THE BRIDE WORE BLACK LEATHER, SIMON GREEN

This is the last of the NIGHTSIDE series by Simon Green, and I hate to disappoint anyone with spoilers.  But we're starting off with the great characters JOHN TAYLOR and his now girl-pal SUSIE SHOTGUN.  They've had a troubled relationship--she's otherwise known as "Oh God it's her, run," and "Just go ahead and shoot yourself, it will be easier." Quite damaged,but slowly making some changes.  JOHN TAYLOR is making some changes, too--he has a new job description now which I absolutely cannot tell you about.

Just get the first one in the series, SOMETHING FROM THE NIGHTSIDE and then start there. It can get really dark at times in this series, but GREEN really balances that with humor. I will say that GREEN makes one wonderful pun. JOHN TAYLOR is a investigator working in the Nightside, and he has a special talent. He can see where anyone is when he opens his third eye, his "private eye." Lovely.

Like most other things in the Nightside, this costs almost too much each time he uses it.  He can see others, but use of his power allows others to see and find him. Neat conundrum.

KNIGHTHOODS

The Beatles and Mick Jagger have all received knighthoods for their service to music, the Beatles in 1996 and Jagger in 2003.  Jagger's honor, like the man, has been much more controversial.   Jagger, of ironic,  devilish music,  a countercultural icon, and a checkered personal life is now Sir Michael Phillip Jagger, gone all respectable. Keith Richard has chided Jagger for accepting the honor, saying that this is is not what THE ROLLING STONES  are all about.  It does seem odd. The author of "Under My Thumb,"(I Can't Get No)Satisfaction, and "Sympathy for the Devil," has been awarded such an honor.  He once called the queen "the chief witch," and she stymied his award for several years.  Queen Elizabeth scheduled to be elsewhere at his ceremony, leaving Prince Charles to do the honors.

So perhaps the Lady Gaga, who is nearly nude in many videos, and whose songs, persona, and fashion styles have been criticized as immoral and vulgar, will be made a Dame one day. One thing's for sure, they probably won't use BAD ROMANCE  as a background music video.

YESTERDAY..AND TODAY, BEATLES BUTCHER ALBUM COVER1966

Speaking of Gaga's meat dress, it is startling to realize that the idea was not new to her. Even the Fab Four experimented with this look.  In 1966 Capitol Records planned to issue their ninth compilation record.  For various reasons the "nice group" planned to change their image to show they were aware of life's cruelties.   In a surreal photo shoot created by an Australian photographer, Bob Whitaker, he posed them in butcher's smocks, with sausages and meat draped around them, and decapitated dolls completing the bizarre look. 
  John Lennon in particular wanted this picture because he was tired of the Beatles' reputation as innocuous compared to the rebellious Rolling Stones.  Another reason he stated was that the cover reflected the groups' commentary on the Vietnam war.
Disk jockeys and those who had received advance copies strongly protested the cover, and it was withdrawn after one month. Capitol Records discarded many of these in a landfill, while others had the offensive photo covered over with a generic picture.  The surrealistic photo shoot pictures can be seen here:

 http://www.neatorama.com/2012/09/13/The-Beatles-Troublesome-Butcher-Album-Cover/

THE LONG DARK TEA-TME OF THE SOUL, BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

Another oldy but goodie , TEA-TIME was published in 1990. I hadn't read any Adams since I  slogged through "LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING," and learned that the answer was 42. Bleah.

Throughout most of this book I was thinking, "This is wonderful. Why didn't anybody tell me that Douglas Adams was a comedic genius." An explosion in an airport is declared an Act of God.  But which god? Adam's world building is similar to Terry Pratchett's, and quite fun. But when I reached the end, he didn't stick the landing.

I realized that Pratchett's conclusions are sharply defined. While he doesn't  beat you over the head, you are not left, for example, in any doubt as to why a few City Guards wear sprigs of lilac in their helmets on a certain day. (NIGHT GUARD.)The ending truly satisfies the long buildup.

With Douglas Adams, I am not sure quite what happened.  The payoff doesn't reward the reader. I am reminded of Neal Stephenson who creates a fine story line in an alternate universe, and then throws it away. I would have rated Tea-Time as a five, but I'd drop it to a three for not finishing what he started. It's still worth a read.

BAD ROMANCE LADY GAGA MUSIC

 I had barely taken notice of Lady Gaga, being only aware that she had outrageous costumes, such as the meat dress. I hadn't listened to her until I heard "BAD ROMANCE" at a store.  I really enjoyed the lively beat and chorus.  Then I watched her video, was confused, and hated it. The white wedding dress with the polar bear skin train was just odd, and the explanation for the video didn't help.  I'd have dropped Gaga, but my sister sent me the link to a parody, "BAD PROJECT." This is the lament of a graduate student who's been lumbered with a bad lab project and hates her life. As a former biology geek, and witness to my sister's wrestles with her PhD., I identified completely.
“Bad Project” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0
There are many, many Gaga parodies out there, not surprising because she's almost a parody herself.
If you brave the original, you'll be rewarded with 
 “Bad Romance Women's Suffrage” an unexpectedly touching video about the fight for women's suffrage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYQhRCs9IHM

The inimitable Weird Al's “PERFORM THIS WAY,” parody of “BORN THIS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss_BmTGv43M

The best complication of the parodies:http://lookatmenow.hubpages.com/hub/The-Best-Lady-Gaga-Parodies-on-Youtube

I'm really attached to “Bad Project” and “Bad Romance Women's Suffrage.”Give them a try.

A FALL OF MOONDUST, ARTHUR CLARKE (1960)

I've been re-reading some favorite books, and this one is an old friend. Set in the near future, a fascinating tourist destination on the moon is the SEA OF THIRST, filled with a peculiar kind of moondust which has developed over billions of years. As the tourbus SELENE returns to the base, a huge underground cavern collapses, and the bus falls into the pit. The bus is trapped underground with the pilot PAT HARRIS, and twenty-two passengers. Luckily, one of the tourists is COMMODORE HANSTEEN, a distinguished space pilot who welds the passengers into a team to survive. Besides Pat's viewpoint we follow several others, especially CHIEF ENGINEER LAWRENCE, who must rescue them. The dust puts up trap after trap for LAWRENCE--first the heat exchangers fail, and the passengers risk heat stroke. Then the other systems of the bus fail slowly, and the passengers experience oxygen deprivation, a further fall of the bus into the now muddy dust, and finally a fire.  Each challenge is met with creativity by LAWRENCE, but the SEA OF THIRST seems to be malevolently toying with him.


It's a great yarn, made better by  CLARKE's excellent writing. "(The dust) had reached the lower edge of the windows; now it was creeping up the panes; and at last it had covered them completely. Pat cut the motors before they tore themselves to pieces, and as he did so, the rising tide blotted out the last glimpse of the crescent Earth.  In darkness and in silence, they were sinking into the moon." Gives me chills every time.

THE NOVICE'S TALE, BY MARGARET FRAZER

Set in a 15th century English convent, this series stars the pragmatic Benedictine nun Sister Frevisse. She's in the Brother Cadfael vein, someone whose real-world experience prepares her for challenges outside the cloister, but she's unique, and not an imitation.

The devout novice Sister Thomasine, two weeks away from her final vows, is forced back to worldly concerns when her braying virago aunt Ermentrude arrives at the convent determined to wrench her away from her prayers. When Ermentrude dies the "crowner," (coroner) wants to sweep the case under due to Ermentrude's hard-living, hard-drinking life. When Frevisse proves that it's poison, Sister Thomasine then becomes the main suspect and the crowner is eager to hang her. In a wonderful scene, Thomasine claims sanctuary while the angry nuns sing Dies Irae in a face-off with the sheriff's men.

The convent life glows under Frazer's hands. Although it's all but impossible to believe the devouts loved their eight daily services, she makes us believe that they do. Her historical details are fascinating. Of note, her character Joliffe, a traveling actor who solves mysteries, made his appearance in a Frevisse novel and now has his own series.

BLAMELESS, BY GAIL CARRIGER--character, Prof. Lyall

Another note about this werewolf/vampire series: I recently listened to the CD and fell in love again with Prof. Randolph Lyall, the always correctly dressed and greatly put-upon Beta of the London Woolsey Werewolf pack. His huge Alpha, Lord Connall Maccon, gets ridiculously drunk over a personal crisis. (It takes formaldehyde, as werewolves are not affected much by alcohol.) Knowing that the Alpha is incapacitated, a "loner" wolf comes to challenge for the control of the Woolsey pack, and Prof. Lyall must fight in his leader's place. He's much smaller than most weres, but has skill, speed, cunning, and over a century of experience. During the fight the drunken Alpha Maccon arrives and literally tosses Lyall to the sidelines. Lyall hates being untidy, even in wolf form, and he cleans up the blood "surreptitiously licking his ruff like a cat." Wonderful character.

And the series also has the flamboyantly gay vampire Lord Akeldama, who's invented the Pink Slurp drink--blood mixed with champagne. Now you're all set for the next W-V party. Be sure to get the cravat straight.

THE MARRIAGE SPELL, BY MARY JO PUTNEY

PUTNEY marries fantasy and romance in a near-perfect way. In an England where magical skills exist, the wizards are accepted everywhere except in the high aristocracy, where they are despised as "wyrdlings." The ton, however,will use wizard healers sub-rosa.

Jack Langdon, Lord Frayne, is a dashing army captain on leave from the Napoleonic wars. He showed some magical promise as a child, and so was enrolled in Stonebridge,a reverse Hogwarts where students have their magic beaten out them. Twenty years later he is nearly killed in a gruesome fox-hunting accident. He's taken to a local wizard, Abigail Barton, who's secretly admired him for years. He's disgusted with her and wishes to die, but his friends prevail upon him to reconsider and give his permission for the healing. As the price for her healing, she asks him to marry her. During the healing,Jack's magical talents begin to emerge.

She expects him to renege on his promise of marriage, and is willing to release him. But to her surprise he quickly marries her. When he takes her to London society,she's able to defy their scorn. Jack's sister quietly reveals that she is a wizard too, and Jack slowly accepts his own magical powers. By the time they leave London for his blighted manor home, he is ready to use all his power to heal the land. I'm not normally a romance fan, but MARY JO PUTNEY may convert me.

THE MILES VORKOSIGAN SERIES BY LOIS McMASTER BUJOLD

This engaging sci-fi series is my all-time favorite—I've re-read them so much they're tattering. The series focuses on personalities, not on technological marvels. Its scientific framework never overshadows the characters. The first two books feature MILES' parents, CORDELIA NAISMITH VORKOSIGAN and ARAL VORKOSIGAN.

In BARRAYAR CORDELIA has retired from her life as a Beta Colony Survey Captain, expecting a quiet and fertile life as the wife of a retired soldier. Then ARAL's career unexpectedly heats up when he's made Prime Minister. Now he has numerous political enemies. A vicious bioweapon attack by one damages the fetus CORDELIA is carrying. CORDELIA literally fights for MILES' life, and he survives when no one else thought he could or should. He's permanently damaged from the bioweapon, with bones like chalk and a stunted height, 4'9.” In the eyes of his world, he's a freak, looking like a despised mutant.

He survives by intelligence, wit, charm, devious manipulation and sheer force of his personality. He ruthlessly bamboozles others into carrying out his plans. Prevented from a normal military career, he spectacularly succeeds in galactic covert ops. Of course, the occasional failures are spectacular, too.

The only thing missing from the series is another book about CORDELIA. She's such a fabulous character and richly deserves a third book. EKATERIN VORSOSSION, a character introduced in KOMARR, provides some potent female viewpoint, and she may be the one to rein in MILES.

SOULESS, BY GAIL CARRIGER

ALEXIA TARABOTTI, with a deceased Italian father, is too darkly complexioned, forthright, and voluptuous for the VICTORIAN marriage competition. As a "preturnatural," she can turn supernatural being mortal with a touch. She has no soul to save for the afterlife, and conquers this deficit with yards and yards of courage, heart, intellectualism, and a strict regard for the manners of polite society.

She is therefore outraged when a newly made vampire attacks her at a party, violating all forms of social etiquette, with his clothing so terribly disarrayed he hasn't even got a properly tied cravat.

In the scuffle, she kills the vampire, a terrible social embarrassment. The very eligible but scruffy bachelor, LORD CONNAL MACCON, Alpha werewolf of the London Woolsey pack, is sent to investigate and helps her cover up the her gaffe.As more new vampires appear and old ones disappear, everyone holds ALEXIA responsible.

As she struggles to solve this problem, she is helped by applications of tea drinking, the flamboyantly gay vampire LORD AKELDAMA, judicious whacks with her trusty parasol, and the increasingly affectionate LORD MACCON himself. Part urban fantasy, part steampunk, this witty variation on the werewolf/vampire theme comes to us through JANE AUSTEN and SOOKIE STACKHOUSE.

THE PATRIOTIC MURDERS,BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

Even though I've read almost all of Christie's books, I still enjoy a re-read. It's fun to be beguiled again. When Poirot's dentist, Morley, dies, is it murder, or suicide over a fatal complication one of his patients had? It's a time-table story, with all the patients' comings and goings noted. One patient is a bird-brained middle-aged lady. Another is a suspicious-looking Greek. There's a finance minister, a quiet government employee, and a belligerent young man who wants to have it out because the dentist has tried to keep his secretary away from him. And an Irish dentist who's often drunk and may have killed Morley to cover his own mistakes.

A long time ago I read a space yarn about a colony which wouldn't allow classic books because they were thought to be an extinct form of entertainment. Vexed, the purveyors starting shooting partial plots to the colonists, and soon the authorities were getting questions demanding to know whether Odysseus ever made it home, whether Jane Eyre married Rochester, and WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD? And if it's possible that you've missed Christie's ACKROYD, find it immediately.

UNSEEN ACADEMICALS, BY TERRY PRATCHETT

I really wanted to like Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, but the humor misses its beats. I don't know whether Pratchett's increasing Alzheimer's is to blame.

Unseen University needs to play a football game or lose the bequest which supplies most of their food budget. Since the wizards have nine meals a day, this is a serious threat. Lord Vetinari chooses this occasion to tame the violent street game, not because it's lethal—that has no downside for him—but because it's started to damage property.

The side plots are more fun. Glenda, the plain-looking cook in UU's Night Kitchen bosses and takes care of her beautiful but dim co-worker, Juliet. Trevor Likely is Juliet's star-crossed admirer. They support opposite football teams, a deadly problem in Ankh-Morpork. A small goblin, Nutt, works in UU as a candle dribbler (no real wizard uses a plain, undribbled new candle), talks like a professor, and has a secret history.

Lord Vetinari shows a previously unknown human side, which really doesn't work. It's fun when he allows Glenda to barge in on him because he has fond memories of her mother's cooking at the Assassin's School. But there are other scenes which aren't believable. This book was only fair

A TREASURY OF DAMON RUNYON, BY DAMON RUNYON

Damon Runyon writes of the Broadway types of the 1930's, of guys and dolls, bookies, bootleggers, double-crossing sweethearts, race touts and more. A sample of his witty writing is "Hold 'Em Yale," where the narrator's friend is looking for a ticket scalper who cheated him. "In fact, the nearest Sam ever comes to a college is once when he is passing through the yard belonging to the Princetons, but Sam is on the fly at the time as a gendarme is after him, so he does not really see much of the college." Runyon is a forgotten genius, and I recommend him highly.

MOVIE, THE HUNGER GAMES. Suzanne Collins

Just read Entertainment Weekly's first look at the GAMES. Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss Everdeen, and the readers initially protested her choice as being "too pretty, too pale, too blond, too curvy." Haven't any of these people ever heard of hair dye? The director chose her because of her work in Winter's Bone, and EW remarked "Lawrence's role there included taking care of younger siblings when her parents can't, hunting in a forest, and skinning and eating a squirrel--basically an audition tape for the GAMES." Look at the EW cover for her transformation--she's not too pretty or superficial there. The movie comes out in March 2012 and I'll be there.

PERSUASION, BY JANE AUSTEN

I started reading Austen late in life, and am at the re-reading stage now. PERSUASION is not as dramatic as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, or EMMA, or as memorable as the parody NORTHHANGER ABBEY. PERSUASION slowly unfolds the tale of ANNE ELIOTT, the unloved daughter of a vain and stupid father, who's ignored by him and her older sister, and used by her younger, married, hypochondriac sister. Eight years before the story begins, ANNE's friend Lady Russell persuades her to give up her love for Frederick Wentworth, then a young navy officer, because she thought he couldn't provide for Anne, and so discouraged them.

When the now wealthy Captain Wentworth returns to her village, she looks for any sign that he still cares for her. There are mistaken "attachments" and much unspoken longing until the pair reunite in the last few pages. The narrator reports Anne's thoughts and feelings in third person. This and the lack of dialogue slow the pace.

PERSUASION is not so much a love story as it is a social commentary. Poor but high ranking, haughty aristocrats, wealthy, low ranking gentry, houses, carriages, parties, happy marriages versus unhappy ones, all come under the Austen microscope. She paints her society with unerring detail. A very rewarding book.

HOW RIGHT YOU ARE JEEVES, BY P.G.WODEHOUSE

I've returned briefly to PGW for a sugary read. The imbecilic but filthy rich Bertie Wooster constantly gets into hot water and needs his valet Jeeves, of the large brain, to get him out. This offering presents Bobbie Wickham, a redhead dynamo who's gotten Wooster into scrapes before, Aunt Dahlia, Bertie's "good" aunt, Reginald "Kipper" Herring, Bertie and Kipper's old headmaster, Aubrey Upjohn, broken engagements, a libel suit, and much fun. The plot of a PGW novel scampers along brightly with G-rated froth.

Bertie is relaxing at home when Bobbie's mother calls crying. There's an announcement in the London Times that Bertie is engaged to her daughter. First time that Bertie's heard of it, because she said no to him before. But it's a ploy to make her mother more accepting of her real fiance, Kipper. He doesn't know it's a ploy, sends her a scathing letter, which crosses in the mail, and before you know it, Kipper is engaged to someone else. Then Kipper, in his position as editor at a small literary magazine, savagely criticizes an article sent in by Aubrey Upjohn. Unfortunately, Bobbie has heated up the review even more, by repeating the lads' claim that the Sunday sausages were made of pigs which had died of glanders, botts, and tuberculosis. Hence the libel suit. Only Jeeves can sort all this out.

THE HUNGER GAMES, BY SUZANNE COLLINS

My God. I just finished THE HUNGER GAMES, and I am completely in awe of this writer. I thought it was another youth phenomenon like the TWILIGHT series, but it's so much more complex. Katniss Everdeen would eat Bella for breakfast, if the rules of the GAMES didn't prevent cannibalism. She's a fantastic heroine, strong, so often frightened but fighting not to show it, hungry all the time, an Olympic-level archer whose battle skills are the only things which will keep her alive.

Astonishing book, amazing writing.
It's what SURVIVOR would be if contestants were really eliminated--and all of them were children. COLLINS understands our sick morbid fascination with reality TV, and writes it large in letters thirty feet tall and dripping with blood. The games...
I sneaked ahead to read a blurb on the second book CATCHING FIRE, and the reviewer said that it ratcheted up the tension from the first. And the first one was a tiny little rubber-band wrist-slap? It's a fight to the death! A mandatory nationwide TV spectacle fought by teens! I can't wait for the sequel and it scares me silly to imagine it.

LAW AND THE MULTIVERSE, JAMES DAILY AND RYAN DAVIDSON

READ THIS BLOG! Lawyers James Daily and Ryan Davidson, who were interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered today, have created the blog "LAW AND THE MULTIVERSE: Superheroes, supervillains, and the law" to discuss what kind of laws might govern a superpower multiverse. For example, would BATMAN be liable under child abuse laws for endangering ROBIN? No, because both BATMAN and ROBIN are highly trained and experienced, and BATMAN prevents ROBIN from working in really dangerous situations. Does he have to pay ROBIN? No, because he doesn't take payment himself.

And in SMALLVILLE, CLARK gets into trouble when he throws a baddo onto the top of a sheriff's cruiser. He's sentenced to community service. Now the jerk wants to sue CLARK's family for damages. CLARK uses his X-ray vision to see that the "victim" takes off his brace--he's faking it. How they they get that information to the court? In SMALLVILLE this is an important plot point, but Daily and Davidson parse that concern. It is very difficult to fake injuries, they claim, because a person who complains of injury has to be examined by a competent medical examiner.

There are posts on Superhero estate settlement, and whether Superman's heat vision is protected by the Second Amendment, and how "finders-keepers" laws might work for those who get their superpowers from an object (Green Lantern and others.) Very fun.

HOW I KILLED PLUTO AND WHY IT DESERVED IT, NON-FICTION, BY MIKE BROWN

Astronomer Mike Brown's novel is awe-inspiring and very funny. His research took him years to complete, and not all of it could be automated. He had to use a jeweler's loupe to study star maps, just like the astronomers a century ago. He finally found a world larger than Pluto, in the Kuiper belt, which is way out beyond Pluto's orbit, and called it Xena. Then he discovered that there may be several hundred objects of Pluto's size out there and decided that they couldn't all be planets.

What's baffling to me is exactly why Pluto and Xena had it coming. Brown and other astronomers simply objected to a solar system which contained too many planets. They decreed that "planet" means "one of a small number of large important things in our solar system." This does not make sense to me, and I'm unclear how the definition will be used in the new star systems we'll discover.

Many pages of the book record the sleep-deprived Brown's obsessive notations on his newborn daughter Lilah. It's been argued that if a female astronomer emoted so much about her baby, her professional reputation would suffer. Double standard, even if the Lilah posts are cute.

NIGHT AT THE OPERATION, BY JEFF COHEN, A DOUBLE FEATURE MYSTERY

In a continuing effort to find new humor writers, I checked out NIGHT. This is another cozy mystery series where the unlikely detective is a guy who owns an old movie theater which only shows comedies. He rides everywhere on his bicycle and must manipulate friends for car rides. I'm not quite sure why I'm not warming up to ELLIOT FREED, but I found this book annoying. The supporting characters, especially his theater employees, are quite endearing, but superfluous to the plot. FREED'S ex-wife, Dr. Sharon, is missing and a suspect in the murder of one of her patients. FREED and Sharon are so close that they still celebrate their wedding anniversary. His tender feelings for her are a huge motivation for solving the case. I've known many divorced couples, both professionally and closer to home, and I've never known any like this. Not happening for me.

I don't know why I can better believe in a Victorian housekeeper surreptitiously solving crimes for her Scotland Yard employer than I can in a down-on-his-luck English major who owns a movie theater, but I do. I might try another DOUBLE FEATURE mystery, but maybe not.

THE GHOST AND MRS. JEFFRIES, BY EMILY BRIGHTWELL

I'm well into this cozy Victorian mystery, and it's quite fun. Mrs. Jeffries is the housekeeper for the harassed Inspector Whitherspoon. He hates murder cases, but always has good luck in solving them, even if he can't quite remember how he did it. That's because the real detective is Mrs. Jeffries, who organizes all the servants into a crime-solving team. Then she feeds Inspector Witherspoon all the clues so that he can solve the mystery. It's her challenge to help him in such a subtle way he doesn't suspect a thing. It's a bright and funny concept.

If this works out well, there's a whole series ahead. EMILY BRIGHTWELL has written over twenty MRS JEFFRIES. My only concern is that they might begin to get a little silly. I'll keep you posted.

I'VE GOT A BAD FEELING

I've been noting how often the "bad feeling" phrase crops up--I can find it in most books. I knew I had heard in in Star Wars, but I wasn't aware that it had been spoken at least six times in Episode IV: A New Hope (the original Star Wars), and had become a running joke. I was thinking of:
"I have a very bad feeling about this."
―Luke Skywalker, when the Millennium Falcon approaches the Death Star
but had forgotten it had been said earlier:
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
―Han Solo, before the walls of the trash compactor start to close in

The latest place I noted it was in GHOST OF A CHANCE, on p.53, where Happy, the depressed telepath, says, "I've got a bad feeling," when the trio enter the haunted London Underground. Melody the tough tech nut replies, "You've always got a bad feeling. It's your standard default pattern. You probably had a bad feeling as you left the womb behind and headed for the light."

I thought I was really on to something no one else has noted, and then found out there's a website. I've got a bad feeling about that.

RELIEF TIME: HUMOR

As mentioned, I'm leaving SFF behind for a minute.* I really don't like horror and need a break. I checked out several humor books at the library and a couple of mysteries which seem to be light-hearted. More anon.

*Which won't stop me from mentioning CHRISTOPHER MOORE again, if your horror quotient isn't filled. One of the funniest, weirdest, authors I've ever encountered, it's typical for him to blend humor, terror, and very moving moments in the same novel, not to say in the same page even. I love him, in small doses.

NOT RECOMMENDED: A ghost of a chance, by SIMON GREEN

Oh, rats. I hate it when a book doesn't pan out, as it did for me with GHOST. It's about the ghost-hunting trio I mentioned, but it goes very quickly into real horror, not just urban fantasy. There is a definite line, even if both involve fighting monsters in a gritty present-day setting. This is a fill-the-London-Underground-with-the-blood-of-tortured-commuters type of book. Also, the main viewpoint character, JC, leaves his team alone for huge stretches of the novel, which is frustrating. SIMON GREEN'S Nightside novels have some, okay, a fair amount, of horror, too, but John Taylor is a fierce knight who stands by you and chases the terrors away.

WICKED, MUSICAL

I saw WICKED this afternoon, and can't find enough superlatives for it. It's the unexpectedly moving story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. She wasn't always wicked--she was green, ugly and smart, and Glinda, the Good Witch, was the clueless and selfish blond type. They became enemies--or was it friends? No spoilers--just go see it when you have a chance. Or buy the DVD. It's good. I mean wicked.

It's been out since 2003, so I'm a little late getting to it; seeing it as a stage production was splendid.

SERVICE WITH A SMILE, PG WODEHOUSE

My Wodehouse group is meeting this week, and this book provides a great break. I actually can't summarize the plot because Wodehouse himself says his books are like musicals without the music.

It's set at Blandings, the stately home of absent-minded Lord Emsworth, (Clarence) who loves his enormous pig, the Empress of Blandings. There are impostors, ("Blandings has impostors like other castles have mice")and star-crossed lovers. Two imperious old competitors of Emsworth are trying to steal the Empress, and Lady Constance Keeble, Lord Emsworth's bossiest sister, is trying to run his life. The usual, in the Blandings stories.

But Lord Emsworth's old friend, Fred Twistleton, is here to sort things out, in his own special way, by introducing the impostor to Blandings in the first place. His job is to re-unite lovers, provide them with financial add, foil the would-be-Empress thieves, and sort out the blackmailing secretary and bossy sister.

It's Wodehouse's genius that another outing with the usual suspects is still fresh and fun. And re-readable decades after I first found him. Did you really need to know the outcome?

THE HIDDEN FAMILIES SERIES, BY CHARLES STROSS

Charles Stross is another SFF author with several series to his name. THE ATROCITY FILES stars office workers in a banal cubicle-hell office whose job is corralling horrors, but The HIDDEN FAMILIES series is more fun.

In the first book,THE FAMILY TRADE, Miriam, an investigative journalist, looks at an old locket and is transported into a parallel world of apparently medieval culture—where guys on horses have machine guns. Miriam has been lost to this world because her mother escaped to the United States. Now that she's back, she is valued as a broodmare for more "world-walkers." The alternate world's economy comes from drug-smuggling, and when Miriam bravely tries to modernize it, the aristocracy plops her into a gilded prison.

Tension ramps up with a bloody civil war, and then it's learned that a faction has spirited away US backpack nukes. Now Miriam is fighting for the lives of the family she never knew.

LOOKING FORWARD TO: HOW I KILLED PLUTO AND WHY IT HAD IT COMING, NON-FICTION, BY MIKE BROWN

Today NPR interviewed astronomer Mike Brown, whose discovery almost came to be the 10th planet. It was bigger than Pluto, but new observations showed that hundreds more similar-sized objects could be found. Brown realized that he couldn't let his discovery become a planet. Instead, he campaigned successfully to have Pluto demoted from planetary status. This has become a new verb: when you're demoted or fired, you're "plutoed."

I love popular astronomy books, and I've put this on hold at the library. In the meantime, let's applaud Mike Brown (or more likely his publisher) for the coolest title of the year.

DESIGNING THE PERFECT PET, National Geographic Article

A long-running Russian genetics experiment (okay, hang on), has investigated animal domestication. Dmitri Belyaev chose the never-domesticated silver fox and bred each generation's least aggressive pups. In four generations, the foxes showed dog-like behavior of wanting to be picked up, wagging tails, and licking faces. Changes in color also came about, because the adrenal gland, which controls aggressiveness, also controls melanin.

It appears that primitive man, too busy with survival, did not domesticate wolves. Wolves who crept closer to refuse piles to feed, and their less aggressive pups, may have helped domesticate themselves. Fascinating reading, and video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR-GHmuumAw&feature=player_detailpage

GHOST OF A CHANCE, DRINKING MIDNIGHT WINE, BY SIMON GREEN

Is there no end to Simon Green's creativity? He shoots, he scores with one-off novel DRINKING MIDNIGHT WINE, a fantasy about an ordinary man who follows a beautiful woman through a door into a magical realm and suddenly finds he's the focal point in the battle for the fate of the world. It's a little too weird in the end when a vicious character is unexpectedly revealed as a good guy, but still a wonderful tale.

In GHOST OF A CHANCE, which I'm still reading, he launches a trio of ghost hunters who destroy evil hauntings. In the first chapter, an ordinary grocery-store parking lot is the locus for an ancient horror. Believably menacing shopping carts! I love his great characters, J.C., the self-important but courageous leader of the team; Melody, who's comfortable only with the massive amounts of technology she brings to the hunt, and Happy, the nearly deranged telepath, who's frightened all the time by what he can see, and is only mellowed by his numerous drugs.

Um, I've got to lay off Simon Green for a while after this. He goes into real horror here, and actually has horror scenes pretty much in every book. I have to read some pages peeking through my fingers.

MAN-KZIN WARS IV, created by LARRY NIVEN

Going back to the classics: LARRY NIVEN, a notable SF writer has created the KZINTI, berserker “felinoids” of upright eight-feet-tall tigers.

SURVIVOR is a reverse My Fair Lady story. A rejected Kzin, unable to compete with other males, finally succeeds in neurochemically modifying a human slave into a semblance of a female kzin, a kzinrett. Very sweet, unless you know that that the kzinretti are subsapient and can speak only a few hundred words.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KZIN, much lighter, is the story of Lawrence Halloran, a telepath who infiltrates a kzin ship by impersonating a dead kzin, Fixer-of-Weapons. Halloran can convince anyone they're seeing anything, as when he portrayed his headmaster parading around nude. He muses, “(Kzinti) could be dominant, vicious, and competitive. THEY were allowed to have fun.” If only the ship's own Telepath doesn't find him.

He defeats a challenger by projecting damaging blows through the strong claws he doesn't have. Yow! As the Halloran/Fixer personalities intertwine, Fixer jerks his hand back from data with a Shame/Disgrace sigil, or Top Secret. Halloran forces it forward. Likewise, a puzzled Fixer tells Halloran that screaming fights are normal greetings.

When Halloran finally drives the crew insane, the Halloran/Fixer entity battle Telepath for control of his body and mind. And Telepath has always been weak. It's a wonderful story about masquerade and reality.

QUICK TAKE: BLUE MOON RISING, BY SIMON GREEN

ANOTHER series by Simon Green is this typical fantasy world where a prince must slay a dragon and rescue a princess, with a twist. The prince, a second son, is sent off on his quest in the hope that it will kill him and remove him as a rival to his brother. And the gentle dragon wants nothing so much as getting the the princess, who's a terror and dangerous with a sword, taken off his hands. But there are other monsters to compensate, primarily the demons of the DARKWOOD, who seek to control the prince's Forest Land.

THE LIGHTNING THIEF, by RICK RIORDAN

Percy Jackson has always been able to think better around water, and be calmer near it. That's a very good thing, because his high school academic record has been dismal, mainly due to his ADHD and dyslexia. He doesn't know yet that he's a demi-god, the son of Poseidon. As he soon learns, the whole Greek mythological world exists today and always has, and the gods brawl and love as they always did.

When Percy discovers his heritage, he has to flee to Camp-Half Blood, a training camp for demi-gods, children with a Greek god for one parent. Here he's protected from the monsters who hunt demi-god, but must learn to fight them. He learns that his ADHD is the sign of his “battle skills” coming out, which help him pay attention to everything at once, and that his dyslexia is due to his brain being hard-wired to read ancient Greek. He must quickly develop all the fighting skills he can, because he's accused of stealing Zeus' thunderbolt, the mightiest weapon ever forged, and has ten days to return it before there's a war between the Big Three gods, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. In a quest which spans the continent, Percy goes after the lightning bolt with his new friends Grover, a satyr, and Annabeth, the daughter of Athena.

I loved this brilliant young adult novel, the first in a series. It's even sweeter to know that Riordan conceived this world out of bedtime stories demanded by his son, who struggled with ADHD and dyslexia.

The movie is not quite as good, but it has Chiron, Percy's centaur tutor, played by Pierce Brosnan in an award-winning role for best chest.

UNNATURAL INQUIRER, by SIMON GREEN

I'm enjoying the NIGHTSIDE series so much I'm posting twice on this. John Taylor, the classic noir PI of the seductive and grotesque NIGHTSIDE, enjoys himself greatly in his capers and isn't afraid of the NIGHTSIDE'S evil. GREEN has so much fun that the exposition often gets in the way of the plot, but it really doesn't matter.

In one scene Taylor is waiting for a train and comments, "The platform was crowded, as usual. Half a dozen members of the Tribe of the Gay Barbarians, standing around looking tough with their leathers and long swords, complete with shaved legs, nipple piercings, and heavy face make-up. A silverback gorilla wore an exquisitely cut formal suit, complete with top hat, a cane,and a monocle screwed firmly into one eye. A Gray alien wearing fishnet stockings and suspenders, passing out tracts. And a very polite Chinese demon, sipping hot steaming blood from a thermos. The usual crowd."

It's a typical throwaway line which has nothing to do with the plot, but which I'll chortle over forever. Enjoy. With or without a thermos of hot steaming blood.

FURIES OF CALDERON, BY JIM BUTCHER, continued

I finished the entire series in page-leaping gulps. Tavi's voyage from apprentice shepherd to something entirely different is breath-taking. I especially like the fourth book, CAPTAIN'S FURY, where he fights epic battles with the Canim, a warrior wolf-like species. Being Tavi, he uses his clever brain and imagination at least as much as military power. In CF story lines coalesce and mysteries are revealed in a very satisfying manner. And there's a lot of Kitai, a Marat girl close to Tavi who is always amused by his culture. Her derisive "Alerans" is very close to Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan's "Barrayarans" whenever Cordelias's annoyed by Barrayar's military mind-set. The last book, FIRST LORD's FURY, had so many battles fought that I began skimming, but it's still hugely satisfying. I was skeptical of this series at the outset, but now I'm a fervent fan. This more than makes up for BUTCHER's knee-capping CHANGES, the most recent DRESDEN FILES offering.

WARNINGS, NON-FICTION, BY MIKE SMITH

Weather warnings have become so ubiquitous that they're annoying, so reading this book is unexpectedly bloodcurdling. Mike Smith, who holds eighteen patents in meteorology, communicates his fascination with weather in every page. He gives us the development of weather forecasting and warning, and the bureaucracy which has many times prevented progress. I can't begin to described the excitement and sheer terror I experienced with this book. It is well written, informative, and riveting. I cannot think of any other non-fiction book I've ever read cover to cover.

Having lived in Tornado Alley all my life, I was stunned to learn that for decades the National Weather Service prevented its meteorologists from issuing tornado warnings, thinking this would cause more deaths due to panic. There was much in-fighting between aviation meteorologists, the National Weather Service, and the media about announcing warnings. I'd never known of this idiocy. Astonishingly, the first completely successful tornado warning was in Topeka Kansas, in 1966. Smith also recounts the mostly unsung story of genius Ted Fujita. He created the F-scale for tornado intensity, and his research into dangerous downbursts directly reduced death from airplane crashes.

The author also relates the unbelievable fact that ten years before the millennium, the National Weather Service was still using dilapidated WWII equipment with vacuum tubes, purchased from a single manufacturer in the Soviet Union. Because of governmental delay, advanced Doppler radar was not completely installed until 1996. Dear Lord in Heaven!

He describes many advances and reverses, and has a long discussion about the tragedies of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, which were well predicted storms.

Closing on a high note, Smith recounts the story of Greensburg, Kansas, which was obliterated by a tornado in 2007. But because of modern warning systems the lives of over 200 people were saved, compared to a similar Kansas tornado fifty years earlier.
I will never complain about TV weather interruptions again.

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.