Plane reading (on and off the plane)

Over the last week or so, including on my first-ever trip to San Francisco (whoo!) to visit my BFF (whoo!) I read:

Black Ships - Jo Graham
The Orchid House - Lucinda Riley
The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
Beautiful Darkness - Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

Gah

The Island House
A Death in the Small Hours
What Darkness Brings
Gone Girl

I read books, I swear...

Not that it seems like it; according to this I haven't read any books between May 8 and May 19 - but I have!

It's just that one of them I can't talk about, and then I'm in the middle of a couple of them so no single one gets finished.

But I did finish (and start) In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters. It was pretty good, especially for YA, I think - there were some "magical" elements, but also a lot about WWI and the Spanish Flu, and I thought the author did a nice job of incorporating her research and really setting the scene nicely. The story itself wasn't all that fascinating. An intriguing main character, and then some (not so) mysterious shenanigans.

Basically, she's the daughter of a man arrested for aiding draft dodgers and flees from Portland to her aunt in San Diego, where her childhood best friend / blossoming first love lived before he enlisted. Nobody's heard anything from him, then they hear he's dead, then he starts haunting her (after in a fit of rage at the desperation and hopelessness of life she goes and gets herself electrocuted) and it turns out things are not what they seem. Except...they kind of are. While I appreciated that in the end we didn't get the happy ending I thought was coming, the "twist" at the end wasn't much of one...unless the audience is supposed to spend the whole book yelling at the protagonist, "open your eyes, girlie!!" (I dunno, girlie seems period-appropriate). But I really did like Mary Shelley Black as the heroine - she loves science (and it's believable, not totally anachronistic, and not overly feisty) and does the right thing even when it's hard and/or dangerous.

Could be the start of a series - at least, MSB seemed way too well drawn, but also with hints at future developments, for a one-off. Not that a character in a non-series book couldn't or wouldn't be well-drawn, there's just something about it that feels like the author is setting her up for future escapades.

One major problem, though - the ghost non-sex sex scene was just LUDICROUS. I mean, seriously. So silly. And yet still a million times less stupid / hotter than the random 10-seconds-of-dry-humping orgasm in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, so that's something.

And they day before I finished a really good - although not as excellent as I had hoped - book, which I can't talk about because it was an advance copy I got my hands on.

Meh

So, Kiana Davenport's Shark Dialogues is one of my favorite books; when I saw another by her on the New Books shelf at the BPL a while ago, I was really excited. But...eh.  The Spy Lover has a fascinating premise, potentially really interesting characters, and a hell of a tear-jerker end. But the writing is kind of terrible. I don't know what happened. I would never, in a million years, have pegged this as one of Davenport's if I couldn't see the cover.
More later, gotta run and return it.

Groundwork

After getting into an Ayn Rand-inspired argument at the bar a while ago, I decided I didn't know/remember enough about Rand and her works to win a fight well. So I recently read Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (OUP, 2009). Not sure I agree with the NYT quote on the cover, "groundbreaking," (I need to dig up the review and get the context) but certainly super easy reading and mildly interesting. It's the first Rand biography I've read, obviously, but it didn't feel like there was anything that new here. But probably I just don't know enough about what was already out there. It was also interesting reading something written more or less pre-Tea Party movement (it's not even mentioned); I feel like it might be a much longer, if not very different, book if she wrote or revised it today.

In several cases, throughout the book and especially in describing Rand's legacy, Burns does not give her readers adequate signposts as to time - years and or relative passage of time. In other instances she talks about famous "disciples" (my skepticism, not her words) of Rand's who later had prominent positions. The problem is, if you're not - as I am not - well-acquainted with leading conservatives and/or somewhat recent political history, the names don't automatically indicate the time period. Especially with all the 80s and early 90s stuff, it's too recent for me to have learned much about it in school, as history, but I was too young to really remember it (or to have been paying attention).

I love Boston!!!

Monday, the 2013 Boston Marathon, started out so wonderfully. It was a gorgeous day, and I was celebrating the amazing achievements of a lot of incredible athletes, professional and amateur, with a group of dear friends by the finish line. After everything went bad, I was still impressed, even in all the chaos, with how wonderfully people responded. But I've been shaken, and haven't read that much. And now I am glued to the TV, huddled up in the living room with my roommates, watching the manhunt unfold for the second of the two suspects. Basically, I don't have much to say.

I tried reading really light books, hoping for some escape. One was The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe, which was set in Boston (and on the Harvard campus) in 1915. It was fine, nothing special. Young woman has visions and/or dreams, there are flashbacks (in the book) to the sinking of the Titanic and China a generation before that; then it gets to the Lusitania, and I was pretty much checked out. Too many things exploding.

Next came Enchanting Lily by Anjali Banerjee which is about a cat that brings happiness to people's lives in a charming little island town in the Pacific Northwest. TOTAL fluff, but I had been saving it for a day when I really just needed to shut my brain off. Didn't really work.

Pretty good, and grew on me!

So, this is the thing, I think, about a GOOD book club - it makes you appreciate the book even more than you would have just reading it. For example, I read All This Talk of Love, by Christopher Castellani for the most recent Grub Street book club. I liked the story, and the writing, and over all was feeling positive about the book, although I wouldn't have said I really loved it, or that I thought it was a masterful literary work. I'm not sure about the latter, still, and probably it's not, but I also think it's a much better book, from a writing & "construction" standpoint, than I at first gave it credit for being. And that's because of the discussion we had at Grub Street. When I read it, I read it fast, needing to read it over a couple of days to finish it in time. I wasn't necessarily thinking about the nuances. But I've always found that I figure out the most, for myself, while talking - and, yes, sometimes arguing - with other people about a topic. This was no exception; hearing what other people thought, even if I disagreed with them, let me to consider new issues and questions that I hadn't in my initial read-through.

It was also interesting to find out more about the book's context; I read it as a stand-alone, but it's actually the third book in a trilogy, so hearing about how the author balanced those aspects as he wrote, and revised, was interesting. I really do enjoy these Grub Street book clubs; it's just great to be able to talk abut the book as a work of art (the tenses, the set-up and structure, etc.) and not just as a story. And getting to hear from the authors themselves, at the end of the session, is great.

Right, so, the book... Basically, it's about an Italian-American family (parents who emigrated in the mid-20th century, their first-generation kids, and, to a much lesser extent, the second-gen grandkids) in Delaware (Delaware? Or PA?), all haunted, in one way or the other, by the suicide of the oldest son decades ago, when he was a teenager. The mother is getting older, and the daughter wants to organize a family trip back to the old country; mom objects, and disaffected son supports her.

It's a spot-on protrayal of Italian-American families, in many ways (not surprisingly, since it's the background the author comes from), but it's even better just at showing FAMILIES. How they can be messed up and wonderful, and hateful and loving, and confused and confident, all at the same time. The author also did a great job of having characters who are both unappealing and understandable, or who do horrid things but aren't horrid people. So, basically, like real people.

Yeah - the more I think about it, the more I like it.

I forgot

I also read, fairly recently, The Winter Sea, by Susanna Kearsley. It was okay. Super predictable, but lovely scenery (Scotland) and one of those fun, back-and-forths between the past (first decade of the 18th century) and "present." Plus, the main character - heroine, really - is a novelist, but a writer of historical fiction, so it's always fun to hear about someone doing research, even if it's just barely mentioned. And who doesn't love a good castle? Very light, rather fluffy, but totally absorbing - I basically read it in two nights, losing sleep, much to my shame, in the interests of getting to the first kiss - but sometimes a little cheese hits the spot. Wine would have gone nicely with this book too...

The writing wasn't anything really special, but it wasn't bad - better, I think, than probably many books in the historical romance-mystery genre, although maybe I'm just being a snob there. I'd read others by her, anyways, if they weren't apparently super popular at every library I have access to; I actually ended up with Winter Sea when i couldn't get my hands another book by Kearsley that I had heard about and that sounded fun.

Anyhow, don't really remember when I read it. Loaned it to T, so we'll see if she enjoys it...

Randoms

Today I read, in its entirety, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. It was fine. Mostly I just had to power through it because I remembered this morning that I had signed up for a book club on it tomorrow evening... The story, about a young woman in the late thirties in New York, was interesting, and the main character and her friend were engaging. Interestingly, the male characters, in this book written by a man, all come across as pretty two dimensional. It's clear the author has a real interest in the culture (literature, art, and music) of the time, and took an interest in working it into the book in a significant but not obtrusive way. He never really explains enough about the protagonist's background, though, to account for her knowledge of the same. At one point near the end of the book a character explicitly says what much of the rest of the tale has been saying, that the main character, a bright, thoughtful, intellectually curious and informed young woman, is unusual in not being a drudge or housewife but pursuing a career instead. It's true, but I'm not sure that the life the author has mapped out for her can come about just through force of character and personality - I wanted to know, at least a little, or even just have acknowledged, how the daughter of a singe, Russian immigrant father is so familiar with some of the cultural aspects she translates into a better life...

The writing was quite good, though; there were some fantastic lines, and overall it was a very clean, bright, sharp prose, if not particularly lean.

I also finished Susan Hill's The Betrayal of Trust, which I read over the weekend. I do love a good English mystery, and this was one; well-written, anyway, for sure, and a decent plot although I did start too feel like there were too many story lines that were twisting around one another but not actually tying together. The "who dunnit" part was also pretty obvious. I picked it up at the Overlook Press table at the AWP on the recommendation of the two guys that were working there, and they said it was their favorite in the series. I am wondering if maybe the author is really just writing a long series about one man, and the people around him, and he just happens to be a policeman who solves crimes...

Grabbed a bunch of books at their table, though, because the guys were friendly and helpful, and the books seemed interesting and for the most part I really liked the covers. This is the first one I've read, and while I do think there were some sad copy-editing mistakes (including one on the back cover - that must EAT at them), I have high hopes.

Speaking of expectations AND English policemen who solve mysteries in series just as much concerned with their personal lives, last weekend I read Elizabeth George's The Edge of Nowhere. Unlike her other books - and what I thought I was picking up from the library - this was not an Inspector Lynley mystery. It was, I guess, a mystery of sorts, but it's also a somewhat paranormal teen romance adventure story? The story is set in the Pacific Northwest, and George does a fantastic job of describing the setting, but she doesn't know how to replicate teenagers' words. I may still read the next ones in teh series whenever they come out, but I hope she gets back to Lynley - and Havers!

Not sure how I feel about this...

On one hand, I totally want to go wander around in this bookstore and find random, awesome stuff. But at the same time, there's something that makes me slightly uneasy about the way the article, at least, makes it seem like the books here really are just stuff - cool to look at and think about, but in the same way that, say, old postcards (or those vernacular photographs from the Ransom Riggs book!), or any kind of collectible - especially offbeat ones - might be. I mean, I absolutely agree that with some books, part of their value is as an object: not necessarily what they're worth, but the way they look/feel/smell/make you feel or make you think of something. Books aren't just the stories inside them. But those matter too... Dunno. I also don't really think I buy, at least as it's laid out here, the Times' editorializing that this kind of place/model "may just be publishing's great new hope."

An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop

A tiny shop in Toronto, specializing in the arcane and the absurd, may just be publishing's great new hope.

Each of these things is not like the other...

Friday night (I think?) I finished Miss Me When I'm Gone, by Emily Arsenault (2011). I'm not sure why I grabbed this particular book from the BPL, but I think it was probably because the author bio on the back says that she lives in Shelburne Falls. And I feel like maybe she has some connection to UMass Amherst or possibly to Harvard Extension. But the more I think about it, the more I think that even if I didn't specifically go looking for this book at the library whenever I got it (late February?), I've had it on my radar for a while.

Anyhow, it was okay. Very predictable, and the writing wasn't anything special, but the story was fine and the main characters - one alive, one dead - were strong. Basically, a young pregnant woman is asked to assemble, evaluate, and possibly edit her recently deceased friend's notes for a planned book. The late friend had recently published a post-divorce memoir structured around her travels through the land of country music, and the songs of female stars, and this new book was supposed to take off from the work of male country stars. Except it becomes clear to the pregnant, remaining friend that her late friend was getting into some shady territory while looking into the murder of the latter's mother and who her father AND who the killer might have been. It's clearer in the book, don't worry. It was...yeah, okay.

And indirectly it made me more interested in learning about early country (women) stars. And reminded me to actually go and download songs from the show "Nashville" instead of always meaning to and then forgetting. Excited to listen to those on my ipod on the way in to work tomorrow!

Finished it Friday night, I think, after a grand evening catching up with C (this blog's first and possibly only reader - hi!!!). Then Saturday I was off to the AWP Bookfair (at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference). Saw C again (yay!) and got lots of hopefully-good books (yay!). Then last night I started Amada Coplin's The Orchardist (2012).

Wait, totally wrong. Finished Miss Me When I'm Gone on Thursday, because I brought it with me on Friday when I met up with C in Back Bay, thinking I'd return it to the library, but didn't. And then Saturday I didn't even bother since I didn't want any extra weight in my bag, or to waste any space I could use for new books. So I must have started The Orchardist on Friday night, after dinner/drinks...yeah, that makes more sense. Because I remember reading the first few pages in bed and thinking I wished I had read them before I saw C because we could have talked about the style issues.

Specifically, the way things were really over-wrought at first. Sort of like Swamplandia, the beginning of The Orchardist felt a lot like you had a really good, and really into descriptions writer, but one who wasn't disciplined enough to weed out. Even if everything is good, you can't use everything, and in the opening pages of the book Coplin just had too much. But she got over it quickly, and I really liked the rest of the book. It was kind of lyrical, although I hate to use that term, but there were just some lovely, lovely lines. At first she beat you over the head with lovely line after lovely line - showing off, maybe, or just too attached to each "moment" to cut it out/ - but once she hit her stride she balanced regular prose with the more complex passages, and added in an interesting story and really strong characters to boot.

Set in turn-of-the-century Washington state, the story follows a fairly reclusive man who lives in a secluded orchard where one fall some pregnant teens appear, emotionally if not actually half feral and on the run from...well, I guess I shouldn't say exactly who, but a bad man. Although, obviously. That's a terrible summary, but it's an interesting story, really well told, with characters who are at once familiar and original, and some breathtaking descriptions of the natural world (and DAMN, is the Pacific Northwest in those days some scenery to work with).

I could probably say a lot more about it - I really liked it, I think, in the end - but I am very tired.

I swear, I haven't given up on reading

It's just that I'm part-way through a whole bunch of books, so actually finishing one isn't happening very quickly.

I did finally finish one last night, though - Mary Malloy's Devil on the Deep Blue Sea: the Notorious Career of Captain Samuel Hill of Boston (2006). I read this one because a while ago I read and enjoyed a semi-historical mystery novel that she had written. And this one, a non-fiction book about a ship captain whose career spanned the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was really good. At least, it was interesting, and written in an extremely accessible and readable way. But, my GOD, Malloy was poorly served by her publishers. Or maybe it was her fault, but the book was terribly edited. One of the msot egregious problems was that clearly her original manuscript was written in an old version of Word or something, and lots of words at the end of lines were broken off. Then when the text was typeset, you had lines like "and then someone did a lazy job of ed-iting and didn't catch huge, glar-ing mistakes." Okay, in fairness, I think there was ever only one word break in a line, but still. How did nobody catch that and fix it? It happened all throughout the book. There were a lot of random grammar and spelling mistakes that just frustrated me so much, because the book deserved better.

And since I'm mostly writing this because I'm procrastinating working on the big homework assignment I have do, I am just going to copy the book description:

"Had he not been a madman, Captain Samuel Hill would likely be remembered as one of the great maritime adventurers of the early nineteenth century. He was the first American to live in Japan, and was in the Columbia River basin at the same time as Lewis & Clark. He rescued men held captive by Indians and pirates, met King Kamehameha of Hawaii and the missionaries who arrived soon after the King's death, was captured as a privateer during the War of 1812, witnessed firsthand the events of the Chilean Revolution, and wrote about all this persuasively. He was also a rapist and murderer. In all his contradictions and complexities, Samuel Hill represented the fledgling United States during its first wave of expansion. At home he appeared civilized and sensible, but as he sailed into the Pacific Ocean the mask slipped away to reveal the recklessness, ambition, and violence that propelled the United States from coast to coast and around the world."

I mean, SOUNDS interesting, right? It was good. I just think it could have been better.

Good and Okay

It was a long week, so I went home to play in the snow (awesome snowshoe hike!) and veg out before a few long (but awesome) weeks to come. I also wanted a break from serious reading so I brought with me a book that I had grabbed on impulse last time I was at the BPL, Pauline A. Chen's The Red Chamber. It was more substantive than I was expecting, and/but I really enjoyed it. The re-imagining of a classic (apparently) Chinese story, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the book traces the lives of three women of the aristocratic (I...think? Kind of? Chinese social hierarchies confuse me; upper classes, in any case) Jia family in eighteenth-century Beijing. The three main characters are finely drawn, but I appreciated that other characters were multi-dimensional and nicely fleshed out as well.

 Chen also did a good job of setting the scene, and making the world the women live in, while obviously very far from my own experience, real and not overly, falsely exotic. Part of the reason I wasn't expecting much was that one of the blurbs on the back was from Arthur Golden, the Memoirs of a Geisha guy; I don't love that book, and I don't get why it was so popular, unless people were responding to the selling virgins / selling sex titillation aspect. That's probably unfair. I'm sure it was exhaustively researched and God knows he did love a setting-detail. I never thought there was much emotional depth, though - unlike Julie Otsuka's Buddha in the Attic, which I loved. Otsuka also wrote a blurb for this book, and that was what instantly decided me on checking it out. Interestingly, I probably also would have if I had read the acknowledgments and seen the should out to Leslie Levine (editor at Knopf / Random House), since I have yet, I think, to read a novel in which she participated in the production of, that I wasn't impressed with (full disclosure, there's something of a slim professional relationship there). I think Levine worked on Buddha in the Attic, too...

After Red Chamber I went back to Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to finish it, since I had a book club meeting centered on it last night. It is...okay? Honestly, I think it's a really, really long short story. But a great short story, probably. The title character is a young war hero home from Iraq after a massively publicized firefight with Iraqi insurgents, being trotted around the U.S. with his squad (er, or whatever - team? I'm not a military expert) for a publicity tour culminating in their appearance at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game. We went back and forth about whether this was a book about sports or war, in the words of one of the book club organizers; I would say neither. It's about a young many, naive in many ways, who's never quite been fully integrated (mentally/emotionally) into the world around him who's now definitely somewhat adrift in a couple worlds that don't really make sense to him. And about figuring out who he is and what he wants - although in a book that takes place in a day, obviously there are no clear answers to be had. Billy, though, is a really appealing and believable character, and very well delineated. His fellow "Bravo squad" members, while never as fully drawn (the whole book is Billy's thoughts), are similarly human, with distinct personalities and backgrounds. Like the character of Billy, Fountain did an excellent job with the relationship of the team, and its one of the strengths of the book. Billy's sisters, too, and his relationship with them, feel very real, although his parents are surprisingly more caricature-like.

The book is rocky, though. The beginning is especially tough to get through, with a story that maybe is meant to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness-y, but just feels over-enthusiastic and under-edited. Fountain also does this thing where he has pieces of words trailing across an otherwise blank page to indicate the flashes of conversations that are getting through to our dazed (hungover and unsure of the world around him) hero. It gets the point across, I suppose, but it feels lazy or like something a writing class student would come up with and find very clever...and then do over and over again. I read the book, as I try generally to do, without knowing anything about the author, and I have to say, I wasn't surprised to find out afterwards that this was a first novel. Fountain is definitely a talented writer - strong characters and some really vivid, evocative descriptive lines - but the book felt like it needed to be edited way the hell down. Maybe not to short story length, but it should have been a lot shorter. In particular, it was one of those situations where the author would make a point really, really well with one or two passages, but then go on to make the same point, again and again, with several more "okay" passages. Less would definitely be more here.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that apparently Billy manages to, in a few moments in a hidden corner, get a cheerleader off merely by rubbing his pelvis into hers. Sure. I am, however, pleased that V, my book club-buddy, also had to go back and re-read that passage to see if she had missed something. I am also amused that the only guy at book club totally thought that was a perfectly reasonable scenario, lol.

So, overall...it was good, but not great. I'd have loved to have gotten my hands on it while it was still being edited, though. A lot of decent points about America and our war machine were made, although often made not subtly at all and repeatedly. Billy, again (I can't say it enough), was a fantastic and fantastically handled character. And the end was a lot better than the beginning. Maybe I just never got over the beginning. In any case, I'm still talking about it and mulling it over, so that's good (and V and I kept talking about it at the next bar after we bailed on the book club after it had melted down into a general discussion of...something).

Siena,

and the Palio, is such a rich subject. And I feel like Anne Fortier's Juliet gave me everything I didn't get from the other Siena/Palio book I read a while ago, Daughter of Siena (Marina Fiorata) [also, HOLLER, system worked, I had no idea what that book was and then found it in the blog just now]. This was more of a Pink Carnation or Mary Malloy type book, with the action in the present and the (related) action in the past being interwoven together. And a kind of mystery. Not that Malloy and Lauren Willig have a monopoly on the style, it's just what I think of.

Anyhow, I really liked Juliet, as I said the other day. I had been getting another book from Lamont, and I saw Juliet down the shelf a couple books, and the spine was appealing. So I read the first page - an epigraph, as it happened - and liked THAT, so I checked it out. Finally got around to reading it during the blizzard weekend, wanting something lighter after I had been reading something heavier, but it was better than just a palate cleanser.

Basically a young American woman who is obsessed with Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet ends up in modern-day Siena where she finds out she's a descendant (and namesake) of the original inspiration for Juliet. She also needs to find the artifacts relating to the story, and the whole story, that were a part of her parents' mysterious deaths when she was a young child. And there's a hot Italian man, and lots of clothes and prosecco and gelatto. Lots of history, too, but handled well - respectfully (and hopefully responsibly/accurately, although it's NOT my period, so it could all be totally wrong for all I know) and lightly, so it's everywhere, but not overwhelming or artificial. Lots of my favorite things in any case.

A lot of it is predictable, especially the development of the "relationship" between our Juliet and the leading man, but still entertaining and the main character, while a bit obvious, is relatable and very engaging. The setting (both the city and the temporal setting too, when in the past) is handled quite well, and the worlds feel real while you're in them. Ugh, except now I really want to go to Siena!!!

Hours of my life I don't grudge!

Over the weekend I read and really enjoyed Anne Fortier's Juliet. More later, running to go celebrate V's first day at a new, awesome job!!!

Hours of my life I will never get back...

At least it wasn't as bad as the movie/trainwreck Snow White and the Huntsman (I almost just typed "Snotwhite" - wouldn't have been totally wrong)?

So, after an aborted attempt at reading The Apothecary's House by Adrian Mathews on Saturday night, I finally finished all 534 grueling pages of it over Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday nights. I think. Now I don't remember when I started it. But I DO remember that every night I'd get into bed and be like "okay, back to the grindstone" and not "yay, back to the wonderful, entrancing story and the finely-limned characters who populate the vivid world in which it's set!" Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Basically, the story is about a young(ish) woman (maybe?) in the Netherlands who works for a group that evaluates claims to artwork stolen by Nazis, and how she gets deeply involved with one painting (and one of its claimees). Then there's also this whole thing where someone's out to get her, and presumably the painting, because of it's freaking mysterious alchemical significance. It's not that any one strand of the story was so terrible or unrealistic, but all together they were way to much. Pick one, Mathews.

The characters were a problem, as well. The two primary supporting characters are probably the best. You get a good sense of who they are, and the author balances their humorous value with more serious sides. The main character, though, is kind of an idiot. While she admits to being something of a b*tch at the end of the book, my issue with her was not that, but that she was totally self-absorbed and really dumb. She wrote people off that she shouldn't have (like the awesome guy she eventually realizes the worth of about 300 pages after you know he's going to be the best thing that ever happened to her), alienated some friends and used others, and constantly got herself into bad situations that she should have seen coming, in most cases, and could have avoided, in virtually all.

I've read other books set in the Netherlands, but it's still unfamiliar enough terrain to me that I think I could have really enjoyed the setting, and the location is very important to the story, but Amsterdam doesn't really come to life here. Also, maybe this is a Dutch thing, or maybe it's some American pc/squeamishness on my part, but I was really, really uncomfortable with the way race was handled/written in the book. At first I thought maybe it was a translation issue, when the main character's friend kept being referred to as "the black girl" over and over again. She has a name, you can use it. Nobody else is referred to as "the white girl/man/etc." But then Mathews started referring repeatedly to another character as "the black." Oh my God. Just call him the Negro and have done with it.

Honestly, even beyond it just making me kind of uncomfortable, it's lazy writing. If the only way you can identify a character is by his or her race, then maybe you need to work a little harder at making him or her memorable. Or even mildly interesting. OR USE HIS OR HER NAME. At one point, when discussing the effect the man had had on another (white) man, Mathews say "the black had stifled him [guy #2]." CAMERON. CAMERON had stifled him. Or "He had stifled X."

Dumb. So glad I'm done with this book. I don't remember ever hearing/thinking about this book, so I'm wondering if I just grabbed it off the shelf at the library because the spine looked cool / the title sounded promising. If that's the case...FAIL.

Orgies

Of reading, obviously.

I plowed through a ton of books this week/end, at least that's what it feels like.

Started Justice Sotomayor's memoir, but I was taking cold medicine for most of the last week, so I didn't want to really get into it, excited as I was to get my hands on it. So more on that later, when I really read it.

What I DID read, and is perfect for when you're not feeling great and spending a lot of time curled up in bed, was the latest Agent Pendergast book, Two Graves. It's pretty much what you'd expect - actually, it's exactly what you'd expect - but that's just fine - it's what I wanted. I will say, I give Preston & Child credit for not recapping the first two books in the trilogy (to say nothing of the entire Pendergast series), and basically just jumping into this particular story. It was schlocky, belief-stretching fun, although way over the top, of course. But who doesn't love when a Nazi hive gets blown up?

After Two Graves I continued on in the same vein with The Third Gate, by half of the same duo, in this case Lincoln Child. It was...fine? It's set at an Egyptian archaeological dig site, so maybe I was extra harsh, given my childhood love for the subject, but I felt like there were a lot of flaws. like the Preston & Child books, a LOT was crammed in - lots of different plot strands, random comments about cars and guns and machines that are maybe boy-brain-action-porn, but weren't doing it for me, and waaaay too much description of the man-made physical setting. Now, about that last maybe part of that is how I read. I generally don't "see" what's being described in my mind's eye, at least not always at the level of detail given, so when you go on and on about how the joists of a particular platform are connected, I get bored. But I think most people would have in this case.

The biggest problem was the huge twist at the end, or at least what I suppose was meant to be a huge twist, was super obvious and I saw it coming right away. Then again, I saw it coming because of clues in the text, so maybe we were supposed to get it, and then saying "you idiots! Don't you see?" to the characters would have ramped up the tension. But instead I just said "you idiots" and then was mildly annoyed when the revelation hit them, because I had been waiting for so long.

The end of the book, too, just seemed very abrupt and unsatisfying. Well, not unsatisfying, because I didn't want anything more, but not satisfying either.

Finished that yesterday, Saturday late afternoon, then started a book called The Apothecary's House (Adrian Mathews) - fine, about art stolen by the Nazis, but it was sloooooow going, so I gave it up, since I started it around 11 p.m. (stayed in last night, long story), and wanted something fast and easy.

So then I flew through another book with NO twist (although, again, when it's that obvious, is it even meant to be a twist?) and a really abrupt and in this case very unsatisfying ending, The Poison Diaries by Maryrose Wood (and inspired by, or something, the work of the Duchess of Northumberland). It's a slim YA book about a girl in eighteenth century England whose father is an herbalist who keeps a locked garden of poisonous plants and about a mysterious young man (heh, I feel cheesy just writing that, but there's no other way) - who's also hot, obviously - who comes to live with them. The main character, even the two main characters, are appealing, and there's so much room in the plot to really explore, but virtually nothing happens and what does happen is incredibly obvious.

And, maybe this is a YA thing, but much like when I watch The Vampire Diaries or Pretty Little Liars on TV, I just want to scream/scold "you stupid adolescent idiot - just TALK to him/her/them and you'll get this all figured out a million times sooner than if you run around trying to do everything on your own and secretly." I guess wisdom comes with age.

Then the end is just like "okay, and now we're done. The end." Dunno. Found myself wishing a better author had taken the same story and made an adult novel out of it.

So then it was 1:30 a.m. (I read it in under 90 minutes), and I had napped from 5:30-7 p.m., so I was awake, so I sped through Lauren Willig's The Mischief of the Mistletoe, which is just such a sweet, adorable little thing (well, almost 400 pages, so maybe not that little...but they are small pages), and then I was happy again, so I went to bed. 

N.B. - looked up The Poison Diaries to the author, and it looks like it's the first in a series. So that may account for the abrupt ending.

Bring Up the Bodies

So, the Wolf Hall sequel. Without giving anything away (mostly because C has already read this, I think), we only get to the end of Anne's reign at the end of the second book. Is Mantel going to continue writing about Thomas Cromwell, or was that it? I feel like at the end of Wolf Hall it was clear there was a next book, but not so with this one...

Anyhow, it was good. Slower going than Wolf Hall, I think, because there was a lot of "this is what you missed if you didn't read the first book" type of catch-up references (throughout, not just at the beginning), but Mantel's Cromwell is just a fascinating and appealing character, so you're willing to put up with the ponderousness here and there. And because she focuses on the details and minutiae so much, it really doesn't matter that you know how the story ends (and develops), because a lot of stuff you don't necessarily know about.

If anything, I actually like knowing the end, I think it adds a weight to the story that's very compelling. It's the same way I accidentally, but providentially, took the Roman Empire class before I took the Roman Republic class, but then was pleased. Knowing how things can go so very, very wrong can totally heighten the sense of urgency and pathos in reading back into things. I'm not expressing myself well, but - it's so heartrending to read about the Roman people forming their republic, and having such lofty aspirations, and yet knowing all the while what is coming for them - dissolute absolute rulers, civil war after civil war, the crossing of the Rubicon. Knowing that Cromwell will eventually end up being executed himself, essentially just for pissing off the king and for making enemies at court, adds another layer to watching him discredit people with the king, and have them end up dead or destroyed, and making those enemies. And the thing is, Cromwell, at least Mantel's Cromwell, knows. He's seen other people raised up and brought down, and he's done it himself, not least with Anne Boleyn. He knows he might be smarter and tougher than many of his enemies, but he also sees - and especially in Bring Up the Bodies - how easily he could fall himself, and take those he loves down with him. I just checked online, and it looks like this is the second in a planned trilogy, so I'll be curious to see if in the final book he sees his doom coming or if hubris catches him up. I hope not, for his sake, as I've grown fond of the character, and for my own, because as a reader I'd rather watch him try to fight and then learn to accept, or not.

I had been wondering where the title, Bring Up the Bodies, came from, and I was intrigued to see that it's a reference to what they said when they were fetching prisoners (in this case Anne's co-accuseds) from the Tower. Is it because, as charged traitors, they're basically presumed to be dead men walking?

Awesome!

Is what I say about Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

I really liked it, although I started it around 6pm on a Sunday night when I found out I had gotten into a book club that would be discussing it at 7pm on the upcoming Tuesday night, so I basically skimmed the last chapter sitting at the bar at 6:45 on Tuesday.

Too distracted trying to get out of here (Friday!) to say that much about it, but basically I thought the two main characters were really strong, all were well developed, and I appreciated that the story was spun out at its own pace, and not for the reader's benefit. I thought the beginning was way too jam-packed with adjectives - and that's coming from ME - but either Russell hit her stride, got more confident & streamlined, or I just stopped noticing. I was certainly engrossed in the story; Russell switches back and forth between her main character, a young girl, and the secondary (in my opinion) main character, the girl's somewhat older brother, and I think it's a testament to the book that as I was reading each character's chapter (the pov switched back and forth), I was torn between wanting to really sink in to the story and hand, but also race ahead to see what was going on in the other storyline, that we had just left.

It's also a HUGE thing that when the presumably (or so I thought, at least) child-molester character starts hanging around our young female protagonist, as much as I was shouting "RUN AWAY!" there was also part of me that was like "Sh*t - I know this is bad, but I really want to know where the author's going to go with this."

A lot of research, particularly into Florida's settlement history, clearly went into this, which I appreciated, although I think Russell did occasionally fall into the trap of "I found this fact, it's so cool, I need to use it!" when less might have been more.

The setting was fantastic, though, a family living on an isolated island (at a somewhat, and clearly deliberately, vague time) where they run an alligator theme park and pose (more or less) as an "Indian tribe" (kind of). Just very unique, and rich - much like the landscape she describes in loving and sometimes overwhelming (but not really) detail.

Certainly got a ton of - amazing - press when it came out, and it had been on my list to read forever, near the top always but never quite there, so I was really happy to have an excuse to finally make myself skip it to the front of the line.

Dark Update!

I forgot I finished two books by Deanna Raybourne (or I am going to post this and realize I already wrote about them, and feel like an idiot) in her Lady Julia Grey mystery series a while ago. I read Dark Road to Darjeeling on my way down to D.C. (whoops, and, yep, suddenly this feels familiar - I seem to recall writing something like "D.C.!!! Whoo!!!" It bears repeating though, so: "DC! Whoo!!!), and started Dark Enquiry (the next in the series) in the airport on the way back. Both were fine, and passed the time, and while Lady Julia is a rather annoying character, the secondary characters have a lot of personality - especially her family - and her husband, Nicholas Bisbane, may be a super cheesy character (half gentleman, half Roma, tormented by his dark past and the gift of Sight he eschews - PUH-lease), but he does come across the page as pretty smokin' hot.

However, it wasn't until I was almost finished with the second book that I realized the reason that I was confused by the characters' chronology was that I was getting them, or at least Lady Julia, mixed up with the characters from another series!

So, in the Dark series, set in the Victorian age, Lady Julia's husband is murdered, Nicholas Brisbane is the hot guy from the wrong(ish) side of the tracks who helps her solve the mystery and then they fall in love, as and before they solve more crimes. She's young, smart, has a free mind and a great fortune. He's tall, dark, handsome and dangerous.

In Tasha Alexander's series, the Victorian Lady Emily's husband, who she doesn't know that well as it turns out, dies and she is left a young widow with a keen mind, independent spirit, and independent means. And along the way, of course, she and the "dashing" Colin Hargreaves (smart, respects smart women, not an aristocrat, kind of dangerous and wholly smokin' hot) do some crime (solving).

You can understand my confusion...

But, as I say, they're fun enough books (the Darks, I mean, but both too), and they're very good for things like airport / airplane reading. I would think if I were sick or hung over, too. Familiar but okay characters. Predictable but entertaining plots. Lots of discrete references to sex, but mainly TOTAL clothing porn.

Growing on me...

I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall when it came out (who didn't?), and I liked it well enough. Then recently I was finally edging to the front of the wait list for the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies (Bringing up the Bodies? Sh*t, you'd think I'd know since I'm reading it right now), so I checked out Wolf Hall to re-read so I'd remember what was going on in the story.

Helpful, since it's a dense story, and especially since after watching The Tudors, my view of that period, and the major players, is always going to be colored by the BBC / Showtime (not that I'm complaining; God, but I sweat Jonathan Rhys Meyers - have since I was a teenager - and Henry Cavill is not too hard on the eyes, either). Turns out that Bring Up the Bodies (or whatever - that sounds more like one of Mantel's chapter titles from Wolf Hall, so it's probably right, but Bringing sounds more like Bringing Up Baby, so obviously I love it...someone should do a screwcap [screwball + madcap = how is this not a real thing?] version of Henry VIII! Genius!) has a lot of explanatory stuff in the end, so I probably didn't need to.

But I still enjoyed it. Too much probably, because I'd curl up with it in bed and then go to sleep way too late (there were also only like, seven chapters in a huge book, so it was hard to find a natural stopping point). I didn't love the way it was written in so far as it wasn't always clear who was talking, or what was being said out loud versus thought, or who the "he" was in ever other sentence (generally Cromwell, not always), but I get that the kind of dense, occasionally crude text was a deliberate choice, and I can respect that.

Did make me wonder though, as most things about Henry VIII and his wives do - Anne always ends up coming across so badly, like a shrewish wh*re. Which, maybe she was, but there had to be more to it, no? I mean, Henry may have been king, but he was no prince. Everyone seems pretty clear that he screwed around on her. Then again, everyone seems pretty clear she did to, and possibly with her brother... I don't know. She probably was a huge raging b*tch, but when EVERYONE dumps on her, it makes me want to stick up for her, or read someone that does... I mean, was she just the Hilary Clinton that everyone got mad at because she wasn't a "nice" lady? And did crazy things like go after what she wanted and insist on being treated with the respect given to other leaders?

Anyhow, it was good, and i actually think I like it better than I did last time, which is very cool.

Sometimes I make myself laugh...

At the utterly random reading I do. Case in point, the varied assortment of books that were waiting for me when I got back from my long weekend in D.C. (WHOO! Amazing as always!)



Lincoln Child, The Third Gate - I am sure I had requested this one because going on plane trips always makes me think of / want an Preston-Child (Agent Pendergast) book, and the latest one must not have been available. So I settled for a just-Child one. (Thanks for the picture, Amazon!)





Karen Engelmann, The Stockholm Octavo - I have no idea what this book is, much less why I requested it. Times review, maybe?





 




Tupelo Hassman, Girlchild - this is supposed to be excellent, I am so excited.
   




Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn - I think this was something that was mentioned when I went to a talk by book review editors, and someone asked what was one of the books that they really loved this year...
 




Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru - came across this somewhere, and I just always love books on the history/complexity of racial definitions.
 




Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall - this one I just want to re-read so that I'll remember the first half of the story when I finally get Bring Up the Bodies in my hands.




Jane, Duchess of Northumberland (hilarious - really??) and Colin Stimpson, illustrator, The Poison Diaries
As best I can tell, an illustrated fiction story about a poisoner, based on the research of an actual poison-gardener? It's confusing, but I can figure it out later...looks cool for now!

Spellbound?

So, this is almost embarrassing.

I read a book last night.

Like, I got into bed, started a book, finished a book about ninety minutes later (I hope it was an hour and a half, and not two hours - I'm not totally sure), then went to bed. Way too late. Was I entranced? Perhaps by the herbal spells that feature prominently in the book?

The book was Garden Spells, by Sarah Addison Allen. It's been on my to-read list forever, so long I had forgotten why I had added it (probably one of those "other people who viewed this title also viewed..." listings), but Widener didn't have it, and I never remembered to go to the BPL and get it. But I was wandering around the other day, after picking up Swamplandia! and remembered & found it.

It's a not-very-long novel about a family that seem to be some kind of witches, that live in the South, garden, and have a magical apple tree. There's also, of course, romance, sisters, endearingly batty old ladies, a bad guy, a precocious child and...hmm, I think this story is called Practical Magic, no? But however formulaic and predictable it might have been, it was engaging and I tore through it. It was a perfect bed-read, I was sated and sleepy at the end - I just wish I had split it into two or three sessions!

The way the book was written, and the cover blurbs or something, made me think this is part of a series, maybe about the town, if not the same two sisters who are the protagonists in Garden Spells... I think it was the way that different families around town were given different characteristics, it's just asking to have spin-off after spin-off. Or you could mosey through the main family's family tree (literally, too, their apple tree is a character itself) generation by generation of strong-willed women who eventually find the right man. Or maybe not a series, but a lot of similar books? Certainly the author had a TON of books spread over a couple shelves in Copley.

I believe my original notes on the to-read listing were that this sounded like a beach book, and I was right, more or less - beach, bed, lazy day wherever. Not great literature, but if there are more out there, it might be worth sometimes having one on hand for when I don't really want to think, but just want a nice story about nice people.

Cleaning house - Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders

I didn't totally love Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (Gyles Brandreth), but I'm going to probably end up reading the other books in the series. I think I actually picked up the fourth or fifth in the series, but it was a totally random grab. I saw the title while browsing for something else at the BPL (Swamplandia!, I think?), and it caught my eye, and I liked the idea of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde running around solving crimes in Rome.

The problem is, I think the author may have also really liked the conceit, maybe a little too much. He just can NOT let go of this whole thing with Wilde being, basically, Holmes, and Doyle being, more or less, Watson. I swear to God, I wanted to start a drinking game - a shot every time Doyle declares he is a man of regular habits, or refers to the crisp/cool white sheets of the hotel. The former is almost every other page in the second half of the book!

But Wilde is a good character, poking at Doyle with humor and affection, and stands in as a good Holmes.

Cleaning house - The Dark Monk

The Dark Monk is the second in the "Hangman's Daughter" series by Oliver Potzsch. No witchily murdered children this time, but someone still gets poisoned within the first couple of pages, so it wasn't exactly Christmas reading, but that's when I read it!

It wasn't exactly a Yuletide miracle, but it was okay. I read the first one (The Hangman's Daughter) because it was at Mom's, and it was fine, but I didn't love it. I feel like I actually thought to myself that I wouldn't rush out and read another one, but then I saw this one when I was meandering down the new-books self at the BPL, and grabbed it. I figured it wouldn't suck, and it was a paperback, so it wouldn't be too heavy... Not exactly a glowing recommendation, but it really DIDN'T suck.

The hangman himself is a strong character. His daughter, on the other hand, is probably meant to be smart and strong and feisty, but she actually feels kind of familiar. I mean, these days, is a smart, strong heroine, even in the seventeenth century, supposed to be a new thing, or a big strength of a book? I could even live with her though - which is good, since she's pretty prominent, and on her own a lot, in this installment - but it's the third main character, Simon the doctor, that bugs me. I don't know why, except maybe that he's a bit of a self-involved idiot, but he just rubs me the wrong way.

Cleaning house - Beauty Queens

Another Young Adult book!

This one is Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray.

I first read Bray's trilogy about girls playing with magic - and then losing control of it - at a boarding school at the close of the nineteenth century. It was a while ago, so I don't think I talked about it (or the later ones?), but I loved the title when I walked by the book one day (A Great and Terrible Beauty) and there were elements that seemed, and were, appealing.

Besides also being about teenage girls, and teenage girls facing up to serious crises, Beauty Queens is totally different, but I still really enjoyed it. This one is about a bunch of beauty pageant contestants stranded on a desert island, and forced to survive on their wits and handiness with a curling iron and homemade tanning beds. Just that premise alone would be funny enough, and Bray is definitely funny. But then she adds on to it a Corporation, with its hand in every pie in America - corporate, political - that needs to take out the teen queens before they ruin its plans to infiltrate a small dictatorship and the rest of America it doesn't yet own.

The overall book isn't quite as hilarious as it thinks it is. The "inserts," fake ads for Corporation products, get to be a little much, and feel a bit like heated over Fforde (then again, even Jasper Fforde re-hashes are still better than a lot of other stuff), but not really a problem. One character, the leader of the pageant pack, is just hilarious, utterly memorable. The character who I think is supposed to be the main character wasn't my favorite, but she has some good moments. What I really liked about the book, puns and lame-awesome jokes aside, is that all of the main characters actually grow and develop, not just one or two. It's really a ensemble piece, and Bray's girls are a strong team. And since they are, of course they thrive and then start kicking some a**.The lessons are kind of predictable, but it doesn't matter; even if we know where we're going, there are some twists along the way, and getting there is fun (secret bad-guy lair in a volcano!).

I'm still waiting to get my hands on Bray's other book, Going Bovine, but so far we're 4 for 4!

Cleaning house - Grave Mercy

I've been going a little nutty at the BPL/Copley recently, so I've got to get down some notes about stuff and then get rid of the books - my bookcase & bedside table are overflowing!

A long time ago (shortly after my trip to San Diego, so mid- to late-November?) I read the first installment in the "His Fair Assassin" series, Grave Mercy (Robin LaFevers, 2012). Normally a paranormal young adult book would not exactly be up my alley, but there was an intriguing review in the New York Times, and the idea of a band of teenage girl assassins running around fifteenth-century Brittany is kind of hilarious.

The protagonist, Ismae, is a young woman who was nearly aborted by her mother and left with horrible scars and is more or less an outcast from her village and abused by her father. After she's sold in marriage to a boor who attempts to rape her, and she violently defends herself, she is packed off, through the aid of some semi-mysterious semi-strangers, to an island abbey where she is healed and then taught that she was actually fathered by the god of death (more or less), who the initiates of the abbey serve, travelling throughout the countryside killing people who need to be killed.

Ismae, as it turns out, is naturally immune to poison, so she's apprenticed to the poison-mistress, as well as being trained in martial arts, stiletto-play, and seduction (glossed over). Of course, just how you know (or the abbess knows) who needs to be killed is a bit trickier, as Ismae learns when she is sent on her first assignment, to the court of Anne of Brittany. And of course the hot-but-grumpy guy she has to both work with and spy on, Anne's b*stard half-brother, complicates things too.

There were a lot of cute, snappy little one liners and the politics of the court read believably, although I only know the very barest of outlines of the actual history, so I couldn't speak to the author's accuracy. The romantic angle was suuuuper predictable, but it didn't distract too much from the main (or other) story line. Hell, I just like titular puns :)

Overall, I'm definitely going to try to remember to read the next book in the series when it comes out in April.

Surprisingly good?

So, somehow I stumbled across a reference to a book written by a Harvard Extension Museum Studies professor / maritime studies somewhere else, Mary Malloy. I think it was a comment someone posted on a Harvard Magazine article about university novelists or something? Or an article about Extension authors? Anyhow, I figured out that Prof. Malloy had written a historical mystery type book featuring a historian from New England. And, as anyone who read this blog knows (so, hi, C, if you're still out there!), I am a sucker for anything along those lines. So I read it, and, honestly, when the book came from deposit and I saw the sort of garish, sort of generic cover I was like "uh-oh." And then the summary on the back made no sense, academically speaking - she (main character) studies 18th century Pacific explorations, but then the story ends up in the Crusades? She would not know the relevant source material!!!

BUT, then Malloy totally acknowledged that, worked it into the story, and also turned out a pretty legit book. The protagonist tackles a set of unknown papers and materials that literally had me drooling (it's the same as the Pink Carnation books - previously untapped archives are history nerd porn), that leads to an older, generations- & centuries-old family-based mystery (love those too), and THAT ended up with the Crusader stuff. There's also a little bit of romantic/sexual tension, decently well fleshed out secondary characters, and a more contemporary "mystery" that plays out well. Good stuff.

I'm definitely going to try to get my hands on the next book in the series, which I think just came out recently. It's not in Hollis, but the BPL in West Roxbury has a copy, so I'll head over there at some point - maybe stop in at the fire station down the street where a very nice man tried valiantly to cut the stuck-on ring off my swollen finger the other night, before the guys over at the Newton Centre station finally managed to finish the job...

Anyhow, the book is The Wandering Heart.

We The Animals

We the Animals, by Justin Torres, was fantastic.

I read it because V and I were going to the Grub Street book club / author q&a, and I am so glad I did - actually, so glad I did all of those things. The Grub Street book club was a new experience, but overall I liked it. Naturally, there were a few people I wanted to murder, since they just kept talking about themselves, or talking about the book but monopolizing the conversation, but for the most part it was really interesting. I very much appreciated the approach, which was looking at the writing of the book - the language, the images, the character development, what decisions the author made and why we thought he made them - as opposed to just talking about the story, which I imagine would have been the focus of a "regular" book club, or one not meant to be filled with aspiring (or realized) authors. The craft was definitely the main point here, which was an engaging way into the book, as well as an interesting conversation on it's own.

The leader of the session, one of Grub Street's instructors, had us start by talking to the person next to us about one scene we really loved, and then we all said them to the group and she put them on the board. I was skeptical at first, but just that alone ended up being cool, because there were some that I had already thought of, some that were like "oh, of COURSE, had to be up there, can't believe I forgot that," and other scenes or lines I seriously didn't remember (but in one case - a scene at Niagara Falls - I thought "I need to go back and read that right now!"). I think starting by talking just to our neighbors before speaking to the whole circle was a good way of breaking the ice. I actually didn't talk much or at all in the larger group, in part because I was getting testy at some of the others, but I think I would have felt comfortable doing so, after having come in, not being sure what was going on, but then having a really animated conversation (well, on my side) with the woman next to me (didn't turn to V, who was on the other side, since it seemed like cheating - we already knew each other, and had already discussed our favorite scenes over the wine we chugged before heading into the meeting).

The rest of the first hour was the group discussion, pretty well moderated, although some people could have been shut up more, and then the author of the book came in to speak with us, answer questions, and then finally do a brief reading. Hearing Torres speak about the book, and, more importantly, the process of writing the book, was great. I was a little disappointed in the reading; someone suggested the scene that was my favorite in the whole book (when they're dancing in the kitchen), but the way he read it just seemed wrong. It wasn't at all the way it went in my head. I know that's dumb, since he wrote it and all, but V felt the same way. It was just...it's a really intimate, strong, gentle/brutal, vivid book. And that scene was all of those things and then some, full of love with danger and uncertainty looming over it, but he read it in this very hushed, polite, friendly, sing-song-y kind of voice, more like a poem about birds or daffodils or something. But maybe that's the way the scene is in his head, I don't know...

As far as the book itself...yeah. Just amazing. It's nominally the "story" of a young boy and his brothers, and their life when they were children. It's hard to say more than that without spoiling one of the main strengths of the story which is how the characters, and their backgrounds, are slowly and very deliberately revealed.

Slim, a quick read, but packed with fantastic images and languages; characters, too, but less so. This isn't really as much a story, I don't think, as it is a series of heart-wrenching (not necessarily in a bad way), gorgeously honed scenes. I remember thinking as I read that he either is or had - or both - an amazing editor, because the book is so very pared down, lean like some sort of ridiculous athlete, just muscles and sinews and a little skin on top, no fat, nothing extraneous, and so very, very strong.

There was one scene with the mother and a co-worker that I didn't understand; that is, I thought it was going to lead to something more (no thoughts on what, just more), but it sort of drifted around by itself. Kind of that, if you show us a gun, someone should get shot thing. A small nit-pick, though.

Most of it, I loved. I loved the way the story starts off with a collective narrator, in a sense - the "we" of the title - and how and why that evolves, I thought he did a fantastic job of parceling out information so it unfolds in a totally organic way but also surprises you and makes you re-evaluate what you've already read... Love :)