Book: Evening

Title: Evening
Author: Susan Minot
Genre: Fiction
Length: 264 pgs

Summary: Ann Grant Lord is dying. As she lays in bed drifting in and out of consciousness, memories of a long-forgotten love affair are triggered by the smell of a balsam pillow.

Excerpts:
pg 12 – Bertie frankly found her a little distant and cold. Dr Baker found [all women] mysterious to a point and Ann Lord had her own brand of mystery. She always looked well turned out and was a little cool ten she would surprise you with a little jolt of something witty and inviting. It was nearly flirtation and challanged something in him. Of course he did not relate that to his wife. He knew that much about women.

pg 14 – No doubt at the time they affected her, stirred some reaction, irritated or pleased her, but now most of them gave off neither heat nor cold and she watched them drop into the gaping dark hole of meaningless things she had nto forgotten, things one level up from the far vaster place where lay all the unremembered things.

pg 179 – Hope is better than mistery, he said. Or despair.
Hope belongs in the same box as despair.
Hope is not so bad, he said.
At least despair has truth in it.
You’re in a dark mood today.

pg 241 – Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions they would stick to them no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick to their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they posessed.

Why should you read this book?
The text has a certain poetry to it, once you get used to its peculiarity. For instance: there are no double-quote marks denoting speech. My third excerpt above is an example of every conversation in the book. That’s one of the more straight-forward conversations. The entire book is a sort of rambling narration, disjointed in its timeline and sometimes in its sentence structure. Makes for frustrating reading if you don’t have the patience to work through it. An interesting idea, with an interesting execution, I can’t decide if I actually liked this book. As the narration is hazy, seen through the drugged mind of a cancer patient, the reader has a distinct level of abstraction so that no real connection is ever made with the characters or, dare I say it, plot.

Book: Never Let Me Go

Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Fiction
Length: 288 pgs

Summary: Kathy grew up in the sheltered, English countryside at the Hailsham boarding school, where the students were raised to believe they were special. Only in her teens does Hailsham reveal how special the students are. Kathy’s narrative slowly reveals from hindsight how a simple deception defines her life.

Excerpts:
pg 195 – But I didn’t say or do anything. It was partly, I suppose, that I was so floored by the fact that Ruth would come out with such a trick. I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off solution, but you can’t work up the energy even to give it a go.

pg 208 – Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it’s a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

Why should you read this book?
This story is intense, subtle, delicate. Its characters are flawed, obsessively so. The overlying plot is science fiction, but without the hopeful ending we expect from genre fiction. Definitely a literary piece, I’m debating whether I actually liked it. For you writers, however, read this for a good example of a first-person narration where the narrator is sensitive, passive, and suspicious without really knowing why. There is no real oppressor or antagonist, reflecting life. If you liked Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I did, then you will definitely like this book.

August 2010 Update

This book is now being made into a movie, which looks breathtaking: Never Let me Go theatrical trailer

Book: Silent in the Grave

Title: Silent in the Grave
Author: Deanna Raybourn
Genre: Historical Mystery
Length: 509 pgs

Summary: Always weak, Sir Edward falls to the floor while he and his wife, Lady Julia, entertain some friends. Julia is sent from the room by her father, but not before a mysterious and dark man, Nicholas Brisbane, warns her that this was very likely murder. Certain Brisbane is mad, Julia disregards his warning until a year later, when she throws off her full-mourning and starts to pack away Edward’s things…only to find a death threat shoved in his desk.

Excerpts:
pg 1 – To say I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

Why should you read this book?
For you historical fiction writers looking for a first-person narrative, this book is a great example from which to learn. Julia is impetuous, frank, and conflicted, all great character traits for a narrator. For those of you writing in the High Victorian era (i.e. late Victorian era, from 1870′s-on), read this book to learn how to drop details about society, class restraints, and aristocratic assumptions without taking away from the story.

Unfortunately for me, I read too much, so many stories start to seem similar and I guess things before I should, like who the killer might be. I did not, however, guess the motive at all and I give Raybourn props for that. An entertaining read, similar in theme to Tasha Alexander’s A Poisoned Season, I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t switch my own 1880′s novel to a first-person narrative in which a young woman loses her husband before she really knew him, thus freeing her to walk about Society the way an umarried woman cannot, and solve mysteries in a Nancy Drew sort of way.

Book: Hurricane Moon

Title: Hurricane Moon
Author: Alexis Glynn Latner
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 397 pgs

Summary: It is the late 21st Century. Catharin, an idealistic astronaut-physician, is part of the crew of Aeon, a starship sent out to find a new Earth. She wants to help society start anew, now that medicine has solved all major problems; molecular biologist Joe Devreze, however, just wants to run away from Earth, for reasons Catharin can’t figure out. Everything goes awry when Aeon reaches a double-planet system: one dubbed Planet Green is covered with vegetation, the other, Planet Blue, is consistently covered with hurricanes. As Catharin and Joe start to settle into Planet Green, Catharin discovers problems with their DNA… to the point where they might be the last humans in the universe. Can she trust Joe, and his shady motives, to save humanity? And just how much attention should Catharin pay to her subconscious warnings that Planet Blue is more than just a watery moon?

Excerpts:
pg 118 – To Catharin’s consternation, Miguel laughed like a carefree man. “Oh, but we need [Joe]. Most certainly, we need him. You see, the gods who are creator and creatrix, especially of small worlds, always take themselves too seriously, and they want their work to be perfect. But evil spirits appear and they start spoiling things, and the gods would give up and throw the world away and start over, if they could. Fortunately, in almost every creation myth, soon there also comes the trickster god. His name is Coyote, or Pan, or Raven. He does absurd and mischievous things that annoy the creator gods. He saves the world, too.”

pg 198 – Maya had glittering green eyes and long dark hair with auburn highlights, and a willful attractiveness that Joe sensed as tangibly as feeling wind or heat.

pg 234 – What the hell had he been doing those years? Working. Walking. Inventing. Suddenly Joe thought about fairy tales, the ones about changelings who grow up to find out that they have no soul. It was an uncomfortable thought.

pg 256 – “Catharin is a cool customer,” Joe said to Wing.

“She’s like a violin. Quiet and tightly strung.”

“D’you suppose she ever lets her hair down?”

Wing answered with a promptness suggesting he’d reflected on this topic before. “I think her nickname, Cat, is apt, Joe. I think she has the soul of a tiger.”

pg 329 – “Luna is hundreds of light-years away, but her influence is woven throughout our evolution, our bodies,” said Sam. “We women are joined to the powers of life and change and birth. Birth scares the men. That’s why WE scare them. But change doesn’t have to scare US.”

Why should you read this book?
This may not be the most unique ideas, that in the future Earth falls to ruin and we send our best out in the universe to find a new Earth, but this is definitely the best-executed idea that I’ve read in a while. Much of the story rotates around the biology and evolution of people and their environment; much speculation is made about why there is a Planet Blue and a Planet Green, and we never really know if it’s the truth, only that this is what the characters have decided must have happened. I loved the science behind it all, mainly because I used to be obsessed with the moon (I kind of still am) and how it affects us daily. The characters react as you expect people to react to something so foreign as two Earth-sized planets on spin-lock around each other.

Latner does a wonderful job of making you feel scientific by the end of the book. She explains without making you feel stupid, and so you know what these highly-scientific characters are doing without getting into unnecessary details. Her use of tension is subtle, but effective: I jumped twice and even yelped once when I was reading and a friend called out to me as he walked past. That hardly ever happens to me (I read so much that I’m almost jaded sometimes). A unique book with a good execution, and even with some romance, this book was entertaining and even informative.

Book: The Extra-Large Medium

Title: The Extra Large Medium
Author: Helen Slavin
Genre: Paranormal Women’s Fiction
Length: 288 pgs

Summary: Annie always thought chocolate brown was the new black, because everyone was wearing it. It didn’t take long for her to realize that no one else saw these people wearing all-brown outfits, and that these people happened to be dead. As a grown-up, Annie begins to treat her habit of finishing the ghostly “unfinished business” as a job; it is when her husband disappears and doesn’t return to her, wearing brown, telling her his unfinished business, that things become seriously wrong.

Excerpts:
pg 1 – In Hell they all wear evening gowns. Heavily boned bodices. Dress-shirt collars just that bit too tight. Your forehead just that bit too sweaty and the perspiration running like an itching, infuriating river down from your armpit into the elastic of your knickers. The point where it pinches your waistband.

pg 36 – Funny how the words for the male member all smack of stupidity. ‘Member’ for a start off, some idiot politician. John Thomas, who no doubt plays a banjo in Tennessee. Todger, the thick dog who can never find where you’ve thrown the stick. Dick, the man who wears the most hideous golf sweaters at the local links. Cock, a strutting brainless bird puffed up with his own importance and getting around ALL the birds. Donger, a dwarf breed of conger eel. Prick, so quick you hardly notice and before you turn your head it’s all over.

pg 46 – Most of the young men, and a couple of the older ones I picked out, seemed only interested in one thing. They made small talk, ate dinner or pretended to listen to your boring recollections from your day at work because they felt that this would work some miracle on the elastic of your knickers. They didn’t want you. They wanted sex. Conversation was just some boring form-filling requirement that had to be gone through to get to the sex. No one seemed any good at it either.

pg 47 – For a brief time at the university I was known as the Ice Maiden because I was notoriously hard work on a date. Then I discovered the Ice Maiden Sweepstake. The bet was on as to who could crack the Ice Maiden. ‘Crack’. It was their word. I would have preferred ‘thaw’: you melt the ice with the heat of your passion. But no. They would have a ‘crack’ at it.

Why should you read this book?
If you think perhaps this book has a theme similar to The Sixth Sense, that’s what I thought too. Except instead of being a thriller of sorts, this book is insightful and humorous, with a succinct tone that doesn’t forgive any character and yet makes you feel for them nonetheless. At its heart, this book is about a woman who loses her husband and waits, against her will, for the day she has to legally declare him dead.

For you writers, read this book to learn how to write about a topic (like death) without depressing the reader. Every character is flush and real, people we can relate to or have had a conversation with. Annie is a great anti-hero, as well; she is flawed, can’t seem to hold on to material objects or the people around her, and yet is crying out for someone to ground her from her ethereal calling. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and read it in one evening, I couldn’t put it down.

Book: The Wayward Muse

Title: The Wayward Muse
Author: Elizabeth Hickey
Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 293 pgs

Summary: It is the beginning of the Victorian era, and Jane is a very ugly girl. On an outing with her sister, Jane is spotted by two artists that consider her the most beautiful woman in the world, thus changing her life forever.

Excerpts:
pg 1 – Jane Burden was considered the plainest girl on Holywell Street, and that Oxford slum was home to many worthy candidates for the title. Mary Porter, who was afflicted with a lazy eye and copious freckles, lived there, just across the street from Alice Cunningham, who had crooked, discolored teeth and thinning hair. Number 142 was the residence of Catherine Blair, whose neck and ear had been horribly burned when she was a baby, and whose left leg was somewhat shorter than the right. But even she was considered marginally better looking than Jane.

pg 2 – But it was her expression that truly made Jane Burden plain. For she seldom smiled, and her green eyes, which might have been considered striking on another girl, were empty. They weren’t sad; sadness could be fetching. They were not grave and serious or soft and pleading or tearful and melancholy. They were blank. Jane’s eyes told everyone who met her of her misery and her despair. They told of a girl who had ceased to hope for anything, who had gone deep inside herself to withstand her lot. It made the others uneasy.

pg 53 – Jane only laughed. Rosetti knew something that the people of Holywell street did not. He knew she was a fairy queen. [...] Her silence was now called dignity. Her height and her skinniness were regal rather than ugly.

pg 286 – “What is my mind made of?” asked Jane.
“Oh, I think it’s a willow basket,” said Morris. He put down his pipe and stood up. “Soft and pliable but incredibly resistant. The only way to unravel it would be with great violence and a pair of very sharp scissors.”
Why should you read this book?
Excellent writing, as you’ll find in the excerpts I’ve posted. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, despite Jane’s character, which makes me respect Hickey even more. Once I realized the plot, I almost put the book away, except Hickey’s writing and depiction of the characters stayed my hand. This book is one of the best fiction depictions of a real Victorian marriage that I have read yet; the main characters are real people, and while the story may not be entirely factual, the plot seems to follow the real time-line faithfully. The writing style is simple yet lush, the scenery vivid, the characters organic and sympathetic. Anyone working on making their characters flawed, especially the main character, should read this book as an example of how to maintain your reader’s interest.

Book: The Glass Harmonica

Title: The Glass Harmonica
Author: Louise Marley
Genre: Paranormal Historical Fiction
Length: 369 pgs

Summary: The year is 2018 and Erin is the premiere virtuosa on the glass harmonica, an instrument that, over the centuries, has been known to make its player and select members of the audience go mad. Though she publicly denies these rumors, secretly she is terrified they are true once she starts to see visions of a girl who does not exist.

The year is 1761 and Eilish Eam, an Irish orphan, has been plucked from her unlucky existence to play Benjamin Franklin’s new invention: the glass armonica.

Excerpts:
pg 116 – It was the terror that lurked in [Erin's] nightmares, that stalked her when she was weakest, most vulnerably. It was the fear that made her snap answers to stupid questions, made her impatient and angry at the probing and pushing of interviewers and reporters and historians. She was afraid. She wasn’t afraid of her wraith, of ghosts or visions or manifestations. What she feared was that, like her predecessors, like the ancestral virtuosi who had first played her precious and mystical instrument, her nerves were breaking down. She was afraid she was going mad.

Why should you read this book?
This book is well-written: all the characters have backstories and motivations, and the setting is fully realized. Despite this, I felt no connection with the characters. I read the entire book, but I never felt drawn to the story, wondering what would happen next. And I should have, because this was an interesting idea. As a musician, I loved the history of the glass harmonica; as a historian, I thought Marley’s depiction of Benjamin Franklin was great; as a scientist, I loved the idea of applying music to neuro-therapy. As a writer, I thought something was lacking, which may be because the back cover copy made the story seem more action-oriented, a time-travel similar to The Lake House (which defies so many laws of physics and time-travel, even).

A pleasant read, the one thing that really annoyed me was Marley’s use of “’twas” and “’tis,” beyond the 1761 dialogue. For example: Eilish pushed the basket again, trying to make her two seed coins clink together. Talk brought no food. ‘Twas money she needed. In my opinion, Marley should have stuck with a first-person narrative for the 1761 story, and third-person for the 2018, if she wanted to write like that. But then, another reader will find it charming, and think I’m crazy for not liking it. Such a subjective profession this is…

Book: Liszt’s Kiss

Title: Liszt’s Kiss
Author: Susanne Dunlap
Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 330 pgs

Summary: Anne, a young pianist about to enter Parisian society during the height of the Musical Romantic Era (1830s, 1840s), has just lost her mother to the cholera epidemic. Her father forbids her from playing the piano. As an outlet, her mother’s friend, Marie d’Agoult, invites her to a piano concert where she sees Liszt for the first time. Anne’s life is forever changed from the moment she matches eyes with Liszt…

Excerpts:
pg 111 – The more she watched, the more she was persuaded that although Liszt leaned in close to Anne and touched her hands to show her how to achieve certain improvements in her technique, everything he did was not really for the benefit of his pupil but was in some fashion on display for Marie herself: the way he moved, the incline of his head, the frequency with which he smiled or cast a soulful glance at the high ceiling, never turning to look in Marie’s direction, yet ensuring that every gesture, every comment, reflected off Anne and she its light over her.

Why should you read this book?
This book is a good example of a story that chose third person omniscient, but might have been better with first-person multiple point-of-view. Dunlap wrote her third-person narrative from the views of her characters anyway, so I’m confused why she didn’t write it in first-person. I felt completely detached from the entire story. I read it because I liked the young doctor Pierre…he was the only character I liked. (Which means Vonnegut was right: always write at least one character for the reader to like.)

The insipid way Anne reacts to things, the two-dimensional father with a mea culpa reason for his coldness, the way the ending felt thrown together…I admit, I’m disappointed in this book. The last two paragraphs, however, were amazing. And yes, I do read the last page first to decide if I’ll like a book. Sometimes it doesn’t work out.

Book: Stardust

Title: Stardust
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 235 pgs

Summary: In the town of Wall there is a young man named Tristran Thorn, and he is in love with a young woman named Victoria Forester. Victoria, young, beautiful, and completely aware of the fact, sends Tristran on a fool’s errand: to fetch the fallen star on the horizon. And so, Tristran steps across the border from the everyday to the mystical.

Excerpts:
pg 23 – He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something abuot a prior engagement.

pg 36 – “Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not wish to marry someone who has already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having someone else break in one’s own pony.”
“Personally, I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widdower,” said Amelia Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities.”

pg 131 – “A nymph. I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn’t you?”
“You would?”
“Exactly what I think. But he didn’t, so I did a bit of invoking while I was running, and–ba-boom!–tree. What do you think?”
“Well,” said Tristran. “I do not know what you were like as a wood-nymph, madam, but you are a magnificent tree.
“I was pretty cute as a nymph, too.”

pg 224 – He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he decalred that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

Why should you read this book?
Because it’s Neil Gaiman, and everyone should read one Gaiman book at some point. This book begged to be read aloud, and I almost wish (now this is a shocker) that I had the audio version. The narration is simple yet intriguing and complex; I want to read it again just to figure out how he was able to convey so much with so little. Which is exactly why you should read this book. Long sentences and over-the-top vocabulary are gimicks easily pointed out…they hide bad plots and expose worse execution. Gaiman’s simple narration is a quick read, yet, there are important themes discussed.

Plus, the movie comes out on my birthday. So, read the book before you watch the movie, as the movie is almost never as good as the original.

Book: Poison Study

Title: Posion Study
Author: Maria V Snyder
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 361 pgs

Summary: Yelena has murdered a man. And the punishment for death, for any unnatural death, even accidental, is execution. Luckily, the Commander’s food-taster has just died, and Yelena, being the next up for execution, is offered the job by the Commander’s right-hand man, Valek. As her tasting and smelling skills improve, Yelena’s survival instinct (a droning sound emitting from her mouth) turns out to be a sort of raw magic. And in a land where magic is outlawed, punishable by death, Yelena finds herself facing death from all angles.

Excerpt:
pg 104 – “You remind me of a pretty bird, willing to sit on the windowsill as long as nobody comes too close, but prepared to fly away if somebody does.”

Why should you read this book?
It’s an entertaining read. I was most intrigued by Valek, who surprises Yelena with the facets of his personality, and therefore the reader. The political intrigue wasn’t the most groundbreaking, but then, the story was more a fantasy coming-of-age than anything else, so I can forgive that. I liked it enough to look for the next book, Magic Study, but I have to admit that Yelena’s horrible past just didn’t really come across with fervency. But once again, that may not have been the point.