DEBlog

Sunday Salon: Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

Random House © 2007, 320 pages

Matthew King's wife Joanie is in a coma and not expected to survive. Matt thus finds himself suddenly thrust into the role of single parent to their two daughters, aged 10 and 17. One day that will mean the normal things--getting the girls up for school and taking them to dentists' appointments, the minutiae of parenting. But for now the situation is extreme. He needs to explain to them that the doctors are taking their mother off life support, and he has to walk them through the process of saying goodbye to her. He also finds himself confronting for the first time the ugly fact that both girls are completely out of control, juvenile delinquents or just shy of it. Meanwhile, Matt has responsibilities to other people: he has set himself the task of letting everyone else know what's happening to Joanie--their friends and family and, as he finds out, the man his wife has been having an affair with. Even he, Matt decides, has the right to say goodbye.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Sunday Salon: The BAFAB Post

By way of celebrating BAFAB (Buy a Friend a Book Week), I'll go with the girls to Barnes & Noble today to buy a handful of Junie B. Jones books for Melissa's classroom (first grade). We've been reading them of late, and have made it through some seven or eight of them, with a pile left to go. I had read a bunch to Rebecca back in the day as well. And rereading them I'm reminded of what I so liked about them. Many of them are just perfectly plotted little gems, both funny and moving.

And, I say again, funny. That is, I think they're funny: not a page goes by when I don't appreciate some clever turn of phrase, and sometimes they're laugh-out-loud funny. But if I snicker occasionally, Melissa sometimes erupts in a fit of giggles that cannot be easily quelled. How great is that?

   

Sunday Salon: Susan Isaacs, Past Perfect

Scribner © 2007, 368 pages

Katie Schottland dabbles in espionage and show business. She writes the frothy TV show Spy Guys, which was adapted from her book of the same name. The show is cloak-and-dagger-light, but Katie brings some real-world experience to the series. For reasons she never understood, she was unceremoniously fired from her low-level job at the CIA 15 years earlier, escorted from the premises by a security detail. The injustice of it still pricks at her. When an acquaintance from the old days calls out of the blue asking for help on a matter of "national importance" and offering information about why she was fired, Katie's curiosity is piqued. But the revelation never comes. Her source disappears. And Katie does some real-life spy work to try to figure out what's going on, and what happened 15 years earlier.

Like the series her character writes, Susan Isaac's Past Perfect is espionage light. Katie Schottland is a likable character, and the book's premise appeals very much. It would in fact make for a good television series, of the Remington Steele variety, though there is no indication that the author intends to take her characters further. My only complaint is that the book, very readable much of the time, slows to a crawl too often, as when, for example, her characters are discussing the various intrigues that led to Katie's firing--a story that goes back to the German Stasi and the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

In short: I like Isaac's main character, love the novel's premise, but the pace of the book is just too slow.

Sunday Salon: Free books and Attila the Hun

Assuming I finish the short book I'm reading now--and I probably will--I will have read 16 books in August. A lifetime record! All accomplished because of the changes I mentioned in my last Salon post, from last week. Below is the beginning of my review of one of those books. But before you read that, make sure you enter my back-to-school contest for a chance to win TEN BOOKS from Hachette Book Group! Now, on to the review:

Beagle Bay Books © 2003, 271 pages

Gudrun's Tapestry is set in the 4th century A.D., when Attila the Hun and his hordes of stocky, scar-faced warriors were menacing Europe, the western Roman Empire enjoying its last gasps. Gudrun is a Burgundian, whose people were decimated by Attila at the behest of the Romans during her childhood. We meet her as an adult, when she has made her way into the city of Attila under false pretences. She is kept prisoner there, and her story--told in the first person--jumps between her intrigues and survival strategies among the Huns and her earlier life among the Burgundians. The latter story builds to explain fully why she came to be with Attila.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Sunday Salon and the secret of life

I think, 43 years in, I've discovered the secret to living well.... Maybe that's excessive. I've discovered a secret to getting things done. It's obvious, and yet I hadn't applied it previously. The trick is to introduce things that need doing into your life in such a way that doing them on a daily basis becomes an unquestioned habit. This has now been working for me in two areas with incredible success. It could (theoretically) be applied to anything you need to get done: writing something, cleaning the house, flossing, exercise. For myself, I've been working on a book since April 21st, a little bit every day, and despite that I really don't have time for this--so I'd been telling myself for years, what with the kids and the errands and the "real" work--it's getting written, quite steadily.

More recently, in fact, 17 days ago, I started exercising regularly: one hour a day on the exercise bike, and I've stuck with it, so it's beginning to feel like not doing it is unthinkable. I can see that I may falter in this: if I get sick or really don't have time one day, I can imagine slipping, but this is as good as I've ever gone before, exercise-wise.

Now, the happy byproduct of this exercise is that for an hour a day I'm also reading. And after racking up an unimpressive number of books read in 2008 prior to August, I am of a sudden reading an enormous number of them. In fact, in addition to doing more regular exercise than ever before, this is the most prolific reading period of my life.

So, in August I have read (with links to my reviews):

Linda Greenlaw, Fisherman's Bend
Will Thomas, The Black Hand
Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Otherworldies
Matt Richtel, Hooked
Judith Guest, The Tarnished Eye
David Grene, Of Farming & Classics
Josh Lanyon, The Hell You Say
George Rabasa, The Wonder Singer
G.M. Malliet, Death of a Cozy Writer
Melanie Wells, When the Day of Evil Comes
Beth Lisick, Helping Me Help Myself (review forthcoming)
Rupert Thomson, Death of a Murderer (review forthcoming; 20 pages from finishing)

It's incredible to me, really, that relatively simple changes--carving out a bit of time for something structured--can have such noticeable results.

Sunday Salon: George Rabasa, The Wonder Singer

Unbridled Books © 2008, 336 pages

Forty-year-old Mark Lockwood has been commissioned to ghostwrite the autobiography of Senora Mercè Casals, diva. For six hours a day he and the Senora, once the world's greatest soprano, talk--she reliving her roles as Norma and Aida and Violetta. She relives the rest of her life as well, singing on her father's cue in bars and hostels, the stranger her father handed her off to, the Spanish Civil War, the men in her life who claimed her and used her and loved her. But after 500 hours of conversation recorded on the precarious snakes of tape spooled in a suitcase's worth of cassettes, Lockwood's diva up and dies, her 80-something body floating "pale, blubberous and opalescent in her bath." The fate of Lockwood's book, given her death, is now up in the air. Lockwood was the right man for the job while the Senora was alive, but with her death his agent wants a bigger name, a bestselling author, someone who can churn out a doorstep-sized biography that will grace the supermarket aisles. He's ready to ditch Lockwood with a fat kill fee. But Lockwood has the tapes, without which the book project--like the diva herself--is pretty much dead in the water. Now obsessed with the diva and with his book, Lockwood grabs the tapes and runs.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Sunday Salon: Vampires and exercise bikes

I've had an unusually good reading week. In fact, in addition to the review I just posted at book-blog.com of Jennifer Anne Kogler's The Otherworldies (see below), I have another review in the works for Matt Richtel's Hooked. The trick to reading a lot, apparently, is ignoring one's other reading obligations--news magazines and the like. Also, it's a mood thing.

Anyway, after finishing Hooked last night, I started reading Judith Guest's The Tarnished Eye this morning. And I'm happy to report that I'm already on page 83. For the third day running, I've managed to ride the exercise bike for 60 minutes straight. Yes, yes, it's at the lowest resistance setting, and I'm not speeding, I suppose, at 50-55 RPM. Still, it's an hour. And during that hour I read Guest's book, so that's twice the goodness squeezed out of the same 60 minutes.

Jennifer Anne Kogler, The Otherworldies

Eos © 2008, 400 pages

Twelve-year-old Fern McAllister is weird enough that she's the regular target of bullies at her over-strict private school, St. Gregory's. Unlike her twin brother and faithful confidante Sam, Fern is pale-eyed and unusually sensitive to sunlight: her skin can blister after just a few minutes of exposure. And it doesn't help that she talks to her dog and climbs trees to escape the other students during recess. As it turns out, Fern is stranger than even her tormenters' can have imagined. Early in Jennifer Anne Kogler's The Otherworldies, Fern finds herself teleporting involuntarily out of a boring English class to a beach miles away. It's the first bizarre event in a long series of them, and the start of Fern's education into her true nature. Fern is, as the book's title suggests, an "Otherworldy"--or, as the less politically correct among us would have it, a vampire.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Sunday Salon: Linda Greenlaw, Fisherman's Bend

Hyperion © 2008, 256 page

Fisherman's Bend is the second installment in Linda Greenlaw's series featuring Jane Bunker, who's newly arrived from Miami to the coastal town of Green Haven, Maine. (See my review of Slipknot, the first book in Greenlaw's series.) This time out Jane's wearing two hats, supplementing her work as a marine insurance investigator with a new gig as the town's deputy sheriff. A routine investigation for the insurance company into some smashed equipment aboard a research vessel involves Jane in more serious crimes--a missing person case, a fatal drug overdose, and attempted murder. Jane's laconic sidekick and father figure Cal has been co-opted into serving as Jane's chauffeur--by boat or car depending on the requirements of the day. The tattooed and pierced Audrey, who presides over the local diner like a tyrant at court, is back serving up sass and below-par victuals. But the love interest Jane was cultivating in book one has exited the stage, leaving Jane on the lookout for another catch.

Greenlaw's latest mystery is a decent read: the plot is interesting, and the characters remain likable enough that one wants to read more in the series--and Audrey is in fact toned down from her first time out, which is a marked improvement. Greenlaw's writing is mostly transparent: you don't notice it for good or ill, except to note that the author's familiarity with things nautical is apparent on every page.

Sunday Salon: How to get rid of books

This will hurt some of you. It would have hurt me once.

Most of my life, until a few years ago, I was the sort of person who (1) wanted to own all the books I read (i.e., no libraries) and (2) never wanted to part with books, read or unread. Then a couple things happened: in 2003 I started blogging, posting book reviews at book-blog.com. The combination of having a (public) record of books read and an influx of free review copies from publishers made it both less practical to keep all the books I read/had in hand, and also less necessary: somehow blogging about the books gave me an ownership of them, even if I didn't have the book itself.

More recently I've found myself becoming, hmmm, cheaper and more interested in simplifying life by ditching possessions. To that end I challenged myself, starting on June 22nd, 2008, to get rid of a thousand things in the coming year. After decluttering my younger daughter's closet today I'm up to 979 things, after a little more than a month. It actually hasn't been that difficult, because there was so much to get rid of. Were I to extend the challenge to a second thousand, I'm sure I would find it much more difficult.

But anyway, the point is that a great number of the things I got rid of were...books. Specifically, I'm 127 books (and magazines) lighter than I was on June 22nd, which is kind of hard to believe.

Here's where the books went:

• 65 books and mystery magazines were shipped out to troops via Operation Paperback
• 42 books were given to our local library for their sale
• 11 books were shipped to fellow Bookins members
• 05 books were sold on Amazon
• 02 books were sold to Powells
• 02 books were given to friends

And I don't feel any the worse for it!

Tags: Amazon, Bookins, books, Operation Paperback, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, clutter

Sunday Salon: Administrative--Keeping house

UnfinishedPerson let me know (thank you!) that there are a number of blogs in our membership lists that no longer exist--a striking example of the ephemerality of many blogs. Hence I'm striking from the membership roll these four five blogs:

At Janice's
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
Gromit is Reading
Deb's Garden
Exuberant Reader

If those people have moved blogs and want to return to the Salon, they are of course welcome but need to provide me with updated information