The Art of Demotivation by E.L.Kersten, PhD

For those who are familiar with Despair, Inc., Kersten is one of its founders.

This is sort of giant Demotivation poster in text rather than image form. The subtitle (A visionary guide for transforming your company's least valuable asset: your employees) puts the target on the back of all of us. That is, all of us worker-bees. It was amusing, even entertaining - except that I started realizing that certain administrators (edubabble for executives) of my experience were busily employing the principles expounded in this little volume. Some of us as fans of Demotivators had noticed that one of them seemed to describe our then administrator so well that only the most daring of our number was willing to use the image as a wallpaper. It was the one labeled "Arrogance" with the subtext: "The best leaders inspire by example. When that is not an option, brute intimidation works pretty well, too." I was not able to find it on the Despair website last time I visited. Sad.

And lest anyone be horrified by the number of items I have posted this weekend, this one has been my book for reading in small doses while away from my desk - in the bathroom - for several weeks. Time to get it back to the dean.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a genuine horror story, drawn gently in pastels. The darkness is there all the time, but by the time the writer begins to reveal it to us, we are too invested in the characters to back out. I kept reading, expecting that they would realize and run, but they meekly walk the path before them. That, I think, is the most horrifying aspect of the whole thing.

This book was nominated for many awards, but always the bridesmaid, never the bride. It was nominated for the award that the author won for The Remains of the Day, but I found it more interesting that it was nominated and shortlisted for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke award - a science fiction award. I suppose that anything which takes place in "some future England" qualifies as science fiction, and it certainly qualifies by my definition of science fiction as the fiction of logical consequences. The science is not the main thing here, although the consequences are. By the way, although it did not win any of the awards for which it was nominated, it did win a place on Time's list of the best 100 novels written in English since they began publishing in 1923.

So, do I recommend it or not? Yes, I guess I do, it is almost more an experience than just a book. It is an easy read, but not a comfortable one.

Eggsecutive Orders by Julie Hyzy

I really have other things to do this weekend and should never have downloaded this book, but I did - so I won't pretend I didn't read it and postpone posting. There is one more of them, but I Promise that I will not download it until next weekend. I did get a couple of others, but that is another matter altogether. I have quite a stack of "books on paper" that I need to read and return to their owners anyway. I should find that cartoon and post it. I never expected to become such a convert to books in electronics, but cataracts have changed a number of things in my world.

This one was - as the others have been - good fun. One of the entertaining aspects was the introduction of Ollie's mother and grandmother into the mix - quite a remarkable and enterprising pair of ladies. I hope they visit DC often.

This time the action occurs around the hysteria of the annual White House Egg Roll. I don't think I had ever considered the magnitude of the task of preparing 15,000 hard-boiled eggs. Back during my thankfully short tenure as kitchen/wait help at the university I attended, the daily early morning pots of hard-boiled eggs to be peeled seemed bottomless, and I am sure that we were dealing with mere hundreds rather than thousands. At least Ollie and her crew didn't have to peel them - just boil and dye them - gruesome enough.

The big cliff-hanger in this one is whether or not Ollie's romance with Tom, the secret service agent, will survive. They officially broke up for "political" reasons - his boss was holding him accountable for her actions - and there have been hints of the awkwardness of their officially "secret" relationship all along - but is this for real? Only by reading the next book can we know for sure.

The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins

I downloaded this quite some time ago. It is one of many free books on the Kindle list. Probably also on Gutenberg. It looks like I downloaded everything available by Wilkie Collins. The only things I had actually read - and I read them many years ago were The Moonstone and The Woman in White. I think my thought was that if he had written two that I had enjoyed as much as those, maybe it was worth looking at some of his less known works.

This actually is quite short, only 1600 "locations" compared to 7200 for The Moonstone and around 5000 for the light-weight mysteries I have been reading. I'm not sure what a "location" implies. A line, perhaps, at some unspecified width which is wider that my setting because I like a narrower format - reads more quickly. I suppose this is probably counted among his short stories. At any rate at just a bit more than a fifth the length of his "major" works, this one moved to the point quickly and kept the tension high for the entire story, which is fairly unusual for a contemporary (and friend) of Charles Dickens.

The plot was predictable but compelling - beautiful girl dumps one admirer for another and both set off on an expedition to the artic, the dumpee swearing vengeance against the fiance whose identity is unknown to him at that point. Expedition ends in disaster. And by the way, the girl has the Second Sight and sees her lover helpless at the mercy of the other. The ending is a classic Collins twist, and that is all I plan to say about that.

An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris

I do like a good three-hour read! I've known that reading would slow down once the semester was underway, but somehow I had forgotten why. Yes, the job and teaching and taking classes are time consuming, but I had somehow managed to forget about rehearsals three nights a week. Orchestra, church choir, and community choir are all back in full swing and that reduces my reading time to almost nothing.

I've been looking forward to downloading this all week. And I did enjoy it. This is not the last of this series, but since I read the last one first, it is the last as far as I am concerned - until she writes another, which I do hope she will. These strike a very nice balance between quirky and seriously grim and depressing. I don't imagine it is a line that is easy to walk. The crimes uncovered in each have been grim, grisly, and gruesome, but her handling of them works. She manages to convincingly deal with the horror of the crimes without getting bogged down in it. Harper is a persuasive heroine who just keeps slugging on through her own doubts and crises.

After the previous one (second in the series, third that I had read), I wondered if twisted families were to be her "thing" in this series. There was certainly a twisted and perverse family relationship in this one, but it didn't seem to be the focus of the story this time. I suppose one might consider Harper's relationship with Tolliver as somewhat twisted, sliding just a hair too close to incest for genuine comfort. Still, as both of them point out to all and sundry, they are not related - her mother was married to his father and they lived in the same household (if you can call it that) for several of their formative years. But compared to the perversity that they discover in their travels, it is the height of normalcy. I guess I will just have to wait for the next to see if the pattern continues.

Hail to the Chef by Julie Hyzy

Okay, so I went ahead and downloaded another one yesterday. Ollie is now the executive chef at the White House and is facing the holiday season with all of its stress and official functions - and ... this time instead of an internationally known assassin, they have a bomber - inside the White House. Good fun. Secret Service boyfriend only had a couple of lines in this one - is Ollie falling for the bomb expert?

Now, I swear that I am not going to download any more light entertainment until the weekend. I still have three books here from the dean's shelf, another that my daughter recommended, and I probably should be reading Chapter 4 from my statistics book.

Oh yeah - I did watch The Girl Who Played With Fire since two of the power users are at work and the third is asleep - I had all our bandwidth to myself!

State of the Onion by Julie Hyzy

Another cooking mystery series with recipes - a recommendation from my sister. The main character, Ollie Paras, reminds me of Goldy Schulz, the caterer in the series by Diane Mott Davidson. Their names are similar, they are both short, their significant others are involved in law enforcement (if you will agree that the Secret Service has much in common with conventional law enforcement), and both have a gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of course, Goldy is firmly installed in Yuppieville, Colorado, and Ollie is an assistant chef at the White House (hence the Secret Service connection). Ollie is promoted to executive chef at the end of book one - not a spoiler, because the series has continued into several volumes already. She has also foiled an assassination plot and been the target of the assassin herself as well as dealing with an idiot administrator and seriously bitchy competitor for the executive chef position. Good fun.

The White House is an intriguing setting for a mystery series. Didn't Eliot Roosevelt try it? Or was the White House just one of the seats of power where he set his novels. At any rate, her treatment feels well researched and plausible. Her president is fictional and of undisclosed political affiliation - definitely safe choices. This was really a fun read. I am tempted to go out and download the next, but I promised myself that I wouldn't get more than one a day - and I snagged a couple more from the dean's shelf Friday and really should read them so I can return them. Not to mention the next chapter in my stats book. Of course, I didn't read a book yesterday - because I was sitting at my desk watching a movie - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with subtitles - so maybe I was reading a movie - whatever - it was excellent. I watched it twice.

Reading in my PC Kindle software is surprisingly comfortable. I'm starting to really want one of the gadgets themselves so I can read somewhere besides sitting at my desk - although, at the moment, I'm not sure where that might be ---

Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris

I am really enjoying these. It is hard for me to believe that the same woman wrote a series of books that I found so boring that I didn't even bother to finish the one that I started. Maybe it is because they were supposed to be "cute" - I'm not real crazy about cute.

These are not heavy-duty psychological thrillers, but they are well-plotted and well written. The characters are believable and solidly drawn. Harper's strange gift is treated simply as a matter of fact. It is incidental to solving the mystery not central, mainly it is the device for getting them on the scene. Far stranger in these stories are the convoluted and perverse family relationships which are the causes of the murders in the first place. At least that is the case in the three I have read. There is one more - maybe next weekend - I have several others in the queue at the moment.

Expecting Adam by Martha Beck

I didn't expect this to be a "page-turner," but it kept me turning pages long after I should have gone to bed last night and hurrying home this afternoon to finish it.

Basically, two young Mormons from the same town in Utah go to Harvard and totally buy into the high-pressure competitive success-driven Harvard attitude - except for falling in love, marrying, and having a child. That isn't what the story is about, though. The story is about how their second child changes everything - even before his birth.

On their way to their PhDs, already "hampered" (in the Harvard view) by marriage itself and a small child, they conceive a second child which threatens everything they have learned to value, but instead of destroying their futures this child remakes their minds, hearts, and lives.

The framework of the story is Martha's pregnancy - as one might expect from the title - but it refuses to be bound by constraints of time and space. It almost seems that time is irrelevant, but it still remains a coherent, if mystical, narrative of a woman who discovers that there are more things in heaven and earth than she ever dreamt of.

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

Testing my theory that I read faster when I am reading from my computer screen - and besides, school doesn't really start until tomorrow. I returned Reading Lolita to the dean's shelf today and picked up another one (not this one). There are two more of these - and I think I will probably go ahead and get the Kindle versions when I am ready to read them. It is so very convenient - go to Amazon, click the "buy it" button, and like magic it appears on my desktop. I have always said that I didn't think I would get into electronic books until they made a waterproof reader - for reading in the bathtub, but now that I have given up my bathtub and am taking showers, it isn't much of an issue.

Stating that I intend to read the two of these books that I haven't is probably as good a recommendation as I can make. They are fun - not funny - and entertaining. Harper is an interesting character and her ability to locate and minimally communicate with the dead is just off-beat enough to work. The two that I have read have similar contexts - convoluted and somewhat perverse family relationships. I'm curious about the other two.

Grave Secret by Charlaine Harris

It was definitely time for something a little lighter. Of course, that might be a strange way to refer to this work involving several murders, attempted murders, druggy parents, and kids trying to hold life together on their own. Oh, and just a touch of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. Our heroine was struck by lightning as a teenager, and since then she can find corpses and they tell her something about how they died. Still, compared to the last couple I've read this was light-weight stuff - but quite enjoyable. Harris has another series going with vampires and such in small town Louisiana - I tried one and couldn't get into it at all, put it down and never picked it up again. I wasn't offended, mind you, just not interested.

My sister recommended these - I think the one I picked up is the fourth in the series. The whole thing was tied up with her disfunctional family - seems like an odd point in the series for that stuff to appear. I may well go back and read the earlier ones. These may be books that I will be able to read in a week. Classes start on Tuesday and I am teaching a class that I haven't taught in a couple of semesters - and taking one that I expect to strain my brain and free time to the breaking point. At any rate, the book a day thing is over for the time being.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Thanks to the dean for putting this on her "free library" shelf in the staff lounge. Thanks to our department secretary for picking it up - and then deciding that she didn't have time to read it now and dropping it on my desk. Even thanks to that book group down the road a hundred miles. I used to hang out on the periphery of the group - I got email invitations to their meetings - always on weeknights, school nights, when I couldn't possibly join them from a hundred miles away. They read it several years ago, before they dropped me from their email list, so I had heard of it.

I can't decide what was the thread that gave this work so much weight for me: the inside view of life in the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini and after; the conspiracy of a group of women who love literature and gather to discuss it in spite of the risks; the insights into Western literature as filtered through the minds of these women; simply the power and intimacy of a group of women. Those threads and many others are twisted and woven into a fabric of amazing beauty.

This is not a straight-line narrative. It is woven around the Thursday morning "class," but wanders back and forth through time: to Nafisi's earlier time in the US, to her initial encounters with each of the women in the group as students in her university classes before the Islamic Republic, to the lives and experiences of the women in the group, and her meetings with her mentor - her unidentified "magician." She groups her telling thematically by authors - or characters - Lolita, Gatsby, Henry James, and Austen. The themes of the books and the themes of their discussions - in their group or in the earlier university classrooms - form the framework for the book.

One of the women is in love with a man who has also been one of Nafisi's students. Their courtship takes place largely in the classroom and is a dangerous departure from the restrictions of the Muslim fundamentalist government. She writes of them, "They became addicted to the secure world they had created through words, a conspiratorial world in which everything that was hostile and uncontrollable became soft and articulated." Now there is a statement on the power of the word - written and spoken.

Another of my favorite bits is in her section guided by Austen. She uses a dance metaphor to define the difference between Persian and Western male/female interactions. Here she compares the stilted formality of eighteenth century dances to the seductive potential of classic Persian dancing. She also extends the dance metaphor to describe the interactions of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, in possibly one of the bests overall views of one of my favorite novels that I have ever read. It is too long to include here, but I am tucking it away in my file of favorite literary passages.

In the Woods by Tana French

And she didn't even wrap it up at the end. Rats! Could the old mystery resurface in some future work? Who knows - I do know it doesn't come back in the next one, because I've already read it (check back two). There were frequent references to the context of this book in The Likeness, but not to the extent that I think that I should go back and reread it knowing what I know now. It was a bit like the Irish police jargon and slang - just keep reading.

The villain of this one is a genuine masterpiece of the detective writer's art. French did drop enough hints along the way that for the experienced reader of detective fiction - beyond the standard police procedural - the finale is not a shock, but still remarkably drawn. Are we sure that French was a student of theater and an actor not a psychology student? Maybe theater is a clue to her writing. It is very visual and and remarkably "staged." She sets the stages and casts the players with impeccable precision yet without droning on in paragraphs of description. The reader gets to experience it all through the eyes of the narrator. That isn't easy to do in first person, but French does it brilliantly - without ever breaking character to explain someone else's response or action. And, by the way, the narrator of The Likeness is not the narrator of In the Woods.

I'm anxious to see/read her next.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This is the current selection of FaceBookEnds, the new book club that I have joined. Obviously, the club is based in Facebook and seems to be an interesting mix of people, some of whom I know and many that I do not. We read this some time ago in my other book club - quite some time ago - I'm pretty sure I remember who chose it, and it was just her turn again, and not for the first time since we read it. In fact, I am pretty sure I was still teaching at that other place at the time, which makes it at least four years ago.

I'm really glad I reread it. It is a delightful read. It is set in the period immediately following WWII and is, of all things, an epistolary novel. I have not read many of them and most that I have read are a bit strained. This one is done so well that I had totally forgotten that it was not a conventional narrative. An advantage, perhaps, is that all of the characters get to speak in their own voices and through their voices a very clear picture of the one character who ties them all together emerges. It is extraordinary that the character of Elizabeth is so clearly drawn and so dominant when she is not present in the "present" of the story at all.

This time I read the end notes and learned that Mary Ann Shaffer began the book, but because of ill health asked her niece, Annie Barrows, to help her finish it. Shaffer died before the book was published, but the collaboration seems virtually seamless to me.

The Likeness by Tana French

Why is it that I don't find these books? I guess I'm not looking in the right places. On the other hand, maybe it is just as well that I am not out there scouting for new stuff, as it is my friends generally tell me what I should be reading - and I don't have to do the screening - and goodness knows that I have little enough time as it is. So, why exactly have I joined another book club?

This one is our book club book for next month. I'm glad I ordered her first one, too. Should be here tomorrow - maybe. Now that I am actually participating in two book clubs I wish we actually had settled on some sort of name for the club of long standing. I'll have to figure out some way to distinguish between them besides the "old" book club and the "new" book club.

This is not a formula mystery novel. Like the Moning novels it is set in Ireland, however, French is Irish. She is writing on her home turf. There are occasional linguistic issues, but it is one of those "don't worry about it, just keep reading" things. Like the last of the Gerritsen books that I read, the entire plot hinges on the uncanny physical likeness of two women. But where Gerritsen makes her character one of identical twins adopted by different families, French doesn't bother to explain it. Cassie is able to pass for "Lexie" even to her nearest and dearest by some cosmic coincidence. That should be a weakness, but somehow I just accepted it because the rest of the story is so compelling.

One of my favorite bits is Lexie's thesis (or I think we would call it a dissertation). Her topic has to do with women writing under men's names. Could indeed make a fascinating subject for research.

I really didn't expect/intend to finish this today. I had plenty of work to do - and I did spend a large chunk of the day yesterday redoing the task that I lost when I closed an unsaved file. But today every time I started to do some work, I thought - this would be so much easier at my desk at school - and - I'll just read one more chapter - until I just gave it up and read.

Faefever by Karen Marie Moning

OK - I have to take a break. I do have the fourth book and will read it and I will read the fifth book when it comes out. But I am going to read something else first. Maybe the new book club book which arrived today, or maybe I'll reread the book for the Facebook reading group. Or both.

At one level I am still trying to figure out why this group of really intelligent and interesting women is so fascinated by these books. They are not, in spite of the cover blurbs, sexy. There is a lot of thinking and talking about sex - and now at the end of this book doing it - but it is not sexy in any romantic sense: it is violent and perverse. Also, I think I can state without hyperbole that it has the highest density of the "F" word of anything that I have ever read - it is overused to the point where I start making mental comments about limited vocabularies.

Armageddon seems to have arrived, but I know there are two more books in the series, and in an afternote the author points out that she promised (foreshadowed, she calls it) a happy ending. Remember, she points out, that Mac initially is describing all of this in the past and that she refers to happy days to come. Moning must be taking a lot of flak from her readers.

Maybe I am just grumpy today because I accidentally closed an unsaved file this afternoon and lost six hours of work - which work is due on Monday. Guess how I am spending the rest of this weekend --

Bloodfever by Karen Marie Moning

Book two. My friend brought me book three today, forgetting that I had only read book one. So, I went out to Amazon and downloaded the Kindle version of book two. More of same. The baddies are badder and no one can tell the players because there isn't a program! Three factions (at least) are competing for the services of our heroine and noone is showing all their cards. The language of Celtic mythology is familiar from other things I have read, perhaps the Jim Butcher Dresden books as much as anything. Elizabeth Moon went there too - different names, but the makers and the unmakers - and Master Oakhallow was a druid by another name as well in Paksenarrion. I think Madeleine L'Engle touched the concept as well in the series beginning with A Wrinkle in Time. The last two dealt much with the battle between good and evil taking place at another "level" from human existence, but requiring from time to time the participation of humans. Butcher's setting is more like Moning's. In fact, Dresden fits well into the subgenre to which the Moning books are assigned - urban fantasy. Moning goes exotic for the American audience by placing her stories in Dublin. Butcher parks the wizard Harry Dresden down in Chicago to fight his battles with the Fae and the Vampire Courts (not to mention werewolves and knightly inheritors of medieval blades).

And I still think Mac is more spoiled brat than anything else.

The Next Queen of Heaven by Gregory Maguire

See, I said that reading would slow down when I went back to work. And when school starts -- I'll be lucky to finish one a week, even tripe. Although that isn't the whole story this time. I finished this one yesterday and tried for several hours (at intervals) to post, but apparently there were issues at the server end. So, before breakfast even this morning ---

I picked this up because the title was intriguing - it was on the dean's bookshelf in the staff lounge. I still have no idea how the title relates to the story. This isn't tripe, but I'm not sure what it is. The author has a disclaimer at the beginning almost apologizing to his faithful readers because this is outside his usual line of territory. Oddly, now that I have finished it, it reminds me in some ways of that Sara Paretsky book - Ghost Country. Also way outside the writer's usual line. Loaded with religious metaphors in strange contexts. It is rather short on plot, but - well, after the first hour or two of it, I almost decided to bag it and get on with something more in MY usual line, but the idiotic characters kept bouncing around in my mind, so I went back to it. They aren't particularly people that I feel that I know or that I even want to know, but somehow they seemed very real - weird, but real.

The only situation that "resolves" resolves back to the original nonsituation. The two central characters almost never interact during the entire book. They are parallel mathematically in that they do not interact, and in many respects parallel each other in situation and action/reaction as well. They leave town together - but there is no real sense that their escapes (plural because it is not that kind of together) are likely to be successful.

Body Double by Tess Gerritsen

I think we are beginning to focus on Maura Isles and I think I know one reason why. The character as described in the text resembles the honey-blond version of Sasha Alexander not in the least. Wasn't she a brunette in NCIS? Neither here nor there. Dr. Isles is thin and elegant with black hair which she wears cropped at chin level with straight bangs across her forhead. If you want a picture, turn to the back of the book and take a look at the notes on the author.

I do not mean to imply that the writing and the stories are diminished by the author's insertion of her double as the main character - the stories are still tense and tightly written and pretty much the good guys win in the end. This one had an added bonus in a character who rescues herself with style and determination. Not all of her women are victims. I do hope she comes up with a boyfriend for Maura, though - the woman deserves one.

Gerritsen is getting a rest though. We only have the first four, and are out of book money for a payday or two. Especially since I did go ahead and order the new book club book - and an earlier book by the author - I love one cent books on Amazon Marketplace!

The Sinner by Tess Gerritsen

This one cooked right along. As my daughter suggested, mostly about Maura Isles, although Jane Rizzoli's story line is seriously significant. The two of them actually do work together in this one. Somehow, Gerritsen makes the changing point of view work. She telegraphs it clearly in the text and follows through consistently. She would never need to label sections with characters' names so the reader can have a sense of who's talking/thinking.

But there were so many sinners in this book - I never figured out which one is THE sinner. I guess it was the guy that actually killed the nuns, but there were a number of excellent candidates.

Back to work tomorrow - I don't expect to be doing one a day any longer. At least there are still a couple of weeks before school actually starts again, at which point I will have precious little time even to sleep, let alone read.

206 Bones by Kathy Reichs

One of the things that I like about Reichs is the science. I guess that is fairly obvious, if you don't like science then you probably aren't reading these books. The science feels and, I believe, is legitimate. Reichs's scientific creditials are impeccable. I was first introduced to Reichs by the girl who was my stand-partner in the orchestra at the time. In addition to helping hold down the second stand of violas, she was a graduate student in forensic anthropology. Given my feeling about the silliness in print about my field, I consider her endorsement worthwhile.

In this one, Tempe is herself the target of falsified and misleading "science" aimed at discrediting her. And we do get the frequently repeated "Tempe in mortal danger" motif - here threaded through the entire book in italicized passages. Leaving the reader wondering not only how the science and criminal investigations are going to play out, but how and why Tempe ended up in such a fix. I suppose it was probably included to keep readers who are not big science nerds reading - the science in this one is fairly technical - but the device is effective nonetheless.

Reichs is riding a hobby horse this time. I'm not complaining - I would only be complaining if addressing the cause damaged the story, and it does not. Also, it is a legitimate cause. Lives depend on the scientific evidence presented in court, and there should be a system in place to allow laymen (including professionals in other fields) to have some confidence in those that present that evidence. That logically leads to some sort of certification or licensure for those professionals.