation from the workies (code name: "catless"?) and friend your main account. It's not sock-puppetry, because you're not trying to evade or circumvent the ToS. It's merely sanity salvation! And I promise we'll all follow you to the new "catless" threads!

Think about it.

>35 - Kath -

As I have mentioned before ... some people are "blind to what they have in front of them that represents excellence and IS excellent". Maybe, not stated in that phrase ... but more like "Wake UP People!" You have Kath ...she is right here ... support her and you support your kids, teachers and parents. Jeeeesh!

I want you to know also, that I want your sister to have good doctors who work together to help her ... not confuse things and make her more uncomfortable physically and mentally. I am sad to hear of the treatment, if you can call it that, that she has been a victim of. She, you and the rest of her family need a rest break and some good medical thinking and actions. Just saying ... my two cents.

Here are a bunch of hugs ((((((((((((((hugs))))))))))))). Did you feel them?

Ruth

>37 - Susanne Alleyn -

Thank you, Susanne for your post. It is good to hear of the publishing experience you shared with Richard and all the rest of us.

Also, I like the fact that you gave us a link to your website. That is thoughtful and gives us good info as we choose how to read what you write.

womansheart/Ruth Criag

Message edited by its author, Sep 27, 2009, 11:43am.

>36 Linda, it's just so...so...misguided of publishers to do the out-of-order stuff in the series-mystery world, don't you think? I expect we're about typical of the mystery-reading public...under 40, educated, possessed of unlimited economic resources, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound...so why is it so common for the publishers not to think of us in their planning?

>37 Who pays the piper calls the tune, indeed, and perhaps even rightly so. But see above...the market doesn't like this...and I know my mystery-reading sisters feel the same way, since we've had that conversation.

Ah well...I like the books, so I'll keep reading. And I fancy that I'm smart enough to see the interconnections no matter the order of appearance. I devoutly hope your editor wants the trilogy to be completed, in fact both of them, so one day we'll see the finished product as you intended us to see it.

I know what you mean about the log-lines...my agent, aka The Divine Miss, has gone round and round with me about the log-lines for the gay sleuth mystery series I've been working on. She reminded me yesterday (slightly heatedly) that these were items on a table d'hote menu, I couldn't get wedded to doing them in some self-generated order. *sigh* I see she's right, as usual. *sulphrous mutters*

>38 Suse! Howdy! I know, it's really quite cool to have someone as august as Herself posting in this piddly little backwater thread, isn't it?

>39 Hey Berlyner, no not a reading tear...pace hasn't changed...but a review-writig tear. There was an author chat with Herself until Friday, and I wanted to get the reviews up while that was going on. Two outta three ain't bad. Considering that I read any book I review twice before reviewing it, I feel rather pleased with myself for getting them up before it was entirely too late.

I'm glad to see you back after almost two weeks of taxi-momming. School is a mixed blessing, n'est-ce pas?

>41, 42 Woofie, where's my hug? *pouts*

Just for you

xoxoxox

>44 - Richard Dear -

There is not a font available that has enough points (is big enough) to express the hug(s) that I am sending to you.

They are big and very aware, you silly-billy, adorably huggable mensch, you.

Because there is no BIG HUG font ... these are invisible, you must understand. They exist in yours and my imagination ... so let them be just the right size for you, big guy.

And, gif free as requested ...

W

>45, 46 *aaahhh*

All better now! I am still loved.

Message edited by its author, Sep 27, 2009, 12:17pm.

thankfully, not being an order freak, I didn't mind not reading Alleyn's books in order .. not that I knew what order they appeared in anyway. I have yet to read Game of Patience but I have read Treasury of Regrets and The Cavalier.

to your post #32, richard ... had me giggling .. Bush reading?

Kath - much much love and hugs.... and a zap on the a$$ to the silly person who clearly isn't sensitive to challenges facing some of your kids.

Oh, heavens yes, cameling! Remember that Miss Laura Bush was a schoolmarm before she was first lady. She made sure Georgie had a lot of books to read..."Cow Goes Moo!" and "The Fuffy Widdle Bundy Rabbix" and all sorts of neato stuff!

Seriously...he read widely during his presidency. A little TOO widely. How does the sitting President of the United States of America have that much time, I'd like to know.

Well, since my local library has exactly 0 of Alleyn's books, I guess I do not have to worry about the other, order freak that I am :)

passing though with a *wave* and good morning wishes

#49: How does the sitting President of the United States of America have that much time, I'd like to know.

He came from the Stasia school of reading - no sleep!

#49 and #52 - at the risk of throwing a little political stuff in here, he was at his Texas hideout a lot so could read there or, and this is a leap I'm sure, maybe he lied. I certainly could never tell from anything he ever said that he ever cracked a book (although he cracked the crack... no wait. not crack, just run of the mill coke.... well. never mind...)

Message edited by its author, Sep 28, 2009, 6:44am.

Kare, I bow to no one in my contempt and loathing for Bush and all that he "stood" for, but I sincerely doubt he used illegals while in office. Too many people would know; the nature of humans being what it is, I am quite quite certain that it would have leaked!

No, no. Not while in office. But when he was a young, rowdy drunken coke user. Pre-Laura I'm sure.

I was just being silly with the crack crack..... gads I must stop this.

Just say "no" to cracks...

lol -- it might have been even funnier for me as I'm reading a story (Blindsight) about crack et al...

Uh . . . "august"? (#44) That's up there with the library website that mentioned "acclaimed author Susanne Alleyn" on its New Books page. (I wish that "acclaim" involved a little more pay.) Gosh, Richard, you'll give me a swelled head.

For those whose local libraries don't have any or all of my books . . . just go there and ask nicely for them, perhaps mentioning that they got great reviews in the trade magazines. ;-) The library may order copies on request, or, if it's not in the budget, perhaps they can borrow copies on interlibrary loan.

Any and all promotion helps us unknown authors. Keep reading, and please spread the word among your friends to keep the buzz going!

Thanks and hugs to all,
Susanne

You guys are "crack"ing me up! I love Spock and bagpipes and Carol Burnett is the best!!

ninety-one of seventy-five:

The Hummingbird's Daughter

Someone needs to explain to me why this book is great. I don't think it's even good. It's The Song of Bernadette for the 21st century, written in prose as flat and featureless as the deserts it describes.

So very, very, very not recommended.

#59. Re the whole bagpipe Spock thing...apparently I was on crack and posted a message for two threads at once. The other comments, which make no sense here, belong to the Gathering Place thread. LOL

R-- Better luck with your next book. Hopefully this is just a blip.

vis a vis >60

Richard..you know that Kath ("mckait") is going to give you Hell for your "review'..it's one of her faves...me, i haven't seen my copy long enough to read it...just warning you, luv....J

Well, Berly, heaven knows I'm in a tiny minority here...the book was received with great praise and happiness by most everyone. I simply don't get it. I grew up on the Texas/Mexico border for a goodly while, so perhaps it's something to do with that fact...? I don't know.

Bagpipes, Spock, and Carol Burnett...references of the most confusing to them as don't thread-hop in the same places we do; still and all, I knew exactly what you were talking about, so perhaps it could go down as an "in-joke" and not that extra pipe of crack you smoked after the xanax.

>62 jude, I know...it's gonna get me in trouble, but why lie? It's just too windy and bloviatorial for me to feel anything other than impatient and irritated.

bloviate - another word I have learnt on your erudite thread, Richard. I wonder if that is an 'Americanism" or else I am just dumb. (No answer required).

Oh, yes, I'll definitely take the inside joke over drugs. Thanks for the out!

blah blah blah you pearl ruled it didn't you???

Ninety-two of seventy-five:

City of Silver by Annamaria Alfieri

An historical mystery set in seventeenth-century Peru, certainly an unusual choice for an author, was completely irresistible to me the day I stumbled across it in the liberry.

Sadly, I ended the 315-page read wishing I'd resisted. It's not a bad book, really, but it's ponderous. The pacing problem that plagues many an historical mystery was amply demonstrated here...murders happened, but seemingly without emotional affect or effect. It's startling to me that the murder of a young woman in a convent could elicit such a small response from me. I was more moved by the death of a miner.

I found the characters in the book hard to get into, feeling little kinship with the POV Sister Maria Santa Hilda and less with her fellow Spanish Potosinos. Simply couldn't be bothered to learn their names, even...I gave them letters in my head, and after "F" gave up entirely...but gravy on toast, lady, could you have found a glummer, less scintillating group of people to write about?!

Overall not recommended.

oh me, oh my ... i'm actually tip-toeing through richard's thread here and for once i have nothing to add to my wishlist! is today going to get anymore weird? am i going to receive a call from my mother telling me it's ok not to go to church?!

*running away*... need a potato chip to calm down....

Message edited by its author, Sep 28, 2009, 6:53pm.

*passes bag of chips*

*voraciously munching* ... thanks Kath

Message edited by its author, Sep 28, 2009, 9:25pm.

Pass some of those over here would ya? Thanks!

#67 He definitely pearl ruled it...

>67 mckait...I am hurt, yes wounded to the quick that you would suspect me of Pearl-Ruling a book that you ecstatically recommended!

On p277 (hardcover), there is a list that Don Tomas makes of things his newfound daughter must do, starting with bathe...when Huila FINALLY dies, no one notices because Teresita has done some stupid thing that everyone thinks is miraculous...so what, who cares, was the only response I could muster to the whole enterprise.

>69 cameling, actually she called *me* and asked me to pass the message on that your immortal soul is aces with the church and you needn't worry anymore, per the Vatican.

>72 Berly...cayete! Zip the lip!

Mmmmm mmm m mm Mmmmmmph!!!

> 73 - Richard Dear - re: your post back to Berly's post ...

How is Dear Berly to eat chips/crisps with a zipped lip. Besides she might get a stuffed up nose, oh ...dear. You can be s-o-o-o-o harsh in your dispensations sometimes.

BTW, you may as well know that I have a little farm now myself. I DID NOT buy it. It came with the game, Farm Town ... trust me on this.

Later, gator man -

Woofie

*chuckle*

You go girl!

And richard.. I will only believe that you didn't pearl it because you said so.. not because you hauled out a random page.

poor dear man....

Ninety-three of seventy-five:

A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly

The first Benjamin January/Javier mystery set in 1833 New Orleans and featuring a black musician/doctor as our POV character/sleuth.

The backstory of this mystery is, in my observation, more interesting than the mystery to be solved. I wasn't able to get into the book on first read, and made it to chapter 3 before shelving it. I re-tried the story, and got all the way through this time. It's a very evocative piece of writing, it's got a lot of characters whose interactions are very interesting, and in the end I was gruntled enough to give it three stars.

What I found irksome was the mystery itself. The sleuth's reasons for investigating the murder are, in theory, the strongest possible. Why then was I so indifferent to the crime and the eventual punishment? Because I don't think the author was fully engaged with that aspect of the story. It's not that it felt perfunctory, exactly, but it felt...extraneous...like she put it in so she'd have a reason to tell us a story in this setting.

Since it's the first of a series, I might pick up the next and see if there's some change that could make me follow the rest...but frankly, it's low on my priority list. Check back in 2013 or so (assuming the world doesn't end in 2012).

Neutral response...hazard at your own risk, historical fans.

#77 Since this is available at our county library, I may take a look at it out of curiosity, as the POV character, setting, and backstory sound interesting and might be worth a look. I'll know not to expect too much from the mystery. Thanks for the informative review!

Always glad to help! I guess the fact that I kept thinking about the book, and felt compelled to try it again, says a lot, no?

#79: I have read a couple of books in the series, and I think the first book is the weakest, Richard, so you may like the others better.

hmmm, interesting non-rdear sorts of books?

I have Fever Season and didn't realize it was part of a series. As I recall it was very good and left me hungry for more.

ETA re: Msg 77

Message edited by its author, Oct 1, 2009, 8:08pm.

Ninety-four of seventy-five:

Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove

Yuck. Sanctimonious self-righteous nineties divorced lawyer and mother of two has a bad day, gets sent back in time to the second century CE, has a bad life, comes back to the present all wise and everything, and is just as sanctimonious and self-righteous but now with "good" (for her, anyway) outcomes.

Unpleasant character who should have been crucified. Time travel was nicely handled. Nothing, but NOthing, should cause you to pick this book up as anything other than a defensive weapon (500+ pages in 6 x 9 trim size = hefty!). It wasn't execrable, merely average for the genre. No excuse for that kind of book taking up your eyeblinks.

#83: OK, I am so skipping that one!

I am really glad that you don't over dramatize when it comes to describing your reads.

no really.

#83 richarddear - tell us what you really think.

LOL!! Richard don't be so coy about your opinions.

where are you rdear? I need a good laugh.

Message edited by its author, Oct 3, 2009, 7:04am.

Oi, you lot, stop giving me the giggles in the shop - the customers will think I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic! :-D

Eleanor .. you could always blame the bears that arrived early at the picnic, stealing said sandwiches ... ;-)

richard : thanks for the heads up. I will happily skip these 2 or at least A Man of Free Color until I see what you think of the others in the series.

clearly, rdear is taking the weekend off.......

>83 -- I really enjoyed Household Gods and recommend it as a fun read. LOL I like it!

ETA Seems to me that Just Chris' take on HG was very like yours. Hmmm... guess I'll have to see how it strikes me on the next go around. :)

Message edited by its author, Oct 4, 2009, 12:36pm.

Watch it Susan;
You will be in the soggy, drippy, dank and damp vestibule where the rest of us have been at one time or another.
hugs, (while you are still dry)
belva

No, no, no one goes to The Vestibule to tend the wet, snowy anoraks and wellies merely for being wrong about a book's merits. Dickens is simply insupportable root and branch, therefore admiration for him is grounds for exclusion from the Great Bookstore in the Sky with Unlimited Credit.

It's houseguest month...two weeks of guesting, then I go to Texas, then more family comes the day after I get back. Not until November are we without at least three extra people staying with us.

Whee.

sorry about that rd.
Sounds like work and no down time.. yikes!

Thanks, loveycuddles!

It's not all bad, but it's a lot of work...and now auntie has invited one of the ladies to come and spend A MONTH here. Of course she didn't check with me. She didn't check with The Divine Miss. She just came on out with it!

Annoyed? Who, me?

If it get to be too much for you... I have a spare room..
tiime you got a chance to make friends with my kitties ...

Richard Dear -

Would you variously describe your caregiving as more like the experiences of an English butler or a hired hand on the biggest spread in Texas ... or neither one! Your assistance and friendship don't seem to quite fit anywhere in there. Only you can describe what your life with the Dear Divine Miss is like.

They better be gracious and grateful guests and willing to help is all I gotta say.

Served the most discriminating choices by the "best in the world" is most like it, I'd say.

Woofie

waahhhh..... I like Dickens and richard sez I won't be allowed into the Great Bookstore in the Sky with Unlimited Credit



*slinking off to cry inconsolably in a corner*

omg

that is the cutest pic ever

99: I like Dickens and richard sez I won't be allowed into the Great Bookstore in the Sky with Unlimited Credit

me too :( what did we ever do to deserve this, sir R?? Surely you can make an exception now!

No Exceptions. No Dickens in the Great Bookstore in the Sky. None, nada, zilch, zip, rien. As "good" Dickensians, though, you may possibly be afforded stockroom privileges and the weekly cup of {insert favorite hot beverage here}.

Ain't I magnanimous?

i have to weigh in as a Dickens Admirer..and i already have enough books to outfit a store, thank you veddy much...but have done stockroom duty in a few places in my life..it ain't bad as long as the coffee is hot and strong...

i empathize with the houseguest woes...my Brother is arriving here on Friday for his yearly invasion/visit..it's only for the weekend..but he is a very upbeat/chipper person...annoying as all hell to curmudgeonly moi...i'll be thinking of you whilst he natters away...whilst i gnash my teeth and wish laryngitis on him...........;-)

Jude...what's he allergic to? Make sure you have a lot of it on hand, that'll take care of the terminal perkies.

Actually, he has Celiac Disease....no wheat gluten...nada...but if i give him a chunk of bread (too obvious, right?)..or anything containing wheat..he sure loses his perkiness..but he does get all fainty and nauseated...and i hate to clean up after sick people...maybe i'll slip him a Vicodin with his did-din Friday evening....and it's supposed to rain here Saturday...we usually go to a big "antique" auction on saturday when he visits.....i guess if it rains i'll take a book and go off somewhere while he stands around...being perky....yurky!

Ninety-five of seventy-five:

The Revolution Business by Charles Stross

The latest of "The Merchant Princes" series, book five in fact, is a wonderful deepening of a chain of alternate worlds that resemble the mundane one you and I live in more, or less, depending on which strand of his story Stross is highlighting at any given moment.

The basic premise of all alternate history is to take off from the world the reader knows at a point he or she can get revved up about. In the US, that most often means alternate outcomes of the American Civil War, 1861-1865; I'd hesitate to speculate about other countries, but I've seen a LOT of Bonaparte-wins stuff in French. In a way, this area of fiction allows readers to fulfill fantasies of what the world Could and Should be like.

What I most like about this series of books is that Stross takes off from multiple departure points, and some so subtly that most all readers will slide right past the references that let you know you're down the rabbit hole until sucker-punched with the difference. Stross does that in this book, and he does it well, if a sucker-punch can be done well. A nagging not-quite-rightness from previous books gets brought up full force, and it's a game-changer for the series. Well done, Sir Charles.

Now, there is a downside to every artistic choice...since there are multiple alternate worlds, each with its own issues and problems to work out on these pages, the focus tends to be a bit blurry. The constraints of having the series POV character physically move among the alternate realities limits Stross's forward momentum in her story, and can feel as though the alternates are getting short shrift. I'd have to say, though, that the sensation of wanting more of all the threads is a good sign that Stross is a capable storyteller operating at full throttle.

This entry in the series will repay your time spent reading it. Don't start here, though...start with book one, The Family Trade. It's high-quality thinking, and reading.

Oh, and George Bush gets blown up by a nuke.

"terminal perkies."

I love that term! Warning, I'm going to steal it--I'll try to remember to give you credit, ricchard.

ETA great review, Richard. But I simply cannot add another series to my list right now--unless I somehow achieve immortality. I'm going to have to start treating your thread like you treat Stasia's!

Message edited by its author, Oct 6, 2009, 1:59pm.

"George Bush gets blown up by a nuke"
Sorry for this abuse of the English language but I have to say "LOL".

>107 Carolyn, why I never! As if I, a mere scribbler, could compete with The Beatified Stasia, Holy Mother of Temptation of the Bibliophiles!

Buy, borrow, steal the series...no less a luminary than Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman praises them.

>108 Eliza, well, can't leave out such a huge piece of fantasy fulfillment, eh what?

Ninety-six of seventy-five:

Bitch Goddess by Robert Rodi

I needed to read some prose snarkier, bitchier, and more cruelly insulting than my email. I found a whole shelf of Rodi's novels in my local liberry...mother lode!

Who cares what books like this are "about"? The plot's an excuse to travel through the meanest, nastiest corners of your psyche guilt-free! And what a catharsis it is. Not one of Rodi's characters could remotely be called a "hero" except in the lit-crit sense. Everyone, but everyone, is a self-seeking scumbag with multi-level agendas of unkindness and power-seeking and ego gratification.

*aaahhh*

Honesty is the best policy? Ha! Honesty needs the best insurance policy, more like! The crashing of dream-castles and the fracturing of hopes and the flattening of the well-intentioned is sheer, vicious, Dorothy-Parker-esque Schadenfreude.

Pop a cork. Sip slowly. Savor the wine, inhale the fumes, and remember not to snort the stuff out your nose laughing.

#106: I had just come across Stross' name recently in connection with his book Saturn's Children. Seems like an author I need to investigate.

#107: Carolyn, he calles me 'The Beatified Stasia etc.', but I am firmly in the vestibule with all the other Dickens lovers!

Aha! A Bitch Goddess....what's not to love??? you have hooked me, you...as if..i could find this in my neck of the Redneck Woods..but i will*snort* anyway... and diligently seek

"Oh, and George Bush gets blown up by a nuke."

I might have to read this one

#11

Stasia, maybe Richard doesn't consider "Beatified" a compliment! Maybe you are beatified because you love Dickens. I plan to wrap all my Dickens in brown paper covers-- like I used to do with the books I didn't want anyone to know I was reading :-D--and slip on by into that great bookstore. It's okay if it doesn't have Dickens because I'll have most of his stuff already, carefully camouflaged.

I like Dickens..... :)

Finally-------------------Somebody wrote a book about me. YEA!~!~!
belva

110 : consider it added to my wishlist and thumb-upped too!

BELVA!!!

You rascal, you.

Goddess, maybe. Bitch, I just don't see it and you must hide it well.

Just saying,

Ruthie

Richard Dear -

How be thee? Irreverent ranting and writing thrill me to the core of my rotten heart. Let me at Bitch Goddess and I will after-words, pun intended, share my humble two cents worth. (Unfortunately, my local library system lacks that title. They have Kept Boy and Drag Queen. What do you advise, if anything?)

Are you serving arsenic cookies and absinthe to the house guests? tsk, tsk now now

Lovings,

Woofie

EBA - to add comment about book's non-availability.

Message edited by its author, Oct 7, 2009, 10:45am.

Hi Belva! Yes, indeed, they've finally captured your essence on the page. *heeheehee*

Kath, oh yes indeed I think you'd like the series quite a lot, but please start with book one or not one word will make sense to you.

Woofie punkin, read Kept Boy then...still snark-filled fun, though not quite as nasty as Bitch Goddess is.

Eliza, I worry for your youthful, dewy innocence if you read this book...it would be like Stasia reading the Marquis de Sade, contact of the pristine with the irredeemable. That makes me sad to think I might have sullied your eyeballs.

I think we of the Dickens admiration club should meet at Richard's house, tie him down, and read him passages from various Dickens books until he sez we have full reign in the Great Bookstore in the Sky. Stockroom my *bleep* ... those places are dark, smell funny, furry things fall on your head and you usually hear scurrying sounds in corners.

I like the sound of Bitch Goddess but nothing doing... my libe does not carry Martha O'Connor. I've written a few suggestion slips for them to order her in, and I hope I've disguised my handwriting sufficiently so they think it's 7 different people wanting the books.

Ninety-seven of seventy-five:

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

I hate Flo, and dislike Rose, and can think of no possible reason for anyone to read more than the Pearl Rule requires or the first three stories, whichever comes first in your edition.

Lovely, lovely sentences telling deadly little quotidian stories about dreary, slatternly people. Not recommended to the point of active discouragement.

>121 Ooo, stinkage, dear cameling! It's a fun read, and the style's even interesting...emails, press clippings, transcripts of recorded conversations...it's fun, like sneaking a read of someone's intime little naughty scrapbook.

We shall Loftily Ignore the backchat regarding the Vile Dickens.

Thanks for the warning, richard dear .... I shan't touch this with a 1000ft pole

Ninety-eight of seventy-five:

Kept Boy by Robert Rodi

Snarktastic.

Kept Boy Toy of rich old queen is threatened with replacement by the sexy young pool boy. The old queen loves kept boy toy, though, and through a series of silly misadventures, ends up throwing boy toy and pool boy a little too often, and they fall in love with each other.

Rich old queen takes them all on vacation after a particularly silly piece of bad luck, finds them shagging each other rotten, has A Moment with them telling each how very much old queen loved him, and dies.

Leaving kept boy toy Everything! All the money, all the houses, the whole cheese. And what does kept boy toy do with it? Makes everyone he loves as secure as money can make them.

And shags the pool boy rotten. Happy endings, anyone? Recommended.

I think I started Beggar Maid at one stage (although obviously before my LT addiction, because I don't seem to have registered it here) and I do have to agree: unpleasant characters. But I rather liked the stories, regardless.

I wonder where my copy has gone...

>125 - Richard Dear -

Doesn't sound like much fiction in this tale of love, true love, love rediscovered, love expressed in settlements of estates ... to me. Living the lusty life with joi de vivre!

Okay ... I'll give it a go, RD. I like happy endings, too.

Woofie

>126 wookieb, I'd say don't spend too much time looking for it. Not worth discovering again!

>127 Hi Woofie!

#125: sounds like a gay Harlequin (now there's an image), Ricardo.

>129 Tui! I was just wondering where you've been, and here you are!

It's got the Harlequin plot, you're right, but it's waaay less romantic and more bitchy than a Harlequin rip-off would need to be.

I've been buried under a bathroom reno. Hardly reading at all. Light is appearing at the end of the tunnel, however.

Ninety-nine of seventy-five:

Already Dead by Charlie Huston

What a ride...really, noir for the new millennium is a fair description of the book, the character, the setting and set-up for the series.

Hyper-violent, and not for the squeamish. Lots of yech-ptui sexual deviance. Plenty of "Reservoir Dogs"-style torture and cruelty.

In the end, I think it's got something fresh to say about the evergreen plot device of hardboiled dick with a heart of gold, a strong girlfriend whose very existence causes him joy, and clients he not only can't trust but whose lies and machinations are calculated to cost him his life. I'd recommend it to the noir readers, but it's not for everyone.

Richard- Nice review! I think you summed it up well! You are right, not for the squeamish, but for everyone else with a fondness for hard-boiled crime, hop aboard! Hope it interested you enough to read the others in the series!

#132: Skipping that one - I proudly remain one of the squeamish!

Definately a good review, adding that one to my wishlist. thanks.

ONE HUNDRED of seventy-five:

The Octopus by Frank Norris merits three stars based on historical interest alone. It's not Norris's best writing by a long shot, that honor belonging to McTeague (in this writer's never-humble opinion), and it's further evidence if any was needed that the loss to American letters that Norris's death at 32 was immense.

The imagination that Norris evidenced in his six-book career is sharp. He saw clearly the world around him, and wasn't about to let the Great Unwashed fail to see it with his clarity. His infelicities of style were those that a longer career could have, and probably would have, beaten out of him. Dreiser aside, the other American Realists improved their writing chops with time; I see no reason to suspect Norris of Dreiser-hood.

But no amount of writerly tyro-hood can take away the astonishing storytelling eye the man had. It's entirely possible that we'd have grown our own, more mellifluous, Conrad right here in Murrika had medical science been only a little more advanced in 1902. A major cultural "what might have been" moment....

I'd say this isn't a book to read and savored and committed to memory, but rather a cultural artifact to be appreciated by those interested in the culture in question.

I finally catch up with you (three threads later) too late for timely congratulations on the 75, but hey! I get to be the first to say well done on the century.

Also, I can't believe the Merchant Princes series is up to 5 books already!! I've got the first two on my shelf, as yet unread, but it feels like only a few months since I first read the review that caused me to put them on my wishlist.... time is elastic indeed.

edit as I was too trigger-happy on the submit button and left out half my post...

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2009, 12:47pm.

Congratulations on the 100th read!

>137 Hi Rachael! Glad to see you! And I've noted the elasticity of time, since it seems like a month or so has gone by after the birth of my (29-year-old) daughter. I cannot possibly be 50, it's not remotely conceiveable. And yet the arithmetic is there.

>138 Thanks, c! However, it's not my hundredth READ, but hundredth REVIEW. I don't count reads, it's not relevant to anything.

silly me;) sorry for the misunderstanding there I probably took the thread title too literally! — RD VII...the seventh thread of richardderus's reading

even bigger congrats on the 100th REVIEW. (makes me feel like I should get on and write a few more)

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2009, 1:07pm.

Hey, after I just offered my hearty congratulations over on this week's WAYRN thread, I hopped across to my profile and whaddya know, I'm on 96 reviews myself! Not quite sure how that happened... Still, mine aren't as snarkily good as yours so I'll end the comparison there...

>140 Yeah, I can't review 'em if I ain't read 'em, unlike Harriet Clausner of ill memory on Amazon. I'm debating whether to switch over to the 100 challenge next year, or stay here. Can't decide.

>141 Elliekins poopsie-pie pwecious poppet, would you consider making it a goal to write 100 reviews in 2010? Sounds like it might be a doable, and worthy, challenge to set yourself. I set out to write 75 reviews this year. I think I've got about 70-75 *good* reviews out of this hundred. I'm setting 100 *good* reviews as my 2010 goal.

One hundred one of seventy-five:

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke is way too long for the story. Meggie isn't interesting enough to make me want to follow her through the convolutions of discovery with Mo and Elinor. I can't believe this took over 500pp to tell!

And yet, and yet...it's aimed at a very different demographic than I am...young girls, it would seem, want long long long books about nothing much, like those hideous Stephenie Meyer warts on the Devil's buttcheeks. So for its target audience, it's a huge improvement over the otherwise available material.

What is it, BTW, that leads adolescent females down these primrose paths of tedium? My daughter loooved the Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" crapola, and I think she still reads them (I'm afraid to ask). If Inkheart had weighed in at 300pp or so, it would have been a much more exciting book. Is there some double-X-chromosome disorder that prevents y'all from liking excitement?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Hi ya stranger! Yes, Inkheart is too long for the story and by book three I just wanted to know how it would all end! The characters irritated me and the cool idea of traveling into a book was passé. Ah well. Congrats on 100 REVIEWS! Your snarky ones are usually your best.

xoxo

Your snarky ones are usually your best.

*chin quiver*eyes mist up*

R...really? *sniff* I...I hoped I was as good at making p...people want to read a book, not j...just a...avoid it....

*snivel*

Oh, do stop sniffing. I like your sincerely enthusiastic ones too.

It's just that the snarky ones make me laugh AND I know I don't have to add anything to my TBR, so there is an inherent lightness to your snarkiness, at least for me.

Hope this helps.

Your biggest fan.

>143 actually, it's not just young girls - my 10YO son loves the Inkworld books and has gone on to read several other Cornelia Funke books off the back of them.

I, on the other hand, while enjoying Inkheart, agree completely with your "too long". It drove me mental how they seemed to spend most of the book either running away from or driving back to the evil villain's mountain village lair (one thing the film got dead right: it cut out practically all of this unnecessary travelling). I haven't gone on to read the other two, though I probably will mainly because my son really wants me to and it seems kind of unsporting not to keep him company.

I completely agree with Berly, Richard sir. The snarky ones are a delight to read AND don't add to my already huge wishlist. Perfection :D

quit insulting my chromosomes, you Y haver you!!!

What's a "haver"? LOL

Richard Dear -

I love the Band of Bats on the purple bar and the lightning bolt at review #100. Way k3wl!

Woofie

Congratulations, richard dear on passing the century mark... (books read, not age )

I actually liked Inkheart and while not exciting, I really liked the characters. But I found Inkspell weak and it put me off wanting to read the 3rd in the series.

Message edited by its author, Oct 12, 2009, 11:14pm.

Richard - felt like some entertainment so just popped in to have a giggle and chuckle at your reviews, even though I have heard of NONE of the books.

Thanks.

>152 Since it's so cold and ucchhy today, I feel like the century mark in age as well, Caro dear. Nasty up your way, too?

>151 Thanks, Woofie! And look at you...k3wl! W00t!

>149-150: My buddy Betsy lived with this looney-tune lesbian separatist for a while who called me, her most frequent visitor, "the Y." She never once spoke to me directly. I'd show up at the door, she'd shout over her shoulder, "Yo, the Y's here," and walk away.

Welcome! Come in! Have a glass of water! Never. What a strange person she was.

>148, 146: Oh. Well. Hmmmf. Alrighty then.

>147 Rachael, greater love hath no mom. Being bored with the sprog is so much a part of the job, and no one ever warns you about it....

Yeah, the hither-thither-and-yonning is really tiresome. A good editor should have axed that stuff.

One hundred two of seventy-five:

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Oh. My. God.

Walls has a non-fiction novel coming out this month, so I decided to re-read the book that started all the ruckus before I got Half-Broke Horses.

A little backstory: I was romantically involved with a man for some time while I lived in Austin, whom I met on a bus. I got on the bus, sat a few seats behind the cute, sandy-haired, rumpled guy with the prominent ears I spotted from the pay-stile, and sighed the happy sigh of one whose world contains all the things he needs: A job, a home, and all the men he can mentally undress and ravish.

I was mid-mental ravishment when Blondie upset the applecart by bursting into tears. As quietly as he could, of course, but tears. A stop later, still crying. Stop after that, still crying. I got up, moved into the seat next to him across the aisle, and said, "What the hell're you reading? I wanna be sure I never set an eyeball on it." That got a laugh, and he held up The Glass Castle and said it was sort of the story of his life.

We talked for four hours that day. I gave him my email and number, and things progressed pretty smoothly until August of last year, but that's another story.

He'd just read Walls's tale of her father taking her pubescent self to a pool-hall and getting her within an inch of getting raped, just so he'd have beer money. It struck a chord, and the story of his own stepfather's abuses of Mr. Man came spewing out of him. I've read the book before just now, specifically so I could discuss it with Mr. Man, but I did so with an already numbed horror bone and a severed humor tendon.

Only now that I am several years beyond that initial encounter with the book can I see how very funny the tragic events in it are, and were to the author. I can see that it's gallows humor of a sort...but also that it's all perfect proof that life's a Zen joke.

If you can chuckle at Dolly Parton's apercu, "You have no idea how much it costs to look this cheap," then Walls is the next step up the Sisyphean slope of learning how to laugh like the Dalai Lama. It's a hard life that etches grooves in the looking-glass, but it's a path worth taking if you can get to the place where "textured" is valued more than smooth. Read the book, you'll know what I mean.

Richard Dear.

Where and how did you learn to write as exquisitely as you do?

Sounds like Mr. sandy-haired, rumpled guy broke your heart? Or, am I reading too much between the lines?

The Glass Castle was one of my top reads last year. I agree with your

Oh. My. God.

Good book, well written... terribly sad.

Is it friday yet?

>102 - Richard Dear -

Thank you for sharing the back-story and the perceptive comments regarding The Glass Castle. Should you decide that you will post a review of the book on the main page for same, please let me know.

I would like to have your thoughts out there as a "hot" review so that more readers will take interest in this book, and read it. It is unforgettable and the philosophizing that you offer us is very worthy.

I read this book back in the day ... and was bowled over. I have waited for her upcoming book Half Broke Horses with bated breath ... been on the special media request list for ages at the library. I see that it was released a few days ago, so maybe I will be reading it soon.

Richard, you are "the man," the penultimate "y" if you will. Thank you so much for your thoughts. I'm ready to re-read this book today!

Woofie

>156 Linda, how lovely to hear such praise! Thank you! I feel unworthy of "exquisite" as a characteristic of my writing, but I am battening on the compliment like a big ol' tick.

About Mr. Man...let me give you some backstory. I grew up in South Texas...Mercedes...and moved to Austin at about 9yrs. Lived there for two marriages, two kids, and some very unhappy years. My mother the snob shopped in NYC for her clothes, so I'd always come here, but I thought NYC was all Bonwit Teller's gilt waiting-room sofas and Schrafft's ice cream sundaes and Barney's fitting rooms.

I was 27, divorced the second time, and sick of feeling like a a lobster in a pot for seventeen months a year. Woke up on my birthday, threw some clothes in a suitcase, flew to NYC, got a job, and left Austin. Thirteen years later, I was back to help my mother die; then my little brother had a very painful and nasty divorce; then my daughter found me after our long separation; then I fell in love with the guy on the bus. I spent 9yrs back in Texas, a place I think of as hellishly conservative and hag-ridden by religion, and wanted to come home to cool, “cool” New York. The Divine Miss and I spoke all the while I was there, though not very often (she was and is still pissed that I left her, even though I had excellent and articulated reasons for so doing), and one day she pulled out the trump card: She needed help. I can withstand most every blandishment and guilt trip you can devise, from long practice, but I cannot resist the klaxon call of help needed by those I love.

Mr. Man, whose inability to come out and face up to his world as the lover of another man wore on my one remaining nerve, got The Talk...I am needed in New York; give me a reason to stay. He failed the test. I am in New York. So now you know a lot more than you did, and probably wanted to.

But my heart, in this as in all other things, is still my own.

>157 Karen, it's just impossible to imagine in advance the impact that this book will have on a person.

>158 no dear, it's not, and that's just so too bad.... xoxo

>159 Woofie, it's posted on the main page. Do your magic! And if I'm the man, who's Brad Pitt?

So now you know a lot more than you did, and probably wanted to.

Richard, I do want to know and it is good to get to know you.

I still want to know where you learned to write so darn well!

Message edited by its author, Oct 13, 2009, 4:39pm.

#161: IMHO, Brad Pitt is just another pretty face. You are definitely the man!

Edited to try and close the bold tag

Message edited by its author, Oct 13, 2009, 11:51am.

(delurk) End bold. (relurk!)

Message edited by its author, Oct 13, 2009, 11:53am.

> Richard Dear -

Brad Who???

W

#164: Thanks! Since it obviously did not work for me :)

Took 2 attempts:) That bold did not want to go!

>161 - RD -

I found it, thanks. I had looked at the main page first, earlier today, and somehow missed it.

I gave the review a thumbs-up. But, I don't have any magic up my sleeve or in my top hat. I do hope others who have read and appreciated the review you posted for The Glass Castle will seek it out and do the same.

You not only are a smart, good, ironic man-person ... but you further the interest of others of us who love well written books and brilliant authors.

You little devil/Saint ... have a good one!

Woofie

Message edited by its author, Oct 13, 2009, 12:03pm.

#161 Richard - What stunned me about the book was her unfailing love of her parents even though they were crazy and alcoholic. She eventually saw that her childhood/teen years were far from normal and wanted to escape from that environment and successfully did so, but still loved them. What a generous heart!

Richard dear, no less that two (2!) hot reviews for you today! Congratulations!

(Oh, and your life story is fascinating, if I may use that banal word. Like Linda said, "it is good to get to know you".)

A double hottie, richard! Good on you.

I loved Glass Castle and with my sheltered upbringing, I wonder if I would have been a third as strong if I had to grow up under those conditions.

snuggle snoozy weather over here although the trees are gorgeous and tempt you to go out for a walk. This is hot apple pie on a deep cosy couch weather... and where am I? under flourescent lighting sitting in a hard chair with uncomfortable shoes on in my office. bleah!

I am the culprit of the bold type...I apologize. I went in and fixed it.

oh Richard..given your Fan Club..i can weigh in on Cornelia Funke...i likeThe Thief Lord...read Inkheart partially..i wanted to like it for it's "young girl loves books" aspect...but...if you want to read a Biblio/Creepy book...try The Ink Drinker by Eric Sanvoisin...only one available at AMAZON..well worth the read....and i still love creepy books..though no longer young

RD- Congrat's on the 100 reviews! You are amazing sir! And a great job on The Glass Castle. I read it a couple years ago and thought it was an excellent memoir.

As head of rdears fan club... checks or money orders in the amount of $44.44
can be sent directly to me for a years membership. For this, you will not receive a newsletter, pictures, a bio or nail clippings.

You will receive nothing at all, but I do need some living room furniture.....

Kath, Many thanks for the laugh out loud belly chuckle!

>175 HEY!! We better be splittin' this pilf! I need reference books!

>176 Linda...my threads are no-GIF zones, though that one is funny and should stay. Off to the Vestibule with you, for a period of one thousand years.

60/40

my idea

no gifs my arse dearie

STOP THE GIF-NESS!

Well, I was just checking in since I am out of town presently, but I see everything is normal here. Carry on :)

gift-ness you say? certainly.. here is a gift for you

Message edited by its author, Oct 15, 2009, 6:27am.

Awww, two of my favourite LOLcats... the first one makes me giggle, the second just breaks my heart. Sorry rdear, I think you've been out-kittied on your own thread! ;-)

Richard Dear -

Seeing how effective these latest gif posts have been in communicating messages of deep import to you in such a brief manner ... I am now thinking that graphic novels might be an avenue for you, as a brilliant writer to pursue. What-da-ya think, RD? Are pictures worth a thousand words?

Poke. Poke.

Woofie

LMBFAO!~!~!~!

Rolling on the floor with Belva. Giggle, giggle, achoo! Sorry, there is a lot of cat hair here...

Cats. Yuck. Ptui.

Finally houseguestless, and it's a nice feeling. I plan to do nothing for the rest of the day. Aaah.

You should at least pour yourself a drink!

One hundred three of seventy-five:

Hell and Earth by Elizabeth Bear

I can't believe I so spectacularly failed to pay attention to the position this book occupies I a series! I am usually completely obsessive about reading series in order. I dislike intensely the feeling of not understanding why something is a climactic moment, when the structure so clearly says that it is...and then, going back to fill in the backstory, I run across the cliffhanger or set-up for the later climax and it's just completely ruined by foreknowledge.

Anyway. This is the fourth book of “The Promethean Age” series Bear wrote in an alternate England still touching the Faerie lands ruled by the Mebd (given to us by Shakespeare, our primary POV character, as Queen Mab). The reason for Queen Elizabeth I's greatness and enduring fame are given as her England's intertwined destiny with Faerie, and her own shadowing of the Mebd's rise to power.

Christopher Marlowe, Richard Baines, Ben Jonson, Thomas Walsingham and a host of other factual figures are used cleverly in this fictional story of intrigues resolved and debts of dishonor paid. It's a wonderful, creative beast stitched together like a Faerie bard's patchwork cloak from bits and snatches of fact and hints of facts gleaned by the careful between-the-lines reading of the author. The conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot, which was a Catholic effort to blow King James I and his family to Glory at the opening of a Parliamentary session, are revealed to have been making a Royal sacrifice, one that would spill Royal blood to sustain the order of the Universe as it was and therefore to prevent change from coming to the material world.

The dark machinations of the Prometheans are all in service of giving the world a vengeful, angry God that will enforce the power and influence of the Prometheans themselves and their evil legatees The poets and playwrights Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson et alii are allied against the Prometheans in these designs, gifted with the most extraordinary ability to write the world in the image they'd have it take. Their loyalty is to Elizabeth, Gloriana as she was then known to her world, the strongest Royal ruler England was ever to know. Their plays and poems are all calculated to give her reign the full force and power she needs to guide England through its rejection of world-straddling Catholicism and its dominion over Faerie.

It's a very frustrating read at first because the book is written in faux-Shakespeearean English, with “thee” and “thou” and “sitteth” heaved around with seeming randomness. The effort I made to read past this stylistic tic was too much, and I would have abandoned ship early on, except I love the story itself. As I slogged on, I realized Bear isn't being random in her use of the old-fashioned English forms. She's pointing up, subtly and nicely (in the oldest sense of that word), the shift that Shakespeare and Marlowe were leading into modern forms of English I shifted from tooth-gritted impatience to a mellower judgment, followed closely by a respectful half-awe at the subtlety of this device and its deployment. Oh, well done, I found myself thinking many times as Lucifer and angel Mehiel and Marlowe would converse Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, here lovers of the most passionate sort, are the only characters who never use anything but the familiar “thee” to each other. It's exactly right for them. It's so quiet that it might easily go unremarked, but if you read this series, be on the lookout for this trope. It will add something good and large to your appreciation of the writing.

Homosexuality. Big topic. I am on record as finding the modern desire to “out” people in history as “gay” before such an identity existed as absurd. These men, though, aren't gay in the modern identity seen see They're in love with each other, and the married one (Shakespeare) is deeply and lastingly troubled by his infidelity to his wife with Marlowe. They reach an accommodation, one reached by many, many people caught in that situation before and since, of acknowledging their love, not acting on it. Cold comfort for the spouse of the one, terrible pain for all, and nothing to be done about it. Well, that's the nature of marriage, isn't it? Making choices, sticking to them as best one can, cobbling together the most workable solution for all the parties. It's a ringingly true part of this writer's repertoire to explore the love and the passion and the needs of people in ordinary situations. She's done so in every one of her books that I've read, and it's a good reason to try her books out if you haven't yet.

I remain annoyed that I know the end of the story before I've read the beginning. I wish like fury I'd started at the start and only reached this point after going where Bear wanted me to go first. But, unless something very weird has happened here, I'd recommend that you go read the books in their proper order: Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel, and lastly Hell and Earth. The ending is one helluva (pardon, please, the pun after you read the books) bang that is really worth the buck.

OK, I'm very behind on the madness here, and just read 57 posts on this thread. My reactions:

I have to read The Glass Castle because some of my grade 12 students are reading it, and I didn't really want to read it. I always had the idea that it was a "poor me, my childhood was awful, let me exploit my upbringing" type book. Now I actually am interested, so thumbs up from me.

As much as I enjoy this thread, I refuse to pay $44.44 for it - I didn't even pay that much for all of LT! However, Kath, I bow to your ingenious money making scheme. Oh, and 40% for Richard seems generous to me.

Finally, I am disturbed by everyone's dismissive attitude toward Brad Pitt - have you never seen "Legends of the Fall"??

Oh, and the Bear series looks good.

Cait, it was to me more of a look how crazy my mommy is book....
and frankly found it both compelling and horrifying...

Cait, if you tell no one, I am willing to give you a twenty percent discount simply due to the similarity of our screen names.. Rdears portion will be cut of course...

Brad Pitt. I like him. Angelina Jolie too. yummy.

Bear... the name sounds familiar for some reason, but I am pretty sure I haven't read anything... maybe I wish listed her books at some point?

Sounds like a fantastic plan to me Kath!

One hundred four of seventy-five:

The Cave of John the Baptist by Shimon Gibson

Self-congratulatory little man digs up some caves in the non-oily parts of the Middle East, relies on folk tales and medieval credulity to tie them to a major Biblical figure, and signs a book contract. The end.

Except it isn't. He witters on for 326pp about his amazing finds and his astonishing insights and his startling conclusions, and they're all pretty sketchily supported from what I can tell, and subject to other interpretations. And that's the kind of sentence he writes, too.

I study Christian/Biblical matters under the heading of "know what your enemy knows"; this book, certainly, shouldn't be part of what the enemy knows because it's a weak case for tie-in to John the Baptist at best. Josephus as your SOLE contemporary source isn't good enough. Josephus wasn't even contemporary to the time of Jesus's supposed existence, and John the Baptist was before that. The New Testament has the same problem. It was written long after the events it purports to describe. So there are no eyewitness accounts to tie this cave to that oddball who behaved so strangely.

Case not proved. Book not needed. Writing not interesting. Next docket item, please.

Fair-warned is fair-armed. Thanks for the heads up on this one.

Don't you wonder where agents and publishers are coming from when they give this individual money and so many righteous writers are languishing in remote areas of, say, Long Island?

*curls upper lip in moue of disgust*

W

>195 No, Woofie, I don't wonder at all. After all, the book purports to make a major revelation about this country's major religion! They hoped people would overlook the crap writing and the weak thinking for the sensational claim. *buzz* Not working! If the writer had had talent, this might have taken off.

>193, 192, 191...so the Divine Saint Richard is a discount item?!? Off to the Vestibule with you both!

>192 Bear, my love, is the authoress of New Amsterdam, that collection of alternate-history mystery short stories you weren't fond of despite my enthusiasm for them.

>190 Cait, it's always a slog to catch up, innit? I'm not sure I ever have after the houseguesting two weeks. I keep finding threads I would swear I'm up to date on, and there are 40 unread posts...yeeks.

be nice or I will run a full fledged sale.......9.99 for a year...

on your 2 Hot Reviews!

Thanks too for the warning... I won't bother with Shimon Gibson's tome

what cameling said :)

Admit it Rdear, #198 is a nice gif!! And I ditto it. :)

Tanks awf'ly, ladies. I'm humbled and pleased.

I find all those letters wiggling at me in #198 somewhat hypnotic :)

Add my congratulations to the rest, Richard. Good job!

Phew..i got in after The Fan Club

i, too, read my BIBLE in a "know your enemy" sense...because where i live they read not/know not...it would be a slamdunk..except when they know not they attack one Personally (always a warm squishy feeling)..which defeats any serious discourse....please read The Kingdom of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess...the, Richard, we can talk...

The fan club is always active there is no after the fan club... lol

One hundred five of seventy-five:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is a debut mystery! A debut mystery, if you please, and a Crime Writers of America Dagger Award winner, and written by a Saskatooni writer, and just flat funny.

Whatever they do to the water in Saskatoon, they should do it to some Murrikin cities that're famous for nothing (eg, Dubuque or Terre Haute) so's they can make their mark on the cultural landscape. Bradley and Bidulka haling from the same city...what up with that?!

Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy, daughter of an extraordinary vanished mother and a reclusive abasent father, youngest of three sisters who are each at difficult ages. She's the most outgoing of the three, she's the most determined and organized and intellectually gifted of them, and alone among her family is not paralyzed by her upbringing. Her determination to prove her father innocent of a murder which takes place directly below her bedroom window is absolute and unshakable. She succeeds because she's a) smart b) stubborn and c) "just a girl" so unthreatening to anyone...except the murderer, who takes her very seriously indeed.

Flavia's dry-martini humor is old for her age, but she's presented from the get-go as old for her age in some very believable ways. Her intellectual capacities are also presented in such a way as to be part and parcel of a believable character. I like this book, it flew past me at a breezy 50mph and hooked me into its slipstream. I suspended disbelief the moment I met Flavia, and the author rewarded me with a very enjoyable afternoon. I'll read the next Flavia book, "Tied Up with Strings" (which I pray is only a working title, it's just gawdawful!) when it comes out from Bantam in 2010.

Go on, give it a try. You'll be surprised how easy it goes down!

~Big Wave to RD~ Good review, sir! I wasn't so sure about this book. I thought it might be a bit to "cute". You have me reconsidering!

book 105:: hey ho, hey ho, onto the wishlist you go!

Just when I finally managed to pick up Murder with Peacocks, you throw a great debut at us. Thanks a lot. ;)

Yodeleewhooohooo, Mark!

Eliza...it will reward you, so I make no apologies. None. Nope. I feel NO guilt about adding to someone's TBR! No! None!

Hello there, Luxx, and hahaha all over you! I'll get you hooked on TWO ongoing series, see if I don't!

It's been a long time since I got hooked on a mystery series, but this year I've started dabbling again. Murder with Peacocks is up next on my TBR list!

One hundred six of seventy-five:

The Christmas Oratorio by Goran Tunstrom

Well, the Nordic reputation for gloom and depression and sadness and cheerlessness is safe again, thank goodness. I thought a book with Christmas in the title, especially a piece of Christmas music that's renowned for being, if not jolly, then upbeat could make the reader smile! No, no, not part of the character of Tunstrom's novel, no smiling, no no, none of that!

Death. Lots of that, and only some of it physical. The psychic deaths of everyone in this book take place in locales that are lovely to look at and lushly described, as if to counterpoint the misery and sadness the humans in these places carry around with them.

I still think it would be delightful to visit Sweden, and one day before I die I WILL see New Zealand in the flesh so to speak, despite the author's best efforts to make me perceive these places as sinks of hopelessness and the futility of human happiness.

Since the work is a translation, I have no idea if the writing is good or not, so I make no comment thereon. But this is one gloomfest of a novel, and I will never, ever pick it up again. Should anyone offer me another novel by Tunstrom, I will politely decline the opportunity to make myself wretchedly depressed by reading it, tear-dampened kleenex crumpled in one clenched fist and suicidally large dose of pills in the other, searching desperately for a glimmering of a reason not to end this wasted, purposeless thing I've not-so-laughingly called my life.

So, on balance, not really recommended.

Message edited by its author, Oct 20, 2009, 5:41pm.

Ouch! Another great review, and another book NOT added to my TBR Tower. Thanks for being the lead scout and saving me from this dreary path.

And another Hot Review goes to Sir Richard ... I would be dancing a little happy jig for you right now but I'm sulking because I've had to add yet another book you've reviewed to my wishlist. Sweetness at the bottom of the pie sounds just too delightful not to read.

I will take his word for that one..

I also want to congratulate the hottie....

I have had Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie in the BlackHole for a long time. I really must find a copy!

I have Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on my Kindle....not read it..yet...your review may give me a tiny ass kick to do so..i love books with "pre-teens with attitude/smarts"...and never "write off' Canadians...and Richard..you will always be my HOTTIE...*now go swoon*
J

love your dancing candy corn!

One hundred seven of seventy-five:

The Great Inflation and its Aftermath by Robert J. Samuelson

I don't like Reaganomics. I don't like the capitalist world that it created, with its massive and absurd inequalities in rewards for labor. I don't like the idea of medicine for profit, or the notion that people *should* retire at a give age willy-nilly.

So I was predisposed to dislike this book because it extols the risk/reward rules that I so frown on. I ended up not disliking the book, though I still dislike the system it praises. Samuelson sings the conservative aria that entitlement spending must come down, must must must, or the sky will fall and *cue horror movie music* profits will shrink!!! NOOOOOO say it isn't so!!!! Profits *sob* won't go to the investors anymore, no no not so much as a billion even, so they can consume more and, oh yeah, invest more to make more *salacious slurping sounds* profits!!!

Yeah, well, welcome to my world, investors. My income has gone down to zero, and I'm ineligible for unemployment "insurance" because employers have the right to deny it to you, and medical insurance? What's that? All because vampires getting millions in bonuses invented a creative way to snatch even bigger gobs of taxpayer money by throwing themselves a recession! (Luckily for me, the personal consequences are mitigated by my family situation, but if they had not been, I wouldn't be on this computer right now, I'd be on the street.)

So I am utterly out of sympathy with this tome's central assumption...that profits for the few belong solely to the few...yet the author makes some very good points. His analysis of the global warming problem is cogent and probably correct: Ain't gettin' solved, no one wants to pay the large and ever-growing price. Health care costs are, undoubtedly, out of control. Hey...anybody notice that there are (for-profit) insurance companies and hospital groups out there, paying executives tasty-big salaries that have to grow, and be earned somehow? Hmmm.

Where I absolutely march with the author is in his abhorrence for inflation, and the necessity of preventing it from recrudescing. Inflation amounts to a large tax on working people. What you get in your pay envelope has already lost some value by the time you get the money into your bank (for a fee, the size of which goes up as your balance goes down, hmmm). The nasty recession I lived through as a young worker was extremely unpleasant. It killed inflation, and so should be praised. Then came the idiot consumption-fest that's brought us to the place we are now.

Why is there no force in the public discourse saying "There is such a thing as 'enough' in every area of life, INCLUDING MONEY AND PROFITS"? Only things that make the least and the last among us safer, better off, more secure, are targets for the "enough" concept. Why is that? I suspect it's because the greedy mo-fos who have the commanding heights of the economy to themselves like it that way. No individual should have a billion dollars in assets. There is simply no conceivable justification for that kind of wealth in private hands. None. So hand it over. An extra billion in, say, Microsoft stocks in the hands of the fools at the Treasury is better than in the hands of Bill Gates. All of us are smarter than any one of us.

Oh well, I am not likely to be appointed to a goveernment position, am I? Not with my confiscatory bent. So y'all're safe.

So far.

Crikey, you actually make this book sound Interesting...and i was about to knock it off of my List...darn you, Richard.....another brick in the wall...

Nice one (once again). Fortunately I love that you write such good reviews that (most of the time) I don't actually need to read the book!

You do sometimes add to my wishlist/TBR though!

I love the word "recrudescing". Now is the winter of our recrudescence.

One hundred eight of seventy-five:

Drag Queen by Robert Rodi

Sometimes ya just need to laugh. Reading Robert Samuelson's chuckle-fest reviewed in #218 above led me to need a laugh but quick. Rodi doesn't disappoint.

What would you do if you discovered a) your mother decides after burying her third husband to enter a Buddhist nunnery, b) but she's not your real mother after all since you're adopted and c) you had an identical twin, you successful Guppie mainstreamer you? You're barely out to yourself, still less the world, even though you've told people you're gay...you act like the OCD-ridden killjoy you are! And your twin? A macho jock, a father-of-five Ozzie clone, a fellow Guppie?

A drag queen.

Horrors!

And that's just the first thirty pages. The book follows the formula: Hero screws up his life, makes everyone around him wretched, finds the right man and drives him away, finds redemption by embracing all he rejected before, and all beds are filled with the right parties of the second part. But that isn't a bad thing, because the outcome might not be in doubt but the scenery gettin' there's mighty nice. Just like a really good date.

Read it, don't read it, it's all the same to me; but those whose noses are right now wrinkling at the...the...genre-ness of it all can leave quietly now, since their kind isn't welcome 'round these parts.

Great reviews ... but then would we have expected any other from you, rdear? But seriously, I did enjoy your review of The Great Inflation even though I had no inclination to read this when I saw it at the bookstore. I think your review did it more justice than the synopsis on the inside cover.

Drag Queen sounds like a riot .....as it sashays over to my wishlist.

Re: Drag Queen. Nice review Richard. Nice sashay Cameling. Nice new book for my tippy tower!

The Great Inflation and its Aftermath by Robert J. Samuelson

Fabulous review, rdear... still.. hasn't convinced me to read the book... but glad you did so to tell us all about it :)

Drag Queen however sounds a blast.. lol

> 218 - Richard Dear -

Thanks for the excellent review of The Great Inflation and its Aftermath.

I had picked it up yesterday at the library, which had to borrow it from another library through ILL. I think I will give it a fair shot, if I can stay awake. I'm still falling asleep from whatever lil' virus bug is doing gymnastics in my body.

You are the man, when it comes to reading the books that entertain or inform me in areas of high interest. You remain above Angelina's sweetie on my Man of the Year list, RD. Truly.

Weakly, with shaky fingers on the keyboard ...

Lovings,

Woofie

PS Maybe Drag Queen would keep me awake. It is hard to sleep while LMAO. Eh?

Hope the weather is beautiful up there on the Island.

PPS I love the one and only flavor of candy corn, too ... the bathroom scale to mark "books read" is the kicker. though. LOVE it!

Message edited by its author, Oct 23, 2009, 10:15am.

One hundred nine of seventy-five:

The Map of Moments by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon

Okay. Here's the deal: You get to go back in time to fix the worst, awfulest thing you've ever experienced. You have to go through some rancid goo to get there, and it will stick to you. But you get to change something that's shredding your insides every day of your life.

Do you do it? Who could resist, right?

After reading this book, I'd say you'd hesitate a good long while before answering. Change comes only at a price. Prices have a way of changing, even though you think you know what they are. Ever bid on something at an auction? Do you honestly think for an instant about the commission, the taxes, the shipping, the added insurance, that winning the auction will entail?

No you don't, and don't lie, it's not nice.

Max the forty-year-old falls in love with Gabrielle the nineteen-year-old. (Ewww, right?) She loves him right back, passionately and completely. Right up until she screws another man and Max walks in on it.

Oh, poor duped oldster. Sniff boo hoo, at least you got some nineteen-year-old...uhhh, well. So what do you do? Run away, go home, leave your job in New Orleans to go back to (grim, unpleasantly stuffy) Boston.

Four months before Katrina. Which kills Gabrielle.

And back comes Max to bury the woman he loves, the woman he'd do anything at all to save, to rescue, to ask "why?" of (and the answer is never, ever one you want to hear, why do people insist on asking it?). He meets Ray, a old man with a proposition: Follow this map of moments, this guided tour of New Orleans's magical history, and you'll land up at a Moment where you can save Gabrielle's life! She'll be alive! Isn't that what you want, Max?

Oh, be careful what you ask for lest the answer be yes...for getting what we ask for isn't always (ever, in my actual experience) for the (personal) best. Max gets a chance to see the hidden magic that sustains New Orleans, and he gets to put right some very basic wrongs, and the price he pays is breathtakingly high.

And I will bet you large sums of money that he'd do it all again. He's that kind of a guy. It's the reason I liked spending my rainy, gloomy Friday with him, and I'll bet you would too.

#205 Richard, the title of the second Flavia deLuce book will be The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag Somewhat better - at least more interesting.
The candy corn dance?? My computer is so old and slow.

What can I say, Richard, I am just a sucker for your reviews! Gotta love them, even if you hate the book. I am adding to the BlackHole far too much from your thread . . .

Me too! At least you, dear Stasia, stand a chance of catching up... :-)

#230: Only if the writers stop writing, Ellie!

OK! You did it (minor grumble) — my wishlist/TBR mountain just grew by 2 books!

You could have warned us that The Map of Moments was the second book in a series:(

(or didn't you know? Mind the Gap is the first and is set in London)

Excellent review my friend! I have The Map of Moments, great title btw, wishlisted!

>228 Violet, that's an improvement, but it's still pretty crummy...of course I was avoiding "Sweetness" because I thought THAT was a crummy title so couldn't be a very good book. Ha ha on me.

>229 Stasia, *evil chortle* I get a teensy oochkin of revenge for the two hundred-plus books I've added because of YOU.

>230 Ellie, what no one talks about is...*whispers*...Stasia is actually the one who trained Harriet Clausner to read!

>231 Oh! Hi, Stasia! Nothing to see in this post, no no...you can skip on to the next thread! Ha ha! See you soon! *sweating buckets lest Stasia read the above secret revealed*

>232 Hi calm, unfortunately I knew about Mind the Gap only after I read The Map of Moments. It made me quite testy to learn of its existence and the now-necessity of reading it. I even failed to "Good girl" the dog's anointure of the grass instead of the Tabriz. She was most put out.

>233 Mark, I am quite pleased that you had to wishlist the book, since I have now gotten all three remaining Joe Pitt books from the liberry. See? See what you did to me? See?!?

Love the review of Map of Moments and it was a no-brainer to add it to my wishlist today ..... despite your comments about Boston - grim it is not .. how could it be? I live there....well at least I live in the 'burb just outside the city! ;-)

Caro dearest, you're an adult and can screw your life up any way that pleases you so to do; if living near that depressing, dank, dismal city is how you choose to do it, well then. And I know where Edd's family is from, so it's not like y'all don't got options. NICE ones. Near *me*!

General Announcement:

I have selected, from among my sixty gazillion ideas, the one I'll use for National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/ for information) this November:

Synopsis: Death in Blue and White
What should a widowed gay man do about his stepson's stepfather's murder? Especially since it's the young man's mother who looks likely to be the killer?

Gloat?
Laugh unpleasantly?
Roll up his sleeves and find the real killer?
All of the above?

I know what my guy's gonna do, but I don't know what he's gonna find out yet....

The Map of Moments? Another brick in my ever-growing biblio-wall- unlike Berlin, mine is to keep ideas inside...my sieve-like brain....and who cares if it's part of a series..i'll add the other titles too

love your NaNoWriMo idea(r) dear....potential for much gleeful gloating, no?

took the day off from Renovating to Vegetate...cook...stare at dumb DVDs..and, yes, read a little bit

Ciao, bebe....

>237 Ciao, Judele!

My NaNo MC is a middle-aged gay widower, partner died of cancer at 50; he's got to solve his stepson's stepfather's murder, even though it looks like the kid's mother is the killer, which honestly makes him want to dust his hands and watch her take the fall since she wasn't very nice to him.

I plan it as a comedic cozy mystery, sort of like Joan Hess or Donna Andrews. The stepson is teenaged, a junior in high school, and is a typical sullen-one-minute, adult-the-next teen. He's straight, but he's so over his mother's homophobia it hurts to listen to her rant; and his geekmoid friends all think he's cool because he's got a gay stepdad. The murdered stepdad, well, he's not so popular...which explains the whole "murdered-in-the-fancy-new-car" thing, no? I'm using Bernie Madoff as my inspiration, and making the mother his witting, willing accessory to Ponzi-fraud.

Suppose I set up a thread in my NaNo group here on LT, in which I post updates on and excerpts from the book? Would anyone be interested in following along?

I'd follow you anywhere!

But....

Don't get too sentimental. I'll brook no marriage proposals from you, you five-time double-crossing polygamist! LOL (See Linda's 7th thread for clarification.)

but but but .... isn't the stepson's stepfather the gay widower himself? Oh wait... nevermind... I assumed that the widower was married to the stepson's mother ...not his father's partner. ok... mystery (in my mind that is) unraveled ... and I am at one with the world again.

yes, yes, yes ... I want an invite to the NaNo group thread please..... or I will sneak over to your house one night and plaster it with decals of all Boston sports teams. you have been warned. *evil laugh*

oh, hell..i'll follow your NaNoWriMo..anywhere...you..i love Joan Hess' ARLY HANKS books..'cause i'm a hillbilly too....that crap notwithstanding..i don't know how the NaNo(NooNoo) works..

.......wot, you offering marriage proposals??? Crikey, is this the right Richard??? i'll pass anywho..

look for'ard to yer story
;-}
J

>238 - Richard Dear -

Please deal me in on following the NaNo thread that you set up. I don't want to miss finding out what happens to that group of characters. No way.

Woofie

What ruthie said....pls.

'Kay, y'all...here is the thread:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/75687

I've posted Our Hero's first-person interview for the general edification.

#234: Are you sweating buckets of blood yet, Richard? Yes, I saw it. I know you have not added 200 books to your reading list because of me. And who the heck is Harriet and what has she got to do with the price of tea in China?

ooh goody! - another thread to star and follow.

One minute ... on second thoughts ... more time here ... less time to read books ...

>245 Oh! Hi, Stasia! Guess you don't remember "Harriet"'s thousands of reviews on Amazon, caused a kerfuffle because no one person could read as much as "she" does...twenty pages a minute, someone calculated once...to post all those reviews. No doubt it was a syndicated identity. And I have added more than 200 books because of you, little missie, you just go look at my wishlist and compare it to your reading list!

>246 calm, of course you should use your time wisely! Read read read!

But y'all bear in mind that, if I don't see the names of my threadies over on the NaNo thread, I will be forced to conclude that you don't like me any more and that will lead me to question the value of my existence and I'll have to retreat to some monastery someplace dirty and hot and poor, there to attempt reassembly of some shred of self-worth after being cruelly rejected.

But no pressure!

It's time for a new thread. This one's gettin' creaky.

Richard the Eighth

And don't forget Death in Blue & White.

richard # 244 & 248

Making us "non-techies" try to get to and star two different threads at one time is just too mind boggling! I hope I don't get lost.

NaNoWriMo thread duly starred....and, vis a vis Robert Rodi...i got Bitch Goddess today...plus What They Did to Princess Paragon...his take on Comics/Graphic Novels...now, i am an inveterate lover of same...butttt..a Lesbian SuperHero(ine)???? Crikey, my dear......have you read this one, R Dear?

J

oh, i found the NaNoWriMo...guidebook...on Amazon for $10...maybe next year i'll take the plunge..this year...home renovations will keep me busy till next week *she said*