Memorable quotes from somewhere in the middle of a book

From A Catch of Consequence by Diana Norman:

“Like most Boston Puritans, Makepeace had a pragmatic relationship with the Lord, regarding him as a celestial managing director and herself as a valued worker in His company.”

Book Review: The Doctor and the Diva

The Doctor and the Diva
Adrienne McDonnell
Little, Brown Book Group, 2011

My Goodreads rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have been looking forward to reading this book for weeks now. I don’t know why. Something to do with the cover, which in my edition uses lots of bold reds and a close-up of a fantastically lovely Spanish-looking diva. So when my mother got to it first, I naturally asked her what she thought of it. She just shrugged, “It was ok.”

Well that was disappointing, but I read it anyway. It’s not unheard of for me to like different books than my mother (Exhibit A: My shelves full of paranormal fiction).

At first I thought I was going to have a completely different reaction to it than my mother. The characters were striking, the period detail interesting but not overwhelming, the story full of just enough conflict to keep me reading. I swallowed up the first half of the book in one delicious gulp.

But in the end, I had to agree with my mother. When my husband asked me what I thought of the book last night, I said, “Meh.” It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t amazing either. It is a solid three-star book.

When I entered my usual stars-only no-comment first review on Goodreads early this morning, I noticed that everybody else who rated this book apparently thought it was a solid three-star book too. Which got me wondering: What makes it that way?

From the summary, you’d think it would be amazing. The action takes place in Boston, Venezuela, and Italy in the early 1900s (one of my favorite times). Deception and scandal abound. And of course, there’s a woman risking everything to pursue her dreams. Even better, McDonnell’s writing is solid, with nothing getting in the way of the story. So why the “meh?”

For me, it has to do with conflict. The first part of the book has it, the rest pretty much doesn’t.

*******Warning: Here Be Spoilers*********

In the first third, Erika’s ambitions to be a world-renowned opera singer spar nicely with her husband Peter’s and even her obstetrician’s vested interest in getting her pregnant. The end of that pregnancy is heart-breaking, and set my expectations up for an equally enthralling close to the book.

Unfortunately, McDonnell didn’t quite deliver. She almost did, and her story kept my attention long enough to finish the book, but from the moment Erika arrives in Italy it seemed to me that McDonnell skipped all the hard conflicty bits.

Erika is not cut off from her family for abandoning her son and husband. Sure, her brother doesn’t seem to like her much any more and her husband divorces her, but the money from her inheritance keeps flowing and her life remains essentially comfortable and blessed. A little bit is made of how much she misses her child, there are a few instances of hunger, but nothing really sustained in terms of the hardship of making it as an opera singer on her own in Italy. She finds a teacher quickly, and when time comes for her debut, it’s a smashing success and she lands one of the most reputable agents in Italy. Then nothing. A span of several months in which people ignore Erika and she deals with rejection is almost completely glossed over.

In other places piles of conflict are ignored in ways that don’t seem to comport with life. For example, after three years of being abroad without sending any word to her son and after losing legal custody of her son to Peter, Erika comes back to Boston, collects her son from school, and takes him to Venezuela for weeks (months?) without telling anyone except her remarkably indulgent father. Her son forgives her for abandoning him within the first few days of her return. Ok. I can wrap my head around that. He’s only nine and he did really miss her.

But I can’t wrap my head around Peter’s response. Peter, the full-grown man whose child she stole, a world traveler in his own right, does nothing about the fact that his ex-wife kidnapped his son and took him halfway around the world. I find the complete lack of consequence Erika incurs for this rash action dubious at best. After all, this is a man who divorced her in a time when divorce just wasn’t done. It’s not like he’s a stranger to taking legal action.

Personally I think it would have been a better book if the consequences for Erika’s actions weren’t ignored and the other characters actually were allowed to get mad and stay mad at Erika, forcing her into some sort of personal growth. Instead, when Erika returns her son to Peter, she returns to Italy and achieves success at the expense of someone else very quickly thereafter. The whole thing is very neatly wrapped in just a few pages with everyone in the book getting at least part of what they want, and Erika almost all.

Related Links:

• Book Review: An Uncommon Soldier (BostonWriters)

Book Review: The Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon

The Queen of Bedlam
by Robert R. McCammon
Gallery Books, 2007

Although Robert McCammon has a long history of writing best-selling horror novels, I generally avoid horror. As a result, this book is both the second book in the Matthew Corbett series and the second McCammon novel I’ve read.

To give you a bit of background: Matthew Corbett is a 20-something former clerk who turns out to be pretty good at solving mysteries. After solving a complex case in the Carolinas (the plot of the first Matthew Corbett book, Speaks the Nightbird), Matthew is recruited as a member of the fledgling Herrald investigative agency. Part of the mystery in this book — who is the Queen of Bedlam — Matthew investigates as a member of this agency, and part of it — identifying the dread Masker and stopping his murderous rampage — Matthew undertakes as a private commission.

Although I had never read him before, McCammon strikes me as one of those authors who develops a passionate following. And I can see why. In addition to his considerable storytelling skills, Robert McCammon can really write a great sentence–when he wants to.

Consider the opening line:

“‘Twas said better to light a candle than to curse the dark, but in the town of New York in the summer of 1702 one might do both, for the candles were small and the dark was large.”

And the closing image:

“How like a maze a fingerprint was, he thought. How like the unknown streets and alleys of a strange city. Curving and circling, ending here and going there, snaking and twisting and cut by a slash. Matthew followed the maze with his glass, deeper and deeper, deeper still. Deeper yet, toward the center of it all.”

I picked those two because they were easy to find again, but there are many more lovely sentences like that in this 645-page book. Unfortunately there are also lots of sentences like

“The horses were really hauling ass.”

It’s like two entirely different people wrote this book. I prefer the one with the lovely turns of phrase.

I have sort of the same problem with the characters.

McCammon’s Colonial America is vivid, earthy, and fascinating, if at times too crude for my taste. His characters belch and fart and vomit, and for some of them, that’s their good behavior. I have trouble reconciling that with the really lovely imagery.

I’ll start with the positive. I really like Matthew. He’s complex, believable, human without being distressingly crude, and smart — although not necessarily street-smart, a fact that McCammon makes excellent use of in driving the plot.

Although some of the secondary characters are well-developed, many read like crudely developed caricatures. I’m ok with that to a point. It’s not possible to make everyone three-dimensional, even in a book of this size. But while the men may or may not be fully developed, to a person, for the brief times they are allowed on stage in the story, the women read like stereotypes.

You have the wealthy widow entrepreneur who’s keeping her late husband’s business alive, but is going to be simply the money behind the business. Day-to-day operations are run by — surprise — one of her husband’s old male friends, who may or may not be her current lover.

There’s the awkwardly unfashionable but personally lovely wanna-be painter/love interest, who might bring bad luck to everyone around her or who may just be a poseur who prefers to focus on the dramatic events in her daily life.

Rounding out the female cast, there’s the nymphomaniac, the redemptive prostitute, and a shadowy fourth figure who will no doubt turn out to be a criminal mastermind (or his love interest/right hand woman) in a future book.

The title character, the Queen of Bedlam, doesn’t even appear until page 330. And even then, she is given only one line. Apparently, she has been so traumatized by her past history that she spends her time staring out a window and doesn’t speak at all to anyone, except to ask if the king’s reply has arrived yet.

At the end of the book, McCammon says something about how the Queen of Bedlam is really New York, but that doesn’t actually address my fundamental problem with the way women are treated in this book. The female characters are simply not given the room to breathe that the men are.

This didn’t bother me in Speaks the Nightbird (the first in the Matthew Corbett series), because that book does feature a living breathing vibrant woman at the heart of the story, even if 80% of the book’s remaining population are men. But the woman at the heart of this book, the Queen of Bedlam, is so fixed in space that it highlights how static all the women are. I don’t know if this is just how McCammon writes women, because I’ve never read any of his other books.

My final problem with this book was that while I really wanted to finish it, I wasn’t motivated to pick it up again once I put it down. Some books I can’t wait for my next chance to read. This was not one of them. It took me three weeks to read, in large part because I was content to have one or two days go by without cracking it open. That said, the story was sufficiently compelling that I didn’t want to pick up any other book in its place.

So now that I’ve finished it, I am wrestling with the question of whether to read any more. I really like this Matthew guy. I’d like to know what else he’s going to do. And the book did close on a strong note with one of those image-ridden sentences that I’m a total sucker for. But I’m not sure I’m ready to sign up for another three-week slog through a book filled with prose that is alternately sparkling and crude, and female characters that are basically flat.

I felt much of the same ambivalence when I finished Speaks the Nightbird. My interest in Matthew got me to pick up the next in the series. Unfortunately, the flaws that I forgave in Speaks the Nightbird bothered me quite a bit more the second time I visited McCammon’s Colonial America, and my affection for Matthew wasn’t enough to overcome them.

I don’t know if I’m going to read the next in the series, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.

Related articles

• Robert R. McCammon ‘The Queen of Bedlam’ Review (horrornovelreviews.com)
• Robert R. McCammon ‘Speaks the Nightbird’ Review (horrornovelreviews.com)
• Book Review: The Unquiet Bones (BostonWriters)

Book Review: Dracula, My Love by Syrie James

Dracula, My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker
by Syrie James
Avon, 2010

When the Borders bookstore by us closed in September 2011, I took advantage of their final clearance sales to pick up two Dracula retellings: Karen Essex’s Dracula in Love and Syrie James’ Dracula, My Love.  I made the mistake of reading Dracula in Love first, an experience that put me off Dracula retellings for several months. Maybe as long as a year. I won’t go into why here, as this Goodreads review by M– basically covers it.

This week after taking all the time I needed to recover from my previous experience, I decided I was finally ready to read Syrie James’ version. Basically, James’ novel tells the story of Dracula from the point of view of Mina Murray, one of the women Dracula pursues in Bram Stoker’s original.

At first, James’ version of the early events in Whitby reminded me so much of Essex’s novel that I thought I’d made a mistake and had already read it. But Goodreads assured me I had not, so I powered on. Once the story left Whitby, the plot became sufficiently distinctive and engrossing that I no longer cared whether I’d read it before. I was enjoying it too much to put it down.

Every once in a while James’ writing veers into an angsty Victorian blend of judgmentalism and misogyny, peppered by predictably disastrous dialogue. But those episodes are mercifully brief, rarely lasting more than one or two paragraphs, and I found I had the fortitude to get past them.

Throughout the book, James uses the incongruities in Stoker’s Dracula (why would Dracula return to his castle in a box when he was perfectly capable of traveling by day, etc.) to fuel her plot. I caught enough of these on my own to make me wish that I had read the original Dracula more recently. I’m sure that if I had, I would have appreciated James’ version even more.

However, while this was a solid read, it’s not one that I feel the need to revisit. Instead I think I’ll bump James’ Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen up on my to-read shelf a bit.

Have you read any of James’ novels? What did you think of them?

Related articles

• Review: The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen, Syrie James (momwithabook.com)

Protecting my will to write

This book is simply too good for me to bear (right now).

Most of the time, when I put a book down without finishing it, it’s because it’s flawed in some respect. Maybe the writing is too full of obvious imagery for me to put up with it any longer (oh look that new character’s wearing green and gold. He must be one of the good guys). Or maybe the plot is too ridiculous, and the writer isn’t the sort of latter day P.G. Wodehouse s/he would have to be to pull it off. Maybe the language is too willfully obscure. Or the characters flat and unappealing, or altogether too perfect.

Sometimes though, when I put a book down, it’s because I’m the one who’s flawed. In the best of these cases, it’s because I’m at the wrong stage of my life to fully appreciate it.

Every once in a while, though, it’s because the writing is very good it completely undermines my own ability to write. My inner editor takes over and whispers in my ear that I will never be able to write like this. Why do I even try anymore?

I used to grit my teeth through it, and finish the book, telling myself it was good for me. That to produce good writing, I needed to read good writing. Then, when I was done, I’d go shelve my work-in-progress and bury myself in technical writing gigs for weeks, months, and in one case, years, until the feeling had passed. Now I don’t. Now I simply stop reading, and file the book away on one of my to-read shelves, promising myself that I’ll read it one day, when my own first novel is finished and the beauty of the author’s gift with language is once again instructive, and not simply overwhelming.

I had written this off as my own personal craziness until I read this:

Many artists refuse to read newspaper reviews for fear they’ll be criticized, but Hilary Mantel has revealed she doesn’t even read the books of her rival writers because she worries her work will not compare.

…

“I haven’t read my rivals because I think it could be a deeply demoralizing process,” she told Radio 4′s Front Row program.

Of course, she’s talking about her rivals for the Costa Book of the Year Award, not some random book she picked up at her local bookstore on the recommendation of a friend, but still. Hilary Mantel, author of Bring Up the Bodies, which won the Man Booker Prize last year and now the Costa Book of the Year award, doesn’t read certain books because it would be too demoralizing for her.

Suddenly I feel a whole lot better about putting Sarah Waters’ Affinity off for another day.

So, does this happen to you? Do you have to put off reading certain books to protect your will to write?

Related articles

• Hilary Mantel wins Costa award (express.co.uk)

Getting the food right: Cooking the way my characters would

While reading Krista Ball’s excellent ebook What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank last December, I realized that my own work-in-progress featured several — shall we say — improbable food choices. Baking with fresh blueberries in New England in April 1880 was just the start, I’m afraid.  A rather unfortunate problem to have in a book in which one of the main characters works in a kitchen.

The Original Fannie Farmer 1896 Cookbook. If I had to choose just one old-timey cookbook for my reference library, I’d go with this one. In addition to actually useable recipes, it includes lots of information on when various foods are in season, sample menus for everything from a simple breakfast to a 12-course formal dinner, and an entire chapter on recipes for the sick. (Photo: Shala Howell)

To correct it, I’ve spent the last few weeks flipping through the stack of period cookbooks I’ve accumulated over the years in an effort to figure out which foods my character actually would have had access to on a monthly basis and what she would have cooked from them.

Turns out, reading (and cooking the odd recipe out of) old-timey cookbooks is surprisingly addictive. For day-to-day practical use, I have to give Fannie Farmer the nod. The recipes in The Original Fannie Farmer 1896 Cookbook are notable in that they actually include enough information for me to cook them.

My other go-to old-timey recipe book, Marion Harland’s 1905 New England Cook Book, has a distressing tendency to gloss over key points, like how hot to make your oven. To a cook trained to preheat her oven to specific temperatures, the instruction to “use a moderate oven” seems a little imprecise. Still, for sheer readability, it’s hard to top Marion Harland.

Marion Harland etal’s 1905 New England Cook Book: The most readable, if not the most useable, old-timey cookbook in my collection. (Photo: Shala Howell)

While looking through Harland’s cookbook for an old-timey pancake recipe yesterday morning, I came across this gem on p. 143:

“Cold days are the gala days for hot cakes. Time immemorial, buckwheat cakes and sausage have gone to the table side by side. There is delightful harmony in this union; but to serve hot cakes and fish together would introduce discord into the best regulated family.”

Yesterday’s edition of Dueling Old-Timey Cook Books ended up the way so many of the Fannie Farmer-Marion Harland  match-ups have recently. I used Fannie Farmer’s recipe for Entire Wheat Griddle Cakes (yum!), but enjoyed reading Marion Harland’s thoughts on the topic more.

Side Note: In case you’re wondering, the 1896 griddle cake recipe differs from my typical wheat pancake recipe in two respects:

1. It used melted butter in the batter (I’ve previously only added melted butter to waffle recipes)
2. It called for a ridiculous amount of baking powder. More baking powder than I’d ever used in a single kitchen event before.

The result: A super fluffy batter and extra-tasty pancakes with lots of rise and a lovely texture. Plus, all that fluffiness meant a single batch made more pancakes than I had expected so there were enough leftovers to feed us all again this morning.

Related Links:

• Book Review: What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank (BostonWriters)
• “How did they make old-timey ketchup?”: A Caterpickles Investigative Report (Caterpickles)
• 50 Books, Day 13 (simchafisher.wordpress.com)

If you can read this, I need you to disable Java in your web browser, please

In case you haven’t seen the story making the rounds on Facebook and other mainstream media outlets, Java 7 has yet another critical security flaw. This one makes it really easy for hackers to take over your browser and steal your identity.

What to do about it:

Disable Java in your individual web browsers. (At least, the ones you actually use.)

You can also uninstall Java 7 completely from your computer, but if you do that, some of your offline software may not work properly. The current vulnerabilities stem from Java running in web browsers, so experts say simply disabling Java in your browser is enough.

But won’t that break everything?

No. I’ve had Java disabled in my web browsers for months now (ever since the last time Java had a critical security flaw that made it really easy for hackers to destroy my life), and after the first couple of days, I haven’t actually missed it.

Gizmodo has some easy-to-follow instructions for disabling Java here.

A final note

My headline makes it sound like you are only able to read this post through the wonder of Java, and that once you’ve disabled Java you won’t see this post any more. It would be marvelous if I were that skilled, but I’m not. I’m just a blogger who wants all my readers to surf the web wisely.

Related articles

• US-CERT warns users to disable Java in web browsers, Apple and Mozilla move to block it (engadget.com)
• Another Java exploit; disable immediately (avast.com)
• Java Vulnerability Will Soon Be Fixed (kake.com)
• How To Disable Java in Your Browser (gizmodo.com)

Cross-posted on Caterpickles.

Book Review: Beginning Birdwatcher’s Book

Beginning Birdwatcher’s Book with 48 Stickers
By Sy Barlowe
Dover Publications, 2000

One of the things that came The Five-Year-Old’s way this Christmas is Sy Barlowe’s Beginning Birdwatcher’s Book. Designed to be a child’s first log of bird sightings, the book includes 48 birds commonly found across North America, such as the Northern Cardinal, American Crow, and Blue Jay.

For the most part, the book includes birds that are relatively easy to spot and/or relatively common, such as the House Sparrow, Mourning Dove, and European Starling. On receiving the book, The Five-Year-Old and I had already spotted about half the birds in it, which made for an encouraging start.

We knew from reading the Burgess Bird Book for Children last year that spotting the rest would be a matter of being in the right kind of place at the right time. Fortunately, we are in a great part of the country for it. The prospect of seeing an osprey at the Cape, a Downy Nuthatch at Moose Hill, or a Northern Flicker at Mount Auburn is an excellent way to pry The Five-Year-Old out of the playroom and into the world.

But don’t think you have to call Massachusetts home to enjoy this book.

The Five-Year-Old’s comments on the murder of crows we spotted along the highway on a recent trip to Dallas. (Photo: Shala Howell)

Roughly half of the birds in this book have ranges that span the entire United States. Several others, such as the Scarlet Tanager, Black-capped Chickadee, and Turkey Vulture, only appear in certain parts of the country (the East, North, and South, respectively). Two birds, the Snowy Owl and the Bald Eagle, are going to be a challenge for any child to find (outside of zoos) due to the sporadic, and in the case of the Snowy Owl, seasonal, nature of their appearances in the United States. Folks who live in the Rocky Mountains fare the worst, as several of the bird ranges explicitly exclude the Rocky Mountains. Still, no matter where you live in the country you’re going to have to do some traveling if your child wants to spot all the birds in their natural habitat.

Fortunately, this 24-page book is slim and light enough to slip into your child’s backpack or travel bag. Each page provides basic information about two birds, including their common and scientific names, size, the type of nest they build, the number of eggs they lay, their favorite food, and general information about their range. There’s also space for your child’s own observations, including the date they spotted the bird, what time and where they saw it, and any other comments they want to make about it.

The book provides 48 colorful stickers that your child can apply to the bird’s basic information page. The Five-Year-Old has been adding the stickers as she spots the birds, but you could just as easily have your child place the stickers immediately to create a visual guide for their bird-watching efforts out in the world.

Whether you are looking for a way to encourage your child’s love of nature or simply a way to pry your pint-sized urban sophisticate off the couch and into a meadow, this book may just do the trick.

Related Links:

• Book Review: Burgess Bird Book for Children (Caterpickles)
• Book Review: In Season: A Natural History of the New England Year (Caterpickles)
• Review: Nature Classes at Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary (Caterpickles)
• Obituaries: Celebrated Illustrator Sy Barlowe, 77, of Massapequa (Newsday)

Cross-posted on Caterpickles.

 

Happy New Year!

From all of us to all of you, a fond wish that your year will be filled with good friends, good books, good luck, and of course, good writing.

Vintage Victorian postcard. (Image via Squidoo)

Book Review: What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank

What Kings Ate & Wizards Drank
By Krista D. Ball
Illustrated by Stephan Lorenz
Published by Tyche Books Ltd, 2012

For me, reading books about writing is a lot like eating celery. I’ll do it (eventually) because I know it’s good for me, but I don’t expect to enjoy it.

I picked up What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank on the recommendation of David Gaughran, a member of Krista Ball’s writing group, because he promised it would be both hilarious and informative.

And it was.