FURIES OF CALDERON, BY JIM BUTCHER

Jim Butcher, the author of the Harry Dresden urban fantasies, has created an astonishing new series with wonderful characters. I generally don't like medieval fantasies, but I couldn't put this one down. On Alera people can harness the elemental powers of air, wind, earth, fire, metal and water, in forces called furies. Almost everyone controls at least one fury. Tavi, an apprentice shepherd, is a freak--he has no furies at all. It's especially galling since the harsh life in the mountainside valley of Calderon depends on furycrafting. Tavi and his uncle Bernard, the Steadholter of Bernardholt, are searching for lost sheep when they are attacked by the Calerdon's hereditary enemy, the barbarian Marat. The gravely wounded Bernard is carried back to his Steadholt by his fury. Tavi's aunt Isana, a powerful watercrafter, heals Bernard, but nearly dies herself.

Tavi has to rely on wits and strength to help his Steadholt fight the Marat, who grossly outnumber them. With his courage he gains aid from Doroga, a breakaway Marat tribal leader, and by the end of the book he and Doroga's daughter Kitai are unwilling allies. In an awards ceremony Tavi, his uncle, his aunt Isana, and Doroga are highly honored by the First Lord Gauis Sextus. (But everything Gauis does has political overtones...)

I've finished the second book so far, and can't wait to get the third.

SUMMER LIGHTNING, by P.G.WODEHOUSE

In yet another break I am re-reading this P. G. Wodehouse classic. In the opening paragraphs Blanding Castle's stuffy butler Beach is reading a Society article in the summer sunshine. (England is almost always sunny in Wodehouse.) He's startled from his reverie by someone whispering, "Psst" from the laurel bush. I know I've read this novel several times before, but I've again succumbed to the comic Blandings world.

NEVER TRUST A LADY by SUZANNE ROBINSON

I must at times take a break from heavy SFF with its wars and W-V conflicts. I recently found this light Civil War romance which chronicles the intrigues of English Lady Eva Sparrow and Texan Ryder Drake. They must foil an assassination plot which would drive Britain into coming into the war on the side of the South. Drake thinks Lady Eva is too frivolous for spying. Lady Eva thinks Drake is a brute who doesn't acknowledge her intelligence. He has to allow her to introduce him into British Society.

Their affair is hysterically PG rated. He accidentally has to hold her and is embarrassed by his physical reactions. She finds herself swooning over his kisses. He brushes his lips over her ears. "Someone has neglected your education, my little peony." Then she has to put him in his place for underestimating her fortitude, again. Together they defeat the villains, and in a final spat he says "Eva, I have no right to ask you to remain here when there's a good chance I'll be killed in this war." She bats him with her fan and replies, "How dare you misunderstand my character after all these months, Mr, Drake? I can face danger as well as you can." Then he asks her to marry him. Delicious froth.

EARTH MADE OF GLASS, by JOHN BARNES

In the 24th century man has created over a thousand new cultures in space, most of them artificial, idealized recreations of extinct Earth ones. Almost all the good real estate is gone, and new cultures battle for marginally habitable worlds. One of these is Briand, with heavy gravity, extreme heat, and a poisonous atmosphere. The only land masses available are Greenland sized islands which rise up into breathable air.

But the real hellishness of Briand is not its climate, it's the ethnic violence of its two cultures, the resurrected pseudo “Maya” and the poet culture of the Tamil.Although the two cultures are viciously opposed, they have each created beautiful cities. It's as though Bosnians built the Sun Palace, and the Serbs the Taj Mahal. A volcanic explosion has destroyed most of the Maya space and they are wedged into part of the largest Tamil city; acts of violence are more common here than in any other inhabited world

Into this volatile situation come Giraut and Margaret Leones, career diplomats who struggle to keep the planet from wrenching apart into outright war. They soak up each culture and entreat each side to seek peace. Margaret and Giraut's marriage is similarly being wrenched apart and neither can communicate with each other. As the Science Fiction Chronicle wrote, “the ending is both surprising and unsurprising, and to understand that paradox you'll have to read this exciting novel for yourself.” The novel is achingly beautiful and one which will remain with me for a long time.

DEATHSTALKER, SIMON GREEN

Yet a third series from Simon Green is this fun space opera. One minute aristocrat Owen Deathstalker of Virimonde is reclining on his silk sheets, and the next he's running for his life, outlawed by Empress Lionstone. His estates and wealth vanish and people he's known for years are trying to kill him. For the first time he calls up his family's internal “boost” powers whose synthetic adrenalin hormones allow him to fight superhumanly for a short while. He's rescued by an outlaw spaceship pirate, Hazel, who escorts him to the icy planet Mistworld, hellhole and rebel planet. This mild historian reluctantly emerges as the warrior his father always wanted. He assembles a rag-taggle crew who will help him face the Empire.

Back on Virimonde the wealthy court Families indulge in intrigues, dynastic marriages, and literal backstabbing. There are Masked Gladiators with secret Family ties, debauched fops, and plotters of murderous vendettas. I especially love Valentine Wolfe, a drug-addled dandy who, faced with a forced marriage, calmly asks his father if he can wear white. With a veil.

This book closely follows the pattern of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey outline. Owen's ORDINARY WORLD is Virimonde, and he's CALLED TO ADVENTURE when he is outlawed. He REFUSES THE CALL when, bewildered, he runs for his life. Hazel is his MENTOR and he CROSSES THE THRESHOLD with her when they blast off the planet. He acquires ALLIES and ENEMIES and faces TESTS, growing in strength. I must find every one of this delicious series.

TRAILER FOR VAMPIRES SUCK

I just saw the hilarious trailer for this parody of the TWILIGHT series--who cares how good the movie really is? Bella is riding the roads of Washington, musing "I feel so safe with you," when she nearly runs over Edward Cullen and crashes her motorcycle. In the second scene she confronts the Jacob Black look-alike. "Why did you just take your shirt off?" "It's in my contract--I have to do it every ten minutes of screen time." Lastly, she hovers over Edward Cullen, breathing "Let's go all the way." Cullen hastily points out, "Purity Ring," as he avoids her.

I had neglected the TWILIGHT series due to its teen orientation, but I'm glad I read it now. It's always good to be aware of the pop-cultural zeitgeist, and know whether you're Team Edward or Team Jacob.

TV SERIES, THE BIG BANG THEORY

When I first heard the premise of BIG BANG, four geeks with a normal girl next door, I didn't want to watch it. I'm fairly geeky myself, and didn't want to see science put down. But after my first viewing, I've become a great fan.

Set in Pasadena, California, the show is centered around five characters: two roommate Caltech geniuses, Leonard, who works with lasers and Sheldon, a theoretical physicist. Their neighbor across the hall is Penny, an attractive blonde, and their equally nerdy and socially awkward Caltech friends are Howard and Rajesh. Unlike NUM3ERS crime-solving Charlie Eppes, the four friend's science careers are inconsequential backgrounds for the storyline. It's more important to know that Leonard and Penny used to hookup, but she rejected him when he told her he loved her.

The dweebiness of the four guys is contrasted for comic effect with Penny's social skills and common sense. The show's real star is Sheldon, an Asperger poster child, who's played by the stork-like Jim Parsons. In one scene Penny makes a snide remark, and Sheldon says, "I THINK I am hearing sarcasm from Penny." When confirmed, he says, "Aha! I'm 8 for 26 this month!"

In another priceless scene Penny drives Sheldon and Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon's female counterpart, to their first date, and vainly tries to get them talking. Every topic falls flat until the pair begin to calculate the number of Penny's sexual partners from the frequency of her dates and “loud noises and references to a Deity.” “Oh God,” she moans, and the pair continue. They are now talking happily while cluelessly mortifying Penny. This is a real jewel of a show. Watch it.

Leonard--Johnny Galecki Sheldon; Jim Parsons. Penny-Kaley Cuoco; Rajesh--Kunal Nayyar. Howard--Simon Helberg; Amy Farrah Fowler--Mayim Bialik.

THE SPY WHO HAUNTED ME, BY SIMON R. GREEN

This second series from Simon Green takes its snarky titles from James Bond movies. Besides SPY, there are also DAEMONS ARE FOREVER and FROM HELL WITH LOVE. Green's hero, Edwin Drood, aka Shaman Bond, takes his name, but nothing else, from Charles Dickens' unfinished novel.

Edwin's secretive family, who used to be the Druids, has spent centuries defending humanity. Their power comes from the golden torcs they wear. When activated, the torcs can shield them from magic, call up a Sight, and beat the crap out of murderous aliens, among other powers. Edwin has distanced himself from his family's manipulations, but he's recalled to retrieve a dying superagent's secrets.

Nearly invincible, when he has to travel to the Nightside, the nightmarish heart of London, he's unsettled, off-balance. He hates the Nightside's miasma of “loud, sleazy, bright color ...like standing on a city street in hell.” “Anything is permitted, everything is for sale,...and no one will stop you or call you to account. Or rescue you when things go bad.” He aches to call up his armor and bring justice and retribution. Of course, that's why Droods are never allowed into the Nightside.

It's that same amoral sleaziness which attracts John Taylor. “Bright neon gleamed everywhere, sharp and gaudy...an endless come-on to suckers and victims and lonely souls. Sex licked its lips and cocked a hip. It was all dangerous as hell and twice as much fun. Damn, it was good to be back.”

Drood is ultimately less interesting than Taylor not just from his tendency to self-righteousness, but because he has fewer tricks and skills. The repetitiveness of “I called up my golden armor” finally lead me to imagine Drood as the Oscar Statuette. I enjoyed Edwin Drood, but I love John Taylor. He is one of the good guys who WILL rescue you from the Nightside.

SOMETHING FROM THE NIGHTSIDE, Simon R. Green

I first encountered Simon Green and his hero john Taylor in the SF Anthology MEAN STREETS, which I purchased for the Jim Butcher/Dresden files story THE WARRIOR. I loved the tale of the deranged and horrifying Nightside of London, where every sin, degradation, vice and desire can be found, and where dwells every monster, demon, and things not yet classified. And someone's graffiti "has misspelled Chthulhu, as usual." A street gang of punks wearing fake demon horns is actually a real band of demons masquerading as a street gang, but they're probably on day release. Humans can have sex with machines, a dead nun will show off her stigmata and an angel trapped inside a pentacle burns forever.

We know we're in for real horror when Taylor says he's seen a werewolf skinned and eaten by the Salvation Army sisters, whose motto is "Save them all and let God sort them out." Taylor's ambiguous friends include Razor Eddie, who rescues him from nightmares he's sent Taylor's way, and Death Boy, forever young, with his symbiotic race car which can handle any marauder and outrun anything.

John Taylor can find things, anything, by using his third eye, his "private eye." Why did no one come up with that joke before? Probably because there are few traditionally trench-coated PI's treading the mean streets of hell itself. This book starts, of course, with a beautiful dame coming into his seedy office, needing him to find her daughter. He'll charge her triple, and then wish it were more, to return to the Nightside he left five years before. I expect great things of this writer.

...Which, with a little more Googling, I find is like saying I think we'll see more of this Stephen King guy. Green has published at least forty novels in multiple different series. He's one of the most prolific SF authors ever.

FLINX'S FOLLY, by Alan Dean Foster

Pip and Flinx are two of my favorite characters in all science fiction. Flinx (Phillip Lynx) first surfaces as an orphan boy on frontier planet Moth. He has an unusual mental talent which allows him to sense other's emotions. He acquires a companion, the flying snake, Pip, with whom he has an empathic bond, and who defends him with a venomous spray. I love Flinx, and marvel at his increasing powers. He eventually did a favor for an alien species for which he is opulently rewarded with his own starship.

It was disappointing, then, to see Foster use the lazy literary device of deux ex machina. Flinx, newly re-united with his old flame Clarity, has escaped two attackers sent by Clarity's suitor, and then is drugged by a third set. Since Flinx had demonstrated remarkable powers even if he appeared to be unconscious, I anticipated his coming through again. Just in time two old friends, Bran Tse-Mallory and the alien Thranx "Tru" Truzenzuzex show up to shoot the villains. Bran and Tru have searched through many worlds and somehow happen on him exactly when they're needed. Pfui!

In a satisfying story, the hero must be tested as hard as possible, and then triumph through his own strength. He can have some aid, but the efforts must be his own.
Harry Potter can destroy Voldemort, but he needs all his friends and allies in Hogwarts to battle the rest of the death eaters.

This is sloppy writing, and it kept me from finishing, let alone enjoying, the rest of the book. I expected better of such a prolific writer.

HEARTLAND, by Mark Teppo

Mark Teppo's quotes about HEARTLAND, the second novel in CODES OF SOULS:"The little mantra I hummed to myself while I was writing was: “Men and Mantras/Shotguns and Sigils.” I was going to write an urban fantasy book without vampires, lycanthropes, zombies, angels, or demons.

"Anyway, we kill a lot of our monsters every year in the fiction we read. By making them desirable, we defang them. We take away what is terrifying about them when we transform them into sex objects, as we convince ourselves that we are mastering our fear of the unknown. But are we?"

Desirable as the idea of a w-v free urban fantasy is, HEARTLAND is hard going.The main character, magus Michael Markham is a "Lightbreaker," who can take souls into his "Chorus," the internal voices which guide and confuse him. He's returning to Paris where he was nearly killed,and suddenly finds himself in the middle of a war where magi battles to become Hierarch, the top man of the mysterious organization. Michael accesses his tarot cards endlessly, but they give no helpful results.

These guys are apparently descendants of the Templars, and they may possibly be searching for the Holy Grail. Or not. It's sort of like THE DAVINCI CODE, with more deaths, only boring. The setup is interesting, but it goes nowhere. Markham is passive, takes no action on his own, and is pushed this way and that both by the Chorus, and his ex-and-future girlfriend, Marielle, who may be his enemy as well. Reading this in the same week as ANATHEM is very heavy going. I am going back to DEADER STILL, in the delightful Anton Strout series. This and the Gail Carriger "PARASOL PROTECTORATE " series are the antidote to this bloated story.

ANATHEM, by Neal Stephenson

When I picked up this 932 page science fiction tome, I hoped not to be disappointed by Stephenson again. In several of his novels, especially the dazzling THE DIAMOND AGE, the opening is marvelous, but the ending is weak, vague, and uncertain. Unfortunately, ANATHEM follows this pattern.

AMATHEM has a bright beginning, as a not-quite priest from a not-quite monastery quizzes a town resident about secular changes since the last opening of the concent/monastery ten years ago. Erasmus, an acolyte of the science based monastery, is taking notes of this humorous encounter. It's only much later that we learn that this seemingly innocent conversation ignites a catastrophic sequence for the monastery's six-thousand year old way of life. Great stuff. Erasmus is a wonderful protagonist whose coming of age story takes him from his Middle Ages life to space age technology.

Stephenson hides his literally earth-shaking events in incredible amounts of exposition. Several times there are more than fourteen pages without a word of dialog. Besides the length, the book is heavy going, as the scientist-priests are in love with philosophy, quantum physics, and mathematics. Good editing could have saved this potentially amazing book.

VOCABULARY. Commentary, CeeViews

In the splendid Alexis Tarabotti "Parasol Protectorate" series, Gail Carriger introduces three new words. The "clavigers," caretakers of the werewolves and agents for their daylight activities, derive their name from "key carrier, or club bearer." That's another twist on werewolf life. Like vampires, they cannot operate during the day. Werewolves aren't burned up by sunlight, and very strong, older werewolves can tolerate it for a few days, but they are mostly comatose. This is an odd limitation.

Where DO they get these ideas? I'm still smiling about fairies and lemon, from the Charlaine Harris TRUE BLOOD series.

Also new is the Dewan position of the Shadow Council, supernaturals who advise Queen Victoria. That word, too, has a long history, and means council member or leader. The word divan is actually derived from dewan because seats of this long cushioned type were found in ancient Arabic council changers. I am unable to track down the meaning of "muhjah," Alexia's title in the council. It appears to be a Muslim name, "heart's blood," or "soul." Is Carriger teasing us with the soulless Alexia having this position? Regardless, these meet my test of great new vocabulary words. I'm thinking about trying dewan the next time I play Scrabble.

COMMENTARY, THE NEW COZIES, by CeeViews.

The proliferation of supernatural series astonishes me.I'm now up to fourteen series. What happened to the super-woman independent PI's of only a generation ago? Of course the immense popularity of Buffy helped, but there was also INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, and the ANN RICE series. Today, although supernatural tales must, by standard definitions, have horrifying moments, the terror is quite dialed down. The Gail Carriger ALEXIA TARABOTTI (MACCON) series is not a great deal scarier than AMELIA PEABODY EMERSON. Indeed, there is more apprehension and dread when Ramses, Amelia's son, spies for England in WWI Egypt.

These last two series have many cozy features. Simon Canderous is an investigator, but for a government agency, and he fears his paperwork more than the living dead. Alexis lives with a werewolf and has no soul, but her Victorian observations are a huge send up much funnier than Amelia's. She has dreary and wittering relatives who must marry for position, not dissimilar to the JANE AUSTEN ladies. The supernatural and predatory has become often funny and by familiarity has devolved into a nearly cozy style. And I like cozies, and heroines refreshed by a good cup of tea.

CHANGELESS, by Gail Carriger

In yet another w-v series, Alexia, Lady Maccon, is the wife of Lord Maccon, a London based werewolf. Alexia is a strange preternatural creature, a curse-breaker who can turn weres and vamps mortal with just a touch. Also, she's missing a soul. Her acerbic point of view is wonderful. The voluptuous Alexia has a figure unsuitable for Victorians, but her husband enjoys it thoroughly. The physical relationship between Alexia and Lord Maccon is as enthusiastic as that of Amelia Peabody Emerson and Radcliffe Emerson in the celebrated Elizabeth Peters series. And Alexia is as deadly with her parasol as the formidable Amelia, whacking the weres to command their attention.

Disaster follows when a strange event plagues the London supernatural community. None of the supernaturals can change form and are trapped as mortal humans. They have lost their invulnerability and face sudden death. Lord Maccon dashes away to fight this catastrophe, leaving Alexia to find and follow him. The werewolf dominance struggles which follow are less interesting. They were enlightening in the Carrie Vaugh "Kittie" series, but are now tedious.

The supernaturals slot into Victorian England in unique ways. They are more or less accepted, and Queen Victoria profits greatly by "her vampire advisers and her werewolf warriors." The East India company is vampire controlled. I knew it! Bloodsuckers if I ever saw any! Enjoy this romp.

DEAD TO ME, Anton Strout

In a refreshing change from the usual w-v's this supernatural novel stars Simon Canderous, a psychometrist in New York. He can tell the history of an object by touching it. This helped him in his previous life as an antiques appraiser/petty thief, but was disastrous in the romance department. (I wonder if this is where Lovejoy gets his talents.) Now Canderous has reformed and is an agent of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. As a government employee, he faces departmental as well as supernatural hell. His in-box is always overflowing, and his field operations are complicated by the amount of paperwork they generate.

In this debut novel he encounters a lovely lady in distress and is quick to help her. Her problem, however, is that she's dead and doesn't know it. Simon's pursuit leads him to the Sectarian Defense League. Even than though it's an agency authorized by the mayor, it's a front for cults. I love the mayor's Office of Plausible Deniability, and the way that mundane humans refuse to see supernatural activity. I'm sure that's the way I'd respond, if I were charged by an angry ghost. A fun new series!

COMMENTARY, Physics of the supernatural CeeViews

In the last posting I praised Poul Andersen for sticking to normal physics in his alternative world. By the same token, one of the the things I hate about the Briggs-Mercy Thompson world is the flouting of natural laws. Humans gain about fifty pounds when they take their werewolf form, for unknown reasons. And in a greater discrepancy, Mercy's coyote form weighs no more than a real coyote, about 40 pounds. Briggs blithely asserts that "this is magic, not science." I think her reason may be to explore coyote-wolf relationships, with the tinier coyote being more nimble as well as sneakier. Still rotten physics.This is the only series I've found where matter relationships are ignored.

OPERATION CHAOS, by Poul Andersen.

The original were story.The courageous werewolf Steve Matuchek and his red-headed witch girlfriend, the talented Virginia Graylock, push back the enemy during a sortie in World War II—the Caliph's War. Andersen's opening is delicious, as the enemy is in control of the weather and throwing the troops a week of cold punishing rain. “Meanwhile, we slogged ahead...the pride of the United States army, turned into a wet misery of men and dragons hunting through the Oregon hills for the invader.” Two sentences later Andersen provides another lively observation. “Our sentries were, of course, wearing Tarnkappen, but I could see their footprints form in the mud and hear the boots squelch and the tired monotonous cursing.” The ramifications of this alternative history are great fun. Magic exists, but follows normal physical laws. And humans are always the same.

The physics of this world is least as fascinating as the adventures. Matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed. Therefore, Steve weighs the same when werewolf or human, and when basilisks change men into stone, the carbon-to-silicon reaction gives off a radioactive isotope. In the second novella of this series, Steve chases away a fiery salamander with the water-burning properties of magnesium and thereby boosts the salary of the tiny physical sciences department. The third novella finds the Graylock-Matuchek family harrowing the skewed geometries of hell with a brilliant mathematician ally. This last novella is the most poignant, with a kidnapping and a soul to rescue. I have never seen the supernatural world handled more deftly.

WEREWOLVES AND VAMPIRES—an astonishing eleven series

1.PATRICIA BRIGGS
Mercy Thompson: Volkswagen mechanic, coyote shapeshifter

2.CHARLAINE HARRIS
Sookie Stackhouse:A waitress and medium

3.CARRIE VAUGHN:
Kitty Norville:A radio show personality

4.STEPHENIE MEYER
Bella, in the Twilight series:A mopey high school student

5.CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Vampires of San Francisco
LATEST NARRATOR:ABBY VON NORMAl, Emergency Backup Mistress of the Greater Bay Area
too many characters to name
no werewolves

6.JES BATTIS:
Heroine whose name I can't remember (bad sign)(Tess Corday)
an OSI-occult scene investigators
Vancouver, vampires, necromancers
no werewolves.

7.IONA AMDREWS
Kate Daniels:Magic/tech turmoil in Atlanta
were beast of all kinds
vampires as orcs.

9.JIM BUTCHER
Harry Dresden series:Chicago
Vampires as major players, at war with wizards
sexy monsters
Werewolves major characters,in Fool Moon
afterwards minor , but persistent players; the bumbling college-student pack lead by the childish Bill, who later grows up to be the powerful Will—almost the only friends Harry has

W-V'S AS SUPPORTING ACTORS

10.TERRY PRATCHETT, the Ankh-Morpork city cities
Angua is a beautiful girl loved by Captain Carrot Ironfounderson
several other supernatural minor, but memorable, characters, including the (not terribly competent vampire) watchperson Salacia and the soldier Malifient in Monstrous Regiment
Also, the Black Ribboner,Lady Margolotta may be the Patrician's lover
He certainly claims to have learned a lot from her when he was young
and who could forget Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer who crumbles to dust every time he uses a flash, but is willing to suffer for his art.
Hadn't realized how strongly drawn these characters are, as is almost ever major character in Discworld
Hadn't noticed it, but there's only one book in which the vamps are evil.
And one with Angua's family and her psychopath brother Wulf

11.J.K.ROWLING
Harry Potter series.
One werewolf, the beloved and poverty-stricken Professor Lupin, friend of Harry's father, nemesis of Severus Snape, very memorable
no vampires

12.SETH GRAHAM-SMITH
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Zombies, but a hugely funny member of this world

MOON CALLED, by Patricia Briggs

Patricia's Briggs series is an exciting addition to the werewolf-vampire world .Her heroine Mercedes “Mercy” Thompson, a Volkswagen mechanic by trade and a coyote shapeshifter. She was fostered by the werewolf pack in Spokane until Bran Carter, the Marrock, leader of all Northwestern werewolves, cast her out when she was sixteen and in love with his son Samuel. (Marrock, a wonderful new vocabulary word, is old English word for a knight who was thought to be a werewolf).

Now she is next door neighbors with Adam Hauptman, leader of a pack a few hundred miles south of her original clan. Mercy's built a life for herself because she doesn't need a pack, unlike weres. Mercy finds Adam attractive, but her mischievous coyote side playfully resists his attempts to dominate her.

Then Adam's human daughter Jessie, is kidnapped, several of Adam's pack are killed, and Adam disappears on the hunt for Jessie. Mercy is forced to look to the Marrock for help. Back in the pack's territory, she encounters Dr. Wallace, the kind old veterinarian who cared for all the weres. His werewolf son has Changed him in order to beat his brain cancer. Now young and healthy, his calm and loving personality has vanished. He's aggressive and viciously quick-tempered, like all weres, and barely restrains his violent tendencies. If he can't get control of his wolf soon, the Marrock will have to kill him for the safety of the pack. The Marrock has his own agenda as he plans to reveal the werewolves to the public light.

Mercy rouses the Marrock's pack to the fight for Adam and Jessie. In the process she uncovers the truths about Samuel and the werewolves' desperate struggles to create families.
MOONCALLED is a fascinating new exploration of the supernatural genre.

DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM, by David Sedaris

I've been re-reading the essays of David Sedaris, who gleefully distorts events through his unique sarcastic kaleidoscope. In DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM, the front blurb lists some of his seemingly normal activities. He plays in the snow with his sisters, he has his blood sugar tested, he gives directions to a lost traveler. The devil is in the details, and Sedaris recounts that he and sisters were locked outside for hours in the snow by their exhausted mother. His blood sugar was taken by a deranged man who mixed up the number for Sedaris' housecleaning service with that of a gay pornographic one. And he helps a lost tourist in one of my favorites, "Nuit of the Living Dead.”

Sedaris is afraid of zombies, and whenever alone at night in his isolated Normandy house, he works instead of sleeping, listening for shambling footsteps. One night a van of lost tourists drives up and he welcomes them in. Then he begins to imagine what the visitors must think of him. He's been assembling a plastic model of the Visible Man, and the intestines are lying on the table underneath a taxidermied chicken. The visitor seems put off by the meathooks inside the antique fireplace, and then Sedaris notices that a cleaver lies suggestively on a child's picture.

By the time Sedaris moves aside a monkey's skull in order to show his maps, I was in snorts of laughter. Sedaris has shared his fascinations with morbid medicine, monkeys, and taxidermy in earlier essays, and they seemed fairly normal then. Only when he imagines the viewpoint of his visitors do they become creepy.

Don't miss David Sedaris. His world is just like ours, except viewed through the eyes of a mad scientist, or a traveler in fear of one.

WHY THE SUPERNATURAL? commentary

The proliferation of supernatural novels raises the question of why this genre is so popular now. I think there are currents in writing, waxing and waning of popularity. A writing instructor told me once that successful writers told the exact same stories, only different. J.R.R. Tolkien may have been the progenitor of modern fantasy, with his legendary Middle Earth trilogy. He didn't have any vampires or werewolves, but certainly chronicled the societies of hard working dwarves, glittering and dangerous elves, and brooding wizards.

Another example is the tough-gal protagonist, with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone its prototype. There have been many followers, of various twists, including Sue Dunlap's Jill Smith cop mysteries. Dunlap's creativity also produced a lowly meter reader P.I, as well as an independent female medical examiner with a gorgeous cook/house boy. V.I Warshovski and Carlotta Carlyle are two other tough broads, given life by Sara Paretsky and Linda Barnes respectively.

Movies of that era also began to abandon the female role of helpless female or girl Friday. Ass-kicking women are now the standard stereotype, from Carrie Moss of the Matrix series to any number of Angelina Jolie's roles. The average woman can't really beat up the average man, but this stereotype is much more fun than the fluttery kind.

Maybe in the future the Chinese will colonize Mars, and spacesuits and rockets will appear, but I predict that sexy, spooky Sookie and her friends will rule for now.

DEAD AS A DOORNAIL, Charlaine Harris, a Sookie Stackhouse novel

I was going to swear off the vamps when I saw the cute cover of this grocery store book. Now three chapters in, I'm wondering why I was prejudiced against this series. I think it was the fact that I don't like visual depictions of the supernatural scene (see previous postings). I was put off by my assumptions about the True Blood TV adaptation. This is obviously contempt prior to investigation. The book is a scream, in a good way. I already don't care much about the mystery, but I love the way Harris plays with her creations.

Fairies, the Fae, visit Merlotte's bar, with their usual untouchable glamour, but don't drink iced tea if you want to meet one. Fairies are as allergic to lemon juice as vampires to garlic. What? Is she just making this stuff up or something? And the mind-reading Sookie deflects the unwanted attention of an obnoxious bar patron by solemnly telling him she has x-ray vision and can read his driver's license through his pants. She's leading him on to ask the obvious next question, so he's pretty cocky as he struts back to his friends, sure she's seen what else he has in that area. Then she switches her attention back to Eric the pirate vampire, who may have information on a local shooting. Who cares, when the inventiveness and humor in this are so much fun.

HOUSE, TV SERIES

After breaking some ribs in a fall, I've been spending time on the couch watching TV shows. I've reinforced my dislike for HOUSE, the long-running series starring Hugh Laurie as a curmudgeonly but supposedly genius MD. It's not the trappings of the TV show which bother me. A glamorous hospital which has all the spiffiest procedures immediately available is much more fun than reality.

What I don't like is House himself. I first got to know Huge Laurie as a British comic actor, playing Bertie Wooster and other roles. The switch from comic roles to dramatic ones is not new; it's been done by Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Bill Murray, to name several quickly. I miss Wooster, but I'm impressed with Laurie's incarnation as a bitter American. Great work. I still hate HOUSE.

In the first I watched he had his team mislead a surgeon by a procedure which temporarily shrank a tumor to the size acceptable for surgery. You can't even think of such dishonesty, let alone not document anything in the chart. What a danger to patients!

That's not nearly as bad as in the next show, where he intubated a patient who had insisted on DNR orders. The patient thought he was dying of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. House arrogantly decides that the patient's own doctor, a young attending who was previously House's resident, is wrong, and hijacks the patient. Of course House is right, and gee, even the criminal charges of assault and battery are dropped, but the ethical precedent is unbelievable. He should have been immediately suspended from the hospital, or, preferably, put out to be eaten by predators.

Disruptive physicians such as House are coming under great scrutiny now by hospitals who question the assumption that brilliance overrides everything. Even if this were so, dishonesty and lawlessness are not excused. HOUSE should go.

COMMENTARY ON TERRY PRATCHETT, by CeeViews

I can't think of many authors who've created a whole universe as diverse yet unified as Terry's Pratchett's DISCWORLD. Larry Niven's KNOWN UNIVERSE, Jane Austen's witty and impoverished England, and Wodehouse's goofy and gentle one, are several which come to mind. The DISCWORLD is a flat circular planet carried on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of the turtle, an Indian legend Pratchhett has taken and run with.

Dozens of books define a DISWORLD of generally medieval technology whose greatest and sleaziest city is ANKH-MORPORK. The growth of the city's police force, mail service, long distance communications, and banking raises the city from medieval to modern, a development which pleases the Patrician, its dictator. The city has a diverse population of many species. The dwarfs and trolls are welcome if they can control their hereditary enmity, and the vampires if they've taken the Black Ribbon Pledge of Temperance.

Ancient guilds include the Thieves, where one can pay a yearly fee not to be robbed, and the Assassins, an elite school with a fine education, and incidentally training in dealing death. Swamp dragons, jingoism, a military regiment of women in disguise, many odd religions, and ANKH-MORPORK's scruffy City Watch flesh out this universe. There are fat, lazy urban wizards and their counterparts, cantankerous rural witches. And then there's DEATH, a character who makes appearances in every book and is the focus of several. DEATH, who speaks only in capital letters, is fascinated by the humans he has to harvest, and tries, in his bizarre and tragic way, to understand them.

The DISCWORLD is one of humor, wit, and wise reflections on our own society without being a fantasy reproduction of it. Terry Pratchett is much more fun than Larry Niven, has as much observation of social situations as Jane Austen, and is much worldlier than Wodehouse. Long may his wit flourish and thrive.

SOUL MUSIC, by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett again shows his unmatchable inventiveness in SOUL MUSIC. A young harpist, a good druid boy, moves to Ankh-Morpork, the biggest and sleaziest town in all the Discworld. His harp is soon broken, forcing him to get a guitar as a replacement. He falls in with Cliff, a rock-eating troll drummer, and with Glod, a dwarf horn blower. Soon they are playing "Music with Rocks In," a intoxicating type of music never heard before. Could it be that the guitar possesses the soul of the player, Imp y Celyn? After all, y Celyn means "of the holly," and "imp" is a small growth, a shoot; one might even say, wait for it, wait for it, a Bud. And it's perfectly good Welsh! One wonders how long Pratchet has waited to play that card.

Almost as long, perhaps, as the scene in The Cavern, a dive owned by the troll thug Chrysophase, where the band gets prepped for their gig. They're served snacks, and another card is played: they get three types of beer, smoked rat sandwiches with the crusts and tails cut off (dwarfs love rats), and for Cliff, a "bowl of the finest anthracite coke with ash on it." Badabing badaboom. The rest of the plot, which has something to do with Buddy's guitar keeping him alive when DEATH's timer runs out, and everyone in Ankh-Morpork, including wizards and barbarians, in love with the new music, really doesn't have to make much sense. It's pure Pratchett fun.

COMMENTARY: Thoughts about Emma and English, by CeeViews

Why should the word "brother-in-law" refer to three different relationships? It refers equally to brother's wife's brother or sister's husband, or sister's husband's brother. I'm re-reading Jane Austen's EMMA (okay, the Wikipedia entry) after a writer mentioned it. At the outset, I thought I remembered that EMMA was going to wind up with Mr. Knightly (do not laugh, I read all the Austens at once and have trouble keeping them straight,) but as he's introduced as her brother-in-law, I thought he was married to her sister. So then, when Harriet confesses that she admires Mr. Knightly I thought, wait, isn't he married? Austen's novels are never like this! Of course, he is John Knightly's brother, and John Knightly is married to Emma's sister Isabella. Got it.

Obviously, I must fit in Austen again between all the vamps and werewolves. Of course, I've already covered PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, the mashup novel "by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith" in my second blog entry.

COMMENTARY ON TRANSFORMATIONS IN MOVIES AND TV, by CeeViews

About those vampires and werewolves--I've realized that I like them only as literary creations, with my own imagination. Vampire movie and TV depictions are amusing and unconvincing, starting with BUFFY and going on to TRUE BLOOD and Stephenie Meyer. Sparkling Edward, anyone? At least that's a creative, if absurd, change from bursting into flames. And fangs are silly. Who's scared of them anymore? Almost every werewolf transformation filmed is slow and ridiculous, including REMUS LUPIN in HARRY POTTER, and the new Benicio del Toro film, "THE WOLFMAN." The transformation of JACOB in the movie adaptation of NEW MOON, however, shocks with its originality. Taylor Lautner goes from pouty running teen to leaping wolf in fractions of a second. The wolf head and shoulders emerge complete, with the rest of the body coalescing behind from sharp fragments. I think there may be part of one tennis shoe left in the picture as the wolf charges, suggesting the boy left behind. It's the definitive version.

COMMENTARY: COME HERE OFTEN? by CeeViews

Recently rewarding myself with new books, I devoured KITTY IN THE MIDNIGHT HOUR (werewolf with her own radio show), by Carrie Vaughn, and KITTY TAKES A VACATION (same). Then I surged through UNKNOWN, by Rachel Caine, (DJINN, genies, but of the malevolent, immortal type). The main course was BITE ME, A LOVE STORY, by the wonderful Christopher Moore (San Francisco vampires, absurd slapstick comedy matching the horror aspect). I was about to end this spree with INHUMAN RESOURCES, by Jes Battis, an Occult Scene Investigation novel set in Vancouver, a nifty change from frequently used California. Then I realized what had happened.

Five books of the same type, all urban fantasy. They includes werewolves, vampires, wizards, and other mythical/magical themes, fine works which take place in the present and don't violate known physics. Conservation of mass applies: a small one hundred twenty pound woman changes into a huge 120 pound wolf. No dragons or elves need apply, although one of the KITTY stories has a fairy. He's human sized, a seductive and evil fae, not a cute little flappy wing type. I've had some lofty pretensions about this blog, wanting people to think my reading varies from genre into sophistication, but what I'm an expert on is what I like.

I do, however, sometimes pick new books in the library area conveniently labeled NEW BOOKS or by browsing books ready to be reshelved. I checked out one this time about a pair of adult daughters whose father moves to Jerusalem and converts to Orthodox Judaism. Interesting premise. Now, back to those vampires and werewolves--see next post.

THE ART OF DETECTION, a Kate Martinelli story, by Laurie R. King, audiobook

I've discovered that I'm least as interested in an audiobook's narration as the plot. In this one the female narrator has reasonably created male voices, although distinctions are hard to hear. The book also has a secondary narrator, a male English voice, who's used for the Sherlock Holmes style novella which is the crux of the story.

This is another in the series of Kate Martinelli, a lesbian police detective in San Francisco. (a San Francisco free of vampire elements, but with other strange creatures.) Kate and her detective partner Al Hawkins are called out to a scene on the Marin headlands where a body is found in a remote park area, in an old gun emplacement. As they trace the victim's past, they find he is a Sherlock Holmes book dealer whose whole life revolves around Holmes. He even has the first floor of his house done up in Victorian splendor, with gaslights, tobacco in a Persian slipper, and "VR" in bullet marks on the wallpaper.

Kate's complete ignorance of the obsessions of literary collectors in general, and the whole Sherlock Holmes canon in particular, seems false, although it may well be true for real police officers. It seems odd that Kate has a hard time believing people would pay fabulous prices for what appears to be junk, and seems to discount this as a motive for murder.

Kate's lover Lee, a therapist, knows about Holmes and fills her in. I'm not sure why things ring false here, except for the fact that Kate is a much more complex detective than, say, Jill Smith, Sue Dunlap's Berkeley police officer. Jill, who fights for the last cherry-filled doughnut in the box, does seem the type to be short on literary criticism, even though Jill is very wise about her Berkeley environment. For the purposes of this book, I wish Martinelli had been more than a "just the facts, ma'am" type.

BITE ME, Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore's unique blend of horror and insane humor is laugh-out-loud funny in this new book, the third in his series about the vampires of San Francisco. Abby Normal, a teen Goth and the self-styled Emergency Backup Mistress of the Greater Bay Area Night, narrates this book in breathless profanity-laced OMG and WTF style. Abby realizes pretty soon that her vampire Master and Mistress are not thrillingly ancient beings; Tommy Flood is only nineteen, and his sire, Jody, is only 26. Tommy worked the late-night shift at Safeway with his buddies The Animals, until he fell in love with Jody and was turned by her. Abby lives to serve them as their minion, taking care of their daytime business affairs and hoping to become a vampire herself. Unfortunately, she's failing Biology 102, and grounded by her mother.

Abby's boyfriend, Steve "Foo Dog" Wong, is a bio-nerd who's researching the reversal of vampirism. He's also the inventor of portable daylight-spectrum UV light mechanisms as novel vampire killing tools. Another vampire killing device is a vile ancient Chinese tea, concocted by the Animals from a grandmother's recipe, and propelled in Super-Soakers.

Now undead cats terrorize San Francisco, baffling all law enforcement except two goth-scene aware detectives. In Moore's talented hands, the creation of vampire cats seems wholly believable. Abby, Foo Dog, Tommy, the detectives, and the Animals combine strategies to defeat the hundreds of cats, and incidentally, the ancient vampires when they do appear.

Moore's plot succeeds in carrying humor and romance, of the mad monkey love-ninja type, through his horror plot. If you've never tried a Moore story before, dive in now.

ROYAL HEIR, by Alice Sharpe, BLACK SHEEP P.I., by Keran Whiddon

I investigated these romance novels to check on my prejudices to them. BLACK SHEEP P.I. has an annoying woman-in-peril plot where the female lead has little action and is very mopey about her marriage to an abuser. She was coerced into breaking off her engagement to the P.I. because her suitor had threatened to hurt her sister. The P.I. was disinherited by his family because he associated with the woman they considered a tramp. When they are thrown back together, they try to resist their passion, but are united again.

In ROYAL HEIR the female lead is much stronger, a pilot who survived a vicious foster care upbringing. The plot has something to do with a kidnapped baby who may be the heir to a fictional island country in the Mediterranean. What's really important to the readers are the sex scenes, in which the abused Julia finally breaks through her old conditioning.

That's not a bad plot point. But it's conveyed in sentences like "...(Her) molten desire, so hot and needy that grasping his head, she pulled his face back to hers and kissed him, wanting to engulf and be engulfed, needing to lose herself inside him." The next sentences describe their sex act, which isn't even as embarrassing as some of those in BLACK SHEEP P.I. “Molten desire” isn't too bad, but I really do not enjoy hearing about “wet centers” and “his tip." Eek!

The best thing about ROYAL HEIR is a gun battle where Will, the baby's father, is hurt and Julia summons the strength to pull him up and shove him up the stairs into a plane. Yeah! Not a superhuman Lara Croft but a regular woman with sudden berserker strength. No heaving loins required.

THE CAMEL CLUB Audiobook David Baldacci, action thriller

I'd seen Baldacci's name many times but never read him before.This thriller would perhaps be better appreciated in print rather than in audiobook format.

The murder of an intelligence agency employee kicks off the plot, after an overly long prologue. The multiple viewpoint characters are hard to follow. They include “Oliver Stone,”a conspiracy theorist who lives in a tent in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, Alex Ford, a Secret Service agent hanging on to his career by a thread, and Carter Gray, a sinister cabinet level Secretary of Security. Others are Tom Hemingway, an intelligence agent who has peculiar ideas about creating world peace, Adnaud, a Muslim terrorist, and several others, including a lovely DOJ lawyer who still bartends. The pace is very slow until about eight of 13 discs.

There is a trite nuclear showdown which of course is only aborted at one second til doomsday. The narrator is good, although he has difficulties creating female voices. I'm not inspired to try another book by this author.

COMMENTARY: BUNNY SALAD RECIPE (as mentioned in review of GOODNIGHT NOBODY)

After reviewing GOODNIGHT NOBODY, I can't resist posting this, because I think it's hysterically described as "easy." These really were brought in batches of twenty-five, to complement orange cream cheese carrots with green shredded marshmallow stalks.

"You have enough on your plate this month with Easter rolling around, pictures needing to be taken and baskets to be assembled. Why not have your little ones help you out this Easter dinner? Below are really easy and simple recipes for you and your little helpers!"


Difficulty: Easy
Things You’ll Need:
Small plate for individual bunnies or couples, platter for bunny family
Lettuce
1 half pear (fresh peeled and halved,(!) or canned halves)
2 raisins
2 almond or cashew halves
1/4 maraschino cherry or red-hot candy
2 toothpicks for whiskers (optional)
1 heaping tablespoon cottage cheese
Lightweight food storage bag to fit plate (optional)
Step1. On a small plate, place a leaf of lettuce as “grass” for your bunny.

Step2. With the narrow end facing you, place pear half cut side down in the grass.

Step3.Press 1/4 maraschino cherry or red-hot candy into the tip of the pear as the nose.

Step4. Break toothpicks in half and poke into pear as whiskers. (The better to have your kids choke on them, I guess).

Step5. Press raisins into pear for eyes. Cut and use half for each eye if whole raisin appears too large.

Step6.With pointed end up, press almond halves into pear for ears. For floppy ears, use cashews. (Nuts, another good thing for kids to choke on).

Step7. Add one heaping tablespoon of cottage cheese as the bunny’s tail. "May substitute a miniature marshmallow for the tail, but if exposed to air too long it won't look good."

Step 8. Run screaming through the house when kids have spilled all ingredients arguing about who gets to eat the maraschino cherries.

GOODNIGHT NOBODY, by Jennifer Weiner.(audiobook) Parker, Johanna, Narrator.

I liked the premise of Kate Klein,the writer-turned housewife who gets to use her investigative skills again when she falls over the murdered body of one of her neighbors. She describes her Connecticut neighborhood as making Stepford seem diverse.

I can really relate when she talks about the perfect stay at home mommies with perfect bodies who are always making crafts with their children. I REMEMBER some of these supermoms, who brought cute little pear-half bunny rabbits arranged on lettuce leaves for the Easter party at the preschool. With cute tiny little sliced almond ears, raisin eyes,and marshmallow tails. Unfortunately, the book is dragging on way too long. I no longer care which perfect neighbor has which sordid past. I thought once that Kate's old boyfriend did it, but he didn't. I'm now hoping that it's not Kate's best friend.

Narrators can make or break an audiobook, and Johanna Parker is good, not great. She really differentiates the women characters, and that's good. But she doesn't have the deeper range for the male characters, and I can't tell some of them apart. Parker is not nearly as good as Isabel Keating, who read PLAYING WITH BOYS

A.D. NEW ORLEANS AFTER THE DELUGE, non-fiction, by John Neufeld

This new graphic (comic book style) novel about the people who faced Katrina propels the reader onward as a nightmare unrolls. The author follows several real people of all colors and ages as they meet the storm. Each decides to go or to stay, and later to return or relocate. No decision is perfect.

Leo and Michelle evacuate to Houston, a nightmarish nine hour drive, leaving behind Leo's beloved fifteen thousand comic books.

Denise, an acerbic social worker, is a sixth generation New Orleanian. She and her family attempt to relocate to Memorial Baptist Hospital, then eventually make it to the convention center. There is little water and no sanitation, but in a departure from what we've all heard, it's the gangsters who provide help by looting stores to bring water, and by keeping order.

Abbas and Darnell are friends who team up to protect Abbas' small grocery and deli. They will finally cling to a rooftop as Darnell's asthma worsens.

Kwame is a pastor's son who's entering his senior year in high school. His father's church will soon drown, and he will finish high school in California.

Dr. Brobson throws a hurricane party in his elegant French quarter home. Later he offers volunteer help for weeks.

Neufeld, who spent three weeks as a volunteer in Biloxi, tracks the storm slowly as the deluge occurs. His drawings are as beautiful as they are dreadful. He follows not only the storm but also the relocation and rebuilding of each life. For Leo, it's getting his comic book collection started again by donations. For Denise, it's being able to return to New Orleans after a bitter time in Baton Rouge. But as she says, it's not over yet, because, “we're not all home.”

PLAYING WITH BOYS, by Alisa-Valdes Rodriguez, audio recording, read by Isabel Keating

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's trademark style intermingles the struggles and triumphs of several Latina women. Her first book, THE DIRTY GIRLS' CLUB, followed six women, friends from their college years. It was an exhausting but fascinating mix.

This book stirs together three LA-based protagonists: the talent agent Alexis, a transplanted Texan who's stuck managing a tasteless, sexist band; Marcella, a former telenovela star hoping to escape her nude photographs and find better roles in Hollywood, and Olivia, a would-be-screenwriter suffering from PTSD since she witnessed the murder of her father by Salvadoran death squads.

The three support each other with humor and warmth in their professional lives and their tangles with men. I feel that Valdes-Rodriguez could have tightened the action by eliminating a little of Alexis' seething about her chunky body and Marcella's hatred of her never quite perfect one. Stay-at-home mom Olivia is initially so dreary and depressed that I began to skip those segments. When she finally re-invents herself, it's worth the wait.

Isabel Keating's narration is splendid; the different voices are distinct and crisp, a pleasure to hear. This artist is top-notch, and I hope to find more of her work. It would be great with another of Valdes-Rodrigues' tasty combinations.

KITTY GOES TO WASHINGTON, by Carrie Vaughn

New fantasy favorite! Carrie Vaughn's heroine is a werewolf, Kitty Norville, who has her own radio talk show. The Midnight Hour takes on the world where werewolves and vampires have just come out of the closet. Kitty gets subpoenaed to testify before a Senate committee whose vicious chair, Senator Duke, seems more interested in persecution than intelligent discourse.

Two things about this series intrigue me. The werewolf and vampire conditions are caused by infectious diseases. Researchers from the NIH and CDC, some unscrupulous, launch investigations to uncover the biological sources of the rapid healing and immortality of these monsters, as Kitty freely labels herself.

But werewolves are not all ravening creatures. Carrie Vaughn explores actual wolf pack dynamics and concludes that for every snarling alpha, there are twelve whose only desire is to submit to the leader. Kitty is one such beta, whose Wolf interior constantly tells her to be quiet, make herself small. No eye contact, no smiling because she might show her teeth--all these show cooperation and keep her safe within the pack. Unfortunately, she's had to leave her pack, which unsettles her. Living alone, she's in charge only with her talk show, dark in the night. She's coping with a solitary life, but submits to others in authority--such as Alette, the Vampire Mistress of Washington, DC

Psychics, dangerous wild Fae, scandal-mongering reporters, and a sexy Brazilian were-panther fill out the roster for a satisfying read. An entertaining bonus short story about a demon-infested band which visits the talk show ends the tale.

Three Roman Mystery Series: comparison, by CeeViews

I found two new Roman mystery series recently and launched myself into them, hoping to find another like the Marcus Didius Falco series, by Lindsey Davis. But the first lines alone tell the difference. From SPQR XIII, THE YEAR OF CONFUSION, by John Maddox Roberts, "There was nothing wrong with our calendar." Steven Saylor, in THE TRIUMPH OF CAESAR, scores better, with "I heard that you were dead." In SILVER PIGS, the first Falco novel, the tone for the series is set: "When the girl came running up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes."

Roberts' hero is the senator, Metullus, who rarely leaves the upper class world. Saylor's Gordianus is sixty-four, and a retired "Finder." When Gordianus stirs to action, he takes a trip to the "dangerous Subura region," where there are "fewer togas and more tunics." Falco lives in the world of tunics, often wine-stained and moth-eaten. His only toga comes from his dead big brother Festus, a soldier-hero, and Falco hates it. The wool is hot and horrible to drape properly. Besides, Falco has already informed us in the first chapter that togas were whitened with the ammonia from urine.

Davis's detail for Roman life astounds. Where Roberts describes shouting workmen removing the scaffolding from a public building, Davis informs us they are cursing slaves, wearing one-armed red tunics. Falco, looking around for a diversion, notes that the Forum steps are crowded with illegal touts and overpriced market stalls. He considers overturning some melons, but settles for some copperware instead, so as not to lose the melonseller his profits. Davis establishes the scene in three sentences and kicks over the copper stall in the fourth, never losing momentum. Before SILVER PIGS is half-way through, Falco has gone undercover as a slave in a silver mine, and been rescued barely alive by a snooty senator's daughter, Helena, who drives a pony cart like a Maserati.

Lindsey Davis states that she wrote the first Falco book as a spoof, setting loose a classic PI in imperial Rome. I can't believe she's serious, but the forthright face on her website doesn't lie about anything. Fascinating description, fast action, and Falco's trademark sarcastic humor combine in an unforgettable series.

QUICK TAKE: PLAYING FOR PIZZA, John Grisham

In a story that promises fun, Grisham leaves his legal thrillers for this tale of a third-string quarterback who relocates to Italy.

MAGIC STRIKES, by Ilona Andrews

This second outing of Kate Daniels and her magic-afflicted Atlanta has more romance, as Kate teams up with her were-panther friend Jim and the sexy shapeshifter Curran, the Beast Lord.

THE FIERY WOOING OF MORDRED, by P.G. Wodehouse

P.G. Wodehouse, the well-known British humorist, has created many enduring characters. One of those is Mr. Mulliner, who has endless nephews.

In this short story Mordred Mulliner falls in love with a girl who lives in a white elephant of a country home. At least it's heavily insured. When he visits her all his competitors are big-game hunter types. Morosely, he retires to write a poem. What a pity that he's got this absent-minded habit of tossing his cigarettes into the waste-paper basket.

How now brown cow-Commentary, CeeViews

I have a T-shirt which states "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." Okay, now that's a lot for one t-shirt, but it reinforces what a devil of a language English really is. So how do we learn it? Slowly, if not at birth. Miss a cue or two, and pow, you're out. But we mowed the hay, plowed the snow, rowed the rivers, watched the towers, and what a fight we fought. I offer the following new doggerel to help you flow down the stream of pronunciation easier.

"The cow and sow just had a row
about the way to mow.
Oh wow, you really don't know how,
Called out the bossy crow.
So Pow! and Zow! they knocked him out,
And then they watched a show."

Pausing only to polish the Polish silver, I remain
Your scribe.

MAGIC BITES, by Ilona Andrews

MAGIC BITES' heroine, Kate Daniels, is a magic-wielding mercenary who navigates the dangerous underworld of an Atlanta which experiences waves of magic and tech. She inserts herself into the investigation of her high-ranking friend's death, in the manner of all PI's. The job takes her into some of the nastiest areas of the city, places ruined by by magic attack and by the evildoers who dwell in them. Along the way she gathers allies, including her friend Jim, a werepanther, and the Beast Lord, the leader of all the shapeshifters in the city. The plot is predictable, and we're not surprised when she experiences enormous physical damage, but rescues the city.

This book is interesting to me mainly because of the vampires, whose description and roles are far different from anything I've seen before. Far from being sexually exotic and dangerous, they're a ruined humanoid species with little brainpower, and less free will. In an insectile manner they cling to ceilings and crawl down walls. They can't even move by themselves, but are "piloted" by others who use them as remotes for observation and attack. But dang, wouldn't you know it, there are some free, unpiloted vampires after all, and when they attack, I'm very much reminded of the hordes of orcs in LORD OF THE RINGS.

It's about time someone took the undead to task, reducing them back to the monsters they were before dozens of books glamorized them.

A RAG, A BONE, AND A HANK OF HAIR, by Jonathan Gash

Lovejoy, no first name, is a scruffy English antique dealer who loves the ladies. He's perpetually down on his luck, despite his amazing ability to sense real antiques which makes him a "divvy." He hates the botched frauds of others, yet is often driven by need to create fakes of his own. However, he crafts them with techniques as close to the original as he can, almost an homage.

In RAG, he is commanded to leave his East Anglia home for London by a criminal antique dealer, Dosh Callaghan, who thinks he's been gypped. "Find me who duffed my padpas."

Duff means to fake. Padparadshas, padpas, from Sri Lanka, are sapphires which are odd colored, orangey pink. Gash doles out this information after enlightening us on faking Holbein miniatures, painted on modern ivorine, a plastic, instead of ivory, and after Lovejoy hears the call of a real, beautiful fruitwood box, found in the modest barrow of a dealer in the midst of the Portobello open air market.

Lovejoy completes the job for Dosh suspiciously easily, but finds Colette, a old friend of his who has lost her antique store and is down to rags and a handcart. She's been reduced to this by the brutal Dieter Gluck, who cheated her and drove her husband to the grave. As Lovejoy prepares to work a scam to catch Gluck, he stumbles across the mystery of Colette's teenage son, who can tell real antiques by their touch. The plot takes many leisurely detours into the antiques world, yet we are always rewarded by Gash's enthusiasm.

ENDLESS BLUE, by Wen Spencer

I wish this intriguing book weren't so exhausting due to its multiple themes. I counted at least twenty-eight. Even ANONYMOUS REX, a complex science fiction/noir detective combination reviewed earlier, has perhaps eight themes. FINAL CUT, the Charlie Salter detective novel just reviewed, has even fewer, about four. ENDLES BLUE has five or six gigantic themes, any one of which could almost be a book in itself.

MIKHAIL VOLKOV, an officer in the Novalya Rus, Russian derived union of worlds, investigates the strange appearance of a spaceship engine which returns to normal space without its ship and covered in coral. He desperately needs to find a weapon which can be used against the Nefrim, humanity's genocidal nemesis, and hopes the engine's origin may point the way.

VOLKOV's foster brother TURK, an officer on his ship, is a Red, one of several types of manufactured, "adapted" humans. Adapted humans provoke endless discussion about racism, slavery, sexual exploitation, finding love, etc.

When VOLVOV's ship jumps through a worm-hole, it crashes in a mysterious space ship graveyard world, the SARGASSO. It's an earth-like universe whose ecology is like the South Pacific, with startlingly different physics. PAIGE BAILEY, the captain of a fishing ship, rescues TURK, then struggles with her relationship with him. PAIGES's ability to communicate with multiple alien species is a vital thread in the book.

I really like the book, despite its many flaws. If the measure of success of a writer is the desire he creates to revisit his world, SPENCER succeeds in ENDLESS BLUE. Next time I'll bring a compass and a sextant.

Commentary:Books as comfort food and obsession. byCeeViews

Yesterday I added another book to my car books pile. A DYING LIGHT IN CORDUBA, is a Marcus Didius Falco Roman mystery by Lindsey Davis joined LOVE LIES BLEEDING, a China Bayles mystery, by Susan Wittig Albert, a young adults book, and several professional magazines. Oh, and a little book on obsessive compulsive disorder. These books met my criteria for a car book.

It should be no surprise that I also have purse books, a greater necessity than ones loose in the car.The current occupants are SF paperbacks by John Barnes, and by Wen Spencer, both authors new to me. I have two books because I'm close to finishing one and don't want to be caught bookless.


I got my love of reading from both my mother and my father. My mother read mainly popular books, mysteries, romances, books on the top ten list. She always settled down with a book in the evening. My father read less often, but his choices were more eclectic, including humor books, Shakespeare, and the old West.

I'm not sure when it became essential to have books with me at all time, or when the number began growing. This habit may be a tiny bit obsessive now, but I would never have become the person I am today without books as my friends.

FINAL CUT, by Eric Wright

FINAL CUT is a mystery featuring Staff Inspector Charlie Salter, of the Toronto Metropolitan police. Salter has an desirable odd-jobs position in the Special Affairs Center. In FINAL CUT he has a sweet assignment, baby-sitting an American-directed film set in Toronto, warmly depicted here. He gains the director's cut view of the craft behind the magic. The villain's escape may be unrealistic, while the contents of a grocery bag are precisely detailed.

The job looks a cinch until various acts of sabotage occur during the filming. After several occurrences, the screenwriter is killed. The pushy young star, the grouchy cinematographer, the unappreciated assistant director, the autocratic continuity manager, and all the others are suspects. Salter investigates with quiet competence, the complete opposite of the flashy car chases of the movie.

A subplot of the novel is Salter's relationship with his teenage son Seth, who wants to dance professionally. Salter is uncomfortable with this decision, though he keeps it from Seth. He wants better for the boy, and doesn't want others, including his police brethren, falsely stereotyping his son as gay. Salter gets Seth a chance to visit the set, where he's fascinated by meeting a famous actor, Henry Vigor. Vigor has made a career playing villains. He's a Nazi in this film, although he escaped from them in real life. Seth idolizes the old man, and by the end of the novel, may have a new career choice.

The noir detective has to walk alone; Salter has his wife and family. That's another reason I love this series. The family relationships are quite real, neither idolized nor demonized.

A CARNIVAL OF BUNCOMBE, by H.L. Mencken, non-fiction

H.L. Mencken was mentioned recently in Connie Willis' INSIDE JOB, and, honestly, I'd barely heard of him before. He wrote from 1899 until 1948, producing an estimated 5,000,000 words. He generated political articles, public health crusades for his beloved Baltimore, and a gigantic work on THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE.

A CARNIVAL OF BUNCOMBE collects 69 of the articles written for the Baltimore EVENING SUN newspaper. His editors caution that his "vivid violent style and...his droll fakery tend ...sometimes to obscure or crowd an astute observation."

In an August 25, 1924 column about the 1924 Presidential campaign, he says of Vice-President Davis, one of the candidates, "Is he in favor of shoving men into jail without jury trials or is he against it? No one knows." Imagine how Mencken would explode about the Patriot Act.

His next column, September 15, 1924, tears into Calvin Coolidge, "He is the favorite of all (Wall Street's) jackals. They believe they will be safe if he is elected, and they are right."

Continuing his slam against Davis and adding Calvin Coolidge "....The money changers greatly prefer a ductile ignoramus, eager for flattery...Dr. Coolidge has been tried (by flattery). And found satisfactory."

He ultimately states that he will vote for Senator Robert M. La Follette, widely hated because of his opposition to WWI. The Senator from Wisconsin had broken away from the Republicans (yes, the Republicans) to form a Progressive party endorsed by the Socialists.

Mencken admires La Folletee for sticking to his principles, but lambasts him. "La Follete (is) busy with his archaic visions of monopolies and his lamentable schemes to curse the country with more and more (political appointed) jobholders."

In a column just before the elections he says of La Follette,  " I shall vote for him unhesitating, for a plain reason: he is the best man in the running, as a man...There is no ring in his nose. Nobody owns him...Does it matter what his ideas are? Personally, I am against four-fifths of them, but what are the odds?"

I don't know of anyone today except possibly Jon Stewart who slams all sides. Even Stewart couldn't get away with Mencken's criticism of former President Warren G. Harding's writing. "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges ... it reminds me of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights."

He goes on for three pages, not neglecting to slam Harding's target audience as "morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables."

And you thought the 21st century had produced great rants.

ANONYMOUS REX, by Eric Garcia

Raymond's Chandler's Simple Art of Murder. “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”
Or, down these means streets a dinosaur must go. In this quick-paced witty novel, Vincent Rubio is a noir-style California private eye with a bad herb habit. He's also a Velociraptor in disguise, one of the 16 species of dinosaurs which have survived the great extinction and insured their future existence by secretly moving into the human world. In a wildly complicated plot Rubio must avenge his dead partner and solve the murder of Raymond McBride, a prominent Carnatour entertainment mogul. There's a dame with secrets, lethal minions, forbidden love between different dinosaur species, and a terrible basil addiction to fight. Garcia has created a wonderful world about hiding and coming out, and the one regret is that he can sustain it in only three books.

WELLSTONE, by Wil McCarthy

In this space yarn, nanotechnology in the ubiquitous form of wellstone, a programmable material, creates everything from buildings to clothing. Fax machines provide instantaneous travel and convert matter into food, boats, or anything else desired.

The Prince of Tonga leads a colony of over-privileged boys, more Peter Pan than Lord of the Flies, to an escape from the summer camp planet where they've been exiled. They discover the raw edges of their universe, not in a Star Wars-like cantina, but a wood-faced coffee shop in Denver. When these rowdies mess up the cafe, the Queen and King of Tonga take note. The Queen of All Things sends them back to a harsh world where there are no flush toilets and their dorky uniforms can't be programmed into anything stylish. The locked fax machine thwarts any travel. It serves only s'mores and frank'n'beans, leaving them to climb the dangerous peach pie trees for any variety to their diet. The defiant Prince plots his next escape with passion but no practicality.

I'm not sure in what wild brainstorming session Wil McCarthy conceived his universe, but it's a splendid one with chuckling references to the cone of silence and adamantium. Youthful rebels dash across the solar system, while only Conrad Mursk, the prince's best friend, argues for reason. When the defiant teens fail to calculate the dangers of their journey, the trip turns deadly.

NINETEEN MINUTES, by Jodi Picoult

I usually take home grocery store books as comfort food. Rarely have I brought home those which are thoughtful and provocative, but “Entertainment Weekly” had given this one a short cover blurb. NINETEEN MINUTES is about the relationships illuminated and changed by a high school shooting spree. In this multi-viewpoint book, two pairs of mothers and children vibrate at the core.

Peter Houghton is the shooter at the school, a lonely bullied boy who strikes back viciously. Lacy Houghton, his midwife mom, is as horrified as anyone else at the shooting. She continuously struggles to understand her son's actions and second-guesses every minute she's ever spent with him. (Wouldn't you?) Alex Cormier is the judge who'll preside over Peter's trial. Lacy delivered her daughter, Josie, with whom the icy career woman has been estranged. Now Alex struggles to comfort her wounded daughter.

Josie and Peter used to be friends, until Josie rejected the always-awkward boy to join the popular crowd. When the detective investigating the shooting finds Peter's yearbook with his victim's faces circled, Josie's is the only one circled, then crossed out, with "Let Live" next to it.

Lacy's self-lacerating thoughts are especially compelling. Did she push him too much? Compare him too much to his golden brother? Not monitor his computer use enough? Leave him too much alone? When the shooting victims are evacuated, their foreheads are numbered with a Sharpie marker to aid in identification. There's no such mark for a killer, and anyone who's ever nervously watched a moody teen, or been one, will identify with that.

CIAO AMERICA, by Beppe Severgnini, Non- Fiction

Beppe Severgnini and his family lived in Washington, D.C. for a year in 1995, and he affectionately describes the America he found then. It seems such a long time ago in the post-9/11, post 2008 crash, world. But his observations still apply in the main, and we have a commentator here perhaps better than we even deserve.

He writes of our well-known shortcomings: we're fat, we can't spell, don't know any history, and share personal information too quickly. But he also describes the things he didn't expect. Deep, deep discounts on everything, to say nothing of outlet malls and free return policies, lure him.

We have 1-800 numbers which dispense detailed advice on repairs from computers to refrigerators, all free. In his Georgetown church, he notes the "choreography" in which each pew of worshipers goes down the center aisle to communion, and comes back up the side. They even stand politely, singing the last hymn, while the celebrant recesses. Italians apparently crowd the communion rail and bolt away.

We further delight him in the inventiveness of our language; we mash up letters and numbers for wonderful creations. I would not have thought that "K-9" for canine, and "want2CU" would have been that exciting, although a vanity plate such as L84AD8 does sound original. In a throwaway newspaper I read today, one company promised "2X UR tax return," while another said they'd keep your car Shine-N. I'm tickled to recognize how these neologisms pleased him.

In this cheerful account, Severgnini says he and his family were happy here. That's the best report card anyone could ever give.

HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, by Thomas Cahill, Non-fiction

The author of this book is THOMAS Cahill, the scholar, not TIM Cahill, the humorous travel writer. The work would be much livelier if they had collaborated, but it's a great book anyway. Thomas Cahill postulates that Irish monks were spared the slaughter of the rest of the Roman empire because they lived in remote islands the barbarians didn't want. In these quiet and isolated locales, they continued the monastery tradition of creating wondrous illuminated manuscripts. Cahill discovered that, surprisingly, they not only copied holy works, but also pagan and secular ones. They recreated Roman and Greek writings, including plays, then spread these lost works back through medieval Europe hundreds of years later, when it was safe for Irish missionary monks to travel again. The re-emergence of these classics sparked the interests of a continent newly interested in enrichment and intellectual challenges.

Since it was St. Patrick who brought Christianity to Ireland, he's one of the heroes who kept our Western world from collapsing. Think about this on March 17 as you drink green beer and march in parades.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIVING SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE, by Mil Millington

I first found Mil Millington's works through a link on cult humorist Christopher Moore's website, in which Moore lists authors to read while waiting for his next book. Mil Millington's writing has evolved from his hugely hilarious, though eventually repetitious, blog THINGS MY GIRLFRIENDS AND I HAVE ARGUED ABOUT to several novels. The first is titled after the blog, and has humorous but not very satisfying action built around blog-type arguments. In INSTRUCTIONS Millington has crafted a much richer story.

Chris is a advertising writer who's outstanding at his work, but despises it and everyone he works with. He plays pranks such as creating rude acrostics in his layouts, and giving child actors obscene foreign phrases to mouth unknowingly. He's planning to resign from his job, and gets roaringly drunk with his friends, in 1988. When he wakes up the next morning, he's in a strange bed, and it's later than he thinks. Eighteen years later. It's not a coming of age tale; it's a coming of sudden middle age tale. He's not quite sure what to do about the mystery woman living in his house, but that doesn't matter while he's got a gut to tame and a life to reclaim.

DAMAGE CONTROL, by J.A. Jance

A critic once pooh-poohed grocery store books, saying that he didn't want to purchase his reading the same place as he bought his laundry detergent, or words to that effect. Working mothers who pulled DAMAGE CONTROL from the shelf, however, knew exactly what they were getting—another chapter in the life of working mother Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady. The Arizona sheriff wrestles with several violent deaths which occur in one storm-ravaged weekend, while juggling the needs of her infant son, teenage daughter, and her supportive but wearying at-home spouse, Butch, whose writing career needs more time. I don't know why Jance always feels compelled to make at least one of the deaths in her books excessively violent, as she does here with that of a young woman. Her writing is strong enough to hold readers without this fillip of gruesomeness.

Male critics may scoff at scenes of hostage negotiations interspersed with those of laundry, new-parent sleep deprivation,and the joys of takeout pizza, but this is exactly where Jance connects with her readers. Brady seems at her most realistic here when she soft-pedals her day to her husband, not wanting the grimness to spill into her home sphere. As someone whose work has been at times grim and demanding, I'll take Joanna Brady as a role model anytime.

INSIDE JOB, by Connie Willis

In the novella *Inside Job,* Connie Willis effervesces with wit and humor. The tale of a professional skeptic, Rob, his beautiful researcher, Kildy, and the medium they hope to debunk illuminates the whole credulous Hollywood landscape which surges after each new psychic offering. Willis shines a light over the addictions of those false hopes, from aura cleansing to psychic liposuction to prior-life chiropractic (the present back pains are due to trauma suffered working at the Pyramids or Stonehenge, don't you know).

Rob spends his professional life battling these swindlers, and he offers amazing insights in the history of various forms of spiritualistic fraudulence. For example, Uri Geller, the 1970's psychic who could supposedly bend spoons with his mental powers, was exposed as a fraud--by Johnny Carson, on the Tonight Show. Carson had been a stage magician in his early career, which was something Geller forgot.

Then a funny thing happens on the way to debunk the medium--and it's a wry, intelligent twist negotiated with expertise and poignancy. The writing is as clear here as a stream in a Japanese garden, with each curve and stone placed so perfectly the effort is invisible. *Inside Job* has become an instant favorite of mine.

I wish the same could be said of Willis' *D.A.*, which seems to be a short story published alone in novella form, with the same dust jacket artist as *Inside Job.* *D.A.* is a mildly amusing little work which might elicit a smile in a short story collection while you thumbed over it for something better. The illustrations, which appear to all be drawings of Willis herself, are so cutesy they gag. I'm hoping she only wanted to take a little breather from her normally thoughtful, more serious output. This is the writer, after all, who took five years writing the dark novel *Doomsday Book,* about the Black Plague. But no one who ever met Willis through *D.A* would be compelled to seek any more of her writing. Back to the grindstone for you, Connie, and please create something special again, like *Inside Job.*

A Plus

To establish my gender prefence as female, after my last post I must comment that if I'd seen a movie-sized poster of the shirtless Matthew McConaughey throwing back his head in shame and agony from the scarlet letter carved on his chest, I don't think I'd have forgotten the Reverend Mr.Dimmesdale either.

GRENDEL, from BEOWULF

One of the greatest pleasures in reading is the Easter egg type in-joke, the subtly placed reference to another literary work. I'm always delighted by these, as I was a few days ago when re-reading GUARDS, GUARDS. A group of would-be heroes is studying the sign announcing the 50,000 dollar reward offered for the slaying of the Ankh-Morpork dragon, and bemoaning the city's cheapness. “You spend that much in nets,” when one comments on the generally poor qualities of quarries nowadays.

So quickly that I'm barely conscious of it, my mind decodes the next few lines. “And monsters is getting more uppity these days. A guy killed one and stuck its arm up over the hall.” What? Why not its head? Extremely odd. Isn't there something very faintly familiar about this?

The next speaker says: “Pour enco-ra-jay las ortas,” a horrid pidgin French. What does this mean? To encourage the other monsters to behave? As an example to them? This comment delays gratification and deepens the confusion. We're not in doubt long, however:

“And the the very next day its mum came down to the hall to complain. Its actual mum! I ask you.”

A flash picture, from a recent movie, of Angelina Jolie's back, her long braid whipping around like a tail, bangs through my brain as I catch the joke:
OHH! I know what this is! This is Grendel and Grendel's mother!
Terry Pratchett has neatly riffed on one of the literary ancients, BEOWULF, decades after the last time I'd thought of it. This almost justifies my having to study the epic poem in high school. But then, if we'd had Angelina Jolie's bare back to enco-ra-jay us, BEOWULF would never have been forgotten in the first place.

Character View: Carrot Ironfounderson, GUARDS,GUARDS, Terry Pratchett.

One of the best reasons to read Terry Pratchett is to experience his characters. One of my favorites is Carrot, the 2 meter tall adopted dwarf who debuts in GUARDS, GUARDS.

Carrot starts out as a naive young man who has to be told he's adopted by his dwarf parents. Rescued long ago when bandits attacked a cart near the mine, he's been clueless even though his dwarf name means 'Head-Banger.' His parents innocently send him to wicked Ankh-Morpork to become a watchman. Carrot has read all the "Laws and Ordinances of Ankh-Morpork" and is ready to enforce every one. For example, he actually arrests the head of the Thieves' Guild for thieving. But he quickly learns it's legally established, the better to collect taxes from, and protects the citizenry from filching for a small sum per annum. His sergeant saves him from disaster when he approaches the Patrician, supreme ruler of the city, about a vehicle violation.

He's appalled by the vicious world of dwarf bars, wades into the fighting, reminds them in Dwarfish them to think of their mothers, and brings the battlers to tears. Carrot also shares dwarfish tendencies to think literally, and doesn't understand metaphor. Woe betide the evil-doer when Captain Vimes finally tells Carrot to throw the book at him.

By the end of the book Carrot is rallying his cowardly NCO superiors to risk advances towards the dragon. He's strangely persuasive for one so young. It seems that everyone wants to follow Carrot. Maybe it has something to do with his crown-shaped birthmark, or the non-magical, but very powerful, sword he carries...

ROUTE 66 A.D.,HOW THE ROMANS INVENTED TOURISM, by Tony Perrottet, non-fiction

I referenced Tony Perrottet in my post on GUARDS, GUARDS, and realized that I hadn't written about this book. This is another quirky travel book which describes the Romans' love of travel, and their determination to write comments about their trips in ancient graffiti.They loved the Egyptian tombs--just see their writings, still to be seen below ancient hieroglyphs. Perrottet and his pregnant girlfriend, who sounds like a remarkably patient sort, retrace the Romans pathways from Greece to the Mideast to Egypt. Perrottet vividly recounts Roman experiences at the first Olympics--the Naked Olympics, expanded in greater detail in his book of that title.

Interestingly enough, Lindsey Davis describes these same paths of tourism in SEE DELPHI AND DIE, a Marcus Didius Falco Roman PI book. Davis is punctilious about her research, and the two books together illuminate this fascinating and previously unknown area of Roman life. It's astonishing the way that our choreographed and prissy Olympics have evolved from the vicious Grecian ones.

Quick Take: PLEASE PASS THE BUTTERWORMS,Tim Cahill. Nonfiction

Tim Cahill has made a career, he says, of remote journeys oddly rendered. He wanted to title his latest offbeat travel book something else, but his publisher insisted on another quirky title to go with JAGUARS RIPPED MY FLESH, A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG, and PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS. His first chapter describes his horseback riding trip to Mongolia. His quest—bringing back hair to help researchers determine whether Mongols might be the original New Worlders. They'll compare the hair with ancient hair retrieved from archeology sites.

His insights on the Mongolian's horses fascinated me. Mongolians, he says, almost never name their ponies, the Mongolians being about as sentimental about their horses as Americans are about their cars. Plus, the ponies are never fed and are expected to forage, punching their hooves through ice in -60F weather. No wonder they're the toughest horses on earth.

Also by the same author: ROAD FEVER, an account of his record-breaking trip with a professional driver from the tip to top of the Pan-American Highway—Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, Alaska.

GUARDS, GUARDS, by Terry Pratchett

Writing a review of a Terry Pratchett book at this date is, as author Tony Perrottet observed on a similar occasion, like writing a restaurant review of that quaint little cafe with the golden arches. But some may not know the best-selling U.K. comedy fantasy writer, and GUARDS,GUARDS makes a good introduction to his Discworld series.

A group of hooded conspirators plots to reestablish the defunct kingship of Ankh-Morpork. They plan to summon a dragon by illegal magic, and to control it while their puppet king makes it disappear. But the dragon can't be so quickly banished and attacks the city, soon crowning itself king.

The bedraggled City Watch has dwindled to four-their drunken captain, Sam Vimes, crass sergeant Fred Colon, runty “Nobby” Nobbs, and new recruit, Carrot, the two meter tall adopted dwarf who is keen to arrest anyone. Vimes can barely rouse himself to care about anything until the dragon threatens the city.

The four watchmen form allies: the orangutan librarian of Unseen University, furious over the stolen book of magic used to summon the dragon, and Lady Sybil Ramkin, an Wagnerian-sized aristocrat who breeds three-foot long swamp dragons, distantly related to their great cousins. This unlikely group of champions unite to vanquish the dragon before it crisps the city. Terry Pratchett recounts it all with his ironic wit and humor.

TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG, by Connie Wills

Fifty years in the future, Ned Henry, an exhausted time travel researcher, desperately needs to escape obsessive billionaire heiress Lady Schrapnell. Ever since Lady Schrapnell discovered that her great-great-great-great grandmother “Tossie” Tocelyn Mering's life had been changed forever by a visit to Coventry Cathedral she has crusaded to rebuild it down to the smallest detail. The original Cathedral was destroyed by fire in a German bombing on November 14, 1940 In her relentless drive to recreate the immense structure, she donates millions of dollars to the time time research department of Oxford and then brutally co-opts the researchers into multiple time trips scouring history for the cathedrals' lost relics.

Ned gets sent to the Victorian era to recuperate briefly, but he doesn't get any rest. After a trip up the Thames in the Jerome K. Jerome manner, he rendezvous with another time-lagged researcher.. The pair endeavor to locate Lady Schrapnell's latest quarry, the bishop's bird stump. It's a hideous wrought-iron sculpture, but it's authentic, and Lady S. must have it.

. The search for the sculpture, making sure Tossie stays on the right path to meet her future husband, and incidentally preventing the collapse of the space-time continuum never overwhelm the increasingly sleep-deprived researchers. Lady S. has scheduled a huge consecration ceremony and the pair's window for return is closing.

Willis combines a time travel Victorian comedy of manners with a love story and mystery. Her powerful narration blends all these elements into a finely polished triumphant whole

JENNIFER GOVERNMENT,by Max Barry, concluded

This book finished well, although it tends to advance the plot like some hard-boiled detective tales: when things go slack, send someone rushing into the room with a gun. In this sardonic dystopia, the Police and the NRA are now publicly-traded security companies. When it has taken the contract, the NRA grimly protects Nike with all force necessary, airstrikes included. Not your cup of tea? Go back to TMIAB.

Save as Draft

THREE MEN IN A BOAT (to say nothing of the dog), by Jerome K. Jerome

I picked up this treasure today while scavenging my sister's bookcase. The last time I read it I was in my cynical teens and didn't see the humor. I'd been meaning to get back to it for ages since I first read Connie Willis' brilliant science fiction novel *To Say Nothing of the Dog.* That book richly deserves its own review, later. I knew that Willis was referencing the Jerome K. Jerome book, but my memories of it were few.

Today I entered its pages more slowly, taking time to smile over the short chapter introductions. "Three invalids--Sufferings of George and Harris--A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies----We agree we are overworked and need rest----George suggests the river--Montmorency lodges an objection--Original motion carried by three to one--"

No one, of course, can possibly enjoy this ancient book, written in 1889, no one at all, unless you have ever overly enthusiastically planned a trip, squeezed a suitcase shut and latched it, only to discover a pair of shoes have been left out, got up ominously late to catch a plane or a train, suffered through a camping trip marred by rain or a hideously uncomfortable tent, or twisted a foot over a small eager dog. For the dog, of course, "to get someone to stumble over him and curse him for an hour, is his highest aim and object; and when he has succeeded in accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable."

QUEENAN COUNTRY, by Joe Queenan

Moving away from rants, I return to High Literature. The last book I finished was *Queenan Country,* by Joe Queenan, subtitled "A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country." He reports on his glorious findings and his glorious hatings with equal glee.

He loves the British for their "arch phrasing, infectious understatement, and delightful euphemisms." He also describes Paul McCarthy as "choochy," and John Lennon as "not choochy." He loathes the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Greyfriars Bobby. He advocates visiting the small town of Berkely because "you can be in and out of the village in two hours flat" and have covered "history, art, religion, regicide, tomfoolery, plague, ornithology, revolution, Norman ecclesiastical architecture, home decor, gardens, state-sanctioned sodomy, and Saxon mortuary in a single visit and can devote the rest of your trip to gambling, the theater, alcohol, or napping...it is also the site of the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. So put it on your list now."

He moans that London can't be seen in a weekend, a week, fortnight, or even a month, and advocates seeing it before age 65, because your feet can't take it and you will have to take your chances with your next reincarnation. I'm putting London back on my life-time goal list, even if I have to make it with a walker.

My angel is the centerfold

"LA gangland tour for $65."

As I click on my Yahoo homepage, that tempting headline jumps out at me, right next to the yawner "Elderly Haiti Quake Survivors Wait to Die."***

Yahoo is daring its millions of readers to satisfy their morbid curiosity by clicking on this tab. The obvious followup springs to mind: "Drive-by Shooting Adventure Ride opens at Disneyland: Johnny Depp to star in blackface role."

Running to the moral high ground, I declaim, "Isn't it bad enough to tease TV viewers with 'Six die in horrible crash--pictures at eleven.' How can the cynical media bank on tragedy as their rainmaker?"

Maybe the truth of our behavior lies in the immortal words of the J.Geils band.

My blood runs cold
My memory has just been sold
My angel is the centerfold
Angel is the centerfold

A part of me has just been ripped
The pages from my mind are stripped
Oh no, I can't deny it
Oh yea, I guess I gotta buy it!

Click.

***Donations for the elderly Haitians may be made at http://www.aarp.org/

A hearse of a different book

Who knew the world of cozy mysteries was large enough for two amateur detective morticians? The *Hearse* series by Tim Cockey stars Hitchcock "it's a family name" Sewell, from a family funeral home in Baltimore. The *Undertaking* series by Mark de Castrique, features "Burying" Barry Clayton, from fictional Gainsboro, N.C The *Hearse* was first.

Each series has its supporting cast, which de Castrique appears to have copycatted: tragic family circumstances, plucky relatives, dogs with stupid names. Hitchcock Sewell gets a kooky sidekick, his sexy ex-wife. Barry Clayton only gets a grumpy surgeon girlfriend.

In Tim Cockey's debut *The Hearse You Came In On,* Hitchcock horns his way into investigating the death of a young woman who has previously crashed a funeral service wearing a short short short white tennis dress. She claimed she wanted to plan her own funeral. Blackmail, dirty videos, police corruption, and political coverups move the story along. Hitch regards it all with wit and often tenderness.

Mark de Castrique's *Foolish Undertaking* starts well: Barry views his uncle praying in front of the funeral home. Oh, wait--he's only planting petunias. End of humor. Barry is tasked with the funeral of an honored Montagnard soldier. The Montagnards helped the U.S. in Viet Nam- this requires boring exposition. The corpse disappears. Not funny.

In the de Castrique/Barry Clayton book the suspects are nearly identical. They're now a dubious Boston detective, a famous actor, a US Senator, and... something else. But they're all ex-military, and quite similar. Each man has his share of aides, and THEY're suspects, too. The last book I read with so many nearly identical suspects was Dorothy L. Sayers' *Five Red Herrings.* I hate *Five Red Herrings.*

Eccentric Baltimore locals and locales vs. respectfully depicted Appalachian ones. Your pick.

Quck Take:JENNEFIER GOVERNMENT, Max Barry

Quick take: I've just started listening to the audiobook of *Jennifer Government,*by Max Barry. It is dark humor, wickedly funny so far. I hope it finishes as well as it has started.

From the jacket cover "The world is run by American corporations; there are no taxes; employees take the last names of the companies they work for; the Police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the government can only investigate crimes it can bill for.

"Hack Nike is a Merchandising Officer who discovers an all-new way to sell sneakers. Buy Mitsui is a stockbroker with a death-wish. Billy NRA is finding out that life in a private army isn't all snappy uniforms and code names. And Jennifer Government, a legendary agent with a barcode tattoo, is a consumer watchdog with a gun."

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, a mashup book by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Another book I would heartily recommend to fans of the British and weird is PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, "by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith." This is a "mashup," a book which purports to be a collaboration between two authors, advertising itself as "the classic Regency novel now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem!" Elizabeth Bennett is a trained zombie killer, as are her sisters (she and Jane are the best, of course). The book consists of about 85% Jane Austen's words and 15% zombies, fitting better than you'd think. The later passages with Darcy slow the pace, but at other points the book exuberantly lives up to its promise.

During one of Lydia's interminable monologues about why the girls should go to the camp and get soldiers for husbands, Elizabeth fantasizes about cutting off Lydia's head with her favorite katana sword. It brightens the scene considerably.