Finished my story about the demon/devil named Larkspur in that I got tired of writing it and engineered an ending which is
- unsatisfying; but
- means I can stop writing it.
I just want to write something new I’m proud of.
Dumb brain.
I read:
Thoughts:
I read and reviewed a lot of my Netgalley books this month.
The Cruel Country by Judith Ortiz Cofer: Reviewed here.
A Place for Margaret by Bernice Thurman Hunter: When I was seven, my father bought me this book from a business trip. Now Tesfa is seven, I read it to her, another copy that I found at the Salvation Army store in town. I’d forgotten how earnest a book it is. Everyone is just so plum nice. And many of the side characters have ridiculously alliterative names (Archie Arbuckle, Matilda Maggotty, etc.). I can’t decide whether the book holds up or not. Tesfa liked bits and pieces of it, but didn’t seem eager for me to read the next two books in the series to her. I might anyway, because I can’t rightly recall what happens in the third book.
The Children’s Home by Charles Lambert: Reviewed here.
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari: I wasn’t going to read this, but then I watched Master of None last month on Netflix and the book was $10 at Chapters so I picked it up. It’s actually quite amusing.
The Night Parade by Kathryn Tanquary: Reviewed here.
The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt: Reviewed here.
Skeptic by Michael Shermer: Reviewed here.
A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac: Reviewed here.
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill: Perfect level of spooky. Much better than the spookiness and eventual mess that this month’s earlier spooky attempt The Children’s Home made.
Unnatural Selection by Emily Monosson: Reviewed here. You would have thought though that the publisher would have picked a different name since Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection was all over the feminist-blogosphere not so long ago.
The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen: I really wanted to adore this book. Instead, I feel like yelling Make up your mind — be supernatural or not! Almost worth it though for the ending (non-supernatural) Gotcha!
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso by Kali Nicole Gross: Reviewed here.
Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt: Awwwwww. Such a sweet story. Like eating cotton candy without feeling sick afterwards.
Favourite book:
I cried. The whole way through this book. Like pretty much non stop for the hour it took me to read it.
Most promising book on my wishlist:
I watched:
I wrote:
Fixed up some short stories and sent them out, again. Worked on a story about a demon or a devil or something. His name is Larkspur because it is and I cannot change it now.
This book might win for Most-Descriptive-Title-I’ve-Read-In-A-While. Indeed, there is a Hannah Mary Tabbs, and there is a Disembodied Torso. No bait-and-switch here. Instead we have an overview of a Philadelphia murder case from 1887 stemming from the discovery of a racially-ambiguous disembodied torso, that of Hannah Mary Tabbs’ alleged paramour. Randomly located body parts and illicit love affairs being as salacious then as now, the investigation and trial was well-covered in the press, although as Gross posits, the whole starting point was the inability to determine the race of the torso; since there was a possibility it was white, the investigators did their thing. If it had been obviously that of a black man, then, like the other body parts found later in the book determined not to be part of the torso in question, then it would have simply been discarded.
(Side note: apparently there were just body parts strewn here and there in Philadelphia at the time, which is interesting in and of itself. Also creepy.)
Thus, via saved press clippings and trial notes that Gross has dug out from various archives, we have a glimpse into the lives of black men and women in 1880s Philadelphia, a group generally excluded from any degree of anthropological or sociological study at the time. So that’s interesting, although the crime aspect of the book is pretty cut-and-dry. It isn’t like a riveting true crime story with lots of twists for an engaging plot. The authorities figure out the who-dunnit without much misdirection. There’s bits of analysis here and there, but, based on some of her comments in the introduction, it seems like Gross is trying to write for general readership rather than pure academic audiences, so she likely scaled the analysis and theory back a bit.
But did she need to? If the book is supposed to be a 101-style-primer, then more context about race, society, race-in-society, etc., at the time frame would be welcome, and flesh the story out a lot more (think The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or Manning Marable’s Malcom X biography). If it’s not meant to be 101, then all we have are the facts of a case with a smidgen of a view into black life in Philadelphia in the 1880s. While such a glimpse is rare, a presentation of such research without analysis doesn’t give the reader much to chew on. The book, both in length and scope, is slight. Diversionary, but slight.
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso by Kali Nicole Gross went on sale January 28, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
So if I read a book that talks about super-germs and then feel sick two days later, am I sick or is my imagination overactive? Medical students’ disease or the fact that I share a house with someone who was sick last week? Not that Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson has anything in it to tell me how hypochondrial I am being. But it does have enough bits and pieces in it to make me feel nervous. And, unlike my last “scientific” book I read, there are references — almost a quarter of the book in my copy. And no holier-than-thou attitude either.
Yay science!
Except boo people, since, as Unnatural Selection points out, people are doing a lot of stuff that may have unintended long term consequences as weeds, bugs, and germs develop new resistance to our attempts to squash them out, or, in a more intriguing aspect I hadn’t know about before, re-activating genes that maybe haven’t been used for centuries. So yay evolution, except for the fact that such evolution in our tiny plant and microbe friends will likely screw us over big time in the coming years. At the end of The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, when they go see the locusts and talk about how all they’ve ever tried to do, and here the locusts still are, thriving, unsquashable, unstoppable, yep. Like that. We’re screwed.
So what to do, what to do? That isn’t really Unnatural Selection‘s scope, since it isn’t a fix-it-up book, but rather a watch-out-your-house-is-caving-in book. It stays scientific; there’s no fear-mongering. But I still get sleepy reading books like this, like the problem is so overwhelming that my brain actually starts turning itself off rather than want to keep reading. At the same time, as the book points out, a huge problem is agri-business, which I can affect only a little (buying antibiotic free meat, writing letters to parliament, etc.). But I can’t really stop Monsanto from tinkering around to get more herbicide-resistant crops that end up cross-breeding with weeds until the weeds are endemic and resistant to all known herbicides. So then I start to freak out, and the book talks about influenza, and I convince myself I have influenza, and I get even sleepier. I perked up at the third and final chapter on epigenetics, but then the book ends, without even so much as a conclusion, and I was left feeling adrift in a sea of antibiotic, herbicide and pesticide resistant super plants and microbes ready to destroy me. Maybe I’ll stay in my house for awhile.
Believable science. No assholery.
Unnatural Selection by Emily Monossson went on sale October 28, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Do you ever sometimes feel you totally get an author’s thought process?
What if … schizophrenia were contagious! And what if … the only one who could stop the spread was someone who had schizophrenia before all this happened! Except … he’s spiraling off his meds and is unwilling to help!
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after you (Joseph Heller — Catch-22).
A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac is a fairly typical thriller-zombie-pathogen type novel. All the standard plot points: strange disease starts to infect a small town, initial panic escalates to full blown pandemonium, military-enforced quarantine, protagonist chased.
Because I wrote pandemonium up there, I feel like thinking about pandas for a bit.
Okay. Done.
For a thriller, A Cure for Madness is well written. The characters aren’t flat puppets bouncing around on popsicle sticks and the pacing is well done; the amping up of the spread of the disease and the way the town starts to fall apart completely believable. The story takes place in a small college town in Maine, so I can imagine the whole story here, in my small university town in New Brunswick (province bordering Maine for the geographically-challenged), especially since McIsaac is also from New Brunswick. Granted, I don’t think we have a mental hospital. The last chapter is heartbreaking, when you realize what this has meant for Clare, our protagonist, who spends the later two-thirds of novel trying to protect her brother with his mental illness.
So it’s a good, solid, easy-to-read thriller novel that I have nothing to complain about, except for the fact that I generally prefer literary fiction to thrillers. But for those days when you just want to read something a little mindless and entertaining, A Cure for Madness works fine.
A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac went on sale January 19, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
At Costco.
Geoff: Are you sure we really need that much Nutella?
Well, now I feel squishkly.
There’s a lot I can get behind in the skeptics movement; I’m a (former) scientist so of course I love science. I think more needs to be done to educate non-scientists about how science works. I think homeopathy works as well as drinking a glass of water (because that’s all you’re getting with homeopathy) and I’m a pretty big booster of vaccinations (unless, for documented, scientific, medical reasons, such as a suppressed immune system, one cannot safely be vaccinated). But I don’t think being an arrogant dickhead about being a skeptic, as Shermer comes off in these seventy short essays, is a way to go about convincing anyone of anything. Plus the squishkliness.
Skeptics aren’t big on faith. That’s fine. You don’t have to believe what you don’t believe in. But I really don’t see the harm if someone also accepts, say, evolution, and believes in God, as long as they recognize that the scientific method isn’t applicable to a belief in God. But I can’t see Shermer being fine with that. I can see Shermer, if the tone in this book is anything like how he is in person, berating someone for believing in God, even if that person’s belief has no impact on their acceptance of science. Shermer is like Christopher Hitchens or any of them: not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with them. Is the goal of the skeptic movement to illuminate the non-scientific about science, or is it to be a pretentious ass about being “smarter” than those with religious or magical or pseudo-scientifc convictions? My money is on the second.
Plus, the essays here aren’t even that convincing. They can’t be. They are all short, seven hundred to one thousand word tidbits, which is not enough space to expound on much of anything. I don’t really see the point of putting them together in a book since all-in-all, the flippancy of their length make the whole book almost pointless. Scientists will already know this stuff. Anti-scientists are unlikely to keep reading after Shermer essentially calls them morons. So who’s the audience? Skeptical sycophants? I thought sycophants were exactly what skeptics want to avoid.
And I’m going to go back to the squishklyness. I recognize my squishkliness is unfair. The book should be judged on its own merits, which, in my opinion, is a bunch of slight, antagonistic essays that will be lauded by people who already agree with everything Shermer stands for, in a scientific sense. Even I agree with his science stuff. I just don’t agree with his tone, style, and alleged behaviour. Or his dismissal of the Humanities’ concern about science being a white, male, cabal (especially since the majority of scientists he mentions in his essays are white and male).
I got very little out of this experience.
Skeptic by Michael Shermer went on sale January 12, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Well, on the plus side, the supernatural aspect is there right from the get-go. No surprise aliens or alternate personalities thrust upon me after I’ve gone a good way into the novel. Julia, our protagonist, is one of a long line of women in her family who have some sort of second sight, able to foretell future deaths and work to avoid them. Anyone remember that show from the 90, Early Edition? Sort of like that, but set during Argentina’s Dirty War and its aftermath. But right there, at the beginning, bam, supernatural. Thank you Ingrid Betancourt for not trying to trick me or surprise me, but just being honest from page one that there is some weird otherwordly stuff that’s going to be going on.
You know what else happens right around page one: two or three metaphors right after each other. Then more. Then characters that earnestly spout vapid phrases like Love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Then coincidences. Then a narrative that jumps around from Julia to other people and back again. Each time I think Okay, I can deal with this, the book goes back into airport thriller style, completely illogical.
So I don’t believe any of the characters. Or the plot. But I do believe Betancourt really really really really really really tried. She can do some things well; she writes the violence amazingly. But then she has a wife hide in the trunk of her husband’s car to see if he’s cheating on her and people oh so randomly running into each other on buses or seeing enemies countries away in photographs hung on the wall of a lover’s house and I think Sure to myself. Whatever.
Maybe go read The Dancer Upstairs if interested in a South American dirty war-esque struggle. Or read The Blue Line, but for the violence, not the book itself.
The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt went on sale January 12, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
We’ll start with my seven year old’s assessment (after some prompting from me. Well, not actually some. More like a lot.): It was like Spirited Away. I liked it. My favourite part was the object spirit town.
And that was all I got from her.
In any case, The Night Parade by Kathryn Tanquary is a middle-grade novel taking place in Japan during the Obon Festival. It’s a somewhat cute, predictable story that didn’t really hold my attention. I kept drifting off in my head while reading it aloud to Tesfa and missing plot points. Tesfa was right though: The Night Parade is similar to Spirited Away with a girl, Saki in this case instead of Chichiro, being drawn into the spirit world. But The Night Parade lacks what made Spirited Away so magical, which comes down to, I’m pretty sure, the pictures. The Night Parade needs pictures, intricately drawn, beautiful, colourful, amazing pictures to really make the story come to life. The writing, on its own, just isn’t enough to elevate the story. It’s one of these stories that’s too long and not long enough at the same time. I want more of the spirit world. I want explanations for why those specific animals were the spirit guides. I want less of the real world, less of Saki’s brother. I want the grandmother to have known something. Basically, I want all the first-novel jitters to vanish, less background, more in the moment stuff.
Still, it’s a perfectly passable middle-grade novel. Just not transcendent. Probably the most damning of all, Tesfa didn’t ask if there was a sequel, the way she does with books she truly loves.
A decent book if you like Japanese folklore. Maybe think of it as a gateway to further explorations in Japanese culture.
The Night Parade by Kathryn Tanquary went on sale January 1, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.