Category Archives: fiction

“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird…”

fiction, news February 4, 2015 Leave a comment

BOOK NERDS! Surely you’ve heard by now that Harper Lee, author of beloved high school staple To Kill A Mockingbird, is publishing another book this summer?

WELL SHE IS.

This new novel, to be titled Go Set a Watchman, was the original manuscript she wrote prior to Mockingbird, but was scrapped when her editor told her to write the whole novel from young!Scout’s perspective, rather than adult!Scout’s perspective (which is when Watchman is set). Yes, Watchman is almost a sequel to Mockingbird, except it was actually written first, and it focuses on adult!Scout and her relationship with her aging father as well as the turmoil of race relations in the 1950s.

No, I have no idea what the title means! Am I still excited? YES!

There are some questions as to why Harper Lee decided to publish now – the main concern seeming to be that someone (her lawyer or agent or whoever) took advantage of her. Her lawyer supposedly found the manuscript going through Lee’s archives.

The New York Times wrote a more detailed piece on it here. The Times also put online their original review of To Kill A Mockingbird. You can take a look at that here.

This was one of the books that I loved in high school, early on. Before I quit listening to my English teachers (sophomore year) when I read books, books we read at school were hard to enjoy.  My friends and I were always sad that we had to read all the plays of Oedipus but there was no Mockingbird follow up.

NOW THERE WILL BE! I can hardly wait for July, this is like when the new Harry Potter books used to come out!

Finally, from Buzzfeed.

12 Beautifully Profound Quotes From To Kill A Mockingbird.

A Dance With Dragons

fiction December 6, 2014 Leave a comment

Kiss me, I’m Italian

– done reading all released books in George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series!

Honestly, this is why I don’t do t-shirts for a living.

As per usual, I am withholding final judgment of the series until all the books are out (so about 37 years from now?) and I’ve read them all (40ish years from now, based on Martin’s schedule of release dates –  “whenever” – and the number of books he plans to write in this series – “however many I feel like”).

It took the better part of a year to read this book between studying and other things I want to read, but I did finally make it happen. Since this is the newest book (and maybe others will have been as slow as me in getting to the end), I will not spoil tooooo much here.

I appreciated a couple of things about this book that didn’t happen in previous stories – aka stuff actually happened and people weren’t just wandering around aimlessly in the woods/desert/snow/under the sea.

Daenerys actually developed into a person and not just a Mary Sue (more on her in a minute). Tyrion got shit done. Theon tried to get his balls back. Arya is on her way to becoming a full-fledged assassin. Jon was showing signs of becoming a pretty decent leader (future lord of Winterfell?) before he, uh, wasn’t allowed to do so anymore. Jaime and Brienne are together again!…probably going to be killed by Zombie!Catelyn, but I’m willing to overlook this. Bran was mostly absent (hooray!).

We had some new perspectives in this book – Barristan Selmy (who I really like especially now that he’s a political schemer) and (I think) Asha Greyjoy (who I also really like).  Quentyn Martell too, although he didn’t make it to the end, and I felt really sorry for him.

Can I make a complaint though? George R.R. Martin gets all this praise for writing women very well, and in a lot of cases, I agree. Cersei, Arya, and Asha are all gutsy, well written, interesting. Sansa…eh, she’s getting there.

Then there’s our dear Khaleesi. She has her moments, I grant you. When she freed the slaves and had the dragons burn the slave masters? I shivered a little.

HOWEVER.

She’s about 13 when she is first introduced. By the end of this book, she is about 15.

How much sex does a 15 year old girl REALLY think about having? Or actually have?

Was I unique in not having ridiculously elaborate sexual fantasies in my early teens? I don’t know. But Daenerys seems to be much more sexually developed than most girls in their early teens seem to be, even in this fantasy series. I get she’s a queen and yada yada, but Sansa and Arya were also in their early-mid teens by the end of book 5 and didn’t have these same things.

Further, I was relieved that some stuff started going wrong for her. I like her, and in my own way I’m kind of rooting for her, but who conquers the fucking world without encountering a problem doing it? Especially as a teenager. I KNOW she has dragons, but until recently the dragons weren’t good for much except making kebobs.

Anyway, I had the same problem I have with the last couple of books. I don’t see where the story is going. Granted, I’ve read some really elaborate theories online – this Song of Ice & Fire/Norse Mythology theory being one of the best thought out and complicated – but it feels like we’re not really getting anywhere. I would like some definitive event where I say to myself, “OH, I GET IT NOW.”

There MAY have been one at the very end, but it’s hard to tell. I’ll say this though: I like Lord Varys a lot and always have.

Excited about the next one.

The Silkworm

fiction October 9, 2014 1 Comment

As I mentioned in another post, I’ve been on a bit of a J.K. Rowling kick this year.

I listened to all the Harry Potter books on audiobook, and listened to The Casual Vacancy as well as The Cuckoo’s Calling. I also listened to The Silkworm. It’s the second novel she published as ‘Robert Galbraith’ and it’s the second murder mystery featuring PI Cormoran Strike.

Now, I enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling a lot, but was skeptical about The Silkworm, only because I was curious to see if Rowling could keep it up.

I’m just not going to doubt her anymore. There’s no point. I really, really enjoyed The Silkworm. In addition to being a solid mystery story, it was a sharp witted critique of the publishing industry.

The story surrounds the disappearance of Owen Quine, an author who wrote one critically acclaimed book a long time ago and has written mostly garbage since. He is later found dead, but Cormoran Strike is hired by Quine’s eccentric wife, Leonora, to find him and bring him back. He’s disappeared before, having affairs and being something of a douche, leaving his wife to take care of their intellectually disabled daughter, Orlando. He did love his daughter tremendously, and seemed to stay in his marriage for her sake.

Leonora becomes the prime suspect in Owen’s murder – basically because he’s a huge jerk to her, but Strike becomes convinced she didn’t do it, and keeps investigating in spite of being told to back off by the police.

We meet some other people in this book, and I think they were parodies of real people. They were over the top, awful caricatures of human beings, and so many stereotypes were employed you had to assume Rowling did it on purpose. Between Liz Tassel (the chain smoking literary agent whose career went down the toilet years ago) and Daniel Chard (the not-so-secretly-gay publisher who seemed to have a taste for barely legal men) and Michael Fancourt (the successful “literary rebel” who maintains literature should provoke social discussion but is actually using that as a cover to be a raging misogynist), they would be awful stereotypes if they weren’t so detailed.

One of Rowling’s greatest strengths – from the Harry Potter series to The Casual Vacancy to these Cormoran Strike novels – is the world she creates with details, allusions to other things. It’s all these little things that make her characters real people instead of horrendous stereotypes – little twists that make them interesting. My favorite example is Hermione Granger in the HP books. She is a bookish know-it-all, but while she is a raging nerd, she is also quite in tune with her emotions and isn’t socially inept (as many other bookish characters are described in other stories). Further, she’s doesn’t hide behind her books, she uses what she learns in them quite well – she isn’t just an academic, she’s a practical, pragmatic girl who saves her two friends over and over again. She’s just different enough to be interesting.

This is what happens in The Silkworm – details, details, details.

Anyway, the investigation is further complicated by Owen’s last manuscript called ‘Bombyx Mori,’ which appears to be a thinly veiled allegory about Owen and the other literary characters in the story.

Also in the story is Strike’s assistant, Robin, my latest favorite female character of Rowling’s, who is quite smart and a decent investigator in her own right. There is a lot of tension between them because Strike treats her like a secretary for a good portion of the book, brought on by the fact that he knows Matthew, Robin’s finace, would give her a hard time if she was doing anything else. Robin eventually is able to overcome this and join in the investigation more actively.

At this point, it’s clear that Strike is battling a growing attraction to Robin, who he thinks the world of because of her work and her brains and her guts. Strike’s former fiance is also still tormenting him from afar, marrying the old college boyfriend she originally dumped for Strike 15-20 years earlier and sending him messages, to which Strike vows not to respond.

I found the ending of this mystery particularly satisfying as well. I have a problem with mysteries – I tend to guess the end. I didn’t guess the end here, which makes me super happy.

So! J.K. Rowling has another good read out. The Silkworm is even more interesting in The Cuckoo’s Calling, I think. I’m very excited about the next Cormoran Strike story, which I hope comes out next year. Rowling says she has planned out a lot of Strike’s stories, and with the first two being very good, I think we can eagerly anticipate the rest.

Harry Potter on Audiobook

fiction October 3, 2014 1 Comment

As a child of the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up with the Harry Potter books. I never did the midnight parties or anything like that, but the books were always pre-ordered months in advance and were delivered to my door the day of release 🙂 …I have a really good mom.

I reread the series every few years, the last time being 2011. This year, I thought I’d do it by listening to the audiobooks at work.

Everyone raved about the Jim Dale narrations of the books (the American versions). He supposedly came up with something like 70 different voices for all the characters and whatever. I got the Stephen Fry narrations (the British version) except for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I like Stephen Fry a lot, and I also didn’t suddenly realize it was him – it was mislabled as Jim Dale. Anyway, I realized the swap when I finally got to PoA.

I hated the Jim Dale narration. HATED IT. I hated it so much that I tried to find to find the Stephen Fry version of PoA to have instead. Dale won awards for his reading, but I found all his voices raspy. Hermione had a lisp – I was unaware of just how many times she said “Harry” until Dale was pronouncing it “Hawwy.” And he pronounced “VoldeMORT” as “VoldeMORE.” Now, I get that this might be the intended pronunciation/original pronunciation, but it is 7 books, 8 movies, my life from ages 11-19, and a major theme park later. Nobody uses that pronunciation. Hell, I don’t think JK Rowling even uses that pronunciation anymore.

So, yeah, I struggled to get through PoA. But I got through the summer (a particularly dull time at work and on sports radio) with these audiobooks. Stephen Fry does a good job even though he doesn’t have a billion raspy voices for all the characters. And I learned that British students don’t study, they “revise.” (For a minute, I had no idea what it was talking about.)

Overall, it was a great time investment. I always feel sad when the series is over, and this was no different.

The other thing I realized is that I wish JK Rowling would write some of the textbooks she mentions in those books. I really want to read “Hogwarts, A History” and “A History of Magic.” Yes, I know about Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. MOAR TEXTBOOKS PLZ.

So yes, I enjoyed the Stephen Fry version of the Harry Potter books and highly recommend them. They are great!

Meme: 10 Books That Have Stuck With You

fiction, humor, memes September 16, 2014 Leave a comment

This meme is going around on Facebook, and I thought I’d share my list here.

In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and do not think too hard. They don’t have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just books that have affected you in some way.

01. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
02. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
03. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
04. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
05. Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
06. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
07. Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs – Dave Barry
08. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
09. Rebecca – Daphne DuMaurier
10. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson

The Casual Vacancy

fiction August 17, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m on a real JK Rowling kick this year. I’m currently in the middle of the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series, and after The Cuckoo’s Calling, I listened to The Casual Vacancy. (Her stuff is very easy to get as audiobooks).

This is the first book she published after Harry Potter and this one was under her own name. It got mixed reviews, I think, because everyone compared it to Harry Potter. It’s not Harry Potter and if you’re expecting it to be like that, you’re going to hate it.

It starts with Barry Fairbrother keeling over dead of an brain aneurysm and then really slows down for, what I’d guesstimate was, the next 100-150 pages. A ‘casual vacancy’ is the opening of a local public office seat when someone dies while in office. In this case, Barry Fairbrother. Anyway, this vacancy opens up a whole mess of issues with different people around town, from other council members to local kids.

I thought the most compelling character in the whole book was Krystal Wheedon, who was on the school rowing team coached by Fairbrother. She’s 16, very poor, and she’s taking care of her baby brother Robbie. Her mother is a useless heroin addict who prostitutes herself when she needs a fix. A lot of the tension in the book comes from parts of the council who want to push ‘The Fields’ – a low income part of town – off on another town which, these council members feel, the other town tricked them into incorporating. Krystal lives in The Fields, and Barry grew up in  The Fields. Barry wanted to keep The Fields, arguing that the kids there have bright futures. Once he dies, other people start plotting against him.

Eventually, a bunch of kids end up hacking the town council website and post a number of humiliating secrets about council members under the username “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother” to get revenge on their parents, friends, etc… it sends a lot of the characters’ lives into disarray.

If you were looking for something even remotely close to Harry Potter, this wasn’t it. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it, but it wasn’t as awful as the worst reviews stated. The positive reviews for the most part seemed to be right on: it was a very slice of life, this could be happening anywhere type of novel. It wasn’t bad, but it was, overall, very depressing/disturbing. You didn’t really leave it feeling very good about how it wrapped up and it sort of just ends, like many events in life just end. Nothing really changes, which is true of life too, in a lot of ways.

The only good thing is one deplorable character ends up alone, which he deserves for being such a sniveling coward.

People who like those realistic novels will really enjoy The Casual Vacancy. For those of you who want a little bit more “escape from reality” in your stories, this probably isn’t the book for you.

The Cuckoo’s Calling

fiction August 16, 2014 1 Comment

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith is the first novel I listened to on audiobook.

Everyone knows by now that Robert Galbraith is a pen name that J.K. Rowling came up with to see if anyone would read her mystery novels, and way fewer people did until they knew it was her. Having now listened to it, I don’t know how people didn’t notice before the British press spilled the beans. The writing is almost exactly the same style.

Anyway, having only listened to Billy Crystal’s memoir on audiobook, I didn’t realize that the person reading did different voices for all the different characters. I know, I know, but I’d seriously never listened to an audiobook. I thought Billy Crystal was just being a comedian impersonating guys like Mickey Mantle and whoever else. Robert Glenister read the audiobook, and I thought he did an excellent job. Now that I’ve listened to some other narrators, he’s definitely been one of my two favorites.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a mystery, the mystery being the murder of Lula Landry, and model from a wealthy family. Cormoran Strike (weird name, right?) is hired by the deceased’s brother to investigate her death after the police classify it a suicide, which he refuses to believe she committed. He hires Comoran because his brother used to know him.

Cormoran is an interesting character – he’s an Afghanistan War veteran who left the military after he had a leg blown off by an IED. He’s just gotten out of a complicated, messy relationship, and his new private detective business isn’t going too well. He ends up with a temp office assistant named Robin, who secretly wants to be a detective herself.

Obviously I don’t want to give too much away because it’s a mystery, but what I really enjoyed about it was that the clues to who did it were in there and you could have figured it out if you were carefully looking. Because I listened to it on audiobook (at work, no less), I definitely didn’t catch them. I solve a lot of mysteries before they’re revealed, and I tend to judge how good the mystery it is by whether or not I enjoyed getting to the solution. In this case, I got to be surprised by the reveal, which was a refreshing change.

I also really enjoyed the relationship between Cormoran and Robin. In fact, I really like Robin. She’s smart, she shows initiative, and she’s good at her job. She’s the equivalent of a “His Girl Friday” character but she gets a lot more credit, which I like. Rowling gives girls/women the best supporting roles in her novels. Hermione Granger was the reason Harry Potter and Ron Weasley made it out of Hogwarts alive, and Robin Ellacott is the reason Cormoran Strike was able to gain enough information about Lula’s murder to solve it.

There was a rumor that Rowling was going to write seven Cormoran Strike novels, but she says she has plans for more, which I’m excited about, because so far I really like them.

I’m not sure there’s anything “classic” about the book, but it was enjoyable. I’d recommend it.

Inferno

fiction July 29, 2014 Leave a comment

Confession: I love Dan Brown books.

Yes, I know the writing is awful. Yes, I know the character is a self-insert Gary Stu. Yes, I know the same thing happens over and over again in every novel. Yes, I know I should be ashamed.

Totally not, though.

I read The DaVinci Code at about 16 because it drummed a lot of controversy. Announcing that I wanted to read it was an exciting moment for my mom because after refusing to read anything on which I wasn’t going to be tested that wasn’t Harry Potter, I finally expressed an interest in a book that was unprompted by her. Middle school and high school didn’t encourage reading and it took me a long time to get over it.

Anyway, with The DaVinci Code, I was going through something of a rebellion at the time – not anything dangerous, just trying to come to grips with the fact that I’d never be the good Catholic my extended family wanted me to be and would receive a fair amount of ridicule from them for it. So…enter Dan Brown with an exaggerated anti-Catholic Church novel. (Fun Fact: I came to terms with my under-developed religion area of the brain unscathed, and eventually graduated from a Catholic university. I even sometimes miss said Catholic university).

I next read Angels and Demons the summer after, and I enjoyed that even more than the previous book. It was actually the first book featuring Robert Langdon, and it was in the same trashy thriller style. The Lost Symbol came next, and then, this year (well, published last year but read this year), Inferno.

For some reason I didn’t like Inferno as much as previous stories. Maybe I’m outgrowing trashy thrillers (unlikely), but I didn’t find it as fun and took awhile to get through it. I was totally blindsided by the twist (seriously, you’d think after all this time, I’d have seen it coming, but nah), so that was enjoyable, but the overall experience wasn’t as good as my previous experiences.

I think my biggest issue was the use of amnesia as a plot point. I didn’t enjoy not really knowing what was going on through most of the story (it’s why I didn’t like the ‘Bourne Trilogy’ too). Langdon was clueless since he was the one with amnesia, and so the reader was as well. The premise was interesting enough – a mad genius created a virus that would infect everyone and, presumably, wipe out a ton of the planet’s population because humans cannot exist on this planet at the rate they are populating it (and he takes it into his own hands to fix this). And he was obsessed with Dante’s The Divine Comedy and left all kinds of adorable clues to finding his virus that had to do with Dante. The World Health Organization gets involved. There’s a mo-ped chase.

I felt like Brown answered too many questions at once. I would have preferred if the answers were more spread out throughout the book, to make for better pacing of the story. I wish we’d seen a little more about the Provost and the Consortium. Of everyone in the story who wasn’t Langdon, the shadowy organization that helped the mad genius accomplish his research was the most fascinating.

What I did like about the novel – as I like about all Brown’s novels – is a) Robert Langdon is endearing because he’s such a raging nerd and b) the setting. Inferno ran through Florence (obviously, as this was Dante’s beloved home) and some other parts of Europe. 3 of 4 of Brown’s Langdon books take place in Europe – Italy specifically. As someone who would like to explore Europe, these novels make me really excited about it for some reason. (I don’t know why. There are so many things to psych you up about Europe and my brain chooses Dan Brown books. Go figure.)

I also like all the symbolism and the history that goes into the book. This, combined with the setting, really make the novels enjoyable in spite of the fact that the writing can be ridiculous at times. They make the story very real – which it needs, since a middle-aged but handsome Harvard professor who swims and is obsessed with his Harris tweed jacket and a Mickey Mouse watch from his parents doesn’t exactly scream “HEY THIS IS A LESSON IN REALISM!”

But as I said, history, symbolism and setting make the books interesting. In spite of the fact that Brown’s books can be clumsy, it’s clear that he does put a lot of research into them and blends facts and fiction into a fairly gripping – if sometimes heavy handed – web.

Overall, I’d recommend Inferno. I didn’t like it as much as Brown’s other Langdon stories, but I was entertained. When it comes to trashy thrillers, that is key, and Inferno doesn’t disappoint in that regard.

A Few Thoughts on Hemingway

fiction, non-fiction July 21, 2014 Leave a comment

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899. Now, his 115th birthday is pretty meaningless as an anniversary, particularly since he’s dead, but since the opportunity presented itself, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Hemingway has become one of my favorite authors. The first book I read by him was The Old Man and the Sea, which everyone else seemed to love and I thought was the dullest 100 pages I ever read. I think this was middle school or early high school. I had no intention of picking up any more Hemingway any time soon.

But for 11th grade English, I had to read three required books (The Jungle, The Metamorphosis, and Their Eyes Were Watching God) and a choice of one from a list of six. I picked The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway because it was the shortest.

I loved it. I looooved it.

I’ve been working my way through his books since then – his collection of short stories are some of my favorites (all compiled in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway). People often single out For Whom The Bell Tolls as his best novel, but my favorite by him is either The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms. I know it’s so cliche that I can’t choose, but I really can’t.

The Sun Also Rises is a beautiful, sad love story. They both are, but this one was a different type of sad. Plus, it was very much about expatriots, members of “The Lost Generation” (the generation of people who came of age during World War I). The only part I didn’t much love was the bullfighting. I really hate any kind of animal killing that is for anything that isn’t food (and even then, I have a very high standard about what’s acceptable and what’s not).

A Farewell To Arms was recommended to me by a dear friend who is no longer a dear friend, and it reminds me of him, so I haven’t read it in awhile, but I loved going through Europe with Fredric and Catherine and watching them fall in love.

I have a new Hemingway book to read in my pile – Death in the Afternoon. It’s non-fiction. I may or may not have another one in the pile, but Death in the Afternoon is the first non-fiction book I will read by him, and I’m sure I’ll love it, but it’d be hard to live up to the other two.

I always recommend either A Farewell to Arms or The Sun Also Rises when someone says they want to read Hemingway. They are two of my favorite books ever, and I’m not one for love stories, but they are exceptional. I have always wanted to write stories, but now I want to tell a story in such a way that I love it as much as I love those two novels.

A Feast For Crows

fiction July 12, 2014 Leave a comment

So I made my way through the fourth book of George RR Martin’s epic fantasy series.

I have had trouble evaluating each book as a book because, unlike Harry Potter, there doesn’t seem to be much that distinguishes one book from another (at least through the first three books). Scheming/politicking, fighting, wandering around in the woods on or off horseback, rinse, repeat.

The biggest difference in A Feast For Crows is that we see some different character view points, the most awesome of which is Cersei, who progressively deteriorates through the book into a paranoid lunatic. By the time the book ends, she has been arrested on all kinds of charges, but prior to that was coming up with ways to kill everyone but her immediate family members minus Tyrion, who she is trying to kill actively.

AND SAM GOT LAID! HOORAY!

That said, new character view points at this juncture are troubling. It’s not that Martin is introducing new characters, but a lot of this is beginning to feel like filler. I’m not one of those people who likes to tell authors how to do their work, and I don’t expect any author to cater to any of my demands except that they entertain me with their story, but this series is very long and doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. In fact, if what I read is true and the real conflict of the series is humans vs. the white walkers, not humans vs. other humans, we’re nowhere near this conflict at all. The white walkers haven’t even made that many appearances. They’re barely mentioned by anyone who isn’t on The Wall or beyond it.

Martin’s writing pace also isn’t what you’d call speedy. It was 5 years between A Storm of Swords and A Feast For Crows and 6 years between A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons, which my mom still complains about, and he seems in no rush to get The Winds of Winter out any time soon. 3 years since the last installment, there is still no publishing date (or even a vague estimate) for the next. While it is tasteless for fans to speculate about Martin’s health and obnoxious to demand he be writing instead of doing other things, it IS irritating to wait the better part of a decade between volumes. He complains that fans are afraid he’ll die before he finishes? WHAT ABOUT FANS, GEORGE? THEY MIGHT DIE BEFORE YOU FINISH. Anyway, yeah, he’s touchy about people who ask he write faster.

Plus, there are rumors that maybe there will be MORE books (rather than the planned seven).

So maybe I’ll be 40 when they’re finished. Sigh.

Anyway, yeah, while A Feast For Crows was good, I continue to have reservations about the series as a whole. I will, of course, hold off final judgment until the series is over, but while I’ve enjoyed the political intrigue thus far, it’d be nice if we had some indication of where this series is going.