Booking Through Thursday--Endings

What are your favorite final sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its last sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the last line.

In thinking about this question, it's dawned on me that I remember first lines much better than last lines. I'm not sure why. Here are the ones that sluggishly made their way to the top:

1. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
2. After all, tomorrow is another day. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.
3. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark.
4. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
5. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
6. All that is very well, answered Candide, but let us cultivate our garden. Voltaire, Candide.

I remember endings better than last lines. An example of this would be the ending of The Dramatist by Ken Bruen. That has haunted me ever since I read it.

REVIEW: Brigadoom

Title: Brigadoom
Author: Susan Goodwill
Protagonist: Kate London
Setting: present-day, small-town Michigan
Series: #1
Rating: DNF

First Line: "You look ridiculous, Kate," my Aunt Kitty said.

When the dead body of your ex-fiance (and the mayor) turns up in your trunk, it's not good that everyone in town knows you were last seen in a golf cart pushing the porta-potty he occupied down a hill. Now Kate London has her hands full trying to catch a killer before she gets thrown in the slammer.

I didn't last more than 28 pages with this one. By page 28, I was lying in bed thinking, "Okay...Aunt Kitty is Grandma Mazur, Kate the deputy is Stephanie the bounty hunter, Sheriff Ben is Detective Morelli, and slimy ex-fiance of Kate is slimy ex-husband of Stephanie." I decided to stop right there before Ranger showed up. I almost stopped sooner than that--the second I read what shade of lipstick Kate smeared on her mouth. Sometimes I think certain books should come with a disclaimer: "Warning: Multiple Mentions of Passionate Petunia Lipstick and Jimmy Choo Shoes!" As you've gathered, I'm not exactly a fan of chick lit.

I am, however, a fan of Janet Evanovich and Stephanie Plum. Instead of reading a rather obvious clone, Fearless Fourteen was just delivered to my mailbox. I'll read Plum in the original, thank you.

REVIEW: Sun and Shadow

Title: Sun and Shadow
Author: Ake Edwardson
Protagonist: Sweden's youngest Detective Inspector, Erik Winter
Setting: Gothenburg, Sweden, 1999
Series: #1
Rating: C

First Line: It had started raining.

Erik Winter is Sweden's youngest detective inspector. He's a flashy dresser, loves jazz, and is about to become a father for the first time. Just back from sunny Spain where his father died, Winter is catapulted into a particularly gruesome double murder. The clues lead in interesting directions: black metal music enthusiasts and swingers for example, but as the snow piles higher and higher, Winter can't shake the feeling that he's missing something that's right in front of his face.

Having recently been introduced to Scandinavian mysteries by Karin Fossum and Henning Mankell, I had high hopes for Sun and Shadow. Unfortunately they were not realized. I found almost everything about this book to be bland--even the villain. The plot was in no hurry and was further weighed down by needless exposition. There were two bright spots: Erik Winter himself, and a young teenager named Patrik. Winter was so detached from it all that I couldn't care about him, and if Patrik had been any more prominent in the book, he would've been the main character. Pity...I was much more interested in him and am still wondering what happened to him!

Edwardson's book just wasn't my cup of tea, but since I greatly enjoy the mysteries of Fossum and Mankell, I'm still ahead with Scandinavian writers.

Tuesday Thingers--The Combination Platter

Today's question: Cataloging sources. What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT's almost 700 sources?

My library is a combination platter: half my own books and half books inherited from my grandmother and mother. Most of my own books were easily found using Amazon, Amazon UK, and the Library of Congress. There were vast numbers of my inherited books that might have come up by searching the Library of Congress, but I found myself entering all the book info for many volumes line by line. Did I mind? Nope! I considered myself to be broadening LT's horizons.

I just had a look at my catalogue statistics at Library Thing. My rememberer works well, I'm glad to say:

3,178 Amazon.com
129 Manual entry
87 Library of Congress
120 Amazon.co.uk
2 University of Chicago

I'm Tempted...

Someone else who's a member of the Early Reviewers program at Library Thing mentioned a daily newsletter called Shelf Awareness. I certainly wish I could remember her name so I could thank her. It's turning out to be a gold mine! One book that really intrigues me from today's issue is Heck, Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Basye. Here's the book description from Amazon:

WHEN MILTON AND Marlo Fauster die in a marshmallow bear explosion, they get sent straight to Heck, an otherworldly reform school. Milton can understand why his kleptomaniac sister is here, but Milton is—or was—a model citizen. Has a mistake been made? Not according to Bea “Elsa” Bubb, the Principal of Darkness. She doesn’t make mistakes. She personally sees to it that Heck—whether it be home-ec class with Lizzie Borden, ethics with Richard Nixon, or gym with Blackbeard the Pirate—is especially, well, heckish for the Fausters. Will Milton and Marlo find a way to escape? Or are they stuck here for all eternity, or until they turn 18, whichever comes first?

This reminds me of Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite authors, and Heck has caught my imagination to the point where I'm wavering. Badly. I'm either going to be Good and pick up Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels from my TBR shelves, or be Bad and order Heck. I can remember the pre-Harry Potter days when I didn't read youth fiction. Now it's fast becoming one of my favorite reading categories!

R U Really Reading Online?

The New York Times has a very interesting article which tries to define the difference between reading a book and reading online...and which is more important. One camp is of the opinion that reading books is what counts and that whatever is read online doesn't matter. Of course the other camp believes that reading online counts, too. I can see wisdom in both, which is undoubtedly why I never did well in high school debate class.

Physically picking up a book, opening it, and reading it is important. You're training your mind to focus, to interpret, to think. If you do it often enough, you'll actually develop an attention span that's longer than two seconds' duration. If you read 600-page hardbacks, you'll also gain some strong wrist muscles.

Technology is a part of our lives, whether we want it to be or not. For bloggers, it would be a safe assumption that we do want it. The Internet brings us unlimited knowledge at the pressing of a few buttons. But how much of that knowledge is well-written?

The pro-online reading camp tells us that children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia find it much easier to read online. There are more graphics. Low-income children who have no access to books at home but who do have access to computers at school read better than those low-income children with access to neither. Children who show no inclination to pick up a book will willingly go online and read page after page of fan fiction. Isn't it better that they are indeed reading, regardless of the source?

The problem with this is discernment. Children who do their reading online seem less capable of discerning fact from fiction. If it's on the Internet, it must be true. As far as that goes, how many of us know adults with the same problem? I think both are important. Making a commitment to pick up a book and read it does good things to your brain, and the more familiar a person is with computers and the Internet, the better off he will be, especially with the ever-expanding range of jobs in the technology field. The rub--discernment--should be dealt with both at home and at school. Children are sponges, and it's always a good idea to teach children what sorts of "liquids" they'll be soaking up.

REVIEW: The Queen's Man

Title: The Queen's Man
Author: Sharon Kay Penman
Protagonist: Justin de Quincy
Setting: Winchester and London, England, 1193
Series: #1
Rating: A

First Line: "Do you think the king is dead?"

Justin de Quincy didn't take well to the knowledge that he's the illegitimate, albeit well-educated, son of a bishop. Starting life anew, he's on the road one very snowy day and witnesses the murder of a goldsmith. As the goldsmith lay dying, he entrusts some very important letters to Justin for delivery to the queen. Justin delivers the letters to a very worried Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her son, King Richard the Lionheart, has been missing for two months, and her youngest son, John, is already plotting to take the throne. It is imperative for her to know the identity of the goldsmith's killer, and she charges Justin with the task. Eleanor is a shrewd judge of character, because Justin turns out to be the very person needed to solve the mystery.

Although all the villains of this piece are a tad cardboard, the "good guys" are all very well-drawn. Justin is a treat: young and naive, but with a ready wit and a true sense of honor and justice. The sense of place and time is excellent but never encumbers the story. Swords clang, snow flies, bodices are ripped, and all turns out well in the end. The Queen's Man was a delight to read, and I'll be looking for more books in this series.

REVIEW: Rat City

Title: Rat City
Author: Curt Colbert
Protagonist: hard-boiled gumshoe, Jake Rossiter
Setting: Seattle, Washington, 1947
Series: #1
Rating: B+

First Line: I'd never used my new pistol.

Nothing like trying to have your first cup of java in the morning when a big palooka storms in your office and tries to punch your ticket to the Pearly Gates.

The above sentence is one reason why Rat City sat on my TBR shelves for a few years. I've seen more than one comedy sketch about the tough private eye, and each time I had to decipher what in the world the characters were saying. I bought the book because of its setting, but when I opened it and realized what sort of book it was, visions of Humphrey Bogart, Maltese Falcons, Mike Hammer and the like began tap dancing in my head and I got a bit queasy. This week, I decided to do some Detesto Testing. I chose three books that I'd had for several years and decided that, one by one, I'd give each a chance. If I wasn't hooked by page 50, they were History. Rat City was the first of the three.

Jake Rossiter, former Marine in the South Pacific during World War II, is back home in Seattle and set up in his own private investigation business. He even has his own gal Friday, Miss Jenkins. When Big Ed, a very big, very angry bookie comes into his office and fires two shots at him, Rossiter doesn't have any alternative but to fire back. Big Ed lives just long enough to gasp, "Gloria!" Not long after that, someone else has another crack at killing him and gasps, "Gloria!" before he dies. It's enough to give Jake a complex, and he sure as shooting wants to know who this Gloria is. He calls in some extra help so he can work the Gloria investigation as well as continue with an old case that's been going nowhere.

Fortunately for me, although Rat City has the look and the feel of 1940s hard-boiled noir, Colbert didn't feel the necessity to use all the period private eye jargon. Colbert has an excellent cast of characters, and the plot moved right along like Rossiter's eight-cylinder Buick Roadmaster. I wouldn't even mind reading the next book in this series just to find out how Miss Jenkins' correspondence course is doing. It's nice to have my expectations kicked in the seat of the pants once in a while, and that's what Colbert certainly did.

A word of warning for anyone thinking of reading this book: it does have some rough language, and I'm not just talking about swear words. If racial slurs bother you at all, I would gently advise you not to read Rat City.

Booking Through Thursday

What are your favorite first sentences from books? Is there a book that you liked specially because of its first sentence? Or a book, perhaps that you didn’t like but still remember simply because of the first line?

First lines alone usually aren't enough to make me dive headfirst into a book, although they can certainly pique my interest. I tend to be in it for the long haul, and the characterization and development of the story mean more to me than the first line. What memorable first lines can do for me is recall cherished memories of reading a favorite book, of a favorite character, even of a particular period of my life. More than anything else, this question reminds me of my teenaged years when I wrote to penpals from around the world-- an activity that required paper, pen, envelope and stamp. One of my penpals lived in the UK, and we shared a love of books. We had a running contest. In each of our letters, we'd have at least five first lines from our favorite books. The recipient (without the aid of Google) had to see if she knew the title and author. This went on for months and was so much fun.

Which favorite first lines can I recall now? Let me see….

1. As far as I’m concerned, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities contains the best first and last lines of any book I’ve ever read: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….It is a far, far better thing that I do….
2. I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. (Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen)
3. On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. (Savage Run, C.J. Box)
4. Call me Ishmael. (Moby-Dick, Herman Melville)
5. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)
7. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. (Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston)
8. It was a pleasure to burn. (Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury)
9. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. (The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley)
10. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. (Scaramouche, Raphael Sabatini)
11. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. (Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier)
12. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. (Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka)

For the past couple of years, I have been including the first line in each of my book reviews. What I've found interesting is to go back through my book journal at a later date and read those first lines to see how much of each book I can remember from them.

REVIEW: Mornings on Horseback

Title: Mornings on Horseback
Author: David McCullough
Biography
Rating: A-

First Line: In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brownstone, numbered six, exclusive of the servants.

Gone are the days when the only things I knew about Theodore Roosevelt were: (1) the Teddy bear was named for him, (2) he was responsible for the Panama Canal, and (3) he was the source of one of my favorite quotes--"Speak softly and carry a big stick." Last year I read Candice Millard's excellent River of Doubt about the last years of Theodore Roosevelt's life. Now I've read David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback about Theodore Roosevelt's childhood. How do I feel about our twenty-sixth president? I greatly admire the man.

McCullough's book takes "Thee" from the age of ten through the age of twenty-seven. As a child, he suffered terribly from recurrent and nearly fatal attacks of asthma. He was not expected to live. His father, the first Theodore Roosevelt, had other plans. One of the strengths of this award-winning book is that we are shown the incredible Roosevelt clan entire. We see how the man who became president could draw on the love, support and strength of those around him.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the family's first trip to Europe, taken in part to get Thee to a better climate for his asthma. Reading the parts of his boyhood diary in which he wrote so enthusiastically about the Swiss Alps, I could see that young boy's wide-eyed wonder. Can you imagine how I felt when, later in the book, they discovered that he could barely see thirty feet in front of his own nose and desperately needed glasses? Putting my near-sighted self in his place I can imagine how much more those glasses would have added to his enjoyment of the Alps. The difference would have been incalculable.

Thee finally started coming into his own when he went to Harvard. He was the typical teenager, with his enthusiasms and affectations, and in some circles he was a laughing stock, but he carried on, keeping sight on the lessons he had learned from his father. Graduated from Harvard, he married the one true love of his life and began a career in politics. By the time he was twenty-seven, he had weathered many tragedies and chosen his life's path.

McCullough brings all this to life and makes it crystal clear just how important a role Theodore Roosevelt's family had in shaping him as a human being and a man. The only part that dragged a bit for me was when Roosevelt began to make his mark in politics. I felt as if I needed a scorecard to keep the political Black Hats and White Hats straight, but the one vision that stayed square before me was that of a young boy, high in the Alps, gazing at the world spread out in front of him and grinning that famous grin.

Tuesday Thingers

Today's topic from the Boston Bibliophile: Recommendations. Do you use LT's recommendations feature? Have you found any good books by using it? Do you use the anti-recommendations, or the "special sauce" recommendations? How do you find out about books you want to read?
I have to admit that I really haven't taken much of a look at the LT recommendations feature. I have over 200 books on my TBR shelves and NTR (Need to Read) lists of about 500 more, and those are constantly being updated. Sometimes I don't want to check out recommendations everywhere just to keep myself out of more temptation! So...where do I get the recommendations for the books I choose to read? My favorite genre is mysteries, though I scarcely limit myself to that one category. I am a member of a Yahoo book group called 4 Mystery Addicts. There is a wonderful group of people there, and I quickly learned which readers share reading DNA with me. I keep close track of the monthly reads and Then/Now/Next posts, and get dozens of recommendations from those alone. I also am a list owner of a small book group at Yahoo that also is a source of recommendations. One of the members is a fellow mystery lover, but the other members read quite a wide range of books that I keep my eye on.

I also subscribe to the Poisoned Pen's monthly BookNews newsletter. I read each issue from cover to cover, circling the ones that interest me...and there are always lots of circles! They cover new books outside the mystery genre as well.

Two publications that tend(ed) to have reviews that "spoke" to me are/were Publisher's Weekly and the Washington Post Book World. I was quite sad when the Post decided to stop print subscriptions to the Book World because it was an excellent resource for me.

Sometimes I just cruise through Amazon, or Google certain topics that I'm interested in to add to those ever-lengthening NTR lists. I'm never short of recommendations!

REVIEW: Priest

Title: Priest
Author: Ken Bruen
Protagonist: ex-Garda Jack Taylor
Setting: present-day Galway, Ireland
Series: #5
Rating: B+

First Line: What I remember most about the mental hospital
The madhouse
The loony bin
The home for the bewildered
is a black man may have saved my life.
Jack Taylor has just spent five months in a mental hospital, trying to recover from the soul-searing tragedy that occurred at the end of The Dramatist. His last remaining friend picks him up and takes him to the place she's found for him to stay. On the way, she relates some of the latest news headlines. In no time at all Jack finds himself investigating the beheading of a child-molesting priest, trying to find his friend's stalker, and trying to locate his ex-best friend. It's not easy for him: he's an eyelash away from the booze and trying to stop smoking all at the same time.

It's amazing how much I like these books. Jack Taylor is not the sort of character I tend to like, but such is the strength of Bruen's writing that I bleed for this tortured, tormented and ultimately well-meaning man. We're allowed so far into the man's mind that it would be impossible for me not to find something I like about him. Bruen's style isn't for everyone. Lean, literary and full of lists, reading Bruen for me is both exhausting and exhilarating. Jack Taylor never fails to snatch me out of my comfort zone and slam me against the nearest brick wall. At this point, I eye a Jack Taylor novel as greedily as Jack stares at a bottle of single malt.

This is the first Jack Taylor that I've graded below an A, and there are reasons for that. I read one detail of the description of a character's home and I knew that person was the decapitator. The knowledge hit me as strongly as if I'd just stuck my finger in a light socket. The other reason is the ending. Perhaps Bruen believes his yank-the-rug-out endings are a trademark, but I think it's time for him to find a different way (and spot in the book) to do it. He's got talent oozing out of every pore, so I'm certain he is capable of doing it!

Entertainment Weekly's New Classics

Here is Entertainment Weekly's list of New Classics - 100 of their best reads from 1983 to 2008.
I can't resist lists like this; I always have to see how many of the books I've read. Sometimes the lists make me read ones I've missed, other times they don't. I've put each title I've read in bold and starred the ones I enjoyed. Your mileage will undoubtedly vary!

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006)*
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000)*3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001)*
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997)
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
12. Blindness, José Saramago (1998)
13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986-87)
14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers (2000)
16. The Handmaid's Take, Margaret Atwood (1986)
17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1988)
18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1990)
19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (2005)
20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding (1998)*
21. On Writing, Stephen King (2000)*
22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker (1996)
24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry (1985)*
25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan (1989)*
26. Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984)
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt (1990)*
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1990)
29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett (1997)
30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson (2004)*
31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (1990)
32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch (1988)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)*
35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt (1996)
37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003)
38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore (1998)
39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros (1984)
42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard (1983)
43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette (1988)
44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende (1988)
46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)
47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow (1985)
48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
49. Clockers, Richard Price (1992)
50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom (1990)
52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan (1992)
53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)
54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware (2000)
55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2006)
56. The Night Manager, John le Carré (1993)
57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (1987)
58. Drop City, TC Boyle (2003)
59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat (1995)
60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
61. Money, Martin Amis (1985)
62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick (1994)
63. Pastoralia, George Saunders (2000)
64. Underworld, Don DeLillo (1997)
65. The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993) Saw the play
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (2006)
69. Secret History, Donna Tartt (1992)*
70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)*73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (1989)
74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger (1990)
75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver (1983)
76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell (1998)
77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney (1984)
81. Backlash, Susan Faludi (1991)
82. Atonement, Ian McEwan (2002)
83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1994)84. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998)
85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)
86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts (1987)
87. The Ruins, Scott Smith (2006)
88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (1995)
89. Close Range, Annie Proulx (1999)
90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl (2001)
91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)
92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow (1987)*
93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1991)
94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2001)
95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman (1998)
96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (2003)*
97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson (1992)
98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck (1988)
99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995)
100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)


A bit "par for the course" for me--only 18 out of 100--and there are less than five of the remaining that I'd want to read. Much of what I read doesn't make it to the best seller lists, and it doesn't bother me a bit! How did your own reading stack up against this list?

REVIEW: 18 Seconds

Title: 18 Seconds
Author: George D. Shuman
Protagonist(s): psychic Sherry Moore and Lieutenant Kelly O'Shaughnessy of the Wildwood, New Jersey Police Department
Setting: present-day Wildwood, New Jersey
Series: #1
Rating: C+

First Line: Sherry stepped off the courtesy cart near the hotel kiosk in the ground transportation level of the Pittsburgh International Airport.

Sherry Moore is blind, knows martial arts, and happens to be beautiful. She also can hold the hand of a dead person and see what went through that person's mind during the last 18 seconds of his life. Lieutenant Kelly O'Shaughnessy has recently been promoted in the Wildwood, New Jersey Police Department. She's thrown her cheating husband out of the house and now spends a lot of time trying to remember the last place in which she dropped off her two young daughters. Earl Sykes is fresh out of prison and back on the streets of Wildwood. Not only does he want revenge for his lost years, but he's back to his favorite past time: abducting, raping and murdering young women--a crime for which he's never been caught. It doesn't take long for the first two characters to be in search of the third.

Well, figuratively speaking it doesn't take long. Seemed to take a couple of decades to me. I liked Sherry and Kelly, and Earl was suitably creepy, but the first two thirds of the book were in definite need of tightening. I almost gave up several times, but on the recommendation of a friend, I kept on till the end. I'm glad I did. When all the elements gelled, I was riveted to the page. Besides the draggy 200 pages, I had another couple of quibbles as I was reading: the book is the first in the series centering on the character of Sherry, yet after a minimal appearance in the first 75 pages, she disappears until the last third. The second quibble involves Shuman's continual description of Sherry as "beautiful", "very beautiful" and "breathtaking". I'm of the reading camp who doesn't require each and every character to be physically described down to the last hair on their heads. I'm much more interested in characters' speech and behavior. Reading over and over of how beautiful Sherry is just downright grated after a while, but then I tend to espouse Homer's description of Helen of Troy--he never did. Homer merely stated that whenever Helen was in view, all the men's eyes followed her. 'nuff said!

I'm doubtful at this point whether or not I will continue with this series. If Shuman tightens up the next one, brings Sherry front and center, and knocks off with the beautiful jazz, I'd be willing to give the series another shot.

REVIEW: A Killing at Ball's Bluff

Title: A Killing at Ball's Bluff
Author: Michael Kilian
Protagonist: Harrison Raines, member of the newly formed Secret Service
Setting: Washington, D.C. and Virginia during the first year of the Civil War
Series: #2
Rating: DNF

First Line: Harrison Raines did not want to talk to the small, dirty boy who darted into the Palace of Fortune and headed directly for his table.

Viriginian Harrison Raines was disowned by his planter father because Harrison doesn't believe in slavery. Making a living from gambling and horse trading, he plays a dangerous game in Washington, D.C.: pretending to be a Southern sympathizer while in reality being a member of a new agency, the U.S. Secret Service, headed by Allan Pinkerton. Raines gets into hot water when Rose O'Neill Greenhow is arrested as a spy, and he's sent back to his horse farm in disgrace. Soon however, he's sent for in order to protect a Colonel in the Union Army who is a close friend of President Abraham Lincoln. When the Colonel is killed, Raines begins tracking down the killer.

I enjoyed the first book in the series, Murder at Manassas, but after reading 100 pages of A Killing at Ball's Bluff, I realized that I just wasn't hooked. None of the characters were keeping my interest and even the historical angle was dry as dust. Normally a DNF is some sort of disaster for me; something was so bad that I just couldn't finish it. In the case of A Killing at Ball's Bluff, I found no disaster in its pages. I just didn't find any interest.

REVIEW: Cry Last Heard

Title: Cry Last Heard
Author: Hannah Nyala
Protagonist: Search and Rescue member, Tally Nowata
Setting: present-day Grand Tetons, Wyoming
Series: #2
Rating: C+

First Line: They don't tell you the 10 codes will save your life, though they will: 10-4, Acknowledge. 10-18, Backup Required. 10-24, Constant Monitoring.

Three years after returning from the Tanami Desert in Australia where her lover was murdered, Tally Nowata is still grieving. So much so that she's managed to push away almost every friend she has in her Search and Rescue (SAR) team. A call brings her and fellow SAR member Laney Greer out in harsh winter conditions to rescue stranded climbers off the side of a mountain, but tragedy strikes and Tally soon realizes that someone is out to get her. When her daughter is kidnapped, Tally is drawn deeper into the mountain snows in an effort to rescue her daughter and herself.

I absolutely loved Leave No Trace, to which this is a follow-up. Dodging killers and trying to survive in the Australian Outback made me a fan of Tally's. Nyala is SAR herself, and the experience she brought to the book made the pages fly for me. Unfortunately, Cry Last Heard was a disappointment. Tally is sunk so far into grief and self-pity that she loses any empathy a reader might have for her. I just wanted to shake her silly. The only thing that rescued the book for me was Nyala's experience in climbing and tracking. She brought the landscape to life--enough that I know I want to stay far away from the Grand Tetons in the winter.

Enjoying Sheriff Longmire

If I have one book-related wish this year (besides having unlimited funding to buy any and all books that strike my fancy), it would be to have all mystery lovers give Craig Johnson's Sheriff Walt Longmire series a try. I love these books!

One of the many reasons why I love them is Longmire's view of the world, himself and those around him, and I thought I would share a few of Johnson's descriptive passages to give you a feel for this character.

"Visiting Doc Bloomfield was like visiting your grandfather about ten years after your grandmother died or the cleaning lady had quit."

"Willy Fighting Bear and Zack Yellow Fox were standing between a couple of ornery-looking Appaloosas and were wearing two of the most enormous cowboy hats I had ever seen, the kind from an earlier period that must have been meant to protect the wearer from meteor showers."

"I looked at my recently divorced deputy, a beautiful, intelligent woman with a body like Salome and a mouth like a saltwater crocodile."

"The place was packed as we flooded in, all the patrons freezing at the sight of an armed sheriff, two deputies, an Indian, and a construction worker; we probably looked like the Village People."

Have I tempted you enough yet? Yes? GOOD!

REVIEW: Death Without Company

Title: Death Without Company
Author: Craig Johnson
Protagonist: Sheriff Walt Longmire
Setting: present-day Absaroka County, Wyoming
Series: #2
Rating: A

First Line: "They used fire, back in the day."

It's almost Christmas, and all Sheriff Walt Longmire wants is a peaceful holiday season so he can enjoy having his daughter home from back East. He doesn't get his wish. Called to the local assisted living home by his friend, former Sheriff Lucian Connally, Longmire is dragged headlong into the murder of a Basque woman. When Longmire begins poking around in the woman's past, he finds that Connally has almost all the answers. Trouble is, will Longmire be able to put all the pieces together before anyone else dies?

This series is a delight, and it has everything to do with Johnson's skill as a writer. Longmire is very much a part of his community, and all his friends become well-known to the reader. Johnson, being the savvy writer that he is, uses this very familiarity with the characters' daily lives to jar readers out of their comfort zones. The marvelous characterizations, the laugh-out-loud descriptive passages, and an absorbing mystery all add up to a wonderful read. Craig Johnson is an author not to be missed!

REVIEW: A Watery Grave

Title: A Watery Grave
Author: Joan Druett
Protagonist: Wiki Coffin
Setting: aboard various ships of the US Exploring Expedition, 1838
Series: #1
Rating: A

First Line: The man who was about to be wrongfully arrested waited in the black shadow of a tree by the Elizabeth River.

I have long been a fan of Joan Druett. Three of her books are in my library: She Captains, Hen Frigates and In the Wake of Madness. When I wish to read about the sea, Druett is the first author who comes to mind. So when I discovered that she'd begun writing a mystery series using the US Exploring Expedition as a backdrop, I was thrilled. Nathaniel Philbrick's book about the expedition was one of my top reads of the year a couple of years ago, and I couldn't wait to read Druett's book. It wasn't a disappointment.

Wiki Coffin, the half-Maori son of a New England sea captain, has been hired as the "linguister" of the expedition. He almost misses the adventure, being wrongfully accused of the murder of Mrs. Tristan Stanton in Virginia. He clears himself so easily of the charges that he impresses the local sheriff, who deputizes Wiki to continue searching for the murderer as the expedition sets sail. We know who the killer has to be, all Wiki has to do is prove his guilt.

What follows is a mystery with tight plotting, good pacing, excellent characterizations, and a true feel of the sea during the age of sail. It is a mark of Druett's skill that her attention to detail never gets in the way of the story. I may feel as though I'm capable of firing off a cannon now, but I never lost track of where Wiki was in his investigation. If you like mysteries with a taste of salt water, you can't go wrong with Joan Druett's Wiki Coffin series.

REVIEW: Smoky Mountain Tracks

Title: Smoky Mountain Tracks
Author: Donna Ball
Protagonist: dog trainer Raine Stockton
Setting: present-day, mountains of North Carolina
Series: #1
Rating: C

First Line: If there's one thing that I've learned in my thirty-odd (sometimes very odd) years of life, it's that nothing good ever happens at three o'clock in the morning.

North Carolina native Raine Stockton knows the mountains and woods of Hanover County better than most. No longer a member of the local Search and Rescue team, Raine still gets a call in the wee hours of the morning: a woman and small child have been abducted and taken deep into the mountains. The police want to get right on this, and the nearest SAR team is too far away. Raine loads up her two-year-old Golden Retriever, Cisco, and joins the search. The mother turns up, but her little daughter is still missing. Everyone knows that, with the March weather in the mountains, time is running out for the child. But the case takes another bizarre turn, and Raine finds herself drawn into the heart of it whether she wants to be or not.

I wanted to like this book. I've been to that general area in North Carolina. It is beautiful. I love dogs. Ball obviously does, too, and she knows her stuff about training and the like. But in the end, this book just didn't do much for me. As soon as Raine opened a platt book, all the clues fell into place and I knew what had happened and whom the culprit was. Raine herself annoyed me: bum knee in a brace, she took needless chances with her life. I'm not particularly fond of any character, bum knee or not, who does this. Another character who can talk to dogs didn't set well with me either. I do believe a person can talk to dogs and understand their answers, but the way this was handled in Smoky Mountain Tracks gave it an unnecessary element of woo-woo. As good as the canine part of the book was, I doubt that I will be continuing with this series.

REVIEW: An Incomplete Revenge

Title: An Incomplete Revenge
Author: Jacqueline Winspear
Protagonist: Maisie Dobbs
Setting: Kent, England, 1931
Series: #5
Rating: A

First Line: The old woman rested on the steps of her home, a caravan set apart from those of the rest of her family, her tribe.

Businessman James Compton wants to buy an estate in the village of Heronsdene in Kent but hesitates after learning of a rash of mysterious fires. He hires Maisie to investigate. After meeting the current landowner, Londoners and a band of gypsies who are all there to harvest hops, Maisie soon learns that Compton was right to be suspicious. There's something else going on, too: the locals are very tight-lipped about a Zeppelin raid that killed an entire family in the village. It takes all of Maisie's skill to get to the bottom of it all.

I enjoy this series, not just for the characters and the twists and turns of the plot, but for the glimpse into the lives of the British in the years after World War I. The "War to End All Wars" wrecked havoc all over the nation, changing forever the way people viewed themselves, others, and the world around them. Winspear does a marvelous job weaving all these threads together in a series of books that enduce you to keep turning the pages.

Being a psychologist as well as an investigator helps Maisie with her investigations. Her experiences as a casualty clearing station nurse in France and all of her training give her insight into how to get answers to her questions. I had deciphered many of the clues in the book as I read, but the ending still had an impact. Human beings are indeed the most dangerous, and gullible, creatures on the planet.

REVIEW: Suddenly As a Shadow

Title: Suddenly As a Shadow
Author: Roy Lewis
Protagonist: Arnold Landon
Setting: the area around Morpeth, Northumberland, England, 1997
Series: #12
Rating: B

First Line: There was a time to kill.

Normally I'm very careful about reading series in order; it's just one of my personal idiosyncrasies. Somehow I managed to jump from #4 to #12 in the Arnold Landon series. Fortunately I wasn't thrown off stride! Arnold works for the Department of Museums and Antiquities in Morpeth, Northumberland. In his free time, he likes to walk the countryside and see if he can find ancient buildings, for if there's one thing that Arnold knows, it's ancient stone and wood.

In Suddenly As a Shadow, Arnold is saddled with a difficult supervisor, Karen Stannard, and the case du jour involves Ravenstone Fell, a planned leisure center that's going to be built virtually on top of an ancient burial site. Arnold is invited to one of the Ravenstone meetings, and his supervisor shows up with her friend, Cate Nicholas, who's an extremely abrasive professor at a near-by university. Cate is thrown off the property, which enrages Karen. Karen has Arnold dig into the Ravenstone matter to see if all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed. Cate, who's recently been given her own television series on a local station, uses some of that information to create a furor, and she ends up being beaten to death. Arnold finds himself reluctantly dragged into the investigation.

I enjoy this series because of Arnold's love of ancient stone and wood, a love that I share, and for the part of England in which the books are set. The book begins with a scene in Prague where a man is murdered and then immediately jumps to Morpeth a few years later. Although the change in locale threw me slightly off balance, Prague did tie into the story at a later stage. I downgraded Suddenly As a Shadow a bit because of characters that I just didn't care for and because the culprit was too easily guessed. The characters aren't Lewis's fault, unless you believe (as I do) that he portrayed them too well!

If you enjoy mysteries with strong ties to archaeology and old buildings as well as an easy-going, "normal" main character, chances are that you will enjoy Lewis's Arnold Landon series.

REVIEW: Watery Grave

Title: Watery Grave
Author: Bruce Alexander
Protagonist: Sir John Fielding
Setting: London and Portsmouth, England in the 18th century
Series: #3
Rating: A

First Line: If you would be so good as to put your mind to it, you might try to imagine a storm at sea.

Things are changing in the home of Sir John Fielding above his Bow Street Court. Jeremy Proctor is fourteen now, and whenever he opens his mouth, he never knows if his voice will be high or low. Sir John has remarried. His second wife doesn't really know how to treat Jeremy, but her mind is really on the return of her son, Tom. Tom was involved in a theft and assault, and Sir John managed to steer him from the hangman's rope and into three years' service in the Royal Navy. Tom's three years are up, but when Jeremy and his mother go to meet him at the dock, it's obvious that something's happened on board the HMS Adventure. One of the lieutenants is accused of murdering the captain during a storm off the Cape of Good Hope. But there are irregularities about the charges, and Admiral Sir Robert Redmond wants his old friend, Sir John, to help him discover what really happened.

This is such an enjoyable series. Alexander is adept at bringing the 18th century to life. His characterizations are superb--from prostitutes and old sailors all the way to the gentry. You can practically smell each and every one! Added bonuses in this third book of the series are that we learn how Sir John lost his sight and we get a feeling for life in the Royal Navy during that time. Although not all comes right at the end, Sir John does manage to finagle some measure of justice for those concerned, even if it is at the price of long-cherished memories.

If you enjoy historical mysteries and have yet to try this series, what are you waiting for?

REVIEW: The Ghost Orchid

Title: The Ghost Orchid
Author: Carol Goodman
Protagonist: writer Ellis Brooks
Setting: Bosco, a writer's retreat in upstate New York
Literary Mystery
Rating: C

First Line: I came to Bosco for the quiet.

Ellis Brooks is given permission to write her first novel at Bosco, an exclusive writer's retreat in upstate New York, because the book is centered around what happened there in 1893. The longer Ellis stays, the creepier the gardens at Bosco become and the more Ellis is convinced that the dead lie very uneasily there.

The Ghost Orchid isn't bad; it just doesn't do a thing for me. I knew as I was reading that the gardens were supposed to be creeping me out. They didn't. The two alternating storylines were very uneven. Compared to the characters living at Bosco in 1893 when it was still a private home, Ellis and her gang of fellow writers seemed very two-dimensional. The only time this technique works is when both stories are strong and impel the reader back and forth in time, eager to devour the next installment of each. In a case such as The Ghost Orchid where one storyline is much weaker than the other, the book limps along like a woman who's lost a heel from one of her shoes. It's a shame because the book certainly had potential.

REVIEW: The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Title: The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
Author: Lauren Willig
Protagonist(s): Eloise Kelly, a Harvard graduate student and Amy Balcourt, a young wannabe swashbuckler
Setting: present-day London and Paris, France in 1803
Series: #1
Rating: F

First Lines: The Tube had broken down. Again.

Harvard graduate student Eloise Kelly knew that the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian, famous spies of the Napoleonic era, had been unmasked, but when she discovers that the identity of the Pink Carnation is still a mystery, she knows what she wants to write her dissertation on and heads off for London. Allowed access to a private treasure trove of early nineteenth-century papers, the reader is suddenly thrown into a novel-within-a-novel. Young Amy Balcourt was exiled to rural England with her mother. More than ten years later, she receives an invitation from her brother to return to France. It is her fondest wish to join forces with the Purple Gentian to overthrow Napoleon and gain some small measure of revenge for the deaths of her parents.

This book held my interest through 250 pages. The voice of Eloise was refreshing, and many of her one-liners were laugh-out-loud funny. And although Amy Balcourt was one of those feisty heroines I'd rather slap than listen to, her adventures in Paris interested the latent swashbuckler in me. However, by page 250 the entire book descended into a traditional bodice ripper--a genre of which I'm less than fond. The alternating storylines did not blend seamlessly into each other, and I had serious doubts about Eloise's intelligence, since the identity of the Pink Carnation was blindingly obvious. I skimmed through the remaining 200 pages vowing never to darken the doorway of historical chick lit again. Everything's a learning experience, eh?