On second thought...

I posted earlier that I didn't have much to say after a busy day.

I've had second thoughts about that, because there's something that is bothering me a lot the past few days.

In the past week, maybe week and a half, I've read not one but two books that I checked out of the library that both had the same problem - someone who checked them out before me felt the need to go through and edit the text of the books.

Now, I can sympathize with this urge. I've noticed in the past, oh, five or ten years that books, including some published by very big mainstream publishing houses, seem not to have the editing and proofreading attention that they should have. Typographical errors abound, weird grammatical constructions that I would have thought would be eliminated in proofreading have become more common, and the books just generally don't seem as professionally presented as they used to be. And as they should be, considering what the publishing houses charge for their product these days.

However, and above and beyond the fact that library books are not the property of the people reading them and the readers should therefore not write in them, whoever did the home "editing" in these two books clearly had no idea what they were doing. Not only that, they had no idea what they were doing in the very same way in both cases. If it weren't for the fact that these two books were in different subject areas - one was about the coming of age of the Baby Boomers, and the other was a memoir by singer Eric Burdon - and that they were from two different libraries in two different counties (I picked up one in a local branch and got the other through interlibrary loan), I would suspect that the same person was responsible for the markings in both books.

Whoever did it, they had issues with punctuation. There were commas crossed out, other commas added, and some commas replaced by semicolons. And none of the alterations made any grammatical sense at all. I'm not talking about the dispute over the Oxford comma here. My roommate kept laughing at me because I kept complaining this free-form editing and threatening to throw the books against the wall. In the case of the Baby Boomer book, I got so frustrated at one point that if I hadn't been close to the end of the book I probably would have just given up and returned it to the library before I finished it. It wasn't really that good a book, anyway.

I guess all of this is a long and roundabout way of saying that I don't care what you do with the books you own. I write in my own books all the time (as I think I've mentioned here before); that's my way of having a dialogue with the book and the writer. But, please, please, please...don't write in library books.

That's what God invented sticky-notes for, isn't it?

Looking back at my year in reading...

I'm proud of myself, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I set a goal to read 40 books in 2013, and I not only reached that goal, but exceeded it by one book. I also read in excess of 15,000 pages in completed books this year, which was also over my goal. I really read a lot more than that, but I did a lot of partial reading of books that had information I wanted for research purposes without having to read the full book.

Now it's the last day of the year, which means it's time for my reading year in review. It was a good year, if only because there is not one book on the list this year that I would have to recommend against reading it. Certainly, I liked some more than others, but I don't regret the time I spent on any of them.

I read more non-fiction than I do fiction, and this year was no exception, although I only read three more non-fiction than fiction books. This was kind of a surprise to me, since it seemed like I was always reading things as research for the book I'm writing. I stuck mostly to favorite authors for my fiction reading this year. I did discover Lee Child's Jack Reacher series, and liked the first one I read enough to read another. I continued my love/hate relationship with Patricia Cornwell's writing - I don't know what it is, other than probably her penchant for experimenting with person and tense. First person present, which she uses in some of her Kay Scarpetta novels, makes me want to scream. I spent a lot of time reading the Kellermans, both Faye and Jonathan, because their books are comfort reading for me. I found a Michael Connelly Harry Bosch novel that I hadn't read, and that was a good thing, as was finding that Faye Kellerman had a new Decker/Lazarus novel out (that was "The Beast").

I only read a couple of science fiction novels this year, "Redshirts" by John Scalzi and "Inception", by W. A. Harbinson. The Harbinson book, though, is really only tangentially science fiction, postulating that UFO sightings can be explained by advanced aeronautics design by Nazi scientists and engineers during World War II. It's not a bad book, really (although the end of it seemed to be a little bit of cheat), but it isn't really science fiction, either. On the other hand, "Redshirts" was superior science fiction (and won the Hugo Award this year for Best Novel), not to mention funny and a kick to read. It was my favorite fiction read all year.

I've just started reading through the Harry Potter series. I'd read the first book years ago, and reread it at the end of this year. I'm reading the second one, which I had started right after reading the first volume the first time but got sidetracked from, now, and I intend to get through the series this time. Yeah, they're for a YA audience, but like many other adults, I really like the story Rowling tells (I've seen all the movies) and want to get an insight into the characters that isn't available in the films. So, look for more of these on my fiction list next year.

So here is the list of fiction I read this year:

Grievous Sin, by Faye Kellerman
Scarpetta, by Patricia Cornwell
Cross Bones, by Kathy Reichs
Bones, by Jonathan Kellerman
The Conspiracy Club, by Jonathan Kellerman
Private Eyes, by Jonathan Kellerman
The Hard Way, by Lee Child
Terminal Freeze, by Lincoln Child
Bare Bones, by Kathy Reichs
A Wanted Man, by Lee Child
Deception, by Jonathan Kellerman
The Drop, by Michael Connelly
Redshirts, by John Scalzi
The Beast, by Faye Kellerman
Inception, by W. A. Harbinson
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J. K. Rowling

And now for the non-fiction.

A lot of the non-fiction I read this year had something to do with the book I'm writing about the Baby Boom generation and the world we live in (being a Baby Boomer myself and all). The rest of my non-fiction reading was either stuff I found at the library that just looked interesting - the Cavett book; the book about the art thefts after the fall of Baghdad; "Anarchy Evolution" which was written by Greg Graffin, who is a punk rock musician and college professor in zoology, with special interest in evolutionary theory; "Hands Through Stone", which is about some local crimes here where I live; and the book about Scientology - or were things that I'm particularly interested in. These included the Coelacanth book, the books on religion and religious belief, and the UFO book. I've been reading about UFOs since I was about 8 or 9 years old, and I find the subject fascinating although I'm certainly not a "true believer". The UFO book was also part of my research for the book I'm writing, since the modern era of UFO sightings began not long after the Baby Boom started.

One of the biggest surprises in my non-fiction reading this year was "Life With Mother Superior", by Jane Trahey. It's the book that inspired the film "The Trouble with Angels" (1966), which stars Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills, and was directed by Ida Lupino - and is one of my favorite movies of all time. The thing that surprised me about the book, a memoir which takes place in the 1930s and was published in 1962, is that the movie was so true to the book, and that some of the adventures in the movie were actually toned down from the events that inspired them.

Seven of the non-fiction books were re-reads: The O'Neill book about the Sixties; both books about the Manson Family (the Sanders and Bugliosi books); "Kingdom Coming"; the Al Franken book; the Stephen Book, which is one of the best books on both writing and on the horror genre that I've ever read; and "Leaving the Saints", which is a very controversial book both among Mormons and ex-Mormons, but a good book worth re-reading nevertheless.

I can't say I have a favorite among the non-fiction I've read this year. Each of the books was good and worthwhile in one way or another, or I wouldn't have finished them. There are too many good books in the world to spend time finishing the ones that aren't good or aren't interesting or don't have valuable information in them - and even those in the last category can be mined for the information I need sometimes without having to be read straight through.

Non-Fiction

Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets, by Dick Cavett
Thieves of Baghdad, by Matthew Bogdanos with William Patrick
Julie & Julia, by Julie Powell
What They Didn't Teach You About the 60s, by Mike Wright
Boom!: Voices of the Sixties, by Tom Brokaw
When F. D. R. Died, by Bernard Asbell
On the Trail of the Assassins, by Jim Garrison
Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s, by William L. O'Neill
The Family, by Ed Sanders
Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry
Kingdom Coming, by Michelle Goldberg
Anarchy Evolution, by Greg Graffin and Steve Olson
Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), by Al Franken
Danse Macabre, by Stephen King
Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth, by Keith Steward Thompson
Prophet's Prey, by Sam Brower
UFO Hunters, by William J. Birnes
Life With Mother Superior, by Jane Trahey
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright
Hands Through Stone, by James A. Ardaiz
Leaving the Saints, by Martha Beck
Weird Arizona, by Wesley Treat
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach

So, there you have it...41 books read over the course of the year, some of them long (the longest was "Boom! Voices of the Sixties", at 662 pages) and some of them much shorter (the two shortest were "Life With Mother Superior" at 210 pages and "When F. D. R. Died" at 211 pages). Some of them easy reads, others not so much. But all of them, depending on what you're interested in, worth the time and effort to sit down and do the reading.

As I've said before around here, go read a book. Does one of the books on my list this year sound interesting? Go find that and read it. Or go to the library or your local bookstore and browse the shelves until you find something that sounds like you'd like it. Or, put something new on your Nook or Kindle or whatever newfangled thing you've got to read on. Me? I'm old fashioned and I like paper books, but whatever format you prefer is fine.

And if you find something you really like? Come back and tell us all about it, so we can enjoy it too.

Happy New Year.

Reading: Mary Roach and "Bonk"

Have you ever read anything by Mary Roach?

Yeah, neither had I, until the past few days. Based on the book I read, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008, W. W. Norton & Company; 319 pages), I would suggest you run, not walk, to the nearest library or book store and find one of her books and read it. Don't worry; if reading about sex is not your cuppa, she's also written about cadavers (dead bodies), in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003, W. W. Norton & Company); what happens to your body after you're dead, in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005, W. W. Norton & Company); spaceflight and what will be necessary to keep humans alive and happy on the way to Mars and back, in Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010, W. W Norton & Company); and the human gastrointestinal tract, in Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal(2013, W. W. Norton & Company).

Really. Don't be put off by her subject matter. Roach will make it fun, educational, and worth your while to read her books. She has been called "the funniest science writer in the country" (in The New Yorker), and after reading Bonk, I'm more than willing to believe that. She has a wonderful, if sometimes slightly twisted, sense of humor. The also is a great writer and, from the evidence of this book, knows her way around a research library. In other words, she is funny, but she is also accurate and writes in a way that keeps you interested in her subject even when her subject is something you might not necessarily be completely comfortable with.

In Bonk, Roach looks at the things that scientists have discovered about sex and some of the lengths that scientists have gone to, to find out what they know. And, she doesn't just write about humans, although we're in there, too. But, because sex is such a sensitive subject, and because there are experiments you just can't do on human subjects (although, you'd be surprised at some of the experiments researchers have done with the cooperation of humans), there's also rabbit sex, pig sex, and monkey sex in the quest to discover why animals and people do what they do in regard to sex. It really is fascinating stuff.

I didn't necessarily go out looking for Roach's "sex book". Honest, I didn't. But I've been wanting to read something she had written ever since I saw an extended interview with her on Book TV a few months ago. Unlike some writers, who can be boring interviews (I can say that, since I am a writer), Roach is engaging, as funny speaking as she is writing, and seems dedicated to write good science for the layperson - and you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find writers like that. Anyway, I would have picked up any of her books; it just happens that the one I found on the shelf at my local library was "the sex book", and so that was the one I read first. Reading Bonk has made me even more determined to get my hands on her other books.

Although, I'm not really sure about the one about the digestive system. Some people are squeamish about reading about sex; I find myself a little less than enthusiastic to read about stomachs and digestion and all that the topic implies. Still, I'll probably read it, too. And you should, too...or at least you should introduce yourself to Mary Roach's writing through one of her books.

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And, on a related note, I'm just one book away from meeting my reading goal for the year, which I've written about before around here. It is a modest goal: 40 books in the year. Bonk was my 39th. I'm not quite sure what my 40th will be yet. I'm actually reading a couple of books at the moment, and it will just be a matter of which one I finish first.

Reading: Even some flawed books are worth reading...

I don't read too much in the "true crime" genre any more.

I've always been interested in the procedural aspect of the solving of crimes, but at some point it just got too depressing to read much of that sort of thing. Yeah, the crimes that get written about are the ones that end up getting solved sooner or later, mostly. I think that's why a lot of people read true crime; the bad guys get theirs eventually, and that's a comforting thought. But, after awhile, it just got to the point that all that tragedy and blood got too depressing for me to continue to make it a regular part of my reading.

However, I just finished an interesting true crime book, Hands Through Stone (2012, Craven Street Books; 350 pages), by James A. Ardaiz.

I wouldn't have picked it up at the library, except that it is about a local case, or actually two cases a few years apart that turned out to be connected. Not only did I remember the latter of the two cases (the first one was before I moved to the area), but in the years after there were rumors that a woman who lived in my neighborhood was related to one of the people involved. I didn't pay much attention to the talk then, but when I saw the book I made that connection and decided to read it.

I'm glad I read it, because it cleared up some stuff about the case that I had not connected up before, including exactly why the second crime - a triple homicide during what initially appeared to be the robbery of a mom-and-pop grocery store - was committed. I'd always heard that it was a crime of revenge, but I never really understood why the revenge was being sought until I read this book.

Yes, I'm deliberately being vague about the details of the case, which got fairly wide publicity especially after the second crime was committed, because I want you to read the book, and I don't want to give a lot away. Because the book was written by the prosecutor in the first case, who later went on to become an appellate judge, there are enough inside details to make the whole thing interesting.

I'm not going to claim that it is a particularly well-written book, because it isn't. There is no real evidence that it had the benefit of much editing. I'm not sure whether that is the fault of the author or of the publisher (a small local press). It could also have used a good proofread. All of that would have ordinarily made me put the book down unfinished, but the story being told was interesting enough to keep me turning the pages.

The other flaw of the book is that at some points, the narrative becomes more about the writer than the subject of the book. However, I even found those passages interesting because of the insight they gave into the mind of the prosecutor, who followed the case even after he was out of it, seeing it out to its bitter end over twenty-five years after the first crime was committed when the former prosecutor attended the execution of the man who had masterminded the crimes.

And that's another thing about the book. No matter which side of the capital punishment debate you are on, the book will give you things to think about. I happen to be on the anti-death-penalty side of the discussion, for various reasons, but I'll wait to write about that another time.

Right now, I'll just say that, yes, Hands Through Stone is a flawed book. But if you can find it, and if you are interested in the subject of crime and punishment and the people who both commit crimes and those who attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice, you should probably read this book.

Read a Banned Book...this is the week for it

If you follow along here at all, you know that I love to read. You also might know, because I'm pretty sure I've written about it before around here, that I had the luxury of parents who did not censor what I read. Ever. Even when I was a little kid. If I wanted to read something, I was allowed to read it.

Sometimes, if it was a book that my parents thought was maybe too mature for me, they would talk with me (notice that I said "with me", not "to me") about it. But they never said, "No. You cannot read that."

I was not quite so lucky at the library when I was young. Around the time I was in about sixth through around eighth grade, there were several books that the library ladies would not let me check out so that I could read them, despite the fact that I had been checking books out of the adult (as opposed to the children's) section of the library since I was in second grade. They were acting as censors.

I suppose I could have asked my parents to check the books out for me, but I was stubborn. So, I read those books - Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H, and Charles Webb's The Graduate come immediately to mind as books I originally read during that time - sitting in the library, off in a corner where one of the library ladies wouldn't find me and scold me or try to take the books away.

My experiences in trying to read those books is how I became familiar with the real-world effects of book censorship. I thought it was wrong then and I think it is wrong now to try to censor books, whether it be because the book is considered to "adult" for some kids, or because someone wants to keep even adults from reading a book because they don't agree with something in the book.

Why am I writing about this now?

Well, it's Banned Books Week, the week every year when the American Library Association and others who care about books and ideas take the time to point out to everyone that there are people out there who want to keep you from reading stuff. And it isn't always the same people. Left-wingers complain about books just about as much as right-wingers do; it's just that it is often not the same books they're complaining about. So, if you were expecting me to rail against the conservatives for being book-banners and leave the other side alone - not happening. I don't care what part of the political spectrum you're on, if you want to keep people from reading I'm not going to be happy with you.

I ran across this video, from last year's Banned Books Week, in which Bill Moyers speaks about book banning:



Let me repeat just one line from the video. "Censorship is the enemy of truth." That is so important.

And if you're going to jump up and say, "But, what about the children? We don't want them looking at hard-core porn," my answer is, well, yes. You're right. But that isn't what is being talked about here. Not at all. What Banned Books Week stands against is the people who want to ban - and sometimes burn - books because they don't agree with something about religion in the books, or something about politics, or something about social behavior, or because there is cussing in the book. And there are people like that around. They think that the Harry Potter books should be banned because "OMG! Witches and wizards!" Or they want Das Kapital out of the schools because of "all that evil Marxism". Or they don't want To Kill a Mockingbird available because it addresses the issue of racism. The list could, and does, go on and on.

Sometimes, the people who want certain books banned just complain about those books to schools and libraries and bookstores. Other times, they will go so far as to check books they object to out of the library and never take them back the object of making sure other people cannot get access to them. No, really. People do that. I'm not sure what gives them the idea that they should have some sort of say over what other people can read, but that's just me. My attitude is, my own parents didn't tell me what I could and couldn't read, why am I going to let a total stranger do so?

At any rate, there are lists of books that people have tried to ban that make the rounds this time of year. My suggestion is to find one of those lists and read one of the books on it. You'll find all kinds of books on those lists - even the Bible, sometimes.

I'm going to leave this video, also from last year's Banned Books Week celebration, here before I go for the day. In it, a number of writers and others talk about the books they've read that people have tried to ban. There's some interesting titles here, some of which you probably didn't know someone tried to keep out of other people's hands and minds:



I think I'm going to go read a book now.

John Scalzi's "Redshirts" - Best book I've read this year

I mentioned the other day that I was reading Redshirts, by John Scalzi (Tor, 2012; 317 pages).

I'm finished reading it now, and all I can say is, Damn, that was a good book. I can't do a proper review of it. I'd have to give too much away in the way of spoilers, and I don't want to do that. I want you - all of you - to go out and read it, and I want you to come to it as it did, with only the most basic idea of what it is about. I want you to discover its delights for yourself.

I will say that I wasn't sure how the codas were going to work (there are three of them), but all three of them relate quite solidly to the main story and are an essential part of the whole. It may even be said that the codas are where the book's soul resides.

I will also say that I can state with certainty that Redshirts has vaulted into the list of my favorite books. At some point, I will have to acquire a copy of my own (I read it out of the library). I like the other things I've read that Scalzi has written very much, but I love Redshirts.

There are a couple of basic things you probably do need to know about the book. It takes a meme from the original "Star Trek" series, turns it on its head, plays with it, and does some extremely odd and interesting things with it. Also, you might have heard that Redshirts is a funny book. And it is - it is very funny; laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. But don't let that fool you. There are interesting ideas here, too, and some interesting issues are raised. These issues show that Scalzi studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, but you shouldn't let that make you hesitate to read the book, either. It all works really well, and he sneaks those philosophical issues into the story in ways so that you might not realize he's dealing with philosophical issues until well after he has you caught up in them.

So that you'll know what you're looking for when you go online to order Redshirts or to the bookstore to buy it or to the library to check it out, this is what the cover of the book looks like:

Whichever way you read it, just go read Redshirts. There's even an audiobooks version, performed by Wil Wheaton.

Oh. One other thing about Redshirts. It won this year's Hugo as Best Science Fiction Novel at Worldcon.

Here, have a fish...

I've been busy today, with meetings and preparing for a presentation that I have to give next week at CVP.

But, I'm also reading a book about the coelacanth right now. I've been sort of obsessed with this particular fish since I first saw one preserved at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History when I was in about the third or fourth grade. They are fascinating creatures, two species of fish - one living in the West Indian Ocean off the coast of southern Africa and one living in the waters around Indonesia - that were thought to have been extinct since around the time the dinosaurs died out until one species was discovered in the take from a fishing vessel off the east coast of South Africa in 1938. Until this discovery, the coelecanth was known only from the fossil record. The Indonesian species was scientifically unknown until 1999.

These species are very old, with biologists suspecting that they have evolved very little in the past 400 million years or so. Because they are so rare, and because they remain in very deep waters during the day and in fact live most of the time in caves deep in the ocean, very little is known about how they live or how long the individuals of the species live. It has been discovered that the female of the species retain the eggs of their young in their bodies rather than laying them and that it takes them about a year to gestate, after which they hatch within the mother and then the mother gives live birth to them.

The photos in the book I'm reading are not the best, clearest that they could be, so I took some time to look around YouTube to see if anyone had any footage of the fish live and in the wild. And, indeed, there is some footage, which I thought I'd share with you:



Yeah, I know. I get enthusiasms for some unusual things. It keeps life interesting, in a good way.

I'm back...and I read some books while I wasn't here

So, I'm back.

It's been a month, exactly, as it turns out. A month without Internet access. A month of mostly really hot weather here. A month of rarely going anywhere except to go to CVP to do volunteer work or to the grocery store. A very rare early morning or late evening walk over to 7-11, because it's been too hot the rest of the time. That's about it.

So, what have I been doing?

I've been reading. A lot. Fourteen books in the month. 5,638 pages.

I haven't gone on a reading binge like this in ages. As much as I love to read, I'm sort of selective about what I read (although you probably wouldn't think so by the list of things I've been reading), and many times I can't manage to find anything I really want to read in that quick a succession. I think I've only started one book that I didn't finish in the month, and it really must have not made much of an impression because, sitting here, I can't recall what it was.

These are the books I've read while I've been away from here:

1) On the Trail of the Assassin, by Jim Garrison (1988; 406 pages) NF - purportedly
2) Private Eyes, by Jonathan Kellerman (1992; 525 pages) F
3) The Hard Way, by Lee Child (2006; 477 pages) F
4) Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s, by William L. O'Neill (1971; 442 pages) NF
5) Terminal Freeze, by Lincoln Child (2009: 429 pages) F
6) Bare Bones, by Kathy Reichs (2003; 383 pages) F
7) The Family, by Ed Sanders (1971; 323 pages) NF
8) Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (1974; 502 pages) NF
9) Kingdom Coming, by Michelle Goldberg (2006; 242 pages) NF
10) A Wanted Man, by Lee Child (2012; 405 pages) F
11) Anarchy Evolution, by Greg Graffin and Steve Olson (2010; 290 pages) NF
12) Deception, by Jonathan Kellerman (2010; 332 pages) F
13) Lies (And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them), by Al Franken (2003; 379 pages) NF
14) Danse Macabre, by Stephen King (1983; 437 pages) NF

I call Garrison's book "purportedly" non-fiction because it presents one particular conspiracy theory about John F. Kennedy's assassination, the one championed by Garrison himself. He presents it as the truth, but it is not widely accepted as fact, not least because by the end of it he manages to throw in just about everything but the kitchen sink. It is an interesting book, however, even if one does not accept the theory he outlines. It was one of the main sources for Oliver Stone's film "JFK", which in itself makes it an interesting book. It is probably so much hokum, but I'm not sorry I read it.

I'm not sorry I read any of these books, and I'm really glad that I discovered a couple of them. Some were re-reads, although at least one of them - Deception - was not a deliberate re-read; I realized about a third of the way through that I had read it before. Another of the re-reads - Helter Skelter - was a re-re-re-re-re-read. It's a book I've read every two or three years since I first read it in 1976. Scariest book I've ever read, honestly, because of my proximity to the Spahn Ranch when Charlie Manson was living there and sending out his killing parties (I was in junior high at the time, and lived 7.8 miles - according to Google Maps - from Spahn).

Probably the most surprising book, and maybe my favorite discovery of the summer, was Anarchy Evolution. Greg Graffin is the founder of a punk band, Bad Religion, as well as a PhD in zoology who has taught at UCLA and Cornell University. It's an interesting combination, and he has some interesting things to say. I have to admit that I'm not familiar with his music, since I haven't ever been much of a punk fan. But if his music is as interesting as his writing is, I'm going to have to do some exploring, I think.

A couple of the books I read have to do with history and politics in the US. Coming Apart looks at the United States in the 1960s, and the thing that makes it interesting is that it was written shortly after the Sixties ended. I found it fascinating to contrast the writer's outlook on the Sixties with the conventional wisdom about that era today. Also interesting for approximately the same reason is Al Franken's book, which was written after 9/11 but before the end of George W. Bush's first term in office as President of the United States. The first thing that is interesting to me is that he was writing the book from outside the political establishment in Washington, but he is now a US senator from Minnesota. He's part of the system now. Also interesting are his takes on some issues and people in light of the events that have occurred since the book was published. The book is also fun simply because before he was a politician, Franken was a comic, and some of his commentary in the book is very, very funny even as it is relevant to the time it was written.

I don't have that much to say about the fiction I've been reading. Kellerman and his Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis novels are old friends. On the other hand, I've just discovered Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels. I wasn't sure I would like his writing when I started reading The Hard Way, but within just a few pages I was hooked. On the other hand Terminal Freeze, by Lincoln Child (no relation to Lee, as far as I know), was my least favorite of the books I've read in the past month. I'm not saying that it was not a good book, or that it was a bad book. It was a little more predictable than I would have liked. But I finished it, and I'm not accustomed to reading through entire books that don't engage me by, say, page fifty or so.

Danse Macabre was another re-read. This is another book I re-read every few years or so. I think Stephen King is a terrific writer, for all the fact that I don't read all of his fiction and that I think he could do with an assertive editor from time to time (certainly not always, however). I like the way that reading his writing is almost always like sitting and having a conversation, and this comes through most strongly in his non-fiction. This book is a discussion of all things horror in the years 1950 through 1980 (although he takes a few detours further back in the history of the genre). He knows his subject well, and he writes about it a thoroughly engaging way (although he would probably disagree with my use of the word "thoroughly"; he writes in another of his non-fiction books, On Writing, that "ly" words are not the writer's friend). I've learned a lot about writing from reading Danse Macabre, and also from reading On Writing, although I haven't quite absorbed his advice about those "ly" adverbs just yet.

So. As I said, I'm back, and Internet gods willing and the creek don't rise, I'm back on a regular basis. It's been difficult not being able to blog in the past month. So much has been going on in the world. I might still write about some of those going forward; some of those situations are ongoing and even some of those that aren't are probably still worth kicking around a little bit.

It's a mystery to me...

Someday I'm going to figure out why I keep reading Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta mysteries.

I'm not saying that they aren't good books, and I'm not saying that Cornwell isn't a good writer. It's just that there is something...I don't know...unsettling is the best word I can come up with, something unsettling about her books.

I just finished Scarpetta (Berkeley Books, 2008; 579 pages), and once again I'm not sure how I feel about the novel. This is the same place I find myself after reading most of Cornwell's books. On the one hand, I finished reading it, in fact found the last half of the book so compelling that I read until I fell asleep last night and woke up at 6:30 this morning to finish reading it. The first half, on the other hand, took me about a week to get through, partly because I was busy doing other things that needed to be done, but partly because I could only take so much of the book at a time and kept having to put it down.

At least this one wasn't written in the first person, present tense which, as I've said here before, probably in connection with other books by Cornwell (since I can't think, off the top of my head) of another novelist who uses that form), drives me crazy. On the other hand, the vast majority of the nearly 600 pages of the novel take place in just about one 24-hour period. Either that, or the time sense of the book is so off that I wasn't able to tell that more time had gone by.

Having almost the entire action of a novel take place in one day or so isn't a problem in and of itself. In fact, I'd like to try to tell a story that way at some point. It's just that those are a lot of pages to take to describe the action taking place in a single day. To Cornwell's credit, she manages this without unneeded details while she moves the story along at a quicker pace than one would imagine, given the time frame occupied by the story.

My biggest complaint about the book is that I figured out who the bad guy was fairly early in the story. On the other hand, after I was fairly sure who the murderer was, the game became to try to figure out exactly how everything fit together. Cornwell did a pretty good job of concealing that until close to the end of the story. It was an enjoyable read, especially the second half of the book.

Still, as always with Cornwell's books, I was somehow unsettled the whole time I was reading, and I still feel that way a little bit now that I've finished reading the thing. I don't know. Maybe she sets out to do that to the reader. If so, she has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, at least with this reader. I'm not sure why a writer would set out to do that, but I'm sure stranger things have happened.

Despite the unease I felt reading the book, I do recommend it for those of you who like mysteries. Cornwell will probably never be my favorite writer but, despite the experimental feel, stylistically speaking, of some of her work, she is undoubtedly a very good writer.

Reading: A trip back to the Sixties...

I am a child of the Sixties.

I was 3 years old when the Sixties began, and 13 when they ended. I remember a lot of that decade, putting lie to the oft-stated conventional wisdom that "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Of course, while I was alive in the Sixties, I was too young to participate in the excesses of the decade, so it makes sense that I might actually remember more of that time than people who were older and did participate more fully.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, yearning for what seemed to be a simpler time (although the Sixties were not simple at all), but I'm fascinated by that decade. So, when I was at the library the other night and, while browsing the shelves, found What They Didn't Teach You About the 60s (Presidio, 2001; 360 pages), by Mike Wright, I picked it up immediately. I'm also doing some research into the decades following World War II, so I also had research aims in mind. But I mostly picked it up because it just sounded like something I would enjoy reading.

And I did. Now, I have to point out that it is not a perfect book. I found a few really obvious but probably minor errors. For example, Wright says that the actress who first played Catwoman in the 1960s "Batman" television series was Julie Newman, when even a non-fan of the show like me knows that it was Julie Newmar who played the role. This might even have been a simple typographical error; there are several of those in the book. Overall, these errors did not spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Wright covers almost every aspect of US culture in the Sixties, from music and television to politics, the Vietnam War, and the protests of that non-declared (from the US standpoint) war. He also covers the Cold War, the space program, the political assassinations that seemed all too common during the decade, and the Civil Rights movement that continued into the Sixties from its roots in the 1950s.

That's a lot to cover in the course of less than 400 pages, but Wright does a pretty good job of balancing completeness and detail. Having lived through those years, I have to admit that there wasn't really that much that he wrote about that I didn't know about, at least in outline. But I can see how someone who wasn't there might not know a lot about many of the events of the decade. In high school history classes, there is generally some attempt to stay away from controversial issues, and there was much in the Sixties that remains controversial even today. So, unless the student who was in high school in the Eighties and the Nineties and beyond, or even, really, in the Seventies, might not know a lot about the events of the Sixties unless they have deliberately sought out the information. While I wouldn't recommend this as the only book someone might read about the Sixties, I think it's a good starting point for anyone who doesn't know much about that decade and would like to know more.

I already mentioned the main drawback of the book, in the form of some mostly insignificant errors. One of the things I most liked about the book as I was reading is that Wright is very good about providing fairly specific dates when different events happened. Perhaps this is just the researcher in me, but I like to know specifically when things happened, not just the month or the year involved. There is some of that here, but there are also a significant number of specific dates. It makes it even more interesting when you can, as I was able to in a couple of instances while I was reading, to be able to say, yes, I know exactly what I was doing on that day, when this or that event took place. But, as I've noted here before, I have a particular fascination with different events that happened to occur on the same date.

It is going to be interesting as I continue my research and fact check the information here against information from other sources (here's a research hint: always fact check, no matter how authoritative a source seems to be), to see just how accurate Wright's dates are, and how his evaluations of events match up with other writers' perspectives on those events.

Which, I suppose, is just another indication of the extent of my geekiness.

When is a cooking book not a cookbook?

Sometimes, you just pick up a book because it's there, and you aren't sure you're going to like it, and then you end up loving it.

That's what happened to me with Julie Powell's Julie & Julia (Little, Brown and Company, 2005; 359 pages in mass market paperback). I was at the library one day and couldn't find anything I wanted to read. Nothing. My last stop was at the "free" paperbacks rack, where they put the donated paperbacks that aren't even really part of the library's collection. You don't check them out; you just take them home and then bring them back whenever you've finished reading, or you bring back another in its place.

Well, I'd seen the film version of the book, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, and liked it all right. So, I figured I'd give the book a try.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the book or the movie, this is the (mostly?) true story of Julie Powell, a secretary for a government agency in the wake of 9/11, not really loving her job and looking for something fulfilling to do. So, she decides to cook her way through volume one of Julia Child's' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". That's something over 500 recipes, some of them very intricate and involved, in a year. Not only did she decide to do this, she decided to blog about it.
The blog eventually brought her a bit of national media attention, as well as a book contract to write Julie & Julia.

I was leery of the book at first. I'm not much of a cook, but more the heat and assemble type. I'm getting better. In fact, after I finish writing this post, I'm going to put on some potatoes and eggs to boil for potato salad. It's a simple potato salad, but it's good. Just the potatoes and eggs, plus salt and pepper, mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, and a little water. Oh, and some wedged black olives if there are any in the cabinet. It's the potato salad my grandma taught me to make when I was very young. Every once in awhile I get a craving for it.

Oops. Sorry for the tangent. The book...I was afraid that there was going to be too much cooking detail that I wouldn't understand. Well, there's cooking detail there, but not too much, and I actually understood most of it. But there is also Julie's life for that year, and the life of her husband and her friends. And there's the blog, which kind of became a character all its own, in a good way.

What the book isn't, is just like the movie. There is much more Julia Child in the movie than there is in the book. There are vignettes between most of the chapters from Julia's life and the life of her husband, Paul, taken from his letters, but they are brief. I would have liked there to be a little more Julia in the book, because the parts about Julia's life in the movie were what I liked most about it.

On the other hand, we learn a lot more about Julie in the book than in the movie. As it turns out, I like Julie much more in the book than I did in the movie. She's plain-spoken and opinionated, and when she screwed up the cooking, she lets you know. She's profane at times - and writes about how some of the readers of her blog were uncomfortable about her use, especially, of the word "fuck". But that's Julie, and it wouldn't be the same book if she reined herself in.

I suspect that Republicans, or at least those without a sense of humor, might not like the fact that Julie isn't enamoured much with the Republican Party, and is plain about that fact in the book. This comes out mostly in her writing about her job, which was for an agency dominated by Republicans during a Republican administration. But, again, that's Julie, and the book wouldn't be the same if the reader didn't get to know that part of her.

This is a good book. If you like cooking, and if you like good writing, you should probably read it. If you don't like cooking, read it anyway. It might make you want to try to do some more cooking. That's the effect it had on me. When I was finished reading, my first instinct was to go grab a cookbook, any cookbook, and see what I might make.

In which I visit the library...

Now that I'm feeling better...and it's about time; colds are not supposed to last this long...I figured this would be a good day to refresh and recharge. So, I headed to the library.

Ordinarily, a trip to the library can fix just about anything. An hour or two browsing the shelves or reading magazines always makes me feel better.

Not today; I couldn't find anything I wanted to read.

Well, not completely. I came home with two books that look like they're going to be interesting. One is How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to be Forever, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. As near as I can tell, this one is about reverse-engineering dinosaurs from chickens. It purports to be non-fiction, and Horner is an internationally recognized expert on dinosuars. He also was scientific advisor on the three Jurassic Park films. I can't help thinking that perhaps that job didn't teach Horner that bringing the dinosaurs back might not be such a good idea. Still, it promises to be an interesting read.

The other book I checked out was Thieves of Baghdad, by Matthew Bogdanos, with William Patrick, about the effort to recover ancient artifacts stolen from the Iraq Museum during the fall of Baghdad. I've heard a bit about this effort, and I'm interested to read more about it.

So, two books that promise to be good reads. However, it took me an hour and going through fifteen or twenty possibilities to find those two.

Maybe it was my mood. Maybe it was because there were so many people in the library while I was there. Maybe I should have gone to a larger branch that has more of a selection. Maybe I'm just too damn picky.

Whatever it was, it's a good thing I found the two books, at least. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and I can't think of many things I'd rather do on a cold, rainy day than curl up in bed and read a good book.

So, what are you reading right now? And, what is your favorite reading on a rainy day?

First book of the year...

I've got a confession to make: I grew up watching talk shows on television, and I love them.

Not, I hasten to add, the crap that passes for talk shows today. I'm talking about the shows that were on in the 1960s and 1970s, where people actually talked about things, and told stories, and didn't necessarily show up only to plug their latest project or to see which celebrity could be the most outrageous. My favorites were always Merv Griffin and Dick Cavett, who would often get a guest on and just let them talk.

So, when I was in the library the other day and saw Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (Times Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2010; 279 pages), by Dick Cavett, on the shelf, I had to check it out and read it.

Cavett has had talk shows on a variety of networks and in a variety of formats through the years, but I mostly watched his show when it was first on, on ABC late at night, from 1968 through 1974. I had one summer, especially, when I was about thirteen years old, when I had horrible insomnia (there was a reason for it, which is another post for another day), where I slept maybe one night per week. Cavett's show got me through that sleepless summer. He had all the best guests, including many figures from the rock world as well as literary guests who wouldn't have turned up on any of the other shows. If I had to be awake, watching these interviews was a great way to pass the time.

Talk Show is comprised of a series of columns written for The New York Times online between 2007 and 2010. Some of the columns recall Cavett's talk shows and the guests he hosted, while others are personal recollections from his childhood or exercises in political or social commentary. A few are disappointing - the man has an aversion to fat people that he isn't shy about expressing - but most are fascinating. I was disappointed that he didn't write more about hosting people like Janis Joplin and John Lennon. On the other hand, he writes at length about interviewing Richard Burton (you can see those shows on YouTube, if you're interested, and some of Cavett's interviews with others), about the show in which writers Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer appeared to nearly come to blows.



The audience at the time, of course, loved it. Cavett's interviews were sometimes not for the faint of heart, at a time when political correctness had not yet been invented.

Surprisingly, perhaps, some of the most moving columns revolved around when Cavett met John Wayne during the time when Wayne was already sick with the cancer that killed him. At the time, Wayne was making his final film, The Shootist, and Cavett recalls being on the set during filming of the famous scene where a doctor, played by James Stewart, tells Wayne's character, who was also dying of cancer, exactly what he could expect the rest of his life to be like. It was no secret that Wayne was sick, and according to Cavett's description, some of those watching the filming had difficulty holding it together during the filming of the scene, including, I suspect, Cavett, although he doesn't say so.

I really liked this book. I must have; I was awake until three this morning finishing it. Maybe you have to have been there, in the sense of having seen Cavett's interviews at the time they were first broadcast, to find his recollections interesting. I'm not silly enough to think that someone who was born in the 1990s is going to be fascinated by Cavett's apparent delight at having been at least a casual member of Richard Nixon's enemies list in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The thing is, Cavett is at least as good a storyteller as some of the guests on his shows, some of whom were consummate storytellers. That alone makes Talk Show worth reading.

I started with a confession, and I'll end with another. It has taken me an unconscionably lengthy period to write today's post. I got distracted by You Tube clips of Cavett's old shows and spent quite a bit of time watching them rather than writing. If you're interested, I'd recommend going over to YouTube and finding some of these clips and full shows. You might be surprised, especially if you weren't around in the sixties and seventies, at what a real talk show could be.

What I read this year...

I read some books in 2012.

Not as many as I had planned to, but more than I read in 2011 (2 more, actually). I passed the 10,000 page threshold, which was my page goal for the year. I read both fiction and non-fiction, which is always my hope and my goal. Despite the fact that I ended up reading a few stinkers, I also found some really good books during the year.

To protect the guilty, and because good and bad is, to an extent a subjective judgement regarding fiction, I won't belabor the subject of which novels I read and did not like. Well, with one exception.

In May, I pickied up a book at the library called Natural Selection. It had an interesting premise: the evolution of a new species that leaves the sea, adapts to life on land, and then wreaks havoc. However, Dave Freedman, who wrote the novel, clearly has no real grasp on how evolution works, does not seem to be able to write a sympathetic character to save his life, and completely contradicts something he wrote earlier in the novel near the end in a way that destroys any credibility as a storyteller he had built in the earlier telling of the story. Not that he had built up much credibility at all.

Maybe I should be easier on Freedman. As I recall, it was his first novel. But Natural Selection was just such a bad book that I can't manage to work up much sympathy for him. Somehow, he managed to keep me turning the pages, but looking back I can't imagine how, except that I had a perverse curiosity to see if it could get any worse. And it did. I remember finishing the book and wondering how he managed to sell it to a publisher.

On the non-fiction side, I have to say that the least satisfying book I read this year was Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate, which I read in April. I've read a lot of books about Charles Manson, the cult he built up, and the horrible things they did. This book was by far the least helpful in understanding that whole situation. I think part of the trouble was that it was co-written by Sharon Tate's niece and a family friend based on writings left behind by one of Sharon's late sisters. As a picture of a family that disintegrated in the wake of the murder of a member of the family it probably has some merit, but the problem is that the family seems never to have found any peace and just passes down its desire for revenge to each succeeding generation. I can see how that could happen in such a situtation, especially when the crime that took their loved one's life attracted so much media attention, but the book really provides no insight. It left me feeling like I hadn't learned anything, but instead just made me feel like I had peeked in on family dynamics that would have been better left private.

On the other hand, I also read my favorite non-fiction in April. That was Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox. Life is an amazing book. I won't go on about it here, except to say that if you have any interest at all in music, in The Rolling Stones, in the culture of the sixties and beyond...read this book. Even if you don't have any interest in any of those things, read the book anyway.

While you're at it, read Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German. I'm not really sure how two books about The Stones turned out to be some of my favorite reading all year. I've never really been that big a Stones fan. But both of these books are really good.

I read a lot of good fiction this year, but by far my favorites are two books in a series that combines fantasy, historical fiction, and a genre I don't read very much, romance. Those are A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night, both by Deborah Harkness. I picked up the first volume while browsing the shelves at my local library. It sounded interesting...at least, the vampires didn't sparkle...and so I checked it out and read it. I might not have done if I had realized that it was the first volume in the series and that the second volume hadn't even been published yet, especially when I finished it desperate to know what happened next. Fortunately, publication of the second volume was just a few months away. In that book, the action moves from Oxford in the present day to London during the reign of Elizabeth I. Like I said, it's a fantasy. Now I'm just waiting for the third volume to be published.

Well, if I reviewed everything on the list, this post would be way too long, so I'm just going to leave my full reading list for the year here with you. Each book is marked either F (fiction) or NF (non-fiction), and the ones I liked the best or felt were of special worth are marked with a double asterisk. Please note, though, that, especially with the fiction, these evaluations are very subjective and based on a lot of criteria, so your mileage may vary. For example, I liked Barbara Hambly's Ishmael very, very much. However, it is a genre novel based on two very old television series, Star Trek and Here Come The Brides, that I was a fan of when I was very young. A lot of the reason I liked the book was because Hambly managed to take two series that were very, very different and capture the spirit of both of them with an accuracy that I would not have believed possible. She also created a story that would have fit into an episode of either series. So, while it is a well-written book, I loved it for very personal reasons that you might not share.

January
**(1) Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969, by William J. Mann (422 pages) NF
(2) Gun Games, by Faye Kellerman (375 pages) F
(3) Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell (498 pages) F
(4) Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (309 pages) NF
February
(5) Hotel Translyvania, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (252 pages) F
**(6) Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly (255 pages) F
March
(7) Hangman, by Faye Kellerman (422 pages) F
(8) Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello (675 pages) F
(9) Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman (338 pages) F
April
**(10) A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness (579 pages) F
(11) Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate (381 pages)
**(12) Role Models, by John Waters (304 pages) NF
**(13) Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (564 pages) NF
May
(14) Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman (414 pages) F
(15) Dead Time, by Stephen White (400 pages) F
(16) Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins (377 pages) F
June
**(17) The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns, by Catherine Whitney (250 pages) NF
(18) The Blackbird Papers, by Ian Smith (326 pages) F
(19) Virgin, by F. Paul Wilson (309 pages) F
July
(20) The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, by DC Pierson (226 pages) F
**(21) Corn Flakes With John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock’N’Roll Life, by Robert Hilburn (280 pages) NF
September
**(22) Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harkness (584 pages) F
(23) World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction, 3d edition, by Brian M. Fagan (299 pages) NF
**(24) How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge (210 pages) NF
(25) Summer of the Dragon, by Elizabeth Peters (277 pages) F
(26) LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour, by Stephen Davis (217 pages) NF
October
(27) Bones Are Forever, by Kathy Reichs (288 pages) F
(28) A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (307 pages) F
**(29) Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German (354 pages) NF
(30) The Bone Bed, by Patricial Cornwell (463 pages) F
November
**(31) The Prism and the Rainbow: A Christian Explains Why Evolution Is Not a Threat, by Joel W. Martin (170 pages) NF
December
(32) The Overlook, by Michael Connelly (262 pages) F
**(33) Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross (401 pages) NF

Cumulative page total: 11,788 pages.

Book review: "The Overlook", by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is a good writer. No, make that a great writer. I haven't found a book of his yet that doesn't keep me turning the pages, often late into the night.

The Overlook (Vision, 2008; 262 pages) is not an exception. This is true even though I've read it before, although not in exactly this version. Written originally as a serial for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, I read it first in its reworked hardcover version. The version I read this time has an extra chapter added to the end of the book. This extra chapter, a sort of epilogue, was originally written as an "extra" for Connelly's mailing list, but was included in the paperback edition of the novel.

In The Overlook, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is called out in the middle of one night to the scene of a murder at an overlook along Mulholland Drive. Very quickly, the murder starts looking like part of a plot by terrorists to gain access to some radioactive material; the victim was a physicist who transported such material to hospitals for use in treatments for cancer patients. Because of the suspicions of terrorist involvement in the crime, it isn't long before the LAPD's Office of Homeland Security and the FBI both become involved in the case. Both try to freeze Bosch and his partner out of the investigation.

It isn't long, however, until Bosch begins to suspect that there is something very wrong with how the case is being viewed. What follows is an exercise in showing that even law enforcement, on all levels, sometimes sees what it wants to see, or what it thinks it could be to its advantage to see, rather than what is really there. I won't reveal any more of the plot, except to say that there are twists in the plot that you might not see coming.

An interesting part of the novel's construction, or at least it is interesting to me, is that the whole story takes place within a span of approximately twelve hours. I've read novels of the same length that take place over months or years. What Connelly does so well here is to manage the detail in which the story is told so that it doesn't become boring or repetitive.

As a writer, I'm interested in the ways in which writers choose to tell their stories and in studying what works for them and what doesn't work. This novel works very well, combining suspense, action, and what I took to be social and political comment (which might be just me; I don't know what Connelly had in mind when he was writing the story) in a way that is never dull.

The Overlook is a quick read. That suited me very well, as I've been engaged in some pretty heavy reading recently, as research for some writing I'm doing (some of which could conceivably appear here sooner rather than later), and reading this was a refreshing change from all of that. It was nice to sit down and be able to finish the book in a couple of days even though those days have been busier than usual.

Now that I think about it, reading The Overlook has put me in the mood to go back and read (or re-read) all of Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, in order. That might be a good project for next year's reading.

In which I gripe about writing styles...

As a writer myself, there are just some things about other writers' styles that bug the crap out of me (that's a technical term, by the way). One of those things is when an entire novel is written in the first person, present tense. It just irritates me. I don't write in that style, and I don't really want to read it.

I bring this up because I recently finished reading The Bone Bed (2012, Putnam; 463 pages), Patricia Cornwell's latest Kay Scarpetta novel, which is written in that style. It is a tribute to Cornwell's ability to tell a story that I stuck with the book to the end. I really wanted to know whodunit, and so I hung in there and finished. It was a good book. I have some quibbles with it, but they are insignificant beside the huge problem I have with the first person, present tense in fiction.

Actually, I should say "in novels", because I've read a few short stories over the years that are written in that style, and they don't bother me nearly as much. Not sure why.

I have finally figured out why it does bother me so much in novels, after thinking about it quite a lot. It's just awkward to read. It is also awkward to write. I've tried, and it just doesn't work for me. There are too many problems to deal with in keeping the story always in the present.

Also, there is the fact that it imitates the real world a little too closely for my taste. Really. We live our lives in the present tense. When I'm reading a novel, part of my reason for doing that, always, is to escape the real world and go live in some other world for awhile. And, in truth, even if a novel purports to take place in the everyday world, it really is creating an alternative universe. That universe might be almost exactly like the one we live in, but it isn't.

An example: I read a piece somewhere the other day...I can't remember if it was a comment on a forum, a blog post, or an article of some kind...that was complaining about the new television series "Elementary", which modernizes Sherlock Holmes and plops him down in modern-day New York City. Good show. I had reservations about it going in, but I like it a lot. The complaint of the writer in question was that no one in the series ever wonders why this modern-day consulting detective has the same name as the consulting detective in the novels and short stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They figured that someone, at some point, would think this was strange and comment on it.

What the writer did not account for is that in the universe of the television series, those books were never written. In the series, Sherlock Holmes lives in the 21st century and is a real consulting detective; he is not a character that Doyle made up over a century ago.

So...when I read a novel, I want to feel like I've gone somewhere else, am looking in on a world, a universe, that might be very much like the one I live in (or not very much at all like the one I live in). By writing in the past tense, the author gives me a clue that this is the case. It comforts me to have that clue, and it disturbs me to a greater or lesser degree when I don't have it.

Ah, well. It's probably just me. Maybe because I do write, this sort of thing has the capacity to bother me more than it bothers someone who doesn't write.

This brings up a question, however: As a reader, and as a writer if you are one, what bothers you when writers do it in a piece of writing?

Three books in four days...

I haven't done that in awhile. Finish reading three books in four days, that is. You know, ignoring things that need to get done and staying up much later than I should considering the time in the morning the alarm is set to go off, all because the book I'm reading is just too good - or at least too involving - to put down.

Well, that was the case for two out of the three books I finished reading between Saturday and Tuesday just past. The other one got read just because it wasn't that long, was pretty easy reading, and I wanted to get through it to know if I could use some of the information from it to help construct next Sunday's Music Sunday post.

The first book I finished, on Saturday, was Summer of the Dragon (1979, Tor Books; 277 pages), by Elizabeth Peters. It's a romantic mystery from the same writer who has given us the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and while it is slight in many ways, it was a fun read. The story concerns D. J. Abbot, an anthropology student who secures a summer job working for eccentric billionaire Hank Hunnicutt. The main attraction of the job is the fact that Hunnicutt lives in northern Arizona, 600 miles away from her family. It isn't that D. J. doesn't love her family; she does. But they are, well, a bit eccentric themselves, and she would rather not spend the entire summer with them.

Hunnicutt is looking for a summer intern because he has found something in the desert. Although D. J. and her advisor at school suspect that this something probably isn't really anything, since Hunnicutt has a reputation for interests that are not entirely scientific and is known to surround himself with mediums, UFO enthusiasts, treasure hunters, and other fringe types. However, the pay is good and the scenery will be different, so D. J. takes the job. But, when she arrives in Arizona, D. J. finds more than she bargained for. Hunnicutt is being very mysterious about what he has found, most of the hangers-on at Hunnicutt's ranch are positively hostile toward D. J., and mysterious things are happening. But D. J. likes Hunnicutt from the beginning, and finds his right-hand man quite attractive despite his abrasive personality.

Developments move quickly, and soon D. J. is in over her head. It's a fun story. I won't claim that some of the characters are not rather flat and stereotypical, but that didn't hurt my enjoyment of the story overall. As a bonusm the archaeology is accurate; after all the author is an Egyptologist with a doctorate from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Summer of the Dragon, in short, isn't great literature, but it's a quick, fun read. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes a good story trumps great literature.

I'll only mention the book I finished - in fact, read in it's entirety - on Sunday briefly, because it is going to be part of Sunday's music blog post. I'll just say here that it was LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour (2010, Gotham Books; 217 pages), by Stephen Davis. It was another quick read, but not my favorite book about the music industry, a genre that I enjoy a lot. It isn't a bad book, but it seemed to me it was more about the author's experience on tour with Zeppelin rather than really being about the band or the tour itself. But...more about that in a couple of days.

The third book, which I finished reading on Tuesday, was Bones Are Forever (2012, Scribner; 288 pages), by Kathy Reichs. This book tells another story in the further adventures of Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist, upon which the television series Bones is based. There are no similarities between the character in the books and on the TV series other than her name and her occupation, but that's okay. The books are very good, and I enjoy the TV series immensely. I just accept that they are two very different things.

In this, the fifteenth book in the series, Temperance finds herself investigating the deaths of four newborn infants over several years, all apparently born of the same woman. The mother has disappeared, and Brennan and detective Andrew Ryan, with whom Brennan has a past, find themselves searching all over Canada to find her. Starting in Montreal, they follow her trail to Edmonton and then to the far north, to Yellowknife, where, they find, things are not entirely what they seemed when their investigation began.

I hesitate to say any more about the story, for fear of giving away too many spoilers. I will say that Bones are Forever is a good book, well worth the time spent in the reading. Reichs has once again constructed an exciting, engrossing mystery, something she is very good at. The characters are well-drawn. The plot is just convoluted enough to hold the reader's interest without going overboard with twists. For someone like me who has read most if not all of the books in the series, the main characters continue to grow and remain interesting, an unusual and not inconsiderable attraction in series mysteries.

I finally finished reading a book...

I finally finished reading a book.

This was a big problem, apparently, in August. Didn't finish reading one book all month. Started a few. Rejected a few. A couple had to go back to the library, even though I wanted to finish them. I had other things to do. It was kind of a weird month.

But...then came Shadow of Night (2012, Viking; 584 pages), by Deborah Harkness.

I'd been waiting for this book to come out for awhile...ever since I read the first book in the trilogy, A Discovery of Witches. It was one of those books that I powered through because it was so good. Then, I got to the end and...cliffhanger. It didn't take me very long to find out when the sequel was scheduled to be published. Fortunately, it was only a few months. Because, you know, I wanted to know what happened next to Diana and Matthew. When we left them at the end of the first book, they had just dropped from the present day into Elizabethan London.

Shadow of Night picks up right where A Discovery of Witches leaves off, and follows Diana, a reluctant witch, and Matthew, a vampire, who have fallen in love and married, as they return to his ancestral home in France, go back to England, visit Prague and the lecherous Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who wants to possess Diana, and then back to London, all in search of the alchemical text that Diana discovered in the Bodleian Library at Oxford before it disappeared back into the stacks, and which it seems the whole world of creatures - witches, vampires, and daemons - want to get their hands on. Danger and intrigue seem to follow the couple wherever they go.

I really don't want to say any more about what happens as the plot unfolds; suffice it to say that a lot happens, and if you read it you will laugh, you will cry, and you will not want the story to end. Or, anyway, those were my reactions as I read. And I will warn you - there is no word yet on when the third book in the trilogy will be forthcoming. But if you are a fan of historical fiction, or of historical romance, don't put off reading the first two books in the trilogy. They really are a treat, romance for those who don't usually read romance novels (that would be me), with history that has been researched by an expert - Ms. Harkness is a professor of history at the University of Southern California.

Really. Go read Shadow of Night and, if you haven't already, A Discovery of Witches. The writing is wonderful, the story involving, and the cast of characters - a few of which you will recognize from history - fascinating.

Sweet frustrations...

As a compulsive and voracious reader, I get frustrated when I can’t find something to read.

You would probably laugh at that statement if you could see where I’m living. Between my roommate and myself, there must be at least a couple of thousand books in the apartment. I have not come close to reading all of them.

Still, sometimes I find myself wandering from bookshelf to bookshelf, repeating the lament, “But I can’t find anything to read.”

I know. Cue the violins and the weeping.

It sounds stupid, but it is a real problem. While I love to read, there are books – there are whole genres, really – that I’m not that keen to read. And even within the genres of fiction and topics in non-fiction that I do enjoy reading, I’m not in the mood to read all the books all the time. If I’ve read three mysteries in a row, for example, I’d probably want to read something else before I read another mystery.

I’ve had this problem a lot lately, and I go through periods like this from time to time. It gets so that I just can’t find anything I want to read. I suspect that the current troubles are at least partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing a lot, and I don’t want what I’m reading to bleed through into what I’m writing.

I’m not really worried about ideas creeping from my reading into my writing, but more about tone and voice. One time, last year, I was working on something that I was writing in third-person omniscient. Then I started reading a book that was written in the first person. Imagine my surprise (and dismay), when I realized that I’d written the last several thousand words in first-person rather than third.

Sigh. I haven’t gone back to that project yet.

However, I’m not here to complain, but to say that I’ve managed to find myself an embarrassment of riches. I’ve got two books, both out of the library, that are, at least so far, fantastic. They’re both so good that I wish I could read both at the same time. When I sit down to read, it is difficult for me to decide which one I want to spend time with.

(Actually, the main reason I’m writing this rather than reading right now is that, when I sat down intending to read for a while before starting dinner, I couldn't decide which one I wanted to pick up.)

One is fiction, 11/22/63 (Scribner, 2011; 849 pages), by Stephen King. I found this one at the library on Monday, sat down and started reading just to see if I was going to like it – it has gotten good reviews, but I haven’t felt moved to pick up any of King’s work in several years – and found it mesmerizing from the first pages. The other is Corn Flakes with John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock’n’Roll Life (Rodale, 2009; 280 pages), by rock critic Robert Hilburn, who wrote for the Los Angeles Times for many years. I read Hilburn’s work in the Times for years and I love books on rock music, so when I found it today I could resist picking it up when I went to take some other books (books that looked good, but which ended up not catching my interest when I started to read them) back to the library.

I used to have this problem, having two (or more) good books to read at the same time, a lot. I don’t know if it is because I’ve read many more books by now, or if there just aren’t as many good books coming out now, or that I’m just getting picky in my old age. Whatever the case, I rarely have two good reads in hand at the same time now.

I plan to enjoy this sweet frustration, and hope that this is a sign that it will happen more often.

Because, man, I really do get cranky when I can’t find anything good to read.

Half-year reading review...

It's time to do my half-year reading summary, since midnight tonight marks the halfway point in the year. I'm not sure where the time has gone, but I've apparently spent at least some of it reading.

This list comes from the Reading Challenge thread over at Ravelry (if you don't know what Ravelry is, Google it), where some of us set a goal for reading for the year and then keep track of what we've read while trying to reach that goal.

I'm not doing too badly so far this year. My goal is to read 40 books this year, and as of a couple of days ago, I've finished 19 books, which is just one below a pace to meet my goal for the year. That's much better than I did last year.

I've posted reviews of many of these books either here or over at my reading and literature blog. That blog decided to go all wonky a few weeks ago, so I won't link to that, although I might try to salvage a few of the reviews later on to post over here.

Looking back over the list, I can only find one that I probably wouldn't recommend - Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman. I'm not sure why I even finished reading it. I'm not shy about giving up on books that I don't like. Still, for some reason I kept reading. When I reached the end of the novel, however, and discovered the cheat Freedman had pulled, I was sorry I had given so much time to it.

I think my favorites from the list are Life, By Keith Richards, with James Fox, on the non-fiction side, while my favorite novel on the list is A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness. I'm looking forward to the sequel, which comes out in a couple of weeks. I also really liked Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins, which I was lucky enough to read before it was published as one of Ms. Collins' beta readers. It's available now as an e-book, and I'd recommend you look for it, especially if you like romance-spiced contemporary mysteries with an historic hook.

Aside from the one book I mentioned earlier, I liked all of the books I've read so far this year, although I did have quibbles with one or two, including Restless Souls, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate. The review is here somewhere, if you'd like to find out exactly what those quibbles were.

Anyway, here is the list. Maybe you can find something here that you haven't read and might like to spend some time with. For myself, I just hope I can find as many books I will enjoy as much as the books I read in the first half of the year.

January
(1) Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969, by William J. Mann (422 pages)
(2) Gun Games, by Faye Kellerman (375 pages)
(3) Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell (498 pages)
(4) Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (309 pages)

February
(5) Hotel Transylvania, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (252 pages)
(6) Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly (255 pages)

March
(7) Hangman, by Faye Kellerman (422 pages)
(8) Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello (675 pages)
(9) Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman (338 pages)

April
(10) A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness (579 pages)
(11) Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate (381 pages)
(12) Role Models, by John Waters (304 pages)
(13) Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (564 pages)

May
(14) Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman (414 pages)
(15) Dead Time, by Stephen White (400 pages)
(16) Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins (377 pages)

June
(17) The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns, by Catherine Whitney (250 pages)
(18) The Blackbird Papers, by Ian Smith (326 pages)
(19) Virgin, by F. Paul Wilson (309 pages)

My next task is to find something good to read. I've started a couple of novels since I finished reading Virgin, and I've put both of them down in disappointment. I might revisit one of them, to give it a few more pages, but I doubt I'll like it any more than what I've already read.