Coffee Flavored Kisses

I was probably 11 or 12 the first time I caught Sneak Previews on PBS, but I was hooked by sharp reviews and intelligent conversation … okay, no at 12, I was probably hooked by the snarky disagreements between Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. I continued to watch as it became At the Movies and then Siskel & Ebert. As I matured, it was the intelligent and witty conversation and argument that kept me coming back to the show because I am not a movie fan. My memory seems to tells me that I agreed with Ebert more than Siskel, but that may simply be that Ebert seemed more like the everyday person who watched movies. But I know this, all the memories I do have of those shows are pleasant.

Those memories may also color my take on Roger’s Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir, but that’s true of any memoir one reads. As I read this memoir, however, those memories may have made things more concrete as the voice of Roger Ebert was in my head reading with me. The very richness of the voice that comes through Ebert’s writing is made poignant, of course, by his loss of a physical voice, but that loss seems to simply have intensified the strength and presence of the author in his work.  That’s a very convoluted way of my saying that the loss of Ebert’s physical voice to his cancer has only made his writing voice more powerful and penetrating. And captivating.

Life Itself: A Memoir starts with Ebert’s childhood and takes up through his college years, his alcoholic years, his television critic years, and to the present. As he explores all of these memories, Ebert is very open and honest. I’d say brutally honest, but it becomes quite clear as one reads the book that Ebert has come to terms with himself–his flaws, his foibles, and his talents, and that removes much of the brutality. As he explores his relationships with his parents and family, we get a strong sense of the love he felt for his father and the love in his strained relationship with his mother in his adult years. Ebert explores his many deep friendships, and even some of his shallow ones. He examines as well what are perhaps the two more important relationships of his life–his friendship with Gene Siskel and, of course, his relationship with his wife Chaz.  These two chapters are wonderfully touching, and just remembering them makes me tear up.

I learned things too about Ebert that I hadn’t known. I didn’t know he had started out writing sports. I didn’t know that he had gone abroad as a student to Cape Town, South Africa. I didn’t realize he had been heading for a PhD in English before entering the world of newspapers. I had never realized much about this man, but one of things I learned from this book was just how witty and bright, and now wise, this person who entered my home once a week was.

I understand Ebert’s Pulitzer more after having read this memoir. The man can write–he puts words together wonderfully…poetically in spots. He has writing voice that many writers would die for (myself included), and while he may not be able to speak–this book speaks volumes for him and for us.

This was a wonderful book I don’t know that I can recommend it more.

 First off, I must apologize for the delay between posts. If I had reviewed anything, it would have been student essays, and that would have been unkind on many levels.

If you like ancient mythologies and have not yet entered the world of Rick Riordan’s novels, you should.  These are some of the most entertaining young adult novels out there. The Son of Neptune is the second novel in the third of Riordan’s series Heroes of Olympus. It’s quite a fun book.

Riordan’s world is a world where the ancient gods–Greek, Roman, Egyptian(in his other series The Kane Chronicles)–still live, though undetected by most of us mere mortals. They have, however, fathered (and mothered) children with mortals, and these young demi-gods are the focus of Riordan’s stories.

In this the second series in the Percy Jackson side of Riordan’s universe, we find Percy wandering in California with no memory.  He is being chased by Gorgons who want to capture him, but he hasn’t a clue why.  He runs into an area where the Romans still live, and he is “rescued” by Frank Zhang and Hazel Levesque. Here’s starts an adventure that takes our three central characters to Portland, Seattle, and Alaska with side trips to Hades and New Orleans. As Percy struggles to regain his memory, Frank and Hazel deal with their own secrets and destinies.  Filled with twists, turns, and monsters, our three heroes learn about life, trust, and themselves as they rush to free death.

The Son of Neptune  is a rip-roaring adventure filled with fun little trivia bits for the mythology nerd amongst us, but it also appeals to those who don’t have a clue about these ancient cultures.

I spent my summer reading, and primarily I’ve read three authors and some stray books. Those three authors have been Agatha Christie (whose works I am still reading), John Scalzi, and Kat Richardson.

As any readers of my blog know (or at least as people who know me know), I am very found of urban fantasy/paranormal romance. I’ve read lots of it, and a chunk of my reviews are about writers in the genre. From Gaiman to Hamilton to Saintcrow, I’ve read and enjoyed urban fantasies. But I want to say that I think I’ve enjoyed Richardson’s Greywalker series more than most. The most obvious reason I’ve enjoyed these is because Richardson is a damned fine writer. The woman can put words together in a way that just draws a reader in. In the four books I’ve read, there hasn’t been a stray, clunky word.

Another reason, I have enjoyed these books so much is simply the characters. Harper Blaine is a character straight out of the noir tradition. A loner who enjoys detecting because of its essential loneliness as a profession, Harper is also very complicated. As the series progresses, we learn about her rejection of the dance career her mother pushed her into and the rejection of her mother, and we learn of the trauma that surrounds her father’s death. We also get so see Harper struggle with her newly discovered paranormal “powers.” In Harper’s struggle we can see a reflection of everyone’s struggles with their “powers” in life. Harper’s growth is one of the things most attractive about the series, but the other characters and their growth are also fascinating to discover. Quentin, the mysterious tech guru, is just as intriguing as Harper Blaine. Myra and Ben, Harper’s tutors in the paranormal, are both great fun and interesting in their own right. (I’d read stories just about these two and the son!) The other supernatural characters eventually all come into their own as the series unfolds. She’s also written some of the scariest vampires I’ve run across.

The series itself also manages to feel like a continuing story–not one that’s leading the reader into unlikely or illogical places. The progression from Greywalker to Poltergeist to Underground to Vanished is a logical sequence, and the consequences of actions in one novel lead to the events of the next. That’s hard to do in a series, and Richardson manages to do it masterfully.

Indeed, I can’t wait until my next trip to the bookstore so that I can buy Labyrinth and Downpour, the two latest in the series. If you like urban fantasy, paranormal romance, even noir mysteries, then I heartily recommend you give the Greywalker series a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

P.S. I need to thank my former student Caleb for recommending Kat Richardson to me!

I keep hearing this book described as Harry Potter for adults, but it’s not that. It’s good,  but it’s not just another boy’s adventure story. It is definitely not that!  Rather The Magicians is more like an existentialist’s fantasy novel (or even a fantasy by Arthur Schopenhauer).

The Magicians is all about how magic and fantasy and the ability to do one and enter the world of the other do not make your problems go away. if you’re a screwed up person in real life, then you’re a screwed up person in fantasy too.  The book’s quests show us that life you make is all about your choices–each choice by someone sets up the next set of events–whether good, bad, or pointless. I mean the novel even posits that magic is pain made into power, so this is not exactly a happy fantasy–there is no happily ever after.
Quentin, our presumed hero, is much more of an anti-hero than many readers of fantasy are used to.  He’s a screw up who keeps waiting for the perfect life to come to him, rather than reaching out for it.  Alice, who becomes his girlfriend, is much more the traditional hero of the novel, or even Penny, the punked out magician.  These aren’t characters we’re meant to love, but rather characters we’re meant to recognize as the normal screwed up people we all are.
For readers used to escaping to fantasy, Fillory (the book’s version of Narnia) is not an escape. Indeed, Grossman’s theme seems to be: Yeah fantasy is fun, but life is what you do now and now what you wait for.  The Magicians is a fantasy with a bleak philosophy. There’s nothing wrong with that.

The Yasmine Galenorn Otherworld series is brain candy for me, and I am up to date on this series (9 and counting). Fun without thinking too much–sort of like a Bruce Willis movie.

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee By Karen Abbott.

So everyone knows the story of Gypsy Rose Lee’s rags to riches story thanks to the musical Gypsy; of course, the musical was based on her memoirs, so it was an exercise in creating a mythic self, just as most memoirs try to do.  The characters and the events depicted by the play, and especially the movie, are well seen through Rose-colored glasses–pun intended.

In her biography, Karen Abbott tries to strip (pun again intended) the self-created legends of Gypsy Rose Lee by talking to Lee’s sister June Havoc and her son Erik Preminger.  This is only partially successful. While we do get to see some of the behind the scenes parts of their lives, we do not really get to see into Gypsy Rose Lee’s mind or personality.  It is not exactly clear how shy Louise Hovick turns into bawdy  Gypsy Rose Lee. As Abbott recounts the early vaudeville years, we see how awful and traumatic those years were, but we get nothing more of young Louise Hovick’s personality than we got from the play Gypsy. This may be because Lee so protected herself that little documentation really remains of these years, but the book is not very enlightening about her character; more interesting and enlightening was the look at the worlds of vaudeville and burlesque.  Abbott’s exploration of the Minsky brothers and their attempts to legitimize burlesque reveals a lot about American culture of the 1920s.  Abbott is an excellent chronicler of the more public aspects of American culture and sex.  As I read, I almost wished she had focused more on the Minsky brothers than Lee.

Abbott’s structure may also be a bit of the problem, at least for this reader.  Rather than tell the story in a purely chronological manner, Abbott cuts back in forth across time and viewpoints.  One chapter will be Lee in the 1940s, the next about the Minsky brothers in the 1920s, and then the Hovick family in the 1910s.  While ultimately this organization doesn’t keep the reader from becoming engrossed in the book, at first, it is distracting as one has to keep referring back to the chapter;s first page to see WHEN things are taking place.

Overall, I enjoyed Abbott’s book, and I would recommend it; however, I’d recommend it much more as a history of New York burlesque more than as a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee–I just didn’t get past the myth, and I am not sure Abbott did either.

With the end of the semester, I’ve been swamped with grading and graduation and so forth.  However, I have been reading, and I have four reviews today for you

The first review is over The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.  This was a very fun read.  Setterfield’s writing moves slowly at first, but the pace picks up.  Written in the Gothic tradition, this novel feels like Jane Eyre meets Rebecca.  The plotting is intriguing, the characters are interesting, and the moors of Wuthering Heights seem a most appropriate place for this story to take place. 

The main character is Margaret Lea, who is the sort of girl who finds Victorian and Gothic novels fun to read. She scorns modern fiction until Vida March invites her to write her autobiography, which leads Margaret to read all of March’s work and to become intrigued by her stories.  These are the two main characters of the novel, and their interactions are quite interesting as are their individual stories. 

The plotting here is slow as befits a Gothic novel, but it does pick up.  There is also a timeless to the novel. For the life of me, I cannot figure out the decade in which the novel is set.  This is more enchanting than annoying since it gives the novel an ahistorical feel. 

All in all, I thought this was an entertaining and well written book.

***

I also read J. R. Ward’s Lover Unleashed.  This is the ninth book in her series The Black Dagger Brotherhood. I do love this series, but it is somewhat predictible and schlocky. 

Ward’s paranormal romance (the story does exist it seems to get the hero and heroine into bed) is well similar to the rest.  In Ward’s novels, the wounded vampire hero is saved by the love of a good woman (or female vampire); the twist here is that the vampire in question is actually a female who must be saved by her heroic lover–a human surgeon.  There are the typical romance novel cliches, and there is, of course, some obstacle, but love wins the day.

Despite the predictibility, Ward writes catchy characters and makes you like them and want to know what happens.  These re fun books to read for entertainment and for fun, if you want a lot of depth go elsewhere.

***

Depth is not what I’ve been reading for, but escape is, and escape is important in The Tiger’s Curseby Colleen Houck. In this novel, orphaned 17 year old Kelsey is looking for summer work, and hires on as a temp at a circus.  Her job is mainly to look after the circus’s white tiger.  All of a sudden, the tiger is sold and Kelsey asked to go with the tiger to India as its defacto keeper.  A tad implausible I know.

Once in India, Kelsey discovers that  her tiger is no ordinary tiger, but a 16th century Indian prince who was cursed to be a tiger (as was his brother), and she and the tiger/prince must quest to escape his curse.

Okay, plausible and realistic this book is not, but it was great fun to read.  The descriptions of India are fascinating as is the look at Indian mythology.  The plot has its weak spots; a few things are not clear such as who placed this curse. However, the book was fun to read. Kelsey, who is the narrator, has a fun voice that most teen girls can identify with.  All in all, I’ll keep reading this series.

****

The last book I am mentioning I picked up because I learned of the author’s passing earlier this year.  And after reading Howl’s Moving Castle, I really wish I had discovered the works of the great Diana Wynne-Jones earlier.  This is a young adult book, but it has a charm to it that enchants the audience and belies the label young adult.

The character of Sophie as she grows from incompetent eldest daughter (and loser) to a more confident woman is fun to watch. The mysterious wizard Howl seems more like a petulant teenager, and part of the fun of the novel is seeing how much of that is something of an act.

This was simply a great novel with fun characters, a fun plot, and darned good writing.  I plan to read more of Ms. Wynne-Jones’ work.

My book club receives its books through the Arkansas Central Library, and while we send in a list of choices, we have gotten a few random choices.  For the most part, both the random selections and our choices have well sucked. We, as a group, have enjoyed two out of the nine books we’ve read.  Those two books were Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society.  However, we have now received Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.  As a whole we seem to be enjoying it.

So I want to try and figure out just why I am enjoying this book.  Well, it is well-written.   Stegner’s prose flows wonderfully, and his words have a feel being how people really use words–both his 1970s and his 1880s characters sound real.  This sounds like a simple task, but it’s actually a very hard thing to do.

His characters are also interesting and rounded.  They are sympathetic more than they are likable.  The narrator is historian Lyman Ward, who is disabled by a bone disease which has cost him a leg and fused the verterbra in his neck.  His greater disability is the chip on his shoulder.   His work on his grandmother’s biography seems more to be a way to escape from the turmoil of the late 1960s/early 70s.  His grandmother Susan Burlinson Ward is an artist, novelist, gentlewoman, mother, and wife–and the order I have used is deliberate in that she values almost everything more than being a wife. Her husband Oliver Ward is a mining engineer, who has taken wife Susan out to the “uncivilized” West–an area and profession he seems to love and plans to remain in.  Susan has other plans  for husband and plans only to stay in the West as long as necessary and then return East.  Much of the conflict of the novel revolves around this conflict of interest.  While Susan is sympathetic, her snobbishness makes her less than likable as do her manipulations of her husband.  Oliver’s persistence and devotion tend to make him sympathetic, but his diffidence makes him less than likable.  However, the two together draw us into their relationship and its ups and downs.

The descriptions of the Western landscape are lovely, and they fit in with the plot.  There is an organic feel to the descriptions, they come out of what the character should be seeing at the time.

I haven’t determined if Stegner has some grand message for us, but then that’s not why I read for fun.  I may determine that after I finish the book, but right now, 330 pages in, I am enjoying the journey–more I think than the characters!

A Discovery of Witches (Viking, 2011) is the first novel by academic Deborah Harkness, and I have to stay I enjoyed it a great deal. It was an intriguing and fun read.

This novel also blends two of my favorite genres of fiction–the academic novel and urban fantasy.  It also has a bit of conspiracy novel thrown in for good measure.

Historian Diana Bishop is an expert on alchemical works, and she is the last of a long line of powerful witches.  However, she disavows the witch powers and focuses on her scholarship. This works for her until she pulls out a mysterious alchemical text, opens it, studies, it and returns it.  This little bit of academic research opens up a new world of adventure and magic for Diana, who must now protect herself from other magical creatures who would use her for access to this mysterious text.

As Diana’s world changes, part of that change is entry of Matthew Clairmont, eminent geneticist, physician, and vampire, into her life. As she and Matthew try figure out the whys of the text, and try to figure out who wants it, Diana must also confront her past and her growing witch powers.

That plot summary hardly describes the mix of romance (classical romance), history, science, and adventure that is A Discovery of Witches.  While Diana Bishop seems to share many qualities with her creator (especially their academic specialities), I do not think the book falls into that catergory of writing occasionally called “Mary Sue” stories, stories where the line between protagonist and author is very thin indeed.  For one thing, Harkness’s Diana isn’t “perfected.” She has flaws and faults that undermine her charm, but are realistic flaws and faults. Diana is stubborn and naive; she is brilliant and stupid.  She tries to ignore who she is.  She is not easily saved.   She does, however, fall for a vampire.

Harkness’s vampires are more traditional than say Meyer’s vampires, but she does play with the traditions a great deal. Then again, we learn this play as our heroine learns how wrong the literary conventions about vampires are.  Indeed, we learn with Diana Bishop about the world of magic around that has run through human history.

Matthew Clairmont does seem a bit of a wish fulfillment kind of male character.  He is protective, but tries to curb those instincts in deference to Diana’s wishes.  He is brillant, but stymied by his emotions.  He respects Diana while romancing her.  If Diana’s character is rather human, Matthew is a bit too good for reality.

The plot moves along well, and Harkness’s historical knowledge helps with that.  Her experience writing academic books gives her a fairly sure hand with her style, which does not read at all pedantically.  There are a couple of places where the first person narrative clunkily turns into an omniscient point of view, but these spots can be explained away by this being her first novel. Also, the reader who doesn’t spend their work day looking for such problems might not even notice them.

All in all, I found A Discovery of Witches to be a fun read–not the next great classic, perhaps–but fun and engaging.  I can say this, this novel makes me want to know more about the historical conext and makes me want to read Harkness’s academic works.  I can’t think of many novels that make want to do that!

Dr. Harkness’s academic works include The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution and John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, ALchemy, and the End of  Nature.