The Ocean at The End of the Lane

Dec24 by Anna

By Neil Gaiman

I have a bit of a love–hate relationship with Neil Gaiman. I loved the Sandman series, of course, and American Gods, and I hated his short story collection Smoke and Mirrors. All of his other stuff sort of falls between those two extremes, and The Ocean at The End of the Lane is pretty smack dab in the middle.

It is quite short, less than 200 pages; really more of a novella, despite “A Novel” being printed on the cover right under the title. And to go off on a side rant: I hate novellas! Somehow they are always both too long and too short. Like, authors write short stories to be compact and novels to be all-encompassing, but novellas pretty much always fail at both, and seem like initial outlines for a full novel. I almost always end up feeling like I’m reading an incomplete work and it has been a waste of my time. I then get sulky about the author being lazy, and bitter about the state of publishing, and it all cycles down from there, so novellas are not my thing.

So, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about this one, but I follow Neil Gaiman on twitter, and lots of people were raving about it. When I ran across it in the library, I figured I’d give it a shot, since I really did like American Gods and this seemed all fantastical, too.

It was okay. It starts off pretty slow, with the narrator reflecting back on the summer when he was seven, when a boarder in his house dies, kicking off a string of supernatural events. He meets his mysterious neighbors, a family of three-generational women including a girl just a few years older than him, and helps them try to contain the odd happenings. It all takes some time to get rolling, but by the middle, the story is quite engaging, though at times I felt it followed a very standard “yellow brick road” narrating style, as the two children walk a path into another reality, and must deal with one strange thing after another.

Gaiman does introduce some quite intriguing characters and imagery that simply don’t have the space to really grow to their full potential in such a short book. It ends up feeling a bit like Chis Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, in which the readers must flesh out the story on their own, and it makes me bitter, having to put all this unexpected work into a story. I just told Tom that this review was circling the drain, and he commented that while I often talk about how much I like Gaiman, I don’t really like the majority of his work, so I guess maybe I’m not really a fan at all. Oh, well.

—Anna

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Dec12 by Kinsey

About this time last year, Anna reviewed a series of YA fantasy books by Holly Black that started out with White Cat. We both finished that trilogy this year, and really enjoyed them. So imagine how happy I was to see that Black released a new book this fall! It’s a YA book about a teenage girl who gets swept up into a whole adventure with vampires. Yes, another one of those. But this one is awesome, and rather than try to explain why by describing the plot, I’m going to list just a few of the ways this book is better than Twilight:

1) First and foremost, the main character, Tana, is the totally kickass opposite of Bella Swan. She takes care of herself and others and doesn’t particularly need saving. And it’s not that she’s a superhero–she’s terrified most of the time–but she sees things that need doing, so she just does them.

2) There is a bit of romance, which I like in my books, but it not the main point of the story. Also, it isn’t a love triangle. Why do books and movies so often involve love triangles, when my experience is that they are just not that common in real life?3) In this book, the public is aware of vampires, because although the old vampires had managed to keep themselves secret for years, they eventually lost control and it all came out and vampires ended up being celebrities. You know that if vampires were real they would be all over YouTube and People.

4) Being a vampire isn’t particularly romanticized here. There are characters that do glamorize it, but it’s actually presented a lot like fame: it might seem exciting, but the reality is not that much fun. The main character spends most of her time trying very hard to not become a vampire, which I found refreshing.

So, overall, a little gory, but very entertaining and way way way better than a lot of vampire stuff out there.

Kinsey’s (Approximately) Three Word Review: A fun, dark ride.

You might also like: Sunshine by Robin McKinley, which Anna already told you to read.

Wheel of the Infinite

Dec1 by Rebecca

Wheel of the Infinite
by Martha Wells
2000

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells, and going through a bit of withdrawal from reaching the end of the series, I checked out an older book of hers and am extremely glad I did so.

I love stories that involve gods and godlike powers and the difficulties faced by both the people who struggle against those powers with just human strength and the gods who struggle to avoid unintended consequences. (Some of my all-time favorite books deal with these issues: Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny, Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, Nameless Magery by Delia Marshall Turner.)

The world-building here is amazing particularly as it comes to the rules of magic and religion, and we get it from two perspectives:

Maskelle is The Voice of the Adversary, a highly ranked priestess, but she was exiled (rightly so) for murder and treason some years back. She has been summoned back to the Imperial and religious center of the land by the request of the Celestial One to help regarding a problem with the Hundred Year Rite, in which the Wheel of the Infinite recreates the world. (A problem with the re-creation of the world is, rather obviously, quite a problem.) But she approaches the people and the magic with deep familiarity and deep discomfort given her past.

Rian is a bodyguard from a far distant land who ran away from an unpleasant situation, and manages to fall in with Maskelle on her return trip, and sees the political and religious situation with fresh eyes.

And that is the premise. From there, stuff happens: after all, there’s a problem with the ritual that recreates the world. Stuff. Happens. I love the exploration of the world that is inherent in our main characters’ investigation of what has happened.

In addition to the amazing world-building, I also just love the characters. Rian’s culture shock is somewhat hilarious (especially as it mirrors the reader’s own shock at this culture). And Maskelle’s deadpan practicality, even as she struggles with her own issues, is a delight.

Another thing I appreciated about this book was that Maskelle was middle-aged and black. The book is high fantasy, in an entirely different world, so clearly she’s not African or African-American, but she and her whole culture are dark-skinned and her hair is in braids. Scifi and fantasy, for all their alien species, tends toward the homogenous white humans, in both writers and characters. (The one exception to this that I can think of off hand is Octavia Butler, but her books tend to be both excellent and extremely hard hitting. Wheel of the Infinite is readable purely for fun.)

The first chapter of Wheel of the Infinite is available online, so you can get a taste. I highly recommend this book.

The Girl You Left Behind

Nov26 by Kinsey

Back in the summer I raved about Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, and I have apparently become one of her groupies: she is delightful on Twitter and I’m here now to tell you to go read her new book. Like Me Before You, this latest one would be an excellent airplane book, and would be a great distraction for those of you about to embark on holiday travel.

The Girl You Left Behind is a little more intricate than Me Before You, with a narrative alternating between two story lines. The first story involves Sophie, a French woman in a small town occupied by the Germans during World War I. Her husband, a painter, has been sent to the front and all she has to remember him is a portrait he painted of her. But the portrait catches the eye of a German officer, and no good can possibly come of being too involved with the occupying soldiers. The second story line follows the painting to the current day, where it’s owned by Liv, a London woman with problems of her own. Her troubles get worse when the mystery of how the painting got from small-town 1917 France to modern-day London blows up in a very public way.

I have heard some critics of Me Before You say that is was predictable, and at times a little far-fetched. I think both those things are true and they’re true of this book, as well. I never know where any story is going, and I guessed pretty early into The Girl You Left Behind how the issue with the portrait would be resolved. But that doesn’t really matter in either book. The characters are so nicely drawn–complex and flawed, but sympathetic–and the stories move along at such a clip that both of these books are just very readable. And I mean that as a high compliment. I finished The Interestings by Meg Woltizer not long ago and while I was reading it I enjoyed it a lot and thought it was very well done. But the instant I closed the book each night I forgot all about it and lost all interest in picking it up again. I didn’t think about it when I wasn’t reading it, I didn’t long to get back to it, or feel the need to read “just one more chapter.” With The Girl You Left Behind, I stayed up until 1:00 in the morning on a Tuesday, desperate to find out what happened.

Also, both of Moyes’s books seem absolutely made to be turned into movies. I’m not sure what it is about them that make me think that–I’d be interested in hearing what other folks think makes a book seem ready for adaptation to the screen. But I think both of these stories would movies as compelling as the books are.

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: A sad, suspenseful page-turner.

You might also like: The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, which also deals with a painting of mysterious provenance, or any of Tracy Chevalier’s novels about historical figures, including The Girl With the Pearl Earring.

Julian Kestrel Mystery Series

Nov24 by Anna

By Kate Ross

So, I’ve been having a bit of a rough time over the last couple of weeks with some family medical issues, and as usual, I’ve turned to my main comfort, rereading old favorites. There is nothing quite so comforting as reading a book where you already know everything that happens, so you can give it as much or as little attention as you have to spare at any given time (highly recommended for waiting room waits). You already know the outcome, so there is no anxiety (you probably have enough of that in your actual life already).

All of this to say that I’ve just reread Cut to the Quick and A Broken Vessel, the first two in Kate Ross’ Julian Kestrel mystery series, and they were exactly right for my current mood. The protagonist, Julian Kestrel, is the epitome of a dandy in Regency-era London, focused entirely on his appearance and amusements until he is framed for the murder of a strange woman who appears at the country house in which he is attending the engagement party of a slight acquaintance. In order to clear himself and his valet, an extremely endearing former pickpocket named Dipper, he must uncover the true murderer among his host’s upper-crust family. The plot and characters of Cut to the Quick aren’t anything new in the extremely well-covered genre of Regency-era mysteries, but they are all just so well written that the book and the series really stands out.

Now, A Broken Vessel is another matter entirely, introducing Dipper’s sister Sally, who shares narration of the book with Julian. Sally is clever, courageous, and a completely unrepentant prostitute, who has stolen a letter pleading for help from one of three men. Sally is wonderful, the mystery is even more intriguing than in Cut to the Quick, but the most interesting thing for me in A Broken Vessel is how it describes the various levels of society in Regency London, with the aristocracy at top, to their servants, to the shop and pub keepers, and finally to the dregs of the crime world, and how people either fall down those layers or claw their way up.

The series contains two additional books, which I read years ago, and haven’t reread yet, though I remember them both as being quite good as well. Our mother first introduced Rebecca and me to the series, and she had a theory on where Ross was taking Kestrel’s character, and we were eagerly awaiting to see if this proved true when unfortunately Ross died, and so no more books in the series will be forthcoming. This shouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading these, though: each book stands alone, plot-wise, though they occasionally refer back to previously introduced characters, and no book ends on a cliff-hanger. You’ll just be sad that there aren’t additional books to enjoy, but you can always just reread these four in times of need.

—Anna

Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman

Nov17 by Rebecca

This is going to be a super brief post, because it’s essentially a single link out to someone else’s article:

I got linked this article some time back, and I have no idea why I didn’t post a link here immediately, but I happened to mention it this afternoon to Anna and she assured me that it needed to go up, pronto. Thus, I give you:

Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman
by Mallory Ortberg
the-toast.net
September 17, 2013

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

(For more, click the link that is the whole excerpt, and it will take you to the original article.)

Marching Powder

Nov15 by Rebecca

Marching Powder
By Rusty Young
Read by Adrian Mulraney
2003

This was a fascinating book, but, once more, this was a book that I would not have managed to get through in anyway other than an audiobook. Even as an audio book, I almost quit it multiple times.

It’s essentially the memoirs of Thomas McFadden, a young British drug smuggler, about his years in Bolivia’s San Pedro Prison. I say “essentially” because I’m a bit unclear on why this book isn’t listed with two authors: it’s written in the first person and there are direct descriptions of how Rusty came to the prison and recorded McFadden’s story on audio cassettes.

The hardest part of getting through this book is that there was no one in the book that I liked. There were better and worse people. And there were definitely situations that no one should have to live through, no matter how nice or not they are, but being a victim doesn’t always make a person innocent. I went into this book knowing it was about a prison and a drug smuggler, but he’s described as being very personable, and I guess he is? But it came across to me as a highly manipulative, almost psychopathic type of personability where I couldn’t actually feel a connection and, through his recounting, couldn’t feel a connection to anyone else, either. As the book described actions, reactions, and motivations, I found myself just generally disliking both Thomas (the narrator) and Rusty (the author) and most of the other people too, regardless of whether Thomas was trying to present them in a good or bad light.

Surprisingly, while the people made the book difficult to get through, the events recounted were not as difficult. I’d gone into this book prepared by Hollywood and stereotypes to hear the conditions of a third-world drug prison (ie, awful, awful, awful conditions). I was surprised that while, yes, at some points in time and in some circumstances, it did live up to those expectations, at other times and in other situations, the prison as a whole acted more like a small city-state with strict immigration laws: ie, you couldn’t leave, but it wasn’t a half-bad place to settle down, start a business, and raise a family.

The corruption described is so prevalent that the it struck me that this wasn’t a corrupt justice/prison system at all, but was something entirely different, merely masking itself to the outside eye as a justice/prison system. It seemed like more of a state-run hostage business or some other money-making scheme that I don’t quite understand, but certainly wasn’t interested in either justice, rehabilitation, or even punishment. This is not is a justice/prison system marred by corruption, because the corruption has taken over. The corruption is so prevalent that it creates it’s own structure, completely replacing the structure that might otherwise have been there.

I’ve been trying to think of a good simile and the best I can come up with is that calling this part of a justice system with some corruption would be like calling a fishing net a sailboat sail with some holes. They can’t really be compared.

To sum up, I’ll steal Kinsey’s three-word review style and say, this book was: informative, interesting, off-putting.

Melting Stone

Nov10 by Rebecca

Melting Stone
By Tamora Pierce
Full cast audio
2007

This was interesting.

Tamora Pierce was a guest speaker at the National Book Festival this year and I was delighted. I was also somewhat shocked that the line to get a book signed by her started forming in front of the signing tent at least an hour before she gave her talk at a completely different tent, and several hours before she would start signing anything.

I’m pleased that she’s popular, but I think the kids in that line made a mistake in going for a signature rather than listening to her speak. She’s a wonderful and witty speaker, with a certain acerbic quality that I enjoy. Seeing her at the festival was also my first notice that her next book has come out: Battle Magic.

I put a hold on it at my local library and checked out Melting Stone.

I grew up reading Tamora Pierce and I still love her books, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading Melting Stone, in large part because it was a born-audio book. While it also came out in traditional book format, that was only after it was published as a full-cast audio-book: meaning each character was voiced by a different voice actor and some sound effects were included, too.

This is not the only thing that’s unusual about this book. The main character, Evvy, was first introduced in a different book, Street Magic. Street Magic, in turn, in the second book that focuses on the character of Briar Moss. Both of those books focused on Briar Moss are single parts in four-book series. Melting Stone also references a lot of events that happen in Battle Magic, a book that was only just published recently in 2013, some six years later. It’s hard for me to tell exactly, given that I know this book series quite well and for some time, but I think this book was intended to be able to stand alone and even introduce the universe to a new generation of readers, who can then go back, if they’d like, and read the backstory of the original books, but don’t have to if they don’t want to, and can continue to read future books as they come out.

Anyway, it was fun, even though it was also intended for a younger audience even than most of Pierce’s books. As Kinsey noted in her last post, we all like reading YA fiction, but generally the audience of those books are teens or the particularly precocious, and the intended audience for this book was more elementary school.

One of the things I love about well-written fiction is that it’s often also well-researched and you can learn a fair bit of non-fiction facts along with enjoying a story with characters and plot-arch. This book, in particular, I thought did a good job of including some basic geology for kids.

So while I enjoyed the story and the characters, I was mostly interested in my own meta analysis of this book. Are audiobooks really becoming more mainstream and standard? Regardless of format, it’s rather brilliant of Pierce to break up the continuity a bit in order to bring in a new generation of kids. I wonder: are there people out there who grew up reading her books who are now introducing them to their own kids?

YA Book Battles and Sad Holiday Movies

Nov7 by Kinsey

It’s pretty clear that all of us here on Biblio-therapy are big YA fans–we may read and review other things, but we always come back to YA. Which is why we were so excited when Friend of the Blog Hannah pointed out Entertainment Weekly’s “What is the Best Young Novel of All Time” bracket game! You can see the complete bracket here. (And boy, do I love a good bracket–the bracket episode of How I Met Your Mother is one of my favorites. “I was there! Trust me! It’s Dead Baby!”) Voting started Monday so we’ve missed Round 1, which is probably all for the best because there were a few choices that seemed impossible. Anne of Green Gables or The Hobbit? I Capture the Castle or The Catcher in the Rye? Harry Potter or Holes? The Fault in Our Stars or Code Name Verity? I’m not sure what I would have done! (Okay, actually, most of those decisions are pretty easy: Anne, Castle, and Harry. But I am torn on the last one. Verity, I think, but I might have to read them both again before I felt truly comfortable with that decision.)

I’m going to keep an eye on the EW website for a while now, because I am looking forward to voting in the next rounds. But I do have one complaint (aside from the whole how-can-one-possibly-vote-on-art thing): some of these books are not YA. I understand that the lines can be a bit blurry, but in some cases, there is no blur involved. Dune is not and never was a young adult book. The Princess Bride? The House on Mango Street? Not young adult. And Prep? Just because a book is about teenagers does not mean it was written for teenagers. Plus it goes the other way, too–The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a straight-up kids book, and seems overmatched in this field.

EW did get it right by including The Book Thief, though, which is one of my favorite YA books ever. And last week I actually had the opportunity to see the new Book Thief movie (officially opening tomorrow). There are so many good things about the movie–all of the actors are just wonderful, especially Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson as the main characters adoptive parents. And the whole thing has a beautiful look. But I wish they had been able to use those same people and sets and costumes and make a six-hour miniseries instead of a two-hour movie. The Book Thief is a long, complicated story, and so many things that had so much meaning in the book were brushed by in the movie because there simply wasn’t time. I am not one to get huffy about film adaptations of books–I tend to like seeing how the shift in format is made–but for me the movie had much less impact than the book. But then, the friend I was with who didn’t know the story, and who is not an overly emotional sort, started sobbing about halfway through the movie and never stopped, so maybe I’m a bad judge. There are a lot of lovely things about the movie, so I hope it does well in theaters. And I hope it inspires more people to go read the book, which is truly stunning.

Nonfiction Graphic Novels

Nov7 by Anna

I previously read Pyongyang and Shenzhen by Guy Delisle, and really enjoyed them, and when I saw that he also had books on Jerusalem and Burma, I was very interested in reading those, as well. I was living in Boulder at the time, though, and the local library didn’t have copies, so I backburnered it and of course forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago, when I thought to try my new library system, which happily had both! Jerusalem was available first, and when I went to go pick it up, I browsed the other offerings in the adult travel graphic novel section (a small section, certainly). I picked up Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story as well.

Being your typical clueless American, I hadn’t quite put together that all three books were pretty much talking about the exact same region. I had just figured that I am generally sort of confused over issues in the Middle East, and perhaps a graphic novel or three would be able to break some of the issues down in a way that I could understand. If libraries weren’t stringently against keeping rental records (for exactly this reason), I’m sure I’d be on some list somewhere.

Jerusalem

By Guy Delisle

Jerusalem is about twice as long as Delisle’s previous books, which is explained toward the beginning when he describes how he and his family are moving to Jerusalem for an entire year for his wife’s work for Doctors Without Borders. By this point, he has made enough of a name for himself as an author that he is spending the year solely working on this graphic novel, while also taking care of the children and doing the occasional lecture.

Delisle’s style is quiet and nonjudgmental. His strength as an author and illustrator comes from showing the reader these foreign cultures through his eyes as a traveling Westerner (he’s French Canadian), so it feels very personal. Several times, I laughed out loud, which is somewhat unusual in a visual media such as graphic novels, and two specific pages related to the other two authors of this blog: 1) Kinsey, apparently you are not alone in playing the game “Hipster or Priest”, and 2) Rebecca, I believe you, too, own some of the Helsing manga?

Like his previous books, this one focuses primarily on his own small, daily experiences trying to navigate a new culture, only referring to more global politics when it touches on him directly. For instance, a recurring theme throughout the book is him attempting and failing to get permission to travel into Gaza to lecture at a university there. In fact, after his fourth and final failure, he wonders if perhaps he is being mistaken for Joe Sacco, a reference that pleased me since I was reading his book next.

Palestine

By Joe Sacco

I have to admit that after Guy Delisle, Joe Sacco came as a bit of a shock and I was initially quite turned off. Like Delisle, Palestine is an autobiographic account of Sacco’s experience in Palestine, but where Delisle is quiet and personable, Sacco is loud, crude, and in-your-face. He is very clearly influenced by the R. Crumb school, which is not my favorite either, and I found his bold lines and clustered text boxes aggressive and claustrophobic. Sacco portrays himself as a bit of an asshole, self-centered and cowardly, and I initially took his word for it, but slowly began to think it is defense mechanism on his part, protecting himself emotionally from so many needy people that he is not in a position to help.

What finally sold me on the book is the sheer amount of information he has managed to pack into it. While I enjoyed Jerusalem more, Palestine gave me a much better understanding of the current situation, and the history that brought about it. As the title might reveal, the book is very much in support of an internationally recognized Palestine, which is not a perspective we hear much here in the United States, and it seems to me that it is an important perspective to hear.

Once I got over my initial bias, too, I started to notice that Sacco is a beautiful illustrator when he wants to be, drawing very detailed and delicately inked vistas depicting the scope of the conditions in the settlements.

Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story

By Ari Folman

I had initially picked this one up because the illustrations are beautiful, like little paintings in each panel. I was not real clear on where Lebanon is (I may or may not have thought it was in South America, the Texas public school system at work.) I had certainly never heard of Bashir before.

It turns out Waltz with Bashir was actually an animated film first (you can see the trailer here) and the graphic novel is made up of frames from the film. It also turns out that Lebanon is just above Israel, and Waltz with Bashir centers around the Israel Defence Force’s invasion of Lebanon. I figured that after the previous two pro-Palestine books, this would be my Israeli perspective.

The book (and film) is an autobiographical account of Folman attempting to recreate memories of his experience as a young soldier in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War, when Israel invaded Lebanon in order to install a pro-Israeli Christian government headed by the titular Bashir Gemayel. Folman knew that he had been stationed near the horrific Safra and Shatila Massacre (Christian soldiers under Israeli protection slaughtered between 762 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians), but had no memories at all of that time or place.

A friend of Folman’s, also stationed nearby, began having nightmares 20 years later, which inspires Folman to begin to dig into his own past. Clearly, it is not a happy book, and it, too, is quite critical of the Israeli military, so I am three-for-three on the pro-Palestine front. (If anyone wants to recommend a solid pro-Israel book on the subject, I’d be happy to check it out, though I’d prefer a graphic novel, clearly.)

Which brings me to my conclusion: while nonfiction graphic novels seem a little odd at first, they are palatable media for communicating very complex and charged information. There is no way that I would read a multi-hundred-page book, or even a dozen-page article, on the Israel/Palestine issue, but I happily and quickly ran through several hundred pages of these three comic books combined. They only made me marginally more informed, but they made me a lot less ignorant, if that makes sense. I don’t think that I could instruct someone else on the nuances of the various issues, but I know enough now not make pat judgments, either.

Burma Chronicles

By Guy Delisle

Delisle’s Burma Chronicles came as a welcome relief after the building heaviness of the Israel/Palestine books above, though it is also Delisle’s most political book. He still writes very much in his first-person perspective, but Burma (or Myanmar, depending on your politics) has such a restrictive government that it interfered quite a bit in his daily life. Burma Chronicles takes place after Pyongyang and Shenzhen, but before Jerusalem; Delisle, his wife, and their infant son travel to Burma for his wife’s work in Doctors Without Borders. For the nine months that they are there, Doctors Without Borders attempts to reach outlying minority groups, with the government blocking their efforts until they eventually pull out altogether. This book highlights Delisle’s main charm for me: at the same time as he lightly touches on global politics, he shows us individuals in a very real light, so it becomes easy to look past the cultural differences and see the basic humanity underneath it all.

—Anna