Category Archives: Books

Folly by Laurie King

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in Books, Reviews

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FollyFolly by Laurie R. King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was waiting for the oven timer to go off yesterday with ten minutes left. Not enough time to walk the dog or settle into writing, so I decided I’d read the first few pages of a book instead. Poor dog. It was over five hours later that she finally got her walk, because once I started Folly, I didn’t stop reading until I reached the end.

I’m not sure why it caught me so thoroughly. It has more description than I usually like, plus very in-depth details about wood-carving and building, and the basics of the story seemed potentially more depressing than enjoyable. But the narrator had an absolutely compelling mix of fragility and strength. She’s an unreliable narrator who knows she’s unreliable, who’s unreliable even to herself, and yet who is persevering in the face of devastating losses. I did guess basically every element of the mystery long before I’d finished reading, but it didn’t matter — the story had me and I kept going until it was done. A very satisfying read.

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Welcome to 2017

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Books, R, Zelda

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I had the loveliest/weirdest New Year’s Eve. It was R’s 21st birthday and I was prepared to be sad about not getting to spend time with him on his birthday. Obviously, now that he is an adult, that’s going to happen less and less often anyway. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that I will never spend his birthday with him again. Although having written that out, it seems very unlikely. I didn’t often spend my birthday with my parents between the ages of 20-30, but after that, I sometimes did, especially the major birthdays. I definitely saw them on my 30th and 40th.

Anyway, it’s a nostalgic day, of course. As always, I remembered details of the day 21 years ago, mostly how madly, head-over-heels, totally joyfully in love I was. I know some moms don’t get that. My midwife told me it was the endorphins from a very long labor. It might also have been some exhaustion delirium—my water broke on Thursday and R was finally born on Sunday morning and there was not a lot of sleep during those three intervening nights—but whatever, I was dazzled and awed and infatuated beyond anything I have ever experienced before or since.

But I was also trying to remember details of the year before that — 22 years ago, the New Year’s Eve when I had no idea, none, of how dramatically and permanently my life would change in the next 12 months. I couldn’t remember a thing. I assume I spent it with the boyfriend that I was coming to realize I ought to be breaking up with and probably that we both drank too much, but no specifics beyond that.

And then my thoughts turned to last New Year’s Eve. It was just a year ago. I had no idea it would be my last new year in my house. If you’d asked me then, I would have predicted this new year’s to be just as the previous seven or so had been: quiet, at home, probably including a nice meal with R…

Instead, he was in Paris. And I was sitting in a friend’s driveway watching the best fireworks display ever. Best, not because the fireworks were out of reason spectacular — Disney has some great fireworks shows with music and fireworks that create designs in the sky, ie Mickey Mouse ears, so I’ve seen some impressive fireworks — but because it went on and on and on, and I could watch it from the cozy comfort of my own bed with the dogs on top of me.

I would love to know what Zelda thought about the whole thing. She’s always hated fireworks, but she’s never figured out that they’re the flashing lights in the sky. She started to get agitated, barking and pacing, when she first smelled the smoke and heard the banging, but then she came and sat on me and watched them with me. Ears up, eyes alert, I really think she paid attention to the whole thing. And they were beautiful, big fireworks, some simple explosions of blue and red and green, others those swishing things like one little explosion after another in white sparkles.

It was a lovely night. Not what I meant to write about this morning, but I’m glad to save the memory.

The other lovely thing that happened was that Andrea Host released a new book in her Touchstone series. I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned the series here before — I know I have elsewhere on social media. But those books somehow became comfort reads for me, such that a few months after reading them for the first time, I got sick and the only thing I wanted to do was reread the series. They’re fantasy/science fiction, but the new book, In Arcadia, is very much a romance: it’s a calm, quiet, slice-of-life story that tells the tale of the main character’s mom from the previous books falling in love. I read it between fireworks and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you haven’t tried her books and you like fantasy/sci-fi/romance, I really do recommend them—she creates worlds that I love escaping into. I’ve reread almost all of them, I think.

In fact, my one regret about In Arcadia is that it makes me want to reread all Andrea’s books, one right after another, and I really shouldn’t. I should be writing my own books!

Resolution for 2017: write lots of words.

Book reviews (the ones I write)

10 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Books, Reviews

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One of my goals for this year — which sounds sort of grandiose, but is better than calling it a resolution, I suppose — was to record the books I read on Goodreads with at least a few words about each one. This wasn’t about public consumption. I wasn’t planning on writing the type of reviews that would help other people choose their books. I just wanted to remember the books I read.

Side note: what a weird word “read” is. Same spelling, two different pronunciations depending on tense. I actually reworded a sentence in that first paragraph so the two different pronunciations wouldn’t happen in rapid succession, because it felt so disorienting. English is a lovely language in many ways, so flexible, so rich, but it is so strange sometimes. Ahem. Back to our previously scheduled discussion…

Obviously, it sounds pretty brainless not to be able to remember the books I read. Is it even reading if six months later, I retain nothing of the story? But when I’m on a roll, I can read two or three books a day, and three hours of mild entertainment does not necessarily stick in long-term storage.

But my goal hasn’t been easy to accomplish, mostly because the last few books I read (or didn’t read, as the case may be) would have gotten reviews that might have seemed scathing. One of them started great. I might even have paid for it after reading the Look Inside. But four chapters in, I was forced to concede complete and utter boredom. I wanted to sleep more than I wanted to read, and it wasn’t night time. That… is not a nice review.

Another one I finished, but mostly because I kept wondering whether it could get more stupid. Answer: yes! It could, it did. It was the “everything AND the kitchen sink” marathon of romantic cliches. (The author, incidentally, is a best-selling indie and probably phenomenally wealthy by this time, so who am I to judge?)

A third was readable but about a third of the way through I was pretty sure that the mystery was going to turn out to be the painfully obvious “teenage girl was being sexually abused” and by halfway through I was sure of it and so I skipped to the end. I was right. As a plot device, the discovery that the teenage girl was an abuse victim is so unrewarding. It’s the justification for everything, anything, and it’s never a surprise.

Those reviews are exactly the kind of content I’d like to keep with the books’ names, so that when I see the books again in my Kindle cloud, I can refresh my memory of what my experience with the book was. But I don’t want to post them publicly because they’re so personal. They’re about my experience with the book, not thoughtful, well-reasoned, articulate assessments of reading material for someone else’s edification. For all I know, on another day, I might have been much more tolerant of books 1 and 3. (Not 2, I would never have liked that one. But lots of people apparently do, so hey, good for them. All reading is good reading, IMO.)

Anyway, I’m not sure where I was going with this, except that I wish Kindle had better tools for keeping private reviews. I sometimes make notes on a book’s cover or first page, especially when it’s a DNF, but then I have to download the book again to see the note. Hmm, and it just occurred to me to wonder whether the drive-by Dresden fan who only reads authors who agree with their precise taste and politics is subconsciously influencing me, despite my intellectual disdain for their attitude. I might have to think more about that.

Either way, though, I’m failing in my goal to review more of the books I read, and I’m going to try to do better. As soon as I finish writing the book I’m writing. Four chapters to go, I think, but they are, of course, big ones. And I might sneak another one in there, just because it would be fun.

Book review: In the Shadow of Blackbirds

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Books, Reviews

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Book Description from Goodreads:

In the Shadow of Blackbirds, by Cat Winters:

In 1918, the world seems on the verge of apocalypse. Americans roam the streets in gauze masks to ward off the deadly Spanish influenza, and the government ships young men to the front lines of a brutal war, creating an atmosphere of fear and confusion. Sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black watches as desperate mourners flock to séances and spirit photographers for comfort, but she herself has never believed in ghosts. During her bleakest moment, however, she’s forced to rethink her entire way of looking at life and death, for her first love—a boy who died in battle—returns in spirit form. But what does he want from her?

Featuring haunting archival early-twentieth-century photographs, this is a tense, romantic story set in a past that is eerily like our own time.

******
I’m never going to write historical fiction. The closest I will ever come is fantasy in a historical setting so that when people tell me all the things I got wrong, I can shrug and say, “Fantasy, remember?”

I suppose technically this author could say the same thing, because she’s writing a book where ghosts exist. But I was the PITA reader seriously bugged by the details. She has her main character describe as scene as surreal. In 1918? The surrealists didn’t start painting until the 1930s. Before then, the word didn’t exist. She excuses a sneeze as allergies. That term was invented in 1906 in Europe, so pretty unlikely to have been in widespread use in 1918 Portland.

Most troublesome to me was that she paints the flu epidemic in San Diego as being apocalyptic in scope, with corpses lying in the street. A quick internet search reveals that 202 people total died of the flu in San Diego out of over 3000 who fell sick in a city of over 70,000 people. That’s … a somewhat unexciting apocalypse.

I did keep reading, but I definitely never became immersed. Instead, I kept leaving the book and looking up random facts on the internet. I guess that makes it an educational read!

The flu epidemic information was the most bothersome — we now know that the pandemic was incredibly devastating and killed millions of people, but people didn’t know that at the time. The epidemic is historically fascinating (to me) not because of the widespread destruction but because in so many places, people were so innocent — newspapers buried the stories about it, people scoffed at the recommendations to wear masks, and by the time they really started to understand the severity, it was almost over. The second burst of the flu, where most of the deaths occurred, actually only lasted for a couple months. Imagine the AIDS epidemic in ultra high speed. I feel like the flu pandemic is actually a lot more interesting than the stereotype of a pandemic in this story, but the story was really more about spiritualism and photography and WWI, so I’m probably being overly picky.

The story overall — lots of vivid smells and tastes, interesting research and information despite inaccuracies, a classic “not like other girls” heroine, a grim mystery with an ending that I did not see coming, and I finished it despite my regular departures to the internet to question the historical accuracy of the details. (The internet failed to tell me when children began being told to share their toys but I really, truly, seriously doubt whether it was much before the 1950s.)

Read via Overdrive.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Books, Grace, Personal, Reviews

≈ 12 Comments

First of all, switching computers and operating systems and browsers and absolutely everything — I even have only one trackpad button now, instead of two — is really disorienting. But I love my new little computer. The battery life is incredible and the keyboard is clicketty perfection. Okay, not quite perfection — I keep getting a 1 when I try to get an !, but apart from that, it works really well and feels great.

Writing-wise it’s sort of interesting — the screen is so small that I can really only see a few lines at a time as I write. It makes it hard to assess the flow, but it also feels like I’m starting to write faster, because I’m not spending all my time being critical of the words I’ve already written. They disappear so fast that I don’t have the chance to stare at them gloomily.

However, my writing got horribly negatively affected this week when the library delivered Naomi Novik’s Uprooted to my Overdrive shelf. I was on the waiting list and it was finally my turn. I’m feeling slightly guilty right now that I haven’t returned it so that the next person on the waiting list can have her chance, but I haven’t yet, because I keep wanting to just drop into that world again for a little visit. I loved it so much. I’ve read other books by Novik — I think I read maybe the first three books of her very long Tremaire series? I enjoyed them but not enough to keep going when I reached the end of the series that had been written when I first started. I hate trying to remember what happened in a series that I haven’t read for a year so I often let series go. But this book was nothing like those books.

It’s a fairy tale mix of… oh, Robin McKinley and Patrick Rothfuss and Suzanne Collins and … someone grim and bloody and someone magical and stubborn. Maybe it is its own thing entirely? After I fell in love with it, I listened to the Sword & Laser podcast about it and then read a Slate review of it. One of the things that both of those sources pointed out was that it’s almost a trilogy in one book: a coming-of-age tale with a fantastic heroine where for the first third, she’s learning in a classic Beauty and the Beast scenario, and in the second third, she’s off to the city in a Mercedes Lackey/Patrick Rothfuss watch-out-for-the-evil-peers story, and in the last third, she is engaged in epic battles to save her home, ala people that I don’t read because I’m not so much an epic battle sort of reader. (And wasn’t THAT quite the run-on sentence.) The Slate review criticized that, suggesting that it would have been better as three books, but I totally disagreed — this is an all-things-in-one, breakneck speed, completely engrossing read. For me, it was perfect.

Well, pretty close to perfect. On a second read, I started to quibble with some things. (What happened to the wolves? Where did they come from and why were they never seen again? Why didn’t the obnoxious girl get transformed into a toad? Seriously, on what planet is tilting her headpiece a year’s worth of humiliation for someone that bitchy? Also holy cow, there are a lot of dead people by the end — I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a book that was quite so bloody.) BUT! None of those things remotely occurred to me on my first read and really mostly I just loved it to death. So much so that as soon as I finished, I went back to the beginning and started again and since then, I’ve been dipping in and out of it at regular opportunities. And worst of all, my night-time and morning day-dreaming — the moments when I’m half-awake and story is unfolding before my eyes, words drifting into my imagination — all those moments are being stolen by Novik’s world. *sigh*

I should really return this book to the library right now and try to forget all about it. Noah needs to finish his confrontation with Lucas and Akira needs to get back from her honeymoon. But you, on the other hand, you, dear reader, should promptly put your name on your library’s hold list. I’ve added the book to my Amazon wishlist and someday after I make it through the holidays, after I finish writing a couple books of my own, I’m going to be buying my own copy of Uprooted so that I can read it until the pixels wear out. (Thank God they never do!)

And oh, bah, I was actually going to write the story of my Christmas tree, but I’m out of time. Oh, well. I have a Christmas tree. It feels magical. It’s not really decorated yet, but I feel a decided glow of happiness when I think about it that matches the glow of its lights.

Christmas tree

The ever elusive last swimming day

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in Books, NaNo

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November 20th. Maybe.

All week long, I was pretty convinced that swimming was over for the year. I’m not sure I even stuck a toe in the water. But yesterday the sun was shining, the air was hot… so yep, swimming on November 20th. Real swimming, floating, playing ball with the dogs for a solid two hours. It made me remember why I love living in Florida.

Today, though, has been a weird day. I’m not sure why my schedule is so skewed, but I woke up, did the normal morning stuff, came back to the bedroom to get my Saturday chores started — strip the bed, laundry, etc. — and thought, wow, I’m so tired, I’m just going to crawl back in bed for twenty minutes and think about what comes next in Grace before I get started.

I woke up at one o’clock. One! In the afternoon! I suppose it would have been worse if it had been one in the morning, but I have no idea why I suddenly needed four extra hours of sleep. The day’s been off ever since. I still haven’t done the morning chores, didn’t make it to the library, haven’t cleaned up the kitchen and it’s now almost 8PM and I’m finally writing my blog post. I haven’t written a word of Grace.

I did read an enjoyable Amazon First book, though: The Short Drop. If you’re a Prime member and you haven’t yet chosen your free book for the month of November, I recommend this one. I haven’t had a lot of luck with those books — some months, in fact, I haven’t even bothered to download one because I’ve grown so dubious about them. But this one was pretty solid. My sister called while I was in the middle of it and after a couple minutes on the phone with her, I had to say, “Sorry, even though I’m pretty sure it’s totally obvious why the missing kid went missing, I need to keep reading.” It dragged a little in parts and I skimmed some, and a bunch of the so-called plot twists were obvious from the beginning, but it was an entertaining way to spend an afternoon. Technically, for me, it means I again fell into the trap of reading fiction at breakfast, although it was almost 2 when I started. I still intended to only read a little bit and then get to work, but five hours later, yeah, not so much.

Ooh, and that thing I just did — the “yeah, not so much” — it’s called a contranym. The “yeah” in that context doesn’t mean what it ought to mean. I read a great article, What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand? in The New Yorker about contranyms, and I love the concept.

A dog with an extremely dirty face is sitting next to me looking pleading. I’m not sure what she wants, but I should go see. And then I should start writing the words that count. 🙂

DNFs

17 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Books, NaNo, Randomness, Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

I have a tickle in my throat that will not quit this morning. I keep coughing, clearing my throat, blowing my nose, slowly sipping water — but there it lurks, a little itch somewhere low in my right… something. Is the throat made up of parts? The sinuses must connect somehow, right? But that’s the spot, I suspect — right where the sinuses join the throat — and no way for me to scratch. Except to keep trying to clear my throat. The dogs are not sure they approve.

So in a comment on the last post, Carol* asked:

Question — have you ever been turned off by a book to the point where you quit reading it? I get the feeling that you did just that with the Shinn book you just reviewed. Do you ever feel guilty about it and hang onto the book, telling yourself you’ll give it another chance some time in the future? Or do you just pass it along or donate it?

I love this question! First, though, I definitely didn’t do that with either of the Shinn books. She’s such a good writer that even when I have issues with a story for one reason or another, I keep reading. It’s why I risked the hardcover purchases — not a risk so much because of the price, which was excellent, but because I don’t really like keeping books made with paper anymore. I don’t want the clutter. If I let myself go, I would have a house filled with bookshelves, overflowing with books, accumulating dust. Instead, I try to keep my bookshelves limited to only books that are keepers, that I loved enough that I will reread again and again, or that are meaningful to me for some other reasons. I’ve read some of the books on my keeper shelves dozens of times. Sharon Shinn’s got plenty of books on my keeper shelves and The Turning Season will join them. She writes so beautifully, even when I want to object to elements of the story. Plus, it’s a really hopeful book and sometimes that’s what I’m looking for in a reread. Yes, it’s on the bleak side, but a reminder to search for blessings in the midst of sorrow is not a bad message.

But I didn’t mean to write more about that book — instead I wanted to answer the DNF question. Yes! I used to persist with every book I picked up. If I started it, I felt obligated to finish it for some reason. As if the book would know that I didn’t like it and have its feelings hurt. I read so many utterly forgettable books that way. But now… now I am merciless. If a book doesn’t grab me or it loses me somewhere along the way, I just stop reading. And I don’t even feel guilty about it anymore. Or at least not very guilty.

At the beginning of 2015, when I decided to really try to track the books I was reading on Goodreads, I also tracked DNFs (Did Not Finish). There was a Kindle Prime book where my review started, “I’m admitting the truth on this one: I’m never going to finish it. I just didn’t like the main character and I don’t want to spend any more time in her head.” and another book that I picked up from the library, where my review included the line, “If it wasn’t a library book, it would sit in my “keep trying” pile forever, but since I had to bring it back, I can admit the truth — it’s a DNF.”

Another one is a pretty perfect example of a DNF review for me. It was Nevada’s Barr’s Destroyer Angel. My review, in full:

4th DNF of the year for me, but I’m not blaming the writing. I have enjoyed Nevada Barr’s books before, so I didn’t look too closely at what the book was about, but this one is more thriller than mystery. Three women, two girls, and a dog are attacked in the woods by a gang of men. When the bad guys first hurt the dog and then debated killing the dog, I realized it was not going to be what I was looking for in a reading experience. I’m sure in the end good triumphed over evil, but the intensity level was not for me. Ironically, one of the bad guys is willing to kill the women but not the dog — I guess he and I have something in common, because I read plenty of books where women get abused, but I apparently had to draw the line at dogs this week.

I actually stopped tracking my DNFs, though, because most often — especially with ebooks — a DNF is either obvious within the first three chapters or falls into that “maybe I’ll try again later”. If it’s obvious right away, I don’t want to leave a review on Goodreads, because it doesn’t seem fair since I haven’t really read the book, and if it’s “maybe later”, I don’t leave the review since, you know, maybe later.

I definitely used to feel much guiltier about not finishing books, though, and I have tried really hard to give up that guilt. The world contains more books than I will ever, ever be able to read, and I figure if I give up on one, I’m making time to read another.

Hmm…you know, I am not going to follow that train of thought out to its logical conclusion, which is that if I give up on writing A Gift of Grace, I’m making time to write something else. I am not giving up. Not, not, not. And so I think I’d best get back to it. But great question, Carol, and thanks for giving me something to write about today!

*Californian Carol, not New Zealand Carol. It’s kind of funny in a blog with half a dozen readers or so that two of you are named Carol. I’ve wondered more than once if I was just confused but since you both commented separately on the same post, I have once and for all concluded that you are two separate people. 🙂

Monday morning

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Books, Randomness, Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

I can’t believe it’s mid-November already. Time is speeding by.

And I just stared blankly out the window for a solid three minutes. Do I seriously have nothing more to say than that? This blogging every day thing does pose its own challenges.

How about a book review? Last week, I saw that the hardcover edition of The Turning Season could be had for a penny (plus $3.99 shipping and handling, and sorry, Catsongea, I bet you can’t get the same deal), so I took the plunge. I hadn’t read any of Shinn’s Shifting Circle books because I’d hit my uncertain purchase spot with her right before she started releasing them and they didn’t sound… well, I hadn’t bought them. They sounded bleak, I guess, and I’m not much of a fan of bleak.

So The Turning Season is the story of a shape-shifter, struggling to get by in a world — our world — that is not so friendly to those who are different. But she’s got friends, an ex-lover, clients — enough of a community of people who are either shifters or friendly to shifters that when she changes (randomly, not under her control), people show up to take over her responsibilities. The crux of the story is a gentle love story: she meets a guy, she likes him, he likes her, slowly she lets him into her world, things happen — some bad, some sad — but by the end, they are living happily ever after. Or, more realistically, happily until her early and untimely death, because in this series, shape-shifters die young because of the strain of the shifting on their bodies.

There are parts of the book that didn’t work so well for me. The fact that all shape-shifters are terrified that anyone will find out about their abilities and automatically hide from any chance of discovery is a cliche and not one that I think makes a lot of sense. The fear of the evil government locking up people who are different feels very 1950s to me, the Cold War mentality in action, and I really think that if there were shape-shifters in the world, at least a few of them would head to Hollywood. In the real modern world, if shape-shifters existed, they’d be on Jimmy Fallon and Ellen and all over social media. I think it would have been more plausible that all shape-shifters were terrified of discovery if the world had been a little farther away from this one, if there had been events in history that shaped their ideas of discovery. As it is, they’re all terrified of discovery but every time a new normal character learns about them, the reaction is basically, “Okay, cool.”

In the same vein, all the characters respond in a very similar way to a key event at the end and it didn’t work for me. Without spoiling it… well, no way to explain without spoiling, so I won’t. But ironically, one of the reasons that Shinn stopped being an auto-buy purchase for me is that in one of her previous books (Royal Airs), an ostensibly good character did something I found horrifying — an incredible violation of someone else’s bodily integrity — but it was presented very nonchalantly and didn’t bother the other characters. In this case, a character did something that made a lot of sense to me and all the characters were horrified. Perhaps I’ve lived in Florida too long. Anyway, I can’t explain it without giving a ton away, but it definitely broke me out of the story.

Those things said, though — Sharon Shinn can really, really write. Her work is lovely and lyrical. The characters were a pleasure to spend time with, the world was beautiful. The book is bittersweet, but oh, so moving. And while the story is definitely entertainment — essentially a cozy paranormal romance — it has a message, too. In the words of her narrator “I will start celebrating the gifts life brings me, no matter how bitter, on some days, they seem. And I will never, inside the curse, stop searching for the blessing.”

Worth the read. But now I should get back to writing a book of my own!

Today’s goal — just to get out of this damn scene I’ve been stuck on. I need to quit being all angst-y and just get on with things. But fingers crossed, today will be the day!