Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life by Karen Karbo

6Aug. Kindle.

A friend at church recommended this one. It came up somehow because I mentioned reading Child's My Life in France, loving it, and being disappointed by Julie and Julia. This is a kick. It is part of series of books on Kick-Ass Women. Other entrants are Coco Chanel, Georgia O'Keefe, and Katherine Hepburn.

The reviews on Amazon complained because it was as much about the writer as the subject. Well, it was, but I didn't see that as a problem. It isn't biography, it was more about how this writer engaged with her subject. She did a tremendous amount of research, but produced a work that is anything but pedantic. She left me wanting to find and read some of her resource material.

Another complaint was that the footnotes were unnecessary - they could have been included in the text. True, but, in spite of the inconvenience of reading footnotes on my kindle, I think it worked. I think she uses footnotes to actually emphasize some of the remarks found there. If I choose this one for my next turn in book club, I will tell them to be absolutely certain that they never skip a footnote. Another book, the one I am reading in the bathroom, uses footnotes similarly. The passages that have reduced me to giggles and carrying the book down the hall to read to my daughter have all been from footnotes. Bathroom books go much more slowly, it will probably be a week or two before I finish it.

As I said, this is not a biography. It is very roughly chronological in presentation, but it is more tied to threads which ran through Child's life as perceived by Karbo: Julia Child Rules - rules for living. What emerges is Karbo's personal portrait of Child and how Child's life informs her own.

Let the Drum Speak (Kwani #3) by Linda Lay Shuler

5Aug. Kindle.

I don't quite know what to say about this one. It was rather repetitive, the basic cycle (new place: she's a witch) repeats several times. Now we are dealing with Kwani's daughter Antelope since Kwani died at the end of the last one.

The incorporation of actual prehistoric Native American sites is intriguing, but beyond the physical layout of the sites, I'm not sure that anything in the stories can be supported by anthropological evidence.

Antelope and infant daughter Skyfeather travel from the pueblos of New Mexico to a major site in eastern Oklahoma, and other characters travel down the river (the Arkansas?) and up the Mississippi to the Cahokia site in southern Illinois. They eventually return to New Mexico to be the ancestresses of the guy that led the pueblo revolt.

Maybe this wasn't all that bad, it just wasn't up to the level of what I've been reading lately.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2Aug. Kindle.

Surely I have reread this since high school, but based on what I didn't remember about it, I'm not sure. I've read Wuthering Heights by sister Emily several times; of course, it was required for at least two lit classes that I took within the last twenty years.

Jane is definitely not as complex as Wuthers but it was a fairly satisfying read. I'm pretty sure that some of the things that I "remembered" about it came from movies rather than from my earlier reading. I remembered St. John as a good, well-intentioned guy that loved her - not exactly, he was arrogant and manipulative. I did remember how nasty Jane's Aunt Reed was, but I didn't remember that she made an attempt (minimal, but still) to repair the consequences of some of her nastiness - too little, too late - but at least a gesture. At least Charlotte killed off the vicious, hateful cousin. I am quite certain that my memory of the scene of Jane's reunion with Mr. Rochester was from a movie. Oh, well.

Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

31Jul. Kindle.

So, to avoid reading the bookman books back to back, I thought I would go back and read some other classics. It has been a long time since I read Nero Wolfe, and I never read them in order. This is the first, but Stout gave it the feel of a long established series. Archie Goodwin has been with Wolfe for seven years. References are made to previous cases. The staff and routine of Wolfe's establishment are all in place: gourmet meals and orchids.

The murder weapon is a golf club - but it is certainly not used in the obvious way, and only Wolfe has all the pieces of the puzzle. Even Wolfe has to dig for them.

I'm not sure why Wolfe is so entertaining. He is more mannered and annoying than Hercule Poirot, and easily out-does Poirot at the exercise of "the little grey cells." At least Archie is not as terminally clueless as the hapless Hastings. He couldn't be, since friendship has nothing to do with relationship between Wolfe and Goodwin. And Wolfe entrusts all the legwork to him since Wolfe himself never leaves the house. Up to that point, the parallels between Poirot and Wolfe are striking. Both are physically absurd. Poirot is small and prissy with an egg-shaped head and a ridiculous mustache. Wolfe weighs upwards of 350 pounds.

Whatever it is, it seems to work for both.

The Bookman's Promise by John Dunning

30Jul. Kindle.

I'm trying to catch up, so these are going to be short.

It is difficult to be brief about one of the Bookman books. It is a shame that there are so few of them. It isn't that some of the writers of series which run to twenty or thirty volumes aren't good. Many of them are excellent - I keep reading them, don't I? But these are orders of magnitude above the usual.

Janeway came home from his last adventure with a goodly chunk of change - so he decided to buy a book. After all, the money was just "Indian Money," a term that a friend used to describe winnings from the casinos on the reservations.

After he returns home with his treasure, a mint first edition of a work by Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), an elderly lady comes to see him claiming that the book was part of her grandfather's collection which had been stolen (well, at least purchased fraudulently) from his widow. She extracts a promise from Janeway that he will find the collection. She dies before she can even return to South Carolina, but Janeway, being Janeway, feels bound to fulfill the commitment he made.

The background educational material is Burton - did he or did he not spy for the British in the days leading up to the Civil War.

The rest of these books are in my queue. It is going to take some restraint (and high class reading material) to resist reading them in straight sets, but I am determined to try. Anticipation ---

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

28Jul. Kindle.

Nothing like the classics. It seems to me that Bunter figures much more largely in this one. We already know that he was with Lord Peter through the war and knows how to deal with his flashbacks, but in this one he is very active in the investigation. He is Lord Peter's entire CSI team: fingerprints, trace evidence, photographs, the whole package. And this one is a tricky one, even by Sayers standards.

The elderly general is found dead in his chair at the club, and across town, his sister has died as well. And all the money goes to the heirs of the one who didn't die first. Complicating things is the fact that it is the British equivalent of Memorial Day - or Armistice Day, I think it was called back after WWI - and this is soon enough after the war to be a pretty big deal.

This is also an opportunity for Sayers to express some feelings about the war and its devastating effects on those that survived.

Louisiana Lament by Julie Smith

27Jul. Kindle.

This one is all very literary - more poets, of course - but everyone has hold of a Gatsby analogy for the crime and much of the dialog involves casting and recasting the various characters in the various roles. It actually works, but it certainly helped to have read The Great Gatsby, maybe Smith figures that most people will have at least seen one of the movies. I did like the part where tough Italian PI, Eddie, sits on a dock waiting for a suspect to return from a fishing trip and reads the book. Never did find out if the book was in his pocket when he got dunked.

In the first one, we knew who the child molester/murderer was almost from the beginning. This time we switch from one suspect to another down to the last couple of chapters. A much more conventional approach to the genre.

Again, families and perversions of families run through everything. We discover that Talba has a half- sister, and that half-sister is central to the plot. Talba is also required to do a lot of "decoding" of the poetry of one of the players. And she throws in an extemporaneous performance to defuse the final crisis.

Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon by Donna Andrews

25Jul. Kindle.

I think Andrews has finally hit her stride in this one. Flamingos was entertaining, but the whole craft show/Civil war reenactment thing was pretty chaotic - and we all know that no Southern (with a capital "S") town is going to allow some flatland furriner to come in and run the circus. Or perhaps, the general scenario in this one just appeals to me because of my first career - and besides, I have always had a weakness for geeks and nerds.

Remember Meg's brother? The one that hated law school (although he did graduate and pass the bar on his first attempt)? The one that spent much of his time during law school inventing a role playing game (the uninitiated may think of Dungeons and Dragons) called Lawyers From Hell. The game caught on and a computer version has been created and is meeting with phenomenal success. Space-cadet Rob who can barely manage to read his email is now the CEO of a software firm. The staff is peopled with every kind of computer geek you can think of. They (or some subset of them) have also rescued a buzzard, George, from a pack of dogs and installed the now one-winged raptor in the reception area of their new office facility as a sort of mascot.

Something weird but indefinite is going on at Mutant Wizards and Rob has begged Meg to temporarily fill the receptionist position and investigate since she is presently recovering from a blacksmithing injury. The receptionist position is proving difficult to fill permanently because most sweet young things appear to have an unaccountable aversion to sharing space with and being the primary caretaker for a disabled buzzard - among other things. One of the other things is the practical joke nerd who is deeply enamored of the automated mail cart. As the story opens, Meg is ignoring him as he rides the mail cart around the office with a stage knife in his chest and stage blood dripping. Several circuits later, Meg happens to notice that this time he actually IS dead - strangled by (can you guess?) a mouse cord. Reminded me of the time that some of my nerdier students pretended to hang themselves with mouse cords in my classroom.

Absurdity mounts upon absurdity. By the way, the intractably vicious Pomeranian, Spike, is resident in a cage under the receptionist's desk. Did I mention that, a la Google, dogs are welcome to come to work with their owners at Mutant Wizards? Hopefully, the tattooed biker dude turned holistic veterinarian will succeed in reforming him.

Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop

24Jul. Kindle.

Second books can be difficult. Characters are established and a balance has been created - if the writer has done that which I most unreasonably demand of them - that they finish the story rather than sign off leaving Pauline tied to the railroad track with the 8:15 due at any minute. Inevitably, the new crisis must be bigger and badder than anything in the previous book and yet have its roots in the events of the original story.

The Crows are one of the more charming of the various terra indigene. They are curious and acquisitive, making them naturals as watchers and informers. One bit in the first book has one of the human characters trying to explain to a Crow in human form that she must give the customer the correct change even if it means that she has to give him some "shiny" not just bills. And, since they are such fun and fairly harmless characters, it is doubly shocking that they are singled out for deliberate mass murder.

It all develops into a world-wide plot to exterminate the terra indigene and make humans dominant. The vehicle being used by the Humans First and Last movement is significantly gruesome. No question about who are the bad guys.

There are still some threads carrying over. Will Lieutenant Monty recover his daughter? Are Meg and Simon ever going to realize that they are in love with each other - everybody else knows. The baddest bad escaped capture and becoming dinner, can he rebuild his evil business? There are doubtless future installments.

Louisiana Hotshot by Julie Smith

23Jul. Kindle

I don't know who is tagging all these books with "a humorous New Orleans mystery" and other subtitles of the same ilk. I have had to disagree with almost all of them. This is not funny story. For a funny murder mystery read Donna Andrews and her "bird" books. The juxtaposition of humor and horror is a time-honored literary device; the contrast heightens the effect. I first became aware of it in college when I was involved in a production of "La Boheme" (much, much later adapted into the musical "Rent"). In the original there is a scene where the starving artists in their garret are celebrating the sale of a painting with wine, food, and (in our production) a mock battle with paintbrushes and such as swords. In the midst of all that there is a knock on the door, and they find Mimi lying on the step at the point of death. Maybe that is a little extreme an example, but the fact that a competent writer uses the device does not make the book humorous. Besides, who wants to read a story that is grim and morbid all the time - maybe that is why the Matthew Scudder stories by Block are so short ---

Maybe the idiot at Amazon just thought the idea of a performing poet becoming a PI was so hysterically funny that it had to be a humorous story. New Orleans, "the city that care forgot," isn't a funny city either. Smith does a remarkable job of dealing with the contrasts and contradictions of the place. Obvious example: to most of the world, Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the party to end all parties; to the level of New Orleans society that is throwing the party, it is a deadly serious business. In fact, it is a major business in New Orleans, as Carnevale is in Venice. Those floats are not thrown together over a weekend by a bunch of college students fortified by a keg of beer. The costumes come with a ticket price that puts haut couture to shame. And at the same time New Orleans is a genuine modern city with one of the gulf coast's busiest ports. Okay, rant over.

This was fun (NOT funny) and old friend Skip Langdon slips in around the edges - although I don't recall being informed of exactly how she and Talba got to be such good friends. Still, every PI needs a police contact, so we will let that pass. And Talba Wallis in her persona as The Baronesse de Pontalba is a working poet. It must be fairly obvious that a working poet must have a day job, so since, in addition to being curious to the core, she is a self-confessed computer hotshot, Talba seems to herself, at least, an ideal candidate for a position advertised for an assistant PI. And Smith is off again crossing the lines of New Orleans society.

The case is brutal. A predator is working the middle class private school set for young girls. Smith sets up an appealing running cast, at least I hope they all hang around. Talba's mother, Miz Clara, is a tough lady who is crazy about Talba's boyfriend, Darryl. Darryl's day job is as a teacher and counselor at the school attended by one of the victims. By night he is a member of one of the best and best-known jazz bands in the city. Talba's new boss, Eddie Valentino is a former cop and self-identified tough guy, who is absolute putty in the hands of his wife and prosecuting attorney daughter.

For a first book in a series, it holds together well - although there is an awful lot going on. The theme is family - the families of the victimized girls, Eddie's exiled son, and Talba's own feud with her brother, even the family of the predator. To Smith's credit, she resolves all these loose ends rather than leaving some of them hanging as a lure to the next book. I suppose, on consideration, that family is one of Smith's persistent things; it is certainly a standing issue in the Skip Langdon books. Must be a New Orleans thing.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

22Jul. Kindle/Book Club.

This is an odd little story of a blind French girl and a German orphan boy whose connection is tenuous at best. It begins in the years leading up to World War II. Marie-Laure's father is the locksmith at the Natural History Museum in Paris and she grows up haunting its corridors and laboratories. Werner Pfennig and his sister, Jutta, grow up in an orphanage in the mining district of northern Germany.

It is also a story of obsession and the madness on many levels. Individual madness playing against the institutional madness of the Third Reich.

The threads of the lives of these two young people cross and re-cross delicately. I was beginning to fear that they would never actually meet, but they do - for a day in the midst of the seige of Saint-Malo. Then the threads float again, crossing in the lives of the people close to both of them.

The End of Always by Randi Davenport

20Jul. Paper/Library.

A friend from church checked this out and read it - and wanted someone else to read it, too. So she called me and had someone drop it off at Vacation Bible School for me. I think I understand why.

This is set in the late 19th or early 20th century. The story is about a young woman whose life has been defined by "mother's terrible accident." It is pretty clear that the "accident" was the deliberate murder of her mother by her father who proceeds to abuse his three daughters. The middle daughter falls for a handsome young carpenter and runs away with him only to find herself reenacting her mother's life. He beats her and starves her until one night the beating is so severe that neighbors rush in and rescue her.

At this point the real abuse begins as she seeks a divorce in a time and place where that is virtually unheard of.

Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

18Jul. Kindle.

This is the one I read many years ago and it put me off the Matthew Scudder books until just a few months ago. Now I'm not sure why I found it so horrifying. This the one where Scudder is fighting his way through his alcoholism. Six or seven days are about his limit for sobriety, but a major black-out frightens him badly.

The booze makes pursuing his case a little difficult. A high-class hooker hires him to tell her pimp that she is retiring - getting out of the life. That turns out to be a non-issue - until she turns up dead, butchered. And then it happens again, to a transvestite streetwalker. Then - well, you get the picture.

The Bookman's Wake by John Dunning

15Jul. Kindle.

Dunning just doesn't miss. I read these years ago at the suggestion of a friend and member of our teacher book club (now pretty much a retired teacher book club). I think I probably got into all that when I read the first one - which I didn't remember having read back whenever.

Denver-based ex-cop turned bookman, Cliff Wakefield, against his better judgement accepts a short-term contract as a bounty hunter. All he has to do is go to Seattle and collect a fugitive book thief and return her to Taos. Yeah, right, nothing is ever that simple in murder mystery land. By the way, the fugitive is named Eleanor Rigby.

As always, the technical information is fascinating. This time, the background is printing, as in fine printing of limited editions. And more about the dollar value of books and people who love books as objects rather than for their contents. I will admit to liking books - even though I prefer to read them electronically. I like them enough that I can't quite bring myself to do those clever crafty things which turn books into decorative objects, not even Reader's Digest Condensed Books, but not obsessively for their beauty and dollar value as a good bookscout and his/her clients do.

Written in Red by Anne Bishop

13Jul. Kindle.

Thanks to my sister for recommending this. I do enjoy a new twist in fantasy. The story takes place on the continent called Thaisia which bears a striking resemblance to North America. The names are disguised, but the places are pretty obvious. The city is called Lakeside, but if you catch a few landmarks, it is in the general vicinity of Chicago. Humans arrived in Thaisia to be confronted with the terra indigene or earth natives, who happen to be shape-shifters. They permit humans to live and farm in restricted areas and to share their technology with them.

The real difference in Bishop's world is the nature of the terra indigene. The main character is a Wolf (capitalized to distinguish the terra indigene from ordinary wolves) named Simon Wolfgard. Wolfgard is sort of the family name for all terra indigene Wolves. In myth and legend the were creature is a human being who under certain circumstances turns into a beast. In Bishop's story, the terra indigene are creatures who can shape themselves as humans if they wish. Simon Wolfgard is a wolf first and not a human being at all, regardless of his shape. The terra indigene come in all flavors - Wolves, Bears, Coyotes, Owls, Hawks, Crows, you name it --- and the Sanguinati - vampires, whose other shape is smoke. And various and sundry others, but telling you all that would spoil all the fun.

It opens with the arrival of a young woman dressed in light clothing in the heart of a Chicago winter night - I've been there in winter, and I wouldn't be out in it wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a t-shirt. For reasons which he can't explain even to himself, Simon hires her to be the Human Liaison (mail room clerk) for the Lakeside Courtyard - the interface point between the terra indigene and the humans of the city of Lakeside. He is the co-owner of the bookstore Howling Good Books (gotta love it) and the leader of all the terra indigene of the area. The bookstore, the coffeeshop next door (A Little Bite) are open to both terra indigene and humans and are staffed by both.

In spite of all this cleverness, this is not a piece of fantasy fluff. Tensions are high between humans and terra indigene, and the situation could easily degenerate into outright war with the humans being the inevitable losers. A good solid read.