Book: 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.
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
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.
Book: A Poisoned Season
Author: Tasha Alexander
Genre: Historical Mystery
Length: 306 pgs
Summary: It is the start of the summer Season in London, and everyone worth speaking to is whispering about Mr Charles Berry, an alcohol-and-woman-happy man claiming to be the lost descendant of the dauphin (that is, heir to Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette). Lady Emily Ashton, our heroine, becomes suspicious of Mr Berry as items once belonging to his "beloved grande-mere" are stolen from unsuspecting peerage about town. As deaths occur and the thief begins to stalk Emily, rather than running away or hiding behind her dear friend Colin Hargreaves, Emily uses her cleverness and curiosity to solve the mysteries plaguing London.
Excerpts:
pg 5 - "Surely you've put aside all thoughts of studying during the Season?" he asked.
"Studying Greek, Mr Berry, is what will get me through the Season."
pg 132 - His lips brushed my hand. "How do you like the room? I finally realized that if I'm to have any hope of marrying you, I'd have to show you my library first."
pg 134 - I think had he the presence of mind to propose at that moment, I would have accepted. The combination of hearing him speak in such an enlightened manner and the perfect setting of his library would have been too much to resist.
pg 296 - Added to this angst was Colin's absence. His actions during the past months had surprised me at every turn. He had not tried to keep me from pursuing my investigations and had offered assistance without taking charge on his own. And now, in the aftermath of it all, I wanted nothing more than to sit with him, in quiet triumph, discussing what had transpired.
I loved to flirt with him, tease him, to discuss Greek with him. But I had not expected to find that, as a partner, he could offer more than that. He challenged me, stimulated my thinking, and offered both comfort and support when I succumbed to frustration. Was it possible that, as his wife, I might grow more than if I remained alone?
Why should you read this book?
This was just the sort of book I needed to read. The voice (written in first person) is amusing, conversational, yet intelligent. We are given detail about the London Season and high society, without it dragging the story. Motives were plausible, and everyone had a story to tell. Even the bit players. And they were interesting stories. Alexander didn't sugar-coat her description of life back then, especially in terms of relations between men and women, married and single; yet, everything was written tastefully. Read this book for an engaging heroine, a cozy mystery, and a fun read. Fun, I think, because of the pacing and the lively characters. This is the second in what I assume will be a popular series, and I'm thinking of going back to read the first book, which I have yet to do. Give it a try, I think you might like it!
Book: Miss Wonderful
Author: Loretta Chase
Genre: Regency Romance
Length: 342 pgs
Summary: Mirabel Oldridge thought she had everything under control on her Regency property. Her eccentric, distracted father was happily studying his plants. She managed to keep her family home safe from opportunistic managers (at the expense of her one chance at love and marriage). But now, now there is a new problem; one she never thought she would have to face: Alistair Carsington. Carsington is a hero from Waterloo sent to convince Mirabel's town, to convince Mirabel, that they need a canal that would ruin their picturesque countryside. It certainly doesn't help that, despite her innate hatred of Carsington and all he threatens to change, Mirabel begins to find herself attracted to the oversensitive, immaculately-dressed, and maddening idiosyncrasies that define him.
Excerpts:
pg 34 - He knew--better than many men, in fact--that a woman's speech could be fraught with hidden meanings bearing no discernible resemblance to spoken words. He did not always know what a woman meant, but he was usually aware that she meant more than she said, and that the "more" was, more often than not, trouble.
pg 88 - No tear trickled from the too-blue eyes and along the straight nose, and the soft, pink lips didn't tremble.
Her chin jutted out a bit, but that seemed to be her usual way, looking defiant or stubborn or in general uninterested in trying to please anybody.
All the same, she struck him at this moment as young, far younger than her years...and lost.
pg 93 - "I can walk and talk at the same time," came Mr Carsington's deep rumble from behind her.
He was very close behind her, she discovered as she glanced back. "I'm thinking," she said.
"But women are much more complicated beings than men," he said. "I believe you can even hold more than one thought in your head at once. Surely you must be able to walk and talk simultaneously."
pg 95 - She pretended not to understand, though she could not pretend it dismayed her. It had been a very long time since an attractive man had made improper remarks about her person. She'd forgotten how agreeable it was.
pg 121 - He was not used to women, to anyone, studying him so closely. He was not used, he realized, to anyone taking the trouble. No one else looked deeper, past the elegant appearance and charm. He wondered uneasily if anything of value existed beneath the polished surface.
pg 180 - As the unnatural gloom dissipated, Mirabel's natural bouyancy returned. Few cases were truly hopeless, she told herself. They only seemed so to people lacking courage and imagination. She was not one of those people.
Why should you read this book?
This is the first romance I've read where the heroine was older than the hero. Made for an interesting dynamic. I liked how Carsington and Mirabel, though they obviously came from familiar moulds, had defining characteristics and backstories. When I first began this book, I rolled my eyes at yet another Regency romance. But then Carsington became much more than a dandy with a limp, and Mirabel was something more than just an old maid who dropped everything for her family. Even the distracted father had a reason for his eccentric ways. Read this book for plausible motives to the characters' actions. I personally would have liked to see a little more character development, but then, maybe it wouldn't have been a strict romance. A good, quick read for those romance readers looking for a little more depth and heart to the fairy tale.
Book: The Thirteenth Tale
Author: Diane Setterfield
Genre: Fiction
Length: 406 pgs
Summary: Margaret Lea has a secret about her birth; a secret that haunts her to this day, and affects every decision she makes. She is the daughter of an antique book dealer, and so is his helpmate in running the bookshop that maintains their lifestyle. One day, a letter arrives for Margaret, written in an awful hand, requesting that she journey to the home of the infamous writer, Vida Winter. Miss Winter is infamous because of her past, or lack of it, for with every interview there is a new rendition, and none of them are true. There is no record of Miss Winter's birth, her childhood...nothing to say who she was before she appeared in the literary world. Miss Winter, it seems, wants to tell the truth of her past for the first time, ever, and she has chosen Margaret for the job. After thirty (or forty, perhaps?) years of public speculation about the past of Miss Vida Winter, and the plot of the missing thirteenth tale from her book Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (only twelve were released), Vida Winter is ready to speak the truth.
pg 4 - (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
pg 5 - Some writers don't like interviews of course. They get cross about it. "Same old questions," they complain. Well, what do they expect? Reporters are hacks. We writers are the real thing. Just because they always ask the same questions, it doesn't mean we have to give them the same answers, does it? I mean, making things up, it's what we do for a living.
pg 32 - I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a yearning for the lost pleasure of books. [...] Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.
pg 45 - People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he'd hurt someone's feelings. But then he was a genius.
pg 46 - "Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. [...] To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work."
pg 100 - You could hear the power of his brain in his voice, which was quiet but quick, with a facility for finding the right words for the right person at the right time. You could see it in his eyes: dark brown and very shiny, like a bird's eyes, observant, intent, with strong, neat eyebrows above.
pg 177 - As he listened, he had been been rather struck by her queer little voice. Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read. And when she paused for breath at the end of a sentence, she would give him a quick look--he had found it disconcerting the first time, though he now found it rather droll--to let him know whether he was allowed to speak or whether she intended to go on speaking herself.
pg 220 - His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.
pg 289 - Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
Why should you read this book?
Because it is a love story to readers and writers. This just might be my favorite book if 2007, just as Elantris was my favorite of 2006. I will be hard-pressed, I think, to find another book that immediately enfolded me in its mystery and charm, leaving me dazed in my everyday activities as I contemplated the characters and plot. Every character is tangible and sympathetic, the setting is distinct, and the plot is original (to me, at least). The style is romantic in the classic sense of the word, yet entirely believable given the narrator's (Margaret) deep appreciation of books. We're never given a time period, yet I'm left with the impression that Margaret lives in the 1930s, 40s, or perhaps even 1950s.
Reading this book left me with sensations of DuMarier's Rebecca, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, LeFanu's The Wyvern Mystery, and other such romantic, gothic, books. Read it for the intense characterizations. Read it to know the language of a bibliophile speaking with another bibliophile, describing favorite works. I feel as though The Thirteenth Tale has changed me and so my writing: it's let me believe that there are readers willing to entertain a more romantic and classic style from a modern author, and that is good news indeed.
Book: Paperback Writer
Author: Stephen Bly
Genre: Fiction
Length: 342 pgs
Summary: Paul James Watson is your typical midlist paperback novelist. He lives a typical middle class life with a devoted wife, loving children, and a cabin in the woods of Montana. His life is a little too "perfect, flat, routine, unimpressive," and his spiritual life is about the same. Thus, Watson turns to his writing to bring the spark back, by indulging in his character, Toby McKenna, a sort of James Bond/Indiana Jones persona. As Watson writes his next novel, McKenna begins to take over, and soon the lines of reality and fiction blur to the point that Watson "may well be lost."
pg 16 - Everything waits. Like street gangs in a dark alley, real life waits in ambush. If I glance up more than two minutes from my writing, real life imprisons me.
pg 26 - There is something innocent and healthy about the way a woman never forgets how to giggle.
pg 29 - "Do you mean you actually have something published?"
"A number of books. But sometimes my imagination runs away with me, and I live a scene out before it happens. While I was standing here waiting, I sort of lived out this scene. That's how I knew about the phone call."
"That's really weird. Does it always turn out the way you imagine it?"
He stared at the large lady and thought about a fictional lady named Carrie. "It seldom, if ever, turns out the way I imagine it," he replied.
She tugged on the sagging lobe of her triple-pierced ear. "Are you sure you aren't a drug dealer?"
pg 147 - "You mean a whole lot more than just a friend, Paul Watson. She leans on you, P.J., and sooner or later a lady who leans on you will want to hug you. And after she hugs on you awhile, she will want to kiss you. And after she kisses you, she will want you to kiss her back." [said McKenna, the fictional character.]
"Where did you hear all that nonsense?" Watson challanged.
"The Lady's Other Tiger, remember?"
"I made it up."
"You mean, it's not true?"
"I don't know if it's true. It just sounded good."
pg 296 - "When you're visiting with a lady, listen to more than her words. Seventy-five percent of what a woman wants to say is never put into words. Listen to her heart, her tone. Pay attention to her posture. Study her eyes. Don't ever take her literal words as the whole story. It never is."
Why should you read this book?
This was an interesting premise: we're in the mind of a paperback writer. He talks to his semi-famous character, Toby McKenna, on the drive home from his motel stay. Half of the time he isn't actually doing anything, he's just "living out the scene before it happens." Which makes for one confused reader. At first, I thought it was so clever, how the narrative seamlessly switched from "reality" to "fiction." I could relate; after all, what writer doesn't go back and mentally rewrite a conversation gone wrong, or imagine a future conversation so that you get the words just right?
But it got old pretty quick, especially when I lost track of what was actually happening, who was actually real, and what was the point of the narrative. Watson talks to Toby, and when Toby annoys him with his debauchery, he tells Toby to go away and starts a dialogue with God, though, God never replies. By the end of the book, we have some sort of closure, and we know who was real and who wasn't, I think, but the "real" plot is so haphazard that my disbelief was not suspended, and I feel cheated. An interesting idea with a not-so-great implementation.
Book: Hood
Author: Stephen R. Lawhead
Genre: Fiction
Length: 472 pgs
Summary: Rhi Bran ap Brychan, heir to the Elfael throne, has never been much for responsibility. Not since his mother died when he was a young boy. Bran is headstrong, selfish, and egotistical; rebellious against his callous and and tyrannous father. But now his father is dead--killed by Norman invaders determined to take over the Welsh and their lands. The people of Elfael have been enslaved, made to pay taxes they have not the money for, forced to work lands that are not their own and thus making it impossible to tend to the year's harvest: the people of Elfael are starving, and they need a leader. Unfortunatly for Bran, he is their last hope.
Excerpts:
pg 59 - So far as Bran could ell, to reign was merely to invite a perpetual round of frustration and aggravation that lasted from the moment one took the crown until it was laid aside. Only a power-crazed thug like his father would solicit such travail. Any way he looked at it, sovreignty exacted a heavy price, which Bran had seen firsthand and which, now that it came to it, he found himself unwilling to pay.
pg 60 - "Pay tribute to the very brutes that would plunder us if we didn't," growled Bran. "That stinks to high heaven."
"Does it stink worse than death?" asked Iwan. Bran, shamed by the taunt, merely glared.
"It is unjust," granted Ffreol, trying to soothe, "but that is ever the way of things."
pg 123 - Bran, working with uncanny calm, placed another arrow on the string, took his time to pull, hold, and aim. When he let fly, the missle sang to its mark. The first warrior was struck and spun completely around by the force of the arrow. The second ran on a few more steps, then halted abruptly, jerked to his full height by the slender oak shaft that slammed into his chest.
pg 138 - Shocked, horrified, mournful, and leaden with sorrow, Merian moved through the first awful day feeling as if the ground she trod was no longer solid beneath her feet--as if the very earth was fragile, delicate, and thin as the shell of a robin's egg, and as if any moment the crust on which she stood might shatter and she would instantly plunge from the world of light and air into the utter, perpetual, suffocating darkness of the tomb. [...] Anyone observing Merian might have thought her distracted or concerned. Knowing that nothing good could come of any overt distplay of emotion where Bran was concerned, she wallowed her grief and behaved as if the news of Bran's death was a thing of negligible significance amidst the more troubling news of the murder of Brychan ap Tewdwr and all his warband and the unwarranted Ffreinc advance into neighboring Elfael.
Why should you read this book?
For one thing, it's the story of Robin Hood set in Wales. Rather than the Saxons fighting the Normans, it is the Welsh, who already have fought with the invading Saxons and come to a grudging level of symbiosis, who now fight against the encroaching and greedy Norman-Ffreinc. Welsh stories tend to fascinate me, if only because they haven't had much play time in the fiction world, at least by my understanding. However, in the last couple of years I've read some excellent books about the Welsh, such as Nectar from a Stone by Jane Guill.
This book, while well-written, could have used some editing in the length, I think. The character development is thorough, and for that reason alone you should read this book. The setting description is vivid and doesn't take away from the pacing of the narrative. Yet, there were parts that dragged and had me wondering when I was going to read a portion that more closely resembled something of the traditional Robin Hood legend. So, if you're thinking of reading this book, don't start it with the Kevin Costner or Errol Flynn versions in mind. This Hood, Bran, is conflicted. He doesn't want to be a hero; he actually spends most of the book trying to run away. An interesting new spin on the tales of Robin Hood, this book is the first in a trilogy, surprise surprise. The next one is called Scarlet, which I can only assume is a reference to Will Scarlet, Robin Hood's second-most loyal companion, Little John being the first.
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