A Reader's Year

Heard this one before...

2008-07-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

It was a dark and stormy night. As the lightning crashed above their heads and bare tree branches clawed at the casements, the book group huddled closer around the dining room table. The electricity long extinguished, the members strained to see the text of the novel each was clutching in the light of the few stubby candles in the tarnished candelabra. Another crash illuminated the darkly paneled room, and a few of the female members shrieked in terror.
“It was just too freaky,” said one of the braver readers, raising her voice over the lashings of rain now sheeting the windows. “Really, I’m sitting in my living room, reading The Thirteenth Tale for the meeting this weekend, and my husband comes in talking about this absolutely bizarre story that he just heard on the news. Something about how that old mansion up out in the country—you know, that one that you can just barely see from the highway, way up on the bluffs west of town—had suddenly burned to the ground. And I swear, all the hairs on my neck just prickled up, that story happening just as I was reading this story. Uncanny, I tell you.”
An involuntary shiver went around the table, as each member briefly considered their situation. Invited to the mysterious group, they none of them had met prior to this meeting, when a letter written in a spindly hand suddenly appeared, summoning them to the remote house on this unseasonably frigid autumn night. Still, at the appearance at the door of the apparently normal (if chilly) housekeeper, they had each inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps their hostess was simply what she claimed to be: a wealthy housebound woman, a voracious reader interested in gathering the opinions of astute readers. At any rate, the allure of a weekend at the posh but remote mansion, simply for the price of some conversation with an eccentric old lady was an offer that none of the invitees felt compelled to refuse.
But as a sudden gust of wind from the direction of the kitchen flickered the candles, the readers were beginning to doubt their decision. One man, a tall, bulky fellow with a touch of gentleness about his eyes, leaned slightly to his neighbor. “When did Clothilde leave?” he asked in low tones. “About twenty minutes ago. She was convinced there were more candles in the woodshed, but I can’t imagine why it’s taking so long,” whispered the woman, a petite redhead with blood red painted nails.
“Brave woman,” the man muttered, “going out into this weather. Make you think we’re on the wild moors rather than—“
“Rather than isolated in the middle of these dense woods?” the woman interrupted impatiently. “I’m not sure this is altogether better, thank you. Especially when the housekeeper off and disappears on us. And not a word about when our hostess will appear. Why do you think she invited us here, when she’s not even going to bestow her august presence upon us?”
“Odd, yes,” the man nodded, reaching for his cup and saucer. “Perhaps Clothilde couldn’t remember where the candles were in the shed.” He lowered his voice as he brought the tea to his lips. “Or maybe she stumbled across something…unexpected… in the woodshed.”
The redhead’s eyes widened as her thin lips pressed into an impossibly tight frown.
“Well, I know one thing,” suddenly announced the tall blond sitting at the head of the table. As if on a string, all the heads on either side of the table swiveled towards the voice. There was enough of the commanding, teacher-like air to the straight-backed woman that none of the members could have ignored, although each had secretly come to loath her. “Whomever was playing their music so loudly last night was beyond rude. Mandolin music, of all things! And the goings on in the garden, right under my window. Whomever was darting around the topiaries has no respect for people’s privacy. Really, I could hardly get to sleep without thinking about it.”
An older woman, attempting to salvage something of a peaceful gathering, gently patted the blond’s bony hand. “There now, perhaps it was only something you imagined. Maybe last night you dreamed of mandolins.”
The blond glared at her.
The man opened his mouth as if to say something, but quickly thought better of it. He, too, had seen shadows in the garden, indistinct shapes flitting about the tortured shapes of sculpted scrubs. But for one moment as the cloud revealed a full moon, he imagined he briefly saw identical features on two faces.
Before he could further consider the meaning of it all, the door from the kitchen suddenly flew open, blowing a slight figure into the darkened room. As a few frightened hands sought to relight the candles, others supported Clothilde as she found her way to an empty chair. The relit candlelight found her face, terror written over every wrinkle. No one could tear their eyes from her unblinking stare, her claw-like hands clutching at the chair arms as if to splinter them.
“I know.” She rasped as another lightning flash dazzled the room. “God help me. I know the secret.”

Pithy Verdict: For good or bad, every Gothic cliché in the book, and your book group has already decided to read it.

The perfect cure for a rotten day at work.

2008-07-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

One dose Shakin' Bacon, add The Funky Trunky.

Tired out? Fill up on a hotdog.

(via Omnivoracious.)

That mighty heart lying still.

2008-07-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments leveled against book reviewing bloggers is the tendency of some to let their own personal experiences play into their reviews, rendering any pretense of objectivity suspect. I can see the validity of such an argument, although I think it makes too much of an assumption that Internet commentary ought to be answerable to the same standards as traditional media--and that's an argument that I'm not about to wade into. Still, I wanted to make the point that my strong reaction Chris Faust's lovely Nocturnes wasn't due as much to the artistic quality of the photos (formidable, by any estimation), but to the sense of being reminded of images so closely associated with the landscapes that I grew up with.

Faust in a Saint Paul based photographer, and the majority of the images here are from Minnesota, Ontario and Wisconsin. He also ranges as far afield as Tennessee, Arizona and Oregon. But as the title implies, the common thread is panoramic night scenes, capturing the landscapes with classic photographic techniques. He uses no digital manipulation of the images, instead relying on very long exposures, careful composition, and considerable darkroom tweeking.

The results are extraordinarily startling. The surface of Lake Superior becomes a burnished mirror, the familiar Duluth breakwater errily suspended above its own reflection. Ice encased freighters moored for the winter have a monumental potency about them. One image of the Duluth docks looks more like a vista along the ancient Nile than the gritty Iron Range. Especially for me, the photos of downtown Minneapolis capture the sense of crackling energy frozen in one vital moment. It's not so much a piece of artwork as a sensation, captured and preserved.

The book includes an essay by former Walker Art Center curator Joan Rothfuss, and most photographs have brief commentaries included in an appendix. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, the images do have a little unevenness of quality in a few--not surprising for a collection of tritones. Presented with a minimum of commentary in the actual collection, the artwork speaks brilliantly for itself.

Pithy Verdict: Extraordinary art that capture more than just the image.

Searching for that magical world.

2008-06-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

The premise of Justine Larbalestier’s first book in her Magic or Madness trilogy is basic enough: Reason, a fifteen-year-old whose existence has taken place largely in the Australian bush, is sent to live with her grandmother, a woman whom Reason’s mother has always regarded as the worst type of evil on the face of the planet. When her mother, Sarafina, lands in a mental institution, Reason uncovers enough signs that her mother wasn’t entirely lying: the remnants of a cat skeleton buried in the cellar, talismans hidden in picture frames of family members, and most intriguingly of all, a large antique key that seems to fit the lock of door that Grandma Esmeralda doesn’t want used.

Well, we can see where this is heading. And sure enough, as soon as Reason steps through that door, odd things begin to happen. Or at least that’s the promise. In spite of a solid, if somewhat uninventive setup, Magic or Madness is seriously lacking in either magical moments or scary instances of madness. On the other side of the door, Reason lands in a deep snowdrift—at the very heart of New York City’s East Village. This is enough to convince her of the existence of magic, and the sudden arrival of a ‘friend’—the magically savvy Jay Tee—suggests that her appearance was somehow expected. But by whom? Why does the door open onto this particular street? And what is the purpose of Reason’s own magic—a particularly astute sense of numbers and mathematics—in this world where magic is so close at hand?

The fact that Larbalestier’s book is the first in a trilogy following Reason points to revelations to come. But there are some serious holes in the first book that aren’t explained and were enough to drive me to distraction. Sarafina is left in the mental hospital, her story largely dropped. The relationship between Reason and Esmeralda changes, but without much justification why this is the case. With the exception of Tom, the neighbor boy who befriends Reason and displays some surprising magical qualities of his own, none of the characters feels fully developed. Finally, Larbalestier tends to hand the narrative off to various characters. One chapter we’re in Jay-Tee’s mind, the next we see things from Reason’s point of view, and after that from Tom’s. The effect is hard enough to do in a solid plot; here, it only serves to annoy. Perhaps in the remainder of the trilogy, Reason and her predicament are whipped into a fabulous tale of secrets and exhilarating danger. But with such a lackluster beginning, it’s hard to imagine any teens willing to extend their attention for another few hundred pages.

Pithy Verdict: A little magic, less madness. Mostly mundane.

The royal reader.

2008-06-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

This is a wickedly funny little novella. It's a simple conceit: the Queen, out exercising the corgis, stumbles on a municipal bookmobile. In the name of good PR, she picks out a title, and obliging reads it. And the floodgates are opened. Soon HM is blowing through Trollope, putting the French president on the spot with her questions on obscure playwrights and drilling her subjects on their current reading during receiving lines. Needless to say, the Establishment is in an uproar. Even the corgis retaliate, chewing the library copy of the McEwan to a pulp. This passage, when the Queen is on her way to the opening of Parliament with a contraband novel, is particularly genius, and worth quoting at length:

Still, it is an ill-tempered royal couple that is driven down the Mall, the duke waving viciously from his side, the Queen listlessly from hers, and at some speed, too, as the procession tries to pick up the two minutes that have been lost.

When they got to Westminster she popped the offending book behind a cushion in the carriage, ready for the journey back, mindful as she sat on the throne and embarked on her speech of how tedious was the twaddle she was called on to deliver and that this was actually the only occasion when she got to read aloud to the nation. 'My government will do this...my government will do that.' It was so barbarously phrased and wholly devoid of style or interest that she felt it demeaned the very act of reading itself, with this year's performance even more garbled than usual as she, too, tried to pick up the missing couple of minutes.

It was with somer elief that she got back into the coach and reached behind the cusion for her book. It was not there. Steadfastly waving as they rumbled along she surreptitiously felt behind the other cushions.

'You're not sitting on it?'

'Sitting on what?'

'My book.'

'No, I am not. Some British Legion people here, and wheelchairs. Wave, for God's sake.'

When they arrived at the palace she had a word with Grant, the young footman in charge, who said it was security and that while ma'am had been in the Lords the sniffer dogs had been round and security had confiscated the book. He thought it had probably been exploded.

'Exploded?' said the Queen. 'But it was Anita Brookner.'

The young man, who seemed remarkably undeferential, said security may have thought it was a device.

The Queen said: 'Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.'

The footman said: 'Yes, ma'am.'

It was as if he were talking to his grandmother, and not for the first time the Queen was made unpleasantly aware of the hostility her reading seemed to arouse.

'Very well,' she said. 'Then you should inform security that I shall expect to find another copy of the same book, veted and explosive-free, waiting on my desk tomorrow morning. And another thing. The carriage cushions are filthy. Look at my gloves.' Her Majesty departed.

'Fuck,' said the footman, fishing out the book from where he had been told to hide it down the front of his breeches.

Brilliant. The reviews have quibbled that the story is slight, and that Bennett uses too snobby a tone. Well, there's not a whole lot to it, but the whole point of the snobby tone is to mimic that stiff upper lip the Establishment is so apt toward. Bottom line: a fun, quirky read, perfect for a lazy Sunday morning.

Pithy Verdict: We are very amused.

Where have we been, where are we going?

2008-06-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been ever since I've posted anything on my humble blog here. Mostly this is due to sheer laziness on my part, but I like to tell myself that because it's finally sunny out in this stretch of the woods, I'm entirely justified in laying off the laptop and absconding to the nearest park to loll around in the shade with the book du jour.

But another idea has been playing around in the back of my mind. This reader's year has been up for quite a while, and I'm wondering if it's time to take the blog in another direction. There will still be reviews of the books I'm reading (I'm pretty sure, at least), but maybe there'll be some more musings on reading, library life, publishing or culture in general. Perhaps some linking to whatever strikes me as especially amusing--or particularly galling. Which will probably make it just like every other blog out there, but as it's my blog, it will be that much more special. I feel the need to do something different. God knows, if it wasn't this, it would probably be rearranging the furniture in the living room. I'm a little frightened of what I might find under the sofa, so this seems like a better choice for all involved.

So, stay tuned. The address won't change, the old posts will remain accessible in the archive (Blogger willing), and I might change my mind in a few days anyway. Stay tuned and check back.

A broken plate, an almighty bang.

2008-04-30T21:35:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing that I'm a sound sleeper. I wasn't roused when an earthquake in southern Illinois apparently sent tremors as far north as this region, but had I been I would have given up reading for good. I happened to be deep into Simon Winchester's Krakatoa at the time, and the possibility that perhaps I'm getting a bit too involved in my reading material immediately crossed my mind. Life imitating literature would, in this case at least, be a bit too much, even for me.

My edginess stemmed from the depiction Winchester gives the catastrophic eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883. At the time that it occurred, the islands of modern day Indonesia were under the colonial rule of the Dutch, centered at Batavia (today's Jakarta), on the island of Java. At the very center of the Dutch holdings was Krakatoa, straddling the very busy shipping lanes between the west coast of Java and the eastern point of Sumatra. Unbeknownst to the Dutch masters or the Javanese population, Krakatoa was also at the very center of a tectonic plate boundary, and a very active one at that. The volcano had belched minor eruptions in the past, but on the morning of August 23, 1883, an eruption occurred that vaporized Krakatoa, triggered an immense tsunami, chilled world temperatures for years and was directly responsible for the deaths of at least 30,000 people, as well as coining a new word for a cataclysm.

As Winchester would have it, the eruption also had a lasting impact on global communications, and possibly sparked the growing global Islamic fundamentalist movement. To be certain, Krakatoa's spectacular demise did have global implications (the declining world temperatures on the negative side, the fantastic sunsets that inspired poets and artists to create some fabulous artwork). But even though Krakatoa's eruption occurred at the dawn of the communication age, and Indonesia experienced a surge in sectarian violence, the connection seems more than a little tenuous to me. The lack of much in the way of sources in this portion of the book is telling.

But, thankfully, most of the book focuses on Winchester's strength: the depiction of why and how Krakatoa so completely blew its top. A trained geologist, Winchester describes in loving detail the science behind plate tectonics, as well as the different biological and geological boundaries that led to the acceptance of the theory--too late for the 1883 explosion, but oh so beneficial in predicting upcoming events. The geological details are couched in the history of the region, culminating in a vivid depiction of Java and Batavia in the days leading up to and during Krakatoa's final days.

When I say details, I do really mean details: Winchester is fond of footnotes explaining perhaps too much about certain points, and they're almost all tangential to the main narrative and in some cases, reiterates points made earlier in the text. He's also prone to polysyllabic indulgences, a trait perhaps not so surprising for a man who wrote two histories of the Oxford English Dictionary, but do we really need to say 'ambuscade' when 'ambush' would do? And some readers may find Winchester's humorous asides to be too glib, detracting from an otherwise straightforward narrative.

For all its faults, Krakatoa not only makes some difficult concepts accessible, but entertaining. Illustrated with historical and contemporary images, the book never fails to give a vivid image of the horrendous toll that the volcano wrought on the entire planet. Written in 2003, Krakatoa was published before the massive earthquake and tsunami originating on the northern coast of Sumatra (occurring along the same plate boundary that Krakatoa rests on), but reading it in retrospect it only continues to underscore how interconnected we are when it comes to the Earth's life cycles.

Sour notes.

2008-04-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

Bel Canto is one of those novels that just seem to keep popping up in reviews, 'best' lists and conversations about literary fiction. Since its publication in 2001, the winner of the PEN/Faulkner, Orange and National Book Critics Circle awards kept reappearing on my list of books that I needed to read, so transcendent was its beauty, its themes haunting and its story meaningful on so many levels. Plus, there was the added benefit of opera as one of its subjects--a topic near to my heart.

So I've read it, and try as I might, I cannot say that I especially liked the book. I agree that Patchett's writing is beautiful: her exploration of art and its bonding essence in a microcosm that has all the beauty and fragility of the sheen on a bubble. But the centerpiece of all this beauty, the catalyst really, never struck me as genuine. Maybe it's something of a disingenuous argument to say that this art is built on sometime that can only be called an artifice. But when the entire premise of the book is to suggest that art, the creation of human beings, can suspend and overcome the divisions so pervascent in humanity, to build the entire plot on a rather unbelievable human character undermines the whole endeavor.

The central character that I'm talking about is Roxanne Coss, world-renowned soprano. She is at the vice presidental mansion of a nameless South American nation for the lavish party of a Mr. Hosokawa, opera lover and wealthy businessman. Wooed to the country in hopes that he will help jumpstart the economy, the wealthy and powerful gather to celebrate the man who almost no one knows, or, aside from his money, particularly cares for. When a radical group storms the house and takes the guests captive, both captors and hostages alike are entranced by Coss' ethereal voice. Soon, the vice president is tending to the cleaning of the house, the rebel generals are meeting for chess in the study, and more than one hostage is getting to know their captors quite well.

There's only one possible ending to all of this, and when it comes, it's still a remarkable moment. But it would be more so if I could really connect with the characters. Patchett is a great writer, but I think Bel Canto could really have been masterpiece with more attention paid to the main character. In the end, Bel Canto had its moments (the story of Mr. Hosokawa's translator being the best), but I couldn't help but feel some disappointment in its closing passages.

Love for the ages.

2008-04-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

A shortish post today, fitting for its subject: The Professor's Daughter, at a scant 64 pages, is slender even by graphic novel standards. I think it took me all of half an hour to breeze through it, and that included a trip to the kitchen to toast a bagel. It's a simple enough story of forbidden love, two people from alien cultures struggling to overcoming thousands of years of history and the bonds of society to somehow start a life together.

It sounds melodramatic, and I think it's fair to say it's over the top. But Joann Sfar's story has the nice twist that the particular culture gap is more like a culture canyon--our Romeo is the dashing mummy Imhotep IV, his paramor, Lillian Bowell, the daughter of Britian's leading Egyptologist. Together, they wander through a sepia London curiously comfortable with daily sightings of active mummies. Still, the world is fraught with danger for the two lovers, from a cup of tea which has nearly devestating effects on Imhotep, to the fathers of the lovers, both of whom will go to (or in Imhotep's case, resist) the grave to in order to keep the lovers apart. A little kooky, but whatever. The real reason for the story is to give artist Emmanuel Guibert an opportunity to show off his brilliant depiction of nineteenth century London and its penchant for antiquities. Working mostly in watercolors, the panels have the muted warmth of old photographs. Interior scenes, especially, glow with the flickering of gaslight or a solitary candle. The damp gloom of the Tower of London or the London docks is immediately established by a blue cast or an eerie green. Guibert mostly sticks to a standard six panel page, but when he opts for larger scenes (too rarely, in my opinion), the perspectives are creative and expansive.

I read The Professor's Daughter in First Second's fine 'collector's edition,' which includes some sketches Guibert made in researching the book. His images of the British Museum and London scenes are beautiful in their own right, considerably different from the panels. Judging by the other works by Guibert, The Professor's Daughter might be a bit of a departure. Originally published in France in 1997, the translation here by Alexis Siegel only just appeared last year. Enjoy the pictures, don't expect too much from the story, and hope that Guibert does more of this type of graphic novel in the future.

Don't be a cow.

2008-04-03T17:07:00.000-07:00

In general, I don't read (or 'read' depending on your definition of reading) books on CD, mostly because I have an attention span that can be measured in nanoseconds, but also because audiobooks are most effective on long-distance hauls, and I tend to use those occasions to sing/shriek along to Joni Mitchell and Neko Case. But I stuck with Catherine Gilbert Murdock's young adult novel Dairy Queen, and I don't regret a moment of lost belting time. As read by actress Natalie Moore, Murdock's fresh coming of age novel sparkles with earthy humor and a genuinely believable protagonist in D. J. Schwenk.

At first glance, D. J.'s story may seem a bit of a stretch: she's a high school sophomore who practically runs her family's Wisconsin dairy farm on her own after her father is laid up with a hip injury. The only daughter in a football mad family, she also struggles in a family with serious communication issues: her younger brother hardly speaks, her father is a demanding figure short on sympathy for his overextended daughter, and her mother fiercely maintains a facade of normalcy over all the damage underneath. D. J.'s also struggling through school, and constantly has to tend to her one (and only) friend Amber. And that's only the status quo at the start of the book. The action actually begins when D. J. is recruited to help get a rival football team's quarterback into shape over the summer. Incredulous, D. J. puts Brian to work hauling hay bays and running sprints, all the while seething over his privileged background and wimpy attitude. But as she starts to work out with him, she finds out that she's slowly falling in love--with football.

Well, there's other stuff going on with Brian, but D. J. is such a well realized character that some formulaic touches are forgivable. Even though she has so much going wrong in her life (and there's more major issues than the ones I've discussed here), D. J. comes across as a thoroughly normal sort of teenager--she handles her responsibility as best as she can, she doesn't get hung up on herself and she doesn't react to the changes in her life with over-the-top actions. She's the right mix of child on the cusp of adulthood, a character that you can imagine meeting at the local high school. And after a year schlepping manure and rising at dawn to milk, D. J. has decided she doesn't want to go through life blindly obedient like a cow.

D. J. decides to try out for the high school (male) football team as a running back, which brings the expected tension of solitary girl in a male dominated sphere--not to mention playing against Brian. My complaint here is that Murdock does tend to fall into the expected scenario of the two facing off against each other on the field. But she doesn't tie up some of the other loose ends as well, for D. J.'s experiences will continue in The Off Season. D. J. is a character worth rooting for, both on and off the football field.

Moonlighting in murder.

2008-03-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

Irish author John Banville may very well deserve a break. His work has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize (his 2005 novel The Sea took top honors), he is a long time contributor to The New York Review of Books, and formerly edited the literary section of The Irish Times. He's earned the respect of literary critics and his work seems bound for the Everyman's Library or Penguin Modern Classics treatment and literary survey courses.

But Banville is taking a different tack, perhaps a little surprising for an author so estabilished in literary circles. The Silver Swan marks Banville's second foray into mystery/suspense/noir fiction, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. His first novel, Christine Falls, introduced Quirke, a pathologist obscurely laboring (and drinking) away in post-war Dublin. In that novel, Quirke stumbled into a mystery when a particular young woman turned up on his autopsy table, and he reluctantly pursued the cause of her death to the very core of his own haunted story. That novel was marked by Banville's masterful depiction of a brooding Dublin, matched by the delicate shifting family relationships. I actually wound up buying my own copy of Christine Falls, probably the highest recommendation my cheapsake self could give to a book.

The Silver Swan picks up a few years after the events of Christine Falls. Quirke is on the wagon, and he's making an effort to mend his relationship with his newly acknowledged daughter, Phoebe. He wants nothing more to do with detective work. But another young woman, this time an apparent suicide, piques his interest--especially after her grieving husband requests that Quirke forego the autopsy. He discovers that Deirde Hunt died by another's hand, but this time, Quirke isn't sure he wants to see justice done--something tells him Deirdre would rest better as a suicide. But when one of Deirdre's secrets, a con man who's beginning to dabble in more serious crimes. He's also pursuing Phoebe, leaving Quirke with no choice but to follow the clues of Deirdre's death to the answer.

Or rather, I should say, until Banville reveals the answer. Quirke isn't a typical private eye who follows the clues. Rather, most of the story is told in alternating perspectives, with the mystery unfolding alongside Quirke's deepening involvement. As such, traditional P.I. fans might not find Quirke to their liking. But Banville captures the noirish, suspenseful feel of the 1950s, so much so that I was partly expecting Lauren Bacall to sidle into some of the scenes. I did think a fault was the stereotyping of some characters. And I'm bothered by the terrible victimization of women both in Christine Falls and Silver Swan. Perhaps Banville is being true to the period, but in both books, women (albeit well developed as characters) are treated appallingly by the men in their lives. It bears watching if Banville does more with his women in future books.

It's sometimes tough to pigeonhole particular books, and Banville proves that it's getting harder to classify authors. But maybe we just need to get over putting books (and authors) into tidy catagories. Banville mixes the best of literary description and atmosphere with the mystery plotting to create a memorable character.

Princess, scholar, schemer, sleuth.

2008-03-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

If there was ever a period in English history more conducive to committing murder without the prospect of getting caught, few can match the reign of Queen Mary. And if you're looking for a prospective victim whose death would be greeted by more approval than dismay by the people in power, then Princess Elizabeth Tudor would be a prime target. Elizabeth knows she's a target, she can trust few, if any, of her surrounding courtiers, and dreads the arrival of every messenger, who might come bearing word of her ascension to the throne--or her death summons. When word comes from her aunt Mary Boleyn, Elizabeth is overjoyed to see someone from the her disgraced mother's family. But an attack on a Boleyn cousin and her aunt's painful death from poison suggests a larger plot to remove all of Queen Anne's relations out of the picture.

Karen Harper's series centered on Elizabeth I adds a little twist to the typical historical mystery, starting out with The Poyson Garden. She's covering familiar ground here: Elizabeth's precarious position during her half-sister Queen Mary's reign is well-covered ground. Where Harper's take on establish historical fact includes vivid reimaging of real people and a pretty good realization of English life at the time. Elizabeth herself is lively and engaging. Less convincing is the inclusion of commoners into Elizabeth's household--it's hard to imagine the young princess taking in (and trusting) an actor from a travelling troupe. But suspending disbelief over that point, the inclusion of Ned Thompson, and the knowledgeable herbalist Meg (who's conveniently a dead ringer for Elizabeth) adds some color and offers all sorts of possibilities to move the action forward.

As far as plot goes, The Poyson Garden moves quickly like any good pleasure read should, but there's little in the way of actual mystery--the only real question of the book is who the poisoner should turn out to be, and that gets resolved about two-thirds of the way through. From then on, it's more a suspense novel, and I can't say that I entirely bought the characterization at the end--but then I don't want to give too much away. It's not a plot spoiler to say that the book concludes with Queen Mary's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne. There are at least eight more books to the series, but I'm not entirely sure I'll continue on with it. Respectable mysteries, Harper's Elizabeth whodunits would make a good alternative to readers of Phillipa Gregory's Tudor novels.

The lady herself; or Jane fix part III

2008-03-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

More than any other author in English literature, it seems, Jane Austen stymies her biographers.* There really shouldn't be any reason for this: we have letters and some manuscripts in her hand, numerous family recollections have been passed down, and she lived in a family and an age with an almost obsessive need to record their experiences for posterity. Yet it's always so tempting to ascribe the experiences of her heroines to the author. It's hard to imagine someone who wrote so convincingly about relationship battles having nothing in her own life that came close. Claire Tomalin's 1997 bio of Austen avoids the temptation to depict Austen as a real life version of her various characters, but she does do an excellent job portraying how Austen's life, both the tragic and comic phases, constantly influenced her writing. Jane Austen: A Life may not be revolutionary in its conclusions, but I can honestly say that it read as easily as any of Austen's novels, and with more than a few figures that could be directly drawn from Emma, Persuasion or any of the other novels.

Austen herself is always at the center of the bio, obviously, but Tomalin gives considerable attention to the figures surrounding Austen (and, mercifully, a complete family tree to keep all of the similarly named Austens straight). Other than Cassandra, Austen's sister and confidante, no one gets more attention than her colorful cousin, Eliza. Born in India of indeterminate parentage, Eliza married a supposed French count, only to see him go to the guillotine. Eliza later married Austen's brother, the charming but flighty Henry. Another brother, Edward, was adopted into a wealthy landowning family, not unlike many of Austen's heroes. The eldest of the Austen brood, James, and his pushy wife are portrayed as an inspiration for Emma's Mr. Elton and the odious Augusta Elton.

This oblique portrait of Austen only underscores how little is actually known about her, in spite of her letters. Much of what has been assumed about Austen is due to memoirs left behind by her family, flavored by their Victorian-era censorship. There are hints, here and there, of Austen's alienation from the social scene (Tomalin notes the sharp satire of Austen's letters regarding Edward's Kentish relations, whom she considered snobs and only found companionship there with the governess). And there is the undercurrent sense that many of Austen's contemporaries didn't quite know what to make of the author. Austen's obvious cleverness sometimes rankled friends and relations, especially if that barbed wit were directed towards them. We can only assume that sharp wit was the reason Austen's niece, Fanny, burned many of her aunt's surviving letters.

Tomalin doesn't go into great detail in critizing each of the novels, which was my only complaint about the book. She must assume that her audience is more familiar with the films (which do not receive much comment, and that limited to notes) than the books, as she provides plot summaries for Mansfield Park and Persuasion. Coupled with the fluid writing, the well-written endnotes and generous images, Jane Austen: A Life is a good starting point for those interested in the author but aren't ready to delve into more scholarly works.

*With the exception of Shakespeare, of course. At least there's no debate over who wrote Austen's novels.

The tourney is on.

2008-03-08T20:15:00.000-08:00

Not a review per se this time, but something much more entertaining. The online Morning News is currently in the throes of its fourth annual Tournament of Books and like previous years, this year promises to be a bloody battle to the end. In round 1, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke smoked Ovenman by Jeff Parker to take the first victory. Personally, I see the final pairing as Tree of Smoke versus wonderkid Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao, but it's anyone's guess what the zombie round will do this year's brackets. Will What the Dead Know carry the banner for honest-to-goodness genre fiction? Or will the witty Then We Came to the End take on its stiff competition to emerge victorious and claim the (real live) Rooster? Obviously, I'm probably getting more excited about this than it actually warrants, but it's still a highly recommended diversion from the workday grind.

The Buddhist and his AK-47.

2008-03-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

I saw this odd little collection of portraits when it came across the desk recently. Not surprisingly, its arresting cover stuck in my mind. In a sense, it's an ingenious idea: take a massively decisive issue and actually go into people's houses and talk to them. Photographer Kyle Cassidy did just that for Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. In addition to the portraits, Cassidy includes each gun owner's answer to the question, 'Why do you own a gun?'

I have to admit, I'm conflicted about the whole gun control issue. On the one hand, I can understand people's appreciation of guns for recreation--I have, and still do, go target shooting on occassion. But I've also seen the damage these same firearms can do when in the hands of even the most careful marksman. Cassidy, to his credit, does a pretty good job of portraying people neutrally (and as an aside, I loved the humorous touch of including the family pets in the family portraits). There are plenty of people here who own guns for the pleasures that hunting and target practice bring to them. There are some surprising gun owners (a chef who wanted to shoot a wild turkey to get a sense of where food really comes from, the artist who needed a shotgun for a bronze casting, the collector with his 12 lb cannon) and some that make a lot of sense (law enforcement officers, fomer military and engineers of all sorts intrigued by a gun's mechanics). But when I read phrases like 'since the bad guys had guns, I should have one, too' or 'I refuse to become prey,' I can't help but wonder how much gun proliferation has turned into a circular argument: since most everyone can have a gun, I should have one too to protect myself from all those people with guns.

The argument has often been made that many nations (especially in Europe) with stringent gun laws have nowhere near as many instances of accidental shootings or the type of rampages that occurred at Virginia Tech or the Omaha mall. On the other hand, the lawlessness following Hurricane Katrina is cited repeatedly as an example of government breaking down, and citizens needing to defend themselves. Perhaps. With the right to bear arms so deeply entrenched in culture (and the Constitution), it's hard to see where (or if) the line should be drawn. As Cassidy's portraits demonstrate, the distinction between who own a gun and why is nowhere near black and white.

Who are these tacky people?

2008-02-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

I confess, I'm entirely transfixed by the idea of royalty. I'm most interested in what went on with powerful families of the past, especially when it came to their penchant for turning against each other, but the current incarnation of the reigning elite does hold a certain fascination. Jeremy Paxman, journalist with the BBC, has something of a royal hang up too. A familiar with some of the swankier circles of society, Paxman uses his access to navigate through the mystique to figure out just who these people are in his 'polite inquiry' On Royalty--and more importantly, whether the modern world really needs them.

Although he considers other nations' royal families (including the recently hired-yes, hired-royal family of Albania), Paxman, not surprisingly, pretty much sticks to The Royal Family: the Windors. The central premise about royalty is something of an oxymoron: how to appear constantly in the public eye, yet maintain enough of an exclusive aura so as not to clue the hoi polloi into the fact that really, there isn't that much that is terribly extraordinary about these people. To be sure, there have been some sovereigns who were gifted in statecraft or scholarship, but the relentless pursuit of hunting is a more accurate picture of a royal pasttime. In fact, they are terribly mundane in many ways (Paxman notes the heavily creased copies of Fredrick Forsyth novels in the Queen's library). But in describing Prince Charles, Paxman gets to the central tragedy of today's royalty: "The prince had consistently misunderstood or ignored a basic truth at the heart of the relationship between royalty and the people. He seemed to believe that his significance lay in what he believed and did. The truth was simply that his significance lay in who he was."

I use the word tragedy as that's the tone that finally emerges. It's perhaps odd to refer to a massively wealthy and priviledged group of people as tragic, but the added pressures of public scrutiny on an already disfunctional (and therefore normal) family, coupled with the expectation that they go through life without expressing the opinions that everyone else is entitled to makes for something of a tragic tale. On the public side, is the magic of royalty really worth the funds spent on maintaining their lifestyles? Paxman makes a well researched, readable argument, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.

Of course, the whole discussion of whether royalty is relevant today owes much of its origin to Princess Diana, possibly the most documented person of the latter twentieth century. Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, The New Yorker and various other high brow glossys, adds her take to an already crowded field of Diana bios. I found The Diana Chronicles to be a tremendously frustrating book, although I stuck with it to the bitter end. Brown's journalistic take on Diana's life not surprisingly focuses primarily on the princess's manipulation of the press in manipulating her image--an obsession so vital to her that the Wales's marriage was less a menage a trois but a duel between Camilla et al versus Di and the entire press corps. All the well-known details are here, but Brown's portrayal of Diana suggests a much more desperate woman who used downright mean tactics to achieve the sort of stable life that she had always been denied. A convincing argument? Brown bases some of her conclusions on her own conjectures and disclosures which may never be proven definitively, but with a subject like Diana, such sources are the norm. It's as good an argument as any of the other Diana bios out there, at least for now.

But for a book based on one of the most photographed woman in the world, the almost total lack of images or plates is an especially frustrating one. Brown bases much of her argument on the manner Diana manipulated her image on specific photos, yet only a few black and white photos are given in endpages. I have a hard time understanding why Brown and Doubleday opted not to include a set of plates (price couldn't have been an issue, given the sure bestseller status). It's an inexplicable omission and one that ought to be corrected in future editions. Also, The Diana Chronicles is very long, and I was never allowed to forget in the course of 400+ pages that Tina Brown is a fabulous person who lives a fabulous life. Luncheons at the Four Seasons with the princess and reminiscences of state dinners are all very well and good to Brown's research, but I think she wouldn't have hurt her argument by cutting out the name-dropping.

Maybe I've proven part of Paxman's argument about needing the magic of royalty--after all, I've just slogged through 800 pages about them. Will the Royal Family ever lose their status? Judging by the popularity of Diana and her story, it's a fair guess that they'll remain an object of fascination for generations to come.

One day, Death met a thief...

2008-02-20T22:07:00.000-08:00

Of the books that I've read lately, Markus Zusak's unconventional 2005 novel The Book Thief has stood out for a couple of reasons. It's the only book that I've read twice in the same year, both being for book groups. I liked it the first time around, and the second go through didn't diminish my regard for it (a rare occurance, believe me). Secondly, I noticed that between the two groups, opinion was decidely divided. In the first group, all pretty much agreed that it was excellent. The second was considerably cooler, most choosing to skim parts that annoyed, and most weren't willing to pass it on to another reader.

Why the divide? On the surface, The Book Thief is something of a hard sell. It's a 500+ page teen novel about Germans during WWII, narrated by Death, relies on images to tells stories within the story, and oh, yes, you'll know from page one how everything is going to turn out. It seems a perfect recipe for a dark and depressing slog in the hands of a lesser writer, but Zusak, on the whole, makes it work. The story centers on Liesel, a gangly, neglected girl on the cusp of adolescence. She is on the way to her foster parents in a Munich suburb when our narrator first meets her, catching her stealing an abandoned book at the freshly dug gravesite of her brother. Her thievery continues as she grows up in the home of Rosa and Hans Hubermann, loving, if unconventional, parents who foster her love of reading. Liesel and her best friend, the Jesse Owens obsessed Rudy, seem to have as usual a childhood as most other kids, but the casual mention of Hitler youth meetings gives way to the images of Jews forced to march through town, pushing Liesel and those close to her to make a potentially life threatening choice between right and wrong.

With Death continually interrupting the story, there's little doubt as to the ending for at least some of the characters. Zusak, rightly, gives Death a wearily ironic tone (could he have any other?) and the narrator's constant interruption of the story can be grating for some. More jarring is Zusak's occassionally ungrammatical writing ('the horizon was beginning to charcoal') and his tendency towards forced descriptions ('cluttered breath', 'shrouded in his uniform as the graying light armwrestled the sky'). This strikes me as contrived, and it's hard to imagine any middle or high schooler keeping themselves from snickering at that florid stuff. But I kept thinking as I read that the effect of such language gives The Book Thief a cinematic sheen; like film, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief to make it work. Then it's not too hard to conjure not just the images Zusak is portraying, but to feel what it would be like to live on Himmel Street with Liesel. It's an ambitious novel, and even if it sometimes it doesn't quite live up to its own expectations, I'd fall into the group that would pass it along. What other novel mixes the mundane and the magical, the worst of human nature with humorous moments, and appeals to both teens and adults?

Not so fantastic.

2008-02-13T22:42:00.000-08:00

So there I was, at the library and absolutely thrilled to be holding a copy of the new Doctor Who Encyclopedia. I'm not a huge Whovian--those legions of fans who dissect every episode of the BBC's long running sci-fi series. But having fallen big time for the new series, I was eager to see if the Encyclopedia would help fill me in on all the lore and oddities of the original series going back to 1963, as well as give me some insight into the making of the show.

Alas, it was not to be. I got it home and soon realized, to my disappointment, that rather than being a history of the series, or even a guide to the individual episodes, the Encyclopedia was simply a collection of the most minute factoids of each episode--essentially a massive collection of trivia. Annoyingly, the book only covers the new series, from 2005 onward. Its arrangement of subjects in alphabetical order is helpful if memories need refreshing while watching episodes (in cases, I suppose, when one can't rest until the question of the Face of Boe's age is finally settled). But for the novice, it's t00 much information. To author Gary Russell's credit, each definition is exhaustively dealt with (Russell is involved with the show's script writing). The Encyclopedia is lavishly illustrated with stills from the series, some of which are better in quality than others. Each definition cites pertinent episode(s), and where applicable, which actor portrayed a character.

Still, it feels like a missed opportunity. It's really hard to imagine anyone other than the most diehard Whovians taking an interest in this particular format. Looking at Amazon, I see that there is a Doctor Who: The Inside Guide, which is probably more what I had in mind when I picked up the Encyclopedia. But that book also ignores the earlier series. Apparently it has to fall to some other entity or fan to write the definitive history of the show, as the BBC doesn't seem to be interested in doing it.

Regency lite, or Jane fix part II

2008-02-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

It's not a secret that I've got a thing for Jane Austen's books (witness the links at right, or previous posts), but I haven't really gotten into reading any other Regency-era influenced social comedies. One name that kept popping up as a tolerable readalike author is Georgette Heyer, the historical novelist whose works usually end up in the romance section along with the ripped bodice covers of Christina Dodd, Kathleen Woodiwiss and the like. But since I've often mentioned Heyer's name when pressed for books like Austen's, I thought I might determine if her books leaned more towards the heaving bosoms of the romance novel, or if she captured the same battle of social customs as Austen.

Happily, Heyer gets the point behind Austen's novels: namely, her social satire. On the flip side, however, she has none of the subtlety that makes Austen's six novels so great. I randomly chose Cotillion from 1953, roughly from the middle of Heyer's writing career (she died in 1974). The elements of the story are fairly simple: a heroine of reduced circumstances stands to inherit a fortune from a querulous adopted grandfather--with the stipulation that she marry one of said grandfather's nephews in order to receive the money. The plucky heroine here is Kitty Charing, raised in general isolation by a governess overly fond of the romantic poets. Kitty is not in any mood to marry any of her potential suitors, except one: the rakish Jack. But when Jack doesn't show to claim Kitty's hand, she latches onto a plan: enter a sham betrothal with Freddy, the least objectionable of her choices, and get to London to work her charms on Jack. Once in London, a series of misunderstandings, pompous characters and secret engagements ensures that everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

There are scenes in ballrooms, social gaffes, clandestine meetings in shrubberies--basically everything that a Janeite would be familiar with. Heyer lampoons much of the musty social pretentiousness of the day (a Mr. Collins type would find many kindred spirits here). But here it all comes over very heavy handed. Part of this is due to the clumsy dialogue. The men use so much jargon are so preoccupied with their own preening, that it's hard to appreciate even the hero of the story. With the exception of Kitty, all the characters come across as very flat--and Kitty can't be called very deep either. The plot also takes awhile to get going, which makes the lack of well-drawn characters problematic at the beginning. I had to push to get through the first 50 pages.

Heyer has been praised for her attention to historical detail, and she does create a believeable world (Kitty and Freddy's reluctant tour of London? Classic). And I was grinning at various points throughout the story, as Heyer heightened the absurdity. By the end, I was enjoying myself, even if I had to skim over some of the more annoying bluster from some of the more unfortunate characters. Die-hard romantics might not be satisfied--there's no Darcy in a wet shirt moment or swoony letters from Wentworth. (In all honesty, the mental image I was getting of the hero was not so much Colin Firth but more Bertie Wooster). Would I recommend Heyer again? Yes, I think I would, in spite of the clunky dialogue. It's not quite on the same footing as Austen, but at least it's in the same orbit.

What would Jane say?, or Jane fix part I

2008-01-31T15:30:00.000-08:00

Let's first off say what Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict is not. It is not serious literature. It is not for those readers who cannot abide serious holes in a plot, or even a plot thicker than a razor's edge. It will not appeal to anyone with a deep aversion to ballroom scenes, clandestine meetings in shrubberies, and polite conversation complimented by meaningful glances over tea and scones. It will make little sense if you haven't read Jane Austen's novels.

Wanting something to read over my own version of tea and scones, I picked up Laurie Viera Rigler's chick lit homage to Jane Austen. Given the current mania for anything Austen, Rigler's slight novel joins a crowded field, and other than is gimmicky plot device, there's really not a whole lot to set it apart from the pack. The premise, in short, consists of dropping current day Angelino and self-described Austen addict Courtney Stone into the realm of one Jane Mansfield, spinster, and inhabitant of 1813 Regency England. Or rather, Courtney is dropped into the body of Jane, automatically taking on some of Jane's memories and abilities. Courtney, not surprisingly, objects to the situation, as much due to the rather lax standards in bodily cleanliness as to the pushy mother who decides Courtney/Jane must marry the local catch. But something in a previous life tells her that this Mr. Edgeworth is not to be trusted. And some portions of Jane's exisance seem beyond Courtney's grasp--such as the odd behavior towards her of a young footman.

For anyone who has read an Austen novel (or likelier, seen a movie), the ending probably won't come as a surprise. But the whole plot comes off as preposterous--it is never explained why Courtney ended up where she did or how, or even more intriguing, what became of the original Jane Mansfield. There are some many places where Rigler could have added more tension to the plot, but she entirely foregoes any deviation from bland formula (even down to the obligatory mention of Colin Firth in knee breeches). Rigler does take a stab at deeper meaning by bringing up the tensions between serving class and ruling class (something never brought up in the novels and largely glossed over in the films). But even this promising lead is dropped.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. Bottom line, Confessions is meant to be fun for dedicated Janeites. It's not too hard convince the addict to indulge in more of their favored drug, but there won't be much to remember after this particular little binge.

Devils among us.

2008-01-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

In some ways, The Devil in the White City seemed an unlikely bestseller. Granted, the subtitle (Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America) promises a virtual trifecta of qualities most Americans can't deny. But in addition to the three M's is a reoccuring theme of...architecture and landscape design?

As far as true crime goes, Larson's 2003 book hits the major points: a well-researched account of an almost unbelievably bold murderer whose total body count will probably never be known. In the person of Henry Holmes, Larson has found a character stranger than fiction. A man of purportedly prodigious charm, Holmes had an early fascination with human anatomy and death that led to many of his victims' being turned into lessons--often as skeletons sold to area teaching hospitals. But the manner and the galling ease by which he killed his victims terrified a nation at the cusp of a new century, once his crimes finally came to light.

But the book isn't really about a crime. Rather, Holmes' activities form a perfect foil to the goings on at the nearby Chicago's World Fair of 1893. In direct contrast to the horrors in Holmes' dark building, the White City of the fair seemed to promise a bright future for America and especially the host city Chicago. But the struggle to get the fair going proved to be almost as dramatic as the murder mystery, which Larson recounts with a dramatic flair. Intrigues, squabbles, sudden deaths, and the prospect of building a magnificent city on a swamp makes for unlikely nailbiters, but Larsen pulls it off. He does tend to get occassionally bogged down in detail and the lack of pictures makes the White City a little harder to visualize, but Larsen's ability make historical figures come across in such vivid characterization generally makes up for such deficiences.

One can't help but have Larsen's successful work in mind when considering Harold Schechter's The Devil's Gentleman: Priviledge, Poison and The Trial That Ushered in the Twentieth Century. Like the earlier work, Schechter mixes a charming young man, a bustling, glamourous city, sex and deviously plotted murders. Here, the story surrounds that of one Roland Molineaux, celebrated amateur athlete and rising businessman, who had recently married a young woman after patiently courting her. Or so it first appears. After one of Blanche's former suitors receives a vial of cyanide of mercury in the mail (and unwittingly gives it to his aunt, killing her), the yellow press pounced on the story. Playing up the sensation aspects of sex, society and power (Molineaux's father was an esteemed Civil War general), the media attention assured that Molineaux's trial would command the entire attention of the nation for years--and gave birth to the phenomenon of media circus trials.

Alas, keeping my attention fixated was more difficult. Unlike Larsen, who focused primarily on the crimes of Holmes, Schechter wades into tremendous detail with Molineaux's trial. There are some high points (especially Blanche Molineaux's spectualarly purple prosed memoirs), but even those points became bogged down in the minutae that characterized the trial. I pushed on through to the end, which held a twist worth waiting for, but I nearly gave it up at several times, in spite of reading more than halfway through. For the legally inclined, it might be worthwhile, but for true crime in a historical perspective, it doesn't quite make an enthralling read.

Sunbleached and bland.

2008-01-19T20:59:00.000-08:00

In general, I try to avoid this type of book. I get enough of the librarian/role of books in public life sort of stuff at work, so there’s really no need to take it home with me. But it was the current pick of the local book group, so I picked it up for a quick read so I could get to my preferred obscure reads.

Well, it wasn’t terrible, but the overall feel was disappointing. The Camel Bookmobile tells the story of Brooklyn-based librarian Fiona Sweeney as she heads into remote northeastern Kenya to help jump start a program delivering books via camel to isolated tribes. Trouble arises when an outcast from the tribe, the aptly named Scar Boy, withholds his library books, threatening future visits from the bookmobile. There’s also the related drama of a woman contemplating leaving her devoted husband and taking up with a man who has been deeply in love with her for years.

Hamilton tells the story from multiple viewpoints as each character considers the ramifications of Scar Boy’s actions in a society on the cusp of massive change. It’s a little hard to imagine how the book would have worked without the multiple perspectives, as I couldn’t warm up to any of the characters entirely. In fact, I couldn’t shake the feeling of looking at characters through some other medium, lacking any real connection. Fiona, especially, emerges as particularly bland. The various relationships between the characters struck me as bordering on soap opera, and I really didn't feel like I cared terribly where people would finally come to a rest. About the only character I found myself warming to was the curmudgeony African librarian who accompanies Fiona on her trips. But once Hamilton had him talking to one of the camels, he lost his appeal as well.

Hamilton does deserve kudos for taking a tough issue and resisting the urge to resolve it with a nice, tidy ending. Her depiction of the African countryside creates a vivid sense of place (is it possible to read this book without feeling the blinding light of the sun on a dry plain?), by far the best aspect of the novel. If she had similar success with her characters, The Camel Bookmobile would be much more memorable; as it is, the story fades out of mind.

Patience rewarded.

2007-12-21T21:43:00.000-08:00

I was drawn to Ariana Franklin's second novel, City of Shadows, mostly due to its setting. The image I have of 1920s Berlin is mostly a combination of decadent nightclubs a la Cabaret and sleek modernist designs from the Bauhaus. But the Berlin of Franklin's novel has a definite dark underbelly, populated by characters desperate to survive in a city that cannot feed its own, in spite of the glittering clubs. Esther Solomonova sees both sides of the city, working for a flamboyant club owner while still recovering from the nightmares of the Russian pograms that left her scarred both physically and emotionally. When her boss, Prince Nick, latches onto a mysterious woman in a local insane hospital who claims to the be the last of the Russian royal family, Esther is given the task of molding her into a believable princess. But with the arrival of Anna Anderson/Anastasia Romanov, Esther finds that the ghosts of her past are not far behind.

Neither, apparently, are the ghosts of Anna's past--and soon more are added. First, the club matron is brutally murdered, then a cabaret showgirl. Esther suspects that anyone with connections to Anna is in the killer's sights, but it is not until Inspector Schmidt of the Berlin police takes the case that Esther's theory is investigated. But as Berlin throws itself into the rising power of National Socialism, the prestige of claiming Grand Duchess Anastasia is a powerful political coup--and at odds with Schmidt and Esther's search for justice.

City of Shadows is a little different from most other suspense novels, in that it took quite a while for the story to really get underway. Franklin uses much of the first portion of the book to create a lush portrait of Berlin and the characters that inhabit it, making the going a little slow at first. But the care Franklin pays in setting the stage pays off in the second half of the book, where the mystery and suspense really start to shift into gear. The depth of characters give that suspense much more of a bite, as I was much more invested in the characters, really caring about the injustices paid to them, and struggling to understand how some could turn to the hateful message of the Nazis.

Anna Anderson was a real person, and many of the events in the book actually happened as Franklin recounts them. But it is as much the nuanced portrait of a city on a brink that gives City of Shadows an authenticity that I sometimes find is missing from many mystery novels. It took a little while to warm up, but I'm glad I stuck with the book as I found myself getting drawn into it more and more. By the end, I was reading at a breakneck pace, hoping it wouldn't end.

The beautiful voice in print.

2007-12-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask people in the know about the goings on of the opera world, they would probably agree that Renee Fleming is the closest artist that could be called current American diva. Especially after the release of her most current disc, Homage: The Age of the Diva, it would appear that Fleming herself isn't adverse to the title. So it perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise that Fleming has released (in 2004) The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer: a memoir, not of her life, but of her voice.

It's an interesting concept, but one that has some inherent problems. For instance, where does the voice end and the singer begin? How does such a book different from a singing how-to (or even an extended voice coaching session)? Opera singers sometimes like to refer to their voices as 'instruments,' a concept that almost makes the singer and the voice two distinct entities. Fleming herself has noted that she doesn't like to think of her voice in that manner, but there is the sense from Inner Voice that we're getting a lot on the voice and not so much on Fleming herself. Much of the book reads like the responses to a very friendly interviewer, leaving the singer herself somewhat distant. There's a little bit of confusion over to whom the book is being addressed as well. Fleming offers considerable advice and examples of how she produces her sound and how to avoid the fatigue and vocal damage that often plagues classical singers. Puzzlingly, some simple musical terms, such as legato, are defined in the text, suggesting an audience with little formal training. Yet more difficult concepts ('tessitura') receive no explanation.

On the positive side, Fleming writes with a down-to-earth sensibility that immediately dispells any notion of the stereotypical touchy diva. If Inner Voice suffers from some a lack of focus, at least one can say that it is a breeze to read, and the moments where Fleming does get into some personal history offer honest, engaging depictions of the hectic life of an opera star. As such, I'm still glad that I took the time to read it. Die-hard Fleming fans, voice students and opera enthusiasts interested in the 'how it's done' aspects of singing would probably find The Inner Voice most satisfying. Fleming's artistry and career are likely important enough to encourage future books; perhaps she'll write a more traditional memoir in the future. In the meantime, this interview and performance on MPR's Saint Paul Sunday provides a satisfying portrait of the artist.

Frosty's been iced.

2007-12-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm a sucker for macabre twists, so it was just a matter of time before I picked up Snow Blind, P. J. Tracy's procedural set in the frigid expanses of rural Minnesota. The twist to this mystery lies in the method by which the killer(s) go about disposing of their victims. In suitable cold weather fashion, they encase their victims in snowmen, complete with carrot noses. Needless to say, I was intrigued.

The story has some fairly formulaic touches: the detectives are cranky veterans who are leary of venturing beyond their Minneapolis haunts and a rookie sheriff finds herself facing down dangerous criminals before she's even figured out how to get to her own headquarters. The pace is typical thriller, moving at a fast pace and zooming between character perspectives. But most of the story is told from the perspective of Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth of the MPD, and their newbie colleague in Dundas County, Iris Rikker. When a snowman appears in the rural northern county, Magozzi and Rolseth find that all clues seem to lead to the Bitterroot Corporation, a front for an abused women's shelter. While trying to unearth the motives behind the murders, Sheriff Rikker makes some unpleasant discoveries that suggest the mysteries behind the snowmen murders has a much longer history than anyone could have imagined. Snow Blind is a fast read (it took me two working days to blow through it), and it's not wanting for plot turns. Astute readers will probably figure out the ending, but Tracy (in reality a pseudonym for a mother-daughter writing team) wisely creates an ending worthy of the topics surrounding the mystery.

I did have one complaint about Snow Blind, however. This is a Monkeewrench novel, named after the computer security firm that Magozzi and Rolseth enlist to hack into websites for clues. I've never read any of the other Monkeewrench titles, which I didn't think would be an issue as the novels all seemed standalone. In retrospect, I probably should have started with the first title which might have given a little more background. Otherwise, I was rather lost on the first few sections in Snow Blind dealing with previously established characters. On the whole, Snow Blind, while mostly sticking to formula does that formula quite well, providing the excitement that whodunits should.

Short and (sometimes) sweet stories of the heartland.

2007-11-29T23:06:00.000-08:00

If it were not for an article published in the Star Tribune last year, I would have had no inkling that a small film called Sweet Land had recently been filmed in the rural streatches of western Minnesota. And if not for seeing the movie, I would have missed Will Weaver's 1989 collection of stories, the title story "A Gravestone Made of Wheat," being the inspiration for the screenplay. I just love it when coincidences all lead to an author that I had almost forgotten, and find a satisfying read in the process.

The stories in A Gravestone Made of Wheat and Other Stories all have connections to the small farming communities of the Midwest, particularly Weaver's home state Minnesota. Weaver's sense of the pull the land has on the Midwestern psyche is pitch perfect in his writing, creating characters that react to their various situations in ways that ring true. In the title story, elderly Olaf's intention to bury his wife Inge on their farm despite the objections of the local sheriff echoes the quiet determination and dignity the young couple faced when postwar prejudices led to snub Inge because of her German birth. With "The Bread-Truck Driver," Weaver creates a humorous take on a delivery man intent on wooing the bored wives of northern Minnesota's lake country, and "The Cowman" gave me a chill when I read the depiction of a marriage breaking under the strain of farming responsibilities. A few stories left me cold: "Heart of the Fields" never captured my interest, "Blood Pressure" was simply strange and "The Undeclared Major" was unremarkable in style and plot.

But in addition to the title story, I was taken with the final story, "You Are What You Drive." Following the ownership of a particular black Buick, the story reveals the cyclical pull of the seasons, life and relationships in a small town. It was a good close to a collection of solid, if not revolutionary writing, but satisfying none the less. Weaver has also released another collection of stories including some from Gravestone and newer publications, which I'll probably pick up soon. And the film is definitely worth checking out, a sincere and beautifully filmed portrait of Minnesota in the 1920s. One good film, a good read and the prospect of another enjoyable collection: not bad for one newspaper article.

A human story hidden in a disaster account.

2007-11-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

This is as close as I get to a thriller. And Mark Levine’s F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century, a description of the freakish outbreak of storms in April 1974 has a definite ‘thriller’ feel to it. But with weather books such as this, there’s often the issue of exploitation hanging over writers (and readers) who are profit from or are entertained by other peoples’ astonishingly bad luck. Levine generally avoids that here; his account creates real, dignified people who are not entirely defined by the tornadoes that swept through their lives.

The April 1974 outbreak spawned hundreds of tornadoes over multiple states, killing hundreds and flattening more than a few communities. Levine examines the storms through the perspective of Limestone County, Alabama, which was struck twice within hours with deadly twisters. I especially like Levine’s opening scene with a young couple driving through the storm, a motif that reoccurs throughout the book. I should note that Levine, in addition to his journalism writings, is also a successful poet, a background that gives the language of F5 not only an immediacy but stark beauty as well.

Levine makes a few missteps, however. His efforts to cast the disaster in the light of Watergate woes, racial tensions and overall malaise slows the momentum and worse, runs against the notion of natural calamity appearing out of nowhere. Nixon may have been a conniving scoundrel, but the storms were not the result of a vengeful God smiting a morally bankrupt nation. Levine skips over most of the science behind the storms, and even that is mostly tied up in the work of Dr. Tetsuya (Ted) Fujita, at the time very much the public face of tornado research. It’s a humanity driven book, and that coupled with the strength of Levine’s writing, raises F5 a notch above most natural disaster books.

O editor, where art thou?

2007-11-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

It seems appropriate that of all the characters in classic literature, Elizabeth Kostova chose to resurrect Dracula for her 2005 tome The Historian. There's no shortage of narrative threads to take up from Bram Stoker's original creation, but most importantly, the central character is notoriously hard to pin down to any one time and place. So voila, your novel can leap from locale to exotic locale, across several centuries and still have a reasonable shot at maintaining a plausible plot.

Kostova's detailed settings are the best aspect of The Historian, a novel that jumps from Cambridge, England, to the bazaars of Istanbul and into the dark forests of Romania and Bulgaria. The reason for all this travel is all a little murky, as the plot of the novel unfolds painfully slowly. The historian of the title is nominally a bookish diplomat, living in Amsterdam with his teenage daughter, who serves as the book's first narrator. She dutifully follows him on his diplomatic travels, but when he suddenly disappears following a trip to the University of Cambridge, she sets out to discover the truth. Coming upon a cache of her father's letters, she learns how intertwinded her history is with the legend of Vlad the Impaler, and how her father's love of scholarship and books sent him on a chase that would put him face to face with the legendary tyrant.

Kostova's plot echoes some of the points of The Da Vinci Code--legendary figures, clues hidden in libraries, mysterious forces trying to thwart intrepid scholars and of course the continuous border-hopping--but while that book had a breakneck pace to keep the reader occupied, The Historian unfolds at a painfully slow rate over its 642 pages. Kostova moves it along fairly well over the course of the first 200 pages or so, but then quickly becomes mired in details that I felt did little to add to the story. Adding to its ponderous pace is the use of several different narrators, a technique that only serves to lengthen the proceedings by requiring backstory for each. The germ of the story is a good idea, and there were portions where I was really gripped by the plot turns. But just as quickly, I was back to slogging through minutae. With tighter editing, The Historian would be more appealing, but asking someone to pick through over 600 pages is a request that only the most dedicated readers would likely undertake.

La vie en rose, Quebec style

2007-11-10T19:58:00.000-08:00

The tiny hamlet of Rapide Blanc in northern Quebec would hardly garner anyone’s attention, even if the town still existed. Created in the late 1920s to house workers at the nearby hydroelectric plant, Rapide Blanc was just as summarily wiped from the map when a nationalized utility company determined the cost of manning the dam would be more than simply running it remotely. So in 1971, the people who had founded the town packed their cars and left the area to return to its natural state.

Rapide Blanc no longer exists, but Quebecois artist Pascal Blanchet creates a fine portrait of the town in his graphic novel White Rapids (his own translation from the original French). As far as plot goes, there’s not a whole lot: the bigwigs at the power company decide to build a dam and a town for its workers, people enjoy their lives far in the Quebecois wilderness, the town becomes more connected to the world, the power company decides to put an end to it all. That’s pretty much it. But the story is simply justification for Blanchet’s lovely, stylized silhouetted figures with a sort of composition reminiscent of 1950s era advertising. They’re warm, glowing images, colored in varying shades of brownish gray, brilliant whites and muted oranges. Blanchard’s art conveys not a utopia—this is a working town, not one founded on any particular moral premise—but a definite sense of camaraderie and whimsy. One particular image of a house party in full mid-50s swing practically pulses with the bonhomie of good music, good company and a fine summer night. In fact, not even the eventual decline of the town can cast a shade over the pictorials; the final sensation is not that of loss, but more like the natural passing that comes with sunset.

Blanchet’s errors are limited to the types of fonts chosen for the text. Some were virtually impossible to make out either due to letter design or color. The story of Rapide Blanc would hardly constitute a paragraph, but in graphic format it works. Blanchet has had little else published in either French or English, focusing instead mainly on illustration and cartooning. His other work La Fugue might be worth tracking down, or else hope that more of this talented artist’s work becomes available in the U.S.

Fiction as accessory.

2007-05-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

If accolades for fiction were handed out based solely on title or premise, Patricia Marx's first novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him would stand a good chance of raking in the awards. Marx's title is one of the wittist ones I've seen, and that snazzy cover begs to be shown off at your local trendy coffee spot. In fact, Him Her would make great reading for quick lunch hours or coffee breaks, as Marx's slight novel works best in small doses.

Him Her opens with our unnamed protagonist, a throughly neurotic graduate student currently trying to avoid doing her dissertation at Cambridge University. In the midst her studies appears the erudite, uptight psychological philospher Eugene, who quickly sweeps our heroine off her feet with his musings on Newton and sweet nothings that she pretends to understand. No sooner does she commit to this towering intellect than she discovers that he has run off with a Hellenistic studies major to the Dalmatian coast. More irked than heartbroken, she finds a way to get even with him, and--well, from the title you can fairly easily figure out the end.

Him Her is something of a satire of chick lit, but like that genre, the plot is terribly thin. At times I was really pushing myself to get through to the end, waiting to see if the plot would kick in. Marx's strongest writing came with the portrayal of 'Her' work at a lesser-known New York-based comedy show 'Taped But Proud,' where some of her best one-liners were delivered. But what plot there is seems only there for the delivery of such lines, leading Him Her to sound more like a worn SNL sketch or a plumped up humorous short story rather than novel material. Having read and enjoyed some of Marx's work in The New Yorker, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, I know she can write well for articles. As a novel, Him Her Him Again The End of Him has its moments, but even for light reading, it doesn't quite live up to its promise.

Aussie ramblings in the Arctic.

2007-04-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

This is probably the most obscure book that I've pulled from the shelves yet, having never heard of the title, the author or its subject matter. As the title implies, Cassandra Pybus' 2002 work The Woman Who Walked To Russia: A Writer's Search for a Lost Legend is just that: Pybus' attempt to track down one Lillian Alling, who reportedly walked across Canada's densest wilderness in the 1920s, all in an attempt to get home to Siberia. It sounds implausible, yet when Pybus hears of Lillian's legend, she immediately packs up and jets off from her balmy Australian home, meets up with a long-lost friend, and starts wandering through the wilds of British Columbia, the Yukon Territory and into Alaska.

Pybus' trek doesn't start out on a promising note, as she's unable to find much information on Lillian and her friend turns out to have changed drastically, a fact made all the more trying by the close quarters the two are forced to share. Pybus strays more from Lillian's story as the trail goes cold, instead weaving in tales of the Yukon gold rush, stories from the inhabitants along the way and overall impressions of a region that has become, if anything, more isolated in the decades since Lillian's feat. As Pybus crosses over the border into Alaska, she is nearly convinced that either the epic walk never actually occurred, or that time and imagination had added to the truth as to make it unrecognizable. But just as Pybus is about to leave the Arctic, she stumbles on a possible explaination that might provide a satisfying conclusion to Lillian's improbable walk.

I had pretty high hopes for this book, as it started out strongly enough. But once Pybus actually hit the trail, I started to lose interest. Much of this had to do with her personal problems with her traveling companion, and as I noted with Driving Mr. Albert, it's never a good idea to bring such emotional baggage on a trip, and a much worse idea to chose to write about them. Once Pybus is on her own, though, I still wasn't really able to muster up much interest in her travels, which seemed mostly intersted in the ordeal of Jack London during the gold rush, and the fate of those drawn to the wilderness (especially Chris McCandless, chronicled in Jon Krakauer's bestseller Into the Wild). I really only kept reading to learn more about Lillian, but the dearth of information on her is too frustrating for both author and reader. Overall, the premise was promising, but like much else in the forbidding wilderness Pybus crosses, The Woman Who Walked to Russia concludes with a great sense of emptiness and missed opportunity.

The force of her friendship.

2007-04-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

I can't recall exactly why I decided to pick up Sigrid Nunez's novel The Last of Her Kind. I vaguely recollect seeing a review or a blurb somewhere that mentioned it, or maybe it was the cover design that appealed to me, a look that oddly brings Ikea to mind. Whatever the reason, I was drawn into Nunez's tale of a relationship between two very different women drawn together by the ideals of the counterculture '60s, only to discover years later the emotional price of that unchecked idealism.

The Last of Her Kind takes shape as a memoir, penned by Georgette George, a scholarship student thrust into the liberal hotbed of Barnard College in the fall of 1968. A child of a broken, violent home, Georgette finds herself the roommate of the brilliant, radical Ann Drayton. Determined to rid herself of the 'bourgeois affectation' of her wealthy upbringing, Ann informs Georgette that she had hoped to be placed with a roommate as entirely different from herself as possible, but in spite of her disappointment in having a white roommate, the women become friends. But as Ann becomes increasingly obsessed with correcting injustices in the world, an irrepreable rift seems to end the relationship. Several years later, though, Ann is convicted of murder, and Georgette is again reminded of how intertwined her own life is with Ann's, her own relationships with her family and lovers shaped by the force of Ann's rise and fall.

Nunez makes references to The Great Gatsby throughout the text, and indeed The Last of Her Kind concerns itself with the same themes of lost idealism and the experiences of a particular generation. Georgette and Ann (or their kin) seem to take in the full '60s experience--everything from acid to Woodstock. Some parts seem a little cliche--I skimmed the overly-long love letter penned to Mick Jagger, a result of an especially bad acid trip. Despite a misstep here and there, Nunez's writing is well-crafted, carefully creating the web that keeps the two women connected in spite of their distance from each other.

As a portrait of '60s counterculture, The Last of Her Kind sometimes strains belief. It fairs better as a novel of the forces of friendship over time, and closes with a hopeful note on the power of humanity in the face of an all-consuming ideal.

The kids are all right. Avoid the parents.

2007-04-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

It seems Americans like to have some sort of constant crisis in education, the only change being what form this dire emergency takes. The crisis de jour is not so much failing schools, burned out teachers or the appalling disparity in quality in public schools between low- and high-income areas--these problems have been with us for so long as to have practically expected. No, the major issue now is far more serious: the possibility that some children will be rejected at elite, private schools, and just may--gasp!- be forced to attend public school.

The topic of overachieving children and the race to get into the 'right' college has been a hot topic as of late. Alan Eisenstock joins the fray with his expose on the private, elite kindergartens that are the first step towards the Ivies. The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get into America's Best Private Schools charts the process of several families as they attempt to get their four-year-olds into elementary schools that cost where a year's tuition rivals that of many private colleges. Eisenstock is himself a former board member for a private, independent school in California, so he knows this ground well. In addition to following the parents through the process (and I stress that it is the parents that are worked up into a lather over these schools; the kids are off blithely enjoying what's left of their childhood), Eisenstock looks in on the almost entirely subjective admissions process with the people that are paid to determine what tot to take and which to reject.*

The results are fairly predictable. Focusing on the mothers (fathers tend to be absent in the pursuit of the thick admissions envelope), Eisenstock portrays women growing increasingly desperate to get their child into the 'right' school, their interviews punctuated with 'I's and 'we's, and strategizing over interview tactics. Admissions officers aren't much better, scorning the sense of entitlement and elitism displayed by some parents, but never entirely addressing the role money and social connections play in selection. The interactions between parents, school directors and other interested parties (educational consultants and directors of so-called 'feeder nursery schools') comes off as a battle of nerves, with parents freaking out over the perceived high stakes.

Eisenstock observes all of this with as objective an eye as could be expected, given his background. His Amazon book description states he was a former screenwriter, and this shows in his recreation of dialogue and plotting. If anything else, Kindergarten Wars is compusively readable, for its cast of 'good' and 'bad' parents and nerve-wracking questions of who will get in where. But Kindergarten Wars' major failing is that it presents the insanity of the race to get into these elite enclaves as a major problem in education. Focusing so much on the problems of these bright, well-cared for kids is interesting, and it is a pity that they can't get into the school of choice, but if they don't they still have a high chance of succeeding in society. Other than a brief discussion of the problems with the No Child Left Behind law, Eisenstock focuses entirely on how people get into the elite schools, and gives almost no attention to why the parents see these schools as so much better than local public ones. By concentrating solely on the upper escelons of education, Eisenstock misses the real story.

*I should mention that Eisenstock disguises the names and, with the exception of New York City, the location of the elite schools he writes about. He instead (to this reader's great annoyance) substitutes aliases based on names and places mentioned in Pride and Prejudice.

Behind the fourteenth door.

2007-04-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman's Coraline is a bit of a departure from my usual reading in a few ways: I don't usually read children's works, nor do I tend to listen to audiobooks. Yet in the name of trying something different and because I was facing a lengthy drive to see family, I picked up Gaiman's little tale.

First the audio aspect: Gaiman does his own reading on this three disc set, accompanied by the spooky electronic sounds of The Gothic Arches. First-time listeners might need to get a little used to Gaiman's British accent, especially over the din of a rough hightway, but he does a marvelous job of personifiying of each of his quirky characters. The major complaint that I had was in the timing of the individual tracks. There are only about 5 tracks per disc, which translates to roughly 15 minutes per track--entirely too long for easy browsing. It's puzzling that the discs were recorded as such, as Gaiman's text has numerous natural pauses that would be ideal for a new track.

Coraline is Gaiman's first novel for children, and has the blend of the fantastic and the real world that is Gaiman's trademark. Coraline is a girl bored with her surroundings and oddball neighbors until her harried mother recommends that she count the number of doors and windows in their new flat. Discovering a door that opens to a brick wall, Coraline's interest is piqued. The next morning, the door suddenly opens to reveal a long hallway leading to her own flat and her Other family. Lured by the promise of things to do, Coraline is tempted to stay, but is uneasy with the Other Mother who seems just a bit too intent on her remaining. When Coraline discovers the bodyless voices of lost children in a closet, Coraline knows she must escape through the door to her old life. Thrown into a battle of wits with her Other Mother, aided only by a scheeming cat, Coraline has to find the souls of her real family and the lost children before she can return to the life that she now fully appreciates.

I wouldn't call Coraline a plucky heroine--determined and strong are adjectives that suit her better. Her early boredom with her life and struggle with the lure of her Other Mother makes her human, and one can't but pull for her while she fights her way back home. When Coraline appeared in 2002, it was awarded the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, as well as a few others. I don't usually read fantasy novels, but Gaiman's fantastic worlds are just a warped enough version of reality to appeal to those who generally avoid the genre. Its fable-like premise might turn off teen readers, but for upper elementary and lower middle school kids, Coraline's parallel world is worth exploring.

Comment bugaboo.

2007-04-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Just a note regarding leaving comments on this site: I've opened up the comment moderation so that any comments that are posted appear immediately on the site, rather than going to my email for me to post after reviewing them, as originally structured. I do read the comments and I've tried to respond to some in the past, but due to a sluggish DSL connection, or a full hard drive on my computer, I've been unable to post responses. So, long story short, if you want to comment, feel free to do so, and I'll try to work out the problem, or respond from another computer. As I figure out where this blog is headed, any suggestions are welcome!

Not worth the repreve.

2007-03-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

In theory, I ought to find The Queen's Fool absolutely riveting: set in the volatile, intrigue-ridden England of Edward VI and Mary I, the story encompasses war, religious upheaval, sex, heartbreak, diplomacy and political maneuvering of the highest order. The title character, Hannah Green, is herself playing a role, hiding her Jewish faith and her sex as she and her father try to make a new life in England after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Hannah's reputation for divining the future lands her squarely into the center of the royal court, required to spy for Lord Robert Dudley, for whom she has more than a passing fancy. When Mary ascends the throne, Hannah finds herself drawn to the queen's strong character, yet endangered by the same woman's determination to rid England of its Protestant faith. Torn between a safe, but mundane life with her betrothed and the intrigues of the court, Hannah's fateful decisions place her at the very center of the turbulent events surrounding her.

And yet...

Honestly, I just couldn't get into The Queen's Fool. I tried (it's a 500 page book, and I stuck with it to the end), but Philippa Gregory's epic of Tudor intrigue just never really came to life for me. The whole purpose of a historical novel is to recreate a particular world, mixing the well-known figures with characters of the author's imagination. It's especially tricky with characters that are as well-known as Elizabeth I and her fractious family, and to her credit, Gregory has done her homework regarding history and life at the court. But they all still feel somehow...flat, I guess would be the best way to describe it. I had read another of Gregory's novels, The Virgin's Lover, a few years ago, and the feeling was the same. Another issue centers on Hannah. Gregory goes to almost absurd lengths to place Hannah at the center of the action, undermining any sense of belief in her character. Was it possible for someone like Hannah to witness Elizabeth's trysts with Thomas Seymour, be summoned to face charges of heresy and be present at the fall of Calais? It might give Gregory the opportunity to describe those events, but it doesn't work as fiction.

The Queen's Fool is part of Gregory's retelling of the Tudor era, the latest of which is The Boleyn Inheritance. Gregory's books always seem to hit the bestseller lists, which isn't surprising given their emphasis on intrigue and scheming. In spite of Gregory's efforts, though, her Elizabethan world still remains impervious.

Shock and awe through an objective lens.

2007-03-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

God knows there are plenty of books out there on the subject of Iraq and the mess we're currently in. I wasn't really looking for a book about the war until I happened to spot Anne Garrels' account of the buildup and opening days of the war come across the circulation desk. I had remembered catching some of Garrels' reports from the battlefield on NPR and being impressed with her work, but I was a little hesitant about picking up a work that was probably outdated.

But after four years of war, reading Naked in Baghdad adds a touch of clarity. A veteran of numerous war zones over the course of her nearly 30 years as a journalist, Garrels knows how to write compelling, gripping reports while keeping a clear, objective eye on the facts. Naked begins in the fall of 2002, as UN inspectors are still trying to determine what sort of weapons Saddam may or may not have and ends in May 2003, around the time of "Mission Accomplished". Arriving in Baghdad, Garrels uses her status as a woman and a correspondent for the relatively-under-the-radar NPR to gain access to the parts of Baghdad where she can get a real sense for how Iraqis feel about their leader. Or so the idea goes. Garrels spends as much time trying to twart the attempts by the Iraqi government to manipulate the news that much of Naked reads as a manual for doing journalism with uncooperative authorities as it does a narrative of a city preparing for war. As the rhetoric and violence escalates, Garrels finds herself part of a dwindling press corps, relying more on her own wits and the bravery of her driver, Amer, in getting the real story. In this sense, Garrels succeeds: the portrait that she creates is an Iraq filled with tension and uncertainty, voicing concerns that will become a familiar refrain over the next few years.

Garrels' Baghdad account in supplemented by email bulletins written by her husband Vint Lawrence, to family and friends. Lawrence is also a talented writer, and his perspective of a husband waiting on the homefront for a loved one provides an illuminating counterpoint to Garrels' war zone experiences. Still, if given a choice between the emails and more of Garrels' reporting, I would go with the latter. Garrels' gutsy reporting in the face of real danger and her insightful portrayal of a complex city makes Naked in Baghdad as relevent to today's Iraq as the Iraq of four years ago.

Neither time nor patience.

2007-03-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

Frustration, thy name is Elizabeth George. With her lush writing, English settings, a complicated lead character with an abrasive partner and thorny mysteries, I should be devouring all of her mysteries. Instead, I find myself picking up her books with the anxious hope that I won't have to force myself through to the conclusion, just to find out who commited the crime.

Okay, perhaps we ought to begin at the beginning. Elizabeth George is best known as the author of the Inspector Thomas Lynley mysteries, a series that, since A Great Deliverance was published in 1988, has grown to 14 titles. A perennial best-seller, the Lynley mysteries have gotten a boost since 2002, when Mystery! began airing its own series based on the books. After I saw and thoroughly enjoyed the series, I turned to the books.

George bases her mysteries in the conflicts in and around her central investigator, D.I. Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, who also happens to be the eighth Earl of Asherton. Uncomfortable with his status, yet unable to escape his own sense of duty afforded by his priviledged birth, Lynley is a study of inner turmoil, bordering on angst. Lynley's foil is his working class partner, Barbara Havers, stubborn and headstrong, yet with vulnerabilities of her own that she hides behind a shell so thick that she doesn't even acknowledge it to herself. This pairing gives George enough material to work with to drive multidimentioned mysteries full of ethical and moral dilemmas.

When George sticks to the conflict between Lynley and Havers and the issues immediately surrounding the mystery at hand, her formula works--even for the 400 or so pages that most of her mysteries run. But too often, George turns to outside characters that are often only connected to the plot by the thinnest of threads (and usually turn out to be annoying to boot). Along with an unfortunate tendency towards the melodramatic, George's novels sometimes come off as bloated soap operas.

Without all the window dressing and emoting, George's mysteries at their core are tightly constructed crimes, without any clear-cut moral answers. The last of her books I read, Missing Joseph, had all sort of juicy moral dilemmas that remained unsolved at the conclusion. But I had to slog through 400 pages before the mystery actually took center stage. Until George returns to focus on her central characters, I won't be continuing with this series.

Simply magical.

2007-02-28T13:10:00.000-08:00

The following excerpt is from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking:

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylght with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themsleves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themsleves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their frief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them. On the night John died we were thrity-one days short of our fortieth anniversary...
I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted him back.

Rather than risk the possibility of farkeling up a review of this book with my amateurish opinions, I will just say that Didion's memoir of grieving following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne stayed with me for quite a while after I had finished it. There's been a lot of critiques of the book, especially since it won the National Book Award, and while some may call Didion's prose too removed or cold for a book on grieving, I felt that her tone was that of someone trying genuinely to cope, to rationally think through a process that isn't rational at all. But reading Didion's strong, unique voice, simply contemplating the emotions and memories that accompany the loss of someone so close can be its own comfort. The Year of Magical Thinking does all the things that a good memoir should--deeply honest and beautifully written, it takes us for a brief moment into the mind of its creator.

For more on Didion and her memoir, check out an interview she did with NPR's Terry Gross.

Forget the stickman--cue the gunman.

2007-02-24T09:45:00.000-08:00

In no less than three places in and on The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards, is a terse statement: 'This book is not affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.' This little disclaimer is vital, lest the reader assume that the Academy (those folks behind the Oscars) wanted to reveal the inner workings of its annual bash. From the stage, it's all glamour and stars, a night where the film industry gathers to recognize those deserving films that epitomize the art of cinema.

Whatever. Anyone who's ever sat through an entire Oscar telecast (admit it, you've done it, and you cheered when Titanic won) has to know that whomever is involved in mounting the production has to have a few loose marbles by the time it's all done. Thanks to Steve Pond, we now have proof. Pond (he's the one between Chris Cooper and the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones in the back flap photo) gained backstage access to over a decade's worth of Oscar productions, revealing a process that tries sanity and could be reasonably blamed for at least one premature death. The story here isn't so much the stars, although there is plenty of humanizing (and demonizing) tidbits about them. Rather, Pond concerns himself more with the people planning the show, revealing the struggles to do the impossible: bring the show in at a three hour duration, avoid any nasty surprises from overly profane or political winners (or hosts) and ban the tedious thank-you lists from winners determined to have their minute (or five or ten) in the spotlight.

Pond reveals some surprising and humourous aspects to the show, such as the ticklish situation presented by the explicitve-laden nomination of "Blame Canada" for best song, and the potential for the use of rubber bullets in case some acceptance speeches carry on too long. In retrospect, the powers that be behind Oscar might have regretted pulling back the curtain for Pond's little book, but certainly with all the disclaimers, no one will be the wiser, right? At any rate, when you tune in on the 25th for the 79th incarnation of the Oscar bash, keep your fingers crossed for anyone who goes too far over the time limit--they may be in the crosshairs.

How the 0.0046% live.

2007-02-15T19:55:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it: I love looking at home decor books. Not so much for the decoration or design of the places (let's face it--it's unlikely I would ever be able to afford the contents of a single room, much less an entire house), but for what the homes reveal of their owners. In most cases, the homes in such books are owned by very wealthy, but fairly anonymous figures. Architectural Digest, however, occassionally features homes of the rich and famous, thereby merging star oggling with the voyerism of looking at their homes.

Part of viewing other people's homes is the smugness that comes with assessing their tastes, and in that sense Hollywood at Home does not disappoint. Never a town (or nowadays, industry) known for restraint, many of the homes easily reflect their owners' larger than life personalities. The best example of excess goes to Jayne Mansfield's infamous Pink Palace, with its bathroom boasting pink shag carpeting on every flat surface (including the ceiling), but is also apparent in Cher's Italian Renaissance villa overlooking the beach, John Travolta's hangar-like home (complete with runway) or Jack Warner's 9-acre estate. Still, for every gargauntuan spread, there's a home that almost looks like mere mortals could reside within its walls. Not surprisingly, these most often belong to Hollywood stars of the past--James Stewart, Katherine Hepburn and Danny Kaye's seem almost quaint in their homey style.

The quality of the essays and photos varies across the book. Some essays concern themselves with the architectural or decorative characteristics of the house, while a few seem more like mini biographies of the famous occupant. The selection of homes is nicely mixed (including some in New York, New England and Ireland), as is the mix between old and new. Some stars are included for who they are rather than for their homes (Marilyn Monroe is here, in spite of the poor quality of images of her homes). But the point of Hollywood at Home's large, glossy format is for display on a coffee table or persual during viewings of Entertainment Tonight, and in that sense it serves its purpose admirably.

A walk braving bears and Katz.

2007-02-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

If one were to undertake a 2,100 mile walk through much of the eastern United States, it's likely that a number of memorable incidents would occur in the course of the trek. If it happens to be Bill Bryson taking that walk, then it is fairly guaranteed that every bizarre possibility imaginable will occur, along with the likelihood of a few other unforeseeable calamities. Thankfully for readers, Bryson did attempt such a stroll, and lived to write about it in A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

For anyone unfamiliar with Bryson's work, A Walk in the Woods is pretty representative of his humourous travelogue style. Irreverent in tone, Bryson has the uncanny knack of revealing the subcultures and history of a particular part of the world, all while displaying an astounding ability to attract the most bizarre characters and experiences during his travels. In tackling the Appalachian Trail, Bryson gets plenty of material to work with. Joined on the trail by his woefully out of shape but divinely humourous companion Stephen Katz, Bryson sets out on the trail in Georgia, hoping to avoid the fearsome black bear and inbred hillbillies. The bears never appear, but Bryson and Katz do manage to stumble across truly frightening examples of humanity, including the annoying Mary Ellen, the forever lost Chicken John, and Ralph Lauren-clad day trippers whom Bryson and Katz get the better of.

While tromping through the woods (or seeking out the least scary motel in he can enjoy some of humanity's comforts), Bryson tells of the trail's convoluted history and reflects on the changing environment of the trail as it falls under heavier use. Part travelogue, misadventure story, cultural study and environmental cri de coeur, Bryson's walk never fails to entertain, even if it won't help you avoid a black bear.

Message in a bottle.

2007-02-05T19:15:00.000-08:00

I have to say that I'm impressed with Koren Zailckas. Not so much for the fact that she's written an engrossing memoir while only in her mid-20s, but rather for the fact that she even remembers anything of the period of which she's writing. For much of her teens and early 20s, Zailckas spent much of her time getting drunk, drunk, or recovering from binging. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood is both the story of Zailckas' struggle with alcohol and a warning of how the dangerous drinking has become a destructive means for young women in particular to overcome feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.

Zailckas points out early in her book that she was never an alcoholic: she never physically required the buzz from a couple of drinks. A good student from a middle class family, she turned to alcohol beginning at the age of 14 to compensate for her perceived social awkwardness. Stories of increased sexual assult and alcohol poisoning in women often appear in the news, but when Zailckas recounts (or sometimes reconstructs from recollections of more sober friends) her experience having her stomach pumped or memories of relationships that revolved around bar hours, her struggle becomes more personal, or in some cases, familiar. Occassionally Zailckas uses grandiloquent language in describing her drinking, an aspect that I found rather annoying, but when she reins in her language, the reality of her experience comes through strongest.

There are several points at which Zailckas makes attempts to curtail her drinking, but when she falls off the wagon she is frank in pointing out her own poor choices. But she also reveals the pervasiveness of alcohol in society and the often contradictory stances toward what is, at its root, a drug. There's a sense of struggle in Zailckas' writing, that the craving for the courage offered by a drink will be something that may never leave her. Her story isn't likely to leave her readers.

Le meurtre dans la ville lumiere.

2007-01-31T09:18:00.000-08:00

As of late, I've been drawn to mystery titles published by the Soho Press, a little company that specializes in works set in diverse locales and unusual investigators (just browsing through the library shelves, I've seen crime stories set in Sweden, Afghanistan and the Arctic). Their list includes some well known authors (they publish Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series), but some authors are often new to most mystery readers.

One such author is San Francisco-based Cara Black, who sets her main investigator back a decade and on another continent. Aimee Leduc, resident of Ile St. Louis in the center of Paris, makes her living investigating mostly computer crime in the heady early days of the Internet. Yet in Murder in Belleville, Aimee finds herself literally thrown into the search for a murderer after witnessing a car bombing. Roaming far from the well-trod center of the city, Leduc searches the gritty streets of Belleville, a suburb of Paris tense with clashes between Algerian fundamentalists and a government intent on cracking down on illegal immigrants. There's a lot that Leduc has to wade through to get to the truth behind the woman killed in the bombing--and much of it leads to friends of hers and the highest levels of the govenment. Her job is made all the more complicated by shadowy figures intent on keeping her from that truth.

Black creates a multilayered, complex knot of a mystery, fast-paced to the point that it's almost impossible to recall all that's going on. I will admit to be entirely confused by many of the events, some of which tended to assume a strong grounding in the history of Algerian/Franco relations--an area that I'm woefully deficient. But part of the mystery played upon Leduc's relationships with Rene, her brilliant (if mostly off stage) partner, and an Inspector Morbier, whom Leduc seemed to rely on in the past. Murder in Belleville is the second in Black's series (Murder in the Marais is the first), so perhaps anyone interested in Black's P.I. would do best to start with that title. For my tastes, I found Black's frantic pace and sprawling cast of characters a little too confusing. But Black's efforts to provide a different twist to a city that seems so familiar is worth a look for anyone searching for murder in unfamiliar territory.

Travels with chilly.

2007-01-26T19:55:00.000-08:00

With so many travel books out on the market, it sometimes hard to capture a reader's interest with yet another story of ramblings about one country or another. So what better way to draw attention to your foray into the genre than by undertaking what any sober person would consider an insane endeavor--an attempt to hitchhike around the whole of Ireland with a refridgerator?

Tony Hawks, to be fair, was not sober at the time he undertook a bet to do just that. Round Ireland With a Fridge is just that--Hawks' month-long journey around the island with a dorm-sized fridge, relying on only the generousity of picking him up off the side of the road in spite of his unusual baggage. Or so the original plan went. Hawks garnered some radio backing, with periodic on-air appeals to give him a lift when rides were slow in coming. I don't know if I would consider that real fulfillment of his bet--nor the use of anything other than a full-size Kelvinator as his traveling companion--but still, it's enough to give Hawks an unusual look at Ireland than if he had been a typical tourist. There's a lot of scenes that happen in pubs and the like (Hawks makes no secret of his desire to enjoy Irish hospitality--preferably with available Irish ladies), but Hawks and fridge also take some forays into some unexpected sidetrips.

Hawks' day job is that of a comedian for a British radio show, and his story is told in a humorous irreverent tone. Following his hilarious description of an especially memorable night in a rural hostel, it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to look at anyone planning a backpacking vacation without feeling pity for them. A twist on travelogues of the past, Hawks' Round Ireland has much of the offbeat feel of Bill Bryson, with the tone of a Dave Barry.

A most compelling 'hero.'

2007-01-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

I picked up The Talented Mr. Ripley because it was the selection for the sole book club that met at a convenient time for me. So I wasn't really eager to delve into Patricia Highsmith's dark, literary style, which made for slow going in the first portion of the novel. But such detailed characterization leads directly into the mind of Tom Ripley, or as close to an understanding of the motives that drive him to commit his crimes.

The novel opens with Tom posing as an IRS representative, running small con jobs while brooding over his own feelings of deprevation and persecution. When he's enlisted to retrieve a wayward son from Italy, Tom sees his chance to have that life to which he feels entitled. Through manipulation and the use of his incredible talents , Tom sets about to get that life. To say more would be to give away much of the plot, but the story arc is not necessarily the best part of the book. Rather, it's Highsmith's ability to make Tom the sort of person that blurs the distinction between the repulsive and the compelling. Tom is always on the edge of being discovered and all his plans exposed, but much of the suspense lies in whether we want to see Tom come to justice--a question that I doubt would be easily answered. It's a pity that Hitchcock never made The Talented Mr. Ripley into a film (as he did with another of Highsmith's novels, Strangers on a Train), as the atmospheric settings of 1950s Italy would have provided a great backdrop for the suspense of the plot. But Highsmith's carefully crafted work requires no visual interpretation to bring to life her chilling story, and a central character who will likely linger in the minds of anyone who encounters him.

The harshest peace.

2007-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

Being a child of the '80s, my personal perceptions of the Cold War consists of mostly stock images and quotes: duck and cover drills in schools, Spam-stocked bomb shelters, ICBMs paraded through Red Square, JFK's 'Berliner' moment, and always, always the image of a mushroom cloud looming on the horizon.

Of course, the intricacies of the Cold War go well beyond a few points in time. John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale, has completed several hefty tomes on the subject. Fortunately for those of us who aren't well-versed in diplomatic history, Gaddis has provided an approachable yet thorough introduction to the period in The Cold War: A New History, published in 2005. Writing over a decade after the fall of the USSR, there's never any question in Gaddis' text whose decisions would prove decisive. Gaddis' theories aren't going to break a great deal of new ground: still, even those who are well-versed in the events of the day will appreciate Gaddis' ability to explain clearly the motives of both sides in spite of the tangled geopolitics of the time.

Since The Cold War serves as an introductory text, Gaddis did sacrifice details of events and personalities for the sake of theories and grand strategies. Those looking for a detailed description of the Cuban Missile Crisis or Reagan's words to Gorbachev at Reykjavik won't find either here. But in a war that was just as much about battles that didn't happen, Gaddis' work is indespensible in understanding why events played out as they did.

Nasty weather.

2006-12-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I'm struck by a random fascination on a particular topic, and such was the case this past summer when I suddenly felt the need to read something, anything, on tornadoes and storm chasing on the Great Plains. Some cursory catalog searches didn't turn up anything that would satisfy my curiousity, so when I happened to sport Mark Svenvold's account of the May 2004 outbreak of storms on the shelf, I immediately snapped it up.

Tornadoes have always had a fascinating quality about them, driving thrill seekers and scientists alike to drive thousands of miles (literally) in the hopes of seeing just one. Yet the draw of witnessing such storms also speaks to what Svenvold calls 'catastrophilia:' the need to be thisclose to possible, and in some cases, real devestation, either on the ground or beamed over the airwaves via the Weather Channel. It is this fascination with weather as entertainment that makes up the central theme to Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America. To be sure, Svenvold does justice to the art of storm chasing, which requires as much luck as science to put a chaser in the right place at the right (wrong?) time. Like any other seemingly insane endeavor, he portrays a case of characters that range from the quiet, Scout master storm spotter, to the main forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center, and the questionable Californian guy who eventually gets to do some 'real' science out of his homemade tornado intercept vehicle.

These parts of Svenvold's work clip along well, but he's as much concerned with the effect global warming and the Weather Channel have had on the weather and how we perceive it. Although Svenvold makes the argument that both have made impacts on the storms over the plains, the momentum Svenvold had created in the remainder of the work effectively lapses into doldrums. To make the entire book a description of his jaunts across Middle America would be bowing to the lure of catastrophilia, but while struggling through his meditation on the sublime as it relates to storms, I wonder if some more stringent editing could have been merited. Still, Svenvold covers the complete culture of storm chasing in a manner that few other authors have done.

A short work about a long walk.

2006-12-12T17:15:00.000-08:00

In this era of fitness mania and extreme sports, the idea of someone walking across the entire North American continent still elicites a sense of awe. We are, after all, talking 3,500 miles across rugged mountains and sweltering plains. Even with modern conveniences such as cell phones and survival gear, it still remains a daunting undertaking. Crossing the continent over a hundred years ago with nothing but a couple of revolvers and five dollars in hand was considered grounds for insanity. Still, that is exactly what Helga Estby and her eldest daughter Clara undertook in the spring of 1896, setting out from their rural Norwegian settlement near Spokane, Washington to New York City, in an attempt to win a $10,000 wager from an anonymous figure. The walk was an epic undertaking, but as Linda Lawrence Hunt chronicles in Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, it was only a small part of the shifts in the political and social landscapes of America at the cusp of a new century.

Like other studies in microhistory, Hunt uses the experience of one, nearly forgotten individual to cast light on the larger shifts within history. The benefit is to make history personal, which is Bold Spirit's strongest point. Estby was a strong, determined woman whose cross-country trek was likely the least of the hardships that she faced in her lifetime. However, getting into the mind of someone nearly 70 years dead is nearly impossible, and Hunt's task is made all the more difficult by the fact that all of Estby's manuscripts recounting her trip were destroyed by her children in the 1940s. This bit of cultural vandalism was a direct consequence of Helga's walk, and makes Hunt's points about the importance of preserving family histories. But it also leaves Hunt with little to go on other than interviews with Estby's granddaughter and scattered newspaper accounts of the trek itself. These hint at Estby's feelings regarding women's rights, the contentious election of 1896 and the cultural mores of Norwegian immigrants in America, among many other topics , but Hunt's attempts to flesh out the whole story comes down to a lot of conjecture. And, more tragically, there's little chance to hear Helga's story in her own words. Still, Hunt's rediscovery of Estby's remarkable endeavor makes for an unique perspective about a pivotal point in history and introduces modern readers to a woman who was well ahead of her time, even if her full story will forever be lost to time.

Red herrings, anyone?

2006-10-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

I've decided to take a brief break from my typical interest in cozy mysteries to try something a little different. I've never read much in the way of police procedurals, but after coming across Peter Lovesey's Diamond Dust, I thought I would give the subgenre another try.

Part of Lovesey's series surrounding Detective Inspector Peter Diamond, Diamond Dust picks up with Diamond at a sort of ebb in his career. Wrapped up in fighting a possible demotion, he thinks nothing of stopping by a recently discovered murder near Bath's Royal Crescent--only to be stunned to find the victim is his own wife. Diamond quickly embarks on an investigation to locate her killer, but a police force leery of a grieving husband commanding an investigation quickly relegates Diamond to a desk job. Frustrated and under suspicion, he begins his own parallel search into his wife's past, only to realize that his someone from own past might know more than they let on.

That's the main premise of the story, at least. I had never read anything by Lovesey before, a longtime writer who has won pretty much every award in the mystery genre. That he deserves the accolades is apparent in the bewildering array of blind alleys, false leads and subplots that keep Diamond (and the reader) throughly at a loss as to who the culprit is. There's a lot of shifty intrigue going on here, and the fact that Lovesey can keep a grip on the plot thread while still propelling the mystery forward is remarkable. But this fast and convoluted plot comes at the sacrifice of character development. Diamond is portrayed as a hard-nosed, tough veteran who isn't really meant to be likeable, but this doesn't explain why I had little sense of him as a character. Understandably, the other players are lightly sketched, but more on Diamond's wife would have made her less a bloodied body and more of a human being, and lent some humanity to her grieving husband. If Lovesey's characters were as complex as the tightly knotted mysteries he creates, there would be little to find fault with his novels.

Portrait of the author's closet.

2006-10-10T19:01:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure what I was really expecting when I randomly selected My Mother's Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes from the new book shelf at the library. A history of famous outfits through history? A tour through fashion trends and revivals?

Well, this is actually a memoir, although a rather inventive one. Justine Picardie, herself a former editor of British Vogue, reflects on her life and family by way of their closets. In doing so, Picardie demonstrates just how much our dress reveals of our selves and sometimes the path our lives take. The wedding dress in the title, a little black dress that Picardie's mother wore only once in spite of its easy elegance, foreshadows the breakdown of her marriage; the hideous pleather trousers Picardie herself sported in the late '70s were as much about teenage rebellion as a fashion statement.

Picardie also goes beyond her own family's history to consider the grip that clothing has on some famous figures. She interviews Donatella Versace, an enigmatic figure in spite of her splashy, bright designs, and gets wound up in the cult of the Brontes while trying to trace the history of a ring. In this sections, it seems like Picardie is trying to flesh out the remainder of her memoir, as she doesn't have quite enough from her own family to make for a complete book. While interesting, it's a little jarring to go from Picardie's own family tale to that of a suicide in a white shirt--there's a connection with the clothes, but it is only by the thinnest of threads. My Mother's Wedding Dress works best as a meditation on what clothes can mean both in life and death, but as a memoir/history it feels incomplete.

Politics, with all the promise and frustration.

2006-10-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

First: I did not pick up a copy of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men with the intention of seeing the movie afterwards. I've been getting a kick out of reading the generalized pans, but that's the extent of my interest in the film. I actually decided to read Warren's novel for two other reasons: it's election season, and a book that's been called 'the American novel of politics' seemed an appropriate read, and second, I wanted to see how well the Pulitizer Prize-winning tome held up 60 years after its publication.

All the King's Men is about politics, and has all the traits of politics: alternatively frustrating, inspiring, long-winded and rousing, Warren's novel seeks to set its stamp on American life, in this case literature, rather than history. Loosely following the story of 1930s Louisiana populist Huey Long, Warren creates a Greek tragedy nominally centered on Willie Stark. Like Long, Stark is portrayed as a man of the people who rises to office pledging to fight the rampant system of graft and entitlement, only to fall short of his own high morals. But really, All the King's Men is the story of Jack Burden, a man who is best described as an 'operator' in the Stark administration, digging up dirt on political opponents so Stark can get his way. When he's directed to dig into the history of one of his closest friends, Burden uncovers a history of lies that eventually is disasterous for Stark and those around him.

Warren was once the poet laureate for the nation, and his description of the Louisiana's steamy natural and political environments can be seen as evocative and transporting for the first few hundred pages, after which it just gets downright oppressive. The characters of Stark and Burden are well drawn, but many of the supporting characters (especially the women), just seemed somehow unbelievable. Much like Greek tragedy, Warren demands quite the suspension of disbelief, but to do so for 600 pages of text seemed like asking a lot. Parts of the novel hold flashes of brilliance--Warren can build tension better than many mystery writers--but the frustrations of the rest of the novel makes All the King's Men ironically very true to its political basis: so much promise, but lacking in execution.

British murder spree! part 3

2006-10-03T11:55:00.000-07:00

I've always had something of an ambivalent attitude towards Agatha Christie's oeuvre. Yes, she essentially created the modern British mystery genre, but at the same time her most famous of sleuths (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot) can be seen as something of cliches. But putting aside such misconceptions, Christie's work still stands as landmarks in the genre. And although the Poirot and Marple novels are her best known works, she did write a considerable number of mysteries that didn't feature either detective.

I came to The Sittaford Mystery (also published as The Murder at Hazelmoor) after seeing the film version recently produced by PBS. I'm glad I decided to read the book: save the names of the characters and the setting (a village in England's west country), the plot is almost entirely different and much more satisfactory, in my opinion. The story starts out simply enough: snowbound and bored, some villagers conduct a seance, where it is revealed that the wealthiest resident of the village is dead. Alarmed, his best friend sets out across the snow to check on him, arriving to find him blugeoned to death. A ner'do-well nephew set to inherit the estate is arrested, and the case appears closed. But then that nephew's fiancee Emily appears, determined to release her hapless future husband and find the real culprit.

It's too bad that Christie didn't write more mysteries with Emily Trefusis as the main detective, as Emily's mix of independence, vivaciousness and dogged persistence would have made for an interesting series. With the help of a somewhat unscrupulous journalist, Emily learns enough of the villagers' secrets to find the real murderer. Christie's murders may not be entirely suspenseful (how, exactly, does someone die from being slugged by a sandbag?) but tightly wound plots and a solution that requires careful deduction on the part of her detectives makes Christie's mysteries still appealing even after 70 years in print.

British murder spree! part 2

2006-09-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

Like Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novels, time and place are central to Elizabeth Peters' novels featuring Amelia Peabody. Like Russell, Peabody is fiercely independent and confident in her abilities, in spite of having spent much of her life under the thumb of her domineering father in 1880s Victorian England. In Crocodile on the Sandbank, Peabody immediately sets out for Egypt, determined to see more of the world after her father's death. Immediately at home in the Valley of the Kings, Peabody sets to work 'assisting' Egyptologist and bachelor Radcliff Emerson, much to his displeasure. Their work is soon interrupted by the appearance of a mummy that drives away all the Egyptian workers and threatens the lives of Peabody and her companions. I found the mystery to be a little hokey (the rampaging mummy kept bringing to mind the Brendan Fraser film The Mummy) and an annoying damsel in distress that everyone would probably be better off without. But Peabody herself is a plucky, appealing character, and her battles with Emerson are enjoyable to behold, even if you already know who's going to come out victorious.

It's not surprising that Peters also did quite a bit of work in romance fiction, as the strength of her book lies not in the mystery (which is quite easy to figure out), but in the sparks between her characters. Originally published way back in the 1970s, Crocodile is the first of Peters' long Peabody series, all set in colonial Egypt. The exotic time and place of the series is also one of its draws, and the fast moving plot and romantic undertones makes Peters' detective an appealing read.

British murder spree! part 1

2006-09-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this post's title is a rather devious attempt to make this post seem more lurid than it actually is. True, I've been indulging in my taste for British murder mysteries, so there are quite a few bodies turning up, but to term it a spree is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, it's murder, but this is civilized killing, thank you. So put on your tweeds, make some tea and curl up while these people go about nicely dispatching each other.

I had previously written about Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice featuring Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, enjoying King's creation of a feisty, liberal partner to Holmes' Edwardian coolness. Continuing with A Monstrous Regiment of Women, King focuses more on developing Russell's character, as Mary delves into the inner workings of a women's organization in which various members have been dying suspicious deaths. Holmes is mostly offstage during the investigation, but never far from Russell's mind as she finds the detective playing a larger role in her life. I've read a few more of King's series, and her strongest abilities lie in the interplay between Holmes and Russell, similar to that of Sayers' Wimsey/Vane novels, and her depiction of post World War I Britian. As her series moves along, I found King's plots to be more tangled, something that wasn't as much the case in the earlier books, were the emphasis was more on suspense rather than unraveling the mystery.

More bodies to come...

I really should be less cynical about book reviews.

2006-09-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone is in love with Frank Portman. Every review that I've come across for Portman's first novel, King Dork, has been in raptures about Portman's take on high school life since it first appeared earlier this year. So of course, I'm immediately skeptical, as usually happens when something appears to be too good to be true, especially in the case of young adult lit, which more often than not can have adults swooning and teens passing.

King Dork meets this challenge head on, poking fun at that Holy Grail of teen lit, The Catcher in the Rye, turning its subject of teen angst on its head. The anti-Holden Caulfield here is Tom Henderson, a mostly rational and thoughtful human being who has the misfortune of attending high school with a bunch of psychotic normal people. As such, Tom (or Chi-Mo or King Dork), spends most of his time trying to avoid abject humiliation from students and staff alike, while attempting to set up a rock band with his friend-in-the-alphabet, Sam Hellerman. When Tom stumbles upon some of his dead father's books, it opens up a mystery surrounded by codes, fake people, questionable pronounciation and what really happened to his father during his high school years. There's no way that I can really do justice to the whole arc of the plot, only to say that I laughed out loud at many of Portman's perceptions of high school. His depiction of Tom's equally clueless ex-Hippie parents is hilarious, a sly commentary on how adults want to perceive their teen children, and just how much teens can see through such b.s. The only complaint I have is that such a twisted storyline takes its time building up, but Tom's such a good observer that those sticking with him will be well rewarded by the conclusion.

Portman, himself a member of the rock group the Mr. T Experience, laces King Dork with references to various rock groups, completes the book with a glossary of terms and misprounciations from the book, and a list of the devil's head incarnations that Tom's band goes through. There's some sex, which might put King Dork at risk for challenge, but if it is it would work to the book's favor in getting it more attention. Not that getting teens to read it should be difficult. I liked VOYA's little blurbette: "King Dork...will appeal only to...teens with an interest in...oral sex..."

Well, who am I to argue with that?

Manga meets meditation.

2006-09-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

I do not claim to know anything about Buddhism, graphic novels or, for that matter, formatting photos in Blogger (my apologies for the above arrangement), but that did not keep me from pushing through all eight volumes of Osamu Tezuka's imaginative and epic retelling of the life of Siddhartha. And I do mean epic: ranging across the foothills of the Himalayas thousands of years ago, Buddha has a huge cast of characters and enough raging battles, miracles and doomed love affairs to make any Charleton Heston flick pale in comparison. This isn't an accident; Tezuka takes definite liberties with the historical record, creating characters and events that help to define his vision of Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment, with a great deal of pulpy action and adventure thrown in. The result is a mostly fast-paced, sometimes irreverent romp through ancient northern India, as Siddhartha slowly becomes Buddha and develops his insights that would become the religion of Buddhism.

Handsomely published in the U.S. by Vertical, the real star of Buddha isn't the story, but Tezuka's vibrant artwork. Best known for his Astro Boy series, Tezuka's take on Buddha is sort of manga for adults--but with all the same visual appeal as his more popular work. The settings allow for some beautiful and suprisingly detailed panoramas, and the violence is simply but effectively portrayed in a spray of ink. Probably the most effective aspect as I read along was Tezuka's ability to depict the emotions of his characters: a devious look instantly establishes a character's untrustworthy nature, and the full impact of Siddharta's inner struggle is telegraphed over his features.

That the visual is so well done works well in Tezuka's favor, as the weakest point about Buddha is the sometimes painful dialog. Do not expect great monologues to complement the great art. But the dialog does have the benefit of making each volume a pretty fast read (each averaging around 350 pages, a volume can be finished off, at most, in a few hours). Other quibbles: the height of the story, I felt, came in the middle of the set (v. 3-5), with the story tending to drop off a bit in the concluding installments. And given how much of Buddha is imagined, it was rather disappointing to see most female characters relegated to passive slaves or victimized royalty. As an introduction to the work of Tezuka, Buddha might not be representative, but it does mark an interesting blend of the serious with a popular art form gaining in respect.

After the levees broke.

2006-09-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

Like most Americans, I was sickened by what I saw happening in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After the images of suffering in the Superdome, and bodies left to rot in the streets of New Orleans, it was hard to imagine it getting any worse. As the storm surge subsided, a flood of books has appeared, attempting to explain just what transpired in late August 2005. Among the hefty (The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley), the scientific (The Storm by Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan) and the official (A Failure of Initiative by the select committee appointed by the House of Representatives), I went with Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne. Metro editor of the Times-Picayune, Horne is well-versed in New Orleans' culture and politics, elements just as important to the course of disaster as weather reports and evacuation plans.

Mixing personal accounts with commentary, Horne creates a vivid portrait of a city ill-served by its elected officials well prior to 2005, and fully documents the continuing failures after the storm. Harshest criticism is reserved, of course, for the inept bungling by FEMA and the Bush Administration, but the Army Corps of Engineers, mayor Ray Nagin and the Orleans levee board each receive damning evidence of misplaced priorities or downright fraud. Horne also dispels many of the misconceptions created by the media, calling into doubt the images of rampaging gangs bent on looting any and all stores, and the supposed lawlessness at the Superdome and Convention Center.

This isn't a book to read if you want something calming--I often found myself wanting to throw it through a wall in frustration at the ineptitude of those in charge. But Horne also includes stories of perserverance--the ordeal of Patrina Peters, who survived on the roof of her flooded home during the storm, heroic efforts at isolated hospitals, the grassroots effort Common Ground which stepped in when the Army and the aid organizations refused. Most of the second half of the book is an examination of the efforts to determine which direction the new New Orleans needs to go. This part lags a bit in terms of storytelling, but represents the more important questions resulting from Katrina: is it right to allow people to rebuild New Orleans as it once was, even when the previous chapters revealed a city seriously in need of reform and overhaul? Horne makes the case for a new city, but for New Orleans to rise again, the events recounted in Breach of Faith demonstrate that it will be a long, drawn out prospect, requiring much more than staunching holes in the levees.

On the trail of Revolutions.

2006-09-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

When it first appeared in print over 500 years ago, Nicolaus Copericus' magnum opus De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) revolutionized the budding science of astronomy. Its publication in 1543 was the death knell for the thousand-year old notions of Ptolemy's Earth centered universe, heralding the dawn of a new, empirical method of doing science. Or did it?

Challenged by a historian's claim that no one read the watershed book when it was first published, Harvard astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich went to epic lengths to track the impact De revolutionibus had on scientists of the sixteenth century. To do so, he undertakes the task of locating and examining as many first and second editions of the work all over the world. Conducting a book census sounds about as interesting as watching a bookworm chew through a dusty tome, but in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus, Gingerich finds that a seemingly straightforward task can lead into unknown corners of historical record and the modern book trade.

Gingerich discovers richly annotated copies of De revolutionibus that quickly settle the question of whether the book was read when it was first published, but raise other issues. What impact did the Catholic church's censorship of De revolutionibus have on the book's readership? Who bought the expensive book and why? How did scientists spread across Europe communicate with each other over the ideas in the book? The questions are not limited to issues of the fifteenth century: Gingerich finds himself testifying in court over a missing De revolutionibus, puzzling over rebound and fake copies, and navigating hostile Soviet bureacracy to reach copies behind the Iron Curtain.

Weaving astronomical history in with the pursuit of rare copies, Gingerich's volume is as likely to appeal to bibliophiles as to astronomy buffs. For those not entirely familiar with such history, parts of Gingerich might be hard to follow--many names sound similar and some are almost entirely obscure. Perhaps a brief collection of biographical sections at the end of the book would make it more approachable, but as it is, Gingerich simply includes notes and an abbreviated version of his final census. For the casual reader, perhaps something like Timothy Ferris' Coming of Age in the Milky Way would offer a better introduction to astronomy history. In terms of sheer persistence and bibliographic sleuthing, Gingerich's chase of Copericus' revolutionary book is a worthy example.

What rhymes with Bush?

2006-09-09T19:48:00.000-07:00

In spite of my best efforts, I’m not the sort of person who would just willingly sit down with a volume of poetry. Nor am I one to spend precocious reading time with any political diatribes masquerading as rational thought. So why exactly did I pick up Calvin Trillin’s new volume A Heckuva Job: More of the Bush Administration in Rhyme? Well, in part due to Trillin’s recent appearance on The Daily Show and previous familiarity with some of Trillin’s essays, but mostly in an attempt to feebly laugh at what has become a scary situation.

As poetry, Trillin is more Ogden Nash than Byron, but his limerick-style is suited to the nonsensical subject matter. Redundant sounds and forced rhythms make A Heckuva Job downright annoying to read straight through, but Trillin isn’t interested so much in proper placement of stresses as he is in driving home his political barbs. This he does with a wry tone, covering the misadventures of Iraq , the war on terror, and the sluggish Katrina response. A stanza from The War in Nine Stanzas is indicative:

Though nothing showed Iraq had played a part,
That’s where some hawks thought vengeance ought to start.
(Then terrorists could count on what we’d do:
Attack us, we’ll strike back, though not at you.)
We toppled first that band of Afghan loonies
Who’d let bin Laden hide out in their boonies.
The Taliban were smashed in one fell swoop.
Bin Laden, though, had plainly flown the coop.
Bush then forgot that name, and said, “In fact,
Iraq’s the place that has to be attacked.”
The war, Rove thought, with this one course correction,
Could still endure until the next election.
(August 15, 2004)

The types and subjects of the attacks are nothing new, and over the course of the volume, Trillin tends to repeat himself. As any good roast needs to be, though, each poem in A Heckuva Job contains enough truth to hit home. In the case of Dubya's policies, that might mean more of an occassion to cry, but at least Trillin's poesies add a little bit of comic relief.

A scientific dispute for the ages.

2006-09-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

As a graduate who has earned a degree in the humanities, I tend to regard those in the sciences as having a considerably easier task in tracking down what is real in nature: formulate the hypothesis, test it and if it works, everyone basically agrees that's the way things are. Yet, as the recent brouhaha over the status of Pluto has demonstrated, there can be a surprising amount of decisions that scientists have to make.

Before there was Pluto, there was the issue of what happens to a star in the course of its lifetime. In the early twentieth century, the debate over what the scientific evidence disclosed and what theories raged in astrophysical circles, easily making or unmaking academic careers. On the one side was Sir Arthur Eddington, world-renowned scientist, theorist and practically credited with inventing astrophysics. On the other was a young unknown Indian scientist, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who formulated the almost unfathomable notion of black holes. Their despute, and the repercussions that it had on the course of astronomy and physics, is the subject of Arthur I. Miller's Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. Following Chandra, Eddington and their contemporaries through blind alleys, dead ends and false leads, Miller weaves the tale of how the quest to understand the life of the stars nearly cost both scientists their reputations. Only with the advent of the atomic bomb and achievements in observational methods did Chandra's efforts be recognized, and black holes become a physical reality.

Part biography of Chandra, part history of an idea, Miller draws on a trove of sources, especially Chandra's own revealing personal letters. He also traces the many competing theories concerning the lives of stars, taking the story well beyond just Chandra and Eddington. Miller includes considerable back matter, including a glossary, brief biographical sketches, notes and appendices, but for those who may not have a comfortable gasp on basic physical and chemical principals may find Empire to be a bit of a challenge. I personally found the latter portion of the book, which dealt with the observational findings and the development of the atomic bomb to be more interesting. Empire of the Stars probably isn't for everyone, but because of Miller's thorough research, could be quite important to anyone interested in the history of science.

Parallel universe.

2006-08-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

Pity poor Misha Vainberg. All he wants to do is escape from St. Leninsgrad to return to that mecca of hip hop, New York City, with his South Bronx sweetheart Rouenna. But just because his father (the 1,238th richest man in Russia and renowned for selling an 800 kilogram screw to KGR) happened to off a politically connected Oklahoman, the generals in charge of the INS won't give Misha a visa. And now, when his beloved Rouenna writes from Hunter College (where she is majoring in secretarial skills) that she is carrying on with Jerry Shteynfarb (author of The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job), Misha is desparate enough to head to the oil saturated state of Absurdistan, where a crooked Belgian immigration official has a passport ready for a small fee.

Before the greasy official can hand over Misha's ticket to the Bronx, war breaks out between the Sevo and Svani ethnic groups over the topic of Christ's footrest, and KBR (a subsidiary of Halliburton) quietly sneaks into the country with a sweet deal from the Department of Defense. Soon, Misha finds himself as appointed head of the Office of Multiculturalism in the mostly corrupt government, and it only gets weirder from there. Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart (author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook) is a dark comedy that has no limit to the absurdities Misha goes through, each with a biting element of the current state of affairs to it. Sporting a Candide-like sense of optimism through it all (or maybe it's the Adivan), Misha somehow holds on to his sense of purpose, even as missles are being launched from the roof of the Park Hyatt.

Shteyngart has a bitter, ironic tone throughout the book, excepting Misha, who blithely sails through the chaos around him with a minimum of qualms. I had a bit of trouble getting into the book, partly because it moves very quickly. Once Misha arrives in Absurdistan though, the plotting works better as the whirlwind of corruption picks up steam. Touching on the insane policies of yesterday (the Cold War) and today (the war on terror), with the backdrop of American consumerism and Russian fatalism, Absurdistan closes as something of a bad dream for Misha. Freed from the country, he sets out to join Rouenna in the Bronx. The date? September 11, 2001.

The portrait of the family.

2006-08-23T09:45:00.000-07:00

Alison Bechdel's new graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, has been getting quite a bit of buzz from various quarters, and with good reason. An engrossing, sensitive narrative, Fun Home has restored my faith in the memoir as quality, worthwhile reading. Often ironic, realistically drawn with bluish-green tinged panels and perfectly paced, Bechdel has created a work that goes beyond the dynamics of her particular family to the more universal theme of a child trying to understand who their parents are and how they have shaped their lives.

The title ironically refers not to the Victorian Gothic revival house that Bechdel's father obsessively restored, but to the funeral home that he ran to supplement his income as an English teacher. At the same time that he's agonizing over William Morris wallpaper, his daughter, Alison, is struggling with her own obsessive behavior in the stultified atmosphere of the house. As Alison reaches adolescence, her growing sense of self and budding sexuality coincides with some revelations about her father's own closeted homosexuality. Gradually, Bechdel's father starts sharing his favorite books with her, leading to a tacit understanding between the two.

Bechdel (creator of the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For) considers her life while making references to some of the books that her father recommends. Touching on Ulysses, the myth of Icarus and Colette's autobiography Earthly Paradise, it becomes clear that books are the common ground between Bechdel and her father, where they can understand each other.

Bechdel's story works very well in a graphic format, and her images convey tensions more tellingly than paragraphs of prose could. The concluding pages may not ultimately answer Bechdel's questions about who her father was, but the final frames have a closing acceptance and ultimate peacefulness. It's a satisfying end to a work of quiet strength.

"Dammit Holmes! It is not elementary!"

2006-08-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

It’s a risky proposition for an author to resurrect an iconic literary character for the purpose of a new series; even more questionable is the addition of a sidekick for the famous figure’s comeback. In the world of mystery fiction, no figure is more sacred than Sherlock Holmes. Yet Holmes’ stature has not kept Edgar-awarding winning author Laurie R. King from imagining what the detective would be like had he happened to take a precocious fifteen-year-old girl under his wing and teach her his craft.

Dangerous, yes, but in creating Mary Russell, the apprentice to Holmes' beekeeper in The Beekeeper's Apprentice; or, On the Segregation of the Queen, King has given Holmes a formidable ally. Fiercely intelligent, the staunchly feminist Russell is the perfect match for the idiosyncratic and often misogynist detective. Through tests of increasing difficulty, the two slowly gain each others trust. But just as Russell and Holmes have become a team of considerable prowess, an opponent from Holmes’ past reappears, with nothing less than the destruction of Holmes and all those near to him their only desire.

I haven’t read any of the original Holmes stories, so I can’t say whether King matches Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in terms of literary merit. But King has created an engrossing chess match of a mystery that requires the full concentration of both detectives and the reader. Her depiction of World War I era England is vivid, and the dawning of women's rights coupled with the passing of the Edwardian era creates a tension in the plot. My quibbles are minor: the story occasionally flags as King goes about constructing her plot and characters, and the beginning is entirely too hokey. Since completing The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, King has penned seven more Russell/Holmes titles, and has developed quite a following in the process. It’s an impressive start, and the rest of the series promises to be just as intriguing. Book number two (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) is already on my request list.

It's just a phase.

2006-08-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

Ah, those glorious teenage years, full of self-discovery, intellectual stimulation, and the quest to become a well rounded individual. Or at least that’s the plan. The reality is usually more embarrassing and awkward, especially if your best friend turns out to be an ‘enthusiast,’ as Julie Lefkowitz knows all too well. When Ashleigh’s obsession with King Arthur leads to a pots-and-pans coat of armor, or her craze for a local band has them camped out under wet blankets, Julie stoically goes along. But when Ashleigh’s attentions shift to Jane Austen, Julie fears what her friend’s whole hearted enthusiasm will do to her favorite author.

Plenty, as Polly Shulman’s first novel Enthusiasm shows. Drawing on her love for Pride and Prejudice, Ashleigh convinces Julie to crash a local boys prep school to search for her own version of Mr. Darcy. The man is found, in the form of Grandison Parr, and the girls conspire to join the school’s musical in order to be near him and his best friend. But trouble arises when Julie learns that Ashleigh has mistakenly assumed Julie likes Parr’s friend—and has a crush on Parr herself.

Shulman’s effort doesn’t stray too far from formula (a school musical, readings in Romeo and Juliet, the obligatory bad boy, divorced parents), and the Austen twist peters out as quickly as the girls’ interest in the minuet. Still, for typical teen formula, Shulman does okay, creating sympathetic teen characters that have a fair amount of depth to them. Enthusiasm might be stronger had it ventured further into the Austen theme, picked up on some the themes of Austen's novel or had a stronger conflict, but on the whole it remains a pleasant if not especially memorable read.

Who wants to be like Kate?

2006-08-09T10:34:00.000-07:00

There are some books that appear on bookseller and library shelves that really just beg the question: What is the point? Various 'gift' books, anything by Mitch Albom, most books penned by celebrities and the style advice book, generally fall into this catagory. Today's book, Style by Kate Spade, can claim two of these characteristics: Spade, the creator of a pricey line of home accessories, stationary, bags, etc. under the ingenious name kate spade, dispenses pithy advice to the stylistically clueless. As a long time member of this group, I thought perhaps Kate might be able to lead me to enlightenment. Alas, not to be: shelve this one firmly in the pointless aisle.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on Ms. Spade, as writing about style for a book is a tricky proposition. An author is generally left to rehashing little bits of common style knowledge, while reiterating that 'style is a personal expression.' That's pretty much what happens here, but Spade chooses to fill out some of the remaining white space with her personal style favorites: for example, Kate likes to pair her blues with tangerine, watermelon or taupe, and she considers Barbarella to be a good example of 'style in space.' We also get a watercolor rendering of Mr. Kate Spade's favorite ski hat (a Swix brand blue Nordic knit with a tassel, if you were curious). Fascinating stuff for the Spade fans, but for the rest of us, it doesn't provide a great deal of guidance.

The illustrations provided are watercolors by artist Virginia Johnson. Charming as art, they aren't very useful as guides, and the sporadic instances where they're used makes them even less so. I found the final two sections of the book on the types and maintenance of clothing articles to be somewhat useful, but again, similiar information could be found elsewhere in probably more complete form. Style is one of three books in a series created by Spade (Manners and Occasions being the others), and while one isn't likely to commit a horrendous faux pas following her advice, there's also little chance of breaking new ground either. True style mavens will already know many of the ideas Spade suggests, and others may do just as well browsing fashion magazines or reading up on stylish women of the past.

On the beach (Miami, that is).

2006-08-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

Summer is the most forgiving season: you can wander about outdoors barefoot, drink another beer safe in the knowledge you'll simply sweat out the alcohol, and indulge in reading equally lasting in nature. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's latest novel, Make Him Look Good, is a prime example of the summer read, light in substance and not terribly trying on the mind.

Valdes-Rodriguqez's novel, fittingly, takes place in and around Miami Beach, a locale not known for its substantive culture. The plot revolves around the 'him' of the title, Latin pop sensation Ricky Biscayne and the women in his life: Milan, the deeply enamored secretary of the Las Ricky Chickies fan club; Jasminka, Ricky's Serbian supermodel wife; Irene, the firefighter who has good reason to hate Ricky's guts, and Jill Sanchez, a very poorly disguised caricature of a particular pop star, among others. However, the task of making Ricky look good is increasingly difficult, until Ricky finally gets the ending that he deserves.

Valdes-Rodriguez moves the narrative between different characters in the plot, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third, which can lead to some confusion over just who's talking when. It also leads to some rather laughable point-of-view choices--I had a hard time buying the supernatural powers of a particular cat. Valdes-Rodriguez also struggles somewhat with her characterization. Along with the Sanchez character (which, to be fair, could be passed off as satire), few characters really achieve any sort of depth, especially the men. This in turn plays into a predictable plot, an unfortunate tendency of one character to lapse into valley-girl speak...

Still, I did chuckle at a few of Valdes-Rodriguez's plot twists, and her portrayal of the insanity that is the pop music industry provides some biting satire. Overlooking the flaws, Make Him Look Good might satisfy some beach readers--there are plenty of plot turns, even if you can see them coming a mile off. The novel's strongest aspect is the vivid recreation of Miami's diverse culture, especially that of its Cuban and Latino populations. For those looking for an easygoing beach read, Make Him Look Good provides suitable effervescent entertainment; those seeking something a bit more substantive might wish to pass.

Camara, check. Road map, check. Revolver and political vendetta, check, double check.

2006-08-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

It's summertime, and with the impossibly oppressive proof of global warming and freedom from classroom tyranny comes that great American tradition: the road trip vacation. Sarah Vowell, contributing editor for NPR's This American Life, combines this innocent past time with another, less familiar American tradition: the tendency to off our duly-elected head of state. Hence Assassination Vacation, Vowell's journey into the obscure, sometimes scary and surprisingly bizarre history of presidential hitmen. Vowell is the perfect companion on this particular tour: a self-described Mount St. Helens of verbiage on the subject of assassinations, she roots out the more intriguing chesnuts surrounding the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Lincoln's demise is well-documented, but Vowell still finds some surprises. From her sleuthing, Americans may always wonder what the second Lincoln term would have accomplished, but for the word 'sockdologizing.' It's a pity in some ways that Garfield and McKinley aren't better known, as the circumstances surrounding their deaths are truly entertaining: Garfield's assassin, Charles Guiteau, may just be the 19th-century equivilent of Michael Jackson in the painful-to-behold-but-still-compelled-to-watch sense. McKinley succumbed to a mere anarchist, yet his campaign to 'bestow' democracy on nations in which the U.S. had substantial financial interests (ahem), Vowell writes, seems entirely too familiar.

Vowell intersperes the historical bits with her actual experiences following in the occasionally poorly documented (or poorly plaqued) footsteps of president and assassin alike, creating a lively and deliciously sarcastic tone to what really is a discussion of a bunch of dead white guys. If there is any linguistic justice, 'Seward plaque' will immediately become part of the American lexicon. Always keen to hypocracies in history and in the current administration, Vowell provides sharp, biting commentary that will actually keep history students awake in class. Assassination Vacation reminds me of another history/travelogue that I supremely enjoyed, Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Pair the two together and you'll have great reading material for the drives between roadside historical markers and tourist traps.

The Seedy Side of the Cities

2006-08-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

Mention Minnesota to most Americans, and the concept of "Minnesota nice" often springs to mind, along with mosquitoes, languid evenings at The Lake and the 'aw-shucks' wholesomeness of A Prairie Home Companion. Editors Julie Schaper and Steven Horwitz do their best to dispel this notion of the North Star State with their collection Twin Cities Noir. Part of Akashic Books' series of noir anthologies centered on various locales, Twin Cities Noir features familiar metropolitan landmarks and occasional episodes from Minneapolis/St. Paul history, often with a tinge of Midwestern dry humor (or fatalism, if you're a Lutheran). So Schaper and Horwitz give us bodies bobbing in the Mississippi ("Bums" by William Kent Krueger), a snow emergency that turns explosive ("Noir Neige" by K. J. Erickson), the uneasy transition to American culture faced by Hmong immigrants (David Housewright's "Mai-Nu's Window") and the gangsters who found sanctuary in Depression-era St. Paul ("If You Harm Us" by Gary Bush), among others.

Authored by Minnesotans from varying publishing backgrounds, the collection is a bit uneven in quality and 'noirishness.' A few stories climaxed into bona fide cliffhangers, but others seemed strangely lackluster or predictable. Perhaps the limitations of the genre and form are partly to blame for this, but there's no harm in skipping over stories that don't appeal, as each entry stands on its own. Like other titles in the series, Twin Cities Noir will primarily draw those who call the Cities home; noir fans will appreciate a setting away from the usual noir scene, with shady characters that you wouldn't want to see walking the streets of Lake Wobegone.

Bibliomane dies and goes to book cover heaven.

2006-07-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

As a reader and a librarian, it would be good of me to adhere to the old maxim of not judging a book by its cover, and focus instead on the quality of the text inside. But reality usually has a way of eschewing such sampler-type wisdom, and no where is that more true in the bottom-line driven world of book design. Happily, in the right hands, a book can become its own work of art while staying faithful to ideas between its covers, and Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006 is a fabulous collection of just how beautiful a book as an object can be, from one of today's best designers.

In all honesty, I had no idea who this Kidd guy was prior to reading another glowing review of this book, and was only intrigued because of the promise of book cover art. When I picked it up at the local library, and started paging through its 400 pages of artwork, I had to laugh to myself, because it quickly appeared that this designer was responsible for some of the most appealing, memorable covers in recent publishing history. At times iconic, humourous, literal, controversial, intense, and exuberant, Kidd's work, to paraphrase the words of one author, uses a few symbols or images to capture the essense of complex literature.

Aside from the beautifully recreated cover art, Kidd provides humourous, insightful notes about each cover design, along with examples of source material and covers that never made it to the bookshelf. Various authors weigh in on what they liked (or didn't like) about the images for their books. Book One also offers a look into the usually tumultuous world of book publishing, especially at Knopf, where Kidd began his career twenty years ago. While hefty, Book One is entirely engrossing, and I had trouble putting it down. In the hands of anyone with an interest in publishing, design, art or books, Kidd's album is likely to have the same effect.

Reading for a quiet, solitary place.

2006-07-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

I was very careful as to where I started reading Louise Erdrich's quietly powerful novel The Painted Drum. Having read another of her recent works, The Master Butchers Singing Club, I knew that I wanted to be somewhere quiet, perhaps outdoors, where I would be allowed to devote myself to entering the world Erdrich creates. I probably didn't need to try so hard; the lyrical, effortless style of Erdrich's storytelling in The Painted Drum would have quickly made me oblivious to the world outside the page, whatever setting I happened to be in.

Like many of her other works, Erdrich draws on her Ojibwe roots for much of the novel's themes and characters' histories, but The Painted Drum is a bit of a departure in that it opens in distant New Hampshire. While coping with her own personal struggles, Faye Travers, herself part Ojibwe, discovers an extraordinary painted drum while tagging items for an estate sale. Mysteriously, she hears the drum sound, but is startled that no one else seems to be able to hear it. Intrigued, she steals the drum and eventually uncovers the history of loss, grief and forgiveness that led to its creation. Restored to its rightful place, the drum continues to mark the lives of those who come into contact with it, including Faye.

The Painted Drum spans half a continent and generations of families touched by loss. Erdrich, like the best storytellers, skillfully weaves her narrative of different families and eras into a continuous tale, with a keen sense of pacing. There's a gentle sort of ebb and flow to her work that I have yet to come across anywhere else, and always makes her novels well worth picking up.

The single girl in the (turn-of-the-century) city.

2006-07-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Occassionally, I find myself reading books that seem to be entirely too familiar--they either mirror events in my life or echo the emotions that I'm feeling through a particularly tumultuous stretch. So maybe it's not fair for me to judge such books, as I'm not basing my opinions from an unbiased viewpoint.

Such was the case with Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth. In her struggle to remain a part of fashionable New York society, Wharton's flawed heroine Lily Bart finds herself fighting as much against herself as the gossip which brands her an outcast. Lily's life had always been about clinging to her precarious position among the wealthy, with a brilliant match to a rich (if unloved) bachelor the ultimate goal. Yet when her plottings are undermined by a jealous matron, Lily finds her inability to let go of her old lifestyle leaves her unable to find happiness.

When it was published in 1905, The House of Mirth landed on the bestseller list and established Wharton's reputation. In spite of the 101 years between its publication and today, Lily's precarious existance still reverberates in today's material-obsessed culture. Perhaps this is why I personally found it to be a little too close to the mark--I would not recommend it for someone in the job market, as Lily's efforts (and failures) to economize seemed familiar. The writing, in my opinion, fails to achieve the beauty and depth of The Age of Innocence, written 15 years later, and the ending veers towards sentimentality. Still, Wharton's depiction of old New York remains a novel well worth reading, challenging romantic notions of Gibson girls and corseted beauties to reveal themes that are strikingly modern.

Art history? Bio? All of the above?

2006-07-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure that Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece could really be cataloged under any one subject. Weaving elements of art history and biography into the tale of the rediscovery of the lost Caravaggio masterpiece The Taking of Christ, Harr's work sometimes reads like a detective story. While I was reading it, I honestly couldn't put it down, but it was more a couldn't put it down because I wanted to get to the aha moment. It proved somewhat elusive, although there were good moments along the way: the discovery of a mention of the painting in a 17th century ledger, the excitement felt by an amateur art historian as he gazes on the neglected masterpiece, and the descriptions of the volatile man who created it. But it all seemed somewhat, well, padded. There's a little bit of everything: descriptions of art restoration techniques, a bit on Caravaggio, a brief lament over the state of upper education in Italy. The Lost Painting is an interesting concept, but I had a sense that there could be more to the story that Harr's book sort of missed. It's an interesting concept that anyone interested in art would find a diverting read, but for those who want to find out more about Caravaggio or the world of art history, they may find the bibliography to be more useful.

Enigmatic Einstein

2006-07-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

Mention the name of Albert Einstein, and it’s likely that one of two images will come to mind: one of a bemused, slightly disheveled genius-next-door, or the serious scientist, calmly explaining seemingly simple equations that would befuddle mere mortals. The complexities of Einstein’s character and the incredible impact his work has had on the world has been documented many times over, making one of the most familiar figures not just in science, but in all of history.

It’s not surprising that with so much ink already spilled on Einstein’s life that authors would be taking different approaches to the man and his work. David Bodanis’ wonderful E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation is an example of a smart, approachable work as entertaining as it is informative. Einstein himself is only a small part of the book: Bodanis traces all aspects of the equation from their origin to their dramatic, sometimes fearful application. So we learn how Voltaire’s mistress laid the groundwork for c², why a winter stroll through Sweden’s woods would lead to the horrors of Hiroshima and how an Indian scientist could begin to imagine a mind-boggling phenomenon we now know as a black hole. The only quibble I have with Bodanis’ text is that it doesn’t include footnotes for the 70-odd pages of notes, but astute readers can catch up with those at the end of chapters. For the layman or for the scientist, E=mc² provides a fascinating, all-encompassing history, and proves how Einstein’s brilliant equation has taken on such a life of its own.

Michael Paterniti takes an entirely different approach to Einstein’s legacy in his Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain. The title is not simply a cute attention getting device: Paterniti’s memoir/travelogue recounts his actual experience driving the pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy across the country, with the famous brain sloshing around in a Tupperware container in the trunk. The story of how the gray matter got there is a weird tale, focusing mostly on the oddball pathologist who had custody of the brain and his dubious attempts to study it. Paterniti also muses on the meaning of genius—whether it can be tangeable like chunks of brain or if it really comes down how society decides to perceive an individual. Unfortunately, Paterniti also chooses to meditate on the state of his relationship during the course of the road trip. This and some rehashed material makes it feel like Driving Mr. Albert was fleshed out to get it to book length (it started life as a Harper’s Magazine article). Driving Mr. Albert got a number of rave reviews when it was first published in 2000, but in spite of it’s promising material, never seems to get beyond the musing stages. Even with his brain close at hand, the key to understanding Einstein’s genius remains tantalizingly out of reach.

You probably already have an opinion about this...

2006-07-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Melissa Bank's first book, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is probably best known as one of the novels that started the whole 'chick lit' phenomenon. This is a shame, as nearly everyone has an opinion about chick lit, most being negative (and certainly not helped by the whole Opal fiasco). Such opinions, however, run the risk of overlooking a promising young author in Banks. Her second work, The Wonder Spot, carries the same structure as Girls' Guide--short narratives from the life of our female protagonist, beginning with her teenage years and continuing, in spurts, to her late thirties. In this case, it's Sophie Applebaum, struggling with relationships, a nonexistant career, and the questions of where she will end up in life. Moving from Sophie's Jewish upbringing in Philadelphia to her struggles at life in Manhatten, Bank's writing is witty and insightful. The story does focus on Sophie's relationships, but all of her relations are equally treated, leaving The Wonder Spot more a take on family life in general than on the romantic relationships of 'chick lit'. I came to this book after reading a glowing recommendation for it, and I tend to agree that Bank is a writer worth watching.

Still tangled after 67 years.

2006-07-12T21:24:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I get the urge to go back and read some of the classics within genres--the ones that most libraries have on the shelves not because of the overwhelming demand for them but because they have attained a sort of sacred status that exonerates them from any to-be-weeded list. I probably shouldn't be so harsh with Raymond Chandler's 1939 classic The Big Sleep. The first of Chandler's novels, it introduces Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles-based private eye perfectly embodied in the equally classic 1946 film by Humphrey Bogart.

As one of the first (and best) of the hard-boiled, haunted PIs of crime lit, Marlowe's character can sometimes be pretty cliched to modern readers, but Chandler's ability to portray the desperate seediness of Depression-era LA still puts to shame many modern writers. If you can't feel the dank rot underlying Marlowe's LA, you're not paying very close attention to Chandler's prose. And in The Big Sleep, everyone has a bit of rot in them. The plot is famously knotted (Chandler himself claimed not to know the motives behind one of the deaths), but what begins as a case of blackmail swiftly turns into murder--and then the serious crimes start to happen. Chandler keeps the twists and turns coming, with characters so shady it's a wonder they don't immediately shrivel up in the sunlight.

In spite of all the deaths, there isn't a whole lot of graphic violence, and the language is relatively cuss-free. For those reasons, The Big Sleep may appeal to older readers turned off by gratuitous violence or foul language, but who still want a compelling mystery. For any reader who likes a complicated private eye on a twisted case, Chandler's work still sets a benchmark in crime fiction.

Savannah soap opera.

2006-07-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, the only reason that I picked up John Berendt's 1993 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was because the branch library I was browsing in had apparently just weeded all of their 900s, and this was pretty much the only thing that remotely appealed. When it appeared back when this writer was in braces, it had instant appeal, became a bestseller, was mentioned on This Old House and was made into film starring Kevin Spacey and Jude Law. That's right. Kevin Spacey and Jude Law. This must be compelling stuff.

Well, I'm always a little skeptical of bestsellers, and I seem to recall some sort of controversy over Berendt's truthiness in his 'plot'. In fact, Amazon calls the book a novel, but various aspects of the book (the real life trial it centers on, the people it depicts) are real and therefore should put the book squarely on the nonfiction shelves--which was where I found it. Publisher's Weekly considers it a travelogue, if that helps. I think you see from the title what I would call it.

However you want to pigeonhole the book, Berendt should get a lot of credit for finding a good story and the characters to go with it. The title refers to some voodoo mischief relating to the trial of a wealthy antiques dealer accused of murdering his lover in a fit of passion. Actually, that's one of the trials: like everything else in Savannah, things seem to be done a little differently. So along with the recounting of the four trials, we also hear of the denizens of this odd little city: the slightly disturbed inventor with a deadly bottle of poison and a surprising knowledge of the city water supply; the industrious voodoo witch; and most notably the over-the-top, sashaying Lady Chablis, formerly known as Frank.

It's kind of fun to watch soaps for a few minutes, and I did enjoy Midnight for about 2/3 of the book. But by the third of fourth go through with the trial, I was beginning to get a little bored. Even throughly odd people can become rather pedestrian if you spend too much time with them. Coupled with my distrust of Berendt's narrative (I'm the sort that likes a thick, definite line between my fiction and my nonfiction), I can only summon up a weak 'eh' by way of an opinion. If you like quasi-novel type travelogues with a true crime mix, it's worth a look.

Third time through...

2006-07-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

I'm back in my native state, and for the occassion I thought I'd tackle a work by its most famous native author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Well, actually the decision had more to do with the availablity of books while I was in the process of moving. For the week or so that I was in the nether world of being without official proof of residence I was also cut off from getting a library card, and thus had to rely on my own store of whatever's not currently boxed up. So, having already done the tenth-grade ritual of reading The Great Gatsby, I turned instead to Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender Is The Night. In all honesty, I was a little skeptical that I would get through it, as I'd tried to complete it a few times in the seven or so years that it's been sitting on my shelf. Apparently all I needed to get through was to be jobless. Not the best way I'd like to get through some of the classics, but it worked in this case at least.

Written nine years after Gatsby, Tender Is The Night carries many of the same themes of the earlier book, but it seems much more of a personal book. The story centers on the decline of psychatrist Dick Diver, struggling to maintain his identity in the face of his wife Nicole's schizophrenia and wealth. That Fitzgerald's wife Zelda was undergoing treatment for the same illness at the time leads many to the conclusion that the novel is autobiographical. Whether or not this is the case, Tender Is The Night has a more personal feel than Gatsby. I can't say that I liked the later novel more than Gatsby--the earlier book had as much coolly beautiful prose with a little more plot--but Tender has a wistfulness that is lovely in its own way. Fitzgerald's writing is timeless, and for those who enjoy taking their time through well-developed characters and gorgeous prose will find it one of those classics that will reward the effort.

9/11, sans the flag waving.

2006-07-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is just me, but I really wish that Farrar, Straus and Giroux would have issued the hardcover version of William Langewiesche's perceptively written American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center with the cover that eventually appeared on the paperback version. Not only is the paperback just more aestetically appealling in every way, but the gaping hole contrasting the soaring towers revealed by the depth mapping underscores the alien world Langewiesche discovers at what has become one of the most emotionally charged sections of real estate on earth. Langewiesche was the only journalist allowed full access to the World Trade Center site, chronicling the efforts to dismantle what amounts to the world's largest Jenga puzzle. But the central struggle goes far beyond the task of untangling WTC steel. Langewiesche writes of the tense encounters between civilian engineers, firefighters and police officers over the respect given (or lack of it) to the bodies of the victims. In the meantime, though, they manage to accomplish the heroic task of dismantiling the pile without losing any more lives.

Originally written for a three part series in The Atlantic Monthly, American Ground is a sensitive narrative of the uneasy future of the trade center site. The battles between the various parties and the very might needed to unbuild the site mirrors the urge to move on and rebuild versus the need to grieve. As of late, the tendency to claim the events of September 11, 2001 for various political motives or as a means of dicisiveness. Langewiesche avoids this by approaching this touchy subject with well-crafted prose that doesn't lag or devolve into patriotic inanity. The story of what happened at Ground Zero after the towers fell is just as revealing as the events during the attacks, and Langewiesche offers an intelligent perspective worth considering before we decide where we go from here.

A less-than-sunny Italian sojourn.

2006-07-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

Writing reviews of classics such as E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread is probably one of the more obvious cases of unnecessary venting over a foregone conclusion: with a classic author, it's very unlikely that anything I or any other modern commentator would have to say about the book would have any bearing on whether or not it's good literature. Published in 1905, Angels was the first of Forster's novels to be published, and while not as successful as his other works, still bears the imprint of Forster's mastery that would become more apparent in Howard's End and A Passage to India.

I came to this novel after reading and thoroughly enjoying A Room With a View. Like the later novel, Angels centers around the experiences of English tourists encountering and being transformed by the Italian countryside. But unlike the humorous, sunny experiences of Lucy Honeychurch in Room, Angels takes a decidedly darker tone. The novel opens as widow Lilia Herriton and her chaperone Miss Abbott leave for Italy, much to the relief of Lilia's in-laws. After receiving word that Lilia has decided to marry an Italian, the family considers her as good as dead. But then a letter comes that Lilia is actually dead, and she has left a baby boy behind. Determined to raise the boy in England, Philip and Harriet Herriton, along with Miss Abbott, set out for Tuscany to collect him from his father. But complications arise, and without giving away the rest of the plot, let me just say that the book is the first of Forster's indictments of Edwardian society. I didn't like Where Angels Fear to Tread very much, but I get the sense that he had to write it before he composed his other works. The same sentiments are here, just in a less refined manner.

A bona-fide star performance.

2006-06-25T17:41:00.000-07:00

Unlike the last book I found while browsing at Memorial, Lee Server's new biography of Ava Gardner was not at all difficult to get through, in spite of its 500 pages of text. Ava Gardner: "Love Is Nothing" moves along swiftly and with as much spirit and vest as its subject. Today, Gardner isn't as well known an actress as her contemporaries Grace Kelly and Katharine Hepburn, but at the height of her career (late 1940s-50s), Gardner was the femme fatale of Hollywood. Her private life often topped her on-screen persona: much of her notoriety came from her affair with the then-married Frank Sinatra, but previous marriages to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw had already set the pattern for Gardner's heady and reckless love life.

Server has a lot to work with, detailing Gardner's rise from the North Carolina backwoods to through her rise to stardom and her slow decline as she became disillusioned following failed movies and love affairs. A combination of mistreatment by her studio (MGM almost made it a point to cast her in terrible films) and insecurity about her acting skills led Gardner to develop a legendary drinking habit, even for alcohol drenched Hollywood. In time, her destructive lifestyle would leave her restlessly wandering, searching for a permanent home and a man who wouldn't break her heart. In spite of her flaws though, Gardner remained a compelling figure. Server brings this aspect of the actress alive through a writing style that echoes Gardner's often ironic tone and extensive, explicative-filled quotes from Gardner and those who knew her.

I really didn't have much familiarity with Gardner's work, only having seen her in Mogambo and Show Boat a long time ago. In a way, though, Gardner's greatest dramatic turn was in the making of her own life, with held as much melodrama and triumph as any screen saga. Like the best type of director, Server frames his star so that her character can shine through to tell her own story. And for both author and star, it is a great performance.

Lose this book.

2006-06-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

Believe me, I really wanted this book to be good. It's a clever concept, a collection of all the great books that might of been, a body of ethereal literature tantalizingly out of reach, by many of the greatest writers. So, it's ironic that The Book of Lost Books' should have the subtitle "An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read": for me, it will remain a book that's never read.

One thing about my reading: I make every effort to make it through all the books I begin. I really wanted to get through this one. And it started out fairly promising. The author, Stuart Kelly, writes in his introduction of his obsession with completeness, beginning at a very young age. Originally confined to novelizations of Dr. Who, Kelly's fixation soon extended to all aspects of literature, culminating in this volume. Beginning with Anonymous (who else?) and working through mostly western literature to postmodernist Georges Perec (d. 1982), Kelly muses over lost, never completed, never started, or otherwise not-with-us-here-today works. There are a few gems in his series of essays: the ancient Greek plays of Menander, praised by ancient authorities and thought lost for hundreds of years, were miraculously rediscovered in the twentieth century--only to reveal the great comic playwright was in actuality an overrated hack. Or the case of Camillo Querno, whose (mercifully) lost epic The Alexias was deemed so awful by Pope Leo X that Querno was awarded the post of poet laureate on the basis of his chutzpah in claiming authorship of such trash than from any artistic merit.

Unfortunately, such good moments are buried in dense, uninteresting verbiage that quickly becomes tedious. I pressed on into the account of Gottfried Vilhelm von Leibniz's Universal Encyclopedia before Kelly's pontificating just became too much. For those serious readers (and I mean those who read their Euripides in the original Greek), Kelly's book might hold their interest; for those not interested in dense, speculative prose, leave The Book of Lost Books on the shelf.

An entertaining murder romp from inside the Beltway.

2006-06-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

I hadn't planned on reading this book. I occasionally succumb to the 'gee, this looks interesting' impulse, drawn to a book because of its cover or the particular mood I'm in. In this case, I was looking for a copy of Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel Thank You For Smoking, partly because I'd heard good things about it, but mostly because I'm too cheap to go see the movie. Alas, another cheapsake had the same idea and had absconded with Memorial's only available copy. So, I instead grabbed the next book on the shelf: No Way to Treat a First Lady, Buckley's satire on Washington life and its legal tangles.

Part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, Buckley's quickly paced plot centers on the mysterious death of a first term, war-hero president following a late-night 'consultation' with a well-known Hollywood actress and party donor in the Lincoln Bedroom. When the president is found dead in his wife's bed the next morning with a sizeable imprint from a Paul Revere silver spittoon on his forehead, suspicion naturally falls on his publicly despised and headstrong first lady, Beth MacMann. Lady Bethmac (as she is fondly referred to in the press) turns to the only lawyer who will be willing to go to the lowest depths to keep her from a lethal injection: Boyce "Shameless" Baylor. That Baylor also happens to be the man Lady Beth dumped to marry War God is only the first of many twists.

As a former speechwriter for Bush 41 and possessor of a tony conservative pedigree, Buckley brings insider savvyness and a never-ending dose of cynicism to the inner malfunctionings of Washington. A few well-known media personalities pop up, and it's likely that some of the fictional characters will bring to mind flesh-and-blood equivalents. Much like Carl Hiassen's novels, Buckely's line between fiction and reality is blurred enough to make No Way to Treat a First Lady both outlandishly funny and wryly believable.

Out of the closet.

2006-06-15T18:05:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

For the past few months, I have been an abject, utterly devoted, borderline-obsessive fan of Sex and the City. In fact, the past few minutes between me writing that sentence and creating the link to the show was spent aimlessly browsing through the fashion shots on the official site. Every evening at 10 o'clock finds me devotedly tuned in to the WB to see the criminally censored, yet still appealing re-re-runs of episodes that I've already essentially committed to memory. Of course, when faced with such an inexplicable possession, there's really only one course of action to take:

It must be analyzed to death.

Which brings me to the topic(s) of today's post. I mined the library resources I had available to me, and spent the last week and a half reading. I started with Candace Bushnell's original book of the same title. I'd heard mixed reactions from fans of the show, so I knew not to expect the same stories, or even the same characters. Still, Bushnell's sharp, cynical prose takes some adjusting to, as does her rapid changes of setting and mood. Some of the storylines from the earliest part of the first season are here (modelizers, the Bone and Carrie's first encounter with Mr. Big are among them), but those looking for the strong friendships between the leads in the series are likely to be disappointed. But one thing that I liked about Bushnell's original columns over the series is the use of multiple perspectives: it's not all single people, and we hear as much from the toxic bachelors as we do the women who are scheming to have their revenge on them.

Amy Sohn's Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, as one might guess by the title, is meant to be the official fan book for the show. Packed with pictures, brief synopses of each episode, the obligatory quiz, it has the flashy, magazine type of layout meant for periodic skimming rather than long, readable text. Probably the most interesting is the interviews of the individual cast members as to how they came to the show and the perspectives they bring to their characters. I was a little surprised that fashion didn't play a larger role in the book--each character gets a double page spread, and designers' names are dropped everywhere, but on the whole, the focus is on the writing, which is where it should be.

But, if we want to forego the frou frou and lend an air of academic respectability to all this, there's Kim Akass' and Janet McCabe's collection Reading Sex and the City. Consisting of essays primarily focusing on the feminist ramifications of the show, the works also discuss the fetishization of Manolo Blahniks and the elusive nature of the show's New York fantasy. Reading Sex and the City was originally published in Britian, and most of the writers are English, so there's some references that don't register for Americans. For the casual fan or even diehards, it's a skippable title. But the points raised by some of the less dense essays bring a different kind of perspective for those who have to have everything footnoted in life (not that I know anyone like that).

Whatever the opinions on the show (and I was entirely skeptical about it before I chanced on a few reruns), Sex and the City is likely going to remain a subject of study, at least in terms of feminist studies. Consumerism, the changing role of the single woman, the discussion of social taboos--there's a lot to get through, and a lot yet for me to analyze.

Growing up, wallflower-style.

2006-06-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

...Then, Patrick pointed at me, and said something to Bob.
"He's something, isn't he?"
Bob nodded his head. Patrick then said something I don't think I'll ever forget.
"He's a wallflower...You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand."

Charlie has already seen a lot in his life, and he's only about to begin his freshman year of high school. In a series of letters to an unnamed friend, Charlie records an angst-filled year of love, betrayal and becoming infinite. Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower could succumb under the weight of all that it tackles: teen suicide, molestation, forbidden love and nasty acid trips--and that's all within the first third of the book. But somehow it all seems to work.

This is due to most Chbosky's believable characters: unlike many high school dramas which try to pigeonhole the players into preconceived types. They may make wrong decisions, but that doesn't immediately set them on an inevitable course that other authors might resort to. In a nutshell, that is really what the story is about: even though wrong decisions might be made, there's always an undercurrent of hope running through the narrative. Observing all this is Charlie, in whom all the characters tend to confide their fears, hopes and frustrations with their own lives. Ironically, Charlie's desire to do right by his friends and remain on the sidelines nearly costs him his own chance at living.

I found this book after noticing that it often came up as a title that has been challenged. True, it deals with some sensitive topics and does contain some objectionable language. But after reading Wallflower, I'm rather at a loss to say why it comes under attack. While one would hope that all teens wouldn't have to face some of the situations present in the book, the reality is that many can relate to similar problems. At the close of the book, the story isn't so much about the ordeals the characters have gone through, but about how they've lived and grown up in the process. It's a conclusion full of hope, and you can't help but feel that in the end, the kids will turn out just fine.

And you think you work with divas.

2006-06-09T16:35:00.000-07:00

You have to hand it to Joe Volpe. Releasing a memoir of his tenure as head of the Metropolitan Opera could put one in a ticklish situation; doing it before he actually steps down (his last official day is in July) could be construed as downright foolish. Yet if there is one underlying theme that comes out of The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera, it is the gutsiness necessary with successfully running the nation's largest (and some would say premier) performing arts organization.

Opera exists for conflict, and Volpe's 43-year career at the Met certainly saw its fair share: the struggle to get the new Met house built, the 1980 labor strike that saw part of the season canceled, and, most famously, Volpe's dismissal of soprano Kathleen Battle. Volpe (with co-author Charles Michener) frankly describes the twists and turns of keeping the pressure-cooker that is the Met functioning and even thriving. That Volpe ended up as the head of the company is in itself due to a twist of fate. As a carpenter working on sets for a production of Turandot at the old Met, Volpe wasn't even interested in opera until he happened to hear Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli rehearsing the trial scene in Act 2. Hooked, he eventually worked his way up the Met ranks, eventually rising to the rank of general manager in 1990.

Volpe's reign has not been without controversy, and occasionally it seems like Volpe is directly defending himself from his critics, especially when the topics of the administration and management of Lincoln Center arises. Nor do some familiar faces from the Met survive Volpe's critique: snobbish administrators, clueless designers and even long-time music director James Levine get sometimes brutal commentary. Yet Volpe knows where to give credit as well, singling out Levine for the artistic strength of the company, and various board members and donors for keeping the Met afloat through tough financial times.

The Toughest Show is a friendly read for those without a background in music or opera, and contains enough Met history to acclimate the unfamiliar with the company's rich and occasionally stormy history. Those already acquainted with the Met will appreciate the generous use of photos and the chance to understand the lives of the people working behind the gold curtain.

A life in full, c. 1785

2006-06-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

I recall seeing someone with this book when it first came out waaaay back in 1998, but as all the readers I know who typically read this sort of bio deny ever having laid eyes on the book, it is possible that I've been hallucinating about this book for the past eight years. Maybe.

But now I'm quite glad that I happened upon Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. A 200-year dead member of the British aristocracy may seem an odd choice for a modern biography, but Georgiana was a surprisingly modern figure, even for our time. Foreman follows her subject from her marriage at the age of 17 to her death in 1806, at a time when the world of British politics was as much about backroom deals, social backstabbing and sexual intrigue as it was about the proceedings in the House of Commons. At the very center of all this upheaval (and some contemporaries would say the cause of part of it) was Georgiana. She was constantly in the eye of the public, not the least for her controversial manipulations of the Whig party and her savvy use of fashion and celebrity to influence popular opinion. Yet behind her public persona was a woman who suffered from an unending feeling of inadequacy, resulting in a gambling addiction (she racked up debts of $6,000,000), the loss of an illegitimate daughter, and the reliance on a bizarre menage a trois to sustain the appearance of her marriage.

Portions of the book dedicated to the finer points of Whig and British politics are a bit of a slog for the uninitiated, but Foreman recreates the personalities and atmosphere of this world so well that Georgiana sometimes reads like a novel. With revolution, sex and politics the norm in her life, it isn't surprising that many of Georgiana's letters were censored by her prudish Victorian descendents. Yet enough of this remarkable woman's personality comes through to reveal her zeal for life, centuries after it ended.

06.06.06: The Beginning

2006-06-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

No, the Rapture didn't happen, planes did not fall out of the sky, nor did the sun explode. But the day hasn't been an entire bust. On this auspicious date, I'm finally undertaking a project that I've been kicking around for the past few months: blogging about the books I've read. I don't claim to be an expert on much of anything, but as a recently minted (albeit unemployed) librarian, the need to proclaim the virtues or failings of my recent reading is in my blood. Hence this blog. It will chronicle my thoughts, opinions, adulations, pet peeves, rants, and other emotions triggered by my recent reads. It may be coherent. There may be links to other book-related sites or stories, and perhaps commentary on other cultural events that catch my interest. One thing is certain: it will evolve, as I'm fairly new to the blogging world and will have to learn by doing. Mostly, A Reader's Year is for my own benefit: a record of what I've read recently and what I thought of it.

A note on what I read: pretty much whatever strikes my fancy. I tend most towards nonfiction: history, memoirs/biographies, works on social topics, books on quirky subjects. Whatever. If I were stuck to reading only books on a particular topic for an extended period of time, I would start crawling up the walls. I'm also interested in literary fiction, mysteries (of the British, civilized murder sort), art books, women's studies, cultural studies, graphic novels, and young adult books. I have a strange desire to read as many of the Penguin classics as I can before I expire. So, in a nutshell, I read random books. What may capture my interest one week might be old news the next.