Moo's Place

Bookmarks Magazine

2011-10-16T16:34:00.002-04:00

Here's what looked interesting in the July / August Bookmarks.

Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips
The Pale King, David Foster Wallace
All Clear, Connie Willis read Blackout first
Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold
Embassytown, China Mieville
In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson

Crime in the Art World
The Forgery of Venus, Michael Gruber
The Raphael Affair, Iain Pears
Doors Open, Ian Rankin
The Rembrandt Affair, Daniel Silva
Xibalba Murders, Lyn Hamilton
Headcase, Peter Helton
A Talent for War, Jack McDevitt
Flanders Panel, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Nonfiction:
Forger's Spell, Edward Dolnick
False Impressions, Thomas Hoving
Provenance, Laney Salisbury
Billionaire's Vinegar, Benjamin Wallace
A Real Van Gogh, Henk Tromp
Loot, Sharon Waxman
The Art of the Heist, Myles J. Connor Jr.
The Art Detective, Philip Mould
The Rape of Europa, Lynn H. Nicholas

Two Cozies

2011-09-02T15:28:00.007-04:00

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure and Crocodile on the Sandbank.

I haven't really read any cozies in many years but after struggling with the Castle for so long I was just in the mood for something light. These are not great literature but were quick afternoon reads that I found refreshing before moving on to something more substantial.

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure is the first in the Haunted Bookshop series by Alice Kimberly. The heroine, Mrs. McClure has just moved to a little town in Rhode Island to assist her aging aunt with her bookstore. As Mrs. McClure attempts to revitalize the bookstore with a famous mystery author event, her famous author drops dead and it looks like it was murder - GASP! As the quiet town reacts to this extraordinary event Mrs. McClure realizes that the bookshop might be haunted by a ghost who is connected to the murder. But don't worry Mrs. McClure solves the mystery and all is well, as is always the case with cozies.

The Crocodile on the Sandbank is the first in the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters. Amelia Peabody is a woman of independent means who in 1884 wishes to visit the pyramids in Egypt. While visiting a archeological dig there is an attempted kidnapping, attacks and even a crazed mummy terrorizing the camp. Luckily Amelia uses her wits to figure it out and save the day.

While the Amelia Peabody series is very well known I must confess that I enjoyed the Haunted Bookshop more. Perhaps I am just a sucker for anything set in a bookshop but the Crocodile on the Sandbank just kept reminding me of the dated Sunday afternoon movies on tv I watched while growing up involving mummies and tombs set in Egypt. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed them both, the Haunted Bookshop just seemed more original to me.

The Imperfectionists

2011-09-02T14:18:00.005-04:00

by Tom Rachman

I picked this up at an airport bookshop one day when I was spending way to much time in airports. I thought it looked like a good diversion and I was really pleasantly surprised. It was a very fast read, I finished it before I reached my destination, but it kept me entertained and I really enjoyed the characters.

The novel is made up of the individual stories of various people connected to an English language newspaper in Rome. While I am not always fond of this style, in this instance it really worked. The individual characters were really interesting and the individual stories worked together to give a wonderful sense of the newspaper.

Overall I found it well crafted, humorous and entertaining. And as this was the author's debut novel I will definitely check out his next effort.

R.I.P. VI

2011-09-02T13:44:00.003-04:00

I cannot believe it is time once again for Carl V's RIP challenge. For information on the challenge go here, for the review site go here. As September is the hottest month where I am, it doesn't feel much like fall, but I am ready anyway. As I love the flexibility and also expect a busy September/October, I am signing up for Peril the Third which requires one book - but I hope to read more.

I have two books that have been waiting on my shelves just for this challenge:
The Historian and
Something Wicked This Way Comes.

I will definitely be reading Something Wicked This Way Comes and will have a go at the Historian. There are also some short story collections I would love to dip into:

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
The Essential Works of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Best of Arthur Machen: 15 Tales of Horror

Unfortunately the Weird is not due out until sometime in October but I have the other two loaded onto my Kindle at the ready.

And if miraculously I have more time I would also love to read:

Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo
Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Bookmarks Magazine

2011-08-20T09:16:00.003-04:00

Here is what looked interesting in the May/June Bookmarks.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan - S
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino - S
The Troubled Man, Henning Mankell - S
Blood, Bones & Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton - NF, S
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Tom Franklin
The Magus, John Fowles
Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson
The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
The Paris Wife, Paula McLain
Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
Pym, Mat Johnson
The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes -NF
The Discoverers, Daniel Boorstin - NF
The Information, James Gleick - NF
The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler - NF
Moonwalking with Einstein - NF

Lost Art of Reading

2011-07-15T13:10:00.002-04:00

by David Ulin

I absolutely love books about books, so I was excited to find this very slim volume one day at the book store. It sounded great: "The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time." I thought perhaps I wouldn't find anything especially new or insightful in this little essay but at least I would agree with the author that books matter!

Unfortunately, the author focuses so much time explaining the distracted time we live in, that he never really gets around to explaining why books matter. In fact, I was left with the distinct impression after finishing the essay that the author ultimately agreed with his son Noah that literature is dead. The most I could gather from this essay was that the author believes books (ie traditional paper books) matter as a sort of antidote to all the distraction - a sort of still point to filter out all the noise and reorient your self.

I don't agree with the prognosis that literature is dead. First of all, while reading physical paper books may be on the way out, just because the story is now no longer in the format of a traditional "book" but can be read on a ebook, the computer or listened to on an ipod, to me does not mean that this new medium is not literature. Second, I think to some degree the advent of the internet and other "distractions" discussed at length in the essay enhance and promote reading books. Access to not only blogs but articles by well respected newspapers, magazines and websites make information on a much wider range of authors and books available to anyone interested. And I now have access to a much wider selection of books, be it for my Kindle, my ipod or in paper ranging from that obscure book that is out of print, the foreign language translation of a Serbian author, free ebooks in the public domain or a an unpublished book downloaded from an author's web site.

Finally, I have never perceived so much excitement and interest about reading as today. I see people that didn't really read much before, picking up Kindles or ipods or downloading apps to their phones to read or listen to books. People still stop me when they see my Kindle and ask about it and the next time I see them they have their own ebook and claim to love it. Twenty years ago I couldn't have found a book group to join if my life depended on it. Now there are not only multiple competing live book groups but you have the entire internet of book blogs, professional reviews, forums, book reading challenges etc. in which you could immerse yourself in nothing but discussing books and literature if you wanted. And yes, that in itself can be distracting, but people are still finding time to read.

I was interested in the authors contention that reading facilitates or teaches empathy but he never really developed that line of thought. While I certainly agree that reading can be a concentration or focusing exercise, so can meditation or running or painting or many other things. The poor author needs to figure out how to live a balanced life in a distracting time, as do we all. Just because distraction is there for us 24/7 does not mean that the means of that distraction is bad. We all have free will and we can choose to be distracted by the internet and email or choose to use them as useful tools and then turn them off and do something else, like read a good book. For an essay on what a distracting time we live in, this is the essay for you. For a mediation on "why books matter" however, you need to look elsewhere.

Once Upon A Time V

2011-06-20T13:07:00.008-04:00

I cannot believe that Once Upon A Time V is finished already. It seems like I just made my original post with potential books to read. While I have not been good about posting reviews throughout the challenge, I have been reading.

I signed up for the Journey because I really appreciate the flexibility and lack of stress. I also said that I was going to watch Midsummer's Night Dream on DVD and do some short story weekends with Jorge Luis Borges. I didn't do the short stories and I just totally forgot about the DVD but I did read five books.

The Alchemist & Executioness by Paulo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell
The City and the City by China Mieville
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Finch by Jeff Vandermeer
The Library by Zoran Zivkovic

I would have to say that my favorite was clearly The City & the City closely followed by Finch. I also enjoyed The Library and the Alchemist & Executioness. I am currently reading the Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry which I am enjoying very very much. (Oddly I am finding it more "Kafkaesque" then I did The Castle.) It is giving Finch a run for its money for second place.

I don't know if this really counts or not but I also just finished watching season one of Game of Thrones on HBO which is based upon George R.R. Martin's books. I have not read any of the books but I absolutely loved the series and cannot wait for season two next year. The world of the Seven Kingdoms was fascinating and beautifully depicted, the plot twists kept you guessing, the photography and special effects amazing and the acting superb. I highly recommend it.

Thanks Carl for once again hosting a wonderful, pressure free challenge.

The Library

2011-06-20T12:29:00.002-04:00

by Zoran Zivkovic

I ran across an interesting review of Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic's The Last Book. Searching for a copy of that book which I eventually ordered used through ABE, I discovered that Amazon had new copies of The Library by that author available. While there isn't much on the Amazon page about the book, its short blurb pretty much describes the Library.

A cycle of six thematically linked stories, droll renditions of the nightmares ensuing upon misplaced, or (of course) excessive, bibliophilia. A writer encounters a website where all his possible future books are on display; a lonely man faces an infinite flow of hardback books through his mailbox; an ordinary library turns by night into an archive of souls; the Devil sets about raising standards of infernal literacy; one book houses all books; a connoisseur of hardcovers strives to expel a lone paperback from his collection.

I always love books about books and libraries so thought I would give it a shot. Looking more into this author I discovered that he has his own web site (in English) and has contributed to Jeff Vandermeer's (the author of Finch) Leviathan series.

The Library, comprised of six short stories, is very short. I did enjoy the collection but I must say that I was not blown away. My favorite library story is still The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. I generally prefer novels instead of short stories, so I am looking forward to reading The Last Book by this author.

Finch

2011-06-20T12:02:00.004-04:00

by Jeff Vandermeer

I had this for last year's Once Upon A Time Challenge but after reading Shriek, which I enjoyed, I decided to save this one for this year. While I know that others have read this without having read the City of Saints and the Madmen and Shriek, I enjoyed the background knowledge they provided.

Unlike the prior books set in Ambergris, this one is styled a detective story. The grey caps, strange fungal entities, have taken over the city of Ambergris and detective Finch, a human who works for the grey caps, is assigned a very unusual murder case involving a dead human and a dead grey cap. His investigation plunges the reader into a fascinating world of rebel insurgents as the grey caps race to complete the building of two mysterious towers. I don't want to give away too much about the plot or the characters as it is such a joy to discover this new story set in Ambergris. Carl V gave a great review of it last year.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend that you read all the Ambergris novels. I know that I intend to keep reading more Jeff Vandermeer, perhaps Veniss Underground, his first novel, next.

The Castle

2011-06-20T11:15:00.003-04:00

by Franz Kafka

I read Franz Kafka's the Trial several years ago and absolutely loved it. I thought it was so funny and found frightening parallels with our current criminal justice system. The Trial is one of my favorite novels. So I was really looking forward to reading the Castle for the Once Upon A Time Challenge.

The Castle is the story of a land surveyor, K. who is summoned to a village by the Castle authorities to be its new land surveyor. The entire story is that of K. trying to deal with the Castle bureaucracy and begin his work as the land surveyor, which he never achieves. The story line certainly had potential.

Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy it. While like the Trial it dealt with the nightmare of bureaucracy, it totally lacked the humor of the Trial. And while it was dark, it was more depressing then truly dark. The characters were also uninteresting and I didn't really care what happened to K.

Obviously this is a highly acclaimed work and some people absolutely love it. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it was unfinished, but then again so was the Trial. I really wanted to love it as I usually enjoy reading about the absurdity of bureaucracy. The Trial was magnificent. Another one of my favorites is All the Names by Jose Saramago about a clerk in the registry of births, marriages and deaths.

The City and the City

2011-06-19T12:41:00.002-04:00

by China Meiville

I purchased this book for my Kindle as soon as it came out but didn't get around to reading it until now for the Once Upon A Time Challenge. I absolutely loved it and have been recommending it to everyone I know. Even people that say they won't like fantasy will enjoy this one.

The story is cloaked as a hard-boiled police procedural with a Detective investigating a murder. What makes the story unique is that it is set in two cities, Beszel a decaying and run down city and Ul Qoma, a modern bustling booming metropolis. Detective Tyodor lives and works in Beszel but an unusual murder case takes him to the city of Ul Qoma. I don't want to give too much away as it is such a pleasure to figure out the connection between these two cities and what exactly is going on as you read the book. The real mystery for the reader isn't the murder, it is the city and the city.

I absolutely loved this book. It is completely original and yet so well realized. The characters were interesting but the cities were by far the most engrossing. Read it, you will enjoy it.

The Alchemist and Executioness

2011-06-19T11:38:00.006-04:00

by Paulo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell

I cannot believe that the Once Upon A Time Challenge is almost over. Although I have not been posting, I have been reading. The first book I "read" for the challenge was actually an original audio book produced by Audible.com. I so enjoyed the Windup Girl by Paulo Bachigalupi that when I read about this new project involving Bacigalupi created just for audio, I thought I would give it a try, especially as it was fantasy and perfect for this challenge. I had read a really interesting interview by the two authors about how they created this work but I cannot find it at the moment. Essentially it is two separate short stories but both set in the same fantasy world. Khaim is a world where magic was once widely used but unfortunately with every use deadly bramble is created. Magic is now banned and punishable by death as the citizens try to battle the bramble back before it swallows the last of the cities.

In the Alchemist by Bacigalupi an alchemist has dedicated his life to creating a machine, the balanthast, which can destroy bramble. He works in secret because his experiments require he bring bramble into the city and for fear his alchemy might be mistaken for magic.

In the Executioness Buckell tells the story of a women who is forced to take her father's place as an executioner and sets off on an adventure to save her children kidnapped by raiders.

These two stories are far more traditional fantasy then I usually read but I enjoyed them both. I also found it an interesting project as there is not a lot of works created specifically for audio. I do note however that it appears that limited editions of these stories have since been published as books by Subterranean Press, although I strongly recommend you try them as they were intended as audio. Both the audio narrators of these stories were wonderful.

2011 Wish List

2011-05-10T15:55:00.005-04:00

I often send myself emails of books that sound interesting with the intention of adding them to my wish list. Apparently I have not gathered these random emails since April 2009 so thought I better do so.

Biblio Mysteries
Here are some links to some great lists:
Green Chair Press Books on Books list

Manchester Public Library Death Among Books

Evanstan Public Library Bibliomysteries

Amazon List Top Biblio Mysteries

The Last Book by Zoran Zivkovic

Homicide in Hard Cover by Kate Carlisle (series)

Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop by Otto Penzler (short stories)

Murder is Binding by Lorna Barrett (series)

Japanese Literature
Ryunosuke Akutugawa – Rashomon & 17 other stories – translator Jay Rubin

Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan

The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata

Spring Snow' by Yukio Mishima

Japanese Science Fiction

Japan Sinks - Sakyo Komatsu

Paprika – Yasutaka Tsutsui

Shinju by Laura Joh Rowland

Science Fiction / Fantasy
Dark Universe – Daniel Galouye

Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds

The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson

Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler (Erika Bann recommended)

Viriconium by M. John Harrison

Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley

Home Fires by Gene Wolfe

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Literature
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

Lethem – Chronic City

Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan (about the Brontes)

Various Flavors of Coffee, A Novel by Anthony Capella

The Blind Contessa’s New Machine by Carey Wallace

Golden Tulip by Rosalind Laker

Death as a Side Effect by Ana Maria Shua

The Unburied by Charles Palliser

Scary Stories
The Beetle by Richard Marsh

Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors

Edited by Ellen Datlow:
Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe

Lovecraft Unbound

Charles Stross - the Atrocity Archives (Lovecraft inspired)

Cory Doctorow – Someone Comes to Town and Someone Leaves Town – Project Guttenberg

The Red Tree by Caitlin Kiernan

Washington Post List

Amazon Listmania

Awards and Best of Lists
Locus Award Finalists

Man Booker 2009

Vandermeer Best of 2009

Best of the Decade

Best of 2010 Publisher Weekly

Time Best of 2009

Books on Books
How Reading Changed my Life by Anna Quindlen

List on Savage Reads

Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer

How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

The Case for Books by Robert Darnton

Magic and Madness in the Library editor Eric Graeber

Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Book by Robert Grudin

Art Books
The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

Making Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Thomas Hoving

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Foger Rewrote the History of Modern Art

Post by Citizen Reader about Art Thrillers

About Van Gogh
Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, Adam Braver’s Crows Over the Wheatfield, Alyson Richman’s The Last Van Gogh and Sheramy Bundrick’s Sunflowers.

Antarctica
Polar Reading List

The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and Antarctica

Antarctica: Life on the Ice by Traveler’s Tales

Nonfiction
Collapse by Jared Diamond

The Power of the Sea by Bruce Parker

The Siege of Shangri-la by Michael McRae

Bookmarks

2011-05-08T08:34:00.007-04:00

Here's what looked interesting in the Jan/Feb and Mar/April Bookmarks Magazine.

The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene - NF
Life by Keith Richards - NF, S
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Cut! by Denise Imwold - NF, S
The Risk Pool by Richard Russo - S
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin -S & L
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham - S
Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie
read Haroun and the Sea of Stories first
World and Town by Gish Jen
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King - S
Three Seconds by Roslund & Hellstrom - S
start with The Beast
The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell - S
start with Faceless Killers
Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat -SF
How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming by Mike Brown - NF

All seem to be available on the Kindle except, Daughter of Time, Risk Pool, Girl In Hyacinth Blue, Three Seconds, Troubled Man and Cut! seems to be out of print entirely.

New York Trilogy

2011-04-21T16:53:00.011-04:00

by Paul Auster

I have been hearing about Paul Auster for many years, and then I read this great review by Carl V. The New York Trilogy is really three stories which were originally published separately and now are published together : City of Glass, Ghosts, and the Locked Room all set in New York City. While sort of noir mysteries they don't really fit that genre and are more of a postmodern endeavor. City of Glass is about a writer who takes on a surveillance job and gradually begins to question realty (and includes a character called Paul Auster). Ghosts is about a detective named Blue who is investigating Black and sending reports to his client White. The Locked Room is about a mediocre writer who gets caught up and lost in a childhood friend's family and literary work after his friend's disappearance.

But you don't read this for plot. The writing is amazing, the characters are intriguing and you never know what is going to happen next. While it is difficult to describe it was thoroughly enjoyable. I definitely intend to read more Paul Auster.

My Name is Red

2011-04-21T14:06:00.000-04:00

by Orhan Pamuk

Nobel Prize winning author, Orhan Pamuk's, My Name is Red is an unconventional murder mystery / love story set in 16th century Istanbul. The sultan has commissioned a group of miniaturists or illuminators to secretly illuminate a special commemorative manuscript, but when one of the illuminators is found dead, the other illuminators begin to worry.

I loved many things about this book. I knew very little about 16th century Istanbul or Islamic illuminated manuscripts so it was very educational and interesting for me. I loved that there were multiple narrators, including a dog, a coin, a corpse, the color red. Istanbul, its court and its inhabitants really came alive.

What I loved the most was the illuminated manuscripts themselves. Random House's web site has several fascinating images, such as this:

I knew that Islam has certain reservations/prohibitions about representational figures, but this book really elaborated on the many Islamic views and the tension with the "European style". This was especially interesting as many points of view were presented and the many differing opinions and practices, even in the 16th century, really made the issue interesting.

I must say however, despite the fact that I learned a lot from this book and liked many things about it, over all I didn't really enjoy the experience of read it. It was very dense, not particularly lengthy or difficult, but it was an effort to get through it. I am glad I read it but I am not in a hurry to pick up another one of Orhan Pamuk's books.

Once Upon A Time V

2011-03-22T11:32:00.005-04:00

Finally it is time for Carl V's Once Upon A Time challenge. I remember when I joined this challenge for the first time. I was new to blogging, new to challenges and didn't think that I actually liked fantasy. What I have realized is that fantasy is so much broader than magicians, fairies, dragons and knights and actually encompasses my favorite type of books - books that are not too constrained by reality such as those by Kafka, Murakami, Calvino and Saramago.

For more information on this challenge that focuses on fantasy, folklore, fairy tales or mythology go here and for the review site go here. It runs from March 21 to June 20, 2011.

I have so many books that I could read for this challenge. I bought Jeff Vandermeer's Finch last year and then decided to save it for this year so I had time to savor Shriek, so I will definitely be reading Finch. I also have had The City and the City since it came out so I definitely will be reading that. I also enjoyed the Calvino and Ajvaz so much last year that I would like to read more of them. And I of course have more Saramago to read. So here is a pool of books to chose from.

Finch by Jeff Vandermeer
The City and the City by China Mieville
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Alchemist and the Executioness by Bacigalupi and Buckell
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Stone Raft by Jose Saramago
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz
The Library by Zoran Zivkovic
The Last Book by Zoran Zivkovic
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey
The Wood Wife by Terri Windling
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladamir Nabokov
The Narrator by Michael Cisco

And if that isn't enough there is always Jeff Vandermeer's Best Fantasy of 2010 review to get inspiration from.

I am going to sign up for the Journey because I appreciate the flexibility and lack of stress which means that I will read at least one book but I might read more. I did the Journey last year and ended up reading four. I also plan on watching Midsummer Night's Dream on DVD and I hope to do a few short story weekends with Jorge Luis Borges. Thanks Carl for hosting another great challenge.

Broken Angels

2011-02-28T23:51:00.000-04:00

by Richard K. Morgan

I read Richard K. Morgan's Philip K. Dick Award winning Altered Carbon for the Sci Fi Experience two years ago and enjoyed it. While this is the second book about Takeshi Kovacs it is very different from Altered Carbon. Altered Carbon was essentially a noir detective story that just happened to be set in the future. In Broken Angels you meet up with Takeshi Kovacs embroiled in a war on a distant planet, working as a mercenary for a giant corporation trying to lay claim to an ancient Martian artifact, in the middle of a war zone. While it was much more of an action/war adventure, I was very happy that it explored the implications of the advanced technology laid out in the first book.

In Kovac's world people have stacks embedded in their spinal column that contain their memories and personalities and as long as your stack is recovered when you die you can either be "re-sleeved" in another body or exist in virtual reality. Because your consciousness can be put into a digital format this has interesting implications for torture, sex, space travel and warfare conducted by soldiers that don't die a "real death".

I also found the story line about the Martians fascinating. The Martians were long gone when humans discovered their cities and artifacts, but by using the Martian technology and information that they left behind, human beings have been able to leap far beyond their capabilities, especially in terms of space travel. I don't want to give the plot away but I found the entire Martian story line fascinating and hope that it is developed more in the following book.

I will definitely read the next (and supposedly last) Takeshi Kovacs book, Woken Furies, which is set on Kovac's home world, Harlan's World, and delves into Kovac's history.

The Windup Girl

2011-02-27T13:41:00.005-04:00

by Paolo Bacigalupi

I had been hearing great things about this book since it came out in September of 2009. And the buzz only continued to grow as it won both the Hugo and Nebula for best novel in 2010. It also seems to appeal to people that do not normally read science fiction and even made Time magazine's top ten fiction books in 2009. Sometimes a book with all that buzz just cannot live up to its billing but I was really wowed by Windup Girl.

The story is set at some time in the future in Bangkok Thailand, after oil has run out, the sea levels have risen and plagues have decimated the world's food supply. Methane made from animal dung lights the street lamps and cook fires and kink-springs are used to power everything from boats and factories to guns. Computers are powered by the individual pedaling away at the treadles and bioengeniered beasts called Megodonts (as pictured on the cover) do the heavy labor. The primary means of transportation are sailing ships and dirigibles. While this may make it sound like a steampunk novel, I didn't really get that vibe from it, but I am no steampunk expert. My favorite part of the novel was the extraordinary future Bangkok, with sky scrapers built during the Expansion now crumbing and overcome with vines since electricity is gone but filled with people.

The primary interest of the novel is genetic engineering both of the food supply and of people and animals. Much of the food supply is tainted and has become deadly to eat while calorie companies control the food supply of genetically engineered crops. Engineered animals, such as the Cheshire cats that shimmer in and out of sight like the one from Lewis Carol's Wonderland, have almost obliterated all of the natural species. And the calorie men search for original genetic plant material to work their gene hacking magic. The Windup Girl of the title is a genetically modified humanoid created by the Japanese as a companion, secretary and translator for a wealthy businessman who abandoned her in Thailand where "New People" are illegal.

While the characters were fully developed and interesting and the plot was complex and fascinating, what I loved most about the story was the way the reader is just dropped into this complex world and allowed to slowly figure it out. To me the city of Bangkok is the main character and the large themes are the main plot devise. It is not preachy in any way but the author manages to create a frightening world that in light of our current state of affairs seems not really that far fetched. It certainly has made me look at "calories" in a new light.

The publisher, Night Shade Books, currently has free downloads of "Windup Stories" which contains two stories that are set in the same world as The Windup Girl, The Calorie Man and Yellow Card. I enjoyed reading them, especially since I understand that The Calorie Man was the genesis of The Windup Girl. I would however recommend reading the book first as it fully immerses you in this world and I think better prepares you to appreciate these stories.

And if you need more convincing here are some reviews from Cory Doctorow , SF Signal.

I read this as part of Carl V's Sci Fi Experience.

Dark River

2011-01-17T08:54:00.004-04:00

by John Twelve Hawks

This is Book 2 of the Fourth Realm Trilogy. I read the first book, the Traveler, when it first came out in 2005. Set in the present day, an evil organization is developing more and more sophisticated ways to track all movements and activities of the population. From credit card and banking transactions, to surveillance cameras on the streets, tickets purchased, web sites visited, and phone calls made, the Tabula is tracking your every movement. The first book was about a Traveler - a person with the ability to travel to "other realms" and a Harlequin, a sword carrying protector of travelers and their pursuit by the Tabula. I thought it was an interesting premise and it was written as an exciting thriller. While I didn't think it quite lived up to all the hype, I did enjoy it and was interested in reading more.

The second book, Dark River, picks up were the first one left off. The Tabula is working furiously to achieve total control of the population. Two brothers search for their legendary Traveler father, one brother working for the Tabula and one hiding from the Tabula, living off the grid and protected by the young Harlequin Maya. While this was clearly a middle novel and could not be read on its own, it did make me interested to continue following the adventure and read the next book The Golden City.

Winter's Tale

2011-01-12T14:10:00.004-04:00

by Mark Helprin

I first read this in the 80s shortly after it first came out. I rarely re-read books but this one really stuck with me all these years and I am glad that I finally re-read it. On a second reading it certainly did not disappoint! And while I remembered some sections vividly, there was a lot that I did not remember which made for an interesting read.

Winter's Tale is very difficult to describe. Superficially the story is about a burglar who falls in love with a young dying heiress when he breaks into her mansion. But that is just what gets the story going. In my mind the main character is the mythical New York City that Helprin creates which seems to always be enfolded in winter and threatened by a cloud wall. We experience almost a century of the city from the days of sailing ships, horse drawn carriages and cobblestone streets to the modernization of electric lights, mighty bridges and printing presses. There is a small upstate town which is not on any map and usually cannot be found, a white horse that can seemingly fly, and an epic struggle to build bridges.

The writing is spectacular and I could vividly picture flying up the frozen Hudson river in a sleigh under piles of fur, hiding in the lighted constellation ceiling of Grand Central Station or skulking through the sewers with the Short Tails gang of Five Points. While this is definitely fantasy it is not elf and dragon sort of fantasy but rather a look at turn of the century New York as a wondrous and romanticized place that you wish it had been. And you don't have to have ever been to New York or even like New York to enjoy this book. One of my favorite books of all time. Read it!

Reading Deliberately 2011

2011-01-11T14:21:00.003-04:00

Last January I decided to try and read more deliberately. I believe the quality of the books that I read in 2010 was much higher than in 2009. I think this is in part due to my leaving my real world book club (and therefore cutting out books I didn't really want to read) but also reading some great books that I have intended to read for a long time but never seemed to get to. I therefore am going to try it again this year.

Books I intended to read in 2010 and still intend to read in 2011:

Gold Bug Variation by Richard Powers
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Lost City of Z by David Grann (nonfiction)

There are also books that I have that would be perfect for challenges that I intend to participate in:

Finch by Jeff Vandermeer - Once Upon a Time
The City and the City by China Mieville - Once Upon a Time
Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - RIP

In addition I would like to read a book about Art, a book about Food, a book about Books or Reading, a nonfiction book as well as something from the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels List which I am extremely slowly working through (The Sound and the Fury is on it).

This is a shorter list than last year but perhaps I can complete it this year and I reserve the right to add to it as I am sure I am leaving something important out.

2010 Year in Review

2011-01-11T10:09:00.003-04:00

I cannot believe that 2010 went by so quickly. At the beginning of 2010 I decided to read a little more deliberately. While I did not achieve all my goals I did make significant progress and had a good reading year over all, especially as it included some really great books.

My five favorite books from 2010:

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

It was very hard to narrow it down to only five, especially since I really loved all of my honorable mentions below. It didn't make any sense to me however to pick 11 favorites since I only read 26 books this year. I guess it goes to show that I had a very successful reading year at least in terms of quality!

Honorable Mention:
Shriek
The Other City
New York Trilogy
A Wild Sheep Chase
Brasyl
Housekeeper and the Professor

Reading Achievements for 2010:
I read twenty six books, which does not compare to most book bloggers but I am quite happy with that number as it is one more than last year and I expected to have read less as it was an especially hectic year for work and life. Of the ten books that I intended to read in 2010 I managed to read half of them, which isn't bad. Of the seven that I had on my shelves that I intended to read for challenges I only read three of them. Indeed, I didn't do very well with Challenges in 2010. I completed the Sci Fi Experience (3 books read), Once Upon A Time (4 books read), RIP (1 book read) and Japanese Literature (1 book read) but dropped out of the Speculative Fiction Challenge and Mind Voyages. I did manage to read two books related to art (The Savage Garden and My Name is Red) and one book about books (The Man Who Loved Books Too Much). I am way behind in writing reviews and need to get better about that, especially since my main goal in having this blog is to replace my physical reading diary.

Statistics:

Although some of the books could fall into more than one category for the purposes of this list I only assigned one category for each book.

Nonfiction - 2

Science Fiction - 3

Horror - 0

Fantasy - 4

Mystery - 3

Literary - 9

Thriller - 3

Other - 1

Female authors - 5

Male authors - 21

New to me authors - 15

Audiobooks - 10
Ebooks - 4

I was surprised that I listened to more audio books than ebooks but since my husband has returned my Kindle to me I bet that ebooks will increase in 2011.

Sci Fi Experience 2011

2011-01-07T09:57:00.001-04:00

It is time once again for Carl V's Sci Fi Experience. If you want to join in go here and if you want to check out people's reviews go here. I have been waiting for this to begin! I have Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan on my ipod ready to listen to (I enjoyed his Altered Carbon) and the Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi on my coffee table in hard cover. I also have Daemon by Daniel Suarez, Light by M. John Harrison and Old Man's War by John Scalzi on my Kindle. I don't think I will get to all of these but if I do there are many more on my list. And as always I am looking forward to reading all the other reviews and adding to my wish list. Thanks Carl for hosting again!

Kook

2011-01-02T16:34:00.003-04:00

What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave by Peter Heller

I am not a surfer, never aspired to be a surfer, don't live in a location where there is much surfing and don't know any surfers. I was spending way to much time in an airport and looking for something lighter than what I had with me for reading and picked this up in a bookshop. I cannot say it is a great work of art or well written for that matter but it was entertaining and introduced me to a world that I knew nothing about. In fact, I immediately went out and rented three surf movies: Endless Summer, Step Into Liquid and Blue Horizon. I had no idea that people are surfing one hundred foot waves. I also picked up the new book, The Wave by Susan Casey, that looks really interesting.

But back to this book. Peter Heller seems to have made a career for himself going on adventures and then writing about them: extreme kayaking Tibet's Tsangpo gorge, the "deepest river gorge in the world"; a radical and dangerous campaign on an "eco-pirate ship" against Japanese whale hunting in Antarctica - and that is just his published books. His adventures are also chronicled in his articles in Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure as well as others. His web site has quite a few of his articles. But back to this book - Kook about surfing.

In Kook, Peter Heller sets himself the task of trying to learn how to surf in one year. He starts out in California and works his way through Baja and into Mexico. In the process he meets all sorts of surfers, from guys nobody has ever heard of to the famous. Oh yeah, and his girl friend comes along and learns to surf too. A surfer certainly wouldn't read this book the same way I did but for a non surfer it was a very accessible and entertaining introduction to the surfing world. I don't know if this is the best introduction to surfing (you cannot beat the visuals of a video for really understanding the waves) but I found it very interesting and was glad I read it. I will probably pick up some of his other books as well.

People of the Book

2011-01-02T14:11:00.008-04:00

by Geraldine Brooks

This book was a surprise to me. I read great reviews of it when it first came out in 2008 added it to my wish list and forgot about. Years later I needed to put something on my ipod for a trip, came across it, remembered it was supposed to be good and got it without really knowing what it was about except vaguely a book. While it was far more serious then I expected, I really enjoyed it. The framework is that our narrator is a young rare book restorer who is tasked with restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah and when she comes across a clue in the book to its history such as a wine stain, salt or an insect wing, we get to hear the story of how that wine stain etc. got there and gradually the entire history of the Haggadah unfolds.

And quite a history it is, from its creation in Spain and travels to Venice, Vienna and Sarajevo barely escaping the inquisition, the Nazi's and the Bosnian War. The author has an interesting map on her web site of its travels. While not a "thriller" I thought the story was just fascinating, especially since it is in most part true. And I am always fascinated by illuminated manuscripts.

I was not familiar with the Sarajevo Haggadah or its history but I don't think that took away from my enjoyment of the work. Obviously this is a work of fiction and I understand that experts knowledgeable of the actual book and its history may take issue with some literary license taken but as a literary work I thought it was great. Each of the story lines was fascinating as well as the many characters and I also learned a lot of interesting history that I was unfamiliar with. I highly recommend it.

A Wild Sheep Chase

2010-12-26T14:45:00.006-04:00

by Haruki Murakami

This is my third Murakami book (after Kafka on the Shore and The Wind -Up Bird Chronicle) and I was certainly not disappointed. Apparently this is the third in the Trilogy of the Rat but I haven't read the first two (which are not readily available in English) and did not feel that I was missing anything while reading A Wild Sheep Chase. The un-named main character is drifting in his life, his wife leaves him, his business is ok but not very interesting, he describes his life as mediocre. Then he gets summoned by a mysterious businessman interested in a photo of sheep used in one of his brochures. He is tasked with finding the unusual sheep and sets off on an adventure. He meets interesting characters - a woman with the most beautiful ears, a sheep man, a sheep professor who never leaves his hotel room and it appears that his friend and business partner (the Rat) who had earlier disappeared is also on the trail of the same sheep.

This was the most straight forward Murakami that I have read (and also the earliest) and can easily be read as a simple detective story. But what I love most about Murakami is the beautiful writing and of course the wonderful characters. And if you feel like it, you can delve into the endless quest of "what is it trying to say" and "what does the sheep symbolize". What resonated most with me however was the narrator's nostalgic yearning to recapture something of his youth. His stay at the cabin in the mountains with nothing to do but read and cook or bake, perhaps go for a run made me nostalgic for my youthful stays at my parents cabin, with nothing to do but read, cook or go for a walk in the woods or a swim in the bay. No television, no dvd, no running somewhere on an errand or to pick up take-out. I miss that.

I understand that Dance, Dance, Dance is a sequel to this and I am looking forward to reading that as well. I am looking forward to lots more Murakami in my future, including a new release in English in the fall of 2011. Although I admit that when I find an author that I really enjoy like Murakami I am afraid to read all of his work too quickly for fear of running out of new books to experience. If anyone has any suggestions on which Murakami I should try next, let me know.

I note that In Spring It Is Dawn has started a Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge 2011 which I immediately signed up for. This book completes my participation in Bellezza's wonderful Japanese Literature Challenge 4. Thanks for hosting another great Challenge Bellezza!

Bookmarks

2010-12-26T14:20:00.006-04:00

Here is what looked good in the November / December Bookmarks Magazine issue.

C, Tom McCarthy
Room, Emma Donoghue
Bitter in the Mouth, Monique Truong - S
Hunger, Knut Hamsun
Percival's Planet, Michael (about discovery of Pluto)
What is Left the Daughter, Howard Norman (set in Nova Scotia)
The Bird Artist, Howard Norman
The Dreaming Void, Peter F. Hamilton - SF
The Dervish House, Ian McDonald - SF
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
Zero History, William Gibson
Fall of the House of Walworth, Geoffrey O'brien -NF

All books appear to be available for the Kindle.

Bookmarks

2010-11-14T15:48:00.005-04:00

Here is what looked interesting in the September/October 2010 Bookmarks Magazine.

The Man Who Invented the Computer, Jane Smiley
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
Passage, Connie Willis
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Reif Larsen
The Tattooed Map, Barbara Hodgson
The Incident Report, Martha Baillie

Contemporary Russian Literature:
Something by Boris Akunin
Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books, Elif Batuman -NF
The World to Come, Dara Horn
Moscow Rules, Daniel Silva

Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan - S
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban -SF
Cookbook Collector, Allegra Goodman - S
Deep Creek, Dana Hand
The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell - S
Kraken, China Mieville -SF
The Passage, Justin Cronin - SF
Blood Oath, Christopher Farnsworth
Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre - NF

The Savage Garden

2010-11-05T16:41:00.002-04:00

by Mark Mills

Bookmarks had a review of Mark Mills’ new book, The Information Officer, a thriller set on Malta during WWII. While I don’t often read books about war I have always been interested in (yet know little about) Malta because the Knights of Malta once owned the island where I currently live. In reading about the Information Officer many of the reviewers liked it but commented that it was not as good as the Savage Garden. I looked up the Savage Garden and it sounded interesting as well, so I decided to start there.

The Savage Garden is the story of a young Englishman who comes to Tuscany to study the famous Renaissance Garden of Villa Docci. While living with the family at the Villa and studying the garden he begins to investigate the garden’s and the family’s history and learns of two unexplained murders that occurred 400 years apart. As he delves deeper into the symbolism of the garden and becomes more personally entangled with the family things get more and more dicey for the young man. It is a mystery after all so I don’t want to give the plot away. Suffice it to say that while the murder mystery was entertaining but fairly light, I really enjoyed the mystery of the garden. It was very atmospheric and I could just see the beautiful yet crumbling villa, the now neglected once spectacular garden and the quirky family. It made me want to buy a plane ticket to Florence right away. Not great literature, not great mystery writing but an enjoyable diversion if you want a pleasant visit Tuscany without actually going there. I bet the author could bring Malta to life as well so I will probably give the Information Officer a try sometime.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

2010-11-04T16:44:00.002-04:00

by Allison Hoover Bartlett

There are few genres that I enjoy more than books about books. I love reading about other people obsessed by books and the entire book world. This is especially true as the world of book collecting is a world I have chosen not to participate in but I entirely understand its allure. Years ago when I lived in Boston one of my favorite things to do was to go to the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair (which is incidentally this weekend) all by myself. I never bought anything but I would just gaze at the beautiful book bindings, fore edge paintings, illuminated manuscripts and rare first editions. I understand the lust for these things. For myself I have chosen to focus on the experience of reading and not to collect or focus on the books as objects, but I could easily have been a rabid collector. I therefore really enjoy reading about others who participate in the book world and was looking forward to reading this.

This non-fiction work tells the story of the author tracking down and getting to know John Gilkey, a notorious book thief. While Gilkey goes to great extremes to steel his books, and while both he and the author often proclaim his love for the books, I just never bought it. It seemed to me that Mr. Gilkey was simply a thief with a compulsion but that he had no real love or appreciation for the books. It seemed to me that he could have easily been compulsively steeling jewelry or paintings. As a mere thief and not a true book lover, I felt absolutely no empathy for the man. In addition, I thought the story line was rather dull and it wasn’t very well written.

I would skip this book and read A Gentle Madness or Used and Rare. Of course many people loved it. On Amazon it has 107 reviews with an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Carl V. from Stainless Steel Droppings also really enjoyed it.

Sweetness At the Bottom of the Pie

2010-11-04T15:51:00.002-04:00

by Alan Bradley

Sometimes you are just in the mood for something light and fun. Eleven year old Flavia de Luce is a little bored rambling around in her English country manner house and doing experiments in her chemistry laboratory. But then she finds a body in the cucumber patch and the police seem to be focusing on her father as the prime suspect so what is she to do but solve the murder herself! This outrageously precocious 11 year old is very entertaining, especially since I listened to this in audio and the narrator, Jayne Entwistle, did a marvelous job with Flavia. While not a great work of literature it was clever and fun and I would not hesitate to read more in this series when in the right mood. For a more detailed review check out Carl V’s at Stainless Steel Droppings.

Master and Margarita

2010-10-31T23:52:00.001-04:00

by Mikhail Bulgakov

I have been wanting to read this "masterpiece" for many years about Satan's visit to Stalinist Russia. The story opens with two gentlemen having a lively discussion in a Moscow park about whether or not Jesus actually existed when they are joined in the discussion by a foreigner named Woland (aka Satan). From there the story takes off in crazy and unexpected directions that were thoroughly entertaining. Woland (aka Satan) has come to Moscow with his entourage and causes all sorts of trouble especially for the literary and theatrical communities. In another story line we encounter Pontius Pilate on the day that he meets Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus). I don’t want to give much of the plot away as the madcap twists and turns are part of the fun.

This novel can be read on many different levels. It was written in the 1930s in Stalinist Soviet Union but because of the regime’s repressive control of literary works was not published there until 1963. The novel is in many respects a satire of the bureaucratic control of literature. One of the funniest little vignettes is when Woland makes a literary bureaucrat disappear but his suit remains at his desk working away and signing documents without any disruption to the office. In fact the title character, the Master, is a writer who burns his novel for fear of the problems it will cause him with the bureaucracy. Indeed, most of the characters caught up in Woland’s antics are either writers, poets, the literary trade union MASSOLIT or part of the Variety Theater.

But the novel can also be read simply for fun. The plot is just wild and wacky and I also loved the characters. I especially enjoyed Woland’s entourage which includes Behemoth a mischievous black cat that can take on human form, Koroviev an ex choir master, Azazello a fanged assassin, and Hella a beautiful red headed succubus. My favorite character is Margarita, the Master’s lover, who fully embraces whatever situation she may find herself in. My favorite scenes are when Maragarita agrees to help Woland out and is given extraordinary powers which she uses to take revenge on the literary bureaucrat that she blames for the Master’s troubles before she leaves Moscow to serve as the hostess at Satan’s springtime ball.

I also really enjoyed the fact that the novel does not paint Satan, or any of the characters, as simply good or evil. As Woland says "what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?" (p. 360). Good can sometimes come out of evil. For example, Margarita is turned into a witch to host Satan’s ball and in return is given a wish. Instead of asking for something for herself she requests that a women that she has just meet be released from torment. And as we all know, good intentions can often lead to evil, a principle that must have particularly resonated during the Stalinist era.

Apparently this novel has been turned into numerous plays, a movie, a mini series for tv, an opera, a ballet, a graphic novel, a painting and inspiration for songs by Mike Jagger and Pearl Jam. I read this for Carl V’s RIP V challenge and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks Carl for hosting a great challenge again. Hopefully next year I will have more time to participate.

2666

2010-10-26T16:56:00.005-04:00

by Roberto Bolano

I finished this book in July and it is almost November and I still haven’t written a review of it. Work has been crazy and we went on vacation etc. and I cannot blame this particular book for putting me so far behind in book write ups, but I must admit that I don’t really know what to say about this book. When it first came out it made quite a sensation so of course I immediately bought it. I started reading it in January and read it in the three sections that my book was divided into with other books in between. This is how Publisher’s Weekly described it:

Last year's The Savage Detectives by the late Chilean-Mexican novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) garnered extraordinary sales and critical plaudits for a complex novel in translation, and quickly became the object of a literary cult. This brilliant behemoth is grander in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job. The novel is divided into five parts (Bolaño originally imagined it being published as five books) and begins with the adventures and love affairs of a small group of scholars dedicated to the work of Benno von Archimboldi, a reclusive German novelist. They trace the writer to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa (read: Juarez), but there the trail runs dry, and it isn't until the final section that readers learn about Benno and why he went to Santa Teresa. The heart of the novel comes in the three middle parts: in The Part About Amalfitano, a professor from Spain moves to Santa Teresa with his beautiful daughter, Rosa, and begins to hear voices. The Part About Fate, the novel's weakest section, concerns Quincy Fate Williams, a black American reporter who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a prizefight and ends up rescuing Rosa from her gun-toting ex-boyfriend. The Part About the Crimes, the longest and most haunting section, operates on a number of levels: it is a tormented catalogue of women murdered and raped in Santa Teresa; a panorama of the power system that is either covering up for the real criminals with its implausible story that the crimes were all connected to a German national, or too incompetent to find them (or maybe both); and it is a collection of the stories of journalists, cops, murderers, vengeful husbands, prisoners and tourists, among others, presided over by an old woman seer. It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.

blurb from Publisher’s Weekly via Amazon.com.

I am not sure I agree with Publisher Weekly. My favorite parts were the first “The Part About the Critics” which describes the scholars who have devoted their lives to analyzing Archimboldi searching for him in Mexico, and the final “The Part About Archimboldi” where we learn the full life story of the missing author. I thought the first part was extremely funny describing the self absorb scholars and the entire academic world. I also enjoyed the writing style, although some have found it too detailed:

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier’s call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times…The word euphemism ten times…. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times.

I thought this was a much more interesting way to convey the gist of the conversation without actually telling us what was said. I also thoroughly enjoyed the long and complicated Archimboldi story.

I found the Part About the Crimes by far the weakest part and had to force myself to get through it. I knew going in that it was going to be lengthy and overwhelming with incident after incident of murder and rape recounted but I had not anticipated that it would be so boring. Far from bringing home the horror of the crimes it simply made me blaise. Or perhaps that was the point, I don’t know. I just kept thinking he needed an editor.

I am glad that I read it but it certainly wasn’t one of my more memorable reads this year (other than the fact that it took up so much of my reading time). I might consider reading the Savage Detectives but am not rushing to do so.

RIP V Challenge

2010-09-27T14:10:00.003-04:00

I have been looking forward to Carl V's RIP challenge for a while but work and life have been crazy and I just realized that I haven't actually signed up for it. I have to select Peril the Third which requires one book because I don't think I will be able to do more. I have already started reading The Master and Margarita by Mikail Bulgakov which so far I am enjoying very much. If I get a chance to read more below is a list of some that I would like to read. For information on joining the challenge go here, and for the review site go here.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - which has been sitting on my shelf since it came out.
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Great and Secret Show or Damnation Game by Clive Barker - I loved his Weaveworld.
The Stand by Stephen King - cannot believe that I have never actually read it.
The Terror by Dan Simmons
We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson - I loved Hill House.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood - also been on my shelf since it came out.

Bookmarks

2010-07-25T11:39:00.002-04:00

July/August 2010

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - S
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan - S & L
Feed by Mira Grant - S
Solar by Ian McEwan
The Executor by Jesse Kellerman
The Love we Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak
Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
War by Sebastian Junger - NF
Callapse by Jared Diamond - NF
Erast Petrovich Fandorin series by Boris Akunin
start with The Winter Queen

Books about New York
City of Dreams, City of Glory, City of God by Beverly Swerling
Paradise Alley, Dreamland, Striver's Row by Kevin Baker
New York by Edward Rutherfurd
Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon

Japanese Literature Challenge IV

2010-06-27T11:49:00.003-04:00

It is time for the Japanese Literature Challenge. For info go here, for reviews go here, and suggestions here. You only need to read one book for the challenge but I have several that I would like to read. I would like to read the following:

Wild Sheep Chase - Murakami
Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
The Tattoo Murder Case - Akimitsu Takagi
Old Capital - Kawabata
Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo

I am definitely reading A Wild Sheep Chase as it has been sitting on the coffee table waiting for this challenge to begin. I also already own the Tattoo Murder Case and the Rampo book would be perfect for the RIP challenge in the fall. And of course I am sure my wish list will get much longer as I read everybody's reviews. I see that there are already 40 reviews posted! Sorry I am late.

Once Upon A Time IV Wrap Up

2010-06-27T11:01:00.003-04:00

I had signed up for the journey to give myself flexibility and I ended up reading four books.

Shriek
The Other City
Invisible Cities
Pale Fire

It is hard to pick a favorite as they are all so different and all enjoyable. I absolutely loved Shriek and it's fascinating mushroom plagued city of Ambergris and am looking forward to the next in the series, Finch. Invisible Cities was less a novel and more an experience which I thoroughly enjoyed. Pale Fire, which purports to be a poem and critical commentary, was a fun and witty novel. I really enjoyed them all.

Thanks for hosting another fun challenge Carl!

Pale Fire

2010-06-19T10:23:00.003-04:00

by Vladimir Nabokov

I began hearing about Pale Fire when I read House of Leaves in 2000 (and it is hard to believe that that was 10 years ago). Like House of Leaves, Pale Fire plays with the structure of the text and often is cited as an important example of early metafiction and hypertext. This novel written by Vladimir Nabokov (of Lolita fame), published in 1962, purports to be a 999 line poem written by poet John Shade and critical analysis of the poem in a forward and lengthy end notes by Charles Kinbote. Although the critical analysis is supposedly about the poem, it mainly provides the story of Kinbote, his supposed friendship (which comes across more as stalking) with next door neighbor John Shade, and the travails, exploits and adventures of the deposed king of the kingdom of Zembla.

I guess because I heard about this book primarily in relationship to its unusual structure and often described as difficult but important (#53 on Modern Library's 100 Best Novels), I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the story and the characters were a lot of fun. I loved that the narrator, Kinbote, could clearly not be trusted and the way he tried to insert his story of Zembla into the poem. I enjoyed the escapades of the zany king of Zembla and the frightening assassin Gradus. I appreciated the commentary on the academic life of a small New England college and its professors.

At first I tried to go back and forth between the poem and the notes but I quickly decided to read the poem through and then read the notes through, returning to the poem text once in a while. It could be read either way. Indeed, as evidenced by the many decades it has been studied and the numerous critical books and essays it has engendered, it could be read numerous times and still give the readers something new each time.

Although it is clear that the narrator cannot be trusted, it is unclear how to interpret the rest of the story. Did John Shade write both the poem and the commentary creating Kinbote as a character? Is John Shade a figure of Kinbote's imagination? Is Kinbote sane? Are his stories of Zembla and the assassin Gradus real?

I highly recommend this book. While you could spend years analyzing it, you can also simply enjoy it as a funny, witty, beautifully written story.

Invisible Cities

2010-06-13T15:35:00.005-04:00

by Italo Calvino

Since I just finished reading the Other City and wanted to read some Calvino I thought this one would be perfect. Invisible Cities is even less of a novel than the Other City. The premise is that Marco Polo is telling Kublai Khan about the places he has visited in his travels. The entries are very short and are mostly one or two page descriptions of cities interspersed occasionally with a page or two of conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Each entry is designated a specific type: Cities and Memory, Cities and Signs, Cities and Desire, Thin Cities, Cities and the Dead, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities etc. I know it sounds strange, without any real plot or characters, just a book describing cities, but I absolutely loved it. The writing was beautiful and it was such a pleasure to dip into these little vignettes of cities.

Since I could never adequately explain this work or Calvino's beautiful prose and since they are so short I could not resist including one in its entirety: Cities and Desire #4.

In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

The building with the globes is now Fedora's museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the medusa pond that would have collected the waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), the fun sliding down the spiral twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).

On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later is possible no longer.

Here are some descriptions of more of my favorites.

The city with no walls, no ceilings, no floors, just "water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows." Thin Cities #3.

The city made up of two half cities, one permanent, one temporary, one a circus, one made of marble, stone and cement with factories, banks, schools. Each year the the marble, stone and cement city is loaded into its caravan to continue its itinerary. Thin Cities #4.

The city whose inhabitants all move onto a new city periodically and take on new jobs, new spouses, new hobbies and yet the city remains always the same. Trading Cities #3.

The spider web city built hanging down from a net over a chasm. Thin Cities #5

The city which has built an exact copy of itself below ground for their dead. Cities and the Dead # 3.

I also enjoyed the discussions between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

Polo: Perhaps this garden exist only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raiding dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.

Kublai: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they shift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them.

Polo: Perhaps all that is left of the world is wasteland covered in rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

No description could do this book justice. Just read it.

I read this for Once Upon A Time IV.

The Other City

2010-05-22T14:41:00.000-04:00

by Michal Ajvaz

I had never heard of this book until I saw it on Jeff VanderMeer's Best of 2009 list and read his review for Omnivoracious.

In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statutes, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. The Other City is a guidebook to this invisible other Prague, overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our feet and waves lap at our bedspreads. Heir to the tradition and obsessions of Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the long and distinguished line of Czech fantasists, Ajvaz's The Other City - his first novel to be translated into English - brings to light all the worlds we are blind to, being caught in our own ways of seeing.

Blurb from the back of the book.

I admit that mention of Borges and Kafka, two of my favorite authors, had me intrigued. And then I read the opening paragraph:

I was walking up and down rows of books at the antiquarian bookseller's in Karlova Street. Now and then I would take a look out the shop window. It started to snow heavily; holding a book in my hand I watched the snowflakes swirl in front of the wall of St. Saviour's Church. I returned to my book, savoring its aroma and allowing my eyes to flit over its pages, reading here and there the fragment of a sentence that suddenly sparkled mysteriously because it was taken out of context. I was in no hurry; I was happy to be in a room that smelled pleasantly of old books, where it was warm and quiet, where the pages rustled as they turned, as if the books were sighing in their sleep. I was glad I didn't have to go out into the darkness and the snowstorm.

I was hooked. In that cozy bookshop with the books sighing in their sleep the protagonist finds a strange red velvet book in a writing that he does not know which leads him to discover a city that he never realized was there, a city that exists in the dark neglected corners and on the edges of the city he knows. The Other City is not strong on plot or character development Indeed, the Complete Review complained that it was almost all atmosphere with little purpose. I have to admit I did not love it as much as I had hoped to. On the other hand, some of the imagery was breath taking and has stayed with me long after I finished reading it. I loved the concept that we live our daily lives seeing what we expect to see and not noticing what exactly is in the shadows and neglected corners. I loved the overlap of this other world and our everyday world.

"There's a tension in The Other City between the fanciful and the baroque, the cleverly odd and the deeply odd, that makes the novel work. It's the kind of book you let wash over you in waves--episodic, funny but not too silly, and marked by a first-class imagination." Jeff VanderMeer. I agree that you need to let the book simply "wash over you" and let your imagination take you away. Indeed, it is more of an experience than a novel.

"What will we do?" the girl said. "We'll never reach the island now. We'll never walk along the white promenades or sit on a terrace above the sea ..."
"It doesn't matter," her friend replied. "It is better this way. We'll imagine it all, and it'll be much more beautiful. Every day we'll dream up excursions, games in gleaming pools, splendid parties with lanterns, flirting with interesting people, dancing at night on the decks of yachts. We're not so dull as to need reality ..."
p. 140-141.

I hope I am not so dull as to need reality, at least not all the time.

I had hoped to read China Meiville's The City and the City along with this as the two books have been compared quite often, but alas, my Kindle with my copy of it is still shanghaied by my husband. The Other City is definitely not for everyone, but I found it intriguing.

I read this for Once Upon A Time Challenge and Speculative Fiction Challenge.

Bookmarks

2010-05-02T14:01:00.003-04:00

Here's what looked interesting in the May/June Bookmarks Magazine.

Tell All, Chuck Palahniuk - S
Sleepless, Charlie Huston - S
Horns, Joe Hill - S
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornett's Nest, Stieg Larsson - S
Innocent, Scott Turrow - S
Solar, Ian McEwan - S
The Big Short - NF - S

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst
Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds - SF
Kraken, China Mieville - SF
Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes -NF
Fordlandia, Greg Grandin - NF
The House at Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper
Forever, Pete Hamill
Lost Books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow
The Information Officer, Mark Mills
The Savage Garden, Mark Mills
This Book is Overdue!, Marilyn Johnson - NF
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot - NF

Shriek: An Afterward

2010-05-02T09:01:00.004-04:00

by Jeff VanderMeer

This is the second book set in VanderMeer's wonderful city of Ambergris. I just adored City of Saints and Madmen. While I think you could dive right into this book and still enjoy it, I would recommend you start with City which not only sets the stage for Ambergris but includes many of the same characters and events relevant to Shriek. Unlike City, which is a collection of short stories, letters, pamphlets and scholarly articles, Shriek is written in a more typical novel format. The book supposedly is a manuscript written by Janice Shriek, a former art dealer, about the life of her brother Duncan Shriek, a former historian. It includes editorial comments by her brother inserted in the text in brackets. But it is more than a story of the rise and fall of these two fascinating siblings. Through the story of the Shrieks it gives a detailed picture of an entire generation of the inhabitants of the city of Ambergris, from its cultural and academic life, to its descent into war, to its mysterious underground populated with the gray caps and their fascinating fungus. Ambergris is richly imagined and VanderMeer's wonderful prose makes it unforgettable. Although a dark mysterious and dangerous city, Ambergris is one of the most intriguing imaginary locals I have ever encountered.

The story of Ambergris is continued in VanderMeer's new book, Finch, which has been nominated for a Nebula award. Although I bought it as soon as it came out , I think I will hold of reading it for a while so I can savor Shriek. My understanding is that it is a novel cast as a noir detective story which takes place a century ofter Shriek when the grey caps have come to power. It has gotten good reviews : here is one from Carl V.

I read this for Once Upon A Time, Mind Voyages and Speculative Fiction Challenge.

Cemetery Dance

2010-04-18T16:45:00.003-04:00

by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Zombies? Really? Zombies? Preston and Child are my go to guys when I am looking for fun fast-paced trashy adventure. I absolutely loved Thunderhead (Anasazi in New Mexico), Riptide (Pirate Treasure in Maine) and Ice Limit (Meteor trouble in Antarctica). And then there is the Agent Penderghast series which began in New York's Museum of Natural History and continues with this newest entry, Cemetary Dance. I normally love Agent Penderghast as a character but this entire book fell flat for me. Indeed, it included characters that I had really enjoyed in other books but it just couldn't hold my interest. In fact, I have read all of their books, except Brimestone, and this is my least favorite. So why did I even finish it? Well, it is really hard for me to not finish a book and I was hoping that it would get better. And of course I did want to find out if it really was zombies. Try the Relic, Thunderhead, Riptide and Ice Limit. Will I read their new Penderghast story Fever Dream which comes out in May? Absolutely, I cannot wait!

Unburnable

2010-04-18T11:00:00.005-04:00

by Marie-Elena John

This was a selection for my book club and I was looking forward to reading it because it was set in Dominica. I love reading fiction set in the Caribbean and Dominica is one of my favorite islands. It turns out that the author is the cousin of the book club member who selected it, so she was able to provide some interesting background. This is the author's first book and although the author's immediate family ties are with Antigua her relatives originally came from Dominica.

The story is of a young woman living in Washington D.C. who grew up in Dominica and was sent to the states to live when she was a teenager after some unknown traumatic event. As an adult she feels the need to go back to Dominica and try and find out about her family history. The novel is the story of three generations of strong women. I concede that the book is one that my husband would call "womeny", nevertheless I thought the characters were interesting and I really thought it captured Dominica very well. I have never lived in Dominica but having visited Dominica a couple of times I could clearly picture what the author was describing.

I loved the scene where the locals were talking about the crazy tourists that had to go visit the boiling lake as it was absolutely dead on. I thought it gave a very interesting picture of the cultural elements of the island such as the Carib Indians (Dominica being one of the few remaining islands that is home to a significant Carib population), the Maroons, a community of runaway slaves, and the origins of Carnival. It engendered an interesting discussion in book club about the distinctions between West Indians and African-Americans, especially as both groups were well represented in book club.

I enjoyed the book so much that I gave away my paperback copy and bought a hard copy to add to my Caribbean fiction collection. Here is the blurb from the author's web site:

Unburnable – a work of literary fiction that is at once a love story, a murder mystery, a multigenerational epic, and a reinterpretation of Black history – defies neat categorization. Covering the African Diaspora, this riveting narrative of family, betrayal, vengeance, and murder, follows Lillian Baptiste as she is willed back to her island home of Dominica from Washington, D.C. to finally settle her past. Haunted by scandal and secrets, Lillian left Dominica when she was 14 years old after discovering she was the daughter of Iris, the half-crazy Carib woman; and the granddaughter of Matilda, convicted and hung for murder. Their infamous lives were told of in chante mas songs sung during Carnival -- songs about a village on a mountaintop and bones and bodies, about African masquerades and a man who dropped dead. Lillian knows these Carnival songs – thus the history – belongs to her. After 20 years away, she returns to face the demons of her past, and with the help of Teddy, the man she has until now refused to love, she is determined to find her answers. Set partly in contemporary Washington, D.C. and partly in the Caribbean island of Dominica, Unburnable is the dazzling debut of a talented writer who deftly intertwines the African-American experience with authentic Caribbean culture and history – the Caribs, the Maroons, the African origins of Carnival, the practice of Obeah – and in doing so, showcases a new literary voice confident enough to also deliver a page-turner.

The author's web site also has some interesting reviews and interviews with the author. Although some book club members weren't sure they liked the ending, I thought it was perfect and everyone agreed that they enjoyed this book.

Bookmarks Magazine

2010-04-18T10:40:00.001-04:00

March/April

Things that looked interesting in this issue of Bookmarks:

True Confections by Katharine Weber S&L
36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory

Once Upon A Time IV

2010-03-19T17:30:00.002-04:00

Finally Carl V's Once Upon A Time Challenge is here. I have been waiting patiently, or maybe not so patiently, ever since Jeff Vandermeer's Finch came out and I bought Finch and its predecessor Shriek but held off reading them until this challenge. For anyone that does not know, Once Upon a Time is all about reading fantasy, folklore, fairy tales or mythology and runs from March 21, 2010 to June 20, 2010. For details go here, for the review site go here.

I am going to sign up for the Journey because I appreciate the flexibility and lack of stress which means that I will read at least one book but I might read more. And I hope to do a few short story weekends.

I am definitely going to read Shriek by Jeff Vandermeer and I haven't decided whether I should save Finch for later or just dive right in.

My pool of possible other books include:

The Castle, Franz Kafka
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
The City and the City, China Mieville
The Other City, Michal Ajvaz
Observatory Mansions, Edward Carey
White Apples, Jonathan Carroll
Alchemy of Stone, Ekaterina Sedia
Something by Italo Calvino (inspired by Bellezza) possibly Invisible Cities
Something by Jose Saramago possibly the Stone Raft

I would also be curious to read something by Angela Carter or Terri Windling so if anyone has any suggestions on where to start I would appreciate it.

And if I run out of inspiration, Jeff Vandermeer always provides lots of ideas such as in his Best of 2009 at Locus, Best of the Decade on Omnivoracious and of course his wonderful Essential Fantasy Reading List.

I look forward to reading everyones posts and adding to my wish list!

Canticle for Leibowitz

2010-02-28T11:09:00.002-04:00

by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

For some odd reason I just love post apocalyptic books. This is a classic that was originally published in 1960 and won the Hugo Award in 1961. The first part takes place after the world has engaged in nuclear war. After the war called the Flame Deluge, the survivors undertook a Simplification in which they destroyed anyone of learning, any written materials and even anyone who could read because they believed that learning had brought this disaster upon them. Leibowitz attempted to save some of the pre-Flame Deluge knowledge by starting an order to hide, memorize and copy books. That is all I really knew about the book when I read it. I cannot however talk about my reaction to this book without spoilers so if you don't want any spoilers stop reading here.

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

The first part of the novel is set in the 26th century in which the United States is broken up into various Kingdoms. One of the monks at the Leibowitz monastery doing a fast out in the dessert comes upon an old fallout shelter and finds documents that may have belonged to Leibowitz. The second part of the book takes place in 3174 where the city-states are engaging in political intrigue to enhance their power. The age of reason is returning and the monastery and its riches of preserved knowledge attracts the attention of secular scholars who are fascinated by one of the monks invention of a treadmill powered electrical generator that powers an arc lamp based upon his studies of some of the documents in the memorabilia. The last part of the story is set in 3781 and the world has nuclear power and spaceships again. The Asian Coalition and the Atlantic Confederacy appear to be on the brink of nuclear war as the monastery tries to activate their plan to once again preserve mankind's knowledge.

There are many things that I loved about this book - the cyclical nature of history, the allure yet danger of knowledge. But then at the end it turned into this bizarre rant about the church's position against euthanasia or suicide (no mater the circumstances) versus the state's attitude toward euthanasia. To me it just didn't fit with the rest of the book. At the very end we have the Abbot trying to convince a women to not euthanize her child that clearly has more than a fatal dose of radiation poisoning. He tries to reason with her, pleads with her and eventually resorts to commanding her to not spare her child unspeakable suffering before her unquestionable death because the Church does not permit it. I have no issue with the author taking a position that I don't agree with but it ruined the book for me because I thought it was totally out of character from the rest of the book.

This book wasn't about euthanasia or obedience to the church. It was about the idea that knowledge, though dangerous, was valuable and the hope that mankind could learn from its mistakes. I could have understood if in the end the Order lost hope and rejected its centuries mission to preserve knowledge in light of mankind's second destruction of the world but that is not what happened. The Order continued to cling to hope and went ahead with its plan to preserve knowledge in the colonies in space. This book is a classic and I am glad that I read it but the ending just didn't work for me.

I read this for SciFi Experience, Mind Voyages and Speculative Fiction Challenge.

Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Society

2010-02-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

by Mary Ann Shaffer

This is one of those books that gets so much hype that I don’t really want to read it. But then I was looking for something short and light to put on my ipod for a trip to my brothers. Cute is the word that comes to mind when I think of this book and I am usually more of a Franz Kafka - H.P. Lovecraft kind of girl. But you know how sometimes you happen to read the right book at the right time in the right place? I was staying in my niece’s very cute bedroom at my brother’s house (my niece being all grown up and in her own house with her own daughter) and each night I would crawl in bed early and/or wake up early in the morning and listen to some of Juliet’s adventures in Guernsey. I enjoyed the epistolary format. I had never even heard of Guernsey and found the information about the Channel Islands fascinating. The characters were fun and diverse (and the narrators in my audio version did an amazing job with the different characters). All in all it was a delightful short diversion.

Brasyl

2010-02-26T17:22:00.001-04:00

by Ian McDonald

I cannot say that I totally understood Brasyl but I definitely enjoyed it. It was a Hugo Nominee in 2008. One can assume that the novel is set in what we know as Brazil and weaves among three different time periods, 1732, 2006 and 2032. In the present day Marcelina strives for the next super sensational reality tv show . In 1732 a Catholic admonitory sent from Rome travels up the Amazon in search of a renegade Jesuit priest who is attempting to establish his own City of God. And in 2032 a street wise entrepreneur becomes obsessed with a beautiful rogue quantum physicist. I don't want to give too much away but the story was action packed and compelling. I was fascinated by the various threads of soccer, quantum computers, capoeira (a Brazilian blend of martial arts and dance), religion, the nature of reality and the idea of multiple universes. It certainly merits another read as it was a little bit confusing especially with the use of many Portuguese words (although there is a glossary in the back).

I felt fully immersed in this amazing world and was surprised to realize that it was written by a guy in Ireland. It made me want to go visit Brazil and learn capaeira. Oddly for a book labeled as cyberpunk, I found the 18th century Jesuit story line the most fascinating and the imagery so vivid that I still can see it in my mind's eye. This was my first encounter with this author who has also written River of Gods and more recently Cyberabad Days and I will certainly be reading more of his work.

I read this for the SciFi Experience, Speculative Fiction Challenge and 2008 Hugo Nominee for Mind Voyages.

Fall of Hyperion

2010-02-26T17:02:00.001-04:00

by Dan Simmons

I read Dan Simmons first book in the Hyperion Cantos, Hyperion, and absolutely loved it. I highly recommend that everyone read Hyperion! This is the second in the series and picks up where the first one left off. If you haven't read Hyperion it is the story of six pilgrims who go to Hyperion to see the Shrike, Lord of Pain at the time tombs as the universe is on the brink of war. As they travel to the time tombs they each tell their stories. Hyperion ends just as the pilgrims get to the time tombs.

In the Fall of Hyperion, which was nominated for a Hugo in 1991, the pilgrims that we got to know in Hyperion have reached their destination and the story shifts between their encounters at the time tombs and with the Shrike, the Web government’s leader Meina Gladstone while she wages war on the Ousters and Joseph Severn, a cyber recreation of the poet John Keats. The structure of this book is more traditional and straight forward than Hyperion and is your typical adventure tale.

I must confess I really wanted to love it, but I ended up having to make myself finish it so I could start a new book. The characters that I so enjoyed in Hyperion seemed sidelined by the action. And we didn’t really learn anything new about the fascinating worlds that were introduced in Hyperion. It did tie up the story that was begun in Hyperion but by the time I got to the end I didn’t really care anymore. I was so excited by Hyperion that I immediately bought the next two books as well but haven’t decided whether to read them or not. I have read some reviews that say that the 3rd book is much better than this one so I most likely will try it at some point.

I read this for SciFi Experience, Mind Voyages and Speculative Fiction Challenge.

Speculative Fiction Challenge

2010-02-26T13:17:00.003-04:00

I discovered this great challenge back in January but apparently neglected to sign up until now. I am trying to limit my challenges, but this one is perfect for me because it encompasses science fiction, fantasy and horror (plus a whole lot more) - all of which I know I will be reading this year. And it runs the entire year! I was going to be cautious and sign up for Inquisitive but I am going to be bold and go for Enthusiastic which requires 6 speculative fiction books in 2010. For more information about the challenge go here. The review posts will be here.

Reading Deliberately

2010-01-31T10:15:00.003-04:00

We are one month into 2010 and I have been talking and thinking a lot about what I am going to read this year and have come to the conclusion that I want to read a little more deliberately. There are numerous books that I really have intended to read for sometime that I just somehow have never gotten around to. I usually read more classics, more "literature" and at least one or two nonfiction books. Here are books that I really want to make an effort to read in 2010. This should still leave me plenty of room to read spontaneously as well as read my book club books.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
Gold Bug Variation by Richard Powers
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Winters Tale by Mark Helprin (re read)
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Lost City of Z by David Grann (nonfiction)

There are also books that I really want to read that will fit perfectly with some challenges that I intend to participate in.

Shriek and Finch by Jeff Vandermeer - Once Upon a Time
The City and the City by China Mieville - Once Upon a Time
Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - RIP
Master and Margarita byMikhail Bulgakov - RIP
Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami - Japanese Literature
Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr - SF
Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - SF

In addition, while I don't think I can join the Art History Reading Challenge, I love reading their reviews and would love to read at least one book about art, either fiction or non-fiction, this year.

I also love reading books about books, so I would like to read at least one book about books, libraries, reading, writing or book collecting.

Housekeeper and the Professor

2010-01-30T08:15:00.003-04:00

by Yoko Ogawa

U.S. Edition 2009

This is the charming story of an elderly mathematics proffessor whose memory only lasts 80 minutes. He quickly goes through many housekeepers until he meets the housekeeper of the title (no names are used in this book) who brings her son, whom the professor nicknames Root because his head is flat and resembles the square root sign. Although the professor doesn't remember them each day they are able to connect as Root shares his love of baseball with the professor and the professor teaches them the elegance of mathematics.

It is beautifully written and although the premise sounds depressing it was not in the least. My husband read it as well and absolutely loved it.

This was my last read for the Japanese Literature Challenge 3. I also read All She Was Worth. I didn't get to the Tatoo Murder Case or Wild Sheep Chase but hopefully Bellezza will host again and I can read them then. Once again I enjoyed the challenge and especially reading everybody's reviews, so thanks Bellezza for hosting.

Review Round Up

2010-01-29T09:05:00.002-04:00

There are four books that I didn't get to review in 2009 so here is a short post about them.

Lucky One I read for my book club. Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks, is about a veteran that returns from Afghanistan to search for a women in a photo he found there. Now I know there is a reason why I have never read Sparks books before. One book club member said it was a Harlequin romance but other members objected and said that Harlequins are better. I don't know about that but the only thing I liked about the thing was the dog.

Cane River was also a book club selection which I did not have high hopes for but I was actually pleasantly surprised. It is not great literature but at least it was entertaining and I found the characters engaging. And I found its Civil War era focus on French settlements of both slaves and gens de couleur libre interesting.

Martian Chronicle by Ray Bradbury was also a book club selection and my favorite of these four books. It was also only the second sci fi book the book club has read in its entire 10 year history. While it was certainly dated this was also part of its charm - a real time capsule into what the concerns of the late 1940s - 1950s were all about. It is really a set of linked short stories and as in all short story collections, I liked some better than others. I especially liked the ones that focused on the Martians. There was this wonderful one with a glass or crystal house with water flowing through it, and I wished there were more stories about the Martian's way of life before people from Earth showed up. My favorite was Usher II about censorship in which a man builds his own Poe inspired mansion and gets revenge on the Moral Climate Monitors in the style of horror masterpieces. I agreed with my other book club members that it didn't really fit in this story collection but I still liked it.

Venus on the Half Shell was not a book club book but I have two friends that have been raving about this book for years and so even though it is out of print I tracked a copy down to see what all the fuss was about. I had first become aware of this book back in the late 70's when I was trying to track down and read all of Kurt Vonnegut. Back then there was no internet to easily find things and I had to rely upon my local book store. Venus was then published under the author's name Kilgore Trout, one of Kurt Vonnegut's characters, and there was speculation that Venus was written by Vonnegut. Apparently now it is determined that this book was actually written by Phillip Jose Farmer. In any case, the main character zooms around in his space ship visiting different planets and having numerous amorous encounters. Although it was Vonnegutesque, I found that each story seemed to be simply an excuse to discuss a topic of interest. Lets go to a planet to consider women's rights or aging etc. I didn't find the stories or characters particularly well written or interesting.

Bookmarks Magazine Jan/Feb 2010

2010-01-24T20:19:00.005-04:00

Here is what looked interesting in Bookmarks Magazine, as well as several that I was reminded that I had been meaning to read.

God Father of Kathmandu, John Burdett - S
Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving - S

Freedom, Daniel Suarez - SF
**read Daemon first
Blackout, Connie Willis - SF
Far North, Marcel Theroux - SF
Inverted World, Christopher Priest - SF
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk
**read My Name is Red and Snow first
Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd
Invisible, Paul Auster
**read the New York Trilogy first
The Children's Book, A.S. Byatt
Generosity, Richard Powers
**read Gold Bug Variations first
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Bartlett - NF
Lit, Mary Karr - Memoir
**read The Liar's Club first
Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne Heller

Mind Voyages

2009-12-30T13:37:00.001-04:00

Robbin of My Two Blessings is hosting a science fiction challenge called Mind Voyages running all of 2010 (just my speed). There are lots of different voyages from reading Hugo or Nebula winners to reading nominees etc. I have selected "The I'm going to Pluto because Pluto is still a planet as far as I'm concerned Voyage" because how could I resist such a title? And by the way Pluto will always be a planet to me. For the Pluto Voyage the instructions are:

Mix it up, choose the number of books you want to read from each voyage,
include some new books you pick up along the way and enjoy the ride.

And I appreciate the flexibility and would love to add some new books!

We don't have to select our books ahead of time but looking through the lists on the site these are ones that I might be reading:

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester (Hugo winner 1953)
A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter Miller (Hugo winner 1961)
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Hugo winner 1968)
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman (Hugo & Nebula winner 1976)
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon (Hugo & Nebula winner 2008)

Anathem, Neal Stephenson (2009 Hugo Nominee)
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (2008 Hugo Nominee)
Glasshouse, Charles Stross (2007 Hugo Nominee)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2006 Hugo Nominee)
The Scar, China Miéville (2003 Hugo Nominee)
The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson (2003 Hugo Nominee)
Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons (1991 Hugo Nominee)
Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven (1978 Hugo Nominee)
The Dying Earth, Jack Vance (1951 Hugo Nominee)

I would love to read some Philip K Dick as I have never read any (but Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies) and more Heinlein as I have read quite a bit many years ago but as he was a prolific writer there are many more to try.

As for new books, see my list for Carl V's Sci Fi Experience.

I am looking forward to reading everyone's reviews and adding to my wish list!

Sci Fi Experience 2010

2009-12-26T12:47:00.009-04:00

I cannot believe it is almost 2010. Work has been getting in the way of reading and blogging but I just had a huge work project unexpectedly come to an end this week so I am looking forward to jumping into the Sci Fi Experience. Thanks Carl for hosting!

I was about to start The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons (I absolutely loved Hyperion) so that will be my first one. I also have Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller recently acquired on my shelves and I have been thinking of ordering The Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. I doubt that I will have time for any more but if I do here are some SF books that are on my wish list:

Daemon, Daniel Suarez

Cyberbad Days, Ian McDonald

The Suicide Collectors, David Oppegaard

Brasyl, Ian McDonald

The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling

Incandescence, Greg Egan

Gridlinked, Neal Ahser

Glass House, Charles Stross

The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi

Old Man’s War, John Scalzi

Stealing Light, Gary Gibson

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr.

Peace War , Vernor Vinge

And as always I am looking forward to reading everyone's reviews and adding to my wish list.

2009 Year in Review

2009-12-26T12:30:00.004-04:00

I know that 2009 is not yet over but I will not be finishing anymore books before the New Year (2666 is taking me a while). Looking back at 2009 I succeeded in many of my goals that I set at the beginning of the year. I read more (25 instead of 20 books), my reading included more science fiction, and I was more consistent in writting reviews (although there is still room for improvement!). My favorite books from 2009 (with links to my reviews) were:

City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
I started reading Jeff's blog before I read any of his books and I am very happy that I gave his fiction a try. City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of stories set in his wonderfully realized city of Ambergris with mushroom people, giant squid and strange rituals. And I loved the innovative formats utilized to tell the stories. I already purchased his other two books set in this wonderful city, Shriek and Finch and cannot wait to read them. This was by far my favorite book of 2009.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami
I am a huge fan of Murakami and I certainly was not disappointed with this one. While this book is more dense then Kafka on the Shore it still has wonderful writing, weird characters and inexplicable events that make Murakami so interesting.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons
This was the book that I simply could not put down. It tells the stories of six pilgrims sent to the planet Hyperion for an audience with the Shrike on the eve of war. Each of the pilgrim's stories are so richly drawn with fascinating characters and amazing and varied worlds that each one could easily have been a novel unto itself.

Eligance of the Hedghog by Muriel Barbery

This was by far the most beautifully written book that I read this year. It is not a plot driven book but its rendering of the concierge, a 12 year old girl and a Japanese man all living in an elegant Parisian apartment building was extremely compelling. I recommended it to numerous people this year and everyone has loved it.

I don't have any specific goals for next year except to read more! Oh yeah, and to fit in more classics. I usually read at least one or two and I didn't manage that this past year.

Statistics:

Although some of the books could fall into more than one category for the purposes of this list I only assigned one category for each book.

Nonfiction - 1

Science Fiction - 6

Horror - 6

Fantasy - 3

Mystery - 2

Literary - 4

Thriller - 0

Other - 4

Female authors - 5

Male authors - 20

New to me authors - 17

Audiobooks - 2

Bookmarks Magazine

2009-12-26T12:20:00.004-04:00

Here's what looked good in Bookmarks Magazine Nov./Dec. issue:

Best Books of 2009 Article
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, Tiffany Baker
Daemon, Daniel Suarez SF
Cyberbad Days, Ian McDonald SF
The Lost City of Z, David Grann NF
The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes NF

The Suicide Collectors, David Oppegaard SF
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
The Calligrapher's Daugher, Eugenia Kim
Cold, Bill Streever NF
The Sisters of Sinai, Janet Soskice

The Elephant Keeper S
Spooner, Pete Dexter S
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon S
Notcurnes, Kazuo Ishiguro S
Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery S
Bad Things Happen, Harry Dolan S

Bookmarks Magazine

2009-11-11T16:38:00.003-04:00

Books that looked interesting in the September/October 2009 Bookmarks Magazine:

The Children’s Book - A.S. Byatt
The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood
Mao’s Last Dancer - Li Cunxin NF
Commissario Guido Brunetti Series - Donna Leon
People of the Book - Geraldine Brooks
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexander Dumas
Censoring an Iranian Love Story - Shahriar Mandanipour
Angel’s Game - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Fordlandia -Greg Grandin NF
Death with Interruptions - Jose Saramago (S)
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon (S)
The Strain - Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan (S)

RIP IV Wrap Up

2009-11-01T11:41:00.006-04:00

It is hard to believe that the RIP IV challenge is over. I originally signed up for Peril the Second which meant that I was committed to reading two books. I read:

Hell House
Turn of the Screw
Pride Prejudice and Zombies
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Thirteenth Tale
House of Leaves

I guess I could have signed up for Peril the First but I appreciate Carl giving us options to participate as little or as much as we can. Each of the books was so different and I enjoyed them all. If I had to pick I would say that House of Leaves and Pride Prejudice and Zombies were my favorites. House of Leaves was the scariest house I have ever encountered and I enjoyed its experimental format and Pride Prejudice and Zombies was just plain fun. For short stories you cannot beat M.R. James and I really enjoyed Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

I am sorry that I didn't get around to Master and Margarita but I bought it so perhaps next year if not sooner. There are 693 reviews posted and I haven't gotten around to all of them yet so I am sure my wish list will be growing. I also ran across an interesting article in the Washington Post that asked famous writers to identify their favorite frightening tale - more fodder for the wish list. Thanks Carl for hosting a great challenge and I cannot wait for next year!

House of Leaves

2009-10-31T16:42:00.010-04:00

by Mark Z. Danielewski

I first read this when it first came out in 2000, or maybe shortly before. At the time I was working at Barnes & Noble and the buzz on this was intense. My reaction then was that it was a great scary story imbedded in too much gimmick, the author needed to get over himself and the editors needed to focus on the story of the house. But over the years this story has stuck with me long after I have forgotten most of the other books that I read. And the house in this story is the scary house by which I measure all scary houses and so far they all come up short. So for Carl V’s RIP IV I wanted to reread this book and see what my reaction would be, especially since in the past nine years my appreciation for books with labels like postmodern, meta fiction and experimental has grown. So my question to myself was this: Is this still the scariest house I have ever encountered and if so does it work in spite of the unique format used or because of it?

At the heart of this story is a house. It is your ordinary suburban house but then a hallway appears where none was the day before. The house is measured and the interior dimensions are greater than the exterior. Then another hallway appears that leads to a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and a spiral stairway that leads down for miles. The walls of the labyrinth are featureless, the temperature is steady and there is no movement of air. Any article left in the labyrinth will gradually just disintegrate and disappear - including dead bodies. And it is not just the immensity of the labyrinth which is somehow inside a suburban house that is terrifying but its lay out changes continually. One minute you can see the bottom of the spiral staircase the next it takes seven days to walk down it. You walk into a room and a moment later the door you just entered is gone. Yes - this is still by far the scariest house ever. But if you just put the parts of this book about what happened in the house together you would only have a short story and House of Leaves is 709 pages which includes extensive footnotes, exhibits and appendices.

The introduction to the book is written by a character named Johnny Truant who claims that he rescued what will be presented from the trunk of a deceased recluse named Zampano. Zampano’s work, which Johnny reconstructs, is an academic scholarly examination of the allegedly famous documentary film, the Navidson Record. The documentary was allegedly made by a famous award winning photo journalist, Will Navidson, about his house on Ash Tree Lane into which he recently moved with his wife Karen, a former high fashion model, and their two children to reconnect as a family. As the house starts changing Will Navidson, his brother, a friend and a professional explorer and his team try to explore the labyrinth with disastrous results. It is only through this scholarly examination of the documentary film that the story of the house is revealed. Zampano’s work is not only written in a dry academic style with exhaustive footnotes and citations to authorities but does not focus on the plot of the Navidson Record or what is happening with the house but assumes that you are familiar with the plot. I often found myself wanting to skip ahead to find out what was happening with the explorers instead of wading through lengthy dissertations on architecture, the meaning of home or the nature of labyrinths. Not only is it written in an academic style but as the explorers are in the labyrinth the very text changes so that parts of the text are written upside down, sideways, backwards. The footnotes become even more difficult to follow as the footnotes have footnotes with footnotes and I know that some I simply could not find. This style really makes the reader feel the frustration of being inside of a labyrinth. And then the text shifts from being very dense and chaotic to only having a few words on an otherwise blank page. This is not your typical straightforward narrative.

Included in the footnotes are notes from Johnny Truant. Some of the foot notes comment on Zampano’s text, for example explaining that he has been unable to confirm the existence of the Navidson Record documentary, the existence of any of the people from the documentary such as Will Navidson, or the existence of the house. The bulk of the footnotes by Johnny however deal with Johnny’s life. As Johnny’s story is laid out in the footnotes we see him slowly descend into madness as he becomes obsessed with the text found in Zampano’s trunk and loses contact with the outside world. The appendices to the book include numerous letters from Johnny’s mother from a psychiatric ward further rounding out his story.

Reading House of Leaves reminded me of the August article in the Wall Street Journal by Lev Grossman entitled “Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard” which caused such a stir. See Mumpsimus or Conversational Reading. Mr. Grossman explains:

The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters. The motto of Ezra Pound's "Little Review," which published the first chapters of Joyce's "Ulysses," was "Making no compromise with the public taste." Imagine what it felt like the first time somebody opened up "The Waste Land" and saw that it came with footnotes. Amateur hour was over.

And House of Leaves takes the difficulty of the Waste Land to the next level. Does the difficulty of reading this text simply feed our ego so we can read a straight-out horror story of a creepy house while feeling superior to the “amateur[s]” or does the difficult text add to the experience? I think when I first read this book I wanted to just read it for the plot (which is a great one) but this time around I enjoyed the journey as much as the plot. And for the record I don’t usually like poetry but I love the Waste Land and have not yet been able to get through Ulysses.

House of Leaves is not the type of book you can read quickly but if you take the time I found it very rewarding. One of the things I loved about this book is its homage to Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite authors. Of course the labyrinth of the house as well as the lengthy discussion of labyrinths, and fiction portrayed as criticism made me think of Borges but the author even includes one of Borges characters. In the chapter about the significance of echos the footnote discusses the echo of Don Quixote by Pierre Menard, a character from Borges wonderful story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In that piece Borges reviews the work of fictional Pierre Menard who through total identification with Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (which is word for word identical to the original) in a manner that was more subtle and infinitely richer than the original. Zampono comments that Menard’s “nuances are so fine as to be nearly undetectable, though ... haunted ... by sorrow, accusation and sarcasm.” p. 42. Johnny Truant in a footnote to that foot note comments “Exactly. How the fuck do you write about exquisite variation when both passages are exactly the same?” I really enjoyed the interplay of Zampano’s serious scholarly work with Johnny’s honest gut reaction. I thought this was a very interesting way for the author (Danielewski) to make his commentary on literary criticism in a fun way.

I also thought that the format of House of Leaves (a story about a guy who finds a manuscript about a documentary about the exploration of scary house) works really well in exploring the distances between the characters. The most terrifying aspect of the house was the fact that the labyrinth was of infinite and changing distance. In one particularly horrifying scene Navidson is at the bottom of the spiral stair case when it moves so that he no longer is within sight of his friends at the top but is trapped at the bottom of the stairway many many miles away from anyone and his situation goes from being almost home to being without hope in a second. Most of the characters are struggling with distances in their relationships and interactions with others as well. The Navidson family specifically move to the house to try and reconnect and eliminate the distances that have been growing between them. Johnny Truant, struggles through out his life trying to make some type of connection with anyone, first his mother, then through numerous one night stands and ultimately ends up totally isolated, alone with Zampano’s manuscript. And the format of the book also places a great distance between the reader and the characters and main plot making you feel the frustration of that distance which I thought worked well.

Just like the Waste Land you could spend years examining the text and indeed, many articles, blogs and websites have done just that. The answer to my question is that I enjoyed the format and difficult text of the book and while it is still the scariest house I have ever encountered it is also a rewarding reading experience. Read it for the plot itself or read it more closely but in any case I highly recommend it.

The Thirteenth Tale

2009-10-31T13:58:00.003-04:00

by Diane Setterfield

Vida Winter, a dying famous reclusive writer hires Margaret Lee, a young girl who works in her father’s bookshop, to write her biography. Margaret goes to stay with the ill Vida Winter at her estate and gradually Vida Winter tells her tale. I was excited to read it especially since it got such rave reviews during RIP III, in blog land and in traditional reviews. As is typical in sprawling family sagas the tale is about family, love, lies, deceits and betrayals. Although this is not the type of story that I usually read, I was caught up in the tale that Vida slowly reveals and the characters were interesting. This is a very atmospheric tale in the style of Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre and I especially liked Angelfield, Vida’s childhood home.

***Spoiler Alert*** The only negative I have to say about this book is that Amazon and other sources refer to it as a ghost story so I kept looking for an actual ghost. Yes, Vida and others were haunted by their pasts, obsessed with departed loved ones and Margaret talks to and sees her deceased twin in mirrors but I didn’t take any of those instances to be more than usual human grief and longing and did not involve an actual supernatural ghost. I also saw the “twist” coming early on but I still enjoyed the story.

Over all it didn’t live up to the hype and I am not going to rush out and buy her next book but I have recommended this book to a couple of people who I think will enjoy it. For me I am much more excited about House of Leaves that I just finished and tackling Bolano’s 2666 which just arrived from Barnes & Nobles.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

2009-10-18T20:46:00.009-04:00

For this Short Story Sunday I read Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James which I absolutely loved.

Montague Rhodes James (1862- 1936) was a medieval scholar at Cambridge and Eaton who also delighted in writing ghost stories which he then liked to read out loud to his friends during the holidays. This is his first collection of ghost stories originally published in 1904. He is one of my favorite ghost story authors and his stories tell tales of scholars or gentlemen, often upon discovering an ancient manuscript or relic, who let their curiosity get them into much more than they bargain for. While dripping in gothic atmosphere M.R. James does not shy away from horror. “Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded.” M. R. James. "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories". The Bookman, December 1929. These are perfect stories to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. This book contains eight stories.

Cannon Alberic’s Scrap-book tells the story of scholar who buys an ancient manuscript and wishes he hadn’t. Lost Hearts is about an orphan who goes to live with a distant cousin and finds that he is not the first child to be taken in and then mysteriously disappear. The Mezzotint is one of his classic tales of a gentlemen scholar who excitedly purchases a Mezzotint that strangely changes before his eyes. The Ash Tree is one of my favorites about the revenge of a witch burned at the stake and scarey spiders. Many of his tales can provide you with invaluable lessons to follow in your life. Number 13 teaches you when staying in a hotel to not even take a room that could have been near unlucky room number 13, even if it does not exist. Count Magus is also one of my favorites about the dangers of hanging out in mausoleums and talking to the inhabitants. Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad convinced me that if I ever dig up a whistle from an ancient archaeological site I will just put it back. And finally, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is very clear that if you ever come upon a well with stairs leading down into it, no matter what wonderful things you think you might find down there, don’t go.

I cannot wait to read his next collection, More Ghost Stories. I down loaded Ghost Stories of an Antiquarian for free from Feedbooks.com but you can also read it online or down load it from Project Gutenberg. Moreover I think many of the individual stories are also on line. I am also curious to read some of Sheridan Le Fanu ghost stories as I understand that M.R. James admired them. If you like ghost stories at all M.R. James is not to be missed.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2009-10-18T15:00:00.001-04:00

by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

In case there is anyone out there who has not heard of this book, Seth Grahame-Smith has taken the original text of the classic Pride and Prejudice, which is in the public domain, and added his own sections into the story involving England’s plague of zombies, martial arts training in the orient for all well breed English ladies and armies of ninjas. Is this a gimmick? Absolutely, but I still greatly enjoyed this fun zombie romp. I certainly have read Pride and Prejudice and encountered some of the movies but I am not a rabid Austin fan. There will certainly be those that find taking such liberties with a classic to be appalling. I for one think imitation or parody is the highest form of flattery. To have both Darcy and Elizabeth skilled killers added an extra depth to their relationship that was missing from the original. This is not a work of great literature and while Pride and Prejudice will likely still be read a 100 years from now, this most likely will not. Nevertheless, literature does not need to be taken so seriously all the time and I enjoy a purely entertaining read now and then. I read this in one day while sitting on airplanes and in airports and it was the perfect read to keep me entertained and chuckling the whole day. I think that you will likely find it more amusing if you are a little familiar with Pride and Prejudice, but it would be interesting to hear someone’s take on it who had not read the original before hand. Those readers that are intimately familiar with the original text seem to be the ones most likely to dislike the book.

I read this for the RIP IV challenge and it has been quite popular with other participants as well. Here are some of their reviews:

Fuzzy Cricket
Book Rat
Biblio Addict
The Little Bookworm
MariReads

Egalia's Daughters

2009-10-18T14:50:00.002-04:00

by Gerd Brantenberg

This was a book that I read for my book club. This feminist novel was originally published in 1977 in Norway and I must say that I found it a little dated and disappointing. I had high hopes for this novel in which the tables are turned and it is a woman’s world. Women hold the power, have careers and provide for their families while the men (or housebounds) stay at home and take care of the children. I thought it would be interesting to explore a society where the women were in control and was disappointed that the author simply flipped the roles of the sexes instead of really thinking about how a society run by women might be different. Of course by the time I got further into the book I understood that the author’s goal was to throw the spot light on our society, not theorize about a true women’s society. The men wear dresses, bows in their beards and fancy decorated “pehos” on their penises which stick through the skirts and hold the penis out straight. Every word with “man” in it has been changed to ‘wim” or “wom” for example seaman is seawim etc. The plot line is pretty thin and none of the characters are particularly engaging but then again, entertainment is not the point of this book. All in all I got the point early on and felt like I was being hit over the head with the authors point. Moreover, 32 years later, our society has changed immensely. Virtually all of the women in my book group are career women and while we can try and imagine what it was like for women in 1977, the issues presented didn’t really resonate with us. Interesting from a historical perspective but not great literature although it did engender a lively and interesting discussion.

Turn of the Screw

2009-10-12T08:46:00.003-04:00

by Henry James

I like Henry James and since this is a classic ghost story, I am surprised to say that I had never read it so I thought it would be a perfect selection for RIP IV. It is the story of a governess hired to care for a young boy and girl at their uncle’s country estate. At first everything is going well and she finds the children charming but then she starts seeing a man and a women about the estate that cannot be accounted for. I don’t want to give the plot away but I was surprised by the ending and found myself wondering if this account, allegedly written by the governess, was “true”, whether she was leading us on with her version of the events, or whether she believed the events to be true but they were really all in her head. After I read the novella I read a little bit about this story on the internet and apparently there is quite a bit of scholarly debate “over the reality of the ghosts and the sanity of the governess.” In any case it was a fun novella which has been turned into both a ballet and opera as well as tv and big screen adaptions. You can read it for yourself on line or download it from Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks.

Hell House

2009-09-26T18:12:00.003-04:00

by Richard Matheson

This is my first read for the RIP IV Challenge. One of my favorite horror stories is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson published in 1954 but I had never read anything else by this author. I loved I Am Legend because although about vampires, it is really about the terror of one man being truly all alone in the world. It does not focus on the vampires but focuses on the psychological terror. Which of course is absolutely nothing like the movie that came out a couple of years ago. I enjoyed the movie but I never would have guessed that it was based on this book if it did not actually say so on the trailer. So enough about I Am Legend except to say if you haven’t read it you certainly should.

Hell House was published in 1971 and while not as powerful as I Am Legend was an enjoyable read. I just love haunted houses and this is one of the creepiest evil houses there is. It is similar to Shirley Jackson’s the Haunting of Hill House but is less of a psychological thriller and has more graphic violence and sex. A dying millionaire wants to determine whether there is life after death before he finds out first hand. To do this he purchases the “most haunted house in the world”, Belasco House, and assembles a team to investigate it. The team consists of a physicist and his wife (Dr. Lionel Barrett and Edith), a mental medium who heads her own Spiritualist church (Florence Tanner) and a physical medium (Franklin Fischer), the only survivor of the last investigative attempt 30 years before. The investigative team initially argues over whether the evil nature of the house stems from the spirit of its prior owner Emeric Belasco or multiple spirits that were involved in the horrible acts of blasphemy and perversion that took place with Belasco as host or whether it is pure physical oddities that can be eliminated. Eventually the question becomes will anyone survive Hell House this time. I would have liked a little more background on Belasco and the history of the house because I am always interested in the why, but it was a fun read. If you haven’t read any Matheson however start with I Am Legend.

All She Was Worth

2009-09-26T11:56:00.003-04:00

by Miyuki Miyabe

Blurb from the back cover:

A suspenseful noir thriller from one of Japan’s best-selling authors. All She Was Worth takes a journey through the dark side of Japan’s consumer-crazed society. When a beautiful young women vanishes in Tokyo, her distraught fiancé enlist the help of his uncle, a police inspector, to find her. The detective quickly realizes that she is not who she claimed to be, and his search for her brings him to a dangerous financial underworld where insurmountable personal debt lead to crimes of desperation. Her, spending frenzies, stolen identities, and unscrupulous creditors can create a lethal mix.

This is my first read for the Third Japanese Literature Challenge. I liked the main character, the police detective Honma, very much and the woman that he was in search of was very intriguing. I found the story compelling and read it fairly quickly because I wanted to know what happened. I found the census and registry procedures in Japan fascinating and especially liked the switching identity story line. Despite an ambiguous ending ,I enjoyed it very much.

There is one aspect of the story which I found a little puzzling which was the extreme consequences of getting over your head in consumer debt. This book was first published in Japan in 1992, 17 years ago. As I was reading I kept wondering whether I was finding it a little dated or whether it was a cultural difference. Today, especially in this recession, I think most people are well aware of the dangers and problems associated with using credit, especially credit cards, to excess and how it can rapidly get out of control. On the other hand, while today stories of people brought to ruin by credit card debt are common, in the U.S. that translates into financial ruin. While you might have to declare bankruptcy and not be able to use credit in the future, no one is going to kidnap or murder you. I suppose if you do go to loan sharks things could get dicey but I also think it unlikely that people in the U.S. go to loan sharks to pay off credit card debt rather than just defaulting on the debt. In the story people go to great lengths to avoid defaulting on debt and consequently get themselves mixed up with a deadly bunch of characters. Do people in Japan avoid defaulting on debt at all costs or has it become more common for people in Japan to simply walk away from debt these days?

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

2009-09-25T08:32:00.003-04:00

by Stieg Larsson

translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland

My husband got me the new DX Kindle for my birthday, having taken custody of the Cybook that he had gotten for me a few years before. To give the Kindle it’s first spin I wanted a page turner and this best seller both in Europe and in the U.S. seemed to fit the bill. I don’t normally read mysteries but I really enjoyed this and immediately purchased the second book in this trilogy.

The original Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women and the story takes place in present day Sweden. A disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, a retired industrialist to attempt to find out what happened to his great niece who mysteriously disappeared 36years before. Blomkvist teams up with an unusual pierced and tattooed young girl, Lisbeth Salander, who is a genius investigator/hacker to try and solve the mystery. Lisbeth has been described in other reviews as having Asperger Syndrome but that is not clear from the book and I think it is also possible that she is just emotionally stunted by mysterious events from her past. In any case Lisbeth is a fascinating character. Obviously brilliant, emotionally distant but with rare and heartbreaking attempts to connect with someone. Although very young she is a survivor and does whatever is necessary to take care of herself. This is a part one of a trilogy so we only get glimpses of her background but I really want to read the other books to learn more about her. All the characters were well developed and I especially enjoyed the creepy and extended Vanger family. And the person at the heart of the mystery is also suitably terrifying. It was certainly a page turner with lots of interesting plot twists and a full conclusion to the mystery at hand. I highly recommend it.

RIP IV

2009-08-29T14:47:00.009-04:00

It is time once again for Carl V’s Readers Imbibing Peril Challenge from September 1 through October 31. Yeah! Obviously I have put way too much thought into this because I have put together a pool of books far longer then I will be able to get to in the next two months. Nevertheless I am signing up for Peril the Second which means that I will read at least two books but hopefully more.

Definitely reading:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I read this when it first was published in 2000 and it has always stuck with me as the scariest house I have encountered. I bought a new copy last year for the RIP III and was very disappointed that I didn’t get to it.

Hell House by Richard Matheson. He wrote I am Legend which I just loved.

Planning to Read:

Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I cannot believe that I have never read this classic and I have it downloaded on my new Kindle.

Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield which I have in audio on my ipod.

Short Stories:

This genre seems to lend itself to short stories and I currently have on my Kindle and hope to dip into short story collections by M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allen Poe and a collection of Famous Ghost Stories by various authors.

I am also intrigued by Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edogawa Rampo which of course would also tie in nicely with the Japanese Literature Challenge.

Other Novels that look good:

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
Great and Secret Show or Damnation Game by Clive Barker - I loved his Weaveworld.
The Stand by Stephen King - cannot believe that I have never actually read it.
The Terror by Dan Simmons
Pride Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova - which has been sitting on my shelf since it came out.
We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson - I loved Hill House.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
The Ghost Writer by John Harwood - also been on my shelf since it came out.

No Great Mischief

2009-08-12T10:51:00.000-04:00

by Alistair Macleod

Whenever I travel to a new place I like to read some literature set in that location. There are not many books set in Cape Breton Nova Scotia but this one was by a well respected author so I thought I would give it a try. It is the story of the Mac Donald clan that came to Cape Breton from Scotland two hundred years. It is told by one of the Mac Donald descendants who grew up in Cape Breton but as an adult now lives in Ontario. As he interacts with his siblings in the present he reminisces about growing up in Cape Breton and the family stories passed down through the generations.

Parts of the book are beautifully written. Here is a passage about his experience working in a mine with his brothers.

It was always a surprise to come to the surface and to be reacquainted with the changes of weather and of time. Sometimes it would be four in the morning and the night would be giving way to dawn, and the stars would appear to be going out like quietly snuffed candles as the sky began to redden with the promise of the sun. Sometimes the moon would gleam whitely above us and my brothers would say, “Chointhe, lochran aigh nam bochd,”, “Look, the lamp of the poor.”

I cannot say that I enjoyed it though. While I appreciate the craftsmanship and I think that it told a very interesting story it was simply too bleak and depressing for me and I had to force myself to finish it. And I am not the type of person that needs books with happy endings. I usually tend toward dark and disturbing stories. My issue with this was simply that the exact same story could have been told with the exact same characters and plot points without losing the tragedy of the whole thing while offering at least some small glimmer of hope. There was one particular episode from the time the narrator’s childhood which is particularly tragic and heart wrenching that is repeated over and over again in the book. I lost count after the sixth retelling of this particular story and would just cringe when it came around yet again. I felt that I was being beaten over the head. I get it, it is a tragic story, a story that keeps repeating itself throughout the Mac Donald clan and the author doesn’t want to sugar coat it. But I don’t believe that this tale is more “true” by virtue of leaving out any hope.

On Amazon it has a four star rating based upon 69 reviews and one reviewer even said he found it “incredibly life - affirming” . That is the great thing about fiction, different people will get different things out of it. To me the despair came through most strongly but you might find something entirely different.

Feeding Frenzy

2009-08-11T09:36:00.000-04:00

Across Europe in Search of the Perfect Meal
by Stuart Stevens

I don’t remember if this travel book was a gift from someone or whether I bought it myself back when it came out in 1997 but it was still sitting on my shelf this year when I was looking for something light and fun to read. The premise is that a journalist and his friend Rat, a high fashion model, take a trip to Europe to eat. Rat’s boyfriend says that he will pay for the entire trip if they are able to eat in all 29 of the Michelin three star restaurants in Europe in 29 days. Hilarity ensues as they decide this must be done in an imported cherry red 1965 Mustang which arrives in Europe with no brakes and they inadvertently pick up a large golden retriever that they name Harry.

Although not great literature, it was very enjoyable. Not only was it funny but it was a very interesting look at many of the famous restaurants of Europe as well as the interesting chief /owners that created those restaurants. If you don’t enjoy reading about food, cooking, restaurants and chiefs I would give this a pass but if those are topics that interest you this is a fun way to vicariously experience a wild European Restaurant tour. If you are looking for serious and accurate writing about the famous restaurants try something else. This author has written other travel books and I would be willing to give them a try someday.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2009-08-10T08:54:00.001-04:00

by Muriel Barbery

Blurb from the book:

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there’s Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

I was looking for some recommendations for my book club and had read such glowing reviews of this book that I ordered it to check it out. Before I got a chance to read it my husband snatched it up, read it and absolutely loved it saying it was one of the best books that he read in years. My book club also really enjoyed it when they read it.

It is beautifully written, which is hard to accomplish in translation. Although not plot driven it is a compelling story and I read the entire thing in a weekend because I couldn’t put it down although I would recommend taking your time and enjoying the language. I went back and re-read it more slowly before our book club and it was even more rewarding. I didn’t like either of the main characters at first but as the story unfolds and you get to see beyond their facade I really loved them both. Although the book includes serious themes such as class struggle, philosophy and the search for beauty don’t let that put you off as it is also laugh out loud funny at times and real joy to read.

Spin

2009-08-09T08:30:00.002-04:00

by Robert Charles Wilson

Blurb from the book:

The time is the day after tomorrow, and three adolescents - Diane and Jason Lawton, twins, and their best friend, Tyler Dupree - are out stargazing. Thus they witness the erection of a planet-spanning shield around the globe, blocking out the universe. Spin chronicles the next 30-odd years in the lives of the trio, during which 300 billion years will pass outside the shield, thanks to an engineered time discontinuity.

I was really excited when this book came out because it sounded like an interesting premise and it got such great reviews. Then it won the Hugo for Best Novel and the Seiun Award (Japan’s Science Fiction Award) for Best Foreign Language Novel. I was so convinced I would love this that I got a paper back version as well as an ebook version from Tor’s new website. It has obviously taken me a while to get around to reading it and I must confess that I wasn’t that impressed. I didn’t dislike it but when it ended without a real ending I was not inclined to rush out and get the next book, Axis. I think the main issue I had was that while I found the concept and the scientific ideas interesting the book seemed more focused on the three characters. While normally that could be a good thing, I didn’t find these characters very well developed or compelling and I didn’t really care what happened to them. Obviously many people loved it (68 five star reviews on Amazon) but it just didn’t do it for me.

Japanese Literature Challenge 3

2009-07-30T19:36:00.004-04:00

I am very excited that the Japanese Literature Challenge 3 is finally here. The challenge is very simple - read one book of Japanese origin between July 30, 2009 and January 30, 2010. For more information visit our host Dolce Bellezza and the review site.

I so enjoyed the challenge last year that I have been waiting with two selections sitting on my coffee table for the challenge to start. I will definitely be reading All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe and The Tatoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi. I also intend to read The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa and something else by Haruki Murakami. So far I have immensley enjoyed his Wind Up Bird Chronicles and Kafka on the Shore - perhaps After Dark, Hard Boiled Wonderland or A Wild Sheep Chase next. And then of course I have no doubt that I will find lots of other books reviewed by the other participants to add to my wish list.

Uncommon Reader

2009-07-19T15:32:00.002-04:00

by Alan Bennett

This book was touted as a celebration of reading and irresistible to avid readers but I was disappointed. While it was cute and amusing and I appreciated the depiction of the Queen discovering the joys of reading and then refining her tastes as all readers do, the ending really spoiled it for me. ***Spoiler Alert*** I was annoyed that the Queen eventually abandons reading and decides that she must write instead.

Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her of life of all purpose. Once she had been a self- assured single-minded woman knowing where her duty lay and intent on doing if for as long as she was able. Now all too often she was in two minds. Reading was not doing, that had always been the trouble. p. 100

[S]he did not want simply to be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator, whereas when she was writing she was doing, and doing was her duty. p. 102

As an avid reader I believe that there is value in reading and that reading is an end to itself, not simply a means to become a writer. If this were truly a celebration of reading then the Queen would not have given up reading in favor of writing. I was also annoyed that reading had such a pronounced detrimental influence on her performance as Queen. While I generally enjoy antidotes about the crazy things that people do who get a little too carried away by books or reading, the antidotes in this story did not strike me as humorous. Instead of identifying with the strong impulse to read that I believe all avid readers share, it merely made me sad that reading had turned into such a negative that she was unable to perform her duties, especially when she actually abdicated the throne to become a writer. I did enjoy the beginning of the book, especially the way that reading opened her eyes to to the world at large and made her more aware of the people around her. While I had high hopes for this little story, I was disappointed.

July/August Bookmarks Magazine

2009-07-19T14:49:00.002-04:00

Here's what looked interesting in the July/August Bookmarks Magazine.

Angel's Game, S. Carolos Ruiz Zafon
Devil's Company, David Liss
Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson but read
Girl with the Dragon Tatoo first
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (S)
Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Moscow Rules, Daniel Silva but start with first in series
Shadow of the Scorpion, Neal Asher but start with first in Polity series
Black Hole War, Leonard Susskind (NF)
The Company, Robert Littell
Stone's Fall, Ian Pears
The Family Man, Elinor Lipman (S)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells tower (S)
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
The World to Come, Dara Horn
How it Ended, Jay McInerney (S)
The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly
Death at La Fenice, Donna Leon
Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry
Pride Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith
Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (SF)
something by Paul J. McAuley (SF)
something by Alastair Reynolds (SF)

Once Upon A Time III Wrap Up

2009-06-20T10:01:00.004-04:00

This marks the end of the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I had only committed to do the Journey (one book) but ended up doing a few short stories and three books.

Book of Lost Things
Death with Interruptions
City of Saints and Madmen

Short Stories:
The Library of Babel
The Lottery of Babylon

I never got a chance to post the links on the review site for Death with Interruptions or City of Saints and Madmen before Mr. Linky went away. By far my favorite read was the City of Saints and Madmen and I definitley plan on reading more by Jeff Vandermeer. Death with Interruptions was also good but I was very disappointed with Book of Lost Things. And of course the Borges short stories were fabulous as always. I enjoyed the challenge and look forward to next years.

City of Saints and Madmen

2009-06-20T09:55:00.004-04:00

by Jeff Vandermeer

I first discovered this author last year when I participated in the Once Upon A Time II Challenge and came across a post on the author’s web site of the Exhaustive Essential Fantasy Reading List. I was intrigued by this list because it included many of my favorite authors such as Kafka, Saramago, Peake, Borges, Calvino, Marquez and made me rethink what fantasy was.The author also has an interesting blog and it made me curious to read this author.

The City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories that all take place in the city of Ambergris. In its first edition it was just four stories, the deluxe second edition expanded to include an appendix which has more short pieces as well as letters from a director of an insane asylum and an Ambergris glossary. The second edition also included an encrypted story on the dust jacket. The paperback edition which I read includes an additional couple of stories and decrypts the story for you.

Ambergris is a fascinating dark and mysterious city with frightful grey caps or mushroom people, strange afflictions, giant squid in the River Moth, bizarre festivals and rituals and an interesting history. The first three stories in the book which introduced me to Ambergris reminded me of China Mieville’s New Corbuzon, although certainly not in a derivative way. The city is slightly evil, creepy, scary, richly imagined and enticing. I really enjoyed the fact that everything was not explained to you but you only caught glimpses and understanding gradually develops as you read more and more. The fourth story, The Strange Case of X, is my favorite and reminded me more of Kafka or Borges then Mieville. I don’t want to give anything away but it makes the reader, and author question what is reality, inserts the author into the story and makes you think about the writing process. The appendix then plays off of the Strange Case of X and includes materials that were in the possession of X such as other pieces about Ambergris in the form of stories, letters, pamphlets, scientific articles and a glossary. I enjoyed the fact that the appendix not only further developed Ambergris but explored different formats to do so. The appendix reminded me of Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimentation with format in House of Leaves and Revolutions. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and definitely will read more of this author.

Death with Interruptions

2009-06-20T08:26:00.004-04:00

by Jose Saramago

Blurb from the Dust Jacket: On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course, causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is celebration - flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life.

Jose Saramago, a Nobel prize winning Portuguese author who is now 86 years old has a style uniquely his own. His sentences run on for paragraphs or even pages, there is not much punctuation used and any dialog is imbedded in the run on sentences so it is sometimes difficult to tell who is saying what. His focus is not a strong fast moving plot or extensive in depth character development. The author definitely makes his presence felt and I have heard my friends remark that he makes himself too evident in the writing and that he was just showing off but should just let the story speak for itself with out intruding. But if you enjoy a different style once in a while Saramago is wonderful and one of my favorite authors.

I love his beautiful use of language, his acerbic wit, and his social satire. The time and locations are rarely identified and characters are often unnamed making the stories seem more like a fable. He takes a big question such as what would happen if everyone went blind (Blindness) or the Iberian Peninsula became unattached from Europe and floats off (Stone Raft) and sees where it takes him. In Death with Interruptions, his latest work (2008) translated into English, the question is what if Death stopped? The first part of the book looks at this situation from the big picture view point and explores what this would mean for politicians, the Church, funeral directors, grave diggers, insurance companies, nursing homes and the mafia. In the second part of the book we meet death, with a small not capital d. I don’t want to give too much away but she, yes death is a she, is faced with a situation she has never had to face before. At the end of this fable humans have a much better appreciation of death and death has a better understanding of humans.

This is not one of my favorite Saramago books and probably not where I would recommend someone start but I thoroughly enjoyed it and will continue to read whatever Saramago publishes. My favorite is All the Names which I selected for my book club and was well received. Blindness seems to be very popular and would be a good place to begin but please don’t see the movie first!

BTT: Niche Books

2009-06-11T13:44:00.003-04:00

What Niche Books do you read?

I have a lot of reference type books on my shelves pertaining to photography, Photoshop, dog training, gardening, travel and a huge collection of cookbooks (my husband loves to cook) but I don’t think of them as books that I “read”. They are simply references that I dip into to extract the information that I need and move on. There are three categories of niche books that I will curl up with and read cover to cover for pure enjoyment: 1) Books about Books 2) Books about Antarctica and 3) Books about the Carribean.

I absolutely adore books about books or reading or writing, either fiction or non-fiction. Some of my favorite fiction ones are The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski, Club Duma by Arturo Perez-Reverte, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino and the Cliff Janeway mysteries by John Dunning. Some of my favorite non-fiction are Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes, Used and Rare by Lawrence Goldstone, and Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles.

I find Antarctica fascinating and hope to get there someday. I have enjoyed fiction set there such as Ice Limit by Preston & Childe and Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robbinson as well as non-fiction such as Big Dead Place by Nicholas Johnson and In the Ghost Country by Peter Hillary. I will note that I have yet to find an extremely well written book about Antarctica but for some reason I am willing to tolerate poor or average writing that I normally wouldn’t read if it has interesting information about Antarctica.

The last niche that I sometimes read is books about the Carribean, either fiction or non-fiction, especially if it about or set in the Virgin Islands. This is a small niche and most of the books that I have are out of print or only available in the Virgin Islands. I must admit that I used to read and collect a lot more in this niche when I didn’t live in the Virgin Islands then I do now. When its cold and snowy in New England it is more fun to read about the Carribean but now it is more fun to read about the ice and cold of Antarctica.

Does anyone have any suggestions for Books about Books or Books about Antarctica?

Edit:

Having perused the other responses I have found some great books about books to check out. From the comments to the post by Savidge Reads:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - Jeremy Mercer
Ex Libris - Anne Fadiman
Classics for Pleasure - Michael Dirda
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop - Lewis Buzbee
The Polysyllabic Spree or Housekeeping vs the Dirt - Nick Hornby
The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New - Rosenberg
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel -Jane Smiley
How to Read Literature Like a Professor -Thomas C. Foster
Why We Read What We Read - Lisa Adams and John Heath
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan

And from Molly from My Cozy Book Nook:
Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
The 7 Basic Plots - Christopher Booker
How to Read a Book - Mortimer Adler
The Well-Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
Mini Lessons for Literature Circles - Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

And a new one:
A Temple of Texts by William Glass

May/June Bookmarks

2009-06-10T15:12:00.000-04:00

Here's what sounded interesting in the May/June Bookmarks Magazine.

The City & The City, China Mieville
Prayer's for the Assassin, Robert Ferrigno
Lambs of London, Peter Ackroyd
Book of Air and Shadows, Michael Gruber
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
Emperor's Children, Claire Messud
Vagrants, Yiyun Li
Way Through Doors, Jesse Ball
What the Dead Know, Laura Lippman
The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling (SF)
Drood, Dan Simmons
The Terror, Dan Simmons
Incandescence, Greg Egan (SF)
Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)

Hyperion

2009-05-19T07:38:00.005-04:00

by Dan Simmons

Wow! I don’t think I have said that about a book in many a year. Here is what the blurb from the book says:

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

While that is the set up, the book is the stories of six of the pilgrims. When the pilgrims first meet up to begin their journey to the planet Hyperion to see the Shrike they decide to each honestly tell their stories and their connection with Hyperion which may aid them in their endeavor. The worlds that are depicted in the six stories are amazingly well realized and could easily serve as settings for entire novels or even a series in their own right. The characters themselves are also very well developed.

I don’t want to give too much away but .... The pilgrims are 1) a Catholic priest 2) a Colonel in the military of Palestinian descent 3) a female private detective with an AI client 4) a Jewish scholar who brings his infant daughter on the trip 5) an incredibly old poet who lived on old earth before it was destroyed and 6) the Consul, a former governor of Hyperion. There are so many worlds and concepts that could serve as entire books in them selves. I loved the idea of “the World Web” which were worlds linked together not only by communications but by “farcaster” portals that literally allowed you to step from one world to another. There are even houses described where each room would be on a different planet. I found the TechnoCore fascinating - AI’s that are linked together in the “datasphere” and that provided humanity with the “farcaster” technology and basically run the World Web. But I don’t want to give the impression that this is just a hard scifi book because it certainly is not.

I loved the depictions of old earth before it was destroyed - the water levels rising, the extreme rich partying in their little enclaves while the rest of the world went to hell. I loved the planet Maui Covenant (think Hawaii) with its living “motile” islands that migrate in groups with the seasons and the dolphins transplanted from Earth that humanity can now speak with. I also loved all the references to the poet John Keats from which the author takes the novel’s name. Keats not only provides the book’s title named after one of his poems but at one point is the name of the main city on Hyperion set up by Mad King Billy to be an artists colony. And then there is a memorable “cybrid” which is an artificial recreation of the poet John Keats. It seems that all the different segments or aspects of earth have been transplanted to the stars. Catholicism, Islam, Judaism all play a part in the story. There are also Templars who have mysterious tree ships that travel between the stars. And then of course there are some other non- earth aspects such as the Ousters - the enemy that Man is about to go to war with. It is interesting that it is not entirely clear that the Ousters are really the bad guys at all.

This book ends after hearing the six pilgrims tales but before they reach their destination to see the Shrike. I understand that there are three more books in the Hyperion Cantos - the Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and the Rise of Endymion. I immediately bought the Fall of Hyperion when I finished this book to see what happens to the pilgrims but the six stories are so completely rendered that even with out reading any more I would have been satisfied.

Book of Lost Things

2009-05-03T08:58:00.001-04:00

by John Connolly

This is my first novel for the Once Upon A Time III challenge. I have read such glowing reviews of this book that I not only read it for the challenge but was thinking that it might be one of my selections for my book club. I am afraid that I didn’t like it. I didn’t hate it either but it certainly didn’t live up to my expectations.

The story is about a 12-year-old English boy, David, who, after the death of his mother, moves with his father and new step mother to the new wife’s family’s country estate. David is given an attic room lined with old books from a previous occupant and the books begin to literally whisper to him. One day after seeing an intruder in his room, David hears his dead mother’s voice in the sunken garden calling to him for help. He follows the voice and finds himself in a very different place where he searches for his mother and a way back to his world.

There is nothing I like better than a book about books. I loved the beginning - who could resist books actually whispering - but as soon as he goes through the crack in the garden wall and finds himself in a different world, the book totally lost me. I appreciated that this new realm is not the realm of Disney fairy tales but harkens back to the brutality of the original Grimm fairy tales that do not necessarily have happy endings. The book is definitely not written for kids, or adults who are the faint of heart. But for me, his retelling of extremely familiar fairy tales was not unique enough to keep my interest. As soon as Roland entered the story I wanted to lay this aside and pick up the Dark Tower series by Stephen King which really does a fabulous job using Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. And it’s not that I don’t like fairy tales (I love the Russian ones like Baba Yaga) or re-telling familiar fairy tales (I loved Wicked by Gregory Maguire).

Not only did the plot not hold my interest but the writing itself just wasn’t enough to captivate me. Some authors could write about watching paint dry such as David Foster Wallace, Tom Robbins or Haruki Murakami and I still would be totally entertained and awed by their writing. The writing in this book does not fit into that category. I kept feeling that I was reading a children’s book, even though it is clearly too gruesome in some parts for children. I think that this came from the very simplistic writing style which I found annoying.

Finally, every review I have read has mentioned something that lead me to believe that reading and books would play a major role in the story. (Like the Shadow of the Wind or the Uncommon Reader). I loved the whispering books at the very beginning of the story but that idea was never developed. I was hopeful that since the boy was ultimately seeking “The Book of Lost Things” that a book would play a pivotal role. It is indeed a book about stories and fairy tales but I had hoped that books themselves or reading would play a role.

It was a quick and easy read. All in all I was disappointed as it didn’t live up to my expectations. I do believe however that even if I had not read the rave reviews and had simply read the cover blurb I still would have been unsatisfied with the book.

March/April Bookmarks Magazine

2009-04-25T15:52:00.003-04:00

Here are the books that look good from Bookmarks Magazine.

Book of Chameleons - Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Deathe with Interruptions - Jose Saramago
Elegance of the Hedgehoge - Muriel Barbery
Metropole - Ferenc Karinthy
Little Giant of Aberdeen County - Tiffany Baker
Gridlinked- Neal Ahser
Suicide Collectors- David Oppengaard
Daemon - Daniel Suarez
Lush Life - Richard Price (Clockers)

History of Computers and the Internet

2009-04-21T13:18:00.004-04:00

When I am in the mood to read about the history of computers and the internet, here are two books to try.

Dealers of Light - Michael A. Hiltzik

Where Wizards Stay Up Late - Katie Hafner

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

2009-04-11T10:31:00.006-04:00

by Robert A. Heinlein

Years ago Robert A. Heinlein was one of my favorite authors and even though this book had been sitting on my shelf for many years I hadn't gotten around to reading it. I finally read it as a book selection for my book club, the first sci fi book ever in its 8 year existence- and I didn't even select it. Published in 1966 it is described as "His classic, Hugo Award winning novel of libertarian revolution." The moon was used as a penal colony by Earth but was also responsible for growing a large percentage of the food consumed by the Earth. The story is of a lunar revolution by a computer, a computer technician, a scholar and an agitator to free its citizens from the control of the Warden and the Lunar Authority.

I must say that I had a very hard time getting into the story at first because of the writing style. For some reason the dialog was not written in complete sentences and the lack of articles or pronouns was hard for me to read. I knew what it was saying it just seemed wrong and took me out of the story. About a 100 pages in however either the author gave up this style or I became engrossed in the story line and failed to notice it any more and from then out I loved it. My favorite character was the self aware computer Mike who was instrumental in the rebellion but also had a fascinating personality. The computer's quest to understand humans, such as his attempts to understand jokes, made for an interesting meditation on what it means to be human. This is a novel of ideas, especially about politics and different forms of societies but the novel also had plenty of suspense and action.

I enjoyed this book but it does not rank up there with some of my favorite Heinlein such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, the Cat Who Walked Through Walls, Friday or Job. I was very supprised that my book club's first foray into sci fi was successful and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

April Wishlist

2009-04-10T20:07:00.005-04:00

When ever I come across a book that I would like to add to my wish list at work I email myself the info. This is my accumulated list from emails from July 08 to present. It appears to be heavy on sci fi and antarctica.

Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

City of Dreaming Books – Walter Moers

Glasshouse – Charles Stross

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town – Cory Doctorow

Alchemy of Stone

Secret History of Moscow – Ekaterina Sedia

Antarktos Rising – Jeremy Robinson

Raising Atlantis – Thomas Greanias

Terra Incognita, Travels in Antarctica – Sara Wheeler

Antarctic, Life on the Ice (Traveler’s Tales) – Susan Fox Rogers

Alfred Bester – Stars My Destination, Demolished Man

Shadow of the Scorpion (Polity Novel Prequel) – Ken Asher
1st Polity Novel – Gridlinked

The Android’s Dream – John Scalzi
Also Old Man’s War.

Stealing Light - Gary Gibson

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks - First one Consider Phlebas

Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy

Fallen Angels - Niven/Pournelle

Altered Carbon

2009-04-10T17:45:00.000-04:00

by Richard K Morgan

I read Altered Carbon for Carl V’s SciFi Experience but then life got crazy and I didn’t get a chance to write a review. It is hard scifi combined with a classic noir detective novel. (I have seen someone else refer to it as cyber pulp which fits exactly.) Takashi Kovac, a former envoy, gets hired by a very wealthy Meth (a person who lives a very long time) on Earth to find out if he really committed suicide or whether it was murder. The gentlemen isn’t dead in any case because his consciousness is backed up periodically and he has cloned bodies on the ready to slip into but he cannot remember what happened between his last backup and his death.

I really enjoyed it but was a little disappointed that it was really just a detective story that happens to be set in the future. I would have liked a little more emphasis and exploration of the interesting world that the author created and the implications for the new technologies. The memories of a person are stored in a stack and those memories can be resleeved, as long as the stack is not destroyed, either in a clone of your body or a totally different body. Of course for the super rich you can have remote back up of your stack and can go on indefinitely . People no longer have to travel. You can just have your consciousness transmitted and then placed in another sleeve. If you are convicted of a crime your stack is placed in storage and your body can be rented out to others for use. Of course the ordinary deceased citizen may find his family hard pressed to afford either a synthetic body for him or a virtual world to inhabit or be stuck in storage until they can save enough money for you to be resleeved.

I enjoyed the fast paced convoluted plot and the author’s view of the future. The characters were not particularly well developed but then again neither were Dashiell Hammett’s. I especially liked the Artificial Intelligence that ran the hotel in which Kovac stayed. I found the hints about Kovac’s past on Harlan’s world very interesting and was disappointed that the events of the novel were confined to Bay City (obviously San Francisco). It was not quite what I expected but I did enjoy it. Someday I would like to read the sequel, Broken Angels that takes Kovac on adventures outside of earth and supposedly deals with some of his back story.

The Lottery of Babylon

2009-03-29T13:10:00.005-04:00

The Lottery of Babylon by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells the myth of a lottery run by the secret “Company”. Centuries ago the lottery started out as chances to win prizes such as we are familiar with today but it soon evolved into “a major element of reality”. First the idea of only winning money was done away with because it had no moral force and the idea of unlucky draws was added. As the lottery evolved, eventually the Company had to assume all public power and made the lottery free, universal and secret. “The mercenary sale of lots abolished; once initiated into the mysteries of Baal, every free citizen automatically took part in the sacred drawings, which were held in labyrinths of the god every sixty nights and determined each citizen’s destiny until the next drawing.” As the lottery permeated all elements of life it is described as “an intensification of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos”. At the time of our narrator there is much debate as to whether the Company still exists or even if it ever existed. Some argue “that it makes no difference whether one affirms or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.”

I don’t want to tell you too much for fear of ruining it for you but you can read it on line here. This is one of my favorite Borges stories which not only asks what is reality but what role random chance plays in the universe. Is the universe run by a higher authority such as the Company or does the lack of discernable meaning signify that it really is all chance?

The Library of Babel

2009-03-22T16:28:00.001-04:00

For OUT3's first Short Story Weekend I read one of my favorite Borges short stories, The Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian author and librarian most famous for his short stories. Indeed, Borges never wrote a novel or novella and some of his short stories are so short that they are only a single page. In addition to fiction he also wrote poetry, literary criticism, essays and screenplays and translated many works into Spanish from English, French, German, Old English and Norse. Common themes in his work include the nature of time, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, reality and philosophy.

The Library of Babel imagines the universe as a vast, if not infinite, library which contains all possible books. The books contain all possible combinations of the 25 symbols (22 letters, the space, comma and period) arranged in apparently random order. There are no two identical books in the library. This means that the vast majority of books make no sense but the librarians endlessly search for sense in the books and the mythological one book that would explain all the other books. Young men travel throughout the labyrinthine library searching for books that will explain the origins of the library or the Crimson Hexagon that is rumored to hold those books that are “all-powerful, illustrated and magical”.

It is not very long and you can read it for yourself online here. In my mind the art accompanying the story online is far more contemporary and well kempt than I envision the library. But that is the great thing about reading - everyone gets to interpret the story in their own way. The labyrinth library from Umberto Eco’s book Name of the Rose (complete with a librarian named Jorge Burgos) is more in keeping with my vision of this library.

Once Upon A Time III

2009-03-20T14:14:00.006-04:00

Apparently it has been a year since I joined my very first challenge and it is now time for another round of Once Upon A Time hosted by Carl V of Stainless Steel Droppings. It lasts from March 21, 2009 to June 20, 2009 and you can choose to participate in many different ways reading fantasy, fairy tale, folklore or mythology. For details please check out the challenge site here. The review site is here.

I was originally hesitant about this challenge last year because I didn’t think that I normally read “fantasy” but as I participated I came to realize that I really do read and enjoy fantasy, I just didn’t know it. See my June 12, 2008 post on the subject here. Author Jeff VanderMeer has posted a fascinating Essential Fantasy Reading List on his blog. I loved the list because it included books and authors that I really love that I had never thought of as fantasy such as Kafka, Saramago, Peake, Borges, Calvino, Marquez which of course leads me to believe that I will like the others on his list as well.

I am going to do “The Journey” meaning that I am going to participate but am not committing to reading a certain number of books. Here are some books that I would like to read:

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago

I would also like to read something else by China Meiville because I so enjoyed his Perdido Street Station last year. I would also like to try something by Charles de Lint because he seems to be so popular amongst other participants. If anyone has any suggestions of which would be a good first de Lint book to try let me know.

I also intend to participate in some Short Story Weekends. Borges is one of my favorite authors and would be perfect for that.

Okay, now I am getting really excited about all these great books to read and thinking that I should just sign up for a quest - but no. I am going to be restrained and stick with the journey and if I read five books great.

Worst Best Book

2009-03-19T14:34:00.002-04:00

Booking Through Thursday asks:“What’s the worst ‘best’ book you’ve ever read — the one everyone says is so great, but you can’t figure out why?”

I haven’t participated in BTT in a while or done much blogging for that matter (life just got in the way) but this is a great question so here it goes.

What immediately leaps to mind is the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. I have had to read the entire thing on three separate occasions in the course of my academic career and it was torturous on all three occasions. I understand why it is an important work but not readable. Of course I am not sure that it counts because it is non-fiction (although there is some debate as to whether it should be read as history or literature).

On a more contemporary note, I have tried to read Ullysses by James Joyce on numerous occasions and haven’t been able to do it. I have every reason to believe that I should like it given my reading tastes. But that cannot count because I haven’t read it.

The other classic that leaps to mind is the Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger which I did read. I just didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t very impressed with the characters nor the writing style. I can understand if you read it as a young boy perhaps the teenage angst would resonate but when I read it as an adult woman and I just wanted to tell Holden to stop whining.

I also read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and the Celestine Prophesy back when they were all the rage to see what all the fuss was about. I just didn’t get it. They obviously have some sort of philosophical appeal to lots of people but they just don’t have any literary merit.

January/February Bookmarks Magazine

2009-03-15T13:18:00.003-04:00

What looked interesting in this Bookmarks issue.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
Death with Interuptions by Jose Saramago
The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Something by David Liss - I enjoyed the Coffee Trader, Perhaps A Conspiracy of Paper
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell (Enjoyed Cloud Atlas)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2009-01-31T21:31:00.002-04:00

by Haruki Murakami

This is the story of a man who’s wife leaves him and his efforts to get her back. At the beginning of the novel Toru or Mr. Wind-up Bird, has quit his job at a law firm and putters around the house cooking and looking for their lost cat while his wife supports them. One day his wife goes to work and simply doesn’t come back. Because this is Murakami it does not involve any navel gazing about what could have gone wrong in the marriage or any action by the man to go out and get a job to impress her and win her back. Instead Toru drifts along letting fate take him where it will and in this case it takes him on some very interesting adventures. In his wife’s absence Toru meets Malta Kano, a psychic helping him look for his lost cat and her sister, Creta Kano, a prostitute of the mind. He crosses paths with his evil brother in law, Noboru a pragmatic politician who defiled Creta Kano years ago and may have something to do with his wife’s absence. He meets Lt. Mamiya who tells him about war atrocities in Outer Mongolia and Manchuria. He runs into a mother and son team that he calls Nutmeg and Cinnamon and joins up with them to psychically heal wealthy women. Toru also makes friends with a teenage girl down the street, May Kasahara , and spends quite a bit of time sitting in a dry well where he has some unusual experiences.

What I really love about Murakami is his writing. This is how he described a smile: “The hint of a smile played about his lips, as if he had just heard a joke and was smiling now in the most natural way. Nor had the joke been a vulgar one: it was the kind of elegant pleasantry that the minister of foreign affairs might have told the crown prince at a garden party a generation ago, causing the surrounding listeners to titter in delight.” Most authors would just call it a smile but Murakami draws a vivid picture. I also love the crazy characters and the way you never know exactly what is going to happen because reality as we know it does not apply in a Murakami novel( New York Times review called the novel Kafkaesque). I have read some reviews that said they didn’t like the ambiguous ending but I like to be left guessing about what happens after the novel ends. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. While I like Kafka on the Shore better because I liked the main character more, this was a great read and I will certainly continue to read Murakami.

Lending Books

2009-01-26T14:14:00.002-04:00

Today’s Musing: “A few weeks back we had a question about borrowing books, this week I was wondering what your policy was on lending books. Do you lend books to anyone? Just friends? Only big readers? How long are they allowed to have them?”

I hate lending books and try not to do it too often. I have book shelves in my office at work filed with my personal books (almost all fiction) because we don’t actually use books for work anymore. Sometimes co-workers will brows my shelves and ask to borrow books. I lent one person a hard cover that subsequently was lost and then eventually found more than a year later but without its dust jacket. My boss borrowed five or six books that I only got back three years later when she retired. And it is not just a problem at work. I certainly cannot loan books to my family. My sister never ever buys books and usually reads whatever paperback she can find free in a book swap to which she returns it when she is done. She has no notion that a book is not to be treated with respect and any book will not only be dog eared but with the spine broken, splattered with wine and/or dipped in the swimming pool when she is done with it. She is absolutely not allowed to go into my books shelves.

The only time I lend out books is when I read a book and just know that so and so absolutely has to read it. For those few friends that I know will take care of books and I am convinced that a particular book is something they must read, I do not hesitate to lend to them the book and they do the same for me. Some of my favorite books are ones that a friend knew would be perfect for me and insisted that I read it. I don’t set any time limit on the loan. Interesting question.

Guardian's 1000 Novels - SF & Horror

2009-01-23T14:33:00.004-04:00

Carl V at Stainless Steel Droppings has an interesting post regarding the Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Should Read which includes a section on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.
Following Carl’s lead, below is a list of those SF books with those I have read bolded and in orange. I was surprised that I had actually read 34. The Guardian list is a little strange until you read their introduction that explains their selections criteria: “all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination. Every truly original writer must, by definition, create a new world. Here is a whole galaxy of worlds to explore.” Of course it is also odd that the introduction specifically mentions that Tolkien is on the list and he isn’t. The fun of lists like this is to not only get new ideas of books to read but also disagree and quibble over the books left out (Perdido Street Station, Ender’s Game) or inexplicably included (Darwin’s Radio), pleasantly surprised by ones that you had forgotten about (Weaveworld) and confirm the ones that you vehemently agree are must reads (Titus Groan, The Trial). This list has given me some good reading suggestions - like I need more books on my wish list!

THE LIST
1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
7. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
11. Greg Bear: Darwin’s Radio (1999)
12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
13. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
25. Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
29. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood’s End (1953)
30. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
32. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
36. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
37. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
38. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
39. Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
48. M John Harrison: Light (2002)
49. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
59. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
80. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
90. Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
110. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889)
114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
118. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
119. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
120. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

2008 Year in Review

2009-01-02T17:49:00.003-04:00

2008 was an interesting reading year for me. I started this blog in February 2008, I tried out my first online reading challenges and moved my reading diary from a written form to longer reviews posted here. I was guessing that I read less this year than in past years because I was devoting more time to the blog and reading other book blogs but this year I read twenty books and when I looked it up it turns out last year I only read 21 and 20 in 2006. I would certainly like to read more in 2009. A friend and I started a book club in 2001 and I know that this year reading challenges have distracted me from that. For the first time since its inception I have neglected to read two of the book club books which I feel very guilty about. I really have enjoyed this exploration of the blogosphere and intend to continue.

Top 4 Books Read in 2008:

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue
A changeling kidnaps a young boy and takes his place in the human world and the novel follows the adventures of these two “boys”. While a novel about children and or changelings would not be the type of book that would normally catch my attention, it was so beautifully written that it turned out to be my favorite book of the year. My review is here.

Secret History by Donna Tartt
I first heard of Donna Tartt when I started reading reviews for her newer book The Little Friend. All the reviews said it was not as good as her masterpiece Secret History. When I was looking for an audio book to throw on my ipod for a lengthy plane trip I selected this and was very impressed. Although it is nominally a mystery in that there is murder and the police are searching for the killer, the reader knows from the beginning “who dunit” and the book is really a psychological study. The narrator is a lower class kid from California who goes to Hampden College in New England and falls in with a rich sophisticated clique of students studying Greek. The book is about the narrator’s one year that he spent with this very odd group of people. Tartt’s use of language is amazing and her characters were both fascinating and vividly portrayed. I loved it.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
I was looking for a book to recommend to my book club that stretched the boundaries of the form of the novel. I had heard of this book but hadn’t gotten around to reading it until this year. It is written in the second person and the protagonist is “The Reader” ie you. He buys a book but after one chapter the rest is missing and he spends the rest of the book attempting to find the rest of it. Instead he repeatedly finds the beginnings of other incomplete books, each one from a different genre or style. The book alternates between the protagonist’s search for the book and the actual books themselves. The book is a meditation on being a writer and as well as being a reader. I absolutely loved it but I must say my book group did not. They didn’t like the lack of plot or the emphasis of form over the story but that of course was the entire point of the book. I enjoyed its experimental nature (indeed selected it for that very reason) and loved its portrayal of an avid reader and the musings on reading and literature.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
I bought this for the Once Upon Time II Challenge but didn’t get around to reading it until later. I really wanted to read it because the author was supposedly inspired by Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, one of my favorite books. As far as I am concerned the main character is the steam-punk city of New- Crobuzon itself and its many varied and interesting species. The plot involves an eccentric scientist who inadvertently assists the slake moths who terrorize the city by taking people’s dreams and leaving them comatose. The scientist and his strange band of friends and colleagues endeavor to save the city. At more than 700 pages there are many other subplots as well, but the plot is not the point. The point is the incredible descriptions of the city itself and its inhabitants. The city is a huge strange dark decaying amalgam of high tech and steam/clockwork technology. The inhabitants vary from bureaucrats that would fit in perfectly in Kafka’s world to Satan, a giant inter-dimensional spider called the Weaver, a sentient super computer, creatures similar to cactus, birds, frogs and insects and Remades that incorporate mechanized technology into their bodies. This is not a page turner. You have to have the patience to revel in the lush imagery and it took me a while to read but long after I finished it New-Crobuzon is still is vivid in my mind.

I have not managed to do reviews of three of the four. I think this is because I enjoyed them so much that I wanted the review to be great and therefore they linger in drafts because I am not satisfied with them. I am going to try and catch up on my reviews and do better in 2009.

Statistics:

Although some of the books could fall into more than one category for the purposes of this list I only assigned one category for each book.

Nonfiction - 0
Science Fiction - 1
Horror - 4
Fantasy - 5
Mystery - 2
Literary - 7
Thriller - 1

This certainly reflects my participation in challenges. I don’t think I have ever read so much fantasy at one time and while I do enjoy horror, literary books usually predominate my reading. I also usually get at least one or two nonfiction books read. I would like to read more sci fi in 2009. Other interesting stats:

Female authors - 7
Male authors - 13
New to me authors - 14
Audiobooks - 4

Happy reading in 2009!