Swords and sorcery. Oh my!

Alanna: The First Adventure
by Tamora Pierce

Pretty good YA adventure.  Set in a make-believe world reminiscent of the middle age knights of chivalry, it's the story of a brother and sister who swap roles.  He becomes a religious and studies to be a sorcerer; she becomes a knight.  That is to say, eventually he becomes a sorcerer and she a knight--this book begins the story, but you sense many more to come.

I've said this about several YA novels but it's still just as true--and not at all demeaning--

If I'd read this as a kid, I'd be hooked for the duration.  As a jaded, seen all, been all, done all grownup, I can live without the rest of the series.  I'll put the second book on my to-read list as number #176 and see if it ever bubbles up to the top.

Dog of the year. Any year.

A story of a dog but not just...it's equally as much the story of Farley Mowat--boy meets Mutt.  Humor ensues.

I loved it--it made me laugh...and it had the power, at the end, to make me cry.  Don't forgo the laughter and the adventure on account of the tears at the end.  They're brief and not as bad as they could have been.

Mutt lives on!  I wish I had Farley Mowat's skill at writing.

HIstory to the heart

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

Six drinks that changed the world--beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca Cola.  Who'd have thought it?

A lot of interesting history is crammed into this short book.  It's easy to read and only very occasionally skipped over a valley that I wished it had slogged through.  A couple of points to ponder:

- In the olden days, beer and wine were safer to drink than water. Coffee and tea, too, since they were made from boiled water. And I guess spirits mixed with water had a germ-killing effect.

- The history classes that they forced me to take in school completely downplayed the role of the East India Company in destroying Chinese civilization for years.  All I learned about trade patters was molasses--rum--slaves.  What about opium--gold--tea?

- Distilled wine was called aqua vitae and credited with magic powers. "It prolongs life, clears away ill humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth."  We feel sorry for those poor people, so desparate to clutch at any remedy for the mysterious diseases that wasted away their loved ones' lives. We think we're so much better off than they--we think medicine has conquered disease and can cure all harm...but how much like them we are at the end.  Still helpless before death; still looking for a  miracle cure.  And it isn't aqua vitae.

Why did I never read Virginia Woolf?

.

Should have been titled 500 pounds a year and a room of one's own, because that's what it's all about.  It's a brilliant set of essays put together into a short book, and well worth the reading by anyone.  Anytime.  Anywhere.

Where are the great women writers, prior to the nineteenth century?  What would have happened if Shakespeare had a sister?  Why don't women take their places in the world of science and philosophy?

They've been too busy keeping the human race running.  And great thought--or writing--doesn't grow from a crack on a sterile sidewalk--it needs the piled up compost of a ten century long cultivation.  Exactly what women didn't have. They do now--and they better make use of it.

Wish I had a monster

             A Monster Calls
               by Patrick Ness 
               inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd
               read by Jason Isaacs

I suffered through the absolutely brilliant rendition of this book on audio by Jason Isaacs, so even though I missed out on the illustrations I got the extra dimension of hearing a gloriously gruff monster growl.  And by suffered, I do mean suffered.  It's a painful book written about a painful experience and that exactly what it needs to be.  When your mum's suffering from cancer and the treatments aren't helping, how do you cope?

Call up a monster.

(I'm suppressing my next statement violently with both hands. No leaks!  No hints.  No telling!)
Apparently they're going to make a movie out of this.  It deserves one.  I don't think I'll go see it, but I really hope they don't screw it up.

Deep reading

Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

Why are the surnames Brown, White and Green common but not Yellow, Orange or Red?  Who knows.  And I'm off-topic.  For a reason.

Reason being that once I read a few novels by an author whose surname was Brown.  I don't remember her first name and don't see any reason to.  They were dreck. Chaff.  Fluff at best.  Thrill rides on the imaginary rollercoaster of romantic love.

Those were books.  This is a book.  Both are cataloged under the general category of words on pages sandwiched between cardboard covers.  But, in my very humble opinion, this, is a book.
From the cover blurb,

• Five months ago, Valerie Lefman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria.  Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertantly save the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create.  A list of people and things she and Nick hated.  The list he used to pick his targets.

The story unfolds in both present and past, with the facts of the shootings as chapter notes before Valerie's current day existence--if you can call it that.  It's more like a quest for existence in a suffocating swamp of guilt and shame and confrontations with all the people who just can't understand. To people who lost their best friends, Nick was the embodiment of pure evil--how else could they deal with their pain?  Evil had taken their friends--not random chance or mental illness or a small-town teenage culture of bullying.  But to Valerie, Nick was not the ultimate evil.  He was her boyfriend--kind, funny, gentle and loving.  No more evil than you or me.

And her family is so damn real you just want to smack them!  There are some things the author leaves unspoken and I hesitate to put my own feelings into the story, but I came away with a strong theory that most of her father's animosity is based on guilt of his own, guilt he will never admit.  If he'd been there--if he'd been a real father--would she have made "better choices"?  Would his own name have been left off the Hate List?

Better shut up.  I'm telling too much.  All I can say to recommend it is this: I read three-quarters of it in one sitting (300 pages); I bawled my eyes out when I re-read the ending; I wanted there to be more closure but won't complain.  Real life doesn't have closure.  It just continues.

Graphic novels for grownups.

Alan's War

The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope

 
by Emmanuel Guibert

Emmanuel Guibert met Alan Cope in 1994 on an island off the coast of France.  They struck up an immediate friendship--the 30-year-old graphic novelist and the 69-year-old ex-GI with a knack for telling stories of his life--and this book was conceived.  To bring it to life must have taken the metaphorical nine months of a human pregnancy following by some number of hours of hard labor, but the results are substantial.  Maybe men can birth babies after all.

If you're a history buff or a world war II fanatic, I recommend this.  Maybe.  Possibly as a antidote for the machine-gun fire and gut-wrenching reality of modern-day movies.  (Anyone seen Captain America?)  It's a reminder that every single man saw a different war.  This one may seem a little tame by comparison but it's never boring...and it has pictures!