Category: Book Reviews

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The Books That Made Me (Part One)

I was thinking this morning about a lot of things, but the thing that my brain fixed on was how there are certain things that I was exposed to as a child that are still in my life today as a taller bean (growing up is optional, growing older isn’t) and how over the course of this span of years, how my perception of the work and the author has changed or grown. It really got me thinking about the books that made me, or rather, the books that had and have the most influence on me.

I have to start with the Chronicles of Narnia because those were some of the earliest books I read and they’ve had a lasting effect on my life. I blew through this series for the first time at the tender age of four. Since then, no one has ever been able to keep me from checking pretty much every single wardrobe I have ever come across for a passage to Narnia. Even still as a grown bean, I can’t help the impulse to check.

My parents had to pry me out of our linen closet over and over, because I’d hide in there and read with my flashlight, because it was quiet and safe and maybe just maybe I’d fall through to a different place to go have so many grand adventures. I was a weird, too smart, undiagnosed ASD girl in the eighties-nineties and books were so much safer than the real world.

As much as I dearly love some of the characters and the storylines, there’s one part that I cannot understand and as I grew older, could not forgive. You might have heard of it. It’s generally known as The Problem of Susan.

Susan who was a Queen and grew up to be a celebrated beauty and diplomat, in addition to her fabulous skils as a markswoman and archer. Susan who was known as the Gentle, who always tried her best and tried to be that good example for the younger siblings, who tried to be grown up and motherly for her siblings when they weren’t with their parents. Susan who was transformed in Narnia, along with her siblings.

Susan, who had this life she’d worked for and then it was all taken away from her, and she was back in the body of who she’d been before this all had begun. Her memories remained untouched. The sheer cruelty of that act is breathtaking.

Then at the end of Prince Caspian, where they’ve been allowed another chance at their old home (thousands of years after the time they’d left it the first time) and she is told that she can never come back and the return is the same as it was before. Memories perfectly preserved.

Then we hear in the last book that she’s no longer a friend of Narnia, that she’s given it all up for nylons and lipsticks and silly girlish things.

And honestly, can you blame her? Leaving and then coming back, not once but twice had to have been horrifyingly traumatizing. Her coping mechanism was to throw herself into what was required for girls/women of the time and pretend that it had all been a make-believe game. It wasn’t malicious, it was a survival tactic.

There’s some wonderful work done exploring the “Problem of Susan” from both commercial and fanfiction authors. It’s not hard to find if you’re looking for it.

However, the Problem of Susan had a profound impact on me as I grew up. I had internalized the concept that “lipsticks and nylons” were bad and that wasn’t something to even bother with. Not if you wanted to remain friends with Narnia. And oh how I wanted to keep on the good side there, I wanted to tumble through to a different place where I might actually figure out the kind of good I could do.

I hated the fact that I was a girl and that made me almost useless here. In Narnia, I could fight or save people or be clever and witty and defuse dangerous situations. In Narnia, I knew I would have a purpose and that I’d be good at whatever that was. There was no such certainty in the real world. I was too quiet or too bossy or too inconveniently smart for my age.

It took me a long time to figure out that all of that was complete and utter crap. That I could have lipsticks and nylons and still have my fantasy worlds. That I could have a purpose and that I wasn’t useless.   That the Problem with Susan wasn’t with the character as much as it was with the author himself.

So that’s the first out of the series of  the books that made me who I am today.  Let me know what you think in the comments or tell me about some of the books that made you.

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Book Review: Shadows Fall

Simon R. Green says that this is the greatest book he’s ever written and having read quite a few of his other series I have to say, that concept-wise, I’d agree. 

Shadows Fall is quite spectacular in concept, the execution, on the other hand, is imperfect, but not so much that it distracted me from the book itself.   

For people not familiar with him, Green specializes in a glorious subgenre of commercial fiction that I don’t really have a name for yet.  It’s not quite Pratchett-esque crack, but it’s not your usual kind of urban fantasy.  The thing I suppose it reminds me the most of is, really well done crossover fanfiction between two or more other properties.   The books aren’t overly complicated but they are always delightful and addicting.  It’s like your favorite television shows or comic book series, only in novel/novella form.  The characters are all memorable and brilliant. The dialogue is snappy and awesome. The settings can blow your minds.  Parts of them are ridiculous but ridiculous in the same way that Doctor Who is, that comics are.   He also has several series inhabiting the same shared universe and so you get cameos and references across several series that tie everything together in fascinating ways.  

Shadows Fall takes place in this shared universe.  It’s referenced in several Nightside books, so I had already known the name before I picked up this book.  Shadows Fall is a town, a town you can’t find on any map.  A small town in the way back of beyond where legends–human and otherwise–go to live out their days as belief in them dies. Comic superheroes who never achieved true fame comingle with rock ‘n’ roll stars who died young; dinosaurs roam the park at night.  This is where legends go to die and lost souls find peace.

I am fairly convinced that somewhere there exists a place like this somewhere in this world or the one to come. Green sets up the novel with a classic horror genre beginning to it. Everything is happy and fine and it’s one of the town holidays. Everyone is out and about.  

And then a murder happens.  And the ball starts slowly rolling.

But this isn’t a horror novel, rather more a mystery quest with a heavy dash of modern apocalyptic fantasy.  Or rather urban fantasy with elements of a mystery quest during a bloody invasion.

There are many different characters that walk in and out of the pages of the book and various plots and subplots that eventually are resolved in the last couple of pages. There are prophecies, priests, demons, Faerie, musicians, teddy bears, snipers, angels, fanatics, lovers, and undead.    My favorite part of the story is where a Golden Age era elderly superhero takes on a T-Rex in the courts of Faerie.

I got chills down my spine when the Faerie went to war.  It had the same feeling that the Entmarch did – that kind of wide eyed this-is-really-happening sort of feeling. The kind of feeling where you know the world will never be the same after this – that if you live through it things will never be the same and you’ll tell your grandkids that you saw this and that and words can’t describe the feelings really.

It’s a fascinating read. Especially as you get to the end and you wonder how it all ties together.   The ending…is something I’m still working though honestly. It has shades of Lewis’ Last Battle but hmm  it’s interesting to parse and too complicated to give anything but general impressions without reproducing the book here.   It’s also by far the weakest part of the entire book.  

Overall?  It’s not a perfect book, the concept is brilliant, but the execution is flawed – it is by no means a perfect book.  It’s not the first Simon Green I’d recommend reading but it is quite something. Definitely worth the admission price for the first two-thirds of the book.  

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From Appalachian Songcatchers to a Revolution

Arthur Krim, “Appalachian Songcatcher: Olive Dame Campbell and the Scotch-Irish ballad.” Journal of Cultural Geography. 2006. HighBeam Research. (October 25, 2010). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-159390035.html

Dick Weissman, “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution: Music and Social Change in America.” New York: Backbeat Books, 2010.

“Twas in the mer-ry month of May, The green buds were swel-ling, Poor
Wil-liam Green on his death-bed lay For the love of Bar-b’ra El-len.” These words come from the first verse of the English ballad, Barbara Allen, which was one of many English, Scottish, Irish, and Ulster-Scots’ ballads to have been found perfectly preserved in the Appalachian mountains. The discovery of these ballads at the turn of the twentieth century have been the subject of fascination by geographers, historians, and folklorists alike. In addition to this, the work of such people as Olive Dame Campbell, Cecil Sharp, and Charles Seeger in preserving these ballads for posterity had a direct impact on the folk and Celtic music revivals of the sixties. These ballads are not native to America, they were brought over with the waves of immigrants from Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. How and when they came to be preserved in small enclaves in the Appalachians has also been a subject of much discussion and scholarship.

Arthur Krim, in his article for the Journal of Cultural Geography, traces the scholarship surrounding these ballads, their preservation, and theorizes how they came to be in the Southern Appalachians. His thesis is how the original discoveries helped to touch off a folk/roots revival that has never quite disappeared, and how this archaic vocal music has maintained a vital part of the cultural practices and geography of the mountain core of Appalachia. It references both immigration and migration in the explanation of how the ballads came to Appalachia. Krim refers to this theory as a “sequence” of events that are tentatively described in the article, beginning with the Highland Scotch and Border British migrations to the Ulster Plantations in Ireland (mid-seventeenth century), bringing the Scottish ballads and their fiddle music, to the immigration of these Ulster-Scots-Irish to America (mid-eighteenth century) through Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Piedmont, to finally settling down in the Appalachians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, having also acquired such instruments as the German dulcimer and the African-American banjo. While the instruments changed or were added to, the vocals did not, and out of this process of Immigration and migration is how a Scottish ballad from 1666 wound up being almost perfectly preserved in a remote Kentucky county settled in 1810 and first heard by Olive Dame Campbell in 1907.

Krim’s sources come primarily from the same people he discusses, Olive Dame Campbell and her husband, John, Cecil Sharp, and Eileen Semple’s work, as well as sources from a number of other people in the field. They are used to illustrate his points, giving background information and providing useful examples for further analysis. The article is more interdisciplinary, geographical with a social history flavor.

Dick Weissman’s book, “Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution: Music and Social Change in America” is a fairly comprehensive guidebook for the relationship between music and social change. He opens the book talking about the beginnings of American history and their music and then proceeds to work both chronologically and thematically up to the present day. The scope of the book is broad and diverse, covering a multitude of subjects from Native American music to union and protest songs to what he calls “music of hate” (racist and neo-Nazi music). Weissman spends an entire chapter to protest, union, and folk songs. He goes into the folk music revival and how it slowly went from songs sung back the backwards hillbillies to becoming a major influence on American music and culture. His sources and examples illustrate not only how social events impact music, but also how music impacts social events in turn. One of the examples he uses is Pete Seeger, famed folksinger and songwriter. Pete Seeger, who was introduced to folk music through his father, Charles, who collected folk songs for the Farm Resettlement Administration, and discovered a love for it himself. Pete Seeger, who among others was one of the founding fathers of the American folk music scene as it is known today. Weissman covers other huge names in the folk and celtic music revival, Joan Baez, Leadbelly, the Weavers, and Bob Dylan.

Weissman’s book is more an overview of the American music scene, specifically the complicated relationship it has with social change and events. It was published this year, so it is more current than the Krim article (published in 2006) and covers things on up to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not reference immigration much past the first chapter of the book or emigration, but there is much talk of migration inside of the United States. Where the music was, where people would travel to in order to be a part of this group or this festival and how that too had an effect on the music scene and the participants in it. Like the Krim article, it is more interdisciplinary with a social history flavor to it.

Weissman’s focus is strictly on American artists and songwriters, and he states that there are several aspects of the American music scene that he did not cover (Gay and lesbian music for one and Christian music for another). Therefore while the book is deep and comprehensive, it is not an exhaustive text. His sources are legion and all of them point to the same conclusion that Weissman drives toward. That the links between music and social change start off as tenuous and grow steadily stronger as time goes by, until the period of the fifties and sixties where they become almost symbiotic with one another. Weissman also provides the connections that link the work of Olive Dame Campbell and the others to the folk/celtic music revival and the movements that sprang up in and around that period. The Krim article in a sense sets up the stage for the performance that the Weissman book portrays.

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Wednesday Reads/Listens: Catch Up Post

Welcome to Wednesday Reads/Listens!  It’s been a hot moment since I did one of these.   So here you go!

What I’ve Been Reading:

The Only Harmless Great Thing – Brooke Bolander

Everyone read this book. Everyone read this book and then come talk to me about it. Because this is a slim but majestic book that will leave you breathless with the delight of the prose.

The Sumage Solution – by Gail Carriger

Oh this was a delight and I cannot wait for the next one. The worldbuilding is great and the characterization is delightful and I super love the way that she builds her stories

Omega Required – Dessa Lux

The first novel length story from this author and I looove this one. I love her worldbuilding and her shifters and just the amount of sleep I lost over this book cause I couldn’t stop reading it. I really hope there are like 20 sequels to this.

The City Born Great – N.K. Jemisin
A short story but an AMAZING one. Definitely pick this one up. It’s hard to describe, but definitely worth the time.

Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey –

Oh. OH. This translation is everything I wanted and never knew I needed.

A Queen From The North – Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

This was absolutely delightful – an alternate universe of England where everything is just a little to the left and it’s positively awesome.

The Brightest Fell – Seanan McGuire

It’s okay. I didn’t need my heart. Totally fine.

A whole lot of Ursula K. LeGuin essays and books and stories- but that’s going to have to be a separate post.

And a whole bunch of fanfic and news articles.  Poke me if you want some of those links!

What I’ve Been Listening To (podcasts that make me scream in delight, send shivers down my spine, tickle me because of the sheer meta levels of NERD, and generally give me A Strong Emotion):

Steal The Stars – a wholly interesting audio drama full of twists and turns and some excellent character moments. Protagonist is female and completely kick ass.  This is the inaugural podcast of Tor Labs and it’s weird and quirky and I sort of want to know more and I sort of am happy with where they left it.

Ars Paradoxica – This continues to delight and thrill me and I’m going to be sad when it ends. Featuring an ace female protagonist!!!  Also time travel,  so much weird, small government towns, and a Partridge in a pair tree.

The Bright Sessions – OH this one is so good. SO GOOD and I am sad to see it ending too even if there are more spinoffs planned.  Just SO much emotional connection to these characters and their stories and just OMG.  I remain forever emotionally compromised by this show and I welcome it because it’s brilliant and just so amazing.

Tanis/The Last Movie/The Black Tapes/Rabbits – how much do I love these? Let me count the ways. I love the plotting and the craft and the everything. I love that I am incredibly terrified that one of these days I will actually have to listen to Nic Silver die over the radio because his reporter dumb can’t stop touching the thing. MK is amazing. I have serious qualms about Alex’s ethical boundaries and I super love the messiness of it all.  I feel for Strand.   I adore Carly Parker so hardcore.   I love how they captured the weird spooky feeling you get when you visit some places in the Pacific Northwest.

I’m pretty sure all four are connected and it’s gonna end with them accidentally raising an Elder God ( I could go on, but then we verge into spoiler territory).

Casefile True Crime – this is sincerely the best true crime podcast out there. I love the host, the music, the research they put into everything. It’s amazing.  ESPECIALLY the series about the Night Stalker/East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer.

The FBI Basement – recaps of the X-Files from the beginning with a whole host of hysterical characters. I love the nerdery involved and all the details they mention and just everything.

Why Is This Happening – Chris Hayes’ new podcast and it’s awesome. It’s SO worth it. He covers some amazing topics and it’s great to hear him and the experts he talks to break down the subject matter into easily understandable chunks.

I will stop there for the evening.  But hey, if you’ve read any of these books or listened to any of these podcasts, come chat with me!   I’d love to hear what other people think of any of the above.

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Passing Though: Narnia and Every Heart A Doorway

Here is a post I wrote about a year or so ago for a different blog, but it was on my mind today so I figured I’d repost it.

**

I’ve told people this before. But I’ll say again and I’ll put it here in writing so that it’ll live on after me.  If I manage to find a secret door to someplace fantastic or happen to walk into 1920’s Paris randomly after midnight, I won’t be coming back.  I know somewhere it says that the true mark of the hero’s journey is that he/they return to tell people about it and the wisdom that they learned…and that not doing so is sometimes seen as cowardice or a failed hero etc…

I’m okay with that actually.

**
It always bothered me when people got to be kings and queens and then tripped over something and got shoved back home, back to the bodies they’d had at the beginning of the story before their Adventures.  Because that just wasn’t fair at all.  They lived those years, they earned those wrinkles and scars and it was in essence being stolen from them in the worst kind of way.   Where they retained the minds and the memories, but not the physical trappings that went with those changes.  Because it’s cheating and it’s not right.   Narnia is the biggest example of this and probably one of the most used examples, I’d wager, because of Susan.

Susan is seen as falling away from the elite number of Earthbound Narnians. That she tells them it’s all in their heads and the silly fantasies and games that they used to play as children etc.   This is seen as a Bad Thing and not to emulated and as a little kid, I couldn’t wrap my brain around why she would do that.  It wasn’t until I got older that I started to understand it more and more.   The cruelest thing in the world is to have your heart’s desire and then have it taken away and  you never being able to get it back.   Queen Susan the Gentle was the most beautiful Daughter of Eve in all of Narnia and a good many of the surrounding lands.  To have grown up there with that kind of stature and influence and then be shoved straight back into your preteen/teen body that you’d started in back in the place you’d been shoved because you couldn’t stay with your parents because there was a war and London was constantly being bombed.  To have healed from a lot of that and then get rudely shoved back, and yet not returned to the same exact mindset.   The Pevensies retained all their memories of their time in Narnia.   To go from being a woman grown and in control and used to having that power and influence to the awkward preteen/teen years where you are no one special and no one has to give you the time of day, much less anything more than that.

It’s one hell of an adjustment.

Then it gets worse. They’re able to go back.  Except it’s not the same Narnia as the one they left.   It hasn’t been that long in Earth time but it’s been hundreds of years in Narnia.  The time differential there is extreme.   Still.  They’re able to go back and it’s glorious until it isn’t.   Until they go through all the trials and troubles of this new adventure and then the worst news of all happens.   This will be the last time Susan and Peter can come to Narnia and they’re not allowed to stay behind and just not leave.

Again she has to go back.  Again she has to adjust.  There’s a whole mess of gender issues here with these adjustments, because where being older than your years, clever, ambitious, and forthright is becoming in men, the same cannot be said of girls.  Peter and Edward will go farther than their peers might because of some of this.  Any of those qualities in women are frowned upon. Susan held the title of Gentle and beautiful, but those hands were not milk-soft. She had archer’s hands and was never one to suffer fools gladly.

She had a much much harder climb back to “normal”  than her siblings did.  Lucy had some of it but she was younger and flights of fantasy are acceptable in younger girls and not as acceptable when you are approaching womanhood.  There was an age gap there between the two female siblings that probably seemed like a huge gulf at times.  Because context, as women know and know well, context is everything.    So yes, the fact that “Susan fell away”  is completely understandable once you see the context of the time she lived in, the stark realities of what was done to her, not once but twice, and you have some basic concept of trauma recovery.

Bear with me, there’s a reason why this came up.

So I finished Every Heart A Doorway.   And it’s the sort of book that is amazing and grand and painful like glass shards in your heart.  Where you are grateful for the bleeding wounds because it tells you you are still alive. Cause I’m 30 and I’ve been reading for 27 years and this is the first book where someone like me was prominently featured and they used our terms and our language and it was just nice to see that.  But I’m also the kid who has never ever stopped opening every single wardrobe and linen closet and cupboard in the hopes of eventually finding a door to somewhere else. To this day, I still do that and that was a thing that made this book simultaneously grand and also like mirror shards in my heart.

This book has a prominent character who is asexual. Who uses that term specifically and it isn’t played for laughs or shock value.  It’s there and it’s normalized.  It’s not something to be fixed, Nancy’s not considered broken because she doesn’t want sex.    Words cannot describe how much just that alone meant to me.

And then there’s the  setting.  A home, a therapy home for kids who fell through cupboards and wardrobes to wondrous, terrifying, amazing places and then came back to Earth.   Got shoved back to Earth and just like Susan, either cannot go back at all or just haven’t found the door back yet.  A home where it’s okay to be as you are,  it’s okay to have feelings about your Adventure, a place where you won’t be called liar for telling your story, where you went, who you saw.    It’s incredible and breathtaking and so bittersweet, like sampling good gourmet semi-dark chocolate where it takes you a long moment to sort through all the flavors blended into it.

This story is real in ways that a lot of books aren’t, it has a truth behind it and it doesn’t shirk away from difficult subjects.  It calls to mind  what Sherman Alexie said, about how the best kids’ books are written in blood.  This book is something I wish I had had twenty years ago.   Ten year old me would have benefited a lot from this book, maybe the years after wouldn’t have been quite so rocky and fraught,  maybe it would have just been rocky and fraught in different ways.  No way of knowing now.  Unless you have a time machine, and really if you do, we have MUCH bigger issues to solve than my weird sort of traumatic upbringing.     Having this now gives me a little balm, a little hope, relief that someone understands.  This book is proof that someone else understands what it’s like.

As it comforts me in some ways, it makes me bleed in others.  The line about the Door that was still waiting in the corner of a bedroom that would eventually fade away because its’ human had died…I had to stop there for a moment and remind myself that people need to breathe.    And my roomie was a little startled at my “Oh no, it’s [x]”  well before we ever find out who actually “dun” it.

Oh and Kade’s story shatters me because I hadn’t thought of it like that,  that the Faeries might not want a prince when they’d snatched a princess.  I am surprised that they didn’t murder him because Fae historically have very bad reactions to being “cheated” and this is the sort of thing that they would classify as that.

Weirdly, also the cocoa scene was harder on me than some of the others.

But I’d love to talk about this, hear what ya’ll who’ve read it have thought of it. Who you love and why?  What was hard and why if you feel like sharing.

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Book Reviews: Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, An Anthology

First, I should say, I have had the very great pleasure of meeting and talking with a few of the authors in this anthology in real live person.  Some of them are very dear friends.   I have also been reading the Joe Ledger series since the first book came out (and there’s a story behind how I got introduced to the series that will be its own post later on) and the idea of an anthology in the canon with the characters I love so much made me ecstatic.

Unstoppable cover (taken from Indiebound.org)

Now, if you have no idea who Joe Ledger is and you like weird thrillers with extremely plausible science (the type of ”no wait, that’s a real thing that is plausible and could happen…oh crap”)  then hie thee to a library or to your favorite bookseller.   They start off with a bang and just get better and better from there.   I’ve heard them  described as “comic books in novel form” and there’s some truth to that.   Jonathan Maberry is amazing at what he does and how he structures his books and it’s the best kind of thing to pick up one of these books and go for a ride down a fantastic, all too plausible rabbit hole.  He’s written an introduction to Joe and his world in the beginning of the anthology in case you want to pick up the anthology first for a taste of what the Ledger books are all about.

The anthology itself spans over the entire timeline of the canon novels and even includes a couple of crossovers with other book series, a thing that has added a few new books to the list of to be acquired.     These stories made me laugh, cheer, and in a couple places, cry (Three Times, by Jennifer Campbell-Hicks). All of the short stories in this anthology are amazing, but I wanted to focus on two of the stories that stayed with me the most.   The first being Mira Grant’s  Red Dirt, which is a short that takes place after the events of the second book in the series, The Dragon Factory, and if you know Mira’s writing…it’s flawless in how the prose grabs you and sucks you into the story she’s weaving.  You don’t read this short, you experience it.   Her sense of place is magnificent.   You can feel the despair and the heartache and the way that red dirt sticks to everything it touches.   It’s gloriously executed and a perfect coda to the second book.  It also made me sniffle for the remembering of certain events.

The second is actually my favorite out of all of them and it’s written by Keith DeCandido.  Ganbatte, features a member of Joe’s team, Lydia Ruiz who is one of the first members of an all-female SEAL fire team.   She is easily one of the most badass characters in the series and this story gives us a snippet into how she got to be a member of Echo Team.   Lydia is a hell of a martial artist and Keith’s own expertise in that field shows in this story.    It also touches on a sensitive topic around one of the people in Lydia’s life and while the situation is an all too real one, the outcome was one that I appreciated the hell out of as much as I simultaneously wished that situations like that would really end that way in actual life.    Just like with Mira’s story, you don’t read this one so much as you experience it.   You feel the wind in your hair, that smell you only get when driving on the overseas highway.  It’s easy to get into Lydia’s head, to see what she sees.   Ganbatte deepens your understanding of Lydia Ruiz as a character and a person.

So all in all, this anthology was exactly I wanted and hoped for.  Some of my favorite authors writing in one of my favorite series.   Definitely a book worth picking up if you haven’t already.  Get it here from your favorite indie bookstore!

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Wednesday Reads (On Thursday)

Because I like to be a rebel and Wednesday was  full of preparations for this early Thursday morning and also troubleshooting cable issues ( apparently all the channels decided to change and that disrupted a lot of things).

So what am I reading, what have I currently read, and what’s still upcoming from the To Read Pile?

Well, glad you asked.

What I’m Reading:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – which has been recommended to me by many places and people and I am happy to report that they were all correct. This book is fascinating for many reasons. It will draw you in with the dialogue and ease of reading and keep you by the narration of the life and viewpoint of a very well known man in one of British history’s most well known periods. The prose is captivating and Hilary Mantel weaves the historical details into a narrative that is easily understood. I haven’t yet seen the PBS Masterpiece Special they’ve based on this, but if they’re true to the book, then it will be fantastic I’m sure.

Fading Suns: RPG book – because this will factor into Christmas gifts and I am making sure that I am familiar with the system and requirements so that modules can be built.   I’m dipping more into GMing which will be fun.

What I’ve Finished:

The second Mitch Rapp book, (chronologically) Kill Shot by Vince Flynn was a hell of a sequel to American Assassin. Mitch gets himself into and out of trouble with a little bit of help from Irene and Thomas and we see Stan Hurley and our good old friend Victor again. It was overall a fairly satisfying read and I’ll be fascinated to see if this is the next Flynn novel to get movie treatment.  I have a lot more feelings about this book, but they are all massively spoileriffic so if you’ve read it,  poke me in the comments and we can flail over it together.

Church Refugees by Ashleigh Hope and Josh Packard

This was an interesting book that I was reading, partly for research and partly for personal reasons.  It’s amazing and also painful.   It talks about the Dones, people who are followers of a certain religious path that are for one reason or another, done with the Church as the institution we are familiar with, but not done with their faith. It takes a sociological look at this phenomenon  and though both contributors are themselves believers in this religion, they try and minimize their internal bias to only focus on the data gathered.  Their academic and scientific standards have been top notch and I want to throw this book at every pastor and missionary I know.   Because I believe it will be that helpful, because I think it will be able to express things in a way that will make sense and be better able to communicate why precisely there are a lot of people leaving the church in order to serve God more.

Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie’s amazing novel about a murder on a train and the detective who has to solve the mystery while the train is stuck in the snow. One of the more interesting character novels, as it provides a great insight into Hercule Poirot’s mindset and personal set of ethics.

What’s Next:

Old Man’s War – my first Scalzi novel! I’m excited to read this.

The King in Yellow – Robert Chambers – this one is for research purposes, but I am so curious about it.  I’ve heard so much about it here and there.

What are you reading?   Share in the comments!

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Renaissance Research: Book Edition

A friend asked me what were some good books to read if one wanted to do more research into the Renaissance. I assembled this list for her and thought it might also be of some use to people reading this blog!   So here you go – if you want to research the Renaissance, this is where I would start.   This is not an exhaustive list, but it’ll give you a good comprehensive grounding on some of the ins and outs and how to structure any further research you choose to do.

Margaret King’s The Renaissance in Europe
This is a fairly good informative textbook – King works more or less thematically through the Renaissance and it gives you a nice grounding in just about everything. It is definitely the book I would go to first before delving into more heavier researching.

Gene Brucker’s The Society of Renaissance Florence – A Documentary Study
My Renaissance and Reformation professor made a comment once in class, that just about everything that ever happened in the European Renaissance – you could find an example of that happening in Florence. He’s yet to be proven wrong. Florence is an amazing case study for the Renaissance as a whole, and that’s due in no small part because Florence is obsessively well-documented. Where the rest of Europe will have a hundred documents or so total – Florence (not to mention the rest of Italy) has thousands upon thousands of documents. Like King, it is organized thematically – but the documents that Brucker has selected give a very good picture of what day to day life was like.

Kenneth Atchity’s The Renaissance Reader
This compilation gives access to selections from the important literary, artistic, social, religious, political, scientific and philosophical texts of the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Louise Labe, Bruni, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Malory, Copernicus and Shakespeare, as well as illustrations representing the work of Giotto, Donatello, Bellini, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and Brueghel. It also provides first-hand encounters with the Renaissance in the form of letters, diaries, poetry and art.

Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy 2nd Edition.
The Renaissance was a highly material and visual culture – there are social cues and codes incorporated into the paintings of the time. This book is both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Renaissance painting, for example, mirrors the experience of such activities as preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels. The volume includes discussions of a wide variety of painters, including Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, Boccaccio, and countless others. Baxandall also defines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by a contemporary critic of painting, thereby assembling the basic equipment needed to explore fifteenth-century art. This new second edition includes an appendix that lists the original Latin and Italian texts referred to throughout the book, providing the reader with all the relevant, authentic sources. It also contains an updated bibliography and a new reproduction of a recently restored painting which replaces the original.

Craig Harbison’s The Mirror of the Artist – Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context
This book looks at the Northern Renaissance and how that transformed differently from the Southern (Italian) Renaissance – it places the art inside the historical context of the time and overlaps with the Reformation. Fascinating reading and has some amazing pictures of the kinds of Northern Art that existed or developed.

These last two names are more along the lines of primary source material, but both are rather essential for sort of understanding Renaissance-era thought.

Niccolo Machiavelli – The Prince and Discourses I & II (Free)
Machiavelli wrote more than just the Prince -which should be required reading for everyone, everywhere, but I digress. His Discourses are also very valuable readings with regards to political thought – and he was more than a simple theorist, being the foreign minister of Florence in the early 1500s–until thrown out of office and tortured by the Medici in 1513–his Discourses and the Prince illustrate Renaissance Italy’s dangerous political environment, on which Machiavelli drew for his insights on political conduct.

Baldassare Castiglione – “The Art of the Courtier” (free)

This book is amazing. It addresses the constitution of a perfect courtier, and in its last installment, a perfect lady. It is the definitive account of Renaissance court life. The book is organized as a series of fictional conversations that occur between the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino in 1507 (when Baldassare was in fact part of the Duke’s Court). In the book, the courtier is described as having a cool mind, a good voice (with beautiful, elegant and brave words) along with proper bearing and gestures. At the same time though, the courtier is expected to have a warrior spirit, to be athletic, and have good knowledge of the humanities, Classics and fine arts. Over the course of four evenings, members of the court try to describe the perfect gentleman of the court. In the process they debate the nature of nobility, humor, women, and love.

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Dewey’s Readathon!

Wow.  This October marks the 10th anniversary of Dewey’s Readathon, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I urge you to check this link out.    It’s an amazing thing that I look forward to every time it rolls around.    This year they are doing 30 Days of Readathon leading up to it and it looks like a blast.   So here’s the chart if you want to keep up with me.

 

I’m a few days behind, but I’ll try and catch up as quickly as possible, when life allows me to.  Being a writer with a day job does have it’s downsides.

30.  Favorite Book

Gosh, that’s like trying to pick a favorite child or pet.  My library isn’t 2500+ strong because I’m not really a big reader.  There are a few that I habitually go back to, some that I own in several formats, and then there are some that I continually buy and re-buy because I keep flinging them at people (Good Omens, if you’re curious. I’ve bought it about 19-20 times by now).  So I will talk about one of the books that I re-read frequently.   It’s an old book, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs back in 1912 and it’s the first in the Barsoom series.  I’m talking, of course, of A Princess of Mars.   You might be more familiar with the movie based on it that Disney put out years ago, titled John Carter.  The movie itself is excellent and a fairly decent adaptation of the first two Barsoom books.   This book mixed my love of fantasy and history with my love of space and gave me exciting adventures

Cover (taken from wikipedia.com)

on a far away planet. It gave me a heroine that wasn’t the traditional damsel in distress.   She’s a competent adventurer, fully capable of defending herself and surviving the wilds of Mars without John’s help.  The movie made her the leading scientist of Helium, which was something I adored.   It gave me a healthy romance pairing and aliens who weren’t humans in funny costumes.  It gave me a world that felt alive and lived in.

It’s the first out of a long series and overall, it’s one of my favorite reads and re-reads because it’s all around a great story.

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Book Review: The Ice Orphan of Ganymede

Book two in the The Jupiter Chronicles, The Ice Orphan of Ganymede kicks off with a bang.  The Jovians are free from Phobos, but there’s still a lot of cleanup to be done and a civil war that is threatening to erupt.    First Petros’ popularity has taken a hit and one of the Jovian General is advocating for his replacement.

But that’s not all,  Ian back on Earth is sick and getting sicker.   Nothing on Earth is able to help him, so Callie tries to take him back to Jupiter to see if they can cure him.    What they find is a mess of a situation and a possible lead in the Book of Ganymede.     Except the Book of Ganymede is missing so Ian and Callie have to go off to find it first.  In doing so, they find much more than just something to help Ian.

The second book in this series ably builds on the framework set up by the first novel and opens up more the intriguing universe set up by the author.   We learn more about Jupiter and its inner workings and the plot twists are delightful.   I can hardly wait to see where the next book takes us.

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