The SECOND Homeless Reviews thread for Richardderus in 2012

“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.”
- Anthony Trollope


“He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.”
- Barrow


“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.”
- Edward P. Morgan

My 2012 ORPHANED books ticker:




My 2012 NEW books ticker:




Books are reviewed in post:

BkC26) Geek Love...#41.
BkC153) Madame Bovary...#140.

31. Look Homeward, Angel...#3.

32. Katherine...#19.

33. A Fez of the Heart...#20.

34. River of Gods...#26.

35. Dead on Town Line...#52.

36. The Disheveled Dictionary...#76.

37. Whispers in Dust and Bone...#95.

38. The Various Flavors of Coffee...#101.

39. Simple Justice...#116.

40. Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio...#127.

41. Smonk...#136.

42. Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her...#182.

43. The Walls of the Universe...#203.

44. Head Wounds...#204.

45. Seven for a Secret...#205.

46. The Devil's Hearth...#208.

47. Moloka'i...#233.

48. Hard Stop...#235.

49. Make Lemonade...#236.

50. Their Wildest Dreams...#255.

51. Stop Stealing Sheep...#272.

52. The Heart of a Goof...#278.

53. Devil's Peak...#284.

54. A Carrion Death...#295.

Well-loved books from my past:
D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths...#45.

The Haunted Bookshop...#46.

Splendora...#57.

Green Darkness...#86.

The Sot-Weed Factor...#149.

The Day of the Triffids...#161.

Ella Minnow Pea...#244.

Welcome to Higby...#254.

The Hundred and One Dalmatians...#299.

Pearl Ruled:



Stradivari's Genius...#23.

15. The Lies of Locke Lamora...#87.

16. The Hunger Games...#113.

18. Keeper of Light and Dust...#196.

21. Strings Attached...thread 26, #255.

23. Finch...#273.

Review: 31 of fifty

Title: LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

Author: THOMAS WOLFE

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Report: Oliver Gant's a drunk, Eliza Gant's a shrew, they have six kids and she doesn't like him, or childbirth, or poverty, or much of anything else that I can see. Oliver likes his youngest, Eugene, better than any of them (so do I, but that's not sayin' a lot), and spends what tiny about of love Eliza hasn't nagged and bitched and niggled and criticized and belittled out of him on the kid.

Eugene grows up in a boardinghouse called Dixieland in Asheville, North Carolina. OOOPSIE! I mean Altamont, Catawba. Wolfe didn't want anyone to know he was writing autobiography, see, so he invented a city and a state! Wow! And then he wrote about the people around him honestly, forthrightly, and in a stream-of-Faulkner style that was then très chic and is even now described as modernistic. EIGHTY PLUS YEARS LATER IT'S NOT EXPERIMENTAL OR MODERN ANYMORE, BOYS AND GIRLS, IT'S PART OF THE TOOLKIT.

Ahem. Sorry.

So Eugene grows up, and we do too, and then leaves home, and we do too, and then everything comes to a screeching halt.

Thank GAWD for small mercies.

My Review: I am no fan of the coming-of-age novel, and I don't often read them. I read this one when I was fifteen, because I wanted to impress a hot boy I was trying to get into my bed, and he thought this was the coolest book ever. I read it every damn day in study hall so he'd notice me, which he did, and we ended up talking about the book for hours.

And that was ALL I got. Yip-yap-yop about Eugene's life and his deepness and ohdeargawdpleasekillmenow stuff about the damn BOOK!!

I don't think I've ever forgiven the book for not getting me laid.

But upon mature reflection, I still dislike the book, for better (more adult, anyway) reasons. One is that even editing legend Max Perkins couldn't give Wolfe a deft enough hand to tell this story in so demanding a style as stream-of-consciousness without it spilling over into self-indulgence and sloppy, untidy, unnecessary sentimentality.

Another is Eugene/Tom's misogyny. I yield to no one in my distaste for the Cult of Female Superiority, whether motivated by “chivalry” or by feminism. Women ain't better than men, but likewise they ain't worse either. Wolfe's woman, mama Eliza, is a horrible gorgon of a vicious emasculating harridan. She has depths to her nastiness and pretension that are entirely credible. What she lacks is the balancing of REASONS for these things. In the first two zillion words, which detail the lives of Eliza and Oliver, Eliza emerges fully formed as a castrating slime. She was born this way? I doubt me much this is true.

Lastly comes Wolfe's conceit. In this Bildungs-barely-roman, he relives the first years of his life...an ordinary, unremarkable one...seemingly in real time. Why? What for? Here is the nub of my objection to coming-of-age stories: We've all come of age, so what makes your story special? In Wolfe's case, I do not see the special. It is entirely possible that I am resistant to his specialness because the story is so boring to me. But I quite simply can not fathom what makes this dreary, low-class, hag-ridden tribe of ciphers anything I should care enough about to do more than put a coin in the charity box to help feed.

Lovely thoughts to kick off a new thread!

I thought so too, Tina! Glad you agree.

I was going to say that it's a circular logic - author is famous then writes his personal story and it's special because he's now famous, but this is Wolfe's first novel so my argument falls apart.

Ego? Therapy? Revenge? Regardless, excellent review.

I yield to no one in my distaste for the Cult of Female Superiority, whether motivated by “chivalry” or by feminism. Women ain't better than men, but likewise they ain't worse either.

I agree. 100%. I don't believe in the Cult of Female Superiority either, and I's an X-er.

I knew you would...and may I add that the Cult of Male Superiority has no adherent chez moi, either!

Well, of course. Equal opportunity rejection.

Both cults are bad, but I must confess to being mildly supportive of the Cult of Nerd Superiority. I know, I'm a bad horrible terrible person.

Well, yes, indeed you are, but that's not the reason.

Hey wait, I read your review this time, so you can't hold that against me...

No, no, not that. I was thinking more of your generally turpitudinous character.

That doesn't make me bad horrible terrible, just....ummmm, unconventional...

Bad character, sadly, makes you pretty conventional.

Oh, calling me 'normal,' now THAT is an insult. Good job. I'll just go to my room and cry now.

NORMAL?! YOU?!?

Ordinary, perhaps, but never "normal."

See, Richard, you dislike it so eloquently that I really, really feel I ought to read it now. Having visited Wolfe's house and seen his Mama's dining room and all.

Only one way to know for yourself, Linda3rd. Suffer through it. like malaria. Or herpes.

Review: 32 of fifty

Title: KATHERINE

Author: ANYA SETON

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Since this is a resurrected review, I'm putting the Amazon book description here:
“This classic romance novel tells the true story of the love affair that changed history—that of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the ancestors of most of the British royal family. Set in the vibrant 14th century of Chaucer and the Black Death, the story features knights fighting in battle, serfs struggling in poverty, and the magnificent Plantagenets—Edward III, the Black Prince, and Richard II—who ruled despotically over a court rotten with intrigue. Within this era of danger and romance, John of Gaunt, the king’s son, falls passionately in love with the already married Katherine. Their well-documented affair and love persist through decades of war, adultery, murder, loneliness, and redemption. This epic novel of conflict, cruelty, and untamable love has become a classic since its first publication in 1954.”

My Review: Whoo baby! And we thought our generation invented sex, lust, and lechery! Our mamas read this paean to the ripped bodice and flung codpiece with, I feel morally certain, cool detachment and a keen analytical eye for its prosody. Because our mamas didn't *ever* think about s-e-x or l-u-s-t, now did they, because that would be ewww.

Well ha ha ha on us. This story of lusty Katherine the Flemish wench, sister-in-law of Chaucer and lover of a Royal Duke, wife of a stunningly boring man who just ups and dies (most handily) one day, and mother of something like six or seven kids (now doesn't that make your baby-maker sore just thinkin' about it?) was about as close to one-handed reading for girls as things got in 1954.

Not being a girl, I had a few problems with it. Crotch-fog did not obscure my vision of the novel as told tale. And there are some things that don't work about it. First is the Romance, the zeal of the organs for their mates, between Duke and minor court lady. It's not a romance, it's his dukeliness wantin' him a piece and Katherine, no dope, trottin' right along with the program. He's ROYAL! What kind of stupid wench says no to a ROYAL in that day and time?! He turns out to be my-t-fine in the sack, bonus!, but he is busy as hell plotting and scheming and what-all, plus he's got a political marriage to contend with, and he and Katherine raise his kids by his first wife, her kids, and their kids in a kind of modern blended family. It is this central fact that makes Katherine important: She did not marry the Duke until they were old, but her four surviving kids by him are...listen carefully, this is true and it's amazing...the direct ancestors of ALL SUCCEEDING ENGLISH ROYALS TO THIS GOOD DAY.

Here's one of the problems: Which story is Seton telling, the one-handed one or the historically astoundingly important one? It's never all that clear. And it's not unclear because the book is too short, because this damned thing is almost 600pp! (Ow.) It's not clear because Seton isn't clear in her mind what she's doing here. She's got two good plots and switches back and forth between them, which makes the book feel patched together.

Another issue obscured by the anticipation felt by lubricious readers of an earlier time is the book's clunky prose. This is La Seton describing Katherine, in her youthful innocence, meeting her future baby-daddy's first wife: "The duchess was today dazzling as the southern May, having dressed to please her husband's taste, in full magnificence of jewels and ermine. Her silver-gilt hair was twined with pearls and she wore her gold and diamond coronet. She smelled of jasmine and Katherine adored her."

That is the narrator, laddies and gentlewomen. The Narrator speaks in this breathlessly leaden, numbingly enthusiastic way from giddy-up to whoa. I won't go into what she has the lovers say to each other.

So don't go into this expecting new and exciting prose experiments, and don't go expecting a clearly defined plot. Do, however, go expecting the story to suck you right in and sweep you along, and do go expecting to keep your pillow-sharer awake from the fanning of turning pages. Repress your snorts of outrage at some of Seton's more moistly written passages, overlook some of her wrong-headed guesses at what filled the spaces in Katherine's historical record, and this could be a decent read.

For me, the seams itched and the sleeves were too short and the zipper caught me in a painful and distracting way. I say it's spinach salad, and I say to Limbo with it. (Not quite spinach and hell like the old cartoon. Guess you hadda be there. Sounded funnier in my head.)

Review: 33 of fifty

Title: A FEZ OF THE HEART

Author: JEREMY SEAL

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Report: Author Jeremy Seal, British of course, found an elderly fex in his parents' attic and, in true Brit fashion, became obsessed with Turkey. I mean, what else is possible when one finds a fez in the attic?

I think an American would be more interested in how the fez got there, which parent had the Turkish man as a lover, what the hell the thing was...not leap straight into Turkophilia. But us colonials, we're just not as finely tuned as the Motherlanders to the nuances of life.

In other words; we're sane.

So off Jezza goes, in 1993 mind you, as a grown man, to indulge his peculiar obsession. He arrives in a Turkey that resembles the fez-wearing Turkey of his childhood interest very little. The story he tells us as we tag along with him on his voyage of discovery is that of Turkey's utterly fascinating reinvention of itself after the Great War swept away empire and sultan all in a day. We meet Turks old and young, and to a one they are as crotchety and odd as one could wish them to be. In the end, the hat that brought Jeremy Seal to Turkey is his personal madeleine, the key to memory and knowledge.

My Review: I like stuff about Turkey because I think it's one of the most interesting places on the surface of the earth. I've liked every Turk I've met, too, and dated one Turk for a year or so. I went into reading this book, on a friend's recommendation, with all sorts of goodwill and eagerness.

I came out with all the goodwill and none of the eagerness.

I like the book, don't get me wrong. I quite enjoyed the capsule Turkish history, I was amused by the cultural divide the author frequently fell into, and I was kept reading by the author's evident love for his subject.

I don't like Jeremy Seal. Not even a little bit. I think he comes across as a snotty little prig, a self-absorbed twit, and an obsessive-compulsive hat fetishist. If I met him in the flesh, I would not be inclined to linger, but rather to escape.

And that, sad to say, is my take-away from this very nice book. It overrode the pleasures of Turkophilia, which I too have, and left me with Sealophobia. I think that's a damn shame.

I am so impressed with your zealous 'stick-to-it ness" in clearing out these old but worthy tomes. Would that I had that much impulse control. It is lovely to have someone remind us that many of those dusty musties are still more than acceptable reads.

Keeping all these venerable volumes has served me well in one way however....I pointed out to the honorable daughter person this past weekend that when the time came, she could certainly put me in "a home" but not until my mind was so far gone that I didn't realize my books weren't coming with me. She had the good grace to laugh.

When I can't read anymore, I hope some kind soul will just kill me. What earthly point is served in remaining among the living when the one great pleasure of my life is taken from me?

I actually approve, more and more, of the idea behind Make Room! Make Room!, the book that Soylent Green was based on.

Pearl Ruled: STRADIVARI'S GENIUS by TOBY FABER (p59)

I just don't care. Stradivarius is dead on p59, buried next to his wife and across the street from their house, and I simply do not care.

I'm interested in the eighteenth century, and I like microhistory, and all things Italian make me smile. What is it about this book that fails to ignite my very congruent interest? I wish I knew. The writing's okay, not world-beating but not leaden or inept. The idea of tracing famous instrument-maker Stradivarius's creations through time and space is appealing, too.

But this book could not grab me and did not entice me. I might pick it up again one day, but I don't know what would make me do so. *shrug*

Man...Look Homeward Angel and Anya Seton.....

Read the former when i was.....14 or 15.....and can't remember even diddly about the experience, never mind the book.....now Tom Wolfe is another animal...

Sixth grade was my Year of Anya Seton...and i can't really recall any of her books either....Seventh grade, i discovered the Russians..and The Brothers Karamazov put its predecessors to shame (yes, TBK was "better than TV)

Thanks for the memories, though...if I could only recall....

;-}

Ah, the perils of growing older..."did I read that..? I didn't? Wha...". I know it well.

*smooch* for visiting!

Review: 34 of fifty

Title: RIVER OF GODS

Author: IAN MC DONALD

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: This is another resurrected review, so I'm putting the Amazon book description here:
As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business—a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is—the waif, the mind reader, the prophet—when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures—one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.

My Review: Ian McDonald. This is a name to conjure with, boys and girls. This is a fearless Irishman. This is a major major talent doing major major things. How dare he, how dare I, warble his praises when he, a white guy from the colonial oppressor state, has the temerity to write a science fiction novel about INDIA?!? There are scads of Indian writers and it's their country! Let *them* write their stories!

Codswallop.

Read the book. Then come and tell me it should have remained unwritten because of some nonsensical national pride hoo-hah.

It's got every damn thing a reader could want: A new gender, the nutes, pronoun “yt;” a wholly new form of energy harvested from other universes; a political scandal-ridden politician who falls for our main nute character, despite his long marriage, and pursues yt desperately; a civil war a-brewin' over water rights in the now fragmented subcontinental political world; aeais (artificial intelligences) that are forbidden by law to exceed the Turing Test that establishes whether an entity is human or human-passable; and, as with any law, the lawbreakers who inevitably arise are hunted by a new breed of law enforcement officers, here called “Krishna cops.” Krishna being the Original God, Supreme Being, One Source in many parts of India, there is some justice to that, one supposes.

Recapitulating the plot is pointless. This is a sprawling story, one that takes nine (!) main characters to tell. I felt there were two too many, and would entirely prune Lisa, the American physicist, and Ajmer, the spooky girl who sees the future, because those story lines were pretty much just muddying the waters for me. I thought the physicist on a quest, who then makes a giant discovery, which leads her back to the inventor of the aeais, could easily have been a novel all on its own, one that would fit in this universe that McDonald has summoned into being. I simply didn't care for or about Ajmer.

The aeais' parent, Thomas Lull, is hidden away from the world in a dinky South Indian village. Yeah, right! Like the gummints of the world would let that happen! I know why McDonald did this, plot-wise, but it's just not credible to me. He could be demoted from player to bit part and simplify the vastness of the reader's task thereby.

So why am I giving this book a perfect score? Because. If you need explanations:

--The stories here are marvelously written.
P388: “And you make me a target as well,” Bernard hisses. “You don't think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to cheer because you're the hero.”
“Bernard, I've always known the only ass you're ultimately interested in is your own, but that is a new low.” But the barb hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion. Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence, or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. “I don't know where else to go,” she confesses weakly. He goes out shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything right.

P477: Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents' house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky.

Some of my favorite passages I can't put here, because they contain some of the many, many words and concepts that one needs—and I do mean needs—the glossary in the back of the book to fully appreciate.

--The concept of the book is breathtaking. Westerners don't usually see India as anything other than The Exotic Backdrop. McDonald sees the ethnic and religious tensions that India contains, barely, as we look at her half-century of independence ten years on (review written 2007) and contemplate the results of the Partition. He also sees the astounding and increasing vigor of the Indian economy, its complete willingness to embrace and employ any and all new ideas and techniques and leverage the staggeringly immense pool of talent the country possesses.

--McDonald also extrapolates the rather quiet but very real and strong trend towards India as a medical tourism destination: First-world trained doctors offering third-world priced medical care. This is the genesis of the nutes, people who voluntarily have all external gender indicators and all forms of gender identification surgically removed, their neural pathways rewired, and their social identities completely reinvented.

Think about that for a minute.

If your jaw isn't on the floor, if your imagination isn't completely boggled, then this book isn't for you and you should not even pick it up in the library to read the flap copy. If you're utterly astonished that an Irish dude from Belfast could winkle this kind of shit up from his depths, if you're so intrigued that you think it will cause you actual physical pain not to dive right in to this amazing book, you're my kind of people.

Welcome, soul sibling, India 2047 awaits. May our journey never end.

Must try to find that one

I strongly recommend it, calm! STRONGLY.

> Alright, already!

I've had The Dervish House a-languishing chez Kindle for.......however long. Now, i have, maybe, a teeny excuse to not dive into it head first (have two Net Galleys that will "disappear" if I don't read 'em sooner than later)

....but, dive i shall!

Good review.....one dainty thumb...and one more onto the Wishlist...

;-}

>29 jdthloue: Oh goody good good! You'll LOVE this book, Jude, and I suspect The Dervish House, too. They are...exceptional...

**Smooch**

Wow, that sounds like a phenomenal book. Thanks for resurrecting your review.

>31 jdthloue: *smooch*

>32 WillyMammoth: It is, it is, Mr. Mammoth, and I can't urge you strongly enough to get thee to a bookery and procure one for yourself.

Well-loathed books I've re-read

Title: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Author: JANE AUSTEN

Rating: 4 very annoyed, crow-feathered stars out of five

The Book Report: No. Seriously. If your first language isn't English, or if you're like nine years old, you might not know the story. Note use of conditional.


My Review: All right. All right, dammit! I re-read the bloody thing. I gave it two stars before. I was wrong-headed and obtuse and testosterone poisoned. I refuse to give it five stars, though. Look, I've admitted I was wrong about how beautiful the writing is, and how amusing the story is. Don't push.

Stephen Sullivan, who rated this with six stars of five, is now on a summer travel break from Goodreads, so I can publish this admission: He was right. It is a wonderful book. I had to grow into it, much as I had to grow into my love for Mrs. Dalloway. But now that I'm here, I am a full-on fan.

Deft is a word that seems to have been created for Austen. She writes deftly, she creates scenes deftly. She isn't, despite being prolix to a fault, at all heavy-handed or nineteenth-century-ish in her long, long, long descriptions. She is the anti-Dickens: Nothing slapdash or gimcrack or brummagem about her prose, oh nay nay nay. Words are deployed, not flung or splodged or simply wasted. The long, long, long sentences and paragraphs aren't meant to be speed-read, which is what most of us do now. They are meant to be savored, to be treated like Louis XIII cognac served in a cut-crystal snifter after a simple sole meunière served with haricots verts and a perfect ripe peach for dessert.

The romantic elements seem, at first blush, a wee tidge trite. And they are. Now. Why are they? Because, when Miss Jane first used them in Pride and Prejudice, they worked brilliantly and they continue so to do unto this good day. Why? Because these are real feelings expressed in a real, genuine, heartfelt way, as constrained by the customs of the country and times. And isn't that, in the end, what makes reading books so delicious? I, a fat mean old man with no redeeming graces, a true ignorant lower-class lout of the twenty-first century, am in full contact with the mind, the heart, the emotional core of a lady of slender means born during the reign of George III.

You tell me what, on the surface of this earth, is more astonishing, more astounding, more miraculous than that. Jane Austen and I Had A Moment. She's Had A Moment with literally millions of English-speakers for over 200 years. She's had moments with non-English speakers for more than a century. Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are cultural furniture for a large percentage of the seven billion people on the planet. (Large here is a relative term. Less than one? Still amazing for a book 200 years old.)

Reading is traveling in time, in space, but most importantly inside. Inside yourself, inside the characters' emotions, inside the author's head and heart. It is a voyage of discovery, whether you're reading some bizarro mess, Dan Brown's mess, religious tracts, Twilight, whatever. You-the-reader are going somewhere in a more intimate contact than you-the-reader have with any other being on the planet. Movies, TV, sex, none of them take you as deep into the essence of feeling and emotion as reading does. And no, snobs, it does NOT matter if it's well written, it matters that the book speak to the reader. (Sometimes, of course, what one learns is how very shallow and vapid some people are...I'm lookin' at you, Ms. Fifty Shades.)

So I thank that rotten, stinkin' Stephen-the-absent Sullivan, safe in the knowledge he won't see me admitting this, for reminding me to live up to my own goal of remaining open to change. I heard him yodeling his rapture, and I revisited the book, and I learned something valuable:

Only admit you're wrong when the person you don't want to embarrass yourself in front of isn't around to see.

Well, well, RD. I never even realized how much you despised P&P. Very good review indeed. I've only ever rated 3 books with 5 stars, and P&P is one of them. (Since you asked, Killer Angels and The Source). Your four, coming up from two, is encouraging.

It was a very sad day to realize how much I missed out on when I first read this book.

I, ummm, still haven't read it... =(

>37 Ape: At twenty-five or under, I don't recommend it to males. Wait until 30 approaches, better still until it recedes.

Even a good rating from you will not induce me to re-read this pompous odious book....too many others I want to get to and my memories of high-school read are not good enough to push it out of the abandoned forever pile.

There is much to be said for knowing one's own mind, esp. when it comes to how to spend one's remaining reading life. I don't think it's necessary for me to revisit Chuckles the Dick, f/ex. Or Li'l Ernie Hemingpants. Or Gert Stein. Sometimes the allergy to the writing is just too severe.

26)Dunn, Katherine, GEEK LOVE: Close to the top of any literature lover's life list of lovely books.

Well, now, upon more than a decade's passing, I can't say I agree with myself here.

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Report: I don't know why I haven't simply been giving the book descriptions here. Why reinvent the wheel? The Amazon book description says:

“Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out–with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes–to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious–and dangerous–asset.

As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.”


My Review: Little Katie D,'s report card:
Idea: A+
Execution: C+
Nutritional Value: D-

While I, unlike some, adored The Night Circus in all its flawed glory, I thought this book was a bag of generic cheez puffs versus Morgenstern's home-made real-butter cheese straws.

I must be hungry....

But seriously, the reason I've given it so many stars is the sheer audacity of Katherine Dunn's imagination. I was gobsmacked by Oly's impregnation. I was stunned by the hubris of the horrible, horrible parents of these deformed and bizarre siblings. I saw in this book a spiritual ancestor to Swamplandia!, and I felt some of the same things about that book as I do about this one: Oooh, so close! It's sooo close to being extraordinary in a good, satisfying way. Unlike Swamplandia!, though, I think this book really does deserve the time and attention of serious fiction readers.

Yes, it does fail on some levels, but it's ambitious enough to make even that really interesting. Yes, it lacks some hard-to-define something, that one thing that makes an unbelievable premise feel right and inevitable, but instead it leaves the reader with a weird, uneasy new set of images imprinted on the brain.

But most of all, despite the ways it's not perfect, one thing it is, is fun. A fun-to-read failure is better for summer than a successful sob-fest, no?

I read Geek Love probaby about a decade+ ago. It still haunts me. I thought Swamplandia! was rubbish, but like poop packaged with a fancy bow. Great review!

>42 CarolynSchroeder: Thank you, Carolyn! The farther away in time I get from reading Swamplandia!, the less I like it. Like eating raw garlic, it gets worse smelling and less piquant as time goes by.

I am reading Firebright and the Edge of Reality by Tessa B Dick had I not seen a Being made out of light several years ago I would be shaking my head at this but I know its true. Next I am going to read Panpsychism in the west and after that will read Ronson's The men who stare at goats. Anyone claiming psi does not exist is talking from ignorance and need to read Ronson's book and the books of Dean Radin.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: D'AULAIRES' BOOK OF NORSE MYTHS

Author: INGRI D'AULAIRE & EDGAR PARIN D'AULAIRE

Rating: 4* of five

Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire were a married couple of Euro-origin, he Swiss and she Norwegian, who came to the US in the 1920s to pursue fame and fortune. Edgar was an illustrator for books, magazines, and the like, while Ingri painted rich guys' portraits. Came the Depression, oh dearie me...everything got harder...so the two collaborated on writing and illustrating kids' books together. For forty-plus years, the couple turned out beautiful, beautiful books.

This book, published in 1967, was a gift from my dad to me. I haven't got a lot of fond memories of my parents, and oddly most of them center around books in one shape or another. This is no exception. Dad read the book to me, even though by 1967 I was reading on my own, and we both loved the experience. He's a hambone and a half, my dad, funny and quick and full of wordplay. This book launched him on trajectories of mythmashing that, had I known then what I know now, I'd've written down or memorized or tape-recorded or something. He was abso-bloody-lutely riotous doing Odin as a doddering old fuffertut and Thor as a lisping faggot (my sides are already hurting remembering the way that made me laugh...still does...) and the Valkyries as whining misery-guts.

P.C. he was, and is, not.

The last time we spoke on the phone, before deafness and vascular dementia made it pointless to speak at all, I reminded Dad of this book. He laughed like he had when he was 40. He lit up as he did the voices again. It was a good last conversation to have with him, and it's all down to being a great big kid as he always was, and appreciating his kidliness left me feeling a lot less angry for his adult failings.

So this book holds my special and dear gratitude for being a bridge to a man I never loved, but always felt impatient with and annoyed by and hurt by. Books are magic, and myths are real, and don't ever, ever, ever forget that.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: THE HAUNTED BOOKSHOP

Author: CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Rating: 3.5* of five

Allegedly a spy story-cum-mystery, it's really a love note from author Morley to the trade of bookselling, with a side of supremely sweet love story.

And I can't help myself, I am charmed and beguiled by the book, by the memories it holds, and by the sheer anti-German fervor of it.

This book and Parnassus on Wheels were in my maternal grandmother's library. She died in 1977, and I chose these two books to be mine because I liked the titles. I read them over that summer, while I was staying in California with my father and stepmother. It was a trying period. The escape into a whimsical, crabby, loving relationship between the couple before and after their marriage was welcome, and the stuff about books...the mystical *fit* between reader and writer, abetted by the bookseller...has stayed with me all these years.

My father was a very proud Nordic Aryan. He thought of himself as an Ubermensch of the first water, and was constantly extolling German thises and thatses and buying Blaupunkt radios and Telefunken TVs and BMWs and Porsches. I used the period-perfect anti-German caricatures in this book to get up his nose in a way he couldn't complain about without getting his titty in the wringer of freedom of speech and encouraging reading etc etc. Hours of fun for me, I can only imagine how ready to murder me he must have been. Heh.

So it's unlikely I'll reread the books now, but what joy they afforded me then! Given the sheer meanness of my appreciation for them, I think it wisest to leave these two entertainments in the groves of memory as lovely flowers beside the path leading to adulthood.

RD....what lovely tributes to the power of the written word on our delicate human psyches. Much love to you for sharing those memories with all of us.

Thanks, Tina! They were dredged up today and I got inspired.

Nice review - I thumbed it. So what makes a book orphaned? The fact that they aren't part of a challenge group?

It's nice to be able to remember something good to remember about a parent who otherwise failed you.

>49 cammykitty: Yes, they don't fit into my 75 challenge for whatever reason, so I call them orphaned. I'm not interested in structuring my reading, particularly, so I don't do most of the other challenge groups.

>50 karenmarie: It was very nice, Horrible, and quite unusual!

Review: 35 of fifty

Title: DEAD ON TOWN LINE

Author: LESLIE CONNOR

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: The book description says:
Of all the revelations her afterlife brings, perhaps the most startling thing Cassie Devlin discovers is that being dead isn't being done. Murdered by a classmate, Cassie finds herself stuck on the edges of the world she once knew and a realm whose tug she feels but can't quite find her way to. And . . . she is not alone. There's another like her, who arrived earlier and who, like Cassie, has some unfinished business. Beautifully crafted in electrifying free verse, Dead on Town Line offers teens an emotionally provocative, can't-put-it-down reading experience that will linger long after the last page is turned.

My Review: I read this because Stephen-from-Ohio read it, it's poetry, and he liked it. That concatenation of events has not occurred before, so I felt it incumbent upon me to investigate. It's a story, a cohesive story, told in free verse.

That should have been enough for Uncle Cynical here to stop the reading process. But no. I want to remain open to things I don't instantly “take to” because otherwise stuff gets past me that shouldn't...Pride and Prejudice, f/ex, which I re-read because of Stephen-in-Vegas. And loved. Damn his eyes.

This book, well, not so much. I don't adore poetry. I really, really, really don't adore adolescent girls. I find YA books wibble-wobble and clank and judder at me, all unintentional steampunk. But the story, a cross between Single White Female and The Lovely Bones, kept me turning pages. Not that this was some major feat, the book is less than 140pp long including full-page illos.

And what awful illos they are. Drawn in grease pencil on old newspaper, by the look of it. Ugly, smeary blotches that did nothing whatever to enhance my experience of the text.

So clearly I'm not going to be recommending the book, right? Wrong! Give it to every 13-16 year old girl you know. Her kohl will be dripping down her cheeks inside a half-hour! Wads and wads of Kleenex all snotted up! She'll have the time of her life, in other words.

UNLESS she's African-American, in which case ix-nay on is-thay. There is an African-American caricature in here that came so close to making me set the book alight...well, it's from the liberry and I can't. It did, however, knock an entire star off my rating.

So, that caveat in mind...

I think it's safe to say you should never ever ever read a book I post a positive review for. Seriously.

Next up is one of your four- or five-star zombie books. I have to read a zombie book sooner or later, and you've read a lot of them and have given them fair and balanced (not in the Fox sense) reviews, so...I await my next instruction.

I know I seem to have garnered this 'zombie' reputation somehow, but zombie novels are really hit-and-miss with me. I've only read 15 total and most of them I wouldn't recommend to many people. Through the process of elimination I have ruled out most of them as 'crap Richard shouldn't read' and narrowed it down to these 3:
The Reapers are the Angels
World War Z
Day by Day Armageddon

The Reapers are the Angels is tagged as YA by many and has a teenage girl protagonist, so that one will have to be ruled out as well even though it's great. World War Z is fairly popular and really transcends the genre, although it's written as a series of interviews. Each character relates their experience during the zombie outbreak, essentially making it a book of short stories. That might be a deterrent.

I, personally, really liked Day by Day Armageddon, but that probably means you won't.

So I'm flummoxed. If you are going to hate it either way go with the quicker read (Day by Day Armgeddon) but if you want to read something everyone else seems to like go with the more popular one (World War Z).

I hated Dead of Night so you'd probably love it. Not recommending it, but just saying.

Or you could just read the non-zombie disease book The Last Town on Earth, which is awesome and you MIGHT POSSIBLY give it, like, 2.9 stars. Possibly.

Sorry for typing too much...I get like that when people ask for suggestions. I'm terrible at it.

Day by Day Armageddon it is. I like the idea of humor in the mix, and I'm forewarned the ending is of the stop-and-setup variety so I won't be pissed at being surprised.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: SPLENDORA

Author: EDWARD SWIFT

Rating: 4 very nostalgic stars out of five

The Book Report: The book description rots on ice. Here is the jacket copy from the 1978 hardcover I checked out of the library:

“Splendora: A steamy East Texas armpit of a town where Sue Ella Lightfoot furthers her study of “sexual motives” with every issue of Real Crime magazine while Agnes Pullens drills young ladies in the finer arts of Dance and Expression (tap-dancing, tumbling, and recitation inclusive) and Zeda Earl Goodridge faces a life of ruin if her Christmas yard display doesn't take first prize this year. Timothy John Coldridge was born and raised here, was fussed over and admired by all—Esther Ruth's beautiful grandson, Little Timothy John.

At eighteen, Timothy John left Splendora, unhappily. Now, at thirty-three, he returns with a dazzling companion: Miss Jessie Gatewood, the new hired-by-mail librarian, come to operate the county bookmobile. Draped (and impeccably accessorized) in Victorian finery and drenched in social graces, Miss Jessie takes the town by storm. But though it might be said that Timothy John arrived with her, it might also be said that he arrived within her...and therein lies the tale. Aided at every turn by a cast of relentless eccentrics, Miss Jessie endures a series of thoroughly splendid adventures. But while genteel romance, high drama, torment, and Technicolored bliss capture center page (Can the organza'd charms of a spinster booklady capture the cloistered heart of Assistant Pastor Brother Leggett? Will Maridel Washmoyer's yardful of Styrofoam igloos thwart Zeda Earl's anticipated Yuletide triumph?) a more subtle underscoring theme persists: What can Timothy John mean to Splendora...or Splendora to Timothy John?”

My Review: My 2000 review: "Seminal literary gay novel of my early queer phase. Wonderful writing and affecting characterization."

Well. Um. You see, I was really young when I read this, and in the throes of coming to terms with impending fatherhood. I figured if you were a gay guy, you'd like to be a woman, like Timothy John seems to want to be. (The idea of transgendered people was not part of my mental furniture.) I'd banged a bunch of guys by this time, and I knew for sure and certain that I wasn't interested in a life of bread-and-water imprisonment within heterosexuality's grim and cheerless razor-wire fences and brooding gun emplacements, but kid = duty so I did it. At least with other guys I knew what the hell we were talking about. But books like this one, they set me on a completely wrong path. Gay, woman...same diff, right, since Timothy John lived as a woman, right? I DO NOT WANT A WOMAN NOR TO BE A WOMAN said my insides. But look! said the outside world, it's in a book!

So I laughed when I was supposed to and patted myself for being Literary Enough to get the point of Swift's humid plot (Miss Jessie and Brother Leggett get engaged but Bro can't deal and comes out to Miss Jessie who says hey cool me too and they have a religion/salvation fight and one thing leads to another and Timothy John burns down his house while Brother Leggett is racing up to spirit him away to live as man and whatever and the town matriarch speeds them off with a happy {if toothless, this is East Texas we're talkin' about} smile). But reinforcing the wrong ideas in my head did not make my life easier, nor did a subsequent encounter with The Carnivorous Lamb with its brother-incest lovers. EWEWEW. No thanks! Gordon Merrick cheesy romances! Yes! But then there was that whole duty thing.

I held onto this as my idea of a Good Gay Novel for a very long time. Re-reading it now, at over 50, I realize it's an artifact of the author's past...it's set in some amorphous 40s-50s type time when there was train service to burgs like Splendora...it's gawkily written, it's pretty garishly bedizened with Faulknerian structural grafts and O'Connoresques of characters, and if this were my first read, I'd probably Pearl Rule it and move on with my day.

Time may indeed heal, but it also inflicts, wounds.

#55 Ape - I read World War Z last year and thought it was a great book. I think Richard would like it too.

#57 RichardDear - I've re-read books that I shouldn't have re-read since looking at them through my-older-self-eyes tarnishes the memory of the original read. I'm very careful these days about what to re-read for this very reason.

World War Z was wonderful, and I gave it 5 stars, but Richard doesn't like zombies to begin with and he doesn't like short stories either, so it's sort of a double-whammy of unpleasantness for him. I figure the likelihood of Richard enjoying a zombie novel is slim anyway so at least the other book is a quick little dip that won't take too long to read.

Great review (although terrible summary!), Richard. It's a rather scary prospect, how rapidly our perspectives change. I'm already questioning my own opinions of books I read a few years ago, when I was 18/19. I'm becoming more and more hesitant to recommend books I read just a few years ago because of that, and I can't help but wonder if the rave review I may post for a book now will hold up over time. We can never truly say "I read it in the past, and it's a really good book," I don't think. We can only say that we like it now, or that we liked it 10 years ago.

Unless we read the same collections of books over and over again every 5-10 years I suppose there really isn't a thing we can do about that.

>58 karenmarie: Hello Horrible! A sensible precaution, that, but this book made some noises in my skull so I felt it was necessary to pacify it.

>59 Ape: I don't think there is a way to prevent opinions from changing without either dying in body or in spirit. I don't WANT to stop changing! The idea scares me sweaty!

Now, you two, shame shame on you! World War Z isn't something I want to read, not because it's short stories (which I don't actively dislike, silly Ape) but because it's about something I find stupid and it's really long. Let me see if I can get past the stupid thing first. Maybe I'll read it if I like that other one the liberry just called to tell me is in.

Hmmmm, I could've sworn you went on a long tangent once about how you didn't like short stories because they ended before you could even begin to know the characters. Though, returning the the perspective discussion, it's possible that has changed since I read the post.

I'm pretty sure the comment was about a *particular collection* of short stories, as there are some writers who do that a lot.

Ah. It's possible that I'm projecting my own opinions on you. I must try to stop doing that. *Writes down in her wordpad that Richard likes short stories and prefers women that wear schoolgirl outfits with absurdly short skirts* Okay, got it. Sorry!

GGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK

ETA This right here is what *I* wanna see in my bed!

Yummy.

Ohhhhh! Sorry. *Amends wordpad entry to include that Richard likes heterosexual threeways with aforementioned schoolgirls*

I guess that's a good example of interpretation, hm?

>65 karenmarie: I know, right?

>66 Ape: *sigh* Yes dear.

No, he means a book. He's librosexual. Duh! ;)

I can totally be librosexual with you, Richard.

Librosexual LOLOL

Classic!!

I'm closing in on my goal of 125 books reviewed in 2012, counting both threads. Yay!

You're way ahead of the game if you're this close, RD!

Librosexual. I like it.

*smooch*

125 books reviewed!!! You're an active librosexual!

I understand why library books are all wrapped up in plastic now, it's always good to practice safe librosex.

125 is a LOT.

Ape, you are sooooo naughty. LOL

*Stainless* librosex.

Review: 36 of fifty

Title: THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY

Author: KAREN ELIZABETH GORDON

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: The book description says:
"What on earth does lagniappe mean? A sluggard who lies around till noon? A she-wolf of Anapurna? A car that demands heavy pampering?" In fact, none of the above. But one can find this Creole French word delectably defined in THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY, which does for vocabulary what Gordon's cult classic THE WELL-TEMPERED SENTENCE did for punctuation and THE TRANSITIVE VAMPIRE did for grammar.

THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY takes a voluptuary's approach to language, offering a lavish feast of words and their multiple uses. Favorite characters from Gordon's earlier books appear in cameo, including Yolanta, Jonquil Mapp, cowboys with lingerie, and assorted royal riffraff. With her trademark cache of illustrations and flamboyantly gothic examples, Gordon takes readers on a hedonist's tour of the world of words, where they can check into the Last Judgment Pinball Machine Motel, slip into susurrant silk pajamas at Cafe Frangipane, or plunge into scenes from such literary works as Torpor in the Swing,The Wretch of Lugubria, and Gossamer and the Green Light.

Laced with erudite insights and eccentric wit, THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY is about the music of speech and the sound and sensuality of language, celebrating not only the obsure but also our most beloved and basic words.

My Review: I read this because Stephen-from-Ohio read it, so I could prove the point that I do NOT hate every book he loves. I was right, I don't hate this book, not at all. I like Gordon's funny, illustrative story snippets and I like the wide net she casts to bring us cool words. In fact, two of my all-time top-ten fave-rave words appear, with amusante little vignettes, on the same page: louche (disreputable, shady, dubious) and lubricious (sexually aroused or obsessed).

The wonderful thing about such books, the browser's dictionaries, is the delight they afford the wordnik. I am unquestionably an enthusiastic wordnik, a complete grinning fool when it comes to English's unrepentant pillaging of other languages' treasuries of words for its own enrichment. I adore that facet of the Anglophone mindset that says, “ooo shiny little trinket gimme gimme” and adds thereby a shade of meaning to its already immense, lustrous, gorgeously hued pile of drachenfutter that is the vocabulary you and I can draw on. “Start” isn't the same as “commence” which isn't exactly “begin,” though they're all in the same family. Shades of meaning make language so much more fun to use and to examine. I love the little books that help me do this.

See? See?! I liked a book you did, Stephen-from-Ohio! And liked it a lot! Thanks for showing it to me.

Well you would get a - but I can't find your review:(

You LIKED it? A book that I read and you LIKED it?

I didn't know the characters were taken from some of her earlier books. I had no idea what was going on with that, so it was all lost on me.

I'm glad you didn't hate the book, Richard! You know how I love the weird and absurd, so I think the concept of you enjoying a book that I liked is fantastic! Though I suppose the universe will be return to balance when you finally decide to read a zombie novel.

>77 calm: Good heavens, calm! I hadn't realized I left it out of my catalog! Thanks. Added now.

>78 Ape: Day by Day Armageddon ring a bell?

Precisely.

You aren't reading it now, are you? I want to bask in this 3.75 rating for awhile. Did I mention you should skip the introduction? It's idiotic and feels like it's written by a 13-year-old.

The whole book feels like it was written by a 13-year-old. But if I squint real hard and pretend I don't get the "journal" part, it's a good story.

I don't know, there aren't enough naked cheerleaders, naked waitresses, or naked nursing assistants for it to be written by a 13-year-old. Unless you mean intellectually so, but intellect has no place in a zombie novel. Pfffft.

:)

I don't recall any nudity whatsoever...you're right. Maybe a 17-year-old.

>76 richardderus: Now, that was a "review"....**snort**

I am a devout fan of Ms Karen Elizabeth Gordon...owning 4 of her "wordy" books, myownself.....in which I like to dip my toes, more often than is good...probably...

;-}

She's done a lot of good work for the English language. Let's give her a medal!

Well-loved books from my past

Title: GREEN DARKNESS

Author: ANYA SETON

Rating: 3 stars out of five, but only because I still love the memory

The Book Report: The book description says:

This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil that stretches from 16th-century England to the present day. Richard Marsdon marries a young American woman named Celia, brings her to live at his English estate, and all seems to be going well. But now Richard has become withdrawn, and Celia is constantly haunted by a vague dread. When she suffers a breakdown and wavers between life and death, a wise doctor realizes that only by forcing Celia to relive her past can he enable her to escape her illness. Celia travels back 400 years in time to her past life as a beautiful but doomed servant. Through her eyes, we see the England of the Tudors, torn by religious strife, and experience all the pageantry, lustiness, and cruelty of the age. As in other historical romance titles by this author, the past comes alive in this flamboyant classic novel.

My Review: My sister used to have a book store. She, our mother, and I all spent the summer of 1973, damn near 40 years ago now, reading this book. We'd been stealing it back and forth from each other until finally she gave Mama and me our own copies so she could read it in peace. We did a sort of group read on the book, and oh my heck how we liked it!

I was a teenager then. I wasn't an inexperienced reader, but I was completely suckered in by anything to do with reincarnation. Mama was just getting the Jeebus infection that ate her sense of humor, compassion, and decency...all oddly enough while sexually abusing her teenaged son, funny how often religion masks corruption...and my sister was in one of the periodic hellish patches that have punctuated her road through life.

We all resonated with the travails of the characters, trying to work out their manifold interconnections and karmic debts. The book's very Gothicness was deeply appealing to each of us for our own reasons, and gave us hours and hours of fun things to talk about. For that, a whole star in grateful memory.

Rereading this at fifty-two was probably a mistake. The writing is very much what one would expect of an historical novelist whose career began in the 1940s. She was renowned in the day for her meticulous research, and yet says in her Preface (p. vi of the 1973 Houghton Mifflin hardcover I got from the liberry), “Source books make for tedious listing, but for the Tudor period {of Green Darkness} I have tried to consult all the pertinent ones.” Imagine someone, even a novelist, trying to get away with that now! There would be calumnious mutterings and sulphrous aspersions cast on the character and the ability of such an author. As if it matters in a work of fiction.

The humid Gothic atmosphere of lust and love denied, the surrendered to, then disastrously brought to a close, was a little hard on my older self. I like romantic stories just fine, but the moralizing you can keep. And there is a deal of moralizing! Whee dawggie! The gay characters are ugly...as within, so without, and Seton clearly has the attitude of her day towards gay men...the lusty lower-class wenches get their bastards and get turned out, the Catholic Church and its hypocrisy suffer agonies at the hands of the vile Protestant politicians...Seton was raised a Theosophist...good people turn hard and cold when given property to protect...the Exotic Hindu Doctor who understands Modern Medicine but Knows How to Be In Touch With the Spirits, oof!...oh, the lot!

So not so much on the attitude. I get it, and in those days I absorbed it because it was the way my family thought, but how I wish I could go back to 1973 and smack this book out of my young hands! Along with Stranger in a Strange Land, its misogyny and homophobia leached right into my brain and lodged there. Never made me one whit less gay, just made me feel terrible about it, like the culture's messages continue to do to young and impressionable kids to this day.

But the fact that the lady wrote this, her next-to-last book, when she was nearing seventy and had only just been divorced from her husband of nigh on forty years, and was beginning her long decline into ill health, makes Green Darkness a poignant re-read for me. Her life was unraveling, and mine was too (what little there was of it at that point); I think both my mother and my sister felt the same way. I suspect some resonance of that bound all of us to this book and spoke to each of us about its unhappy people in unhappy lives. There is, in the best romantic tradition, a happy ending. But I for one have never believed it.

Pearl Ruled: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (p145).

I just can't get with the program on this one. Not like it's bad, nor even just not appealing. It will not rise to my hand and, if I grab it, it slips away from me.

Plus I can't remember anything at all that's happened between readings. Never a good sign.

#86 I think you have saved me, and possibly my husband and child, from making the same mistake. My husband and I read GD shortly after it came out, if not together then in rapid succession. We would have been living in a suburb of New Orleans at the time, newly married and reading "at will" for the first time in a while after completing English majors Loved the book for its Gothic atmosphere...don't remember any of that stuff about gay men. I suspect we'd have been severely chastised by Dr. Daughter if she had taken up our recommendation to read it herself. What can I say...we've all grown up a bit. *goes to remove wilted copy of Green Darkness from library*

Removing it seems a bit harsh, Linda3rd. After all, it pleased you once! Let it lie, but heavens don't push it at anyone! Forty years of attitudinal change later, very little looks as good as it once did.

Having just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary this spring, I think I will let that last statement pass unremarked.

Heh.

I've had exactly the same reaction to The Lies of Locke Lamora, Richard. Many people seem to love it, but I pick it up, read a bit, forget what I read, it drifts away somewhere, and it just doesn't do anything for me as a read.

#90 laytonwoman3rd congratulations! That's a beautiful thing

#93 Thank you...and yes it is...for the most part!

Review: 37 of fifty

Title: WHISPERS IN DUST AND BONE

Author: ANDREW GEYER

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: The book description says:
"Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there. Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Sharing a point of origin and a journey, their characters weave in and out of the stories, looking for new starts-for answers-and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina. The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.

Famous blurbers: Andrew Geyer's earthy, edgy, colorful stories range from Texas to Peru, reflecting life's frustrations and occasional small triumphs.—Elmer Kelton
The contents...reads like the track listing of some Marty Robbins album-dusty and elegiac, but with that ten-dollar smile, that flash of white teeth under a hat brim. Even when the stories take you to South Carolina, or South America, still, it's Texas. The real one.—Stephen Graham Jones
The most important work of fiction to come out of the Southwest since Woman Hollering Creek.—Michael Hathaway

My Review: I am a native Californian. Lived there for a whopping six years, then made visits because my divorced parents couldn't bear to be in the same state. (Not that I think they were wrong...two people that negative and vicious in one state is too many.) I was yanked away from the world I knew to start life anew in Mercedes, a horrible little burg in farthest-possible South Texas...which, in the mid-Sixties, was an unbelievably stark contrast to wealthy urban/suburban Northern California: POOR PEOPLE! MEXICAN PEOPLE (Matamoros, Mexico is closer to Mercedes, Texas than is San Antonio or Laredo)! SPANISH!! EEEEEEEEK! Oh, and heat. Lots and lots of heat.

And ya know what? I hated the heat. I hated my mother, and sister. But I didn't hate horrible, podunk Mercedes near as much as I hated, and still hate, plush piss-elegant pointless Los Gatos, California. I liked the Mexican migrant kids, I LOVED barbacoa and breakfast tacos and quesadillas and refritos and enchiladas (to my mother's enduring horror), I liked Spanish...and for the first time in my life, I felt like there was something to this idea people called “home.” Cali? Never did fit. Haven't been there in 20 years, and am not at all sure I'll ever go back.

Fast forward from 1966 to 2004. I'm living in Austin at that time, my mother having died and left me her house there. I found this collection of sixteen stories, published by Texas Tech University Press, at BookPeople (Austin's excellent unchain book heaven), on a shelf marked “Staff Recommendations.” Since money wasn't a problem for me then, I bought it on a whim...what a whim.

Peru! The Amazon! Ranch country in South Texas! Powpowpow the book-bullets hit me, spun me, felt like fire as they got in under my skin and made me smell smells I'd forgotten I knew (caliche roads, anyone?) and think about the life I almost led in places I'd been and left behind.

But, and I know this is such a boring cliché to hear again and again, but it's the characters and their voices that pinned me to my chair and kept the pages turning. Andrew Geyer made, in this collection, a believer out of me, and I'll read all his books one day before I die. Every one of the stories has someone in it that I knew, or know, or am related to. I recognize them, their concerns, their attitudes and prejudices. I don't always like them, but I know them, somewhere in the calcium in my bones I know them and their life and their deep fear of change. Change, in this world, is Never Good. Here, from my very favorite story, “Trust Jesus,” is a succinct statement of why:

At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year.--p27, hardcover edition

As soon as the pattern of things changes, the certainties shift, the roots of survival are attacked. I forget this. I can't keep it in the forefront of my mind because I'm not this kind of person at heart, I'm a change-loving city-dweller by nature and design. Conservatism, which I regard as a character flaw to be rooted out and extinguished by all right-thinking people, has its roots here in this South Texas archetype tough ranch woman.

Andrew Geyer reminds me, in these stories, that nothing comes from nowhere...that people think and feel and believe what they do for reasons that make sense to them. That, in spite of my judgments, the world will always have these folks in it, and best to adjust to that immutable law of human nature.

This is why I read. To remind myself not to disappear up my own ass. People are different, not (only) wrongheaded. I hate being made to think, don't you?

I struggle with this idea a lot, because I know and love so many people who are way farther off center than I am in both directions...I try to see where they're coming from and allow for it. Sometimes Ah kin and sometimes Ah cain't.

Mostly Ah'm on the "cain't" side, I fear.

Oooo - the discussion on Lies of Locke Lamora is interesting. I know several people who have raved about it, but it isn't jumping to my hands either. The fact that you read it and then forget what's going on in between sessions sounds ominous. Perhaps I can prune it from my LT listings, since something in me is already resisting for no apparent reason.

>98 cammykitty: Go with your instincts, cammykitty! The book wants you to read it, or it doesn't at all want you. Either way it will let you know right quick.

Words of wisdom!

Review: 37 of fifty

Title: THE VARIOUS FLAVORS OF COFFEE

Author: ANTHONY CAPELLA

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: The book description says:

From the internationally bestselling author of The Wedding Officer comes a novel whose stunning blend of exotic adventure and erotic passion will intoxicate every reader who tastes of its remarkable delights.

When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her desire.
—Abyssinian proverb

It was a cup of coffee that changed Robert Wallis’s life—and a cup of very bad coffee at that. The impoverished poet is sitting in a London coffeehouse contemplating an uncertain future when he meets Samuel Pinker. The owner of Castle Coffee offers Wallace the very last thing a struggling young artiste in fin de siècle England could possibly want: a job.

But the job Wallis accepts—employing his palate and talent for words to compose a “vocabulary of coffee” based on its many subtle and elusive flavors—is only the beginning of an extraordinary adventure in which Wallis will experience the dizzying heights of desire and the excruciating pain of loss. As Wallis finds himself falling hopelessly in love with his coworker, Pinker’s spirited suffragette daughter Emily, both will discover that you cannot awaken one set of senses without affecting all the others.

Their love is tested when Wallis is dispatched on a journey to North Africa in search of the legendary Arab mocca. As he travels to coffee’s fabled birthplace—and learns the fiercely guarded secrets of the trade—Wallis meets Fikre, the defiant, seductive slave of a powerful coffee merchant, who serves him in the traditional Abyssinian coffee ceremony. And when Fikre dares to slip Wallis a single coffee bean, the mysteries of coffee and forbidden passion intermingle…and combine to change history and fate.

My Review: Um. Well. Uh. I have a problem here. I started reading one book, thinking I was getting one kind of thing, and I ended up getting rather another, and along the way I oscillated between irked and amused often enough that I thought I was on some sort of story-magneto, swinging from pole to pole.

There's a good deal of energy in this tale, no doubt about that. It's got a swinging pace, it's got an emotional charge from its characters' absurdities and failings, and it's set at a time of radical change which is always good for a sense of urgency.

The irked pole on the mageto, for me, was narrator Robert himself. His studied, dandyish pose of Oscar Wildean epigrammatic speech made me homicidal. That the conceit of the book is a tale told in retrospect prevented me from hurling the damn thing aside, as the narrator-Robert shared my amused, then annoyed response to character-Robert, is both a good and a bad thing. I got the sense that narrator-Robert and I were in cahoots, smiling with impatient indulgence on the emotional excesses and self-delusions of Those Young People. It also popped me out of the story a good deal, at least until I'd made my peace with its narrative drag on the pace.

Also on the irked pole of the swing was the romance Robert clearly has with himself, and extends to Emily, a Modern Girl (in the 1897 meaning of those words) working (!) in her father's firm before entering into marriage. As Robert is hired to create a coffee vocabulary with Emily's help, the story being told about coffee seemed to suffer from the superposition of A Romance. That the romance was doomed (not a spoiler, Robert says so) is no surprise whatsoever. No one's first love is his last. More to the point, Robert's constant use of prostitutes isn't gonna fly with a Modern Girl, and one can always rest assured that the secret one least wants revealed will be known by those one least wants to know it at the worst, most embarrassing moment. In fiction as in life. So the doomed-ness of the romance was crystal clear and left me waiting for the other shoe to drop, rather than being a sad case of readerly anticipation followed by a wistful sense of opportunity lost. It might be an inevitability of the retrospective structure used here. I would have thought, however, that the author would have expended more effort in making this Grand Passion more immediate, no matter the structure.

But the real annoyance to me was the occasional interpolation of present-tense bits into this review of the life and times of Robert, when the PoV shifts to others. If these aren't Robert's memories, why are they here? So annoying to have the rules the author himself chose broken with such complete, unexplained violence. So. Annoying.

But there were positive pole-swings, too, and really good ones. The author has narrator-Robert decrying the change from Victorian to Edwardian worlds, from hidden, gaslit Vices to unforgiving, electrically lit Morality...a point I found really interesting. The backdrop of Africa was also deeply felt and wonderfully evocative. I have no gauge to measure its accuracy, as I've never been to East Africa, but it felt wonderful and enfolding and right to me. The author, I will note, was born in Uganda. This makes me inclined to trust his evocation of place.

But the main pleasure the book afforded me was coffee. The smell, the taste, the politics, the essence of the world in these pages is coffee. The vocabulary character-Robert develops with Emily, the first of its kind, is delightful. The descriptions of the coffees, their differences, their quirks, all superbly rendered and skillfully deployed to avoid both the dreaded info-dump and the (inexplicably, to me) less-dreaded light garnish or inadequate gilding of fact on a wodge of story that could be anywhere, anywhen, about anything and/or nothing.

And while I've mentioned in positive terms the pace the author sets in the book, I can't overlook the sheer length of the opus. Over 500 pages. Oh dear. One hundred fewer, with the simple alteration of no annoying PoV switches, and I think this would have been a more exciting, more fully enfolding book.

It's a good read that could have been excellent. *sigh*

mmmmmmm coffee!

I read The Various Flavors of Coffee in May and gave it 4 stars. I thought the bits about Africa and Brazil fascinating. I also loved reading about the manipulations of markets. Liked Emily Pinker whole bunches.

I agree that it was a tad longish, but I was in the frame of mind to devour a book, and it was there, and I devoured it.

I have The Wedding Officer waiting in the wings for the right moment.....

XO Horrible

>102 mckait: I agree, Kath!

>103 karenmarie: Lots to like about it, Horrible, I was just really put off by enough things to have to knock it down a bit. xoxoxo

So when a woman who hates coffee gives a man coffee, what does it show?

True love, cammykitty.

Or homicidal loathing. Take your pick.

Surely, one extreme or the other.

& BTW, I have a recommendation for all librosexuals. Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. There's a scene in a library... I'll say no more.

Addicted to coffee. Must. Get. Book.

>108 cammykitty: I reviewed it and boy do I remember that!

>109 tututhefirst: I suspect this will be one you ***LOVE*** Tina.

Ah, nice review. So you liked it against your better judgement. When I got to that library scene, I thought of you.

Heh. I don't think I'm surprised, but I am pleased.

Pearl Ruled: THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins

Rating: 1* of five (p81)

What was I thinking? I don't like books about teens. Well, that's not entirely true...I am not a Serial Killer is about a teen boy who's sure he's the evilest thing ever born, is told from his PoV, and yet that gets darn close to 4 stars. I don't like books about teen girls. Well, that's not entirely true, either...Deathless is told from the PoV of a teen girl in a magical struggle for her life, and yet it got four full and eager stars.

So why didn't I like this book?

Because the whole thing is a cynical exercise in marketing a product that has elements the publisher recognized as hot and trending: Strong teen girl; dystopian setting; children in battle for their lives. Sound familiar? Think Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and forward. Same situation. Female hero. Technology not magic. No humor, ungraceful writing, and cold business calculation set it apart from the Potter books.

I don't know Ms. Collins, and I impute no impure motives to her. She might very well have written the story dearest to her heart, for all I know. But I do know, and have for quite some years, publishers. This is a product promoted to fill a gap in the line-up, like the Chrysler 200.

Awful. That it succeeded so well is depressing. That it's so unquestioningly lauded is either life-sappingly grim or suicide-inducingly terrible. In a country where free speech is ever under attack (hence the First Amendment, and laws supporting it...no one legislates the safety of a thing unquestioned), we waste our collective breath lauding a second-rate industrial product, a foolish simplistic ramshackle pastiche of better books that, in a better world, would merit only silence and oblivion.

Shame. Shame. And more shame on me for adding to the chorus.

If in a minor key.

Bravo for applying the Pearl Rule...you may be forgiven for even attempting this piece of drivel.

>114 tututhefirst: Heh. Thanks, Tina!

Review: 39 of fifty

Title: SIMPLE JUSTICE

Author: JOHN MORGAN WILSON

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Description: Following the death of his lover and a scandal involving his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, crime reporter Benjamin Justice has fallen into a hazy, alcoholic life, hiding out in the West Hollywood neighborhood known as the Norma Triangle. He is called back to the world of the living by an unexpected, and unwelcome, visit from Harry Brofsky, his former boss. Brofsky wants Ben to do some background work (strictly off the record) with another reporter on the investigation of a seemingly motiveless killing outside a local gay bar. The investigation throws Justice back into the life of gay bars, spurned lovers, dysfunctional families, and tawdry secrets--all the things he had been trying to escape. And it leads, ultimately, to the reexamination of his own dark past, and his own crimes of passion. Simple Justice is a subtly plotted mystery that takes a piercing look at not only violent crime but also violations of the heart and soul in the sometimes glamorous, more often dark and gritty gay world of West Hollywood.

My Review: Simple? Simplistic. Subtle? Clichéd. Voices are muffled as if through handkerchiefs. (Seriously...try that sometime...all you are is inaudible.) Gunshots? Are you sure it wasn't a car backfiring? (In the past 20 years, the ubiquity of fuel injection has made this once-frequent occurrence unusual enough to be more noteworthy than a mere gunshot.) The large, muscular African-American bouncer at a gay bar says the victim was “all by hisself.”

Nauseous.

The murderer, when revealed, is so boringly predictable that, on the character's first appearance, I noted “killer” on the page. (Since erased. Hey, quit frowning, some people dog-ear.) The red herrings were days old, and smelt up the place. (Punishment will continue until praise is heaped upon me.)

So why did I finish it? It's the sixteen-year-old first book in a series that has eight books. First books are seldom all that wonderful, and a series that's lasted eight has something. Maybe I won't like that something, but I'll try one more to see. It only took about three hours to read this one, so it's not like I'm making a major time commitment. Plus the Pearl Rule looms behind each page-flip, dangling its gorgeously made invitation to say “sayonara” and sail away for better-written shores.

Great review, RD! I think the "Nauseous" comment will cause me by Pearl Rule this one at page 0.

Thanks Horrible! I was going to rape pillage and burn, but decided it was more trouble than the book was worth.

Hey, quit frowning, some people dog-ear.

LOL, I'll remember that if I'm ever tempted to write in a book. (I think I've done it once or twice when something got entirely Too Much for me.) "Hey, at least I don't dog-ear the pages!"

I find it funny when I get a library book with a dog eared page in the middle of a climactic scene. What were they thinking, putting it to one side, at this stage of the story??

I find it funny when I get a library book with a dog eared page in the middle of a climactic scene. What were they thinking, putting it to one side, at this stage of the story??

It's like we come from a different planet than those people, isn't it Tania?

Back when I could work and had throw-away money, I bought four cans of these dealiebobbers:



They're perfect perfect perfect for someone who wants to come back to a quote, or mark a climactic scene, or mark a place in a shared book. Love them!!

Oooo, those book darts are cool. I've been using the magnetic bookmarks - they are sort of like the darts, but I'm sure they cost more so you don't want to leave them in a book.

I think the magnetic bookmarks are a lot bulkier, too, and the darts are whisper-thin. Doesn't do bad stuff to the book's binding.

Those book darts are neat Richard. The last book doesn't sound as good:( Hope your next read is something better.

Thank you, calm...it was marginally more fun to read Equal of the Sun than it was Simple Justice. Marginally.

Gruel is marginally better than tea in RD world, I imagine.

I'll take gruel over tea 99 to 1. Tea = cats = Satan.

Review: 40 of fifty

Title: CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS OVER AN ELEVATOR IN PIAZZA VITTORIO

Author: AMARA LAKHOUS

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: A compelling mix of social satire and murder mystery.

A small culturally mixed community living in an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victim's neighbors is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. Each character takes his or her turn center-stage, giving evidence, recounting his or her story--the dramas of racial identity, the anxieties and misunderstandings born of a life spent on society's margins, the daily humiliations provoked by mainstream culture's fears and indifference, preconceptions and insensitivity. What emerges is a moving story that is common to us all, whether we live in Italy or Los Angeles.

This novel is animated by a style that is as colorful as the neighborhood it describes and is characterized by seemingly effortless equipoise that borrows from the cinematic tradition of the Commedia all'Italiana as exemplified by directors such as Federico Fellini.

At the heart of this bittersweet comedy told with affection and sensitivity is a social reality that we often tend to ignore and an anthropological analysis, refreshing in its generosity, that cannot fail to fascinate.

My Review: Reading that book description isn't necessarily helpful. Social satire plus murder mystery, to most book-readin' Murrikins, is gonna call forth the specter of Murder by Death. You are not in for a satire like that. You are in for a very sophisticated and layered short novel in which a murder is committed, but frankly no one really cares who did it because it needed doing, and the perp the police have identified is a community pillar. No one believes Amedeo committed this murder, which no one calls a crime.

Amedeo steps out of the stories of ten people who all live in a small apartment building on Rome's tatty side, on the Piazza Vittorio. All ten people are displaced, not Roman, and all are made to feel more alien than guest by Rome and its Romans. Amedeo comes to the rescue of each person here, in ways practical and spiritual. He's a fixer, a born organizer, he spends his time on this earth open to and listening for the truths under the stories his neighbors tell, the truths under the facts of Rome and Italian society, the truths that not very many people will bother to learn or, quite possibly, ever realize are there.

So how can the police suspect this wonderful, soothing, special man of MURDER?! Because he, like everyone else, fought with the shit who got murdered? No...because he has disappeared. Not for the first time in his life. He has vanished, and in police work, that's as good as a confession. The novel is told in the interviews the police take with all the residents of Amedeo's building.

Interspersed with these interviews are wails, the first-person accounts of Amedeo himself. They're called wails because Amedeo, né Ahmed Salmi in Algiers, spends a lot of time locked in his wife's bathroom with a tape recorder, setting down his impressions of the people around him, and vocalizing in that uniquely Arab way...the ululating wail, used for joy, for mourning, for any access of emotion that words can't encompass. It's a wonderful way to let us into the experience of being alive in the skin of a force of nature. We're inside Amedeo, Ahmed, we're privileged to be the unseen auditors of the story of his world.

His private world. We have no sense whatever of his work, his living...he remains in a tight little box, as do all the characters, one that focuses on someone we don't meet or hear from or, frankly, care about. The victim is not the point. The murderer didn't commit a crime so much as perform clean-up on aisle two. The more we hear about him, the less we care that he's dead. It works well as a narrative technique to emphasize the almost miraculous nature of listening, and its almost total lack in the modern world.

So why 3.75 stars, when all of the above sounds like such praise? Because the Italian reviews mention an exuberance of language, a gonzo balls-out feeling that the text gives. In Italian. The translation is like the book description above, not uninteresting but nobody's idea of gonzo or balls-out writing. It's a translation. It feels like a translation. It's never going to convey the sense that the original can, of different regional voices, of different classes and different kind of Italian, because American English isn't that kind of language and American culture doesn't, at least at the level of culture where one finds readers of translated novels, like “dialect writing” because it's not Nice.

We lose. I want to read this book in Italian now. It's bound to be more fun. The translation is a good book. The original, I will bet, is a fantastic one.

*sigh*

Sorry the translation misses the nuances of the original Italian ... it still sounds like one I would like to read even in a flawed translation. Thanks for the review.

>129 calm: Oh goodness yes, calm! Read it! I liked it. I just couldn't rate it higher because it's not...well...it hasn't got that *oomph* that would make it great. I suspect the original does.

Library doesn't have it:( I'll keep my eyes open for a copy though.

I can't say I'm surprised by the liberry not having it. I was pleasantly surprised mine did. Hope a copy comes your way...I'd send you mine, but it's the liberry's and they frown on that.

Yes they do .... annoying isn't it:)

I'm glad to see this review. I've just read Lakhous' Divorzio all'islamica a viale Marconi in my Italian lit class and really enjoyed it. So I'll definitely check this one out.

Circulation managers are pooh-bahs in the Longface Puritans League for sure.

Review: 41 of fifty

Title: SMONK

Author: TOM FRANKLIN

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Description: It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results. Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.

In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.

My Review: Oh! Oh, I see...THIS is what y'all were on about when y'all were carryin' on over Franklin's writing. It surely to hell couldn't've been that crooked mess. That was painful.

Eugene Oregon Smonk is as horrible a character as Ignatius Reilly. He's as gross, as grotesque, as cruel, and as massively hilariously vile. Smonk suffers from gout, so he's already ten yards ahead of everybody else in the book in my good graces. He's got terminal consumption, too. (I don't have that.) He's bowlegged, he hates horses, he detests people. He's murdered and raped and generally been as much like Attila as a modern man can be.

Evavangeline is fifteen, a whore, and mean as a butt-fucked polecat. She doesn't know what “thank you” means, she's got no idea what impulse control is, and she expresses her displeasure with johns who don't pay up (I refuse to reach for the cheap joke inherent in “stiff her”) in most-often fatal ways.

And these, laddies and gentlewomen, are our heroes.

Yeup. This book, it's as much fun to read as a William S. Burroughs novel edited by Roger Corman. It's got energy. It's got no time for sacred, for nice, for sweet. It's got no place for normal, for kindly, for restrained. (Unless you mean “tied up for sex.”) It is, in short, a book for the boisterous and the bawdy, not the timorous and the tidy.

I totally get the Franklin thing now. That crookedy crapola? That's nothing much, it's no doubt what happened when some longfaced Puritan somewhere started biting Franklin behind the ear after this book came out. He should slap her into next Sunday and go back to Smonking. This genre-busting carnival of louche and salacious and violent living is far far far more interesting and better written.

Just curious RD....where do you find all these luscious little known num nums....I'm going to have to get clash.. from Bates college - the only copy in the whole state!

Just for fun, I clicked the Oracle as I often do.. Oracle agrees with me, that this isn't a kathy book.. lol

Mmmmrrrph...until you got to the rape and murder part, Smonk sounded a bit like a cousin of my Dad's...bowlegged, hates horses (and dogs of a certain size), dying of lung disease, I dunno about the gout... I think I'll just let my personal acquaintance with him serve in lieu of getting to know Mr. Smonk. But foo...I enjoyed that "crooked mess".

BkC153) Flaubert, Gustave, MADAME BOVARY (tr. Lydia Davis): Classic novel, deathless. Sorta like a literary zombie.

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: As if one is really necessary. Well, here it is:
A literary event: one of the world's most celebrated novels, in a magnificent new translation.

Seven years ago, Lydia Davis brought us an award-winning, rapturously reviewed new translation of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way that was hailed as "clear and true to the music of the original" (Los Angeles Times) and "a work of creation in its own right" (Claire Messud, Newsday). Now she turns her gifts to the book that redefined the novel as an art form.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.
When published in 1857, Madame Bovary was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for its heroine. Today the novel is considered the first masterpiece of realist fiction. Flaubert sought to tell the story objectively, without romanticizing or moralizing (hence the uproar surrounding its publication), but whereas he was famously fastidious about his literary style, many of the English versions seem to tell the story in their own style. In this landmark translation, Lydia Davis honors the nuances and particulars of a style that has long beguiled readers of French, giving new life in English to Flaubert's masterwork.


My Review: Realism à la Balzac gets a hefty infusion of Romanticism. The novel will always be very important for this reason. It was Flaubert's trial for obscenity, due to his authorial refusal to explicitly condemn Emma Bovary for adultery, that opened the floodgates of “immoral” realistic fiction. If anyone needs any further reason to read the book, it's also got some juicy Faustian bargaining in it. Plus everybody dies. (Srsly how can anything about this famous book be a spoiler? Don't complain to me about it.)

So the review is really about this translation by Lydia Davis. She's alleged to have done a fabulous, marvelous job.

Uh huh.

Then, in sudden tenderness and discouragement, Charles turned to his wife, saying:

“Kiss me, my dear!”

“Leave me alone!” she said, red with anger.

“What is it? What is it?” he said, stupefied. “Calm yourself! Don't be upset!...You know how much I love you!...Come to me!”

“Stop!” she shouted with a terrible look.

(Part II, ch.8)

Literal translation isn't always the best. Can you, like me, hear the nails and smell the sawdust as this wooden edifice is erected? Can you, like me, feel the uncertain sway of the uneven floorboards as we ascend ever farther up Flaubert's towering if creaky scaffolding?

A well-furnished mind has Bovary in it. Unless you want to slug through the mannered 19th-century French, or have a high tolerance for sawdusty English prose, I'd say do the Cliffs Notes and call it good.

>137 tututhefirst: Heh...I'm a voracious consumer of Europa Editions' output. I hear about a lot of things.

>138 mckait: Since you steadfastly refuse to give me a clue as to which of the books I've reviewed that you're talking about because putting post numbers in your responses seems to bug you, I don't know which book you're talking about. Neither of the most recent reviews is of a book I'd ever suggest that you pick up, though.

>139 laytonwoman3rd: Well, Linda3rd, if you liked that book, this one would be likely to set your eyebrows ablaze.

LOVE that GIF!

Excellent review of Madame B. I read it once, at age 18, to help a friend do a paper on it...I was out of school with babycakes and long-since-discarded husband and missing school like mad.

I dunno, maybe it's just me, but translations from the French don't generally work well for me. Surely it can't be all of French lit.? Perhaps it's just a singularly difficult language to trans. into English, full of nuances and whatnot. I did adore Dangerous Liasons. What a terrific reading experience that was!

Oh, good aftenroon, Rdear, and a *smmoch* to you.

I loved M. Bovary, but I think it was because I read it for a course taught by an amazing professor more than because the novel itself was amazing. *shrug*

>144 Matke: Everyone gets a starter marriage. French is hard to translate because it's so precise. English has too many soft edges to give the feel for prismatic, hard-edged French.

*smooch* back at'cha

The right professor can make anything work. I had one like that, and I credit him with showing me how to love Faulkner the way I do.

>145 scaifea: I don't dislike the novel, really, Amber. I don't like this translation, and I think that reading it in French was the reason I like it at all. French does things to ideas that English isn't capable of. Lheureux and Emma's conversations, read in English, are...quotidian...in French, they're seductive, because Lheureux shifts from vous to tu and back again with the mood of the moment.

>147 laytonwoman3rd: That's the truth, Linda3rd. A good teacher/student fit means *everything* to appreciating a work of art.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: THE SOT-WEED FACTOR

Author: JOHN BARTH

Rating: 5 golden stars of five, with a rapturous yodel cluster

The Book Description: Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem. On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has lasting relevance for readers of all times.

My Review: The book description is a bit weak-kneed, but I can't find a better one, and I detest writing the book reports with a passion.

A couple months ago, I started a re-read of this book that did not go well. I sighed. I snorted. I rolled my eyes, and cut up rough whenever we got into the book's faux-antique Englysshe. I was responding to it like it was a phauntaiysee nawvelle with majgickq and other such borderline-criminal goins-on. I put it aside, and I forgot it, except to renew it online from the Port Washington liberry.

Damn me anyway! Why can't I listen to my REAL self?! John Barth, my Real Self murmured, John Barth of The Floating Opera and this book which you adored thirty years ago, he deserves better than this, to which Angry Self replied, “Shut up you! Seven hundred plus pages of this phauntaaahsticall-ness will make us homicidal! Why not encourage me to read Dickens or Tolkien if all you want to is encourage me to massacre random strangers? Silence! Begone!”

Damn me! What an ass! I read the first six chapters and tossed the book aside! But...I did keep renewing it....

And today, today with two days left on my final renewal, to-goddam-day I pick the book up again. And I read the first paragraph/line. And oh damn me! Damn me! How beautiful, how simply and completely perfect it is, and how I wish I could boil Angry Me in oil!

In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

Oh. Oh oh oh oh. I just had a crisis.

Now I *could* just power through the seven hundred-plus remaining pages in the next two days, ignoring all other beings and duties...to the detriment of our carpets, as the dog would be on her own re: eliminatory functions, and the complete bumfuzzlement of my houseys as I would not be showing up at the station to fetch them...but it's not on. It's just not. This isn't a book to be got through, it is a book to be appreciated, savored, delighted in.

I will await the tides of fortune washing a copy of my own back up on the shores of my private liberry. It is worth the wait. The rapturous narcosis of my first immersion has returned. Thirty years are as but a moment. John Barth is still there, his words as gorgeously deployed as ever they were.

Delightful. Delightful.

Damn me anyway!

Have you ever read Giles Goat-Boy? It was an underground classic at university back in the '60s, and I think you'd definitely appreciate it.

I did, Roni, and liked it a good bit...but this book and The Floating Opera were my favorites then and now.

RD.....Happpy Birthday.....Amazon and Barnes and Noble have ebooks of Sot weed Factor available for free. !!!! And thanks for reminding me that I read this years (eons, decades, centuries?) ago and always said I wanted to re-read it. I guess now I'll have to push it up in the queue.

Enjoy your day my friend.

I alternate between loving and hating, both, Sot-Weed and Giles Goat-Boy. I read the latter while in the Peace Corps in "Upper Volta" (it was called then, now Burkino Faso). Really, sat on a concrete pad outside my two concrete rooms, all with grass roofing, and drank Nescafe coffee and read. I was not a star Peace Corps volunteer. I retreated into sex and reading, and was sent home "early". But I did love John Barth.

>152 tututhefirst: Thank you, m'dear! The Kindle freebie is the original, the tale from which Barth took off, not the novel. I checked.

>153 maggie1944: I think I would've been even worse than it sounds like you were, Karen44. But reading and sex are pretty damn fabulous pastimes!

Happy Birthday on this thread, too, RD!

*smooch*

>155 karenmarie: Thank you dear OLD Horrible! *smooch*

I'm only 6 years older than you are, dear LESS OLD RD! *smooch*

Six years older...? But...you're not 27, or your daughter was born awfully young...

Ha Ha.

My daughter was born awfully young. She was 0 minutes old when she was born......

My father's mother, "Mom", lived with us as I was growing up. She always told us she was 39. When I was 7 my dad turned 39. I asked Mom how she could be 39 if Dad was 39. She then told me she was really 78, which I remember as one of the biggest shocks of my life.

So be VERY careful who you tell you're 21 to, lovely RD!

>159 karenmarie: In our family, my dads grandmother was called "Mom". I adored her. She was a teeny little woman with pure white hair and beautiful eyes! Your post made me remember her and smile.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

Author: JOHN WYNDHAM

Rating: 4 worried, sky-searching stars of five, with a pair of dark goggles at the ready

The Book Description: In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”

Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere twenty-four hours before is gone forever.

But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk, and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, fifty years before their realization, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.

My Review: In this time of fearful concern over genetically manipulated Frankenfoods, the triffids should give this book a fresh and timely aura, IMHO. For Soviet manipulation of plants, read Monsanto, and, well....

One of the big issues with the book is the Dreaded Infodump, pretty much all of chapter two. I know why folks don't like long expository passages, but there is always a certain amount of world-building to do in any novel, especially so in SF. So, in the end, I come down on the side of the flow NOT being interrupted by the backstory. I think it was well handled, well as well-handled as such a thing can be; Wyndham starts the chapter with "This is a personal record." That's the jumping-off place for the character's memories. That was, for me, an adequate narrative frame for the purpose of keeping the important sense of forward momentum present in the 18pp (in my Modern Library reprint) it takes to put readers in the picture.

I think I was lulled into acquiescence by Wyndham's style, as well: "Such a swerve of interest from swords to plowshares was undoubtedly a social improvement, but, at the same time, it was a mistake for the optimistic to claim it as showing a change in the human spirit." (p21, Mod. Lib. reprint) Understatedly gives the reader a sense of the narrator's already extant character and informs the retentive reader that later dark musings the narrator indulges in are not due to a freshly developed case of the post-apocalyptic blahs.

Then this chilling bit: "But there were a number of not unobvious characteristics which escaped comment for some little time. It was, for instance, quite a while before anyone drew attention to the uncanny accuracy with which {the triffids} aimed their stings, and that they almost invariably struck for the head. Nor did anyone at first take notice of their habit of lurking near their fallen victims. The reason for that became clear only when it was shown that they fed upon flesh as well as insects. The stinging tendril did not have the muscular power to tear firm flesh, but it had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup on its stem." (p31, Mod. Lib. reprint) EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW

But how much more effective and chilling and revolting and scary when delivered in the even, measured voice of a scientist-cum-post-traumatic-stress-survivor instead of screeched at us. The narrator's reliability is well established with the reader at this point, and later horrors are subtly magnified by the unconscious impression of trustworthiness this kind of technique provides.

REAL horror, not gore: that sense of unspeakable and terrifying things happening on a Wednesday afternoon at four pm, not in some horrible abbatoir at midnight where I the reader/moviegoer know for sure and certain there are not enough wild horses to drag me.

Uh oh. I'm hearing crickets chirping. Better clam up.

Great review....I'm passing however. Not my cuppa.

Awww Tina...maybe you'd like it!

Actually, no you wouldn't, so do skippity-skip.

Nice review! I'd heard of it before, but not what it was about. That'll be on the tbr, and I haven't read a classic sf in quite awhile too.

It's a nice piece to use to dip the psychic toes back in the pools of old-timey SF. Enjoy, Katie!

plants that are ALIVE
Now that is scary.
PS, you have another thread!!

Yuh-huh. Shorely nuff do, and have had since who-whupped-the-cat.

I reread Day of the Triffids in 2010 for the first time since adolescence, and thought it held up remarkably well over time. Very nice review.

Thanks, Roni!

Nice review Richard - I keep meaning to reread some John Wyndham ... but as always so many books so little time:)

You know, calm, as I've become *mumble*ty-plus, I'm re-reading more and more selectively. I don't know that I'd suggest to anyone that s/he re-read this book...maybe if other Wyndhams made a good impression on you long ago, then this would be a good expansion.

I never read the book, but did see the movie as a kid. Scared me to DEATH.

As I was...lessee here 1962 minus...negative 29 when the movie came out, I wouldn't know...but I've heard from the Golden Years Brigade members I know that it was pants-poopingly scary.

Really, quite a remarkable review, Rdear. Thumbed and added to the WL...

Golden Years Brigade members??!?!? harumph.

Somebody was ... oh, let's see.... 3 years old?

>174 Matke: Thanks Gail!

>175 karenmarie: Many millions of people were three in 1962...I, however, was NEGATIVE TWENTY-NINE. Got that? NEGATIVE. Cause, see, I'm a stripling of all of twenty-one.

Stop laughing. I am SO!

Haven't stopped laughing since September 19th at 1:03:01 p.m. Sure you are. Neener neener.

Yes you are 21. Embedded in the 53, that is. :)

What is this mysterious "the 53" of which you speak, o Elder? No one in all my TWENTY-ONE YEARS on this planet has apprised me of its existence.

You are what you think you are.

So, 21 would be right for you.

I am a contented-to-be Old Lady with weird tastes and a very odd sense of humor.

I'm liking the Old Lady Who Will Do What She Will spot, too. Hi, Richard. Hope your cold is mostly all gone and you are feeling better for this weekend.

>179 Matke: Hmmm. I wonder...am I any age at all?

>180 maggie1944: So so so much better today! Amazingly! *smooch*

Review: 42 of fifty

Title: GIRL SLEUTH: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Author: MELANIE REHAK

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: A plucky "titian-haired" sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the Sixties (when she was taken up with a vengeance by women's libbers) to enter the pantheon of American girlhood. As beloved by girls today as she was by their grandmothers, Nancy Drew has both inspired and reflected the changes in her readers' lives. Now, in a narrative with all the vivid energy and page-turning pace of Nancy's adventures, Melanie Rehak solves an enduring literary mystery:
Who created Nancy Drew? And how did she go from pulp heroine to icon?

The brainchild of children's book mogul Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy was brought to life by two women: Mildred Wirt Benson, a pioneering journalist from Iowa, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a well-bred wife and mother who took over as CEO of the pioneering Stratemeyer Syndicate after her father died. In a century-spanning story Rehak traces their roles--and Nancy's--in forging the modern American woman. With ebullience, wit, and a wealth of little-known source material, Rehak celebrates our unstoppable girl detective.

My Review: When I was about nine, I went through a Hardy Boys phase. My mother, who went from buying Oldsmobile-priced cocktail dresses at Henri Bendel and Chevrolet-priced suits at Bonwit Teller to working three jobs to support us, never said no when it came to buying me a book. So I read my way through the catalog, and looked around for more. Mama somewhat diffidently pointed out the Nancy Drew books. I asked if she solved crimes. “Yes, and drives a blue roadster,” said the wily old girl, and I had another school year's reading at a quarter a book. (Used. We most often bought used...Mama said the words didn't wear out and who cared about the cover anyway?)

Ever after, I've had a “thing” for All-American boys and girls who just damn well do it for themselves. From such acorns....

Mystery-reading pleasure was a given. Mother and sister were big consumers of the genre. I got my own books, and they were not mysteries, but good heavens a boy can't survive on a book a week! I mean really! So I read their mysteries. I checked mysteries out of the liberry. I read all the Hardy Boys (always preferred Joe to Frank, Iola be hanged) and Nancy Drew (what a maroon Ned Nickerson was!) a couple times each. They lost their luster about the time I found good SF.

But do you ever forget that first kiss? I know I haven't. Nancy, Frank, and Joe...oh my how I treasured their orderly world. No one behaved badly (my narcissistic parents were astonishingly insensitive and ill-mannered in their divorcing) without consequences, and crimes were punished. I liked that a lot! And I still do.

Melanie Rehak apparently did, too. She set out to tell the story, public since the 1970s at least, of the origins of Nancy Drew, Girl Sleuth. All the ookie bleccchhhy part about families in conflict over Smothers-Brothers-y “dad always liked you best” and “I sit here with mom and you swan about” and so on; all the fish-out-of-water growing up of a major tomboy with a ginormous brain, in a rinky dink dink little wide spot in the road, leading to Iowa State and college degree in the 1920s; all the nasty mean greedy behind-the-scenes moneygrubbing everyone seems to have thought nothing of.

It's as good as a novel. It's as much fun as a Nancy Drew story to unravel. It's not perfect, but it's got a lot of story and it tells the story concisely, yet without leaving annoying holes or piling numbing crap all over the reader.

The focus is on Nancy, her “father” Edward Stratemeyer, her “mother” Midred Wirt, and wicked stepmother Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. That's enough for a 600pp doorstopper, let me assure you! Author Rehak got out her laser, finely cut and carefully etched the truly important bits from these three peoples' lives and then soldered and electroplated the whole thing into a lovely, solid bracelet shaped like Nancy Drew.

Even if you've never read one of these books, THIS book is a very good read, and an intriguing side window onto American culture in the mid-20th century.

I loved the Hardy boys books--always thought Nancy paled beside them, but my baby sister loved her dearly. But this book goes on the wishlist anyhow!

I suspect you'll like it, Roni, it's a really interesting trip through the world of the times.

>182 richardderus:

Irony of ironies....i just started an eBook series by Kate Emburg featuring another "titian haired" teen sleuth. Only her girl is Susan Slutt.....and her stories have a more homoerotic slant....and are very "non PC".....and are a hoot to read! My current title is Susan Slutt, Girl Sleuth.....a nearly perfect "take off" of 1950s teen sleuths, with some spice thrown in...

I wish the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys series' had been this much fun! Back in the 50s, though...I think not!

A big Thumb for your review...

Susan Slutt!! HA!! Priceless...oh oh can you imagine the shrieks if that'd been around in 1956? Ha!

I got these from Rainbow eBooks......and, i think they're having a sale! Just sayin', since i have them on my iPad and would "share/lend" 'em if I could.

The 1950s parents would have shat bricks over this , this Gawd Awfulness!!!

Many, many a stroke...and many a pulpit pounded. Oh the mental pictures I'm conjuring!

>182 richardderus: This looks good. I read all the Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon, Cherry Ames etc books as a kid. Thats all they had in Catholic school library :) is that sort of books. Hardy Boys, Bobbseys.. you know. The Bobbsy Twins annoyed me.

"the words didn't wear out"....I love that.

>189 mckait: I expect you'd enjoy this one, Kath, so I'd push you in its direction. I think Rehak did a very creditable job.

>190 laytonwoman3rd: Mama was a pithy sort, Linda3rd. Apple, meet tree.

Oh, 'tis a pithy apple you are, indeed, RD.

Excellent review, Rdear. I remember the thrill of learning about roadsters and raccoon coats--thanks to Ma for 'splainin' all that for me. In fact, those older settings really made the books shine for me. I hated it when they modernized them and refusted to buy my Daughter any, which was fine, as she had lots more to choose from and started "adult" mysteries around age 9.

Those were indeed the days...before the world set in to our lives--brief, wasn't it? But treasured in memory.

Nancy Drew......................now there's a thought! maybe....................

>192 laytonwoman3rd: Heh!

>193 Matke: *mist* They were indeed the days. Oh how I miss 'em!

>194 tututhefirst: A good thought...follow it up!

Pearl Ruled: KEEPER OF LIGHT AND DUST by NATASHA MOSTERT

Rating: 2* of five (p141)

The Book Description: A highly original supernatural thriller blending magic, science, martial arts, and the greatest desire of all: to live forever

Mia Lockheart has a secret. Her mother was a Keeper, as was her grandmother--women who were warriors, healers, and protectors. As Mia practices her craft among the boxers and martial artists of South London, and begins a romance with her childhood friend, the fighter Nick Duffy, she has no idea that a man who calls himself Dragonfly is watching from the shadows.

Adrian Ashton is a brilliant scientist, an expert in the breaking field of biophoton emissions from cells within the human body. He is also a skilled martial artist--and a modern-day vampire. With the aid of the enigmatic Book of Life and Death, written in the thirteenth century by the legendary Chinese physician Zhang Sanfeng, he preys on other martial artists and drains them of their chi--the vital energy that flows through the body.

Mia finds herself drawn to his dark genius, but when he targets Nick as his next victim, she is forced to choose between the two men. It becomes a fight to the death in which love is both the greatest weakness and the biggest prize.

My Review: Oh for goodness' sake. Really now! I made it to p141, the end of chapter 27, by dint of the good things I'd heard about the book...interesting conflicts, good writing, and so on. The following is said of a hungry vampire:

“His heart trembled. He couldn't remember desiring anything so much.” (p141)

And that's where my give-a-damn gave out. The writing's okay, not by any stretch of the imagination awful or even tedious, but with a tendency to the over-the-top that wore on me. It doesn't help that Mia, the main character, is so annoying to me that I want to cause her pain.

So, on balance, I think not. And I'd steer you away from it, too, if unbearable aches and eternal yearnings and the like make you twitch the way they do me.

Yup. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll pass. Unlikely I ever would have considered it, any way. But good to know! *air kisses*

*smooch*

Phew.....another one passes me by.....

>199 tututhefirst: I should hope to kiss a pig! Oh my lordy me, Tina, you'd LOATHE this book...too much of too much for your finely calibrated palate.

I am pretty much out of my vampire phase so will pass on a vampire whose heart trembles.

*smooch*

>201 karenmarie: *icy freezing silence*

Review: 43 of fifty

Title: THE WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE

Author: PAUL MELKO

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: John Rayburn thought all of his problems were the mundane ones of an Ohio farm boy in his last year in high school. Then his doppelgänger appeared, tempted him with a device that let him travel across worlds, and stole his life from him. John soon finds himself caroming through universes, unable to return home—the device is broken. John settles in a new universe to unravel its secrets and fix it.

Meanwhile, his doppelgänger tries to exploit the commercial technology he’s stolen from other Earths: the Rubik’s Cube! John’s attempts to lie low in his new universe backfire when he inadvertently introduces pinball. It becomes a huge success. Both actions draw the notice of other, more dangerous travelers, who are exploiting worlds for ominous purposes. Fast-paced and exciting, this is SF adventure at its best from a rising star.

My Review: Well, THAT was fun! I have a fondness for multiverse stories, and this one's as much fun as H. Beam Piper's Paratime series. It made me think of the Star Trek: TNG episode “Lower Decks,” which shows us for the first time what the actions of the Big Boys look like from the ordinary crewmember's PoV. And like the recent success story Redshirts by John Scalzi, the hero has to figure out what's happening and how to fix it without knowing the big picture.

Why I had to knock a quarter star off the top grade the book could ever reasonably have gotten was the mega-dumb love story part...both John Wilson, the dupe, and John Rayburn or John Prime as he's called in the description above, are world-class bunglers in love. It points up the small inelegance in the book: The characters, while I liked them and invested myself in their antics, didn't always make sense as they rocketed from idea to idea. Things that should've been second nature to any reasonable semi-adult just passed right by them and caused avoidable problems for the author. It would have given him more room to flesh out the other small inelegances, like a messy sense of elapsed in-story time and a few logical gaps (like when John Wilson drags a woman and child into another universe and conveniently forgets this while trying to determine the radius his device works in) that exist.

But heck! What's a little dent and scrape among friends? I can't wait to get the next one in the series!

Review: 44 of fifty

Title: HEAD WOUNDS

Author: CHRIS KNOPF

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: Sam Acquillo can hide in his windswept waterfront cottage all he wants, but the demons of his past are going to find him. Worse, they've teamed up with some pretty nasty demons of the present, including a very determined Chief of Police whose top detective has Sam caught in the crosshairs.

Part-time carpenter, full-time drinker and co-conspirator with an existential mutt named Eddie Van Halen, Sam tries to lead the simple life. But as always, fate intervenes, this time in the form of Robbie Milhouser, local builder and blundering bully who shares at least one thing with Sam -- an irresistible attraction to the beautiful Amanda Anselma.

Peel back the glitz and glory of the fabled Hamptons and you'll find a beautiful place filled with ugly secrets. This is Sam Acquillo's world. Moving effortlessly across the social divide with wry pal Jackie Swaitkowski and rich guy Burton Lewis, the ex-boxer, ex-corporate infighter seems doomed to straddle the thin red line between envy and love, hate and forgiveness, goodness and greed.

And sometimes life and death. Only this time, the life at stake is his own. .

My Review: This third entry in the Sam Acquillo Hamptons series is, as usual, superior storytelling and top-flight modern noir.

It's set in glitz-a-licious Southampton, New York. The seamy underbelly of same, of course, this being noir. And oh my gracious me is this underbelly seamy! Real estate, in a world as awash in money as Southampton, is going to attract some very unpleasant people. Those there are aplenty in this tale of long-held grudges and long-simmering feuds.

Amanda, Sam's sexy relationship-avoidance cospecialist, is the motivating factor for the story when her efforts to redevelop the neighborhood home she owns in North Sea (Prolehampton, for those not gifted with a Long Island connection) lead to arson and murder, with a trail back to a very dark part of Amanda's pre-glitz Southampton youth. Sam, still running from his inner demons, finds that running from a murder rap is a lot harder than he supposed it would be for an innocent man. Which he's sure he is. We the readers? Well....

Knopf gets the tone of an aging loner's inner monologue pitch-perfect. He knows the indignity of looking in the mirror and seeing someone's grandfather looking back at you from your own eyes. He puts that into Sam's casus belli with the world. Knopf also makes sure we know, without being stupid or unrealistically smutty about it, that Sam's not dead from the waist down, and a cross-section of Southampton Township's females are pleasantly aware of this fact. It's very nice for someone Sam's age to be shown as realistically sexually active and alive, instead of a hyper horndog or simply a man gelded by age.

It's even nicer that Knopf doesn't use it as a ridiculous prop. Sam, while tempted and while quite elozable, isn't about to run out and make more trouble for himself with his bedroom behavior. It's about the only wise thing he does. Glad he picked this one.

Less well-handled are the ins and outs (!) of some series characters, eg Sam's rich lawyer pal Burton and a local paper reporter...clearly inserted for future use; the Township's cops aren't there as more than props; but all of these are minor issues, because the pacing of the story makes deep investments in these sidebar people unwieldy and even, to some degree, undesirable. A little more, a little little bit more...in the name of enriching the tapestry...sacrifice some of the angsting and repetitive violence....

Yes, the violence mandatory in noir is there. Sometimes drearily predictably so. There's a scene with a goon that goes on too long, and in the end is resolved unrealistically, at the end of the book, that strikes me as something we could've done without and missed nothing. A few times, flashbacks to Sam's past are, well, I myownself found that skimming them caused no diminishment in my reading pleasure.

But here's the reason I keep looking for these books, which seem to come out every two years or so: This quote, from the very end of Part 2:

But old Kant would tell you, reality is only as sure as the mind perceiving it. I wished I could get him to take {the doctor}'s seat across from me in the hospital canteen to I could put it to him straight:
Can a man be outsmarted by his own brain?

If that fails to raise a smile on you, this book is not for you.

Review: 45 of fifty

Title: SEVEN FOR A SECRET

Author: ELIZABETH BEAR

Rating: 4.3* of five

The Book Description: The sequel to New Amsterdam!

The wampyr has walked the dark streets of the world's great cities for a thousand years. In that time, he has worn out many names--and even more compatriots.

Now, so that one of those companions may die where she once lived, he has come again to the City of London. In 1938, where the ghosts of centuries of war haunt rain-grey streets and the Prussian Chancellor's army of occupation rules with an iron hand.

Here he will meet his own ghosts, the remembrances of loves mortal--and immortal. And here he will face the Chancellor's secret weapon: a human child. .

My Review: Stories and novellas! Stories and novellas!! What is this Bear woman DOING to me?! WRITE A DAMN NOVEL ABOUT THE WAMPYR ALREADY!

Ahem.

I liked the story collection that introduced us to Don Sebastien de Ulloa. I thought it was an interesting alternative to our own history, and liked the characters quite a bit. Bear killed off one of my favorites, but heck, I still read Louise Penny books and she did worse than kill off one of my favorites.

Forensic sorceress Lady Abigail Irene is back, but not for much longer. She's almost 90, and she's not immortal. Don Sebastien, now Dr. James Chaisty, is of course accustomed to his human favorites growing old and dying. He's not happy about it, but he's not unhappy either. He has perspective, that of millennia of life, and he has the mental and emotional flexibility to reinvent himself with new times and new people.

Abby Irene isn't kidding herself, she knows what time it is; she's leaving soon, but she wants to finish a few things she felt she did badly. She reflects on her life in the context of solving the problem of what to do about the Prussians' nascent army of werewolves...which turns out to be a damned sight tougher than she or the wampyr thought it would be.

We're introduced to a variety of characters, which in a 128-page novella isn't always good, since we spend little time with any of them. Still, Bear is a past mistress of the few-deft-strokes characterization technique, so one doesn't feel slighted so much as shorted...MORE PLEASE.

One fact that has vanished from this book is annoying in its convenient absence: Don Sebastien was Europe's great detective in the collection and now he's living in a city occupied by an anal-retentive authoritarian bunch of Germans and he's not recognized.

Uh huh.

A sentence or two about keeping one's head down, assuming an identity already in place, something, would have fixed it. And how he's passing for human, if he is, is beyond me. Well, it is a novella not a novel (which it could easily have been), so one doesn't always get the fullest development of ideas.

And it's Elizabeth Bear. That means it's good writing. It's set in London, so there's a good bit about rain and cold, which made me shiver. And Abby Irene has a conversation with her thousand-year-old lover about growing old and leaving memories, which made me mist over...until the wampyr says, “Twenty years or eighty, you're all ephemera to me.”

Cold and rain have not one thing on the bleak solitariness of that statement for chill factor.

It need not be read after New Amsterdam to be fully appreciated, but I do think it's worth a place in your TBRs. Short, strong, and good.

Isn't "wampyr" dangerously similar to "majyck" and therefore to be abhorred?

Sounds good, actually, although I don't usually go in for too many short stories or novellas.

*smooch*

>206 karenmarie: *smooch* Heck yeah, it's ridiculous, Horrible. So is Lady Abigail Irene's profession of forensic sorceress.

Rule, meet exception.

Review: 46 of fifty

Title: THE DEVIL'S HEARTH

Author: PHILLIP DEPOY

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: Fever Devlin leaves his university job to return to his home in the Georgia Appalachians, prepared to confront the ghosts of his past. But his arrival is greeted with the discovery of a body on the porch of the family cabin -- a corpse that turns out to be a half brother Fever never knew existed.
The truth about the murder and the secrets surrounding Fever's life remain hidden in the determined silence of the locals. He must sort through his quirky family history -- where an adulterous mother, an unnamed father, a secret diary and a priceless church relic become the pieces in a puzzle of grim awakening and dark suspicion.
It takes the brutal murder of an old wood-carver to expose the festering secrets of this mountain community where the dead tell no tales -- and a killer plots to ensure Fever joins their eternal silence.

My Review: So. Further proof the hardest reviews to write are the “yeah, it's okay” ones. It's not horrible, it's not excellent, it's not fascinating, it's not repulsive.

Would I read another one? Yeah. Will I seek another one out? No. Fever Devilin (what a dumb name) is not my bestie, like Gamache would be if he was here. It's better than ~meh~ and not as good as it should have been. I liked the folktales scattered around. The secrets, when revealed, aren't all that interesting or surprising. The second murder made me mad, which is why I kept on at all.

Richard, I hope that the setting and local culture for the above mystery was at minimum a bit interesting. Was it? Did you read some "folk tales" that were unique to that place?

>209 maggie1944: No, can't say I did. It was sort of like Joan Hess's Maggody played straight-faced. Bog-standard mountain hicks.

Couldn't agree more: it's so easy to write a scathing or fulsome review, and so hard to say, "Well, yeah, it was okay, but just okay," in any other words. You did well.

Thanks, Gail, I really wanted to find something more upbeat to say because A Certain Someone feels that I don't like any of the books {insert name here} recommends. It was fine! It just wasn't...well...it didn't...

Ah hell. You know what I mean.

And that's so disappointing to both the recommender and the recommendee, too. Usually I'm on the recommending side; the recipient looks at me with that, "What? You thought this was great? What is wrong with you?" while graciously mumbling pleasant nothings.

Still, a dull world if we all liked white milk.

I like the DePoys a lot. They amuse me :) I would rather hang out with Fever than Gamache any time. I would however rather live in Three Pines, and have a vacation home next door to Fever. That would maximize my pleasure :)

I will pass on the New Amsterdam sequel, as I am not a fan of stories and novellas..

I think you have had some good reads for you.... that seems like it is a good thing?

>213 Matke: Besides the fact that, if no one read or recommended anything other than what one already liked, how would new favorites be discovered?

>214 mckait: Living in Three Pines sounds delightful. If you want to visit Fever, okay; I'll be in Saskatoon with my sweetie Russell Quant.

LOL ~ Talk about dreams that can't possible come true.. we seem to be good at it.

Heh. No doubt.

Fever Devlin's okay. I've read The Devil's Hearth and it struck me the same way as it did you - meh. Okay to read, not enough to go crazy over, like Gamache, or Jack Reacher, or a few other of my favorites.

I have 4 more of them on the shelves and might eventually get to them.

You've mentioned Russell Quant before. I've tried to mooch them, and only succeeded with book 4 - The Stain of the Berry. In recent years I've tried to read series in order, so am hesitant to read it. What'cha think? Can I read it out of order or should I hold out for the first 3 in order first?

*smooch*

HOLD OUT! HOLD OUT!

T'anks.

Wishing you a super day.

It was pleasant...I ate raspberry jam-filled cookies dipped in chocolate and drank brandy.

Mmmm.....Raspberry and chocolate....a combination that's hard to beat.

Both sound wonderful.

I went to bookclub last night and eviscerated Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and the Pearl-ruled Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. Had fun. Most people thought I was too harsh. I thought they were too sympathetic.

omg, wrong thread. sorry.

Cookies. I remember cookies.

>222 laytonwoman3rd: Amen, Linda3rd!

>223 karenmarie: I run into the same issue in my f2f book circle. It gets wearisome being told you're wrong to have your opinion and express it, while they are not.

>224 Bookmarque: Hi there! Glad you stopped in.

>225 mckait: They're these marvelous shortbready cookies, with a chunky raspberry jam inside; one end of each little sandwich of heavenliness is dipped in some barely sweetened dark chocolate.

MMaaaarrrrvelous!

Why is it that expressing a contrarian opinion is considered to be so impolite? I've always had strong opinions and I am always shocked when people leave the room....

I'm still struggling with a very sore right hand, so that's all I'll say

i think >224 Bookmarque: just accidentally posted in the wrong thread.... I have done that, but I go back and post the right thing in the right thread.

I have contrarian opinions often and say or post outload what they are all the time.I agree. Shocking when people leave the room.

People don't like hearing their opinions challenged. *shrug*

True enough.

True and silly.

It certainly didn't hurt my feelings, even when Stephanie gave me a snarky look as she was saying that "some of us" were too harsh. I mentally reviewed my opinion, still agreed with myelf, and discounted HER opinion of my opinion.

Hallo RD! Happy Saturday to you.

Review: 47 of fifty

Title: MOLOKA'I

Author: ALAN BRENNERT

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven, Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy. Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i.

In her exile she finds a family of friends to replace the family she's lost: a native healer, Haleola, who becomes her adopted "auntie" and makes Rachel aware of the rich culture and mythology of her people; Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies, one of the Franciscan sisters who care for young girls at Kalaupapa; and the beautiful, worldly Leilani, who harbors a surprising secret. At Kalaupapa she also meets the man she will one day marry.

True to historical accounts, Moloka'i is the story of an extraordinary human drama, the full scope and pathos of which has never been told before in fiction. But Rachel's life, though shadowed by disease, isolation, and tragedy, is also one of joy, courage, and dignity. This is a story about life, not death; hope, not despair. It is not about the failings of flesh, but the strength of the human spirit.

My Review: This historical novel is about a time and a place most of us don't pay a lot of attention to. Hawaii is a state now, fifty-three years of statehood, but there are many Hawaiians who don't feel like they're American, only Hawaiian and that's enough for them. The USA might rule over Hawaii, but its contributions to Hawaii's history are recent...not yet 150 years out of over 1,000 of history...and, if there is any justice in this world, ephemeral.

Part of that contribution is told in this angering, awful tale of the injustices once thought unremarkable that were the lot of mixed-race Hawaiians, as well as the pragmatic but inhumane exile of lepers from their lives and families to the island of Moloka'i. Rachel is our heroine, a child taken from home and family because of leprosy. Her life on Molokai, from childhood to death, is full, and rich, and replete with love; it's also terribly heart-breakingly sad, as all lives are, with loss and sacrifice and connections made late, too late, that can never be made what they were meant to be.

Rachel's daughter Ruth, at Rachel's funeral, meditates on what self-sacrifice gave her, and cost her, at the end of the book:

“...I'm lucky, you see: I had two mothers. One gave life to me; one raised me. But they both loved me. You know, some people don't even get that once.

“It took me a while to say the words 'I love you' to my {birth mother}. It was a different kind of love than I felt for my {adoptive mother}, but founded on the same things. … There's only one disadvantge, really, to having two mothers,” Ruth admitted. “You know twice the love...but you grieve twice as much.”

(p382, US hardcover edition)

I had a mother I wasn't fond of, I had a stepmother I was fond of, and I had superlative good fortune in having older female friends who mothered me and supported me in ways my own mother would not have wanted, or been able, to do. I've grieved the various losses as they've happened, and wondered what it would mean to grieve one mother, one time, with one whole and undivided heart.

But it's when I read this passage again that I realize my heart wasn't divided. It was multiplied, many many times, by the gift of so much love and kindness I received from them. So for Jan, and Irene, and Jo, and Nina...all gone but one...I thank you again for helping form who I am. I refer to your examples when I am in doubt. I keep working to be more like each of you in giving more than I'm asked for.

For Alan Brennert, thank you good sir for your ever and always timely reminder that love makes families as much as birth does.

This is obviously a novel that went to the root of my experience in the world, but it's not by any means a perfect novel. It's not hugely beautiful, it's instead heartfelt and deeply experienced. It's sentimental, in a good way, and it's also got a healthy dose of sentimentality in a bad way. But on balance, reading through the pages, my thoughts overruled the rolling of my eyes as I felt my way through the life of Rachel the mixed-race leper. Her world, and her places in it, were evoked fully in Brennert's somewhat heavy prose. Pages did not fly up to meet my fingers, they waited for me to come and turn them with the stolid stodgy heaviness of poi...stickier and heavier than potatoes, not quite adhesive enough to be glue.

So don't go into this read thinking the linguistic arabesques will delight and amaze you in their lightness and nimbleness, and the rich, satisfying prose carving a truthful, worthwhile woodcut of a story will reward you.

I've read several books about the "leper" colony in Hawaii, and each has had a story of love to tell. Nice.

Review: 48 of fifty

Title: HARD STOP

Author: CHRIS KNOPF

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: In this, the fourth installment in the Sam Acquillo series, Sam's past reaches out to pull him back into the world of big money and even bigger egos, where the term "corporate intrigue" is redundant and ambition the only virtue. It seems a woman vital to the private life of a very important person has gone missing in the Hamptons. And it looks like the best way to get her back is to extort the cooperation of Sam Acquillo. After finally achieving some measure of peace and contentment on Long Island, Sam is yet again an accidental player in other people's dramas. It takes him into the world of private security goons, predatory financiers and lifestyles of young hedonists, some brave, some beautiful, all a bit lost. This time Sam has a few ambitions of his own that lead him into something all his battles in the ring and corporate boardrooms could never have prepared him for.

My Review: Knopf is one reliable writer. His Sam Acquillo is a noir hero with the right stuff, whose world is made up of wastes of space and friends. He doesn't much care which side of The Highway (local Hamptonsese for “the tracks”) you live on, were born on, made it big on...do you pull your own weight? Do you decline to play stupid status games? You got a shot at being on Team Acquillo.

In this outing, Sam's enemies are a smidge more removed from his life, since they come from his past as a major mover and shaker in the world of petrochemical engineering. Sam's whole life has been lived, since the implosion of that career with its house, car, marriage, status, and clothes, in an attempt to be what he always really was: A water rat scraping by, doing the carpentry and fixitry he loves best.

Sam's deep disdain for wealth and for showiness are on full display here. He's a brilliant engineer. He's not, however, greedy. And it works for, against, and through him in this book. The pace is pretty unremitting. The language is, as always, witty and amusing then turning into violent and angry. That's what we pay for, after all, when reading noir novels.

The cop characters are more fully drawn, and that helped; the villain, well, the villain is just a nasty piece of work and no doubt ever obtains as to what or how the crimes that were committed came about. There's a minor twist in the murderer's reveal. But it's this sense that Knopf has another hundred pages of needed backstory to reveal that keeps me rating these books in the middle threes. I love economical storytelling. I like a writer who leaves me some room to think what I want to think. But I also need to make some sort of real connection with the characters, all of them, or I don't see the point of working them into the story. Honest Boy, yes the character's name is Honest Boy, is my prime example here. He shows up with that moniker, which means he's got my attention, and then...piff gone for most of the book. When he shows back up it's not to do anything earth-shattering, either. He's set up for a return engagement, like the local journalist in the last book.

All in all, though, this is a solid book and it's by a solid writer and for noiristas this series is a strong bet. Dog lovers should read them just for Eddie Van Halen. I love that mutt. Go get one. No harm will come to your leisure budget.

Review: 49 of fifty

Title: MAKE LEMONADE

Author: VIRGINIA EUWER WOLFF

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Virginia Euwer Wolff's groundbreaking novel, written in free verse, tells the story of fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, who is determined to go to college--she just needs the money to get there. When she answers a babysitting ad, LaVaughn meets Jolly, a seventeen-year-old single mother with two kids by different fathers. As she helps Jolly make lemonade out of the lemons her life has given her, LaVaughn learns some lessons outside the classroom. With two kids hanging in the balance, they need to make the best out of life -- and they can only do it for themselves and each other.

My Review: Okay. Brace yourselves. This is a YA novel written in a teenaged girl's voice in free verse. What does this strongly imply I am about to do? Rant and invectivize and holler, right? As a rule, a safe bet.

Rule, meet exception.

I love LaVaughn and Jolly and their weird, codependent growing up. I am impressed by the genuineness of all the various lovings going on through the book. I am even overlooking the free-verse affectation. It's totally unnecessary to tell this story in any kind of verse, but whatever. LaVaughn's first person voice is poignantly like that of other young women I've known as they grew up, and makes me mist over a little bit.

Quote me on that and I will swear an oath on a stack of Bibles that you're lying.

The events that LaVaughn narrates remind me of my many attempts to save others. White knight, in more ways than one, rides in and saves the day...then poof you're invisible when things go right. It's like being a parent!

It IS being a parent. And that both sucks and blows. But it's also, in a weird masochistic way, the best feeling of all, because there is one fewer roadblock in someone else's path through life because you, O Savior Complex Haver, gave in and did what your warped sense of self insists is right.

Problem is...that warp is there because, more often than not, you ARE right.

La Vaughn's in for a long long haul. But she also gets something big in return, something not always obvious at the moment, and often not until a lot of life has passed beneath one's eyes. She gets to know in her heart that at least a few people had one less rock to carry, one more reason to smile, one small moment of being, if not feeling, cared about and for, because she lifted, carried, cared, smiled.

Most days that's enough. Come hear her tell about it. It's a good story.

Thanks, dear man. That is a review to clip and keep in a notebook, if I did that sort of thing.

Garshk! Thanks, though it's not clear to me why it should be so. I liked the book a good deal, it's true.

Thanks my friend for reading Make Lemonade. Your review is incredible and said all I wanted to say!

Thumbs up!

Thank you, Linda, it means all the more because it's your inspiration that drove me, caterwauling the while, to read it.

I liked Moloka'i much more than you did...but glad you liked it at least a little :)

Have a good day.. I am off to work shortly.. will be back tonight.

Nice review!! Gave it a thumbs up and added Make Lemonade to my wish list!

Thank you kindly, Tina! I appreciate the vote of confidence.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: ELLA MINNOW PEA

Author: MARK DUNN

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Description: There are two book descriptions, both good; this first is for the hardcover, published by MacAdam/Cage, that I read years ago:

Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel set in the fictional island of Nollop situated off the coast of South Carolina and home to the inventor of the pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog. Now deceased, the islanders have erected a monument to honor their hero, but one day a tile with the letter “z” falls from the statue. The leaders interpret the falling tile as a message from beyond the grave and the letter is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride themselves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock, when another tile falls and then another.... Mark Dunn takes us on a journey against time through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea and her family as they race to find another phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet to save them from being unable to communicate. Eventually, the only letters remaining are LMNOP, when Ella finally discovers the phrase that will save their language.

The second is for Anchor's trade paper edition, which seems to me to give a better flavor of the book:

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

My Review: Delight. Dialogue, description, the lot. It's fun to read the book because the story is so very absurd. Imagine an entire country that's established around the veneration of a weirdo who invented a sentence to exercise your typing skills with! And imagine further the populace of such a place, held in thrall to language, ruled by a council of puritans who do their damnedest to make sure the entire island respects the gift of the English language...to the exclusion of all other considerations, personal, practical, political.

The book was published in 2001. That was, for those of failing memory, the year (in my never-humble opinion) Shrub Bush stole the presidential election for the first time. It was clear to anyone not conservative and/or christian that there was a bad set of rapids ahead, and a lot of it would turn on public and private discourse, its nature and its tenor. The novel foretold the increasing gag effect imposed from Above on reporting and discussing the various wars, the various and nefarious doings in and around the Oval Office, and on and on. Dunn could see it coming, and he pointed and hollered the best way he could, via a highbrow high-concept novel that would fly above heads and under radars.

I lapped it up like it was the dust on the mirror and began begging people I knew to read it, even buying several of them copies. (I had a good job in those days.) And to my increasing despair, not ONE of them so much as read it until poked; after reading it, not one of them was even lukewarm.

Ella and her family living like Anne Frank and her family, Ella making the discovery of a new pangram, Ella obeying the lipogrammatic tyranny of the Council in her letters to those who have left, escaped, the madness engulfing Nollop...this was sunshine and I was heliotropic in following it wherever it led. And not one soul to keep me company.

And now, eleven years on, someone reviews it, and I am all back in the fray. Please, do everyone involved a favor and get a copy so you can revel in the pleasures of an honorable woman telling a surreal, Dali-and-Kafka-have-a-baby kind of story and, in the end, revel with her in the joy of open and free speech.

A voice in the wilderness?

Who is, you or me?

LMNOP.....one of my all time favorites, and since I seem to be suddenly in a re-reading mode, this one is hopping to the top of the pile.

Also thanks for the heads up on Edith Pearlman, I have put in an ILL request for what appears to be the ONLY copy in the entire state. This had better be good. Since you rarely lead me astray, I'm really looking forward to it. I LOVE good short story collections so--as all my sutherin friends say----I'm fixing to settle in to read it soon as it arrives.

Smooches.....stay dry and well-stocked on batteries and booze.

Heh...just saw your gazebo on FB...oops!

If you don't like the Pearlman, I will keel over in near-fatal shock. Keep this in mind as you read.

Oh, how I loved Ella Minnow Pea on that first read! It just slathered itself all over my brain, soaking in like good moisturizer. I don't know why I've never reviewed it before now. Well, yes I do, there are so MANY from the past I haven't made time to review because I'd never do much of anything else!

RD...I also want to thank you for such a great dissection of the underlying issues in LMNOP. I had been considering it for a book club read, but couldn't decide whether there was enough to engender a discussion deeper than "I liked it because...." Thanks to you I now have a good batch of discussion starters. Why don't I plan to do this late spring 2013, and you can come visit and throw in your three cents?

If I could physically do it, sure. My major issue in travel is pain. I can't sit for more than an hour at a stretch these days. Still, in January I'll be able to access health care again! Who knows...I might inflict myself on you and Bob one weekend....

I found it a very deep book, obviously. I think the reason it was as big a hit as it was is down to the fact that it can be read and enjoyed on so *many* levels. Commentary, absurd humor, literary writing. I love discovering books like that!

Until January, you'll just have to do with our virtual kissies to make the boo boos all better.............

>246 richardderus: Mark Dunn is the voice, according to my thought at the time

OIC

Yes, indeed he was, twelve years ago. His story was pretty much unique at the time, unless there are books I don't recall, which goddesses know is probable!

Well-loved books from my past

Title: WELCOME TO HIGBY

Author: MARK DUNN

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Book Description: Touchstone's trade paper edition has this description, which seems to me to give a better flavor of the book than MacAdam/Cage's short line:

Following the national success of Ella Minnow Pea, this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South. A Robert Altmanesque comedy, Welcome to Higby follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend. From mousy Carmen Valentine, whose guardian angel, Arnetta, gives her penny-pinching shopping tips, to addled old Hank Grammar, who preaches Jesus to his neighbors' pets, Higby's townsfolk have a knack for getting into -- and trouble getting out of -- outrageous situations. Blessed with an unerring eye for dead-on details, Dunn lovingly traces the eccentric and touching lives of his characters, offering an intelligent yet heartwarming vision of life in small-town America. Welcome to Higby is a Southern comical tale about simple dreams both realized and thwarted by all the complexities of the human heart.

My Review: Everything slips a bit with a sophomore effort. It just can't be as perfect as a first novel like Ella Minnow Pea was. But oh my gracious goodness me! If this is a sophomore slump, it's better than most writers' first novels.

What makes this story so satisfying is that the characters have such real, recognizable, and yet still over-the-top personalities. They aren't in any way caricatures. They are, at base, the people those of us who grew up in smaller towns around the country quite probably knew. Batty old bachelors? Everyplace has 'em, but in most big places there's no way to get to know them as well as one does when they go to your church, shop in the same market, have the same mechanic that you do.

Unrequited loves? Oh my heck, yes! We all know or know of one of those Grand Passions. In a smaller town, we all probably know of several, if only from high school. Dunn doesn't go the easy way around the subject here, and where it ends up is frankly a hoot.

Higby feels real. I love it. Not as much as I loved Nollop, but that's no knock on Higby, rather a further proof of Dunn's great capacity for creating delight through novel-writing. This right here? This is the sort of novel that makes the whole cultural phenomenon of fiction make sense to aliens.

Review: 50 of fifty

Title: THEIR WILDEST DREAMS

Author: PETER ABRAHAMS

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: “Mackie dreaded the mail.” From this simple beginning, Peter Abrahams opens the curtains on a mesmerizing world down on the Mexican border, a world of complex and passionate people whose ambitions will lead them on a relentless collision course, a desert world that rises to the mythic in Their Wildest Dreams. The suspense will grab you and not let go, the surprises will shock you, but in the end it will be the wonderful characters who linger in your mind.

Characters like Mackie Larkin, a suburban mother desperate for money, who finds she can earn it as a stripper; Kevin Larkin, her ex-husband whose get-rich-quick schemes left her with a mountain of debt, and who now dreams up an even better one; Lianne, their beautiful, impulsive teenage daughter, for whom almost anything, even bank robbery, is possible; Jimmy Marz, the wrangler she loves, who gets a dangerous onetime offer that could take him to the life he’s always wanted; Buck Samsonov, the charismatic strip-club owner building a southwestern empire in the lawless style of a 19th-century robber baron; Clay Krupsha, a twenty-first-century captain of detectives in a border town where no crime is what it seems; and Nicholas Loeb, a struggling mystery writer whose encounter with an unstable muse entangles him in a web of true crime more mysterious than anything he imagined.

Utterly original, multilayered, and marked by the gripping suspense, sharp wit, and fascinating psychological insights for which Peter Abrahams has been acclaimed, here is a major work—a riveting story of modern-day desperadoes living their wildest dreams.

My Review: At the apex of the Mouldering Mound of ~Meh~ one finds thrillers with silly sex and sad women who don't quite have it. And here we are.

Plots revolving around trusting women getting taken by smooth-talking con men, whether husbands, boyfriends, or strangers on a train, annoy me. And here we are.

Teenaged girls who fall for older bad boys, lose their virginity to them, and lose big, tick me off. And here we are.

Why go on, if the picture's not clear yet it won't get clearer. These are well-worn paths in thrillerdom and there is not one bit of this book that's “utterly original.” It's multi-layered, I suppose. It's competently written, I suppose. It's fast enough paced, I suppose.

And I do not give the hairs on the ass of a rat. It's fine, yes sure, fine fine, nothing to complain about except how completely forgettable it all is, and in an hour I won't remember if Lianne was the mom or the daughter, or Nick was the writer or the daddy. In a month, I won't remember the title, and by next birthday, you can show me this review and my only question will be: “Did I read that? I didn't read that.”

But I'll say it in my best Bette Midler voice, so you'll get the joke.

So ok, think I'll skip this one....but congrats on getting to 50 of 50. I'm impressed.

>256 tututhefirst: Thanks, Tina! And it's not even December yet.

Congratulations on reaching 50/50!

I'd never heard of Ella Minnow Pea until you mentioned it here, and lo and behold, there was a small stack of them at the second hand shop this afternoon. (They were all a little bumped and bruised, so I guess they were there as seconds.) I snaffled a copy, and it sounds gorgeous. Thanks for the heads up!

Thank you, Tania! I really hope it weaves its web of word-joy around you as it did me. It's a terrific book for word-lovers.

I apologize in advance for not paying close enough attention, or just skimming something I should have read more closely, but would be so kind as to define what you mean by "orphaned" books? I get that the orphans are written about in the "homeless" threads, but I feel a need to know why.

I am quite sure you are 100% right about that book you just reviewed, above. I've already forgotten the name of it.

"Orphaned" books are the ones published more than two years before the current year, which by my definition are all in the 75er challenge category. They also include book circle reads, and well-loved books from my past. Pearl Rule reviews follow the same rules as all other books.

The exception to the rule is books recommended to me by friends here, which are automatically 75er thread material so the recommender will be sure to see the review, and series mystery books. I think next year I'll have a separate thread for mysteries, thrillers and suchlike. It will compel me to read more widely to make my 75.

Woo, hard to keep up with you, RD. Make Lemonade sounds like it would fit well with my brain, Ella Minnow Pea not so much, despite your excellent review. Sorry to join your unreactive pals on that one.

Their Wildest Dreams sounds eminently forgetttable, despite the come-on title, so thanks for the warn-off. Thumbs galore.

Oh, OK, they are orphans because they don't belong to your 75 books challenge thread, which is limited to newer books and books recommended by other 75 book folks. I think I've got it.

>262 jnwelch: I appreciate the thumbs despite the fact that they come from a philistine unable to appreciate anything as subtle and divinely inspired as Ella Minnow Pea.

:-P~~~~

>263 maggie1944: Much more concisely said and completely accurate.

Upgethumbed, with several chuckles as I read it. Good job, Rdear. The sad thing is that there are so many of these immediately forgettable books. Especially liked "Did I read that? I didn't read that." My exact thoughts and words many times.

>265 Matke: Thanks, Gail! Surprising to me how many people have told me they feel that way too.

RICHARD!!!! {{{{ i missed you}}}} I haven't been on for a few days, and the last time I was on your thread we lost you to Sandy. I'm glad you are okay. I hopped over here from your other thread to read your review on Ella Minnow Pea loved that review! which is peeking out of the teeter-totter TBR pile, passed over your Geek Love review which I will be back to read after bringing 6 dogs out to... well you know, (it's also in the teeter-totter TBR pile) But right next to my computer table, so easy to find. Your absence made me realize how much I enjoy the way you see the world and appreciate how you share it with us, on LT. Gorsh, RD, I think I have a crush on your brain! (80}

>267 mmignano11: *blush* Mary Beth! Your husband! *blush*

Oh boy oh boy, I can't wait to hear what you make of Geek Love! *popcorn bowl*

*chaste unthreatening smooch*

*waving on the way through this thread*

*grumble*

Hawaii sheesh some people have it made

*growl*

Oh, gosh, Richard, I do feel badly that I was unable to find a backpack appropriate to the task of teleporting you from your house to Kaua'i. The weather here might not be to your liking, you know, it is pretty warm (up to 83 today) and pretty humid. I broke a sweat just trying on a new bathing suit!

You prefer it a good deal cooler, I think. And probably don't like sweating at all.

Plus the ocean nearly knocked me off my feet when I was wading in it today! This is a very difficult vacation with which to cope, I am telling you! Can't wait to get back to the rainy cold pacific northwest corner of the US of A. Then I can catch up with my reading of threads, and books.

Review: 51 of fifty

Title: STOP STEALING SHEEP & FIND OUT HOW TYPE WORKS

Author: ERIK SPIEKERMANN and E.M. GINGER

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: A classic guide to typography -- now updated for the Web -- More than 200 full-color illustrations and photographs bring the discussion of typography to life.

-- Updated to include new material on Web typography and other forms of online text display.

This classic typography book, first published in 1993, is now updated with brand-new typefaces, fonts, and illustrations. Internationally renowned graphic designer Erik Spiekermann explains in everyday terms what typography is and offers design guidance in choosing type for legibility, meaning, and aesthetic appeal. Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works, 2nd Edition guides the reader through all aspects of typography, from the history and mechanics of type, to training the eye to recognize and choose typefaces. Uncover type's roots and placement within society and learn how to use space and layout to improve overall communication. This elegant guide for readers of all levels is revised and updated to discuss the particular design challenges of type on the Internet. Note: This title was originally announced in the October 2000 Pearson Technology Group catalog.

My Review: Books about type are a guilty little pleasure for me, one I do my best to hide underneath a front of ignorance and indifference. People, by which I mean boring, unimaginative consumers of Stuff, are seriously snotty and cuttingly dismissive of typeheads when their difference comes to light. “My gawd, don't you have anything better to obsess about?!” is the most printable of the snarls I've had directed at me when I venture to observe a sign's efforts to communicate are vitiated to the point of incomprehensibility by the typeface used.

But this book is so much fun, I will go on and review it, and inform the uninterested that their uninterestingness is showing. Don't bother commenting. I'll only be rude to you. Loudly and at length.

Now...for the initiates, the Cool Kids...here's a hit from the hookah of type maven Spiekermann that will keep you snickering at the spirited writing and musing on history's chanciness at the stories he's telling. How a typeface survived in the days before the web is really a function of chance. The examples that the book gives are a hoot, the sample word he chose is “Handgloves,” which for no reason I can explain caused me to burst forth in gales of mirth, the defense of Comic Sans alone...!

I learned a lot about the story of type. I learned a lot more about the role of type in problem-solving, social (Interstate signage, form design) and commercial (brand identity, book design) than I ever knew I didn't know. I had a rare experience all the while: I had fun.

Not for everyone, for sure and certain! But a gas and a half for the amenable.

23. Pearl Ruled: FINCH by JEFF VANDERMEER

Rating: 3* of five (p139)

The Book Description: In Finch, mysterious underground inhabitants known as the gray caps have reconquered the failed fantasy state Ambergris and put it under martial law. They have disbanded House Hoegbotton and are controlling the human inhabitants with strange addictive drugs, internment in camps, and random acts of terror. The rebel resistance is scattered, and the gray caps are using human labor to build two strange towers. Against this backdrop, John Finch, who lives alone with a cat and a lizard, must solve an impossible double murder for his gray cap masters while trying to make contact with the rebels. Nothing is as it seems as Finch and his disintegrating partner Wyte negotiate their way through a landscape of spies, rebels, and deception. Trapped by his job and the city, Finch is about to come face to face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever.

My Review: I gave up at the transcript of yet another torture session. I don't care if it's noiresque in its intentions, I can't hang with that. The fungus-laden narrative I can even go with. Torture and torture and torture? Nope. No can do.

Wildly imaginative concept, decent writing, a trippy species of alien, a police procedural of sorts following alien rules...all good. All sounding like I should batten on the book. I probably would. But when phrases like “Prolonged screaming” recur, I recuse myself.

So I guess I'm just a wuss.

I would probably do the same. There is too much actual torture in the world!

BTW, Hi! From sunny, warm, breezy and happy Hawaii. Wish you were here.

Hey wuss....I'm with you. Too much suffering in RL...I'm at a phase where I want escape in my reading (and a handsome stud doesn't hurt either.)

>274 maggie1944: *sigh* So do I...so do I...but we're only 12 for Turkey Day, so yay. Less cooking.

>275 tututhefirst: Amen, amen, I say unto you AMEN sister-woman! All of the above.

When I went to thumb your Sheep book, I was surprised to find that you were not the only one to own, and review it :)

Review: 52 of fifty

Title: THE HEART OF A GOOF

Author: P.G. WODEHOUSE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: "Golf is the Great Mystery. Like some capricious goddess, it bestows favors with what would appear an almost fat-headed lack of method and discrimination." These words, uttered by "The Oldest Member," set the stage for a romp around the greens only Wodehouse could have conjured up. In nine stories Wodehouse describes not only the fates of the goofs who have allowed golf "to eat into their souls like some malignant growth" but also the impact of the so-called game on courtship, friendship, and business relationships.

This volume includes "The Heart of a Goof," "High Stakes," "Keeping in with Vosper," "Chester Forgets Himself," "The Magic Plus Fours," "The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh," "Rodney Fails to Qualify," "Jane Gets off the Fairway," and "The Purfication of Rodney Spelvin."


My Review: I bow to no man in my appreciation of Wodehouse, even when the subject of his talent is the shudder-and-narcolepsy inducing topic of golf. (Seriously, have you ever watched golf? It is unspeakably dull...almost as boring as cricket, which is the emperor of all screamingly tedious pastimes. Both feature commentators explaining the goings-on in such hushed, reverential tones that they rival nature documentary narrators for comatosity. The mind boggles and the spirit quails before the notion of viewing the “action” live in either case. Has the World Court heard about this? Seems they need to pep up their torture prosecutors, haven't heard of a single case against golfers or cricketeers.)

Where was I? Oh, Wodehouse and his brilliance. The stories in this collection are uniformly amusing, with moments of laugh-out-loud funny. I chose this moment from “Chester Forgets Himself,” a tale of a young man of fine sensibilities and a distinct inability to let loose his baser instincts in cursing the duffers who infest golfing:

...there was something particularly irritating about the methods of the Wrecking Crew {four bad late-life converts to golfing}. They tried so hard that it seemed almost inconceivable that they should be so slow.

“They are all respectable men,” {the Oldest Member} said, “and were, I believe, highly thought of in their respective businesses. But on the links I admit they are a trial.”

“They are the direct lineal descendants of the Gadarene swine,” said Chester firmly. “Every time they come out I expect to see them rush down the hill from the first tee and hurl themselves into the lake at the second.”

(p75, 1956 Herbert Jenkins Autograph edition)

If that doesn't raise a smile, or as in my case cause a laugh, avoid the book, and indeed possibly Wodehouse. He's like this a lot. The Oldest Member, a stock character of great and enduring popularity...the tedious old buttonholer in a prominently placed chair who will talk your ear off about nothing much...is so marvelously played for laughs that he's a National Treasure. The Oldest Member always has a story to match your circumstances, explain your problem, soothe your temper. That is, if one isn't whipped into frothing frenzied hatred by the old boy, as quite a lot of 21st-century people are.

But if one can slow down a bit, forget Adam Sandler's insulting humor or Jim Carrey's manic muggings for a moment, there's a humor in here that might just wind a tendril of affection around one's heart. It's a humor of silly and sly and slow genesis, from subjects of daily familiarity. Not the butlers and not the expensive golf clubs, no, those are the set decorations. Wodehouse's humor is about what kind of people there are in our lives. Old people who want to tell you things to help you, but go on and on. Young people in love with each other and not knowing how to say so to each other. Harried strivers working the angles and never quite seeing the forest for all those pesky trees.

Wodehouse knew them, smiled at them, made them into figures of fun, and never once insulted them. I love that, I treasure that, I batten on it. Given the right mind-set, maybe you can too. What have you got to lose? A half-hour reading a story? Try “The Heart of a Goof,” first of this collection, and if there are no smiles, no chortles, no guffaws, return the book to the library and pass on to your next read. You won't be harmed, and you might be enchanted.

Oh, it's been *years* since I read Wodehouse! I've got a couple of Jeeves and Wooster somewhere, must dig them up...

Color me philistine: not a Wodehouse fan.

>279 wookiebender: Worth the rediscovery, Tania, as an antidote to modern life's many ills.

>280 maggie1944: He's not for everyone, and never was. My mother would scoff and huff in impatience with all the characters. Just isn't for everyone.

Philistine.

Ah, how great to learn you're a Wodehouse fan, Richard. Me, too. And like you, I have zero interest in golf (the wasted time on the links would be good reading time, right?) So I've avoided these golf stories of his. But hearing accolades from a fellow disdainer got my attention. Thumbed, by gum, and I'll expand my Wodehouse enjoyment to even include (oh, the ignominy) golf stories.

Everything I know about golf I learned from Wodehouse.

And promptly forgot.

Review: 53 of fifty

Title: DEVIL'S PEAK

Author: DEON MEYER

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: From rising South African thriller writer Deon Meyer, a gripping suspense novel about revenge, forgiveness, and the race to catch a trained killer.

A young woman makes a terrible confession to a priest. An honorable man takes his own revenge for an unspeakable tragedy. An aging inspector tries to get himself sober while taking on the most difficult case of his career. From this beginning, Deon Meyer weaves a story of astonishing complexity and suspense, as Inspector Benny Griessel faces off against a dangerous vigilante who has everything on his side, including public sympathy.

A gruesome abuse case has hit the newsstands, and one man has taken it upon himself to stand up for the children of Cape Town. When the accused is found stabbed through the heart by spear, it's only the beginning of a string of bloody murders - and of a dangerous dilemma for detective Griessel. The detective is always just one step behind as someone slays the city's killers. But the paths of Griessel and the avenger collide when a young prostitute lures them both into a dangerous plan - and the two find themselves with a heart-stopping problem that no system of justice could ever make right.


My Review: For once it's a good thing I don't keep good track of who it was suggested I read something. Whoever suggested this book to me: Don't fess up or there will be split lips and black eyes in your immediate future.

I hated this reading experience. Hated it. Fathers with murdered children, children in jeopardy that they can only desperately struggle to save, oh my bloomin' garden I was hit from every emotional angle and then smacked from behind and then misdirected into several dark corners and therein kneecapped. I started reading the book and, six and a half hours and one piddle break later, emerged on the other side of the dust jacket with bloody stumps in place of my ground-away teeth, hurting belly from all the unaccustomed muscle-clenching, and a serious need for a shower and hair wash to rid myself of the stress-sweat stink.

I am still in a state of high dudgeon at being made to participate in the shenanigans surrounding vigilante justice that I can only say I approve of (oh how that hurts to type) and police corruption scandalously indifferently treated (pause for blood to stop boiling over) and a miserable alcoholic a-hole with a serious need to destroy, himself his life the world, whatever comes into range, who happens to be the one being Diogenes would light up with that damn lamp...!

So. Unless you want to be lifted from the confines of your safe little rut, smacked into walls and hit with unbearably terrifying images of loss and its unending damage, beaten with the sensory overload of immersion in a landscape and a culture alien and familiar and overwhelmingly pungently vibrantly present, don't even think of reading this book.

Poor you, if you don't.

You're a tease RD, did you know that? Devil's Peak has been added to my wishlist.

*smooch*

Richard, I think I have to make a new category of books to be read in 2013. To wit: Books Richard convinces me I must read or be the poorer for not having done so. This Devil's Peak is going on my list! Not the wish list, the will be reading it list! Sigh.

>285 karenmarie:, 286 *evil Muttley laugh*

I am a gooooood Booksatan. Yes I am.

Finally, I get to read this review. You described exactly what I thought when I read this book. And the next. Which I believe is better than this one. Because in that one you can add a Father's angst over a daughter's recovery, and his determination to see that never happen again. Plus, more about the culture of trying to right past racial wrongs via affirmative action actions. Then you can throw in smuggling. You need to read Thirteen Hours. I think Deon Meyer is a great writer of thrillers. He even creates a hero about whom you can have hope who has a therapist. Unlike the hero in Jo Nesbo books.

Ooohhh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

You *meant* to say, "Thirteen Hours stank on ice, Richard, no need to keep reading, the series fails on every level after the first book," I'm sure that's what you MEANT, so I will avoid the book because I need another series to follow like I need herpes, uh huh that's it. No more!

*requests Thirteen Hours via ILL*
*with a hateful glower at Benita*

oh, goodie, you got me hooked without full disclosure. Now I learn it is a series. Double big sigh.

*snerk* My work here is done.

I have been gone for a considerable while and I return only to find that you have been stirring up all kinds of literary mayhem. Were you spying on me when I decided that in 2013 I would commit to reading more mysteries/thrillers? I have read so many good reviews by LT mystery/thriller aficionados that I can't possibly neglect the genre as much as I have in previous years. And that was never because I didn't like the idea, more a case of "so many books, so little time". But I'm not missing out in 2013! Oh, no! So, Meyer gets added to the list...I recently held Devil's Peak in my sweaty little paws, I guess I should have held on to it. I'm sure it will come around again. I recently dug out several Laurie King books based on the reviews of "Mike" one of the 75ers. He really enjoys her Holmes pastiches, so I'm going to give those a go round, why not and also the Scandinavian authors we are hearing so much about these days.
PS-Loved your review on the Spiekermann book. Very much in agreement on signs being totally ineffective without the right choice of typeset. I often wonder if the sign maker has been eatin' his carrots!

Heh...well Mary Beth, it's In The Air is all I can say, and Meyer's not the only ooo ooo ooo review in this space...check back maybe Wednesday....

Can't wait. I have to say I'm in the mood for a really good read. Life of Pi was good, not great in terms of complete immersion, that's what I'm looking for about now. I'll have several reviews on my thread and the book pages over the next couple days.

Review: 54 of fifty

Title: A CARRION DEATH

Author: MICHAEL STANLEY

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour-no body, no case.

But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse midmeal, it turns out the murder wasn't perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case.

The detective's personality and physique match his moniker. The nickname "Kubu" is Setswana for "hippopotamus"-a seemingly docile creature, but one of the deadliest on the continent. Beneath Kubu's pleasant surface lies the same unwavering resolve that makes the hippopotamus so deceptively dangerous. Both will trample everything in their path to reach an objective.

From the sun-baked riverbeds of the Kalahari to the highest offices of an international conglomerate, Kubu follows a blood-soaked trail in search of answers.

Beneath a mountain of lies and superstitions, he uncovers a chain of crimes leading to the most powerful figures in the country-influential enemies who will kill anyone in their way.

A memorable detective makes his debut in this gritty, mesmerizing thriller. Set amid the beauty and darkness of contemporary Africa, A Carrion Death is the first entry in an evocative new series cutting to the heart of today's Botswana-a modern democracy threatened by unstable neighbors, poachers, and diamond smugglers. Those trying to expose the corrupt ringleaders will find themselves fighting for their lives...


My Review: I want to smack the copywriter who created the promo copy above, and on the dust jacket of my library's hardcover. “Detective” Kubu is “Assistant Superintendent” Kubu. And there's something very uncomfortable to me about the “darkness” of modern Africa cited above. Just tin-eared phrasing, I'm sure. No one in publishing could be unconsciously playing with stereotypes. No no.

Mm. That's as may be. I found Kubu and his Botswana to be a welcome new angle on territory once owned, in the US market and mind, by McCall Smith's rather more twee Mma Ramotswe series. Kubu, the dangerous hippo of a detective in the series, is a Mozart-singing grocery hound, a kind of African Nero Wolfe-cum-Inspector Morse with a very nasty boss, a very appealing wife, and a large country to help police.

It's a nice debut novel about an interesting character with a lot of promise. The writing team, one Afrikaner and one Minnesotan, do a lot with their man's appetites for food, truth, justice, and facts. They're a bit less facile with the villains, using a lot of shortcuts...wealth equals evil...and failing to avail themselves of opportunities to work in some believable offsets to the faults.

The Superstitious Natives Who Are Right trope isn't one I like much, either, but I'll let that go for this book. If it happens again, there will be discussion of it then.

On balance, the series deserves another shot, and the sleuth a chance to grow and shine. Until next year, then.

Holy grim rd-man..... re: these thumbed books.

I'm checking my library for that one...Africa always calls to me. I gave Mma Ramotswe a go, but wasn't captured. Kubu sounds like he's off to a promising start.

>296 mckait: Thanks, snooglepoogus!

>297 laytonwoman3rd: If you DIDN'T like Mma Ramotswe, you're likely to like these. I think they're sort of the anti-Precious. Heh. Thanks for stopping in, Linda3rd.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: THE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS

Author: DODIE SMITH

Rating: 5 stars out of five, because I still love the memory of being rescued

The Book Description: Pongo and Missis had a lovely life. With their human owners, the Dearlys, to look after them, they lived in a comfortable home in London with their 15 adorable Dalmatian puppies, loved and admired by all. Especially the Dearlys' neighbor Cruella de Vil, a fur-fancying fashion plate with designs on the Dalmatians' spotted coats! So, when the puppies are stolen from the Dearly home, and even Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Missis know they must take matters into their own paws! The delightful children's classic adapted twice for popular Disney productions. Ages 8-11
(This is from a 1996 Barnes and Noble edition)

My Review: Mine wasn't an especially happy childhood. The particulars don't matter all that much, what does is that I was on my own in an adult emotional landscape a long time before that was a good idea. I am lucky beyond luck that I seem to have been born with a love of reading. Both my parents and both my older sisters read to me a lot when I was a kid, which doubtless had a lot to do with fanning the flames of my obsession with books; but there was never a sense in me that there was something else I'd rather be doing, even watching TV.

My mother and I, after the aforementioned sisters left us and my father was removed from our world, had all sorts of books in our house. I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times.

One of the books that spoke to me on every level, which I discovered in the Allandale branch of the Austin Public Library, was this book. I was nine, I was miserably angry and unhappy, and I didn't know that anything was wrong. I found this book, this fabulous perfect rescue fantasy of authority figures who don't know their butts from their elbows but who know that they love, and want, their charges to be safe, and who go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen...well! That sounded peachy keen to my abandoned boy self. So I checked it out, and I read it. And I read it. And read it.

Easily a hundred times over the next two years.

No authority figures rescued me. I found some who loved me, but none could, or would, see the emotional hell I was in. When I was about twelve, the fantasy stopped satisfying my need and instead made its unsatisfied nature worse. So I stopped reading the book.

This christmas I decided to read the book again, just to see if there was as much here as I remembered, and to look at the pages with adult eyes.

I can't see it with adult eyes. Just as that desperate child full of reinflicted pain and rage. Oh the poor thing, I'd think, no wonder he re-read the book so often, look at this, or this...everything, really. It was a perfectly ordinary kid's book of its day, misogyny and elitism and racism permeating it with an almost industrial strength stench. But it also rang, and rings, true: Rescue me! It's a cry many kids don't vocalize but they do feel. Sometimes, for the lucky ones, they find stories to crutch them onwards towards adulthood.

For me, this was one fine, sturdy crutch. I still love it, and I still thank Dodie Smith for it, with all its time-and-place flaws. It's wonderfully parenthetical in its style and it's simply deliciously fantastically comfortable and comforting in its plotting.

A grateful salute, then, Miss Dodie Smith, from a forty-plus year distance, from a young redheaded fat kid lost in so many ways, for writing him a star to guide him. I'm here today because you did.

Great, great review, Rdear. I too had a "rescue me" book which I read over and over and over, wondering why I couldn't find these people. Completely empathize with you.

Thank you, Gail! What was your book?

Richard, I first read that book at nine, also. It did not speak to me as it did you, but in my childhood of exclusion, books were my companions and friends...and they never were mean to me.

I've never read the book, but your review is both amazing and heart wrenching.

>302 fuzzi: And for that we all, all of us readers, thank them. It's amazing to those who don't have to cope with those things how much simple not-meanness means.

>303 TinaV95: Thank you, Tina, that's a lovely thing to say and I appreciate it.

S-l-e-e-p-y
xo

nighty-night then sweetness

Oh, man, you nailed it! Books were so much a window into a world which I wished I could be in, escaping the "real" mess I was living in and then, bingo! We were in those book's worlds. Thank goodness for all those fine authors who held out a hand to all the lonely, unhappy, neglected, and sometimes abused kids who need them so much. Nicely written, dear friend. Thank you, too.

>299 richardderus: I love it RD. What books do for us in those dark times when our young minds and spirits don't quite understand what is going on all around us. The story of Rapunzel has a deep meaning to me in a similar way. I'm glad you reread the book.

Please feel better soon.

Great review of one of my childhood favourites:) Are you going to put it on the work page?

A lovely review of one of my all-time favorite books, Richard. Well done! I love when people share how and why books spoke to them. I think I need to reread that one this year. *smooch for you*

>307 maggie1944: It's one huge reason I think libraries are so wonderful. ANYone can get a card and use them for free. *smooch*

>308 luvamystery65: I will do my best, Roberta. Same to your mom!

>299 richardderus:. Beautiful.

>312 NovaLee:, 313 Many thanks to each of you!

When you upload that review, let us know so we can give you the thumbs you deserve!

I hadn't realized that I didn't do that. Thanks, Tina.

Lovely review, Richard. Wish that kid you describe had it easier.

299... One big ol' thumb!

>317 jnwelch: I do too, for his sake; but for me, it's what made me who I am, and I don't know that I'd be able to change that.

>318 TinaV95: Thanks, Tina!

Richard, my dear, that is one of the most beautiful reviews I have ever read.

"I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times."

I love that image, and I'm so glad that books were available for the too-many of us who needed an escape from the reality that was around us. I escaped, for a time, into icky Harlequin Romances (I suppose that was representative of my own longing for rescue, but I do regret that I sought it in less-than-literary sources, though I have compassion for the child I was, who couldn't freakin' concentrate with all the chaos around me, so had to read something simple.....at least I was reading).

And: "I do too, for his sake; but for me, it's what made me who I am, and I don't know that I'd be able to change that."
To that I say amen! Absolutely perfectly put.

xo

Garshk Ellen, such praise! It brings the blush to my withered old cheek!

Thank you. Those Harlequins need thanking too, because they saved you. It so doesn't matter where salvation comes from, it only matters that one finds it.

I am so saddened by the number of people who don't, can't, or won't find it and end up on the news.

This discussion makes me wonder.... How many of us used books of any sort as a means of rescue / escape from a sad childhood? We each have different stories and different books that probably "saved" us (borrowing Richard's lovely words)...but I'm guessing if there were a study of LT'ers we'd find a pretty significant percentage. *My saving genre was mostly mystery.

I think your thoughts above spoke to my unspoken & unconscious story. It is one of the most truthful statements I have ever read.

I was very shy when I was growing up. I was also tall and big attributes not looked on kindly during grade school years. Books were an escape for me from the loneliness I experienced during those years

>322 TinaV95: I suspect you're correct, Tina, most LT users are quite likely to be lifelong bookworms and probably for similar, social-exclusion reasons in at least a plurality of cases.

Mysteries, as I've said around these parts so many times, are very appealing to the orderly side of my personality. I love that they have crime and punishment in proportion to each other, and that the guilty suffer for their actions. Kinda Old Testament of me, I suppose.

>323 cdyankeefan: Oh dear, a tall girl! That's never been a good thing, has it? Being different isn't a good thing at all in childhood. That had to make natural shyness more pronounced, and that's just no fun at all.

324. I like your take on mysteries!

#324 no it wasn't Richard. I've been blessed to have made friends in high school and kept them for over 40 years and who have been with me through good and bad

>325 TinaV95: *sweeping bow*

>326 cdyankeefan: What with your recent loss, I am sure that made adjusting to the new reality much more comfortable than it would've been otherwise.

#327. - very true-iwould have been absolutely lost without my friends from Connecticut-I don't have the words to tell the how grateful I am to them