The Foggy Foot Review

A Temporary Change of Pace

2012-01-28T20:55:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly two years since I wrote that post on The Gates by John Connolly. Since then a lot has happened (Lily and MLIS classes mostly) and this blog has languished from lack of time and a certain amount of laziness, but now it's time to whip this puppy back into shape (metaphorically speaking of course, I could never sanction real puppy whipping).

I'm taking a class this semester on material selection for children ages 0-4, and one of requirements is that we read a great deal of books for children ages 0-4, which seems like a really great deal to me. Some of our assignments are to be posted to a blog, and so I'm dusting off Foggy Foot for this purpose, but not this purpose alone. I want to keep a record of what I read for this class, and I want to do this for two reasons. 1. Professionally speaking, I hope to work with children's and young adult materials and having notes on what I read will be helpful. 2. The material for this class will either be age appropriate for Lily, or age appropriate for her soon.

And I suppose there's a third reason too. The egotist in me really likes reading my own thoughts. It's interesting to see what I thought of a book, and the angle I approached it with. I love books, so even if this is only a chronicle of what I've read, written haphazardly in the limited time that I have, I want to take up the reviews again for my own gratification. I like being an active reader, a reader who thinks about what's she's reading and fully engages the text, even of the text is a supernatural teen romance. These reviews are a way to keep me from becoming a passive reader, and while there's nothing wrong with reading passively, my brain needs the action, I think. So there we go. The Foggy Foot Review, back in action again.

The Gates by John Connolly

2010-02-17T20:31:00.000-08:00

John Connolly is best known for writing thrillers, though he first caught my attention with his short story collection, Nocturnes, and his first book for younger readers, The Book of Lost Things. The Gates is Connolly's second venture into younger-person friendly fare, and it's got a lot going for it - demons, Satanic rituals, a Large Hadron Collider, and a small, clever dachshund named Boswell. Unfortunately, The Gates also suffers from something that I'm not sure many people would actually mind - the voice of an author who seems to have read Terry Pratchett extensively and wishes to do the same thing. More on that in a moment....

The Gates is the story of young Samuel Johnson, an endearingly odd boy who tries to show initiative by trick-or-treating three days early, and who brings a pin to show-and-tell under the auspices that one cannot prove that there aren't angles dancing on its head. Samuel is a winning protagonist, and his constant companion, Boswell, is one of the most expressive non-talking dogs I've ever had the pleasure to read. Unfortunately, Samuel's adventure, which begins when he sees his neighbor's satanic ritual and it's unfortunate results (they open a portal to the eponymous gates of hell), is regularly interrupted by clever footnotes and charmingly informative, though plot-killing chapters on physics, black holes, and other assorted items of a scientific nature. Granted, a Large Hadron Collider helps open the gates of hell, so a little background information is useful. The information is also presented in a super-charming way, but it's that very charm that distracts the reader from the actual goings-on of the plot.

The Charm (tm) that pervades The Gates is one of those qualities that is fantastically effective in the proper dosage. Terry Pratchett, more often than not, manages to deploy a similar kind of charm to good effect in his Discworld series (though, sometimes, he too hops over the charm-line into the realm of the self-conscious and precious). Connolly slaps Charm (tm) all over everything, cluttering up his prose and wearing the reader down so that it's hard to appreciate it when it's appropriate.

Disclosure: Connolly's particular brand of charm involves the frequent use of something which is an irrational pet peeve of mine. I hate it when an author does this: "She was about to jump off the cliff but, well, she didn't." I really hate that well. Connolly uses it, well, a lot. It might be okay in speech (although I don't like it much there either), but dialogue and narration are not speech, they are the written representation of speech. As such, they leave no room for um's, huh's well's and the like - especially not when used with compulsive frequency. It's just not, well, cute.

That said, The Gates was good fun, and I honestly liked Samuel Johnson. He's a believable boy, despite his carefully chosen idiosyncrasies, and for that alone I think The Gates is worth reading. I would just consider borrowing it from the library instead of, well, paying full price for the hardcover :-)

Solstice Wood by Patricia A. McKillip

2010-02-10T20:23:00.000-08:00

This is going to be fairly brief under the auspices of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Let's just say that Solstice Wood is not Patricia A. McKillip's best work. McKillip usually writes highly literate fantasy in a vaguely medieval period, such as Alphabet of Thorn. Quite often, there will be well-placed illusions to Celtic myths and traditional fairy tales, as in Winter Rose. Solstice Wood, unfortunately, is neither terribly literate, nor does it feature anything well-placed. It felt like a hodge-podge of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, any number of insipid novels prominently featuring knitting or quilting (and no, I'm a knitter so I'm not knocking fiber arts), and teen fantasy centered on how much someone wants to be a witch/fairy/changeling.

The other problem is simply one of structure. The structure is a hodge-podge too. Though the protagonist is meant to be an oddly unlikable young woman named Sylvia, the story is told in the first-person serial, meaning that everyone, from Sylvia's equally un-likable grandmother to a fairy changeling gets a chapter. Sylvia only gets a small handful of chapters in which to establish her role as the protagonist. The result is that the narrative, which is slender at best, has no core. Pair this with the absolute triteness of the conflict and ending, and you've got a book that it's pretty hard to care about.

And now, I think I'll just leave it at that and say that, in the spirit of niceness, I don't have anything more to say.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

2010-02-10T19:54:00.000-08:00

I confess that I actually finished A Great and Terrible Beauty, the first book in Libba Bray's trilogy about her vision-having heroine, Gemma Doyle, about a month ago, but between one thing and another (mostly a series of colds and starting my Masters in library science), I've only just been able to sit down and write anything about it. It is for this reason that my thoughts are going to be pretty general on this one, but I figure that whatever impressions have stayed with me after a month are the ones that are most important anyway.

Impression One: Use of the first person present progressive tense in a novel gets tiresome. While many would argue that sentences like, "I am running down an alley, sobbing," put the reader directly into the action, I would argue that being constantly told that "I am doing this," and "I am doing that," gets distracting - not critically so, but enough that I had to fight the impulse to put the book down in the first couple of chapters.

Impression Two: Libba Bray definitely knew her material. A Great and Terrible Beauty reads like part gothic romance, part Victorian pulp in the tradition of H. Ryder Haggard's She, and Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm - there's lots of occult danger and Eastern 'otherness' (both sexy and threatening to a respectable, young Englishwoman), lots of lurid drama. All in all, it's pretty fun.

Impression Three: Libba Bray also really knows young women. Gemma Doyle is a good heroine, as far as teen-age heroines in historical fiction go - she's active, she has agency, she's flawed but passionate. There's a fair amount of conflict and fight in her, which would make her easy for a modern teen to relate to. Gemma's friends are also interesting - the drab, unattractive Ann (who is a cutter, due in large part to her implied depression and alienation), the gorgeous, ornamental Pippa, who just wants to be loved, and Felicity, who, of the four, has the most force of personality and complexity. They're an interesting mix of types and not one that comes together easily (there's a great deal of initial antagonism). Though I found the progression of their friendship to be a little forced, it was also believable in that there are girls for whom dislike is an automatic precursor to respect. The four of them together make a pretty interesting dynamic.

Overall, A Great and Terrible Beauty is quality YA - fun, dark, a little edgy and sexy in a historical way. The thing I liked most about it however, was the fact that all four of the girls, Gemma, Pippa, Ann, and especially Felicity, want autonomy - they want personal power, they want to valued for themselves, they want to be heard and, in their own way, they fight for that privilege in a Victorian world that valued silence in its women and girls. For that alone, A Great and Terrible Beauty is worth reading, though I'm not quite tempted to read on in the trilogy.

Soul Music by Terry Pratchett

2010-01-14T10:33:00.001-08:00

I am not a fanatic fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I do, however, enjoy the books, albeit some more than others. Hogfather, for example, is pretty wonderful in my opinion. Some of the others (usually ones that don't feature Death, Susan or Lord Vetinari, but that's just me) can get a little tiresome as they seem to rely more on unrelenting cleverness than actual plot. Soul Music falls somewhere in between.

Soul Music is the story of how rock n' roll came to Discworld and got everyone all shook up. It's also the story of Susan's first time stepping into her grandfather's professional shoes (her grandfather being the anthropomorphic personification of Death). Lots and lots of promise there, and Soul Music definitely doesn't fail to amuse. Rock n' roll, called Music with Rocks In for Discworld purposes because the drums are a set of rocks banged on by a troll, literally infects the residents of Ankh-Morpork from the Unseen University down. Suddenly seventy year old wizards are acting like teen-agers and fashioning robes out of studded leather, and middle-aged housekeepers are tossing their undergarments at the lead singer of The Band.

The lead singer is the connection between the Susan plot and the music plot, and it's a connection that I feel wasn't taken full advantage of. The singer, a young druid named Imp y Celyn, forms a band with a troll and a dwarf, accidentally gets his hands on a magically electric guitar, changes his name to Buddy, and unleashes Music with Rocks In on the unsuspecting populace. Unfortuantely, Buddy was supposed to have died, (enter Susan doing her grandad's job), but the music reanimates him. Her heart then goes "twang" and she spends the rest of the book trying to save him from the music. I think. It gets a little muddy in there. And that's the main problem.

Pratchett tosses lots of fun stuff at the reader, but ultimately, when it comes time to wrap everything up, it all feels rather messy and contrived. In the end, it does all come together, but it does so in a bit of a tangle, so while Soul Music is definitely a fun little ride, it leaves you in a less than satisfying place. I wouldn't go so far as to not recommend it to someone looking for a little light fun, but if you want an ending that satisfies, I might look somewhere else.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

2009-12-28T13:18:00.000-08:00

The Mysterious Benedict Society is the first book of what is becoming a series of New York Times Bestsellers. It is a longish "young person's" novel about four extraordinary misfits who take on evil and challenge themselves in the process. It's a charming book in some ways, and Trenton Lee Stewart certainly knows how to work the conventions of children's chapter books (misfit find other misfits to fit in with, children solving problems no adult can, orphans finding some form of family etc) . That said, I was disappointed in the end. Even though The Mysterious Benedict Society does pretty much everything right, the results are pretty ho hum.

The real problem for me, is that while Stewart's story is technically good, it lacks soul, or more specifically, it lacks an understanding of a child's soul. This is an intangible quality that I don't think an author can learn. Take, for example, A Wrinkle in Time, a warhorse in children's literature. Madeleine L'Engle tells a very sophisticated story from the perspective of a cranky, misfit girl named Meg. Meg is the older sister of an extraordinary boy named Charles Wallace (who has more perspective at six than most people have at sixty). L'Engle's Meg never sounds like an adult's idea of a cranky, misfit girl, just as Charles Wallace never sounds like an adult's idea of a six year old savant. They sound like real people, not adult constructions. All of Stewart's extraordinary kids - from Reynie Muldoon, the moral compass and natural leader, to George "Sticky" Washington, the genius beset by nervous ticks - feel like an adult's "Very Clever" conception of very clever kids. There's a fug of grown-upness over the whole thing and it just doesn't work.

The other problem with the story, is that there's a huge bloody build-up to what should be a huge bloody show-down, but the final resolution happens off-screen, AND it's not even the kids who achieve it. An adult, the eponymous Mr. Benedict, mysteriously dismantles the Evil Machine of Doom (tm). This results in an Ok-so-I've-read-and-read-and-read-and-THAT's-the-resolution?!? feeling in the reader. Then we scoot through the denouement, and because of some serious authorial strong-arming, everyone ends up happy. Deux ex Machina is splashed all over this thing. It's as if Stewart got his characters right into the thick of the action, and didn't know what to do next - there's too much machination, and too little imagination to make the thing take off.

All in all, The Mysterious Benedict Society is a great idea, and there is a lot in it that works - obviously, people like it as it's selling like a Bestseller. Still, it missed the boat for me. There are a lot of children's books out there that work (anything by Roald Dahl, Coraline, and The Phantom Tollbooth to name a few), and they work because they are genuine things - stories that appeal to the instinctual fears and fascinations of children. It's not enough to be clever, you have to be genuine, and that's where The Mysterious Benedict Society, which is ever-so-clever failed.

The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo

2009-12-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

I read and finished The Magician's Elephant on flight to Texas for Thanksgiving. It is a lovely little thing. Kate DiCamillo, who wrote the Newbury Award winning, The Tale of Despereux, has a wonderful way with magical realism in children's literature. The Magician's Elephant doesn't read as fantasy, but it does have a whimsical sense of the fabulous which makes you feel like your reading a story much older than it is.

The story primarily concerns a boy whose greatest wish is to know if the sister he lost as an infant is still alive. A fortune-teller reveals that she is, and that if the boy wishes to find her, he must "follow the elephant." Being that the boy lives in a fictional northern-European city, he does not hold out much hope of ever seeing an elephant, let alone of finding one to follow. But then a magician inexplicably conjures an elephant in place of a bouquet, and the boy follows it to his heart.

While the boy, Peter Augustus Duchene, is very much the protagonist, DiCamillo takes full advantage of her omniscient narrator by also presenting the perspectives of the lost sister, the magician (who is imprisoned after the elephant falls on a noblewoman), a kind police inspector, and even the elephant herself. She does so fluidly - the changes in perspective feel very natural to the narrative - and in doing so, allows this simple story to take on a universality that it would otherwise lack.

The Magician's Elephant is not an overly dynamic book (it was made for candles and snowy evenings), but it is absolutely lovely, full of warm shadows and inevitable magic. My only complaint is that it's very satisfying ending arrived too soon.

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

2009-11-12T21:32:00.001-08:00

I'm on a bit of a YA kick right now. Maybe it's just a perverse rebellion against the Twilight series, but I feel like there's so much excellent fiction out there for young people, and much of it is getting overshadowed by the juggernaut that is vampire romance.

Strictly speaking, The Westing Game isn't really YA lit. It's a "chapter book for young readers, ages 8 -12," but much like The Graveyard Book and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, The Westing Game more than holds up to adult scrutiny. I remember reading it for the first time when I was about twelve and absolutely loving it, but not being able to fully follow the intricate, quick-moving plot. This time around, I not only loved it for it's quirky characters and perfect comic timing, but I also found myself completely sucked into the mystery at its heart. Seriously, I stayed up late last night because I didn't remember the final solution and I really had to know. Good stuff.

The basic premise is a kind of Who-Done-It. A paper-mogul named Sam Westing is found "dead in bed." In his will, he calls together 16 heirs to play "the Westing game." The heirs are an unlikely group which includes a 65 year old delivery boy, a religious fanatic, a 12 year old financial wizard and narcissistic housewife. They are paired with the perfect person, as one of the heirs (a 15 year old ornithologist with a degenerative disorder) notes. They each receive a set of clues and the directive to find out which of them stole Sam Westing's life. The winning pair then receives the bulk of Westing's multi-million dollar estate. But most of the heirs are not what they seem (there's a bomber, a thief, a bookie, and Sam Westing himself hiding in the mix) and the goal is to find out who is who before it's too late.

Ellen Raskin won the Newbury Award for The Westing Game in 1979, and it's a masterpiece of a mystery. But what really sets it apart, above and beyond the intricate plotting and accessible voice, is that each character undergoes some sort of transformation over the course of the book. This is quite a thing to pull off, but Raskin's hand is light, and her control of the material complete. Each of the heirs gets his or her arc without detracting from the whole - in fact, that quality of personal growth is what makes them work as a group.

The Westing Game is great fun and compulsively readable, but there's much more going on. For a literary mystery with humor and substance, I'm not sure that it can be beat - who cares if you have to go to the kid's section of the library to find it.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

2009-11-09T20:35:00.000-08:00

And next on the Neil Gaiman line-up: The Graveyard Book. I promise I'll write about something by another author next, but I was on a roll, and I'm really glad I was - The Graveyard Book is, for my money, Neil Gaiman's best work. Hands down. I've found that many excellent, prolific authors have one story or one book that transcends everything else they've written (and sometimes everything else they will ever write). A.S. Byatt has Possession, Margaret Atwood has The Blind Assassin, Iain M. Banks has Use of Weapons and Neil Gaiman has The Graveyard Book.

The Graveyard Book is the coming of age story of a mortal boy named Nobody Owens, who is raised by the kind spirits of a graveyard. The book begins chillingly with the murder of the boy's family, then coasts into charming episodic chapters about his life from the age of two to roughly fifteen. The episodes are by turns insightful and quirky and sometimes quite dark. Death is a regular presence in the book, but that isn't the source of the darkness. The darkness comes from the perils of growing up, and from the shadow cast by the man who killed Nobody Owens' family, a man called Jack who, years later, is still trying to finish the job.

Neil Gaiman as said that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book served inspiration, and Kipling's influence is definitely evident in The Graveyard Book's structure and themes - especially in its themes. Belonging, isolation and the bittersweetness of growing up are foundational to both books, and the episodic pacing keeps the plot moving so that these themes can be touched on without beating an already well-beaten dead horse.

This is really wonderful book and a really scattershot post. Every time I settle into addressing one aspect of the book, I get pulled in another direction, it's just so pitch-perfect, so thoughtful and so bittersweet. This is Neil Gaiman's perfect book. I hope it gets read widely and voraciously because it deserves every award it could get.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

2009-11-03T11:20:00.000-08:00

Coraline is wonderful. I'm not sure if it's an exception to the rule or the start of a trend, but I think that it is by far Neil Gaiman's best work. The reviewer at Locus Magazine was quoted as saying that "Coraline may be Gaiman's most disciplined and fully controlled novel to date," and it is this discipline and control that makes Coraline stand out.

To begin with, it's starts with a wonderful idea - that on the other side of a hidden door, a girl finds an "other" world, where her other mother and other father live and where everything is much more interesting. It's a lovely place. Except for the shiny, black buttons that everyone there has instead of eyes. Coraline is immediately wary, and she is right to be so. But we don't have to wait for her to go through the door for things to get strange - it's creepy right out of the gate. Odd things happen, things that when taken out of context mean nothing. But put them in context, and an air of foreboding quickly settles over Coraline's new house.

I really appreciated the tightness and lucidity of the story - especially because it would have been a cinch to let the material run away with itself (Gaiman was writing on very fertile ground). I loved Coraline's creepiness - as an adult, I was never scared, but I would have been as a kid, and I have to admit to a certain amount of edginess every now and then, even as an adult. But the thing I loved most about Coraline was Coraline herself. She's a wonderful, modern, no-fuss girl, very intelligent and very bored. And she's no easy mark for the evil that intrudes upon her world. Unlike her counterpart in the film adaptation (which was nowhere near as good as the book), the literary Coraline is never seduced by the "other" world, as most children would be. She is wise and brave in the face of frightening things, she wins through cleverness twice, and in a lovely, subtle stroke at the end, she learns not to be bored in the mundane world.

Coraline is everything that it could be, and that's saying quite a lot. Neil Gaiman recently won the Newbury Award for his newest book for young readers, The Graveyard Book. Before reading Coraline, I have to admit I was a little doubtful, but based on the strength of the book I just finished, I'm really looking forward to reading whatever Gaiman writes next.

Postscript: I just started The Graveyard Book (I'm on a roll), and I have to say that it's really wonderful so far. :-)

The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman

2009-10-29T09:27:00.001-07:00

The Wolves in the Walls is Neil Gaiman's second picture book, and it's full of all the things that people read Neil Gaiman for - it's darkly imaginative, charming and a little bit unsettling in an oddly breezy way. It's wonderfully illustrated in a sort of collage / mixed media form by Dave McKean, whose work effectively reflects the aesthetic of Neil Gaiman's prose. The first time I read The Wolves in the Walls, I gobbled it up and smiled. The second time however, when I started to really look at it, I was disappointed. This is not because Gaiman's story did not hold up - it did. In fact, the second reading impressed me insofar as Gaiman's ability to tap into the darker corners of childhood fear. What disappointed me, in the end, was the execution. Let me explain.

The Wolves in the Walls is loooong by picture book standards - over 2000 words, when the average is about 700. This is not necessarily a problem if the writing is tight, clear and efficient. If the writing isn't tight, clear and efficient, the length of the book works against you, so that by the end of it, the reader has ended up having a pretty muddy read. It isn't enough that the prose be tight and clear - the story itself can't have any fat, no areas or episodes or moments that don't drive the narrative forward or in some way feed the rhythm of the book. This is where The Wolves in the Walls disappoints.

The basic concept - that a little girl named Lucy hears wolves in the walls and her family doesn't believe her - is awesome, especially because it turns out that Lucy's right. The beginning starts out slowly, but that's not a bad thing as it built up a sort of mild, creepy suspense. But when the slowness continues through the entire of the story it doesn't work so well - there's little sense of disaster when the wolves do come out of the walls, and little sense of climax when the family reclaims their house. The high stakes and suspense are all muffled under cluttered prose and Lucy's overly talkative family. One severe edit would have done the trick, but without it, The Wolves in the Walls is only half of what it could have been.

I find this with a lot of Neil Gaiman's work. He's brilliant and I love the way his brain works and so desperately want to whole-heartedly gobble up everything he writes, but he's undisciplined. The only reason The Wolves in the Walls got published without the edit it deserved is because Neil Gaiman's name would make it sell. If his craft were as developed as his conceptions, he would be amazing, but it rarely is, so I always end up feeling teased by the book's potential. And that's how I feel about The Wolves in the Walls - it's so damn close I could smell the smoke, but no cigar in the end. :(

Dust and Shadow by Lindsey Faye

2009-10-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

The full title of Lindsey Faye's debut novel is Dust and Shadow, An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. Let me just say that, generally speaking, I feel that there is very little ground left untrampled regarding Jack the Ripper. Let me also say that I tend to dislike it when modern authors "discover" new, never-before-published episodes in the case chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. They are invariably gimmicky disappointments at best and, at worst, ill-disguised attempts to cash in on the enduring popularity of Conan Doyle's brilliant anti-hero. That said, Faye puts all other Sherlockian sharecroppers to shame. Seriously, Dust and Shadow is great.

To begin with, Faye obviously researched the hell out of this book. Her grasp on the Ripper killings was thorough and her familiarity with Victorian London, from Whitehall to Whitechapel, was complete. From the ease with which she made use of Victorian working class slang to the quality of the noxious London fogs, Faye knew her stuff. But best of all, she obviously knew Holmes. This is the only time I've read a non-canon Holmes and forgotten that Arthur Conan Doyle hadn't written it. Every choice in diction and syntax, every bit of characterization, both major and minor, were spot on imitations of Dr. John Watson's biographical "tone." There wasn't a false note in the thing, and believe me, I was looking for one.

Better still, Lindsey Faye posits a solution to the Ripper killings that not only explains who the killer was and how he managed to avoid capture, but why the identity of the killer was never revealed, if indeed it was ever known. The solution fits very neatly into the logic of Holmes's world, making it seem that it could never have happened any other way. Of course the fictional Sherlock Holmes successfully investigated the real life Ripper killings - why shouldn't he have?

All in all, I tore through Dust and Shadow. At first it was simply because I was kind of shocked by how good it was, but very quickly, the mystery pulled me in, as any good mystery should, and I ended up gobbling up page after page just for the pleasure of finding out who-done-it (the answer, let me tell you, is perfectly logical, but oddly chilling - something I was also not expecting). I can't recommend Dust and Shadow enough. If you like Sherlock Holmes, or Jack the Ripper or Victorian suspense, definitely pick it up. It really is a treat.

Hell by Robert Olen Butler

2009-09-24T08:46:00.001-07:00

I'm a fan of what James calls "infernals" - novels that are either set in hell, or about the devil or some such thing. Huge fan of the Inferno, which goes without saying, but I also loved I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan and A Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, which, though strictly speaking not an infernal was close enough to appeal. Given my taste for this uplifting subject, I was pretty interested when James picked up Robert Olen Butler's new novel, Hell. It is indeed about hell - one person's hell in particular, set in everyone else's hell - and there was a lot to like about it. But I can't get much more enthusiastic than that.

Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He is also, now that John Cheever's gone, one of our foremost short story writers. The bar on anything he publishes is pretty high, and for good reason. This is a man who has mastered his craft and yet, for a man who has mastered his craft, Hell is pretty slap dash.

Briefly put, Hell is the story of Hatcher McCord, a newscaster in life, and now head anchor on Satan's own Evening News from Hell. Rather than Dante's lakes of molten fire, Butler's hell is like an extremely bad day that never ends. Good sex is impossible, sulpherous rains fall from the sky, there is no meat to be had and physical harm is done only long enough for denizens to suffer a bit. Then they reconstitute and go about their day. It's the suffering that's important, and the most damnable thing about Butler's hell is that the denizens are compelled to seek out the things that will make them suffer most. But Hatcher discovers that perhaps this is not, strictly speaking, how it has to be.

The widely held belief is that Satan can hear everything going on in everyone's heads so that each denizen gets punished according to his thoughts. But during an interview with Satan for Hatcher's "Why Do You Think You're Here" series, he discovers that Satan cannot hear his thoughts. This opens up a world of mental freedom and self-discovery for Hatcher, a journey he undertakes with the hope of eventually finding a way out.

All of that is excellent. It's a great premise - that we suffer because we expect to, that hell is our own assumed response to perceived external threat. The problem is that Butler doesn't explore it. He doesn't even really pay attention to it. He's too busy piling on the cameos to care.

Butler's hell is a who's who of everyone who ever lived. Hatcher's girlfriend is Anne Boleyn, who still carries a torch for Henry VIII, despite her detachable head. The BeeGees make an appearance with J. Edgar Hoover as Satan's powder-blue suited minions, Dick Nixon is Satan's chauffeur, Chaucer is a failed novelist and Chaucer's girlfriend, Beatrice, is screwing Virgil on the side. Etc. Etc. Etc. It's all clever, but overdone. What's worse is that the cameos, which Butler clearly loves, distract, perhaps intentionally, from the premise that could be so compelling. He fails to develop the story, and so it fails to have a point, let alone any intellectual or emotional resonance.

In the end, Hell is thought-provoking (if you look hard enough), but hardly thoughtful - very careless work for a writer of Butler's stature. The story's potential, though not totally wasted, fails to get fulfilled. I'd recommend reading it if your looking for light diversion, but not wanting to be totally consumed. If what you want is an infernal with a little more bite - emotional or philosophical - I'd look somewhere else. Dante's always good.

Drood by Dan Simmons

2009-09-08T11:34:00.001-07:00

This is not a review of Drood by Dan Simmons. This is a reminder to myself of two things:

1. Self, you started Drood and stopped after the second chapter.

2. You stopped because you are a dork. You took offense to Simmons' taking liberties with Wilkie Collins, one of your favorite 19th century authors, and the fictional narrator of Drood.

Simmons used Wilkie Collins as his narrator and, though the portrayal was droll and interesting at first, it quickly devolved into a portrayal of Collins as a petty, no-talent hack. While you cannot speak to the petty part, Wilkie Collins was by no means a no-talent hack. He revolutionized gothic fiction and introduced the concept of serialized narration with The Woman in White, he was one of the first to use the detective figure to solve a literary mystery in The Moonstone (an innovation which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle among others), and he examined the injustice of inheritance laws for women in 19th century England in No Name. On top of all of that, Collins wrote some really ripping good ghost stories.

For all of these dorky reasons do you love Wilkie Collins, and for all of these reasons did you put Drood down. Just a little note should you ever want to pick it up again.

A Meal Observed by Andrew Todhunter

2009-09-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

I enjoy food memoirs, this despite the fact that I haven't read that many of them - some of Peter Mayle's Provence books (charming), several M.F.K Fisher essays (brilliant), and a few other odds and ends. Happily, I can now add Andrew Todhunter's book, A Meal Observed to the list.

A Meal Observed is, quite literally, an account of one meal, a meal that Todhunter and his wife, Erin, ate at the venerable Taillevent, a Michelin 3 star restaurant in Paris, arguably the best in France. This meal, as Todhunter describes it, is a work of culinary art. He takes us through each of the nine courses slowly, describing not only the food, but the ambience in the dining room, the impeccable service and, most interesting to me, the preparation of each dish in the kitchen. He includes informal anecdotes and interviews with the chef de cuisine, Philippe Legendre and pastry chef Gilles Bajolle, which he compiled over several months of apprenticing in the kitchens of Taillevent.

I loved Todhunter's description of food - he made me want to eat lobster, and I don't like lobster at all. Unfortunately, I could have done with a little bit more time spent with the meal and less on Todhunter's interesting, yet at times random, musings. Still, this is a small complaint, and one I should be careful in making. Todhunter is a bit of a curmudgeon as far as restaurants and etiquette go, and I enjoyed most of his random tangents because I tend towards the curmudgeonly too. For example, his mild rant about American waiters calling their patrons "guys", as in "hey guys, can I take your order?" cracked me up, so I can't complain too loudly at its inclusion.

A Meal Observed is a book that I would like to own, not because I loved every minute of it (though I would say that I enjoyed almost every page), but because it recounts in thoughtful detail a meal of the sort that I will probably never enjoy. We are not likely to go to Paris anytime soon, and if we do, we are quite unlikely to to spend $700 on dinner, which is a shame because I'd like to. I wouldn't say that A Meal Observed is as good as being in the restaurant yourself, but it is a lovely reminder that such restaurants and experiences do exist, and that someday, maybe, maybe, maybe, you might have that experience too.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2009-08-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

Laura Miller at Salon.com reviewed Sarah Water's fifth book, The Little Stranger, in terms that I can only completely agree with - this is a "masterly, enthralling new novel", and a serious must-read. I'm including the link to Miller's review here. There are only a few other things that I would add.

The first is to comment on the subtlety of Waters' plotting and execution. For a writer who successfully mastered the art of explicitly wrought, Dickensian plotting in Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith, Waters has done something truly impressive here - she has mastered, with equal or greater facility, the tightrope walk of the implicitly driven plot. Whereas her first novels were rendered in a fully Victorian style with complicated twists and last minute revelations, The Little Stranger builds slowly, implying much, confirming nothing, all the while gently stoking a tangible feeling of dread. This is a gothic ghost story sustained at perfect pitch. I doubt even Henry James could have made The Turn of the Screw work at 300 pages, and yet Sarah Waters does, drawing the reader into the decay of Hundreds Hall and unraveling its inhabitants inch by creepy inch.

The second thing I want to mention is the narrator of The Little Stranger, Dr. Faraday, whose first name we never learn. This is interesting and something I'll have to think about. Anyway, I can't say much about him without allowing my interpretation of the book to color another reader's experience, but I will say is that rarely have I ever seen dramatic irony so skillfully and thoroughly employed. Her characterization of the kindly, stable Faraday is brilliant and sad and unnerving, thanks to the ambiguity ruling the book. Faraday alone is worth the read, but it would be short-changing Waters' skill to say that he is the only reason to read The Little Stranger.

I have been a fan of Sarah Waters ever since I read her first novel, Tipping the Velvet. It was a raw and exuberant, heart-breaking book, which she followed with the emotional gut-punch of her second book, Affinity. Waters' early novels reveal a young writer tapping into and exploring her prodigious talent. With The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters has given us a fully mature work, a master-stroke in the form of a controlled, slow burn that delivers on the full weight of her potential.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

2009-08-23T14:51:00.000-07:00

I finished The Blind Assassin, the novel for which Margaret Atwood finally won the Booker Prize, about a month ago, but I was so completely and uselessly fan-girled by it that I wanted to wait a while before writing up my thoughts. I figured that way I'd have more to say than just "Oh my god, oh my god, that was... I mean... wow!"

I do have more than that to say after a month of rolling the book around in my mind, but it still all boils down to "wow." The book is successful in so many ways that I can't address them all without boring anyone who doesn't live in my head, so I'm going to focus on structure for this little write up.

Structurally speaking, The Blind Assassin is a perfect novel. A structurally perfect novel is impressive no matter how you slice it, but it's especially impressive in the case of this novel, which weaves together four different, yet inter-related narratives. There are no last minute revelations in The Blind Assassin, as one might expect from a novel that is, in a sense, a bit of a jigsaw. Last minute revelations would disrupt the novel's elegant lines. Subtlety is called for, and that what Atwood uses, guiding the reader along implicitly, so that when something is revealed explicitly, the reader finds that they were already subconsciously aware of it.

The four threads that form The Blind Assassin are the modern, day to day dealings of the elderly protagonist, Iris Chase, Iris' remembrances of her childhood and early adulthood, and the whole text of a novel, also called The Blind Assassin, that her sister, Laura Chase, supposedly wrote before committing suicide in the 1940's. Laura Chase's The Blind Assassin is also set in the '40's, and tells the story of two lovers doomed to be separated by circumstance. In that novel-within-the-novel, the unnamed man writes a story for his lover, a rich society bride. It tells the tale of a blind assassin and the woman he rescues from death.

These are a lot of threads with very disparate contents, and one would think it nearly impossible to keep them operable and without using literary "cleverness" or falling back on trite and obvious tricks. What amazed me about The Blind Assassin, is that Atwood never makes a false move, not once, through the entire thing. Each of the threads elucidates the others, each narrator passes the narrative burden as if it were something light and delicate, like a teacup. The execution is flawless - literally, without a flaw. Incredible.

I've always liked Margaret Atwood. I deconstructed a number of her short stories when I began teaching myself to write, I gobbled up The Handmaid's Tale and I'm in the middle of loving Alias Grace, but The Blind Assassin is something different. It stands out to me as being that rarest of rare things: the Important Book that is also a genuine, keeps-you-up-until-dawn pleasure to read. This is why, after all of the babble that went into this post, and all of the thinking that preceded it, in the end, all I can say is "wow."

The Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill

2009-08-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

The Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill, is the third in her Simon Serrailler crime series, and I'm afraid it's the last one I'm going to read.

Her first book in the series, The Various Haunts of Men, was brilliant. Here's a link to my review of it last year. I loved how edgy it was, how Hill never coddled the reader, trusting in her audience's intelligence and emotional strength to get them through a rather disturbing and, at times, very sad read. The plot was taut, the characters compelling, the omniscient point of view (which is tricky to pull off) used to good end. I'd never read a mystery/crime novel that gave the reader so much emotional credit. I loved it, and I really looked forward to the next in the series.

That was The Pure in Heart. I didn't find it to be half so strong as The Various Haunts of Men - it wasn't bad, it just wasn't the Holy Cow! good of its predecessor. Here's the link to that review.

So, on to The Risk of Darkness, the third (but not last, as there's another on the way) in the series. By now, Hill's use of the omniscient third-person narrator is starting to wear thin. It's a difficult thing to pull off successfully in a novel-length work. That's why I was so impressed by The Various Haunts of Men. Usually moving to a new point of view in every chapter is exhausting, but it worked in the first Serrailler book, because the narrative arc was so taut. Used well, the technique demands the reader's emotional investment, but it requires a bold rising action and climax to work, two things that The Risk of Darkness lacks.

The Risk of Darkness picks up where The Pure in Heart left off - on the track of another serial killer in idyllic suburban England. Woven into the main plot is Serrailler's disconnect from people in general, his sister's worrisome disconnect from her husband, a young woman dying of variant CJD (mad cow disease), her husband going off the deep end, a young female priest with surprisingly little agency, her mother's victimization at the hand of burglars and a woman who's a jerk to her kid. There are other narrative threads in addition to these, but I think you get the idea.

The omniscient third-person no longer serves its purpose the way it did in The Various Haunts of Men. It pulls the reader in too many directions at once. We cannot invest in Serrailler - we're not with him long enough and, frankly, he's just not that compellingly drawn. We cannot invest in the dying young woman and her mad-with-grief husband - we're no with them long enough. Etc. etc. etc. In fact, rather than making me care about all of these various characters, I found myself doing the opposite. By the time I finished the book, I was glad to be out of the heads of such myopic, fatalistic, pathetic, cauterized and/or vaguely tiresome people.

I do have to say that Hill's approach to crime fiction is non-standard, which is refreshing. But the narrative convention that worked so well in The Various Haunts of Men is stunting the other books in the series. The Risk of Darkness should be edgy, compelling. It's not. It's ultimately tiresome. The omniscient third-person point of view has rendered Hill's characters two-dimensional. Despite a great deal of potential, they have become cookie-cutter people made to type and manipulated, and sadly not worth the investment.

So, the verdict? If you want to read a fantastically strong crime novel with structural integrity, read The Various Haunts of Men. Skip the rest of the Serrailler series - they'll only make you miss the excellence of the first book.

Grendel by John Gardner

2009-07-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

This review will actually be quite short because, after a quick synopsis, there are really only two major things I'd like to address.

So, before going any father, here's the quick synopsis:

Grendel by John Gardner, is a fictional autobiography of Grendel, the troll/ogre antagonist-creature of Beowulf fame. Grendel, it turns out, is really quite a thinker, pondering all manner of metaphysical and existential questions while indulging his baser interests - he is still Grendel after all, which means he's pretty base and mean. The narrative is spare and follows the general goings-on of the Beowulf right up to the end, when Beowulf triumphs.

So, the first thing that bears commenting on is the portrayal of Grendel as being quite a thinker. I actually really liked it, and I liked that he behaved in his famously brutal, cruel way, despite being metaphysically concerned. For example, he continues to attack Hrothgar's hall, not only out of malicious rage, but because it gives him an identity - he becomes the monster that sacks Hrothgar's hall. The only reason he doesn't simply kill everyone is because, if he did, he would lose the identity he's earned. However, it's important to remember that Grendel is a philosopher only when compared to those in his society. His mother has long since lost the gift of coherent speech, and most of the other characters - both those like Grendel and human men are not what you might call "socially curious" or even terribly "smart."

The real mind of interest is that of the dragon. Among the many things of philosophical interest that the dragon says during a conversation with Grendel, his most pithy bit of advice is "collect as much gold as you can, and then sit on it." I liked the dragon so much, that I would have preferred the book to be about him. This leads me to my second point.

The real reason that I didn't enjoy Grendel as much as I felt that I should have, despite beautiful language and good humor and interesting characterization, is Grendel's narrative voice, or more specifically, John Gardner's authorial voice filtered through Grendel. We're now entering into dodgy territory, because what I'm talking about is not in any way concrete. Gardner filtered through Grendel is, to put is gently, painfully self-satisfied, not a pretty quality in an author, no matter how celebrated.

It's all right for Grendel to be a little bit pompous - he's both sympathetic and repellent, a thinker and a brute - but the pomposity is not Grendel's, it's Gardner's. Everything in the narrative smacks of authorial self-satisfaction. You can almost here Gardner in the background, daring you to think he's not clever. This is a real turn-off, and it's the reason that, despite everything that's great about it, I didn't enjoy reading Grendel. It's a real shame. I almost wish Gardner's fictional dragon had written it instead.

A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker & You've Got Dragons by Kathryn Cave

2009-07-12T18:45:00.000-07:00

I don't usually read children's picture books, mostly because I don't have children. But for several months, I've been reading a lot of them as research for several projects. Many of the picture books I've read are cute but, for the most part, nothing special. I have come across two, however, that made a serious impression.

The first, Bonny Becker's A Visitor for Bear, I heard read on the radio before I read it for myself. Daniel Pinkwater, the great children's book author, was on NPR's week-end edition. He read through Becker's A Visitor for Bear, which is about Bear, a reclusive sort who doesn't like visitors (he even has a sign) and the mouse who wears him down. Even without seeing Kady MacDonald Denton's illutrations (which are lovely and expressive) I was completely charmed by the story. Bear's revelation, that maybe friends are a good thing, comes around with gentle inevitability and good humor. To see the apron wearing Bear exhausted into providing tea and a crackling fire for the cheeky mouse is one thing, but Becker takes it further, exposing Bear's vulnerabilities - the mouse listens to him, takes an interest and laughs at his jokes, which are all new experiences for Bear - so that when the mouse says he has to go, Bear's despair is painful and understandable. Happily the mouse ends up staying and the pair enjoy a second cup of tea by Bear's fire, a comforting ending to a moment of genuine catharsis and change on Bear's part.

The second book, You've Got Dragons by Kathryn Cave and illustrated by Nick Maland, is the sort of book I wish I'd had as a child. The dragons are humorous stand-ins for the very real fears and anxieties children (and adults) have. The book goes through all of the things we tend to do when we've got dragons - we ignore them, yell at them, hide from them, fight them, and yet they keep growing bigger until we're expert dragon-havers. But, if we take a different approach, if we acknowledge our dragons, give them names (I liked Montgomery the Math Test Dragon), know what they look like and treat it with respect, the dragon shrinks, until one day it disappears. But the really wonderful thing is that it gives no false promises to the child reader, ending with the line, "now you'll know what to do the next time you've got dragons." You will get more dragons and that's ok, because now you know what to do. It's a comforting message, and practical advice that both children and adults could benefit from, delivered in a humorous and charming package.

Very often, children's books are formulaic, or didactic, or saccharine, or simply nothing special. Every once in a while though, you come across a book that reminds you of why you loved picture books as a child. A Visitor for Bear and You've Got Dragons are two such books. I will very proudly read them to our children should we be lucky enough to have them, and if we aren't, I'm very happy to have them on my shelf anyway.

The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend

2009-06-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

For a while now, I've felt like a hypocrite. I love meat. I mean, I really Love meat. But the inhumane living conditions, and even worse, the dying conditions that many animals raised for food experience on factory farms and in standard assembly-line meat processing plants disturbs me. It isn't the act of eating another creature that bothers me. I'm a human and, as such, I'm an omnivore, which means that my diet consists of both meat and veg in varying degrees depending on the budget, my iron levels and what I happen to feel like cooking. What does bother me, however, is needless suffering. I don't think that the animals that will become the meat I eat should have to suffer for the privilege of feeding me. So I've been at a cross-roads for about a year, unwilling to completely give up the yumminess of meat, but increasingly unable to stomach the practices that put it on my plate.

Given this backpack full of guilt, empathy and hypocrisy, I didn't feel prepared to read Catherine Friend's book, The Compassionate Carnivore, when it came out a year ago. I made excuses like, "I'm not ready to think about this yet" and "I'll check it out soon...." Well, I finally did check it out and it was, in two words, freaking excellent.

Friend is a life-long carnivore. She also raises sheep on a small farm in Minnesota with her partner. They sell their sheep for meat. They eat the sheep they raise, and they raise those sheep in such a manner that they have very good, safe, sheep-like lives, before they fulfill they're ultimate destinies as lamb chops and mutton. I say all this upfront, because it's important to understand that Friend's point of view is one that stems from respect - for the farmers, for the consumers and especially for the animals.

Friend is not about giving up meat. In fact, that's the opposite of helpful if one's concern is animal welfare. Rather, Friend would have meat-eaters continue to eat meat with one important change. Think about where your meat comes from and make a conscious choice about the kind of meat you buy - organic or local? Vegeatarian fed or grass fed, or grass finished for that matter? Slaughtered humanely (I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it isn't) or herded into meat-packing plant's disassembly line?

Once you've decide what kind of meat you want to eat, the next step, according to Friend, is to vote with your dollar. Support small farmers whose practices reflect whatever it is that you feel is important, whether its sustainability or humane treatment or just a little less corporate agra-business putting the squeeze on family farms.

What really makes The Compassionate Carnivore work is a combination of two things. The first is Catherine Friend's humor, empathy and total lack of bull-shit. Not only has she been through the meat-eater / animal lover's conundrum that I outlined above, but she's still going through it, and rather than taking an all or nothing approach, she recommends baby-steps, as in her experience, you have to be patient with yourself if you want to make a lasting change. The second thing is the abundance of resources she gives you to help you educate yourself and make whatever changes are right for you. This book never once hit a preachy note - a pleasant and important surprise considering how volatile the subject is.

All in all, I would recommend The Compassionate Carnivore to anyone - to those who eat meat with joyful abandon, as well as to those who have given it up because of fear of animal cruelty. What Catherine Friend outlines is a middle-road full of good humor and dual-perspectives. On the one hand, it's vital to have compassion for the environment and for the creatures who will one day become our food. On the other hand, it's vital to have compassion for yourself, which is something that I needed to hear.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

2009-05-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

The Time Traveler's Wife isn't usually the kind of book I gravitate to. It has a the indefinable haze of Today-Show-approved-quality-chick-lit about it. I'm a staunchly no-chick-lit kind of gal, so I surprised myself a few weeks ago when I picked it up a the library after listlessly wandering around for half an hour. I'm really happy I did - my anti-chick-lit snobbery learned a valuable lesson in chilling out.

Audrey Niffenegger's first novel is sort of a surprise. It feels, even as you're reading it, quite breezy, swinging along as it does. But every so often, Niffenegger allows shadows to cross over the work - not so surprising, given that she wrote The Time Traveler's Wife while simultaneously working on her second book, The Incestuous Sisters, a beautifully illustrated book about, yes, three incestuous sisters.

Niffenegger's real triumph is how deftly she manages time. Her protagonist, Henry DeTamble is a CPD - (a person with chrono-displacement, a genetic abnormality which causes the patient to time travel in much the same way that epilepsy causes seizures). He meets Clare Abshire, who will become his wife, when she is six years old and he is in his thirties (in his present, when he meets the six year old Clare, his wife, Clare, is pregnant with their daughter).

It would be easy for an author to drop any one of this story's chronological threads, given that Niffenegger moves Henry back and forth through the past, present and future seemingly at random, all the while building the narrative logically if one lets go of traditional time. For example, although Clare has known Henry since she was six, he meets her for the first time when she is twenty and he is twenty-eight. This is a minor example of how Niffenegger manipulates the chronology, and all to good effect. By the end of the book, all of the pieces fall into place inevitably, as the reader has been given glimpses of the inevitable throughout. In this way, Niffenegger places the reader firmly in Henry's shoes - the pieces of his life align only at the end of the book, in what is very close to hindsight.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a romance, it's true. But it is quiet and matter-of-fact. There is little of the "romance" about it. Similarly, while Niffenegger created a disease for Henry to explain how and why he time travels, it's a foundational element, this bit of science fiction, very quietly driving the book. In the end, I would say that The Time Traveler's Wife is speculative - it speculates on the nature of time and it's elasticity; it speculates on what kind of love could survive the strain of chronological displacement, an appropriate concern for moderns who never seem to have enough time; ultimately, it speculates on what kind of life could be lead when even the facade of control cannot exist. It's a touching book and an affecting book and chick-lit or not, it was absolutely worth the read.

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

2009-04-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

I read The Passion by Jeanette Winterson as an undergrad in a feminist lit. course. I remember thinking it was all right, although I was absolutely conscious of the fact that I wasn't really getting it. Still, I liked it well enough to hang on to my copy for nearly ten years. Being at an absolute loss for something to read, I picked it up again and I'm incredibly glad that I did. This time I had enough experience and perspective to not only get it, but to actively enjoy everything that I had missed the first time through.

The Passion is, at its heart, a meditation on passion - sexual, spiritual, filial and emotional. The story itself is a simple one set in Europe over the course of the Napoleonic Wars. The first chapter follows Henri, a simple French soldier who follows Napoleon with unquestioning faith. The second chapter introduces Villanelle, a Venetian woman who literally loses her heart. The third chapter unites these two separate threads and the fourth chapter ties them together. But far from being cliched or even predictable, Winterson weaves the narrative with so much of the surreal, the questionable and the casually fantastic that the reader ends up feeling caught in a strange sort of tapestry. Her style turns a seemingly simple story into a grotesque and beautiful fairy tale told through a looking glass.

While The Passion is worth reading for the language and imagery alone, I especially loved Henri's ruminations on the nature of passion - that there is no hate like the hate that comes from passion disappointed, that to be in love is to live one's life in the service of the beloved, that the beloved bears a mirror, and only in that mirror can the lover see himself. None of these ideas are new, but to read them in Henri's vulnerable, earnest voice, to think of them after the book is done and his fate completely known is a lovely, melancholy experience, one that I couldn't have hoped to understand as a young, inexperienced girl.

Ultimately, The Passion can be read in many ways - as a magical realism, a fairy tale, a literary experiment, even, if one squints, as a feminist track, although, looking back, I think that the only reason it qualified for a course in feminist lit., is because Villanelle genders-bends and loses her heart to a woman. The queer material is presented casually, very much not the express point of the novel except in that it illustrates the way in which passion neither respects nor requires restriction (honestly, the fact that Villanelle has webbed feet is given more narrative attention). That said, regardless of how you chose to read The Passion, regardless of where you place its weight, it is very much worth reading, if only as a doorway to ruminate on the role of passion in your life.

Disquiet by Julia Leigh

2009-04-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

I have really, desperately wanted to read something good for the past while, good being loosely defined as anything ranging from very well executed pulp to the legitimately highbrow. Unfortunately, good in any shape or form has eluded me, so much so that I got tired of writing negative reviews, so I haven't reviewed the past couple of books that I've read. Then, yesterday, I came across Disquiet by Julia Leigh, an Australian author I'd never heard of, but whom Toni Morrison and J.M. Coetzee seem to think highly of. The volume was a slender novella just released in paperback, with a blurb that read "a haunting, mesmerizing tale of a family in extremis." Whether it was the blurb or the form that attracted me (almost no one writes or publishes single novellas anymore), I finished Disquiet in a two hour sitting, and it was very good.

Disquiet is about a woman, Olivia, who arrives at her mother's chateau on the run from an abusive marriage. She brings her children with her. Olivia's brother, Marcus, also arrives with his grieving wife, Sophie, after the birth of their stillborn daughter. What follows is a fragile unfolding.

The novella does this unfolding quietly, disquietingly, in fact. Leigh's prose is spare and elegant, with not a word wasted. She implies much more than she says and is all the more powerful for it. Her style is an elegant brushstroke through which Olivia's disconnection and despair become painfully clear through small actions and omissions. The other characters are drawn with equal, spartan care, while Sophie's grief takes on grotesque proportions, contrasting directly to Olivia's painful flat-affect. In the end, both women undergo emotional crises at the hands of the other, forcing an end to their respective stagnations.

Disquiet is a very fast read, easy to savor and finish in a week-end, if not a day. As starved as I've been for good, and as good as Disquiet was, I wouldn't wish it into a novel - what made Disquiet so excellent was its brevity. All of its power and elegance are rooted in its form. To wish for more would be to spoil it. That said, having read it, I feel refreshed and content and almost relieved. Now I feel ready to continue the search for the next good thing.

The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler

2009-04-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what my problem is, but I feel sure that I must have one. I feel like I should have loved The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler, I feel like I should have gobbled it up like the diverting little confection it is, I feel like it should have at least enjoyed it. But I really didn't. It's the sort of book I would have eaten for lunch five years ago, and then told everyone they should read it for a quick good time. But these days, it just made me feel impatient.

Some background: The Arcanum is a secret society of occult investigators, a supposedly brilliant quartet of unlikely heroes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, H.P. Lovecraft and the voodoo queen, Marie Laveau.

There are problems with the choice of characters in more than one way - too many ways in fact to go into in the space of a shortish blog post with very limited readership. Suffice it to say, the most glaring problem is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not his legendary creation, Sherlock Holmes. Nor was H.P. Lovecraft Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary creation, Sherlock Holmes (supplemented by a heaping brainful of paranoia and an obsession with the occult), and yet Wheeler insists on upon treating both characters as if they were. And Harry Houdini? Well, one can only ask why the hell he would want to secretly investigate the occult (a question that never comes close to getting answered). As for Marie Laveau, why the most feared and respected voodoo pracitioner ever must resort to lifting her skirts and pretending to be a prostitute every time the group gets into a tight spot is beyond my understanding.

Toss into this motley mix of unlikelyhood The Book of Enoch, Alastair Crowely, fallen angels, an annoying thug of a detective, and a far ranging plot to expose God's mistakes and bring about the end of the world, and you've got the makings for some good clean fun. Unfortunately, it's not. There's something in Wheeler's execution that falls flat, perhaps beneath the weight of his purple prose (Lovecraft could get away with this, Wheeler, sadly, cannot). But it's really the sense of everything being massively and incredibly contrived that made me squirm. Wheeler bends and twists his characters to suit his needs, mutilating all sense of narrative authenticity as effectively as the big, bad Evil kills its victims. Like I said, it made me impatient.

I love a good, trashy romp - I really do. I just like my good, trashy romps to cop to what they are and do it in a genuinely trashy, not-trying-to-be-anything-else way. Unfortunately, Wheeler's The Arcanum fell short there. He managed to turn what could have been a fun and diverting diversion into a pretentious, unintuitive clockwork. That he used figures like Doyle and Lovecraft to do it just makes it feel all the more like an eldritch failure.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

2009-03-22T17:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted a review in well over a month. At first, this was because life caught up with me and I didn't have the time to sit down and read for several weeks. Then things slowed down and I picked up a book I'd been intending to read for over a year - Michael Cox's debut novel, The Meaning of Night, and things slowed down even more. As in, I have been trying to strong-arm myself through this book for three weeks, and it feels like I've been at it for months.

That said, I don't want to imply that The Meaning of Night is not well-written, because it is. Cox is, in fact, a noted Victorian scholar with a special interest in the gothic. This man knows his material, which I believe is the biggest problem. Cox knows the literature of the period so well that he is able to thoroughly imitate, in minute detail, the styles and tropes of those masters who created the ghost story and the Victorian gothic novel, but when Dickins and Collins and Henry James did it, they were treading new ground, they were innovating existing literary molds. Cox's debut novel, on the other hand, does not contribute anything new to the dialogue. Rather, it very self-consciously follows an already well-beaten path.

Cox uses standard tropes (obsession, unreliable identities, lost heirs and doomed love to name a few) in a purely standard way - the narrator/protagonist seeks revenge against the man who deprived him out of his education, his love and his rightful place in society, etc. etc. etc. This would be fun (no innovation required), if Cox didn't present the material in such a ponderous, self-indulgent way, quoting Donne at random intervals, interrupting the narrative with interminable flashbacks and foot-noting everything from the Latin chapter headings to hotel and restaurant locations. This might read as clever to some, but to me it was interruptive and precious, and worse, it didn't serve the story in any tangible way. The result was akin to Cox standing at a lectern, interjecting minutia, while Anthony Hopkins tried to read Bleak House to an audience of undergraduates.

Now, one might argue that the tiresomeness of the prose is deliberate - the novel is written in the first person and is meant to be the confession of a bibliographic man who is far too intelligent for his own good. But Cox sets up a separate problem there. Although the narrator/protagonist Edward Glyver, has a very legitimate reason to hate his enemy, Phoebus Daunt, Cox destroys the reader's ability to truly and deeply sympathize with (or even like), him before the end of the novel's first line:

"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper."

Now, I don't object on moral grounds - several of my favorite books have morally reprehensible protagonists (see I, Lucifer and Use of Weapons) and because it is natural and appropriate for those narratives, I'm totally good with that. I object because Cox throws this out there and then expects the reader to trust and like and invest in Glyver's ponderous narrative without question.

In the end, I'm a reader who likes questions and conflict and psychological interest, and my greatest objection to The Meaning of Night is that Michael Cox had a great opportunity to plumb some very intriguing depths, and he chose instead to show us all how terribly much he knows. Given that, I would recommend that if you're looking for a gothic romp, give it a read, but if you expect more, or would like a gothic romp with substance, pick up Tipping the Velvet or Affinity by Sarah Waters, Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin, or the real, original deals by Wilkie Collins, or Charles Dickens or any of their contemporaries.

The Gargoyle: A Novel by Andrew Davidson

2009-02-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

Andrew Davidson's first novel, The Gargoyle, did something to me that I love, but which happens relatively infrequently - I ended the book feeling melancholy and out of sorts because it was over. Apparently, The Gargoyle took Davidson seven years to write and the end result is a novel that fully embodies the benefits of its long period of gestation. This is most evident in the mellowness of the narrative's strong pull - nothing feels manufactured, nothing feels forced. The story simply pulls the reader forward through to its inevitable end.

Here follows a very brief and necessarily incomplete synopsis:

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator/protagonist - a hyper-intelligent, beautiful man who, as the result of a great string of circumstances, is a drug-addled pornographer at the time of the fire that nearly kills him. Though he survives his accident (quite against his preference at the time), the narrator is left severely disfigured with nothing but a fantastically thorough plan to commit suicide pulling him through his grueling recovery.

Enter Marianne Engel, a beautiful sculptress of gargoyles and grotesques undergoing temporary treatment at the hospital's psych ward. She comes to the narrator's room and informs him that she was a nun 700 years before in medieval Germany, and that he was the love of her life, a mercenary whom she'd helped heal from burns received in battle. The narrator thinks she's crazy (really, why wouldn't he), but something about her draws him and he begins to look forward to her visits.

Over the course of these visits, which become increasingly important to the narrator, Marianne Engel tells him stories - beautiful stories of doomed lovers intertwined with their own history and readings of Dante's Inferno. Although the narrator's logic never fully accepts these stories and their history as being factual, he does come to believe that she believes them, and this is enough for him.

When he is well enough to leave the hospital, he goes to live with her, and for a time they are happy. But Marianne Engel believes that her carvings are a penance. She receives word from God that there are only 27 left before her time on earth is finished, and the narrator, who has never loved before, must travel through his own inferno before coming to the end.

Davidson ties the threads and themes of Dante's work, Marianne's stories, the narrator's experiences and their medieval history so successfully that the narrative progresses with inexorable grace. The narrator unflinchingly relates his own emotional progression with a sardonic self-awareness that gradually mellows to simple self-awareness, as indicated by the subtle and gradual shift in narrative tone.

Implications and perceptions are presented without forced conclusions, questions of religion and faith are raised without the desperate expectation of an answer. In this way, Davidson trusts his reader more than any first-time author I've ever read. He never strives, grasps or manipulates. He simply weaves a seamless tapestry of a novel and allows the reader to see what she (or he) will.

I suspect that some will love The Gargoyle while other might just think it's neat, and I suspect that the response will depend entirely on the reader. For me, this was certainly the best first novel I've read in a very long time. It did not feel like a first novel, it felt sure and brave and inevitable. If this is the result of Davidson's first seven year effort, I will happily wait another seven for a work of equal worth.

The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

2009-02-01T21:00:00.001-08:00

I've never reviewed a cookbook on this blog before, mostly because, as much as I like reading cookbooks, I've never come across one like The Art of Simple Food. It is a lovely, gentle book, made charming by the Alice Waters' obvious love of food and the process of cooking.

Waters walks the reader through 200 pages of basic techniques and foundation recipes, but far from being overwhelming or disheartening, Waters is gentle and empowering - so much so that I felt comfortable enough to successfully try a recipe for a basic souffle, something that I've heard, on more than one occasion, no novice cook should attempt.

Following the foundation recipes, are more recipes - variations on the foundations that Waters has guided you through in her clear, warm prose. The idea is that once you understand the principals at work behind a dish, you are utterly free to play with variations from there, and idea that I really appreciate.

The other thing I liked about The Art of Simple Food, aside from Waters' voice and down to earth style, is that this is no glossy cookbook meant to be leafed through on coffee tables but never used. This is a functional book. There are no fancy photos of high fashion food. Rather, The Art of Simple Food features lovely, Art-Nouveau inspired, pencil illustrations by the artist Patricia Curtan, giving an overall effect of understated warmth that highlights the ingredients as well as the finished dish. The spot light is on the food itself, not untouchable masterpieces conceived by a distant chef. In fact, despite her fame, nothing about Waters is distant - she is fully accessible and completely encouraging in an understated, un-patronizing way.

And, I suppose that's where the success of this book lies. It is a beautiful, homey, aesthetically pleasing, functional cookbook with recipes and prose suitable for novice cooks, as well as more experienced amateur chefs. Even foodies who don't cook would find pleasure in the joy Waters obviously takes in presenting menus and techniques based on what's in season and the contents of a well-stocked pantry. Utterly lovely reading. It will take me ages to cook my way through The Art of Simple Food, and I'm very much looking forward to the process.

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

2009-01-19T16:49:00.000-08:00

I always find it a little difficult to review a short story collection. My instinct is to take the stories individually and review them one by one, but that would take forever and I doubt if anyone has the patience to read an epic blog post. The trouble is that the stories in many collections are oftentimes either unrelated, or tied together by a general theme as loosely as six year old's tennis shoes. However, the curse of the unrelated story does not plague Kelly Link's dark and lovely collection, Pretty Monsters. While all of the stories here stand on their own, they are united by the theme well expressed by her title: they are stories about monsters - some pretty, some subtle, and some simply monstrous.

"Monster", the first story I'd ever read by Kelly Link, literally made my neck twitch, which is not an easy thing to do. It is also an excellent example of the quality that permeates her entire collection - the quality of Wrong.

I'm not referring to Wrong in a moral, ethical or societal sense. I'm referring to that subtle ache one gets when something is vaguely Wrong, when something nebulous is unsettling the lizard brain. That is the quality that best defines all of the stories in Link's collection, although it shows up most strongly in "Monster," which is about a scout troop's camping trip, an urban legend, and a monster in the woods. What makes the horror element so effective in Link's work, is the lightness of her hand, the humorous charm of her narrative voice, and the politeness of her monsters - they aren't trying to scare you, they're just being themselves.

In the subtler stories, like "The Wrong Grave," Link uses communicative ambiguity to great effect. She allows the narrator to connect with the reader, then destabilizes the reader's sense of not-Wrong with the narrator's subtle Wrong-ness. The result of this is that I finished the story feeling vaguely disturbed for reasons I couldn't pin down.

The only place that I felt even slightly dissatisfied with the collection is exemplified by the story, "The Faerie Handbag". It's a completely successful story that borders more on fantasy than horror. Still, the story's narrator is incredibly, if subtly, unreliable. What left me dissatisfied was the potential for a deeper exploration of the narrator - why does she believe what she believes? Why is she telling us this story? Is she having fun at our expense? Is she traumatized? Is she mad? There were a lot of psychological possibilities at play and I wanted Link to explore them. That said, I recognize that this is a matter of writerly preference - while I as a writer who tends to plumb characters' psyches, Link's story functions successfully without doing so. It's just a matter of taste.

Kelly Link is one of the most exciting young writers around right now, and the fact that she writes genre fiction in the short story form is especially exciting, given how far out of favor the short story form has fallen... but then, that's a discussion for another post. It's enough to say that Kelly Link's collection is a well-crafted, funny and subtly disturbing read. The experience of reading Pretty Monsters is like being tickled while the world tilts around you, and that, as experiences go, is one that I would recommend.

The Foggy Foot Annex

2009-01-16T17:55:00.001-08:00

Hi everyone - this is patently not a review. I just wanted to announce the arrival of The Foggy Foot Annex, my new, secondary, non-review blog. I will continue to write my sporadic reviews here. The Annex is for everything else, which amounts to quite a lot.

The Annex is not completely spiffied-up yet, but it is up and running with a shiny, new first post, so give it a look-see whenever you have a moment, or are feeling so inclined. In the meantime, I'm cooking up reviews for Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link, which my awesome husband just gave me for Christmas, and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, which is one of my all time favorites. I promise I'll get them up here before I'm old and gray.... In the meantime, thanks for reading!

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

2009-01-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

I finished Lauren Groff's debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, early this morning. I didn't finish it last night because I was going cross-eyed from exhaustion and promised myself that I would exorcise it before another day passed. It was really that good.

Originally, the premise sounded a little well-worn -- young, ambitious female scholar has affair with professor, it ends badly, she goes home to small town to recover. However, the fact that she tries to run her professor's wife down with a bush plane piqued my interest enough for me to read on, and I'm very glad I did. Although The Monsters of Templeton is a very fast read, it's not a popcorn book - Groff's prose-style alone precludes that. In fact, it's her prose that makes the novel stand-out. Well, her prose and the novel's structure.

While the unifying thread is that of Willie Upton, the ambitious female scholar with the bush plane, the novel wouldn't be half as interesting if it were only about her (the only real weakness I found in the book were some minor elements of her characterization that didn't quite ring true. But then, that's a matter of personal taste...).

Groff expands the narrative to include the entire town of Templeton including its settlement, the "monster" in Lake Glimmerglass and Willie's venerable family tree. As Willie solves the mystery of her parentage, the history of her family and town unfolds through letters, journals and the fictional work of a fictional genius. From a structural point of view, I enjoyed all of that because I'm a structure geek, but neat structure doesn't necessarily guarantee enjoyable reading. However, Groff peppers in so many dark, humorous and, frankly odd, elements -- a spinster with pyrokinesis, a charming murderess with a cross-dressing sister, a benign, violet colored ghost with a penchant for cleanliness, and the aforementioned "monster" in the lake (which I though to be the loveliest character in book) -- that it's hard not to be charmed by the narrative itself.

And so, because of all of these things and others that I would rather not spoil, The Monsters of Templeton was a lovely read and I very much recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of a look at the dark side, without tipping over the edge.

Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt

2008-12-02T13:25:00.000-08:00

Though A.S. Byatt's most well-known work to date is, arguably, the novel Possession, which won the Booker Prize in 1990, Byatt's work is not limited to novel form. She writes wonderful short story collections that incorporate elements of academia, fairy tales and folklore, pop culture, and art. She also writes novellas, which can be tricky for both reader and writer, as they inhabit to the gray space between the short story and the novel - too much information for one, not enough for the other.

Her book, Angels and Insects, straddles this divide. The volume is made up of two novellas - "Morpho Eugenia" and "Conjugial Angel", which are thematically, if not narratologically related. Although I enjoyed "Morpho Eugenia" a great deal more than "Conjugial Angel", I can see why Byatt chose to put them next to each other in this volume. Together, they offer a novel length examination of the relationship between science and religion as it was being explored in the mid-19th century, and as it is still being explored today.

"Morpho Eugenia" tells the story of a naturalist, William Adamson, recently returned from the Amazon and welcomed into the marbled household of his patron, Harald Alabaster. Byatt parallels William's enchantment with the Alabaster family, particularly the pale, beautiful Eugenia, with his study of insects until, through William's disenchantment, the reader is brought to see how human beings and insects are similarly ruthless, and misunderstood. All of this is set against the competing backdrops of evolution vs. faith, and reality vs. fantasy, which Byatt weaves with the threads of Milton's Paradise Lost, a fictional religious treatise, etymology and several invented fairy stories.

"Conjugial Angel" occupies an entirely different tone and space than does "Morpho Eugenia". Whereas Byatt concerns herself with the base root of humanity in the first of the two, "Conjugial Angel" poses questions about things of a spiritual nature through the strange happenings at a Victorian seance. Though decidedly more tongue-in-cheek than "Morpho Eugenia", "Conjugial Angel" lacks its companion's depth and clarity, though it is far from substance-less. While I would recommend "Morpho Eugenia" to anyone as a stand alone (with the slight warning that it is a stylistic pastiche), I cannot do the same for "Conjugial Angel." However, read in their intended pairing, both stories work beautifully as an overall exploration of faith, science and the changing nature of love.

The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr

2008-11-23T20:40:00.000-08:00

I'll come straight to the point - The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr is a very nice piece of Sherlock Holmes fanfic, but really not worth the time it took to read it. I am not in any way disrespecting fanfic as I've read some that is really quite good, but I expect more from the celebrated author of The Alienist - a book that is both very well written and, quite frankly, disturbing.

The Italian Secretary features a sadly anemic Watson's pitifully anemic account of how a dreadfully anemic Holmes solves the horribly anemic "case" of the haunting of Holyroodhouse. It was preposterous from the moment Holmes and Watson are called to Scotland by Mycroft, who is apparently on very intimate terms with Queen Victoria. Like is said, preposterous, not to mention sadly underdeveloped. Instead of building the case throughout the narrative, Carr simply insists at every possible juncture that everything that happens is either breathtakingly thrilling, important or dangerous. It is not, though clearly the reader is meant to think otherwise.

Carr is obviously a genuine fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's (I can't fault his enthusiasm - I'm a huge fan myself), and he's clearly read the canon. Unfortunately, this obvious knowledge and appreciation did not translate into a compelling "further adventure," or even a convincing portrayal of the master detective (for that go straight to said canon, or the Granada TV series with Jeremy Brett). Rather, The Italian Secretary simply made me feel cranky and dissatisfied - a feeling that only went away after I'd re-read "The Blue Carbuncle" and "The Resident Patient." So that's what I would suggest - stick to the real Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (or any of the other canonical collections or novels) wherein the cases and the hero are anything but anemic.

The Haunted House by Charles Dickens

2008-11-17T21:41:00.000-08:00

I haven't read any Dickens since I re-read A Christmas Carol several years ago, and, upon finishing The Haunted House, I was once again reminded of why I like him so much. Dickens is really funny. Really, I'm serious. Dickens can actually be funny enough to make up for the lachrymose moralizing that sneaks into some of his longer works (see Oliver Twist, or, god help you, Little Dorrit). Granted, Dickens wields the lachrymose as a means of social commentary and even of reform so it's hard to complain. Still, his sly, almost biting humor, does help the medicine go down.

That said, the medicine in The Haunted House is already pretty sweet, if a little pious and saccharine at times. The haunted house of the title is engagingly drawn, complete with cataleptic maids and panicky cooks - people that are as whimsically ridiculous as anyone Edward Gorey could create. But the house isn't really haunted - at least not by rattling spirits. The only ghosts that haunt the denizens of the house are their own. Their memories, pasts and experiences comprise the 'haunting' stories named for each of the occupied rooms.

Ultimately, the set-up is a fairly Dickensian exercise in catharsis, redemption and acceptance, although Dickens did not write all of the stories himself. He orchestrated the frame tale, entitled "The Mortals of the House," and contributed two other stories, but the rest were commissioned for the Christmas 1859 edition of All the Year Round. Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Hesba Stretton, among others, contributed, each writing a story set in one of the 'haunted' rooms. Sadly, most are negligible, though pleasant reads. There are exceptions in Collins' tale of the terrors of a candlestick, and Stretton's melancholy story of nearly lost love, but, for the most part, Dickens initial frame tale, "The Mortals of the House," is the only must read.

So, here's my recommendation:

Should you be interested in trying The Haunted House, borrow it, read the frame, and cherry pick the rest. Then go read Great Expectations for a full dose of the good stuff.

Ah, Christmas

2008-11-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

The holiday season is coming up, and several very wise friends have done the smart thing and made their Amazon Wishlists publicly available, so I'm going to follow their lead, as queries are being logged. Here's the link that will take you to my wishlist. Eventually, I'll put a little button on the blog, but for now, I hope this will do....

On a separate but related note, its going to be hard this year for a lot of folks with the economy being what it is, so if any gift givers were inclined to donate the money they would spend on my present to the SPCA (for all of the foreclosed and abandoned pets) that would be really awesome too.

And with that, I end this flagrantly non-review related post!

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2008-11-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

I just read Dracula for, I think, the fifth time - could be the sixth, I'm not sure, so it goes without saying that this is one of my favorite books. In fact, Dracula has become a sort of friend, a book that gets better with every reading, disproving the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. It's my number one choice for comfort reading - the literary equivalent of a blanket and tea on a rainy day (which may be why I tend to read it in the fall, just when the seasons are turning). So, instead of writing a review that I'm too biased and unqualified to write, I'm going to use this post to plug a three editions that I've especially enjoyed, and one that I would very much like to.

1. For anyone who has already read Dracula and wants to do it again, I recommend The Essential Dracula edited by Leonard Wolf. This edition is the one I just finished, and while I think that the footnotes would most likely distract a first-time reader, the inclusion of so much scholarship was fun for me. Wolf's introduction is informative without being too stuffy (as are most of his copious footnotes). The other thing I like about this edition is that it includes the deleted first chapter of Stoker's text, now called "Dracula's Guest," which implies certain things about the origins of Dracula's famous brides.

All of this said, the first time you read Dracula, it really should be to get lost in the story, which remains charming, funny, tragic and suspenseful, even after a century. So, onto the next edition.

2. Dracula by Bram Stoker, published by Modern Library Classics. This is a great, basic,

trade paper edition. Peter Straub's introduction is informative without being distracting, the text is nice and big, and the appendices are both relevant and interesting if you happen to like appendices, which I do. Also, included in one of the appendices (which I thought was just cool), is the alternate ending that Stoker didn't use - hours of fun for comparative purposes and lit. geeks everywhere.

3. For those of a more visual frame of mind, it gives me great pleasure to recommend the Barnes and Noble edition of Dracula illustrated by Edward Gorey. While every page does not have a picture, this edition is peppered with them - not to the point of distraction, but just enough to charm. This edition also includes "Dracula's Guest" and a lucid introduction by Marvin Kaye. The appendices, also compiled by Kaye, include a brief "Sampling of Contemporaneous Opinion," and a nice snippet of biography on Stoker, who was a pretty interesting character himself.

4. Lastly, the edition that I haven't read yet, but want to: The New Annotated Dracula, edited by Leslie Klinger, with introduction by Neil Gaiman. Just released in October of this year, The New Annotated Dracula is the newest addition to Norton's "Annotated" series, which has proved to be pretty excellent across the board. The series has, so far, included The Annotated Brother's Grimm, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, and The Annotated Alice among others. But what makes The New Annotated Dracula so exciting is Leslie Klinger's involvement (although Neil Gaiman is neat). Klinger worked for years on The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which James gave me for my birthday, and which is also FABULOUS. I can only say that the prospect of reading Klinger's annotations and scholarship in conjunction with Stoker's text is a very happy one for me.

So there you have it. Four editions of Dracula just waiting to be picked up. Actually, there are probably over five hundred editions out there by now, so there's no excuse - go out there and get one and enjoy it to pieces, hopefully more than once.

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

2008-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

When either Oprah or the Today Show tells me that I absolutely must read a book, I tend to think "yeah, uh huh, ok, definitely, maybe at some point..." This is partly because I'm a snot and just don't find the selections of mass media book clubs terribly interesting, and partly because there are too many books in the world and I will only get to read a fraction of them. Seriously, I have pangs of anxiety over the fact that I will never read everything I want to read before I die (and yes, I know how obsessive and lame that sounds).

That said, I had been wanting to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Hadden (a Today Show Book Club selection a couple of years back) for quite a while, mostly because the title references the Sherlock Holmes mystery "Shoscombe Old Place" and I'm a Sherlock Holmes junkie. I finally got around to it last week-end. I finished it in a day and a half. It was wonderful.

This book manages to both charm and ache thanks to the author's empathy in portraying his narrator, Christopher Boone. Christopher is autistic and a mathematical prodigy. He numbers his chapters not with the cardinal numbers (1,2,3,4...), but with prime numbers, because he likes prime numbers and can count them up to 7,057. He also has a very difficult time understanding human emotions. He hates being touched and he hates the color yellow, but he likes animals because their faces can't lie. Though he doesn't like fiction, he does like mysteries because mysteries are a puzzle. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time begins as Christopher's account of a mystery he solves using "logic" like Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character whose emotional detachment he admires. What the book becomes however, is a portrait of Christopher's internal life and how it effects the people around him.

The book is well paced and very engaging, which is quite an achievement for a novel with an autistic protagonist. Hadden triumphs because of the skill and sensitivity with which he renders Christopher's voice. While this is anything but a sugary Disney-fication of autism, the novel also never descends into the gritty or truly disturbing (though there are some tense interpersonal moments). Hadden allows Christopher to narrate in a staccato, emotionally detached voice that manages to convey a world of emotion, both expressed and unexpressed, in himself and in others. What results is a book that relates not only Christopher's internal reality, but his external effect as well (as seen in his various relationships and encounters).

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was charming and touching, and insofar as a novel can be, more important than not. Hadden's empathy is... honestly, I don't have a word that hasn't been over-used... let's say that his empathy is prodigious and Christopher's voice is true. While I could still skip reading My Antonia with half the country, the Today Show Book Club got it right with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This is really a book to read.

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

2008-09-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

Moral Disorder and Other Stories is a quiet sort of novel, not completely like Atwood's other novels, but still recognizably Atwood... and that's actually not a typo - Moral Disorder is a novel told in short stories. I didn't actually realize this when I picked up the collection. I just felt like reading some Margaret Atwood (like you do sometimes...) and Moral Disorder was on my sagging, overburdened "To Read" shelf, so I read it. Even if the novel-in-short-stories wasn't one of my favorite structures (it really is) and a lovely surprise, I still would have enjoyed the book, though not as much as some of Atwood's other work.

The stories make up a semi-chronological biography of a woman named Nell, some narrated by Nell in the first-person, others in the third. Most of the stories Nell narrates deal with her childhood and adolescence. In these, Atwood employs the lovely, hazy tone that distant memories have, mostly through language and observation. Nell's narration lopes along, peppered by the very specific, quirky details - the raisin stains on the layette she struggles to knit for her baby sister, the patronizing laughter of her mother's friends, how her sister adopts the paper-mache head Nell makes for Halloween because she feels bad for it (it's not Bob's fault that he doesn't have a body). The first-person narration ends with the last story of Nell's adolescence, "My Last Duchess", which ends with her walking into adulthood.

The adult Nell's stories are picked up by a third-person narrator. While the tone is more clipped and necessarily more distant, the switch works. For much of her early adutlhood, Nell is disconnected from her family and from herself. The narrative shift shows that. It also allows Atwood to play with a less halcyon tone and humor.

Overall, I enjoyed the stories in Moral Disorder. It's a quiet sort of account of a quiet sort of life, with none of the speculative, psychological or epic qualities much of Atwood's work tends to have. In fact, Moral Disorder feels more like a fable - an edifying look into someone else's life, from which you can take what you need.

Sarah Palin

2008-09-10T11:52:00.001-07:00

Sorry Folks!

It turns out my vetting process has proven that the link I was going to post is false, so I won't be posting it :-)

The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyers

2008-09-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Ok, yes I admit it. I read the Twilight series. Sigh. It wasn't even very good, although the first book, Twilight, showed a lot of promise. But the crack-like addictive-ness, faded over the course of the next two books, Eclipse and New Moon, until by the time I got to the last one, Meyer's new release, Breaking Dawn, I was skimming huge chunks just so I would know how it all ends (not with a bang, but a whimper). This is not to say that the books weren't fun - they were. It's just that they felt kind of like styrofoam boulders. At first they seemed substantial and even intriguing, but then you pick them up and they turn out to just be foam. Fun foam, with a bit of potential, but foam all the same.

That said, I'm actually not going to give Breaking Dawn or the Twilight series a serious review because they aren't meant to be read that way. They are strictly entertainment, and for the most part, they succeed. And while I don't understand the crazy following Meyers has gathered because of them, I'm also not a sixteen year old girl.

My only real problem with the series is that Meyers fails to grow as a writer over the course of it. She keeps using the same tricks and they get tired after awhile. And the books keep getting longer, really needlessly longer, which results in big fat patches you just want to skim. You hang in there for the climax, which you assume will be awesome, but when the climax finally comes, it feels like opening up a bottle of flat champagne. Kind of a bummer. A lot of it just feels self-indulgent on Meyer's part. A little bit of serious editing and the series could have been tight and suspenseful. As it is, the books gets progressively flatter and flabbier. In fact, by the time Breaking Dawn comes around, Meyers is writing more and saying less than pretty much any author I could name... except for maybe Thomas Pynchon, but that's a whole different post.

Huh. So much for not doing an actual review.

Anyway, the Twilight series is fun and entertaining and sort of compulsively readable in a weirdly impassive way. As far as brain candy goes, it's not too bad, it's just could have been a steak. I know that to fault it for what it could have been isn't really fair, but hey, what can you do?

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

2008-09-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

I finished Use of Weapons Saturday night, but didn't want to write the review for it until I had figured out how to talk about it without revealing too much. I still haven't done that, but I really want to say something, so I'm just going to go ahead with the warning that if what I'm saying seems circular or vague, it's because I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

Okay, first things first. This is the first book I've ever read that might be considered "hard" science fiction, or the sort of sci-fi that tends towards technological speculation. I've just never been terribly attracted to that sort of book. Use of Weapons also has a pretty prominent military component, which has never been my thing either. So, the only reason I picked up Use of Weapons in the first place is because someone I really respect *loves* this book and I figured, it must be worth reading, even if it isn't the sort of thing I'm into and....

I loved it. Like, really loved it. As in, Use of Weapons, in all of it's hard sci-fi glory, is now in my list of top 10 favorite books. Seriously, it's awesome. Really.

Quick caveat. For reasons that I can't get into without totally wrecking it, there are people who find Use of Weapons to be "dark" or disturbing or genuinely upsetting. The book examines what might be considered uncomfortable territory from a moral point of view, and I can see why it strikes some readers as difficult. All I can say is that, for me, though affecting at times, I was too jazzed by what Banks was doing to be disturbed by it, "it" being something that I can't talk, so I'm going to stop referring to "it" and move on.

Very generally speaking, Use of Weapons is a sort of non-linear biography of Cheradinine Zakalwe, an operative for the Culture's Special Circumstances department. He makes, runs and strategizes wars and is a very bad man. He is also charming, fractured and funny - as is much of the book itself (discounting certain parts).

The biography is comprised of two separate narrative streams. One moves forward with the present operation, the other moves backward in Zakalwe's life, slowly revealing his past. The two streams alternate chapters and are book-ended by two very important prologues and an epilogue. This structure can be challenging at first, but once you find the rhythm, it becomes intuitive and fairly seamless. This structure was a bold choice on Banks' part - it asks a fair bit from the reader, but it works brilliantly as a reflection of Cheradidinine's psychological make-up.

And that's really at the heart of the book - Zakalwe's social and psychological make-up (which is probably why I enjoyed the book so much). Use of Weapons is a sort of onion-skin portrait of this character. As more and more gets revealed, the reader's understanding grows until the climax blows general expectation out of the water. Fantastic.

Though I can see why this isn't widely considered Banks' best book - it straddles literary fiction and genre with its structure and subject matter - it's a brilliant book and I wish it were more widely read. Regardless of where you categorize it, Use of Weapons is truly speculative, not just technologically, but socially and psychologically as well. I loved it. Even if I had found the "disturbing" portions difficult, I think I would have still found that the book as a whole very much worth the disturbance.

The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath

2008-08-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

The Grotesque is Patrick McGrath's first novel, published in 1989 before Asylum and Martha Peake brought him a wider audience. It's an unusual book with few of the problems typical to first novels, over-reaching and precosity being especially dangerous for an edgy young Brit and, at the time of publication, McGrath was very much an edgy young Brit. I enjoyed The Grotesque for the most part. It reads like an intelligent, sometimes lurid, often gothic semi-hallucination thanks to McGrath's narrator (more on him in a second), but though I enjoyed McGrath's execution and language, it fell short of being ultimately satisfying. This isn't to say that The Grotesque was unsatisfying, it just fell slightly short of the impact I'd felt coming since the second chapter.

The Grotesque is about point of view, really. Briefly, the plot revolves the around Sir Hugo Coal's reconstruction of the events surrounding the disappearance and murder of his daughter's fiance. At the center of Hugo's reconstruction sits the sinister figure of his new butler, Fledge, for whom Sir Hugo formed and instant and apparently reciprocal dislike. But McGrath puts a twist on the typical retrospective 1st Person narrator by having Sir Hugo reveal quite early on that he is, in fact, a vegetable. Having suffered a cerebral "event" several months before, Sir Hugo narrates the story from within his own paralyzed carcass. Nobody knows that Hugo is cognizent, so we get the story without any filters but his and though he starts off quite reliably, he soon begins to unravel.

This unraveling is a gradual process, one that McGrath handles with awesome subtlety. Hugo presents his conjectures as fact and imagined scenes as actual events until the reader doesn't know if Sir Hugo is deluded, obsessed or simply crumbling under the weight of his own unexpressed consciousness. In short, he proves himself to be a very unreliable narrator, all the more so because he admits that his "empiricism" (before his "event", he was gentleman naturalist) is beginning to fail due to his vegetal condition.

The overall effect of Sir Hugo's gradual narrative decline is a pretty juicy one. The reader has to read actively. Hugo betrays his unreliabilty in small details and part of the fun is piecing together the possibilities. However, as fun as this is (and it is fun), the pieces fail to culminate in a meaningful climax. This is why The Grotesque fell just short of being satisfying. This book is full of so many breaking mirrors and crumbling echoes that you want it all to come together to a purpose. It's possible that the novel doesn't need to - this is not a story that requires resolution - and I'm glad that McGrath avoided the oh-so-clever notes on which it could have ended. Still, I can't help but feel that if one more connection had been implied, one more facet exposed, it would have pushed the book into the realm of the unforgetable. As it is, I'm very glad I read it, but I feel no compulsion to own it.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

2008-08-01T16:20:00.001-07:00

The Woman in Black is written by the same Susan Hill who wrote The Various Haunts of Men and The Pure in Heart, though I never would have guessed it if I hadn't already known. Whereas Hill's style is CSI-modern in the Simon Serrailler series, she does an admirable job of sounding Dickensian in The Woman in Black.

The Woman in Black is, first and foremost, a ghost-story in the tradition of The Turn of the Screw. It is a short novel, almost a novella, and it moves along at a brisk pace without an ounce of fat. But for all that, Hill manages to build up a real sense of dread without seeming as if she were trying, so that by the end, we're primed for her punch to the gut.

Here's the inevitable synopsis:

The novel begins, as a good many Victorian era ghost-stories do: with a frame-tale.

It is Christmas Eve at an English country manor, and though set roughly in the 1940's, an air of warm antiquity hangs over the house. The family takes turn telling ghost-stories as our narrator, the family patriarch, grows increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, when it is his turn to tell a tale, he abruptly leaves; the events of the past have come back to haunt him. He decides to exercise this ghost once and for all, and proceeds to write down the scarring experience that has been with him since he was a young man. This is the story of the woman in black.

As a young solicitor, the narrator travels to the north of England to sort through the papers of a recently deceased client, a Mrs. Drablow, whom he's never met. At her funeral he sees a woman in black, wasted and dressed in mourning. While he is staying at Mrs. Drablow's home, Eel Marsh House (fantastically conceived as sitting in the center of a fen - inaccessible except for a causeway which is, by turns, exposed and submerged with the tides), the young solicitor falls prey to a series of disturbing visions, sounds and experiences, all of which climax with the realization of who the woman in black is.

Unfortunately, to say anymore would stomp directly all over Hill's awesomely constructed plot.

Now, I have to admit that for most of the book, while I was impressed by Hill's style and even-handed detail, I wasn't feeling the little gut twist of nervousness that I like to come with a ghost story. It all felt too laid out - so perfectly constructed as to be inevitable, and so, not very emotionally unsettling. Until the final chapter. The final chapter did it, and did it really well.

Overall, The Woman in Black didn't get me the same way that James' Turn of the Screw or "Uncle Silas" by Sheridan le Fanu always do, but it got me all the same; enough so that I want to trade in my library copy for a copy of my own. It's the kind of story for a rainy November day - an awesome post-Victorian, Victorian ghost story.

The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill

2008-07-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

So, The Pure in Heart is the next book in Susan Hill's Simon Serrailler crime novel series, and it's pretty good. It's only pretty good though, as compared to The Various Haunts of Men which was fantastic.

Technically, The Pure in Heart is almost as strong as The Various Haunts of Men. Hill uses the same multiple 3rd person POV technique again and it still works, though for some reason it was vaguely less effective. Once more, the reader is drawn into the lives and minds of the characters, all of whom are realistically drawn. But....

There's something missing and it took me a little while to figure out what it is. The book lacks a central sort of heart - a sympathetic central point of view. In The Various Haunts of Men, that heart was Freya Graffham, who, for reasons I'm not going to get into, does not appear in the second book. Now, instead of Graffham, we are given Simon Serrailler, whose point of view was the only one never given in the first book. Simon was always either observed or talked about, but his point of view was never breached. This made him something of a cipher and very compelling. But he was compelling because Freya found him compelling. She convinced the reader to find him so as well. Left on our own with Simon now, he's not so much compelling as as inaccessible and hollow. Hill obviously still finds him a very attractive character, but without Freya's eyes to soften the portrait, he's just rather frustratingly cold.

The story itself also lacks something. The Pure in Heart is much more procedural in nature. We see the Lafferton police rally to search for an abducted boy, or solve the murder of a handicapped woman and both are not uninteresting. But the taut line of suspension that runs through The Various Haunts of Men just simply isn't there, so the climax is less of a catalyst and more of a get-it-done sort of experience.

Though well written and interesting to a point, The Pure in Heart is a lesser book than its predecessor. The Various Haunts of Men is most definitely the one to read. I wouldn't necessarily bother with The Pure in Heart unless you're a hard core fan of procedurals and crime fiction, or you're a sucker for inaccessible, emotionally distant men.

Bookmarks Magazine

2008-07-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

I just picked up Bookmarks Magazine for the first time and it's great. Ever since I stopped working in bookstores, I've felt a little disconnected from the general publishing scene, which I used to follow like politics. It was really fun knowing whose getting published and what's going to be released before the books hit the stores. Bookmarks fills that geeky knowledge gap.

Each issue generally covers about two to three months of new releases in both fiction and non-fiction, literary and genre, with a compilation and overview of all published reviews to date. Each issue includes author interviews and reader picks and all kinds of good, book-y fun.

Check out their website here.

The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman

2008-07-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

In the past few years, I've started several of Alice Hoffman's books, but this is the only one that I've finished. It's not that the others weren't good - they were very well-written from what I could see. They just didn't hold my attention.

The Third Angel - Hoffman's newest - held my attention. A lot. So much so, that I finished it in two days and, between it, work and my own writing, got very little sleep. And I'm still not sure why I couldn't put it down....

So, instead of trying to put into words the intangible something that apparently got me, I'm going to focus instead on the more tangible - arguably - issues of style and structure.

Hoffman's style is easy - she writes with a very light hand. This suits the structure she chose. The story is actually three stories divided into three interconnected parts. Each part is its own novella, with a complete narrative arc. The three novella/chapters are woven loosely together by imagery (feathers, darkness and light), themes (death, redemption, hauntings), setting (London, a mid-class hotel) and the characters. The characters being the strongest link. For example, the too-handsome fiance from the first chapter is the son of the girl in the second chapter. The girl in the second chapter writes a song about the lovers in the third chapter. These are just the largest, simplest threads - the links run from huge to miniscule, but they never feel contrived. Hoffman's characters walk through each other's lives, barely touching or devastating, and forming a web of experience around the titular third angel.

I liked Hoffman's idea of the third angel - maybe it's this idea that drew me. In the second chapter, a doctor tells his daughter that there is the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death. Then there is Third Angel, who walks among us and whom we're supposed to help. This angel is a mirror, so that we might see ourselves and respond. The Third Angel carries with it the sense of regret and responsibility and, oddly enough, hope that runs through the book. Characters lose themselves in a single moment, lose a part of themselves, become ghosts. Sometimes that part is recovered; sometimes it stays lost.

But Hoffman doesn't preach. She just loosely weaves her tale, and I suspect that every reader will get something different out of it - something reflective of themselves. For my part, I am both impressed and unsettled by how she moved me. It was very unexpected. Based on that alone, I'll be giving her other books another try.

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

2008-07-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy mysteries and crime novels, though I tend to gravitate more towards Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy L. Sayers than the grittier, 21st century sort. Given this, I was kind of surprised to find myself up at 2am, totally eaten by The Various Haunts of Men.

This is Susan Hill's first book in the Simon Serrailler series, which feels much more like a psychological crime novel than a traditional murder cozy, though there are plenty of murders to go around. Here's a very brief, spoiler-free (hence the brevity) synopsis:

Detective Constable Freya Graffham transfers to the cathedral town of Lafferton from London's Met after finalizing her divorce. She fits in well with the town and the force, and becomes fascinated by her superior, the rather enigmatic CDI Simon Serrailler. When a middle-aged spinster goes missing, Freya finds herself unable to let it go. When more townspeople and even a dog disappear on 'The Hill', Freya's hunch is verified and a serious police search begins, drawing her closer to Serrailler and the dark, startling ending of the book.

The strength of Hill's writing is in her structure and her subtly. Through the use of multiple points of view, she allows the reader to understand and become attached to many of the characters, even (and perhaps especially) the characters who will later disappear. She alternates the multiple third person POV with brief chapters written in the first person, allowing us to briefly occupy the perpetrator's mind. In this way, Hill slowly reveals the criminal's identity and the full scope of his/hers (see, no spoilers) psychosis.

The other thing I really liked about The Various Haunts of Men is the ending. Obviously, I'm not going to say much about it, except that Hill is a very unsentimental writer - she allows things to happen to her characters as things might happen to people in real life. Just because you love someone, does not mean you will be loved back. Just because you're turning you're life around, does not mean it cannot end. Hill avoids the temptation to neatly tie up the ends and in doing so she wrote a crime novel that feels a great deal like reality, only with more corpses than most of us will probably ever see, which is pretty much fine by me.

Incidentally, this all started when a friend sent me a LibraryThing recommendation for Susan Hill's novel, The Woman in Black - a ghost story in the Dickens mold. I read The Various Haunts of Men while waiting for Link+ to deliver it. There are also three more books in the Serrailler series (the newest will release in February), so a small swath of Susan Hill posts are probably going to follow....

"Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman

2008-07-09T21:28:00.001-07:00

"Study in Emerald" is not a book, it's a stand alone short story by Neil Gaiman and it's fantastically well-written and chilling as well.

One warning: While "Study in Emerald" is good enough to enjoy on it's own, the reader will get a thousand times more from it if he or she has at least a passing familiarity with the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle and/or Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos. I am not a Lovecraft gal, but I'm addicted to Holmes. The friend who sent me the pdf of Neil Gaiman's story loves both. "Study in Emerald" is brilliant, but because its brilliance is tied into how well Gaiman uses the Doyle and Lovecraft material, knowing the two narrative contexts helps.

Okay, that said, I want to be sure not to scare people off because this is one hell of a short story. Lovely use of period language (terrific Victorian 1st person POV), lovely description and a beautiful subtle twist of an ending. Just wow. It's available free online here. And be sure to read the advertisements that are sprinkled throughout the text - I especially liked the one for Vlad Tepes's Exsanguination Service. Too funny.

For the lit. geek with a fondness for Victorian mystery and/or existential horror (love that that I can actually classify that as a subgenre), "Study in Emerald" might just be the best short story you'll come across in a very long time.

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Philips

2008-07-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

Gods Behaving Badly is Marie Philips's first novel. I loved it. Here's a quick synopsis:

The gods of Olympus live on on the 21st Century, but their powers are waning because no one believes. They're forced to live two to a bedroom (Apollo and Ares share; Persephone takes the floor when she visits Demeter) in a dilapidated house in London. They do mundane work to pay the bills (Artemis is a dog-walker, Apollo's a TV psychic and Aphrodite is a phone sex worker), and in general are having a bit of a hard time (Eros has converted to Christianity and Zeus is the crazy old guy in the attic). Apollo refuses to heat some shower water for Aphrodite (they have to conserve their powers) and revenge ensues. Then Artemis hires a mortal cleaner named Alice, who, with her non-boyfriend Neil, bring about some greatly needed change, though entirely by accident.

This synopsis doesn't do justice to the plot, which arcs very cleanly while covering a a great deal of well-paced ground. In fact, their isn't one loose link in the plot or one flabby bit in its execution. Philips's breezy, clever style works beautifully for the material, as well. But in a book full of the delightful, it's Philips's characters that make Gods Behaving Badly an especially enjoyable read.

Neil and Alice are Philips's two mortal protagonist/heroes. We first meet them in Alice's broom-closet office when they sat down with orange juice boxes to play Scrabble before watching a taping of Apollo's awful cable TV show. Their most outstanding qualities, respectively, are how nice they, yet Philips also establishes them as fully rounded characters without compromising her generally light hand.

And if Philips's mortals charm, then her Greek Pantheon dominates. I actually laughed out loud. I almost never laugh out loud when I read (nor do I usually cry - except for Where the Red Fern Grows, which made me cry like a little girl, and not just because I was a little girl when I read it). Philips's characterizations of the Olympians as narcissistic and fantastically amoral worked - and it worked because she also allowed for a great deal of pathos in them as well. Demeter is beside herself because she couldn't keep a clemetis alive, Artemis misses her dogs, and Athena, though the goddess of wisdom, cannot communicate clearly enough for anyone to understand her, and so on....

Philips's characterizations, which come through like crystal in her dialogue, are her real achievement. The characters, and her care in conceiving them, set Gods Behaving Badly apart from the flock of other clever, post-modern retellings of historical, mythological and otherwise un-copyrighted material that has recently been appropriated. Much as Glen Duncan re-conceived the devil in I, Lucifer, Philips re-conceives the Greek Pantheon here. Granted, Duncan's work is by far more speculative and intellectually daring, but for sheer entertainment purposes, Gods Behaving Badly is an absolute winner.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale

2008-06-19T13:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've gone off on a non-fiction "research" tangent - anything about true crime or medicine in Victorian England is up for grabs. Given the recent fascination, I was really excited to run across a recently published account of the Road Hill Murder, a murder case that rocked Victorian England and inspired the first true-crime frenzy, which period newspapers called "detective fever". Unfortunately, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale only partially lived up to its blurb (which, incidentally, was very nicely written).

Ultimately, the issue with The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is that Summerscale juggles enough material for three different books without proper integration. There is the biographical portion on the great Victorian detective, Jack Whicher, an account of the Road Hill Murder, and an investigation of how both Whicher and the Road Hill case directly affected what was to become known as "detective fiction". All three aspects are interrelated and highly complimentary. They even play together nicely in the blurb - hence my excitement, but they compete with each other in the book, where Summerscale jaggedly juxtaposes them along with other semi-related facts (Protestant distrust of the Roman Catholic Church and watercolors of the Great Barrier Reef being some of the larger tangents).

The Whicher biography was a compelling portrait of a sharp-minded man ahead of his time, ruined by the largest case of his life. Summerscale handles the Road Hill portions with equal interest, painting the scene with forensic detail and compelling emotion. She also makes some genuinely interesting connections between the Whicher/Road Hill historical material and the literary craze that it spawned. One can definitely see Whicher as the prototype for Inspector Cuff in The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. There are even shades of Sherlock Holmes in his single-minded pursuit of forensic proof. Likewise, one can easily see how the Road Hill case spawned hundreds of literary imitations in the form of the "estate mystery," where a murder or crime takes place at a large country manor, with the guilty party being either family or visiting friend. Every single aspect of the book is interesting, but therein lies the problem. They each remain single aspects instead of well-integrated parts of a whole.

Given all of this, I recommend the book but I do so with a warning: The narrative and historical fascination Summerscale delivers are tempered by structural flaws and tangential wandering. I recommend reading the parts that interest and skimming over the rest to avoid what I found to be irritating side-tracks.

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

2008-06-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

I'd been meaning to read The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole for ages. I'd been told many times by many people that any fan of gothic literature sort of has to at some point, and after having read it, I think those many people are right... on condition.

The Castle of Otranto is sort of the grand-daddy of gothic literature and its many permutations -Victorian gothic (Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker), gothic romance (everyone from Anne Radcliffe to Victoria Holt), gothic mystery (Edgar Allen Poe), even Stephen King's modern psychological horror (The Shining) and Anne Rice's tortured, vampiric anti-heroes owe something to Horace Walpole's novel of death, sexual obsession, religion and hidden identity, all of which revolves around various claims on the castle in the title. It was stumbling across all of these instances of influence that I most enjoyed about reading The Castle of Otranto....

And here is where I have to admit that I didn't enjoy much else about it, which actually embarrasses me. The thing is, there was nothing particularly wrong with the book. In fact, it might just be that I wasn't in the mood for melodrama. I suspect if you read The Castle of Otranto with your tongue in your cheek it would prove to be pretty entertaining, especially if you have a passing familiarity with medieval romance, which Walpole both draws from and satirizes with the story and its narrative tone. Altogether well-done and entertaining. I just found it to be a bit tedious. Maybe I wasn't in the mood...

Regardless, I would recommend it. It's fairly short, so it isn't much to slog through if you are, in fact, finding it tedious, and the pay-off is pretty good from a lit. geek point of view. I couldn't help but enjoy reading the locus from which so many other genres and works grew, so even on those merits alone, The Castle of Otranto is worth the read.

Revenge: Limited Edition by Ellen von Unswerth

2008-05-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Last week was a hard week and I didn't much done in the way of reading. Still, while I didn't get to finish anything that I've got started, I did manage to get side-tracked by Ellen von Unwerth's lovely book of photographic erotica, Revenge.

While there is a general narrative arc (taken as "excerpts" from the diaries of the nubile young heroines), von Unwerth primarily uses stylized black and white photography (think Helmut Newton meets Man Rey) to tell the story of how the Baroness "disciplines" her newly orphaned nieces.

It is not an original story, but Revenge is really not about the story. What little narrative there is, is executed with a tongue-in-cheek panache that sets the winkingly saucy tone of the book. And the eroticism in Revenge really does have panache. The models are gorgeous (think Robert Palmer's Wall of Babes), the clothes (when there are clothes) are gorgeous, the set (a glorious mansion and its extensive grounds) is gorgeous - all in the style of the lovely pornography of early 20th century France and Italy.

The sado-masochistic elements tend less towards real pain and suffering and more towards the discomforts of dominance and submission in a campy, Vogue Paris sort of way. You can't help but laugh, but you also can't put it down - it's just too damn pretty.

Though I found the pleasure of reading Revenge to be more aesthetic than erotic, I certainly won't deny that it was a pleasure all the same. Revenge: Limited Edition is a sexy little volume, all the more so because it doesn't take it so too terribly seriously. If a book could wink, this one would.

Library Thing

2008-05-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

I LOVE LIBRARY THING!!!!!!!

Loss of words. Just great. Love it. Spent week-end inputing ISBN's and cataloguing personal library. Am serious geek. So happy. Love it.

Sigh. Wonderful.

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

2008-05-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

The Cement Garden is Ian McEwan's first novel, written in 1978 after having published two successful short story collections. As first novels go, it's good in a strange sort of way. I'm much more familiar with the Ian McEwan of Atonement and Amsterdam (for which he won the Booker Prize). His later work is fairly well defined by a light hand, psychological sensitivity and thematic subtlety. His prose is, by turns, both searing and delicate, a balance that draws the reader over the fine line of his characters' minds. The Ian McEwan of The Cement Garden is most definitely younger, more gleefully brutal and quite psychologically cold.

Without revealing too much about the plot (though anyone who's read the Greeks will see the nature of the novel's climax coming), the story concerns four children, ranging in age from the youngest, Tom who is about six or seven, to the eldest, Julie, who is a beautiful seventeen year old. Their parents die in quick succession, and the story concerns what happens after they are left to their own devices, isolated and with no supervision.

The brutally offhand tone with which McEwan tells this story, so jarring in light of his later work, is actually appropriate for the kind of tale he seems to have intended. The device that allows him to reach this tone is his narrator - the eldest brother, fifteen year old Jack. McEwan captures the naturally obsessive self-concern of the teen-ager (yes, I'm generalizing), and in this way executes a chilling series of events without making the reader feel that the children are actively monstrous. They are simply young, and the young can be quite monstrous at times, and at other times, nothing but pathos.

I've read some reviews of this book in which the reviewers were either profoundly disgusted or terrifically disturbed by The Cement Garden. I suppose I can see why, but I would say that this makes it a successful novel. Disturbing things occur, but the story drives forward and remains incredibly readable. It's the offhand delivery of disturbing events that make the novel thought-provoking and worth the read. You'll either like it or you won't, but you will not be ambiguous about it, and that, I would say, is quite a compliment to Mr. McEwan.

Bound to Please by Michael Dirda

2008-05-11T22:27:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Michael Dirda's book, Bound to Please, piecemeal for a couple of weeks and have found it to be a fantastic cure for the overtaxed attention span (some week-nights it's even hard for me to concentrate on what the cats mean by "meow", but I read one review and I'm re-engaged and not mentally multi-tasking).

Bound to Please is a selection of Michael Dirda's essays and reviews on lesser known books that deserve to be read. Michael Dirda is the editor of the Washington Post Book Review and holds a PhD in comparative literature (I'm biased on this because I got my MA in comp. lit. and it's still a pretty young field). His insights are educated and erudite, as well as charming and accessible, almost all the time, whether he's writing about Herodotus or Terry Pratchett or a lesser known biography of George Bernard Shaw (reviews for all of which appear in this book). That he should be both titanically intelligent and a complete lit. geek is just kind of formidably adorable....

OK, at this point, I think it's only fair to admit that I have a crush on Michael Dirda, or least on Michael Dirda's brain.

But anyway, according to his introduction to Bound to Please (which is charming... sigh) Dirda's whole reason for compiling this particular collection of essays/reviews was to introduce a selection of books that deserve reading but don't often get read. It does this quite nicely too - my 'to read' list has nearly doubled (plus Name of the Rose is getting a bump up in the queue). It was also neat to read his fantastic review/criticism of two books that I already love - Possession by A.S. Byatt and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series.

All in all, if you like reading book reviews (I do) or you enjoy light but insightful literary criticism, Bound to Please is a lovely book to have around. It's the sort of thing you can just pick up and browse through - especially when you're not sure what you want to read next.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

2008-05-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize winning novel, The Remains of the Day on Saturday and needed a day or two to think about it.

On the surface it is a wonderfully subtle comedy of manners, but what is so brilliant about Ishiguro's prose is that what appears on the surface, to be nothing but the amusingly miopic recollections of an iconic English butler, is in fact, a tragedy unfolding in slow motion. This novel is, as Salmon Rushdie put it, "a story both beautiful and cruel" about a man who suspects he has wasted his life but cannot truly acknowledge this waste and so he cannot redeem it. He is cauterized and this cauterization dooms him.

I'm not qualified to say anything new about The Remains of the Day - it's long been hailed by scholars and critics as a modern classic for good reason (and the fact that it won the Booker Prize really does speak for itself). That said, I was impressed by one thing that I feel is especially worth mentioning from a craft perspective. That is the subtlety and respect with which Ishiguro portrays his narrator and protagonist, the butler, Stevens.

In lesser hands, Stevens could have been a ridiculous figure, with his seemingly hollow obsessions, such as with his "staff plans" (a brilliant device on Ishiguro's part), the superiority of a particular silver polish, and his somewhat horrifying understanding of the nature "dignity". His blind faith in his employer, Lord Darlington's, judgement could frustrate as much as his inability to emote in even the most extreme situations (as with his father's death). It is a testimony to Ishiguro's sensitivity as a writer that all of these qualities, qualities that could so easily have read as farcical, should instead break your heart slowly. There is an intense vulnerability in Stevens that is entirely implied through repeated actions (such as his obsessive rereading of Miss Kenton's letter) and Ishiguro's 'quoting' of certain words and phrases that are outside of Stevens' comfort zone ('bantering' and 'having one on' among them). All of these work to create a narrator/protagonist who prides himself on being an inscrutable professional (something he largely succeeds in, if he is to be believed). But he is also a man who constantly and subtly betrays an astonishing depth of pain and bewilderment in private moments. Of course, Stevens would be horrified to hear that.

The Remains of the Day is simply excellent, as excellent as anyone who has ever told me that I absolutely must read it, insisted it would be. And so I'm going to hop in line with all of those people and say, "you absolutely must read it - it's absolutely excellent." You won't be sorry if you do (though you may be a little melancholy for a day or two after).

I, Lucifer, or, I might as well have fallen off the edge of the Earth....

2008-05-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

There are no words to describe how sheepish I feel as I write this post more than a year after I wrote the last one. No words. But being me, I'll try.

All I can say is that I had a rough year, followed by a hectic couple of months. Happily, things are settling down. We're back in California (which is lovely), I'm tutoring kids (which is by turns both rewarding and fantastically frustrating) and writing short stories (which I simply love).

One day, in the middle of all of this new found sort-of-calm, I was gently reminded by my Lemur and my very good friend, Mexalapotis, that eons ago (which translates to slightly over a year in the language hyperbole), I had written book reviews and posted them on a blog. This had really seemed like something that I'd enjoyed - perhaps that was something I might want to do again? I said, "Hey, great idea!" Then three months passed.

Then last week, Mexalapotis came to visit. It was a terrific week-end all around - we took her to see both the ocean and the Bay (because they are different, though both are full of water), Sutro Baths, our old apartments, Golden Gate Park, Park Chow (yummers), the Seven Sisters at Alamo Square and the Palace of Fine Arts. Then at her request, we went to Green Apple Books on Clement.

Now, I really have to say that Green Apple is, outside of Powells in Portland, the most dangerous place in the world for me... and I'll just stop right there. If I don't, I'll go off on a tangent about independent bookstores and new/used stock and the beauty of remainders and two story buildings stuffed to the rafters (literally) with new/used stock and beautiful remainders.

So, there she bought I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan, which is an absolutely fantastic book - almost everyone (including nuns with a sense of humor and/or a lot of pathos) should read it at some point or another, if only to appreciate Lucifer's incredibly un-trustworthy yet appealing narrative voice.... But I'm getting off track.

Mexalapotis. She visited and we had fun, and she bought I, Lucifer, and then sadly went home. But before she did, she mentioned the whole forgotten blog thing again. This time, I said "Oh, yeah, huh..."

Meanwhile, Mexalapotis wrote a wonderful review of I, Lucifer which can be found here. And after getting all excited and reading it and commenting, I realized that it really is time for me to get off my duff and start posting the reviews again, if only for my own pleasure of my own reading and the pleasure it gives me.

So now here I am, and this time I'll try not to fall off the edge of the Earth.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

2007-02-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

Alasdair Gray's novel, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer edited by Alasdair Gray, is one of those great books that I never would have known about if it hadn't come so very recommended by a good friend of mine who happens to have really interesting taste in literature.

The general plot is a little difficult to describe without giving too much away, so I'm going to cheat and quote the blurb on the back of the paperback edition. It reads:

What strange secret made beautiful, tempestuous Bella Baxter irresistible to the poor medical student Archie McCandless? Was it her mysterious origin in the home of his monstrous friend Godwin Baxter, the genius whose voice could perforate eardrums? This story of true love and scientific daring storms through Victorian operating theaters, continental casinos, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church.

And believe me when I say that's only the beginning.

Gray's style is like the offspring of the most modern post-modernist and the most ardent Victorian Gothic realist - and I'm not even sure if there is such a thing as Victorian Gothic realism. Gray winkingly introduces Poor Things as a book "written" by Archie McCandless and "edited" by himself. In his Introduction, he admits to a certain disagreement over whether or not the book is purely fiction or an amazing account of real occurrences. This sets up one of this book's primary points of interest - it's written in such a way that the reader has no idea which narrative voice he or she can trust. Gray pulls this thread of narrative untrustworthiness all the way through, starting with his introduction and then continuing it through McCandless' book. But then he whollops all of the reader's certainty about McCandless' veracity with a letter from Bella Baxter (now Victoria McCandless), denying the truth of her husband's story and telling her own version of it. Then Gray topples the reader's ability to rely on her testimony with the "historical evidence" he's collected. The reader is left with no clue as to which perspective is the accurate perspective and the distinct impression that they could all be lunatics. I love being kept on my toes and Gray did it without ever making me feel manipulated.

I also loved Gray's ability to play with the English language and his use of that play to chart the development of a brain from childhood to adulthood. But I don't want to say any more about that for those who haven't read it.

I just had so much fun with this daft, terribly clever novel. I never would have heard about it, let alone read it, without a recommendation (particularly because it is pretty post-modern and I don't usually go in for that), but I'm so happy that I did. Therefore, I am heartily recommending it in turn - it's not hard to find and very worth the read, especially if you like Frankenstein, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G.Wells, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalian, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Alice Through the Looking-Glass or Rider Haggard's She. Belle Baxter/Victoria McCandless herself claims that her husband filched elements from all of these books and incorporated them in his Poor Things, but I wouldn't necessarily trust her. Just read for yourself....

Dracula on Masterpiece Theater

2007-02-12T14:08:00.000-08:00

This doesn't exactly qualify as a review, but last night I watched PBS's presentation of Dracula as done by Masterpiece Theater and I wanted to mention it, since Dracula is one of my favorite books and I tend to love film adaptations of the story, even if they have little to do with the original text. I love the Coppola film version as one that follows Stoker's text pretty faithfully, but I also really like Wes Craven's Dracula 2000, which had little to do with the original text aside from the fact that the vampire's name was Dracula and Abraham Van Helsing tries to stop him. I'm not really a purist, I just like the literary and cultural mythology that's grown up out of Bram Stoker's book

Unfortunately, the Masterpiece Theater version of this often adapted work kind of sucked. Please forgive the pun. I guess they had to fit as much as they could into 1 hour and 45 minutes so they sort of cut and slashed through the story. They fit in new material (like syphilis and a secret cult being the reason for Dracula's arrival on British soil) with some of the tale's more famous elements (like Lucy's sexy death and vampiric resurrection) so haphhazardly that nothing ended up being very well developed.

I can say this though: it does just keep moving. Which I suppose could be considered a good thing, if it weren't so unsatisfying. As the Lemurhubby said last night, "wow, I've definitely heard of a minute feeling like a hour, but not an hour feeling like a minute...at least not in a bad way." It did so much whizzing over both new and familiar territory that you just kind of missed out on any substance. And believe me, Dracula is chock full of substance.

It was sort of breezy, it was sort of pretty. But for my money, check out Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula or Wes Craven's Dracula 2000. Or Bella Lugosi's portrayal for that matter. Or hell, just read the book. Any of those would probably be more satisfying than the Masterpiece Theater version which sort of merrily skipped right over the mark it was trying to hit.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu & Other Stories

2007-02-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is, quite simply, one of the loveliest short story collections I've read recently. It's beautifully written, charming and witty and even slightly horrifying at times (Susanna Clarke's fairies are not the adorable, flowery creatures made popular in Victorian fairytales - they are sensual and viscious by turns).
The stories are also accompanied by Charles Vess' detailed illustrations and are introduced by Professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe Studies at the University of Aberdeen. I really enjoyed that - between her "Professor" and the smattering of footnotes, you really get a sense that Ms. Clarke is a woman who has waded through A Lot of academic texts.
But on to the stories themselves...

As most people know, Susanna Clarke wrote the rather massive Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in which she succesfully sustained a complicated collection of narrative threads through more than 800 pages. She did this so well that when I closed the book on the final page, I still wanted more. So I bothered several people for several days theorizing about various allusions and things that she'd left ambiguous.
The bottom line was that Susanna Clarke had seriously engaged me with her first novel, but I wasn't really sure how her style would translate to a shorter form. After all, I was still left really curious, maybe even a little antsy, after reading 800 pages - would she really be able to arc a short story well enough to be satisfying?

Short answer: Yes.

Little did I know that I'd already read four of Susanna Clarke's short stories in various anthologies and had enjoyed them enough to dog-ear them (yes, I do dog-ear pages and I know I suck for doing it). These stories - "On Lickerish Hill", the excellent "Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower", "Mrs. Mabb" and "Antickes and Frets" stand alone, without reference to the imagined historicity of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. In fact, Ms. Clarke is comfortable enough with her material that her stories possess a beautiful self-contained quality, rather like the small engravings so popular in the early 1800's or a tiny piece of jewel-toned embroidery. They are lovely enough to make you want to continue to the next story, not because you're left unsatisfied with the one you've just read, but because you're curious as to what she'll do next.

This quality of self-contained beauty threads through all of the stories, even the two which directly reference Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell ("The Ladies of Grace Adieu" and "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse"). Several other stories are briefly mentioned in a footnote here and there in the novel, but you really don't need to have read it to fully enjoy each tale for its own considerable merit.

To end, I was going to plug a couple of the stories that I especially enjoyed, but I don't think that I can. I honestly enjoyed them all. A lot. So, all I can say is that whether or not you've read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a treat that I would recommend. Read the stories in order or out, in one sitting or over a month but definitely take a look at this collection.

The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere

2007-01-29T11:06:00.000-08:00

A very good friend of mine, who happened to have been an English major at a really amazing liberal arts college (I have some serious education envy on this point, but I digress), loaned me Sue Limb's book, The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere and told me that, as a former English major, I absolutely *had* to read it. So I did.

This book charmed me so much that I didn't know what to do with myself. I almost felt like I should thank it for being such a clever, lovely read by treating it to tea and scones at Lovejoy's (SF's yummiest and most Jane Austen approved tea house).

The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere is a sort of gentle parody of some of the most famous poets writing during England's Romantic period. Sue Limb tells her story through Dorothy Wordsmith's journal entries as she and her brother, the great poet William Wordsmith (aka Wordsworth), settle into domestic tranquility at Vole Cottage. Limb gives Dorothy's journal a handwritten look, complete with doodlings in the margins and Freudian scratch-outs (the Wordsworth siblings were apparently rather questionably close and the real Dorothy devoted her life to the service of her brother's towering "organ of the imagination"). It's really, really funny - especially when Limb's interspersed illustrations underscore the parody. My favorite was of Dorothy lifting an armoir while begging her "Beloved Wm" not to strain himself with two books. Limb also gives us bits of William Wordsmith's poetry, most notably "The Withered Turnip" and "The Sod Wall" done in Wordsworth's style (which is admittedly a little on the dry side).

During their stay at the idyllic Vole Cottage, their dear friend and fellow poet, Cholerick (Coleridge), comes to stay with them, bringing with him a little brown bottle of "medicine" and his famously sensitive bowels. Lord Byro (Byron) appears, bringing with him a pregnant Italian woman who proceeds to give birth in the upstairs bedroom while Byro himself seduces every female in sight. I especially liked the bit where a stray lightening bolt strikes Dorothy's stays and corset, zapping them right off of her when Byro enters the room. Also making an appearance are Percy Jelley (Shelley) and his lovely new bride Mary Godwit (Wollstonecraft Godwin) who are being pursued by her irate father because they married, instead of choosing to live together unshackled by matrimony.

The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere is just a really charming and incredibly well-thought-out little book. Sue Limb obviously knows her Romantics and strikes the perfect balance between gentle satire and great storytelling. I think that anyone could really enjoy this book and it's definitely worth finding. If you're a former English major, I'm going to follow my friend's lead and say that you absolutely should read it. But even if you're not, pick it up if you come across it - the illustrations, story and humor will get you even if you never had to take a course on the Age of the Romantics in college!

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

2007-01-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

I need to preface this post with several admissions:
1. I've been looking forward to reading this book for months and was ready to enjoy it regardless of its quality.
2. This is not a review of the book as a whole. It is a review of the first 100 pages.
3. I have never failed to finish a book because I found it to be unreadably bad. Until now.

I am now finding myself at a loss - for a way to begin and for words succinct and effective enough to make my point without making me sound like a literary hell harpy. So, for lack of a better place, I'll begin at the beginning with the author's own words.
Dahlquist, who is an accomplished playwrite, begins his first novel with the following sentence:

"From her arrival at the docks to the appearance of Roger's letter, written on crisp Ministry paper and signed with his full name, on her maid's silver tray at breakfast, three months had passed".

A little muddy. Forgivable, but a little muddy. He continues:

"On that morning, her poached eggs steaming in their silver bowl (gelatinous, gleaming), Miss Temple had not seen Roger Bascombe for seven days."

A little muddier and featuring some questionable sentence structure. I'm getting a slight sinking feeling in my stomach at this point, but it doesn't matter because I *want* to enjoy this book. It continues on in the vein and all the while, the author indulges in convoluted and unclear sentences meant to convey a Victorian sense of social minutia. Unfortunately he succeeds only in confusing the reader as to what is happening, why and to whom. Then, four pages in I'm stopped short by the following sentence:

"How, if she was with clarity embracing her new sense of loss and redefinition, did nothing - not even an especially cunning lacquered duck - generate interest?"

Ok. At this point I am with no small amount of "clarity", realizing that I'm only four pages into this book and already tired of the author's overly precious and highly contrived sentence structure and narrative style. It's as if he read Dickins once, maybe in college, and vaguely remembered that distinctive, sometimes chatty, Dickensian voice and thought it would be really neat to use it in his story, a story which is vaguely reminicent of Victorian penny-dreadfuls...and not in a good way.

Alright. So the style badly apes Dickens. Style is difficult and trying to make your modern authorial voice speak in a highly embellished Victorian tone would be very, very difficult. It doesn't mean the story (or at least the first 100 pages of it) is bad. Right? The characters could very easily redeem the entire thing and make it quite worth the read. Right? Perhaps...but not this time.

The Characters:
Once again I freely admit that I only read the first 100 pages, so I've only met two of the central characters: Miss Temple and Cardinal Chang. I'll begin with Miss Temple because Dahlquist begins with her. Barring the twisting maze of egregious embellishment, the author describes her as small, grey-eyed and of above average prettiness. Fine. Victorian heroines often are. She is also an heiress. Excellent. Victorian heroines in thrilling stories need money and security if they are going to have an adventure worth reading about. We are told that she is also intelligent, independent, spunky and ruthless. Dahlquist writes:

"it [her island upbringing] had marked her like a whip - though part of that marking was how very immune to whips she was and would, she trusted, remain".

All of these are excellent qualities for a fictitious heroine to have. Unfortunately, while we are *told* and told often that she is all of these things, the behavior that she *displays* led me to the conclusion that she is petty, arrogant, delusional and Stupid. After bumbling herself into a situation that any sane person would see as bloody dangerous for a chaste young woman alone in a sinister place (ie: interogation by beautiful women with knives, stumbling across unconcious bodies and being told to put on crotchless, yet "darling", silk pants) it isn't until she is actually in the process of getting raped (which she avoids through sheer dumb luck and the power of the plot) that she admits to herself that she's in a "dangerous spot" and should possibly "act carefully". I can't say that I was compelled to spend any more time with such an Idiot of a heroine. Luckily I didn't have to because at this point, Dahlquist switches his focus to one of the book's other "heroes".

Moving on to Cardinal Chang. Hmmm.... I bet there's a neat story behind that character's name. Well, there's a story. Cardinal Chang is neither a Cardinal nor Chinese. He is a "brutal assassin", with the "heart of a poet". Fine. I think that an assassin with qualities beyond the ability to kill people in creative ways has the potential to be quite interesting. He got the name "Chang" because when he was very young (though from a family of means) a young aristocrat slashed his face with a riding crop, damaging his vision and giving him scars across the bridge of his nose and eyes that make him appear "oriental". This gives Dahlquist a reason to give him super-sexy glasses with smoked lenses (he's light sensitive and he doesn't see very well. Yet he's an assassin). Chang is called "The Cardinal" because he wears a super-sexy, full length, Red Leather Coat (which he had stolen "from the costume rack of a traveling theater". Of course). A little conspicuous for an assassin you might ask? Well, lest the reader labor on under this misconception, Dahquist explains straight away that Chang feels this to be alright because anyone who wished to find him would, even if he was wearing "the drabbest grey wool". Not bloody likely, but Dahlquist obviously Loved the red leather coat. Finally, Dahlquist, in an effort to render his assassin three-dimentional, often interrupts Chang's thought processes with bits of bad poetry, for although it now hurts Chang to read, before his eyes had been damaged as a "child" he had been a "scholar" and has retained his love for the written word. A child scholar? Amazing! At this point, the sheer force of Dahlquist's contrivances finished me and I put the book down. From what I've read (and it's admittedly only an introduction to the character) Cardinal Chang is the culmination of all the things that a 12 year old boy or a 16 year old girl would think an assassin should be. I've seen more skillfully developed RPG characters.

After only 100 pages, I don't feel that I can speak to plot as I hadn't really seen much of one. The threat of the "sinister cabal" is as vague and muddy as the sentence structure. Items that were clearly meant to create suspense (ie: strange masked balls, private operating theaters and slashed clothing) left me feeling either unsatisfied or confused or incredulous.

Ultimately, I put the book down because it became painfully obvious that Dahlquist didn't know what he was talking about. He clearly did not study the narrative style he tried so hard to emulate. He clearly did not research the reality of being a young woman in a Victorian-type society. He clearly did not research the psychology involved in the adoption of a life as a professional killer or the requirements of such a life. Most damningly, he clearly did not think thoroughly enough to convincingly create the alternative society his readers are supposed to immerse themselves in. The first 100 pages of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters read like a higly contrived and self indulgent first draft. Self-indulgence in first drafts is acceptable. It is not however, acceptable in anything people have to pay money to read. I simply cannot imagine forcing myself through another 700 pages of the same. Not even during Lent.

My Brother Hath a Blog

2007-01-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

So, this entry has nothing, strictly speaking, to do with books. However, I am plugging my brother's blog, which is about teaching and the general state of education in California and the United States. He's a second year teacher (history and civics in high school and junior high) and he's starting his Master's in administration. He's also thought a lot about what it is to be effective in the classroom and the politics of education in general. Plus, he's just a pretty interesting and smart guy... :-)
So, check it out!

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

2007-01-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

I went on a book buying orgy. Thanks to this and Christmas (gift certificates to book stores are Awesome. Period.) I have a fantastical amount of fiction that wants reading. This is very happy and I'm getting a tingle just looking at the ridiculous pile of books that has been quartered off and whose parts are slowly migrating around the house. Sigh of contentment...

So. Where was I?

A yes, a book on reading. So, with all of the books I bought, only one was non-fiction and I decided to start with that one because I'm currently in the middle of "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" (I know, even I can't believe I hadn't read it yet) and as many may know, it's a little on the longish side and wants all of one's attention. I'm one of those people who doesn't like to have their salad on the same plate as their steak for fear of getting a steaky salad or a salady steak. And what does this have to do with anything, one might ask? Well, I'll tell you. I'm the same way with books. Because I'm reading the rather steaky (and yummy by the way) "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" I wanted something seperate and different so as not to make the flavors mush together. So, I picked up Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer".

This book is fantastic. Actually I don't think I have a word for how great I think this book is. Prose goes through the basics of close reading - reading not just for content but for characterization, structure, style and voice. She starts with words and moves on to the appreciation of sentences, paragraphs, dialogue and narrative - everything that makes prose effective. I wish my undergraduate classes had been such a comprehensive examination of how fiction functions. I especially appreciate that Prose includes numerous and diverse works as examples of what she very succinctly explores in her text. I'm getting a new taste of works that I've read and loved (Wuthering Heights and Madame Bovary), works that I've read and disliked (Hemingway and Gravity's Rainbow) and works that I wouldn't have thought to pick up but now very much want to. This accounts for a great deal of the migrating pile.

Admittedly, I'm an academically inclined person who is developing my own skills as a writer, so it follows that I would find "Reading Like a Writer" to be completely facinating from a topical perspective. But even if I wasn't looking to have my thoughts provoked, I think that Francine Prose does it in such an engaging way that the process she outlines of reading closely and slowly, maybe even lovingly, would effect me regardless. It's a good thing to slow down, think about what you've read and not just scan for the plot. This is something I've gotten out of the habit of doing after months of marathon reading for my graduate oral exams. It's really nice to get Prose's refresher course and settle back into a richer reading experience than I've been able to enjoy for awhile.

Happy Christmas!

2006-12-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas Eve Eve - one of my favorite days of the year. All of the holiday's sweetness is just peeking around the corner, just about ready to pop out but not quite. It's a sort of quiet and lovely anticipation. Admittedly, however, the week before Christmas can be absolutely insane. So I usually read one of my favorite books (which happens to also be my favorite Christmas story) to ground me in the actual season - a season whose celebration existed for centuries before the Church and certainly existed as something important long before Apple started pushing iPods at us. It's a little like asking a good friend to throw a bucket of water over me to help stop the inevitable seasonal panic. I have not managed to crack this old friend open yet, so that's what I'm doing tonight - reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

This is not what most folks would think of as a typical Christmas story...to be honest, a lot of people read it as undergraduates and file it away under the mental heading of "vaguely remember if you should ever be talking to a sexy medievalist college professor - otherwise, go ahead and forget it"... But it really is a lovely story all about rebirth and regeneration during the coldest and darkest days of the year. It's a 14th century poem, so the Christian overlay is there, but underneath it you get lots of glorious pagan and Celtic imagery, with the challenge of the self-regenerating Green Knight and Gawain's quest to bring honor back to Arthur's court. It is also a quest during which Gawain discovers qualities in himself that will continue to challenge him througout the year. And besides, the imagery is just so rich and...well, illuminating.

It's a classic allegory for the return of the sun after the solstice. It also depicts a way to seeing clearly after the darkness of delusion has been lifted from your eyes. Or at least my eyes through Gawain--that's what I mean by this story being an old friend. I learn something new about the text and about myself every time, and that's something I never want to stop doing.

Happy Christmas everyone! I hope your holidays are lovely and warm and a little illuminating too.

Triumph and a Nap

2006-12-14T22:29:00.000-08:00

It's official! I have my Master's in Comparative Literature. Well, nearly official anyway - Monday is the obligatory "get crazy amounts of paperwork signed, copied and through the department so I can get the diploma up on the wall" day. But I passed the exam. And here's the thing...I actully had fun. Thanks to copious note taking and a fairly obsessive-compulsive personality, I was prepared enough that the exam felt more like a long conversation and less like the culmination of 2 and a half years work. So yay!!! Now it's time to start reading the stack (and I mean Stack) of books that have been waiting for me for the past, well, forever. And it's time to start focusing on writing full time while I can. And it's time to research instructing at Dallas area community colleges. But mostly it's time to take several longish naps. Then I might actually post another review...

NaNoWriMo

2006-11-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Due to technical error, this posting sadly got deleted. But the comments are still there and they are swell!

On Geekdom

2006-11-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

This does and does not have something to do with a particular book. I've been tackling fairly heavy material recently as I prep for my orals, so in the evenings I've been reading short stories and young adult books (they're great - usually really well written but less taxing on tired brain cells). Last night I finished 'Over Sea, Under Stone' by Susan Cooper. It's the first in her Dark is Rising series. At the recommendation of a bookseller friend, I'd already read the second book in the series, also entitled 'The Dark is Rising' appropriately enough, and I was impressed. Really nice use of description and characterization, plus it incorporates Arthurian legend in a really clever way - and I'm a Huge one for Arthuriana.

Anyway, 'The Dark is Rising' was so good that I decided to check out the first book in the series, 'Over Sea, Under Stone'. It was, alas, a bit of a let-down. The characters are kids who unfortunately waver between frustrating and insipid and the writting isn't as confident or concise. Her growth as a writer between the first and second books is pretty immense. However, the book did have a highpoint for me. In the Epilogue, the predictably triumphant kids are at a museum gala where their great discovery has become the newest and most honored aquisition. It's a grail and in keeping with the Arthurian theme Cooper will pick up throughout the series. But here's the cool part - various scholars discuss the grail in fairly detailed language that goes over the kids' heads...but Cooper uses the names and critical arguements of real Arthurian scholars, including the grandaddy of them all, Roger Sherman Loomis. And that tickled me to no end and rescued the book for me.

And that is why I'm a Geek.

Dracula

2006-10-31T12:35:00.000-08:00

Today is Halloween and given that I'm looking for any excuse to take a break from the big ol' stack of articles I need to be reading, I thought I would write a little something on one of my absolute favorite books - Dracula by Bram Stoker. I've been reading this book since I was 13 as a primary way to calm down...Nevermind what that says about me...

There isn't much in the way of new things to be said about Dracula - it's still being read, both critically and recreationally, today though it was written over a century ago (it's popularity has no doubt been pushed along quite a bit by the veritable flock of film adaptations). But it's a classic for a reason. So instead of beating a dead horse, I'd like to say that it is a masterpiece of genre fiction and illustrates exactly why I think genre literature is so interesting - it provides a ready made allegorical form in which anything can be discussed.

Take Dracula as the example. Everyone knows what the basic story is by now, but in case you don't here it is in a nutshell:
1. A young London solicitor named Jonathan goes to Transylvania to broker a real estate deal with mysterious and reclusive Count.
2. Strange and scary things happen to him in the Count's castle (including several pretty sexy scenes with Dracula's vampire brides)
3. While our young hero is trapped in Transylvania, Dracula goes to London and starts preying on several middle to upper class young women.
4. Eventually he turns the sweet, young, rich Lucy into a vampire, stealing her away from her aristocratic fiance who then has to drive a stake through her heart and behead her. It's very sad.
5. Dracula then seduces Mina, Jonathan's young wife but flees back to Transylvania when Dr. Van Helsing, Jonathan and a band of noble young men destroy and consecrate his lair with Holy Water etc.
6. Jonathan, Dr. Van Helsing and a band of noble young men take Mina back to Transylvania in hot pursuit, hoping to kill him and free her from the curse of vampirism.
7. And on the Very off-chance that someone hasn't yet read it, I'm not going to say how it ends, but wow - if you don't know, get yourself to a library and Check It Out. Please. Thank you.

So, there we have a pretty typical horror story - big nasty monster stalks and chases victims with many a hair raising-adventure along the way. Keep in mind that in much the way Tolkien created the prototype for the modern fantasy novel with The Lord of the Rings, Bram Stoker is the grandfather of the horror genre as we know it and certainly the first author to really flesh out the vampire in fiction (fans of LeFanu or Polidori please don't jump all over me - I definitely acknowledge their influences, but Dracula was the first full length novel that explicitly featured the vampire as a threat and the first to treat the sexuality of the theme at such length). But I digress.

Underneath the very tightly wound suspense and horror of the initial story, Stoker weaves together themes on Victorian sexual anxiety, xenophobic fear of immigration due to colonialism and threats to the aristocratic social order to name only a few. Yet this dialogue, which explores the social psychology at work in Victorian England operates cunningly under the innocuous disguise of a thrilling story. Brilliant.

And this is why I think genre literature is worth taking a bit more seriously. Certainly not all thrilling stories operate on this dual level, but some do - perhaps more than you would think and it's worth considering that not all of the pertinent social commentary gets made in high-brow higher brow "literary" fiction.

For a great critical edition of Dracula, which has lovely annotations on everything lurking beneath the surface of the text check out:
Bram Stoker: The Essential Dracula ed. Leonard Wolf
ISBN 0743498038

Here we go...

2006-10-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

So here we go after a couple of tests...
I've really resisted creating a blog for ages mostly because...well, for some reason, leaps in technology scare me a little bit. Yes, I'm a really big Luddite. And besides, I really didn't feel like I had much to say.
That said, I've been prepping for my oral exams for the past three months, which means mostly that I'm reading a lot right now - even more than usual - and I'm reading a lot of books which I might not otherwise pick up. I've wished that there was a place where I could write something up on the reading I do, both for the Master's degree and for my own enjoyment. And presto - something to say.
So while I might wander off target every so often with my posts, this blog's main focus is on books, book reviews and recommendations, thoughts on books both brand new and out of print and a general appreciation for the grand tradition of the printed word - a tradition which will probably start changing as the publishing industry catches up with technology.