Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Aug10 by Anna

By Mindy Kaling

Having finished The Checklist Manifesto on my beach vacation (taking a lot of grief from my friends for bringing such antithetic beach reading), I picked up Mindy Kaling’s memoire, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, at my friends’ house while waiting for my airplane back home, and it really would have been a much more suitable book for the beach. I really enjoy Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor in “The Office,” and I’m a little embarrassed that while I realize logically that as a successful writer, director and producer, she must be much smarter and more insightful than Kelly, she does such a good job of inhabiting that character that I keep sort of forgetting that she’s not Kelly. At least I’m not alone at this, because Kaling includes a whole list of ways she is similar and ways she is dissimilar to Kelly as a service to her readers. In all of our defense, she does actually have quite a few similarities, including the tone of the book.

My friends had warned me that it isn’t quite on the level of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and it isn’t, but I think I enjoyed it just as much, quite frankly. Bossypants is a much more traditional memoire, while Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is more of a collection of comedic bits strung in chronological order of her life. I perhaps would have liked a little bit more about her actual life stories, like her childhood in what sounds like a very well-to-do and predominantly white neighborhood in Massachusetts, the lasting friendships she made in college, and her breakthrough in New York and then LA. But, I wouldn’t have wanted to sacrifice the stand-up-comedy tone of the book, either. I do also love “listicles,” which are getting a bit of a backlash on the Internet nowadays, and there are several chapters that are structured as lists.

So, basically, this would have been a great book to read on the beach but was also a good book to read during the Olympics’ endless volleyball games, being then easy to put down for the gymnastics or diving.

Graphic design addendum: I think this book just has the prettiest cover ever. Like, lots of covers are elegant, striking, distinguished, mysterious, or garish, but I can’t think of another one that is just so straight-up pretty.

—Anna

Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews

Aug8 by Rebecca

Gunmetal Magic
by Ilona Andrews
2012

This is a pretty mixed review given that it’s for a book that I enjoyed in a series that I loved.

I enjoyed this book a lot. There was fun banter and exciting action and all sorts of fun. On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly the best work of literature I’ve run across, not even the best by this author. The plot depends more on shiny-magic-handwaving than it does on logic and the characterizations are pretty dependent on introductions from previous books. There are also a few scenes that seem to have been included for no particular reason at all.

I assume those scenes are part of the set up for the next book, actually. That actually brings me to skirting around a spoiler that I wrote about in one of my spoiler posts, regarding how this book was written primarily in order to set up some circumstances in preparation for the events in the next book. This book is well-worth reading as the next building block in a really awesome series, but I don’t think it can or should stand alone. I definitely recommend the series, though, but start at the beginning and read them in chronological order. While the main series is planned to have seven books, I would say that this counts as book 5.5. While focusing on a side character, the events of this book are necessary to the development of the series in general.

The suggestion to read the books in chronological order includes, incidentally, the suggestion to read the novella, Magic Gifts, which is included at the back of this book, before reading Gunmetal Magic. Which means, that when you get the 448-page book, the first thing to do is to flip to approximately page 330 and start reading. Magic Gifts is the story of what Kate Daniels, the main character of the series, is doing in the background during Gunmetal Magic, which focuses on the adventures of Kate’s best friend Andrea.

Anyway, a couple of things about the book in particular:

On the plus side: One thing that I really appreciated about Gunmetal Magic is how deftly it managed to flirt with but then avoid the classic romance-novel cliché of the love triangle in which one girl must choose between two guys. While the structure is still there, Andrea deals with the situation in a realistic fashion without all the angst and general waffling that I had feared. I was impressed. The characters were fun, the banter was fun, and I was pleased at the romantic resolution.

On the minus side: This could be a plus or a minus, depending on your perspective, I suppose, but the book covers some heavy ground regarding extreme childhood abuse very lightly. Maybe a bit too lightly. It’s not that I want to read a realistic depiction of how extreme childhood abuse affects adult relations (which I assume would be horribly depressing,) but I kind of think that introducing the issue and then not dealing with it might be worse. On the other (third?) hand, I’m willing to handwave away some of that with a vague explanation of magic and societal changes, etc.

So I will end this review with the suggestion that you go read Magic Bites (Kate Daniels, Book 1)

Ilona Andrews Spoilers, part 2

Aug5 by Rebecca

As I mentioned in the previous post, I attended a book signing by Ilona and Gordon Andrews yesterday evening. In the first part, I described what they said regarding some of their books and stories that were published prior to a week ago. This post describes Gunmetal Magic and future Ilona Andrews publications.

First, there are a few general things about upcoming books, and then more specific spoilers under the cut.

The Kinsman series (currently consists of Silent Blade and Silver Shark) seems to have been primarily written by Ilona (the woman) with less input from Gordon than the other Ilona Andrews (the author) stories. Thus, it was a bit disappointing when she said she didn’t really have any ideas regarding what to write for any future stories set in this universe. Too bad. But she did say that they had plans to write something to post for free on Christmas as a present to their readers, and that story could potentially be set in that universe. I’ll live in hope.

The next book set in the Edge series is planned to be the last of the books. They sold the rights to a TV series, which would be awesome, and is yet still extremely unlikely to actually come to fruition. Depending on reader and publisher interest, Gordon seemed to think there might be another book following a slightly more grown up Jack and George, but there are no real plans for it at the moment.

However, there are solid plans for a Jim and Dali book which should come out after the Kate Book 6 book but before Kate Book 7.

And now, for the real spoilers. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t click the link below.

Continue reading →

Ilona Andrews Spoilers, part 1

Aug5 by Rebecca

Ilona and Gordon Andrews, who jointly write under the name Ilona Andrews, were at BookPeople yesterday evening and I went to hear their talk and to get a signed copy of their newest book, Gunmetal Magic. The talk was a lot of fun, and their youngest daughter, who was maybe 14-years-old and constantly interjecting comments, was adorable. (The daughter actually kind of reminded me of Lydia from The Lizzie Bennett Diaries… big smile, rolling eyes, and a propensity for teasing her parents.) However, I told Anna that she was probably just as happy not being able to attend, because there were a lot of spoilers.

Thus, the reason for breaking the description into two posts:

This post, part 1, is going to be Anna-friendly, ie, discussing all the books and stories that were published prior to this week. The next post (part 2), will discuss all the books and stories that might be coming down the pipe.

It was interesting to see that Gordon loved talking about the plot twists coming up while Ilona (the individual) didn’t like any possible mention of spoilers, including mentions of facts that were stated in previous published books. However, since I’m going to recount some stories about the writing of different books, there will be spoilers below.

For those of you who haven’t read and don’t want spoilers for AlphaMenz, Magic Bites, or Magic Mourns, don’t click on the spoiler cut below.

Continue reading →

Refining My Theory of Memoirs

Aug1 by Kinsey

I’ve mentioned before that I much prefer memoirs that center around one concept or event, and then use that frame the story of the author’s life. Recently I’ve read two books that support my theory and one exception that might prove the rule.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag by Jennifer Gilbert is the story of how Gilbert, as a recent college grad, survived a brutal attack and then recovered and built a thriving party planning business (hence the title) and family. Gilbert has an inspiring story, and I could have read an entire book about her narrowly-avoided party-planning disasters, but the book reads very much like a one-thing-after-another narrative account of her life. I’m sure that to her it felt like it was all part of one story, since it’s her life, but I’m not sure it hung together as a narrative for the reader. Also, I only figured out by Googling her later that she was one of the real housewives of New York, something she never mentioned in the book at all. (Apparently, she was phased off the show because she wasn’t dramatic enough, which probably speaks well of her.) So, you know, it was fine.

Then I read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, about a young woman who decided to deal with grief over the death of her mother and a divorce by hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. Strayed talks about her childhood and marriage and about all sorts of things, but her story is all centered around her hike, which gives the story a solid structure that supports her tangents and digressions. I really liked Wild, but it was not necessarily a happy, feel-good story. Strayed was seriously grieving and seriously unprepared for the trail, and there are parts that were so harrowing I had to essentially read through squinted eyes. But Strayed so clearly described how empowered she felt by the hike that I felt kind of empowered myself. (She also describes her blisters and black toenails in such detail that my feet started hurting.)

Finally, A Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch didn’t have any single, centering event, but I found it so charming that I didn’t mind. The book is nominally about how Dratch stumbled into a relationship and baby in her early forties, when she had all but decided she would not have a family. In reality, big swatches of the book are about her start in comedy, and Saturday Night Live, and dating in New York, and the story just sort of ambles along. But Dratch is funny and sharp and sounds like she would just be an awesome person to hang out with, and the book is fun and quick. So I think the exception to my memoir rule is that if you are a professional comedian, then you can write a less-structured memoir. Otherwise, I suggest everyone read Wild and then write your own memoir around a very specific event.

Daytripper

Jul30 by Anna

By Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon

Confession #1: Daytripper is the only comic that has ever made me cry.

After reading the review of it on NPR’s Monkey See blog, I had sort of vaguely put this on my list and then forgotten about it until I ran across it in the library a couple of months ago.

I promptly picked it up but read it over the span of a week or so, which is pretty unusual for me with graphic novels. It reads like poetry, really, where a little goes a long way and after every ‘chapter’ of the book, I had to put it down and think about it for a little while. The plot, such as it is, is tough to describe; it is really more of a philosophical exploration of life, death, and the relationships that make up our lives.

It took me a while to write a post about it, because it is unlike any other graphic novel I’ve ever read. Glen Weldon at Monkey See described it way better than I could as “the way death, whenever and however it comes, retroactively imposes a shape on a person’s life.”

Confession #2: I read comics almost primarily for the illustrations; I mean it has to be well-written, too, but if the illustrations aren’t to my liking, I won’t read it no matter how well-written it is.

And Daytripper is absolutely gorgeous. The inking is expressive of the mood of each panel but the coloring is where it really stands out, with gorgeous, watercolor-like spreads. It is set in Brazil, and beautiful, expansive spreads showcase the city- and country-scapes of the region.

Seriously, check these out:

—Anna

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Jul26 by Rebecca

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries
By Hank Green and Bernie Su
2012

I would not have thought it was really possible to transpose Pride & Prejudice into a modern setting, but then I watched some of the episodes of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and was amazed. This is the Bennet family in the current time as told through Lizzie Bennet’s online video blog. And it’s delightful!

It’s also still a work in progress, still being updated twice a week with new episodes. So far there are 30+ episodes, each between 2.5 and 5 minutes long, and Lizzie and Jane are staying at Netherfield, visiting Bing Lee, his sister Carolyn, and friend Darcy.

The translation of the story from the 19^th century to the 21^st century is both really well done and kind of fascinating. What changes and what doesn’t change is pretty awesome.

While the majority of the story is told diary-fashion about off-screen events, some of the events take place while Lizzie is recording the videos and seven characters have directly appeared on camera (so far): Lizzie Bennet, of course, but her also her friend Charlotte who helps with the video editing, her sisters Jane and Lydia, Bing Lee and Caroline have appeared a couple of times, and, in one memorable episode, Mr. Collins.

It’s really well done, and it’s a bit like potato chips: each episode is short and quickly watched and yet you can’t just watch one. There’s more to watch and you want to watch them all!

Thus, you should go start watching! Here’s the first one.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Jul21 by Rebecca

The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right
By Atul Gawande
2009

To start off, this is a really excellent book and I recommend it to everyone. I’ve reviewed a few management books in the past, but this one is by far the best one, in part because it’s less about managing people in specific scenarios and more about managing complex situations in general, and in part because it’s focused on a single recommendation and discusses how and why that recommendation is important. As the title says, the book is about the importance of checklists.

As a manifesto, it set out to convince me of its premise: that checklists can be used to great effect. It succeeds. I am thoroughly convinced and now think you should be convinced, too.

A lot of jobs today are incredibly complex and only getting more so as time goes by. Checklists can go a long ways towards helping to compensate for this extreme complexity. The examples Gawande uses are surgery (Gawande himself is a surgeon), aviation, building construction, investment analysis, and cooking.

Historically, these jobs were all performed by individuals relying solely on personal experience and instinct. Now, these jobs are most often performed by teams of experts with access to vast quantities of research in addition to their own personal knowledge. This is an improvement, of course, but it also introduces problems of complexity in having to coordinate with multiple people and incorporate excessive amounts of information.

In performing these jobs, the professionals need to know and be able to instantly recall more detailed information than is really possible and they need to be able to trust that their teammates are performing equally super-human mental tasks as well. Such trust is often a mistake. When dealing with extremely complex tasks, professionals will sometimes focus so much on the difficult or tricky portions of their tasks that they forget to perform the basic preliminary steps. Even the best and most experienced experts in their fields are still just human. Checklists, however, can supplement memory to ensure that everyone remembers the basic steps, while at the same time running through a checklist as a group can ensure that everyone on a team is on the same page.

I would love to go through each of Gawande’s examples and explanations because the examples were all so interesting and the explanations were all so useful. For example, the discussion of how airplane pilots came to use checklists and why they go through some every single time they fly, no matter how experienced they are, is fascinating. Equally fascinating is the interview with Boeing’s master checklist writer regarding what defines a good or bad checklist. The whole book is both interesting and useful and I could burble on about each of the stories or arguments or lessons, but really, it’s probably better if you just go and read the book.

The Old Gods Waken

Jul17 by Anna

By Manly Wade Wellman

So, in my continued effort to not have to try anything new, I recently picked up The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman, a favorite author of mine in high school. His main protagonist is ‘Silver John,’ a nomadic folk singer who travels throughout the Appalachian area, picking up old songs and stories and tackling the odd supernatural force along the way. (He’s called ‘Silver John’ because his guitar strings are silver.) The cover advertises The Old Gods Waken as Wellman’s first Silver John novel, but he had several books of short stories previously published.

As a teenager, I had been fascinated with the descriptions of the very rural characters and settings, it being unlike anything I’d ever experienced so far, growing up in suburbs of Boston and Austin. It felt so authentic, so…earthy! There was a purity to the simple country lifestyle and I loved it. Even the supernatural elements seemed more realistic somehow, since they were often the product of old folklore.

Today, it reads quite romantic, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It feels a bit contrived, like the Romantic Period, with all those paintings of pretty, fresh-faced shepherdesses tending flocks of bright white, fluffy sheep. (The first time I saw sheep in real life—a field trip in college—I was appalled at how dirty and kind of mean looking they are.) Wellman’s characters are all perhaps a little too folksy, his settings a little too pastoral, and his dialogue a little too colloquial; the whole thing comes off a bit manipulative and twee.

In a discussion with Rebecca, however, I wondered if perhaps I wouldn’t have felt all of this so strongly in a pre-Palin world, where I hadn’t been inundated with “you betcha’s” for a year or so. Perhaps it is not just me, but that the whole world is getting too cynical for a true appreciation of simplified life in nature. Or perhaps I’m just crabby because it is so damn hot.

— Anna

Too Hot to Read

Jul10 by Kinsey

I’ve been struggling to write an entry the past couple of weeks. It’s been so hot and miserable that I’m hardly motivated to do anything more than slowly sip a cold beverage while staring into the middle distance–even reading seems like a lot of work–and nothing I’ve read lately has been inspiring. I want to tell you about books that I love, but recently every book I come across is one I am basically okay with, they’re all fine, whatever. But other people seem to like all of these books, so let’s do a quick round-up:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles–This has gotten rave reviews and it seems like something I should love–bright young things in New York City in the 1930s! And I did love the descriptions of what it was like to work as a secretary and eat at the Automat. But the main male character (who I guess I was suppose to be pining over?) was a total blank to me and the best friend seemed like a terrible friend that the main character was better off without. Plus, I felt like we were eternally on the edge of a more interesting story that we never quite got to–the book kept making allusions to the fact that the main character was Russian but had Anglicized her name to get ahead in the world, but we never learned anything about her family or why she did that or what the costs were. I wanted more. If you know the perfect glittering 30s book, let me know.

The Pirate King by Laurie King–This is the latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series (short version: after Holmes retires to the country, he teams up with a young girl and they end up solving mysteries together). I ADORE the first three, but the later ones have seemed lightweight, like generic mysteries that could be solved by any generic characters. The first few books were so enjoyable because Holmes and Russell and their relationship was so clearly drawn, and I feel like that’s been lost a bit. Only for diehards.

Shape of Desire–Remember when I was talking about how much I love Sharon Shinn? I do still love her, but please don’t read this one. I think this is her attempt to get on the Twilight bandwagon, not with vampires, but by setting a supernatural romance-type story in this world. I am on board with supernatural romance, but this one felt like a twenty-page short story blown out into a whole book. Go reread the angel books instead.

Slow Love by Dominique Browning–A memoir about a woman who gets laid of from her job and finds herself seemed like it would be right up my alley. It’s subtitle is “How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness,” and doesn’t that sound fun? Eh. Way too much of the book was taken up by her whining about a relationship that ANYONE could have told her was pointless, and as far as I could tell, her happiness consisted of her using her enormous severance to retire to the vacation house she already owned. Less inspiring than I had hoped.

Here’s hoping that my upcoming beach vacation results in a whole stack of books I love and can heartily recommend.