Old Man's War by John Scalzi

I think I have read this before. I think I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it this time. And - as the author confesses in his end notes - it is decidedly Heinleinesque - perhaps part of the reason I enjoyed it. Shades of Starship Troopers! One of the more notable features of the Heinlein is the course (or courses) in History and Moral Philosophy which were primarily a device for Bob to drop in a good healthy dose of his political theories. Scalzi doesn't need to do that because his characters are old - and have plenty of history, moral, and political philosophy of their own already.

His primary device is intriguing. Take people at the point of system failure - 75 years of age - and offer them youth. Sort of on the "if had known then what I know now" principle. Enlistees can reason that if they do not survive the ten years of their enlistment, they hadn't had very good odds at surviving the next ten years anyway - and they would have spent the time old. The military get soldiers who have a lifetime of experience and knowledge and practice in exercising judgment. The big surprise for the enlistee is that he is not rejuvenated as he expected; he is planted in a genetically modified body grown from the DNA that he put on file when he "pre-enlisted" ten years earlier.

Our hero, John Perry, is a retired advertising copywriter who had planned to enlist with his wife of 42 years. His wife had a stroke and died; their kids are grown and gone; and he doesn't have a dog. So, off he goes, and discovers that he has a gift for soldiering.

Carousel Tides by Sharon Miller

I was curious about what Miller could do on her own. I may have to look for her others. The opening was charming - very reminiscent of those slightly old fashioned romantic suspense novels:
A young woman travels alone on a dark and stormy night and reaches her destination, her grandmother's mysterious house, to find no one there.

She takes up running the family carousel (which doubles as a prison for bad entities from the other "worlds." And, of course, she searches for clues to Gran's disappearance. Finally goes to consult with an old friend of her grandmother. It does seem slightly odd that she must meet her in the middle of the night on the beach - but the other shoe drops when the woman wraps her sealskin rug around herself and dives into the water, surfacing out to sea as a seal. I guess the Maine coast is as good a place for a selkie as anywhere else. From there on little remains of the commonplace view of the Maine coast.

The Sharing Knife: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold

I keep thinking that Bujold has used this up - and that the next book can't possibly measure up to the previous one(s). Wrong again. Dag and Fawn have been forced to leave his people because they are unwilling/unable to accept their marriage. I'm reasonably sure that the American Indian and 19th century midwest agrarian societies are the models for the "farmer" and Lakewalker groups of the books. Here the Lakewalkers have the ability to see and manipulate "ground" ("the force" might be a fair analogy) and the mission of combating an ancient evil which threatens all of them. I touched on most of this when I logged books one and two. The Lakewalkers, who protect the world, are contemptuous of those who people the world they protect, and prove to be far more intolerant than the ungifted farmers.

As Dag and Fawn go out into the "farmer" world, Dag forms a personal mission to reconcile the two groups. No easy task, since the Lakewalker's attitude toward the farmers has generated a pervasive atmosphere of resentment and fear in return. Still, with Fawn's help he does a fair job on that portion of the world which they encounter - including a couple of young Lakewalkers.

I did wait a couple of months before reading this one. It has been in the queue for most of that time. At the moment I am fairly current. I have read the books for both book clubs, although I really should reread one of them. And it is still over a month until summer school starts and I've already done some of that reading - yes, I know I will have to reread it all - but it will be easier for having done it once. So I could probably talk myself into going ahead and getting book four of this series.

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

I was told that there was a twist in this one, but I had both Caroline and Shirley paired with their eventual husbands early on - and had figured that Mrs. Pryor was Caroline's unaccountably missing mother. Still, a good read - for the most part, there were long rants here and there which I read very, very quickly.

I did find some passages which I found interesting enough to note for future discussion - since this is one of the readings for a class which I am taking this summer. I hope I can find them again when I get my paper copy. The instructor and I started discussing, but decided that we really should wait until the class meets. It is a face-to-face class - in four venues by ITV or whatever they are calling it these days. I've never taken a course in that format, but I will be in the actual room where the instructor is.

But, back to the book. Until now, the only Bronte works I have read are the perennials: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. This isn't much like either one of them - it is rather political, in and around the romances, which are not wild passionate affairs in any case. The whole story centers around two girls, an orphaned heiress, Shirley, and the supposed orphan niece of the local rector, Caroline, whose absent mother turns up as Shirley's companion and former governess. The politics involve the Napoleonic wars and the industrial revolution. The tone is far from the brooding romanticism of the more familiar works of the Bronte sisters. There are a couple of long romantic soliloquys, but they seem generally to be tossed in because they were expected. Not much at all in the way of high romance, but detailed characterizations that are quite delightful. And along the way there are some rather pointed views of some of the ills of society - for one thing, Caroline's mother abandoned her daughter and went into hiding to escape from brutal abuse at the hands of her husband. We also get some insight into the treatment of the underclasses, particularly those sufficiently well-born and educated to serve as governesses and tutors for the moneyed classes.

Duainfey by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

What? I told you I was going to read this immediately. Yep, this one begins at some point before Longeye which I just read and continues right up to the point at which it begins. It begins on the human side of the keleigh, the barrier which separates the world of the fey from humanity - although there is a certain amount of crossover by both. The human setting seems to be about the beginning of the industrial revolution, but it would doubtless be a mistake to draw firm parallels between that world and this one.

As usual, Lee and Miller make a persuasive case for their universe and introduce some quite compelling characters. They also have, as usual, chosen to enact most of the drama on the non-human side. Their "fey" possess some of the attributes of our western tradition of faerie, but by no means do they simply take the package and set their story within the tradition.

The introduction of the sentient trees is charming, and projects a "green" theme into the stories. The trees may be thought of as "entish," but they are much more alert than your average ent, and less mobile.

Good fun. Lots of sex, significantly more perverse than in the tales of the Liaden universe, but the good guys win in the end. And I always like a story that ends on an upbeat.

Longeye by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

So, I picked them up in the wrong order. It is an uncorrectable error. However, I shall immediately and forthwith read the one I had ought to have read before this one.

Of course, there's no getting around the fact I know that in order to correct the ills of the world, they must remake it. Okay, you still don't know HOW they remake it.

I am curious about whether the difficulty I had reading it is stylistic or the result of a flaw in the process of converting the book to Kindle format. There were three distinct interrelated story lines and in the Kindle text there was nothing to indicate switches. You are reading along, a sentence/paragraph ends and the next line is someone else, somewhere else. I do mean the next line, no double space or anything. I think we were entitled to at least a row of asterisks or something.

But the story itself wasn't bad. Interesting characters, interesting structures, both societal and with the world itself. I am mildly anxious to see whether the first book sets up the characters of this story.

Deadly Interest By Julie Hyzy

I'm sorry that Hyzy apparently has dumped Alex for other characters. She does do the girl quite a lot of damage in the two stories (so far?), maybe she just isn't as bloodthirsty as many of us murder mystery fans. I think I had a similar complaint of Harris's treatment of her character Lily Bard.

Still a bit predictable. It took absolutely no imagination to guess who the uber bad was. In addition, she has dumped the potential boyfriend and sent him out of the picture leaving Alex with only a couple of MUCH older admirers.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

I've heard all sorts of reports on this one. I liked it. I don't think it is one that I will reread repeatedly although others have told me that they will, nor did I have a hard time finishing it as others have told me.

It is a mother/daughter thing and very, very Southern. Southern with a capital S. Although I don't think that people in Louisiana go around naked quite as much as Wells would have it. And guess what! Thornton, Louisiana, is a real town - unlike Shakespeare, Arkansas (of Charlaine Harris's Lily Bard books).

Although the main character is Siddalee (how's that for southern), it really revolves around her mother, Vivi, and her three BFFs from childhood - the other Ya-Yas. Vivi is wild and crazy and in many ways broken and her brokenness is visited upon her daughters. The plot is very simple. Sidda wakes up one morning and, in absolute terror, postpones her wedding and runs away to think things out. She does - with the aid of her mother's scrapbook (The Divine Secrets of the --- yeah, you guessed it) and the intervention of the other three Ya-Yas - and returns home for her mother's birthday and decides to go through with the wedding. Most of the story is flashbacks to various events and/or periods in Vivi's life.

It is like The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks in that the reader learns a lot of background and explanation that Sidda never learns. But she does learn that what she and her mother share is a part of her, and that she must accept it to get on with things.

And I do like a happy ending.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

I wonder why I dreaded/disliked this book. When I found out that it was the beginning piece for a class I intend to take this summer, I thought I had better reread it. I used to complain that the two Cathys and all the similar names confused me, but I certainly didn't see anything like that this time. I didn't even remember the happy ending!

Once I got started, I couldn't stop. The level of perversity of the characters is amazing. Given the Bronte's upbringing it isn't really surprising, but I hadn't ever gotten quite that sense of it. I read it once when I was in high school - not as an assignment, but because it was on my mother's annual summer reading list. I'm pretty sure I read it again, but I don't remember the time or circumstance. I have had no inclination to read it again. Possibly all those years of listening to seniors whine and generally carry on about having to read it.

I don't think I would go as far as a former English Chair at the high school where I used to teach and declare that it is the greatest novel in the English language, but it is a doggone good story. Compelling if unlikeable characters: you want desperately for some of them to see the light and change their ways, and I suppose that Hareton and Cathy II do at the very end - and the sight of them is enough to make the great satan himself, Heathcliff, abandon the torment of the two of them and go commune to his death with the ghost of Cathy I. Nelly Dean is an inspired character; as a device for narration, Bronte could hardly have done better. Nelly is everywhere and nowhere as as proper a British servant as she can be in the bizarre households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.