A literary time machine!

No it's not science fiction!  It's not fiction at all. I recently read and enjoyed One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson.

This was like a literary time machine! I had read a couple of Bryson's books but they were not about a period of time. This was an amazing deep dive into life before television, computers, the internet, or so many other things we take for granted. Even radio was really just getting started.

Bryson focuses on the summer of 1927, especially on Charles Lindburgh's solo flight across the Atlantic, Babe Ruth's career, boxing, baseball, politics, and some events I had never heard of, such as a scandalous murder trial. I learned a lot, and I was entertained at the same time. 

The narrative jumps around a bit; I did wish the publisher had enabled the Kindle's X-Ray feature because people would be described in one chapter and reappear chapters later, and I didn't always remember their details. The X-Ray feature on the Kindle is great for this kind of thing but a lot of publishers just don't care about the ebook version. The footnotes were not formatted as links, ether, which made them much less helpful because you only read them when you got to the end of the chapter. If you read the ebook version, all the illustrations are at the end, so be sure you keep paging through as they are interesting. 

I don't generally read much nonfiction. I like a story, with a plot and characters I can relate to, but I loved this book! 

p.s. The Kindle version is really cheap right now! Only $1.99!

Good news (I hope!) for Jane Austen fans and P.D. James fans

Some time ago I wrote a review of Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James. The novel is both a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and a murder mystery. PBS plans to air a dramatization of the book as a Masterpiece Theater miniseries that starts this coming October.

I really, really hope they didn't muck it up! It looks okay from the preview, but you never know.

Review: The Golem and the Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is a wonderful debut novel! It's nice to find a fantasy in such an original setting, and with such a cool mix of fantastic creatures. If you are as tired of werewolves, vampires, and zombies as I am, this is a good book to try.

For those who aren't familiar with golems, they are creatures of Jewish mythology, created from clay and endowed with a semblance of life by arcane spells known only to learned rabbis. In a way, a golem is the thinking man's Frankenstein's Monster.

Jinnis (aka genies) are familiar from the genie in a bottle tale, and indeed this jinni is not only trapped in a bottle, he is trapped in human form. In spite of that, he has some superhuman abilities. His fingers can generate fire, because his true form is actually fire-based.

The huge influx of immigrants from both Europe and Asia bring the two supernatural creatures to New York city in the early part of the 20th century. The golem ends up in a Jewish neighborhood and the jinni in Little Syria. Eventually, their paths cross (neither of them sleeps, so they are both awake all night) and they know each other at once.

In addition to the eponymous main characters, this novel employs many secondary characters to narrate the story. I had no feeling of “head hopping” because each of them has a distinctive voice and clear motivations. Most of the story is set in the East Side of Manhattan but there are scenes in Poland, the Middle East, and on an ocean liner. Everyone's part in the story is like a piece of yarn that the author knits into the story to create a cohesive whole. The nonhuman characters are just that: not human. They have their own natures and they stay true to them.

There is some resolution at the end, but clearly, a sequel could easily happen, so don't say I didn't warn you. I also want to commend the publisher for an extremely clean Kindle copy of this book. Kudos for no formatting errors!

All in all, an excellent read! The only thing I didn't like was the cover, which I thought found neither appealing nor helpful in determining what the story was about.




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Review: Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas

Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I am bemused. This book was very different from anything I have ever read. The characters in it don't just “break the fifth wall,” they cut a window, install drapes, and pull up a chair to enjoy the view.

It starts with people on some far-future starship noticing how many of them die on away missions. Eventually they figure out their fate is driven by something outside their universe. WARNING: Spoilers ahead!

These folks discover that for each of them there is a corresponding actor in a TV show, and if the plot calls for that character to die, then the starship crew member dies, too. So many layers of unreality end up layered together, it's like practicing archeology to read the narrative.

After seeing everything from the alternate future universe crew member's point-of-view, we move to our own earth and see things from the TV show scriptwriter's POV, and then from one of the actor's POV. And along the way, every character seems just as real as any other character. It's clever, it's well written, and it's entertaining. I'm just not sure it's actually a novel.

I liked it a lot, but I am bemused.



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Rankings and reviews

While the recent flap about JK Rowling writing a non-best-selling mystery as Robert Galbraith proves reviews aren't everything, Amazon reviews really do help! That's why I was happy to see that The Sixth Discipline reached the half-century mark on Amazon.com—50 reviews!

At the same time, I am also looking at its ranking, which has fallen a bit lately, after the huge rise in May.  In Italy though, where the book has just recently become free, it would look like it's doing really well.

That's 762 in all free Kindle books, and 8 in "Fantascienza" Kindle books in English.  I think Fantascienza is Italian for science fiction, except it looks like it could also come from the word for fantasy. Actually, that's probably a pretty good word for my books, as I make no claims that the science in them is plausible. Some folks would call my work science fantasy. I hope bambini e ragazzi doesn't mean Amazon has classified it as a kid's book!

But to return to the number, 762 sounds great, and 8 sounds even better, but remember that the Kindle store in Italy seems to consist almost entirely of books in English. All the top sellers and top free books are in English. And in fact, the number of books I have given away in Italy is still in the single digits, which means there are not a lot of people in Italy downloading free Kindle books!

I guess this means I can get in on the ground floor—or as they would say in Italy, the pianterreno.

Review: The Cloud Roads

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This is not the usual sort of review that summarizes (aka, gives away) the plot. Rather, I want to talk about why this book made such a good impression on me, and the one thing that bothered me. The Cloud Roads is that curious beast, a book that defies genre labels. Mind you, I'm not saying it transcends its genre. I hate that phrase, because it implies that genre is a bad thing, and I have no problem with genre.

The Cloud Roads is impressive because it mixes genres in an interesting way. The book is set on a world called the Three Kingdoms that doesn't appear to be our own earth. The many and varied humanoid and non-humanoid species on it are clearly alien— not elves or fairies or dwarves or any other mythical creatures from assorted folklores. No, they are true aliens, and not Star Trek putty-on-their-noses aliens, but beings in a world where a single “ species” can have many forms.

The protagonist is named Moon. When the story begins, he doesn't even know what kind of creature he is, because he has never met any others like himself since he was quite young. The Three Kingdoms are inhabited by groundlings (creatures who walk), skylings (fly), and sea creatures (swim/live in the water). Moon has two forms, groundling and skyling, and can shift between them. There is no science in this shifting, as there is in Joe Haldeman's Camouflage. The change is clearly accomplished with magic, like the augery and a few other features of this world. For one thing, in one form Moon wears clothes and in the other not, and Wells accounts for this by mentioning that he had to learn to do that magic as well as the magic of changing his body.

Eventually, Moon meets several Raksura, other creature with two forms who can shape-shift at will. But the Raksura's alien-ness is not limited to shape shifting and the oddness (wings, scales, tails) of their bodies. No, their species has two main classes of beings, one of which is winged when shifted and the other not. In addition, not all Raksura are fertile. They live in communal “courts” where they are dominated by a reigning queen, a specific variant of Raksura, who is fertile. Queens mate with consorts, and while both are large, fierce fighters with a full compliment of wings, scales, and claws, queens are pretty damn scary fighters.

Queens fight over consorts, and mark their mates with a scent, so that other queens will leave them alone. But not all females are queens. It's not that they don't have gender roles, it's that they have multiple roles for each gender. The Raksura may be humanoid, but they are not human. Thus, Raksura relationships do not always occur in tidy pairs, and the concept of family is pretty much indistinguishable from community.

The bad guys are called the Fell, and they also shape shift and fall into multiple categories of beings, with the smarter ”rulers” controlling the dumber varieties. They are impressively evil in that they exist only to prey on other species, which they do quite literally by eating their victims.

If I have any complaints with the book, they are mostly about how creatures are named. Raksura is a perfectly fine term, but the two categories of Raksura are Arbora, who are teachers and mentors and whose alternate form is wingless, and Aeriat, who do have wings in their shifted (or non-groundling) form. Why, after building such a wonderfully rich and totally alien setting Wells chose two names that sound and look like English words for tree-related and air-related I will never know. They grated on me, pulling me back from her magical otherworld into the everyday, and I resented that because she did such a good job on everything else. Even calling the bad guys “the Fell” struck me as misguided. No other species had a particularly apt English adjective as a name.

I wanted more consistency and logic than I got in naming; even the three main categories of Fell annoyed me: rulers (smart ones), major kethel (the big but dumb ones), and minor dakti (small but still dumb). Rulers were always called just rulers, but sometimes the others were called simply dakti and kethel and sometimes they were major kethel and minor dakti. I kept waiting for a major dakti and a minor kethel to appear but they never did. If they only came in one variety each, then why did they need the major/minor distinction? It made no sense!

Of course, I am legendary in my critique group for complaining about characters' names, so it's not surprising this was the one thing that bothered me. I was even bothered by a language being called Altanic because I read it as Atlantic for the first six times I came to it.

But, nit picks aside, the story itself is wonderfully told. Moon is a great protagonist; damaged, prickly, but still soft-hearted, Moon hopes for good from the world but so often encounters bad. Wells does a good job of sketching secondary and tertiary characters in just a few sentences, so that the other “people” all feel real. The story has a good mix of action, dialog, and Moon's thought processes. The story is told from Moon's point of view, in third person so close and consistent you could change all the pronouns to make it first person with almost no re-writing. The flying scenes are particularly well done.

In short, I loved it!

Caveat for Kindle owners: The Kindle version I have had some bad formatting; I sent an email to the publisher about the errors in the book (mostly missing word spaces and some funky paragraph indenting). They suggested I should buy the trade paperback because it is formatted much better and has attractive graphics. I don't have good feelings about their ability to keep making money in the future.  This was some time ago, so possibly this has changed. Please comment if you had a different experience.

Addendum: Sadly, it seems I was correct about the publisher. They are attempting to sell their assets to avoid bankruptcy.


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Review: The DaVinci Code

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This wasn't as bad as I had led to believe it would be. The prose is uninspired, and Brown makes things up to fit the story, but isn't that what fiction is? Novelists are allowed to make things up. However, the nature of a thriller is to make the tension credible, and the lack of plausibility of some aspects of the story was noticeable. I had trouble believing an elderly man dying of a gunshot wound to the gut would work out and flawlessly execute the elaborate scenario described in the beginning of the story. The victim's granddaughter learning the details of his death and instantly understanding that she needed to save the chief suspect from false accusation was equally unlikely. I also had trouble believing the protagonist's (he's a Harvard professor of "symbology)" assertion that pretty much every fable or fairy tale ever told is actually about Mary Magdalene.

What bothered me more than that was the plot's dependence on the professor's repeatedly coming up with flashes of insight just as some crisis occurred. It was is if he were a magician whose hat had an inexhaustible supply of rabbits.

Still, the story was entertaining, at a certain level. It dared to aim for a grand story line, and if it didn't hit the target for everyone, obviously a lot of folks enjoyed it. This book will never win Dan Brown a Pulitzer, but on the other hand, it made him a boatload of money and guaranteed his next book would sell well. I would not sneer at that.

Kindle users's note: This book had a fair amount of French phrases. Some but not all were translated by the narration, so the translation feature on the Kindle came in very handy! I just had to highlight the words, and then select Translate from the More option on the Highlight menu. Also, the Kindle formatting was excellent. 




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A literary challenge of note

A blogger has announced an interesting plan. Mathew Kahn's blog Kahn's Corner has a post where he announces his intention of reading and reviewing every year's best selling book since 1900. He's using Publisher's Weekly as his source for the best selling book of any given year.

It's an ambitious challenge to meet, and it also illustrates several facts. First off, many of the older books are ones most people under 40 have never heard of; in some cases, they might not even have heard of the author. Second, John Grisham has sold one hell of a lot of books. Third, a lot of best sellers (especially those from the second half of the list) got made into movies.

On a personal level, it's interesting for me to see which of these best sellers I have read.  Out of 94 books, these are the only 11 titles I have ever read:

1918: The U. P. Trail by Zane Grey

1929: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

1936: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

1941: The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin

1952: The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain

1955: Marjorie Morningstar  by Herman Wouk

1961: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

1970: Love Story by Erich Segal

1975: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

1985: The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel

Reassuringly, only one of the above was assigned reading in school. The others were all books I got from the library or the bookstore just to read. On the other hand, there are nine additional books where I at least watched the movie.

The first book is interesting partly because the author's name is Winston Churchill, and although he was rich and famous in his time, he's not the Winston Churchill; he's not even English.

A final observation is that I have not read a book that was a best seller if it was published after 1985. I must be very out of step with the mainstream!  Feel free to check the original post and report your count of best sellers read in a comment. I am wondering how I rate.

Book review: Indian Maidens Bust Loose

Indian Maidens Bust Loose by Vidya Samson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vidya Samsom pulls off quite a coup with this book. She managed to write a very funny book (at times it was laugh out loud funny) that touches on some very serious subjects. The entire book is told in first person by a young woman named Nisha Desai, who lives in a house that is comfortably middle class by Indian standards, but it looks very strange and inhospitable to her two American born and bred cousins.

The house belongs to Nisha's mother's mother, which makes for an interesting dynamic, as Nisha's father is a petty tyrant who wants to rule the roost, even though he doesn't own the hen house. Nisha's mother is suffering from a bad case of sibling rivalry as her disgraced sister (she ran off with a white American boy when she was quite young) has been allowed to return home with her two young daughters. Nisha and her sister Vinita give up their own rooms so the aunt and cousins can be more comfortable but this isn't what disrupts Nisha's life: the cousins have not been taught that their father's word is law; they don't believe in tradition and blind respect for elders. Pretty soon Nisha waffles between envy, fear, and wistfulness as she realizes how different her life is from theirs. For one thing, their father isn't trying to marry them off to any man who will take them off his hands without asking too much dowry.

Other themes touched on include the caste system, the plight of the poor, the corrupt nature of politicians, the difference between acting from a sense of duty and acting out of love, and how easily many people are fooled by false hopes. There's a dash of romance thrown in, mostly at the end, but this isn't really about falling in love as much as it is about learning to know yourself.

Nisha's tone is very funny and personable. The author has some of the characters speak English with a kind of consistently incorrect grammar that borders on dialect, which wore on me after a while. It might be accurate but repetition made it annoying. There were just a few rough spots on this gem, but on the whole it was a very enjoyable book that was also rather an education. It reminded me of the kind of comedy of manners kind of book that authors like Nancy Mitford used to write; the author could even have called this one LOVE IN A HOT CLIMATE.

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Book Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t read much nonfiction. I like books that are stories, with a plot and a climax, and characters I can empathize with. Nonfiction often drags for me, with its insistence on sticking with real events and real people. I do read historical fiction because I like to read stories in distant places and long ago times. The Hare with Amber Eyes is the rare nonfiction book that worked for me.

Edmund de Waal is an English potter with a Dutch last name, but his grandmother was born into a fabulously wealthy family of Jewish bankers and grain merchants. The Ephrussi were contemporaries and equals of the Rothschilds, related by marriage. Originally from Odessa, they moved to Vienna and then some of the younger sons moved to Paris. Through this family, de Waal inherited a collection of 264 netsuke, small carved figures that Japanese gentlemen used to wear on their obis, rather in the manner of a watch fob. The collection included the eponymous hare with amber eyes. De Waal decided to tell the history of the various Ephrussi who had owned the netsuke, starting with his great-great-uncle Charles Ephrussi, who was, among other things, a patron of the arts and a critic in late 19th Century Paris. If you are familiar with the famous painting The Luncheon of the Boating Party, Charles is the man in the background, looking slightly overdressed in a top hat and black frock coat. He was a friend and patron of Renoir and other Impressionists, right at the peak of that movement in art.

In fact, as it turns out, the history of de Waal's netsuke is largely the history of the 20th Century. Charles eventually gave them as a wedding gift to a nephew who lived in Vienna, and they made the journey across Europe to take up residence in the incredibly grand Palais Ephrussi where eventually they became the playthings of de Waal’s grandmother and her siblings. From post-war Vienna they eventually made their way to England and then, amazingly, back to Japan.

Obviously, netsuke cannot speak, but de Waal has researched his well-documented family, and he describes their lives and times beautifully. When a visual and tactile artist tells a story, you would expect a level of detail that makes you feel like you are there, and de Waal does not disappoint. He clearly sees more than many of us; he never says “tree” but always linden, or elm, or oak, or whatever kind of tree it was. His history immersed me into first Paris, and then Vienna, and then Tokyo. I even forgave him his extensive use of present tense, a thing I do not forgive easily.

I should mention that I read the Kindle version, which was very clean and had only two tiny formatting errors (an excess hyphen and a space in the middle of a word). The photographs of people and places came through very well; I suspect they were all (or almost all) taken in black and white. The only thing missing from the Kindle version was the book cover! Oh, and the netsuke themselves, which do not appear in the book (not even the printed version; I know because Michael Dirda mentioned it in his review). Luckily, you can see some of them online, as well as Mr. de Waal’s pots. One thing he never mentions is that he is not just any potter, but a world-class potter with gallery showings. [Edmund de Waal page on Artsy]

All that and he wrote this fabulous book, too! I am so happy he did.


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Review: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I would have given this 5 stars if Atwood had not made so much use of present tense. I understand she was playing with tense, and much of the novel is a series of flashbacks, but even in the flashbacks she sometimes used present tense and I hate that.

It's a brilliant book, but too literary for my taste. Atwood can spend three paragraphs on the metaphorical aspects of the act of sex and pages and pages on exactly how things look and feel for the narrator. She also leaves the reader with a highly ambiguous ending. Between that and her insistence that this isn't science fiction, she's lucky I didn't give her three stars.

But it is a chilling read, more so now than when it was written. Talk about a war on women! In this book, women lost the war. Offred, the title character, relates being virtually brainwashed and physically abused by religious zealots who feel compelled to make her accept her place as a man's chattel. And many of her abusers are women. All this is done in the name of God.

The one thing that bothered me in plot of the book is that Offred (for Of Fred, her protector; no other name is given for her, except in the notes at the end where it says she might have been called June) recalls her past of less than a decade before as if it were completely normal (i.e. much as life is now). And yet in the Republic of Gilead the birth rate is terrifyingly low because of pollution causing birth defects and sterility. It seems to me that kind of problem wouldn't happen overnight; it would have had a major impact on life even in a free society.

Still, a compelling story.




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Death Comes to Pemberley: a review

Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
Hardcover: 291 pages; also available as an ebook
Publisher: Knopf

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to write a sequel to one of the most well known and well-loved novels of the English language. Pride and Prejudice probably has more TV and movie adaptions than any novel except perhaps Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (I'm talking through my hat here. I haven't actually counted). In written form, P&P also has numerous sequels, prequels, alternate tellings, and mash-ups.

As you might infer from the title, Death Comes to Pemberley is a murder mystery. From reading the blurb on Amazon, I thought it was Mr. Wickham who was murdered, but in fact he is more suspect than victim. I was disappointed, as I had thought he would get his just deserts. Well, he does suffer, but not nearly enough for me. And when it comes to murder mysteries, P.D. James knows her stuff.  I thought I had caught on to the true motive, but I was a bit off.

It turns out Baroness James also does a pretty good job with early 19th century English. That, of course, is the true test for the writer. Austen wrote P&P as a contemporary novel, but since she died in 1817, that gives you a sense of how far back in time James had to look. On the whole, DCtP does very well at keeping the reader in the early 19th century, with narrative like this:

The entertainment and seasonal diversions of country living are neither as numerous nor enticing as to make the social obligations of a great house a matter of indifference to those neighbours qualified to benefit from them . . .

A couple of times, I thought she slipped just a tad, as when Darcy says he needs to "make sure Bingley is fully in the picture. . ." and when a magistrate says, "The constables will need blankets, and some food and drink to see them through—cold meats, bread, the usual.” The phrases make sure, fully in the picture and the usual struck me as too modern for the time. Mind you, I don't know that they are, but they sound wrong to me.

On the other hand, this passage, where Elizabeth Darcy (nee Bennett) is recalling that phase of her husband's courtship where she abruptly changes her mind about him impressed me as being on target and rather clever:

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

She even worked in the title of the original novel! There were several places where it was almost as if she were channeling Austen, as when she describes Mr. Collins' letter to Elizabeth:

He began by stating that he could find no words to express his shock and abhorrence, and then proceeded to find a great number, few of them appropriate and none of them helpful.

It's apparent, too, that James has done her research about the times. At one point, in order not to disturb Darcy's sleep, the servants wrapped chunks of coal in paper before putting them in the fire, so that they would burn with less noise. I have read a fair amount of historical fiction, but I had never heard that,

When the story begins, it's about six years after the Darcys' and the Bingleys' marriages, and both Elizabeth and Jane have children. I was pleased that James didn't feel compelled to tinker with circumstances too much. She did marry off Mary Bennett, who is little seen in this novel, but appears to be happy as a clergyman's wife.  The only unmarried Bennett sister still at home (and happy to be there, in full possession of her parents' time and attention) is Kitty.

If I have a complaint about the book, it's that I knew the original novel well enough not to need the retelling of the P&P backstory that James felt compelled to include. I thought it slowed things down too much, and considering the book was written in the style of the 19th century, that made it darned slow in places. On the other hand, I can see why James didn't want to exclude from her audience people who either never read the book, or haven't read it recently.  I also agree with a few commenters I saw on Amazon who complained the ending felt a little rushed. It did seem to me James might have spent a bit more "ink" in the ending.

If I were giving out stars, I would say 4 out of 5. An excellent job on copying a master, and an enjoyable mystery, too.

Addendum for Kindle owners: I read (naturally) the Kindle version. The formatting was excellent.

Why an ereader is a great tool for a book reveiwer

I've started reading Death Comes to Pemberley, and I'm enjoying it so far, but one thing I had decided before I started reading was that I would most likely post a review of it. With that in mind, I have been using the Kindle's annotation and highlight features, two very handy things if you plan to review a book, and with the Kindle Touch, very easy to use.

To create an annotation, you simply press your finger to the screen where you want to annotate and hold it there for a second or two. You will get a menu showing the definition of the word you touched and menu buttons to create a highlight or a note. Once you press "Note," the on-screen keyboard appears and you can type whatever text you like and then save it.  In the book it appears rather like a footnote, but with the number in a box

For a highlight, unless you want to highlight a single word, you press the screen on the first word and after half a second, you move your finger to the right and then down. When you reach the end of the area you want to highlight, remove your finger from the screen, it will ask if you wanted to create a note or a highlight (or to share via social networking).

Notes and highlights can be read and reviewed from within the book itself using the Kindle's menu, but for writing a review, one reason they are a real boon is that they are also available on the web as part of your Amazon account.  You go to the special Kindle area of Amazon, login to your account,  and click "Your Highlights" to see them, in chronological order, most recent book first.  From there you can copy and paste directly into the review. It's a wonderful function!

I know a lot of other ereaders and ereader apps offer annotation and highlighting (iBooks even does different colors), but I am not clear on whether they offer web access to just the highlights and annotations. If anyone out there knows, feel free to chime !