Instalove

One of the reasons I don't read a lot of high school YA (which is to say, YA that takes place in an actual high school, as opposed to fantasy, science fiction, or generally speculative YA) is because of the predominance of romance plots.  I generally find straight-out romance to be a pretty tedious basis for a story, though it makes delightful subtext, fun B-story, and generally great background content.  But even my romance novels need some other pretty serious conflict going on--even if it's all personal/emotional--if I'm going to tolerate it.

High school stories, especially, also run the risk of the instalove problem, which is where two characters meet and are immediately in a romantic entanglement.  As in, there's no getting to know each other, no reaction besides attraction and affection and desire, and their feelings take on the same weight of importance as other, actually weighty things in the real world.

And example of this is Every Day, by David Levithan, which I loved, but which, it was pointed out in my book club, really rides on the fact that A and what's-her-name are meant to be together, and that they both feel instant, life altering feelings (and not just pants-feelings). At least that book was entirely about the life of this one person; the things that changed and were considered important because of this instalove were the things that are actually affected by being in love--your motivations, your life choices, whether you should try to date them.  Too often, instalove is also supposed to Change the World.

And oh, here's why Daughter of Smoke and Bone has ceased to charm me as much as it did when I started it. The first half is about Karou and her unusal life, her at school and wishes and friends and dangers and it's wonderful.  There's the mystery of what's going on with Brimstone, and the strange handprints and the ominous angels, and it's just really coming together.

And then Karou and Akiva make eye contact, and they are in LURVE.  And after almost no conversation, they know that they need each other, and they trust each other, and they're considering (one more than the other) giving up everything for each other.  And the story becomes about what's more important, your love or  your family, and UGH.  There's a promising undertone of what happens when your morals don't align with those of your loved ones, but it's muted by OMG HE'S SO GORGEOUS and you're so impressive, let's just be together. 

It's to the point where I'm almost disgusted, although really, it's just a chunk.  I think if could just get past the insta- part and take the -love as given--pretend the drama had been earned--I might be able to get back to enjoying the story, like what's up with Brimstone and what are Akiva's siblings going to do, exactly?  But oh, how his manly soul aches for her, and I can really hardly bear it.

Now, I just read another book, Gated, which had a much more appropriate use of the immediate infatuation thing.  First, it was very clear that the attraction was mostly physical--it was very much a 16 year old girl realizing that looking at this boy was just really, really enjoyable, and she'd REALLY like to look at him more, to the point where she makes what she would normally consider some bad decisions.  This is entirely reasonable and realistic--I'm not pretending teenagers don't get crazy over lust-crushes.  I'm just pointing out that I, the reader, am going to think they're being idiots if they treat them like life partnerships.

More on Gated soon; it was a lot of fun.  I really hope that, by the end of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, I can say that about this.

Deconstructing Fusion Literature

Book club time again, kids!  We read Reconstructing Amelia, by Kimberly McCreight.  My nutshell opinion: eh, probably don't bother.

If I say that the book is Gossip Girl meets Gone Girl, that will make it sound much better than it is.  I think it's more like it's trying to be that kind of one-two punch. High-powered lawyer and loving single mother Kate is called to come pick up her daughter at school, and when she arrives, Amelia has fallen from the school roof to her death.  Why would this down-to-earth, bookish girl do such a thing?  Kate can't imagine, and as she emerges from her grief, she decides to find out.

Two stories unfold--Kate's investigation into Amelia's death, and Amelia's account of the last few months of her life.  There are text conversations, Facebook updates, and posts from an anonymous gossip blog at Amelia's elite private school.  There are secret clubs, sexual awakenings, and Bar Association scandals.  The two stories--high school drama (crushes, clubs, love, friendship) and investigation of a tragedy (motives, anonymous texts, bribery, lies)--play out on pretty different levels. 

To be honest, the high school story worked better for me, which was surprising.  Each step Amelia takes makes sense to me.  When she chooses not to tell her mom or her teacher something, it seems like, if not a good decision, at least an understandable one.  They're teenagers, they're smart, but they want teenaged things and react in dumb, teenaged ways.  It was very human, and very believable.

The investigation, though?  Was daytime TV-worthy.  X was sleeping with Y, who was secretly the father of Z!  Did the principal know?  Did the cop get paid off?  Those texts were sent from where? By whom?  Wow, seriously?  Who was Amelia's father?  Woah, did we see that coming?  Yes, actually, we kind of did--so how come the characters didn't?  And since when does Lennie Briscoe let the grieving mom accompany him to interrogate witnesses? 

Another peeve--Kate.  Willfully blind, painted as a loving-if-overextended mom, she's not there for her kid.  When your kid is trying to talk to you and your phone rings, you don't say "I'll talk to you if it's important, but if not I'll take this call."  You weren't talking about what to watch on TV--she was trying to tell you something.  I could see that, even before we got the same scene from the daughter's point of view.  Kids don't beg for help--they need you to be standing there extending a hand before they reluctantly take it.  Even I know that.

So all her self-blame that I feel like the book wanted me to brush away--no, of course it's not your fault, there was nothing you could have done--kind of seemed reasonable to me.  Yeah, you weren't the great mom you thought you were.  Absent with good intentions is still absent.  And I'm not sure how much redemption you get for your pursuit of the truth after she's dead.  It's great and probably all you've got, but it would have been better to be there before.  Jeez, I'm mad at Kate--I generally don't like guilt-inducing pile-ons, but I feel like the book wanted me to dismiss her as a player in Amelia's tragedy, which she was not.

Ultimately, the tangled web was pretty messy, and the twists were so twisty as to be a little silly.  Did it keep me reading?  Sure.  Did I want desperately to know what had happened?  Absolutely.  Do I think you should pick it up because you're missing something cool?  No, not really.  Read Gillian Flynn for twists and Eleanor & Park for intense high school experiences; give this one a pass.

Uncaught Up

I was really expecting to use my vacation this weekend to catch up on some blogging.  Note to self: next time, double check to make sure the hotel has internet access.

I'm also finding that photos I took with my computer can't be located (which is a problem with Windows 8--everything is an "app" instead of an application, and it's frequently non-transparent with no visible Help.  So I can't show you the delightful photo I just took of my newest library book--suffice it to say that I love library bindings with those plain covers and white block letter imprinted titles on the spine.

I finished a couple of really good books in the past few days, which was kind of overwhelmingly satisfying.  I've been feeling slow as molasses lately, and I've finally figured out why; I lost a huge chunk of my reading time when I stopped taking the bus.  That was a full hour a day, probably more than half of my reading time--even more since the office moved and my commute is now a bus to a train.

Now, that's morphed into biking time most days, which is good for me and really enjoyable.  But it's completely changed my reading life, and that gap has become seriously noticeable.  Without that dedicated time, a lot of my reading is snatched in brief moments, and I get a lot less submerged in my books.  It's changing my brain, and I don't love it.

The question is what to do.  Any suggestions?  How do you fit reading time into a busy life?

Me vs. Book Club

As part of our "folks with funny names series," I present you with the heroine of Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, Flight Behavior: Dellarobia Turnbow.  That's about all the mockery I have for the book, but I have to say that almost every time her name was mentioned, I was startled again by how weird it is.  It's meant to make you see how it would be hard to take her seriously, and I can't argue with that.

My book club considered this a 2-to-3 star book.  They thought it was slow and heavy-handed in its Message about Global Warming.  I can't argue too much with their specific points, but my feelings about the book were very different; I really enjoyed it, as I almost always enjoy Kingsolver's books.

First, I love the way she writes about rural people.  They are frequently poor, uneducated, stubborn, and hard, and their worlds contain all of the ugliness that poverty and ignorance can result in.  But they are not unintelligent, not evil, not some foreign, less-than "others."  The characters--Cub, Hester, Dellarobia, Bear, even their neighbors and friends--are individuals with their own histories and motivations, and their virtues are not just the "noble savage" virtues that a lot of "positive" images of rural people display.  I feel like she acknowledges their humanity without sugarcoating the difficulty and even brutality that can be a factor of living in rural poverty. 

The story in this book is about a flock of migrating monarch butterflies that end up in the wrong place for the winter.  Instead of a comfortable mountain in Mexico, they're in Tennessee, which is too cold for them.  They're discovered by Dellarobia, a somewhat dissatisfied farm wife, and become a scientific, local, and national phenomenon.  The monarchs' visit to the Turnbow forest stirs up a lot of issues--Dellarobia's crush on the scientist who comes to study them, her growing intellectual life and how that conflicts with the path she's been on, the small town vs. wider world thing, money troubles and logging rights, etc.  But over all of this, driven home and home and home again, is climate change.

The winter is wet and rainy and strange.  The butterflies are off course, when we don't even know how they ever kept their course.  The world is going to hell in an ecological handbasket, and the red states won't listen!  This is hammered home explicitly by angry rants, patient explanations, heated arguments.  Climate change is real and urgent and bad, and Kingsolver is letting you know that in no uncertain terms.  Repeatedly.  And this--justifiably, I think--detracted from the enjoyment most of my book club found here.

For me, though, I felt like climate change was the setting on which the personal story played out.  I didn't feel preached to, maybe because I've read enough other Kingsolver books (The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--wow, that's kind of a lot) to feel comfortable with her sermon-like way of telling a story.  I feel like she writes like she's lecturing even when she's not, and I like that--her certainty, her firmness, her earnest conviction.  Honestly, the hardest part for me is that she does love nature and lavish descriptions thereof; sometimes she can get going on natural description and leave me in the dust.

I do think that part of my reaction here was around the setting and the people.  The town I grew up in was nothing like the town here, but I grew up on a farm that my parents ran with my grandparents, and my grandparents were rigid people in many ways.  Dellarobia's relationship with and perceptions of Hester and Bear were very familiar to me, and reading especially about Dellarobia and Hester was quite poignant for me.

I really liked the book.  It was long, and took a long time to read, but I enjoyed every minute.  I guess this one is for Kingsolver fans--and I guess I'm a big one.

So Much Reading

You know how sometimes a blogger will disappear for a while, and then they'll come back and say "sorry, guys, but there was SO much going on in my personal life that was rough/awesome/in defiance of the laws of physics, but now I'm back and I'm not going to talk about that" and then never tells you what was going on?

Well, you're lucky, because guys, there was SO much going on in my reading life that was rough and awesome and in defiance of the laws of good taste, but I am SO going to subject you to all of it.  The only problem I have is that there are so many thoughts they are having trouble coming together to form coherent posts. 

I've been deeply immersed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer this year. I watched the entire series through the course of several snow-day binges and a few weeks of a very tolerant husband letting me do my two-episodes-a-night thing.  It was almost unhealthy, how into it I got.  But guys, it's a really, really good show.  The acting is great, the balance between the personal and the adventurous is excellent, and of course the writing.  I mean, if you're not already a fan of Joss Whedon--well, I'm not sure why you're reading my blog, because I can't imagine our tastes overlap much.

When I ran out of episodes, I tried to watch Angel, but that kind of sucked.  I suspect it's mostly just that the first season sucks, but honestly, I don't like Angel very much.  Tortured doesn't do much for me.  I might try some more when I'm desperate, but for now, I've turned instead to the comics.

Now, here I'm going to go about things a bit backward.  Again, I am so intensely immersed in this experience that I can't really sort out my feelings, so I'm just going to start in the middle, somewhere I can explain what I'm thinking: Angel & Faith.

So the Buffy comics start with Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, which I'm not ready to talk about yet, but will be shortly, don't you fret. (Seussed!)  Sufficient for now is that it's deeply flawed, but also full of all those characters I loved and missed so much.  And at the end of that series (mildest of spoilers) Angel is a mess and Faith is taking care of him.

Thus begins the spinoff, Angel & Faith, which is part of the Buffyverse Season 9.  It takes place at the same time as the Buffy Season 9 stories, but they don't share any characters or story elements (yet). (Caution: things get more spoily as we go on.  No direct giveaways, but if you know the characters you might end up figuring some things out.)

Okay, so all that is the backstory of my reading life that has kept me from writing this post for so long.  Anyway, here's the thing about this series.  Buffy Season 8 was kind of a mess, plotwise.  It read very much like a bunch of people passing the story around between them--major plot elements fell out of the sky (sometimes literally), Important Truths about the Nature of Magic that had been previously unknown to everyone were revealed and then messed with.  It was story whiplash.  Here, in the first book of Season 9, you're watching a gifted writer, Christos Gage, dig his way out.

He does an admirable job, really.  He takes some of the prepostrosities (a word that I just made up, thank you, and am quite proud of) that he was left with, runs with them in the only reasonable (albeit ridiculous) direction, and then has someone in-story say, "wait a minute, this is kind of nuts."  And then suddenly it's not badly written nuts, but just post-traumatic vampire nuts.  He pulls things back from the edge quite admirably, and for that I am grateful.

Now, Eliza Dushku is as convincing an actress as a three year old with a mouthful of cookies.  I have always kind of liked Faith for her badassness, but Mike can't stand her, even in the comics, because he reads her dialogue with her stiff delivery.  I personally think Faith is the only role for Dushku--like Keanu Reeves in Speed, she'd be fine if she just stayed typecast--so I'm cool with that.  And her voice, of course, is captured full of its slang and catchphrases.

The problem--the whole problem--is Angel, in the long and short term.  As I said, I've never cared for him; he jerked Buffy around (mostly motivated by wanting a spinoff, but still), he turned into Angelus at the drop of a hat, and he actively shunned happiness because he thought pain made him sharper.  Sounds like a 23 year old living in a garret and writing his memoirs to me--not someone I want to know.

Here again, you have him actively facing his own suffering and refusing to come to terms with it.  I'm not against atonement, or even the notion that he needs his powers to do the good that constitutes that atonement.  It's all the little ways that he could be less-than-miserable while doing these things that don't make sense.  It's his totally counter-Buddhist insistence on focusing on the past at the expense of the present or the future. 

And see, that's something (Buddhism again) causes EVERYONE'S suffering.  Mine too--I do that!  But I know that trying to undo the past--as opposed to make the best future possible--is pointless.  I know it intellectually, even as I struggle to live it day to day.  Lots of people do.  But in a fantasy universe, you can get away with trying to undo things that can't be undone for a lot longer, and it's hard to tell a denial-like character flaw from a virtuous determination to right a cosmic wrong.  (Sorry to be vague; I'm actively Not Spoiling.)

Anyway, this was a problem with his TV show (to the extent that I watched it), as well.  I'm never quite on board with his logic, and I'm never quite sure if the writer wants me to be.  Am I supposed to admire his determination, or wonder if maybe he's a little, you know, insane?  On TV, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to admire him.  In the comic, though, Faith frequently steps up to say what I'm thinking--"Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

Angel doesn't give up (of course), but neither is faith seduced into his world of Sisyphean struggle.  This makes the overarching tension one I'm really digging--the comic is looking askance at the same things I am!  My sensibilities, are being honored!  I'm all over this!

At least in volume one.  Halfway through volume two, we're pushing the other side of this balance a little; one's understanding of mythology allows one to recognize the bad guys and prevents one from siding with them, even when the good guys aren't making as much sense as you'd like them to.  It's like the X-Men problem--Magneto's politics seem way closer to justice and pragmatism than Xavier's.  When the Big Bad is making sense to me, I start to worry that the writer is going to a) try to make me change my mind, or b) duck out the back door with the logic and bring a convenient deus in from the machina to wrap everything up without addressing the real issues.

See how much I have to say here?  And this is just the SPINOFF series.  I haven't even begun to discuss Buffy, seasons 8 OR 9.  I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  Can you forgive me for taking so many weeks to post this? 

And, to begin a little overarching theme in these upcoming posts: what kind of name is Buffy, anyway?

Let's Rant

Wow, it's been a while.  Spring is a busy time, and I started a bunch of books and then put them aside to read for book club.  So it's been a while since I finished something.  Also, I have some Big Things I want to talk about--Buffy! Comics!--some vast, sweeping subjects that have been quite intimidating when I sit down to them.

So let's start out with a little rant.  Lianna, this one's for you.

I read this book about three years ago.  I'm going to give away the entire plot, so I'm not going to give the title of the book, but it's got enough searchable keywords that you'll have no problem finding it if you want to.  I can't believe, looking back, that I gave it two stars--it speaks to something that it made enough sense at the time that I gave it the benefit of the doubt. 

But last week, I suddenly thought of this book, and I started laughing.  For two days, every few hours I'd belt out a laugh at how ludicrous the whole damned thing was.  A girl is at a gas station and she sees a guy in a full-on rabbit costume kidnap a kid from the back of a car where she's waiting for her mom.  Now, it turns out that this girl just HAPPENS to have a traumatic childhood memory that is at least loosely associated with a man in a full-on rabbit costume, as well as a best friend from childhood who disappeared when she was young.  So this is a mind-blowing experience for her, and she gets involved in the investigation.

First off, let's think about how preposterous that is.  I mean, on one hand, if you're going to kidnap a kid, there's no better way to hide your appearance than a complete body costume.  On the other, in a small town, how hard can it be to track down the guy who owns or rents a rabbit costume?  And then, I'll point out that the fact that the witness is childhood-bunny-memory-girl is a complete coincidence, not some sort of gaslighting psychological torture on the poor girl.  So, this small town is pretty messed up, right?

Okay, so that's one level of ridiculous.  Now let me tell you the big reveal at the end.  Because when it's revealed as a twist, it's kind of shocking, but when you think about it as something that was lived through, you're like, WHAT?!?

So the wife of the convenience store owner had a best friend who disappeared when she was a small child.  Apparently, this messed her up royally because now, 40 years later, she felt the burning psychological need to get involved in a missing person investigation. So she had her nephew come kidnap a kid as a harmless prank.  All in good fun, right?  Why did he wear the rabbit suit?  Well, because kidnapping a kid in a rabbit suit is a good plan.

Now, he was supposed to just take her across town and hide her at a campsite for a day or so.  Then auntie could come out as the hero.  But the kid panics in the car and there's a kerfuffle that ends with her falling out of the car on the highway and DYING.  Because apparently kidnapping someone for kicks is not as frigging foolproof as you might think.  So the dude hides the body and then shows up to help with the search like nothing happened.

In the meantime, in a startling demonstration of Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, he spends a couple hundred pages being a love interest for the girl who was traumatized by a guy in a rabbit suit years ago.  If only there was a layer of meaning about how she's being haunted by the rabbit suit.  If only it made any sense at all!

If only.

Anyway, I got a laugh out of that book, many years later.  But I somehow can't bear to put the title, and I really think it's because I'm afraid the author will Google herself and find this and be really hurt.  That's a pretty thin protection I'm leaving, isn't it?  Eh, well.  It's not a very good book.

Those Magic Words (and Some Musings)

IN TRANSIT.  As in the library system is sending the books I want in my direction.  Calloo-callay! 

I'm sorry about the dearth of posts.  I have about four half-written, but spring has impinged on my time, and I'm busy being a social butterfly.  But I'm planning to write a rant later tonight--watch for it!

Also, I just spotted this in an old post at Jenny's Books, which I think is very useful.  I don't know why I didn't recognize it--I've read that post twice--but somehow today it struck me.

"I like books in which principles and values are challenged by a changing reality in interesting ways and the holders of those values have to figure out what to do about it. This is a pretty broad scope of things....It’s also why I do not enjoy books about how stifling the status quo is and the search for meaning within a routine world. Boring! Boring! Boring! Have some new situation for your characters to confront and then we can talk."

I'm aggressively not reading her recent review of Days of Blood and Starlight, because I'm only halfway through Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  And oh, I so love it!

My Soapbox

Many thanks to Sarah for this link:

30 Things to Tell a Book Snob

I had a great conversation with someone in the writing world recently about how literary writers talk about the demise of the reader, but a) it doesn't exactly exist, and b) to the extent that it does, that's because so many literary writers consider their audience to be other writers.  The reader is a different person than a writer, and when the writer forgets that--when s/he writes for him/herself and his/her MFA classmates--then yes, their audience does get smaller.  Go figure.

But this article goes way beyond my usual lit fic bashing and genre defense.  It's not just about types of writing--it's full of good tidbits.  And I don't know who Martin Amis is, but I hate him already!

(Brenda, don't let the Beatles and Shakespeare references defeat the point.  They are actually very good entertainers!)
------------------
Editing, because this is TOO good not to share, and thanks again to Sarah.  The Wikipedia entry on Martin Amis begins:

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness".^[4] Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father, Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style...that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.

Right!?  I'm going to start a magazine called The New Unpleasantness.

Structural Integrity

Another book from Netgalley--One Step Too Far, by Tina Seskis.  If this book was a house, you would be sitting in your well-appointed living room enjoying a glass of white wine and listening to Mozart when you feel something weird and shaky happen, and you realize that the whole house has shifted a foot to the left.  You call the contractor and he's like, seriously, dude, you have to move out--the foundation is a COMPLETE MESS.

Because this book has some lovely writing and some incredibly cool scenes about how you leave your life and everything you've ever known behind, but there are some serious structural flaws that get worse and worse over the course of the book till it falls completely apart in the epilogue.  At the beginning, I was intrigued.  Emily Coleman is on a train, speeding away from her husband and her house and her life and everything she's ever known to start a new life, because of something horrible and unnamed.  The story proceeds in the presence as she finds herself in a new city with no plan, no friends, just a relatively small stash of money, while flashbacks in parallel tell about Emily's childhood, her marriage, her family, until the two stories converge at the end.

I suspected pretty early that I had guessed what the big reveal would be; I ended up being wrong.  That's good. But I think it wasn't actually as impressive as it needed to me--the tone was, I think, a bit of an issue here.  Or maybe tone isn't the right word, but intensity?  People's emotional reactions and the narrator's sense of intensity did not always match the objective circumstances as I perceived them.  In some places, there's clear "I just have a lot going on!" going on, and you can see it as being appropriately inappropriate, but in others, it just reads wrong.

I'm not sure if this is actually a Writing Error or more of my pet peeve, but if you aren't Virginia Woolf, don't change third person limited viewpoint characters in the middle of a paragraph.  If we know what Bill is thinking (he's so surprised he can't think of anything to say), don't tell me what Jane thinks of his reaction (she's surprised by his silence).  This is either a super-basic error or an attempt at super-advanced writing; if we can't tell, it didn't work out.

Also, if you're telling the current story in the first person present tense and then flashing back to the character's past in the third person, it's okay to interpose some chapters from the point of view of her family, sure.  You get a better picture of her life this way.  It is not okay to do very, very occasional flashbacks into the history of a secondary character.  This will imply that this character's past will tie together with your main character's past in some way, rather than just that you made up a really cool back story for the roommate and couldn't bear to cut it out of the book.

I feel so whiny, I'm going to stop.  The problem is that I liked the beginning so much, I'm kind of heartbroken that the end turned out to be not just a letdown but an actual mess.  (Also, what's up with Caroline?  How random is pretty much everything about her?)

God, I suck at ARCs.  I feel like I should apologize to Tina Seskis, who clearly had some great ideas and some great chunks of book but was trying to write something much more ambitious and ended up trimming it in a lot of awkward places.  Watching Emily turn herself into Cat--Emily, who is like me into Cat who is someone I'm kind of afraid of (and for)--is a really wonderful story.  It's the coming back to Emily that is messy.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

I think I capitalized that right; I really hate the headline capitalization rules, since I find they frequently look wrong when they're right and vice versa.

I am not a frequent reader of romances, but I'm not in any way opposed to them.  As with any section of the bookstore, there's a lot of chaff in with the wheat, and I don't have the kind of context or network I need to find the good stuff easily.  Interesting characters, a compelling story, clever dialog--I have some favorite romances.  So when I see an interesting recommendation or a good premise outlined in a Netgalley blurb, I'll jump on it.

The Spinster's Secret, by Emily Larkin, had the latter going for it.  Mattie is a spinster living in her uncle's dreary house.  To earn money and her freedom, she writes salacious novels under the pen name Cherie.  When her uncle commissions her late cousin's friend to find out who's been writing the dirty books and run them out of town, Mattie is torn between her career and her heart.

Sort of.  I mean, that's not a very good description I'm giving there--she's not very torn at all.  No one is here--there's really nothing keeping the hero and heroine apart.  Which is fine, I think--the big strength of this book is that it's a very nice, pleasant story of two people meeting and becoming friends.  I like them both very much, and they're pitted against the cartoonishly miserly and uptight uncle, which makes them positively heroic.

Isn't that cover awful, by the way?  Okay, so a big point of the story is that they're neither of them very attractive people.  She's six feet tall and muscular--normal-pretty, but mocked for her proportions.  They spend a lot of time talking about her deep bosom and wide hips--and also how shapeless and ugly her clothes are (not that the descriptions are any more pleasing when she's out of them).  He's a huge man who has been terribly scarred in battle--scarred face, limp, lost part of a hand and an ear.  Does the cover above reflect this?  Aside from his being pale in an unhealthy way, I don't think those people fit the description.

So I really liked the first half of this book, in a meandering, story of a relationship kind of way.  Then you get to the love scenes, and ugh.  It's just dry.  I mean, I don't get worked up by romance sex at the best of times, but at least I like to get the impression that the characters are.  These people are dutiful and plodding to the end.  They enjoy having sex with each other--and that description right there is about as exciting as it gets.  The sex scenes in the book-within-the-book are almost better, and they're cleaned up.

I would have given this book four stars at the halfway point, but it comes in at three in the end.  I don't require hot-and-bothered, but warm-and-energetic, at least, please.

Netguilty

I was reading this post at Jenny's Books about a Netgalley themed anxiety dream and I felt that it encapsulated a problem I've had for a few weeks now, which is duty reading.  Specifically, I have no self control when it comes to browsing, especially when there's no money involved.  This is why I never come home from the library with fewer then five books (frequently more like 15), and why I have way too many advanced reader's copies to finish in any kind of reasonable amount of time.

And the worst part is, some of them are only mildly interesting to me.  I mean, there are so many books I want to be reading RIGHT NOW, and most of the ARCs I have from Netgalley look interesting, but are things I've never heard of, by authors I've never heard of. 

Can you believe I haven't read Black Powder War yet?  I mean, how did I not race through all the Temeraire books already?  Well, it's because I haven't come anywhere near reading all the Miles Vorkosigan books yet, either.  But I can't start those, because now I'm really excited to read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which I was so excited about when I got it for Christmas.

In the past couple of years, I've gotten really good at putting down a book that's not doing anything for me in the first few chapters.  Life is getting shorter, the list is getting longer, we've got to keep this thing moving.  But I have way more trouble doing that with Netgalley titles.  I need to get my reviewed percentage up, just so I don't feel like I'm stealing.  I think I need to shoot for 30%.  Right now I'm at something abysmal like 15%.  Maybe even worse.

I've been thinking I should post some Amazon reviews, too.  My blog posts don't translate very well to actual "reviews," so when I do a review on Goodreads it's usually completely separate from the blog.  But there's no reason not to put it on Amazon.  Though I'm not sure if I'm just heaping more work on my shoulders for no particular reason.  ARCs are great and all, but darn it, all this is cutting into my reading time.

In fact, what am I doing here?  Later, suckers--the heroine in this romance novel is about to get some action.

Don't Hate the Game, Hate the Player

I can't stand Hayden Christensen, and I've made no secret of this.  The only movie I ever liked him in was Shattered Glass, and even in that his performance was somewhere between wooden and melodramatic.  (You should totally see that movie, though.)

So I never watched the movie Jumper, even though the premise sounded great, because the movie looked horrible.  And by all accounts, it's a very, very bad movie.  So why, exactly, did I pick up the book?  Even more startling, why did I pay money for it?  I honestly can't remember--it was definitely a review somewhere, but I'm pretty sure not on one of the blogs I read regularly (though I apologize if I'm misremembering that).  It's the first book in a while that I was really sold on by the free Kindle sample from Amazon, so way to market, guys.

The novel Jumper is by Steven Gould, and you should ignore the cover you see over there.  None of the covers are actually very good.  The book, however, is so much better than you'd expect. 

First, ignore the blurb for the movie, because while the premise may be the same (17-year-old guy suddenly discovers he can teleport), the plot is totally different.  There's no ancient war between his people and their enemies, no secret cabal dedicated to his destruction.  There's no complicated underworld he enters.  That's the best part of the book, really--a large portion of it is just about what you do when you suddenly discover you have a superpower.  It's very much like the beginning of Spider-Man. 

Davy's father is beating the tar out of him for the millionth time when he suddenly finds himself at the library.  He assumes he had some sort of blackout, but soon he realizes that he has the ability to teleport, or jump, to anyplace he's ever been.  He learns to control the power, escapes from his father, and sets out to build himself a life.  Some things are easy (transportation), some things are morally tough for a kid on his own (he can't get a job without a Social Security card), and some things are just as hard for Davy as they would be for anyone else.

There's a lot of great how-to and worldbuilding here--where does Davy go when he can go anywhere?  If money doesn't matter, how do you live, and why?  The first half of the book is just this wonderful accretion of figuring out how this thing works and what to do with it.  In the second half of the book, (action hero voice) things get personal, and Davy takes on terrorism, the NSA, and ghosts from his own past.  But can he find his way to a future?

There are flaws here--there's a girl who's very much his strong, nurturing woman friend.  But really, this book is a bit of a thought experiment in the emotional and social effects of teleportation, and that is kind of my favorite kind of book.  I'm not going to say you should run right out and read it, but I do wish there were more books like this on my to-read list.

Behind the Book

I'm usually not a fan of author readings.  Really, I'm not a big fan of getting to know the people behind most works I enjoy--I don't want to know more about actors or directors or writers.  Statistically speaking, I'm going to dislike some of the people involved in my favorite books and movies.  Almost as bad, I'm going to be really fond of the author of something awful, and that will just be uncomfortable.  I'd much rather deal with the work than with the people behind it.

But I hereby make an exception for Mary Roach, who is welcome to be my new best friend or my honorary aunt or just to come to karaoke this weekend, because I really just want to hang out with her.

Roach is starting up a tour for her new book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  I've read a bunch of her previous books (Spook, Stiff, Bonk, Packing for Mars; here's my review of Spook, which I think is my favorite).  I love people who do in-depth research and then tell me about the fun bits; this is what I'm looking for in nonfiction, and Mary Roach is the Sarah Vowell of science (as Sarah Vowell is the Mary Roach of history).  Her books are fun and irreverent and interesting and thoughtful. 

And then I saw her speak, and she is ALL THOSE THINGS!  It was thrilling!  Interestingly, the format of the talk was a conversation between her and Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cooks Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen.  I have no particular position on Christopher Kimball, because I find CI and ATK to be way too involved and complicated, and I'm just not up for doing 75% more cooking for a 10% better product.  But my good friend Kris, who sat next to me during the talk, hates him with a passion, and by the end of the discussion I was right there with her.

Mary Roach would be funny, and Christopher Kimball would try to be funnier, but end up being not funny.  In asking her to tell an anecdote, he would basically tell the anecdote, leaving her to come up with something else to talk about.  He kept bringing up quotes from her previous books--this is not a rock show.  I already read that book. 

But Mary, she was delightful.  She was sly and clever and smart and interested.  There's so much to be said for a childlike sense of wonder, and that irreverent wink she seems to be giving you in her books shines through when she talks.  She really does find all this stuff absolutely fascinating, and she's really happy to share it with you.  I highly recommend going to see her, if you can.  And I'm going to buy a copy of Gulp, just as soon as I finish three of the eight books I'm reading right now. 

Or maybe two. I'm not made of stone.

Midpoint Commentary

True to my quirky, offbeat, charming (I'm charming, right?  RIGHT?) format, I feel the need to write about a book I'm smack in the middle of.  I honestly don't quite understand waiting till you're done with a book to want to talk about it--I mean, now is when I'm chewing it over in my head, right?  So I seize the moment.

It's called One Step Too Far, by Tina Seskis.  I've never read or heard of the author before--I was drawn to the blurb, picked it up somewhat randomly, and the premise is quite intriguing.  It opens with Emily on a train, speeding away from her husband, child, home, and life with the contents of her duffel.  She's clearly in a bad place--they'll be better off without her, she needs to just get away and start over cleanly.  But there's no real information on what she's escaping from.

The story flips back and forth between the present--Emily calls herself Cat, finds a room, looks for a job--and flashbacks.  Childhood, meeting her husband, her relationship with her sister.  Good, compelling snippets that are fitting together to show a nice life and hint at the darkness that's coming.  I'm having a good time with the book.

But here's where the authorial trust thing comes in.  There are some slightly risky things going on here, and I don't know Tina Seskis at all.  I have no idea if these choices she's making--the frequent switches of viewpoint character in the flashbacks; the very broad showing-not-telling descriptions of Emily's early childhood--are fumbles or solid choices. 

I won't know till we get to the end.  Honestly, this is more of a nailbiter for me in a book than actual will-they-won't-they questions about spies getting caught or characters hooking up--is the author giving me a flashback to this secondary character's childhood for a reason?  Or just because they thought it was interesting character building?  Are we going to delve into everyone's past as we go on, or was that one non-Emily history a one-off?  The tension, it's killing me. 

So far, though, there's some great stuff going on here.  I love detailed how-tos, and there's some great "how to walk out of your life" stuff here (it helps that she has valid ID with her maiden name on it), and the vignettes from the past and the present are well-drawn, frequently touching, and sympathetic.

Of course, a lot of the success of this book is going to hinge on what I presume is the Big Reveal.  I'll let you know how that turns out.

King Hereafter, Part 2, Part 2

Aarti and I continue our Epic Co-Review of King Hereafter, by Dorothy Dunnett, with this review of Part 2 of the book.  Part 1 of the review of Part 2 of the book is at Aarti's site; below is the second half of our conversation.

Sharon: One other thing I was asking myself about Rognvald--and this might not be a useful question to answer, but I think it’s interesting to ponder--is how much of his rage and frustration is envy (fraternal,  political) and how much is jealousy (romantic).

Aarti: Agreed.  I wonder how much, too, was in retaliation to the thwarting of both those things when Thorfinn had him publicly flogged.

Sharon: I think this is the part where I have to admit that my positive feelings about this book drive much closer to “appreciation” than “enjoyment.”  There’s just SO MUCH that I can’t follow, and it feels like I go for long periods of time reading about instances that are probably meaningful but not to me, or listening to discussions of people and politics that I just don’t get, because I don’t know the names or remember the relationships of the places.  I had Duftah and Malduin mixed up for a good chunk of time, which left me pretty lost.  

In fact, I’m finding it kind of hard to dive into the third part.  As history, it’s thorough and engaging, but as a novel, I feel like it doesn’t use a lot of the tools that literature usually uses to hit me where I live.  You know?

Aarti: Oh, gosh, yes!  It is hard to read this book and separate Dorothy Dunnett’s writing and research from the characters that are in it for me - which I think is true of all her books.  I too was lost for much of the book (just wait till you get closer to the end when ALL OF THESE PEOPLE come out of the woodwork and you are thinking, “Er, I feel like you are important, but I don’t remember why”).  I mean, I don’t even remember who Duftah is, to be perfectly honest.  And I still made it through the book ok, though I kept wishing that there were Cliff’s Notes.  I feel like often Dunnett thought that I could understand all the different levels of intrigue, the subtle hints and the veiled insults and challenges, and I really could not.  Did you feel the same?  I was always so relieved when Groa or someone would explain to another person (usually referred to as dim-witted or stupid) why the situation was so tense or what was wrong, etc.  I would have been that dim-witted person!

Sharon: This is an excellent description of how I feel about the whole book.  It reminds me of a mystery where the detective needs a sidekick to ask questions that we, the viewer/reader, would be asking.  Except this book provides that only about 10% of the time.  This must be getting in the way of my enjoyment more than yours; I’m finding that there are whole chunks of the book that seem to have no meaning to me because of this, and that I often feel like I might as well skip them.

I strongly suspect that if I was better at skimming I could take this book on more directly.  The fact is, I’m missing 60% of what’s there, but I’m TERRIBLE at skimming--I forget to do it, I get worried I missed the important stuff, I get confused--so I’m investing just as much of my attention in that 60% as I am in the 40% that’s clean and sharp and reachable to me.  It throws off the balance of the book.

Aarti: I can understand why you are struggling to dive into Part 3, though I do think it starts out with lighter humor, though again, I was lost as to WHY Thorfinn was doing what he was doing.  It was still entertaining to read, though!  Please don’t feel like you have to finish the book because of me, though!

Sharon: I’m going to give it one more big push as soon as I finish my book club selection for the month.  I really do want to  know what happens; I think this is a book that I might love if I was just able to skim the parts that I can’t follow.  I’m glad you’re really enjoying it!
--------------------

I have promised to try and so I shall.  I make no further promises, though!

Metadinner

Interestingly, at no point during book club--over dinner, in a restaurant--was my mind drawn to any parallels between our meal and that of the characters in The Dinner, our selection this month.  It's an obvious parallel, even without the obsequious maitre d' or the tiny but overpriced portions.  (I am seriously, deeply in love that pecan chicken salad.)

But of course, we're not a bunch of hateful sociopaths, so OF COURSE it didn't feel anything like that horrible dinner. We're good human beings, many of whom are trained in helping young people with serious psychological problems.  Our conversation was amusing and interesting--and the book made for great conversation; it's really an object lesson in picking a book club book.  Moral ambiguity, unfolding layers of information and character, excellent writing, a quick read, and a few "what just happened there?" moments. 

The plot is described in many places: two couples meet for dinner to discuss an Issue with their teenaged sons.  You know this from the cover.  You learn early on that the two men are brothers, one a big name politician and the other more of an average joe who's kind of resentful of the fancy restaurant his brother chose.  His brother's a snob and a fake, you see.  And the first third of the book is mostly about that--about the absolutely disgusting pretension of really fancy restaurants that are just stealing your money, and about how much we hate phonies and hypocrites. 

Honestly, at the halfway point I called the book slow; if you're going to rely on hiding the real point of the book from me for that long, you have to give me an artificial point of the book to hang my hat on, and "I wish the waiter would stop telling me what country the ingredients come from" is not enough.  When the revelations start to come--the narrator found a troubling video on his son's phone; there's a story in the news recently; there's this incident from a few years ago--none of them are really surprising.  Guess the plot based on the cover blurb; these scenarios probably crossed your mind.  But about halfway through, as the revelations of fact begin, so do the revelations of character.

And THAT is where the book really kind of blows up in your face.  Because you spend time with each of these characters, feeling embarrassed for or scornful of or frightened for or frightened of each of them, and then you get an inch, and then an inch more, and you wonder how reliable your narrator is, and then you wonder if maybe he's totally reliable and your judgement is off, and then wait a minute, really!?

I've heard that this is the new Gone Girl.  (Well, someone at book club had heard it; I heard it for the first time last night.)  It's not Gone Girl, and I wouldn't ever draw that parallel of the experience of reading the book.  But when you get to the end and you look back on it, you might think: yeah, you know, the place you end up in this book is not too distant from the place you end up after Gone Girl.  You just took a completely, totally unrelated route to get there. 

And then, if you're me, you go read a nice book about nuns to try to leave that place behind you.

Awesome, awesome book club, by the way.  On which subject, I really want to watch Pride and Prejudice again.  This will happen; there will be a Viewing.  Count on it.

Upcoming

Okay, wow, I'm kind of behind here.  This happens when I get ahead with posts; I lose track of how many I have.  Also, I've been driving to work, so I've lost a significant chunk of my reading time, and got caught up in one very dense book that I haven't finished yet.  But I've also gotten distracted--I'm so distractable lately!--and I lost track of time.

So, apologies and a little preview: on deck we have some space opera, some thoughtful YA that it turns out was not ruined by Hayden Christensen, some horrible people eating dinner for book club, and, I hope, some comics.  A lot of comics.  A lot of really good comics. 

Stay tuned!

Oh, Misty

I've explained before how I feel about Mercedes Lackey, and how I keep reading her books anyway.  This time, I was going to make another dive into her Elemental Masters series, which I've enjoyed a few of but not really followed.  I picked up The Gates of Sleep, just because the cover and the heroine seemed kind of appealing.

Sadly, this post is mostly going to be a list of reasons I didn't get past page two.  (If I ever write a novel, I'm going to have to take this blog down, because I feel like I'm so mean sometimes.)  Let me clarify that one of the reasons is that I'm having trouble connecting with any books right now--things that I might generally be able to get past are tripping me up badly here.

1) The narrator describes the character's morning dress as "artistic."  I do not know what an artistic dress is--a painter's smock?  That dress that Angela made in season 3 of Project Runway for an "art teacher?"  I especially do not know what an artistic Edwardian morning dress would be.  I need more information here.

2) I finally admitted to myself that I hate--hate, hate, HATE--that Lackey characters never smile.  Rather, they CONSTANTLY "suppress a smile."  There is no reason on earth for this character not to smile at her friends, but instead she suppresses a smile.  When it's a hardened warrior trying not to give away her image, fine.  When it's a queen not laughing at ribald jokes, okay.  But when a character is in a room with some of her dearest friends and feels warmly toward them, there is no reason she should suppress her smile.

3) In the 1800s, it is not necessary to mention that a carved cradle is "hand-carved" as though that is impressive.  That it is intricately, or elaborately, or delicately, or fancifully, or in some other way impressively carved would be useful.  Hand-carved is only special because we now live in a world where that would be rare.

Some of this is sloppy, and some is just personal tweaks.  Another time I would--will--read past these quirks.  But, sadly, not this week.

Don't Worry Your Pretty Head

I'm still torn about the very notion of Fairest, the Fables spinoff that's about the women of that universe.  The first issue was perfectly enjoyable--I liked it better than the first issue of Fables itself--but my reaction is all over the place.

So, I think Bill Willingham really excels when he's writing episodes in a bigger overarching story.  I'm pretty sure Fables is the only thing I've ever read that I feel that way about--I'm almost always a bigger fan of the "monster of the week" episodes than I am of the "cigarette man conspiracy episodes" (and if you didn't watch X-Files, that won't mean much, but you can translate it to pretty much any franchise you'd like).  But I think Fables is always at its strongest when it's going somewhere, whether it's up against the Adversary or the somewhat less compelling Mr. Dark.

That's why the first two trade paperbacks were the weakest, and why the Cinderella spinoffs, while fun, always seemed slight.  Willingham needs time to develop things.  This one reminded me of Cinderella--pretty good story, but the really compelling parts were the ones that tied tightly to the broader story from Fables.  Specifically, that would be the Snow Queen and her return to herself after being a servant of the Adversary for so long.

Okay, all that said, let's talk about what's really bothering me--the idea that the female characters need their own series.  Now, I realize that this was probably just the answer to the question "what can we spin off to make some more comics?"  And this seems like a very female-positive answer.  But the thing is, the women weren't taking a back seat in the main book, and it feels really marginalizing to give them a series of their own.

Also?  Let's take a look at some of the covers of the individual issues.

(Images courtesy vertigocomics.com)

And then the cover of the next trade collection.  I'm just saying, there's a lot of naked and near-naked ladies here.  It's not that out there for comic books, but it's actually way more sexualized than Fables usually is.  

As for the story itself, it's not so bad.  There are definitely some riffs on "what women need" and "how relationships really work," but most of them are DEFINITELY made ironically by the annoying pest of a character.  I didn't love how one character fell for Ali Baba completely unnecessarily and then the other one felt all left out--there's so much more going on in all these people's lives, and the fact that Ali is just there does not make him all that covetable.

I'm going to keep reading these, make no mistake.  Other writers will be coming into the story (the next one will be Lauren Beukes), so we'll see what direction it goes in.  The one-off story at the end with Beauty and Beast looks  like a really promising exploration of those characters with some good twists.  I hold out a lot of hope here.

King Hereafter: A Joint Review

I'm very excited to be reviewing Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter with Aarti at BookLust.  I feel this way partly because I love Aarti's blog, and partly because the book was full of words and content and plot, and I was grateful for a little hand holding.  It's not the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth, but rather a take on the historical figure on whom Macbeth is based.  I understand this to be a matter of some speculation, but I know much less about the subject than Dorothy Dunnett (you do, too, I guarantee it), so I'm going to take her at her word.

This is a long book, so we're going through it party by part.  This is the first half of our conversation about Part I; you can find the second half at her site, here.  Part II coming soon!

I'm in blue and Aarti's in red.  So, without further ado...

I have so many things I want to talk about in this book!  There’s the world she’s building, the writing style, and the politics.  But I think the first thing I wanted to mention was just how much the fact of the book being tied to Macbeth influenced my expectations and experience.  I find that in books that are based on other stories I know, I’m always looking for the characters I know about, and looking for how the stories fit together.  So I kept trying to figure out who was Banquo.  

But of course, this isn’t based on the Shakespeare, but rather on the history that he was writing from.  And it’s a different story from that one in almost every way.  Did you find the Macbeth tie in distracting, or that it set up expectations?  Or do you think it added anything to your experience of the story so far?

At the risk of sounding very uncultured, I’d have to say I don’t think Shakespeare’s Macbeth has tied in much at all for me because I hardly remember it at all!  I read it in high school and then never again, and all I can say is that Groa is nothing like Lady Macbeth so far :-)  I do think that Groa’s son, though, might be seen as a slight nod to the witches of Macbeth as he seems to have the ability to predict the future.  But I like that he is so fond of Thorfinn and just states what he thinks are facts, and then those facts just happen to turn everyone else’s world upside down.

I’ve read Dunnett’s other historical fiction books - The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo and it’s interesting how these ideas of fate and destiny are present in all of them.  In a way, if you know the story of Macbeth, you know how this story will end, but what’s so interesting is that Thorfinn himself seems to know how the story will end, but he’s still going out there doing his best every day to make the most of it.  I love that.

I also just love Thorfinn and Groa.  I was worried that I wouldn’t like Groa because I don’t love most of the women Dunnett writes.  But Groa is great and I am so looking forward to seeing her grow.  And Thorfinn - he’s so inscrutable and hard to read.  So many times through this part of the book, I feel like he was having conversations with people on multiple levels, and I really only understood the most obvious one!  Did you get that feeling?

Through most of the first section I felt the absence of female characters.  There’s Godiva, who is absolutely amazing and I want to be her, but she’s really the only one till Groa comes in.  I love her, too, and I felt like I understood her better than any other character, by far.  She starts out sort of on the outside of everything Thorfinn is doing, which is hugely frustrating (because she’s so great and you want her to be in the middle of the action), but it’s frustrating for her, too.  I think that makes it even more satisfying when she does get to play an active role, and when she and Thorfinn finally become close.

As for Macbeth, the story is already so far from the Shakespeare that the parallels are more interesting than informative.  I mean, killing Duncan was just a selfish, dirty move in the play, but here, it’s the only thing that made sense.  A lot of my enjoyment of the story comes, I think, from getting a feel for the rules these people are playing by--how do you predict what all the other players are going to do, and what does loyalty look like?  The latter is a huge deal here, because there are friends and there are allies, and they’re related but not entirely overlapping.  Thorfinn’s relationship with Eachmarchach is a great example--they’re clearly true personal friends, but on both their sides there’s an element of cultivating the political allies they need.  (It reminds me of all my friends who say they hate networking; all social activity is a little bit networking!)

Let me ask you this, though; how much of the outline of background events did you actually follow?  I feel like I recognize about half the names that are used in a lot of the descriptions of things that are going on, and can pinpoint and remember the details about even fewer.  There’s always another uncle or step-cousin or half-brother, and so many are named Thor and Finn!  (A character named Finn appeared in the other book I’m reading and I had an instinctive reaction of trying to figure out whose cousin he was before I realized that he worked at Google and had probably never been a-viking.)  I’m fascinated that the story can be so engaging when the “lens” is set so wide, and so much of it is taken up with broad descriptions of political maneuvers and war craft.

Head on over to Aarti's site for the second half of the review.  And stay tuned for more of Thorfinn, Groa, and all the other guys named Thor!

Mr. Penumbra Stands Alone

February was the least prolific reading month I've had in the ten years or so I've been keeping track, and very possibly ever.  I finished two novels and one collection of comics--and one of the novels I started in January. There were a few factors there--an emotional slump, a few false starts, and at least four really long reads that I've put a ton of time into but not yet finished.  Hopefully this means March will make me look like a whiz kid, but right now I'm feeling kind of a reading slump, where everything I pick up seems either too hard or just bad.

I have WAY more to say about the graphic novel, Fairest, but I think that needs a post of its own.  so let me just give a little shout out of love to Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.  This book absolutely made my month--it was just what I needed to read.


I knew almost nothing about this book when I started it, and you don't really need to.  The only thing I think it helps to know from the beginning is that this is a bright, hopeful book.  I kept waiting with dread for the grimness to come in, but it never does.  There's a bad guy, kind of, but although he's sinister, he's more of a B-conflict; the main conflict of the book is The Mystery.

Clay is an unemployed graphic designer in desperate need of a job, so when he lands the role of night clerk at a small "independent" bookstore, he's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  But he realizes that the store is kind of a front for a lending library for the terminally eccentric, and he starts to learn more about books and the goals of a secret society.  With the help of a girlfriend who lives her job at Google, some of the smartest technology in the world, and some of the oldest examples of the printed word, Clay assembles a crack team of brilliant, kooky friends and allies to solve the mystery of centuries.

I loved almost every character in this book--they were all super-competent and passionate, and they were all great ambassadors for their little worlds--the artists, designers, programmers, researchers, antiquarians, anthropologists, bibliophiles.  Each of them got a chance to showcase their arena, and nobody got sniffed at.  Not so realistic--almost cartoonish in its upbeatness--but so right for me at the exact moment I read it.

There was an exception; I hated Kat.  Everyone in my book club hated Kat.  I think it was easy to hate Kat, partly because Clay LOVED Kat--every sentence she appeared in for the first third of the book involved the word "cute," or maybe "gorgeous" or "adorable."  Or else Clay was distracted by how awesome and charming and frigging cute she was, wearing the same shirt every day.  Kat is kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl--not quite the traditional definition, because she definitely has her own goals, but she's definitely the perfect girl who is just totally on board with whatever the hero wants to do and opens up a whole new world of possibility to him as though she had nothing else to do with her time.  Even the changes she goes through in the story make her seem kind of sad and childish, like an object lesson--which wouldn't be so bad if she had started out more complex than "supersmart and adorable."

Anyway, she was by far the weakest part of the story.  Everyone else shone.  I'm not going to read too much into her being the only major female character--I loved the book too much.  I'll read more Robin Sloane (please, I'd like him to write some more, please) and hope he does something a little more interesting with women then.

Brackets!

The Morning News does a Tournament of Books every year, and they've released the brackets!

(See it in more detail here.)

I have to admit, this kind of "competition" seems kind of silly to me--how do books go head to head?  How can you put Round House up against The Fault In Our Stars?  That's the only bracket where I've read both books, and aside from both being about teenagers, they have pretty much nothing in common; comparing them is apples and oranges.

But of course, I haven't read most of them (many on my to-read list, though!).  So I can put only slightly more thoughtful consideration into this than I do into picking Superbowl Squares--which, I will point out, were randomly generated.