The Venetian Betrayal - Steve Berry

2007; 550 pages. Book #3 of Berry's "Cotton Malone" series. Genre : Action-Thriller; Cri-Fi. Overall Rating : A-.

.

Someone's collecting a group of ancient medallions that were minted to commemorate Alexander The Great's semi-victorious campaign in India. They're doing this by stealing them out of museums, then torching the buildings to cover up the thefts. Cotton Malone becomes involved when he's included as part of the kindling at one of the heists.

.

What's To Like...

It's a "busy" book, with a bunch of storylines. To wit : a search for Alexander The Great's grave; finding a cure for HIV; political intrigue in a newly-formed Alt-History nation in Central Asia made from the various "-stans" there (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc.); a secret order of Venetian businessmen; the re-invention of Greek Fire; and last but not least - what's so cotton-pickin' important about those medallions?

.

Berry deftly interweaves all these lines. The action is non-stop, there are a bunch of red-herrings, and a zillion plot-twists. The tale teeters on having too many twists - is the one character a septuple or an octuple agent? But it keeps you on your toes.

.

All this action and plot comes at the cost of character development - everyone is either black or white. Indeed, one of the main characters, Irina Zovastina, starts out "3-D gray", but towards the end she's "2-D black". One of her (wounded) soldiers heroically saves her, and she rewards him by shooting him in the head. Actually, she ends up killing lots of her fellow black-hats, yet is curiously averse to offing any of the good guys/gals.

.

Kewl New Words...

Most of the new words were technical ones - dealing with architecture, medical research, etc. Some of these were : Mullioned (divided by vertical bars of wood or stone, such as a 'mullioned window'); Campanile (a bell tower, usually as a separate structure); Cartonnage (a type of material used for Egyptian funeral masks, consisting of layers of linen or papyrus and covered with plaster).

.

Excerpt...

And you, adventurer, for my immortal voice,

though far off, fills your ears, hear my words,

Sail unto the capital founded by Alexander's father,

where sages stand guard.

Touch the innermost being of the golden illusion.

Divide the phoenix.

Life provides the measure of the true grave.

But be wary, for there is but one chance of success.

Climb the god-built walls.

When you reach the attic, gaze into the tawny eye,

and dare to find the distant refuge.

(pg. 130. this is the riddle to be solved)

.

It was a Berry good book...

I liked The Venetian Betrayal, even if there were a couple eye-rolling moments. The cri-fi aspect (finding a cure for HIV) was done well enough to where one reviewer felt compelled to tell us why Berry's solution doesn't work. Well duh. Too many twists is much to be preferred over too few. The characters could've been developed a bit more, but then we'd have a 900-page tome. We'll give it an "A-", and note that the next book in the series, The Charlemagne Pursuit, is sitting on my TBR shelf.

You Suck - Christopher Moore

2007; 328 pages. Full Title : You Suck, A Love Story. Sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends, reviewed here. Genre : Romantic Comedy Vampire Spoof. Awards : #6 on the NY Times Best Seller List in February 2007. Overall Rating : A-.

.

After more than a decade, Christopher Moore pens a much-asked-for sequel to his first vampire story. You Suck opens romantically : our fanged heroine, Jody, kills her lover, Tommy Flood. Kinda. He's not dead, he's just now a fellow, undead vampire. She was lonely.

.

Moore mayhem (pun intended) ensues. Since they're now both creatures of the night, Tommy and Jody need to find a daylight minion. Meanwhile, the 800-year old vampire that "turned" Jody gets loose, vowing to terminate both of our protagonists. And Tommy's turkey-bowling supermarket night-shift cohorts, led by a smurf-colored hooker named (appropriately enough) "Blue" who took all their easy-earned money, are out to put a stake in him as well.

.

What's To Like...

Once again, the humor is profuse and laugh-out loud funny. The storyline is well-paced. The great cast of characters from BSF are back : the Emperor and his dogs, Lazarus and Bummer; the sinister Elijah Ben Sapir; the Keystone Koppish Animals, and the gay cop duo of Rivera and Cavuto.

.

Ah, but Moore also introduces us to a whole slew of cool, new ones - the aforementioned Blue; the teenage Goth minion Abby Normal; her moony friend Jared; and Chet the Shaved Cat. This is more than a cheap, low-effort, feed-the-readers-any-old-tripe story yawned out by Moore.

.

Be forewarned, there's a lot of cussing, potty humor, and sex in the book. If such things aren't your literary cup of tea, steer clear of YS. And although the book is a stand-alone, it will make a lot more sense if you read BSF first.

.

Some found the ending to be meh, but I thought it was good enough. Moore seems to keep it sufficiently "open" to allow for at least one more book in the series.

.

Cool/New Words...

onomatopeed (verb, pg. 7) : "onomatopeia" is one of my favorite words, but this is the first time I've seen it turned into a verb. punani (adj., pg. 101) : well, these are "family" book reviews, so we won't give the definition here. You can google it. I had never heard of this word before. Sheltered life and all that.

.

Excerpts...

"Ha!" Jody said. "I am a finely tuned predator. I am a superbeing. I--" And at that point she bounced her forehead off a light pole with a dull twang and was suddenly lying on her back looking at the streetlights above her, which kept going out of focus, the bastards.

"I'll be back to get you," Tommy called.

He's so sweet, Jody thought. (pg. 45)

.

"I could be a slave to your darkest desires," Abby said. "I can do things. Anything you want."

The vampire Flood commenced a coughing fit. When he had control again, he said, "Well, that's terrific, because we have a lot of laundry piled up and the apartment is a wreck."

He was testing her. Seeing if she was worthy before bringing her into his world. "Anything you desire, my lord. I can do laundry, clean, bring you small creatures to quench your thirst until I am worthy."

The vampire Flood snickered. "This is so cool," he said. (pg. 96)

.

You b*tch, you killed me! You suck!

Those are the opening lines of the book. Sequels (with the exception of Mad Max 2), always struggle to catch the magic of their predecessors. You Suck actually does a pretty good job of that. We'll give it an "A-", and a bloodthirsty recommendation. It kept me laughing and kept my interest. That's good enough for me.

Feet of Clay - Terry Pratchett

1996; 357 pages. Genre : Fantasy Satire. #19 in the Discworld Series (out of 36, oops, out of 37, since "Unseen Academicals" just came out this week). Overall Rating : A-.

    An old priest and a dwarven baker are murdered; someone is poisoning the Patrician in a very slow fashion; amd no one is sure how. This would be a typical day in Ankh-Morpork, except that the Assassins Guild isn't involved in any of these dastardly deeds. So it's up to Sam Vimes and the City Watch to find and arrest the miscreants. The trouble is, those pesky things called clues keep getting in the way of blind justice.

What's To Like...
This is Pratchett's nod to mystery stories in general, and Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. We are introduced to a number of cool chartacters. There's Cheery Littlebottom, just one of the dwarven boys, until he starts wearing lipstick, earrings, and a kilt. There's Wee Mad Arthur; a ratter by trade, 6" tall, with the fighting power of a stick of dynamite. And for us techno-geeks, Sam is equipped with an unorganized organizer; consisting of an imp in a small pocket-sized box, who can manage his calendar, alert him to appointments, take memos, and give him inspiring daily quotes, but can't do any of this competently.

Oh, and there's also a bit of synesthesia; see an excerpt of it below.

.

Themes...
There are always themes in any Discworld book after about #5. Besides murder-mysteries, the themes here are The Monarchy (Pratchett finds little use for it), Racial and Gender Prejudice, Labor Unions, and Evangelists (meet Constable Visit, short for Visit-The-Infidel-With-Explanatory-Pamphlets). Pratchett also tackles the question of what constitutes Life itself.

.The storyline in Feet Of Clay is well done, and all the threads get tied up nicely. Sam is gradually coming to grips with his inter-species bigotry. By the end of the book he decides that Golems and Zombies can now be part of the City Watch, although Vampires are still excluded.

.The story is formulaic, but that's okay for a series of this genre. The characters evolve from book to book, and Pratchett comes up with new themes each time.

.Excerpts...
Afterward, she always remembered the odors as colors and sounds. Blood was rich brown and deep brass, stale bread was a surprisingly tinkly bright blue, and every human being was a four-dimensional kaleidoscopic symphony. For nasal vision meant seeing through time as well as space: man could stand still for a minute and, an hour later, there he'd still be, to the nose, his odors barely faded. (56)
.The barman leaned over to Sergeant Colon. "What's up with the corporal? He's a half-pint man. That's eight pints he's had."
Fred Colon leaned closer and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. "Keep it to yourself, Ron, but it's because he's a peer."
"Is that a fact? I'll go and put down some fresh sawdust." (145-46)
.
"Slab : Jus' say 'AarrghaarrghpleassennonononoUGH'." (Slab is an illicit drug in Discworld) (26)

.

T'dr'duzk b'hazg t't!" ("Today is a good day for someone else to die!") (311-12)

Come On In! - Charles Bukowski

2006; 279 pages. Genre : Modern Poetry. Dewey Decimal Number : 811.56 B869C. Cost (new) : $27.50; Cost to check it out from the library : free. Overall Rating : A-.

.

The prologue to Come On In! reads : "These poems are part of an archive of unpublished work that Charles Bukowski left to be published after his death." Although he is best known for his 5 semi-autobiographical novels (Ham On Rye, et. al.), most of Bukowski's books are either poetry or poetry/short stories.

.

What's To Like...

The poems are broken into four sections. The first part is his reflections on growing old; the second is about women; the third is about the writing profession; and if there's a unifying theme in the fourth section, I didn't catch it.

.

The poems have no meter, no rhyme, and no structure. I usually struggle with this form of prose, but these were quite readable. There are even two poems referencing Li Po, who happens to be my favorite classical Chinese poet. It's amazing that Bukowski was familiar with and influenced by him.

.

I found the "Aging" section especially poignant. It should be rated PG-50 : anyone younger than that has to read it with their parents. Towards the end of his life, Bukowski was battling leukemia; and he offers a lot of insight regarding his mortality. His point in one poem is that a poet is never allowed to retire. His public expects him to keep following his muse and composing poems, even when he's dying.

.

The "Women" section is revealing, but less inspiring. Bukowski's philosophy on the opposite sex seems to be : Live with them, even marry them if need be. But when they get to be irritating, it's time to move on. He chides couples that have been married 60-70 years, writing, "either of whom would long ago have settled for something else, but fate, fear and circumstances have bound them eternally together".

.

In the "Writing" section, he cuts through the BS associated with his fame, laughing at aspiring authors who butter him up, then send him their unpublished manuscripts for him to read and forward along to his publisher.

.

I give Come On In! and A- because it resonated with me. There's nothing high-brow here - indeed, he mocks poets who feel compelled to work Greek and Roman gods into their prose, or who try to impress with a line or two of French or Italian. Instead, Bukowski is a poet for the proletariat, a Robert Frost with an attitude. Read Come On In! when you're tired of social snobbery and just want some honest, down-to-earth insight.

.

Excerpts...

I can't think of another poet who makes people as

angry as I do.

I enjoy it

knowing that we are all brothers and sisters

in a very unkind extended
family

and I also never forget that

no matter

what the circumstances,

the park bench is never that far away

from any one of

us.

(last part of "the x-bum")

.

peace of mind and heart

arrives

when we accept what

is:

having been

born into this

strange life

we must accept

the wasted gamble of our

days

and take some satisfaction in

the pleasure of

leaving it all

behind.

cry not for me.

grieve not for me.

read

what I've written

then

forget it

all.

drink from the well

of your self

and begin

again.

(last part of "mind and heart")

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

2008; 274 pages. Genre : Modern Literature; Historical Fiction. Overall Rating : A-.

  .It's 1946 and World War 2 has recently ended. Juliet Ashton is a one-hit author (of an Erma Bombeck style of book) trying to adjust to a normal life after her London flat was flattened in the war by a V-2 bomb. She crosses paths with some of the inhabitants of the island of Guernsey (a British protectorate, located in the English Channel just off the coast of France) who are trying to adjust to a normal life after having been subject to German occupation for five years. To cover their curfew violation one night, they invented the Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society, which had the unforeseen benefit of introducing a bunch of the islanders to Classic Literature.

What's To Like...
It's a great epistolary novel. There's a slew of engaging characters, none of whom are entirely black or white (not even the Germans), and most of whom evolve as the book progresses. There's wit throughout and even a subtle thread of humor underpinning the storyline.
.
I liked the first half (where everyone is making acquaintances with one another) better than the second (after Juliet arrives on Guernsey). I had trouble keeping track of who's who. Especially the Londoners, all of whom seemed to have S's (how does one correctly write that?) for initials. There was Sophie and Sidney and Susan; there was Stark and Stephens and Strachan. Sheesh.
.

It's an ambitious book in that it combines the themes of the horrors of war, reading the classics, and ...oog... relationships (romantic and otherwise) into one story. It's hard to say who the target audience is. But I enjoyed it, I give it a high recommendation and an "A-" rating.
.
Oh icky-ewwww! It has romance in it.

True, but the main romance is between Juliet and the island of Guernsey.
.

Yeah, there's the secondary one, where Juliet agonizes whether to choose "wealth, high society, and a life of ease in America" (but with a controlling husband) or "writing & reading, a farmer's small income, and an instant kid in Guernsey" (but with contentedness). Fortunately, not too many letters are devoted to this, so even I could get into the story. And FWIW, any guy could reason his way through Juliet's quandary in about 5 minutes. ;-)
.
Excerpts...

On the afternoon before our wedding, Rob was moving in the last of his clothes and belongings while I delivered my Izzy article to the Spectator. When I was through, I tore home, flew up the stairs, and threw open the door to find Rob sitting on a low stool in front of my bookcase, surrounded by cartons. He was sealing the last one up with gummed tape and string. There were eight boxes - eight boxes of my books bound up and ready for the basement!
He looked up and said, "Hello, darling. Don't mind the mess, the porter said he'd help me carry these down to the basement." He nodded to the bookshelves and said, "Don't they look wonderful?" (pg 24)

.

"I never want to see you again."
"Juliet?". He really had no idea what I was talking about.
So I explained. Feeling better by the minute, I told him that I would never marry him or anyone else who didn't love Kit and Guernsey and Charles Lamb.
"What the hell does Charles Lamb have to do with anything?" he yelped (as well he might).
I declined to elucidate. (pgs 213-214)

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

2002; 328 pages. Genre : Modern Literature. Awards : winner of the 'Richard & Judy Best Read Award' (whatever that is). Rating : A-.

   ."My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer."

   .The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's first novel, examines the devastating effect the murder has on the victim's family, neighbors, and high school friends. It is told in the first-person, through the mind and eyes of Susie, as she looks down on the world from her self-realized heaven. Sebold draws upon personal experience in writing this novel; she was raped during her freshman year at Syracuse University.

.What's To Like...
The story is both heartwarming and brutal. The pacing is good and the ending isn't what I expected. There is emphasis on character studies, especially of Susie's family, each of whom reacts in a different way to the tragedy. The family unit is shattered, then works at putting itself back together. Susie matures as the book goes along, as is evidenced is in her writing.

.It isn't a perfect book. Parts of the ending seem forced, and if you're looking for a Crichton-esque technical explanation of how Susie flits around our world, time-hops, and reads people's minds, you'll be disappointed. Some people were critical that Sebold's depiction of heaven wasn't more "religious" in nature. Pooh to them; Sebold's vision of the afterlife is a pleasant non-preachy change.

.

"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence : the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life." (page 320).

.This is a story about hope and strength, and draws upon Sebold's actions in coping with her college rape. You can read the Wiki article about her here. The writing had a poetic feel to it, which I liked.
.
I give The Lovely Bones a solid "A-". Highly recommended, provided that the violence of Susie's death doesn't bother you. And in closing, I've heard that the movie version of it will be coming out later this year.

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1995; 416 pages. Comics originally published in 1986-87. Genres : Graphic (in both senses of the word) novel; action. Awards : One of the NYT "100 Best novels"; Update : 1988 Hugo Award for Best Other Form. Overall Rating : A-.

   .It is nigh impossible to discuss the plot without spoilers, so here's the ultra-condensed version : the brutal slaying of a retired superhero leads to a plan underway that threatens the fate of the whole world.

.What's To Like...
    A fantastic storyline; in-depth character development; breath-taking artwork. A cool alternate history setting where the US wins the Vietnam War due to two of our heroes' involvement, and Richard Nixon gets to be President-for-Life.

.The term "superhero" is a misnomer here, since only one of the group has superhuman powers. That's Dr. Manhattan, who through personal ineptness turns himself into a walking, talking Star Trek transporter. This fascinates the US government, but generally irritates everyone else, particularly Manhattan's Vonnegutian view of time.

.The group also includes Ozymandias, the world's smartest human. But face it, right now, someone's walking around on earth with that same distinction. And Nite Owl creates some fabulous Batmanesque gadgets, but nothing unbelievable. The rest of the group seem to be ordinary people with a sense of vigilanteism and a fetish for capes-&-spandex.

.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?One of the charms of Watchmen is that it examines a number of situational ethics themes. Here are two of them; albeit modified so that spoilers are avoided.

.Theme #1 : What if your superheroes aren't?
Yeah, Spiderman may have to occasionally confront his dark side; and Batman might have a moment or two of psychological self-doubt. But in the end, they always emerge as all-American good guys, that little boys can idolize when they read the comic books.

.But what if they had some permanent character flaws? Suppose Superman felt compelled to get a sex-change, or Batman physically abused Robin, or Underdog got insanely jealous of all other superheroes. Would we still hero-worship these world-savers if they weren't perfect?

.Theme #2 : The Hiroshima Syndrome
For all the nuclear-weapons-in-terrorists-hands phobia nowadays, the fact is - only the USA has ever detonated an atomic bomb on another nation. And we did it twice, and against civilian, not military, targets. At Hiroshima, roughly 70,000 people died on the day of the blast; then another 40,000 a few days later at Nagasaki. After another three months, those numbers double; and another equal number of deaths occurred due to long-term cases of cancer, etc. All told, more than a quarter million lives lost.

.Even today, the debate still rages about these bombings. In school, the teachers always justified the action by saying the bombs were dropped to "save American lives that would have been lost if we had actually invaded Japan" and to "destroy the will for warfare of the Japanese people."

.

Watchmen gives you its opinion of the Hiroshima Syndrome. I won't spoil it for you, instead I'll lay out a similar scenario.
.
Suppose a swine flu epidemic arises. It has a 95% mortality rate; is highly contagious; and spreads rapidly. For now, it is confined to Iran. In another week, it will spread throughout the world. Question - do we nuke Iran for the sake of the rest of humanity?
.
Now what if the point-of-infection was, say, your home state? Does your answer change? And who makes the decision? The US Government? Would their answer be different if the point of infection was Washington DC?

.Halt! Hugo's there?I give Watchmen an A-. It is a genre-changing opus and redefines the depth that a comic can have. It is complex, with a lot of food-for-thought, and held my attention. Plus I'm a sucker for situational ethics.
.
OTOH, it is not one of the 100 best novels of all time. While the ending is superb, the final steps in getting there are a bit clunky.

.Nor should it have won (update : nor did it win) the Hugo Award for Best Novel. As beautiful as the artwork is, I am more in awe of somone who can give you just as vivid of a scene, using only text. Like Sylvia Plath, for example :

."The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water."

.Oooooh, that's sensational! It's not a matter of which is better, it's a matter of what constitutes a novel. Thankfully, the Hugo folks came to their senses, and have since established a separate Awards category for Graphic Novels. As for me, although I can't say I won't read another Graphic Novel in the future, I will say that they'll never replace a good, text-only book.

Going Postal - Terry Pratchett

2004; 394 pages. Book #33 in the Discworld series. Awards : nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards in 2005. Genre : Fantasy. Overall Rating : A-..

    Condemned to be hanged by the neck until dead (and in fact, done so), con-man extraordinaire Moist von Lipwig is made an offer he can't refuse - become Ankh-Morpork's postmaster general. The alternative is to jump (or be pushed) from an incredibly high tower, and hope that angels catch him. Moist chooses the more terrestial alternative.

   .Alas, the postal system is in disarray, being viewed as obsolete now that the clacks system (think giant semaphore towers) have been built. It is going to require all of Moist's effort and ingenuity to turn the business around.

.What's To Like...
    A good storyline and some good themes. There's the sorry state of the postal system, of course. The clack towers are the equivalent of our modern-day Internet and e-mail (bigger, faster, and prone to meltdowns), and at least in this book Pratchett's sympathies are with the Post Office. But Pratchett also dwells upon shady and asset-less business dealings. And gives some insight on why people fall for scams.

.

Going Postal marks the debut of Moist von Lipwig. Besides him, the book also showcases Lord Havelock Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork and self-professed tyrant. Pratchett presents both in a rather favorable light, which is a nice literary change. Moist gradually finds the Post Office a more-satisfying career than swindling people out of their money. And Vetinari may be a tyrant, but he does look out for the welfare of Ankh-Morpork, albeit while employing some highly effective assassins and spies. .Being a recent Discworld book, Going Postal focuses more on the story, and less on groan-inducing puns and mangled metaphors. I've made my peace with Pratchett on that issue.

    .Going Postal is especially recommended if you value interesting plotlines over plentiful wit. I think this is as good as it gets for recent Discworld books, so we'll give it an A-, particularly if you're looking for a "light read". The Locus and Nebula Award people agree.

A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin

1996; 807 pages. Book One of the series "A Song of Ice and Fire". Genre : Epic Fantasy. Awards : Locus Award - 1997; World Fantasy Award - 1997; Hugo Award (Best Novella) - 1997; Nebula Award 1997. It kicked Fantasy Award butt that year. Overall Rating : A-..

    A Game Of Thrones gives a wink and a nod to Tolkien and Robert Jordan, then blazes a new path with a gritty, dark approach to Epic Fantasy. GRRM intertwines three complex storylines here.
.The main one involves the island/continent/kingdom of Westeros, where an uneasy peace exists until the king dies, leading almost overnight to a bitter civil war between at least five powerful Houses.

.The secondary plot follows the Dothraki, a Hun-like force marauding in a land across the narrow sea to the east, where exiled princes plot their revenge and eggs of long-gone dragons still survive. Thirdly, in the north of Westeros, the undermanned Night's Watch attempts to maintain a wall of ice and keep out an assortment of "others", "wildlings", and undead.

.What's To Like...
    If you're tired of black-&-white, two-dimensional characters that never evolve, then AGOT is for you. The heroes have faults; some of their children are brats; and the villains have redeeming qualities. In this cold, dark setting where sometimes even main chatacters die too soon, some much-enjoyed wit is surprisingly supplied by one of the bad guys. GRRM uses a Point-of-View narration, with the reader seeing the world through the eyes of one of eight different characters. This is especially effective when Tyrion (the wit) is showcased. The prevailing "House Stark is good; House Lannister is bad" duality is shown to be a simplification of a much more complex, "gray" affair.

   .In certain ways, AGOT is the polar opposite of Jordan's Wheel Of Time series. There is some magic here, but it takes backseat to political intrigue and a strong sword-arm. And although "here there be dragons, monsters, and undead", for the most part the action involves only humans. That of course could change in subsequent books. Finally prophecy and predestination, so inevitable and immutable in WoT, are unreliable and trivial in AGOT.

.   The cast of characters can be daunting at first, so Martin adds an Appendix that helps you keep track of who is born of, sworn to, or married to whom.

."When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die."
    This is not a book for everyone. At 807 pages, it's not a quick read. It took me more than a week, and that included eight hours on an airplane. It's also not one for the kiddies - there is rape, incest, sexuality, cussing, and blood-and-gore violence in it, all of it graphic.
.
In the end, I gave A Game Of Thrones an A- because the good points far outweigh the bad. Yet I may or may not continue to read the series. Why?

.Well, AGOT came out in 1996, and as of today, three more books in the projected series of seven have been released. That leaves (at least) three to go. Will we have to wait another 13 years for the conclusion of A Song Of Ice And Fire? I hope not. But George R.R. Martin will be 60 years old this year, and I've already had to deal with Robert Jordan dying before completing his spanning-17-years WoT series. I'm hesitant to commit to another 6,000 pages and waiting more than a decade for a resolution to the story.

Snow - Orhan Pamuk

2004; 463 pages. Translated by Maureen Freely. Genre : Contemporary Literature. Awards : One of the NY Times "10 Best Books of 2004"; Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first Nobel Prize in any category ever awarded to a Turkish citizen. Overall Rating : A-.

    .An exiled poet named Ka returns from Frankfurt to Kars, a small, impoverished city close to Armenia in eastern Turkey. His official reason is to do investigative reports on the upcoming local elections and the wave of suicides by teenage girls reportedly protesting the head scarf ban. But he also wants to look up an old flame, Ipek, now recently divorced from an Islamist. Things get complicated when a touring actor, along with a hometown Colonel, stage a local coup and begin arresting anyone who isn't a loyal nationalist.

.What's To Like..
    .The character development is excellent. Our hero Ka, for instance, is a mixture of dark and light. He is artistic and idealistic, yet naive and not very loyal. He can manipulate disparate factions into signing a proclamation protesting the coup, yet is equally manipulated by the Islamists, the coup leaders, and the secret police. He's handsome and charming enough to convince Ipek to move to Germany with him, yet his idea of "love" is for him to enable Ipek to go shopping for western clothes in Frankfurt, at the cost of her being hopelessly dependent on him because she's so far removed from her family in Turkey.
.
The story subordinates to Pamuk's look at the deep and varied issues and forces that pull at modern Turkey. The forces include militant Islamists, Kurdish separatists, secularists ("atheists" if you aren''t one), the Army, the Secret Police (which isn't the same as the military), the Attaturk nationalists, and the family unit. The issues include the wearing of the head scarf, suicide as an unpardonable sin in Islam, finding God, "east versus west", the hopeless plight of the Turkish poor, the widespread wiretapping and bugging of Turkish citizens, and something we in the USA can't relate to - how to live with recurring military coups.

.Amazingly, Pamuk treats all these forces and issues impartially. None are "all white"; none are "all black". If anything, he succeeds in painting them all the same shade of gray. You won't find any answers here, but you will gain deep insight into the complexity that is Turkey.

.We're Not Stupid; We're Just Poor.I have present- and past-life ties to Turkey, so I found Snow to be fascinating. It reminded me of Toni Morrison's Beloved though. If you can relate, it's great. If Turkey and head scarves and Kurds and modern-day Islam don't hold much interest to you, then this may be a slow and tedious read.

.An excerpt...
"People might feel sorry for a man who's fallen on hard times, but when an entire nation is poor, the rest of the world assumes that all of its people must be brainless, lazy, dirty, clumsy fools. Instead of pity, the people provoke laughter. It's all a joke : their culture, their customs, their practices. In time the rest of the world may, some of them, begin to feel ashamed for having thought this way, and when they look around and see immigrants from that poor country mopping their floors and doing all the other lowest-paying jobs, naturally they worry about what might happen if these workers one day rose up against them. So, to keep things sweet, they start taking an interest in the immigrants' culture and sometimes even pretend they think of them as equals." (pages 298-99)

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

1971; 200 pages (216 if you include the biographical note). Genre : Autobiographical fiction. (Is that an oxymoron?) Overall Rating : A-

  ..The Bell Jar was originally published in early 1963, and is Plath's only novel. It is a thinly-veiled autobiography of her summer internship at Mademoiselle Magazine in 1952, followed by her mental collapse when she returns home.
.
What's To Like...
This is a beautifully-written novel, which is a rare treat. We have lots of great story-tellers nowadays (Dan Brown, James Patterson, Steve Berry, etc.); but frankly, they're not good writers. Plath paints stunning images, even when describing mundane things. A couple examples :
.
"He had a big, wide, white toothpaste-ad smile." Kewlness. Or :
.
"It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller, and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."

.

    The 200 pages are divided into 20 chapters, and they almost all are exactly 10 pages long. One wonders if Ms. Plath also suffered from OCD.

.

So what was Sylvia Plath's problem?
    Some think she was manic-depressive, but I doubt it. She had no "up" periods. Those who think she was clinically depressed are on the right track. Here's a glimpse (from page 2 of TBJ) into her world, describing her summer in NYC :

."I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
.
    In the whole book, I never found Plath to "feel" anything. At one point, she remarks that she hadn't felt happy since she was nine. She supposes she'll fall in love and get married someday, but you can tell she's never going to feel "love". She enters into her first sexual encounter the same way she approaches electro-shock therapy : "Let's get this over with." Indeed, those five words might sum up her entire outlook on life.
.
    Sadly, although I felt like I grasped Plath's mental issues, I can't think of a solution for them. The electro-shock therapy seemed to help, but subsequent events prove this either was an illusion, or was temporary. While "playing the game" of getting well, she discusses various methods for killing oneself with her similarly-afflicted friend, Joan. And when Joan hangs herself in the woods, you still don't get the impression that Plath "feels" anything.

.

    To close, The Bell Jar is a fantastic read, but it is broodingly dark and sad, without an uplifting paragraph anywhere in it. It gave me a great deal of insight into the world of depression, but I still can't say I understand it, nor would I know how to talk someone who's depressed out of suicide. The world was too soon deprived on Sylvia Plath's literary excellence, and 45 years later, we still don't have any answers for her plight. In February 1963, one month after The Bell Jar was first published, Sylvia Plath turned on the gas, and stuck her head into the deepest part of her oven.

The Crossroads of Time - Andre Norton

170 pages; 1956. Genre : Sci Fi (Young Adult). Overall Rating : A- to C+.

.   By having a premonition to help someone out, Blake Walker finds himself drawn into dimension-travel, and the tracking down of a rogue who's importing sophisticated weaponry into less-advanced dimensions for personal gain.

   .Andre Norton (1912-2005) was one of the top Sci-Fi authors in the 50's/60's. While she didn't introduce the concept of time- and space-travel, she popularized it by using it as a repeated theme in her books. TCoT is one of her earlier stories, which she then developed into a 4-5 book series.

What's To Like...
    This is a perfect story for a young teen boy. There's a fair amount of fighting and killing; and no yucky romance. Parents will appreciate that there's no sex or drugs. The bad guy is a UE (Ultimate Evil), but at least he's resourceful and cunning. And our hero doesn't start out as a perfect defender-of-all-that's-good. Indeed, he's as much of a liability as an asset in this present UE-hunt.
.
    I like Norton's treatment of our timeline. All too often, Alternate History authors portray our particular time/space continuum as being the most advanced there is. We boldly go where no one has gone before, benevolently enlightening the rest of the Cosmos.

   .No so here. Our dimension comes off as being quaintly naive, psionically primitive, and dangerously prone to violence. Just the sort of place a UE would want to take over. That's a refreshing viewpoint.

What's Not To Like...
    Not a lot. Norton doesn't spend a lot of time fleshing out most of the alternate worlds here, but I suppose that's to be expected in a 170-page book. And I swear, although every Norton book ever issued has at least two completely different bookcovers, none of them (including the one shown above) have anything to do with the story itself.
.
What If...
    Norton's general hypothesis here is that an alternate timeline spins off at every critical juncture in history. Thus you end up with thousands of parallel universes.

   .The one that Norton does take some time to explore here is a world where Hitler wins the Battle of Britain. The remnants of the British army and government flee to Canada, and the main phase of World War 2 consists of Germany and Japan besieging North America from both coasts. The effort eventually fails, but at the cost of tremendous destruction and anarchy in the United States. TCoT is set in the present (well, mid-1950's), and while Blake and his associates try to catch the UE, a few plucky, local New Yorkers are trying to re-establish civilization.
.
Overall Rating : Adults : C+; Young Adult : A-
    In the end, the plot is just a bit too straightforward to keep an adult reader's interest. And it has to be asked just how the universe decides what constitutes an critical juncture, worthy of an alternate world spin-off. But for a kid into science fiction, this should be a fun story. And it is cool to read someone who blazed the path for present-day Alt-History writers.

The Thin Place - Kathryn Davis

2006, 275 pages. Genre : Fiction, American Literature. Overall Rating : A-..Kathyrn Davis' 6th novel examines a cross-section of humanity in a bevy of people (and a number of animals) in a town steeped in Americana.

.
What's To Like...
    This book is hard to characterize. It's about three girls/friends coming of age; but it's not Chick-Lit. It's about one of those girls being able to bring people and animals back to life; but that's really just incidental to the story.

.It gives the hyperactive, mischievous thoughts of dogs; it has a resolute beaver that never loses hope even when caught in a trap; and there's a feline who tests the saying, "Curiosity kills the cat". But this isn't Dr. Doolittle. It has a 92-year-old lady still full of life, but this isn't On Golden Pond.
.
What's Not To Like...
There's not much of a plot. It's more of a snapshot of a small New Englandesque town (although the exact location of it is never really given). With about 50 pages to go, things start to build towards a climax, but even that is ...um... anticlimactic. If you're seeking for swashbuckling action, look elsewhere.

.There are a lot people who, for some reason, expected The Thin Place to have a spiritualistic overtone - good-vs.evil; demons & angels; etc. True, there's a bit of that here, but this is more mystical than metaphysical.

.Finally, this is not an easy read. The story demands your full attention, as it swirls from one being to another in almost random fashion. Clive Cussler fans should avoid this one at all costs.
.
Overall Rating : A-.  There's no middle ground. You'll either love The Thin Place, or give it up after 50 pages. It reminds me of Waiting For Godot, but instead of witty dialogue to substitute for a plot, Ms. Davis treats you to some beautiful writing. This is an excellent book for a quiet evening with New Age music playing in the background. But don't try to read it while watching TV.

Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson

Overall Rating : A-.

.

This book came recommended to me by my cousin (Thanks, Janet!), and is subtitled, "A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History".

.

The book tells the story of the 1900 Hurricane that ravaged the city of Galveston. This was before the Weather Service started assigning names to hurricanes, so it is only known as the "Great 1900 Hurricane" and several other monikers. To this day, it holds the record for the largest number of deaths in the USA by a storm. 6,000-12,000 people lost their lives.

.

What's To Like...

Larson weaves several engaging storylines together here. There is the account of the storm itself, of course. But there is also the biography of Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau's local man in Galveston in 1900 . In addition, Larson gives the technical science involved in the making of a hurricane. Finally, there is a narrative about bureaucratic incompetence and hubris.

.

Isaac's Storm also offers a pleasant glimpse into life in American at the dawn of the 20th Century. Telephones? Not yet. Automobiles? Nope. Radio? Uh-uh. But you get to see the sights, and smell the smells (even if they are often horse manure) of America in 1900. Having recently had the opportunity to see some of my Grandfather's photos from as early as 1907, Larson's descriptions here were really a treat.

.

What's Not To Like...

There are no pictures!! Larson recounts using a magnifying glass to look at a number of photos showing the storm's aftermath. Hey, Erik! Next time, put those pics in the book! Sheesh. Even the Wikipedia article on this hurricane, which can be found here, has some photographs.

.

Larson paints an unflattering picture of Isaac Cline. Apparently, in Galveston today, a lot of people take exception to that.

.

What Have We Learned in 100 Years?

Galveston got nailed in 1900 because it had a smug feeling that it could handle anything Mother Nature threw at her (they disdained building a seawall several years earlier); because the US Weather Bureau did a crappy job of predicting the storm's path (they thought it was heading up the Atlantic coast), because the bureaucrats in the Weather Service cared more about politicking than about putting out accurate forecasts (they jealously refused to listen to the Cuban forecasters' warnings); and because Science was used for political purposes (years earlier, Cline had written that it was meteorologically impossible for an Atlantic storm to ever hit Galveston).

.

100+ years later, in light of Hurricane Katrina, what has changed? The levee system in New Orleans was in gross disrepair (it failed in 53 places); the Weather Service (again) predicted the storm would move up the east coast of the US; we had a stooge heading FEMA ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!"); and a large segment of the dittoheaded US population still cannot grasp what the warming of the oceans (and the Gulf of Mexico) is doing to the strength of hurricanes (because, golly gee, Dubnutz, that might make it sound like Al Gore knows what he's talking about!).

.

But I digress. I enjoyed Isaac's Storm, even though I'm not a big reader of (non-alternate) History. I liked the intermingling of the various storylines (others might not). This is recommended reading for anyone living in Texas, or indeed, anyone living in a hurricane zone. We'll give it an A-, only because this book screams to have some photographs included.

The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

Overall Rating : A-.

.

Thanks to the Matt Damon movie, The Bourne Identity is undoubtedly Robert Ludlum's best-known novel. A bullet-riddled-yet-still-alive guy gets plucked out of the briny and discovers he's got a bad case of amnesia. He spends the rest of the book/movie trying to regain his memory; dodging bullets from (and then killing) a slew of professional assassins; and attempting to figure who is so all-fired anxious to kill him.

.

What's To Like...

The book is radically different from the movie, so there's a totally new plot and ending. In fact, the only similarities between the two are :

.1.) Our hero has amnesia.
2.) The heroine pulls a "Patty Hearst", gradually morphing from unwilling kidnappee to active GF and confederate of Jason Bourne.
3.) There is an outfit called Treadstone.

.

The plot is complex; the action is non-stop; and the book is a page-turner. There is both a good climax and a "door" left open for a sequel or two.

.

What's Not To Like...

I'm still nonplussed about the amazing foresight of Jason Bourne to have the number of his Swiss bank account implanted in his hip. Sheesh, how convenient.

.

The Treadstone in the book (which is very different from the movie's version) seems to be suicidally lax in security when it comes to high-level meetings.

.

Lots of other people b*tched about the movie being so different from the book, and this is probably valid if you read the book first. I didn't, so this isn't an issue for me.

.

Sequel, Threequel, Fourquel, Fivequel...

Ludlum of course mapped this out to be a trilogy, so one should expect some huge loose ends at the conclusion of Bourne-1. In addition to the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum, a guy named Eric van Lustbader has penned another two books in the series (after Ludlum was so rude as to die), titled The Bourne Legacy and The Bourne Betrayal.

.

So if you can't get enough of the saga, there's a couple thousands pages-worth of sequels out there. I'll take it one book at a time. Bourne-1 was a great read. We'll see if Bourne-2 can keep up the pace.

Watchers - Dean Koontz

Overall Rating : A-.

.

Watchers is considered by most to be one of Koontz's better efforts. A depressed man comes across a remarkable Golden Retriever while hiking in the southern California wilds. The dog promptly saves the man from a menacing something, they bond, and thus begins a suspenseful book-long chase involving a monster, a psychotic hired hitman, and some duty-bound and therefore not-on-our-side NSA feds.

.

Oh yeah, there is a love-story too, but we'll ignore that as best we can.

.

What's To Like...

It's fast-paced. No 50 pages of introductory yawning here. By the time page 30 rolls around; you've already been introduced to the man, the woman, her erstwhile tormentor, the dog, the monster, and the hitman.

.

The central character - the high-IQ dog - is a joy to follow. What if one of our canine companions was as intelligent as us? The dichotomy (wow, I always wanted an excuse to use that word) of a human-like mind in a dog's body is a fascinating study.

.

Finally, ther are no slow spots. You'll find yourself staying up late to read more of Watchers.

.

What's Not To Like...

The characters are fairly shallow. The good guys are completely good; the bad guys are completely bad. The romance is straightforward. The central cri-fi theme - DNA manipulation - has been done by others, and in a better-researched manner.

.

The ending is hurried and tepid. After 450 pages of a great build-up, the evilnesses are disposed of with remarkable ease. You won't guess the ending, but that's simply cuz you'll be expecting more.

.

Finally, Koontz leaves so many loose ends that you'll be tempted to roll 'em up into a ball of yarn. The hitman murders - unresolved. The sabotaging of a top-secret government research project - unresolved. The reason that the book is titled "Watchers" - unresolved. The consequences of genetic manipulation - unresolved.

.

Genres? We've got genres coming out of our ears...

This book must be a librarian's nightmare when trying to think of where to file it. We could call it a Thriller, yet the monster's character is sadly under-developed. Indeed, his only purpose for most of the book is to do a random grisly killing about every 70 pages or so.

.

Or maybe we'll file it under Romance, although the love story is obvious and trite. The girl has head problems; the guy magically cures her with his love; and she never has any relapses again.

.

How 'bout Cri-Fi? Except that Koontz never really tries to make the science seem plausible. Maybe Mystery - but as mentioned before, half the killings are never resolved.

.

Perhaps the best fit would be to call it a Boy-And-His-Dog story, and put it next to Lassie. But I don't think little Timmy ever had to deal with monsters that liked to gouge out eyeballs and decapitate its victims; nor hitmen that fantsized about bludgeoning pregnant women.

.

But I digress. Watchers is a great read; yet I doubt I'll pick up any more Koontz novels. In his 3-page "Afterword", Koontz states, "I believe that we carry within us a divinely inspired moral imperative to love, and I explore that imperative in all my books". In other words, if you've read one Koontz story, you've read them all. I intend to stop at just one.