morsie reads

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

a couple mysteries

Pride and Prescience:
Or, a Truth Universally Acknowledged by Carrie Bebris

Another Pride and Prejudice spin-off, Pride and Prescience is the first in a series (the Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries). It combines paranormal elements with Austen's characters and social milieu.

Caroline Bingley announces her engagement to a mysterious American at the Darcy/Bingley wedding reception, characteristically trying to showup the two brides. After her own whirlwind wedding, however, Caroline begins to act quite strangely. After a number of inexplicable incidents, Elizabeth begins to wonder whether other forces are at work in their small community.

I don't think the book is at all true to Austen (not even Austen's more gothic novel Northanger Abbey), but it was a quick read and can be fun if readers accept Elizabeth as a sleuth with possible psychic abilities and overlook some obvious flaws. The way that the various characters address each other is inconsistent and not appropriate to the timeperiod. Harder to overlook is the fact that the two main American characters are more or less stranded in England because of the war breaking out, one of them suggests that Caroline should be taken to the Louisiana estate to recuperate from her nervous disorder.

Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris

Shakespeare's Landlord is the first book in Harris' Lily Bard series. Unlike the Sookie Stackhouse and Harper Connolly series, there's nothing supernatural going on in Lily Bard's Shakespeare, Arkansas.

Shakespeare's Landlord is a cozy mystery, but darker. Lily is a fiercely independent woman who runs a cleaning service and studies martial arts. Shakespeare's Landlord opens with Lily happening upon someone disposing a body with her own garbage cart. Because she doesn't want the police unearthing her own past, Lily withholds the information she knows about the killing and tries to figure out the mystery on her own.

The backstory that Harris gives Lily is horrific and may turn off readers who normally enjoy reading cozies.

Labels: mystery

Monday, November 02, 2009

It's Monday! What are you reading?

This past week I finished reading:

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris (see post)
Second Glance by Jodi Picoult (see post)

As always I have loads of titles waiting in the wings, but here are the titles I'm actively reading:

The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park by Jack W. Lynch (I'm nearly done with this one)
Pride and Prescience: Or, a Truth Univesally Acknowledged by Carrie Bebris
Shakespeare's Landlord by Charlaine Harris (the 1st Lily Bard mystery; a New York Public Library on-demand audio book)

Labels: currently-reading

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Second Glance

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

I've decided that I like Picoult's early novels best. They don't seem to be unbearably depressing like some of her more recent novels have been.

I enjoyed Second Glance very much. I liked how Picoult focused on the eugenics movement and drew comparisons to modern gene therapy.* I also liked the supernatural elements in the novel and how they were used to tie the past to the present. I thought the twist at the end was particularly satisfying.

* maybe gene therapy isn't the right term, but the right term is escaping me right now

Labels: general fiction

Saturday, October 31, 2009

trick or treat

I got a belated birthday package this week, which contained two books:

Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus by Salley Vickers

In the latest retelling of the world’s greatest stories in the Myth series from Canongate, the highly regarded novelist Salley Vickers brings to life the Western world’s most widely known myth, Oedipus, through a shrewdly told exploration of the seminal story in conversation between Freud and Tiresias.

It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from the debilitating effects of cancer, has been permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna. He seeks refuge in England, taking up residence in the house in Hampstead in which he will die fifteen months later. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger who comes and goes according to Freud’s state of health. Who is the mysterious visitor and why has he come to tell the famed proponent of the Oedipus complex his strangely familiar story?

Set partly in prewar London and partly in ancient Greece, Where Three Roads Meet is as brilliantly compelling as it is thoughtful. Former psychoanalyst and acclaimed novelist Salley Vickers revisits a crime committed long ago that still has disturbing reverberations for us all today.

The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey

Respected financial expert Dave Ramsey offers a comprehensive plan for getting out of debt and achieving financial health. Against a playful backdrop of fitness terminology, Dave gives solid, hard-hitting advice needed to make your goals a reality. Filled with both the hope and the how-to, The Total Money Makeover includes: Useful worksheets and forms Readable and informative charts and graphs The four factors that keep people from getting in shape financially Photos and amazing stories from people who have succeeded following The Total Money Makeover plan

The Total Money Makeover is a necessity for everyone in need of a financial makeover. Readers will learn to live by the The Total Money Makeover motto: If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.

Labels: gifts, nonfiction, series

Friday, October 30, 2009

Friday Find #9

We discussed a graphic novel at our book club meeting on Wednesday (see post). One of our members listened to Nancy Pearl's September podcast on graphic novels prior to the meeting and brought with her a list of the books mentioned in the episode. One in particular jumped out at me...

Stitches by David Small

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die.

Small, a prize-winning children's author, re-creates a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. Readers will be riveted by his journey from speechless victim, subjected to X-rays by his radiologist father and scolded by his withholding and tormented mother, to his decision to flee his home at sixteen with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist. Recalling Running with Scissors with its ability to evoke the trauma of a childhood lost, Stitches will transform adolescent and adult readers alike with its deeply liberating vision.

Holy moly! this sounds both horrible and fascinating. I'm hoping our library's graphic novel collection has a copy so I can check it out.

Labels: find, graphic novel, memoir

Thursday, October 29, 2009

book clubbing in October

Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson

I wasn't sure how Box Office Poison would go over with the book club considering the fact that we universally disliked our last graphic novel selection (Why I Hate Saturn, see post) and the amount of naked man flesh in Box Office Poison, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that almost everyone at least kind of liked it.

Originally published serially, Box Office Poison is a 600+ page behemoth of a graphic novel. Readers can easily plow through it, but I really do think it would be easier to appreciate if read in installments.

On his blog Robinson shares quite a bit of commentary on
Box Office Poison, which makes for very interesting reading. I think an annotated version of Box Office Poison would be fantastic because there's just so much that readers might not catch as they are reading it.

During our discussion we talked about which characters we liked and disliked, the storyline about Irving Flavor and what it told us about the comic industry, the various characters' happy and not-so-happy endings, the two homeless girls and what their role was in the story arc, Box Office Poison's target audience, and the similarities between Eddie and Robinson (at least how they are drawn), among other things.

Labels: book club, graphic novel

future book club selections, 2010-2011

January 2010: The Night Villa by Carol Goodman

February 2010: Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

March 2010: The Blue Girl by Charles de Lint

April 2010: Under the Sabers by Tanya Biank

May 2010: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

June 2010: Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

July 2010: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

August 2010: One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell

September 2010: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

October 2010: Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

November 2010: Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office by Jen Lancaster

December 2010: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

January 2011: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

February 2011: The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan

March 2011: The Host by Stephenie Meyer

April 2011: Wings of the Dove by Henry James

May 2011: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

June 2011: Blankets by Craig Thompson

July 2011: Jane Austen, pick your favorite title
Sense and Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817, posthumous), Persuasion (1817, posthumous)

August 2011: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

September 2011: Buffalo Gal by Laura Pederson

October 2011: Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty

November 2011: The Shop of Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber

December 2011: The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

For information about how books are selected for our book club, see this post.

Labels: book club, lists

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

From Dead to Worse

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

I'd decided to stop reading the Southern Vampires/Sookie Stackhouse books after the seventh novel because I thought All Together Dead was far too violent to the point that it seemed out a character with the rest of the books in the series. Yes, the earlier books have violence, but they were not so in-your-face.

However since then I've seen True Blood (the violent and excessively sex-filled television series based on the novels, but departing more and more from them as it progresses) so when I saw From Dead to Worse (the 8th novel) among the New York Public Library's available on-demand audio books, I decided to give it a try.

In any case, in From Dead to Worse things are back to "normal" for Sookie and the usual cast of characters. In addition to the usual were/vampire dramas (and a revelation about Sookie herself early in the novel), there was an interesting plot twist near the end.

Labels: paranormal