Like title, like book

Golden

Never was there a book that better deserved this title.  Or, have I got that backwards?  This title deserved such a book.  Such a book!

Absolutely adorable little teen novel you can read in a night and probably will.  It's hard to tell you what its about--I'll have to leave that to the professionals--but it's a lot about guilt and duty, and the fear which drives them both.  At first the story seemed a little weak, maybe even manufactured...but it ended up feeling  as real as reality.

Absolutely great...except for overuse of a certain unfunny joke

Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan

I've never learned so much while listening to such a weird and wild story.  I didn't know whether to recommend it as educational or entertainment, so I did a little research...

The answer is "entertainment".   Some of the places and systems he describes don't seem to exist, or else they're so secret that an Internet search can't find them.  Probably they're just plain imagination--but he describes them so masterfully that I believed every word.  Are Google's product managers really selected by chance?  Is there really a huge, automated warehouse in Vegas that stocks tons of random museum-worthy artifacts?  Is there a real fantasy trilogy called The Dragonsong Chronicles?  Was Albus Menutius a real person?

I believed it all.  It's like one of those dreams that get confused with reality and you wake up shaking your head.  That real.



\The overused joke I refer to might actually be funny to you, so I can't cite it here.

Books to entertain

236 pounds of class vice president


Jason Mulgrew's second story of growing up in Philadelphia.  I was told it was inferior to the first and mostly a rehash of the same material, but this is the one that ended up on my reading list.  So it was new to me.

Pretty funny.  And you pick up some good hints about Philly cheesesteak, Tasty Kake, and the pork roll slider, such named because it will slide right through you.  He suggests that it's best to wear a diaper when you consume one.

If you laugh at that one, you'll think the book very funny.

Juvenile but a good one

Superman Versus The Ku Klux Klan:
The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate
by Rick Bowers

This is the kind of history that can hook a young reader and still be relished by an old crone.  Where did Superman come from?  Okay, I know, Krypton, but whence did the legend spring?  From concept to comic and years of failed pitches to publishers, this book unwinds the mystery.  When Superman finally hit the newsstand, he hit big.  He survived comic strip bashing and comic book burning, became a radio show, and helped keep up morale among soldiers during the long years of World War II.

After the war Superman's designers weren't satisfied with his return to the domestic tedium of mobsters and murderers.  What to do next?  What to do, BIG, next?

That's the point of this book and it's a grand one.  Researched to a fault and (I hope) barely embellished with invention to supplement the fact.  It would be cool to hear that radio show again...hmm...looks like I can.  See ya!

My "review" that totally failed to say what the book was all about.

The Orchardist
by Amanda Coplin

I was reading a large print version, and the text didn’t have any double-quote characters around the dialog.  Was this a feature of the typeface, or did the author want it that way?  It had the strange and eerie effect of making it seem like that characters were talking to themselves—in their own heads—a lot of the time.  Which they were.   They were a quiet kind of people.

And a most uniquely amazing kind of people.   A lot of characters seemed to lack depth, but that wasn’t a failure of the author, rather, a failure of the characters themselves.  Everyone isn’t as introspective as you or I, and a lot of people don’t really have a clue why they do what they do.   Other people have a clue but only after the fact; others a clue some of the time but that doesn’t stop them from doing what they do, anyway.  Are you with me, here?

Bear in mind that I’m a pretty ordinary reader—no Ulysses or Moby Dick for me—but in my humble opinion this was some of the best writing I’ve read in a lot of years.   So invisible I didn’t even notice the missing double-quotes until several chapters in.  It wasn’t writing at all, but story-telling.  Marvelous!

Big business wins again. Always.

Flow: The Cultural Study of Menstruation
by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

Want to be barraged by advertisements within the covers of a book?  This is the one!  And all for a reason--to show you all the ways product promotion have shaped our views on woman's bodies, health, and ourselves for so many years.  Feminine "protection" has been big business ever since it was a business--ever since advertisers discovered that women need to be protected from that scary, life-threatening, quarter-cup of monthly blood.

Restricting its scope in time and place but not in topic, the book deals with all aspects of women's reproductive health except for pregnancy itself.  It touches on hysteria, menarche, PMS, cycles, menopause and hormone replacement, telling all that is known and frequently highlighting where little is known.  It appears that normal female non-reproductive behaviors aren't the subject of a lot of research funding, except by the drug companies who want to "fix" it--never have a period!  Banish those hot flashes!  Stay fresh and dainty!  Hormones for hire!

They ought to make all high school girls read this book.  Tee-hee.  We'd soon have tampon vending machines in the school cafeteria rather than hidden in the ladies room.  It's amazing how such a normal activity has become surrounded with so many taboos.  Although when you see the ads in here, it's not so amazing.  Fear of embarrassment sells products!  (Even if you have to manufacture the fear and exaggerate the embarrassment.)

The book did reiterate a little too much, making some simple points over and over.  Almost like it was meant for a juvenile audience.  I'll let that slip--it's a bang-up of a job and well worth my recommendation.

Best travel adventure in I don't know when

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
by Dervla Murphy

Superb!  What a journey, and what a woman!  I’d even venture to call her a lady—she does all those ladylike things, like slog through dust storms in blistering heat; bathe in creeks, puddles and icy mountain rivers; wear shorts decayed to the point of indecency; sleep in flea infested blankets amid a pile of local people; eat rancid ghee (but only once);sweat like a sewer in the day and freeze to ice in the night; eat everything offered until she got to India and found the food too full of spice to swallow.

Tea with salt?  Broad beans munched raw?  Dried mulberries?  I've seen a mulberry in the wild--she calls them "the sweetest of all fruit."

The only thing that didn't please me about this narrative is that she condensed the first part of the journey, from Dunkirk (France) to Teheran, into 425 Kindle "locations".  To put that in perspective, the whole narrative only makes up 3700 locations.  That means over 2/3 of the distance, 3300 miles, was squeezed into about 10% of the book.  Since the book was created from her travel journals, I guess she didn't take very good notes at first.

I screwed up royally on this one

Ordinary Jack
by Helen Cresswell

I don’t know how this book got on my must-read list, why it stayed on there, and why I decided it was important enough to buy a used copy through Amazon’s booksellers.  I can only hope my 1-cent purchase benefited some charity.

I’m sure it had its place, its time and its audience, long ago.  It might have been one of those “reluctant reader” books that librarians love to recommend.  Let me just say that there are many kids’ books that survive the test of time.  Or will survive, like Saffy’s Angel.  Probably not this one.



Sorry to be so negative.  I'm a grownup and had no business reading it anyway.

Mystery Irish style

In The Woods
by Tana French

Drat.  I liked this so much and then, pretty near the end,  the author had to indulge in a bunch of stupid hint-dropping.  Where was the editor?  Did they get tired of marking out the stupid narrator's “little did I know” comments, assuming that if you’d read three-quarters of the way through, you’d put up with a few at the end?

They almost spoiled it for me.  It’s what I think could be called a “police procedural” with a lot of human beings and emotions mired in along the way…quite deliciously.  Cool Irish rural atmosphere.  She set up the denouement quite cleverly—I didn’t guess it at all, but when it happened, it made sense.  I hope she brings back the lady detective in a sequel, if there is one, but I don’t dare check until I get this posted.  I don’t want to bias my personal option by confusing my brain with the rankings of others.

Rating decided; I can go check now.  But the question is, do I want another?





Homebodies by Charles Addams


I can't rate or review this--the cartoons didn't fare well in their journey to a small paperback format.  Fully half were undecipherable.  The ones I could see were vaguely amusing and in their time, side-splitting.  But I'd seen the TV series, which spoiled them.

Mighty fine kids fare

Olivia Kidney by Ellen Potter

I read #2 and #3 before #1, and it’s clear that she’s been getting better and better.  This one, #1, was no slouch of a book, though.  Fabulous kids’ fare—ghosts and magic conch shells and pirates and one crazy old woman who sees what's happening in the apartment below through her glass floors—what an imagination Ms. Potter has!  Does she get help from some childish ghostwriters (pun) somewhere?

I solemnly swear I’d have loved this stuff just as much as a kid as I do now.  It makes me want to go pull some kids off street and read to them.

Kids deserve to be read to.  And played with.  And taken to parks and zoos and movies.  I used to do it a lot and I’ll never, ever regret a single moment of it.  Sometimes it feels like the one right thing that I did.

Good book; missed me

Everest - The First Ascent:
How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain
by Harriet Pugh Tuckey


This time I’m freely admitting that the failure is all on my side.  This was a great book—half biography and half science, all clearly written, engaging, and thoroughly researched.  It took me an awfully long time to read it because I kept finding excuses to put it down in favor of something livelier.  Silly of me, but that was the mood I was in.

I started off thinking it was all science and so I was surprised when the oxygen-assisted ascent of Everest was over and the book wasn’t half done.  The second half turns a more personal side, finishing the life story of Griffith Pugh, the scientist responsible for the success of the Everest climb.  He also did groundbreaking research on hypothermia, high-altitude exercise, and the physiology of high-endurance athletes.  But the book also reveals the author, his daughter--how her research changed her opinion of her father from ill-tempered beast who mistreated her mother, into a man with personality flaws and a talent for success at any cost.  Scientific success, not personal.  She came to admire that part of him and so did I.

Lot of good stuff here, it just didn't resonate with me.  With others, it will.

I only we'd listen to ourselves

The Wisdom of Hair
by Kim Boykin

Aw, sweet!  Despite the grim premise, you get a heroine you can root for--even when she's doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons.  With a drunk mother and a long dead father, plucky Zora determines to undertake a new job and a beautician school...far, far away from the problems of the past.  What she takes with her is her own problem.

You sure hope she figures that out.  You just have to like this girl--and your thrilled for her when others do, too.  I haven't loved a heroine so much since Trudi in Stones From the River.

The other nun book

Nun In the Closet: A Mystery

by Joanna Michaels

As before mentioned, this is NOT to be compared with the book by Dorothy Gilman.  But they both have nuns in them.

These nuns are fiercely conflicted or tightly repressed, dealing with real human emotions...well...sex.  Sex can become pretty emotional if you obsess over it.  Maybe they should require prospective nuns to have a few normal human relationships before they're allowed to enter the religious life.

Okay, I'm just kidding.  A little.  Besides, these are made-up people who probably bear no resemblance to real life people, anywhere, anyhow.  But they're thoroughly enjoyable made-up people and you get to like them quickly.  I bonded so strongly with the main character, probation officer Callie Sinclair, that I hated seeing her falling for the accused woman, an owner of a lesbian bar who had a long history of flitting from relationship to relationship.  (a.k.a slut)

The mystery and detection part of it all was pretty cool even though Sinclair was not a real detective.  The author may have been setting up for a series there at the end.  If so, I might try another.  Probably not, though.

Dratted disappointment

Elske
by Cynthia Voigt


Gosh, I love Cynthia Voigt's books so much...and I just didn't like this one.  I don't think this is her genre--it's like a Conan the Barbarian fantasy complete with made up peoples and made up places.  Heroic fantasy, is that what they call it?  The heroine, Elske, starts the story as the Death Maiden attending at the king's funeral.  It's her job to be raped by all the king's top-ranked warriors, then be buried with the king to serve him in the afterlife.  What kind of servant that might make her is never to be explained, but I bet it's not one the king's going to enjoy.

Needless to say the story goes on after that, so there's not a lot of suspense about it.  There's not a lot of suspense anywhere, and the fighting scenes are blah and even the human emotional encounters--Ms. Voigt's specialty--left me unexcited.

Sorry.  Maybe it's me.