Starseeker, Tim Bowler

*wipes away tears*

*throws tissue into trash can*

*puts sad book back inside purse*

So I won Starseeker in a giveaway from Bart’s Bookshelf (thank you, I really liked it!), and I got it in the mail the other day and I read it today in between being scared shitless by “Hush” (why are the Gentlemen so scary?  why do they do that with their hands and their faces?) and trying to figure out what the hell happens in “Doomed” (hell happens.  They have to go back to high school to fix the stupid Hellmouth; such a subpar episode, plus there’s loads of Riley acting a fool, though – hey, goody – this is also the one where Spike figures out he can hurt demons!), which is what I’m doing now while I’m writing this, and it was really good, and it made me cry like a baby, a hungry angry baby.

Ever since Luke’s father’s death two years ago, he’s been a bit floundering, falling in with A Bad Crowd of rotten kids (what is with British schoolchildren?  Are they really like this, or are British YA novels and my old flatmates lying to me?), and the aforementioned Bad Crowd has recruited Luke to break into an old lady’s house and steal a box that she has.  But Luke is hearing things that other people can’t hear, voices, humming, the sound of a young girl crying – and when he breaks into the house, he finds a girl there.  There’s a lot more than this going on – he has a gift for music, there’s a piano concert coming up, his mum’s thinking about remarrying – and when it all (tearing up again here) comes together at the end, it’s very lovely and moving.

I am still sniffly.  I cried a lot of tears.  Starseeker reminded me a smidgy bit of David Almond – with the gentle, delicate way of dealing with loss, and the slightly mystical thing.  I like the slightly mystical thing.  I am all about mystics; in fact, I am all about Englis mystics.  Hooray for England!  I support your long tradition of mysticism!  Actually, British YA fiction seems to do this sort of a lot, all this touchy-feely stuff, which is strange because American YA fiction doesn’t, and Americans are waaaaay more touchy-feely than Brits.  Thoughts?

The Children of Men, P.D. James

So my thoughts on the film version of Children of Men sort of went like this: Mmmm, Clive Owen.  And then, Ah yes, apocalypse, issues being dealt with – I wonder if Clive Owen’s going to strangle someone with his bare hands.  This is shallow, I know, but I just have this reaction to Clive Owen every time I see him.  Even in Gosford Park when there was absolutely no chance of his strangling someone with his bare hands, because it was all proper and British up in that movie.

My thoughts on the book did not include any reflections about Clive Owen.  I was underwhelmed, I have to say.  For a dystopian novel, this was pretty tame.  All the women in the world have stopped having babies (that’s quite excellent as a premise!), so the world is slowly dying out.  Not very nice for anyone.  The protagonist, Theo, is cousin to the Warden of England; he keeps a diary and gets approached by a group of dissidents.  They want him to approach the Warden and ask the Warden to fix some things, like the officially-voluntary-but-really-sort-of-compulsory mass suicide of the elderly.  This doesn’t work out, as you might expect, and then it turns out that one of the dissidents is pregnant!  And then they have to go on the run!

Here was my problem, and I’m going to have spoilers here.  The whole thing lacked a feeling of suspense.  There wasn’t a viable enemy – the pregnant chick was convinced that she would die instantly if the government found her, so that’s why they were on the run.  I didn’t have a feeling that they were in really terrible danger, even after several of their group got caught and killed.  For some reason, Theo kept a diary for half the book, alternating with third-person narrative, and then he was like, Meh, I’m tired of this diary business, which felt like P.D. James saying, Why did I start this diary in the first place?  Jesus.  You don’t find out Julian’s pregnant until halfway through the book.  I WAS DISPLEASED.

However, I still want to read some of P.D. James’s proper mysteries.  Dystopia may not be her thing.  And I don’t really like dystopian books either, although I seem to have read a lot of them in the past year for some reason.

Other thoughts:

an adventure in reading
books i done read
Grasping for the Wind
Books on Screen
Books and Other Stuff
Ready When You Are, C.B.
she treads softly
Semicolon

Let me know if I missed yours!

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, Shirin Ebadi

So I have been reading Iran Awakening on and off ever since the Iranian election took over the news.  This has been quite a while.  I wanted to read it because I felt like I didn’t know enough about Iran and the United States, and the revolution and everything.  I thought it was fascinating, how she told about the changes in political power throughout her life.  She talks about helping in the revolution, and how afterwards she was asked to wear a headscarf, how people told her Just wait!  We want to deal with women’s rights but there are so many more important things to do first!  Ugh, it was awful – since, of course, this never materialized.  She writes about the Iran-Iraq war, her anger when so many of her friends left Iran for safer territory, the legal cases she undertook, and her time in prison with such vividness.

I didn’t finish it at first because it gave me really bad nightmares (men without faces put me in cars and asked me important questions in another language).  I have only just finished Iran Awakening yesterday, and now I don’t know what to say about it.  It was terribly upsetting, but I’m glad I read it.  I have several other books about women in Iran, and they look grim too, and if I weren’t so interested I wouldn’t read them but I am VERY VERY interested.  I just won’t read them before bed.  Before bed maybe I will read my anthology of Persian literature.  Yes!  I got one from the library!  An anthology of Persian literature, it’s going to be great!

Incidentally, this is an excellent, concise overview of Iran’s recent political history from the perspective of, you know, people.  (And yes, I am here differentiating “people” from “politicians”.  Sorry, politicians!)  If you don’t know why Iran does not want to be America’s BFF, and you have been wondering, here’s why.  I wouldn’t want to be our BFF either.  Sheesh.

Other thoughts:
Lotus Reads
Ramblings by Tammy

Let me know if I missed yours!

C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, eds. Lyle W. Dorsett & Marjorie Lamp Mead

So my life has been in a smidgy bit of an uproar lately, for various reasons – my library card expired, for one thing, right on the day that half my books were due to get renewed!  I had no idea the expiration date was so soon; it feels like I just renewed it a few weeks ago.  And, see, I have this friendly blue library card with an elegant number that I have memorized, and it has one of the earliest extant drafts of my signature, which I had only invented recently when I got the card in 2001.  However, the library has since “upgraded” to fancy new white library cards that are just so cold and hateful and soulless, and every time I see them my brain is all NOT THE MEAN WHITE CARD DO NOT WANT, and the last time I got my library card renewed, the librarian tried to take my old card away and give me a nasty new one, and it was such a narrow escape, you have no idea.

This time I was prepared.  I said a whole lot of words to the library guy to convince him of the sincerity of my desire to keep my exact particular library card FOREVER.  “BECAUSE I KNOW THE NUMBERS BY HEART,” I explained to him urgently, not giving him my card when he put out his hand for it.  (I kept having visions of him snipping it smartly in half before I could stop him, and it was like watching someone CUT UP A CHILD.  It’s just so irrevocable.  Once you have cut a child in half, it’s too late to fix it!  You cannot tape it back together and keep using it!)

And he didn’t say anything, just kept waiting for me to hand him my library card, and I believe I said something along the lines of, “No, seriously, listen, I understand that there is a new library card in town but I cannot bear to lose this library card.  We have been together all these years and we just can’t be parted, you see, because it would be far too painful, a brutal separation really, and CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD?”  As I mopped up my tears and prepared to ululate martyr’s funeral style, to make sure he understood the serious mourning I would have to go into if he took my friendly blue library card away, the library guy looked to his colleague for assistance, and his colleague said, “Um, yeah, she can keep that one if she wants it.”  OH AND I DO.

Well anyway, it was very stressful, as you can imagine, in spite of the very validating realization that I have only accrued $13.30 in fines since three years ago when my card last had to be renewed.  So I sensibly bought myself some spiritually soothing books to get me through these and other difficulties.  I got a large green book with a soppy nature drawing on the front that is a compendium of C.S. Lewis’s religious writings – I need some of these, and the book cannot help the soppy drawing – and I got The Essential Rumi, which I love so much I haven’t yet figured out how to address it on this blog, and I got C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children.

Phew.  That was a long introduction for a very slim book.

Those of you who read this blog regularly may know that I have a rocky relationship with C.S. Lewis.  The longer we are apart, the more he bothers me.  I am sensibly buying a lot of C.S. Lewis’s books, so that I will be statistically more likely to read his stuff frequently, because in reality I love him an awful lot.  And this book, his letters to children, mainly about his Narnia books, is exactly the reason (well, one of many) that I love him.  He does not patronize, and it’s so easy to patronize a kid.  He writes in a serious but good-natured way, and answers their questions very politely.  Behold an excerpt:

Dear Lucy,

I am so glad that you like the Narnian stories and it was nice of you to write and tell me.  I love E. Nesbit too and I think that I have learned a lot from her about how to write stories of this kind.  Do you know Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?  I think you wd. like it.  I am also bad at Maths and it is a continual nuisance to me – I get muddled over my change in shops.  I hope you’ll have better luck and get over the difficulty!  It makes life a lot easier.

It makes me, I think, more humble than proud to know that Aslan has allowed me to be the means of making Him more real to you.  Because He could have used anyone – as He made a donkey preach a good sermon to Balaam.

Perhaps, in return, you will sometimes say a prayer for me?

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,
C.S. Lewis

I have this book of letters that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, and the editors of it have cleverly chosen a selection of letters relating to Lord of the Rings.  I bought it one time when I was in California learning Chinese (not very successfully though I can still count quite high), and although I do not count myself among the die-hard Lord of the Rings fans in my family (didn’t even read it until the films came out – I know, I know), I was captivated by Tolkien’s letters about it.  I wish someone would do a similar thing with C.S. Lewis and letters relating to his writing.  Not just Narnia but all of his writing.  How good would that be?

Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud

So Shan said that she found it difficult to read Understanding Comics because it was lots of information coming at her all it once – and I thought that was ratcheted up a few notches in Reinventing Comics.  It was still full of interesting things to consider.  Scott McCloud talks about the directions comics are taking, the revolutions that have to take place for comics to Take Their Rightful Place, including limited representation by anyone who isn’t white and male.  He handles these delicate subjects quite well, without being a jerk at all or failing to recognize his position of privilege.

However, when I got past to the bits about computers and things, that was too much information coming at me all at once.  I mean, I was reading it in a blackout (I love Louisiana and I love Louisiana storms, but power outages are no fun at all in the middle of summer), and feeling guilty for not cuddling the dog I’m baby-sitting for, and I was having certain problems about which I am too much of a lady to talk.  I do admit the possibility that there were other problems apart from my brain shutting down when too many computer words fly at my head.

On to Making Comics!  I am very excited about Making Comics!  I think it will be extremely fascinating!

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

So in case you’ve been living in a hole and not hearing about The Hunger Games – it’s a grim, grim dystopian future, and every year the government makes each of the twelve districts send one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to participate in the Hunger Games where they all get placed in a specially designed Perilous Terrain and fight to the death on live TV.  Katniss, our dauntless protagonist, volunteers to take her little sister’s place, and the other tribute turns out to be the baker’s son Peeta (I know, right?), who once saved Katniss and her family by giving them bread when they were starving.  And while they’re there, Peeta declares his love for her – this is great television – and she’s all, Oh it’s a ploy to get audience sympathy la la la while Peeta pines away and she tries to decide whether she likes Peeta best or whether she wants her sexy woodlands lover Gale.  Oh, and they also participate the Hunger Games where everyone tries to kill everyone else.  This takes up a lot of time.

Why is the kid’s name Peeta?  Seriously.  It’s fine for Katniss having a stupid name because everyone already loves her (and I’m sorry to report that Gale calls her Catnip), but since she is going to eventually have to choose between Peeta and Gale (I assume – I mean she could go all Pocahontas and end up marrying some random stranger, or she could do something really radical and not ever find a life-mate), I feel like having him named after a yeasty flatbread puts him at a disadvantage.

One time Wesley said to Fred, “Your run-on sentences have gotten a lot less pointless.”  I just mention it.  Oo, pita bread.  I could use some baba ghanoush right now.  I am serious, y’all.  Baba ghanoush and stuffed grape leaves.  I am so distractible today, holy crap.

Ahem, never mind all that.  The rumors are true!  The Hunger Games was very good.  It is more redemptive than the dreadfully depressing Life As We Knew It, and the supporting cast is less sickening than in How I Live Now, so hooray for dystopian YA novels that induce neither nightmares nor vomiting.  And includes a Juvenal reference that pleased me because I like that “bread and circuses” bit but annoyed because without a book-truth way to explain why the country is called that, it seemed gimmicky.  But that is my mostly only complaint (I mean, that and how clueless Katniss was, for heaven’s sake)!  I liked the Minotaury quality to the whole thing, and the extent to which it was exactly like reality TV is in the real world.

Other thoughts:

an adventure in reading
Bart’s Bookshelf
Farm Lane Books
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’?
The Reading Zone
Dear Author
bookshelves of doom
Devourer of Books
Unmainstream Mom Reads
Booking Mama
Wands and Worlds
MotherReader
books i done read
Au Courant
Thoughts of Joy
Books and Movies
Framed and Booked
Reading Rants
Diary of an Eccentric
Teen Book Review
Cheryl Rainfield
YA Book Realm
Becky’s Book Reviews
The Sleepy Reader
Wondrous Reads
Lesa’s Book Critiques
YA New York
Semicolon
Children’s Literature Book Club
YA Fabulous
arch thinking
Gimme More Books
The Book Muncher
Maw Books Blog
Bending Bookshelf
thebookbind
Presenting Lenore
Good Girls Read Books
1330V
SciFiGuy
The YA Book Blogger
My Friend Amy
The Compulsive Reader
About Books
At Home with Books
Bloggin’ ’bout Books
Liv’s Book Reviews
she treads softly
nineseveneight
Look at That Book
Persnickety Snark
Fantasy Book Critic
reader rabbit

My fingers are tired – let me know if I missed yours.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe

I told Colleen at Foreign Circus Library that I love books about research, and she ever so kindly sent it to me in the post!  Lucky me, I read it over the weekend.  Poor Connie has just got through with her qualifying exams – sounds like a nightmare, that lot, I don’t think I was sufficiently sympathetic to my dear friend tim when she was having quals (sorry tim!) – and her scatty New Age mother demands she go fix up her (Connie’s) late grandmother’s old house and get it sold.  While living at the house, Connie finds a little key inside a Bible, and a name, Deliverance Dane; and this leads to all kinds of mad research into the Salem witch trials.

Although I enjoyed The Physick Book a lot, there were some smallish things that I thought could have been improved.  I was not in love with the Boston accent approximations – I know these things are difficult to do, so I give her mostly a break on that.  I thought the book telegraphed punches a bit, with Connie failing to pick up clues that even I caught, even though she was supposed to be doing a dissertation on colonial America and I, um, took American history when I was in high school.

Throughout the book we flash back to Deliverance Dane and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter and this was really excellent – I wanted more of it!  The sections from the past felt much more immediate and real than the bits with Connie doing her researching and having her rather unbelievable fling with Sam.  Deliverance and her daughter Mercy, in particular, made me get a bit sniffly since, of course, it being the Salem Witch trials, Deliverance gets hanged. Oh well.

Final verdict: This book sounded like one of Barbara Michaels’ books, and it really was a lot like that.  Only less polished.  Barbara Michaels but less polished.  I’d love to see Katherine Howe write an entire book set Back in the Day.  I bet that would be really good, although I don’t tend to love books set in colonial America.  I would read one if Katherine Howe wrote it.  I believe in you, Katherine Howe!

Other thoughts:

Tara at Books and Cooks
Wendy at Caribousmom
Fyrefly’s Book Blog
book-a-rama
S. Krishna’s Books
Devourer of Books
Medieval Bookworm
Booking Mama
3 Evil Cousins
Joyfully Retired
TV and Book Addict
Bookfoolery and Babble
In Search of Giants
Shelf Love
I Smell Books
LitBites
Literary Fangirl
We Be Reading
The Book Splot
My Two Blessings
The Burton Review
Reading Rocks
Books for Breakfast, Drinks for Dinner

Love Is Blue, Joan Wyndham

It is difficult for me to review Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries.  What really can be said?  Here is what I have to say about Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries:

“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Ein liten pinsvin,” which translated literally means “a little prickle pig”. The hedgehog had a very winning little face, but smelt abominable. We sat and played with it for a bit but then I could see a certain look on his face and he took his glasses off – always a bad sign – so held the ‘pinsvin’ firmly in my lap like a living chastity belt. However, it takes more than a hedgehog to deter a Norwegian and before I knew what was happening – hey presto – there I was flat on my back. Very damp it was too.

Oh, Joan.  Joan, how I love you.

Shiny treats in the post

I was all sick and unhappy today, but on the other hand, I got a bunch of books from the library on Sunday, including a number of books about Iran – would you believe, with all this shit going down in Iran that is all over the news all the time and everyone is fighting for their freedom, and on Saturday I received from the lovely Colleen a copy of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (hooray!  It sounds just like one of Barbara Michaels’ books, with the spooky past and everything!), and today, oh heaven, I received from PaperbackSwap the second volume of Joan Wyndham’s diaries, Love is Blue.  Which I am just heading off to cover with contact paper and so protect forever, but I just wanted to remark that Joan Wyndham charms me just as much as ever, and if there were fifty volumes of her diaries I would buy and read them all.

She walks in a very sexy way, leaning back from the hips as if offering herself to some invisible lover.  She once told Oscar that her whole body was one vast erogenous zone.  We looked this up, and are very jealous.

Typically I got mumps halfway through my last week of training.  I’d been feeling feverish for days, but put it down to the excitement.  Then my face swelled up like a balloon and I was hauled off to the isolation hospital.  Sister was a dragon, she came charging down the ward, doing a running commentary – you could hear her coming from afar.  ‘Good morning, Lieutenant, had your bowels open?  Don’t pick your nails, Eileen.  What’s this I hear about your refusing the bedpan, Wyndham?’

I love her so much.  Why is she dead?  It’s totally not fair.

Two books by Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters – under this pseudonym as well as her other one, Barbara Michaels – is one of my most favorite authors of all the authors.  I like her because she writes the kind of book I like, but she does it (usually) tongue-in-cheek, and furthermore she has read all the same books I have read.  Not just, like, Little Women, which everyone has read, but you know, Rafael Sabatini and The Sheik and trashy things like that.  I appreciate this from Elizabeth Peters.

The Love Talker and Devil-May-Care, both of which I read in the last few days, are superficially rather similar.  In both, a woman comes to live with her eccentric relatives, and a number of strange happenings ensue.  In The Love Talker it’s all to do with fairies getting photographed, and in Devil-May-Care it’s ghostly apparitions of the ancestors of the posh families in the town. Devil-May-Care is, I must say, vastly superior in every way.  The resolution of the mystery is more satisfying, and I like the heroine better, and I like the elderly relatives better, and Ellie in Devil-May-Care has an aggravating fiance to be gotten rid of in a totally humorous fashion.  (Though why she was with him in the first place one is never really sure.)

If you are ever in the mood for a friendly, rather Gothic sort of mystery, Barbara Michaels is generally the way to go.  Elizabeth Peters has written these two ones, which are a bit Gothic, but most of her books under this pseudonym are regular (non-Gothic!  non-ghosty!) mysteries.  Her four books about Jacqueline Kirby totally slay me, especially the one set at a romance novel convention.  Oh, Jesus, I need to read that again.  I cleverly bought a Jacqueline Kirby omnibus in New York, but it was tragically published before Naked Once More got written, so it’s a Jacqueline Kirby, I don’t know, pluribus instead.

I really don’t feel this blog accurately reflects my tremendous fondness for Elizabeth Peters.  Her Amelia Peabody series is a load of lovely mysteries set in Egypt at the turn of the (20th) century, and she’s written one of her best women for it – she does men better than women really.  The series has been going on perhaps a smidge too long, but I’d say right up to Children of the Storm the books were all excellent.  I don’t even like mysteries that much.  She’s got a Master Criminal, and all sorts of mummies and antiquities and Howard Carter.  I love Elizabeth Peters.

(Oo, but don’t read Someone in the House.  It’s so scary!  I couldn’t sleep after I read it!  The house in question (spoilers ahead, but that doesn’t matter since I know you’re going to listen to me and NEVER READ IT), the house is spooky and haunted and it’s trying to make its inhabitants happy.  Yeeeeeergh.  It’s not trying to get rid of them!  It’s trying to make them happy.  It creeped me out so much!  Way more than haunted house mysteries where the house is trying to drive people insane or kill them.)