Mistral's Kiss

Laurell K. Hamilton

Laurell K. Hamilton is one of those authors I read because she is laughably, screamably bad, and for some reason I – enjoy that? I guess I do, because I keep reading her. I have long since stopped providing her money for her already-stuffed pockets which inflates her crazy-insane head inside of which her rat-shaped, slimy-scaled red-eyed ego skitters and picks its nose and shrieks obscenities at the people who don't "get" her awesomeness because we are so not smart enough, you know? It's too much for us. The library, she is a beautiful thing.

Anyway! So I read them because I totally like to challenge myself with poorly-written trash. And I was startled to find that while it is still a trashy, easy, read-in-a-couple-hours kind of book, this was not nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I know!

There was, of course, the endless parade of "dirty" sex magic and biting and things, but there was an astonishingly small amount of everyone standing around and discussing their next move, and the choreography was not nearly as awkward as it usually is, and though there were the usual "OMG WE LOVE THE HEROINE SHE IS SO GRATE AND TOTALLY PERFEX0R" moments – there was action, and the plot advanced, and the book was short, and I closed it, completely surprised that I had enjoyed it with a minimum amount of rolling my eyes and sniggering. Enjoying is probably the wrong word. It had passed some time in a nearly pleasant way. So my thought is that I have gotten dumber, or LKH might be getting smarter. I think probably I'm dumb.

You Suck: A Love Story

Christopher Moore

I hated Bloodsucking Fiends when I first read it – oh my god, is it really 11 years ago? Good christ. Anyway. The characters were hateful, the comedy was not very comedic, and I could tell the San Francisco Moore was writing about was a big imaginary San Francisco he was making up in his head even though at that point I hadn't even been to San Francisco -- there was just a sense of amorphous lies about the whole setting. The book was amorphous and kind of irritating, and it was a major disappointment after Coyote Blue, which was complex, and funny and weird and hilarious in a way Bloodsucking Fiends just never was.

So You Suck is a sequel about the vampires from Fiends and it is, generally, about as complex and nuanced as its title. Jody and Tommy are slightly less hateful – possibly because Tommy develops something of a personality and the major inequality in their relationship, which was squirmingly painful in the first book, is balanced out somewhat. Much of the plot is telegraphed early on, the goth girl who becomes their minion is Moore's opportunity to make very dumb jokes about goth teens and woe, the pain, and the ending is not particularly satisfying, but I liked this anyway, because it is Christopher Moore, and usually, even when he is not great, he is good, and engrossing, a fast and smart and fun read. Except for Bloodsucking Fiends, and also Fluke.

Sister Noon

Karen Joy Fowler

Oh, I loved this. It was strange and mysterious and folding and unfolding like origami and moving through time and as unreliable as memory. There were hints of the speculative and the weird, and though nothing was ever really resolved fully, I was completely satisfied. That surprises me, because I really kind of didn't care that much about The Jane Austen Book Club.

Book Club was a very nice book and hooray Austen, but I didn't find it nearly as delectable and charming and delightful and quirky and eat it up num as everyone else in the history of the world apparently did now please be quiet. Now that I know Fowler has such a subtle and skilled touch and an imagination I envy, and does not need to write love stories to be fascinating and wonderful, I am even more disappointed in Book Club, retroactively, and I am sure she'd be bereft to hear that.

I am going to pick up the other copies of her earlier books that we have got in the library, and I think I will be very pleased.

Three Junes

Julia Glass

This book was recommended to me by a friend who said it has a great sense of place, and that my own book needs a sense of one of those, so I should read this.

And having read it, I agree that it does have a very nice sense of place, and it is a very nice book with many sad things in it, and the structural concept – that it covers three pivotal Junes in the lives of interconnected characters – is a lovely one. Especially since I spent years vaguely assuming the book was about three ladies named June who did things in Ireland somewhere. Which is not what it is about.

The novel has that familiar leisurely, delicate pacing that tends to distinguish literary fiction. It is a book about relationships, and it slows down in step with the rhythm of its characters. But while I was struck by some of the language in the book, and many of the vignettes were quite beautiful on their own, much of the story, many of the characters (many of whom I kept confusing, because they all had names that started with the same letters as all of the other characters, and that was deeply irritating) were not entirely worth that endless meandering. The characters were often flawed and fallible, and that should have been interesting and engaging except often, I found myself impatient with them, and impatient with the author and the quibbles I had with the book – sentences that should have been rewritten, a baby who shows up out of nowhere, contradictions that should have been caught in the copy editing.

The ending, though, was lovely and remarkable and touching, and that is, in the end, what left me with a generally positive feeling about this book, though no desire to read her next.

Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Shadow of the Wind sounded intriguing when I read all about it on 50 books - I wanted something frothy and not brain-hurty, because lately, my brain hurts and I am stupid like a sack full of puddings with extra raisins. Also, I cry a lot. Anyway, it sounded like it fit the bill, and it was on the shelf of my library, so I snatched it up and ran away with it.

It is translated from the Spanish, but it keeps that flavor of Spanish – the very lovely and evocative, big and blowsy language combined with the totally profane ordinary everyday and it was a style that had me rolling my eyes a little bit now and again, but sometimes thinking that I would like to steal that turn of phrase, especially the one about dragging a shadow behind her like a bridal veil. That ruled.

The story, though – it is about a boy who finds a book, is fascinated by the mysterious author of said book, and ends up stumbling into (don't all characters in books do a lot of stumbling into?) a heartbreaking story of violence and loss that ends up affecting him as well. Great! Except the story just inched its damn way along the backstory that affects the frontstory and it felt alternately boring and frustrating and then intriguing and then boring again, and I took long breaks between my reading sessions for things like staring out the bus windows and being awesome. So then of course I forgot a lot of what was going on (see above, re: sack of puddings) and I got irritated by the way I was never ever going to know what was going on.

So at one point in the middle of this irritation, I decided I was done, and the book would remain forever unfinished, but then I flipped forward, read a little bit of juicy gossip, and raced through the rest of the book on my lunch break and a little while after, back at my desk, and sniffled a little at the ending, and was a little angry because suddenly one character was the savior of the major characters, what? That character did hardly anything but sniffle a lot. Shut the fuck up.

Anyway. I think if I had had a better attention span and was less like a sack of puddings with extra raisins in, I would have raced through this book more quickly and have enjoyed it more for that. And I might not have noticed how all the female characters swan around being beaten and wrecked by their love of a man and that their entire existences were based on the men in their lives. But maybe not.

Heinlein x6

For some reason, back in December, I got a bug up my butt, and decided I wanted to reread some of the Robert Heinlein books I had already read and re-read several dozen dozen times over the course of my life. When I moved, I had given away all my Heinlein books, except for the hardcopy of Stranger in a Strange Land which had belonged to my mother (and which was the impetus for her bad trip in college, in which she felt she was drowning in a glass of water).

I checked my library's catalog though, and lo! We have The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and The Number of the Beast. I borrowed them, devoured them, reread my copy of Stranger, picked up a copy of Glory Road at Black Oak, found at Green Apple copies of I Will Fear No Evil with a really creepy cover and Job: A Comedy of Justice with the cover I remember, and I read them all in the course of a couple of days, and I was left a little sad, which I think happened to me the last time I read him.

When I was growing up, I remembered him as deliciously dangerous and subversive, brilliant and groundbreaking with so many excellently cool ideas that should have changed the world and lives. Now, he seems to me like a weird old creepy man with, nonetheless, a talent and a hell of a lot of opinions.

I had forgotten that Number and The Cat collapse from adventure stories into his weird Lazarus Long Future Utopia Happy Sex and Smartness fantasies; Stranger is nice in theory, but also appallingly hippie like and a little creepy; Glory Road and Job are flat-out fun stories with important scathing subtext instead of Messages; and I Will Fear No Evil is just flat-out fucking weird, though I have a soft spot for it, for no reason than I can articulate.

I have not yet shaken the Heinlein bug, and I am sure I will be off hunting in used bookstores for awhile yet.