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By Beth, September 1, 2010

The Mysterious Howling
By Maryrose Wood

A Whole Nother Story
By Dr. Cuthbert Soup

When You Reach Me
By Rebecca Stead

Sometimes you just want to feel like a kid again.  If you like gloomy mansions, governesses, orphans, and sly humor, try The Mysterious Howling.  If hilarious wordplay, Lemony Snicket, and The Mysterious Benedict Society are more your style, try the madcap romp A Whole Nother Story.  And if you want a nostalgic 1970’s-era time travel story, try Newbery-winner When You Reach Me.

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By Bryan, August 2, 2010

Blood and Guts in High School
by Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker is a burning hot razor blade. She can disembowel you. She can purify you. Defining the aboutness of her books is a difficult task due to her aggressive methodology, but here goes: Blood and Guts in High School is nominally about Janie Smith, who begins life as a sex slave to her “father” in Mexico, only to escape (or be abandoned) to New York were she discovers true poverty and punk rock. From there, her life lapses through a dream sequence of enslavements and rebellions by and against various masters and complexes of power. She goes to Paris, and then north Africa, stumbling closer and closer to Egypt, the womb of Western civilization. Where she goes to die.

It’s the story of a woman’s body flung into textile mill of capitalism: body as natural resource, controlled by others. It is also a metaphor for being trapped in cycles of repetitive behavior due to our childhood experiences. Who can related to that? How ’bout everybody! Each episode has a dream-like repetitive quality reminiscent of the “psychodramas” of 1950s experimental films. Times merge. Every lover/father/hero/boss figure bleeds into the next, as if they are just a place holder in macrocosmic template. Even Acker/Janie’s literary outlaw hero Jean Genet loves/betrays her in equal measure. Seeking the secret to this cycle of use and abuse, birth and death, leads her to Egypt.  Perhaps she has to die to learn the secret. Perhaps she has to die to have any relief. Perhaps she has to die to be free.

Having no choice, being born into this organism/machine/economic-system/psycho-biological myth complex, Janie is more free/happier when she rebels, even if such rebellion is, literally, self-abortive. Doing what she wants with her body and mind always takes its toll. There are only so many natural resources to go around. Literally bleeding/bursting through the text is visual dream material. No matter how oppressive the physical circumstances, one’s inner life pulses on though it might be distorted, perverted, altered. Despite the roles we inhabit on our social relationships our inner life is always churning with psycho-mythic dough. Blood and Guts in High School exhibits Janie’s PTSD-suffering physical and mental state.

Acker is a sex-positive feminist and her words and pictures will affront some readers. Especially those feminists who feel her methodology is, well, self-abortive.  There is a large potential for misinterpretation, especially by men. This is why Acker’s work is dangerous. A female person, any person, can be silent (erased), or write (do) what they want and prepare themselves for the consequences. Of course the deck is rigged, the possible consequences are predetermined, so why not rip it up? The form of Blood and Guts in High School echoes it’s function. Acker writes:

As far as I know, “terrorists” are people who use chance methods to hurt people in a society in order to get the rest of that society to realize a particular political situation. I’m not sure you do that with books. I’ve never taken someone by chance and hurt them, or killed them, in a way that would wake a society up. What I did in Blood and Guts in High School was to attack a certain relation between a political situation and literature. It seemed to me that in high culture there were certain presuppositions behind high culture and these were political presuppositions that had a lot to do with class structure. What I was interested in was attacking the very close relations between a fairly rigid class and structure and high literature. I don’t think that’s terroristic. That is, I wasn’t kidnapping someone by chance. (Milleti, 2004)

The book is actually quite funny in parts, offering hilarious send ups of both Erica Jong and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To appreciate all these aspects you do actually have to read the book, as opposed to just flipping through the pages and scoffing at the “dirty” parts (much like librarians used to do with Mark Twain). Spoiler alert: the killer is you.

If you enjoy a challenging read like Blood and Guts in High School you might be interested in the Down the Rabbit Hole Book Club here at NPL. We read avant-garde texts, cult classics and literary graphic novels. Click the link for more info. Cut.

- Bryan

Milletti, Christina. ”Violent acts, volatile words: Kathy Acker’s terrorist aesthetic.” Studies in the Novel 36.3 (Fall 2004): 352(22).

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By Bryan, July 26, 2010

The Vinland Sagas

The Norse colony in North America always fascinated me. Why not go right to the source? These documents were once thought legendary, then proved to be (at least partially) true by the archaeological record. Included in this collection of “Vinland Sagas” are the Book of the Icelanders and the Book of the Settlements, which chronicle of the colonization of Iceland; and the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which chronicle the colonization of Greenland and subsequent excursions to North America.

Written in 13th century, I was afraid these would be dry and boring, but boy was I wrong. They are full of personal details and fascinating anecdotes, only occasionally bleeding into the fantastical. There’s a lot killing and a lot ice. The texts are rich enough that we are transported into another world. A world that existed a millennium ago. We learn about what the Norse wore, ate, and worshiped. Most fascinating are the tensions between the traditional religion and Christianity. The conversion of Europe to Christianity happened so long ago, it is often just a line or two in a school book, but in these sagas we have records of what that conversion was like, the tensions it caused, and how communities dealt with said tension. Did I mention the killings and the ice?

Another surprise was that the Iceland sagas we’re often more interesting than the Greenland ones. In these we find majority of material about the pagan-Christian problem. Did you know there were people (not the Inuit) on Iceland before the Norse? Did you know Iceland had a parliamentary government centuries before other European countries? This is not to take anything away from the Greenland sagas. As is pointed out in the brief notes which accompany it, the Eirik the Red’s Saga is a masterpiece of European literature.

If you have a library card, Vinland Sagas is downloadable for free from Netlibrary with no DRM-restrictions. They are read by Norman Dietz and the inimitable George Guidall.

I can recommend two novelizations of the same material. The first, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, focuses on Eirik the Red’s daughter Freydis and her role in founding of the North American colony. This is the first of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams sequence which explores the European conquest of the North American continent. It includes ink drawings by the author and contemporary accounts of his travels through Greenland.

The second is the award winning Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard de Boucheron which imagines what the dwindling Norse colony on Greenland must have been like in the 14th century. You can read my original review here.

For those not book oriented there is Severed Ways, Tony Stone’s dreamy yet realistic portrayal of two Vikings stranded in Newfoundland. Even if your not interested in the Norse, this is one of the best, truly independent, American films I have seen in recent years.

None of these titles are for the squeamish.

- Bryan

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By Amanda, July 10, 2010

Dead in the Family
By Charlaine Harris

I don’t know why everyone told me this was not a good book.  I almost didn’t read it because I didn’t want to waste my time.  And while this isn’t my mostest favoritest series by my mostest favoritest authors (for those, see my PNRUFy list), I’m still glad I picked it up.

SPOILER ALERT – If you’d like to remain blissfully unaware of any events in the book, please stop reading now, go check it out, peruse it, and then come back.  We’ll still be here.  For the rest of us who’ve read the thing or for those of you who like to read the back page first (gasp!), soldier on…

This is the tenth book in Harris’s popular Southern Vampire series, and I must admit that the last couple haven’t really floated my train (yes, I know that train’s don’t float, as a rule, but imagine how good something would be to make that happen!).  I’m not really sure why I’m not in love with Sookie and her world, but the books usually just leave me flat.

This one, however, I thought was better.  There wasn’t one big plot device that Sookie and pals had to overcome.  It was more of a regrouping after the last couple of death-defying endings.  I enjoyed seeing the characters go about their everyday lives for a change.  After all, you don’t have to have an apocalypse in every book, right?

It was good for Bill to get some page time – even if it wasn’t under better circumstances.  I have to say, True Blood has redeemed Bill a little bit in my eyes, but I am still an Eric girl at heart.  Which means, I’m very glad Sookie and Eric got to spend a good chunk of time together.  They still have a few issues to work through, but I am keeping my fingers crossed for those two crazy kids.

Ok, fellow PNRUFy freaks, here’s my call on this one.  Not the best book you’ll ever read, but definitely worth the couple of hours it will take you to get through it.  When you’ve finished, treat yourself by checking out a few episodes of True Blood (We just got in season two! Woohoo!). 

Happy Sookiefying (Sookiesizing?)

Amanda

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By Jenny, July 1, 2010

The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Canadian author Steven Galloway, is a brief novel of four ordinary people trying to maintain their humanity in the midst of war.

A young father meticulously makes his way through Sarajevo’s streets to bring back water from the brewery, the only safe source of water in the whole city, provided by springs deep beneath the earth. He loves his family. He wants to help his grumpy old neighbor lady. He keeps moving, one excruciating step at a time. Every intersection is perilous and snipers kill in an instant.

A man old enough to yearn for retirement finds himself toiling in the only bakery still operating in the city. He dreams of Sunday picnics and playing with grandchildren. Every day his walk to work is perilous. He is all alone in the city after his wife and son escaped on the last bus out of Sarajevo.

Amidst this danger, a cellist appears at 4pm daily on the spot where 22 people were gunned down standing in line for bread. He plays Albioni’ Adagio, a piece of music from 17^th century Venice discovered in the rubble of WW II’s firebombing of Dresden surviving that other terrible war. Is he playing for the dead or the living?

Arrow is the sharp shooter assigned to protect the cellist daily. Morally repulsed by this task, she was recruited for this duty against her will because she served on the university rifle team. Each of these characters yearns for normalcy and strives for humanity. This is an elegant and thought provoking little book.

- Phyllis

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By Amanda, June 19, 2010

The Help
By Kathryn Stockett

I like reading about the south.  It’s usually fiction and usually about the Civil War.  However, recently I’ve heard so many good things about Katheryn Stockett’s, The Help, that I decided to try it out – even though it’s set a century later than my favorite time period.  Thank you to everyone who told me to check out this book, because it was completely worth it.

The Help is about a handful of African-American maids and the white society ladies they work for in Jackson, MS during the racially-charged 1960’s.  I thought the characters were well developed and I really enjoyed how Stockett wove all the different story lines together.  Growing up in the racially-homogenous north (in a slightly more recent decade), we didn’t have help in the house, so I don’t know about the accuracy of the author’s portrayal.  All I know is that it was a good story and an enjoyable read – which is what I’m looking for in a book. 

Now, when you finish with The Help, I predicting that you’re gonna come in and say, “Amanda, I really liked this one.  What else you got like it?”  Well, because you asked so nicely, I am going to give them to you right now…no waiting.  I’ve got three books that I think are both very similar to, and as good as, The Help.

Book #1: The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder
by Rebecca Wells

I’ve told you about this little gem before.  Check out what I said here, and then feel free to jump into the fun. (Get it?  Jump in…because the girl of the cover is jumping…ha ha…but seriously folks…)

Book #2: Between, Georgia
by Joshilyn Jackson

I thought this one felt a lot like The Help. Not quite as racially divergent or controversial, but still a good, solid read.

 
Book #3: To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

Ok, I must admit I’m not the only one to make this comparison, but I do think it’s a good one.  Both of these are set in the south.  Both cover racial issues and civil rights tension.  And both are first major novels from their authors.   Mockingbird actually makes a few cameos in The Help, as the main characters read it.  One of my All-Time Top-Ten Reads (Ever!), you definitely can’t go wrong with this one.

So let’s get readin’, y’all.  (Sorry, that’s my best attempt at a southern accent…)

 Amanda

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By Jenny, June 17, 2010

Peninsula of Lies:  A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love
by Edward Ball

What Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah, this story does for Charleston.  I’m not sure why this story never achieved the same level of bestsellerdom but it’s just as lurid and fascinating.

It is the story of Gordon Langley Hall, the only son of parents who were “in service” to British aristocrats. After making his way to America he somehow managed to inherit the personal fortune of elderly American heiress Isabel Whitney. Hall headed to Charleston where he embarked on a grand restoration of an antebellum home on Society Street, filling it with fine antiques and making a place for himself in Charleston society. Adding further to his celebrity status he somehow managed to publish a string of  biographies, including one of Lady Bird Johnson.

All of this is scandalous enough but the real story begins when he takes up with a much younger African American man, changes his name to Dawn and has a sex change operation at Johns Hopkins. Bear in mind this all took place in the late sixties and early seventies. Think of the gossip. But wait, there’s more. Dawn shows up with a baby. Author Ball is to be commended for sorting the truth in the midst of a Gordian knot of lies, deceits and conflicting stories in this entertaining read.

- Phyllis

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By Amanda, June 12, 2010

Ok.  So I am cough cough years old (excuse me, ah, something in my throat :) ) and have never, until very recently, understood the allure of audio books.  I thought because I tend to read things very quickly that the slower pace of the books would bore me and make me lose interest.

But I’ve heard such good things about a few series, that I just decided to try a couple.  It’s not like it cost me anything but time (thank you, NPL!).  First up on the docket – my Harrys.  Harry Potter and Harry Dresden. 

The Harry Potter series  (by JK Rowling) is read by the illustrious Jim Dale who somehow manages to create a different timbre of voice for each of the myriad number of characters he presents.  I have read the print books numerous times and have the movies memorized, but it is still fun to hear them read to me in my car as I drive to work.  And somehow I manage to find something new every now and again.  The library has all the HP books on audio, so feel free to start listening today!

With Harry Dresden (by Jim Butcher), on the other hand, we were a little more selective in purchasing.  You can’t get the first couple of books on audio from us, but the back half of the series is just waiting on you to check them out.  This series is read by James Marsters – or Spike of Buffy fame, if you will.  He even uses his Spike voice when he reads Bob’s parts, which is awesome.  Marsters has that dry wit that totally works for Harry and I’ve long thought these two were a match made in heaven, and now I can see that I wasn’t wrong.  Good times.

I will admit that I have read all of these books before I listened to them, and I’m not sure I could tackle an audio book for a first “read.”  There are times when I find my mind wandering, which doesn’t matter so much if you already know the story.  Also, I can guarantee that the reason I like these so much is directly attributable to the reader.  If there was someone not quite as talented, that would be a complete turn-off for me (as would smelly feet and an overinflated sense of ego, but I digress…). 

After I finish with the Harrys, I’m going to listen to Paolini’s Eragon and Eldest to refresh my memory before I start Brisingr.  We’ll see how that works out with a new reader.   Fingers crossed…

So you may now consider me convinced (partially, at least) that audio books are good.  My name is Amanda, and I am an official audio book convert (more or less…).

Amanda

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By Jenny, June 10, 2010

Maisie Dobbs
by Jacqueline Winspear

My favorite mysteries feature women detectives who rely on pure intellect to solve their cases. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Dorothy L. Sayers Harriet Vane come to mind. Add to this list Maisie Dobbs, nurse, veteran of the First World War, Cambridge educated, psychologist and private detective. This series by Jacqueline Winspear begins with Maisie Dobbs and continues with the seventh volume, Mapping of Love and Death, due out in March 2010.

Begin with this first volume, for background on how a bright working class girl developed into the remarkable Maisie. Starting out as a servant after the death of her mother, she is taken under the wing of Lady Rowan, the vivacious and progressive aristocrat who recognizes Maisie’s talent and sees she receives a first rate education after intense tutoring by her friend psychologist Maurice Blanche. During WW I Maisie finds herself a nurse in a field hospital in France where she treats victims of mustard gas and other horrific injuries before she and her fiancé, surgeon Simon Lynch are both injured themselves.

This war experience provides the foundation for all of Maisie’s work as a private detective, giving her compassion and understanding as she navigates the harsh realities of post war England when the tremendous death toll of the war left many damaged souls as well as social and economic devastation. Somehow, the conclusions she reaches while solving her cases move Maisie and her clients a little closer to healing the wounds of war. For mystery lovers who relish plowing through multiple volumes at once, this character driven series is a prize.

- Phyllis

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By Amanda, June 5, 2010

My Soul to Take
By Rachel Vincent

Ah, teenage romance.   It’s fun for everyone.  Teens.  Vampires.  Bean Sidhes (also known as banshees).  In Vincent’s newest series, Soul Screamers, high school student Kaylee Cavanaugh is about to learn that things are not always what they seem.  Pretty girls around her keep dying, which is really freaking Kaylee out.  Literally.  She sees about-to-be-dead people and all she wants to do is scream.  Unfortunately, that’s what got her locked up in the psych ward.

But she can’t help feeling the way she does.  Turns out, Kaylee’s a bean sidhe.  Screaming around dead people is what she’s genetically programmed to do.   Doesn’t mean she has to like it.  Take the angst of Twilight, the female empowerment of Buffy, and add just a dab of that creepy I-see-dead-people kid from The Sixth Sense, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you’re in for with this one.

This series wasn’t quite as enjoyable as Vincent’s Werecats, but it did have its own unique take on banshee mythology.  A little predictable in places, Vincent’s left herself quite a few possibilties for future story lines. Before you pick up My Soul to Take, though, make sure you read the prequel, My Soul to Lose, which is a free download from Vincent’s website.  It’s short and if you don’t read it, you’ll be lost through most of the book.  Just FYI.

Alrighty.  Well, you better get reading.  After all, you’re not going to live forever…or are you? (insert evil laugh here)

Amanda

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By Amanda, May 29, 2010

The Spellmans Strike Again
By Lisa Lutz

Ok, let me ask you something.  When was the last time you started to read a book on the same day you checked it out from the library?  Maybe you’re a better library patron than I am, starting each book responsibly, as soon as you get it home.  But me?  I have what some would call a massive To-Be-Read (from here on known as TBR) pile, and what usually happens is that the books I get from the library go on top (because they have to go back before the ones I bought, which I own in perpetuity) and hopefully I get to them before my third renewal runs out (yes, you get three!  Woohoo!). 

Except with this book.

On the Friday I checked this out (I remember it was a Friday because I had to watch Friday Night Lights before I could read), I went home, had supper, watched TV, and then started it.  Being the fourth book and final (gasp) book in this series, I couldn’t wait to see what happened to my beloved Spellmans. 

If you’ve never met the Spellmans, let me bring you up to speed.  A family of PIs, the five members (Dad, Mom, David, Izzy, Rae - in birth order) seem to spend more time investigating each other than solving local mysteries.  Lutz has a charmingly eccentric writing style that includes the use of humorous footnotes.  Here are the books you need to read sooner than later:

Without giving too much away, this last entry finds Izzy struggling to deal with her family while at the same time trying to maintain the family business.  Her friend Len is pretending to be a butler, Henry is pretending he likes her again, and good old Morty is pretending to like the great state of Florida.

Lutz hasn’t said definitively that she’ll never write another Spellman book, but if she does, I’m going to have to wait a VERY VERY long time for it (sigh).  And that makes me sad. 

What am I gonna do without my annual Spellman fix? Oh yeah, my massive TBR pile. That’ll work.

Amanda

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By Bryan, May 17, 2010

Can’t get enough of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy? Can’t wait for the third book to come out in the U.S.? Check out these Stieg Larsson read-a-likes…

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By Bryan, May 10, 2010

Beautiful Losers

Beautiful Losers chronicles a loosely knit group of “street” artists who conquered the commercial and fine art worlds. Featured artists include Ed Templeton, Geoff McFetridge, Shepard Fairey, Margaret Kilgallen, Harmony Korine and others, all of which embody a punk-DIY spirit. Most interesting is the connection between contemporary art and skateboarding. If you are snickering you’ll swallow it when you immediately recognize the work. These artists (some of them anyway) are paid large sums to sell you diet cola. As a teen, Templeton was my favorite skater. I never liked the lines of his paintings but thrilled over the lines he cut with his skate. In the interim, his work has grown by light years. N-ville’s favorite cringe monger H. Korine is mostly on good behavior, filming his talking head shots in Fannie Mae Dees Park. He laments the lowered crime rate. Tricky implications of outsiders becoming insiders are glossed over, but Beautiful Losers is an inspiring film that can enlighten people as to where the art and design that surrounds them originated.

I assume the title of the film, and the group show it accompanied, is borrowed from Leonard Cohen’s great novel of the same name. Do it… yourself.

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By Amanda, May 8, 2010

Darkly Dreaming Dexter
By Jeff Lindsay

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a fan of the TV show Dexter (if you missed my previous thoughts, feel free to catch up here).  I’ve only got one more season to go before I am caught up with the general viewing public – so don’t spoil it for me.  (Yes, I heard what happens, but I’m still going to be surpised when the dark deed occurs.) 

While I’m waiting for the latest season to emerge on DVD, I thought I’d give the novels a chance.  I’m always curious to see how close the show/movie comes to the author’s original vision.  So to begin at the beginning, I picked up Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay.

Lindsay’s style of writing is good – narrative with just a hint of sarcasm.  It’s written in first person, much like the show is narrated with a Dexter voice-over.  We get all of the wonderfully macabre thoughts that flit across his brain.

Plotwise, the story is pretty similar to season one.  Bad guy is the same.  End result is slightly different – one character dies in the book that doesn’t die on the show and Deb has a different level of involvement with our villain, but the main objective is still acheived.

Since the endings were slightly different, I’m interested to see where book #2 goes, compared to season 2.  in fact, I may have to read all four books in the series (a fifth is coming out in September 2010). 

TBR pile: 429-1+4…  Will it never end?

Amanda

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By Kyle, May 7, 2010

Pressed for time? Check out these three stellar collections of Southern short stories:

Reasons for and advantages of breathing

Mrs. Darcy and the blue-eyed stranger : new and selected stories

New stories from the South : the year’s best, 2009

- Beth