Friday, January 30, 2004
The last book I read on the trip was The Hidden Warrior by Lynn Flewelling. This is the second book of what I assume is a trilogy about a girl who has been concealed as a boy (literally - she was magically changed into the image of her brother, who was killed) in order to hide her from her uncle, who has all female claimants to the throne killed lest they depose him. Um, this is fantasy, in case you hadn't guessed that already. I love Lynn Flewelling because of her treatment of gender and sexuality. It's interesting that SFF is often the genre where gender play is treated as a natural part of society - thus providing a window on our own reality where gender and sexuality are such loaded topics and a cause for so much hate and conflict. It also gives her books an edge over the typical fantasy formula - something extra that lifts them above the mass of similar plots. Good stuff - can't wait for the third book.
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Idoru by William Gibson was next. I came late to William Gibson. I didn't read Neuromancer until many years after I'd already discovered Neal Stephenson and Melissa Scott and even then I wasn't terribly impressed. That all changed when I read Pattern Recognition last year. That book knocked my socks off and I've been slowly gathering his previous works to read. I totally loved Idoru. It gets in some great jabs at the media rule under which we live - the cult of celebrity and how we create and destroy them. It also touches on the nature of fandom (rather appropriate seeing as how I'd flown all the way across the country just to see my favorite band play two shows), and loyalty and love. Man, how have I missed reading Gibson until now? He's three for three with me.
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Then, Mind Hunter by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. John Douglas is one of the first FBI "profilers", and helped establish the program as we know it today. This is part biography and part history of the department, with brief case summaries sprinkled throughout. It was good, but ultimately unsatisfying. He worked on hundreds of cases, but I wished for more details on the most interesting ones. Mostly he just explains his profile in each case and then comments on the accuracy when the killers were caught. That's great and all, but I was left thinking there was more left unsaid. Perhaps if it had been more biography or more of a case study... I don't know. It was pretty interesting and fairly gory though, so I did finish it, I just wasn't captivated.
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Next up was The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I repossesed this from my parent's house when I was visiting at Christmas. I love the Anne books and the Emily trilogy and have read them countless times, but I haven't read any of her others. I started reading this one and quickly got the feeling that I'd already read it. It wasn't familiar like when I read Mansfield Park (which I finally realized was so like An Old Fashioned Girl, a favorite I had read previously) but familiar like a book I know I'd read before. I can only imagine that my mom bought it for me years and years ago and I just haven't read it since. Anyway. I totally loved it, of course. I loved Valancy's courage to completely change her life and go after what would make her happy. I think this one will go in the permanent rotation.
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I was in New York City for a week and had a lot of time to read on the plane and on the many train rides. The first book I read was Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold. How much did I love this book? Oh my. It was sad and funny and light and profound and exciting and took its time all at the same time. It made me talk back to it, and for me, that means I'm completely engaged and absorbed. It evoked such a glorious picture of San Francisco in the early 1900s and of the vaudeville circuit. It also managed to surprise me several times, without ever leaving the realm of the plausible. It's a fantastic book and one that I will be keeping in my collection and re-reading.
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey is the middle book in a trilogy. It's been ages since I read the first one and I had forgotten just about everything that happened in it. Carey is good about putting in reminders though, without making it feel too forced or making the character whiny for dwelling on past events. It took me a little bit to get into the story, but once I did I was caught, even staying up past my usual bedtime last night to finish. It's got a lot going on in it and the initial cast of characters and all the political intrigue can be a little overwhelming, but I didn't have too much of a problem keeping things straight. Still, I think it would've helped more if I had re-read the first book to have those events fresh in my mind. I'll definitely be getting the third book soon, so I won't have the same adjustment period.
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
Okay, so it's not a book. But it was one of the best things I've read lately. "Tense Present. Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" by David Foster Wallace in the April 2001 issue of Harper's Magazine is possibly the only 20 page article on grammar that I have ever read, let alone laughed out at. In public. In it, he talks at length about Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which is a favorite of Sars, a true grammar queen. Since I have "SNOOT" leanings myself, I was fascinated by DFW's explaination of the grammar wars and the different camps, the Prescriptivists vs. the Descriptivists, and how Garner nimbly straddles that divide. He talks about the racism of Standard Written English, the presence of a Universal Grammar (a concept I'd never considered before), and uses cross-dressing as an example of a Descriptivist argument. The more I read his works, the more impressed I become. DFW is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
So. Sarah by JT LeRoy. I'm not entirely sure why I picked this up. I might have read a review when it first came out a couple of years ago. Or maybe I saw it in PW or online. Or... something. In short, I really don't know anything about the author or if the book is supposed to be autobiographical, as some of the reviews on amazon.com would have you believe. I knew even less when I started reading it and maybe that's the way to come at a book like this; one that could be so horrible and depressing if you thought for a second it was real. Not that I think it couldn't be - I'm not that naive. But it is written as almost a fairy tale, or a tall tale from the Old West. Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Little Red Riding Hood. Pecos Bill. There are touches of all those fantastic yarns that could just be acute knowledge of human psychology or they could be magic. The writing is very matter-of-fact and direct, with no moral judgments implied by the author. It is obviously not to be read as a cautionary fable then, but more as an adventure story. True, an adventure story about a cross-dressing pre-pubescent professional prostitute, but one nonetheless.
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Monday, January 12, 2004
Sunday I wanted something that wouldn't make me think, so I pulled out Full Tilt, by Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes. I had high hopes because I love the Stephanie Plum mysteries, but alas, this book is nowhere near as fun or smart or silly as those. The characters were straight stock romance cardboard cutouts (feisty, independent woman and arrogant, handsome, yet likeable man) with little touches of Plum here and there (Vera and her gun is very reminiscent of Grandma Mazur and DeeDee is very Jersey), while the hit men and Swamp Dog seemed like they were brought in from a sub-standard Carl Hiaasen ripoff. The romance wasn't hot enough to make it guilty fun and the mystery wasn't developed enough to give it any depth. It was just brainless fluff, pretty much. It didn't piss me off enough to make me give up, but I wasn't thrilled with it either. This one will be returning to the used book store from whence it came.
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Saturday night I was deciding which books I was going to give up on and just take back to the library and I pulled out A Beautiful Mind, which I've been meaning to read since, oh, the movie came out and have never gotten to. I started flipping through it and reading paragraphs here and there and before I knew it, I'd skimmed the whole thing. It was interesting enough that I will probably go back and read it in depth later when I don't have so many books clamoring for time. One thing though: I knew there was an outcry when the movie came out about how it didn't depict Nash's sexuality accurately. I thought maybe it was just an overly intense friendship here, a longing look there that they didn't stick in there... but no. It was full-fledged long-term sexual relationships with men that they just somehow overlooked for the film. That's such a major thing to not put in a biopic. It's just weird. It's not like doing a movie of Liberace and insisting he was straight or anything, but maybe like not acknowleging Bowie's past assertions of bisexuality or Lou Reed's or something like that. It's a documented part of history, people. It couldn't be that Russell Crowe objected - the dude has played gay before (and quite well, I might add). Weird. I wonder why they would write it like that?
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So I finished The Mammoth Cheese, which actually didn't sound all that appealing from the description, but had really strong reviews. And yeah, it was good. Sometimes the parallels seemed to get a little out of hand or a little too obvious, but then again it was nice to read something that attempted to make connections and say something larger while telling a good story so I didn't mind all that much. It's not one I'm going to rush out and buy for my own collection, but I'm glad I read it.
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
One more quickie from the weekend: Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, a recommendation from Daisy who has pretty good taste. This was set in a future where North America had been buried under sudden layers of junk mail and pollution and forgotten about until 2000 years later when a motel is excavated by an archaeologist. The humor comes from the irony of the explanations of the findings (the TV is an altar, the tub a sarcophagus, etc). It is all done very well and is a light, quick read.
I've started The Mammoth Cheese, which I didn't think I'd like, but it has pleasantly surprised me so far.
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I've started The Mammoth Cheese, which I didn't think I'd like, but it has pleasantly surprised me so far.
Monday, January 05, 2004
And finally. Yes, I did actually finish Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. I honestly don't know why it took me so long. I think I just hit a block after the murder because the last 300 pages went very quickly. I am pretty convinced that the murder was a conspiracy and that Mary was smeared in a strategic campaign and offered up as a scapegoat when Bothwell became unavailable. Compared to Elizabeth, anyone would come off as a political amateur, but Mary seems to have been especially out of her league as a monarch. She consistently relied on stronger men around her to guide and shape her policies and was often naive or plain stupid. Weir picks apart inconsistencies in the historical evidence of her guilt and provides pretty compelling motives for the conspiracy of nobles she believes was responsible. I haven't read anything else of substance about Mary, so I don't know what the prevailing opinion is, but, while Mary was clearly guilty of plotting against Elizabeth, I don't believe she offed her husband.
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Next (whew) was Sara Paretsky's response to our post 9/11 world, Blacklist. I was reading this on New Year's Eve and let's just say I wasn't the happiest of campers that night. Between the political outrages in the book and having been with my right-wing parents for over a week, I was a little on edge. I definitely liked this better than McDermid's. I didn't spot the murderer, for one, but I also enjoyed how it played out. The McCarthy trials/Patriot Act parallels didn't feel too heavy handed and showed the gray areas in which we live and operate. I like that Paretsky's novels rarely, if ever, have truly happy endings, which makes sense seeing how Warshawski primarily deals with financial and business crime (with murder as a regular result of such) and we've seen how well those people get punished. While the reader may find out who did it, there isn't a nice Law and Order finish with the big bad guy being shipped off to jail.
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The Distant Echo by Val McDermid was next. I usually enjoy Val McDermid's mysteries, but I don't necessarily seek them out like I do, say, Elizabeth George's. This one showed me one reason why that may be, namely that I spotted the killer about a hundred pages in. I don't mind figuring books out before the ending, but only a fourth of the way through? That said, I did finish it, so it wasn't too horrible or annoying. But every time she tried to throw in a red herring it didn't ring true. Maybe more subtlety would have been nice. Or a wider suspect base. Or maybe splitting the timeline of the book (half in the past and half in the present) made it easier than if she'd revealed the discovery of the murder and the subsequent events that caused the four friends to drift in flashbacks. I think that would've made it a stronger and better book.
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Next was Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story by Steve Hodel in which the author, a former highly ranked police detective, attempts to make a case against his father as a serial murderer of women in and around Los Angeles in the late 1940s - 1950s, including the Black Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders. He first starts investigating when, after his father's death, Hodel finds what he believes are two pictures of Elizabeth Short in a small photo album among those of other loved ones. Eventually his investigation will lead him to speculate that his father and his father's friend committed a string of rape/murders and were not only known to the police and the district attorney's office as the perpetrators, but also that their crimes were covered up and they were allowed to escape without prosecution because of his father's prominence in the community and his involvement with an illegal abortion ring the police were protecting. Heavy stuff. The most damaging evidence is the handwriting samples and their link to two of the murders. Hodel submitted his evidence and write-up to a current prosecutor in LA who writes near the end that he would, with the evidence presented, feel confident in bringing Hodel's father up on murder charges for Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French (the Black Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders, respectively). Hodel further speculates about a number of other disappearances and unsolved murders, pointing to similar circumstances, causes of death, and MOs, including that of the mother of author James Ellroy (of LA Confidential fame) who has written not only about the Black Dahlia murder (The Black Dahlia, duh, which fictionalizes the crime) but also a non-fiction work about his mother's death and his investigation into her murder (My Dark Places, which I am picking up from the library tomorrow).
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Post-Christmas wrap up...
First up was Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg for my book group. Man, this was better than I remembered it. I think I twisted the asteroid ending into some sort of lame science fiction cop out in my mind over the years and convinced myself I liked it okay, but hated the ending. Maybe that was the movie? I don't remember. Anyway. I really like this book a lot. It's one of those thriller/mystery books that transcends the genre through a remarkable main character and an atypical setting. Smilla herself is awesome. She's prickly and proudly independent, yet never unlikable. Hoeg softens her just enough through the flashbacks with Isaiah and her relationship with the mechanic without compromising her strength or obstinacy. The writing is cold, Smilla is cold, the weather is cold and yet it all works to make you care about the characters much like how Smilla cares about ice. The plot is difficult enough to surprise the reader with its twists, but doesn't ever get too confusing (perhaps, though, I followed it better because this was my second time through). This is definitely on my list of better than average mysteries.
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First up was Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg for my book group. Man, this was better than I remembered it. I think I twisted the asteroid ending into some sort of lame science fiction cop out in my mind over the years and convinced myself I liked it okay, but hated the ending. Maybe that was the movie? I don't remember. Anyway. I really like this book a lot. It's one of those thriller/mystery books that transcends the genre through a remarkable main character and an atypical setting. Smilla herself is awesome. She's prickly and proudly independent, yet never unlikable. Hoeg softens her just enough through the flashbacks with Isaiah and her relationship with the mechanic without compromising her strength or obstinacy. The writing is cold, Smilla is cold, the weather is cold and yet it all works to make you care about the characters much like how Smilla cares about ice. The plot is difficult enough to surprise the reader with its twists, but doesn't ever get too confusing (perhaps, though, I followed it better because this was my second time through). This is definitely on my list of better than average mysteries.
