A Fool

Others have told me how good Christopher Moore is, and I was always skeptical. I've been thinking about why, and I realized that I used to be skeptical about Terry Pratchett, too, before I read one of his books and realized how much meat there was to it.

And I think that's the essence of the problem; I mistrust a comic novel because I assume that comedy will be all there is. I'm not into slapstick, and I get really annoyed when a story doesn't make sense because the author's too busy being funny. I think this is the flip side of my mistrust of so-called "literary fiction." Something good has to happen. It has to fit together and make good sense, both practically and emotionally.

Holy crap, does Christopher Moore pull it off. I am fine with suspension of disbelief, and if this Britain isn't historically accurate, it's some damned fine worldbuilding. I try to keep this blog clean for the kiddies, so I won't tell you about my new favorite swearword, and I won't go on as long as I could about how absolutely FUN Pocket makes the F-word sound. I've been laughing out loud on the T.

I'm tempted to ask why you people didn't tell me about this guy before, but Brenda did suggest Lamb a long time ago, and I'll admit I was suspicious. Now, of course, I'm running right out. And trying really, REALLY hard not to end this post with a swear.

ps. JMLC, any other favorites of his?

Quick Updates

1) The Safe-Keeper's Secret did not follow the iffy track that I was worried it would follow--though it didn't renounce the idea, either. Sorry I can't comment further without spoiling it, but I will say that it's overall a really wonderful book. I'm excited to have discovered Sharon Shinn.

2) The librarian was kind of rude to me today. I bent over when I didn't realize she was behind me and bumped her with my butt. For the record, I was bending over to keep Adam from pulling all the videotapes off the shelves. Anyway, she harrumphed at me, and I quickly and abjectly apologized. She IGNORED the apology and kept walking, so I called another one after her. She ignored that one, too. Not a nod, not a "sure," nothing. This was the children's librarian, for crying out loud.

3) To end on a positive note: I went to the library for half an hour and did not check out ANY books for myself! I got some picture books for the baby, but that only seems fair, since I returned all his other library books--including Karma Wilson's Moose Tracks, which nearly broke my heart. But NO books for me. I'm very proud of this.

So in short: two out of three ain't bad.

An Up Note

I'm having a fabulous streak right now with the books I'm reading. It's been a long time since I've had this much trouble deciding which book to pick up when I have a minute to read, but what an embarrassment of riches!

Fool, by Christopher Moore. I will admit to never having read King Lear. I guess for a lot of people this wouldn't be something to be ashamed of, but I did take a Shakespeare class in college, and I was assigned to read it, and didn't. Knowing me, I probably read the first scene, but never got any further. So while I know the story pretty well--crazy old king asks his daughters to earn their inheritance with flattery, Cordelia refuses, madness and death ensues--I'm a little foggy on the details. I read A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley, which is based around the Lear story, but it ends very differently. I should watch Kurosawa's Ran sometime, too, and I could become the world's foremost expert on Lear who's never read nor seen Lear.

Am I babbling? Anyway, Fool is a novelization of the events of Lear as told by his fool, Pocket, who (if I recall rightly from class discussion) is a major character in the play. It's bawdy and funny and authentic and modern and really ripping good stuff, and I'm having a blast with it. I would not have expected it to be my wavelength, but it totally is.

A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett, is the second Tiffany Aching book, the sequel to The Wee Free Men. I would say it's not quite as good as the first one, but by that I mean I LOVED the first one, and merely love this one, so I don't think it's much of an indictment. It's definitely a step scarier than the other, and there's a little less time spent with the Nac Mac Feegle themselves, but I've never been let down by Terry Pratchett yet. It's so nice to have a go-to author who can be relied upon for humor AND story.

The Safe-Keeper's Secret, by Sharon Shinn, was something I picked up after getting a recommendation for another book by the same author, set in the same world, called The Truth-Teller's Tale. Since I began writing this entry, I've neared the end of this book, and I'm worried about the direction it's headed in. But since I'm not sure what's going on exactly, and I don't want to spoil it, I won't say anything except that I have thoroughly enjoyed it. It's the story of a woman who is a Safe-Keeper, someone to whom you can tell your secrets and know they'll never be told out of turn, and her children--one by birth, one adopted, and the mysteries of their parentage. It's a domestic story, about growing up and growing old how people live together, and it's just so interesting and lovely and well-written, and I can't wait to read the rest.

So, high marks all three. I'll let you know if The Safe-Keeper's Secret goes totally off the rails, but I probably won't tell you why. Anyone who's read it, though, is welcome to let me know what they think.

Out of Character

A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick, seems on its surface to be exactly the kind of book I would hate. Thematically, it's about how the human condition is ruled by lusts of the flesh. In language, it uses every possible poetic way you can say "lusts of the flesh," "delights of the body," and "sensual pleasures." Now there's a combo to set my blood boiling, right?

I might not be a good enough writer to make my point with examples like that. I have a hard time with "literary" novels, which we've been over here. But part of my awkwardness with them runs up against the fact that I have trouble telling the good ones from the bad ones. This is largely due to the fact that books that are "good" and ones that I enjoy do not reliably create a large segment in the Venn diagram.

So overall, here are the general facts of the case:

The book was extremely descriptive, and a lot of time was spent on the emotional state of the characters. This is generally a bad sign, but there was so much action going on on that level, and so much history revealed in those parts, that it worked surprisingly well for me.

The prose wobbled between rich and florid. These long and lavish descriptions were mostly successful at capturing what they intended to capture, but they definitely get all worked up and fling themselves overboard at various points. I can say with 80% confidence that an outside source would agree with me on that assessment.

The theme of the book is that physical passion is an irresistible force that will mess you up no matter what you do with it. Sex sex sex, and there's nothing to be done about it, is the nature of the human condition.

Plotwise, we have a man in the early 1900s who advertises for a wife, and gets a woman with a past that she's hiding. He has lived a sterile, hyper-controlled life since his first marriage ended in tragedy, and he has suddenly decided that it's time to start fresh, with a new wife and an attempt to reach out to his estranged son.

He thinks about sex as much as an adolescent boy, which is why he lives in an iron vice of his own willpower. She has spent those same years doing all the things he's been thinking of, and is trying to hide that. They find some solace in each other. The plot is complicated by his long-lost son. We learn how each of them came to this place.

There's drama. There's a weird running theme about how people in Wisconsin tend to go crazy because of the long winters. As I'm writing about this, I think I'm talking myself into liking the book more than I initially did. And it's definitely not bad. It's just strange, very strange, and while I don't regret reading it, I'm not sure what to make of it.

Okay, having thought about it, I'd put my opinion this way: I think the author did an excellent job painting the internal landscapes of these people for me, but they are people who are motivated by things that I really don't quite comprehend. So even though he makes me understand, there's a level on which I can't really empathize deeply enough to love the book. That's what I thought of it.

Project Trackback

Okay, so I'm trying a thing, and I'm really excited. I've made up a bunch of cute bookmarks with the LibraryHungry URL on them, and whenever I return a book to the library, I'm going to put a bookmark in the book. I hope that whoever checks the book out next will come here and leave a comment. I'm curious how often my favorites get checked out, who's reading them, anything people would be willing to tell me.

I love the idea of the very real connection between people in the solitary act of reading. I always love the little signs in library books that someone else has been here--a grocery list, a blank envelope. Sometimes I'll find one of the printed receipts the library gives and get all excited that the last person to read this book checked out two other books I just read! And then I'll realize it was my receipt and I forgot I stuck it in there. And I get embarrassed and tell the story to the internet.

I hope the library doesn't get mad, though. Technically it could be seen as advertising, and I bet the library wouldn't like it if I went through the stacks and stuck a take-out menu in every third book. I hope they'll let this slide, though. It's done with love!

So--for any new readers out there, welcome to LibraryHungry, and to Project Trackback. Please, please leave a comment, even just a short one telling me what book you checked out, and what library. I don't keep track of whether I got something from the BPL or somewhere in the Minuteman system. I'd love to know who's reading what. And welcome! I hope you enjoy the show.

Storefront Library

A couple of exciting things going down; I'm going to be volunteering at the Storefront Library in Chinatown. This is a temporary library that is being put up for three months by Boston Street Lab (with the help of a lot of other local organizations). The idea is to demonstrate both the need for a branch of the BPL (which the Storefront Library is NOT) in Chinatown and an example of the kind of thing that can be done with empty space in a city to activate empty space and improve a neighborhood.

It starts next week and I'm very excited. So far I've just had orientation, and I don't know much except the people involved are great and the space is absolutely lovely. I'm looking forward to working on it. Stop by sometime--it's right next door to the Chinatown RMV.

I'll keep you all posted on how it goes. It's my first Real Library Gig. Go LH!

No Excuses, No Apologies

Is there anything more boring than a blog post about why you haven't posted to your blog in a while? Thought not. So.

Catching Fire was pretty awesome. There's almost always a point at the beginning of a sequel where you're kind of adrift. You're reading it because you liked the first one, but it's a whole new book, so you're kind of adrift in new-book land. There's the awkward hop-step when entering any book, like trying to get on a moving sidewalk. But with a sequel, you already read the first part of the story--you know the characters and the author. So you aren't expecting the ground to change--like stepping from one moving sidewalk onto another. Not smoother, and in fact, maybe a little rougher. This effect is often intensified by Backstory and Exposition, which can be awkward and painful if you just came off the previous book--like the time a few weeks ago I told Brenda the same anecdote about my clever packing innovation (inflated sandwich bags!) twice in two days.

So there were a few pages at the beginning of Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire (sequel to The Hunger Games) where I didn't quite know what the vibe was, or when we were going to get into the meat of the story, and I was worried for us, the author and me. But then bang, here it comes, and whoosh, we're off on a train tour and starvation mode and survival and PTSD and all kinds of very real, complicated treatments of the fallout of good action adventures. Start with The Hunger Games--this stuff's worth it.

In a painful labor of--well no, not love, determination, maybe? I'm reading Dawn Rochelle, which is a collection of FOUR Lurlene McDaniels books about a character with cancer. All her books are about a character with cancer. I had a strong memory of the first one in this series, Six Months to Live*, and I wanted to reread it, just to see how it held up. Not great, is the answer. If you want to make an 11 year old girl cry, this is the book for you; if you are a lover of the English language or finely expressed emotions, not so much.

But I didn't go the easy route--no, I had to check out the four-in-one volume. And since each book is 120 pages, then dammit, I'm going to finish it. I've already read Too Young to Die and So Much to Live For. I only have the 120 pages of No Time to Cry left to slog through. Maybe this will be inspirational. At the very least, I will be Someone Who Follows Through.

Children of the Dust, by Louise Lawrence, is another post-apocalyptic book that I picked up recently. It was interesting; it told the story of a nuclear holocaust through the lives of three generations in one family--a girl who lives through it (for a little while), a relative who is born in a bunker and meets the outside world, and a future generation, where the bunker people emerge to meet up with the mutants who have adapted to the new world. It wasn't bad--it was interesting in a thoughtful way--but it wasn't compelling at all, and I won't tell anyone they must read it. I also felt that, while the ending was appropriate to the story, some of the developments that happen at the end are a little pat and therefore flawed.

Anyway, that's where I am. I'm going to do something fun next and read A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett, and then some of the other piles and piles of books that are stacking up around me. Don't worry about me, team, I'm still out here going through all these books for you.

*Point of order: at no point in this book is the main character or anyone else told that they have six months to live.

How I Feel About Books

I've never done this before, but this post at The Rejectionist explains how I feel about a lot of literary fiction.

Nautical Happenings

In honor of National Talk Like a Pirate Day, I have been planning to post a selection of piratical books that I have enjoyed.

You might not know this based only on my reading habits, but I am really big into swashbuckling. Give me high boots, a poofy shirt, and a skinny sword any day. It doesn't show up in my reading as much as in the movies I like, but still, in my heart I am the swooning maiden on many a Harlequin cover, as long as there's a ship in the background.

So let me give you a little taste of some of my favorite pirate books, for readers of all ages, in no particular order.

The Sweet Trade, by Elizabeth Garrett.
This novel covers the well-documented and oft-accounted story of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, two notorious female pirates of the 18th century. I have a vague idea of the parts that are literally factual, but I don't know how much of the personalities are captured.

I do like, though, that the book contains another of my favorite tropes--the girl-disguised-as-boy. If I remember correctly, Anne Bonny is just a swashbuckling lass tooling around with Calico Jack and his pirate crew, and Mary Read was a sailor who had been disguised as a man for years and living a soldier's life, and who eventually fell into pirating.

Another worthy thing about this book is the sense of balance it gives. Pirating is not seen as glorious and delightful--a lot of their crew are drunks and louts, a lot of people's lives are hurt. You see the freedom and the violence, and I think that's an unusual balance to find in a pirate book.

The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists, by Gideon Defoe.
British humor, Charles Darwin, an a great deal of ham. There's some cross-dressing in here, too, used to more humorous effect. The Keystone Cops on the high seas. Very funny, and you should read this.

I Love My Pirate Papa, Laura Leuck.
This one is for the little kids--a picture book about a little boy and his stuffed hippo, and the life they lead on the pirate ship where they live with his Pirate Papa and his fearsome crew.

Under the Jolly Roger: Being an Account of the Further Nautical Adventures of Jacky Faber, by L.A. Meyer.
This is the third in the Bloody Jack series, but I include it because it actually involves privateering. Jacky knows her way around a ship, and these books are all funny and delightful and full of swashbuckling and hijinks. This is one of those series where I sometimes wonder why all books aren't like Bloody Jack. Kris, if you're reading this and you've never read this series, you should go out right now and do it.

Okay, the hour is getting late, and if I want this to make it online on the actual occasion of National Talk Like a Pirate Day, I need to hop to it. If anyone has swashbuckling book recommendations for me, though, I'll take them with thanks!

Arr!

**Correction and apology: it's INTERnational Talk Like a Pirate Day. So sorry, to all those non-American pirates out there!

IN. MY. HAND.

Ladies and gents, Adam and I went on a little adventure to Lexington's Cary Memorial Library today, where we saw the Most Glorious Children's Room Ever, were chatted with and helped spontaneously by two separate employees, AND acquired a copy of Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins. I have died and gone to library heaven, and it's on Mass Ave in Lexington.

Swooning.

Like Mint in a Mojito

Which is to say, muddled.

(How far won't I go, ladies and gentlemen, for a post title?)

Maisie Dobbs (post-WWI British mystery), The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (post-WWII British epistolary novel), and Q's Legacy (sequel to a post-WWII British/American epistolary memoir) are getting all befuddled in my head.

I'm reading about the woman who published 84, Charing Cross Road (which you MUST read if you haven't--it takes an hour and it's so charming), and then I'm reading a book of letters from a writer to a reader that take place in the same time period as 84, CCR. The characters in the novel Guernsey Literary are getting mixed up with the bookshop owners in 84, CCR. When Juliet said she was going to visit Guernsey, I became convinced she'd never get there, after decades of dithering. But no, that's Helene, not Juliet.

And then, just when I get all into these Nazi occupation stories, I put on my audiobook and forget that the Germans were Huns to Maisie--there were no Nazis yet. I keep wondering what happened to all the small town characters I'm thinking of--what's going on with Amelia? Oh, no, wait, she's in the other book.

Up next: Disney movies of my childhood: Pollyanna and Escape to Witch Mountain. Don't think Haley Mills isn't going to dance through my dreams tonight.

Follow-Ups and Conclusions

1) The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman, is that elusive beast that I've long stopped looking for--a book in which you like the characters and nothing awful happens to them. I used to sort of lament that you never got to know your favorite characters when their lives are going well, because only when things fall apart do people write novels about you. Once, I found a book in which the characters are all good folks to whom good things happen: Three Wishes, by Barbara Delinsky. It was really, really awful.

But The Family Man is more about little bits of drama, rather than crisis. Admittedly, it makes for somewhat less than compelling character development, but there's a nice plot, and enough tangles and annoying people to keep you reading, but never to the point where you're getting furious. I was wondering for the first third if someone was going to die suddenly to make it more intense, but no--it's just a fun book.

2) Maisie Dobbs and I are good friends now. Audiobook totally worked for that; she comes across as being solemn instead of a dead fish. I never quite noticed how often she touches people on the arm, though, and I'm still not sure I'd like her in person.

3) I've missed Catching Fire again! When I checked in before heading to Cambridge yesterday, it was gone. At least, though, I know that they're keeping a browse copy there. If I check every day, there's a good chance that I'll be able to run over and snatch it up before someone else does. Brenda, be ready to run on my signal.

A Quest for "Fire"

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins, came out last week; it's the sequel to The Hunger Games, which was an action-packed YA read from last year. The waiting list is outrageous--25 people waiting for five copies at the BPL (three of which are on order, rather than available), something like 215 waiting for 40 copies in the Minuteman system. So I developed a little quest for myself.

See, a few branches will have "local request only" copies, intended for browsers, so that we tricky reserve people don't suck up all the copies for the first six months. Chelsea public library had a copy like that, so last week Adam and I set out to find Chelsea public library.

I've been to the neighborhood two or three times--driving a friend to the garage that was fixing her car, picking up a piece of furniture from Craig's List. It's a little convoluted--a lot of three way intersections at weird angles with one way streets and no signage. But it's very downtown, so no one's driving too fast, so you can creep along and figure things out.

My main problem, it turned out, was that the library doesn't have their own website. Their info is on the City of Chelsea website. Because of that, Google coughed up the wrong address for me, and somehow I ended up at City Hall instead of the library. I headed home in frustration, only to realize that the library is across the street from City Hall, and if I'd turned my head thirty degrees to the right, I'd have found it.

A week later, armed with better information, we headed back. Found the library, ended up a mile and three neighborhoods away due to one way streets and poor parking options, but we managed to circle back around and find a spot by cutting across three lanes of traffic. Sweet.

The library itself is a creaky old building, tiny and very, VERY weirdly organized. YA is a shelf in the "Family Room," which is also where nonfiction is. Fiction and nonfiction are either misunderstood or (I like to think) simply mislabeled. Fiction has its own room, and then there's something that's either a media room or else a staff room; hard to tell.

The personnel were attentive, but strange. The first lady seemed to be having a different conversation than I was, albeit on the same subject. I would say something like, "Well, there's her other book, but I don't see the one I want," and she'd say, "Oh, you found it?" Or I'd say, "Well, here are the C authors," and she'd promptly jump a few feet down to the G's. Or I'd say, "Is there a computer I could use to check the catalog?" and she'd say, "Maybe you should check the catalog." It was kind of surreal.

Then the librarian at the counter seemed intent on figuring out whether they had bought the book (looking through book receipts) in spite of the fact that it was in the catalog. Finally we just established that the book had been checked out, the catalog was wrong, oh well, and I went home, escaping with my sanity and a handful of books that the Disney people made movies out of in the '70s (Escape to Witch Mountain, Polyanna).

I'm on the waitlist, but the Central Square branch of the Cambridge library has a browsing copy, and Adam has only been to 8 libraries. Our goal was 10 by his first birthday--Central Square it is!

On Again, Off Again

Maisie Dobbs and I have that kind of relationship; in real life you'd say it was unhealthy. As it stands, though, I think this time we've really found a way to make it work. I really feel like we've figured out how to be together without my calling her a cold fish and her treating any casual attempts at conversation with humorless formality. I really feel like we've found each other's wavelength.

The secret? Audiobook.

I really do find that the audiobooks can overcome certain types of problems, either issues with the writing, or with my personal ability to connect with a book. Specific kinds of humor, especially the kind that is so dry as to be easy to miss, come across much better with a speaker to point them out. Similarly, Maisie's precise and clinical personality seems much warmer because the narrator is able to put the warmth into her voice.

It's wonderful. Like we've found each other again. Okay, maybe I'm not in love, but the spark is definitely there.

Lady Lit, or I Ain't No Chick

Sometimes I get Elinor Lipman and Susan Isaacs confused in my head. They generally write quite different books, and their styles are fairly different--Isaacs goes for either light adventure stories or epic life-spanning personal histories with lots of dry verbal humor. Lipman is a little more "literary," in that her stories are generally smaller, more personal family stories (usually with a strong romance plot), with fewer dry jokes, but an intelligent and witty use of language. I'm not quite sure why I get them confused.

Anyway, I like a lot of Isaacs' work, but I haven't liked her more recent books. and Shining Through and Lily White are two of my frequent re-reads, but I found Any Place I Hang My Hat to be lackluster to the point of boring, and I couldn't even get past the first chapter of Past Perfect (ex-spy-turned-TV-writer-turned-neurotic-New-York-wife-and-mom, I'm exhausted). And somehow, my constant confusion made me doubt Lipman.

I should not have. Her expertise is in writing the character who sweeps into the life of her straightlaced protagonist and turns their life upside down. In Then She Found Me, it's a long-lost biological mother; in My Latest Grievance, it's the narrator's father's first wife. These books make me almost twitchy with anxiety--I like my neatly ordered life and would never dream of letting anyone like Isabel from Isabel's Bed into it--I love them, too.

So when I started The Family Man today, I was really nervous. Partly because I had my lingering disappointment with Susan Isaacs in the back of my mind, partly because it looked to be another book about someone who ignores what you want and everything you say and does whatever she damned well pleases with your life. But also because the jacket flap made the book sound kind of annoying. A single, fifty-something gay man living in New York reconnects with his ex-wife of many years ago and the young woman who was, for a brief time, his stepdaughter. Hi-jinks ensue.

Does this or does this not sound like kind of story where you have to watch a guy get bullied and manipulated by women who are out for his money, or having fun setting him up, or just teasing him mercilessly? The jacket copy goes on and it just sounds worse and worse, like I'm not going to like any of these characters.

But I was wrong--I love them all. The daughter, the father, even the memory of his deceased best friend. The ex is just annoying enough to complicate the plot without making me want to throw anything at all at the wall. I'm twirling blissfully around the living room, and breezing through this book. And I'll tell you, I could use a breeze, and am glad to have found one.

Greek for Beginners

I'm reading Beginner's Greek, by James Collins. Mike made a little joke about whether I'd learned any new Greek words from my book about Greek for beginners, and I had to explain that yes, I did, but that was a different book that I've had for years (a first grade Greek language workbook), and that this Beginner's Greek is a different book than that. It was a long, complicated explanation, but I got a chuckle.

Anyway, I'm only halfway through the book. It's probably inappropriate to write a review at this point, right? But I think this is the point where it's easiest to get a handle on what the experience of actually reading it is like. When I get to the end of a book, the ending will often color my experience of the whole thing.

A Curse Dark as Gold is an excellent example of this. I found most of the book to be a drag to read--it's like there was a great book in there for somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Like meeting someone who you think seems really cool, but somehow not being able to get past a superficial relationship, small talk. Then the last hundred pages were so good, I walked away thinking it was a great book. But that's not what the experience of reading it was like.

So: halftime at Beginner's Greek. The reviews I've read are so mixed, I think that the buzz might work against the book. I think it's great, but if I told you it was amazing and wonderful, you'd probably be disappointed.

It's an almost oddly simple book. It's a love story, pretty straightforwardly, with all the nice hurdles to romance that a love story needs. It uses the toolbox of literary fiction, including a lot of attention to details of environment and small anecdotes for verisimilitude. Amazingly, I find these incredibly engaging, I think because they're used very directly. Every word is used to tell you something important, rather than just a huge amount of information that drags the story down in the mundane.

Can you tell how I usually feel about literary fiction?

But what I like about the book--what I think lends to the simplicity, the black-and-whiteness of it--is that it reads almost like a fable. It is, at least in part, about fate stepping in in ways that just don't happen in real life. Coincidence, sudden realization, bolts of lightening, etc. play a huge role in the story. It's almost mythological, with sort of a dreamy solemnity.

Now, some people might say that a story like this should have an unhappy ending, to drag you back to earth. But I have to ask why you'd want to be dragged back? Wouldn't that negate the rest of the experience, the same way a good ending can negate a less-than-stellar reading experience?

I think the only way to end this book is with "...and they lived happily ever after." I'm looking forward to it.

Ready to Burst

I've put off posting so long that I have too many things to say and can't keep track of them all. I guess I'll pick one. Let's see....

Terry Pratchett should write all the books that there are. I just finished The Wee Free Men, which is billed as a kids' Discworld novel. It was so funny and smart and solid, and I couldn't stop talking like a tiny blue Scotsman for days afterward. I'm just amazed by his ability to do everything that goes into a book: language (description and humor), plot (complicated and satisfyingly fitting together at the end), character, world building, everything. Funny, scary, smart, dramatic, everything. I love Terry Pratchett.

Okay, two: I've been meaning to read some Georgette Heyer forever--I have in fact checked several of her books out several times and returned them unread. Finally, finally this time I picked up The Grand Sophy. It's SO good! If you've read all the Jane Austen books and are sad that there aren't anymore, pick this up. It's not exactly like Austen, not by a long shot--because they were written more recently, the characters have a more modern sensibility--but the setting is satisfyingly similar, and the drawing room dramas and comedies are just what a frustrated Austen fan might be looking for.

Also, A Curse Dark as Gold was good, but could have been better. The first three quarters just seemed too long--each scene, and there were too many scenes, ditto paragraphs, everything. The last quarter was fabulously tight and so satisfying.

Okay, now that's off my chest. Maybe I'll keep up with my blogging!

Don't Fence Me In

I can't stand a five point rating system. Goodreads uses a five star system to indicate how you feel about your books, and it just kills me. (Roger Ebert, by the way, whose days revolve more around star counts than mine, agrees with me.) I know five stars is for awesome, and one is for dreck. I don't do zero stars because that looks like I forgot to rate it. But how do you sort out the in-between?

Goodreads offers you rollover text: 5 for "loved it," 4 for "really liked it," 3 for "liked it," 2 for "it was okay," and 1 for "didn't like it." I can handle that, I think--I try to save 5s for things that had me clutching my seat, weeping, shrieking. Anything I just plain liked gets a 4, something I didn't NOT like gets a 3--maybe I just sort of didn't care, but it wasn't bad.

Two holds a lot of, "eh, not really." Two is for a book that I don't think, objectively, is a bad book, but that I didn't enjoy at all. Or, alternatively, it's for a book that objectively is an awful, awful book, but that I enjoyed a little on some level--but not enough to transcend its awfulness. And of course, 1 is just yuck, yuck, don't ever read this. I want those hours of my life back.

But what I find, often, is that I'll finish a book, and I'll feel one way, but then when I look back at my rating a while later, I'll be shocked. I finished, for example, The Queen of Attolia, and called it something I really liked, a 4. But a few weeks later, when I think about that book, I remember loving it passionately. I want to read it again right now. It's SO good. Why didn't I give it a 5?

Or Just Ella, why did I only give it one star? It wasn't totally without redeeming qualities--I saw enough in there to run out and--rather maniacally, I'll admit--read pretty much everything else the author's written. Shouldn't it have at least gotten 2?

I think the problem is, when I'm sitting with a book, I see the complexities. I see the imperfections, the flaws. Isn't that a sad way to be? It's not that I'd always be wishing it was better, but when you analyze something technically, it loses its sparkle. But from a distance of a few weeks, I remember impressions. I remember the big moments, or the big feelings.

So is it better to record my in-the-moment reactions, or what lingers? Is what matters the experience I had then, or the memory I have now?

And for heaven's sake, why can't the scale be more reasonable? Like 1-100? Just Ella gets a 24.

Well, 23.8.

Purchasing Power

I decided to spend my 40% off Borders coupon, come hell or high water. And I got there and I dithered. I found a copy of The Thief, which I'd been wanting, but it only cost $8. Hardly worth wasting a coupon. A couple of board books for Adam, similarly inexpensive. Sure, they add up, but this is indulgence we're going for.

But then, oh then. I don't remember if I wrote much about In the Company of the Courtesan, which was, I think, the last book I finished before having the baby. It was so great. An amazing combination of character and setting, storytelling and writing. A beautiful book about a very high class prostitute in Venice in the 16th century, beautifully written and so compelling.

I have been meaning to read more of Sarah Dunant's books since then. And today, in the bookstore, I discovered that her most recent novel is about NUNS! Sixteenth century nuns. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not often that an author I already love produces a nun book. It makes me feel small in the face of the universe. I am humbled, and thrilled, and now I OWN this book!

O happy day

Pippa Greg

O, Philippa Gregory, how you've failed me! For books that are all so similar, I've had such different reactions to the three books I've read that I can't even tell you what I think of this.

I'm reading The Other Queen, about Mary Queen of Scots. The problem I'm having is that there are almost no scenes in this book. It's told by three narrators, two of whom are the couple who hosted/imprisoned Mary during her time in England on Queen Elizabeth's orders, and the third Mary herself. You follow the large events of the day--armies are amassing, court intrigue is going on--but mostly the narrators get this news through letters and gossip. Each short chapter reads like a dispatch, and rarely is there a conversation, or even an occurrence that actually takes place as I'm reading about it. I'm just not compelled. At all.

This is a far cry from my reactions to The Other Boleyn Girl (Harlequin trash!) and The Queen's Fool (action-packed chick lit!). I didn't love Boleyn Girl, but I really did like Queen's Fool very much. I had really hoped that there would be something in this book of that one. But at this point, I'd settle for a ton of steamy sex. And at least each of those books was immediate--what happened in the book was actually happening as you read about it.

But I'm halfway through. I'm loathe to quit now. I might, though.

By the way and for the record: by the end, I really loved American Wife. I think the best way to explain my change of heart is that, at the beginning, I felt like the author and the narrator shared a sensibility that I couldn't. By the end, I realized that the author and I were the ones with the same opinions; the narrator was the only one who saw things her way. It was good, in the end, to have the author on my side.