A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

There is are reasons why I don't ordinarily read this sort of thing. They are unbelieveably long, have an incredible number of characters, have terrifically convoluted plots, and frequently (as in this case) have story lines which do not intersect the main plot at all. And, most annoying of all, the reader is blatantly set up to purchase the next book. That said, this is not bad of its type.

I'm sure someone has come up with a name for the sub-genre - maybe something like "massive multi-volume fantasy saga." I read quite cheerfully the first three volumes of Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" mmvfs, and could probably have continued - but I started thinking of all the things that I could be reading instead and gave it up. I spoke with a former student of mine today who is a voracious reader; during his tenure in my high school English class, I once loaned him a milk-crate full of books - which he read and returned in a week or two. He is waiting with bated breath for the last(?) volume of "The Wheel of Time." Come to think of it - I think he was the one who got me to read it in the first place. I trust his judgment as a reader - maybe he is willing to invest the time because he has so many years yet to be reading - and he may read faster than I do. I used to read faster than I do.

This one has not failed of any of the basic characteristics of the class. And in the end it resolved not even one of the running story lines. Point of view switches among no fewer than eight characters and most of the time each is carrying a story line that cannot be told by one of the others. The land now has three declared kings, and three of the major characters (if you count a wolf, and I do) are in limbo. Actually, that is one of my issues with this book: the wolves here have such enormous fantasy potential and although they are introduced early and carried throughout the story, they are nonentities.

One of the things that did intrigue me in this was something else that the author failed to develop - the climate of this planet. They are tied to a "year" calendar, but summer and winter last for several years each. Since the concept of year is tied to the cycle of seasons, this implies that the planetary rotation has changed/is changing. Maybe that is another thing he intends to address in later volumes.

Many plot elements were lifted straight out of Shakespeare and fantasy standards and then subjected to some rather heavy-handed resetting. I don't particularly object to the borrowing, but borrowed things should be treated with respect.

I try to read things that are recommended to me, particularly by students. I like to know what they are thinking and what motivates that thinking. I have learned a great deal by following that policy, even when I never read another book by the author. Cujo put me off Stephen King forever - not because it was bad - because it was way too plausible and persuasive. I consider it unlikely that I will return to this series, but I do know more about the young man who recommended it to me than I did before.

The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

Not bad for a second in the series. Bujold seems to have avoided most of the issues that plague the second volumes of trilogies - of course this is a tetrology(?), so maybe the issues don't arise until the third book. You know what I mean - even Tolkien loses momentum in The Two Towers. This is overall at a slower pace than the first book. Actually, in many respects, it is a continuation - it picks up literally in the same minute that the first ends - of course, so does The Two Towers.

In Book 1, Beguilement, Bujold takes her mixed pair back to Fawn's farmer family and resolves those conflicts. In this one, they go back to Dag's people and find that the conflicts are beyond reconciliation. Bujold leaves us in no uncertainty about the contempt with which the Lakewalkers, the protectors of the world, regard those whom they protect.

Bujold has set up at least the next volume pretty well. With that out of the way, she can get on with what she does best - spinning tales about intriguing characters.

Shakespeare's Christmas by Charlaine Harris

I don't know why she called this one Shakespeare's Christmas. It didn't happen in Shakespeare - at all. It was probably because the Lily Bard stories have all included "Shakespeare" in the title and without this cue, how would the reader know what they were getting. Okay, not a big deal, really.

Actually, Lily has gone home to another small town in Arkansas for her sister's pre-Christmas wedding. Arkansas is well supplied with small towns, and several mentioned in this story are ones I actually know exist. I was a little surprised at how blatantly Harris telegraphs the central mystery in this one - practically neon sign and flashing lights. Still, it was a good story and a fair amount of action. AND neither Lily nor those near and dear end up in the hospital - a few bruises, but nothing to signify compared to the abuse the poor woman has endured in the two previous books - and in events which predate the actual series.

I do feel compelled to wonder about Harris's true southern credentials - based on my relatives and experience living in the land of the razorback - both Lily and her sister, Verena (now there's a good southern name) are almost hopelessly beyond bridal age. Even I married younger than that, and my Oklahoma and Arkansas kin had written me off as a hopeless old maid at something near 19. At near thirty, Verena should be slinking off quietly to the JP rather than holding a white-gowned extravanganza. Murders or no murders.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Like Alice, it's been a long, long time since I read this. And again I am amazed by the genius of the writer. I have read and reread it since I was very young - I was probably in single digits when I read it the first time and have never failed to cry over Beth's death and Jo's rejection of Laurie and to be charmed by Meg's romance, and amused by Jo's.

The amazing thing is that all of these characters seem so vital, so real, in spite of being surrounded by as incredible a weight of moralizing I have ever read. If the sermons were removed, the book would probably be reduced by half. And yet - who can forget the plays performed for an audience seated on their bed and the Pickwick Club. And then there are all of Marmee's gentle lectures and the object lessons that each of the girls picks up along the way. Perhaps Marmee's confessions of her own faults help lighten the lectures.

The least persuasive character is their father, who is endowed with saintly wisdom and virtue and apparently without fault or flaw. Did the Alcott girls actually see their father in that way, do you suppose? In many ways Papa March is supposed to be patterned on Bronson Alcott - Certainly in that he reduced the family to financial ruin.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

I was looking up some of the Vor books at my favorite book store and found this. I don't think I have ever read anything by Bujold except the Miles Vorkosigan books (assuming you count the Cordelia books in that category). Well, maybe one title seemed familiar - although I couldn't remember too many details of the story. There aren't very many of them, but they are there.

This is fantasy, the Vor are definitely science fiction. It is genuine fantasy, not pseudo science fantasy like McCaffrey's Pern books or Shinn's Samaria books which start as high fantasy and then run back to technology to justify everything. That isn't a put-down - I love those books and have reread them many times. There is something different about building a fantasy context and letting it stand on its own. Of course, I have only read the first one of these (there are four), so I may be leaping to a conclusion.

It is difficult to find a term to characterize this book - I was delighted to discover the term "cozy mystery" for that subgenre - and maybe such subdivisions exist for fantasy, but I haven't encountered them. Perhaps it would suffice to say that it is "gentle" fantasy - although there is plenty of gore and grim and fell monsters.

The setting is reminiscent of the rural midwest of about a century ago, with the addition of the "others," the lakewalkers, who have an ability in addition to the usual five senses which they call "groundsense" and appears to be an awareness of the "rightness" of things as well their location within a range that varies from one individual to another as hearing does. The lakewalkers are perhaps similar to the plains tribes, except that their mission is to eradicate an ancient evil which surfaces apparently at random threatening human settlements, not to mention the existence of life on earth in general.

In this story, a lakewalker rescues a "farmer" girl a) from a would-be rapist, b) from one of the primordial monsters, and c) from death of her injuries, and, predictably, they fall in love - with all the problems associated with cross-cultural alliances. I assume that their story continues in the next book, because they haven't quite crossed all the bridges yet.

Ghost in the Polka Dot Bikini by Sue Ann Jaffarian

I may have been wrong about the California sights. Although this was focused around a murder that took place on Catalina Island, there really wasn't much about the island itself - and actually very little of the story took place there.

It was entertaining. The ghost is a non-starlet from the sixties (1960s, as Emma informs her great-great-great granny), one of the flocks of beautiful girls who flock to Cali and hang around the fringes getting occasional bit parts. She seems unclear on the point of her death, even whether or not she is dead and certainly about how she got that way. Emma gets everything cleared up for her at the expense of a group of now aging movers and shakers in Hollywood circles.

A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow

See, a whole book on paper! Recommended by someone at school. I enjoyed it, even on paper. Didn't make me want to go to Alaska.

As suggested above, this is set in Alaska and the heroine/detective is an Aleut. The crimes here are definitely "frontier" crimes - things that happen where life is in the process of changing and the law is more of a suggestion than an imperative. A "them and us" crime prompted by the assault on the old ways by outsiders.

That said, I think in this story there wasn't sufficient evidence shared with the reader for me to be satisfied with the way Kate (Shugak, not Martinelli) springs the solution on us. Or maybe I was just having too much trouble with the print in a used mass market paperback. Anyway, it almost reminded me of the way that Agatha Christie's detectives would reveal the answer to admiring fans, although Agatha's parlor reveals were more comfortable than an abandoned mine in the middle of an Alaskan winter. I like Agatha's stuff - just every now and then I thought that she could have provided the reader with more hints about the direction that genius was taking.

I have a feeling that these may get better as the series goes on - and I think the rest of them are available electronically!

Grace Under Pressure by Julie Hyzy

Since the television blew up, I no longer have my long-standing appointment with "Friday Night Trash TV" and have been filling the gap with lightweight murder mysteries.

This one is cozy, I think, even if Grace isn't a cook or a knitter or a cat owner. She does have a pair of gay men as roommates, though. She is the assistant curator at a mansion/museum somewhere in the south and takes over when the curator is murdered, solving the murder and a couple of other mysteries as well while managing the estate/tourist attraction. In addition, she has to put up with probably the bitchiest assistant in all of fiction.

Fun and games, I did enjoy it, but I don't feel any strong compulsion to run out to Amazon and buy the next one in the series. It may simply be that I have simply maxed out on this particular subgenre for a while. I have a book on paper that I really am going to read this three-day weekend, came in the mail today. And I still have another that has been on my desk for over a week - the there is the excerpt of a novel that a student brought me today. Should be enough to occupy me for three days.

Ann Veronica, a modern love story by H.G. Wells

Who would have thought that the man best known for The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds had written such a thing. It seems that this dates from his "middle period" and is less science fiction and more socio-political. This work does address the women's suffrage movement, but I would disagree with the biographer who implies that the movement is central to this book. Ann Veronica's fling with the suffragettes was neither long nor notable and Wells' handling of the activists was condescending at best. In fact, I would consider his treatment of the movement and the women involved in it as contemptuous. Ann Veronica finds the movement unsatisfying and moves on.

In the course of her adventures, Ann Veronica runs away to London to look for work, borrows from an neighbor and acquaintance of her father who takes that as her agreement to be his mistress, contracts an engagement to a man who has been pursuing her in hopes of settling her debt, joins the suffragettes and spends a month in jail to have a roof over her head, and finally runs away with a married man.

In the end, Wells takes the girl he created with the instinct for rebellion and turns her into a totally conventional housewife. One does have to get past the fact that she ran away to live in sin with the man while he was married to another woman, who refused to live with him because he had cheated on her, but wouldn't divorce him either. (Remember the period!) It was not clear to me what happened to the wife. Perhaps after a few years she relented or died. Still, it was a little disturbing to find that the penultimate scene has them living in conventional domesticity, having invited her father and maiden aunt to dinner to inform them of her pregnancy.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Yes, of course I have read it before - many times.

No need to explain this one - except that I was eating supper at my desk and had finished the previous book. E-books are much easier to read while eating than paper books, so I scrolled down through the free stuff that I had downloaded and found Alice. It has been years since I last read it - and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Kindle doesn't do illustrations, so I had to remember the Tenniel illustrations - no problem - but I did regret the lack of formatting. The mouse's tail just isn't quite the same as a paragraph.

Maybe the years between readings wasn't a bad thing, because I was amazed at the contemporary flavor of the word games that he plays. And I had totally forgotten the giant puppy, although when I read it I remembered the illustration clearly. Another thing I had forgotten (maybe because my father never bothered to read it to us) is the piece of moralizing at the very end. Or maybe it actually wasn't there - there were several notations about "earlier editions." I only remember Alice waking up with her sister and telling her about her dream and then running off to tea, not several pages of the sister thinking about Alice growing up - rather painful after all the whimsy.

With Child by Laurie R. King

Kate's lover has abandoned her to go live in the wilderness and recover from her crippling injuries (A Grave Talent) and her partner is getting married. Kate has befriended Jules, the precocious 12-year old daughter of her partner's fiancee, and undertaken a quixotic quest (don't you just love alliteration?) on her behalf. When Jules chooses to stay with Kate during Al and Jani's honeymoon, the child vanishes without a trace from a hotel room somewhere in the Pacific Northwest - Portland, I think. Kate can't hang on to anyone. Of course, to add a little chill, there is a serial killer murdering girls of her description in the vicinity.

In spite of the title, Kate spends much more of the story without child than with. There are references to Barry's "lost boys" and that seems to be a subtext for the entire story. Homelessness again, but this time specifically lost (or discarded) children.

Ghost a la Mode by Sue Ann Jaffarian

I took Amazon's recommendation on this one. It was fun and I will definitely read the next one - actually it was the next one that was on Amazon's list. After reading the free sample, I hunted down the first one and got it.

California again, but Southern Cali this time. Emma, the heroine, lives in the LA area, but it looks like, based on book one and the excerpt of book two, that Jaffarian is going to feature choice locations in southern California. The first one featured the former gold-rush town of Julian, near San Diego. She informs us in an afterword that we can go there and trace Emma's steps. She claims to have been faithful to both the setting and the history of the town. The second takes place on Catalina Island. Maybe she will go a bit north and do Solvang. She can write a lot of books about scenic and historically interesting spots in California. Maybe someone should try that for New Mexico.

Emma is in her mid-forties and in the process of divorcing her TV personality jerk of a husband, and in the process of rebuilding her life reconnects with an old friend and UCLA prof who asks her to go with her to a seance which is part of the friend's research. Enter Emma's great-great-great-grandmother, who was hung for murdering her husband, and wants her name cleared.

Shakespeare's Champion by Charlaine Harris

Even more intense than the first one of these. This time instead of an almost accidental murder, we have a racist conspiracy, and murder and mayhem on a grand scale. Lily has a new boyfriend, but both of the old ones are safely paired up with appropriate partners. I got the feeling that Harris had decided that neither one of them was going to work for Lily in the long run - but she liked them, so she wrote in new characters so she wouldn't have to just dump them on their own.

It would be an interesting change if in the next one she can avoid mauling Lily to within an inch of her life. I really think she has reached beyond a plausible limit of physical damage that she can inflict on one character.

This was my Friday night treat - and it really is still Friday night although the clock says Saturday morning. I will try to hold off on another one of them - or another one of the San Francisco stories for a few days at least. I have several books on paper that I really do want to read - and there is always statistics - the good doctor informed us in our last class meeting that the pace we have been keeping was only review and the actual course would start in another week or so.

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

This was one of the nominations for the next read for the FaceBook club that I am in. It was not the selection, but it sounded interesting. It certainly is.

I've been trying to remember what I had recently read that ran two timelines - it was Sarah's Key. That is far less complex than this one. There the timelines are barely a generation apart - here they are four hundred years apart. The seventeenth century story does not take a strictly chronological path, and then those characters start to appear in the 21st century. There is perhaps a parallel between the crimes committed in the name of alchemy (or as we would call it - science) and the crimes committed in the present day story. Those crimes are terrible and terribly convoluted, starting with the perversion of pure science and the corruption of men in its pursuit.

The narration is interesting. Lydia is not addressing us as she tells the story, but her lover, Cameron, who is a major player in the story. Although Lydia is at the center of everything, she still seems to be more of a passive observer than the usual protagonist. Things happen to her and around her, but she doesn't make them happen.

It is very difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys here. It was only when I had finished the book that I started thinking, "That should have been a clue that ... ." As Buttercup would have it, "things are seldom what they seem" in this story.

To Play the Fool by Laurie R. King

Darmok.

A homeless man is murdered and the only one who seems to know anything is another homeless man who speaks only in quotations. The quotations may more or less directly answer questions, but more often they allude to the context of the quotation or to obscure parallels OR to actual events in language which serves to hide rather than reveal meaning. Our rational and straight-forward cop faces a new attack on her well-defined environment.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

The journey through the convolutions of the life of "Brother Erasmus" and the events that brought him to that place in that state of mind and the struggles of Kate and Al to find a point of communication with him drive the novel. From the Kate of A Grave Talent who keeps her private life so private that she uses a different name at work and among her very limited circle of friends, she grows to a point that not only does she invite others to the home she shares with her partner, Lee (for Leonora), she enlists them in the effort to solve the crime.

Another aspect of this book is a view into the world of the homeless that most of us have never seen and, in all probability, never will.

A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King

Definitely not a "cozy." I suppose that its category among mysteries is fundamentally police procedural, but it is so much more. San Francisco is a marvelous setting, with moods and attitudes of its own which are material to the events of the story - almost to the extent of making the city a character itself. And speaking of characters - detective series inevitably have a cast of "regulars" to fill out the lives of the main character, even in police procedurals - maybe Lee Child's Jack Reacher is an exception, but then those are hardly conventional detective fiction, and, in my opinion, the strongest of those are the ones which reach back into Reacher's own past. Anyway, the incidental characters who surround Kate Martinelli in this (and hopefully many more) are a remarkable and independent lot - from her duty partner and superior, Alonzo (Al) Hawkin and her domestic partner, Lee, to all the players in this particular story - and I shall be sorry not to see them again.

This is a story of madness and hideous revenge and to say much more would be getting into spoiler territory. But I can tell you that the action never slows down, so take a deep breath and make sure you have the evening free.

I really had intended to read a "book on paper" this weekend. But it is so much easier to read in electronic format, I'm beginning to think that this creeping difficulty with reading on paper may be as much to blame for my reduced reading level as being a school teacher.

The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins

Another novella, probably intended as a short story. Murder and supernatural retribution, gotta love it. And to top it all off - it is set primarily in Venice. There is enough discussion of the more popular sights and locations to convince me that Collins did actually spend some time in Venice. This is rather more grotesque than the others of his that I have just been reading, and weaker in execution. The manner of the revelation of the crime is rather peculiar. Still this may be one of the earliest fictional applications of forensic dentistry. Were they actually doing that sort of thing in the nineteenth century?

Buffalo West Wing by Julie Hyzy

I didn't know that these and their like were an official sub-genre. Well, maybe I knew it, I just didn't know what it was called - they are "cozy mysteries." How appropriate. Does make me mildly embarrassed to be reading them, sort of like confessing to reading Harlequin romances, but not quite. I learned this by following the link at the end of this book to a group blog written by a whole gaggle of these ladies - all women and all food-oriented series. Surely cats and knitting are also cozy - yes, they are! I just scanned down through the list of writers on another group blog and found several cats and knitters. I'm not prepared with a definitive statement of who/what is or is not "cozy," for now I think I am simply satisfied that I know them when I read them. They make me quite certain that they could be recommended without reservation to certain gentle souls of my acquaintance who are not quite up to the stress and grim of things like the Stieg Larsson books. And most importantly, they are perfect for a Friday evening at the end of a difficult week - or a Friday morning when schools and government offices are closed by order of the governor (or at her strong suggestion in the cases of institutions not under direct state control). The governor having taken action after the recent cold spell was over to conserve our natural gas resources. Good work, Susie!

But this is supposed to be about the book. I guess having them settled by genre takes a bit of the pressure off. It is another one; it is fun. Ollie has a new boyfriend - as hinted in the previous book. Her old boyfriend has turned into a prize jackass. And a new administration has moved into the White House creating situations that make Ollie, once again, fear for her job. Oh yes, and this time it is middle eastern terrorists.

This is in no way a put-down. I love books of this type - and I am glad I visited that blog, because now I have a whole collection of them to try while waiting for Ms Hyzy to produce another one.

Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

This was fun, not funny, mind you, but fun. Lily Bard is an interesting character - and clever Charlaine has left her with two gentleman admirers so I have to read the next and the rest. You have to like a woman who moves to a town named Shakespeare because her last name is Bard. And besides that, her chosen profession is house cleaner, and she is a body builder and advanced karate student.

I'd planned to read this on Friday evening, but classes are cancelled for tomorrow and even though the university is officially open, I don't think I will go in. So I can read the last one of the White House chef books, and watch the third of the Stieg Larsson movies - and study statistics for the test on Tuesday.

I may even download the next of these for this unexpected three day weekend. I am left wondering why someone who can write stuff like this messes with those incredibly silly things. Actually, I'm afraid I know the answer. Nothing wrong with making a living, I guess.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I was right, I did enjoy this book - and it was so long ago that I remembered almost nothing about it. In many respects, it reads like contemporary detective fiction. Among the ingredients are an insightful retired police detective, star-crossed lovers, mysterious foreigners, ancient curses, not to mention a murder.

Collins' narrative device is to pass the story around to the best observer at each given point in the story. At the outset there is some fairly conventional story-telling, but once the setting moves to England the old butler leads off, followed by the self-righteous proselytizer, and so on through eight (I think) narrators. My personal favorite is the butler, who is a great believer in Robinson Crusoe and returns to it on any and all occasions for comfort and guidance. He does not see why anyone would resort to any other text when all the world's wisdom is contained within its pages.

This narrative device has the story told by successive observers who were privy to various parts of the tale. Of course, a few letters are thrown in - it is hard to get a narrative from a dead character, but most of them here considerately left long letters behind them. In a way it reminds me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (wish the thing had a shorter title--) in which many letter writers create a central character.

It was fun. Maybe I'll reread The Woman in White, too. And I won't be able to resist The Haunted Hotel for long.