badgerbooks

Books Read in 2012

2012-01-04T19:42:00.003-06:00

Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed by Carl Zimmer

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide by Eva Talmadge & Justin Taylor

How to Get Divorced by 30: My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage by Sascha Rothchild

Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick

Total: 4

It all makes sense now.

2011-10-08T23:22:00.000-05:00

Sweet nerdery

2011-04-17T22:29:00.004-05:00

In celebration of National Library Week, book-themed cakes are the featured Sunday Sweets on Cake Wrecks this week. My favorite is this wonderful one inspired by Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books:

There's also a post on Hobbit-themed cakes.

book shirts!

2011-03-10T23:59:00.000-06:00

Another place to spend my money once I win the lottery! Vintage book cover T-shirts from Out of Print.

I want this one for Nico:

Dude.

2011-01-15T02:34:00.005-06:00

There's a whole tumblr of awesome bookshelves and reading rooms: http://bookshelvesandlatefees.tumblr.com/

Books Read in 2011

2011-01-13T21:36:00.020-06:00

The Big Year by Mark Obmascik

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

Mastiff by Tamora Pierce

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Hunting Unicorns by Bella Pollen

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro

The Mermaid Garden by Santa Montefiore

Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner

Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Abandon by Meg Cabot

Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore

Don't Breathe a Word by Jennifer McMahon

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson

The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

The Stone Child by Dan Poblocki

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick

Total books read: 28

Green Books Campaign: The Coke Machine

2010-11-10T12:00:00.000-06:00

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 200 bloggers take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled or FSC-certified paper. By turning a spotlight on books printed using eco-friendly paper, we hope to raise the awareness of book buyers and encourage everyone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the discussion on "green" books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner! A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on the Eco-Libris website.

For the second year in a row, I was invited to participate in the Green Books Campaign, which has been expanded this year to include 200 bloggers posting reviews of 200 books printed in environmentally-responsible ways. (You can read last year's post here.) I chose and received a copy of The Coke Machine: the dirty truth behind the world's favorite soft drink, written by Michael Blanding. My book is printed on FSC certified paper.

The Coke Machine delves into the history of the Coca-Cola company, beginning with the birth of the company and examining its meteoric rise to become one of the dominant companies in the US and the world in a relatively short span of time. It also explores some pretty dark allegations, including:

>> Coke exploited school systems' need for money in order to tie schools into exclusive contracts and introduce Coke products into the daily lives of even the youngest US children.

>> Coca-Cola at best ignored and at worst incited violence against union organizers at bottling plants in South America, especially in Colombia, as recently as 2004.

>> Coke inflicted severe ecological and environmental damage upon several regions in India through the actions of its bottling plants.

I wish I could say that these accusations were shocking, but unfortunately the stories are all too common. It seems inevitable that large multinational corporations are going to have quite a few skeletons in the closet, especially when they do business in Third World countries with lax worker protection and nonexistent or easily-ignored environmental regulations. I'm not qualified to comment on the larger issues at stake when capitalism and a global economy intersect with very poor people in very poor or unstable nations. I am not naive enough to think that it's unusual for large US companies to outsource work to these countries in order to keep expenses low and profits high. I realize that the American consumer benefits from this practice in the form of lower prices on products that are produced by low-paid labor forces. I find it deeply sad, though, that a company able to spend upwards of 2 million dollars on a 30-second Super Bowl ad stands accused of putting profits so far ahead of people.

The book is a little grim, but it's also quite interesting. I love to read about the early stories of common brands, and Coke certainly has a colorful history. The biggest surprise for me was that the majority of organizing on college campuses against "Killer Coke" was done during my years as an undergraduate. I was heavily involved in environmental activism at my school during the years of the heaviest battling against Coke, and yet I never heard a word about it. It's kind of fascinating to realize that while our environmental group was wrapped up in lobbying to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, there were other students just like us in other parts of the country equally wrapped up in lobbying against Coca-Cola and who knows how many other diverse and worthy causes.

I won't say that the book convinced me to give up Coke - and I believe Michael Blanding himself admits in his author's blurb that he drinks a Coke every now and then - but it definitely made me devote some thought to the complicated politics and morals of consumer products. If you enjoy books like Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania and Garbage Land, you might also like The Coke Machine.

In an effort to keep my bookshelves manageable and to engage in a little bit of recycling, I would like to give away my copy of The Coke Machine. If you're interested, please leave a comment on this post by midnight CST on Tuesday, November 30 and include a valid email address. On December 1 I'll use random.org to select a winner. Residents of the US and Canada only, please!

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book to review as part of the Green Books Campaign. The opinions in this review are my own.

BBAW: Future Treasures

2010-09-17T12:03:00.003-05:00

(Don't miss the giveaway at the end of this post!)

When I think of Future Treasures, I think about the books that I'll be able to share with my son as he grows. He already has an entire shelf on his bookcase full of books for when he gets a little bit older and less prone to chewing on everything he can grab. At eight months old, he's only ready to be unsupervised with board books, but I do read him several picture books each night before bed. We participated in the Summer Reading Program at our library, reading 52 books over the course of June and July, an experience that showed me once and for all that not all kids' books are created equal.

Some have great art but the text is cumbersome to read or not all that engaging. Some are cleverly written but have so-so art on the pages. The ones I like best, of course, have good art and are well-written with a good flow to the words. I prefer books with a bit of rhyme to the text, since I feel like they sound nice and are easy to read aloud. Here are my (and Nico's) top five picture book picks from our first summer of reading:

1. Bear Snores On
by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman

2. Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?
by Bill Martin and Eric Carle

3. How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague

4. The Hound From the Pound
by Jessica Swaim and Jill McElmurry

Guess How Much I Love You?
by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram

**************************************

Even though Nico will be picture-book-aged for quite a while longer, I'm always on the lookout for books to save for when he's older. I was offered the chance to review Queen Vernita Meets Sir HeathyBean the Astronomer by Dawn Menge and Heath Rhoades. Since I'm a fan of astronomy, I was excited about a book that will allow me to share it with Nico.

In the third Queen Vernita book, the titular monarch hosts Sir HeathyBean the astronomer and Cora the Teacher for a year at her castle. Each month, a different guest comes to call and learns about a planet or celestial object. The book is packed with great facts about the planets and other Solar System objects, and I think it would be a great book for a kid already interested in the planets or to spark interest in a kid who hasn't really thought much about them.

I was hoping to end BBAW with a giveaway, but didn't want to give up our copy of the book, so I wrote to the author to see if she'd be willing to provide a second copy. She graciously agreed to send not only another copy of Queen Vernita Meets Sir HeathyBean the Astronomer, but also copies of the first two Queen Vernita books. To win all three, leave a comment on this post with a favorite kids' book of yours...either one you like to read to a child in your life or one you remember from your own childhood. Comments will remain open until midnight CST on Thursday, September 30, at which point I will use random.org to select a winner. US & Canada only, please!

And don't forget to leave a comment on Monday's post for a chance to win a copy of Alexa Stevenson's excellent memoir, Half Baked or on Tuesday's post for a chance to win a book of irreverent advice by Carla Collins. I'm extending the deadlines on my three giveaways so people have a chance to work their way through the plethora of BBAW posts and giveaways.

I received a free advance review copy of Queen Vernita Meets Sir HeathyBean the Astronomer through the author. I am not being compensated for this review.

WINNER!
Congrats to Hendy!

BBAW: Forgotten Treasure

2010-09-16T21:53:00.005-05:00

The BBAW theme for Thursday is Forgotten Treasure: "Sure we’ve all read about Freedom and Mockingjay but we likely have a book we wish would get more attention by book bloggers, whether it’s a forgotten classic or under marketed contemporary fiction. This is your chance to tell the community why they should consider reading this book!"

Contrary to what you might expect, I actually don't buy a lot of books these days. I used to be a serial book-buyer, but in the past few years I've really reined myself in due to dwindling bookshelf space and increasing financial responsibilities. When I do buy books, I tend to buy things that I've read and loved and want to eventually read again. But a few weeks ago, I went to Barnes & Noble with the intention of buying Alexa's book. I was feeling uncharacteristically flush since I'd found a leftover Christmas gift card in my purse, and on the way out, Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow caught my eye (the power of a flashy cover!). I was feeling fond of werewolves, having just finished Maggie Stiefvater's Linger, and the back-cover writeup was promising. I had Nico with me and he was rapidly turning into a pumpkin, so I bought it and then set it aside for a couple of weeks while I read other things.

When I did pick it up, I flipped it open and stopped to stare, stomach sinking. It's a free verse novel, as in poetry. And I don't do poetry, in general. I considered returning it, but I was on my way to work and didn't have another book handy to take to read on my breaks, so I decided to give it a shot. I'm happy to report that I was pleasantly surprised. The text reads as smoothly as prose, with an interesting crispness to it. The story takes place in LA and is populated with werewolves who can (and do) pass for dogs and can transform at will. The characters range from sweet dogcatcher Anthony and the girl werewolf he unwittingly falls in love with to calculating pack leader Lark to bridge cardsharks Cutter and Blue to surfer girl/wolf Annie to mysterious Mr. Venable and his associate Goyo (who reminded me strongly of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere). The story is sharp and at times violent, but ultimately I really enjoyed it. I must say, sometimes it can be satisfying to have one's first impression of a book proved so very wrong.

Don't forget to leave comments on my Monday and Tuesday posts for a chance to win Half Baked by Alexa Stevenson or Angels, Vampires & Douche Bags by Carla Collins!

BBAW: Unexpected Treasure

2010-09-15T06:00:00.004-05:00

The challenge for the third day of BBAW: We invite you to share with us a book or genre you tried due to the influence of another blogger. What made you cave in to try something new and what was the experience like?

I previously featured Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater at Number 2 on my list of books to read after (or instead of) the Twilight saga.

Back then I said: I read this book on the recommendation of the fabulous Kerri Anne, and I loved it. LOVED it. The book makes a significant but not unwelcome change to the archetype, featuring werewolves whose transformation is triggered not by the full moon, but by the coming of winter. Unfortunately, the werewolves in question live in Minnesota, where winter doesn't screw around. Fantastic, believable characters and a tightly-woven plot made for a serious page-turner. I had this book with me the day I had to sit in the waiting room at the lab for four hours to have blood draws done, and the time flew. If that's not a hardcore endorsement, I don't know what is.

Shiver centers on the relationship between Sam, a teenager by summer and a wolf by winter, and Grace, the girl he saved from his wolf pack when they were both twelve-ish. He has watched her from the woods every winter since their first encounter, and she has loved him with a depth she doesn't understand since he started watching. When Grace meets human Sam, their relationship is finally set in motion. Stiefvater has written a tight, believable story, and despite her characters' youth, I didn't find their "true love" tale as hard to believe as I usually do with teenaged characters (because, come on...finding "the one" at sixteen?). As the only child of inattentive parents, Grace has basically raised herself, and Sam was raised from a young age by his pack of grown wolves / men, giving both characters a maturity beyond their years. While Grace and Sam are dealing with the problem of Sam's impending transformation, he is also coming face to face with the harsh truth of his entrance into the pack. There are some dark surprises and some tender moments to be had, and the tension of the subplot involving some new and unwelcome werewolves kept me turning pages.

Last month I read the sequel, Linger, which picks up where Shiver left off. I don't want to spoil anything from the first book, but I don't think it's giving too much away to say that Stiefvater expands the scope in Linger, adding chapters in two other characters' voices besides Sam & Grace's. Sam is thrust into the role of human pack leader and forced to deal head-on with some questionable decisions made by his surrogate father and former leader Beck, while Grace finds her health suddenly deteriorating. By the end of the book, it's clear that Stiefvater intends to stray further from the path of the clichéd moon-fueled werewolf mythos, and I frankly can't wait to see where she goes with it. Linger exposes one of my only regrets about discovering a great new series while it's still in progress...it's always so hard to wait for the next book.

Don't forget to leave comments on my Monday and Tuesday posts for a chance to win Half Baked by Alexa Stevenson or Angels, Vampires & Douche Bags by Carla Collins!

BBAW: New Treasure

2010-09-14T06:00:00.009-05:00

Tuesday's BBAW theme is "New Treasure." The official plan is to swap blogger interviews, but I didn't sign up for that option so I'm going to wing it and post a second giveaway.

Back in June I posted a mini review of Angels, Vampires & Douche Bags by Carla Collins:

This one was pitched as a "comedic motivational book," and I almost passed on it due to my distate for motivational books of any kind. It turned out to be more of an advice-meets-memoir book. In it, Collins explains how she divides the world into three kinds of people -- the angels who help and support us, the vampires who suck out our money or energy or emotional reserves, and the douchebags who act douchebaggy. She weaves in stories of angels, vampires, and douchebags from her own life and shares anecdotes that don't always relate to the theme of the book but nearly always amuse. The pace of the writing was often frenetic, as if I was reading the transcript of a stand-up act instead of a book, and while it was a bit tiring at times it did keep things interesting. I got a good chuckle every few pages, too.

I was surprised by how much I liked the book, and it was a pleasant treat. For a chance to win my advance review copy of Angels, Vampires & Douche Bags, leave a comment on this post and tell me about a book that was better than you expected (US & Canada only, please!). Comments will be accepted until midnight Central Standard Time on ~~Sunday, September 19~~ Thursday, September 30, at which point I will use random.org to choose a winner. Good luck!

And don't forget to leave a comment on Monday's post for a chance to win a copy of Alexa Stevenson's excellent memoir, Half Baked.

I received a free advance review copy of Angels, Vampires & Douche Bags through the publisher. I am not being compensated in any way for this review.

WINNER!
Congrats to Lori L. at she treads softly!

BBAW: First Treasure

2010-09-13T00:00:00.003-05:00

Today is the kickoff of Book Blogger Appreciation Week 2010. I hope to have a new post up each day (and some will include giveaways) to celebrate. The official theme for Monday is First Treasure, but instead of writing about the first book blog I discovered, I'm going to write about a blogger's first book.

I began reading Alexa Stevenson's blog Flotsam in late 2007, just before her son Ames died and the tense wait for her daughter Simone's early birth began. Even though I've been following the story of Alexa and Simone -- now a healthy two year old -- since then, Alexa's memoir is so much more than a rehashing of things she'd already written. Half Baked: the story of my nerves, my newborn, and how we both learned to breathe is an enveloping page-turner of a book, the kind that actually merits the statement "I couldn't put it down." Even though I knew the beginning and the end of the story, I found myself wrapped tightly in the weaving of the tale.

After several miscarriages and a struggle with infertility, Alexa and her husband conceived twins via IVF. She found herself uniquely qualified for the heightened worry of pregnancy after a lifetime of anxiety and an adulthood spent developing the ability to over-research anything. But as the back-cover writeup admits, Alexa had spent most of her life preparing for the wrong disasters. At 22 weeks and 2 days, after having been told the sexes of her babies and that they looked "ideal," Alexa received the devastating news that Ames had died. For three more weeks, the goal is to keep Simone inside and healthy as long as possible. Then Simone is born, and Alexa is plunged into a motherhood she never expected.

She finds that the personality quirks that once left her nervous and paralyzed have left her uniquely equipped for the numbers and stats that dominate NICU life. The ups and downs of Simone's long hospital stay are relayed with stark honesty and surprising humor. One doesn't usually expect to laugh out loud while reading a story of a very early baby, but Alexa has written that kind of book. The good and the bad, the transcendent and the mundane, the heartbreaking and the unexpectedly funny, Alexa lays it all out and turns it into a fantastic and immensely enjoyable read.

Because she's awesome, Alexa is going to send one commenter a signed copy of Half Baked. For a chance to win, leave a comment on this post before midnight CST on ~~Sunday, September 19~~ Thursday, September 30. In the spirit of BBAW, please include a link to one of your favorite blogs so I can discover some new great sites! Residents of the US & Canada only, please.

WINNER!
Congrats to Amy S. at Atypical Musings!

Hee!

2010-09-04T23:05:00.003-05:00

http://xkcd.com/788/

I love these pajamas

2010-08-19T00:14:00.004-05:00

Usually the google keyword ads that pop up in my email inbox range from absurd to useless, but the other day one actually caught my eye. It was an ad for pajamas printed with the dinosaurs from Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaurs... kids' book series:

The books are super cute (my favorites are How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?) and the illustrations are great. I really love the idea of a pair of pjs to match a favorite book.

J'adore

2010-07-29T22:48:00.001-05:00

Five by Five

2010-06-25T22:31:00.001-05:00

Here are five books I've read recently, reviewed in about five minutes each:

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

I was hesitant to start the May Book Lushes selection because I'd heard murmurings on Twitter about what a jerk the titular character is. An interwoven set of short stories that feels more like a novel than an anthology, the book examines the life of abrasive retired schoolteacher Olive from various angles. Olive is in most of the stories, sometimes as a very minor character, but even the ones in which she barely appears teach us something about her and her life. By the end I still felt that Olive was a jerk, but I didn't find her entirely unlikable. Some of the characters were beautifully written (especially Olive's husband Henry), and the book made me want to write fiction again.

Angels, Vampires, & Douche Bags by Carla Collins

This one was pitched as a "comedic motivational book," and I almost passed on it due to my distate for motivational books of any kind. It turned out to be more of an advice-meets-memoir book. In it, Collins explains how she divides the world into three kinds of people -- the angels who help and support us, the vampires who suck out our money or energy or emotional reserves, and the douchebags who act douchebaggy. She weaves in stories of angels, vampires, and douchebags from her own life and shares anecdotes that don't always relate to the theme of the book but nearly always amuse. The pace of the writing was often frenetic, as if I was reading the transcript of a stand-up act instead of a book, and while it was a bit tiring at times it did keep things interesting. I got a good chuckle every few pages, too.

The Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry

The suicide of a patient and the discovery of her father's drastically failing health throw therapist Zee Finch's life into turmoil, and she begins to question whether she wants to put things back in order. A flawed, well-written character, Zee deals with the new reality of her father's decline while trying to cope with the lingering trauma of her mother's suicide during Zee's thirteenth summer. Family secrets, a new and slightly mysterious lover, and the magic-tinged setting of Salem, Massachusetts blend together to create a rich, enveloping story that ultimately blurs the lines between coincidence and fate. (I also enjoyed her first book, The Lace Reader.)

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

This was June's Book Lush selection and another one I wasn't sure about but decided to try. Just like before, I ended up really enjoying the book, which is a retelling of the Biblical story of the family of Jacob and specifically his daughter Dinah. Diamant expands the story of Leah and Rachel, the first two wives of Jacob. I always felt sorry for Leah, the woman Jacob was tricked into marrying before being allowed to marry the woman he really wanted, her sister Rachel. In The Red Tent, Diamant re-imagines the relationship so that Leah and Rachel came up with the switch themselves, and gives Leah the role of respected wife and mother. Rachel is styled as a skilled midwife who has a gift for saving other women's babies while struggling to conceive and carry her own. The book begins with remembrances of Dinah's childhood with her four mothers -- her birth mother Leah and three aunts -- and eleven brothers (Jacob's last son, Benjamin, is born after Dinah leaves the family's camp). Dinah finds and loses love, bears a son into difficult circumstances, and grows into her own as a midwife of great skill. Her life is hard and often tragic, but the story is ultimately a rewarding read.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Book Lushes have had such a great track record that I decided to go back and pick up February's book, which I skipped because back then I had a teeny tiny baby and zero reading time. So far, The Help is my favorite of the books the group has voted to read. Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, The Help is largely the story of two black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and of Skeeter, the white woman who decides to write about what life is really like for black maids in white households in the Jim Crow days. The voices are distinct and authentic, the story is intense and well-crafted. I'd call this one a page-turner, for sure, and I feel like it really did live up to all the hype I'd heard about it. It's a wonderful book.

The joke's on you, narrow-minded cur!

2010-05-29T21:09:00.002-05:00

Holy crap, this is awesome.

Crossing the Gates of Alaska by Dave Metz

2010-03-31T22:13:00.002-05:00

Crossing the Gates of Alaska is the tale of Dave Metz's incredible trek across 600 miles of Alaskan wilderness with his two dogs. Pulling all his supplies in sleds -- and later carrying them on his back -- Metz set out to traverse the forbidding Brooks Range. His journey took him out into true wilderness, eventually into places where he may have been the first modern human to set foot. The journey demanded an immense amount of physical and mental resilience, both from Metz and from his two dogs. I found the book interesting, if a little preachy at times about the evils of modern society. The scale of the trek itself is truly monumental, and the book will probably appeal to anyone interested in wilderness adventures. I loved reading about the beauty and peace Metz found, though I know I'd never be able to undertake a similar journey myself!

I received a free advance review copy of Crossing the Gates of Alaska through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I am not being compensated in any way for this review.

Truly, Madly by Heather Webber

2010-03-31T21:56:00.001-05:00

Lucy Valentine's family has been in the matchmaking business for generations, using their psychic gifts to introduce soulmates. When her father is caught in a compromising position, he jets off to St. Lucia to lie low until the whole thing blows over, and leaves Lucy in charge of the family business. But Lucy has a problem -- her psychic gift was short-circuited by an electrical shock at age 14, and now all she can do is find lost objects. With no choice but to fake it until she makes it, Lucy attempts to settle in at the matchmaking agency.

Almost immediately, things begin to get complicated. A client still carrying a torch for a lost love lands Lucy in hot water with the police and in the middle of a murder investigation. She finds herself dodging the interference of her nosy grandmother, Dovie, and helping a friend weather an identity crisis. And then there's Sean Donahue, the sexy private eye she gets wrapped up with, despite her fear of the Valentine Curse. For it seems that even though they're born to unite true loves, the Valentines themselves have never had success in love or marriage.

I found Truly, Madly to be a smart, sexy, and really enjoyable novel with a twist that I didn't see coming. I definitely recommend it for fans of Stephanie Plum and Sookie Stackhouse, as well as anyone looking for a well-written and entertaining mystery with a terrific protagonist. I'm really looking forward to the second Lucy Valentine book, Deeply, Desperately, which is due out in August.

I had hoped to have this review and giveaway up in time for Valentine's Day, but the whole having a baby thing threw me off schedule. I'm still going to do a giveaway, but instead of a Valentine theme it'll be a psychic theme. For a chance to win my copy of Truly, Madly, leave a comment and tell me...If you had a psychic gift that only had one purpose (like matchmaking or object-finding), what would you want your talent to be? I will accept entries with valid email addresses until Sunday, April 25, at midnight. US & Canada only, please!

I received a free advance review copy of Truly, Madly through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. I am not being compensated in any way for this review.

Book Autopsies

2010-01-08T22:11:00.001-06:00

This stuff by paper artist Brian Dettmer is ridiculously cool:

Books Read in 2010

2010-01-01T09:44:00.028-06:00

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Room by Emma Donoghue

Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Journey (Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Book 2) by Kathryn Lasky

The Capture (Guardians of Ga'Hoole, Book 1) by Kathryn Lasky

The Coke Machine: the Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding (review)

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

Bloodroot by Amy Greene

Half Baked: the story of my nerves, my newborn, and how we both learned to breathe by Alexa Stevenson (review)

The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce

Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce

Wolf Speaker by Tamora Pierce

Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce

Linger by Maggie Stiefvater (review)

Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Next by Stieg Larsson

Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry

Angels, Vampires, and Douchebags by Carla Collins

Spooky Little Girl by Laurie Notaro

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Watership Down by Richard Adams

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen

Eyes Like Leaves by Charles de Lint

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Crossing the Gates of Alaska by Dave Metz

Truly, Madly by Heather Webber

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Total books read: 39

O Christmas Tree

2009-12-04T22:07:00.002-06:00

via LISNews

Where books come to life

2009-11-27T06:42:00.001-06:00

How about Team No-Plot-Holes?

2009-11-24T07:00:00.000-06:00

(this is a cross-post from my regular blog)

I kid, I kid...I don't actually advocate burning of the Twilight books. Unless, of course, I'm freezing to death. Or just really chilly. Now, like the guy in the above photo, I admit that I haven't actually read the series. I watched a bunch of people I follow on Twitter react with derision after reading the final book, and have heard from many sources that the writing is pretty abysmal. I may eventually read them, but don't hold your breath. Also? Robert Pattinson is really, really not attractive. Sorry. And watching someone while they sleep? That's not romantic and sexy. That's stalking, and it's both creepy and the reason we have restraining orders.

So! I thought it would be fun to post about five books that I recommend instead of Twilight, or to pick up if you've read Twilight and need another vampire / werewolf story to feed your addiction:

5. Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett
I put this one at number five because while I did find it enjoyable, I think it's one of the Discworld books that works better if you've read some of the others. Some of the books in the series can almost stand alone, and others are a bit more meaningful if you've already been introduced to the characters. That said, I don't think any Discworld book is totally inaccessible as a first encounter with the series.

4. Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause
I like that in Blood and Chocolate, the girl is the werewolf, and the boy she falls for is the human. Main character Vivian isn't completely without flaws, but I didn't have trouble putting up with her. The story has a little less impact to it than the ones I placed above it, but I do remember that I liked the book. I haven't seen the film version, but the wikipedia summary leads me to believe that the screnwriters took a lot of liberties. Might be a fun one to watch for creeps, though.

3. the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris
Also known as the Southern Vampire Mysteries, this series served as the inspiration for the HBO series True Blood. I wrote a review of the first book, Dead Until Dark, back when I read it: "The heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, is no Sunshine, but she's a good character. In some ways, she's similar to Sunshine, in that both are pretty ordinary girls--not geniuses, not knockout babes, not karate champions. Where Sunshine had a magical heritage, Sookie has a magical talent--she can read people's minds. Because of this, she has few friends and zero romantic experience. When she meets an "out of the coffin" vampire, things change, and before long, Sookie's trying to solve a mystery and stay alive long enough to figure out whether or not a vampire boyfriend is what she really wants.

My only objections to this story: unnecessary (in my opinion) murder of a family member, even more unnecessary murder of a pet, and a vampire named Bill. My friend Tamsyn, who gave me the book, pointed out that Harris was likely trying to create an alternate take on the stereotypical vampire tale. Instead of femmy glam vampires named Lestat or whatnot, she created a vampire who represented a typical 1870s American Southerner. I'm okay with that, but wish she'd called him Will or Liam or even William. I just don't dig the name Bill, having once had a horrible coworker by that name.

Pressing through my misgivings about the name turned out to be worth it, and the story was really enjoyable. I was surprised but not incredulous when the murderer was revealed, which is always really nice in a mystery. There was also one really unexpected and funny moment where it is revealed that a certain extremely famous, dead but occasionally still spotted singer still kicks around as a creepy pet-fancying vampire. I'm definitely going to look for the second book in the series the next time I'm in the mood for a sexy mystery."

Possibly best of all -- if you're looking for something to carry on with now that Twilight is over -- there are now nine books in the series. I sent my friend Rachel the first book and she called me a crack-pusher for getting her addicted.

2. Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
I read this book on the recommendation of the fabulous Kerri Anne, and I loved it. LOVED it. The book makes a significant but not unwelcome change to the archetype, featuring werewolves whose transformation is triggered not by the full moon, but by the coming of winter. Unfortunately, the werewolves in question live in Minnesota, where winter doesn't screw around. Fantastic, believable characters and a tightly-woven plot made for a serious page-turner. I had this book with me the day I had to sit in the waiting room at the lab for four hours to have blood draws done, and the time flew. If that's not a hardcore endorsement, I don't know what is.

1. Sunshine by Robin McKinley
I absolutely loved Sunshine. Not only is it my favorite vampire book ever, but it's also probably on the top ten list of books I've read in the past few years. There's a slightly more extensive review here, which concludes thusly: I usually don't go for vampire stories, but I enjoyed this one immensely and would recommend it to anyone. It's got enough magic and undead for the sci-fi / fantasy fan and more than enough down-to-earth, believable characterization for those who tend to prefer non-fantasy fiction.

If you've read any other great vampire or werewolf books, please leave a comment. I'm always open to suggestions for new books to read!

Green book review & giveaway: A Walk for Sunshine by Jeff Alt

2009-11-10T22:46:00.003-06:00

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on the Eco-Libris website.

Back in September, I was offered a chance to receive a green book for review in conjunction with a campaign to raise awareness about environmentally-responsible books. Not only were many of the books about green topics, but most were printed on either recycled paper or paper made from sources certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Participants were allowed to pick a first and second choice from the list of 100 books, and I was selected to review my top choice, A Walk for Sunshine by Jeff Alt.

My book is printed in compliance with the green press initiative on FSC-certified 100% post-consumer content paper. Recycled paper is a cause close to my heart, having spent several years in college in an environmental club that devoted some time to the Sierra Student Coalition's campaign to convince major paper companies to adopt sustainable forest management practices and increase the use of post-consumer content in their products.

I also have some first-hand experience with how difficult it is to convince businesses (and schools) to use recycled paper. In her fantastic book Garbageland, author Elizabeth Royte relays her experiences related to the cause. She asked her publisher to consider printing the book on recycled paper using soy ink, but they were unable to accommodate her and produce what they considered a cost-effective product. Knowing this, I appreciate even more a book that is printed on the best paper possible for the environment.

A Walk for Sunshine is author Jeff Alt's memoir of his 1998 thru-hike of the 2160-mile Appalachian Trail. A lifelong lover of the outdoors, Alt conceived the idea of an AT thru-hike as a fundraiser for the Sunshine group home where his disabled brother Aaron has spent most of his life. Alt spent a year preparing, researching, and recruiting sponsors before undertaking the five-month hike from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine. He would eventually raise $16,000 for the Sunshine home and inspire a yearly fundraising walk in Sunshine's hometown of Toledo, Ohio.

But the book is mostly about Alt's experiences on the trail, and it is a great adventure tale. From the skunk who curled up on his feet on a cold night in Georgia to the bear who charged him on a wooded stretch of trail in Maine, from the thru-hikers he bonded with to the civilians who provided him with "trail magic," Alt weaves a light-spirited, bighearted tale that kept me turning pages from beginning to end. An AT thru-hike is a bit of a Holy Grail of outdoor experiences, something many nature lovers dream about but never attempt, let alone complete. Alt is refreshingly honest about the physical and mental hardships of the trail, but never stops feeling grateful for the experiences he is having on his journey. I found his optimism and good nature enjoyable.

Alt is not afraid to poke gentle fun at himself, and even chooses a trail name based on a silly rookie mistake -- he dubs himself Wrongfoot after spending his first day on the trails with his arch supports in the wrong boots, resulting in blistered feet. The book moves along at a good pace, and short chapters make for easy reading. Each chapter is preceded by a map of the Appalachian Trail with an arrow marking Alt's progress, a nice detail that keeps the reader rooted in the geographical significance of this truly epic walk.

I enjoyed the book very much, even though it did make me feel a bit sheepish about my own somewhat brief encounter with the Appalachian Trail. In the spirit of sharing, I'd love to pass on my copy of A Walk for Sunshine. For a chance at it, leave a comment here sharing a favorite hiking memory or a goal for something major you want to accomplish. For an extra entry, tweet with a link to the giveaway and leave a comment for me that includes your Twitter ID. I will accept entries with valid email addresses until Sunday, November 15, at midnight. US & Canada only, please!

And the winner is... Danger! Congrats :)

As for everyone else, check back in December...the author emailed me and is going to send a copy of the DVD that's being created to go along with the book, so I'll most likely have another giveaway after I've watched and reviewed it :)

BBAW winners!

2009-10-09T06:52:00.001-05:00

Apologies for the delay in announcing the winners of the two book giveaways. We experienced a sudden computer death and are just now getting things back in order.

Congrats to Vicki, the winner of Homer's Odyssey, and to the two winners of The Lake That Stole Children, Book Dragon and Gaby!

I'll send all three winners an email and once I get addresses, I hope to get the books mailed out next week.

Thanks to all who commented!

BBAW Giveaway #2: The Lake That Stole Children (A Fable) by Douglas Glenn Clark

2009-09-18T18:33:00.001-05:00

To wrap up Book Blogger Appreciation Week, I'll be giving away two copies of The Lake That Stole Children by Douglas Glenn Clark. In this fable-style tale, a village has been losing its children. After a stern and overbearing fisherman refuses to let his young son cast a line into the river, the boy sneaks out at night to try it on his own. He is pulled into the water and swept downstream to the ominous and forbidden Flat Horn Lake.

The fisherman tells a gathering of villagers of his son's disappearance and begs for help searching for him, but the people dismiss him by saying that his son has surely drowned. But the fisherman knows better, for he hears the voices of the missing children when he weeps for his lost son. The only people who respond are a husband and wife who recently lost their daughter. The two fathers head to Flat Horn Lake and discover that the missing children have been swallowed by a giant glass fish, guarded by schools of smaller, vicious fish. Unwilling to accept defeat, the fisherman sets about crafting special lures, designed to capture the glass monster.

I won't spoil what happens, because the end is well-crafted and well-written. As a fable requires, lessons are learned by all parties, but it never comes across as preachy or overly trite. Some of the language is downright lovely -- my favorite line describes the assault of the guardian fish, who rise to the surface of the lake with the "smooth aggression of a mushroom cloud." A slim volume, The Lake That Stole Children would be appropriate to share with young adult readers and maybe even kids. As always, I'd recommend reading it for yourself first.

For a chance to win a copy, leave a comment on this post by midnight on Sunday (September 20th) and tell me what your favorite fable or fairy tale is, either now or from childhood. Open to readers in the US & Canada!

shelfporn for Monday morn(ing)

2009-09-14T09:41:00.001-05:00

I love seeing photos of other people's book collections, especially authors I love.

And so, Neil Gaiman's library, courtesy of Shelfari.

It's Book Blogger Appreciation Week! Click here for book giveaway #1, and come back later this week for at least one more.

BBAW Giveaway #1: Homer's Odyssey by Gwen Cooper

2009-09-13T21:10:00.001-05:00

It's time once again for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, and to celebrate, I am giving away a copy of Homer's Odyssey: a Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Live With a Blind Wonder Cat by Gwen Cooper.

I've got a bit of a soft spot for pet memoirs, as long as they're not too heavy on the schmoop. I've read and enjoyed the ubiquitous Marley & Me, the sweet Dewey, and the more cerebral The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. So when Homer's Odyssey appeared in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in June, I added it to my request list. For days afterward, I wondered if I'd made a mistake. The only problem with pet memoirs is that there's usually a heartbreaking if predictable ending. I tend to do most of my reading at work on my lunch breaks, and so a sob-inducing ending is something to be avoided. When I was selected to receive an advance-review copy of Homer's Odyssey, I was quite pleased, but set it aside to read in the evenings at home. But then I read the prologue, which talks about Homer in the present-tense, and it gave me hope that the book was work-safe.

When she met Homer, Gwen Cooper was living with a friend, trying to figure out where her life was headed after a breakup with the man she'd assumed to be "the one." Already a cat person, she was sharing her life with one-person-cat Scarlett (so named because when she was found, she was so dehydrated that she was prone to fainting spells. And if that's not the greatest cat-naming story ever, I don't know what is.) and sweet beauty Vashti. Even as she drove to the vet to meet Homer -- in desperate need of a home after losing his eyes to a life-threatening infection at two weeks of age -- Gwen was aware of the reasons she shouldn't adopt another cat, but as soon as she met him, her fate was fixed. Touched by Homer's resilience, heart, and literal blind trust, Gwen agreed at once to take him home.

The story moves smoothly through the months and years of Gwen's life with her now three cats, chronicling her realization that a nonprofit salary will not be enough to make her self-sufficient, her difficult decision to swallow her pride and move back in with her parents while she re-aligns her career path (perfectly described as a "break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario"), and her eventual move to New York City. Even though the story is largely about Homer, the blind cat who never spends a day of his life believing that he is disabled, the story is also about the people whose lives are touched by Homer. Everyone he meets (with the exception of one horrible first-date) is not only won over, but instantly converted to dyed-in-the-wool Homer fandom. And the story is ultimately about Gwen. Without getting too schmaltzy, she relates the ways in which Homer teaches her about, well, life and love.

Cooper is a great writer, blending insight with humor to create a book that is a fast read but not fluff, touching but not cheesy, and ultimately extremely satisfying. And best of all -- spoiler -- no pets die at the end of the book! There is a close call near the end that made me worry, but all three cats are alive and well at the close of the story. There were several sweet moments that made me a little sniffly, and the scenes of Gwen fleeing Manhattan on foot in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and then spending several days trying to get back to her cats, trapped in her apartment only a few blocks from Ground Zero, had me fighting tears. The difficult moments are never played as cheap tear-jerkers, though, which I greatly appreciated.

I loved Homer's Odyssey. In fact, upon receiving it, I was planning to use it as a giveaway book for BBAW, but as soon as I finished it, I couldn't bear the thought of giving it away. I already had a list of people I wanted to loan it to, and I wanted to be able to re-read it someday. On a whim, I emailed Cooper's editor, and she was kind enough to arrange for another copy to be sent just for this giveaway. How rad is that?

To enter to win, leave a comment on this post and tell me either your favorite animal-related memoir or a favorite pet story / memory of your own. You have until Friday (September 18th) at midnight to comment, and sometime after that, I'll put all the entries into random.org and choose one winner. The giveaway is only open to residents of the US and Canada, and you must include a valid email address to be eligible.

For other great BBAW giveaways, go here. To purchase a copy of Homer's Odyssey if you don't win (or if you do but need another copy to give as a gift), go here.

And finally, check back here later in the week...I'm planning to do at least one other giveaway, and maybe more!

Take Your Shirt Off and Cry by Nancy Balbirer -- Review & Giveaway!

2009-07-26T20:26:00.002-05:00

In Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: a Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, Nancy Balbirer chronicles her years-long struggle to find fame, fortune, or just a living wage in the killing fields of LA. After receiving praise and encouragement throughout her tenure in acting school, a bright future in the industry seemed assured, but Nancy find that LA is, too often, the place where dreams go to wither under the strain of reality.

Nancy's tale isn't all doom and gloom, however, and she writes with a refreshing blend of humor and honesty. Vignettes about her acting school experiences, dysfunctional boyfriends, fellow actors, and rare glimpse of success blend together to create an interesting memoir. I was left with the impression that Nancy would be a great person to sit next to at a dinner party. And best of all, even though Nancy never lands the fame and fortune she went to LA to find, the story has a happy ending.

If you would like to win my copy of Take Your Shirt Off and Cry, leave a comment on this post and tell me what you always thought you'd be when you grew up and if you followed that path or not. The contest will close at midnight on Wednesday, August 5th, and is open to anyone in the US.

As for me, I always thought I'd be a paleontologist when I grew up. I never got there, but I did get my geology degree in college and I do work in a science field today.

Winner! Congrats to basscomm! It seems that random.org wants you to have this book!

The Séance by John Harwood

2009-07-14T22:08:00.000-05:00

I was hoping to do a very thorough review of this one, but I've run through the maximum number of renewals allowed, and it's due back at the library tomorrow. The Séance was recommended to me by a coworker who had recently read The Thirteenth Tale on my recommendation and loved it.

The Séance is similar in tone to The Thirteenth Tale and shares a sad family mystery at its heart. The Séance is very Victorian, and though I usually don't enjoy the time period too much, I was able to look past the few obviously Victorian elements (woman meets man and decides within the space of an afternoon that they are meant to be, they get engaged days later; woman is overcome by fear / stress / shock and swoons). The heroine of the story is Constance Langton, raised in a sad, quiet life by a father so distracted by his work that he might as well be completely absent and a mother so blinded by grief for Constance's sister who died at age two that she might as well be alone in all the world. Constance drifts through life, mostly ignored, until developing a curiosity about séances and spiritualism in her late teens.

It begins as an attempt to coax her mother out of mourning for the dead child, Alma, but all of Constance's good intentions go tragically awry. I won't spoil it, but basically the next few years' events set up what will become the main thrust of the story. One day, while living with her uncle and still lacking purpose, Constance is informed that a distant relative she's never heard of has left her a crumbling mansion, Wraxford Hall. The lawyer who delivers the bequest tells her that she may do with the property as she wishes, but he begs her to never live there, and encourages her to sell it sight unseen. Instead, Constance becomes intrigued and begins to investigate the history of the house.

Constance begins to uncover the bizarre events that supposedly took place at Wraxford Hall many years ago, and as she immerses herself in the mystery, the story really takes off. I won't summarize it, but I will say that it is dark and interesting and at times a bit strange. There's a twist ending that I didn't see coming, too, which is always a nice surprise. If you've read and enjoyed The Thirteenth Tale, give The Séance a try. If you haven't read The Thirteenth Tale, read both!

I wish I knew how to quit you

2009-07-13T20:39:00.001-05:00

(cross-posted from my regular blog)

I have been a fan of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series for years and years. The books can be sexy, entertaining, scary, and sidesplittingly funny when Evanovich is on, and for many years she produced hit after hit with a rare miss or two that I can recall. But lately, things just haven't been working for me. I do mostly enjoy the "between-the-numbers" books, even though on its face the premise of superhero-like Unmentionables is a little silly. In fact, it may be that silliness that keeps the holiday-themed books fun. In the early days of the Plum books, they were fun because you never knew what to expect. Now, as I told my friend the bibliophile one day when we were talking about the Plum books, I feel like Evanovich is almost trapped by her fan base. She can't play around with the characters as freely as she once did, because so many people are SO invested in them. She can still play around with the holiday books, because by definition she is outside the strict boundaries of the normal Plum universe.

I said in an email to the bibliophile, I also see a problem in that the numbered books always follow the same formula -- a bad guy or main case is introduced, Stephanie decides to track down fugitive, has some slapstick moments, has sex with someone, and then eventually catches the fugitive. There's only so many ways you can tell that story before it starts to get old. After I read Fearless Fourteen, I found myself thinking about giving up on the series. I honestly can't even remember why I was so disappointed, that's how bland it was. But then the new book, Finger Lickin' Fifteen, appeared on my library hold list, and I told myself I might as well give the series one more try. Happily, FL15 was much more enjoyable than its immediate predecessor, enough so that when the inevitable #16 comes out, I'll probably read it, too. Reading it also helped me refine my difficulty, I suppose, as it brought into focus the things about the series that just don't work for me. There are really only two big issues.

First, there's the apparent fact that in all her prior fourteen (or eighteen) books of bounty hunting, Stephanie has really not learned very much. I'm okay with her not carrying a gun, and I could buy it if she had a quirk where she constantly forgot her taser. Or, I could deal with that stuff if that were the only things that hadn't changed since the early books. But she still handcuffs people and then has to watch them run off. She still lets cornered bounties go to the bathroom before running them down to the police station, only to have them slip out the window and escape (that happens twice in book 15). She still takes Lula with her on jobs, and Lula still freaks out and knocks Stephanie down in a spazzy moment, allowing the target to escape. Now, I realize that Evanovich has chosen to follow a very loose progression of time, and I've heard that's she's stated on record that she's not going to move ahead years in time. I'm okay with that, especially since it means we probably won't have to suffer through the age-related death of Grandma Mazur (or Rex the hamster), or Morelli's retirement. But really, even if the span from the beginning of one book to the next was only a month (unlikely), that would mean she's been a bounty hunter for 15 months. And she's still letting people escape out bathroom windows while she stands around waiting for them to come back?

Secondly, I feel like character development has pretty much stalled out. Most of the minor recurring characters have been dropped entirely (Valerie the sister, Moon Man the stoner and occasional bounty, Sally Sweet the drag queen). The main characters really haven't changed much in several books, and Morelli barely made an appearance in book 14. Again, I have to wonder if the huge fan base and associated expectations are trapping Evanovich. It would be great to see Morelli and Ranger and especially Stephanie continue to change and evolve, but how would fans react if their old favorites suddenly developed along new storylines? I gotta say, I doubt I'm the only fan who would be happy to see some new direction.

How about you guys? Any Stephanie Plum fans out there? How do you feel about the books lately?

I'm not a huge James Joyce fan...

2009-06-24T21:13:00.002-05:00

...but this is pretty ridiculously cool: Twitter performance of Ulysses, chapter 10.

I have always imagined that heaven will be a kind of library (Jorge Luis Borges)

2009-06-17T21:54:00.000-05:00

And I suspect it will look something like this:

This is the Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, as pictured in 20 of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries. Neil Gaiman (yes, really) was kind enough to post a link to the article on Twitter with the tag "libraryporn." I believe I would actually weep if I was standing in some of the libraries pictured in the article.

Also, the fabulous and ridiculously funny Cake Wrecks did a feature recently on cakes inspired by books, which possibly equals the library porn post in awesomeness, albeit a different genre of awesomeness.

Tamora Pierce

2009-05-25T20:46:00.001-05:00

Though many women my age grew up reading Tamora Pierce's Alanna books, published in the early to mid-1980s, I had never heard of her until my younger sister began reading her stuff in middle school. For her birthday back in 2003 (I think), my sister wanted to go to Louisville to hear Tamora Pierce read, and so we went. She was fabulous. Absolutely fabulous. Somehow, it still took me another four years to finally track down and read any of her books.

I'd meant to start at the beginning with Alanna, the story of a young girl who pretends to be a boy so that she can train as a knight, but instead my eye was caught by Trickster's Choice, the first of two books about Alanna's daughter, Aliane. I loved-loved-loved Trickster's Choice, which was my introduction to Pierce's richly textured world of the kingdom of Tortall and surrounding nations. Ali, daughter of lady knight Alanna of Trebond and her very cool husband (who I won't name, in case you want to be surprised when you read the first four books), is caught up in a net of political intrigue and unrest in the Copper Isles, chosen by the trickster god Kyprioth to serve a purpose.

Using the skills she has learned from her father, Ali sets up an intricate network of spies and agents, working to keep the girls who are heir to the islands' native royal line alive. The story blends the best of a spy novel, an adventure tale, a girl-power novel, and a historical treatise, examining the tensions in a country where the dark-skinned native people have been subjugated for generations by light-skinned newcomers. It is not an entirely gentle tale, and there are tragedies and unexpected twists. The first novel also ends with such a wicked cliffhanger that I did something I never do -- I called the library from work and asked if they would put the second book on hold for me so I could pick it up on my way home. Trickster's Queen is just as good if not better, and after finishing it, I considered myself a full-on Tamora Pierce convert.

Last year when I went to Alaska, I packed the four Alanna books for the ridiculously long plane ride. It's rather obvious that Alanna was Pierce's first book. The writing is simply not up to the level of her later books, though it is completely fine. I enjoyed getting to know Alanna and her fellow students, and her character arc was immensely satisfying, though I did like the Trickster books better. Even though they are not perfect books, there is a lot to be said about what is basically a real-girl action hero who came around in the mid-80s, before the "girl power" trend really came into its own. A friend of mine has a sister-in-law who went to West Point and became an officer in the Army, and she said that reading the Alanna books as a kid inspired her to do so. Also, I think the argument can be made that Pierce's quartet is trailblazing because Alanna sleeps with two boys before choosing to marry one of them. And amazingly, there's not a load of angst, there's no guilt, there's no drama. She chooses to do so, she enjoys their company, and then she makes a choice for her future based on her heart and her wants, rather than on expectations people have of her.

Earlier this year I picked up my copy of Terrier, the first book in a promised trilogy about Beka Cooper, ancestor of one of my favorite Pierce characters, George Cooper. I'd had the book for a while, but hadn't got around to it. That turned out to be a good thing, because as soon as I finished it I wanted to read the second one, but it wasn't going to be out for a few months. If I'd read it when I bought it a year or so ago, I would have been d-y-i-n-g to read more. In Terrier, Beka begins training as one of the Provost's Dogs, basically a watchman for the city of Corus in Tortall.

Written in the form of entries in Beka's journal, the story weaves together Beka's interactions with her fellow trainees (puppies) and her training Dogs, the respected veterans Mattes Tunstall and Clara Goodwin. Beka, like Alanna in later books, has a mysterious and talkative black cat as a companion, this one called Pounce. She also hears ghosts that ride on the wings of pigeons, and can catch snippets of conversation captured by the city's dust spinners. As in Pierce's other books, the magic is never heavy-handed or overdone, and it is the action and the characters that drive the story.

Last week, I got to read Bloodhound, the second Beka Cooper book. After losing yet another partner unwilling to keep up with her, Beka is placed back with Tunstall and Goodwin. She and Goodwin are sent to neighboring Port Caynn on the trail of a coin counterfeiter who is endangering the well-being of the entire kingdom. The story is a great mystery / crime tale, and Beka continues to grow as a character. Now I have to wait until next year for the third Beka book to come out, though in the meantime I can read Pierce's other books.

It's probably safe to recommend any of her work, but if you're an always-in-order purist, start with the Alanna books. If not, I'd recommend starting with the Trickster books or the Beka books. They are fantastic, and I plan to re-read them all someday.

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx by Sally Koslow

2009-04-28T22:28:00.001-05:00

Molly Marx is 35 years old, mother to beloved Annabel, wife to suspected philanderer Dr. Barry Marx. She's mostly happy, but by the time the novel starts, she's already dead, killed in a biking accident that might've been murder, might've been suicide, or might've been plain old bad luck.

The novel interweaves scenes from Molly's past with scenes of her watching the family and best friend she left behind. Molly's ghostly powers and her visit to the afterlife -- known as the Duration -- are never overstated or presented in a cheesy way, and she is not able to haunt or interact with the living.

As the mystery of her death is investigated and her family and best friend Brie struggle to come to terms with her loss, Molly revisits her own life and takes an honest look at her strengths and failings. Molly is no saint, she has made mistakes, but ultimately she was a good person and is an extremely likable and relatable protagonist. She only rarely feels sorry for herself, is often clever, and at times is laugh-out-loud funny. Not bad for a dead woman.

Every character in the book, from Molly's parents to the detective investigating her case to her daughter's nanny, is well-rounded and well-written. The pacing is fantastic, and the book is quite a page-turner. Until the last few chapters, I was desperate to find out the truth about Molly's death, but by the end it almost didn't matter. Her death had never been the point of the story, as even Molly herself realized. I won't give away the ending, but it made me a little teary, and wrapped the story up in the most satisfying way I could imagine. I loved this book, and heartily recommend it.

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx is due out on May 19, 2009, and is available for preorder on Amazon.

Bookish Birthday, again

2009-04-03T23:29:00.002-05:00

Thanks to my fabulous friends, I had a wonderfully book-filled birthday. Between what I was given directly and gift cards, my birthday added these books to my shelves:







Basscomm also gave me a really cool old science book from the 1930s that I can't find a picture of, The World Around Us : A Survey of Science I for Junior High Schools. And I still have a Barnes & Noble giftcard from my parents that I haven't even touched. :D

Thanks to everyone...you guys rule.

Buffalo Gal by Laura Pedersen

2009-03-01T23:03:00.002-06:00

Buffalo Gal is Laura Pedersen's memoir of growing up in Buffalo, New York, in the 70s. She describes her upbringing in a cold, quirky town with humor and just the right amount of nostalgia. From the drab institutional architecture to the folly of owning a white car in a city prone to lake-effect blizzards, Pedersen paints an entertaining picture of life in a place where winter lasts nine months.

Raised by two caring but very different parents who let her determine her own course much of the time, Pedersen made up her mind early on that she would not let rules define her life. From riding her bicycle across the bridge into Canada to gamble at a horse track to enrolling in a college finance course as a high school senior, she developed the guts and smarts to go after what she wanted, and would eventually become the youngest person with a seat on the American Stock Exchange. I really enjoyed her story, and am looking forward to reading more of her work. If you're looking for a fun, light read that will make you laugh, Buffalo Gal is a good bet.

As part of the Bookroom Reviews Book Giveaway Carnival, I am giving away TWO copies of Buffalo Gal. If you live in the US or Canada, you can enter by leaving a comment on this post. For an extra entry, blog about this giveaway and then leave me a comment with a link to your post. You have until March 8th to enter, and then random.org will help me choose two winners. Good luck!

WINNER #1: Deltay at Lucid Conspiracy

WINNER #2: Terra H.

Congrats! And everyone else, check back soon. I'll have another giveaway up in the next week or so.

Do you know where your towel is?

2009-02-25T22:26:00.002-06:00

http://xkcd.com/548/

Coraline: a side-by-side review

2009-02-23T22:38:00.006-06:00

With a plan in place to go see Coraline (the movie) last night with my mom and sister, I decided to re-read Coraline (the book) Sunday night and Monday at lunch. It's very short, weighing in at 162 pages, including some full-page illustrations by frequent Neil Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean. I loved this story the first time I read it back in 2006, and I still love it. It also gives me a serious case of the heebs.

The blurb on the front of my copy says, "One of the most frightening books ever written -- New York Times Book Review," and they are not kidding. It's the insidious kind of frightening that sneaks up on you while you're not paying attention, too. The first 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is pretty safe, and then things get REALLY weird, REALLY fast. It's a great book, and though it's classified as a Young Adult book, it's not really for the sensitive kids.

To briefly summarize, Coraline Jones -- age eleven -- gets bored with her somewhat boring, distant parents, and goes exploring in and around the house where her family has just rented a flat. A door in the formal parlor opens onto a brick wall...at least until later that night, when a skittering noise draws Coraline out of her bedroom. The passageway that is revealed leads Coraline to another flat, almost identical to hers, where her Other Mother and Other Father offer her everything her real parents do not, from attention to non-experimental food to sentient toys. But there's a small problem in this other world. First, everyone has shiny black buttons instead of eyes, and second, the Other Mother is awfully, awfully clingy.

When she escapes the Other Mother's clutches only to find that her real parents have been locked away, Coraline must venture once more into the Other Mother's world, to rescue her parents and other children that the Other Mother captured. To say she does so with courage and wits would be to sell her a bit short -- Coraline is a kickass heroine. And just when you think it's over, Gaiman has another twist for you. But never fear, it all ends well. Don't take my word for it, though. Go out and find a copy of Coraline and read it for yourself. I don't think you'll regret it.

Now, for the film. I've been looking forward to it since first hearing about it on Neil Gaiman's blog about a year ago. Knowing that it was directed by Henry Selick, who directed my beloved Nightmare Before Christmas, made me even more impatient. Coraline was well worth the wait. It was designed to be shown in 3D, but don't worry -- the 3D effect just makes the grace of Selick's stop-motion even more evident, and gives the film amazing depth and richness. I only remember one moment where I thought, "Now you're just showing off," and it was in the intro sequence. For the rest of the film, it didn't draw attention away from the animation at all.

The stop-motion itself is jaw-dropping. I can't even describe how fluid it is, other than to say there were scenes that made me doubt it was actually entirely stop-motion, because it was almost too good. A standout for me was the performance given by the trained mice in the Other world, which was, no exaggeration, absolutely exquisite. Oh, and the scene when Coraline and the cat wander out beyond the boundaries of the Other Mother's world is perfection. The soundtrack is lovely and perfectly suited to the film, the scenes and sets are fantastic, and all the details are looked after with care. In my opinion, Coraline is an absolute must-see.

Since this is a film based on a book, I feel like I should address the whole chicken / egg question. I read (and re-read) the book first, and I was able to enjoy the film even though there were a few significant changes. The film is strong and would easily stand alone if you haven't read the book, so if you're a purist and / or you get easily distracted by book / film discrepancies, I'd recommend watching the film first. Enjoy the animation and the awesomeness, and then go read the book. I'll talk a little about the changes below, but be warned: there are going to be some semi-spoilers.

**ALERT: SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT**

**SERIOUSLY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. IF YOU GO FURTHER AND ARE DISAPPOINTED, YOU HAVE NO ONE BUT YOURSELF TO BLAME.**

Most of the changes that were made appeared to be for pacing / flow purposes. In the book, the story is told from Coraline's point of view, so we read what she thinks and how she feels. Since it's hard to convey these things on film without a narrator, the fact that Coraline is not as hesitant to accept the Other Mother's attentions at first made sense. The addition of the Coraline spy doll was a little extraneous, though it didn't detract from the story. The addition of the gorgeous garden that the Other Father tended was lovely, and I actually liked it a lot. Changes made to the Other Mother's appearance were actually pretty cool, even though they differ somewhat strongly from the book in a significant way.

The only major thing that bothered me was the addition of a friend for Coraline. In the book, her only sidekick is the black cat, who can talk in the Other world but not in the regular one. In the film, she is given a neighborhood boy for a friend. He's fine as a character, and pleasantly animated, but I take issue with the fact that yet again a strong, independent female character is given a male sidekick. Wybie (as the boy is called) doesn't exactly swoop in to save the day, but as my mom pointed out, Coraline did just fine without him in the book. I read online that he was added to avoid scenes of Coraline walking around talking to herself, but I feel like they could've easily just had her talk to the cat. Or heck, the doll. I just wish they had let the girl handle 100% of the ass kicking, just like Gaiman wrote her to do.

That said, I still think Coraline is a fantastic film and a fantastic story. Go see it! And then read it! And then come back and let me know what you think.

Huzzah!

2009-02-19T06:43:00.002-06:00

I'm probably the last one to find out, but I just heard that Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won the 2009 Newbery Medal.

I'm always pleased to see Gaiman's work getting attention, because I think he was vastly underrated for a long time. If you haven't read The Graveyard Book, I highly, highly recommend it. I would suggest reading it for yourself before giving it to your kid to read, though...as usual, it's a little dark. But lovely!

The Map Thief by Heather Terrell

2009-02-05T22:15:00.003-06:00

I was offered a copy of The Map Thief to consider for review back in the Summer, but didn't have time to read it until the Fall, and clearly took my sweet time getting my thoughts together to write the review. This should not reflect poorly on the book, however, but instead speaks to the heights of my to-be-read pile and the depths of my scatter-brained-ness.

The Map Thief is an art / archaeology adventure story in the vein of The DaVinci Code, but with less violence and overt big-screen-ready hamminess. There's the obligatory Templars connection, and a whip-smart protagonist sent on a globetrotting search for a missing artifact. Beyond that, however, DaVinci similarities fade, and The Map Thief stands quite well on its own two feet.

As the main character, recovery expert Mara Coyne is believable and likable. Even after she finds a similarly likable love interest, she remains a strong character, never relying on a man to sweep in and save the day, which I appreciated. The story centers around Mara's search for an ancient map that has the potential to rewrite history.

The story is told in three interwoven plotlines -- Mara's modern-day search, the map's 1421 creation at the hands of a Chinese cartographer, and the use of the map by Portuguese navigators in 1496. This style of alternating storylines is one of my favorite devices in a history-heavy novel, and Terrell handles the various threads beautifully. Her handling of it reminded me a lot of both The Historian and The Thirteenth Tale, two of my favorite books from the last several years.

The Map Thief is a sequel to The Chrysalis, which I have not read, but the references to the events of that novel were only mentioned in passing and lacking the knowledge of the first book didn't seem to be a problem. I thought the book was a little slow to start, but once Mara sets out to seek the map, things picked up right away. I found it to be a quick and enjoyable read, and the coworker I loaned it to after I finished had the same experience.

In the interest of keeping my bookshelves manageable, I'm going to pass this book on to someone else. If you'd like a chance to win my copy, leave a comment on this entry and tell me your favorite historical figure / group / theme / era / whatever to read about. Personally, I'm a sucker for a book that involves old-timey sailors. You have until midnight on Wednesday, February 25th to enter. Good luck!

Winner! Congratulations to Riva :)

I'll be posting a new giveaway on Monday as part of the Bookroom Reviews Book Giveaway Carnival, so come back soon!

The Bomb That Followed Me Home by Cevin Soling

2009-01-25T22:24:00.000-06:00

I wasn't sure what to expect when I agreed to accept a review copy of this book. I suspected that the story of the "cute" stray bomb that followed a little boy home would be sort of morbid and maybe even a little pretentious in that wanna-be avant garde way that "edgy" books often are. Instead, I was surprised to find that the book is actually pretty good. It's weird, for sure, but I thought it was clever and in several places very funny.

The illustrations are fantastic, and even though several reviewers on Library Thing complain that the book uses too many big words, I think that's fine. I don't agree with declaring a book is inappropriate for young readers because they might not understand the "big words" in it (like, no joke, coniferous and deliberate). Are kids not allowed to have dictionaries? Or parents that can help them look up words that they don't know?

That said, I don't think the book is intended for the very young. Saying that it's morbid and inappropriate because the book ends with some grumpy neighbors meeting an untimely end is not surprising, but let's take a moment to think about all the so-called classic children's tales that involve violence and / or untimely death. Also, the nearly-constant presence of slapstick violence in cartoons and other kids' shows.

In tone, the book reminded me a lot of Neil Gaiman's recent children's book, The Dangerous Alphabet, which involves a little girl being kidnapped and chained up in a dark sewer by creepy and unsavory characters. To be honest, I thought Soling's book was a little less creepy than The Dangerous Alphabet. The Bomb That Followed Me Home would've amused me as a child, while it would've horrified my sensitive sister.

The letter that came with the book indicates that the story contains social and political commentary, and I suppose I could examine it and write a really in-depth piece on what it's telling us about tolerance or something. But I would prefer to just take the book at face value and declare that it was amusing enough, and that I liked it more than I expected I would. I would recommend the book as long as you have a sense of humor, don't take things too seriously, and take the time to read and judge the book for yourself before you pass it on to any kids you know.

A special giveaway

2009-01-22T19:40:00.005-06:00

Today is a very good day, because today I get to give away a book written by someone I know and love. My homegirl Stephanie Snowe, also known as That Chick Over There, is officially a Real Live Author. Her first book is entitled Meeting Mr. Wrong:  the Romantic Misadventures of a Southern Belle, and it's available on Amazon for the ridiculous bargain price of $9.95.

Of course, I encourage everyone to go buy Steph's book, but you can also leave a comment on this post for a chance to win a copy. To enter, you can either tell me a funny bad date story, or go check out Steph's blog and then tell me about an entry that made you laugh. If you do both in two separate comments, I'll give you two entries in the random drawing.

For a review of the book, go here. For a sneak peek at the first four chapters, go here (it's in PDF form). You may not want to read the sneak peek at work, unless your coworkers are used to you snorting with laughter at your desk.

Steffus, my sista-chica, I am so! damn! proud! of you. SMOOCHES.

Details:  This is also cross-posted at my regular blog. I'm giving away one book, and you can comment here or there. The contest is open to everyone (everywhere) and closes at midnight on ~~February 2nd~~ February 4th. The book comes out on February 3rd, and I'll ship the winner's copy as soon as it arrives from Amazon. If you decide to buy a copy for yourself (which I hope you will), you can still enter to win and pass the book on to someone else or give it away on your own blog. And if you don't win, please buy the book, because everyone needs to read the chapter about the guy with the pet birds. TRUST ME.

Winner!  Congratulations to Megan at Write Meg! Thanks to everyone who entered. I enjoyed cringing at all your bad date stories. You guys have had some interesting encounters.

Heh

2009-01-15T21:35:00.004-06:00

Buy this book! Support a blogger / first-time published author!

2009-01-10T12:15:00.000-06:00

My dear friend Stephanie / Chick's book is available for pre-order on Amazon as of today:

The more orders she gets, the better she'll do in the rankings. She's a first-time published author, and trust me when I tell you that she deserves all the success in the world. Her book's only $10, and I promise it'll make you laugh. Please consider pre-ordering, and pass the word on to all your friends who like books, laughing, and doing nice things for people!

Books Read in 2009

2009-01-03T00:10:00.033-06:00

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

A Walk for Sunshine by Jeff Alt (review)

Husband-Coached Childbirth:  the Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth by Robert A. Bradley

The Lake That Stole Children by Douglas Glenn Clark (review)

Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger

Your Best Birth by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein

Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

Homer's Odyssey:  a Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life With a Blind Wonder Cat by Gwen Cooper (review)

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

The Dangerous World of Butterflies:  the Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists by Peter Laufer

Red by Ted Dekker

Darwin Slept Here by Eric Simons

Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich (review)

Little Pink Slips by Sally Koslow

Take Your Shirt Off and Cry:  A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences by Nancy Balbirer (review)

Black by Ted Dekker

The Seance by John Harwood (review)

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

Debbie Harry Sings in French by Meagan Brothers

Bloodhound by Tamora Pierce

The Mystery of Grace by Charles De Lint

It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather B. Armstrong

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx by Sally Koslow (review)

The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Coraline by Neil Gaiman (review)

Meeting Mr. Wrong:  the Romantic Misadventures of a Southern Belle by Stephanie Snowe

Terrier by Tamora Pierce

Not Quite What I Was Planning:  Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by the editors of SMITH Magazine

The Daily Coyote by Shreve Stockton

Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak by Writers Famous and Obscure by the editors of SMITH Magazine

The Mighty Queens of Freeville:  a Mother, a Daughter, and the Town That Raised Them by Amy Dickinson

Buffalo Gal by Laura Pedersen (review)

My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson

Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich

Bloody Jack:  Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary "Jacky" Faber, Ship's Boy by L.A. Meyer

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman

Total books read:  43

Yes, Miss Granger?

2008-12-06T22:10:00.003-06:00

Leeway Cottage and Good-bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon

2008-11-18T23:01:00.002-06:00

A somewhat embarrassingly long while back, I received an email from someone at a marketing firm, asking if I'd like a copy of Beth Gutcheon's Good-bye and Amen to review on this blog. She assured me that I had no obligation to write anything specific, or even to only say positive things, so I happily agreed. I must admit that upon first opening it, I was a little concerned. Good-bye and Amen is written as a series of short passages in the voices of a cast of nearly four dozen characters, as if an unseen interviewer has asked them questions. I decided to give it my best try, and before long I was completely wrapped up in the story of Eleanor, Monica, and Jimmy, the grown and recently-orphaned children of a brilliant, quiet father and a brash, domineering mother.

The secondary characters -- a majority of the cast -- faded into the background a bit, and helped to flesh out the town of Dundee, Maine, site of the family's beloved summer home, Leeway Cottage. Through the course of the book, the three main characters examine their childhoods and growing-up years, their relationship with their parents, and their parents' relationship to each other. The framework of the story is a last summer at Leeway, where the three siblings and their spouses struggle to divide up their parents' possessions while remaining civil with each other. Old hurts are laid bare, new wounds are laid open, but ultimately all the characters discover they still have some growing up to do and that they love each other in spite of the emotional hardships of their upbringing.

The plot device of interview and remembrance was so well done that at least a half-dozen times I found myself flipping to the front cover, just to make sure it really said, "A Novel" under the title. The illusion was furthered with the clever inclusion of a section of "family photographs" in the middle of the book, complete with captions. (Incidentally, I am dying to know who all the people in the photos are, and whether the photos inspired the story or if the author just put them in later to shore up the believability.) Even without that, this would've been a deeply engaging book, sweetly told and rather beautifully rendered.

I only had two small issues with the story. First, there are passages in italics that seem to be written in the voices of people watching the action unfold from their afterlife in Heaven. For the most part, I was not sure who these people were supposed to be, or how their observations really fit into the larger story. They did provide a way to offer a bit of exposition here and there, but overall I didn't feel like they totally fit into the larger tale. Secondly, I didn't realize it until I'd started the book, but Good-bye and Amen is a sequel. Since I hadn't read the first book, there were a few things that took me longer to work out than they probably should've. That said, I really enjoyed Good-bye and Amen, and would definitely recommend it.

Once I'd finished it, I was quite curious about the first book, Leeway Cottage. I really liked the characters (well, except for Norman, but I won't give anything away), and was curious to see where they'd come from. I also wondered if reading the first book would give me any insight into the characters who seemed to be watching from the great beyond. Deciding to go out on a limb, I emailed the person who had contacted me, and asked if there was any way I could get a copy of Leeway Cottage to review here as well. She agreed, and the book landed on my doorstep days later.

Leeway Cottage is written in a more traditional style. It begins during the childhood of Sydney Brant -- mother of Eleanor, Monica and Jimmy -- and more or less tells the story of her entire life, all the way up until her death, which sets in motion the events of Good-bye and Amen. A reader approaching these books in the proper order would no doubt go into the second one with an understanding of where the characters have come from, and with sympathies firmly in place for some of them. I had a bit of the opposite experience. I read first about the cold side of Sydney, and about her husband Laurus as a quiet and almost meek man, and only later got to see the pair fleshed out and living their own lives. Sydney's treatment of her children is no less regrettable after knowing about her own awful mother, but it at least is a bit more understandable.

My favorite aspect of Leeway Cottage was getting to meet Laurus Moss, the young virtuoso pianist who weds Sydney and then leaves her to birth and raise their oldest daughter alone while he works for the Danish resistance during World War II. I'm not much for period dramas for the most part, but the tales of Laurus's war years -- and the story of what happened to his sister Nina to turn her into the frail shadow of a woman she is in Good-bye and Amen -- were captivating. Leeway Cottage is engaging and well-written, with a scope that has to be respected -- almost an entire life laid out with both sympathy and unflinching honesty. The reader can see Sydney for the flawed woman she grows up to be, but is never prodded to despise her, or even really to pity her. The characters are not neat, pat creations. They are rounded and rough-edged, imperfect and typical, and I think that's why they came across to me as such realistic, believable people.

I liked these two books so much that I hate to give them away. I'm pretty sure I'll want to pick these up and read them again before long (especially since I'm still working out the observers-from-beyond angle). But when I asked for a copy of the second (or first, really) book, I promised I'd do a giveaway when I was done to drum up interest in the reviews.

If you're interested in winning my copies of Leeway Cottage and Good-bye and Amen, leave a comment on this post and share a favorite summer vacation memory. Don't forget to include your email address so I can get in touch with you if you win. The giveaway is open to residents of the U.S. and Canada, and ends at midnight on December 5th.

And the winner is...

Congrats to Kaye!

Thanks to everyone who read and commented. Check back soon, because there are more giveaways coming up!

Free Neil Gaiman book! Free!

2008-09-13T00:38:00.003-05:00

Neil Gaiman is offering his fantastic novel Neverwhere FREE to read online or on your computer! Click here for all the details.

If you've never read any of his work, give it a try. You can't beat free, and he is really amazing.

Hee!

2008-09-04T19:19:00.003-05:00

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

2008-08-31T11:13:00.004-05:00

I received Hurry Down Sunshine through the Early Reviewers program. The book is a memoir recording the psychotic break suffered by Greenberg's daughter Sally, who is hospitalized and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The book easily conveys the shock and worry that Greenberg and his wife experience through the summer of Sally's break and treatment, and is sympathetic but honest about Sally's condition. To me, the most heartbreaking part was Sally, only 15 years old at the onset of her illness, realizing she was going to have to try to find her way back to herself, even though she'd not really discovered who she was yet. By turns sad and hopeful, and often reading a lot like a blog, the book was an easy read about a difficult subject.

I'm going to give away my copy of Hurry Down Sunshine, so if you're interested, leave a comment below and tell me ( 1 ) your email address and ( 2 ) your favorite nonfiction book. The giveaway is open to residents of the US and Canada, and will end at midnight on September 21.

Winner!
Congrats to Yan L, and thanks to everyone who commented :D

Here are some other cool book giveaways floating around the internet:

On My Bookshelf is giving away a copy of Anatomy of a Boyfriend.

Reading and Ruminations is giving away three Barnes & Noble giftcards.

Bookroom Reviews is giving away a copy of Mia King's Sweet Life and a basket of chocolates.

Fashionista Piranha is hosting a Neil Gaiman giveaway that I desperately, desperately want to win: an ARC copy of The Graveyard Book, a copy of Coraline, a Lush bath bomb and bubble bath, AND $25 to a charity of the winner's choice. And she's adding new prizes for every 50 entries, solidifying both her status as most kickass giveaway host AND the fact that I'll never win this one. Oh, well...I have to try!

And Random Wonder has posted a HUGE list of book giveaways from all over.

Summer Blowout by Claire Cook

2008-07-26T21:39:00.006-05:00

I received Summer Blowout through the Library Thing Early Reviewers Program. It took me a little while to get into the story, in part because the main character, Bella Shaughnessy, is a makeup artist and spends quite a bit of the first few chapters talking about makeovers and salons and lipstick. I don't wear makeup and know nothing about it, so I was at a bit of a disadvantage.

I'm glad I didn't give up on the book, because it did get better. I loved the relationship Bella had with her brother Mario, and thought that she was a believable and relatively likable character. Her love interest, Sean Ryan, is nice and funny and doesn't do anything sleazy or suspect, which is nice in a chick lit novel. Overall, Summer Blowout was a light, fast read, which is sometimes just what a summer day calls for.

I'd like to pass on my copy of the book, in the interest of sharing the summer fun. If you're interested, leave me a comment and tell me about your favorite summer book. You can name an individual book, a genre, or even share a treasured summer reading memory. Don't forget to include your email address. US residents only, since this is the first giveaway I've tried and would like to start simple. Contest closes on August 14th at midnight.

To be fair, here's one of my favorite summer reading memories: the summer before the Two Towers movie came out, I re-read the book. I went to a writer's workshop that summer in a town with an open-air chapel that overlooked some fields and a small strip of woods. It was the perfect setting for a lazy afternoon reading about the battle at Helm's Deep, and I know that every time I re-read that book, I'll be transported back to that day.

Your turn, and good luck!

Winner!

Congratulations, bibliophile 81! I plugged all the entries into random.org, randomized them, and then emailed MB at work to ask him to pick a number.

Thanks to everyone who entered. I'll probably be giving away a few more advanced copy books in the next few months, so check back!

Just kidding!
The bibliophile admitted she just entered the contest to be supportive, and had already looked at the book at the library. I re-listed everyone, re-randomized it, and had her pick a number. So, congratulations to geek girl!

To Be Read List

2008-07-26T10:37:00.003-05:00

Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies? by Jena Pincott

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

How Shakespeare Changed Everything by Stephen Marche

Why We Get Fat Gary Taubes

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Mademoiselle Boleyn by Robin Maxwell

Spiced by Dalia Jurgenson

If I Tell by Janet Gurtler

Jane by April Lindner

Run, don't walk

2008-07-11T23:23:00.000-05:00

If you are at all fond of "magical realism" (think Practical Magic style stuff), then get thee to a bookstore or a library and find a copy of Sarah Addison Allen's Garden Spells. It is WONDERFUL.

Lula would agree

2008-06-20T07:31:00.001-05:00

I went to the library yesterday on my way home from work to pick up the copy of Odd Hours that I had on hold. The clerk told me I had another hold, and then said, "Aha! It's in the back!" She vanished into the work room and then came back out with a copy of Fearless Fourteen.

"Brand new and never been checked out!" she exclaimed, waving it around reverently, not in a spastic way, but as if to say Ta-daaaa! "The one we've all been waiting for, so we can read more about Ranger."

"I want to see her end up with Morelli," I admitted. "I'm in the minority, I guess."

"I don't care who she ends up with," the clerk announced with finality, scanning the book and sliding it across the counter to me. "I just want to hear about Ranger."

True that, sister. True that.

Forever Odd and Brother Odd by Dean Koontz

2008-05-03T21:30:00.004-05:00

Ack! Epic fail! It has been my goal to write at least one post on this site each month, and I totally dropped the ball in April. If April had 31 days, I'd be fine, because on Thursday I thought, "Crap! Need to hurry up and write a book post!"

Oh, wait. Damn.

Anyhoodle, I've read quite a few books lately, and just haven't had the time to write about them. Back in February and March I followed up the highly enjoyable Odd Thomas with the two sequels, Forever Odd and Brother Odd. Forever Odd was problematic, to put it lightly. The setting was great -- the ruin of a burned-out casino in the desert -- but the rest was not so great.

Odd was still a fantastic character, but the supporting players who made the first novel so rich were barely featured. I have a pretty good ability to willingly suspend my disbelief, but this plot was a bit much even for me. I won't give it all away in case anybody wants to read it, but let's just say it would've been bad enough if the villain was a dominatrix who duped Odd's friend into telling her all of Odd's secrets and then kidnapped him to get to Odd. But did she really need to have vampire henchmen, an obsession with the undead, and did there need to be a wolf involved? I mean, I could've probably handled one of those things. Even two. But all of them? And I'm only altering the details a little bit. Gah. To be honest, as much as I love Odd as a character, I would recommend reading Odd Thomas and then skipping straight to Brother Odd.

Brother Odd also didn't stand up to the first book, but it was much better than Forever Odd. After the difficult (and bizarre) events of book 2, Odd has decided to retreat from the world. His friend and surrogate father, Chief Wyatt Porter, and the priest uncle of Odd's late girlfriend Stormy have arranged for him to live at a Benedictine abbey up in the Sierras. Odd finds peace for a time, but in the midst of his first snowstorm, things begin to get complicated again. First a monk goes missing, then the dark entities Odd calls bodachs start swarming in the dormitories that house the disabled children who are cared for by the nuns. The monsters of the book are pretty cool and very creepy, even if one scene felt like it borrowed a lot from Neil Gaiman's Corinthian. The plot was a bit over the top, but Koontz once again filled Odd's world with interesting and endearing secondary characters, and my suspension of disbelief wasn't taxed too terribly. It was encouraging that the third book was such an improvement over book two, and it gave me hope that the upcoming fourth book will be decent. We'll see!

shelfporn

2008-03-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

I love storage solutions almost as much as I love books, so when it comes to storage solutions for books? I'm so there. The bibliophile forwarded me a feed the other day with links to several really cool bookcase ideas.

Some of them looked fantastic, but seem like they might damage the books, especially paperbacks, over time:

Others were very artsy and chic, and I could almost see them in my house (even though I'm not very chic at all):

This "storyline" shelf by Frederik Roije represents the soundwave created by speaking the word "bliss." How appropriate is that?

This equation bookshelf from estudio breder would make a great gift for my sister, the math major:

Any shelves that hold books on a diagonal would drive me bonkers, I think. They kind of make me go cross-eyed, and I know my anal-retentiveness would kick in and I'd spend all my waking hours arranging and rearranging and trying to get everything to look just right:

These aren't really my style, but I think they're pretty cool:

These, I love. These I want in my house RIGHT NOW, please:

This is a wicked cool idea. Probably wouldn't work in my house, but I dig it:

As far as how to arrange books on traditional shelves, I'm glad that a lot of design sites recommend mixing traditional side-by-side arrangements with stacking books. It saves space in a big way, and also creates a little bit more visual interest:

I also love the recently popular trend of arranging books by cover color to create a rainbow effect. I don't think I'd be able to do it if it required breaking up series or sets, but I love looking at photos of other people's efforts:

There's an entire Flickr pool devoted to spectrum shelves.

Here's the original bookshelves post.

Edited to add: one of my message board friends posted this the other day, and I cannot believe that something so awesome is in the world. Library built into a staircase:

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

2008-03-01T01:07:00.000-06:00

Odd Thomas was my first Dean Koontz book, even though I've been aware of his work for years. As with many books (including the Stephanie Plum series and the incredible American Gods), I was alerted to the existence of this one via an audiobook my mom was listening to the other day when I stopped by the house. The book is not great literature, it is not going to change the world, but it's really, really enjoyable. Be warned -- it's not a happy story, though there are some really funny lines, and the ending is not entirely without hope. I previously associated Koontz with gory horror stories, but Odd Thomas is not a nasty book. It's more of a character-driven paranormal-tinged mystery, and a page-turner to boot (I started the sequel today, and in two hours reached chapter 19 / page 111).

The titular character, Odd Thomas, comes by his name honestly if strangely. His mother sometimes told him she meant to name him Todd, and other times claims he was meant to be named Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle, and blames a typographical error for his unusual name. His father says his name was always meant to be Odd, but offers no explanation. Odd is regularly visited by the unhappy dead, who sometimes seek justice through him, though they never speak. He also suffers grim semi-prophetic dreams. Because of his complicated secret, Odd keeps his life as simple as possible--no car, no life insurance, no plans to ever leave the smallish city of Pico Mundo, California. He works as a fry cook at a local grille, spends lots of time hanging out with the ghost of Elvis, and knows trouble is coming when the streets of his hometown begin to fill with dark entities called bodachs.

The book is populated with well-drawn secondary characters, such as Odd's soulmate, the lovely but unlikely-named Stormy Llewellyn; his tragic landlady, Rosalia, whose entire family went "invisible" when their plane was hijacked on September 11 and who needs Odd to visit her each morning to verify that she herself has not turned invisible; and Odd's mentor, 450-pound mystery author Little Ozzie Boone, who keeps a Greebo-like cat named Terrible Chester. With their support, Odd must face down the greatest evil ever to brew under the blistering Mojave sun.

The entire story takes place in less than 48 hours, but never feels rushed or over-filled. For this achievement alone, I'd recommend it, but Odd is also one of the most endearing characters I've discovered lately, and his first starring gig has many things to recommend it. If you're in the mood for something with action, suspense, highly likeable characters, and just enough depth, give Odd Thomas a try. I don't think you'll regret it.

Book Nerd Makeout Meme

2008-01-27T01:52:00.000-06:00

a.k.a. Ten Literary Characters I Would Totally Make Out With If I Were Single and They Were Real But I’m Not, Single I Mean, I Am Real, But I’m Also Happily Married and Want to Stay That Way So Maybe We Should Forget This.

crossposted from the regular blog at the urging of the bibliophile

The hilarious Radioactive Jam tagged me for this back in early October, but I wanted to save it for NaBloPoMo (for obvious reasons).

So, here goes:

1. Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, from the Scottish play

I can't really explain this one, other than to admit that it's probably based less on the actual play than on the fact that the actor who played Macbeth in the production I saw as a junior in high school was FREAKING HOT. That guy made crazy look so terribly sexy.

2. Pyetr Kochevikov from Rusalka by CJ Cherryh

I've long been a sucker for the bad boy with a heart of gold, and I've had a crush on Pyetr since I first read this book around age twelve. Too bad he ends up married to a wizard who could kill me with her mind.

3. Thomas from Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel

Speaking of bad boys with mysterious pasts...

4. Borrible Jones from Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint

Hot mysterious tinker with a great sense of humor. What's not to like?

5. Geordie Riddell from Charles de Lint's various Newford books

He's a fiddler who plays at faerie revels and is sweetly and deeply devoted to his best friend and secret flame, Jilly. A date at a faerie revel?? Hell yes.

6. Bonanza Jellybean from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Yowza.

7. Jesse, the hottie ghost from Meg Cabot's Mediator series

Tall, dark, and handsome; great body; sexy accent...sign me up. Okay, okay...so he's also a 19th-century murder victim. Details, details.

8. Shadow from American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Not sure I'd care to meet his dad, though.

10. Jamie Fraser from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander / Dragonfly in Amber / Voyager

Tall, strong, loyal, handsome, Scottish accent, and good in bed. Um, yes.

10. Sam Vimes from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series

HEART!

2008-01-11T01:12:00.000-06:00

Which Discworld Character are you like?
created with QuizFarm.com

You are Captain Carrot Ironfounderson of the City Watch in the greatest city on the Disc, Ankh-Morpork! A truly good natured, honest guy who knows everyone and is liked by all. Technically a dwarf, but only by adoption. You'd rather not be reminded that you are the true heir to the throne, but that does explain why people naturally follow your orders.

Carrot Ironfounderson

88%

Gytha (Nanny) Ogg

56%

Greebo

56%

Death

50%

Lord Havelock Vetinari

50%

Esmerelda (Granny) Weatherwax

50%

The Librarian

50%

Commander Samuel Vimes

38%

Cohen The Barbarian

31%

Rincewind

19%

Books Read in 2008

2008-01-02T21:33:00.031-06:00

Rocket Man by William Elliott Hazelgrove

All the Clean Ones Are Married:  and other everyday calamities in Moscow by Lori Cidylo

Larry and the Meaning of Life by Janet Tashjian

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

The Map Thief by Heather Terrell (review)

Nation by Terry Pratchett

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Brisingr by Christopher Paolini

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

Iodine by Haven Kimmel

Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce

In the Hand of the Goddess by Tamora Pierce

Alanna:  the First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Leeway Cottage by Beth Gutcheon

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Why I Let My Hair Grow Out by Maryrose Wood

Good-Bye and Amen by Beth Gutcheon

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg (review)

The Used World by Haven Kimmel

The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz

Summer Blowout by Claire Cook  (review)

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

In Odd We Trust (graphic novel) by Dean Koontz & Queenie Chan

Odd Hours by Dean Koontz

Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Bottlemania:  How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It by Elizabeth Royte

Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

The Spymaster's Lady by Joanna Bourne

Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (and Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom) by Celia Rivenbark

Free for All:  oddballs, geeks, and gangstas in the public library by Don Borchert

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

Paranoid Park by Blake Nelson

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz (review)

Forever Odd by Dean Koontz (review)

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz (review)

Coast to Coast Ghosts by Leslie Rule

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich

Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair by Laurie Perry

Total books read:  46

The Golden Compass: a side-by-side review

2007-12-09T22:36:00.000-06:00

Before I get started, let me come right out and say that I just finished The Golden Compass for the first time on Friday. I haven't been a lifelong fan like some people, so my opinions are going to be based on a newcomer's view of Lyra's world.

I loved the book. I haven't been so caught up in a story since reading Trickster's Choice, when I'd come back to my desk after lunch and find that my mind was still back with Aly and her spying. In the week or so of lunch breaks it took me to read The Golden Compass, I spent a lot of time wishing I could blow off my real work and go back to what Lyra and the gyptians and Iorek Byrnison and Lee Scoresby were up to.

I found all the characters believable, I loved the daemons, and the world was pretty masterfully created. I liked tough, plucky Lyra and her cast of supporters very much. Like the later Harry Potter books, The Golden Compass is definitely not intended for children or sensitive teenagers. The scene where Lyra and Pantalaimon were nearly separated made me cry, and the bear fight was pretty intense.

I did find that the big revelation about the nature of Dust at the end felt sort of tacked-on. The whole story could've proceeded just as well without it, and in a way it seemed like Pullman created a world with magic and depth and then at the end decided it needed to Represent Something Bigger. But, like I said, I've only read the first book once, so I'll have to see how I feel when I've finished the other two installments.

Now, for the movie. As always with a movie based on a book, there's no possible way to get every detail onto the screen. The film did a good job covering all the major segments of the plot, and even though at first the transitions between them seemed sort of choppy, I did eventually get used to the pacing. The things that were added and altered made sense for the presentation / pacing on the screen, and the casting was flawless. The effects were beautiful but not overwhelming. It never felt like the director was showing off, or that the movie was simply a showcase for the CGI wizardry. I especially loved the armored bears, and the spectacular battle at Bolvangar, where Tartars, gyptians, and witches clash in the snow.

I haven't read much of anything about the "controversy" surrounding the film, though a cursory Google search revealed charming headlines such as "Christian Groups Claim Pro-Atheist 'Stealth Campaign' in Nicole Kidman Fantasy Film 'The Golden Compass.'" (A pro-atheist stealth campaign? Oooh! Nefarious!) And apparently the Catholic League put out a pdf booklet called The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked. Oh, my. Anyhow, the movie was somewhat sanitized for public viewing, and everything was vagued-up. The Magisterium was presented as a shadowy government agency and the Catholic church was never specifically mentioned. Dust was presented as something that causes people to have "bad thoughts."

As usual, if people hadn't made such a fuss over the movie as an attack on Christianity, most of the non-reading film-going public would have never made any connections at all. In fact, after the movie, my mom (whose parish priest apparently wrote an anti-Golden Compass diatribe involving the phrase "endanger your immortal soul") overheard several people in the restroom saying, "I don't get it. There wasn't anything in there about the Catholic church at all!" That said, the film--like the book--is not for very young children. I heartily recommend it, but I also recommend that parents see it on their own and decide for themselves if their kids can handle the action and the scarier scenes.

I hope that the movie gets lots of people interested in reading the books for themselves, and that people decide to watch and read and decide for themselves whether or not the religious kerfluffle is all a bunch of nonsense.

**SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT**

**SERIOUSLY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. IF YOU GO FURTHER AND ARE DISAPPOINTED, YOU HAVE NO ONE BUT YOURSELF TO BLAME.**

Some of the darker elements of the plot have been diluted or left out. The children with their souls cut away are glossed over a bit, and instead of finding Tony Makarios in the shack by the lake, Lyra finds Billy Costa. Billy doesn't die, though his daemon is gone. The horrible scene in which Lyra and Pan fight for their lives at Bolvangar is much shorter and less wrenching. However, the bear fight is NOT as toned down as I expected. I really did not think they would show Iorek tearing off the bear king's jaw, but it happened, exactly like in the book. When it happened, about ten people in our theater actually cried out in surprise and horror, and a little kid almost started crying. It's not an overly gross scene, there's no blood at all, but gah.

The movie has the scene of the children escaping from Bolvangar and the events at Svalbard reversed, but after the movie was over, it made a lot of sense. The movie ends after the battle at Bolvangar, with Lyra and Roger setting out to find Lord Asriel. I'm sure a lot of purists will be horrified, but I think it makes a lot of sense as a film to have the story end there, instead of with Lyra alone (except for Pantalaimon, of course), her best friend dead, and her illusions about her father destroyed for good.

In a way, I'm glad I didn't find out about these books until now, because I can't imagine reading the first one and then having to wait around for the second to be published.

Oh, and just for fun, go to www.goldencompassmovie.com and take the quiz to meet your daemon. I've got a fox named Archeleron, and MB has a moth named Aspasa.

A PSA for Booklovers

2007-12-08T21:49:00.000-06:00

(I'm cross-posting this from my regular blog.)

I was going to start this post with "Would you like to earn free book money?" but then I realized ( A ) it would sound like a bad infomercial and ( B ) that's pretty much the most rhetorical question ever.

So, here's how to get that free money for books.

First, get a Borders Rewards card. It's a membership thing, but you don't have to pay dues, and it doesn't give you a discount. Don't worry, though...the discount part comes later.

Now, just for getting the Rewards account, you'll be signed up to get coupons via email. The lowest value coupon I've ever had was 20% off one item, and I get those at least once a month. Around the holidays, they send out 30% and even 40% ones on a semi-regular basis.

To get the free money, sign up at e-Rewards.com to take online surveys. Yes, the surveys can be slightly annoying, but you get to tell them how many you want to receive per month, and I believe there's an interest survey at the beginning. You'll only make a bit of money at a time (usually 50 cents a survey, but I've seen them go up to $7.50), but it adds up. I only started doing the surveys every time I got one around the beginning of the year (and I only get 1 - 2 surveys per week), and I cashed out my first $15 reward in November and still have $19 in my account.

The rewards can be used at lots of places, but the reason I signed up--and the reason I'm writing this entry--is to get Borders Bucks. It looks like you can only get $15 in a given month, but $15 of books is still pretty sweet. I used my $15 in Borders Bucks and a 25% off coupon and got the Dark is Rising box set for just under $8, which was a steal.

I'll admit that at times the surveys can be irritating. My main complaint is that the majority of the surveys I get offer $5 and then tell me about halfway through that I don't fit the demographic they're looking for. Even partial surveys give you 50 cents, though, so I figure if I keep plugging away I could earn another box set in no time. So what are you waiting for? Go get free books!

a booklover's Christmas tree

2007-12-03T08:32:00.000-06:00

link courtesy of the bibliophile

2007-11-11T01:32:00.000-06:00

"Bookish Landscapes" on Things Look Like Things

M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

2007-11-07T00:47:00.000-06:00

This book would make a great introduction for someone just starting out with Neil Gaiman's work. It's officially a young adult book, though a few of the stories seem a little heavy for young middle-schoolers. As such, it's a quick but thoroughly enjoyable read. In the introduction, Gaiman says that M is for Magic was inspired by Ray Bradbury's short story collections for young adult readers, R is for Rocket and S is for Space.

Three of the stories are repeats from Fragile Things: "October in the Chair," "How to Talk to Girls at Parties," and "Sunbird." As before, I really liked "October," found "How to Talk to Girls" a little abstract, and thought "Sunbird" was good but a little long. Of the new ones, I especially enjoyed these:

"The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds," which retells the nursery rhyme as a noirish detective story
"Chivalry," in which an old lady finds the Holy Grail at a thrift shop
"The Witch's Headstone," about a living boy who is being raised by the ghosts in a graveyard (and who seems to have a vampire for a guardian)

One story ("The Price"), about a black cat who fights the devil every night to protect the family that has taken him in as a stray, started out sort of whimsically but ended up sad. "Troll Bridge" had a semi-sad ending, but I liked it. "The Price" just left me wishing he'd given the cat a victory at the end rather than ominous ambiguity.

In the introduction, Gaiman writes, "Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit." Many of the stories in M is for Magic fit the bill, and as a collection it is cohesive and enjoyable.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

2007-10-31T01:26:00.000-05:00

O I forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.

Even before I knew about this book, I was vaguely familiar with the ballad of Tam Lin, and I read the Jane Yolen version when I worked in the children's department of the college library. Over the past few years, two friends have separately and enthusiastically recommended Pamela Dean's retelling to me. I even went looking for it once, only to find that it was out of print. Then, last year, I was puttering around at Barnes & Noble and saw it in a glossy brand-new paperback. The next time I talked to my friend Tamsyn online, I told her, "Hey, guess what I saw at B&N! Tam Lin in paperback!" She replied: "*bangs head on desk* I'm sending it to you and the Untamed Shrew for Christmas. Don't tell her."

And she sent it! Most fun of all, I had actually completely forgotten about our conversation by the time the book arrived, so it was a surprise after all. I had it in my to-be-read stack until last month, when I packed it for our camping / wandering trip. Dean's Tam Lin is set at a Midwestern liberal arts college in the 1970s. The classic ballad actually plays a somewhat small role in the overall scheme of the book. Most of the tale is the story of main character Janet and her college years. Dean perfectly portrays the exciting but intimidating freedom of the first years away from home, the forging of intense friendships and the desperate sadness in the fleeting moments when you realize those friendships may not last forever, and the topsy-turvy emotions of 18-year-olds falling in love.

When the final magical encounter at last occurs, it's rather short and matter-of-fact, but it works. In Tam Lin, Dean spins a believable and very readable tale with just the right amount of magic mixed in. It's a great read for lazy summer days or cold winter afternoons in bed.

A New Book Meme

2007-10-01T01:59:00.000-05:00

Total number of books owned: I have no earthly idea, so I'm going to guess somewhere between 500 and 700. I'll let you know when we move again and I have to pack them!

Last book bought: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I checked it out from the library and loved it so much that I bought it at Barnes & Noble the day I finished it.

Last book read: Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Five books that mean a lot to you: This is going to be difficult!

1. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

It was one of the first Discworld books I read, and is still one of my very favorites from that series. Whenever I'm trying to introduce someone to Discworld, I usually recommend this one, because it works pretty well as a first look. It's funny, it has action, and you don't really have to be familiar with the whole Discworld universe to be able to enjoy it. Plus, I love Sam Vimes.

2. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

I'm counting the whole trilogy as one item. I realize they're not for everyone, but I really do love them. I have my mom's 1970s paperback copies, so they have the wonderful old-book smell and everything. Thinking of these books reminds me of reading The Return of the King for the second time. It was the summer before the movie came out, and I was reading it at this really cool outdoor church in a weird artsy commune type town, sitting on a ledge overlooking a field. I don't think I could've found a more perfect place to read about the battle at Minas Tirith.

3. Rusalka by CJ Cherryh

This has been one of my favorite books since I read it the first time. I think I was about twelve years old then. I also have a fondness for it because my mom recommended it to me. In a way, I feel like I grew up with the characters hanging around in my head, because I read it several times over the years that I first started trying to write fiction of my own. Rusalka and its two sequels really aren't the best books ever, but they'll always have a special place in my heart.

4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Whenever a really and truly amazing book comes along, it's always special. American Gods was that book for me last year. Other than Good Omens, this was my introduction to Neil Gaiman, and I've been hooked ever since. With a really good book, I feel like I'm caught up in the story. With this one, I felt like I was actually in the story, down on the ground, watching it unfold right alongside Shadow. It was a great ride.

5. Tailypo by Joanna Galdone

This book scared the pants off me when I was a kid, but I loved it anyway. I don't know how many times I looked at it at the school library. My mom works at the public library now, and several years ago she brought home some raggedy picture books that her branch was going to throw away. She saved them from the garbage and was planning to take them to Goodwill so they wouldn't go to waste. One of the books was Tailypo and I snatched it up. It still scares the pants off me, but I'm so very happy to have it.

Tagging: the bibliophile, Megs, Blogapotamus Rex, the Pop Culture Librarian, and Danger. Who knows if they'll see this, but I figured it was worth a try!

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell by Laurie Notaro

2007-08-06T01:16:00.000-05:00

I enjoyed Laurie Notaro's first novel quite a bit. The main character, Maye, seems to be pretty closely based on Laurie Notaro, but that's not a bad thing. She's funny and smart and relatable, and her fruitless search for a friend in her new hometown is basically exactly what I feared was going to happen to me when I thought MB and I might be moving somewhere new for me to attend grad school.

Her various missteps into the social circles of Spaulding, Washington, are really quite hilarious, from the "Gothic literature" group who are more into Wicca than Henry James to the bitterly divorced bookstore clerk who can't hold her liquor. Maye's yard man warns her that the local wildlife will kill her ("Raccoons are nocturnal animals, and if you see one when it's light outside, that thing's got the distemper and it's crack-ass crazy. Don't make eye contact. Never look it in the eye, or it will rip your face off with its claws and eat it like it was a Fruit Roll-Up."), and her mailman has a grudge against her dog Mickey. Worst of all, her husband's delightful new boss is married to a poisonous shrew who takes perverse pleasure in insulting Maye to her face every time they meet.

Then Maye decides to enter the town's annual Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, and things start to get really interesting. It didn't take me too long to figure out the twist, but there's something satisfying about guessing the end and then seeing it play out, so I don't think it took anything away from the book. All in all, this one is a nice, fun romp, and should appeal to established Laurie Notaro fans and newcomers alike.

You're Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton!

2007-08-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

You combine all the elements of a mad scientist, a brash philosopher, a humble researcher, and a money-hungry attracter of tourists. With all these features, you could build something monumental or get chased around by your own demons. Probably both, in fact.

A movie based on your life would make millions, and spawn at least two sequels that wouldn't be very good. Be very careful around islands.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Wishes do come true?

2007-07-30T23:41:00.001-05:00

Haven Kimmel has a new novel coming out in September! Eeeek!

2007-07-29T19:13:00.000-05:00

2007-07-29T01:59:00.000-05:00

Books Read in 2006

2007-07-29T01:56:00.000-05:00

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (review)

Sunshine by Robin McKinley (review)

Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

books 1 - 6 of the Mediator series by Meg Cabot

Eric by Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Mommy wars:  stay-at-home and career moms face off on their choices, their lives, their families by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett

Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner

Mort by Terry Pratchett (review)

Widdershins by Charles de Lint

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (review)

Julie and Julia : 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen by Julie Powell

Frindle by Andrew Clements

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

Sightings:  the gray whale's mysterious journey by Brenda Peterson and Linda Hogan

The Dogs of Bedlam Farm by Jon Katz

The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint

Abhorsen by Garth Nix

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

Lirael by Garth Nix

The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks

Marley and Me by John Grogan

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Medicine Road by Charles de Lint

Jack of Kinrowan by Charles de Lint

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett (review)

Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera (review)

The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Total Book Count:  44

Books Read in 2007

2007-07-28T20:24:00.000-05:00

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper

The Grey King by Susan Cooper

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper

M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

Little (Grrl) Lost by Charles de Lint

Promises to Keep by Charles de Lint

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Charmed Thirds by Megan McCafferty

Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty

Winkie by Clifford Chase

Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell by Laurie Notaro

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling

The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho

Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel (review)

The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel (review)

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (review)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling (review)

Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich

Human Wildlife:  the life that lives on us by Robert Buckman

An Idiot Girl's Christmas:  True Tales From the Top of the Naughty List by Laurie Notaro

Pants on Fire by Meg Cabot

Interior Desecrations:  Hideous Homes From the Horrible 70s by James Lileks

Sammy's Hill by Kristin Gore

Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon (review)

Trickster's Queen by Tamora Pierce

Trickster's Choice by Tamora Pierce

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie

Gorgon : paleontology, obsession, and the greatest catastrophe in earth's history by Peter D. Ward (review)

Forever in Blue by Ann Brashares

Garbage Land:  on the secret trail of trash by Elizabeth Royte

In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

Sister Bernadette's barking dog : the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences by Kitty Burns Florey

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (review)

Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks

Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause

Round Ireland With a Fridge by Tony Hawks

Multiple Choice by Janet Tashjian

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (review)

Total Book Count:  51

Something Rising (Light and Swift) by Haven Kimmel

2007-07-13T01:02:00.000-05:00

I LOVED this book. Absolutely loved it. It started out strong, breaking my heart with little bone-deep truths and minute, mundane tragic moments. The middle was a little slower, but still solid, and it picked back up for a really nice finish.

Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy's long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the object--a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter--and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack.

The main character, Cassie Claiborne, is the daughter of a mostly-absent pool hustler father and a withdrawn, mourning mother. Her older sister, Belle, grows from an odd child into an extremely eccentric adult. Even as a child, Cassie is strong for her sister, for her mother, for her friends. When her father finally leaves for good, she hustles pool and works odd jobs to pay the bills and support Belle and their mother. In The Solace of Leaving Early, Kimmel reveals early on that Langston's brother Taos is gone, and that the circumstances of his absence are tragic, but it's not until nearly the end that the reader finds out what happened. The move works well, creating interest and slight tension without feeling like an obtrusively dangling carrot. In Something Rising, the lure is the knowledge that Cassie's father Jimmy will leave. It's not so much finding out why he leaves, but examining how his leaving resonates through Cassie's life, that makes this carrot worth chasing.

Cassie grows up angry, but in the end she finds a way to escape the trap her life has always been, and the journey is endearing and beautiful, though sad at times. The final task of Cassie's struggle to accept the truths of her life / upbringing was masterfully written and emotionally gripping. The most surprising aspect of the book, to me, was a one-line revelation of a small truth about a minor character that ratcheted up my respect for Kimmel's story-weaving skills to a whole new level. I can't say anything more than that, but I hope if you read both novels (and you should) you'll enjoy the moment as much as I did.

The groundhog was lying belly up. He'd been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also, his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he'd--

"What is it, Cassie, do you know?"

--been turned to liquid. There weren't bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.

"I'm going in, I'm not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence, Cassie, so those dogs can't get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?"

Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat. It wasn't his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog's back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she'd managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie's back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by the paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back was arched like a high jumper's, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.

Too bad I didn't see this cake before I got married!

2007-06-29T19:42:00.000-05:00

Neat, huh? In reality, we wouldn't have been able to afford it, and our cheesecakes were better anyway since MB doesn't even like cake. But! It's still pretty spiffy.

I also liked this one, even though it has nothing to do with books:

I know a girl who lives in Minnesota, and she says that the cityscape is a pretty good representation of the skyline of Minneapolis.

In other news, I realize it's been way too long since I blogged any books. I've been reading, just not taking the time to write about what I've read.

When I went to San Francisco last month, I took a whole stack of books with me, just in case. One of the best choices I made, bookwise, was to grab Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the last minute. It got me through my short flight to O'Hare, my three-hour layover, and almost all of my four-hour flight from Chicago to San Francisco. I've read it before, but only once, and that was back in the summer of 2003. Since the movie is coming out next month, I figured it would be a good idea to re-read. I liked it very much, although, as last time, I felt like smacking Harry a few times for his overwrought and misplaced adolescent rages. And I still think Sirius's death was a cheap tearjerker move. She's got one more book in which to convince me otherwise.

On the way home, I was extra glad to have books when my flight got cancelled and I got rebooked for a 1:19 PM flight instead of the 6:35 AM flight I started with. I read Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark during my extremely long wait, and I liked it quite a lot. The heroine of this "Southern Vampire Mysteries" series, Sookie Stackhouse, is no Sunshine, but she's a good character. In some ways, she's similar to Sunshine, in that both are pretty ordinary girls--not geniuses, not knockout babes, not karate champions. Where Sunshine had a magical heritage, Sookie has a magical talent--she can read people's minds. Because of this, she has few friends and zero romantic experience. When she meets an "out of the coffin" vampire, things change, and before long, Sookie's trying to solve a mystery and stay alive long enough to figure out whether or not a vampire boyfriend is what she really wants.

My only objections to this story: unnecessary (in my opinion) murder of a family member, even more unnecessary murder of a pet, and a vampire named Bill. My friend Tam, who gave me the book, pointed out that Harris was likely trying to create an alternate take on the stereotypical vampire tale. Instead of femmy glam vampires named Lestat or whatnot, she created a vampire who represented a typical 1870s American Southerner. I'm okay with that, but wish she'd called him Will or Liam or even William. I just don't dig the name Bill, having once had a horrible coworker by that name. Besides, it's hard to take a vampire named Bill seriously when I kept thinking of Terry Pratchett's Death calling himself Bill Door in Reaper Man.

Pressing through my misgivings about the name turned out to be worth it, and the story was really enjoyable. I was surprised but not incredulous when the murderer was revealed, which is always really nice in a mystery. There was also one really unexpected and funny moment where it is revealed that a certain extremely famous, dead but occasionally still spotted singer still kicks around as a creepy pet-fancying vampire. I'm definitely going to look for the second book in the series the next time I'm in the mood for a sexy mystery.

After I finished Dead Until Dark, I moved on to Haven Kimmel's The Solace of Leaving Early, which the bibliophile recommended to me a few years back and even gave me for my birthday in the hope that I would remember to read it. I finally remembered, and I'm glad I did. Though parts of it felt heavy and a little over-academic, Solace is overall a very sweet, very unexpected story. It's pretty clear from the very beginning which two characters are going to find themselves falling in love, but what happens in between was refreshingly different. With a protagonist (the somewhat oddly named Langston Braverman) who is at times almost unlikeable, it was surprising just how drawn in to the story I felt, and I think it speaks well for Kimmel's writing that she let Langston's fragility show through her outer eccentricities and overbearing academic-ness. On its surface, the story is a bit unbelievable, but in reality it works, and works well. It's not a book you'd turn to for a quick, light read, but next time you feel up for something that takes you a little deeper, I recommend giving this one a try.

Another book meme

2007-05-27T14:00:00.000-05:00

(cross-posted from my regular blog)

Instructions: Look at the list of books below.

Bold the ones you’ve read.

Italicize the ones you're planning to read.

Cross out the ones you won’t read / aren't interested in.

Star the ones on your book shelves.

Place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

Do nothing to the ones that you may or may not read.

I grabbed two different lists and combined them, and then alphabetized them by title because I was really irritated by the haphazard arrangement.

*1984 - George Orwell

(The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho)

Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt

Angels and Demons - Dan Brown

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

Anna Karenina - Tolstoy

Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand

(Atonement - Ian McEwan)

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

*~~The Bible~~ (I tried reading it all the way through once and got through the second or third page of Numbers before I gave up.)

(Blindness - Jose Saramago)

The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

*Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

*Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding

The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger

The Celestine Prophecy - James Redfield

Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

The Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel

~~A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess~~ (From what I've heard about the movie, I don't think I'd enjoy the book.)

(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)

Confessions of a Shopaholic - Sophie Kinsella

~~The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas~~ (I love the newer movie version, but judging from the three or four pages of The Three Musketeers that I slogged through once, I don't think the book will be quite as interesting.)

*Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

(The Diviners - Margaret Laurence)

Dune - Frank Herbert

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Emma - Jane Austen

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

~~The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje~~

(Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald)

(Fifth Business - Robertson Davies)

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

*A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

~~The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom~~

*The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

~~Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell~~

*The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck

*Good Omens - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

~~Great Expectations - Charles Dickens~~

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

*The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

*Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - JK Rowling
*Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
*Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
*Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
*Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

(His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman)

*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

*The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

(I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb)

~~Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice~~

(In The Skin Of A Lion - Ondaatje)

*Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

(Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer)

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

~~Les Miserables - Victor Hugo~~

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

*The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis

*The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

*Lord of the Flies - William Golding

* The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien
*The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers
*The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

(Love in the Time of Cholera - Gael Garcia Marquez)

*The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

(Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides)

The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley

(Neuromancer - William Gibson )

~~The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks~~

(Not Wanted On the Voyage - Timothy Findley)

Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

One Hundred Years Of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

*Outlander - Diana Gabaldon

The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton

(The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett)

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

(The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay)

(A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving)

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

(Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier)

*The Red Tent - Anita Diamant

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I tried to read this as a kid, and I just remember that Colin whined a hell of a lot and I got bored.)

(The Secret History - Donna Tartt)

The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd

(The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zago)

*She’s Come Undone - Wally Lamb

(Shogun - James Clavell)

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - Ann Brashares

*Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

The Stand - Stephen King

(The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence)

(The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields)

(The Summer Tree - Guy Gavriel Kay)

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough

The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

*Ulysses - James Joyce

War and Peace - Tolstoy

*Watership Down - Richard Adams

White Oleander - Janet Fitch

Wizard’s First Rule - Terry Goodkind

(A Woman of Substance - Barbara Taylor Bradford)

The World According To Garp - John Irving

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Book Meme: 123.5

2007-05-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

(cross-posted from my regular blog)

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Since I was at the computer desk, I had MB pick a book at random from the shelf in the living room.

He picked Lirael by Garth Nix.

Page 123, sentence 5 is: "They didn't," replied the Dog happily.

If you want to play along, grab a book and either post your line here in the comments, or post it on your page and leave me a link! :)

Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon

2007-05-06T21:08:00.000-05:00

I read a few pages of Promise Not to Tell about two weeks ago at Barnes & Noble, and couldn't get the setup of the story out of my head. I requested it from the library, and it came in just in time for me to take it with me on a camping trip this weekend.

The book starts with a murder, but it was really the section right after the murder scene that hooked me:

My name is Kate Cypher and I am forty-one years old. I killed someone tonight. I have always believed myself to be a person incapable of murder. Suicide has crossed my mind once or twice, but murder? Never. Not this white-winged dove. I've marched for peace and give money on a regular basis to Amnesty International. I'm a school nurse who draws happy faces on Band-Aids, for Christ's sake.

But none of this changes the fact that it was little old me who pulled the trigger and, with near-perfect aim, put a hole in another human being's heart.

Promise Not to Tell is the story of the unsolved 1971 murder of Kate's best friend, 12-year-old Del Griswold, a girl no one really knew. It's the story of Kate coming to terms with her betrayal of Del just before her death and of a recent copy-cat murder. It's also a ghost story, and a damn good one.

The book alternates sections of the present-day story--Kate caring for her mother, stricken with Alzheimer's and a strange obsession with a gray-eyed blonde girl who's been dead for thirty years; Kate trying to comfort Opal, daughter of a woman who grew up in a hippie commune alongside Kate; the mystery of the recent murder of Opal's best friend; Kate's continuing guilt over Del's murder and reacquaintance with Del's brother Nicky--with the long-past story of Kate and Del's short and tragic friendship. The alternation of storylines never seemed choppy, and served well to establish tension in the story.

Some of the things I suspected about the story arc turned out to be accurate, especially in the case of the ghost story, but some aspects of the plot took me by surprise. I can't say much more than that without ruining the end, which would be unfair. Promise is utterly believable, just creepy enough without going too far (I was able to read it by the campfire and still sleep soundly in my tent afterwards), and enveloping. It's also pretty short, and a fast read. I definitely recommend it!

jennifer-mcmahon.com

Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History by Peter D. Ward

2007-04-27T00:36:00.000-05:00

Many people (maybe even most people) have heard of the K-T Boundary, the line of iridium-rich deposits marking the division between the Cretaceous Period and the Tertiary Period. In less sciencey-speak terms, most people have heard of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, because it's the one that killed the dinosaurs. Fewer people have heard of the Permian-Triassic extinction, but it was the Big One. After this so-called "Great Dying," almost 90 percent of the species on land and in the sea had been wiped out. 90 percent.

Even as a geology major, I knew only vaguely of the P-T extinction. I knew it was the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history, but I didn't realize that, as Peter Ward puts it in Gorgon, it basically reset the evolutionary clock. Large species of "mammal-like reptiles", the reptilian ancestors of modern mammals, were at the top of the food chain by the end of the Permian, but few survived the extinctions. I had forgotten that critters like Dimetrodon were Permian, even though I knew they were pre-mammals.

Sidebar: Dimetrodon was not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs' legs were directly under their bodies, like elephants. If it's got a sprawling, lizard-esque walk, it's not a dinosaur.

It's sort of amusing and maddening that the cover photo of a Gorgonopsian is credited as "dinosaur image," since Gorgons weren't dinosaurs, either.

Also, while grabbing the link for Dimetrodon, I found this hilarious note: "Dimetrodon appeared in the film Journey to the Centre of the Earth, live acted by iguanas." This, of course, begs one question--how'd they attach the sails? /sidebar

The Gorgonopsians for which the book was named were pretty fearsome characters:

However, they're only part of what Gorgon is about. Ward is a paleontologist, but he writes with an accessible journalistic style. The book tells the story of his quest to uncover the truth about the P-T extinction, documenting both the science behind the hunt and the specifics of spending more than ten years searching for bones and answers in the Karoo of South Africa, beginning in the late days of apartheid.

As a geologist (even a non-practicing one), I find his geology-related sections especially cool, but I suspect that even someone without a geology degree will find them interesting and easy to understand:

No other field of science has found it necessary to codify the timescale applicable to, and usually known only to, geologists. There is no formalized biological or chemical timescale, although, of course, all processes described by these two great fields have temporal components. All other fields of study simply use the intervals of time known to us all: seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on. Geologists, on the other hand, talk about periods and epochs, eras and zones, stages and series, the arcane subdivisions of what is known as the geological timescale. All are defined by death. The bigger the division, the greater the body count. For geologists, death becomes the ticking of the geological clock.

The divisions of time used in geology come from a study of the fossil record. Major time units are recognized and defined by mass-extinction events, sudden global catastrophes causing major biotic turnovers and extinctions. Two of these were especially dramatic. At the top of strata named the 250-million-year-old Permian System--and at the top of a much younger, 65-million-year-old Cretaceous System--the vast majority of animal and plant fossils were replaced by radically different assemblages of fossils. Nowhere else in time were such abrupt and all-encompassing changes in the faunas and floras to be found.

These two wholesale turnovers in the makeup of animal life on earth were of such magnitude that they were used to subdivide the geological timescale into three large-scale blocks of time: the Paleozoic Era, or "time of old life" (extending from the first appearance of skeletonized life 530 million years ago until it was ended by the gigantic extinction of 250 million years ago); the Mesozoic Era, or "time of middle life" (beginning immediately following the great Paleozoic extinction and ending 65 million years ago); and the Cenozoic Era, or "time of new life" (extending from the last great mass extinction to the present day.

Here's another supercool version of the time scale, and a link to another one.

There were so many times when I'd think, "That is exactly right!" while reading one of his descriptions.

For instance, after the field team couldn't afford to rent a Land Rover and got a little Korean car instead of the large sedan they asked for:

"We made our way through the valley once more, again slowly crawling over the large field, trying to avoid the holes and termite mounds. Time and time again, we scraped the bottom of the stolid car so unsuited for this type of fieldwork. This ridiculous Korean car was trying to kill us. Or, more accurately, I guess we were trying to kill it. I wondered then, as I do know, why there isn't some large box printed in red on every car rental form: "I swear on all that is holy that I am not a geologist and will not be using this rental car for geological fieldwork." How many rental cars must the fraternity of geologists have trashed?"

When I was in college, our professors always borrowed 15-passenger vans from the school to take us on field trips. When we brought them back, they were always full of dirt and mud and tiny pieces of all the rocks we'd hauled back from the field. Once, on a 10-day trip to Canada, the guys' van had the rankest smell imaginable, and no one could figure out why, until one day they opened the cooler and realized that the bottom was full of half-rancid juice that had leaked out of a package of ground beef. Lovely, yeah? We always wondered why the school still let us have vans, or why they didn't at least give us the same trashed vans every time.

And this sounded pretty familiar, based on my 6 1/2 weeks of geologic field camp in the desert valleys of Montana:

"Life in the field seems to accentuate everything. Food tastes better, smells are sweeter, and all things physical seem more pronounced. You get a sense that you are a center of consciousness being carried on a physical body and that the two are allied but separate things. And while the brain may not seem any better--quite the opposite if it is hot--the body is in its element. You--the brain, the Command Center in this situation--really take account of how your Mobile Unit is doing."

Ward can be funny, as he demonstrates with the caption accompanying a photograph of his alarmed-looking toddler son standing next to a Gorgon skull: "Patrick Ward, age two, being menaced by a large mammal-like reptile skull in the South African Museum--an example of paleontological child abuse."

He's also insightful, and I really like his style: "We had no outhouse at this camp. A shovel stood in the corner with a roll of toilet paper wound around its handle. Everyone found some remote spot behind some tree or other. It was awkward business on those cold mornings. We pretend we are not animals, with our antiseptic and comfortable bathrooms. The Karoo lays bare the lie."

I'm not sure I completely buy his conclusion about the cause(s) of the P-T extinction, but the book itself was fantastic and enveloping. Even though there's a lot of science, I feel like the book will be enjoyable for non-scientists, and I'd definitely recommend it as a good, non-dry nonfiction book about paleontology.

To conclude, I found this earlier this month and posted it on my other blog:

Brak = love, everybody! I predict you'll find Gorgon twice as amusing if you picture Brak every time Ward mentions the gorgonopsians.

A Bookish Birthday, Part 2

2007-04-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

I had a co-birthday party with my dear friend Danger this past Saturday night, and besides being an absolute blast, it added to the bookishness of my birthday.

As promised, the bibliophile gave me Anonymous Rex / Casual Rex, and she also gave me Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Since I loved The Mother Tongue, I have high hopes for this one.

The other party attendees also spoiled me, and I ended up with much-coveted Barnes & Noble gift cards to spend. I just finished Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Choice yesterday, and I loved it so much that I called the library and had them hold the sequel for me so I could pick it up after work. I decided it was high time I read the first set of Pierce's Tortall books, so tonight I redeemed half of my gift certificates for Alanna: the First Adventure and my own copy of Trickster's Choice.

Book birthdays are most definitely the best birthdays!

A Bookish Birthday

2007-03-15T02:41:00.000-05:00

Besides getting to take two fantastic outdoorsy trips for my birthday (which was on Tuesday), I was also the lucky recipient of several new books. On Friday, my sister gave me Terry Pratchett's Night Watch and Sergei Lukyanenko's Day Watch. Then, while we were at Barnes & Noble on Sunday to pick up some books that he wanted, MB let me get a two-in-one novel of Eric Garcia's Anonymous Rex and Casual Rex from the bargain table, even though he'd already taken me on the aforementioned trips and given me Munchkin Bites:

When I told the bibliophile about the finding the Rex book for so cheap, she admitted that she'd already got me a copy for my birthday, so while Danger and I were at B&N tonight / yesterday for our weekly chai date, I exchanged the first Rex book for Hot and Sweaty Rex, after being tipped off by the bibliophile that it was also on the clearance table. Yay! On Danger's insistence, I also got to pick out two more birthday books, so after much pondering, I settled on Charles De Lint's Memory & Dream and Bridge to Terabithia. Hooray for bookish birthdays!

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

2007-03-15T01:33:00.000-05:00

"For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way." --Margaret Lea

I don't remember hearing much buzz about this book. In fact, I can't even remember how I heard about it. It's possible that I saw it at the library or the bookstore and was mildly intrigued by the title, since I do have a liking for the number thirteen. In any case, my good friend / library fairy the bibliophile sent it down to the main library to be held on my behalf, and I read it a few weeks ago. I really, really liked it.

The narrator of the book is Margaret Lea, a young unmarried woman who works with her father in his bookshop, writes biographies as a hobby, and loves to read most of all things in life. She is a very cool character, and the author makes no apologies for Margaret's plainness, lack of romance, or bookish qualities. On the contrary, it is these things that make Margaret such a compelling narrator. The first few chapters, in which Margaret details her life and her love of books, were nearly perfect. There were portions that rang so true that I wanted to absorb them into my skin, where they'd remain as invisible tattoos, helping to define me. That probably sounds crazy or creepy, but it felt as if the author had found that undefinable feeling I get in my chest when I really connect with a book, and had put it down on paper.

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books."

She also addresses another concept that I have always loved to roll around in my mind:

"Lives--dead ones--are just a hobby of mine. My real work is in the bookshop. My job is not to sell the books--my father does that--but too look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to annihilation. For in the books they write they continute to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.

As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books ar read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead."

When Margaret is recruited to write the biography of one of the world's premiere writers, the mysterious and reclusive Vida Winter, the story takes a turn away from books, but The Thirteenth Tale doesn't suffer for it. The novel alternates scenes of Miss Winter's life--told as a third person account of the lives of the odd and often violent Angelfield family--with "real-time" scenes of Margaret interacting with Miss Winter and eventually investigating different angles of Miss Winter's story.

It is a rare book that makes both the reader in me and the fiction writer in me nod and emphatically agree with statements it makes, and The Thirteenth Tale is such a book. Besides the already-mentioned spot-on lines about reading, I particularly love this piece of dialogue between Miss Winter and Margaret:

" 'Life is compost.'

     I blinked.

     'You think that a strange thing to say, but it's true. All my life and all my experiences, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on that black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel.'

     I nodded, liking the analogy.

     'Readers,' continued Miss Winter, 'are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.' "

All of the characters in the book--even the peripheral ones--are written very vividly. The whole novel has great pacing and a good measure of quiet what-happens-next suspense. Calling a book a "page turner" is almost cliche, but the phrase actually applies to this book. I was enveloped in it, just as Margaret and her father were often enveloped in the books they read on slow afternoons in the book shop:

"After lunch, when we have finished the unpacking and the cataloging and the shelving and we have no customers, we sit reading as usual. It is late autumn, it is raining and the windows have misted up. In the background is the hiss of the gas heater; we hear the sound without hearing it for, side by side, together and miles apart, we are deep in our books."

One night while about halfway through the book, I decided to read "for a little while." I opened the book at 8:00 and didn't resurface until after midnight. I had no awareness of the passage of time, of really much of anything outside the story that was unfolding on the pages. That, to me, is the mark of an excellent book, a book that hearkens back to the all-encompassing reading experience of childhood. I felt a little like Margaret, who goes to bed promptly at 8:00 every night with a book in hand: "Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time."

"My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie." -- Vida Winter

In a story that revolves around secrets and half-truths, lies and the things that are often kept hidden, a twist ending was pretty much required, and Setterfield definitely delivers. I've read enough books that I usually get an inkling of what's going to happen when I know there's a twist coming. This makes it even more enjoyable when a story is able to keep me guessing until the very end, and The Thirteenth Tale did so. It's not a book with a perfect, pat ending, but I think that works in its favor. This is not a story that could be satisfactorily wrapped up and tied with a neat bow.

"I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels.

Contemporary literature is a world I know little of. My father had taken me to task on this topic many times during our daily talks about books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for his opinions. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish that I prefer.

During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod my head, but I always end up continuing in my old habits. Not that he blames me for it. There is one thing on which we are agreed: There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere."

Margaret's ending and Miss Winter's ending blend a bit of the old novel approach with a bit of the contemporary novel approach. I won't give anything away, but when you draw your line, I think you might want to keep The Thirteenth Tale on the "to be read" side of it.

Happy Blogiversary to Me

2007-02-24T03:11:00.000-06:00

I just realized that Badgerbooks had its one year anniversary this month. With only 15 posts (counting this one), it's not really a big deal, other than the fact that I'm finding it hard to believe that it's been a year already!

The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, by Bill Bryson

2007-02-02T23:43:00.000-06:00

"To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."

So begins the fourth paragraph of Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue. When I finished it a few weeks ago, I had dogeared so many pages to mark quotes I wanted to write down that I ended up buying the book so I could just note the best passages with a pencil instead of writing them all out. The Mother Tongue is basically about the origins and many, MANY eccentricities of the English language. I realize that probably sounds sort of dry and boring, but it's actually really funny and very cool. I'm sure it's not a book for everyone, but I think that English geeks and fans of solid nonfiction would really enjoy it.

And don't forget, it's often hilarious. One review I found online counseled, "Do not read this book in public. Actually that's a health warning which could be applied to most Bill Bryson books. Don't read them in a public place, because you'll laugh so much people will look at you like you're crazy. And don't whatever you do read them on a plane. Otherwise the other passengers will stare at you strangely for the remainder of the flight!" This rather closely echoes a comment left on my Christmas post by Northwoods Baby: "Bryson RULES, but don't listen to his books on tape if you're driving. Danger."

Some of my favorite passages:

"It is often noted that Chaucer's spelling was widely inconsistent: Cunt, if you will forgive an excursion into crudity (as we so often must when dealing with Chaucer), is spelled in at least five ways, ranging from kent to quainte. So it isn't possible to say whether the inconsistency lies with Chaucer or his copyists or both."

"Rather more alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:

Then owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat--which meant precisely the same then as it does now--but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him."

"Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the split infinitive. ... I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive:
1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted."

"One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.

But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change--at least slapdash change. Even the most liberal descriptivist would accept that there must be some conventions of usage. We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one's lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceedingly difficult to housebreak."

"To keep your pecker up is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously, pecker has the same slang meaning there), but to be stuffed is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, 'I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed,' an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone's fanny; in England it means a woman's pudenda. ... Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is--well, we've covered that."

"Often place names arise from mishearings or misunderstandings--notably the West Indies, which of course have nothing to do with India. They simply reflect Columbus's startling inability to determine which hemisphere he was in. Yucatan in Mexico means 'What?' or 'What are you saying?'--the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores."

"English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasurable in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little-noted idiosyncracy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility or, stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than 'Get fucked!' We might as well snarl, 'Make a lot of money!' or 'Have a nice day!'"

Overall, I liked The Mother Tongue so much that I thought about reading it all the way through again, but I've decided to tend to my ever-lengthening reading list instead. I definitely will pick this one up again, though.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

2007-01-22T00:58:00.000-06:00

"I think...that I would rather collect a life mis-spent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt." The words turned up in a dream and I wrote them down upon waking, uncertain what they meant or to whom they applied. ... It seemed like a fine title for a book of short stories. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.
-- Neil Gaiman, introduction to Fragile Things.

I finished Fragile Things several weeks ago, and then put it aside without writing about it so that I could dive right into reading Neverwhere (which I finished last week and haven't reviewed yet). Since the collection is made up of pieces written at various points in Gaiman's career, it was both eclectic and slightly uneven. But since it's Gaiman, even the weakest pieces are still pretty strong. For me, the least engaging stories were:

"A Study in Emerald" -- I found it somewhat intriguing but it didn't stick with me. I had to page back through it to remember what it was about when I sat down to write this entry.
"Forbidden Bride of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" -- According to the introduction, this was written when Gaiman was 22 years old and was tucked away unpublished for another 20 years after it was dismissed by editor friends. It felt to me like it was trying too hard to be scary. Not an awful piece, but definitely not on par with Gaiman at his most on-target, as one would expect from something so early in his career.
"Other People" -- I found this little circular piece to be interesting, conceptually, but it didn't make a huge impact.
"Diseasemaker's Croup" -- This one was somewhat hard to follow, and didn't hold my interest.
"Goliath" -- Not bad, but since it was written for the website of The Matrix, it had a derivative feel.

I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is not story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold in to leaves, from silk to cobwebs, on waking. Still there are things you can bring back with you from dreams: atmosphere, moments, people, a theme.
-- Neil Gaiman, introduction to Fragile Things

Quite a few of the stories, while not favorites, were good and extremely solid:

"Strange Little Girls" and "Pages From a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky" were written for the tour books of Tori Amos's Strange Little Girls and Scarlet's Walk. Along with "Fifteen Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot," I enjoyed these as little snippets of larger stories that lay beneath, waiting for my imagination to fill in the blanks. The Tori Amos version of " '97 Bonnie and Clyde" has always spooked me a little, and Gaiman's version in "Strange Little Girls" was just as eerie.
"In the End" -- Short and interesting, though it didn't really stick in my mind. What I like most about it is this note from the introduction:

I was trying to imagine the very last book of the Bible. And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means "that thing over there."
     ("Quick, brave Himalayan Guide--what's that thing over there?"
     "Yeti."
     "I see.")
"Keepsakes and Treasures -- The narrator of this one is thoroughly dangerous and yet completely likable. You can't trust him, but it doesn't matter. When I read this, I had forgotten that the narrator, Mr. Smith, is a character in the American Gods novella that ends the book (which I read first). When I re-read the novella, I noticed this: "Shadow found himself starting to like Smith. He told himself that liking this man was not a sensible thing to do. He had met people like Smith before, people without consciences, without scruples, and they were uniformly as dangerous as they were likeable."

I wouldn't mind reading more stories with Smith as the narrator. A line from Smith: "You don't drive in London?" asked the professor in the loud suit. Heavens protect us from the dress sense of American academics.
"Harlequin Valentine -- A very cool piece. The identity-stealing reminded me strongly of Mirror Mask, but not in a bad way. I loved the character of Missy and wished the story had gone on so I could follow her a bit longer.
"Feeders and Eaters -- This one was icky, but it didn't keep me up nights or anything. I pretty much predicted the ending, so it wasn't all that shocking.
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties -- Paging back through this, the association that comes to mind is with the more abstract and suspenseful stories of Ray Bradbury.
"The Sunbird" -- I found this one enjoyable, if a bit long. My favorite part: "I have a presentiment of doom upon me," said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy that night, in a bed that was far too small for him, before he slept. "And I fear it shall come to us with barbecue sauce."
I found the included poems pleasant but not noteworthy, except for this one:

A wodwo, or wodwose, was a wild man of the woods (introduction).

GOING WODWO

Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life
Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves
Going in search of food and for a spring
Of sweet water.

I'll find a tree as wide as ten fat men
Clear water rilling over its gray roots
Berries I'll find, and crabapples and nuts,
And call it home.

I'll tell the wind my name, and no one else.
True madness takes or leaves us in the wood
halfway through all our lives. My skin will be
my face now.

I must be nuts. Sense left with shoes and house,
my guts are cramped. I'll stumble through the green
back to my roots, and leaves and thorns and buds,
and shiver.

I'll leave the way of words to walk the wood
I'll be the forest's man, and greet the sun,
And feel the silence blossom on my tongue
like language.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It's as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.
-- Neil Gaiman, introduction to Fragile Things

Several of the stories in the collection stood out, fragments of them turning up in my mind days and weeks later. My favorites:

"October in the Chair" -- I loved the different characterizations of the months, and the framework of the storytelling ritual, even though they didn't feel completely essentail to the core tale of the piece. I especially loved the description of October: "His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life"

To me, October (and autumn in general) always feels like a friend, so this description really resonated. The story October tells was fantastic, a tale of a living boy who finds a place of safety, friendship, and adventure in the company of a dead boy, and who ultimately decides he wants to stay in the dead boy's world.
"Closing Time" -- Of all the ghost stories in the book, this was by and far my favorite. Very cool.
"Bitter Grounds -- At first, this well-woven zombie story reminded me somewhat obliquely of a Flannery O'Connor story. I loved it.
"The Problem of Susan -- Fantastic and heartbreaking. It'll definitely come back to me the next time I read the Chronicles of Narnia all the way through.
"How Do You Think it Feels?" -- Excellently creepy, even more so (to me) than the more macabre "Feeders and Eaters". I was also immensely pleased to find a Cowboy Junkies reference (the characters listen to The Trinity Sessions).
"The Monarch of the Glen" -- When I read through the introduction's summary of each piece and discovered that the final story in the book was a novella featuring Shadow from American Gods (my favorite Gaiman book so far), I skipped ahead and read it first, and loved every word. To be fair, I read it again once I'd finished the rest of Fragile Things, and I still loved it even without the extra appeal of excitement. I don't want to say too much about it, because the plot is fantastically fun, but I will say that Shadow is as solid a character as ever, and I wish Gaiman would write a few more Shadow books.

In summary (finally), I really enjoyed Fragile Things, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes somewhat dark modern fantasy / sci fi. Even if you've never read any of Gaiman's work, I feel like this book would be very accessible. And even if the less engaging pieces don't appeal to everyone, the ones I marked as favorites are definitely worth a try.

As I write this now, it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas--abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken--and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.

-- Neil Gaiman, introduction to Fragile Things

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...on my bookshelf !

2006-12-25T23:55:00.000-06:00

It's been a fabulous Christmas for my book collection. Several supremely cool people gifted me with great books that I can't wait to read / re-read.

From my Secret Santa:

Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing

"To go beyond the legacy of revolution, religious fundamentalism and veiled women and find the real people of Iran, a young Canadian dons the cloak of Islam. The result of Alison Wearing's journey is a warm, funny and shocking collection of riveting portraits and stories about the generous, irrepressible people she met. With a novelist's love of language and eye for detail, she takes the reader into the homes and hearts of people whose spirit, intelligence and laughter enlighten and impress. Beautifully written, engaging, fascinating at every turn, Honeymoon in Purdah reveals an Iran rarely seen by Westerners and leads this exceptional bestselling young writer across new literary borders."

From my very sweet uncle, who drew my name for the family gift exchange:

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

"There are places in the world where darkness rules, where it's unwise to walk. Sunshine knew that. But there hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and she needed a place to be alone for a while.

Unfortunately, she wasn't alone. She never heard them coming. Of course you don't, when they're vampires.

They took her clothes and sneakers. They dressed her in a long red gown. And they shackled her to the wall of an abandoned mansion--within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight.

She knows that he is a vampire. She knows that she's to be his dinner, and that when he is finished with her, she will be dead. Yet, as dawn breaks, she finds that he has not attempted to harm her. And now it is he who needs her to help him survive the day..."

(I LOVE this book, and reviewed it in my last entry.)

Thud! by Terry Pratchett

"Once, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom Valley, trolls and dwarfs met in bloody combat. Centuries later, each species still views the other with simmering animosity. Lately, the influential dwarf, Grag Hamcrusher, has been fomenting unrest among Ankh-Morpork's more diminutive citizens—a volatile situation made far worse when the pint-size provocateur is discovered bashed to death . . . with a troll club lying conveniently nearby.

Commander Sam Vimes of the City Watch is aware of the importance of solving the Hamcrusher homicide without delay. (Vimes's second most-pressing responsibility, in fact, next to always being home at six p.m. sharp to read Where's My Cow? to Sam, Jr.) But more than one corpse is waiting for Vimes in the eerie, summoning darkness of a labyrinthine mine network being secretly excavated beneath Ankh-Morpork's streets. And the deadly puzzle is pulling him deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear—and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself."

(This is another previously-read favorite.)

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

"In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis again employs his formidable talent for fable and allegory. The writer, in a dream, boards a bus on a drizzly afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell. He meets a host of supernatural beings far removed from his expectations and comes to significant realizations about the ultimate consequences of everyday behavior. This is the starting point for a profound meditation upon good and evil. 'If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.'"

From my awesome sister, two books I'd read previously and am extremely pleased to now own:

Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint

"Welcome to Newford...Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.

Like Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and John Crowley's Little, Big, Dreams Underfoot is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all who seek magic in everyday life."

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

"Armed with only with a frying pan and her common sense, Tiffany Aching, a young witch-to-be, is all that stands between the monsters of Fairyland and the warm, green Chalk country that is her home. Forced into Fairyland to seek her kidnaped brother, Tiffany allies herself with the Chalk's local Nac Mac Feegle -- aka the Wee Free Men -- a clan of sheep-stealing, sword-wielding, six-inch-high blue men who are as fierce as they are funny. Together they battle through an eerie and ever-shifting landscape, fighting brutal flying fairies, dream-spinning dromes, and grimhounds -- black dogs with eyes of fire and teeth of razors -- before ultimately confronting the Queen of the Elves, absolute ruler of a world in which reality intertwines with nightmare. And in the final showdown, Tiffany must face her cruel power alone....

In a riveting narrative that is equal parts suspense and humor, Carnegie Medalist Terry Pratchett returns to his internationally popular Discworld with a breathtaking tale certain to leave fans, new and old, enthralled."

From MB:

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

"Others. They walk among us, observing.

Set in contemporary Moscow, where shape shifters, vampires, and street-sorcerers linger in the shadows, Night Watch is the first book of the hyper-imaginative fantasy trilogy from bestselling Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. This epic saga chronicles the eternal war of the "Others," an ancient race of humans with supernatural powers who must swear allegiance to either the Dark or the Light.

The agents of Light--the Night Watch--oversee nocturnal activity, while the agents of Dark keep watch over the day. For a thousand years both sides have maintained a precarious balance of power, but an ancient prophecy has decreed that a supreme Other will one day emerge, threatening to tip the scales. Now, that day has arrived. When a mid-level Night Watch agent named Anton stumbles upon a cursed young woman--an uninitiated Other with magnificent potential--both sides prepare for a battle that could lay waste to the entire city, possibly the world."

From "Santa Claus" (a.k.a. Mom & Dad):

Eragon by Christopher Paolini

"When Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon realizes he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself. Overnight his simple life is shattered, and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic, and power. With only an ancient sword and the advice of an old storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a king whose evil knows no bounds. Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands."

(Great literature? Probably not. But it's lots of fun.)

MB gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card and I got a Books-a-Million card in the gift exchange with his family, and I'm thinking I should probably use at least one of them to buy some nonfiction to balance out this year's haul of sci-fi / fantasy. I'm thinking about the new Jon Katz book, or maybe something by Bill Bryson, who's been recommended to me so many times that I've lost count.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

2006-12-02T02:31:00.000-06:00

(this is a cross-post from my regular blog)

I finally finished Sunshine by Robin McKinley this afternoon. The quick and dirty version is that I absolutely loved it.

The review it deserves is a bit longer than that. I'd never read any of McKinley's work and actually don't recall ever hearing of her until Sunshine was recommended to me. Would I sound too much like a nerdy squeeing fangirl if I revealed that it was recommended to me personally by Nancy Pearl after she asked me what I'd been reading lately and I said Neil Gaiman and she said, "Oh, if you like Neil Gaiman, you'll love this book."? If so, don't look, because I'm about to show you the actual note she wrote so I would remember to look for the book:

(/squee)

Since this conversation took place in a library, I hunted up and checked out the book on my way out the door that night. It's taken me nearly a month to get through it, not due to the text itself, but because between NaNo and NaBlo and watching some TV on DVD, I only really dedicated lunch breaks at work to reading it. Right from the first page, I loved the tone, the voice of the narrator (Sunshine), the style, and the pacing. You can read the first few pages of the book here.

I loved the way McKinley wove details of the otherness of Sunshine's world in slowly. Rather than spending several pages on exposition and scene-setting, she opens with Sunshine describing somewhat commonplace things from her life, such as the coffeehouse where she works and the people she sees often. Then, on page 9, an innocuous comment: "Kenny wanted to get into Other law" with no further explanation forthcoming until the bottom of the next page: "When I was ten the Voodoo Wars started. They were of course nothing about voodoo, but they were about a lot of bad stuff, and some of the worst of them in our area happened around the lake." I remember at this point noticing how she was drawing me in with subtlety, but not minding even though I was aware of it. Then, a page later: "I never heard them coming. Of course you don't, when they're vampires."

She continued this slow weaving-in of details throughout the rest of the story, and it never felt drawn-out or gimmicky. It seemed instead to fit what a narrator would say if she was telling you a story from her everyday world, which seems very much like a somewhat-supernaturally-infused version of our own. The narrator, Sunshine, was believable and likeable. Many heroes / heroines of sci-fi stories have somewhat fantastic life stories. They're witches or wizards or noble or are exceptionally smart or insanely brave. In contrast, Sunshine is a pretty normal girl. She scraped through high school and is perfectly content in her job as a baker in a local coffeehouse. She has no big ideas, no grand plans, until she is caught up in a war between two vampires, and her life is changed forever. I don't want to reveal too much, but there is some elemental magic, some interesting interactions with one of the vampires in question, and a whole lot of enveloping world-making detail.

Reading Sunshine was a lot of fun. The book is somewhat creepy, somewhat funny, and really entertaining. I liked it so much that I put it on my Christmas list before I'd even finished it. While I was still reading, I was dying to get to the end, but once I did I wished that I was still embroiled in it. It did leave me with a few questions, though none are really nagging enough to be considered plot-holes or loose ends, and I don't want to give anything away by mentioning them, so I won't. Let me close by saying that I usually don't go for vampire stories, but I enjoyed this one immensely and would recommend it to anyone. It's got enough magic and undead for the sci-fi / fantasy fan and more than enough down-to-earth, believable characterization for those who tend to prefer non-fantasy fiction.

This is an outrage, ya'll.

2006-08-02T02:21:00.000-05:00

I'm sharing it so that I won't have to experience this horror alone:

The Ultimate Discworld Casting Pages

Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson as Crowley and Aziraphale from Good Omens?

Tom Cruise as Nobby?

POSH SPICE as Lady Ramkin??

I love Kevin Smith, truly, but cast as the PATRICIAN???

JOHN TRAVOLTA or HUGH GRANT as Sam Vimes???????

ADAM FUCKING SANDLER as CARROT?????

At this point my head has exploded. Some of the suggestions on the site are good, but most of them make me wonder what books these people have been reading, since it's obviously not the same ones that I've read.

Mort

2006-06-14T23:07:00.000-05:00

I finished my re-read of Mort today. I enjoyed it a lot, though it wasn't as well-done as I remember. It has been interesting watching Pratchett's concept of Death (the character, of course) evolve. In the first two Discworld books, Death was more...not exactly malicious....but more deadly. Upon once again being denied the chance to reap Rincewind's soul, Death cut a mayfly out of the air. In later books, it is very clear that Death does not kill; he merely collects after the fact.

In Mort, the Death of later books is beginning to take shape. He objects to the mistreatment of cats. He makes it clear to his apprentice Mort that his job does not involve killing. He goes on a short-lived holiday to experience the thrills of the flesh and even finds a job as a short-order cook. However, in a scene toward the end of the book, Death knocks over and breaks several life-timers (hourglasses) during a fight, which seems inherently irresponsible. It's also inconsistent, as Death is dueling with his apprentice in anger for Mort mucking about with fate. Yet Death seems to not notice the premature ending of a half-dozen lives, which is surely quite a bit disruptive to fate.

Pratchett plays around with the idea of an alternate reality, a device he will exploit successfully in Jingo. The character of Mort is believable and intensely likeable. My only real complaint about Mort is that the ending feels somewhat tacked-on. The characters are in Death's world and all is uncertain, and then you turn the page and Mort is suddenly married to Death's daughter, who is Duchess of Sto Helit even though she had no claim to the title before the previous Duke's lifetimer was smashed during the fight. The Princess who Mort saved from assassination--which created the alternate reality--is Queen of her kingdom. All is well. But it just feels too neat. Death explains it away by saying he had a chat with the gods. Fine, I guess...but it seems like a lazy way to wrap up a number of loose ends.

Overall, I was satisfied with the book, but it definitely shows a Discworld that's still experiencing growing pains.

http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/florent.bouchez/discworld/images/death.jpg

Equal Rites

2006-05-30T02:31:00.000-05:00

Today I completed my first re-reading of the summer project by finishing Equal Rites. It's been years since I last read it, and I didn't recall most of the story. Equal Rites was my introduction to Granny Weatherwax back when I read it the first time, and I didn't like Granny all that much until very recently. Re-reading E.R., it was hard to say whether I'd been unfair to Granny back then, or if the fact that I like her now--very much--was coloring my re-reading of her first starring role.

E.R. is definitely not on par with Pratchett's later, better books, but it wasn't truly awful. It gave me the feeling that the city of Ankh-Morpork hadn't really been fully conceived yet, which is probably perfectly accurate. There wasn't a lot of continuity between the place-details in The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and E.R.. This is most noticeable when it comes to Unseen University. In later books, the faculty is pretty stable, and there are several recurring characters, including the Bursar and the Archchancellor, Mustrum Ridcully. No one recognizable has arrived yet in E.R., with the exception of the Librarian. The culture and physical setting of the Ramtop Mountains and main character Esk's village of Bad Ass are depicted in good, solid detail. Ankh-Morpork itself is beginning to take shape, but hasn't yet begun to occupy the nearly-a-character role it takes on in later books.

Granny is not as fleshed out as she will become in later appearances, but the framework is there, and some of the filling-in is starting to take shape. Pratchett's irreverent style and throw-away one-liners haven't quite come into their own yet, either, but two passages did catch me just right:

"They had been in Ankh-Morpork for three days and Granny was beginning to enjoy herself, much to her surprise. She had found them lodging in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never inquired about one another's business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet. The lodgings were on the top floor next to the well-guarded premises of a respectable dealer in stolen property because, as Granny had heard, good fences make good neighbors."

"[Granny] stood up. 'Let's find this Great Hall, then. No time to waste.'
          'Um, women aren't allowed in,' said Esk.
          Granny stopped in the doorway. Her shoulders rose. She turned around very slowly.
          'What did you say?' she said. 'Did these old ears deceive me, and don't say they did because they didn't.'
          'Sorry,' said Esk. 'Force of habit.'
          'I can see you've been getting ideas below your station,' said Granny coldly.'"

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/terrypratchett/Char_GWeatherwax.htm

The Light Fantastic

2006-05-20T22:45:00.000-05:00

I finished The Light Fantastic today. It's the second Discworld book, and I liked it a lot more than I expected. I think I have been unfairly judging the first two books in the series for years now. Sort of embarrassing! I really enjoyed the story, even though the eleven days that have elapsed since my last post tell me that I probably won't be able to complete the reading / re-reading of the entire series by the end of the summer. I think perhaps it will be a good idea to figure on the project lasting into the fall, especially since I'll probably only be reading the Pratchett books at work on my lunch break, and reading other things at home. Next up, Equal Rites.

summer reading project

2006-05-09T19:34:00.000-05:00

I don't know how well this will go, but I am hoping to re-read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series in chronological order this summer. There are 30 books so far, not counting The Last Hero and the ones that are classified as young adult fiction.

I finished The Colour of Magic today, and I think it might be the first time I've actually read it all the way through. My first Discworld book was Soul Music, shortly followed by Small Gods, and I didn't really start reading them in order until a few years into my Pratchett habit. I also never went back and picked up the first two books in the series, until now. I'd tried to read them each at least once before and had trouble getting into them. I've never been a huge Rincewind fan, so I think that had something to do with it.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed The Colour of Magic. I'm sure many Pratchett fans will disagree, but I don't really feel that the author had hit his stride quite yet in the early Discworld books. Even the third book in the series, Equal Rites, didn't really zing like his more recent stuff. But the fourth book, Mort, had parts that left me with my mouth hanging open. It was as if suddenly Pratchett nailed what he was after and just ran with it.

It will be interesting to try to work my way through the books one by one instead of jumping around to just re-read my favorites.

a rare case of liking a movie more than a book

2006-04-08T20:43:00.000-05:00

About a month ago, I finally read the book Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. The movie version has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it a few years ago, and I'd been meaning to read the book from the first.

It's a young adult book by classification, but that really doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. Some young adult books are vastly more enjoyable and complex than some adult books.

As a general rule, movies based on books are almost never as good as the books themselves. Rarely, a movie is as good as the book, though often such movies are qualified by saying, "Different, but really good." It's very rare to find a book that follows a book pretty well and does a good job of telling the story. Sometimes a movie can deviate immensely from the book and turn out all right. I found the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie entertaining and sweet, and as a stand-alone young-adult movie, it was pretty good. Compared to the first Sisterhood book, it was a very pared-down and possibly even oversimplifed version of the story, but taken on its own merits, it was quite enjoyable. On the flip side, I never saw the movie version of Ella Enchanted, but I've been told that the characters' names and one main plot conceit were all that the movie kept from the book. My sister was displeased, and said that the movie should've been billed as "based on characters from the book Ella Enchanted."

Whale Rider, in movie form, falls somewhere in between these two. There are things that were complicated in the book but simple in the movie; things that are explained further in the movie than they were in the book; and a few changes in characters and points-of-view. This is where it gets unusual, at least in my experience...the movie tells the story better. Blasphemy, I know. But bear with me.

Narration

The book is narrated by Rawiri, the uncle of the main character. Rawiri is in the movie, but he plays more of a supporting role. The movie is framed by the point-of-view of Paikea, the young girl whose story really is at the heart of the tale, and it makes SUCH better sense for Pai to narrate. In the book, the girl's name is Kahua te Rangi, not Paikea. They call her Kahu. Now, Kahua te Rangi was the ancestral/mythical whale rider's name, and Paikea was another name by which he was known (from what I gleaned from the book, anyhow). I'm not sure why the movie script was altered to have the girl named Paikea instead of Kahu, but whatever. That's one of those inexplicable movie things (like changing Novalee's number phobia in Where the Heart Is from 7 to 5.)

Paikea/Kahu makes a much more compelling narrator, to me, then Rawiri. Rawiri is a cool character, and he's funny...but it seems odd to be seeing Paikea/Kahu's story from such a distant and detached point-of-view.

Nanny Flowers

Nanny Flowers is Paikea's grandmother...or maybe great-grandmother. In the film, Nanny is clearly Pai's grandmother and Koro Apirana is clearly her grandfather. In the book, it is said that Koro is Pai/Kahu's great-grandfather. I suppose that means that Porourangi (Pai's father) is Koro's grandson. In the film, Koro does not look old enough to be Porourangi's grandfather, which may explain the change. Also, in the book, apparently Koro means something along the lines of "bugger" or "asshole" in Maori. Nanny calls her husband "you old koro" when he pisses her off, and little Paikea/Kahu picks it up and starts calling him "koro." In the movie, the context suggest that Koro is either his name or his title. Anyhow, Nanny Flowers is a cool character in the film, and she's actually a bit cooler in the book. Her periodic threats to divorce Koro and keep Paikea are present in the book, as well as her support of Pai throughout. She is also a lot more strong-willed, and reference is made to her Muriwai blood--inherited from a mythic ancestor who was able to either rule as a man or actually transform herself into a man. In the film, Nanny tells Pai that she has the blood of Muriwai in her veins, and encourages her not to regret being a girl. Nanny is sassier and a bit more of a smartass in the book, and it's enjoyable.

The Whales

In the film, the whales are referenced in the stories, and Pai changes her mind about leaving her village, makes her father stop the car, and jumps out just in time to see whales breaching nearby. When Pai goes to the sea to call the whales, they arrive and beach, setting up the climax of the film. In the book, the whales actually take a character role. It doesn't work as well as I'd hoped it would, however. The whales are very mystical and highly anthropomorphized. Instead of a gnarly barnacle on the old bull whale's forehead, as depicted in the movie, the old bull whale in the book has a tattoo that "swirls" with "psychic energy" and emits light at times. The old whale also learned how to open footholds and handholds in its hide and create some kind of air pocket for the original Paikea to lie inside while they swam together. I am glad that this was skipped over for the movie. Mysticism is one thing, but whales altering their skins and having glowing psychic tattoos is a bit much.

The beaching is also a much more traumatic scene in the book. Maori men rush to the beach and begin to butcher the dying whales, instead of rallying to save them. It is only later, after Rawiri and his movie-omitted gang of motorcycle buddies go to the beach to run off the butchers, that the villagers gather to try to save the whales.

Paikea

Finally, the girl Paikea/Kahu is quite different in the book. She is younger, only eight years old at the end of the story. She has no real presence in the book, other than as an odd child, always hanging at the back of the boys' classes and doting on her unresponsive Koro. The movie allows more dimension to Pai's character, and as acted by the breathtaking Keisha Castle-Hughes, she really becomes the heart and soul of the film. The book reveals why Paikea is destined to be a leader, and I'm not sure how I feel about its omission in the film. In a way, it's nice to think that Pai was just born to be the leader/savior of her people. But the book also has a neat mythical angle, in which Pai's birth cord was buried under a tree which was actually--unbeknownst to anyone--the last of the spears the original Paikea threw into the soil, which was meant to sprout and grow only when the people needed it.

Overall, the book was good, but I felt that the characterizations were not as developed as they could've been. No character, not even Rawiri, was written with a lot of depth. He had a good voice, but no real roundness. Koro Apirana is more human in the film. He is still cruel to Pai, but you are allowed to see his fear and his weakness, and moments of tenderness toward the girl. In the book, he's just a mean old grump, pretty much all the time. I also liked the simplifications written into the movie script. I feel that it strengthened the film to focus on Paikea and to leave out some of the more mystical stuff. All in all, I'd recommend Whale Rider as a book, but only if you already like the movie. If you're only going to check out one version of this story, definitely go with the film.

I'm not ignoring this blog...promise

2006-03-19T01:24:00.000-06:00

I've just been reading more than posting lately.

Coming soon(ish), reviews of:

Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett)
Marley & Me (John Grogan)
Sabriel (Garth Nix)
Whale Rider (Witi Ihimaera)
(maybe)Medicine Road (Charles de Lint)

Two Top Ten Lists

2006-02-14T00:15:00.000-06:00

TOP TEN TERRY PRATCHETT BOOKS

Probably not in any particular order:

Reaper Man

Mort

Night Watch

Thud!

Small Gods

Good Omens (non-Discworld, with Neil Gaiman)

Guards! Guards!

Witches Abroad

Wyrd Sisters

Soul Music

Fans will of course note the bias toward Watch books. I fully admit to having a huge, unfading crush on Sam Vimes.

TOP TEN FANTASY / SCI-FI BOOKS

This one will be harder, and of course these lists evolve constantly as I read more books, and really from day to day depending on how I'm feeling.

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

Thud!, Terry Pratchett

Rusalka, C.J. Cherryh

Spirits in the Wires, Charles de Lint

Medicine Road, Charles de Lint

the Lord of the Rings trilogy*

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(I actually like all of the Harry Potter books, but #3 is still my very favorite.)

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Forests of the Heart, Charles de Lint

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

Outlander/Dragonfly in Amber/Voyager, Diana Gabaldon
(Technically I think these are sort of romance-y / historical fiction, but you know what? Chick goes back in time through a set of standing stones. That's pretty much sci-fi. Besides, it's my list.)

*God, cliche...I know. But really, no matter how many times I read them, I still get totally wrapped up in them, and I still cry during the siege of Minas Tirith, because I can't stop thinking about how awful it would've been to be there, and to have no hope, and to have your friends' heads catapulted over the walls, and to still stand and fight the greatest evil your world has ever known, and then poor Faramir has his heart broken and stomped on by his own father...so yeah. I know there are many Tolkien-haters out there, but I'll never be one of them.

I was so caught up in the story that I flat-out bawled through almost the entirety of Return of the King at the theater, and I'm not generally a crier (and we're talking serious-waterworks, tears-streaming, nose-running, chin-trembling, shuddery-silent-sobs CRYING). The whole time, my husband's holding my hand and whispering, "You know that Aragorn is coming! You know the good guys will win! It's okay...Aragorn will be here soon!" and the guy next to my husband is totally trying to be sly but he's totally staring at me like, "Dude, what. a. freak." SO, to conclude. I love me some Lord of the Rings. Except the introduction to Fellowship...I'll admit that it does drag on a bit.

Hello! Welcome to my book blog!

2006-02-08T21:54:00.000-06:00

My friend Danger told me I should create a recommended book list. I decided it wasn't a bad idea, and could also be a fun way to waste time and to keep track of books I've read and liked.

This is really a secondary blog, since I didn't want to scatter book-related entries throughout my regular blog.

Hope you like it! :)