Armageddon: A Novel of Berlin by Leon Uris

I went through a phase of reading everything available by Leon Uris, but I never read this one. It is about the army of occupation in Germany and the final third of the book center on the Berlin Airlift. And, after all, I was there. So I decided that it was high time that I read it.

After all eight or nine hundred pages (it is hard to tell - not all Kindle books have page numbers), I suspect that I may have started it at some point and not finished it. In Mila 18 and Exodus the history is very present, but it is all delivered as part of the story. In this one, characters and "story" are secondary to long lectures on the history. Sometimes the history is delivered by "Big Nellie," the omnipresent columnist, but sometimes it is just parked between passages of narrative.

A number of the characters have great potential, but we are not allowed to get close enough to any of them to care very much. The opening character is an Army captain, Sean O'Sullivan, from San Francisco. He hates the Germans personally for the deaths of his two brothers during the war. His persistent hatred is inconsistent with the character as developed and is consistently jarring. None of the characters seem very complete and the ones we spend the most time with all end badly.

The details of the Airlift are, as always in Uris' work, very thoroughly researched and were fascinating. For me, of course, there was the additional side note of the dates of Mother's letters and knowing that at this point or that we were in or near the action of the story. I found the "story" part of this book so disappointing that I almost with that it were simply a history of the occupation and airlift with the real names of the players. Of course, if it had been that sort of book I almost certainly would not have ever read it. Maybe I should hunt up some actual historical accounts of the airlift.

First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones

Somebody recommended these to me. I think I remember who it was. I was expecting something rather like the Charlayne Harris "Grave" books. Not exactly. Rather more like Dean Koontz's "Odd Thomas" stories. Of course, these dead people actually talk to our heroine, who rejoices in the name "Charley Davidson," unlike the dead who seek out Odd. Actually, the ghosts, for lack of a better term, rather remind me of the ghosts in the fluffy books by Sue Ann Jaffarian - chatty and a little vague.

There is definitely more sex than I think strictly necessary in a murder mystery, although as it involves a noncorporeal being maybe it doesn't count? And all the action she is getting doesn't stop her from indulging in ogling every male who comes her way.

The actual murder mystery was a little amorphous, the story was really about letting the reader know who/what Charley is and about her supernatural boyfriend/dream lover. Since we find out who/what he is, I am left wondering how this plays out in a series. So I guess the device works - I will have to buy the next one to find out.

The setting is Albuquerque and seems reasonably accurate, so there are many references to streets and neighborhoods with which I am familiar - not to mention green chile stew (as I recall misspelled "chili" - which as all real New Mexicans know refers to a concoction lacking subtlety and made primarily in Texas - and, incidently, not green). And then there is the character - actually one of the murder victims - named James Barilla - like the brand of pasta. Barela would have been quite acceptable, but Barilla? Really now.

It was fun, I won't resent (too much) reading the second, but it doesn't climb to the top of the charts - at least not my chart.

Mila 18 by Leon Uris

This was on the list of Kindle books being sponsored by the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (American Version) - or maybe it was the offer which was sponsored. Whatever. At any rate, they had a list of books and you could get one (only one) for a dollar. I read and reread the list and finally decided to go with this old favorite which I hadn't reread for many years.

No wonder I reread it so many times. The characters are bigger than life, the situation is desperate, the action is dramatic, and the whole story is based on real events. The characters, not so much, but the heroism and self-sacrifice they displayed must of necessity have been shown by the people who lived through the defense and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The time and events of the book are, from all accounts, represented accurately - Uris is known for the quality and quantity of his research. Part of the danger to humanity in all ages is our unwillingness to accept the depths to which humanity can reach given the opportunity. When one of the Nazi officers discusses the probability of the defeat of the Third Reich, he casually dismisses the aftermath of the world's discovery of the incredible cruelty and viciousness which typified Nazi Germany with references to the short memory of mankind and by pointing out that the world has been informed of events like those which took place at Baba Yar and the existence of the extermination camps. Specifically appalling is the indifference of the Polish people to the things taking place around them, indifference so profound that it is indistinguishable from complicity. "Never forget."

Castle Terror by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Interesting. Classic gothic romance - I loved these things when I was a teenager; I may have read this when I was a teenager - it was published in 1965, guess I wasn't a teenager. A Jane Eyre opening - a young nurse goes to tend a mad girl in a Scottish castle (relocated stone by stone to some indefinite location on an island somewhere off some coast of the United States). There she finds a dying old man and his operatically dramatic wife - and his brooding adult son - and the charismatic keeper of the bird sanctuary on the island.

All the gothic cliches are there - insanity, murder, blackmail, secret passages, smuggler's caves which are submerged at high tide, and a deadly hurricane. Not to mention a Newfoundland named Thumbelina.

Maybe Thumbelina saves it (as well as the heroine) from utter disaster. It is well written - for this sort of thing - from Bradley it would have to be. McCaffrey's romances stop short of the gothic cliche, this book completely embraces it. It was her fourth published novel, perhaps she was still searching for a marketable genre.

Hawkmistress! by Marian Zimmer Bradley

This is one of my favorites of the Darkover books. Perhaps, in part because it is character-driven and I find Romilly a particularly appealing character. The rest of the Darkover setting is in and around the story, but the reader is with Romilly all the way through - no shifting from one character or center of action to another. Not that Romilly hangs around any one place for long.

Like so many fantasy heroines, Romilly runs away from home to escape marriage. Her psi gift is handling animals and, after some fairly desperate adventures, she is welcomed by one of the armies contending for the throne. She trains and manages the large carrion birds which perform arial reconnaisance, and she trains war horses for the army. She comes close to losing her sanity and her life when she is unable to deal with the deaths of these creatures with which she shares rapport.

Throughout runs the thread of her relationship with a great hawk which she trained and with which she has a psychic bond. Romilly frees the hawk when her father takes it from her to give to her brother, but the hawk, Preciosa, never completely abandons her. Preciosa saves her sanity in the end and allows her to return to use her gift to rescue a man who had befriended her and has been taken as a hostage.

Rather than leap to the obvious romantic conclusion of the story, Bradley has Romilly take charge of her own life and go to a tower to learn to use and control her gift putting the possibility of marriage on hold until she has learned who she is and what she wants. Rather stylish.

And a deep sigh of relief - I can still speak up for Bradley - as long as I avoid her "historical" fantasies. Although I suppose that someday I am going to have to read The Mists of Avalon because that was one of my younger daughter's all time favorites.

The Fall of Atlantis by Marian Zimmer Bradley

After my big reread of Anne McCaffrey, I thought maybe I should revisit Bradley. Darkover is in many ways a more complex universe than Pern, and it has been many years since I read any of them. I happened to spot this in my Kindle library and decided to start there, although it isn't a Darkover story. Surprise! I don't think I had ever read it. Or if I had, I had totally forgotten it.

Frankly, it wouldn't be amazing if I had forgotten it. I may have started it and not finished it. It isn't bad, it just isn't nearly as good as most of Bradley's work. I think our Latin textbook, with a running story set in the last days of Pompeii, was more convincing. The characters seem a little flat and the plot is not particularly compelling. I was sure that I had it on the shelf, but I couldn't find it. I did find a two-volume version called Web of Light and Web of Dark, but not the full piece.

Bradley did a whole line of pseudo historical novels. Besides this, there is The Mists of Avalon and its sequel, the title of which escapes me at the moment, obviously set in Arthurian legend. There is another called The Firebrand that I think is set in ancient Troy. There are probably others which I don't remember or have never encountered.

I didn't sit down here to trash the book, but it was definitely disappointing from a writer like Bradley.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

This was a third reading. My other book club is doing it now - my first book club did it back in May, at my suggestion. So for a more complete discussion, see entries in this list for May of 2011. It is a stunning book, even third time through in probably too short a time. I remembered enough about the details of the sub-stories to be slightly resistant to continuing because I knew how horrifying so much of the detail was. The triumphant survivor of the story is the book itself, the Sarajevo Haggadah.

I am going to put Brooks' other titles on my wish list.

Stitch in Snow by Anne McCaffrey

Again, this one is purely a romance - a chance encounter with a stranger, both stranded by an unseasonal blizzard. I have always considered this book a candidate for McCaffrey's personal fantasy. Dana Jane Lovell is fifty year old writer of YA fiction who moved to Ireland to avoid taxes. She also has silver hair with traces of its original red. I have not, however, found anything to indicate that McCaffrey was a knitter.

The description of Dan Lowell, the romantic interest is point by point the same as that of Michael Carradyne in The Lady, including the mustache. I suppose it is really the other way around - Michael Carradyne is Dan Lowell transposed to Ireland, since this one precedes The Lady by a year. The suspense element is an accusation of murder against Dan, which is dropped as soon as they locate Dana on her lecture/book tour and she provides him with an alibi.

The book is pleasant and enjoyable. One of my favorite things is her "memory" - the journal in which she keeps track of where and when she has been and makes notes of potential characters which she encounters. It is so "writerish." Of course, the journal proves to be invaluable in substantiating her defense of Dan.

This is my favorite of her romance novels - possibly because the heroine is fifty, possibly because she is a knitter. The discussions of knitting are very real, I must suspect that McCaffrey did knit. I do have questions about someone knitting a large men's Aran in less than two weeks. I know I'm not a particularly fast knitter, but really - two weeks?

To my utter amazement, the wiki refers to two of these romantic suspense or romance novels (Ring of Fear and The Mark of Merlin) as gothics. Really? I don't think so. I just checked to see what Amazon had to say - they call them romantic suspense. On the other hand, they list a volume entitled Three Gothic Novels by Anne McCaffrey. It includes those two plus another one which I have never read. One of these days I'll get around to them - I think I read the Merlin one (I did remember that Merlin is a dog), but the other I had never heard of. For now, I think I will get back to the other two or three books that I have started - or the textbook for the class I am taking next semester.

The Lady by Anne McCaffrey

Ten year intervals. Restoree was 1967, Ring of Fear was 1977, and this one is 1987. We have traveled from Romance/Suspense/SF to Romance/Suspense to Romance. We have also traveled to Ireland, where, as we all know, McCaffrey lived for many years. And, a real surprise, I don't think I had ever read this one although it was right there on the shelf in the hall. I did find it a little slow starting - and longer than her usual, but once it got going it rolled right along.

Like Ring of Fear, its setting is horsey. This time an Irish breeding/training farm as opposed to the show circuit and a Long Island estate. The characters are a bit extreme, almost stereotypical. The good daughter, Catriona, is really too good for a twelve/thirteen year old. The religious fanatic wife/mother, Isabel, is at the point of psychosis. The American cousin, Patricia, is almost a cartoon of the British/Irish opinion of Americans.

When I characterize this as a romance, that is not to say that there isn't some of the rest. For one thing the principal romance involves the husband/father, Michael, of the horse farm and Selina, the wife of a wealthy financier. The affair begins while both are married, but the proprieties are observed in the long run. The fanatic wife/mother fasts herself into a hysterical and physical breakdown and dies. The financier beats and rapes Selina then beats her again in front of more than three witnesses - which is necessary if a woman is to obtain a legal separation in Ireland.

Now, if all this sounds appallingly Victorian - the setting is 1970. One theme of the book is clearly the position of women under the law in Ireland, but that isn't introduced until at least the half-way point - except that I had to keep flipping back to chapter one to remind myself that it was set in the 1970s not the 1870s.

Reading these back to back, inevitably I am finding bits that are very reminiscent of other works. An early crisis in the book is the death of Catriona's pony, Blister. She is behaving herself properly in the field at the hunt and an ignorant, arrogant fool runs them down at a jump and very nearly kills Catriona as well as breaking her pony's legs. It reminded me very stongly of the scene early in Dragonflight where the watchwher falls to its death to obey Lessa's command.

There are minor things, too. I have found more than one character named Maired, and I think the general physical type of the romantic men is decidedly similar - down to the mustache.

Ring of Fear by Anne McCaffrey

Pure unadulterated romantic suspense, plus horses and a cat. Not to mention a couple of murders and a whole lot of blackmail.

A slight twist on the usual formula: our heroine meets and marries the hero within the first few chapters, just a couple of days of story time. I suspose that one possibility is that the marriage gave McCaffrey license and excuse for rather more sex than she usually includes. There is a fair level of implausibility all around, but still it is good fun.

The publication date is ten years after Restoree. This one is considerably more consistent than the earlier one. The characters are more realistic and the flow is much more even. I think I may skip ahead and reread one of the very last of her romances. There's one where the main character is a rather more mature (read older) woman than the usual romantic heroine.

Restoree by Anne McCaffrey

This is the first book by McCaffrey that I ever read. And, guess what! It is the first book she ever had published. It came out in 1967 and I bought it along about then. I had just graduated from college and was still realizing that I now had enough money (on my princely salary of $8000 per annum) to occasionally buy a book. It is not available for Kindle - and the copy I just finished reading is not the first that I have owned.

There are clues that this is an early work. The characters aren't as clearly drawn and convincing as in later works, there are some inconsistencies in plotting, there are even a few spots where it drags a bit - but nothing that kept me from loving this book and rereading it many times. Another curious thing about this book in particular - it doesn't settle down cleanly on one side or the other of the line that separates McCaffrey's work into two categories in my mind. The setting and context here are clearly SF, but it shifts into what is primarily romantic suspense with the SF still dominating the action in the background, but the romance the story around the main character, Sara.

McCaffrey makes an interesting case for a society which has high technology only as a result of having captured it from invaders, and makes much of the technological voids left by having achieved space flight and such by springboard rather than by inventing it stone upon stone on their own. It is in some ways like an examination of Roddenberry's Prime Directive, which has become almost as fixed in current techno-SF as Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Sara frequently wonders why they don't have such commonplace conveniences as zippers, paper, and effective ground transportation. When the locals are ready to mount an expedition to Earth to invite them(us) to join their alliance against a mutual enemy, Sara is delighted to inform them that although earth does not have interstellar travel, there is a planetary defense system and that unaided by alien tech the people of earth have made some forays into space.

The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

I can't find the Harper Hall books. No doubt they are in a box in the storage locker or the shed. They are not available for Kindle and I'm not going to buy another paper set. They are around somewhere.

It is hard for me to imagine having read this one without the background that is filled in by the Harper Hall stories. I don't think I have read another batch of books which actually overlap the way these do. You can't set Dragonsong between Dragonquest and The White Dragon because events in one take place during the timeframe of the other. Complicated.

The many story lines seem to be resolved here - but there are plenty of spaces left for fill in or back story - of which there are legion. There are McCaffrey's own books, a batch of what I call "ands" (as in Anne McCaffrey and Joe Schmoe), and quite possibly "friends of" books, as in Friends of Darkover. I have never found any of the books outside the main series of six particularly satisfying - although I admit that I haven't read many of them.

The White Dragon seems to wrap things up pretty well. Jaxom and Ruth are a rather charming pair and are definitely central to this story. A large part of the surrounding story is about the discovery of the ships that brought humans to Pern in the distant past.

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

It seems that everything has happened. I can't remember what is left for the third book. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

The alliance with the Oldtimers has disintegrated and they have been exiled to the southern continent. The queens fought and died and Brekke has recovered, although not to impress another queen. Jaxom has impressed Ruth, the undersized white dragon, and taken him back to Ruatha with him. F'nor with Canth has attempted to go to the Red Star with disastrous results. The grubs which render threads harmless have been rediscovered and are being spread with all judicious haste.

And yet nothing seems quite resolved. I guess that is the fate of the middle book in a trilogy. It seems odd that I can't remember what goes on in the third book, though. I believe there is some exploration of the southern continent, while avoiding the exiled oldtimers. And this must be where/when they discover the ship - they do discover a ship, don't they? It has been too long since I read these.

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

It seemed appropriate to do a memorial reread of McCaffrey's best known series. I have not read them in several years, possibly because they are no longer resident on the correct shelf in the hall. Amazon (and Kindle) came to the rescue, now they will always be convenient to reread. Some of my other McCaffrey favorites are still in their places - fortunately, because they are not her best known works and this is the point at which such things start being "collectible" (read "expensive"). I'm sure that many of her SF fans would be horrified to know that she wrote some excellent romantic suspense novels.

It is almost difficult to comment on books that I know this well. Dragonflight introduces a group of interesting characters, and a compelling disaster from which the world must be saved. Perhaps it is McCaffrey's insistence on scientific plausibility that gives them such staying power. I remember being annoyed by the lapse into science in Shinn's Samaria books, but it never disturbed me in McCaffrey's Pern. The characters carry the drama.

This reread will include the original trilogy and the Harper Hall trilogy - assuming I can find them. I have read some of the other Pern books, but they never seemed to stand up to the original six, although some of those have led reluctant readers into the world of fantasy and science fiction. McCaffrey will be greatly missed.

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

Book Two. Title book of the "sequence." New children, rather new child - although there had to be quite a crowd of children because the child, Will Stanton, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This fact is not immediately apparent because, for one thing, Cooper never gets around to actually counting the offspring - and secondly because the first son of the seventh son died in infancy and is never mentioned in the family.

Is the eleventh birthday something significant in British folk whatever? It seems to come up regularly. Harry Potter, for example, is carried off from the dreadful Dursleys on his eleventh birthday. In this case, on his eleventh birthday (on Midwinter day) Will comes into his mythic inheritance. He is revealed as the last born of the Old Ones, some of whom, like Merriman Lyon (Gumerry of Book 1) have been around for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Will's coming of age launches an epic battle between good and evil - all of which takes place between the winter solstice and Old Christmas (January 6). Of course, a great deal of the action takes place outside time, so the usual constraints did not apply.

It was really pretty good. The fact that I have been reading epic fantasy for so many years is probably a handicap. This volume was even blurbed in comparison to Narnia and MiddleEarth - although the Tolkien connection escapes me. This owes far more to the tradition and mythology of the British Isles than Narnia does. I think that one of its problems is that it does not seem to be written to its apparent target audience. It is listed as "age 8 and up," but the writing and the themes are a bit beyond eight year olds of my acquaintance and even a stretch for most twelve year olds.

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

First volume of an apparently very well-known series of children's books. It is British and is vaguely reminiscent of the Narnia books. Three children, rather than four, removed from their usual setting to a mysterious old house in Cornwall. While exploring the house, they discover a map, not a doorway to another universe. The setting here is Arthurian legend rather than Christian allegory, and the Arthurian aspect is rather lightly addressed.

The children are much in the company of their odd, but beloved, Great Uncle Merry, also known as Gumerry (wasn't it a Shoes book by Noel Streatfield where the child or children had a Great Uncle Matthew known as Gum?). Gumerry sets them off on a quest to follow the treasure map (of course, it is a treasure map) to find an Arthurian artifact lost for 900 years. There are evil villains and rotten people and at the end we are left to wonder who Gumerry is really - a question which will doubtless be addressed in the remaining four books in the "sequence" (not series). A minor curiosity is that the series is known by the title of the second book, not the first.

It is quite well done, and I had never heard of it until I found all five volumes in a box of my younger daughter's books. The mystery left to me is why a look up of Susan Cooper referred me to Diana Wynne Jones, whose books aforementioned daughter did insist that I read.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

This time we have an imported murder victim, who totally deserves to be made dead, an excellent choice. No further inroads are made on the population of the village in this one. Actually, a villager and another person die in the course of things, but it could have been worse.

Again, we have causal madness and general grimness. We have a potentially fatal situation for Inspector Gamache and his faithful sidekick, Beauvoir. A new twist is that a double agent has been placed on Gamache's team to help destroy him - for some long past and somewhat incomprehensible sin against the Surete. This story line is left unresolved as a hook.

There is something odd about the way that Penny uses dogs in her stories. Unravelling that will probably require reading more of these books - and possibly reviewing a couple of things from the first books. It is interesting that immediately after an unnecessary discussion of how people put down their aging and infirm pets there is a conversation between the Superintendent in Montreal and his agent on Gamache's team. It was all vaguely reminiscent of the foreshadowing of the ending of Of Mice and Men in the scene where they shoot Candy's dog. Less subtle, but still suggestive.

Still Life by Louise Penny

A friend recommended these - at least I think she did. The author's name is different, but the town and its general location are the same. I will check with her next time I see her. From her description, I expected a quintessential "cozy" mystery; she kept telling me how "sweet" they were. I did not find this sweet, although it is set in a tiny village (ala Miss Marple). The tiny village is somewhere not very near Montreal, and if she bases an entire series of murders in this village, it will soon be a ghost town. I suppose fictional villages are flexible. They are close enough to Montreal that the detective sent out to investigate is a Chief Inspector of the Surete, not a little old lady with her knitting.

I enjoyed it - enough to read the next one (probably even before I go back to the cookie mysteries - definitely cozy). Maybe my friend didn't read this particular one. I went back and got the first one. She said something about deserving murder victims - and this one was definitely not deserving. We also had insanity, gratuitous cruelty, homophobia, and an incompetent police officer who is fired by the Inspector. There wasn't a great deal of action - but I did love the scene where the murderer has another victim tied up in the basement and two policemen (including the inspector) and her husband come to the rescue and fall down the stairs, which the murderer has rigged to explain the fatal "accident."

Death Before Compline by Sharan Newman

I had been thinking about rereading the early books in the Catharine DeVendeur series and when someone asked me about getting books for my Kindle, Newman's name came to mind. Most of the books in the series are not available for Kindle, but this one was available - it is a collection of short stories featuring the characters and setting of the series - and even includes recipes! In Newman's notes she makes a joke of the recipes, which were requested when the stories were commissioned for themed collections. She asks that the reader be aware that recipes were not common in the twelfth century - except for cleaning compounds and poisons, which she did not feel were exactly appropriate. So she came up with some recipes which she has tested in her own kitchen and which she feels are reasonably faithful to the methods and ingredients of the period.

The stories cover a wide time range - from Catharine's early period at the Paraclete to adulthood, and a couple of them feature her Jewish cousin, Solomon.

Good fun.

Postcards from No-Man's Land by Aidan Chambers

This was an easier read than I expected, to the point where I kept wondering if it was actually designed to be YA. So I checked out the Wiki on the author, and found that it is indeed written for Young Adults (read "teenagers").

I did expect (based on the title) a story about the war. It really isn't, although one of the story lines takes place during a specific allied action in the Netherlands, the war is never the focus of the story. The author describes some of the action and talks about the Year of Hunger which followed the Allied liberation of the country, but it seems somehow remote even from the direct narrative in the period.

It is fundamentally a romance. Two women love the same man, Sarah, the pregnant wife back home in England, the other, Geertrui, the Dutch girl who nurses him in hiding during the campaign. The author does have a problem - he has to get the man well enough to impregnate the Dutch girl - but he still has to kill him, because they can't both have him. As a character, the war-era Jacob is functionally voiceless. The two women are the characters. Sarah we know through her grandson, Jacob, who is sent to attend the anniversary memorial to the liberators of the Netherlands. Geertrui actually tells most of her own story in first person. I do think Jacob's heart attack was a bit cheesy, not to mention the opportune return of Geertrui's old boyfriend - and his willingness to marry her and raise her child as his own.

The writer seems to carefully raise "issues" to titilate the youthful reader, such as assisted suicide (legal in the Netherlands) and the relaxed attitude toward homosexuality there, particularly in Amsterdam, and for modern-era Jacob to deal with. He does steer clear of the legal prostitution. Although, actually, young Jacob never really deals with them - he is simply exposed to them.

To summarize, I found it somewhat unsatisfying - perhaps because it was quite predictable - or because it softened all the edges so much. I have to read a "grown-up" book or two next.

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

My day for Annes, I guess. Found this one in the same box as the previous one. This Anne, however, really is Anne McCaffrey.

Basic fairy tale: runaway princess meets runaway prince and they eventually fall in love all while incognito. The "gifts" are the fantasy twist in this one. The princess's gift is a green thumb, and she has run away because it is deemed unsuitable for a princess - oh, yes, and because she is about to be forced to marry a rotten old baron. The prince's gift is the ability to cast a "glamour" and cause people to see what he wants them to see, and he has run away because he has been beaten for refusing to use his gift to trick our very own runaway of the first part into marrying the evil baron.

I'm guessing the story is primarily a vehicle for the illustrator, whose work in this context I found disappointing. All pages had wide, drawn borders resembling woodcuts - and they were all the same and not particularly illustrative of the story. There were also a very few (three, I think) full page illustrations also in the woodcut mode, which were supposed to represent scenes from the story - and didn't. McCaffrey is one of the best at word images and it was unclear to me that the illustrator had read the story. Of course, without those page borders, the book barely would qualify as a short story.

Bailey's Window by Anne Lindbergh

Found in a box of books belonging to my younger daughter and held out of the repack because of the author's name. She is not Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose books I devoured when I was about the age that this book targets, she is her daughter. The target audience is late elementary or middle school.

It is fairly well done, the fantasy is clever and not too heavy duty. It reminds me of Half Magic by Edward Eager, which my sisters and I read and reread as children. These children don't ever really "figure out" the rules like the children in Half Magic and a couple of fairly heavy duty issues get dropped with no discussion. In addition, there is a scary character woven through the narrative, but there is no real development or resolution of his role. Still, not bad compared to the average run of stuff mass-produced for young readers.

The Liaden Novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

I know, I know - I've read these repeatedly, but I've had a cold and sometimes it is nice to read something familiar. Besides, note that I am posting the eight books as one. I had finally calmed down a little from the dismal mess that attempted to pass for something in this series, and it was a good time to revisit and remember that it all started out amazingly well.

Definition - when I say "the Liaden books" I am referring to Conflict of Honors, Agent of Change, Carpe Diem, Plan B, I Dare, Local Custom, Scout's Progress, Crystal Soldier, and Crystal Dragon. I did enjoy the Theo Waitley books, and The Mouse and the Dragon, but I am extremely wary of the "Adventures in the Liaden universe" books.

For some reason, this reading I was very much aware of the "set-ups" in the Crystal books. It is almost as if they went though and checked off everything in the earlier books - "and here is the beginning of the divergence of the Xtrang troop language" and such. It wasn't as annoying as the loose ends left for future stories in Ghost Ship.

Blueberry Muffin Murder by Joanne Fluke

Ok, three in a row is enough for a while. The pattern has been quite consistent, although in the first book, the secondary victim was discovered before the primary victim which led to some confusion.

So far, the primary murder victim is someone who totally deserves to be murdered, and the second murder is to help hide the murderer. At some point, so far at the point of discovery, Hannah is threatened by the murderer and narrowly escapes with her life. Many cookies are baked, but the titles of the books have nothing to do with the stories.

On the other hand, the characters are appealing and the treatment is amusing. Besides, the recipes look pretty good.

Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Stop fussing! So I have just read two in a row of the same genre by the same author. So what? I enjoyed the first one - I had to see if they held up.

This time the primary murder victim is the high school basketball coach, who totally deserves to be murdered, but not for the reason for which he is murdered. Follow that? He is an all-round nasty guy who beats his wife, but that doesn't get him killed. The secondary victim also deserves to die - not a nice lady.

Hannah's relationship with the police detectives is a little beyond the usual, the junior detective is her brother-in-law and the senior detective is her boyfriend. And anybody in their little Minnesota town will do anything for cookies. I suppose that if I wanted strictly plausible, I would be reading true crime instead of cozy mysteries.

A minor irritant - this really is picky - the titles have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the story. Hannah is a professional cookie maker, so of course she is baking cookies. The title recipe is by no means the only one in the book. They do sound good, I may have to sit down and transcribe them for actual use. For me transcription will be necessary because I have them on my Kindle and I like to see the entire recipe on one sheet when I cook.

Another thing to consider, in this book she kills the high school basketball coach, and the secondary murder victim in book one was a busted up former high school football hero. Does this point to some standing bias against high school athletics? Hard to say at this point, I guess I will have to read another.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Change of Pace!

This falls in the subgenre of mystery novels called Cozy Mysteries and into the subsubgenre featuring culinary settings rather than knitting or cats - although this one does have a resident feline. Aforementioned feline is named Moishe, which is somehow supposed to be after Moshe Dayan, because he has only one eye. I don't know enough Yiddish to know if Moishe is a diminutive for Moshe. Whatever - nobody but the cat is Jewish - and he doesn't keep kosher.

The story is set in Minnesota and the heroine is named Hannah Swenson. She has a bakery/coffee shop which specializes in cookies. The story reminded me very strongly of the Goldy Bear mysteries by Diane Mott Davidson. Goldy is a full-time caterer, and Hannah "caters" (beverages and cookies) many events in addition to running The Cookie Jar. Both are closely associated with the local police or sheriff's department. And both, after describing the food in mouth-watering detail, provide recipes. Herein lies one of the major differences: Hannah's recipes sound like ones I might actually try - perhaps because they are for cookies, or perhaps because they only call for a normal number of ingredients and far less arcane culinary knowledge.

Good fun, reasonably well-crafted mystery, and entertaining characters and plot line, plus the series suspense of wondering which of her two boyfriends (the balding but very funny dentist, or the totally gorgeous police detective) she will end up favoring.

First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher

And all the really bad guys got dead and all the good guys survived and they all lived happily ever after. Well, maybe. There is a major loose end left hanging - the Vord are still occupying the continent which was the home of the Canim - the aptly named dog/wolf people, and inevitably, they will someday want the rest of the world.

As for the strands running into this book from the previous one: my not exactly a prediction turned out to be correct - Aquataine's Vord-controlled wife, Invidia, does do him in in the end - making it unnecessary for Tavi/Octavian to do it. But they did NOT name the baby Nonus, I suppose because they are building a new Alera, based on Truth, Justice, and something or other and it was a good time to stop numbering the generations. Decius wouldn't be too bad, but Undecius - or, horrible thought - Duodecius?

In all fairness, I enjoyed this more than I usually do these monster series. (I finished it, didn't I?) Butcher held it together quite well, and the pattern wasn't too dreadfully obvious. You know - just when things are absolutely at their worst, they get even worse and Our Hero must save the day.

His nonhumans were quite creative, ranging from the merely different Marat, the quite likeable canim, the eerie Icemen, and the monstrously alien Vord. The Roman names and stuff went unexplained - at one point someone is reading a book on military strategy recognizeable as Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars. There is a hint at the Pern thing - the human civilization originated on another world but it is merely mentioned and dropped.

The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. It all came about rather oddly, I saw a phrase from "The Second Coming" and looked it up to refresh my memory. I ended up reading not only that poem, but a number of others and various commentaries and criticism - and ended up considering whether or not I might actually like Yeats rather than just a couple of isolated poems. So ---- I went to Amazon to see what they had for free. After examining quite a number of pages of works by Yeats that were either free or nearly so, I just went back to the top and ordered the first thing on the list.

After Eavan Boland and a blast of feminist criticism this summer, I suppose I expected this to be nationalistic and chauvinistic. On the other hand, maybe I have no idea what I was reading - or what I was hearing this summer.

This was low-key, nostalgic, and anecdotal. It was also a little wistful at the sense that even Ireland was joining the world of rationality and leaving faery behind. It was in no way an attempt to define and categorize the tales he heard, or to trace origins and antecedents. He simply told the stories as they were told to him. He also threw in a little verse here and there - if not stating outright, at least implying that it was traditional and not of his composing.

I'm a little concerned that those whose lifework is the study of literature would be happy to inform me that I have absolutely no understanding of the subtext, but, since they are unlikely to read this, I shall go on my merry way enjoying what I read - at my own undoubtably superficial level.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Interesting. Not a page to page absolute delight like Good Omens, but still an interesting premise with a quirky execution.

It seems that all the immigrant peoples to come to America (clear back to the folks who arrived via the Bering land bridge) brought their gods with them. As time passed, these became less and less the focus of their people's worship as social groups homogenized and new gods arose to supplant them. These new gods are representative of the ills and icons of American society. We enter the scene as the old gods are preparing for war with the new gods.

Shadow, the central character, has been released from prison a day ahead of schedule because of the death of his wife in an automobile accident. An unusual old man with a glass eye, who is called Wednesday, accosts him and offers him a job as his general dogsbody - and since he has nothing else to do. Shadow eventually accepts.

My friend and my daughter agree that Shadow is too passive. I see their point, but I think there is more to it. He just floats along and does as he is told for most of the story, but something like this requires an observer, and Shadow is a perfect observer. He is placed to see everything, intelligent enough to understand much of what he sees, and passes the rest on to the reader.

And I love the part about having Thoth, Anubis, and Bast run a mortuary and funeral parlor.

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno, MD

A friend recommended this to me many years ago. Somewhere in this house there is an actual paper copy. Suddenly about a week ago it occurred to me that the choir concert is coming up in just a couple of weeks - and I can't stand for much as five minutes without that deep pain in my back on the right side just below my waist. Sunday mornings with the doxology followed by a hymn followed by the choir special were a case in point. I can't afford a chiropractor, and one worth the money wouldn't guarantee to "fix" me in two weeks. Sufficient pain-killers to do the job would leave me in a stupor. So I decided to read the book - EC told me that she had not had back trouble since reading it.

The premise is that back pain is generally caused by repressed motion, particularly anger and can be cured by recognizing that.

Dr. Sarno is very gentle with his colleagues. He discusses institutionalized blindness, and a long history of traditional medicine. He even alludes to the risks incumbent upon challenging conventional wisdom.

He does not point out that palliative care is forever. If an individual is cured of a long-standing complaint, he goes away - and takes his money with him. He does hint that pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in extended drug treatments, but never suggests that members of the medical profession could share that view of treatment.

He also forbears to point out that many patients are unwilling to take any responsibility for their treatment beyond taking a pill. There is a
pervasive believe in the "magic bullet" - the drug that will fix everything. There is also the Munchausen contingent of the population which craves ever more expensive and exotic treatments for the sympathy which is lavished upon them. These patients do not want a simple, inexpensive, total cure.

As for me, I wish I had read it when she told me about it. Maybe I could have spent the last ten or fifteen years without the pain. I made a joke of it to Anne and told her that I was going to fix my back by the "think system" as in Music Man. It does sound like it. But it has been said, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." And the truth is that there is nothing really wrong with my back - if there were, I would have had worse problems years ago. Early episodes of back pain many years ago can all be associated with visits from my husband's parents. It doesn't take a lot of insight to realize that I have been repressing a lot of anger for the last ten years at least. The beauty of this is that you don't have to "cure" the anger - you just have to recognize the fact that it exists and that your brain has hidden it by giving you some pain to worry about. I don't know that I can think myself well by the concert - but I really do think it can be done. Last Thursday, I wandered all over campus without any problems at all, until I headed over to the police station to get a parking sticker, knowing all the while that my driver's license is expired - has been for two years. I hobbled in and they gave me a parking sticker without even asking to see my license. -- And I walked back to my office without a twinge in my back.

Theirs Not to Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson

Honest, stand-up space opera. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It would be a standard Marines in space number except for the fact that the heroine is a precog - this only one of a number of special talents. She uses her varied gifts to get herself and her unit through all sorts of extremely awkward situations.

In the course of book one of the series, we see her through basic training after her enlistment on her eighteenth birthday to a field commission and awards for valor granted by the hand of the (nearest analog) vice-president of the government of earth (picture the final scene of the original Star Wars film). She is probably about twenty at that point.

In her spare time, she writes letters to people to make sure that they are in the right place at the right time to protect the future of the entire galaxy. Oh yes, and it seems that she may not be entirely human, sort of.

Apparently, the next book is not yet out, although there is a long excerpt at the end of book one - is a book really out if it is not yet available at Amazon? If a tree falls ...

The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel

Ok, not great - however, it is the first in the series and one can hope that she improves with practice.

It is an unusual detective team - an Irish Catholic Priest and a "Janet Peet" character, an Arapaho woman who has been away, become a lawyer, and returned to the tribe. It is clear that the priest "admires" the woman a bit more than is strictly appropriate given his chosen profession.

The basic story is pretty solid, although the title seems to be only minimally related - something which I always find annoying. Another problem is that several times she leaves glaring pointers which she then drops. I found myself continually irritated by a couple of verbal mannerisms - maybe I should call them bad habits. The story is set on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming. For the most part, life on the rez sounds a lot like life on the rez in a Hillerman novel. We all know how people dress out here. So why, for crying out loud, does she never simply refer to someone's hat as a hat - it is always his "cowboy hat." I don't know of anyone who calls a cowboy's hat a cowboy hat except possibly six-year-olds in the Northeast. But it is always a "cowboy hat": "He pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead." "He grabbed his cowboy hat as he ran from the house." Sounds silly. Slightly more subtle perhaps - she never simply refers to a character (even one we have met fifty times) by name, it is always "the Arapaho man or women or boy or whatever".

One can hope that these flaws will be overcome in further works - after all there are ten or twelve of these now. I will read another - because a friend recommended them, not for their compelling narrative and insight into a modern Native American society.

Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

This is a good, solid series and I'm still enjoying it - but I am finding that now toward the end of it, I need something else in between. There is just so much fighting. It makes me tired. I still like the characters and they have held true to character which is a big bonus. I hope that in Book 6 they get their well deserved rewards.

The overall plot of the series has been no secret for several volumes now - actually, that is good, too. It shows that this is a mmvfs not an indefinite series with the same characters. This is the first one that left a clear cliff-hanger, though. Maybe it isn't exactly a cliff-hanger - maybe it is more like a preview of coming attractions in case you were so tired of fighting the Vord that you were considering quitting. Gaius Sextus is dead and Aquaintaine has seized control, but we have been clearly informed that Tavi is the chosen one. So we know that whatever else happens, Tavi will be the First Lord - which, I suppose, means that his and Kitai's first-born will be named Nonus or some such. And, mind you, I never make predictions, but I think it would be fitting if Aquaitaine's Borgified, excuse me, I mean Vordified wife Invidia makes a final showing to do him in herself.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

I hope I don't run into another book like this too soon. There are things I need to get done - and since I started this book I have done very little besides read it. I liked The Historian, but this one kept me reading long past when I should have been grading papers or some such thing. Maybe it is the romance, maybe it is the mystery, maybe it was the immersion in the minds and work of painters.

Maybe it was the possibility of some sort of time/space thing. Given my lifetime of reading science fiction and fantasy, I kept expecting something like that. I had figured out the basics of the plot long before the end, but I kept looking for a Jack Finney conclusion. Kostova brings it to a totally satisfying and rational conclusion. In spite of my expectations I enjoyed it completely.

The two time tracks are beautifully woven together. The switches between the two are clean and logical. Discovery in each track leads to the events in the other.

Kostova uses a couple of devices here that are not my favorites but she does it very effectively. I'm not a big fan of the new narrator for every chapter thing. All that voicing is difficult to do effectively, and I think it disrupts the narrative line unnecessarily. Here, Kostova allows us to hear each of the women in Robert Oliver's life in her own voice: the wife, the mistress, and the obsession. And one of those is only accessible through a packet of letters - the epistolary form which also is not my favorite. She makes it work.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Now that was fun - a parody of the apocalypse. It seems that the demons charged with delivering the antichrist to the family which was to raise him mislaid the infant. A perfectly ordinary child goes to that family and the antichrist goes to a perfectly ordinary family - and it is recommended that we refrain from wondering what happened to the extra baby.

I believe it includes every required element of the end times - including the four horsemen (mounted on motorcycles) and the antichrist's personal hellhound (morphed into a nondescript mongrel called "Dog") and a book of prophecy and all the rest.

The story in the endnotes about the writing of the book is almost as much fun as the story itself. I do intend to read the work of Gaiman himself; Coraline was just a teaser.

On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Change of pace. I found this on the give-away table in the hall upstairs. Somehow when I see a book that I loved lying in such a place, I just have to take it. (Explains my three copies of Mistress Masham's Repose). I really didn't intend to sit down and read it, but it was the old edition with the Garth Williams illustrations, so I flipped through it. Next thing I knew I had read from the middle to the end - so it seemed only logical to go back to the beginning and read up to where I began.

I've always been charmed by the way that Laura grows up in the series - not just the character, but the vocabulary and sentence structure and general tone of the stories. In this one she goes from seven to eight with Mary a year ahead and Carrie a toddler. Before Baby Grace, and before Mary becomes blind.

I'm glad I still like them.

Quietly in Their Sleep by Donna Leon

Somehow this one seemed a little more intense than previous ones. While Leon's stories tend to be rather dark, this one went beyond - or maybe it was just the subject matter. There are two story lines both involving corruption and abuse of position/power in the church.

In one, a priest who abuses little girls - and happens to be Brunetti's daughter Chiara's religion teacher - is found out and through family connections is appropriately dealt with. The other involves murder and madness and money and the Opus Dei and the bad guys totally get away with it.

In a departure, Brunetti is injured rather seriously by a crazy woman with a large knife. His recovery is complicated by a severe infection in the cut which is apparently the result of mishandling in the ER at the most charitable, and there are hints that the aforementioned bad guys arranged the malpractice with the intention of killing him since the crazy woman didn't finish him.

And after all that discription: the title actually works. It starts out with a report of a number of nursing home patients who died "quietly in their sleep" although they were at no immediate risk of death.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

One of the developmental English teachers is using this for the novel for her class so, since I have been impressed by her intelligence and judgment, I decided to read it.

I absolutely loved it. Coraline reminded me somewhat of Isobel ("Isobel, Isobel didn't worry; Isobel didn't fret nor flurry. She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, then Isobel calmly ate the bear up.") It could be very dark and quite frightening, but Coraline is a very brave and practical child and proceeds in spite of the general creepiness. Gaiman uses the juxtaposition of normality and "the other" to excellent effect.

Coraline is the centerpiece, though. "On the first day Coraline's family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly." That tells you what you need to know about Coraline.

Still, while it is totally charming, I can't help wondering if the whimsy will be lost on reluctant readers.

Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

Book Four of the Codex Alera. More fighting, more intrigue. Tavi finally announces himself as Gaius Octavian son of Septimus, etc. More crises, more of everything. This one spent a good bit of the end blatantly setting up the next book. I find that I didn't resent that as much as I have with some others. In large part, I think, because the characters are so satisfying. And, too, although the story has become fragmented, the individual story lines are still satisfying and their joint focus is always apparent. AND they actually tie together at the end, even though two more books are coming.

Character development is always an issue in a mmvfs*. I am cautiously optimistic about this one - oh, hell, four volumes in is too late for caution. I am optimistic about this one. The qualities that made Tavi an interesting character as a young boy in book one - his stubbornness, his innate sense of right and wrong, his refusal to accept limitations - persist in the young adult Octavian. He is still all of that, but with maturity and perception of necessity. As a boy, he runs off to fetch home the sheep that he neglected when he chose instead to get flowers that a girl asked him for. The result is that Bernard, his uncle, is gravely injured and Tavi himself is nearly killed in the storm which follows. Octavian, as Captain of a legion, mourns every man that he puts in harms way, but bows to the necessity - and leads them.

Even the side characters grow. One of the more interesting is Marcus/Fidelias. He is Amara's master in Cursor training and betrays her and the First Lord to the Aquitaines. He appears then as Aquitaine's chief spy and assassin. And in this book and the previous one as the First Spear (appears to be the senior noncom) in the First Aleran Legion of which Tavi becomes the Captain. He, of course, was put in place by the Aquitaines to assassinate Tavi if he seems likely to become a threat to their plans. However, the back story on Fidelias is that he betrayed Sextus, the First Lord (read King), because he believed quite honestly that he had become a danger to the realm. Serving in Tavi's legion convinces him that Tavi is the future and when he is in place to kill Tavi, he kills instead both the senator who is a tool of Aquitaine and Lady Aquitaine herself. Except that she wasn't as dead as all that, but that is part of the set up for the next book.

*massive multi-volume fantasy series

Cursor's Fury by Jim Butcher

More gore, more war - but at least now we definitely know that Tavi is really Gaius Octavian, son of Septimus, son of Sextus, son of Quintus, I suppose. I had been pretty sure of that since book one, but they hadn't given out enough details to figure out how he came to be an apprentice shepherd at a rural hold.

With a little more info on their military system, all becomes clear. It seems that (now in book three it can be told) they have a universal draft, not just men. Women fulfill their obligation by working as domestics for the legions. So that is how Isana and her sister came to be on the scene. Septimus, of course, falls for Isana and actually marries her - what? you mean you hadn't figured out that Tavi is Isana's son, not her nephew?

Anyway, in the final passages of that war, Septimus sends his BFF (and the greatest swordsman the world has ever known) Araris Valerian off to guard the pregnant Isana and her sister. In their flight, the sister is killed, Tavi is born, and Araris turns himself into the half-wit slave Fade to stay at hand to guard Isana and Tavi.

All that, however, is ancient history. In this story, Tavi sort of accidentally becomes the commanding officer of a rookie legion and leads them to victory against the Canem (sure am glad I know some Latin). The Canem are big, vicious dog critters who are in league with the evil villain who wants to take the throne from Gaius Sextus. Well, one of the evil villains who wants to take the throne from Gaius Sextus. But it turns out that they were actually leaving their homeland, lock, stock, wives and puppies, because of some nameless threat.

So, book four is set up and ready to go.

Wench: A Novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

After the discussion at today's luncheon, I debated about whether or not to force myself through the rest of this. It isn't that it is not well written, it is just so damned depressing. And don't let anyone kid you - it is nothing like The Help. I gather that it is being promoted with "If you liked The Help, you'll love ... Lies, all lies. When the most voracious reader of our entire group announced that she had quit halfway through and had no intention of finishing it, I seriously considered just putting it aside. But another spoke up and pointed out an aspect of it that I had not quite considered. The plight of the slaves, both men and women, is the centerpiece, but the lives of the white women were appalling in their own way. For example, the "wench" who is the central character is installed by her master in the bedroom directly opposite his wife's - in the house that had belonged to his wife's family.

I kept on picking it up again, hoping that something would happen - but nothing ever does. Maybe that is the writer's point, but the thing is set ten years before The Emancipation Proclamation - so, in the historical context, you know something is coming, but you have no sense that it will come in time for any of the characters in the story.

I did finish it, reading very quickly! I suppose that it is well-researched and so on, there were definitely aspects of slavery as practiced in the United States that I was completely unaware of, but I'm not sure it was necessary for me to read this.

Well, when it is my turn to pick - the book I have in mind is not exactly a fun read either.

Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher

Book 2 in the Codex Alera - which goes on (at this point) for six volumes - large volumes. That may be it, although Dresden has certainly gone on longer than that. Of course, as I pointed out in the post for the first book, Dresden is Urban Fantasy and Alera is High Fantasy. The clue that book six may be the end is that the title is First Lord's Fury, which implies that our hero eventually gets promoted to that level and the First Lord is the top dog in Alera, and since, based on the title of the book actually under discussion, the title reflects Tavi's status. In book one he is merely the handicapped orphan nephew of a steadholder and his sister and in book two he has achieved his heart's desire which is to attend the academy making him an academ - Aleran for student.

Perhaps some discussion of the magic of Alera is in order. Furies are elemental spirits which attach themselves to humans. Those who attach a water fury are healers and empaths, those with earth furies are builders and control growing things, those with air furies can fly and call on them for enhanced vision, those with fire furies are metalworkers, and so on. These are only the basic implications; it is a fairly involved system. One of the fundamentals is that strong furies tend to attach themselves to strong competent individuals, hence an inherent heirarchy.

Personally, I believe that Butcher calls these entities "furies" because it allows him to indulge his penchant for puns and irony. All of the Dresden titles are word plays, here all of his Alera titles can be read at face value or in knowledge of the local meaning of "fury." The irony arises because our hero, Tavi, who is clearly intelligent and resourceful, has no furies. Therefore, in the Aleran context he is handicapped. There are clear indications that there is more to Tavi than meets the eye, but nothing that has been explicitly defined as yet.

I actually finished this several days ago. I don't know why I didn't write it up. Lack of time, maybe? And I have the distinct impression that I read something else between these two. Maybe I just started a couple and ended up getting hooked on this. I was reading a Wilkie Collins - and a book by Daniel Pink - but I guess I didn't finish either one of them. Guess I'd better before I read book three - of course, I have already started the next book club book. Oh, well.

Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher

Certainly a departure from the Harry Dresden books. Dresden falls into the "urban fantasy" genre, I suppose - a wizard whose base of operations is Chicago. This is high fantasy, with a twist.

I'm not sure it is exactly "a" twist. Every fantasy convention is turned just a few degrees off standard settings. For example, furies are entities associated with the four classic elements - air, earth, fire, and water - but they can also act as familiars for certain individuals. In fact, everyone "has" a fury - except one boy, Tavi.

Tavi takes the Frodo role - of the helpless, hapless hero, or maybe he is more like Garion, who turns out to be the high king or some such thing, raised in ignorance for his protection. There are definitely hints that he is much more than he seems. It was a little obvious at the end to have him blow off the awards ceremony with the First Lord to go fetch home his sheep.

I read this several years ago - and didn't remember enough to read book two - I think there are six books in the stack. I don't think I can go on immediately - there was so much action that I am really tired. Maybe I'll go back to one or another of the mystery series that I have been rereading - while I debate whether or not to go ahead and buy the Kindle versions - they would be so much easier to read.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

I've reread this more recently than I had A Girl of the Limberlost. I was already doing quite a bit of reading on my computer desktop rather than on paper and downloaded almost all of the Anne books from Gutenberg just a couple of years ago. I had to order the last few on paper - those were the ones that I had never read before - on into the life and times of Anne and Gilbert's children.

I don't think Mother read these. I can't imagine why not, but I don't remember that she ever recommended them. My siblings may correct me at will - not that they need permission.

Anne is a quirky and engaging character. If the whole tone is a bit sentimental - consider the period. Anne gets into as much trouble as could be expected of any male character, but she is all girl - the hair dye episode is priceless - and flavoring the cake with liniment - and scaring herself silly with imagined ghosts - and taking a dare and falling off the roof - and on and on.

This is just a very satisfying read. I suppose there is also the comfort of familiarity, and now I have to decide whether or not to keep on going through all of them again.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

I never forgot that this was a terrific book - but I didn't actually remember much about it. Maybe the morals are a little pointed, but in a book aimed at young people that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I remembered vaguely that the overt rite of passage is the Trial - the children of the ship are dropped on a planet to survive for 30 days. I also remembered that it turned out very badly for the group of which Mia, our heroine, is a part.

That much reminds me of one of the Heinlein juvies - Tunnel in the Sky, maybe? At any rate, the final exam for their survival course is being dropped (via some transmat device) on a primitive world to survive. Turns out that the world is much nastier than anticipated - and some cosmic something or other disrupts the gate and they can't get them back. In this book, the world is colonized by humans and they are the major nasties, but there are also good guys and Mia must revise her prejudices.

Much more of the story takes place in the ship society than during Mia's trial, but the scenarios of bias and self-determination play out in a number of ways leading up to the Trial - and afterwards in the decision of the population of the ship with regard to the planet. Mia must deal with the fact that her adored father, while a truly good man, can be devastatingly wrong.

I am considering the suggestion that I use it as the novel for my English class. It would certainly be on the list of suggested reading if I ever got to teach SF.

The Long Walk by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

Interesting. Similar to The Running Man in some respects. Not so much the game show, or reality TV, feeling - in fact there is only casual mention of local media coming out to get some footage. One hundred boys are selected from the pool of applicants to participate and they start in northern Maine and walk to death. They must walk at a rate no less than four miles per hour and they do not stop until only one of them is still alive. If they slow down, they get three warnings and if they are not back on the pace in 30 seconds they are shot by the monitoring soldiers. No rest breaks, no sleep breaks, no potty breaks, no meal breaks. They are supplied with food and water to consume as they walk. I assume that King did the research on the physiological effects of such a thing; the effects he describes are pretty gruesome.

A little predictable - the narrator is one of the participants - so, since everyone but the winner is dead at the end, it is a fair bet that he is going to win. I suppose that King could have done an All Quiet on the Western Front number, but that doesn't really seem to be his style.

The setting is not so unregenerately distopic as The Running Man, but there are hints. The hero's father is not in the picture because he was "squaded" after speaking too freely against the government in action reminescent of the stories we have heard of the death squads in some parts of the world. In general, it seems very much like America in the fifties, while June Cleaver reigned and everyone went around trying to believe that everything was "jes' fine," to quote Grundoon (sp?) a well-known political figure of the time. Except, of course, for the fact that they selected 100 of thousands of volunteers and killed them one by one.

On a different, but related subject: I love my Kindle!!!!

Ghost Ship by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

I'm sorry. I have enjoyed this series very much - I have reread all of them several times, and I suppose that I will read future books as well, but I will resent it. There will be more Liaden books - I can't think of anything I have ever read which left more and more blatant openings for future stories. I don't think any of the multitude of story lines was definitively resolved. Consider the pot boiling.

Hangman by Faye Kellerman

So the serial killer and his girlfriend hang the girl and do their best to pin it on an innocent bystander who turns out to be a serial killer in his own right. In addition, a friend of Decker's has gone missing and he suspects the psychotic husband, who runs a string of casinos and brothels and is a contract assassin. The friend has dumped her teenage son who is a general all-round genius and piano virtuoso, on the Deckers. Along about that point it starts to get complicated.

Good storytelling, great characters, I believe that the Kellerman dumps the kid there to give Decker some home interaction and his own kids are pretty well grown and out of trouble. I have missed several of these, but I seem to remember that family interactions are the method Kellerman uses to illuminate Decker's character and she has worked his family out of its troubled youth making it necessary to put one in.

She does a really good job of leading the reader to a conclusion then taking a spin in a totally different direction, keeps it interesting.

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter

I know I wrote this up back early in the week when I finished it. Must have been Tuesday - after Body Work and before The Running Man. I remember distinctly because I included a couple of links - I guess I must have been more tired than I thought and forgot to push the "publish post" button after I previewed it. Trust me on the timing, it did NOT take me six days to read The Running Man! If it had, I would never consider it for a developmental English novel.

So, about A Girl of the Limberlost, it was one of my mother's favorite books when she was a girl and she encouraged all of us to read it - and a pack of others by Porter. I did read it, I can't answer for my sisters, but that was many and many a year ago. I quite enjoyed it this time, too, although I don't think I read and reread it as Mother did.

The girl, Elnora, lives on the edge of the Limberlost, which is a real swamp (or was) somewhere in Indiana. She was a country girl and caught and mounted moths to pay her way through high school. The author was a naturalist and the natural history included is quite authentic. In the book, Elnora desperately needs a particular moth, an imperialis, to complete a collection which would finance her first year in college. This moth is so beautiful that in the story a ball gown is made with the moth as inspiration.

There is a lot of discussion of the particularly beautiful large moths, which include the luna moth (which haunts those sleep-aid commercials). We used to see lunas around the trailer we worked in down at the tox lab in central Arkansas. There was another very large moth that we saw as well, and I wondered if that was perhaps it was the imperialis. Naturally, I opened a browser window and googled images for "moth imperialis." As I expected, there were any number of pictures of the moth (not the one we used to see). What I did not expect was a picture of a ball gown. It wasn't the gown from the story, which I don't suppose was ever actually made, this one was based on the luna moth - but there was a reference to the story. The designer explained her reasons for choosing the luna for her inspiration rather that the imperialis as in A Girl of the Limberlost. So (maybe this is why I forgot to publish my post) I spent some time poking around her website. It is fascinating; she is a textile and costume historian and does meticulous reproductions of historical costumes as well as original design work. In case anyone is interested, her URL is http://thedreamstress.com/. If you want to see the luna gown: http://thedreamstress.com/category/costume/luna-moth-gown/.

And besides all that, I did enjoy the book very much. It is definitely old fashioned and perhaps a little too sweet sometimes, but it isn't as ponderous a read as much of the literature of the period. And they all lived happily ever after - and sometimes that is really very nice.

The Running Man by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

I said that next I was going to read something different, something not my usual fare, something I had never read before. I think this qualifies. Some time ago, at a student's insistence, I read a novel by Stephen King. It left me uneasy for months. I concluded that King's gift is that he brings horror so close to the mundane that you can't help wondering, just a little bit ...

If I understand correctly, the Bachman books are early works that King published after he was a successful author. That makes sense with what I saw here. It is distopic, and horrific - but not in the way that his more usual books are horror. The events and their world are hideous and dreadful, but not supernatural or perverse.

A colleague wants me to use it as the novel for my English class next semester. I had been thinking of The Hunger Games - and this is in some respects similar. I think it is unfortunate that King used year references in the story - because he wrote it a long time ago and the dates are all in the second half of the twentieth century. I've read enough SF and such that it doesn't bother me, but I'm not sure if kids would cope as well, especially ones who are not particularly strong readers.

It would be fun to let students chose between the two - I can imagine some interesting discussions.

Body Work by Sara Paretsky

V.I. Warshawsky hasn't lost a step since the last one that I read. I guess I am going to have to go back and pick up what I've missed - add those to the list.

In this one, she gets involved quite without deliberate intention in a murder which turns out to be related to another murder and for which an Iraq vet with PTSD is framed. Along the way we draw in a defense contractor, a loan shark/drug kingpin, and a woman whose club act consists of having people paint on her. Oh, and did I forget the woman who plays heavy metal on authentic renaissance period instruments - and V.I.'s cousin Petra?

Lots of characters, lots of Warshawsky-scale action - it kept me turning pages. I have read other books by other writers with fewer characters and a more straight-forward plot which were much more difficult to follow. I am amazed and delighted by the way that Paretsky keeps all the balls in the air without causing me to lose sight of where they all are at any given point in time. Not to mention the way that her descriptions of Chicago in winter make me so very thankful that I no longer live anywhere near there.

A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly

Another reread, but what a good one. There are any number of mysteries placed in historical settings, from ancient Rome to medieval England to rennaisance France and even into imaginary futures (e.g. Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov), but this series is set in New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century. Americans are moving into the city and the long-standing Creole culture is beginning to crumble from the weight of its own assumptions. The detective in the series is a musician and surgeon - and colored, not black - black implies full African descent, and colored that the individual in question has some white blood.

Benjamin January, the son of one of New Orleans' placees, the mixed blood mistresses of the traditional Creoles, has returned to New Orleans after a number of years in Paris where he studied and practiced medicine, to find the city greatly changed by the shifting power structure. He finds himself the most convenient suspect in the murder of one of the demimonde and must solve the mystery to save his own life as well as a former piano student of his.

Summer School or Why did I think this was such a great idea?

Okay - I promised myself that I would total up pages after I got my research paper turned in, so here goes -
Human Learning by Dr. Jeanne Ormrod - 534
Object Lessons by Eavan Boland - 254
Outside History by Eavan Boland - 152
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - 258
Shirley by Charlotte Bronte - 608
some of Collected Poems of H.D. - ~80
about half of Uneven Developments - by Mary Poovey 250
Minimum of 8 research sources - 200
total - 2336
Pages written ~40
Two class presentations

Busy four weeks.

Okay, maybe that isn't so much compared to some of the previous months' totals, but if we are going to make that sort of comparison then there needs to be some sort of "page equivalence" factor. A page of Human Learning has at least as many words as four pages of your average murder mystery - and I read the book twice, once before the class began and again on the assignment schedule. That edition of Wuthering Heights only ran 258 pages for the story, but I figure them at about 2 paperback pages each, I've seen Wuthers in fairly normal looking paperbacks, but the print is really small. Throw that into the sum and we're looking at about 5000 pages.

I "reviewed" Wuthering Heights and Shirley when I read them a couple of months ago.

The ed psych book was actually quite entertaining for something of that sort. I might actually send the woman a birthday card. Lots of very real examples which are easy to remember.

Eavan Boland is going on my bedside table permanently - amazing stuff.

I am now looking forward to about six weeks of reading nothing but escapist fiction. I've already started and should finish that one tomorrow. Except, of course, for reading a stack of possible novels for the Developmental English class which I will be teaching this fall. Should be fun after four years of nothing but math.

Pilgrimage by Zenna Henderson

I actually finished this a couple of days ago, but this server was acting up and I couldn't get it posted. Try, try again. I really didn't exactly take the month of June off, no tropical beaches or rustic cabins in the mountains far, far from the madding internet, just summer school. Just summer school - right. Once I get the last "bit" (a 20 page research paper) done, I'll total up the pages I read during the month of June - the total is truly staggering.

This book was my "just a few pages to keep my sanity" reading. I hadn't reread it in years. It is still as magical as it was when I was a kid and read the individual stories in my dad's back issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. They were mostly printed during the fifties, back in the days when Isaac Asimov was writing snarky footnotes to the "kindly editor" which were printed with responses to the "gentle reader" and every couple of issues had an extremely shaggy dog story featuring the inimitable Ferdinand Feghoot (I believe Asimov was the perpetrator of these as well).

The first of "the people " stories I read was "Gilead," the second in the chronology. Every time I reread it I was in tears for Peter and Bethie. In actual fact, I think the stories stood so well on their own that I would have preferred to see them presented as simply a collection rather than this loose novelization, a la I, Robot. Of course, I do know that short story collections by lesser known (NOT lesser) writers do not sell well. At least, like the Asimov, they didn't mess with the stories at all, just constructed a multi-windowed frame to contain them.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Not my usual sort of thing, but very interesting.

The basic premise of much of our society is that the expectation in a decision situation, be it economic/financial, political, or dietary, is that we rational human beings will behave in a rational manner, considering the options and making a "best" decision based on the available data. Apparently, this is not at all the case. Whether the decision in question involves purchasing a car or a breakfast cereal, choosing a dog or a doughnut, or whether or not to cheat on our taxes, we are led to irrational choices by irrelevant factors. In addition, this irrationality is measurable and predictable.

I found particularly interesting the section on cheating. In one test, they had the participants do a recall exercise before the actual experiment. One group was asked to recall ten books that they read in high school. The other was asked to list as many of the ten commandments as they could remember. They used a control group which had no opportunity to cheat to establish a baseline for scores on the test. The book list group cheated, the ten commandments group did not.

In the US, members of a group ordering in a restaurant are likely to order something they don't particularly want if someone in the group has already ordered what they really wanted. In China the situation is reversed. Americans want to be thought unique. Chinese want to be thought respectful.

Interesting stuff. By the way, Ariely suggests that we decide what we want to eat in advance and if possible order first - or at least announce our intentions to the group before ordering.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

Someone at book club mentioned this title. It is a twist on the multigeneraltional family saga.

The precipitating event is the arrival of an unattended four-year-old girl on the dock at Maryborough, Queensland in 1913. She doesn't know who she is, and the harbormaster takes her home and he and his wife raise her as their own.

The story ranges from the story of that child as an adult trying to solve the mystery of her life, the events of the previous generation which brought her to Australia, and the story of her granddaughter who returns and puts all the pieces together.

The narrative follows three women, Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra, skipping Lesley, Cassandra's mother and taking an occasional look back at Georgianna, Eliza's mother. Also tucked in are a few allegorical fairy tales written by Eliza. Each of the stories is told in chronological order, but the time slips freely among them. Surprisingly, the switches are not difficult to follow. When a part of one of the stories needs to be told Morton does it. She lets us see the parallels without beating us over the head with them.

Her one descent into literary "cuteness" is the inclusion of Frances Hodgson Burnett in a cameo role. I suspect that was a clue to the reader that she knew she was borrowing some plot elements from The Secret Garden.

Arrow's Flight by Mercedes Lackey

Finished them all. Next time I reread them, I will just keep it a secret and we can just assume that I was too busy to read anything for a couple of days.

I know that there are more Valdemar books, but I haven't ever gotten around to reading them. I remember reading Katharine Kurtz's Deryni books and after I had read the prequels and the sequels I never really cared to go back to the original three which I liked very much and had read several times. On the other hand, maybe reading the rest of them would cure me of these. Of course, then I would have to find something else to go back to when I wanted some "comfort reading" - yes, from the same general idea as comfort food. At this moment, I'm tired and depressed from just the thought of the next four weeks. And one of the two courses I am committed to I actually expect to thoroughly enjoy - if keeping up with the other doesn't take all the fun out of it.

Arrow's Flight by Mercedes Lackey

I suppose that we all knew that once I started the reread I would reread all three, didn't we? I've read this enough times that I feel no deep compulsion to comment on it at great length. That number says more about the book than anything I could add. It may not be one of THE books for everyone, but it is for me.

Death and Judgment by Donna Leon

I had not read this one before (there are two copies on the shelf, though). I don't know why - obviously I intended to, but somehow never got around to it. This is one of the dark ones, not that any of them are exactly cheerful, but this is one where the bad guys don't get what's coming to them. And these are very, very bad guys. It's about white slavery and snuff films and people who operate above the law. And we are left at the end with the sure and certain knowledge that everything will be back to business as usual even before Brunetti manages to get home from the Questura.

I have every intention of reading something else before going on with these, even though they are somewhat addictive. I have the book club book. And I have several that have been recommended to me that are sitting in my queue. Besides, the summer session starts a week from today - so much for personal reading.

Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey

I know -- this is just on the top end of YA and I have read it more times than I can remember. In spite of all that, it remains one of the books that I return to when I am tired or depressed. I always think that I will just read my favorite parts - like Talia's meeting with Rolan and subsequent trip to the capital - and then get back to something else, but it never seems to work that way. I've read it all the way through - again - and will go look for the second book before I go to bed tonight. That's okay. I have another Donna Leon book begun, and it is one that I haven't read before! And I'm reading the new book club book - Predictably Irrational. But with two classes on the schedule for June, I probably won't be doing much reading for its own sake for a while.

Dressed for Death by Donna Leon

I am reading two other books, and have several informative texts in the queue as well, but I'm not sure I want to post the text for the class I am going to take starting on the sixth. I have almost finished reading it. And the books for the lit class I will definitely post; in fact, two of them are already posted - the two Bronte books.

I will probably reread another one of these before the summer session begins, though, because I am enjoying them very much.

Again, Brunetti is forced out of his beloved Venice to investigate a crime - this time in Mestre. At least the initial crime takes place in Mestre. Mestre is the industrial city that is on the mainland opposite Venice, La Serenissima, in the lagoon. It is also set in the season of the year when the entire population of Italy (including Brunetti's family) seems to decamp for cooler climates - and the entire population of Germany seems to settle on the beaches of the Adriatic. Perhaps having lived in a desert climate as long as I have and in addition having spent eight years in the deep south, August in northern Italy never seemed that desperately hot to me - but then I have heard that people in England die of heat stroke when the temperature goes over 80, so maybe the horror of the heat isn't as exaggerated as it seems.

Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

It is going to be slow going here for a while. I am trying to get through the basic textbooks for the courses I am taking this summer - and even just underlining or highlighting slows me down quite a bit. Interesting stuff though.

This was another reread. A new book of hers came up somewhere or other and I decided to go back and read some of the earlier ones. I love reading about Venice and these are very well researched. This particular one involves soldiers from the American army post Caserma Ederle in Vicenza. It is actually a NATO installation, but it was fun reading because Commissario Brunetti must go to Vicenza and the main area of interest to him is the base hospital. Leon describes it quite accurately - and I would know, having spent over a month there waiting for daughter two to be born. We lived a little over two hours away at Aviano Air Base - which is also mentioned in the story.

Venice is the most amazing place and Leon conveys that through her detective Brunetti who was born and raised there. I find it charming that he is aware of his attachment to the city and almost seems to feel sorry for anyone who isn't a Venetian. "It would have been easy for Brunetti to grow indifferent to the beauty of the city, to walk in the midst of it, looking and not really seeing. But then it always happened: a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his heart tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty." For five years I visited Venice any time I had an opportunity to do so, and never failed to see things that I had never seen before. I am guessing that Leon felt the same, and I like it that she made her native Venetian cop feel that as well.

Incidentally, the mystery itself is well crafted and the bad guy gets taken care of in the end. However, the crime which leads to the murders in this story exists at a level that is beyond the scope of any one police officer to deal with - even with connections in publishing and the aristocracy. Definitely not a "and they all lived happily ever after" finish.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Read this several years ago, I think it was recommended by one of my swimming friends. It was a wonderful read then and now. Maybe a little more difficult to read now because I know what is going to happen. I had forgotten some of the minor characters and they were definitely worth remembering.

This is the current read for the online book club, the possible misinterpretations by the young members who are sure there is a political agenda in everything make me nervous. At least there have been neither bursts of adoration nor sulky "I don't get it"s.

The title plays at many levels, something that I missed (or have forgotten) the first time I read it. We have the obvious: the soprano, Roxane, who was the bait to get all of the others together in the remote location. Her "beautiful song" changes every one of them. The romances are songs of their own. The affection that grows between the child terrorists and the hostages who recognize them as human beings in ways that their commanders do not. The Frenchman who discovers that he is desperately in love with his wife, and that he can operate as a chef. The Russian who (along with all of the other hostages) is in love with Roxane, but wants only to confess it to her, not to possess her. The Japanese businessman who creates a new identity for himself as a pianist and accompanist. And the list goes on.

I was intrigued by the fact that Patchett based the novel on an actual incident, which I had never heard of - the taking of several hundred people at the Japanese embassy in Peru (I think). It reminds me of the way that Brooks creates a host of characters and events over five centuries based on the existence of a book.

June 6
The online book club almost unanimously (well, of the three or four members who had anything to say) hated the book. Discussion just flat didn't happen. So, just to satisfy myself, I am posting here a list of reasons that I made for liking the book (may be a little redundant):

I liked the way that Patchett created a "lab" setting for a collection of vastly different characters.

I liked the parallels between the two central characters, Roxane and Gen. The others all rotated around the two of them. Gen because he was the only one who could communicate directly with almost everyone with and Roxane's music touched and changed all of them.

I suppose you could call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I liked the way that the child guerrillas found new role models and a different way of thinking from observing and interacting with the hostages and the way that the hostages "adopted" the children.

I liked the passionate Russian, whose passion required only verbal expression, not possession.

I liked the Frenchman who fell in love with his own wife when he thought that he had lost her - and who became his own national stereotype by becoming the chef for the group.

I liked the Japanese businessman who became a different person by becoming Roxane's accompanist.

There are frequent references to the almost surreal nature of the situation, and on first reading I wondered how Patchett would handle the inevitable transition back to reality and the few truly intense relationships: the boy that the Vice President planned to adopt, the young singer that Roxane was going to train, Gen and the guerrilla girl, Roxane and the Japanese businessman and opera aficionado. The last two at least were utterly impossible in the "real" world. Perhaps her settlement was a little "pat" but the bonding of the survivors definitely plays.

Through Wolf's Eyes by Jane Lindskold

I quite enjoyed this. I am inclined to call it YA, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it is like the distinction between Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies - in the tragedies, everyone is dead at the end; in the comedies, everyone gets married. In that way it has a feel of the comedies - lots of pairing off of the young people, but that is by no means the whole of the story. On the other hand, it is rather long for a YA novel.

This book finishes conclusively, but there are any number of lines that need to be resolved. We, the readers, know who the wolf-reared survivor of the lost colony really is, but only the elderly king knows in the story - and the young man assigned to watch and teach her, who was sworn to secrecy by the king. The potential romance between Lady Elise and Sir Jared must be resolved. And there is the mystery of the "voices" which directed the wolves to care for the human child in the first place - we have been told of their actions, but we don't know who or what they are.

Lindskold set up plenty of story lines for a series. And I expect I will read them. This book was not as compelling as Child of a Rainless Year, but it was good fun in a much more conventional direction.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

I really didn't have time to discover a book this good at this moment: it is finals week!! I have the distinct feeling that sometime in the recent past I read another book that unexpectedly left me thinking, "Wow, that was a good book." I'm not finding it in the last couple of months of this blog - unless it was the way I felt after rereading People of the Book.

This was remarkable. Depressing, but remarkable. And not without redemption in the end. The narrator is a young girl whose mother is totally single-minded in her insistence on having her own way at all costs. When that way leads her to obsession, murder, and life in prison, we find the daughter, whose name we don't even know for some time, thrust into the foster care system and imprinting on a series of "mothers" on her journey.

It is a fascinating view of the diversity which can exist within a small area, because, except for Astrid's memories of places around the world, the action is in Los Angeles. The oleander itself becomes in some sense a metaphor for LA - embodying, as it does, both incredible beauty and deadly poison - as it does for Astrid's mother who uses it as a murder weapon.

Astrid does survive and does eventually face life on her own terms, once she discovers that she is permitted - even required - to do so. In the process, she learns the hard truth that while our pasts are part of us and unchangeable, what we make of them is our own call.

Real Murders by Charlaine Harris

It was definitely time for some fluff here at the end of term. I am impressed with the way that Harris can write fluff mysteries without cats, knitting, or cooking, also that she can write light entertaining prose in a fundamentally grim and gruesome genre.

Aurora Teagarden came highly recommended and I did enjoy her and her murders very much. Let's see: Lily Bard is a housecleaner and body builder. Harper Connelly is a professional psychic. Aurora (Roe) is a librarian. Like at least one of the others, she has two boyfriends and that surely will be resolved. Charlaine's characters seem to play the field only for a bit then settle down to monogamous relationships.

The mystery centers around a true crime club, a group which meets monthly to discuss actual mysteries and murderers. The first of a seriously nasty string of murders opens with a murder at their meeting. They, especially Roe, continue to investigate in spite of the police, because it seems that the murderer is determined to implicate various members of the club in the crimes.

As for how it plays out - I'm sure you have guessed, but it still would be telling.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

This was just as good as I remembered - and I'm glad that I was on hand to remember the title when a member of the book club was unable to decide what to choose for her turn.

Multiple stories blend together into a remarkable whole. As the present day researcher and conservator studies a five hundred year old Haggadah in a Sarajevo museum, Brooks opens windows into the history of the book. A fragment of a butterfly's wing from a species which only lives in the high alps, a wine stain mixed with blood, a single fine white hair - each sends the reader to another time and place with equally compelling characters. The researcher herself, of course, doesn't know the stories - only the reader knows.

The contemporary story alone has sufficient drama and mystery to warrant a complete novel. There we have a woman at odds with herself without actually knowing it. She is forced to confront herself on a number of planes and discover who and what she truly is.

The book of the title is the Sarajevo Haggadah, which actually exists and the rough outlines of its story are the framework for this one. Perhaps part of which makes this work so fascinating is the knowledge that the book actually is in that museum in Sarajevo. The story itself is fiction, but the book is real.