Book Reviews
Jan. 9th, 2012 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frogs_of_warSomeone like Steven might just exist. Hyperpolyglots are people who know more than eleven languages. But most of these men (almost all are men) do battle with languages like they are playing Risk. They want to win the world. Some guy who worked for the Vatican back in the early nineteen hundreds knew between 60 and 114 languages with master of about 30. I’ll try to review Babel no more by Michael Erard after I get it from the library.
Devil’s Food Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke has all the flaws of the other novel length book in the series I read, but after the other books I read, I needed the comfort food.
The story I read before it was The Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht. The name was compelling, like the best of titles, making me want to read the book. So I was very disappointed. The Barbary Coast refers to the Red Light/Black Market district in Victorian San Francisco. Not my cup of tea. The main (?) character flies across the country to help out her father’s war buddy, a retiring cop, after a body with wolf like features is found in the wall of an old Victorian house that is being renovated.
The book starts out with a woman’s journal or report which stated that although she is a paranormal researcher, nothing paranormal happens in this instance. Then we switch to third person, then to an old journal that isn’t found by the characters until the very end, back to the present third person, the hundred year old journal, etc.
The journal was too full of detail. If I woman really needed to write everything down in the hour or so before her husband and her cook woke up in the morning, I can’t see it being this clear, chronological, and detailed. People just don’t tell stories like that on their first attempt.
The policeman used to be on the vice squad, so of course he was a dirty cop. He also had anger management problems, once giving a young thug a joker-like scar. The kid wasn’t an innocent, but he didn’t deserve permanent mutilation, which because the other cops covered up for their own, the boy never received money for surgeries. But he had enough head x-rays to give him a brain tumor later in life.
Also, if someone is POV, you should know what they know. The author made the lab guy mysterious, making the reader think that maybe he was using his dogs to kill people. I don’t even remember if that part was ever solved. But it wasn’t him. His no-future pessimism was caused by terminal brain cancer of which he was well aware.
And the woman from the journal: she kept doing, and being allowed to do, crazy non-Victorian things. What man would allow his wife to volunteer at a mission in the worst part of town from late afternoon to just before midnight every night? That is the job for, maybe, a spinster sister or widow or at least some woman without a reputation to uphold. Her husband owned a business. She could have ruined his reputation and therefore his business and their source of income by any of her silly antics. And the author never explained anything until afterward, like someone was reading the journal part and kept pointing out these oddities and then the author would put the explanation wherever he was currently writing. He might have been doing this to add mystery, but it just made me think he hadn’t done his research. Like that the journal writer risks her life and reputation to visit a prostitute late at night. Later we find that the prostitute is her sister, but to me that isn’t enough to be worth the risk. Much later we find that the journal writer was raised up out of that lifestyle rather than that her sister fell to it. Her parents were trying to con money out of her father’s brother, so her father rented out his wife and older daughter and eventually sold the girl to a brothel for money to pretend they were respectable, but then both parents died in a ferry accident on the way to the meeting and only the chronicler survived. If we would have been told this at the beginning, the book wouldn’t have been half so frustrating. Or maybe a little under half.
And in the Main characters memories, the cop was always suave. He was gentle and romantic and used to dance with her mother. The only thing even near that man is that he still dances. Far into the story we find that years ago he was married and his daughter was kidnapped from outside their house. Then near the end, we find that the cop is using the money he gets from crime (shaking down drug dealers and pimps who’s girls are well underage), to pay for the care of a young women with brain damage that turned out not to be his missing daughter. Too little too late. I don’t like him. He made me feel dirty just reading his POV.
There was a lot wrong with the book. Like that who or what the wolfman was is never explained, nor what happened after he came to live with the chronicler. The only part of the story I really liked was at the end when the main character, a young widow, has to decide whether to stay with the guy she’s falling for until the brain cancer kills him. The book ends with him telling her as the run down a hill for a great view to live in the moment and her, for the moment, doing so.
So then I thought I’d read a romance, so I started Darling Jim by Christian Moerk, but it isn’t a romance at all. (I really have to start writing the genres down somewhere) The book starts with a postman making his rounds. It waxes wordily about how the postman wrangles coffee out of many of his customer and that they think he’s weird, but they put up with it good-naturedly. Then at the last house on the route, he discovers a body. Once the police get there, they discover two more locked in rooms upstairs. The postman stands around, trying to get a look at the young women that he might have heard once, but wasn’t curious enough to investigate. The neighbors all decide that makes him a pervert and he’s always looked at in askance afterwards and is gossiped about and never invited in again.
Only the book states, only minutes later, that the postman went home that night, burnt his uniform, and never left his little apartment again. So was he treated cruelly as he did his rounds or did he become a hermit? He can’t really be both. That’s when the story begins to unravel.
Ghosts show up after the three women are buried and they look in the post office where a young postman comes across a package in the dead letter office or whatever it’s called in Wales. The package is the journal of the oldest sister, explaining why they were killed by their aunt. The ghost sisters ride with the postman on the handles of his bike. He doesn’t see them. He reads the journal in which the oldest sister explains who she and her sisters and her aunt are (one of her sisters escaped before the rest of them died) and how they met Jim and supposedly why their deaths were inevitable once they met him. He is a story teller and the journal is full of word-for-word accounts of stories the chronicler heard years before. Not believable, in my opinion.
And what this review so far hasn’t described is the gross, need-a-shower feeling I got when I listened to it. It made me itchy and not in a good way. So I did what I wasn’t going to do and I stopped listening.
Right now I’m listening to Ghost Story by Jim Butcher. Dresden comes back as a ghost after he was murdered at the end of book 12. I probably wouldn’t have read this one if I hadn’t read book 12 and I wouldn’t have read 12 if I hadn’t read his stories in anthologies. Even his stories with different POV all star Dreden, which is weird because the author wrote a fantasy series with a lot of important POVs, which I liked better. I can take only so much Dresdan.
One of the problems with the book is that it’s on CD instead of mp3cds. The difference is CDs have only a dozen tracks a piece and then I have to hunt up the name of the next disk which in this case was: BK disk Ghost Story Disc # (3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15) or Ghost Story Disk # (4,7) or Harry Dresden 13 (1) or Harry Dresden-Ghost Story Book 13 Disk # (5 & 12, but the name is so long that my phone locks itself before the disk number appears) or Unknown Album (6, 8, 2, and the first track of disk 4). I realize this is not the book’s fault, but it ruins some of the enjoyment, plus Dresden spends so much time feeling sorry for himself that several times the disk had started over and I didn’t notice for a full track.
I haven’t read any other Dresden books. I didn’t get though a full chapter of book one a few years ago. I don’t plan on reading the others, but now that I’m caught in it, I want to read to the end.
But for a book I really like, I just watched Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I’ve read the book twice. The first time I was eighteen or so, younger than Anne when she gave up her true love. I didn’t really like it. I was more of her sister’s mother-in-law’s mindset: why wait? But the second time I read the book, I was in my early thirties and my husband was out of work with no job prospects and unemployment had run out. My husband had brought home an application for food stamps which he hadn’t filled out. He wasn’t quite without hope yet. And I still had mine, but I had to acknowledge to myself that if we would have waited until my husband was out of college to get married, he would have actually graduated. Or even if we’d waited to have kids. Either way we would be better off financially. That time, I realized just how much better Anne and her captain had it because they didn’t get married young. Being married the captain would have taken much fewer risks and he would have spent money sailing her across the seas to be by him.
I don’t think I’d change things even if I could, but I do encourage my kids to wait until they are out of college for commitments. I wonder if they will listen.
Devil’s Food Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke has all the flaws of the other novel length book in the series I read, but after the other books I read, I needed the comfort food.
The story I read before it was The Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht. The name was compelling, like the best of titles, making me want to read the book. So I was very disappointed. The Barbary Coast refers to the Red Light/Black Market district in Victorian San Francisco. Not my cup of tea. The main (?) character flies across the country to help out her father’s war buddy, a retiring cop, after a body with wolf like features is found in the wall of an old Victorian house that is being renovated.
The book starts out with a woman’s journal or report which stated that although she is a paranormal researcher, nothing paranormal happens in this instance. Then we switch to third person, then to an old journal that isn’t found by the characters until the very end, back to the present third person, the hundred year old journal, etc.
The journal was too full of detail. If I woman really needed to write everything down in the hour or so before her husband and her cook woke up in the morning, I can’t see it being this clear, chronological, and detailed. People just don’t tell stories like that on their first attempt.
The policeman used to be on the vice squad, so of course he was a dirty cop. He also had anger management problems, once giving a young thug a joker-like scar. The kid wasn’t an innocent, but he didn’t deserve permanent mutilation, which because the other cops covered up for their own, the boy never received money for surgeries. But he had enough head x-rays to give him a brain tumor later in life.
Also, if someone is POV, you should know what they know. The author made the lab guy mysterious, making the reader think that maybe he was using his dogs to kill people. I don’t even remember if that part was ever solved. But it wasn’t him. His no-future pessimism was caused by terminal brain cancer of which he was well aware.
And the woman from the journal: she kept doing, and being allowed to do, crazy non-Victorian things. What man would allow his wife to volunteer at a mission in the worst part of town from late afternoon to just before midnight every night? That is the job for, maybe, a spinster sister or widow or at least some woman without a reputation to uphold. Her husband owned a business. She could have ruined his reputation and therefore his business and their source of income by any of her silly antics. And the author never explained anything until afterward, like someone was reading the journal part and kept pointing out these oddities and then the author would put the explanation wherever he was currently writing. He might have been doing this to add mystery, but it just made me think he hadn’t done his research. Like that the journal writer risks her life and reputation to visit a prostitute late at night. Later we find that the prostitute is her sister, but to me that isn’t enough to be worth the risk. Much later we find that the journal writer was raised up out of that lifestyle rather than that her sister fell to it. Her parents were trying to con money out of her father’s brother, so her father rented out his wife and older daughter and eventually sold the girl to a brothel for money to pretend they were respectable, but then both parents died in a ferry accident on the way to the meeting and only the chronicler survived. If we would have been told this at the beginning, the book wouldn’t have been half so frustrating. Or maybe a little under half.
And in the Main characters memories, the cop was always suave. He was gentle and romantic and used to dance with her mother. The only thing even near that man is that he still dances. Far into the story we find that years ago he was married and his daughter was kidnapped from outside their house. Then near the end, we find that the cop is using the money he gets from crime (shaking down drug dealers and pimps who’s girls are well underage), to pay for the care of a young women with brain damage that turned out not to be his missing daughter. Too little too late. I don’t like him. He made me feel dirty just reading his POV.
There was a lot wrong with the book. Like that who or what the wolfman was is never explained, nor what happened after he came to live with the chronicler. The only part of the story I really liked was at the end when the main character, a young widow, has to decide whether to stay with the guy she’s falling for until the brain cancer kills him. The book ends with him telling her as the run down a hill for a great view to live in the moment and her, for the moment, doing so.
So then I thought I’d read a romance, so I started Darling Jim by Christian Moerk, but it isn’t a romance at all. (I really have to start writing the genres down somewhere) The book starts with a postman making his rounds. It waxes wordily about how the postman wrangles coffee out of many of his customer and that they think he’s weird, but they put up with it good-naturedly. Then at the last house on the route, he discovers a body. Once the police get there, they discover two more locked in rooms upstairs. The postman stands around, trying to get a look at the young women that he might have heard once, but wasn’t curious enough to investigate. The neighbors all decide that makes him a pervert and he’s always looked at in askance afterwards and is gossiped about and never invited in again.
Only the book states, only minutes later, that the postman went home that night, burnt his uniform, and never left his little apartment again. So was he treated cruelly as he did his rounds or did he become a hermit? He can’t really be both. That’s when the story begins to unravel.
Ghosts show up after the three women are buried and they look in the post office where a young postman comes across a package in the dead letter office or whatever it’s called in Wales. The package is the journal of the oldest sister, explaining why they were killed by their aunt. The ghost sisters ride with the postman on the handles of his bike. He doesn’t see them. He reads the journal in which the oldest sister explains who she and her sisters and her aunt are (one of her sisters escaped before the rest of them died) and how they met Jim and supposedly why their deaths were inevitable once they met him. He is a story teller and the journal is full of word-for-word accounts of stories the chronicler heard years before. Not believable, in my opinion.
And what this review so far hasn’t described is the gross, need-a-shower feeling I got when I listened to it. It made me itchy and not in a good way. So I did what I wasn’t going to do and I stopped listening.
Right now I’m listening to Ghost Story by Jim Butcher. Dresden comes back as a ghost after he was murdered at the end of book 12. I probably wouldn’t have read this one if I hadn’t read book 12 and I wouldn’t have read 12 if I hadn’t read his stories in anthologies. Even his stories with different POV all star Dreden, which is weird because the author wrote a fantasy series with a lot of important POVs, which I liked better. I can take only so much Dresdan.
One of the problems with the book is that it’s on CD instead of mp3cds. The difference is CDs have only a dozen tracks a piece and then I have to hunt up the name of the next disk which in this case was: BK disk Ghost Story Disc # (3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15) or Ghost Story Disk # (4,7) or Harry Dresden 13 (1) or Harry Dresden-Ghost Story Book 13 Disk # (5 & 12, but the name is so long that my phone locks itself before the disk number appears) or Unknown Album (6, 8, 2, and the first track of disk 4). I realize this is not the book’s fault, but it ruins some of the enjoyment, plus Dresden spends so much time feeling sorry for himself that several times the disk had started over and I didn’t notice for a full track.
I haven’t read any other Dresden books. I didn’t get though a full chapter of book one a few years ago. I don’t plan on reading the others, but now that I’m caught in it, I want to read to the end.
But for a book I really like, I just watched Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I’ve read the book twice. The first time I was eighteen or so, younger than Anne when she gave up her true love. I didn’t really like it. I was more of her sister’s mother-in-law’s mindset: why wait? But the second time I read the book, I was in my early thirties and my husband was out of work with no job prospects and unemployment had run out. My husband had brought home an application for food stamps which he hadn’t filled out. He wasn’t quite without hope yet. And I still had mine, but I had to acknowledge to myself that if we would have waited until my husband was out of college to get married, he would have actually graduated. Or even if we’d waited to have kids. Either way we would be better off financially. That time, I realized just how much better Anne and her captain had it because they didn’t get married young. Being married the captain would have taken much fewer risks and he would have spent money sailing her across the seas to be by him.
I don’t think I’d change things even if I could, but I do encourage my kids to wait until they are out of college for commitments. I wonder if they will listen.
