2015 Reading, Books 22-24

22. Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg

A fun and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious imagining of assorted literary characters conversing via text. I think my favorites were Hermione frantically trying to keep Ron from disaster via hopeless cluelessness and gullibility WRT such Muggle matters as credit cards and Nigerian prince spam schemes and the idea that Prissy of Gone With the Wind was faking her stupidity all along in the interests of sabotage.

23. Rita book #6

I am not the target market for this book. Which made it a challenge to judge, because my not being its intended audience doesn't necessarily make it a bad book, you know? But I did my best to evaluate how well it succeeded at what it was trying to do, and to imagine how a reader who was looking for something different from a love story than I am might perceive it, so hopefully I was fair.

24. Getting Lucky by Beth Bolden

A fun, sweet read that I especially appreciated for having likable characters not prone to overreacting or misunderstanding each other just to drive the plot along. That said, I didn't like it as much as Bolden's previous book in the same series because it's not so much a baseball romance as a small town romance about a character who happens to be a baseball player, and contemporary American-set small-town romances are not my personal catnip.

2013 Reading, Books 109-111

109) Through the Evil Days, by Julia Spencer-Fleming.

After two and a half years, finally another entry in one of my favorite mystery series. I loved it, and was especially impressed how Spencer-Fleming switched POVs among five or six characters without ever tempting me to skip ahead to the next section featuring my favorites. (I tend to do that with George RR Martin, and with Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Remembrance it was years before I went back and read all the stuff about the Pacific theater of the war, I was so much more interested in Natalie Jastrow and whether she survived than any of that submarine and battleship stuff.) That said, she ended on ANOTHER cliffhanger, and how many more years will I have to wait before I know if Clare's, um, how to say this without being spoilery, health situation works out OK?

110) Od Magic, by Patricia McKillip.

This is a lushly lyrical fantasy--really MORE lush and lyrical than my usual reading taste that follows several characters through a crisis in how their kingdom manages magic. It's not a big, epic war and/or quest fantasy (which I confess to a certain partiality for), nor does it focus tightly enough on any one character that I connected to the story as much as I like, but I'm glad I read it nonetheless, variety being good for the brain and imagination IMHO.


111) Oh Myyy! There Goes the Internet, by George Takei.

A light, fun look at George Takei's current life as an unlikely septuagenarian internet celebrity. It was the perfect relaxing read for a day when I was home with a bad shoulder and feeling sorry for myself, but it's not pure fluff. Takei doesn't hide his activist side WRT gay rights or building awareness of Japanese-American internment during WWII, and he also has some good thoughts on Facebook and Twitter for those of us who use social media for publicity.

2013 Reading, Books 88-90

Still busy busy busy, but hopefully almost to the point where I can actually announce Good Writing News. Watch this space...

88. Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores, by Jen Campbell.

Exactly what the title says it is, and hilarious, too.

89. A manuscript by my critique partner, Rose Lerner. Assuming her publisher accepts it, y'all may be able to read it in, oh, November 2014 or so. So for now I won't say anything other than that it's beautifully written and different. However, she does have a new release scheduled for March that I can highly recommend, too.

90. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark.

This isn't my usual type of book--I'm more about the smart genre fiction than Noted Works of Literature. But I heard an interesting discussion of the book on NPR, and I'm glad I gave it a try. I wouldn't say I enjoyed it, exactly, but it made me think. I'm not sure what to think of the book, or of Jean Brodie, but I expect I'll be turning it over in my mind for some time to come.

Drive-by post

I'm insanely busy, as is always the case in December, this year with the added challenge of finishing the first round of edits on my 2013 novella and putting together a proposal for its sequel. However, when I have a spare moment between racing from holiday event to holiday event, I've been cleaning out my Gmail inbox. Which feels like verrrrry slowwwlllly traveling back in time.

Anyway, I found the following link in an email I sent my critique partner back in 2009.

A Regency Romance in 2 Minutes

I'm not sure which made me laugh harder, the reason for the heroes' terrible reputation or their titles.

Books read the past two weeks

78) A political book. And that's all I'm going to say, since I try to keep my politics out of my author world, though they've been known to creep out on Twitter from time to time.


79) Love Thy Rival: What Sports' Greatest Rivalries Teach Us About Loving Our Enemies, by Chad Gibbs. As in God and Football, Gibbs writes a humorous travelogue of sports fandom with a light touch of Christian inspiration. At the end of the book he talks about rivalry at its best--the Army-Navy football rivalry between two schools dedicated to the common cause of sacrificial service to their country--and at its worse--the Alabama fan who poisoned Auburn's Toomer Oaks. The latter incident still makes me shake with rage, even though I'm not truly part of the Auburn Family myself. (My oldest brother is an alum, so I guess I'm family of the family?) What kind of evil person murders TREES, beautiful, hundred-year-old liveoak TREES, over football?

As you see, I'm having trouble loving that particular enemy. And when you suggest I ought to love my political or ideological enemies, it gets even harder. Heck, it even raised my hackles a bit that Gibbs closed the book with a challenge for rival fans to compete by giving to a nonprofit I'd personally never donate to for political reasons. (You will note I didn't name the nonprofit here. I'm biting my tongue hard, because if I named names, I wouldn't be able to resist explaining WHY I'm against them, complete with links and sputtering outrage. I really don't want to go there in my writer space.)

80) 45 Master Characters, by Victoria Schmidt. A writer's guide to archetypes and the hero's journey. I like that she described a masculine and feminine version of the journey--and then stated that sometimes female characters follow the masculine journey pattern and vice versa. I tend to get frustrated with gender essentialist approaches to such things.

Books read, week of 3/21

I'm editing like mad, since my manuscript for An Infamous Marriage is due in less than two weeks, but I've managed to squeeze in some reading time:

33) The Duchess of Richmond's Ball: 15 June 1815, by David Miller. Only of interest to the SERIOUS Waterloo geek, especially if said geek is working on a novel including a scene at the famous ball. Containes a complete guest list with mini-bios of everyone present. That said, I'm not sure how far to trust any of those bios, since I caught several errors about the Duke of Wellington's background--e.g. he gets nuances of the Wellesley family's assorted titles wrong, and he says that Wellington was 3rd of 4 brothers rather than 3rd of 5 (admittedly, Gerald managed to avoid the fame/notoriety of the other four--no sex scandals that I'm aware of, for starters--but his existence isn't exactly hidden and hard to discover). Of course, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter that Richard Wellesley was Earl of Mornington before he became Marquess Wellesley, nor that there was a less famous clergyman brother named Gerald, but still, it makes it hard for me to trust the book on areas where I'm NOT coming in with preexisting expertise.

34) How to Be Black, by Baratunde Thurston. One of the blogs I followed obsessively during the run-up to the 2008 election and still check from time to time is Jack and Jill Politics, so when I heard that Thurston, the blog's cofounder, had a book out, I requested it from the library. While I'm white, you can't live in America without being aware of racial issues (especially if you've got a smart kid who asks all kinds of probing questions based on snippets of commentary she hears on the radio), and this book is a satirical, thoughtful look at where we are now.

35) While at Amazon preordering Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, I noticed Proto Zoa, a collection of Lois McMaster Bujold's early short stories that I'd never read before. I'm not a huge fan of short stories, because you don't have time to connect to the characters, but I like Bujold's writing so much I bought it anyway. I'm not sorry I did. It was a nice, quick read even if I didn't love the stories the way I do her full-length books.