bookshelves of doom

Dead Girls Don't Write Letters - Gail Giles

Gail Giles would kick the crap out of M. Night Shama-whats-it when it comes to the twist ending.

I love Gail Giles.

Dead Girls Don't Write Letters is a very loose version of the prodigal son story. Sunny's older sister, Jazz, died in a fire a few months ago. Their dad starts drinking, their mom falls apart, and Sunny (except for the whole parents=crazy thing) is actually pretty happy. Everyone else had seen Jazz as this beautiful, vibrant and wonderful girl. Only Sunny knew that she was actually the devil--manipulative, selfish and just plain horrible. But then, Sunny gets a letter from Jazz. And she's coming home.

I read this book in about 45 minutes. And it was a good thing that the house wasn't burning down or anything, because I wouldn't have moved until I was done. Now I have to track down Playing in Traffic. After I've read that one, I'll just have to sit around and wait until she writes another one.

Sirens Sang of Murder - Sarah Caudwell

For those of us that have run out of Dorothy Sayers books to read.

Not that Sarah Caudwell's books are all that like Dorothy Sayers, but I think that the same people would like them. They're smart, funny, and very, very British. She only wrote four books before she died in 2000--I've read three of them, and now I don't know if I should read the fourth. If I do, I won't have any left to read. (This goes along with my Lord Peter problem--I've read all of the novels, but I don't want to read the short stories, because then I won't have anything left. I'm going to be really mad if I die unexpectedly).

Although Prof. Hilary Tamar (Man? Woman? Who knows? Only Sarah Caudwell, and unfortunately, she's not going to enlighten anyone) is the character that ultimately solves the mysteries, the reader gets a lot of information from the Professor's friends--a group of young lawyers. Here's an excerpt from a fax that Cantrip sends to the crew back in London (this is from The Sirens Sang of Murder):

If you're an ace investigator hot on the trail of a villinous high court judge it's a good thing to know what town you're in, so I nipped off the boat as fast as I could to find out where we were. The first thing I spotted was that everyone was talking Frogspeak, so putting two and two together I deduced we were probably in France.

I felt a bit miffed at first. I've nothing against France, except for it being full of foreigners, but it wasn't where I'd have expected old Wellieboots to go if he wanted to get the goods on my clients. I started thinking poor old Catseyes Cantrip might be on a wild-goose chase. Still having got this far I was blowed if I was giving up right away, so when he got ashore I started tailing him again.

If you're still not sure about reading them, Edward Gorey did the cover art. So there.

The Grand Tour - Patricia C. Wrede & Carolyn Stevermer

The summer of the good sequel continues, even if it's technically fall.

If you liked Sorcery and Cecelia, then read the sequel, The Grand Tour. The authors wrote both books while playing the Letter Game. So cool.

If you like Jane Austen and Diana Wynne Jones, and you (god forbid!) haven't read Sorcery and Cecelia, then get moving, bucko!

What? You want to read a bit of it first? Okay, here's a bit from Cecy's deposition:

"I'm in excellent health," Thomas said in a strangled voice. "Never better."

"You are not," Kate said flatly. "And it's very odd that of the five of us, it's the three wizards who are suddenly feeling not the thing."

Before James or Thomas could respond, the coach lurched violently. I heard incoherent shouts outside and then a muffled crack. We stopped moving, but I felt no better. Then the coach door was flung open, and a man thrust his head--and a large pistol--into the coach and said something in incomprehensible French.

James looked quite fierce for a moment, but then he glanced at Lady Sylvia and me. His lips tightened. "We had better do as he says," he said.

"What did he say?"

"We're being held up," Kate said much too calmly. "We're to get out of the coach. James, will you help Lady Sylvia? I think Cecy and I can manage together, and I'm sure that Thomas will do quite well on his own. Since he is feeling so perfectly well."

Doing It - Melvin Burgess

This one makes Forever look like Junie B. Jones.

A while back, Collomia and I had a conversation about how we were so used to reading YA books that the sex scenes in grown-up books kind of freaked us out. Well. I've got the YA book to change all that--Doing It, by Melvin Burgess. There's been a LOT of uproar about this one--Anne Fine, in particular, wrote a scathing (and in my opinion, completely unfair) review of it in the Guardian. (Which is unfortunate, because I really like her books). Lots of people are defending it, too. On the back of the american edition, there is a quote from a review in The Scotsman:

Anybody who takes the trouble to read the book, rather than just recoil from the smutty quotes, will find that it is a geniunely moral work of fiction about a subject--the confusions, joys and terrors of adolescent male sexuality--rarely addressed with such comprehension or sympathy.

I thought it was a great book--it was funny, yeah, but mostly, it was honest. I think that the people that are freaking out about it either don't remember their teens AT ALL, or they had extremely, extremely sheltered childhoods. (Mine was pretty damn sheltered, and there were A LOT of scenes in the book that brought up some pretty vivid memories. And no, I'm not telling which scenes).

Godless - Pete Hautman

The Ten-Legged One Lives!

I don't think that there are many authors out there brave enough to write a YA book about a teenager questioning his religion. Pete Hautman's Godless is the first one that I've run across. I'd imagine that this book is going to ruffle some feathers out there. But I also think that there are plenty of people out there that won't take Jason Bock's personal journey as an attack on their own personal beliefs. I really think that it's a super book, and worth reading, regardless of where you're at, faith-wise. Like the two previous books, it's a book that I don't want to say too much about. So, once again, go and read it so that I can actually talk about it with someone.

Naked - David Sedaris

I'm still working on reading all of the Sedaris books. (We don't have all of them at my library, so I've been ILLing them, which takes time). This time around, I read Naked. Although I liked Me Talk Pretty Some Day more (probably because so much of it was about his childhood), I'm starting to think that most everything that this guy writes is worth reading. (Before anyone can say anything, I have Running with Scissors at home on my TBR pile. (For all of you non-nerds out there, that would be my To-Be-Read pile)).

I will say that this one made me laugh out loud more than MTPSD. The story "c.o.g."--where he's working at the apple packing plant--almost killed me. When he goes over to his co-worker's house for a beer, and is horribly surprised by what he finds:

Whatever Curly's theatrical fear, it could not begin to match my genuine horror as he opened the door to his bedroom, which served as a showplace for his vast collection of artifical penises. They hung from the walls, jutted from plaques, and stood upright, neatly spaced upon shelves and tabletops. Duplicated in wood, plastic, or fleshy rubber, what they had in common was their substantial size. Some were detailed to include veins and curly-haired testicles, while others existed as a minimal idea. Black or white, buffed aluminum or flesh-tone, electric or manual, the message was the same.

"So what do you think?" Curly said, lowering himself onto the waterbed.

"That's really some...bedspread you've got there, " I said, hoping to focus the attention toward the color scheme. "It's a real...orange orange, isn't it?"

I can't help it. I'm laughing again. The story "something for everyone", about working with Dupont, the black man who puts on the Uncle Tom act whenever the boss is around, and constantly tries to get David fired. The title story, about his week-long stay in a nudist colony. And, "a plague of tics", which was (yay!) another story about David's childhood.

Now I need to get a copy of Barrel Fever.

Last Chance Texaco - Brent Hartinger Shattering Glass - Gail Giles

Two books that I now have to buy.

This weekend, while I wasn't having my heart broken about the house, or going to a wedding, or spending time with my absolutely insane family, I was (surprise!) reading. Chrissy and Lauren had both (completely independent of each other, unless there is some strange conspiracy that I'm unaware of) been on my case to read Last Chance Texaco. Neither of them would tell me anything about it--they just said that I had to read it. I don't really want to ruin anything for anyone either, so I'll give you the first few sentences:

The door was locked, and I sure as hell didn't have the key.

I was standing on a front porch, and the door before me was tall and wide and arched, with a fancy black iron handle and hinges, like the door to a church or a haunted house. I should know--I'd been dragged into a whole lot of different churches over the years, and while none of the many houses I'd lived in had actually been haunted, most of them had been plenty scary.

This was a great book. I had a couple of vague tiny complaints, but they weren't really even worth going into... If, at the end of a book, I feel like turning it over and starting again, it is considered a Very Good Book. So read it.

The second one, Shattering Glass, might have found a place on the hallowed shelf of my Chris Crutcher books. (Well, not really, because Crutcher and Giles are separated by authors D, E, and F, but in terms of quality, it'll join 'em). In fact, on the back of the book, Chris Crutcher says:

Shattering Glass is a dark, finely crafted, on-the-money coming of age suspense story. From page one, I felt myself being pulled to its grim conclusion by a very fine storyteller. This novel will be around for a while.

So, a recommendation from Leila is good. A recommendation from Chris Crutcher is basically a command to read the book. I don't want to give anything away, though, so get your butts in gear and read the book so that we can talk about it. Here's the first paragraph:

Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him.

How could you not run out and devour this book after an opening paragraph like that??

Candyfreak - Steve Almond

For those who remember Candy and Me.

I read the other candy book, Candyfreak. This one wasn't nearly as lighthearted as Hilary Liftin's book, but still really funny and (gasp!) informative. The author (Steve Almond--who's been tormented for years by people serenading him with the Almond Joy song, even though he HATES coconut) is insane. He certainly loves candy more than anyone I've ever met. This includes my dad, who, even though no-one ever goes to his house on Halloween, buys 10 pounds of candy. Then he puts a black light up on the porch, (which makes the house looks deserted), and eats all of the candy himself.

Steve Almond brings the reader on a tour of the few independent candy companies that are still managing to eke out an existence in the days of the Big Three (Nestle, Hershey's and Mars). At least, he tours the companies that will let him visit:

Ms. Gordon laughed politely and explained that no such visit would be possible. For competitive reasons, she said, not impolitely. She assured me that the manufacturing process for the products in question was proprietary and that the company's equipment was beyond state of the art. "Beyond state of the art," I said. "Surely you jest. Junior Mints enrobed with lasers? Genetically engineered Sugar Babies?" "Sorry," Gordon said. As it turns out, the larger candy manufacturers are notoriously secretive operations. I had always assumed that the industrial espionage in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was trumped-up fiction. Not so. Roald Dahl based his book on the legendary exploits of the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, who routinely sent moles to spy on one another's operations.

Insane. The candy industry is insane. The people who make candy, sell it, everything: they're obsessed. The guy who runs CandyDirect.com was really, really upset when Wacky Wafers were discontinued. Remember, this is a guy who makes his living on selling hard-to-find candy:

"I talked to one of their product managers and he told me something about Wacky Wafers being too similar to Bottle Caps and how one line is cannibalizing the other line, something like that. This guy didn't even understand the difference between the products. Wacky Wafers are fruit-flavored. They're about the size of quarters. Bottle Caps are much smaller and they're flavored like sodas, which, I'm sorry, are not fruits. But you know what happens with these companies? They get a bunch of MBAs in there who've been working with computers and they don't care about candy. They're just in it to make a buck."

Even though I loved this book, and I think that it's totally worth reading, both for the entertainment value and for the really cool descriptions of the candy factories, I will warn that it's depressing. It goes right along with the WordsWorth thing: little indie companies being squashed by the big guys, and consumers losing out because the products that are left are all homogenized and whitebread. Big stores like Wal-Mart and Shaw's charge the candy companies for the prime shelf space by the registers--the going rate for space is $20,000 a spot. Obviously, the little companies can't afford that. It's cut-throat and scary, not happy little Candyland.

On a more cheerful note, Almond included the websites of a lot of the places he visited, so as soon as I have a little extra money, I'm going on a candy-ordering spree. Valomilk, here I come!

A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray

The Craft goes Victorian.

About half-way through A Great and Terrible Beauty, I said (out loud, to an empty house), "Oh. My. God. This is just The Craft. Yet somehow, like that crappy, crappy movie, it completely engrossed me. I read it in one sitting, and I can see myself reading it again. (Kind of like whenever I come across The Craft on TV, I need to watch it. Again). This is a completely entertaining book if you can get over the fact that the language doesn't seem at all Victorian. At about page 50, I got over it, stopped quibbling, and just enjoyed myself.

The book starts out with a bang--Gemma's mother gives her a mysterious necklace, then dies mysteriously, and although Gemma isn't on the scene when it happens, she sees the whole mysterious thing. In her mind. (Doo doo doo doo...) A few months pass, and Gemma is sent to boarding school in England. On the way there, spooky things start happening again:

Behind the little girl, I sense movement in the murky dark. I blink to clear my eyes but it's no trick--the shadows are moving. Quick as liquid silver the dark rises and takes its hideous shape, the gleaming bone of its skeletal face, the hollow, black holes where eyes should be. The hair a tangle of snakes. The mouth opens and the rasping moan escapes. "Come to us, my pretty, pretty...

This book really does have it all: secret societies, unsolved mysteries, a strange little girl, gypsies, nasty boarding-school bullies, and a few good glimpses of the crappy parts of the Victorian age.

If you feel like something pretty light, and aren't in a really critical mood, go for it. It's good reading for a grey, rainy day--like today. If I didn't have to work, I'd probably read it again. I was thinking yesterday that I'd even read a sequel. And what did I just find out? It's going to be a trilogy. Cool.

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris

Am I hip now? Or is it too late?

Lauren, don't answer that. I finally broke down and read a David Sedaris book. What can I say? I loved it. Enough that I'm going to read all of his other books and possibly use one for my high school reading group.

I knew that I was going to really, really like Me Talk Pretty One Day when I found out that David Sedaris lisped as a child. While the descriptions of speech therapy brought back some bad memories for me, they were also hilarious:

I didn't see my sessions as the sort of thing that one would like to advertise, but as my teacher liked to say, "I guess it takes all kinds." Whereas my goal was to keep it a secret, hers was to inform the entire class. If I got up from my seat at 2:25, she'd say, "Sit back down, David. You've still got five minutes before your speech therapy session." If I remained seated until 2:27, she's say, "David, don't forget you have a speech therapy session at two-thirty." On the days I was absent, I imagined she addressed the room, saying, "David's not here today but if he were, he'd have a speech therapy session at two-thirty."

While all of the essays are worth reading, "You Can't Kill the Rooster", "City of Angels" and "Jesus Shaves" were my particular favorites. "Jesus Shaves" tells the story of the day that David's immersion French class talked about Easter. A Moroccan student asks, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?" The attempts that the other students make at explaining the holiday, in very, very basic french are hilarious. "City of Angels" is a story about David's friend Alisha, who comes to visit him in New York, and brings along a friend of hers (a friend that she's only known for a short while) from North Carolina:

The two women arrived in New York on a Friday afternoon, and upon greeting them, I noticed an uncommon expression on Alisha's face. It was the look of someone who's discovered too late that she's either set her house on fire or committed herself to traveling with the wrong person. "Run for your life," she whispered.

I don't even want to give you a taste of "You Can't Kill the Rooster". Just take my word for it and read this book if you haven't already. And if you have, maybe you should read it again.

Son of the Mob: Hollywood Hustle - Gordon Korman

Son of the Mob, Part Deux

Actually, it was called Son of the Mob: Hollywood Hustle, but let's not split hairs. If you liked the first book, you'll like this book. If you haven't read the first book, then where the heck have you been? Go read it. Sheesh.

Back to the people who've been waiting and waiting for this one... It was pretty good. (I think that the first one was better, but take it into account that I LOVED the first book). And I liked this one well enough that I started and finished it last night. Vince, Alex and Kendra are all off to college. Vince and Kendra are in the L.A. area, and Alex is in Las Vegas. Vince (stupidly) assumes that being on the other coast will mean that Dad's business won't affect his life anymore. Of course, it doesn't take him long (4 pages) to realize otherwise:

I flip the clasps on my bag and throw the lid open. And slam it back down again.

This isn't my suitcase! I mean, the suitcase is mine, but the stuff isn't! This is full of--

I peek again, hoping against hope to see my mother's neat packing job, an engineering feat that borders on the Cartesian. The perfectly folded clothes, the shoes stuffed with tissue paper, the toiletries filling empty spaces with geometric precision...

Uh-uh.

My luggage is filled with hundred-dollar bills, thousands of them, bundled in rubber bands.

He gets to school, meets his roommate (coincidentally a congressman's son), and has a day or two to get settled into crazy college life. Then, his brother Tommy shows up. And it goes on from there. If you liked the first one, this book is totally worth reading. I was just a little disappointed that Vince's mom didn't make an appearance. Because, after all, she is the coolest.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves - Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss, the punctuation nerd.

I've been looking forward to reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves for a long time. This weekend, it was finally my turn for the library copy. I loved it: it was funny, informative and it made me feel better about the day at Garden Street Market when I looked around to make sure no-one was looking, ran over to the outdoor whiteboard and erased an apostrophe from the word "litterbugs". (The sentence read, "Don't be litterbug's!") I couldn't help it. It had irked me for days, and finally, I just couldn't stand it anymore.

I stink at grammar. We never officially learned it in school--I think that we were supposed to just pick it up as we went along. I've always just written what seems right to me. (I did realize, during the reading of this book, that part of my problem might be that English & American grammar and punctuation rules are very different. Since most of my punctuation knowledge comes from reading, my love of British novels has probably mixed me up for life). I DO, however, know the difference between "it's" and "its", and that the word "groceries" does not require an apostrophe (the afternoon that I finished reading the book, I saw a sign that read, "Grocery's available here.")

I've always been semi-careful about complaining about crappy punctuation because: (a) My punctuation has never been that hot, so who am I to complain, and (b) I don't want people to think I'm any more of a complete snot than they already think I am. But Truss touches on this problem in the Preface:

...Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated. To which accusation, I say (mainly), "Pah!" How can it be a matter of class difference when ignorance is universal? ... Caring about matters of language is unfortunately generally associated with small-minded people, but that doesn't make it a small issue. The disappearence of punctuation (including word spacing, capital letters, and so on) indicates an enormous shift in our attitude to the written word, and nobody knows where it will end.

Any lover of language should read this book. For the information, sure, but also because it's a genuinely enjoyable read, full of bizarre factoids. Before I read this book, for instance, I didn't know that Gertrude Stein thought that the comma was "servile". A word of warning, though: after reading this book, you'll see the mistakes everywhere. And they will really, really annoy you.

one of those hideous books where the mother dies - Sonya Sones

If it had been by anyone but Sonya Sones, I probably would have loved it.

Unfortunately, I think that it might be impossible to top What My Mother Doesn't Know. It's so annoying. I wish that this new book (her third), one of those hideous books where the mother dies, had come out first. Then I would have been head over heels in love with it, and I would have made everyone read it, and THEN she could have topped it. But please, please, please, don't get me wrong. This is a good book, and well worth reading. Anyway, it's rough when the second book that you write is one of the BEST BOOKS EVER!! How can you follow that up?

It's another verse novel, but this one also includes emails between Ruby and her best friend back in Boston, Ruby and her boyfriend back in Boston, and from Ruby to her mom. Ruby's mom has just died, so she's getting shipped off from Boston to go and live in Hollywood with her movie star father (she's only ever seen him in the movies), and who ditched her and her mother before Ruby was born. Yeah--that's going to be an easy adjustment.

The parts about the Hollywood high school are priceless, Aunt Max is awesome, and like What My Mother Doesn't Know, it's predictable, but not in a bad way. Oh, and she's a big reader, so there are a couple of poems that are basically reading lists of awesome YA books. Rad.

Kings of Infinite Space - James Hynes

I want someone who has done tempwork to read this.

I kept thinking of the movie Clockwatchers while I was reading this one. One of the major differences, though, was that I cared about the characters in Clockwatchers, whereas I didn't get attached to anyone in Kings of Infinite Space. (Except for maybe Charlotte, the ghost-cat who torments the main character by making his apartment smell like cat pee and only allowing his television to show cat-related programming most of the time. But there wasn't enough of her).

It was totally entertaining and I enjoyed it, and the author kept me guessing and so on and so forth, and while I'm glad that I read it, it's not a book that I would read and re-read and read again. There were some things, though that made me think that it would make a great movie--the place that Paul temps at was described completely differently from the offices in Being John Malkovich, but I still was reminded of John Cusack's crouch-walk. And then there are bits like this:

Dear God, thought Paul, please don't let me sleep on my break. Not on my own time. He pushed the book away and pressed his fingers into his eyes, and when he pulled them away he saw a string dangling from the ceiling fifteen feet away. Paul squeezing his eyes shut, then looked again. The string was still there, hanging over a lunchroom table straight as a plumb line, suspended from a little, black, triangular gap where a ceiling panel was askew. At the lower end of the string a little noose was being raised and lowered over a salt shaker in the middle of the table. The noose draped once over the shaker without catching it, then twice, then again, the string above slackening each time. Then, one more try and it caught around the neck of the salt shaker. The string went taut, and the salt shaker swung silently up off the table.

Crazy things happen in this book. And it just gets crazier and crazier as it goes along, but even at the most insane moments, it worked. So, while I won't re-read this one a million times, I'll read more of his stuff. And I'll hope for a movie version. But only if Charlie Kaufman writes the screenplay.