What I've Been Reading--Adult Edition

The Thousand--Kevin Guilfoile

This is an odd hybrid of mystery, thriller and science fiction that centers on Canada Gold, a pro gambler with a neurotransmitter implant to control her severe ADHD. The implant, or "spider" as she calls it, allows her to focus and process minute changes in the environment and gives her near superhuman powers of observation. (Yes, in case you hadn't thought of it, she's a veritable Lisbeth Salander clone.) Anyway, so there's a lot about her father the composer/murderer, the murder of her friends, a mysterious job she's given, a schizophrenic artist, and a giant society dedicated to mathematical secrets of the universe that's fighting amongst its two branches. Crazy. There's some interesting stuff here, but any time you've got some sort of gigantic secret society fighting over the mystical secrets of the universe, I snort and grow bored.

Guilfoile did write a hilarious series of stories about atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair as a detective in hell.

Gunshot Road--Adrian Hyland

I reviewed the first book in this series back in 2008, and this is a worthy sequel. Emily Tempest has a new job with the police as an aboriginal community police officer, but on her first day of training the superior who hired her and likes her winds up injured and off the job. So Emily has to face racism, sexism, assholism, and the death of an old friend of her dad's, a miner who was also a passionate philosopher. Her digging into the case leads her across the outback, into tiny towns and roadhouses, and into a ton of danger. It's a hard read, but has beautiful language and an economy of description that really gets the feel of Australia across with lines like "I threw a scrap of turkey, a lump of roo-tail and an orange in my little saddlebag and headed for the track to town."(5)

Tooth And Claw--Jo Walton

I first found Jo Walton through her Small Changes trilogy. Check it out, it's an awesome read. It's a fantasy series with aspects of mystery and thrillers. The story takes place in a Great Britain that made its peace with Hitler after the Battle of Dunkirk. But this book is even trippier. It's a Victorian novel in spirit and themes--but with dragons. The central conflict is the aftereffects of the death of a patriarch. He left clear instructions on the dispersal of his gold amongst his two sons, married daughter, and two unmarried daughters, but his intent for the dispersal of his body was less clear. (Yes, dragons eat their dead and their weak--this detail lends a great fraught quality to the story). His louish son-in-law eats more than is fair, and one of the sons decides to sue. Throw into the plot other wickedness of the son-in-law, the marital prospects of the daughters, the attempts of the son to rise in the legal ranks, and a Catholic-Protestant simile, and still more plot and excellent characters in this detailed world. A great read!

Knowle's Passing--Edith Forbes

I read her novel Alma Rose back in 2006 and recently decided to finish up reading her novels. Bless you, Phoenix Public Library for your interlibrary loan services! This is an interesting meditation/mystery looking at the after effects and cause of Vernon Knowle's death by gunshot in his Vermont farmhouse.

Stumptown--Greg Rucka

A graphic novel set in Portland about a PI with a gambling problem. So I've been really interested in this but it was $30 for a 159 page hardback. Thank you, ILL because this really was not worth the money. Dex Parios is set up to be a classic noir badass detective with her own code and a heart of gold, but she leaves me cold. I just didn't find the character interesting or sympathetic, even with the brother with Down Syndrome and the gambling problem. Too much action and not enough character-building. And the artwork is all hard edges and gray and blue and makes Portland look really ugly and kind of like Cleveland or Detroit. And the ridiculously leg-humping fanboy introduction doesn't help.

What's next--

We Need To Talk About Kevin--Lionel Shriver

I was on the reserve list for this book for 3 months. Since it's publication in 2003, it's been a perennial book club read because of its polarizing narrator, and the essential question of whether a psychopathic school shooter is born or created. It's now a film with Tilda Swanson. I've read about 10 pages and it floors me with its intensity.

A Discovery Of Witches--Deborah Harkness

I think I described this book as "Harry Potter for adults." That's actually an insult to the Harry Potter series--it at least had some subtlety. This book is an enjoyable romp of a read that kept me busy for a couple of nights, but it isn't in any way emotionally deep, despite attempting to create a shorthand deepness for its characters by putting them in peril.

Right, so we're in an alternate modern time in which three types of supernaturals coexist secretly with humans: witches, daemons, and vampires. Witches use magic, vampires are gorgeous but able to exist in sunlight and eat raw food and pursue their eternal interests, and daemons are brilliant but tend towards ca-ra-zy. Personally, I liked the daemons best. They seemed to be the most fun.

So Diana Bishop is an historian with a specialty in the history of science. She's also the daughter of one of the most powerful and renown prodigy witches of all time, and her daddy was no slouch either. But Diana has no interest in magic, and has never honed her powers. She blames it on the fact that when she was 7, her anthropologist parents were killed in Nigeria for being witches. So no magics for her! Science and logic only! Magic is only for use in an emergency, like when the washer overflows. So one day off in Oxford at the Bodelian, she gets her hands on a manuscript, Ashmole 782. This manuscript is supposed to be missing. And it's locked up in magic, but opens when Diana touches it. But being freaked out, she sends it back to the stacks. Dumb. Ass.

So starting the next day there's all sorts of supernatural with an interest in Diana's doings, including hottie vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont, who's all following her around, gazing at her while sleeping, taking her to yoga, being her new bestie. And then LOVE! And DANGER! And SECRETS!

Right, so Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont have a bad case of The Perfects. Maybe that's what brings them together. Because not only are they each sort of bland, but there's no emotional conflict. Oh, you stalk me? That's okay. You killed someone to protect me? Thanks, hon. Your mom hates witches? Oh, but we're getting on okay. Vampire-witch forbidden love that leads to a secret governing body to tell us to knock it off? Eh, whatevs. You don't believe in intercourse, and are all about the everything but? That's so romantic. Diana particularly has "faults" that are just additions to her perfection, like her "anxiety disorder" that fills her with adrenaline and makes her irresistible to vampires, bad dress sense, and her limited emotions. I mean, you expect a vampire to be perfect, at least.

It's not a bad book--it is very enjoyable, but as you know I'm a character-based reader and the characters in this are not that interesting. So it's just not for me.

More Sad News

Diana Wynne Jones, an awesome British fantasy writer who had a big influence on Gaiman, Rowling and the like, is dying. She was one of my favorite authors as a kid. Don't let your girls watch the movie version of Howl's Moving Castle as it is crap--make them read the book instead. Much better feminist message and role models in the book. And The Chrestomanci stories written in the 70's were the ones I had access to, and they are wonderful for the 8-11 year old reader.