mystery books

The teen council at the library did a "blind date with a book" project. They wrapped them up and wrote a hint/personal ad for the book and put them on display. It's pretty cute! Several of them have already gone out. With our system, they can be checked out without unwrapping, which helps preserve the mystery! I haven't checked any out* but maybe I will!

* because my to-read stack is too tall! On the docket: 

• Wolf Hall - still reading this. I love it, but it requires my full attention. The good news is the Thomas problem isn't as bad as it was in the beginning. (everyone is named Thomas!) 
• Saga vol. 4!! I'm so excited to read this! my hold came in and I've got to get it read, but also don't want to just read it in a hurry. 
• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link. BEYOND EXCITED for this one. I love her so much. My hold just came in from the library, but she's reading at Powell's on Wed, so maybe I'll just buy my own copy. 
• The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson - book 3 of her Shades of London series, which I love! The previous one left off in a very exiting way. 
• Exploding the Phone - for non-fiction book group. Very much looking forward to it! 
• Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn. I almost forgot about this one because I checked it out digitally from the library so it's not in a visible stack right in front of me. I wanted to read it when it came out, but it got away from me. The Vaginal Fantasy book group just read it and renewed my interest. 
• Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch. Book 3 of the Rivers of London series. love these books! (also a digital hold from the library.) 

what's on your book stack? 

this happens all the time

I check out a really cool book from the library, like this one: Le Notre's Gardens

then I leave it on the shelf until it's almost due without looking at it. It is the only copy in the system. Some other discerning individual has put it on hold, I cannot renew! 

I open it up and see beautiful pictures like this and kick myself for not looking sooner. It happens all the time. I'm trying to train myself to LOOK SOONER, but I'm not 100% on that just yet. 

Dynasty-era cover

I haven't read this one yet! I just learned, thanks to goodreads, that this is book 6 of M.M. Kaye's Death In... series. I just got up and counted and I have FIVE of them with these lamé-glamorous early eighties covers! I must have hit the jackpot at a library sale or used bookstore. I've only read Death in Zanzibar and Death in Kashmir - they were written in the 50s, published with these covers in the 80s (duh) and read by me in the 90s. As I recall, they feature plucky young ladies falling into  international adventures and being cleverer than the villain (who is usually handsome and/or charming as is the way of these books), which is to say the kind of story I like. 

Oh no! I just inspected the covers more closely, and my copy of Death in Zanzibar is from 1984 and therefore lacking the shiny metallic part and the heroine is wearing a jumpsuit. (an EIGHTIES JUMPSUIT.)  I'd better go to bed before I get myself too worked up about this discovery. 

the end of December

(winter scene from somewhere on Mt. Hood, taken sometime in December of 2009)

Greetings! It turns out that if I want to say something before the end of the year, I pretty much have to say it now because I work tomorrow and have 2 books to finish if I'm to make my Goodreads goal! 

(Northanger Abbey: Almost done! Catherine is sneaking around the abbey thinking the thrilling worst at the moment. The other is a collection of gardening columns from Vita Sackville-West that I can't remember the name of... Anyway - it's arranged by month and I am in December, so I should be able to make it to the end in time.) 

This, the TENTH YEAR of this blog, has been my year of least posting. In the new year I'd like to get back into the habit of a lot of things, of which blogging is one. I don't know. It helps arrange my thoughts, somehow. 

Well now it's after midnight and time for chapter 10. More on books and thoughts and pictures and everything in 2015! Or tomorrow. You never know. 

more books

Hello again - here are a few more recent-ish (mostly from July because I am behind) book impressions.  What are you reading? Do you dig it? My up to the minute book update is that I'm reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell and I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Ugh, it's so good. People at work are tired of hearing me talk about it. ("oh, it's fiction? Nevermind." OR "never heard of it" OR OR OR I could go on but I won't. I just reassert its felicity at every freaking opportunity and hope someone will eventually take me up on it.) 

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick  by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky Read July 16

Love, sex, comedy, funny, Queen, crime, color, library, hating your job, loving your job, financial crisis, sex fascists, sex comedy, one cool trick

Explicit but big hearted. Funny.  Surprising. A perfect meld of writing and artwork. 

                                 

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill  Read July 19 - 20

Epistolary, marriage, language, depression, infidelity, fidelity, sometimes the city is not your friend, short, wild animal feelings in your chest

if you enjoy reading about complicated human feelings including ones that are not always positive and if you can tolerate a journey that reaches a stopping point but doesn’t feel like the end (because complicated human feelings keep on shifting and turning and don’t easily resolve), try this book. The writing is beautiful and it’s short!

the two covers: I prefer the one on the right but the library had the one on the left so that's what I read. The insides are the same! 

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch  Read May 26 - 28  

Constable Peter Grant discovers that there’s a lot more to London policing than he thought: trickster ghosts, magic, wizards, and a lot of other urban fantasy stalwarts. My favorite parts (I tore through this book and couldn’t wait to get back to it when I had to put it down), dealt with the Rivers of London that give the series its name: they’re an ancient, powerful, embodied, bickering blended family and have chosen Peter to keep the peace.

 

Adults with jobs, nobody gets kidnapped, no misunderstanding, their siblings get married, when it clicks it clicks

It Happened One Wedding by Julie James Read in July 

I usually don’t read contemporary romance novels unless they’re funny, but someone mentioned this on twitter so I gave it a go. I liked it! It’s only funny incidentally, but I enjoyed it regardless. Our couple consists of an investment banker and a FBI agent. The closest thing to hijinx is that their siblings are getting married and they’re thrown together in situations with religious parents where they have to pretend they’re not doing it. What sets this apart from many contemporaries is that while they have a little friction at first (because someone is a bit of an asshole), they enjoy each others company! They are equally successful in their jobs! And despite one of them being in the FBI, nobody gets kidnapped or shot. Despite one of them being an investment banker, nobody gets thrown out of the family business. Grown ups in love acting like adults!

GREETINGS and book bits

GREETINGS. (I heard something on NPR recently where an American correspondent was talking to an African correspondent and he was all "hey, hello" super casual and she came on with a strong 'GREETINGS' and it was perfect. Like, it's the only way I want to greet anyone ever, want my phone message changed to it, etc. GREETINGS.)

ANYWAY. I started to get into the bananas nature of my summer, but that way lies mission-creep so I deleted it for now. It will have its day! But today I come before you to talk about BOOKS. I've been trying over the many years of this blog to find a way to speak briefly about various books that I've read. I've tried some things, but nothing made me particularly happy. Then I started writing in a notebook.  Just the title, then a list of top of my head things I thought about it. I'm bringing those here, and then I'll write a little more about it if I feel like it.

I'm trying to train myself to bring my thoughts a little closer together so if someone asks me about a book (not unusual or unexpected in a library) I can pull it together and respond. As it is now, it's like all my thoughts are floating at various depths in a swimming pool. They're there, I just can't lay my hands on them in the space of a quick conversation. (does that make sense? I will trust that it does.)

The list method is something I picked up from Lynda Barry's What it Is. There's a part where she has this enormous word list that you cut apart and use in your writing/drawing exercises. After you select your words, you quickly write down whatever pops into your mind. I've used this in other writing and find it VERY USEFUL.  Here we go:

The Girl with all the Gifts by M.R. Carey  read August 2-3

Dystopia, horror, thriller, science, good teacher, young girl with extraordinary intelligence, failures of bureaucracy, road novel, it’s probably what you think it is

This was a fast read once I got about 30 pages into it. I don’t want to say too much because while I don’t agree that spoilers are inherently evil (or good), I think this book is best enjoyed just diving in. Warning: creepy and gross. But the pages kept turning!

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness  finished July 28

Creatures, science, family, magic, time walking “the old fashioned way”, trust, loyalty, lots of castles, vampire investment opportunities, knew everyone, invented everything

This was the concluding volume of the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness; it tried to tie up EVERYTHING, which I think made for an overstuffed book. Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed the trilogy and would be lying if I said I wouldn’t read another installment next year. (As far as I know there are no more installments.) I thought aspects of the story were too tidy, but I really love the world she has built over three doorstopper volumes. (Volume 2 is set almost entirely in Elizabethan England!) (p.s. I heartily disagree with the “Twilight for grownups” dismissals that this series has received and will happily have it out with anyone who wants to bring that argument to me.)

+++++++

I was going to put more books up tonight, but I think I'll just do short little bursts and we'll see what happens. More soon, but not now - I've got to get myself to bed because there are Florida relatives in town and they are running me ragged with their tourism demands! (it's super fun, though.) 

currently reading

despite having a million things I want to read someday checked out from the library, I couldn't settle on anything. I'd read a few pages and put it down because nothing was quite right. (apart from the serial novel I'm reading, but I can only read that as it's being released - more on that next time.)

ANYWAY.  There's a new Richard Jury (detective) novel coming out in June by Martha Grimes (author) and I thought I'd go back to the beginning and read the first one. I haven't read it in YEARS so it's kind of fun to meet everyone for the first time again. When I read it last I'm sure I had no idea I'd be anxiously awaiting book number 23 in the series.  This is a super grubby paperback that I bought from the library's bookstore (where they sell discarded library materials), probably some time in the very early 90s.  I think I managed to make a complete set, which is good since some of them are now out of print! Although I think they're slowly coming out as ebooks, which is good.



This book is set near Christmas, but it still feels like the perfect thing to read sitting under a tree in the springtime. (creatures spotted while sitting under the tree: finch, crow, squirrel, honey bee, bumblebee, mason bee, spider, mystery bug, cat.)

Boy, Snow, Bird

my library copy the day I had to take it back

Helen Oyeyemi is not a straight-ahead writer. She deals in the things that happen out of the corner of the eye - stuff you subconsciously know is there (or fear is there), but can’t quite see - she understands the strange obliqueness of fairy tales. It’s so frustrating to read reviews of this book on Goodreads that are upset because the blurb (UGH BLURBS) promised a retelling of Snow White and this is not that. I enjoy retellings, but I especially enjoy when a writer can take the spirit of a thing and fashion it into something new, wholly itself. It’s not Snow White just like it’s not Cinderella - the fairy tale similarities are in the telling and the relationships, not the exact logistics of the tale. Oyeyemi gets better than most the weird dark strangeness of a fairy tale, which is also the weird dark strangeness of life. Mirrors lie, small magics seem possible, curses are real, things appear to be what they are not and are not what they appear to be. But in all of the Oyeyemi books I’ve read (3 of 5), it’s possible for characters to become aware of their narrative in a way Snow White never could. It’s not about Prince Charming, it’s not about being good and pure of heart - it’s so much more complicated.

Boy is our heroine’s name. Her skin is white as milk, her hair so blonde it’s almost white. Her father, referred to only as ‘the Rat Catcher,'  has long soft hands, a penchant for poison and is one of the creepiest characters I’ve read in a long time. Boy grows up, runs away from the Rat Catcher, builds a new life and becomes stepmother to Snow (a beautiful child with a dead mother) and mother to Bird (also a beautiful child). COMPLICATIONS ENSUE. The jacket gives away what could be a spoiler, or could be someone’s point of entry into this book, so I’ll mention it: Bird is born with dark skin and thereby reveals her father’s family secret - they are light skinned African Americans (or ‘colored’ in this book since it’s set in the 50s-60s) and have been passing as white for years.

The book is primarily about women and relationships between women, which is another thing that makes it interesting and unusual in today’s literary landscape. Here’s Oyeyemi in a Guardian interview where she gets to the meat of the story:

"For me Boy, Snow, Bird is is very much a wicked stepmother story. Every wicked stepmother story is to do with the way women disappoint each other, and encourage each other, across generations. A lot of terrible things can come out of that disappointment. I also wanted to explore the feminine gaze, and how women handle beauty without it being to do with men, per se. The women all want approval from each other, and are trying to read each other. I also wanted to look at the aesthetics of beauty – who gets to be deemed the fairest of them all. And in Snow White that is very explicitly connected with whiteness. It had to be an American story because "passing" is an American phenomenon."

The book is divided into three sections (I think! I had to return it to the library so I don’t have it right here in front of me). The first is from Boy’s POV, then from Bird and Snow, and then back to Boy. I really enjoyed this book - its still sending out little ripples in my brain a week later and I expect it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. RECOMMENDED!

Oh, wait! here's one more quote from the book - this is from the Bird section and doesn't really have much to do with anything discussed above, except how Bird is an excellent narrator: 

The note read BARBARA THOMAS IS FAST and inquiring minds wanted to know whether this was true, and what Barbara Thomas was going to do to try and prove her innocence. Louis looked as if he was feeling sorry for her, especially when I pointed out that the only way she could prove she wasn’t fast was by never kissing another boy until the day she died. But I couldn’t think of a better person for such a thing to happen to, so I laughed. Going to middle school in the same building as the high school students makes you see the reality. School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years. (p. 202)