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.