Magic Rises

Aug19 by Anna

By Ilona Andrews

This is the sixth book in Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series, and Rebecca has previously introduced the series here.* It is my favorite in the over-abundance of series about spunky women in a werewolf- and vampire-populated world, but to my mind the series peaked at book 3 and went downhill from there. (As an aside, Rebecca and I had a lengthy discussion about whether this is a common phenomena; are trilogies so standard because authors tend to lose steam after the third book? There are a lot of series that support that thesis, and only a few that belie it.)

As an aside on first impressions, when I first got the book, I was somewhat taken aback by the cover. The featured woman looks somewhat different than previous illustrations of Kate Daniels, which is fine, artists change visions, etc., etc. But, doesn’t she look strikingly similar to someone else instead? I feel like, as an artist, you should take your inspiration from wherever you like, but maybe don’t make it so blatant.

A very mild spoiler for the series: book 3 settled a romantic tension that had run through all three initial books, and all the subsequent books have had relationship drama that I don’t care for, and increased violence, possibly to counter-balance the relationship drama, now that I think about it. A lot of the violence, too, was starting to be directed toward various magical (and deadly) creatures that populate the world, and I have a big problem with violence against animals, even fictional ones. A true hypocrite, I don’t have nearly the same problem with violence against people, which is why I was fine with the earlier books. I was still committed to the series, but was not anticipating this book with the eagerness I had earlier in the series.

In fact, this book way exceeded my expectations, and I believe rejuvenated the series a bit in a very clever way. Andrews changes the setting from Atlanta, Georgia, where all previous books are set, all the way to Europe, so there is a freshness just in the change of scene. With the new setting, she also constrains the number of characters, which had been expanding exponentially with each book, until the action started to get muddled with so many players. Magic Rises is pared down to just a cleanly written and plotted, extraordinarily fun supernatural adventure, and I am just so, so happy to have my favorite fluff series back.

One caveat to all of my praises: I went back to the earlier books to double-check a minor character’s name, and it reminded me of the casual humor and one-liners that made the early books such a pleasure. As the books have ratcheted up the drama and tension, that humor has mostly disappeared and I miss it. I almost feel like that as the authors have become more accomplished, they perhaps have edited out those parts as being less polished, and that makes me sad.

* There has been some update in information from this original review. The series has been expanded to ten books instead of the previously planned seven, when the authors realized that they would not be able to wrap it up conclusively in just two more books.

Books and Food: Two of My Favorite Things

Aug15 by Kinsey

Although I’m currently in the middle of about five different books, my reading for the last month hasn’t been particularly blog friendly, as it’s been heavy on sequels, things Anna or Rebecca have already reviewed, and books that I didn’t like enough to spend any time writing about. But was thinking about cookbooks recently when I gave a couple of new ones as birthday presents (It’s All Good by Gwyneth Paltrow and the Joy the Baker Cookbook by Joy Wilson–I’m hoping Anna or Cara might pop into the comments to report on how they like those). Considering that I don’t actually cook all that much, it’s possible that I have a small cookbook problem, since I have two shelves full of them and another box in storage. I love getting them as gifts, I love browsing through them, and on occasion I even cook things. Despite my small cookbook library, there are few key ones I come back to again and again.*

More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre
My family calls this “the Mennonite cookbook” since it’s really a collection of recipes from Mennonites around the world. These are very basic, hearty, healthy recipes that focus on economy, using what you have, and feeding the world. (The Mennonite were into sustainability and unprocessed foods before those things were cool.) And because Mennonites so often work as missionaries, there are a surprising number of recipes with Indian, Asian, or South American origins. This was the first real cookbook I ever used as an adult, and the easy curry, golden eggplant casserole, and eggplant Parmesan recipes were standbys in my early 20s.

Chocolate from the Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the Mennonites. Byrn has a whole series of books on how to use modern convenience foods as shortcuts in recipes. I know that sounds a lot like Sandra Lee (and not in a good way) but her cake mix books are quite smart. All the recipes start with a cake mix, but then add things like sour cream, yogurt, fruit, flavorings, puddings, etc. The processed cake mix makes the recipes practically foolproof, but all the additions make them taste fabulous. I’m quite a good baker and I don’t have problems making cakes from scratch, but I will admit here and now that this book contains the recipe for the single greatest cake I have ever baked or eaten–a white chocolate lemon cake with lemon curd filling.

The Homesick Texan Cookbook by Lisa Fain
I’m from Texas, so I can tell you with authority that the things you cook from this book taste right. I am a particular fan of the cheese enchiladas with chili con carne, the Ranch oyster crackers, and the Texas sheet cake.

How to Eat by Nigella Lawson
The pictures in How to Be a Domestic Goddess or Forever Summer might be better, but Lawson’s first book is packed with not just recipes, but ideas for how to put food together. This is the book that helped me figure out how to roast vegetables, and her sticky toffee pudding is so, so good. I am big Nigella fan and have lots of her books, but this is my favorite.If you have a cookbook that you love, tell me about it in the comments!

*My actual favorite cookbooks are those Kinkos-produced, spiral-bound ones that churches sell, where each recipe lists the name of the nice church lady who contributed it. I have a collection of those dating back to the 50s, and I use them more than you might think.

RIP Elizabeth Peters

Aug11 by Rebecca

RIP Elizabeth Peters
(Sept. 29, 1927 – Aug. 8, 2013)

I just learned that Elizabeth Peters recently died. Her actual name was Barbara Mertz, but I knew her as Elizabeth Peters when I grew up reading her books.

She was a prolific mystery writer, her characters are a delight, and her writing easily mixed suspense and humor. I particularly loved her sense of character though. Her heroines were all very real, with very definite personalities and perspectives. They were all people that I would have loved meeting, but also that I could have imagined meeting. They were real people and they continue to delight me. The love interests were also all strong personalities that could hold their own against the main characters, and the large casts of secondary characters were always zany and delightful.

I think growing up reading these books provided a wonderful salve to also growing up reading classic science fiction, which tended to skimp on the character side of things, especially when it came to females. Peters’ characters more than made up for the lack in any other books, though. Her were a delight and a wonder.

The first book of hers that I read was Crocodile on the Sandbank, which introduced me to Amelia Peabody, Peters’ most well-known character. Peabody is a British female Egyptologist in 1884. As you might guess from that, she is quite opinionated and strong-willed. Watching her butt heads with pretty much everyone is a delight. Amelia along with her eventual husband and eventual son are the focus of 19 books.

My favorite series of hers though is the one that follows Dr. Victoria Bliss, a medieval arts scholar who works at the National Museum in Munich. Vicky is Barbie-doll-esque enough in appearance that most people don’t take her seriously as a scholar. Her boss Herr Professor Anton Schmidt is Santa-Claus-esque enough in appearance that no one takes him seriously as an adventurer. John Tregarth is a master criminal who tries valiantly to not be taken too seriously. Together they find and/or get drawn into all sorts of historical and criminal adventures.

Some of my favorite books of Peters, though, are her stand alone novels, introducing whole new casts of characters and a single mystery to be resolved. Of her many such books, Summer of the Dragon is probably my favorite, closely followed by Devil-May-Care and The Love Talker.

This is an author well worth reading and who has had a major impact on my youth, reading, and writing. She set a high bar for others to follow.

Rest in peace, Elizabeth Peters.

One Click

Aug8 by Rebecca

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
By Richard L. Brandt
2012
read by Neil Shah

Curiously, this kind of reminded me of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s about a rather eccentric bookseller who isn’t actually interested in selling books so much as making a major impact on society. The fact that Amazon.com started by selling books is mostly a side effect of the fact that Bezos wanted to start a transformative online retail business.

Bezos seems like an interesting character. He’s presented as very analytical in his thoughts and emotions, as well as a visionary. I can’t help but compare him to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook as presented in The Social Network (i.e., I haven’t actually read any nonfiction about Zuckerberg, but I’m still going to make this comparison.) They’re both very smart with a vision of using the Internet to revolutionize the world and somewhat out of step with other people socially. But where Zuckerberg comes across as trying a bit too hard to both fit in and to make other people fit to him and generally being an ass, Bezos comes across as being very comfortable with himself and honest about who he is and what he wants. He seems like a decent guy. Oddly, the author of the book strikes me as falling in between the two, trying rather desperately to model himself after Bezos (good for him) but still uncomfortable and nervous and trying too hard to casually use “nerd” as a descriptor rather than an insult.

In fact, Brandt come across in awkward in several says. First, he slants all the descriptions to show Bezos as being ultimately in the right, and all of Bezos’ questionable activities (standard CEO stuff: too demanding, too micro-micromanaging, too distant, too whatever) are presented in a lump in one of the later chapters rather than interspersed through the story.

Another oddity in Brandt’s writing is some of the rather lurid prose that occasionally pop up in a rather jarring fashion. I enjoy a certain level of purple prose: the grammar alone can add a pleasing complexity and richness to a description even beyond the subject itself. That said, “the stock prices fell like spit off a bridge,” “the stock was as sickly as a CEO with swine flu” and similar phrases gave me pause. The writing is generally fairly straightforward and even a bit pedantic, but it’d dotted with these WTF metaphors and similes that make me blink and go “huh.”

I’m really glad that I was listening to the audiobook version of this rather than trying to read it. There are long sections that strike me more like elaborated lists than any real narrative, and I’m fairly sure I would have bogged down in them if I’d been trying to read them. But with it read and simply playing out during my commute, I go at a steady pace and the information is fairly interesting.

Despite the rather lukewarm review, I enjoyed the book. I also found it a particularly timely read.

On Monday, I learned that Bezos is buying The Washington Post. He’s not even buying it as an Amazon.com acquisition, but rather through his personal wealth.

A while back, I watched Page One: Inside the New York Times, and despite it’s apparent intent to convince me that newspapers were still important, it mostly succeeded in convincing me of the opposite. Bezos has demonstrated a deep understanding of how online capabilities change retail. I very much look forward to seeing if he will demonstrate a similar understanding and sense of innovation regarding online capabilities in the information business.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Aug2 by Rebecca

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
By Mary Roach
2013
Read by Emily Woo Zeller

This was excellent, but…

That’s pretty much my review of this book. It was excellent—funny and informative—and yet, there are so many warnings necessary before I could possibly recommend this to anyone else.

I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers some years back and enjoyed it a lot. It was funny and educational and oddball and also kind of gross but mostly that just made me get all picky about what I want to have done with my body after I die. I had not expected adventures in the alimentary canal to be significantly grosser than a recounting of the things that can and do happen to bodies after death. Oh, how wrong I was! Gulp got incredibly gross, and I am now hyper conscious of my bowels. I can only hope that awareness disperses after I move on to another book.

Second: I have to warn about animal harm. So. Much. Animal. Harm! You know how people have learned about the digestive track over the centuries? Largely by doing really unpleasant things to animals. Do you know what vivisection is? If you don’t, then count your blessings and don’t ask.* If you do, well, if you read this book, you’ll know a lot more about it. The people at the dog food factory loved their dog taste-testers and treated them extremely well. I cling to the fact that there are people here who love their animals. Because all the other animals mentioned in this book came to gruesome ends.

Moving on, I was surprised about how Roach didn’t spend much time on the intestines. She started at scent and taste and swallowing, moved on to the stomach, and then dealt with digestive juices, but then moved on to the colon (and stayed there for a really long time) but I didn’t really think the small and large intestines got their fair share of time. On the other hand, this isn’t exactly intended as a textbook. Maybe she just couldn’t find the same number of stories—horrifying and hilarious—for that particular section of anatomy as she could for the rest.

Finally, while I listened to this in audiobook format, I think it probably works better read in a traditional book format. There were a fair number of footnotes that discussed tangential issues and it was occasionally difficult to track the divergence and subsequent return to the regular text.

So, if my various warnings haven’t put you off too much, then I do recommend this book. It is hilarious and I have learned things that I never would have expected.

* I first learned of vivisection from a book in which the bad guys did it and the good guy was Jack the Ripper. Let that give you some perspective.

Me Before You

Jul30 by Kinsey

I can’t remember why I picked up Me Before You by Jojo Moyes–I must have seen it recommended on a blog or on Twitter, since those are those places I learn about everything–but I didn’t know a thing about it when I started reading. I think I thought it was a romance. Which I guess it is, sort of, but calling it a romance seems way too simple.

Now, when I summarize the plot, you’re going to think it sounds like a bummer. It’s about a young British woman, Louisa, who takes a job serving as a companion to Will, a man who was recently paralyzed in an accident and isn’t very pleased about having her around. I know, I know, I wouldn’t have wanted to read it based on that either. And it’s not a happy book–there were definitely tears. But it’s also charming and the characters are real and funny. When the book starts, Lousia is working at a coffee shop with no plans to do anything else, and Moyes did a great job of making Louisa aimless without her seeming dumb or unsympathetic. The relationship Louisa has with Will is complicated and layered, but her relationship with her family is presented with equal care. Even when some of the plot turns got a bit melodramatic, the characters kept the story grounded.

Gretchen Rubin (the author of The Happiness Project, a book I’ve raved about before) offers monthly book suggestions on her site, but very specifically doesn’t describe the books at all. She says that she finds herself less interested in reading a book when someone tells her what it’s about. I like hearing details about books before I read them, but I struggle with the actual describing part here on the blog sometimes. Often I feel like I’ll steal some of the magic of a book by revealing things that are better discovered as you go along. If I were queen, I would just tell everyone that they should trust me and read what I tell them to. Me Before You is definitely a book where I don’t want to risk any of the magic, so just trust me and read it already.

If you need any more convincing, Anne Lamott raved about this book in the most recent People magazine, so I feel like it’s been blessed–if she likes it, how could anyone not?

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Funny, sad, cathartic.

You might also like: Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It’s not really like Me Before You–it’s a non-fiction memoir for one thing–but it’s the last thing I read that inspired the same kind of emotional reaction (laughter, tears, inability to get it out of my mind days later).

The Art of the Steal by Frank Abagnale

Jul27 by Rebecca

The Art of the Steal
How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America’s #1 Crime
By Frank W. Abagnale
2001
Read by Barrett Whitener

This book is enthralling and funny and useful. I definitely recommend it.

I just started a new job (yay!) which comes with an hour-long commute (hmm), so I’m starting to look at audiobook options. I started listening to this one when my hour-long commute (which would be half an hour if it weren’t for rush-hour traffic) turned into a two-hour-long commute due to construction. I give this audiobook full credit for saving my sanity. It’s not only well-read, but the reader is well-matched to the author. I have no idea what Abagnale actually sounds like, but in my head, he sounds just like Whitener and not much at all like Leonardo DiCaprio.

The DiCaprio reference is not as random as it might at first appear. The character of Frank Abagnale was played by DiCaprio in the movie based on Abignale’s autobiographical book, Catch Me If You Can. He was a con-artist for five years, from age 16 to 21, and then managed to grow up and started to understand consequences. Since being released from prison, he has made a career out of helping businesses avoid being conned in one way or another. Interestingly, this book is apparently his first effort to reach an audience of small-businesses and private individuals. The Art of the Steal goes over a lot of the major methods of fraud, how they are perpetrated and how they can be avoided or at least dealt with.

I think the part that I found funniest was Abagnale’s suggestion on what to do to embezzler’s. Since embezzlement is really difficult to prosecute, and often has more major consequences for the victim than the perpetrator, most companies just cut their losses and let the perpetrator go with no reprisal. Abagnale suggests filing an IRS form letting the IRS know that the company “paid” the perpetrator the amount that was embezzled. The criminal and civil court systems might not do much to embezzlers, but the IRS is not at all nice to tax dodgers. The thought of using the IRS as your personal attack dog just cracks me up.

There were also a lot of descriptions of awesome and interesting science projects and social science experiments that I would love to try out if only they weren’t both illegal and malicious. (Is it really that easy to set up an entirely new identity? I kind of want to try it and see! But I won’t. Because I am moral, I am lazy, and I don’t want to deal with potential consequences.) But there are all sorts of interesting ways to forge different types of documents and it’s fascinating to hear what they are and what their various strengths and weaknesses are.

The book contains eleven chapters, nine of which were excellent. The chapter on online and digital fraud was necessarily severely dated: this book was published twelve years ago and the digital/online landscape has changed a lot in the interim. The chapter on counterfeit objects too clearly highlighted the fact that Abagnale’s normal clients are big business: he conflates the issues of (a) getting high-quality goods without the expensive middleman with (b) getting low-quality goods with counterfeit expensive branding. These are different issues and should be treated differently.

Anyway, with those caveats, this was a fascinating book and kept me well entertained on my daily commutes. I definitely recommend it as being well-done, interesting and useful.

Dark Triumph

Jul23 by Anna

By Robin LaFevers

Kinsey recommended the first in the His Fair Assassin series, Grave Mercy, just a couple of weeks ago as a fun historical romance about deadly nuns. I was at the library when I read her post, and figured, why not? I checked it out, despite the size of the book (large), the cover of the book (beautiful girl posing melodramatically), and the inside blurb description (“For how can she deliver Death’s vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?”), and I gobbled it up within the next week. It is just nonstop fun with the historical intrigue, which I liked better than Kinsey, and lots of romantic hijinx. I had a great time reading it, but wasn’t sure I was going to continue to read the series until I read the little teaser for the sequel in the back, at which point I immediately went back to the library to get the sequel.

Dark Triumph follows a peripheral character introduced in Grave Mercy, another, more troubled novice of the nunnery for the God of Death. The book focuses more on the character and her past than the surrounding politics, and is thus able to make her more nuanced and interesting to follow. The two books remind me a bit of Ilona Andrew’s Edge series, where the first one is lots of fun action with somewhat generic heroine and hero, and the second one takes the more interesting side character and continues his story. While I liked Grave Mercy, I loved Dark Triumph, and literally struggled to put in down at times within the three to four days that I devoured it. So Grave Mercy is worth reading if only to then read Dark Triumph (which does not stand alone, so needs to be read sequentially).

I would be reading the third book in what I believe will be a trilogy if it was out already, but unfortunately I have to wait until Spring 2014. I’m not terribly intrigued by the heroine, already introduced in the background of both books, but I’m hooked on the series now. In the meantime, I will leave you with a phrase from a critic’s praise for Grave Mercy that I found amusing (from the back cover panel of Dark Triumph): “a plot that nods to history while defying accuracy.” (Yep, that seems about right.)

P.S. – While looking for the book cover image, I ran across the author’s website, where she has posted the first chapter of Dark Triumph, which gives an excellent preview to the book, and also does spoil Grave Mercy a bit, so use caution.

—Anna

Parecomic and That Lovely Horrible Stuff

Jul18 by Rebecca

Parecomic: The story of Michael Albert and Participatory Economics
Written by Sean Michael Wilson
Drawn by Carl Thompson
2013

Not liking the current economy very much, a book about an alternate way for an economy to run seemed like an excellent opportunity for me. Especially since it’s a graphic novel and thus likely to be at least slightly livelier than other books about the economy.

However, while it wasn’t a terrible book, it wasn’t a particularly good one either and I was really not impressed with participatory economics as it was described.

The first two-thirds of the book were more a biography/personal history of the civil rights era. I found this portion extremely interesting, even if it wasn’t saying much about participatory economics. The people and the times were interesting enough that it was okay that I didn’t find the main character (or any of the other characters) very sympathetic.

The later third of the book did discuss participatory economics, but did so very poorly. This is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I might understand why Ayn Rand was so down on liberals and socialists. Given that this book was written in Albert’s words, defending his ideals, presumably to the best of his ability, I have to admit that maybe Rand wasn’t entirely making up her annoying “liberal” characters as I’d assumed.

Albert wants to save the working class and the poor, but he sure doesn’t respect them. He argues that white-collar workers aren’t any better than blue-collar workers but assumes that it’s obvious that white-collar work is better and more empowering than blue-collar work. He assumes that everyone will like the same things and dislike the same things and generally have the same opinions if only they really understood. Thus, in his view, business meetings can reach consensus quickly and easily, and if you don’t agree with him, then you just don’t understand the situation.

It started out interesting, but ended up mostly irritating. On the other hand, it was well-illustrated, the first part was interesting, and the book as a whole wasn’t that long. So, faint praise, but still praise.

That Lovely Horrible Stuff
By Eddie Campbell
2012

This was in the nonfiction new-release section at my library and it seemed to be a graphic novel about currency, which I thought would be interesting. Instead it was mostly some biographical ramblings of the author about his money troubles. It did have a section about the stone money of the island Yap, which was really interesting. I wish the whole book had been like that. Instead I mostly got annoyed at Campbell for being whiny. Like Parecomic, it was interesting and well-illustrated (and really quite short), but the main character was even more off-putting.

List Challenges and Book Lists

Jul12 by Rebecca

I recently discovered List Challenges, the website. I do like list challenges, especially ones about books. And here are a whole bunch of them:

NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books
(I’ve read 32 of these, and saw a bunch more that I’ve been intending to get around to reading. It really is an excellent list.)

Top 25 Fantasy Books, from IGN
(I’ve read 11 of these.)

101 Best Selling Books of All Time
(I’ve read 27 of these, but more to the point, these books made for a really odd collection. They aren’t themed or anything, just the books that have sold the most copies. Very odd.)

Modern Library 100 Best Novels (Modern Library ran the poll in 1998)
(Urg. Here are the Great Classics, the real, high literature. I’ve only read 6 of these books, and only enjoyed 3 of them. Just, urg. There’s only so much delving into the human condition that I can take and it’s not that much.)

BBC’s The Big Read – Best Loved Novels of All Time
(I’ve read 30 of these and loved most of those.)

The 50 Best Books for Kids (from the National Education Association)
(So I’m not exactly the audience for this list anymore, but I’ve still read 25 out of the 50, and not all of them while I was a kid. These are good ones, and also include books for a range of ages, from picture books for toddlers to young-adult readers.)

The 20 Best Books of the ’00s
(Now, this is just embarrassing, but I’ve only read 1 of these 20. At least I recognize several more?)

NPR’s 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels
(I’ve read 31 of these.)

This website of lists is a major time-sink so I had better tear myself away from it so I can go do something at least moderately productive. But you, dear reader, should definitely go and lose yourself in the various lists. How many of these books have you read?