First Quarter Thoughts

With the first quarter of 2012 ending today, I thought it was time to check up to see how I am faring this year, since this is my first year of truly tracking details of this sort rather than just the number of books read.

To date, I have read 44 books. This is a slightly slower pace than last year, but with a week of vacation pending, I suspect I can improve upon it. I would really like to hit 200 books read in one year but if I don't make it, it is no big deal.

Here are some other stats for those who are interested in those things:

• Total pages read: 11,865
• Total audio time: 5.30 days
• 30 percent of the books read were written by males. 
• 18 percent have been audiobooks. 
• Surprisingly, only 22 percent have been YA to date. 
• 73 percent of the books have been by new-to-me authors. 
• The average amount of time the books read have been on my TBR pile is 219 days. 
• 34 percent of the books read have been from publishers. 
• The average age of the books read is over 8 years. 

Challenges:

• What's In a Name Challenge: 5/6
• The Chunkster Challenge: 3/6
• TBR Challenge: 100 percent

These stats do surprise me quite a bit. I am glad to see the percentage of review books decline from last year. I knew I had a lot of books that had been sitting on my shelves for longer than they should. I am really shocked at how little YA I have read so far. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

As far as challenges, these are always something I like to finish as soon as possible, but they are not something I consciously have in mind when I select books to read. I am glad to see that I am halfway to completion on all of these so far.

How are you doing so far this year?

Fabulous Friday - March 30th

39 days of almost nothing but fresh juice and salads. 1 more day to go. I've lost over 20 pounds, and clothes that were too tight at the beginning of this are now loose. This juice fast has been a great experience but I am ready to start cooking and eating regular food again. The thought makes me almost giddy.

I have dreamed of eating Mexican food for 40 days. 

What makes it a Fabulous Friday for you?

Review - Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwartz

Title: Displaced Persons
Author: Ghita Schwartz
ISBN: 9780061881770
No. of Pages: 368
Genre: Historical Fiction
Synopsis:

"In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, lands near a displaced persons camp in the British occupation zone of newly defeated Germany. Alone, possessing nothing but a map, a few tins of food, a toothbrush, and his identity papers, he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of refugees, civilians, and soldiers.

Gifted with a talent for black-market trading, Pavel soon procures clothing, false documents, and a modest house, where he installs himself and a pair of fellow refugees—Fela, a young widow who fled Poland for Russia at the outset of the war, and Chaim, a resourceful teenage boy whose smuggling skills have brought him to the Western zones. The trio soon form a makeshift family, searching for surviving relatives, railing against their circumscribed existence, and dreaming of visas to America.

Fifteen years later, haunted by decisions they made as "DPs," Pavel and Fela are married and living in Queens with their young son and daughter, and Chaim has recently emigrated from Israel with his wife, Sima. Pavel opens a small tailoring shop with his scheming brother-in-law while Fela struggles to establish peace in a loosely traditional household; Chaim and Sima adapt cheerfully to American life and its promise of freedom from a brutal past. Their lives are no longer dominated by the need to endure, fight, hide, or escape. Instead, they grapple with past trauma in everyday moments: taking the children to the municipal pool, shopping for liquor, arguing with landlords.

For decades, Pavel, Fela, and Chaim battle over memory and identity on the sly, within private groups of survivors. But as the Iron Curtain falls in the 1990s, American society starts to embrace the tragedy as a cultural commodity, and survivor politics go public. Clever and stubborn, tyrannical and generous, Pavel, Fela, and Chaim articulate the self-conscious strivings of an immigrant community determined to write its own history, on its own terms."

Thoughts: For many schoolchildren, Holocaust survivors were rescued by the Allies, and they lived happily ever after. This is the extent to which history books discuss the plight of the Jews and other political prisoners deemed unworthy to survive by the Nazi regime. Ghita Schwartz’ Displaced Persons disabuses this notion and showcases just what did happen to the hundreds of thousands of people from whom everything had been taken. It is by turns thrilling, thought-provoking, and always informative, as it shows a people continuing to struggle to survive.

The end of the war was not just devastating to the people of Germany. For those who survived the concentration camps, the end of the war still meant being detained in camps for those without family or home. In other words, nothing really changed. They continued to be at the mercy of soldiers, albeit British or American ones and without the fear of death. There was little money and little food. More importantly, they remained unwanted, not only by Germans and Polish, but also by Americans and the British, both of whom limited the number of refugees they would allow into their borders. Yet, in spite of this ongoing miserable treatment, people like Pavel and Chaim, Fela and Hinda begin to rise and to recover.

Displaced Persons begins to falter once all of the characters make their way to New York. It is at this point in time where their stories become less dramatic and enthralling. What was a fascinating study in sociology and human nature becomes something more mundane as they each struggle to find happiness and overcome the sense of not belonging anywhere. Their stories are told in little vignettes with jumps through time, sometimes spacing several years. There seems to be no continuity to these jumps other than to show how long-lasting the pain of the past really is and how it influences future generations. The details remain murky, as each advance in time comes with the sense of visiting someone you haven’t seen in years but have no time to spend catching up before diving into everyday life. There is an impression of unfamiliarity with each jump that is disconcerting to the reader and interrupting the flow of the narrative.

When you have seen and experienced the worst that one human can do towards another, how do you recover from that? The short answer, based on Pavel’s, Chaim’s, Fela’s, and the others’ experiences, is that you don’t. The long answer, as discovered in Displaced Persons, is that recovery means different things for different people. Some became criminals, some ignored the past, others harbored fear or anger or both, and yet others developed a profound need for family and security. While their stories are interesting, Displaced Persons shines brightest when it tells the stories in the displaced persons camps. These are the stories that show how fragile and yet how very strong these survivors truly were. The rest of the novel tends to drag, ruining the impact of what could have been an amazing novel.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to HarperCollins and the LibraryThing Early Reader program for my review copy!

Audiobook Review - The Stand by Stephen King

Title: The Stand
Author: Stephen King
Narrator: Grover Gardner
ISBN: B0078XQQIC
Audiobook Length: 47 hours, 56 minutes
Genre: Horror
Synopsis:

"When a man escapes from a biological testing facility, he sets in motion a deadly domino effect, spreading a mutated strain of the flu that will wipe out 99 percent of humanity within a few weeks. The survivors who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge--Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious "Dark Man," who delights in chaos and violence."

Thoughts: Horror – a feeling of intense fear, anxiety, or hopelessness; something that causes a very strong feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. The Stand is a horror story through and through, and after reading it, one has no problems understanding why Stephen King is considered the master of the horror story. On this post-apocalyptic cautionary tale, Mr. King takes readers on the ultimate emotional roller coaster, through the highest of highs, the absolute lowest of lows, and everything in between. Along the way, his very large cast become more than characters on a page but take on a life of their own.

Mr. King is not afraid to go for the emotional jugular when it comes to storytelling. No one character is safe, leading to some of the most upsetting scenes in the entire book. At the same time, because no one is safe, there is an air of realism in spite of the supernatural elements, which makes the reader feel like everything unfolding could really occur. Death can and will happen to the best and worst among people, and Mr. King is just reminding readers of that fact. It is a potent piece of writing that keeps one’s heart in one’s throat throughout the novel.

Grover Gardner does an absolutely masterful job narrating this tome. With its extremely large cast of characters, a listener could easily get confused without any differentiation between characters. Mr. Gardner’s performance is subtle but very effective, so that one needs nothing but vocal cues to understand who is speaking at any point in time. He captures their fear, their doubts or absolute certainty in their cause, their joys, pains, and so much more with the least amount of inflection. Through his performance, listeners receive a clearer picture behind each character’s motivation, thereby providing its own character development beyond what is written on the page. Very few narrators would be able to pull of the audio version of The Stand, but Mr. Gardner completely nails it.

One can easily see why The Stand is considered one of Mr. King’s best pieces of work. It really does have it all – a terrifying image of the brute force of a pandemic and its terrible aftermath, good versus evil, survival at its most instinctual, deep character knowledge, romance, humor, and so much more. It is by turns horrifying, thrilling, mystifying, thought-provoking, and utterly breathtaking. Mr. King sweeps the reader into his post-flu world within the first few harrowing sentences and does not let them go. The Stand just may be one of the best examples of a modern-day epic to date and well worth the time involved to either listen to it or read it.

Acknowledgements: Mine. All mine.

Review - The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny

Title: The Book of Madness and Cures
Author: Regina O'Melveny
ISBN: 9780316195836
No. of Pages: 307
Genre: Historical Fiction
Synopsis:

"Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entr e to this all-male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body.
Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe to find where-and why-he has gone. Following clues from his occasional enigmatic letters, Gabriella crosses Switzerland, Germany and France, entering strange and forbidding cities. She travels to Scotland, the Netherlands, and finally to Morocco. In each new land she probes the mystery of her father's flight, and open new mysteries of her own. Not just mysteries of ailments and treatments, but ultimate mysteries of mortality, love, and the timeless human spirit."

Thoughts: During a time period where men and women were readily tortured and burned for being witches or having control over mystical forces, would a woman, let alone an unmarried one, really be allowed to openly practice medicine? When decorum and appearances meant everything, would an unmarried woman of status be able to travel by herself across a continent? Ultimately, these are the questions readers must reconcile when approaching The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O’Melveny, for these questions are the main premise behind the story.

The Book of Madness and Cures leaves a lot for the reader to uncover on one’s own, without much in the way of clues or answers. Why does Gabriella wait ten years before searching for her father, when she has been the recipient of slurs and barbs from the Guild long before they announce she can no longer practice medicine? More importantly, why even train Gabriella as a doctor in the first place? Wouldn’t her father put her own safety before his desires to pass along his knowledge? Questions like these remain frustratingly unanswered, even though their answers would go a long way to adding credence to a highly improbable storyline. If the reader could understand better past decisions, then Gabriella herself, as well as her entire journey, becomes slightly more plausible.

The Book of Madness and Cures is really a tale of two stories. On the one hand, it leaves a lot to be desired in the way of realism. One cannot help but admire Gabriella’s tenacity, even while questioning the veracity of her story and her journey. The emotional elements are lacking, making the story-telling uninspiring and the characters flat and insipid. Similarly, the entire novel feels a bit like a fairy tale, with a hapless hero on a quest to uncover the truth and find happiness, complete with its own tidy, and happy, ending.

On the other hand, it is an interesting look at life during the Renaissance and fascinating glimpse of medicine in the 1590s. The discussions of remedies, herbal and otherwise, medical knowledge and supposition, and even descriptions of “diseases” make for mesmerizing reading. Similarly, the minutiae of Gabriella’s trip, when described, offer intriguing hints as to what the world was like during this time. These nuggets of appealing factoids are what keep the reader coming back for more, no matter how far-fetched the story might seem. Unfortunately, The Book of Madness and Cures is enjoyable from the historical aspect but rather unexciting when it comes to the plot and all of the various characters, making for a jagged story that one can only recommend to others with the utmost caution.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to NetGalley and Hachette Book Group for my e-galley!

It's Monday! What are Your Reading? - March 26th edition

Hosted by Sheila from Book Journey, this is a weekly event to share what we've read in the past week and what we hope to read, plus whatever else comes to mind.

Finished Last Week:



I absolutely flew through the last three books. They were all amazing in their own right!

Currently Reading:



Currently Listening:



Up Next:



As always, I reserve the right to change my mind, depending on how I feel on any given day.

What are you reading this week?

The Sunday Salon - March 25th

Guten Morgen, meine Liebchen! It is a glorious Sunday morning here in southern Ohio. Yesterday was just as beautiful. In fact, we spent yesterday raking up old mulch and putting down new stuff. It was too beautiful to stay inside. Today's plan, other than reading, is to mow and edge the lawn and just relax. I am really looking forward to sitting on the patio and diving back into Maggie Stiefvater's Linger.

Remember when I mentioned that my local school district was in desperate financial straits? Somehow, I now find myself as the treasurer of the newest local not-for-profit organization, one that we are establishing from scratch solely to help generate more revenue for the district. The website is still in development, but expect to hear more from me about this endeavor in the next few weeks!

Jim had his big interviews this week. In his words, he "nailed them." We have heard two different stories about when we should expect to hear something about official offers. The recruiter told Jim that we should hear something early this week. Then, others within the organization have told us that the company is notoriously slow in issuing offers. All I know is that we are going on vacation on Friday, and it would be really nice to be able to have something settled before we go.

Reviewed this week in case you missed them:

• Chime by Franny Billingsley
• The Good Father by Noah Hawley
• All That I Am by Anna Funder

With that, I'm signing off. I think today might be a day to unplug. Did I mention how lovely it is today?

Have a relaxing Sunday, everyone. Happy reading!

Saturday Goodies

I've got nothing this week other than a few bookish odds and ends.

• I mentioned last week, Armchair BEA is back on, and now we are even on Facebook! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter as well.

• Why yes, I did see The Hunger Games on its opening day. I'm still blown away too much to discuss it fully. I want to see it again. 

• The Spring readathon has been announced, and reader sign-ups are now open. I'm not certain if I can participate yet, but if you are free on April 21st, please sign up!

• The 5th Annual Tournament of Audiobooks is now up and running. For some reason, I really love this silly little tournament - probably because I've actually listened to most of the books. You should check out all the action.

Fabulous Friday - March 23rd

Happy Hunger Games!

Enough said!

What makes this a Fabulous Friday for you?

Review - All That I Am by Anna Funder

Title: All That I Am
Author: Anna Funder
ISBN: 9780062077561
No. of Pages: 374
Genre: Historical Fiction
Synopsis:

"When eighteen-year-old Ruth Becker visits her cousin Dora in Munich in 1923, she meets the love of her life, the dashing young journalist Hans Wesemann, and eagerly joins in the heady activities of the militant political Left in Germany. Ten years later, Ruth and Hans are married and living in Weimar Berlin when Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany. Together with Dora and her lover, Ernst Toller, the celebrated poet and self-doubting revolutionary, the four become hunted outlaws overnight and are forced to flee to London. Inspired by the fearless Dora to breathtaking acts of courage, the friends risk betrayal and deceit as they dedicate themselves to a dangerous mission: to inform the British government of the very real Nazi threat to which it remains willfully blind. All That I Am is the heartbreaking story of these extraordinary people, who discover that Hitler’s reach extends much further than they had thought."

Thoughts: Much has been made of the German people’s involvement in Hitler’s wartime activities, and many questions have been raised and answered about that involvement being voluntary or forced through coercion and fear. What sets All That I Am apart is not only the fact that Ms. Funder is writing about people who actually existed, she shines the spotlight on those who protested and tried to fight Hitler’s increasing tyranny. They were the first ones forced to seek asylum as Hitler sought to silence their voices quickly and absolutely. They were the ones who so desperately tried to open the eyes of the West to what was truly occurring in Germany. Theirs is a story that is relatively unknown until now.

All That I Am is a flashback within a flashback, which can lead to more than a little uncertainty as the reader struggles to keep track of the jumps in time and switching between characters. Ruth Becker flashes back to her own set of memories, while at the same time she is reading the memoirs of Ernst Toller, who is also remembering the same time period. The first fifty pages or so do require careful reading and close attention to the narrators.

While Ruth and Ernst move in largely separate circles, eventually their stories do interconnect, largely through their love for Dora – a force entirely all her own. While Ernst attempts to balance his fame with his civic duty and Ruth struggles with a husband who is not acclimating to life as an exile very well, Dora is the motivating force behind their mission to inform. Her commitment is unwavering, even at tremendous sacrifice to her health and happiness. While Ruth and Ernst are the main narrators, Dora is the true heart of the novel. Even though All That I Am is a fictionalized account of their pre-war actions, the fact remains that Ernst Toller, Ruth Becker, Hans Wesemann, and Dora Fabian did exist and did try to raise awareness of Hitler’s true aims behind his rise to power. Ms. Funder does a remarkable job balancing the fact from the fiction, staying as true as possible to the known details of this period in their lives.

All That I Am is a breathtaking tribute to those who risked everything, including their lives, for their country. The fate of the main four characters, as well as their entire group, is a profound example of everything that the West did wrong in the months and years before World War II. From a failure to ignore the reports from Germans forced to flee for their lives to an inability or unwillingness to protect these same exiles from harm, so much could have been avoided had the Western powers just listened and believed. One can do nothing but admire the courage and fortitude it took for this little band of left-wing exiles to fight to raise awareness of a pending war against insurmountable odds and appreciate Ms. Funder all the more for highlighting these courageous people and their efforts.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association for my review copy!

Review - The Good Father by Noah Hawley

Title: The Good Father
Author: Noah Hawley
ISBN: 9780385535533
No. of Pages: 318
Genre: Literary Fiction
Synopsis:

"As the Chief of Rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian, Dr. Paul Allen's specialty is diagnosing patients with conflicting symptoms, patients other doctors have given up on. He lives a contented life in Westport with his second wife and their twin sons—hard won after a failed marriage earlier in his career that produced a son named Daniel. In the harrowing opening scene of this provocative and affecting novel, Dr. Allen is home with his family when a televised news report announces that the Democratic candidate for president has been shot at a rally, and Daniel is caught on video as the assassin.

Daniel Allen has always been a good kid—a decent student, popular—but, as a child of divorce, used to shuttling back and forth between parents, he is also something of a drifter. Which may be why, at the age of nineteen, he quietly drops out of Vassar and begins an aimless journey across the United States, during which he sheds his former skin and eventually even changes his name to Carter Allen Cash."

Thoughts: While the media loves to pounce on an alleged killer and dissect every aspect of his or her life before summarily declaring the person innocent or guilty well before the courts do, they tend to forget about the parents of the alleged killer. Theirs is a story that remains mostly untold. What must it be like to be labeled as the parents of a killer, to know that people now judge you because of the actions of your child? How do they reconcile their memories of a laughing little kid to an adult on trial for murder? Noah Hawley explores these questions and more in his psychological thriller The Good Father.

Dr. Paul Allen faces every parent’s second-worst nightmare - to be faced with the idea that your child has taken the life of someone else. Understandably, Paul immediately sets out to prove his son’s innocence. This flight-or-fight response is not so much about taking care of Daniel but more about assuaging the guilt he feels for not taking better care of his son during those all-important formative years. His search for proof is a flight from the idea that the few weeks each year he spent with Danny after the divorce may have contributed to Danny’s reclusive behavior. While The Good Father is not necessarily a cautionary tale about how children of divorced parents grow up to be killers, it is easy for a reader to make that assumption based on Paul’s questions, actions, and conclusions. While this may not have been Mr. Hawley’s intention, it is there just the same.

Interwoven between Paul’s investigation and the story of Danny’s path from New York to California are the backgrounds of real-life assassins. It makes for an interesting point/counterpoint to compare Danny’s actions and thought processes with the facts that are known about men such as Timothy McVeigh, Sirhan Sirhan, and other famous assassins. Included as part of Paul’s research in the truth behind the assassination, there is even the inclusion of the various conspiracy theories surrounding these famous assassinations. While it is interesting food for thought, after a while it becomes more evidence that Paul is grasping at straws rather than accepting the actions of his son. In other words, a reader may get increasingly bored with Paul’s obsession and failure to truly be there for his son rather than running around after even the weakest lead.

While novels like THE UNDERSIDE OF JOY explore the definition of motherhood, The Good Father investigates what it means to be a father, the compromises, and the tough choices that must be made as the figurative head of the household. It is the story of Paul coming to grips with his failures as a father and with the choices his son made, and accepting that which he can no longer change. Mr. Hawley does an effectual job of making Paul empathetic enough for readers who are parents to be able consider how they would handle similar situations. More importantly, The Good Father gives voice to those silent but suffering parents of famous killers, the pariah status they immediately inherit because of their child’s actions, the changes to their lives they are forced to make.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday for my e-galley!

Review - Chime by Franny Billingsley

Title: Chime
Author: Franny Billingsley
ISBN: 9780803735521
No. of Pages: 368
Genre: Paranormal, YA
Synopsis:

"Before Briony's stepmother died, she made sure Briony blamed herself for all the family's hardships. Now Briony has worn her guilt for so long it's become a second skin. She often escapes to the swamp, where she tells stories to the Old Ones, the spirits who haunt the marshes. But only witches can see the Old Ones, and in her village, witches are sentenced to death. Briony lives in fear her secret will be found out, even as she believes she deserves the worst kind of punishment.

Then Eldric comes along with his golden lion eyes and mane of tawny hair. He's as natural as the sun, and treats her as if she's extraordinary. And everything starts to change. As many secrets as Briony has been holding, there are secrets even she doesn't know."

Thoughts: In many ways, Franny Billingsley’s Chime is a difficult novel to describe. While targeted to young adults, many of the themes are predominantly adult and rather psychological in nature. The supernatural elements are understated, making the reader question whether they are a figment of Briony’s active imagination or are indeed real. In addition, Chime contains elements of a traditional murder mystery as well as a romantic coming-of-age story. However, it is neither of these things in its entirety. Instead, the various elements combine to form a completely new type of story, one that does not fit easily into any one genre and yet manages to maintain a poignant and powerful simplicity.

Briony is one of those deliciously simple characters who insist on making things more complicated and difficult than they are or need to be. In Briony’s case, it is her unwavering opinion that she is not only a witch, but one that uses her powers for selfish means. Her entire life is spent secretly atoning for sins she supposedly committed when she was younger. Yet, the reader instantly spots that there is more to Briony’s story than even she is aware. One’s desire to uncover the truth and ultimately save Briony is the driving force behind the novel, and with the exquisite phrases and descriptions, the reader becomes an active participant in the unfolding events, ultimately heightening the suspense even more.

Chime has an otherworldly quality that makes it difficult for the reader to determine the time and place of the novel. While Ms. Billingsley does include clues to make it known that the setting is rural England at the beginning of the 21st century, without these details, Swampsea could be in any country, and the story itself would be just as realistic set in the New World among the Puritans as it would be in the 1920s. This unearthly feature exacerbates all of Briony’s secrets, increasing the doom and gloom as well as her sense of guilt and urgency.

From the opening sentence, which is one of the better opening sentences ever read, the reader knows that Chime is going to be an amazing story. The setting is appropriately mysterious and eerie, and the unknown forces behind some of the novel’s more thrilling scenes are decidedly uncanny - supernatural without being overtly so. Briony is a young girl forced to grow up early and bear more than her share of guilt. Her frustrations with her father and with her lot in life make her extremely sympathetic, escalating the story’s overall tension and Briony’s fear of discovery. The answers, when revealed, are brilliantly simple and obvious with hindsight, but Ms. Billingsley manages to keep the truth buried beneath layers of secrets. Chime is another excellent example of a YA novel that succeeds in appealing to those outside of its target audience.

Acknowledgements: Mine. All mine.

It's Monday! What are you reading? - March 19th

Hosted by Sheila from Book Journey, this is a weekly event to share what we've read in the past week and what we hope to read, plus whatever else comes to mind.

Finished Last Week:



Currently Reading:



Currently Listening:



I need something light after the tome that was The Stand.

Up Next:



As always, I reserve the right to change my mind, depending on how I feel on any given day.

What are you reading this week?

The Sunday Salon - March 18th

Happy belated St. Patrick's Day, meine Liebchen! As befitting a last name of Shannon, we hosted several of our coworkers last night. It was a great night, even if we have way too much green beer left over. Steak and Guinness pie, potato and leek soup, Dubliner cheese tart, Guinness chocolate cupcakes, and more were devoured with thankfully little in the way of leftovers. Given everything that has been happening, it was wonderful to unwind and not worry about work for a while.

Speaking of work, we finally have movement. I was actually in Beloit on Thursday for a whirlwind trip and four interviews. I went up there thinking these were going to be informal things, but I was definitely wrong. Considering I don't even know for which positions I was applying, I have no idea how they went. Jim is heading up on Monday for his interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday. We're hoping that this means that one of us will be receiving some sort of formal offer before the end of the month. We shall see. In the meantime, I keep applying to every job that looks somewhat interesting in and around the Chicagoland area, as well as Milwaukee and Madison. The law of averages has to kick in one of these days.

Did you see the big news? Armchair BEA is coming back again this year!! My fellow organizers and I are busy planning and working on all of the little details that have made this event a fan favorite. Given last year's amazing growth, we know we have to live up to some amazing expectations, and we are determined to deliver. Stay tuned for more details!


In case you missed them the first time around, here is what I reviewed this week:

• Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler
• The Underside of Joy by Sere Prince Halverson
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman (audiobook)
• The Temple Mount Code by Charles Brokaw

With that, I am going to hunker down with my books - I have to finish Lady Chatterley's Lover and am hoping to finish Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwartz - and watch more of the NCAA tourney. After standing all day yesterday cooking and cleaning, my feet are still throbbing. A day of rest is just what the doctor ordered. I hope everyone has a wonderful and relaxing Sunday. Happy reading!

Review - The Temple Mount Code by Charles Brokaw

Title: The Temple Mount Code
Author: Charles Brokaw
ISBN: 9780765328717
No. of Pages: 352
Genre: Thriller
Synopsis:

"An old friend summons dashing linguistics professor Thomas Lourds to Jerusalem to examine an ancient text. But Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also wants the same document. Khamenei and many others believe that the book contains a secret that will allow its owner to rule all of Islam and wage a Global Jihad the likes of which has never been seen before.

Arriving in Jerusalem, Lourds discovers that his friend has been murdered and his apartment ransacked. With the help of Miriam Abata, a beautiful Iranian-American Jewish graduate student, he races against the clock to seek the dangerous document: Lourds seeks to save civilization while his enemies hope to destroy it."

Thoughts: Simply put, The Temple Mount Code is one of those forgettable conspiracy thrillers that are inexplicably popular while simultaneously trivializing all of the excellent thrillers that do exist. Thomas Lourds is the most awful type of protagonist – cocky, headstrong, self-righteous, smarmy, and slightly misogynistic in his relationships with women. For Charles Brokaw fans, this third Lourds novel follows the same formula as the previous two. Lourds finds something big through his unsurpassed linguistics knowledge. He is called upon by a long-time best friend, with whom coincidentally he has not spoken in several years, to solve something even bigger, since only he is intelligent enough to break the hidden code. He sleeps with every woman with whom he interacts. There are lots of explosions and gun fights. There is a remote possibility something bad might happen to Lourds, but it is over in the blink of an eye and he walks away with the prize virtually unscathed leaving ruin trailing behind him. Then the story is easily forgotten. This format should be familiar to anyone who has ever read a conspiracy theory novel after The Davinci Code first became popular.

The story itself is decent. The plotting is fast-paced, and there is just enough minor character development to make things interesting. The issue with The Temple Mount Code and the entire Code series is Thomas Lourds. He is supposed to be like a modern-day Indiana Jones, complete with trademark hat, but he comes across as nothing more than a self-aggrandizing asshat. The treatment of women in these stories is disturbing. Yes, they might be intelligent, capable, and, in the case of The Temple Mount Code, even quite lethal, yet they invariably end up losing their clothes in the melee as hapless victims and then voluntarily dropping their clothes for Lourds. Every. Single. One. James Bond he is not, although one could question Mr. Brokaw’s attempt to mold Lourds in Bond’s image as much as possible without infringing on any copyright issues.

The Temple Mount Code and stories of its ilk really are better suited for the male persuasion. As a female reader, I could accept Lourds’ conceit one time only. In reading this latest book in the series, it became too much to ignore and seriously detracted from my enjoyment of the overall novel. The entire plot took a backseat to how ridiculous Lourds’ character truly is. The saving grace is that The Temple Mount Code, like all the rest of the series, are extremely easy reads and require very little time and effort to complete. That being said, readers who like action-adventure stories with very little character development or even required thinking should give The Temple Mount Code a try.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Forge Books for my review copy.

Fabulous Friday - March 16th

It was 80 degrees on Wednesday. Eight. Zero. Insane and yet utterly delicious. One cannot help but celebrate the return of spring. How do I know this weather is not a fluke? This is what my willow tree looks like already.

Yes, folks, Spring is all but here.

What makes this a Fabulous Friday for you?

Audiobook Review - American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Title: American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition
Author: Neil Gaiman
Narrators: Dennis Boutsikaris, Daniel Oreskes, Ron McLarty, Sarah Jones
ISBN: 9780062101914
Length of Audiobook: 19 hours, 39 minutes
Genre: Fantasy
Synopsis:

"A storm is coming . . .

Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.

But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.

Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow ever imagined—it is a job that takes him on a dark and strange road trip and introduces him to a host of eccentric characters whose fates are mysteriously intertwined with his own. Along the way Shadow will learn that the past never dies; that everyone, including his beloved Laura, harbors secrets; and that dreams, totems, legends, and myths are more real than we know. Ultimately, he will discover that beneath the placid surface of everyday life a storm is brewing—an epic war for the very soul of America—and that he is standing squarely in its path."

Thoughts: For thousands of years, humans have considered their gods to exist, to walk the Earth, and interact with humanity. In AMERICAN GODS, Neil Gaiman takes this historical folklore and belief system and turns it on its head. For not only are these very same gods real, they are no longer immortal and all-powerful. New gods have come to usurp their place in the hearts and souls of humans, and subsequently their powers. The battle is brewing between the two opposing forces, and poor Shadow finds himself facing situations that border on impossible while trying to make sense of it all.

Shadow is a great main character. His confusion is the reader's confusion. More importantly, the vulnerability created by the loss of his wife and best friend and his reacclimation to the outside world creates an instantaneous bond with the reader. His role in the pending storm is one of the Everyman, as Shadow represents the layperson among the deities.

Still, the gods do steal the show. Their sufferings, their views of the world, and their personalities create these larger-than-life characters that are utterly and miserably human. It is at once humorous and yet somewhat depressing. If Shadow is the Everyman, the ancient gods as a whole are anything that has ever been deemed obsolete. They are the stone tools and the horse-drawn carriage. They are the Victrola and cassette tapes. They are hunting and gathering and cooking over hearthstones. As amusing as they are, there is an underlying sadness that accompanies their scenes in the story. No one wants to be forgotten, not even the immortal.

One of the more delightful aspects of AMERICAN GODS is how subtle the entire story is. Mr. Gaiman does not beat readers over the head with obvious explanations of the gods involved in this fight. Instead, he weaves these gods into the story in such a way that an unobservant reader may completely miss who is whom and where the story is going. Observant readers, however, will come to realize that Mr. Gaiman gives them all the answers - to the identity of the gods and to the final scenes of the novel - well before the big reveal. The trick and the fun is in trying to decipher the clues about the characters as well as about the story. This is one story where predicting the plot in no way detracts from one's overall enjoyment.

Full productions of audiobooks can be tricky. If there is not enough dialogue, the entire production can become stilted. Each time a new voice breaks the flow of the main narrator, it can draw a listener's focus away from the story and onto the new voice. AMERICAN GODS does not suffer from this fate. In fact, one might be compelled to say that this full cast production of Mr. Gaiman's masterpiece is only enhanced by the multitude of voices. The amount of dialogue lends itself well to multiple narrators; because each major character was treated to his or her own narrator, this helps the listener follow the dialogue more easily than if one person was trying to enact all of the voices. There is also the addition of audio clues in the form of accents and intonation that also helped the figures come to life. Between the audio production and Mr. Gaiman's strong descriptions, the figures become more than a set of isolated voices but rather something much fuller and almost visual. This is an outstanding audio experience.

AMERICAN GODS is a stunning novel and leaves no surprises as to why it has earned Mr. Gaiman so many accolades and awards. Extremely well-written, the reader is taken on a whirlwind adventure filled with displaced, humanized gods seeking to reclaim some of their former glory. It is a premise that is breathtaking in its scope and ambition and lives up to it all.

Acknowledgements: Mine. All mine.

Review - The Underside of Joy by Sere Prince Halverson

Title: The Underside of Joy
Author: Sere Prince Halverson
ISBN: 9780525952596
No. of Pages: 307
Genre: Literary Fiction
Synopsis:

"To Ella Beene, happiness means living in the northern California river town of Elbow with her husband, Joe, and his two young children. Yet one summer day Joe breaks his own rule-never turn your back on the ocean-and a sleeper wave strikes him down, drowning not only the man but his many secrets.

For three years, Ella has been the only mother the kids have known and has believed that their biological mother, Paige, abandoned them. But when Paige shows up at the funeral, intent on reclaiming the children, Ella soon realizes there may be more to Paige and Joe's story. "Ella's the best thing that's happened to this family," say her close-knit Italian-American in-laws, for generations the proprietors of a local market. But their devotion quickly falters when the custody fight between mother and stepmother urgently and powerfully collides with Ella's quest for truth."

Thoughts: What is one’s definition of a mother? Does the title automatically fall to a woman who gives birth, only to give the baby up for adoption immediately? Is it a title that is earned through the tender nurturing and loving of a child? Can one forfeit the title under certain circumstances? Can one earn back the right to be a mother? All these questions and more face Ella Beene in Sere Prince Halverson’s The Underside of Joy.

As much as I wanted to embrace The Underside of Joy wholeheartedly and shout from the rooftops about what a wonderful novel it is, I just cannot do so. My problems with the novel revolve around Paige. I do not believe that birth mothers should be given more rights than adoptive mothers, and it never ceases to infuriate me when judges continually forget the child’s best interest in custody disputes. Like Ella, I wanted to forgive Paige and give her the benefit of the doubt, but then she goes and continues to put her own needs in front of those of her children’s. Her actions in court, on the phone, in front of the kids, and in general upset me so much that I wanted to throw the book across the room. While one could argue that this emotional response is a sign of an extremely well-written book, and it is, my overall enjoyment of the novel will forever be tainted by my abhorrence of Paige’s actions in the name of motherhood.

No matter one’s opinion of Paige or of Joe for keeping secrets, any reader will marvel at Halverson’s beautiful writing. The scents and scenery of Northern California come alive with her words. Ella’s pain is so perfectly rendered that readers will find themselves sobbing uncontrollably at random moments or, as in my case, forced to stop reading because of an inability to handle the intensity of Ella’s, and subsequently their own, roiling feelings. It is an emotional juggernaut of a novel that will make even the most hard-hearted of readers wilt until the feelings of pain, loss and confusion while at the same time make readers start planning trips to Sonoma to find their own Elbow, California.

The Underside of Joy is a magnificent ode to motherhood – the endless sacrifice, the unconditional love that makes even the worst day better, the doubts, the fears, the pain, the joy. Ella is a formidable heroine, refusing to buckle under three of the most difficult situations one will ever face. Ms. Halverson’s writing is so amazing that Ella’s pain becomes the reader’s pain, her celebrations become the reader’s joys. Except for my personal issues with Paige, her actions, and the court system in general, The Underside of Joy truly does live up to the hype as one of the best books of the year.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association trade show for my review copy!