02.08.10
Snowmageddon
Here are a couple of pictures I took on Saturday afternoon during Snowmageddon:
The apartment balcony
My car. I had the pleasure of excavating it yesterday.
Veil of Lies by Jeri Westerson
Veil of Lies (Crispin Guest #1) by Jeri Westerson
2008. 277 pages (hardcover).
From: the public library
For the challenge: Thriller and Suspense 2010
In a nutshell:
This ‘medieval noir’ takes place in London 1384. Crispin Guest, disgraced and disenfranchised knight, makes his trade as a ‘tracker,’ chasing down lost items, and other investigative work. A wealthy merchant hires Guest to find out if his wife is being unfaithful. When Guest returns to the merchant with his findings, he finds the man murdered. The resulting investigation is complicated by false identities, holy relics, and lots of villains all too willing to commit violence against Guest and others.
Review:
After abandoning another historical mystery, Francine Mathews’ The Alibi Club, I restlessly chose Veil of Lies from my library stash as a replacement read. It took me a little while to get into it, but in the end, it was worth the time.
I wasn’t enamored by Crispin Guest himself. He’s kind of broody. Also, maybe I’m tired of heroes in historical novels who are uncommonly humane for their time. The other characters mentioned numerous times how unusual he is in that respect. However, Guest isn’t entirely anachronistic, for which I was grateful. Class matters much to him, though he is no longer in a position where it should. He threw in his lot with a misguided cause and that led to his past downfall. It is a fine line for the author to walk: to make the protagonist likable without being unrealistic to the time period.
My favorite character was Jack, Crispin’s young scrappy servant, who is paid with food and shelter. I hope to see more of him in the next book.
The story is a potpourri of locked-room murder mystery, political intrigue, and romance, with some light supernatural shading. I’m not sure it all worked together smoothly, but it definitely made for some surprising twists.
I’m not a connoisseur of noir mysteries, but my immediate standard for comparison was Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy, which are set in Nazi Germany. (Excellent, but very dark, series.) Kerr had the rat-a-tat, aloof noir-speak down pat, complete with the wry figurative language. Westerson’s book doesn’t quite have that same sensibility, which is too bad. The noir label doesn’t quite fit in my mind as a result.
Still, the medieval setting and characters are of enough interest that I will probably check out the next book in the series.
02.06.10
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
by Susan Jane Gilman
2009. 304 pages. (Hardcover)
From: The public library
For the challenge: Memorable Memoir Challenge
Recommendation found at: Sophisticated Dorkiness
In a nutshell:
In 1986, recent Brown university graduates Susie Gilman and Claire Van Houten decide to travel around the world, starting with China. China only recently had become open to independent backpackers. They start their journey with naive over-confidence but as their weeks in China progress, cultural disorientation, illness and Claire’s erratic behavior plunge the two women into nightmarish scenarios.
Review:
With time made available by the snowstorm in my area, I started and finished this book in one day. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is a gobsmacker of a travel tale, managing to be funny, awe-inspiring and scary all at once.
From the standpoint of nearly twenty years later, Gilman writes with unflinching honesty about the trip. She does not cover up her younger self’s failures and naivete. This is not to say that young Susie Gilman is unlikeable in the novel: I enjoyed seeing her discover wells of resourcefulness she didn’t know she had. Still, I appreciated that Gilman didn’t airbrush out some of the stupid things she said and did during that time. This perspective can come only with time.
Gilman’s writing is superb, conveying both the sights and sounds and smells of China as well as the inner confused swirl of her emotions and thoughts. Here’s an excerpt:
Elbowing through the gawking spitters, smokers and farmhands, I ran down the dank hallway after Claire, shouting, “Someone, please. Ni shou ying wen ma?” My voice broke then; tears dripped down my cheeks. I couldn’t find Claire; she’d been taken from me. This was far too much, way out of my league. “STOP” I yelled hoarsely down the empty corridor to no one, my voice dissolving into the damp vegetable air. “STOP!”
Despite incidents like that described above, Gilman also writes beautifully of the country’s grandeur, and particularly how she is humbled by the Chinese people’s generosity and kindness. The helpfulness of strangers – from both Chinese people and from fellow backpackers – is astounding.
Though I never had travel experiences as extreme as Gilman’s, I could identify with some of her struggles. I once had a travel companion who started feeling inexplicable pain in her knee. We decided to visit a hospital, where our basic French barely sufficed. That friend and I also had some interpersonal conflict that reared its ugly head during the trip. It is a strange thing to feel furious anger while standing at the top of a chateau in the Loire Valley. (Surprisingly, we actually became better friends after all that.) The problems between Claire and Susie were much more serious, but at a certain level I understood the conflicting emotions Susie felt toward Claire.
If you are put off by the weird cover (the more common red cover – not the one I have used here) or by the title, don’t be. The red cover is all wrong for the book. Also, the title does not refer to some desecrating act at a Chinese landmark as I feared, but rather is a reference to a feverish dream recounted by Gilman. There is some mild sexual content and strong language, but it’s not as provocative as the book’s packaging suggests.
I hope that my review has stirred up your interest, because this book is an incredible read. Many thanks to Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness whose review made me want to run right out and read it.
02.05.10
The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher
The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
by Tim Gallagher
2005. 250 pages. (Hardcover)
From: the public library
For the challenges: The Colorful Reading Challenge, 2010 Biodiversity Challenge
In a nutshell:
In my National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, purchased in 2000, the entry on the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker says the following:
Thought now to be extinct in North America . . . Unconfirmed sightings in recent decades in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas undoubtedly have been smaller Pileated Woodpecker.
In 2004, after chasing down credible sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Tim Winchester and his friend Bobby Harrison sight the bird in the swamplands of Arkansas. The Grail Bird tells the story of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the quest of Winchester and others to find it, and then what happens after the confirmed sighting in 2004.
Review:
The first chapter of The Grail Bird sets out the story of loss: the path that led the ivory-billed woodpecker to its declared extinction. One of the saddest parts for me to read was how early ornithologists used their knowledge of birds to kill them for their taxidermy collections. The rarer the bird, the more sought-after it became. When a bird neared extinction, one taxidermist urged, “Now is the time to collect.”
After recounting the history of the ivory-billed woodpecker, Gallagher then launches into a description of his project. A wildlife photographer who works for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Gallagher has traveled widely to study birds around the world. He decided, along with his friend Bobby Harrison, to follow up on all the credible-sounding sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker and see what they could see.
What I love about the book is that Gallagher’s passion for birds, and particularly the ivory-billed woodpecker, is contagious. There is an awe associated with it, not just because it was thought to be extinct, but because of its own qualities. It was a large woodpecker – the size of a crow – and had distinctive white markings. It flew fast and straight. The ivory-billed woodpecker was sometimes nicknamed the Lord God Bird because people would say when seeing it “Lord God, what a bird!”
But the book is about so much more than just the ivory-billed woodpecker. It is also about the people who are bound together by seeing it. Gallagher writes as warmly about people as he does about the birds and he introduces readers to some passionate, intrepid characters.
Gallagher laments the destruction of the primeval southern forests, which he calls “one of the greatest environmental tragedies in the history of the United States.” Indeed, reading interviewed people’s accounts of the great forests, and of the disappeared bayou cultures, I felt almost personally stricken by the loss.
The author also speaks reprovingly about how the scientific community reflexively mocked sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker, even sightings that were backed by respected ornithologists. These sightings were treated like those of Bigfoot or Elvis and careers were ruined by the skepticism.
Roughly the last half of the book describes the story of Gallagher’s particular sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the team of birders and scientists that seek to further confirm its existence afterward. It’s a suspenseful account complete with disorienting swampland and cottonmouth snakes – all rewarded by a glimpse here, a fuzzy video there, of the grail bird.
As I’ve probably made clear, I loved this book. It’s an incredible story well-told and the story is not over yet. I will conclude with this video I found on youtube that uses Sufjan Steven’s song, “The Lord God Bird” as the background track.
(You can download the song for free via NPR’s website, who commissioned the song from the artist about the bird and the town that got put on the map due to its discovery.)
02.01.10
Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto
Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto
Trans. Michael Emmerich in 2002
1989. 186 pages (Hardcover)
From: The public library
Recommendation found at:
In a nutshell:
Maria and Tsugumi are cousins who have lived near each other for most of their childhood. Tsugumi’s parents own an inn in a coastal village. Maria’s mother helps out at the inn. Maria is a normal, good-natured girl. Tsugumi is a rude hellion who is afflicted by physical frailty.
When Maria’s father finally gets a long-awaited divorce from his first wife, he brings Maria and her mother to Tokyo, where Maria will start college. When Maria learns that Tsugumi’s family plan to close the inn to move to the mountains, she returns to the coastal village for one last summer there.
Review:
Though this book recommendation came from Fluttering Butterflies blog, I should also credit Eva from A Striped Armchair for the assist. I first heard of Banana Yoshimoto from Eva.
Goodbye Tsugumi excellently captures the mood of summer, particularly summer nights. I think it’s a good book to read when it’s not summer, actually, because the book is written as a recollection. In these wintry months, I identify with the book’s ode to summer. I also identify with how Maria misses the ocean once she’s moved the city – how Maria and her mother stop in their tracks when a breeze carries the scent of the sea to Tokyo. And it is also a book that captures the feelings one may feel when a chapter of life is ending.
The book has a wonderful poetry to it, such as this with this passage:
Everyday life had never really made much of an impression on me before. I used to live here in this little fishing village. I would sleep and wake up, have meals. Sometimes I felt really great; other times I felt a little out of it. I watched TV, fell in love, went to classes at school, and at the end of every day I always came back here, to this same house. But when I let my thoughts wander back through the ordinariness of those cycles now, I find that somewhere along the way it has all acquired a touch of warmth – that I’ve been left with something silky and dry and warm, like clean sand.
But I don’t want it to seem like the book is only mood and good writing. Though not a lot happens in the book, stuff does happen. Mostly, Tsugumi happens. The first line of the book is “It’s true: Tsugumi really was an unpleasant young woman.” She throws fits, laughs at others’ sentiment, and constantly calls everyone names. And yet, through Maria’s eyes, and also maybe through Tsugumi’s sheer force as a character, I came to like her, just as Maria did.
During this last summer, Tsugumi falls in love with Kyoichi, whose parents are building a new fancy hotel in the village. This causes him trouble with others in town who see what this new hotel will do to the other inns’ business.
Dogs are also a main part of this book. Maria sort of ‘bonds’ with Tsugumi while they walk a neighbor’s Akita named Pooch. They meet Kyoichi when Pooch riles up Kyoichi’s little Pomeranian, Gongoro.
The book is kind of like Gongoro, the Pomeranian – it may not be a big book, but it has a lot of spirit and heart for its size. I will definitely be looking out for more books by this author.
01.31.10
Touchstone by Laurie R. King
Touchstone by Laurie R. King
2007. 548 pages (paperback)
From: Christmas gift from my sister K.
In a nutshell:
Bureau agent Harris Stuyvesant travels to London in 1926 to investigate a suspected British bomber who has been behind several explosions in the States. A shady government official connects him to a WWI veteran, Bennet Grey, who has the ability to sense when someone is deliberately lying. With Grey’s assistance, Stuyvesant goes undercover among one of England’s elite families.
Review:
The historical backdrop to this novel is fairly unique. It is the interwar years in England, and tensions are high in London due to an impending miner’s strike. The labor unions and the ruling class are at each other’s throats. I appreciated that this was a time period in history that isn’t usually covered in fiction.
Unfortunately, the first 150 pages are so are slow going. It is very heavy on exposition and there’s an element of showing off research in the dialogue of the main characters. In a Facebook chat with my sister K. who gave me the book, I admitted that I was finding the beginning to be slow. She said, “It gets better when they get to the house.”
“The house” is the Hurleigh House, the great estate where Stuyvesant begins his undercover investigation. It is clear that King loves describing great English country houses – this was demonstrated also in Justice Hall, one of her Mary Russell/ Sherlock Holmes books. Hurleigh House has some great character to it though, so I didn’t mind the long descriptions too much.
Both K. and I agreed that we weren’t sure we liked Harris Stuyvesant at first. K. said she was particularly perturbed by this because she had liked Mary Russell right away in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. But Stuyvesant comes into his own as a character when he goes undercover. King does a good job of writing smart characters. I love getting into their heads as they figure out individuals and group dynamics. Stuyvesant understands how to win over people, how to strategically play a part to get people to respond a certain way. He does make mistakes, but it’s still cool to read the intelligence at work.
The ending was not entirely predictable and for that I was glad. Some of the characters are revealed to be different from how Stuyvesant had pegged them.
The book could certainly have been edited down, in my opinion. There’s an interesting story there, but it is suffocated in places by too much exposition of the history or the setting. If you’ve never read Laurie King before, you should start with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, which is one of my all-time favorite books, with one of my favorite literary characters, Mary Russell.
Other reviews:
01.30.10
Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
Princess of the Midnight Ball
by Jessica Day George
2009. 272 pages (hardcover)
From: the public library
Heard about from: The Written World
For the challenge: What’s in a Name
In a nutshell:
This young adult novel is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale. Actually, my copy of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales calls it “The Shoes That Were Danced To Pieces.”
Review:
Soon after I started reading this book, I stopped a moment and read “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces.” In the fairy tale, the princesses wear out their shoes every night and it’s a mystery how they do this. So, the king issues an open call for princes to figure it out in three days, the reward being the throne by marriage to the princess. If they don’t, they are killed by the king. The princesses in the fairy tale appear to like dancing at this mysterious ball, and don’t want their fun being spoiled by any of the princes. A soldier eventually succeeds in solving the mystery and marries the eldest princess.
In Jessica Day George’s book, the princesses are cursed by a pact their mother made, to dance every evening at the ball of an underworld king. Due to the underworld magic, they are unable to speak of their curse to anyone. The king does seek the help of other princes, but they are killed by the underworld king’s magic, not by the king himself. So the book’s retelling of the story makes a whole lot more people sympathetic.
Jessica Day George also supplies the story with some light historical context. The kingdom of the princesses is Westfalin (similar to the historical region of Westphalia in Germany) and terms of address include “Herr” and “Frau”. The Catholic Church plays a role too, as the witchcraft comes to the attention of an archbishop.
I liked Jessica Day George’s descriptions of the sisters, such as how they describe the last three sisters “the younger set.” Some of the twelve were little more than a type: the religious one, the one who plays piano, the vain one. But I particularly liked Poppy, the rebel, who retains a sense of humor throughout the princesses’ ordeal. Rose is the sister that is the main character, but Poppy was actually more interesting and I wish she had a bigger part, or even got her own book.
The hero, Galen, distinguishes himself as a man who knits, because as a soldier, you had to learn to make your own socks and clothing. This skill plays an integral part in the story, fabric being a thing that can contain magical properties.
Princess of the Midnight Ball was a quick pleasant read overall, which was just the type of book I wanted after I had finished Touchstone, a longer, more densely plotted book (that I will review soon.)
01.27.10
Library Loot: January 27
Library Loot is hosted by Eva at A Striped Armchair and Marg at Reading Adventures.
I checked out three books from the library this time, so now I have ten checked out total. I can get away with this amount because my public library allows you to renew twice as long as no one else has a hold on it. So I usually can have a book out for four weeks.
Anyway, the three in this library loot:
The Wreck Of The River of Stars by Michael Flynn
- This is by the same author of Eifelheim, one of my favorite reads of last year, so I’m very excited to read this one. The River of Stars is the name of a doomed spaceship, thus the very sci-fi appearance of the cover.
Veil of Lies: A Medieval Noir by Jeri Westerson
- I saw the sequel to Veil of Lies in the New Mysteries section. It sounded interesting, but I like to start at the beginning so I trotted back into the stacks to see if the first book was there. I was in luck! Stories set in medieval times tend to attract my interest and I like a good noir.
The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank
- My library has a display that is sometimes thematic but usually just whatever the librarians feel like putting up there. I remembered reading a good review of this book. I’d seen the cover picture as a thumbnail image reviews, but never in person: I had thought that the image on the cover was a bird but it’s actually an aerial shot of a young woman walking in a red scarf.
01.24.10
What My Books Say About Me (meme)
I saw this meme going around the blogosphere started by the blog Stuck in a Book and decided to participate. The rules are:
1.) Go to your bookshelves…
2.) Close your eyes. If you’re feeling really committed, blindfold yourself.
3.) Select ten books at random. Use more than one bookcase, if you have them, or piles by the bed, or… basically, wherever you keep books.
4.) Use these books to tell us about yourself – where and when you got them, who got them for you, what the book says about you, etc. etc…..
5.) Have fun! Be imaginative. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read them or not – be creative. It might not seem easy to start off with, and the links might be a little tenuous, but I think this is a fun way to do this sort of meme.
6.) Feel free to cheat a bit, if you need to…
Here are my ten:
1. Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
I bought this one long ago for my introductory English course when I was a freshman in college. I confess that I’ve never much cared for reading Shakespeare, or any play for that matter. My best experience of Shakespeare was watching a performance of “The Taming of the Shrew” in Stratford-upon-Avon.
2. The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr.
I read this book in high school and liked it, eventually buying a copy at a used-book sale but not reading it again. I hardly remember anything about it now, but I am planning to re-read it this year as part of the Flashback Challenge.
3. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
Another book that I bought for a special topics course in college that focused only on the authors Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I loved Faulkner’s style of writing even if some stuff went over my head. Sanctuary was the least dense of the Faulkner books that I read.
4. National Geographic’s Birds of North America
I had to buy this one for a field biology course, which was the best science general education course I could have picked. We got to tromp around outside, learning to identify birds, bird calls, trees and plants. Have I used the book since? Actually, no I don’t think I have. But I like to have it around as reference, just in case.
5. The Outcast of Redwall by Brian Jacques
The Redwall series by Brian Jacques were childhood favorites of mine. Traditionally, the ferrets, rats, weasels, etc were evil in the Redwall universe. I remember being excited to read Outcast of Redwall as the main character would be a ferret and that promised something different. Unfortunately, this book would only serve to underscore the determinism of the Redwall universe. The mouse who raises the ferret from birth says in the end “Veil was bad . . . I know that now. Some creatures cannot help being the way they are.” I was furious at the ending of the book and it caused my subsequent disenchantment with the series. As an adult, I’m still fond of the series and own seven of them still, but I should probably donate Outcast because of my strong feelings against it.
6. Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
This book was given to me by my sister, because she knew I liked the movie which stars a young Jena Malone. I can’t remember now how the book and movie compare, but I believe the book is a little darker.
7. I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl
For my senior honors project in college, I explored autobiography, memoir and the concept “everyone has a story.” I bought this book at the beginning of my exploration. It didn’t get used for my paper in the end, but I remember liking it.
8. Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
Finally, a more recent purchase! I first read this book as a library copy and then bought my own copy last year at a library used book sale. Despite the generic title, this is really a great read. I got to see de los Santos speak at one of the annual National Book Festivals in D.C. and she was funny and personable.
9. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray
10. Personnages, 2nd edition by Michael D. Oates and Jacques F. Dubois
All I can say about these two is why do I still have them around? Both are books that I needed in college (the second is a French exercise book). I don’t need them anymore.
In conclusion, what this random selection says about me is that a lot of my collection is still populated by books purchased when I was an undergraduate. I graduated almost six years ago!
The truth is: I am actually not a huge book-buyer. I heavily rely on the public library to supply my reading needs. Hence, many of the books I own are those that I was required to purchase. I have shed a lot of my college books over the years, but yes, I still own at least three or four Norton Anthologies. (Former and current English majors know what I’m talking about.)
