The Sportsman by Dhani Jones

I do so love watching the Olympic Games. While I prefer the winter games and Canadian coverage,¹ I'm making the best of things with NBC-group coverage this year. In any case, the XXX (modern) Olympiad seemed like the perfect excuse to post about a sports memoir that I should have reviewed last year.

The Sportsman: Unexpected Lessons from an Around-the-World Sports Odyssey
by Dhani Jones with Jonathan Grotenstein

I need to open my comments on The Sportsman with the admission that I did not finish the book. Regular readers will be aware that I prefer fiction to nonfiction and that I don't often post about memoirs or sports-related books. Lest any of you think that my preferences yielded to bias against The Sportsman, I submit this confession: I am a huge Dhani Jones fan.² When Time Warner dropped the Travel Channel from our Buffalo cable package, Dhani Tackles the Globe is the show I mourned the most. If anything, my love of Dhani likely predisposed me toward his memoir.

I was excited to get my hands on a review copy of The Sportsman and couldn't wait to get an extra dose of that endearing Dhani personality. The memoir's subtitle, "Unexpected Lessons from an Around-the-World Sports Odyssey," left me expecting a narrative built upon Dhani's experiences making Dhani Tackles the Globe and presented in a style like referenced the television show.

The memoir starts from the beginning ("my parents took two years to name me," 3), explaining how Dhani developed a love of sport and how he came to play football despite his mother's objections. Dhani's first person narrative is a bit too informal (in describing his teenage attitude problems he uses "mofo" and "suck my left nut"), but I was willing to give him (and his coauthor) the benefit of the doubt. But, on page 5, the narrative is interrupted by "A note from Commander Samuel L. Jones a.k.a. Dad". This I did not like at all. Yes, it did give an alternative perspective on Dhani at that period of this life, but it was jarring and odd (shades of helicopter parenting). And, couldn't Dad's viewpoint be shared in Dhani's own words? When a note from "Dr. Nanacy Jones a.k a. Mom" cropped up on page 14, I knew that I wasn't going to make it through The Sportsman. I gave up shortly thereafter.  

I was originally reticent to post about The Sportsman since I hadn't actually read very much of it.  I wondered whether I'd given the memoir a fair chance.  And, I held out the hope that I could get Russell to read it and offer his perspective (that didn't happen, I wasn't a very good salesperson). But, going through the early pages again, I realize that I still have no desire to keep reading The Sportsman. Maybe it gets better, but there were just far too many turn-offs in the early pages for me.

But, just because I didn't like The Sportsman, doesn't mean that you won't. The Sportsman has a 4.7 star rating on Amazon (16 reviews) and a 3.55 on Goodreads (70 ratings).

1. CBC did it well, CTV does it even better. Access to Canadian Olympic coverage is one of the things I miss most about living in Buffalo.
2. And, Russell and I both went to University of Michigan where Dhani played college ball. Russell actually saw him play in The Big House, though Dhani was already playing for the Giants by the time I got to Ann Arbor for graduate school.

disclosure: I received a review copy of The Sportsman from Rodale via NetGalley.

The Pirate King by Laurie R. King

The Pirate King by Laurie R. King

Mary Russell, wife and current (1924) assistant to and chronicler of Sherlock Holmes and his adventures, goes undercover at Fflytte Films at the request of Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Lestrade. The studio's secretary has gone missing, but more significantly, strange coincidences follow the giant of the British film industry whose reputation has been built based on its realism for example, an increase in drug trafficking after a film about a woman and her drug use. Fflytte's current project, "Pirate King is about a film crew that's making a picture--which is also called Pirate King--about The Pirates of Penzance. The picture's director--the fictional director, not Randolph Fflytte--is dissatisfied with the looks of the men in England, so he takes the production to Lisbon to hire some swarthy types, only to have their boat captured by actual pirates" (39). Russell replaces the missing secretary and joins the cast and crew on a boat destined first for Portugal and then Morocco.

Published in September 2011 The Pirate King is the 11th installment in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery series. I requested a review copy of the novel, despite not having read any of the other books in the series, since I was in the mood for a dose of Sherlock Holmes. I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to adaptations, sequels of classics written by contemporary writers, et cetera, and I was intrigued with the idea of Holmes having taken a wife.

Now, I'll admit right now that I didn't finish the book, which is not to say that I didn't give it the old college try. I read 100+ pages before I threw in the towel. Why didn't I finish it? The plot was overcomplicated--even the "author" Mary Russell says in her author's note, "I fear that the credulity of many readers will be stretched to the breaking by the case's intricate, and shall we say, colourful complexity of events" (10)--and the mystery wasn't compelling to me.

Mary Russell, who seems to have taken over for Dr. Watson, is the sole investigator (through chapter 15 at least). Holmes appears only at the very beginning of The Pirate King when he convinces her to go along with Lestrade's plan and as an addressee for Russell's correspondence from the field. This would likely not be a problem for series fans, but it was a source of great disappointment for me. While the film-within-a-film bit was complicated enough especially considering the studio's strict adherence to realism and insistence on not making changes to the film's script, King adds in an abundance of secondary characters a number of whom are excessively complicated themselves (case in point: the Portuguese translator with multiple personalities born out of intellectual need). Where I stopped reading more than a third of the way through, the story was still so bogged down in set-up that I'd nearly forgotten that Russell was supposed to be getting to the bottom of some sort of mystery.

I assume that fans of Mary Russell and this series will enjoy The Pirate King. I'd caution others not to use The Pirate King as an introduction to the series, but to start at the beginning with The Beekeeper's Apprentice.

disclosure: I received a review copy of The Pirate King from Random House via NetGalley.

Lord of the Vampires by Gena Showalter

Lord of the Vampires by Gena Showalter

Lord of the Vampires is the first book in Harlequin's Royal House of Shadows series, a set of four paranormal romances, each based based on a fairy tale. Lord of the Vampires is inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Jill Monroe’s Lord of Rage by "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," while Lord of the Wolfyn by Jessica Andersen is based on "Little Red Riding Hood" and Nalini Singh's Lord of the Abyss on "Beauty and the Beast."

I haven't read any of the other books in the Royal House of Shadows series and based on my experience with Lord of the Vampires, I'm not sure that I'd want to. I like the premise of the series, which is why I requested a review copy of the first installment, but I'm baffled by the execution. I really did not enjoy Lord of the Vampires at all. The only reason that I didn't give up on the novel entirely is that I'd been promised a retelling of a fairytale (at the time that I was reading the novel I didn't know which tale Showalter had taken as her inspiration) and I was determined to find that story. I didn't, though. Alice in Wonderland didn't cross my mind as a possible inspiration because it is not a fairy tale. And while looking back now I can see how Showalter used Alice in Wonderland as a jumping-off point, I'm not sure that I'd have seen Alice in Wonderland in Lord of the Vampires without having been told to.

While the lack of an obvious fairy tale inspiration was a disappointment to me, it was by no means the only one. I couldn't connect to either the hero or the heroine and, more important given the fact that Lord of the Vampires is a romance novel, their relationship lacked any semblance of romance. Yes, there was sexual chemistry, but lust and ownership completely overwhelmed any bit of connection I saw between the two. Jane was not a sympathetic character and her willingness to go along with Nicolai made little sense in the face of his treatment of her. The only thing Nicolai had going for him was magnetic sexuality. He was domineering and manipulative and he lacked much in the way of redeeming characteristics.

The story was over complex difficult to follow with its multiple flashbacks and magic-induced memory loss (maybe this confusion is an intentional nod to Alice in Wonderland) and it succeeds in feeling both slowly paced and rushed. Suffice it to say that I couldn't wait for this one to end. I haven't read much of Showalter's work (just one of her young adult novels), but I suspect that Lord of the Vampires not typical given how strong her following is.

disclosure: I received a review copy of Lord of the Vampires from Harlequin Nocturne via NetGalley.

and on into 2012

The plan for this coming year is to post more consistently than I have recently.  I don't plan to post every day (I still have the big writing project which must be attended to), but I'd like to share my thoughts on the majority of the books I read even if that means more in the way of informal comments than proper reviews.  I also need to write up posts for a number of books that I should have reviewed in 2011 (see better-late-than-never tag).