The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

4May. Kindle.

I really enjoyed this - do I sound surprised? I should, because non-fiction is definitely not my usual territory. Not only that - it is a sports story, and sports is totally not my thing.

One of my problems with non-fiction is that you generally know in advance how it is going to come out. In this case, we know that these guys go to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and bring home gold. By the way, in case you hadn't guessed from the title, their sport is rowing - eight man crew. I can't say I've always had a secret fascination with crew - because I haven't. Somehow, Brown manages to maintain a high tension level even though the reader knows - from the very beginning, when Brown meets Joe Rantz shortly before his death and Joe's daughter shows him the gold medal. Or maybe it is the other way around, because I knew all along that they would get there and win, I could keep reading, in spite of the crises and set-backs.

Brown does another thing that I typically find annoying, but he managed to make it work. He packs in large quantities of history - particularly of the propaganda division of Hitler's Germany. The reader suffers through a grueling season of hours of rowing in horrid weather - honestly, the weather was not THAT bad the years I lived in Seattle - and suddenly the scene changes and we are in Germany attending the birth of Goebbel's daughter - and handed the fact that in a few years the child's mother would poison her - and her other four children - before she and her husband commit suicide in the collapse of the Third Reich.

There is as much incident and event as any reader could want, but somehow the whole thing is character- driven.

Did hundreds of thousands of people really turn out for these boat races? I had no clue.

Wellspring by Jenna Zamie

Sometime between the last two posts. Uploaded manuscript to Kindle.

How could I have forgotten!?! This was a reread, of course - after a major revision by the author. I read it and am now reading it again for the purpose of nitpicking -- at the request of said author. Since I was fairly familiar with the story and frequently in discussion with the author my reading was rather different than my usual read. Still, it did occupy my reading time for several days.

I suppose I could/should postpone actual commentary (I guess that is what I do here - these posts are certainly not formal reviews) until after it is published, but just for the record - I really like it.

The Gates of Sleep by Mercedes Lackey

30Apr. Kindle.

Elemental Masters Book 3.

Has it really been ten days since I finished a book? I suppose it is possible - last week I was trying very hard to finish a gift for a friend and then I was out of town over the weekend. Still seems rather improbable. I'll have to check and see if there is anything that I forgot to log. I really need to upload these write-ups to the web. The first date in this batch of unpublished posts is in February.

I know I bought this one to have something to take with me over the weekend that I knew I would enjoy and wasn't too taxing. As it was I hardly had a chance to pick up my kindle, although I got some work done on a new project. In spite of the familial preoccupation with baseball, my sister and I managed to get in several hours of talking.

Guess all that doesn't really matter much. I did enjoy this reread - once I got time to read it. I'm enjoying the fairy tale aspect of them far more this time. - And she pricked her finger and fell into a deep sleep and so did everyone else in the palace - Still good fun and it is entertaining to see how modern writers handle the old plots. I think most of the present generation of fantasy writers has given it a whirl.

As I suggested above and telegraphed quite clearly by the title, this one is a treatment of Sleeping Beauty. Evils of the industrial revolution and all that. It just occurred to me that it is easy enough for us to treat the industrial revolution with proper horror from our safe vantage point in history, but when Charlotte Bronte wrote Shirley it was actually happening - I know it had a great deal of immediacy that is lacking from current treatments. We know a great deal more about the long term effects, but somehow the sense of chaos and a world out of control doesn't come through in quite the same way.

The focus here is on potteries and the young women who were "paintresses" and lived and breathed lead based paints - until they died early and horribly. There is also a supernatural element, naturally, these are books about magic and the evil villains used the industry as a base of operations. Now, wrap "Sleeping Beauty" around all that.

Lackey does it rather successfully. I like some of her stories better than others, but she never seems to completely fail. I will have to check out a couple of series of hers that I have never read - maybe when school is out.

Dreams and Shadows by C Robert Cargill

20Apr. Kindle.

Another recommended by a friend - but not this time for its literary merits, she had not read it, but she had known this guy in high school - and figured that he was as good a candidate for the Lectureship as Paolo Bacigalupi. Could be. Another friend did attend sessions of the lectureship and thought that Bacigalupi was amusing and insightful and read very well. All probably true, still I found his book incredibly depressing. At first I thought that this one would be just as depressing. It wasn't, quite.

I think I would characterize this as whimsical, but rather dark. Seems an odd juxtaposition. I guess it would slot in as urban fantasy, if one is driven to catagorize. We have the entire range of western European faerie with a little bit of eastern thrown in for good measure - one of the main characters is a djinn - who is cursed. All set in and around Austin, Texas. What Jim Butcher and Dresden did for Chicago, Yashar and Colby Stevens do for Austin.

It took some getting into - in the beginning, it resembled a collection of short stories more than a novel - but eventually all the back stories are in place and the threads start weaving together. I did enjoy it, in spite of the fact that almost all the characters are dead by the end. At least the dog doesn't die. It does remain to be seen how many volumes the dog survives since it was clear at the end that this is merely book one. Maybe the first quest in the next volume is to return Gossamer (the dog) to his home.

Plain Murder by Emma Miller and Renee Luke

17Apr. Kindle.

Unrealized potential. The murder was transparent. I am not particularly perceptive, but I knew whodunnit within the first few chapters. The main character is an idiot - since she doesn't catch on until the last chapter. The whole story seems to be about the conflicts of this formerly old order Amish girl who leaves and has a successful business career then returns to the old neighborhood - and hangs out, without rejoining the church - having made enough money to buy the old manor house and turn it into a B&B. All this, mind you, before she is thirty.

It is an intriguing setting. The Amish exist as a separate country embedded within our own, but this book didn't really get there. The discussions of cultural differences are definitely told not shown. The red herrings are simplistic and silly.

And as I sit down to critique the second full draft of my daughter's novel, I think again on the immense quantity of absolute schlock that gets published and feel very confident about its publication potential. The story my daughter wrote when she was in the fifth grade had more interesting characters and a better developed plot than this. The scary thing is that it is far from the worst that I have read lately.

Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia

16Apr. Kindle.

Recommended by a friend - I think she wanted someone else to read it and share her horror, it is pretty horrific. I do not read "true crime" because the dimension of reality - real people, real events, real places - takes it far, far beyond my comfort zone. I like fictional crime, thank you very much. And while most of the story takes place in Alaska, its beginnings were in Fort Worth, Texas, and another stage was in north central New Mexico. Too close to home.

Robert Hale, who later reinvented himself as Papa Pilgrim leading his godly family including many children, started his career by getting his high school sweetheart pregnant. running away and marrying her, and murdering her - even before the baby was born. In Texas, as in much of the world, money talks and he walked away from the whole thing.

He did not reform. He found another young teenaged bride and set forth on a course of psychological and physical abuse toward her - and their eighteen or nineteen children. And when his daughters got old enough - I don't think I need to go into detail there. And all this in the name of God - I don't use the term blasphemy very often, but this seems an appropriate time.

He also made a very public issue of flauting the law and --- I don't want to talk about this book any more. At least he died in prison - but it was much too late in his life to even begin to be adequate punishment for what he did. I guess that is up to a higher authority.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off: The Yarn Harlot's Guide to the Land of Knitting by Stephanie Pearl McPhee

14Apr. Kindle.

Good fun. Not as wildly entertaining as At Knit's End, but still fun. And I have to confess that I didn't read it all. There were letters inserted from an (I assume) imaginary woman who discovers knitting and becomes an addict to several different people (I think), and occasional responses. They were inserted as images in the text and I found them very difficult to read -- so for the most part, I didn't. The few I did struggle through were hilarious, but it was so very much work. I wonder if the library has a copy. It is also making me reconsider the manner of the epistolary inserts that I have planned for Mother's story. I was thinking of including occasional actual images of Mother's hand-written (or badly typed) letters - but I'm not so sure now particularly given the growing prevalence of e-text as opposed to print on paper.

Not much to be said about this book - definitely a read for knitters, not the general population. Those unlettered in the art might even think that some passages were written in a foreign language - not really, just technical jargon.

She did make one point that I have been trying to share with others, most of whom are totally disinterested in such observations. Knitting is magic - I consider it a mathematical magic - you take a piece of string and, as she says, you wave it around with a couple of sticks (many, many times) and convert it into a fabric - a line into a surface. Mathematically a line has only one dimension and a surface has a minimum of two, frequently, three. If that isn't magic, I don't know what is.

The Palace Guard by Charlotte MacLeod

10Apr. Kindle.

It is getting serious between Sarah and Max. They even managed to get mostly disrobed in the same room - but no. At least it has gotten beyond "I'm newly widowed and can't even think about that" to "not yet."

I really do enjoy these. They have a vague flavor of the thirties, although they are set in what was, at the time of writing, the present - the early 80s. Okay, I know that was thirty-five years ago now - but still fairly contemporary - no cell phones. Maybe it is Sarah's continual concern with the proprieties - or maybe that is just the way Boston is.

The action in this one centers around a museum which I believe is meant to be a parody of the Gardner - at least I think it is the Gardner. Wasn't there a whole series of murder mysteries set in and around the Gardner? Or maybe not - maybe I am thinking of Murder at the Gardner by Jane Langdon. Something else to reread!

Stolen art, faithless friends, and a fake countess who creates antique Eastern Orthodox icons. Also a couple of rather nasty murders. And a serious suitor for Mrs. Sorpende - it looks like she is going to become a Kelling.

Sick of Shadows by Sharyn McCrumb

10Apr. Kindle.

Since I can't get the ballad books for kindle, I thought I would try one of the Elizabeth McPherson books. Not as atmospheric and moody as the ballad books, but doggone good. I remember reading a couple of these long ago, and I am looking forward to rediscovering the one with the business of the novice ducks. I'm thinking it may be book three in the series, Highland Laddie Gone, since I remember that the action took place at highland games somewhere in the coastal south.

I remember these books as being really funny, but this was not. It is definitely lighter fare than the ballads, but neither is it at the level of hysteria of Bimbos of the Death Sun. McCrumb is clearly a woman of infinite talents.

Elizabeth ends up being the default representative of her branch of the family to the wedding of her cousin, Eileen Chandler. The poor cousin (Elizabeth) is drafted into the service of her domineering aunt and is required to address last minute invitations and sundry other mundane tasks while the bride-to-be wanders about vaguely and works secretively on a painting destined to be a gift for her prospective husband - until the bride-to-be becomes the murder victim.

The Chandlers are a clan with enough money to do (or not do) as they please, and they possess neuroses and psychoses for a crowd several times the size. All of which makes for an interesting group of suspects, including Elizabeth who, with Eileen, the deceased bride-to-not-be-after all, out of the picture, is back in the running for a great-aunt's bequest of $200.000 to the first of her great-nieces or nephews to marry.

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

8Apr. Kindle.

I've been picking things semi-randomly to read at my desk. I generally don't spend a lot of time here and am more comfortable abandoning things that simply don't work for me. This was a complete surprise and has kept me sitting at my desk instead of sitting out with the dog, crocheting and reading on my kindle. I had expected one of those cutely quaint little old lady mysteries and this is anything but.

According to Winspear's wiki, she has taken the period encompassing the aftermath of WWI as her own. Maisie is a non-traditional character in all aspects. Her family is lower class. Her father is the British equivalent of the guy we knew seventy years later in northern Italy as "Melone Banane" selling produce from a truck (or horse cart) through the city. Maisie goes into service, but catches the attention of her employer who recognizes her intellectual capabilities and provides her with an education - including entrance into the women's college at Cambridge. Then comes the war and Maisie abandons university for nursing.

The story runs two tracks between the "present day" as Maisie goes into business as a detective with a psychological side and the story of her upbringing, education, and war service. Unlike something I complained about several books back, the two tracks deepen the story and demonstrate a strong connection between the events of the two periods.

I really enjoyed this and I am looking forward to reading the entire series - since book one is available for kindle, I expect/hope that all of them will be.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

8Apr. Kindle.

I think I have had enough post-apocalyptic dystopian YA for a while. This was probably the best read of the lot, but although I will read the other books in the series, they can just wait a while.

In this post-apocalyptic dystopian Chicago, society is divided into "factions" along philosophical lines concerned with what each group blames for war. Abnegation philosophy holds that selfishness is the primary cause of war, hence they strive for selflessness in all things. And so on, the other factions are Erudite, Dauntless, Candor, and Amity - fairly self-explanatory.

The timeframe is a little fuzzy and it seems fundamentally illogical to me that an entire society can separate itself based on ideological distinctions which in some ways remind me of college fraternities and sororities. At sixteen young people are tested to see which faction they should belong to, but they choose whether or not to follow those results - then they are tested and initiated according to protocols set up by each faction. The mechanisms of support for an essentially urban society are simply disregarded.

Predictably, there is a great deal of tension between the factions - with predictable results.

The heroine, Tris or Beatrice, does not test neatly into one or another faction - she is Divergent, possessing qualities of several factions - this makes her dangerous to those who want to control everything.

This series is being or has been made into a series of films. It's a natural - lots of action and bizarre sets.

Nora Bonesteel's Christmas Past by Sharyn McCrumb

6Apr. Kindle.

I was disappointed - because it was so short. I had hoped for a collection of short stories at least. Oh well, even short as it was it had that marvelous completeness of McCrumb's ballad stories and was more worth the 1.99 that it cost than many full length novels that I have read.

This piece is intriguing for several reasons, things that I think are uncharacteristic of the ballad novels - I would like to be sure of that, but unfortunately very few of them are available for kindle. I'll have to go check the shelves - I know Bimbos of the Death Sun is back there - but that is not one of the ballad novels.

Back on point, there are two separate and distinct story lines that never cross, they are told in parallel but have completely separate casts. And then there are the principals of the two casts. One of them features Nora Bonesteel as the central character, I seem to remember that she is usually a side character - as in Songcatcher which I read recently. And we know from the beginning that she is dealing with a ghost. The other story is about Sheriff Spencer Arrowood - again, although I think he appears in all the ballad novels, I don't think he has ever been the "star."

Anyway, two charming Christmas miracles wrapped up in one package by a master of the craft. Gotta love it.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

5 Apr. Kindle.

I really did not like this one. It is the current choice of a book club that I sort of keep up with because some very good friends are in it.

It is one of those things in which the point of view switches between characters and instead of chapters you sections headed "Rachel" or "Megan" or "Anna." I'm not crazy about those to begin with - and this one adds the crime of putting the three narrators on different timelines. Sometimes it is effective when you have stuff happening in different centuries - but in this one, one character was out of phase by a few months. And the primary narrator was incredibly annoying - she was a drunk and must have reformed at least half a dozen times in the few weeks of the main narrative thread. None of the characters are likeable - I have a really hard time with stories about people I don't like.

The Curse of the Giant Hogweed by Charlotte MacLeod

5Apr. Kindle

Silly. The Peter Shandy books have been improbable and off-beat with wildly unlikely characters, but this one is just silly. Shandy and his side-kick Timothy Ames and the until this point minor faculty member, Daniel Stott of swine fame, are called to England to confer on an infestation of a noxious weed known as the giant hogweed (sounded a lot like kudzu - only it came in stalks instead of vines). Somehow they are transported back to some fantasy prehistory of the region where among other things, people, and creatures they encounter a semi-wicked (but reforming) witch who inadvertently tells Peter the spell necessary to destroy the giant hogweed.

MacLeod's mysteries tend to be light, funny, and slightly archaic in feel - but this was way beyond all of that. I am informed that the next one returns to her standard fare.

Bloodline by Felix Francis

31Mar. Kindle

The best I can muster is a qualified "ok." The writing is just a little flat somehow. I would really like to be able to qualify that more specifically - but I can't. Well - there was this one habit that started grating on me - and on a look back I couldn't find an example - but he ended many chapters (enough to annoy me, at any rate) with pained exclamations by the main character: "Oh, Clare, why did you do it!" to his dead sister and so on.

Also, it is what I consider a dishonest murder mystery. The murderer just sort of springs out of nowhere. He is in there, but way off to the side - and absolutely nothing points to him.

Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey

31Mar. Kindle.

One of her supernatural thrillers featuring Diana Tregarde. Diana is a "practitioner" whose second job is consulting on issues regarding the occult. She actually makes her living writing romance novels. I've read a couple of these (Diana Tregarde stories, not Diana's romance novels) and somehow they never quite seem to have the depth or complexity of plot or character that her SF has.

In this one, one of the old gods of the Aztecs takes over an American visiting Mexico City. He returns to Dallas with his four handmaidens and all hell breaks loose. A cop investigating the gruesome murders had worked with Tregarde back during their college days and calls her in to help.

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

30Mar. Kindle.

This was grim, a look at a post-apocalyptic world from the lowest levels. It was well written and well plotted with striking characters and settings. Can't say I enjoyed it.

The writer is to be the guest of honor at the Williamson Lectureship next week. Maybe it is just as well that I will not be able to attend any of the sessions. (I am reliable informed that Bacigalupi was charming and entertaining. Oh well.)

At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much by Stephanie Pearl-Mcphee

25Mar. Kindle.

Wow! Two winners in a row! I don't know when I have read anything that had me giggling as much as this one. It is set up (as much as I can tell from the kindle translation) just like one of those devotional books. You know the ones? There is generally a scripture verse at the top of the page in italics, a short homily in the middle in standard type, and a take-away "message" at the bottom, again in italics. Only in this one the scripture slot was filled with quotations from such varied luminaries as Einstein, Ghandi, and that great source of witticisms - Anonymous. The homilies are based on the experiences of obsessive knitters, and the moral lessons are --- hysterically funny - at least to knitters.

I truly don't know whether or not to recommend it to non-knitters, I did read a few bits to my non-knitting daughter and she at least chuckled mildly.

The Serpent's Shadow by Mercedes Lackey

24Mar. Kindle.

Elemental Masters #2

What fun. Thank goodness. Of course, it could be considered that I cheated by rereading something that I know that enjoyed the first (and second) time around. I was very nearly driven to rereading one of my comfort favorites that would have been read to shreds if I had been reading paper instead of electrons.

This one is set in what I believe is the usual period for these books, Edwardian - although I recall that one is a WWI piece. The heroine is the daughter of an English doctor and a high caste Indian woman and is herself a doctor. She has fled to England from some unspecified enemy who has murdered both of her parents. The battle with this supernatural enemy draws out her just-barely-more-than latent elemental gifts and brings her into contact with the British elemental masters.

Breeder by Casey Hays

21Mar. Kindle.

More tedium. I was informed that this one was much better than Hays' first effort, The Cadence. Well, I suppose I could bring myself to go better, it could hardly have been worse. But I don't think I could go much better. My friend told me that at least it was shorter. OK, that was an improvement.

Can I whine now? For crying out loud, the woman used to be an English teacher - doesn't she know how to run a spell-checker? I don't claim to be without error in that department, but I do run spellcheck and if a word looks funny to me - I google it. Bad grammar and usage is simply inexcuseable (lay and lie, for crying out loud). And then there are the multiple instances of wrong-worditis - one that comes to mind was the use of the word "rain" in place of "reign." And not all of them were homophones - there was at least one sentence fairly early on that I simply never did figure out, I have no idea what she was trying to say. There were probably more, but fairly early on I started reading very, very fast. I was personally irritated from page one by her use of "hogan" to describe the huts they lived in. For one thing, the structures she described were not hogans, and it showed a remarkable ignorance of and insensitivity to the culture in which the people do live in hogans.

Then we have the matter of the zodiac. Great chunks of the terminology of the book, including the title of the series, are based on the fact that our sixteen-year-old heroine was born in the eleventh month therefore under the sign of Sagittarius, the Archer. Can happen - but most of November (the eleventh month, at last count) falls under Scorpio. And that would have been such an easy fix!

The plot was thin and fraught with logical inconsistencies. If she wanted to show a female dominated society, she should have read some of the good stuff - Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country comes to mind. Maybe Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for an opposite view. And there was one - I can't remember either the title or the author at the moment - maybe Silverberg - in which women dominate and men are pampered boy-toys - much more practical than locking them in foul stinking holes and expecting girls to go copulate with them there. If she was after the post-apocalyptic thing, there is a world of reading that she should have done first, including a couple of short stories which she almost certainly taught as a high school English teacher but apparently did not read. YA does not mean that the audience is stupid.

This was also billed to be as a venture into Christian YA fiction. Really? Nothing even remotely Christian showed up. Mind you, I don't consider that a flaw - self-consciously so-called Christian so-called literature I generally find fairly offensive. I think she threw in the "Christian" tag as a retrofit to try to tap into a genre audience (and publisher?). The scripture verses at the head of each chapter were seldom even remotely related to anything in the following text. I had this vision of the writer sitting with her finished manuscript and a concordance searching for verses which contained key words from the following material, to hell with relevance.

I am really sorry that I wasted as much of my spring break reading this and the Atlantis mess as I did. Although I purchased it, I doubt if I will ever actually read the second book in this trilogy, in which I understand we have teenage mutant ninja boys. Enjoy your royalties, Ms. Hays - I don't think you will get anymore from me.

The Fall of Atlantis by Marion Zimmer Bradley

20Mar. Kindle.

Web of Light

Web of Darkness

This is actually a double - which may in part account for why it took so incredibly long to read - besides the fact that it was boring. It is also representative of a dirty rotten trick that publishers/authors pull on the reading public. The two Webs were published in 1983 and four years later the double was published. Apparently, in the biz such a volume is referred to as an "omnibus" edition. And in all fairness, I did not find the omnibus on my shelves in paper. However, there was not a notation at the beginning of the ebook that it was in fact an omnibus. I remembered, vaguely, that I had not been impressed by the two separate books. At least I don't think there was; I will check. Okay, my apologies, buried in all the small print in the pages before the story begins - pages and pages back - there is a notation that it was previously published as Web and Web. Wish I had a paper copy so I could check it - Glad I don't have a paper copy because that would mean that I bought it twice on paper before buying it again as an ebook. At any rate, I remembered, vaguely, that I had not been impressed by the two separate books.

I suspected that there was a reason why I never reread this. I love Darkover, but Bradley's pseudohistories not so much. In fact, on rereading I found this incredibly tedious. Endless smart people doing dumb stuff.

Note to self: do not read this one again. Reread Darkover.

The Ship Who Searched by Mercedes Lackey and Anne McCaffrey

19Mar. Kindle.

Maybe I can get this right. One of McCaffrey's best (at least it is one of my personal favorites) is The Ship Who Sang. For personal reasons, McCaffrey never revisited the character and situations. Her publisher, ever willing to cash in on a good concept, proposed a series of stories by other writers in the Helva universe (Helva being the heroine of The Ship Who Sang). This is Lackey's contribution.

It was pretty good up to the final scene, in which Tia, the brainship, has a cybernetic body created for herself so she can actually have sex with her brawn. Yuck.

Something the Cat Dragged In by Charlotte MacLeod

17Mar. Kindle.

What the cat dragged in was the toupee of a professor emeritus of Balaclava College. Since he never ever appeared in public without it, that makes him a shoe-in for victim number one.

As usual, the inept police chief and the lazy coroner declare the death an accident. However, the victim's intrepid landlady, who also happens to be the Shandy house cleaner, is convinced that the vic's apartment has been searched and calls on Shandy to investigate.

An interesting development in this one is that said inept police chief (under the guidance of Professor Shandy) begins to develop a certain amount of actual eptitude. I suppose Charlotte figured that if she was going to continue with this series, she was going to have to do something about him. I rather like this particular direction.

Also as usual, there is a point at which President Thorkjeld Svenson is the prime suspect. But very much NOT as usual, Sieglinde Svenson and Helen Shandy are very minor presences - now that I missed.

Ice Cold by Tess Gerritsen

14Mar. Kindle.

I read the early books in this series some years ago and enjoyed them, but for some reason never kept up with it. They do tend to be fairly grim, maybe that was it.

This one was certainly no exception in the grimness department. And I may have to go back to the beginning to catch up with the back story. Jane Rizzoli is married! To an FBI agent, no less. And Maura Isles is engaged in a long running affair with the police chaplain - a Catholic priest. Talk about places I never expected this series to go.

But this one has it all. Maura goes off to a conference in Wyoming in November and in frustration over her romantic situation takes off for a weekend with an old med school classmate and a group of his friends. We get an abusive polygamist cult, mass murder, and criminal police officers. And Maura in mortal danger, of course, and Jane and husband coming to the rescue. Not a relaxing read, high adrenaline all the way.

Prague Counterpoint by Bodie Thoene

10Mar. Kindle.

I keep thinking that I must have read something else - how could it possibly have been five days since I finished a book? I've checked both kindles and the desktop app and this is it. Last week was pretty busy and this past weekend was nuts, several times I came home and sat down to read and/or crochet ... and woke up several hours later. I suppose that could put a serious bite into my reading time. And I had this book going on my computer and the previous one on my kindle - so time got split.

It was interesting reading these two particular books in parallel - because there were a great many parallels. Didn't expect that. Fantasy set in the early 1900's in San Francisco and historical fiction set in Europe during the early days of the Nazi expansion. Lots of dramatic chase scenes, I guess. Of course, it is hard to imagine a more serious "evil villain" than the individual and collective minions of the Third Reich and they hound Elisa in much the same way that? Rose is hunted and driven by the evil Paul du Mond and Simon Beltaire in Fire Rose.

The crisis in this book never lets up though; it is downright exhausting to read. I grant that the period is one of the most horrifying in all of human history. At no time has evil operated so openly and effectively -- as one of the characters quotes: "while the world slept." The evil of the madman Hitler and the opportunistic monsters that were part of his power structure and the hordes of smaller, not lesser, evil beings that swarmed in their wakes pale in this part of the story before the leaders of the great powers and of the press who supported Hitler by their silence, self-interest, and active suppression of the events taking place in eastern Europe. Chamberlain is presented as nearly as monstrous as Hitler himself. Craine, Thoene's Nazi- supporting news magnate Craine is a scarcely disguised Willliam Randolph Hearst.

Although many characters from Vienna Prelude are present, the character that focuses the action in this story is a five-year-old boy with a cleft palate - deemed unfit to live by the Reich - so unfit that his unborn sibling is aborted, his mother and father sterilized - and eventually killed - because they were the parents of such a "monstrous" being.

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

10Mar. Kindle.

Elemental Masters, Book 1.

A poor memory is sometimes quite nice. I could have sworn that I had read this book before along with the other early books in the series, but like On Basilisk Station a few days/weeks ago, I remembered absolutely nothing about it. Something I read somewhere recently (probably in a wiki) put me on notice that books in the elemental masters series are based, at least loosely, on traditional fairy tales. This is The Beauty and the Beast.

It is set in turn-of-the-century San Francisco - so besides all the nicely crafted Lackey fantasy we have, inevitably, the great San Francisco earthquake. The "beast" is a Firemaster who has seriously messed up his life by attempting unwisely to turn himself into a werewolf and ending up stuck somewhere between. The "beauty" is a young woman who is a doctoral candidate in classics at the University of Chicago who is orphaned and cast adrift by the death of her improvident father. The beast recruits her to assist in his researches to attempt to correct what he has done to himself since his form as neither wolf nor man and has left him unable to write or turn pages or even to read without great difficulty.

Rather than misunderstanding and such creating the crisis, we have a fairly conventional evil villain - and the ultimate crisis occurs in the midst of the earthquake. Fun.

The Withdrawing Room by Charlotte MacLeod

5Mar. Kindle.

So, Sarah, now widowed and impoverished through the activities of her now dead wicked mother-in-law and her wimpy son, Sarah's husband, has turned the family mansion into a boarding house - and now her boarders are being murdered. Fortunately, the intrepid art expert Max Bittersohn has managed to secure a room in the Kelling boardinghouse.

Even as a landlady/hostess/cook/chief bottlewasher, Sarah is finding life generally easier than under the despotic rule of her mother-in-law. The worthless Edith is dismissed and Mariposa, who made an appearance or two in the first book in the series, has taken over as housekeeper and general assistant and her boyfriend, an actor who is between jobs, is "acting" as butler. He is a great admirer of Hudson from the BBC series "Upstairs, Downstairs."

The Cadence by Casey Hays

3Mar. Kindle

Oh dear. One does hope, but seldom are those hopes realized.

Here we have bad writing in all of its modes. Globally, for starters, telling instead of showing. That was my father's weakness as a writer of fiction. He was so anxious that his readers "see" what he was "seeing" that he invested far too much time (and way too many words) in the attempt to convey his personal vision. Mark Twain had it down: “Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.” And I would add, if you absolutely MUST tell me - tell me once. How many times did the heroine of this piece link pinky fingers with her BFF to seal a promise? OMG!!

The plot is thin and derivative. Justification for the whole thing is sadly lacking. It sort of reminded me of a television series some years ago, which I confess I never watched, that dealt with a collection of kids with superpowers. "Heroes"?

The characters are about what I would expect a high school (maybe middle school) student to come up with - one that had read Twilight. And let's just close our eyes to spelling, grammar, and word choice.

I could rant for quite a while longer, but this simply isn't worth the effort that would take. Don't read it.

The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau

1Mar. Kindle.

All in all an acceptable treatment of a standard theme in SF. Who doesn't remember "Examination Day" by Henry Seslar? It is a standard in midlevel lit books. On examination day all the children are tested and those who test too high are eliminated to maintain a nice level of manageable sheep.

The story is set in some future post-apocalyptic North America. After a few pages the heroine's "Five Lakes Colony" is recognizable as a reference to the Great Lakes, although one might question how a closed colony without much in the way of transportation which is parked on the edge of Lake Superior, for example, is going to be seriously aware of the other four lakes. Those things are big. Other colony names are less obvious, but it becomes fairly clear as we hear more and more of them, a description of the St. Louis's Gateway Arch, etc.

The best and brightest of the graduating class in each colony are selected by some external agency and sent for testing for entry into the university. Only very few are selected, and those who are sent for the testing are never heard from again. The official line is that they are relocated, but as students wash out of the testing, they disappear. We know that some do attend university and are placed in colonies to pursue their field. Cia's own father attended university and works as a plant geneticist at Five Lakes and all teachers are university graduates. So why has it been ten years since graduates at Five Lakes have been selected for the testing and why is Cia's father less than enthusiastic about her selection under the new teacher?

It is too easy to ascribe deep sinister motives to writers of YA fiction, but it appears at this point that having selected potential leaders the purpose of the whole business is to weed out the potential goats from the potential sheep and destroy them. No doubt all will become clear in the next two volumes.

Gamble by Felix Francis

1Mar. Kindle

It was all right. I tend to side with the critics who describe it as being somewhat "flat" compared to the writing of Father Francis. Will I read the others. Yeah - they, even lacking some kind of spark, are way better than some of the junk that I have been reading quite recently.

Critical Condition by CJ Lyons

28Feb. Kindle.

End of the line for this series. Four volumes and quit. For all the blood and gore, this series, even this volume of the series, was far less gruesome than volume one in her FBI series (see Snake Skin a few back.

I have said all along that reading one of these was a lot like watching an episode of the old ER tv series. (Are television series supposed to get italics or quotation marks? I never can remember, and I am far to lazy to dig out my old - or new - APA style guide.) This "episode" was definitely terminal. Many, many years ago there was a soap opera that ended its run with a bomb that blew up the entire town, killing all residents. I was beginning to think that she was taking this one there. A mad bomber - who also has the answer to the mystery surrounding the life of Dr. Lydia Fiori (or whatever her "real name" is) - has bombs set all over the hospital and plans to blow them all to kingdom come.

The series was fun - in a high action sort of way - so I hate to drop too big a spoiler, but it turns into a Shakespearean comedy instead of a Shakespearean tragedy. In case you haven't figured out the difference from your high school study of the bard: A Shakespearean tragedy ends with everyone dead except one character who makes the final declamation (sometimes he drops dead, too, after declaiming). A Shakespearean comedy ends with everyone getting married.

Steadfast by Mercedes Lackey

26Feb. Kindle.

Elemental Masters #8 (I think). I think I will start identifying series in these notes.

I have missed several of the Elemental Masters books. I didn't like one and quit reading the series. I quite enjoyed this one and will probably go back and reread and fill in the gaps. I'll even reread the one I didn't like. I am intrigued by something I read about these being rooted in fairy tales. This one is telegraphed by the title - The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The fate of the soldier in this one is not nearly as sad as in the fairy tale. He survives and gets the girl.

The setting is fun. We have an elemental mage - a real magician - working as a stage magician. He acquires Katie as an assistant. Katie had been a circus acrobat and contortionist. After the deaths of her parents in an unexplained fire, she is forced by the owner of the circus to marry the brutal strong-man in order to continue in the only life which she knows. She eventually runs away and takes shelter with a troup of gypsies, but they must send her on her way when her presence endangers the entire troup.

The steadfast soldier is the stage door guard at the theater. He is also an elemental mage (mages are less capable than Masters), and falls hard for Katie, who, unlike the paper ballerina in the fairy tale, also falls for him. Predictably, her husband finds her and the inevitable crisis occurs.

Snake Skin by CJ Lyons

26Feb. Kindle.

I can't seem to avoid tv analogies with Lyons. This was like all the most horrifying episodes of L&O: SVU all rolled into one, including the issues with the central cast and their own families. I don't really want to read the next one, but I'm afraid that I will.

Enter the Saint by Leslie Charteris

23Feb. Kindle.

The Saint was much more fun on television. I had a hard time imagining Roger Moore into the character as portrayed in the book. The paper guy was much too earnest. Roger Moore always seemed to be having fun. Of course, that was a long, long time ago - and Roger Moore was even more gorgeous in his day than Tom Cruise in his.

The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern by Lillian Jackson Braun

22Feb. Kindle.

I used to try to get students to see that a great deal of humor is based on the juxtaposition of unlikely elements - probably a lost cause, the average sixteen-year-old still considers slapstick the height of funny. Here we have the crusty news veteran (owned by a siamese cat) set to provide light reading on interior decorating.

Herein enters siamese #2, the dainty YumYum to keep Koko company. Shades of "The Mikado;" Braun must have been (she died in 2011) a Gilbert and Sullivan fan.

The Honor of the Queen by David Weber

21Feb. Kindle.

Rats! I thought I was catching up and found, buried in the midst of my backlog four titles that I had passed over in my note making.

This was in many respects similar to On Basilisk Station as far as plot is concerned. Honor is betrayed into a hopeless situation and comes out smelling of roses - at the cost of ships and lives, of course. The set-up is a bit different. Still, the evil People's Republic of Haven is behind everything, but even they are being double-crossed by their allies.

I remember references in books in the series that I actually have read to injuries that Honor received and the imperfect restoration of her facial musculature. This is the one in which she is injured. At a state dinner, she takes a partial disrupter blast for the head of state of the planet.

Wrack and Rune by Charlotte MacLeod

17Feb. Kindle.

And the caricature of academia continues. Now that I am at least minimally involved in academia I am finding this far more entertaining than I would have in earlier years.

A stone with Viking runes carved on it is discovered in the vicinity of Balaclava U. An eminent Scandinavian scholar (who happens to be President Swenson's uncle) comes in to investigate. The cast of characters expands to include sundry New England hillbillies. Can anywhere in Massachusetts actually be so determinedly rural as portrayed here? Somehow I doubt it. At least they never wander off to Boston or such. It is just that everywhere in Massachusetts is so close to everywhere else - how can such profound cultural differences develop in so few miles?

As the Crow Flies by Damien Boyd

16Feb. Kindle.

Not bad. A cop is called in by the family of a friend who dies in an apparent rock climbing accident. The family (and the cop) feel that is unlikely, since the dead guy was an expert climber.

I was somewhat annoyed by the final conclusion. The prologue was designed to steer the reader away from a particular resolution - and then, after wandering through all sorts of likely and unlikely causes, he drops the bomb. I dislike having a mystery writer deliberately set out to mislead the reader. Smacks of ineptness on his part.

The Book of Killowen by Erin Hart

15Feb. Kindle.

I should track the "grades" of my impulse purchases from Amazon's cheap books for Kindle lists and see if I am wasting a lot of money. On a more positive note, this one gets an "A" - not an "A+", I think; but a good solid "A". Solid enough that I have ordered the first book in the series. It was priced beyond my limit for a kindle book with Amazon's disclaimer that they didn't set the price, so I decided a pox on both their houses and ordered a used copy for $.01. So there.

The opening scenes were set in medieval Ireland and I expected that it would develop into one of those historical murder mysteries. This was ok with me although I had expected it to be Celtic fantasy. However, we quickly return to the twentieth century and the discovery of the medieval murder victim (now a bog person) in the trunk of a car - also buried in the bog.

The Family Vault by Charlotte MacLeod

13Feb. Kindle.

Sarah Kelling is not the typical mystery heroine. She is young, shy, over-protected, and married to a much, much older man, a cousin of hers, for the convenience of the family. That family is old Boston with all that implies. Actually, I'm not sure what that implies - sometimes that "old family" stuff seems incredibly foreign to me.

The murders are also all in the family - and go back over twenty-some years. When the family vault is opened for the interment of old uncle what's his name, there is an undocumented body there. The body is easily identified as that of a bar singer who disappeared many years before. And the web of connections reaches out to all corners of the Kelling family.

We have the charming absurdity of Sarah's extended family of eccentric and egocentric Boston elite juxtaposed with the less charming absurdity of murder for money to keep up appearances.

On Basilisk Station by David Weber

11Feb. Kindle.

I was really certain that I had read this before, but now I'm not so sure. I didn't remember/recognize characters or events that I would have expected to. I recognized a lot of character names, but not in the context of this story.

We have young (well, semi-young) Honor's first command and her success against overwhelming odds.

Honor and her cruiser Fearless are sent out to support the Manticore presence at Basilisk Station. The assignment is a punishment tour visited upon Honor and her ship because they have succeeded where they should not have and were then set up for failure. The senior captain at Basilisk is totally nasty fellow who tried to rape Honor when they were both students at the Manticore Naval Academy, Saganami Island. He didn't manage it, and Honor refused to rat him out because she assumed that no one would believe her. So, being the son and heir of a peer of the realm, Pavel Young survives the black mark on his record and is now in a position to destroy Honor, having none of his own, of course.

Young essentially abandons Honor and Fearless and her crew to accomplish the task which he didn't bother to attempt with more ship and personnel and goes away snickering at the thought of her ultimate failure and disgrace. Of course, she pulls it off at enormous cost in lives and ship, but comes home covered with glory.

Urgent Care by CJ Lyons

8Feb. Kindle.

Filling in gaps - six weeks worth of gaps - therefore some of these are going to be very short. Breaks your heart, right? I know verbosity is one of my besetting sins - and sadly only one of them. (Note: In the meantime, six weeks of gaps have become four months worth.)

This one is going to be short, because I simply don't remember too much about it as an entity distinct from the other three in the series. It is all building up to the big finish in book four. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. It doesn't even mean it isn't worth reading - on a snowy afternoon with a roaring fire and a hot drink. But great literature it ain't. Good entertainment -- I think I could go that.

The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lillian Jackson Braun

5Feb. Kindle.

What fun. I guess I was ready for some fluff. It has been years since I first read these and I had almost forgotten how much I had enjoyed them.

In the series opener, Qwilleran becomes acquainted with Kao K'uo Kung, who apparently does not object to having his name reduced to Koko as long as he has his gently braised filet for dinner. He falls into Qwill's keeping when his former companion (can't call him "owner") is murdered. Out of loyalty, I suppose, Koko goes on to solve the murders. Qwill's function is primarily to explain Koko's insights to the police, since they are disinclined to seriously consider evidence produced by a cat.

Vienna Prelude by Bodie Thoene

3Feb. Kindle.

The story is set in the years preceding World War II. The pivotal historic event, or series of events, is Hitler's subjugation of Austria. On the historical level, we see Europe step aside and allow it to happen. We also see the events leading up to the critical episode in Uris's Exodus, the boatload of children who are turned away from Palestine, is set up. I assume that it takes place in a later volume in the series.

Elisa Linder/Lindheim is a blonde, blue-eyed German Jew (by Nazi definition) who is a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic. She can, and does, pass for Aryan. For the bulk of the story, she remains certain the what is happening in Germany cannot possibly happen in Austria, but eventually she takes her Aryan appearance and forged documents to run a stage on an underground railroad rescuing Jewish children.

On another level, Elisa cannot meet a man without having him fall hopelessly in love with her. There are three in particular: a German army officer, an Austrian peasant, and an American journalist. At essentially the same level, we have an almost ridiculously unrealistic happy ending - Elisa's mother and brothers are temporarily safe in Prague and her father escapes from Dachau (really?) just in time to collapse on the steps of Elisa's apartment in Vienna and be loaded up to escape Austria with Elisa and her husband (guess which one) just ahead of the Anschluss.

There were enough hanging threads that I am guessing that the characters and story continue through the series. If not, Thoene has a great deal to answer for in failing to explain how the Jewish concertmaster's Guarnarius turns up without provenance years later in the prologue to the story.

The Chaplain's War by Brad Torgersen

29Jan. Kindle.

Intriguing. Humanity is losing the war. The Mantes have them outgunned to an unimaginable degree and it is all over but the shouting (and of course, the final extermination of the human species). Then a Mantis scholar drops in to chat with Harry, the Chaplain's Assistant, at what amounts to a POW camp. He has to chat with the Chaplain's Assistant because the chaplain died of injuries received in the action that resulted in all of them being confined as they are. The Mantes are essential without anything resembling religion, and while extermination of competitor species is their basic mode of operation, they wish to investigate the concept in case it has some pertinence to their own society. Harry is without religion himself, and was only made a Chaplain's Assistant because the guy making the assignments didn't like him much.

All that said, Harry manages to arrange a temporary cease-fire, then to completely undermine Mantis society and end the war - and save the human race. And --- find something strongly resembling faith for himself.

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

25Jan. Kindle

An old friend found me on Facebook a few days ago and we chatted for a couple of hours about all sorts of things - including books. She was an English professor at the place where I now teach, and I took a number of very entertaining courses from her - we did Jane Austen one semester, all of Jane, and then there were the murder mysteries. And am not sure that we actually did a course - but I did do a paper for presentation on "the little old ladies." This is not a little old lady mystery and it is about as "uncozy" as they get.

The book is billed as a "Simon Serrailler Mystery," but Simon is hardly the central character, even his sister Cat spends more time on stage than Simon does. Simon is a DCI in a small town somewhere in England. I don't know British geography well enough to recognize the implications of various regions. The madman serial killer is right out there the whole time - and I did figure out who it had to be about halfway down. The story revolves around a young female detective sergeant who becomes not-quite-obsessed with several disappearances - then (I suppose this is a seriously major spoiler) the writer kills her. I was pissed. It seemed unnecessary to me, there was plenty of creepy perversity to serve any number of purposes without that. By then there was no more mystery left, they knew who they were after. It seems a terrible waste of a well developed and interesting character, a character that it is easy to like and care about.

Justice Calling by Annie Bellet

23Jan. Kindle.

I believe this falls within the range of Urban Fantasy. As I understand it, that means modern setting with fantasy critters. In this case we have a community of shape-shifters and a sorceress in hiding. Sorcerers being fundamentally considered bad guys (our heroine is an exception, of course). Regular old human beings are muggles, unaware of what/who is there all around.

It was kind of fun, not as porn oriented as the Derynda Jones book. A high level of sexual content seems to be a feature of urban fantasy, with possibly the exception of the Dresden books by Jim Butcher - and even there it surfaces in both personalities and specific varieties of entity.

Even Money by Dick and Felix Francis

22Jan. Kindle.

This is the one before Crossfire. It tends to support my theory that this book was more of a collaboration than the last of the "ands." How do people collaborate on a book, anyway? A text or technical book - I can see it: each contributing their technical knowledge/expertise to specific areas. Perhaps they even write different sections of the book while reviewing and editing each other's work. But in fiction it is difficult to imagine - although I know it is done. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett have collaborated to create some of the best work from either of them - I read (probably a foreword or end notes) about how exciting it was for them to work together, but I still have no sense of the nuts and bolts - how the words actually got on the page. Oh well, subject at hand. This book is a more successful collaboration than the next one - which of course is the previous one here.

The bookmaker hero was less appealing than Francis's usual, but at least he had a connection to and interest in horses and racing. I suppose part of my lack of engagement was my unwillingness to think about the business of how odds are calculated and what they signify - the jargon was fairly meaningless to me. The part of the story that drops the mystery in his lap is dreadfully convoluted and not terribly persuasive. Also, the long drawn out business of his bi-polar wife doesn't really do much to advance the plot either.

I am thinking that I have been terribly cranky about virtually everything that I have read lately. I'm not sure where to go next. A good long nap, maybe - only the semester has just begun - no serious nap time for a few months. Maybe I will just pick out something that my sister has purchased and give it a run.

Crossfire by Dick and Felix Francis

21Jan.. Kindle.

This is out of order! And I made it this far without messing up! I was already well started when I realized my error, and simply decided not to go back.

I'm sad - because for only the second time in the Dick Francis reread, I am disappointed. The plot seemed rather formulaic, even a bit plodding. I never had that sense of tension and drama that I am accustomed to find in the scene in which the hero is tied up or knocked in the head and left for dead. The whole business was far too similar to that bit in an earlier book.

The hero, Tom Forsyth, had the potential to be one of the most compelling in all of Francis-dom, but fell far short of the mark. It opens with a scene in Afghanistan - where he, an army officer, gets his foot blown off by an IED. Then it's just sort of, so what? The only major impact of that is that he is not going back to his regiment as a combat officer. By the way, how many seventeen-year-old runaway enlistees end up at Sandhurst and come out officers? Really? Seventeen years later, he goes "home" because he has nowhere else to go - to the mother and stepfather that he ran away from - rescues the world and his mother, a racehorse trainer, retires and leaves him the business.

He has no strong ties to horses or racing, doesn't really care about either - he doesn't go to the races - he doesn't pitch in with the horses.

His army career doesn't connect with the story except that it gives the writer an opportunity to quote long passages on military strategy from Sun Tzu as Tom goes after the bad guys single-handed (and single-footed, although that doesn't pose a significant handicap to him). No ties to his actual experiences - except occasional discussions of how he never minded slaughtering the Taliban, but killing a white man gives him pause.

I think they overreached in their attempt to use the military as a framework - not because it couldn't be done - but because I don't think either of them understood it well enough to go there. This is the last of the "ands" (Dick Francis AND Felix Francis), and one might speculate that father was failing badly and son hadn't quite got the act together yet - but it makes me nervous about the Felix Francis books which follow this.

The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge

18Jan. Kindle.

My reading friends and I have complained from time to time about books that didn't have any characters that we liked. In these books there really isn't anyone that I don't like. I like some more than others, but no one is really unpleasant. In this volume of the Eliot saga, we have David Eliot hating himself and a new character, Sebastian Weber hating him as well. The main thread of the plot is decoding Weber's hatred for David. As a reader, I really want it resolved because I like them both and because at many levels, they have so much in common that they shouldn't hate each other.

Goudge's focus on the children continues with the introduction of David and Sally's Meg and Robin. I sometimes want to think that her children are the product of some sort of fantasy - but somehow she makes them seem real in spite of their insight, intuition, and apparent maturity.

I can believe in her children - but I'm not so sure about the compelling beauty of the countryside she describes. Most years we receive a calendar from a relative with pictures of the region of England in which he and his family live, I don't suppose it is the same region Goudge describes, but, to me, the scenes are at best banal. Maybe it is simply poor photography, but I'm afraid it really is just boring. I grant that those of us who live in the western US are terribly spoiled by the spectacular beauty that we have easy access to. I wonder if the scenes and setting of these stories exist - I would like to see them and make my own judgement. I suppose that for those who are susceptible to the appearance of "my own, my native land" nothing could possibly compare - regardless of where that spot is and what it looks like. Personally, I'm not sure about a place where a fire is appropriate in August.

First Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones

14Jan. Kindle.

I bought this a long time ago. The writer is/was local and someone recommended her. I don't think I managed to finish it - it was just barely short of pornography. My sister read it and liked it enough to buy the next book in the series, so I gave it another shot.

Basically, I still think it isn't very far from pornography, but I managed to read past that and finish it. It had some merit - in terms of setting (Albuquerque) and characters. Charley (Charlotte) Davidson sees dead people - and chats with them. Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas merely sees them, but they follow him around. Charley's dead people follow her around and talk to her. To converse with them in public, she pretends to be talking on a cell phone. The recently dead tell her what has happened, which makes her a real whiz at solving murders.

Then we get into the super-supernatural and - shades of "Ghost Whisperer" - her job is to help them pass over to "the other side." This is also the subject of many cute punny asides.

Oh well, I probably will go ahead and read book two - but I intend to read another more conventional mystery or two first.

Pilgrim's Inn by Elizabeth Goudge

12Jan. Kindle.

The center book of the Eliot trilogy and my favorite. Typically the middle book of a trilogy is like the development section of a piece of music - an awful lot happening, but no real conclusion. This one is so much the strongest of the three that I have wondered if it was actually the first one written - the wiki says no. There were eight years between The Bird in the Tree, 1940, and Pilgrim's Inn, 1948, and yet another five before The Heart of the Family in 1953.

Warning Signs by CJ Lyons

10Jan. Kindle.

I have figured it out. Reading these books is like watching ER or Hill Street Blues: ensemble cast and high drama. The central character this time is the fourth year med student, Amanda, who, among other problems, is the baby child and only daughter of a very Southern family in South Carolina (?) who can't understand why she would go away to Pittsburg to study medicine. They persist in thinking it is just a phase she is going through and that eventually she will come to her senses and return home to be a proper Southern Belle and the light of the Junior League. A priceless bit is the call she receives from one of her brothers trying to bring her to her senses as she is sitting in her demolished car after surviving a murder attempt.

I was hoping that the obnoxious resident would turn out to be the murderer and that they could get rid of him. No such luck. Hope that isn't too much of a spoiler.

The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

8Jan. Kindle.

Usually I reread this more often. It is a very, very nice book without being cloying. Yes, I was thinking of the Jan Karon book that we will be discussing at book club this month. Maybe cloying is a bit strong - but not much. I suppose that a weakness in Goudge is the idealization of children. Even the brats are rather idealized. Still, I can't help liking the people and the descriptions of the setting make me want to go there, although I am not fond of damp climates at all.

Rest You Merry by Charlotte MacLeod

6Jan. Kindle.

It has been years since I read this, what a blast. My sister has rediscovered MacLeod and told me that this one reminded her of me in the initial events. It seems that Dr. Peter Shandy's college has a tradition of elaborate Christmas decoration in the faculty residential loop. Shandy has resisted all pressure to participate for eighteen years, but finally decides to avenge himself for all the annoyance. He arranges to have his house decorated with the gaudiest and most annoying display imaginable - including loud music - locks the program in --- and leaves town. Sort of the inverse of the first year we lived in this house. We had been away for Thanksgiving and returned home to find our street ablaze with light and sound - except for one dark space.

And so it goes. When Shandy's cruise ship develops engine trouble and puts in to port for repairs, he returns home to the monstrosity he created - and finds the body of the chief annoyer in his living room. The parodies of academia are priceless.

Unnatural Causes by P. D. James

5Jan. Kindle.

A colony of writers in a remote corner of England - an obvious setting for a murder. One of the writers, who actually remains rather aloof from the others, is Adam Dalgliesh's Aunt Jane, which puts Dalgliesh on the scene. In fact, Dalgliesh himself is a writer and has published a couple of volumes of poetry. Aunt Jane writes scholarly works on birds and birding. The mystery writer is the one who ends up dead.

This is an extremely convoluted plot, even for James. In essence it is a "country house" murder - limited pool of suspects with interrelated motives. And, classically, the least likely character (setting aside Aunt Jane) turns out to be the murderer. Of course, the murder of a mystery writer gives James the opportunity to insert all sorts of jabs at mystery writers as a group - good fun.

The Third Hill North of Town by Noah Bly

3Jan. Kindle.

Didn't like it. Pointless. Plotless.

Have to hand it to the author - he has a degree of arrogance that is truly monumental. First he compares this piece of idiocy to Huckleberry Finn - the only similarity that I noticed was that there were two boys, one white and one black. Then, not content with that bit of hubris, he announces that it is similar in its fundamental nature to Cervantes' Don Quixote. Well, one of the central characters is crazy ---

Through a endless sequence of improbabilities, leaving a trail of death and mayhem behind them - quite inadvertantly, of course - with flashbacks to the crazy lady's childhood, she and the two boys travel to the site of her childhood home - and the scene of the trauma which, improbably, she had blocked for forty years. No surprises; it was all completely telegraphed by the flashbacks.

No surprises at the ending that is. All the other deaths and general distruction seemed completely unnecessary and pointless.

White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey

1Jan. Kindle.

After my comment that Dragonflight stood up well in the reread, I hate to report that this one didn't. Of course, being on antibiotics and feeling generally rotten may have had something to do with my attitude. My general feeling is that it was too long and too diffuse. There were several plot lines that could have been central, and somehow none of them were. It just seemed to ramble on. Another problem may be that it seemed to me to require the background provided in the Harper Hall books which overlap this trilogy. A host of characters appear which are developed in the Harper Hall series without any introduction to speak of. Curiously, the Harper Hall books do not seem to be available for kindle - and they are not where they should be on my shelves, either.

I do like the way she changed the central characters in each. Still, while Jaxom is an appealing character, he doesn't stand up well to Lessa in the first book or F'nor in the second.

My Mother's Ring by Dana Cornell

29Dec. Kindle.

This is a dreadful excuse for a book. I wish that Amazon would flag self-published garbage, although, in all fairness, it only took me a couple of minutes to figure it out once I realized what I was dealing with. I suppose I am going to have to add that bit of research to future purchases. I had actually taken a look at the reviews - my, how they glowed! This woman must have a lot of friends and relatives. So why did I actually read it all the way through? A friend asked me to. She had read it and wanted someone to discuss it with. I honestly don't think she liked it much - and wants me to tell her why.

I can tell her several whys, I suppose. Some months ago one of my book clubs read a self-published book by a friend of a member. It was frustrating for its failure to develop the potential of the story material. This one does not have even that going for it. The "story," such as it is, is trite and hackneyed, told many times and told much better. It is the recital of events in the life of one of the sheep of Warsaw, who ignored the warnings to escape Poland and then tamely marched off to Auschwitz. It appears to be a sort of amalgam of many accounts of the atrocities of the holocaust - poorly narrated. And a number of "reviewers" thought it was a true story - in spite of the writer's quite proper disclaimer. I suppose that is a lesson to me about Amazon reviews.

In the book of my friend's friend, one of our complaints was that the dialogue was stilted and pedantic. At least that book had some dialogue. This one is endless narration with no dialogue to speak of. As Alice says, "What is the use of a book with no conversation and no pictures?" (I should check that quote.) It was intended, maybe, to be the deathbed ramblings of the survivor - I forget his name - thus, logically, it would be narrative not dialogue. If that was the intent - the frame should have been fleshed out with interaction with the receiver of the narrative. She could even have done the old trick of starting a "telling" and slipping into a direct action passage. Most likely, she simply can't write dialogue.

There was very little plot and what plot was there was painfully predictable; characterization was weak: I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about the guy - and there weren't really any other characters. Our "hero" doesn't bother to learn the names of those who share his fate in the camps.

A complete waste of time and money. An observation: I seem to have a lot more to say about books I didn't like than ones I did.

Renovate or Die by Bob Farr

27Dec. Paper. Loan.

This is not my usual thing at all. The subject is "fixing" churches, specifically United Methodist Churches. Preacher wants to use this for a church-wide study. I'm not so sure, but it will depend on the delivery. I thought he was a little vague about overall strategy. And when he started talking about NCLB and PLCs, I nearly threw the book across the room. He was just using them as analogies, but what dreadful analogies!

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

27Dec. Kindle.

I've read these enough to remember most of the main events, but I still find bits and pieces that I never quite registered before. I really believe that if a book is worth reading, it must be worth reading again. And that doesn't mean it has to be "great literature."

McCaffrey has a real gift for characters. Hers always seem to be believable and engaging. I am not likely to reread books with no characters that I care about.

I do think the situation with the "oldtimers" went south a little too fast to suit me, but it was solidly plotted.

Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery

27Dec. Kindle.

I really hadn't intended to continue the series immediately, but this was just there on my computer. It is cold at my desk and I have not been sitting here as much - so the books on my kindle and my new kindle have been getting more attention. At least, that's what I thought - my kindles are not communicating well, so I have a different book on each - and paper in the bathroom.

This was more like the earlier books - maybe Lucy herself recognized the lack of children as a problem. There were certainly enough children in this one. The minister's four children - the "manse" children - and Anne and Gilbert's six (yes, six) and the orphan girl that the manse children adopt. Sufficient crowd to create all sorts of craziness. The minister's daughter Faith carries the Anne-ishness on most "faithfully" I think. She always has the best of intentions ---

Anne's House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery

23Dec. Kindle.

Still a satisfying reread, although perhaps they are waxing just a bit too sentimental. On consideration, there just didn't seem to be quite enough human errors to give this one quite the same kick as the others. No children - maybe that's the problem.

Still, the side characters were interesting.

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

23Dec. Kindle.

I found this by accident on my Kindle. I'm not sure which one of us bought it. Couldn't resist. It is a three-in-one - so I'm sure the other two will appear here soon.

It is always nice when an old favorite holds up under multiple rereadings. Lessa is still one of my all-time favorite characters.

A Mind to Murder by P. D. James

20Dec. Kindle.

Nothing like a psychiatric hospital for a murder setting. Of course, the motive turns out to be one of the classics, no mad axe murderers for James.

Dalgleish develops some. The suggested relationship with Deborah Riscoe from the first book (Cover Her Face) continues, but very tentatively. Let's see if she turns up in the next one. There is more development of his "Watson" - his detective sergeant, Martin. Somebody should do a study of the Scotland Yard detective sergeant in fiction - maybe I'll start taking notes. Would require some seriously enjoyable rereading, anyway. And what about the British detective sidekick in general: Bunter? Watson? Hastings? Do they have significant commonalities with the police detectives? Oh well, that for another day.

I found this one a little slow starting - but not as slow as the start of the first one. But once things picked up, they really picked up. I am anxious to revisit the third book.