Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Title: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Pub Date: 2012
Genre: Memoir
Nutshell: Award-winning author Jeanette Winterson writes about her memories of growing up adopted and gay in a religious household and coming to terms with both of those truths as she grows up

This book's title is something Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother actually said to her one evening as Jeanette was leaving home, after trying once again to explain why, exactly, she wanted to date other girls. She never got through to her ultra-religious mother, who preferred to take her life lessons from the Old Testament and Revelations, and who was probably more than a little mentally unbalanced. To say Winterson's childhood was harrowing at times is an understatement, and that she came out of it even as well-adjusted as she did is a minor miracle. 

This memoir is in some ways the true story behind Winterson's first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was a fairly fictionalized account of her upbringing and eventual coming out story. She says in this book that Oranges, as bizarre and bleak as it was, was in many ways more wishful and happier than the truth, because she couldn't yet deal with the real truth at the time. 

Why Be Happy bounces back and forth between two eras in Winterson's life.  The first is her childhood in Lancashire, which includes her unstable mother, her silent father, her religious life, her surreptitious trips to the library in order to read the books her mother bans from the house, and her eventual romances with neighborhood girls.  The second is her adulthood, after she leaves home to attend Oxford and eventually moves to London, where she continues to attempt to make peace with her adoption, her upbringing, and her parents. She also decides to track down her birth mother, which unleashes more trauma and grief than she bargains for. 

This was a good example of a memoir done well by an interesting author who definitely has a tale to tell. Her story continues to be one of hope and fighting past the odds, and also about the importance of owning your past, no matter how painful. 

Every Last One

Title: Every Last One
Author: Anna Quindlen
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A woman, her family, and what happens to her after something awful occurs

No spoilers, but if you can't figure out that something bad happens at some point in this book, we need to talk about your reading comprehension skills. It's mentioned on the book jacket. The only surprising thing for me was the exact nature of what happened and how long it took to happen. I don't necessarily think this was a failure on the author's part -- a failure of Foreshadowing 101 or anything, but it did get to be a bit grinding by the time the denouement finally occurred. You know from the book jacket that something bad is going to happen, and then within the first few chapters, you would get that sense even if you weren't the type that reads book jackets. And then it just keeps going. There's a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire thing that nobody seems to see except the reader, and for me it just got wearisome. I don't know if it would have helped not saying anything about it on the book jacket and just letting you kind of read for yourself with no expectations, but it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that something is not right and, already provided with the information that something is going to happen, you're kind of set up with the expectation. 

So I don't know whose fault that was, but it kind of soured this whole experience for me. I never really felt connected with any of the characters--I couldn't even keep secondary character names straight, and there's not that many. I couldn't find anyone necessarily to really like or hang on to. Maybe that wasn't the point. Everyone is believable enough as real people. The writing is good. I just never fell into this book the way I do with something I really connect with. This was just something I read and said, "Okay, that was technically proficient and I didn't hate it." Maybe others will have better luck.

Plotwise, this is the story of a wife and mother who has three teenage children. The children have friends, the couple has friends and jobs, everything is fine, until one night everything becomes very much not fine, and then the rest of the book is the main character navigating the wreckage left behind. That's all I'll give you, because that much more or less exists everywhere including the book descriptions on Goodreads and Amazon.

Heart-Shaped Box

Title: Heart-Shaped Box
Author: Joe Hill
Pub Date: 2007
Genre: Horror, Fiction
Nutshell: A musician who buys a ghost on the Internet gets more than he expected

Most everyone who cares to know by now probably is aware that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. That fact may draw some people to his writing, or it may turn some people off. I'm not a huge fan of King myself--his stuff is either entirely too long (The Stand) or just too too. I like more than a little something left to the imagination, and I don't like a lot of gore and nastiness in my scary books. Personal preference. But I had heard that Heart-Shaped Box was on the more atmospheric and creepy side than the ew side, so when I finally found it at the library, I picked it up, since we're coming into October and the time of year for a spooky read.

I have to say, I was overall pretty happy with the book. It's generally creepy without being particularly gory. There's blood, but it is a horror novel. Nothing is overdone. There is a very icky (not necessarily horror-related) turn in the last part of the book, but it's handled deftly and nothing is dwelt on there that will make you feel like you need a shower. I will post two spoilers at the very end of the review: one that is a trigger warning, and one that is for people obsessed about the fates of animals in books. Be aware that those will be down there, and if you're not interested in either, you can skip them.

Plot: Musician and singer Judas Coyne is a sort of Gene Simmons or Alice Cooper kind of figure who has been into the shock metal scene for decades. He collects the sorts of things you might expect that sort of guy to collect, and in fact, most of the things in his collection are things his fans have sent him. One day, his assistant sees a listing on an auction site by a woman selling her stepfather's ghost along with his suit. He decides to buy it. The ghost does indeed come along with the suit, but who it is and what he wants aren't quite what Jude thought when he made the purchase.

I finished the book, which is not overly short (384 pages in hardback) in about a day. It's a quick read because the two main characters, Judas and Georgia, are definitely people you come to care about after a bit. They begin somewhat as sterotypes, but they grow on you as they let their guards down around each other and so around the reader and become more and more real as their situation grows more and more desperate. It's a good horror novel without being particularly gross or over-the-top. Hill definitely learned from his dad but brings enough of his own talent in that he should be regarded as a writer in his own right as well.


****End of Review. Spoiler Warnings Follow. Stop Here If You're Not Interested in Major Plot Points.****
Spoilers themselves are in white text. Highlight to read.








Spoiler #1: Trigger Warning (Sexual Abuse):
A major plot point concerns the longstanding sexual abuse of minor girls by older men. There are, however, no descriptions of the abuse other than the statements that it happened and a brief discourse into how (hypnotism) and the fallout of the abuse. Perpetrators are punished.


Spoiler #2: Dog Warning:
The dogs don't make it. But they are heroic and necessary, and there are puppies at the end. 

White Like Me

Title: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
Author: Tim Wise
Pub Date: 2008Genre: Memoir; Race RelationsNutshell: Thoughts on race and privilege from a white anti-racism activist


There's this thing that I do when I know that I don't know enough about something to have anything like an informed opinion on it. I go to the stacks. Even if that opinion is only for my own edification, I still like to feel like I know a little something about whatever is maybe troubling me in the news or whatever. This most recent time, it was all of what was going down in Ferguson, Missouri. Note: I am the whitest white girl that ever whited. I am the great great generationally go on back great granddaughter of English colonial settlers who came over to Virginia in 1633. I'm not off the Mayflower, but I am not that far off it either. There's not even, to the best of my records, any so-called "dubious whites" in my family -- none of those Popish Italian or Irish or Eastern European later arrivals here; no, sir. Now, I don't know how rich we were in the mother country (after we stopped ruling it -- RIP Richard II), and we certainly didn't do particularly spectacularly for ourselves over here in the long haul either, but we certainly do have a long history, and that history is about as pale in hue as you're likely to get out of anybody.

All of that to say that I know that I know zero about being black in America. I also know that I hold a fair amount of privilege due to the fact that I was born at the tail end of all that pale history up there. I can tell you about being a (white) woman in America, and I can tell you it's not always fantastic, but when all that blew up in Missouri, I knew there was a lot going on that I did not understand. And I wanted to. So, off to the stacks. And by stacks, I mean the library, because I don't buy books anymore (out of room and/or money -- usually both). I wanted something that would tell me specifically about privilege.  I knew I had it, but I wanted to find out exactly what it was, where it was, and how to see and recognize it. So I found this book, which does an excellent job of laying all that out.

Tim Wise was very lucky in that grew up in a home where racism was not acceptable. His mother fought against it where she found it and provided a role model for him to become an anti-racist and activist later in his life. Wise has fought against racism since college, and lays out in this book how white people who also want to fight against racism and promote social change can do so. But, as whites, we have a lot of unpacking to do before we just jump in. He doesn't pull any punches, either. He had a lot of unpacking of his own to do, and doesn't shy from telling the reader about any of it. He made a great number of mistakes, and admits to them with candor and honesty. This is definitely a very personal work and something that isn't always easy to read. But if you're interested in this kind of thing, I would say it's important to learn.

I took a great deal away from this book, and I think it helped a lot in terms of learning more about my place in society. Wise makes an excellent point that white people should fight against racism, not because we think people of color can't conquer it on their own and they need our help, but because it is a poison of our own race. It makes us less than who we could be because it diminishes our ability to see the best of ourselves and everyone else. We should do it for nobody else's sake than our own. And we don't deserve anyone else's thanks or recognition or approval for it, either. I had never viewed it that way, but he has a really valid point. 

I'd recommend this to anyone, really. But especially if you, like me, are white and wish you could do something more for social justice and change. There is a lot to be done, but we need to tread carefully, and this book is a good place to start on that journey.

The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons

Title: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and RecoveryAuthor: Sam Kean
Pub Date: 2014
Genre: Medical History
Nutshell: The series of bizarre, horrifying and macabre circumstances that led to today's knowledge of neurology

I am a sucker for popular medical history and science. If you can tell it without requiring an actual medical degree, I'll probably be interested. I got my start with historical epidemiology (still my great passion, if it could be called that), but since then I've branched out into other interests. There are a few writers that can take something pretty complex (the brain is, you must admit, one of the more complex organs in the body) and make it entertaining and interesting enough that a layperson will enjoy reading about it. This is one of those authors, and this is one of those books.

Kean's book gives a good overall history of mankind's attempts to study the human brain and what exactly goes wrong with it and why. For most of our brief history with experimentation, we've simply been forced to wait until something catastrophic happened, and then sort of poke around in there and see what looked different. Sometimes that actually yielded results. We get a look at the different parts of the brain, what bits are responsible for what, and how scientists and doctors came by that information. As with a lot of medical experimentation in the past, some of the stories are certainly less than ethical. Some scientists in the olden days didn't necessarily lose sleep over shocking the brains of the mentally disabled in order to see what happened, or sticking unwashed fingers into holes in people's skulls at times. 

The things that makes this book unique among a lot of other medical histories are the stories it details. Unlike a lot of medical research, most of the real work that's been done on the brain has had to do, by the very nature of the organ, with living people. A dead brain doesn't really yield much. So much of what brain damage and brain regeneration is has to be observed in living patients, and Kean does a really good job of telling the stories of the people who contributed, oftentimes just with their initials, to science simply by having something happen to them and being observed. You get to know the people affected in a way that other medical histories don't always allow for, and that's interesting. It makes the book more personal, and better to read.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in medical history in general or the brain in particular. It's definitely written with laypersons in mind, and all the jargon is explained. There are even cute little rebus puzzles at the beginning of each chapter, if you care to try your hand at them. The answers are usually fairly obvious once you start reading. 

The Terror

Title: The Terror

Author: Dan Simmons
Pub Date: 2007
Genre: Historical Fiction/Psychological Horror
Nutshell: The crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, stranded in the Arctic wastes while searching for the Northwest Passage, are being hunted by something on the ice.

Oh my gosh, you guys, this book is LONG. I read it on the Kindle, so I didn't have a real good idea of the length, but one reviewer said the book won't kill you unless it falls on your head. That may be true. But the length may be part of the point of the book, since the characters in the book are stranded in the high Arctic for years. The seeming endlessness of the book echoes the endlessness of the days. But boy howdy is this a slog in parts.

But anyway. The tale is told from the points of view of various sailors aboard the two ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, who are on yet another expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, which Great Britain seemed to be obsessed with in the 19th century. Something goes hopelessly awry and the ships get completely stuck in the solid pack ice of the high latitudes, and after a while it becomes apparent that something is hunting them. After that, it becomes a slow winding down unto eventual death between the ice, the unrelenting cold, starvation, the thing, mutinous sailors, and various forms of illness. 

The story is based on the historical ill-fated Franklin Expedition to the Arctic of 1845, from which there were no recorded survivors. Of course, Simmons takes some liberties with the plot to add the element of horror to the story and twists the ending to make it more interesting than the likely more factual result. And for all that it was so incredibly long and I do admit to skipping parts, I did keep going to the end. Volumes upon volumes of Patrick O'Brian have made me used to longer seagoing narratives than I might otherwise be accustomed to reading. The main narrator, Captain Francis Crozier, was a compelling enough character that I couldn't leave him completely behind, and some of the other sailors, namely Lieutenant Irving and Surgeon Goodsir, were also interesting enough to keep me slogging. The beast/terror on the ice is presented vaguely enough that it remains mysterious until the end, which was a good choice. And, in the end, the fact that I started reading this in the end of August in Kentucky, when the temperature is 90 degrees and the humidity is staggering was likely the best possible environment for hundreds of pages of ice and snow and subzero temperatures. 

I would hesitate before recommending this book to any but the heartiest readers, honestly. I read this on a recommendation for psychological horror, and it's definitely not one for obvious gore or anything, but it is a long walk to get to much of anything. If you're interested in naval fiction, it's not bad for that. In terms of bleakness, it's no worse in its way than O'Brian's Desolation Island or The Unknown Shore, just infinitely longer. If you're really into Arctic exploration, have at it. If you're into Inuit mythology, there's a bit for you here too. But otherwise, it's a very, very long book. 

Hollow City

Title: Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

Author: Ransom Riggs
Pub Date: 2014
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Nutshell: The peculiar children of Miss Peregrine's loop struggle to help their injured headmistress while keeping safe from hollows

I read the first book in this series (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) about a year or so ago. It's an odd premise--a novel seemingly built around a series of photographs the author found, more or less. But the narrative itself is quite good and definitely draws you in, and the quirky pictures eventually take a back seat to the story.

This is the second novel, and you have to have read the first to really understand what's happening. Suffice it to say that Jacob and his peculiar friends have been ousted from their safe home and are on the run from forces that want them dead. This book is the story of their journey toward London in their search for help for their wounded headmistress, Miss Peregrine, and also to rescue the other kidnapped ymbrynes that hollows are keeping locked up. On the way, they will meet other peculiars and learn a great deal about what they're up against.

This is another engrossing tale and a very quick read. There aren't a lot of punches pulled here, so for all that it's YA, very young readers might be a bit overwhelmed. But I would have loved this series at about age 11 or 12. Adults will also find it most enjoyable.

The Devil Wears Prada

Title: The Devil Wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger
Pub Date: 2003
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A young woman gets a job as a personal assistant for the diva editor of a fashion magazine

So, "chick lit." This is a difficult world for me, because while I should technically be a consumer (being a chick, and being a consumer of lit), I have a very hard time finding much in the genre that I can like very much. This book turned out to be not much of an exception to that. It was okay, but the further I got into it, the harder it was for me to stay with it or to like much of anybody in it.

So we have Andrea, fresh out of Brown University on some kind of Literature or English degree, who accidentally walks into a job working as the junior personal assistant to Miranda Priestly, the uber-bitch editor of the fictional Runway magazine. Andrea knows nothing about fashion, has no idea who Miranda is, and zero experience as an assistant of any sort, but quickly learns that her job is to be a sort of highly-comped servant to be misused and abused at all hours of the day and night by Priestly, a sort of caricature of a rich, out of touch society woman who has never been told no in her life loud enough to have heard it after reaching a certain level of power.

As her year of servitude drags on, Andrea begins to lose her friends and relationships to the all-consuming task of being Miranda's assistant. She cannot take personal calls. She cannot make plans, even on weekends. She must be available at all times, because she never knows if she will be summoned to a black tie event or a week in Paris. Her best friend becomes an alcoholic, her boyfriend grows distant, and yet Andrea continues to be Miranda's complaining lackey, because at the end of the year, she might be able to get in the door at The New Yorker, her dream job, at a much faster speed than trying to do it the old-fashioned way.

The real problem with the book for me is in the characterization. Maybe it's because I have never lived in New York. I'm Kentucky born and raised, and we don't understand or exactly trust Yankees in general and New Yorkers in particular. Maybe it's because I am a grizzled and weathered 35 instead of a young and naive 22. But I cannot believe that anyone behaves in the ways that either Miranda or Andrea behave. The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but the main two are just complete aliens for me. I didn't see the movie, and I'm sure that Meryl Streep managed to make the role of Miranda divine in that way of hers, but in the book, she's just horrendous without mitigation. There is one moment in Paris when she is almost human, but you almost by that point get the idea that she might just be a sociopath by that point, grooming her victim. Or maybe she's just trapped in an echo chamber of her own making, and Andrea just has a martyr complex. Either way, I cannot really like either one of them. Andrea's incessant whining and yet continuous running and fetching gets old quickly, and Miranda's complete inhumanity just start to grate. I would tell both of them to get a grip inside of five minutes.

This was an easy enough read, I suppose. Certainly not mentally taxing. But probably I won't hang on to it. Maybe I'll catch the movie some time and see what Meryl does with the part. 

Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales

Title: Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales
Author: Kenneth Hite
Pub Date: 2008
Genre: Literary criticism
Nutshell: A Lovecraft scholar takes us through the writer's collection of stories

Obviously, there's a certain barrier to entry with this book. If you haven't already read Lovecraft's works, you're probably going to want to either before or as you're reading Ken Hite's book, because otherwise there's not much purpose to the exercise. This is a companion piece and not a standalone work. 

However, if you, as I, are a Lovecraft nerd, or even just a Ken Hite fan, this is worth the 8 bucks you'll pay for it on Kindle (it is totally out of print). I came to Lovecraft in my 20s, after a thorough affair with Poe, and then discovered Hite through the completely excellent and yet manifestly silly H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com: all the Lovecraft stuff in the history is free--it is now a subscription model with one free episode a month as they're going through stories mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"). I also heard Hite speak last year at GenCon in Indianapolis, and the man clearly knows his stuff, and a lot of it.

Hite is the rare author that still makes me consult a dictionary every few pages. The Kindle format is great for that, since you can just long press on a word and off you go. For me to have to look up a word is pretty rare, but he definitely does not hold back on the vocab. He is an unabashed fan of Lovecraft, and while he and I do not always agree on what we like, there is enough here to be interesting ephemera to the original stories. Probably only for a true fan, though. You have to have already fallen into the wormhole. If you don't like Lovecraft and don't really care, then this isn't for you. Otherwise, this is an interesting and cheap and well-written companion piece from a guy who obviously knows quite a bit.

The Bridges of Madison County

Title: The Bridges of Madison County
Author: Robert James Waller
Pub Date: 1992
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A photographer and an Iowa housewife engage in a passionate and brief affair in the summer of 1965.

At one time, this book would have fallen into what I call "housewife porn." And in a way, I suppose it still does. There are certainly elements of romance to it that appeal to a woman--especially a woman with responsibilities who might find herself a bit bored with normal life. But reading it now (for the first time--I saw the movie years ago and liked it fine. I'll watch about anything Meryl Streep does, and I thought the cinematography was lovely), this is much more a story for and by an older man than any kind of narrative meant for a woman, whatever its audience ended up being. 

I'm not going to go all feminist critique up in here. I'm pretty far out of school for that (thank goodness). But, for all this is ostensibly a narrative told about and ultimately by a woman, this is very much about a man. It reeks of it, especially after a certain point.

I don't think I'm going to be giving much away, here. The movie was huge, and the book is hardly coy about what ultimately happens. It's a very short read (took me maybe two hours all told), so you're going to know what happens fairly quickly, even if you somehow don't already. Francesca Johnson, age 45, lives on an Iowa farm with her husband and two children. One summer afternoon while her family is away at the Iowa State Fair showing a steer that got way more attention than she did, she meets photographer Robert Kincaid, age 52, who is in Iowa taking photos of covered bridges. Kincaid is everything her husband is not--complex where he is simple, thoughtful where he is careless, poetic where he is dull. And lo, they fall in the sort of love that only ever really happens in fiction, where they cannot separate themselves from the other and they become some other thing entirely. 

Let it not be said that I am not a romantic, for indeed I most certainly am. I found the love of my life at the age of 30 and I am still with him five years later, still every bit as much in love with him now as I was then, and we are gloriously happy together. I left behind more than a few obligations and responsibilities to be with him, because I had to. To not be with him was quite frankly not an option. And non, je ne regrette rien. So don't tell me about certainty and love, Robert James Waller. I know quite a bit. But if my love, this man, ever spouts off something like, "I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea," I would probably ask if he had maybe had some kind of drug interaction. If he said it during sex, I would honestly fear an aneurysm. Because people--and I don't care how old you are or how many places you've been--people do not talk like that outside their own heads unless they've ingested enough substances that I don't think sex would be on the table at that point. 

But this guy, Robert Kincaid, is the last of a dying breed. He's a shaman. He's a wanderer. He's -- as soon as they start having sex, any narrative drive Francesca had in the book ceases and everything shifts over to him and his bizarre cowboy fantasies about being on the dead end of an evolutionary chain. It's not until he leaves that it returns to her. It's very odd, for all it's supposed to be from her journals. 

And in the end, this book isn't about Francesca. She is merely the necessary object to be acted upon and against and through in order for him, Robert Kincaid, to have his experience. It could have been anyone, it happened to be her. Anything interesting about her as a person sort of vanishes in the middle of the book and never exactly comes back. It's frustrating. This isn't as much housewife porn as it is exceptionalist old guy porn, in a way. It's inoffensive, to be sure. The writing is lovely, and the setting is evocative. It's a very fast read, and you could certainly do worse for yourself on a lazy afternoon. But it left a weird taste in my mouth all the same.

People Who Eat Darkness

Title: People Who Eat Darkness
Author: Richard Lloyd Parry
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Nonfiction; True Crime
Nutshell: The mystery of an English woman who suddenly went missing in Japan

The story of Lucie Blackman, who disappeared in Tokyo while working as a club hostess in 2000, is a sad an incomplete one. Her disappearance ripped her family apart, and became a minor cause celebre for a time within Britain and other countries. The European stereotype of Japanese "strangeness" increased because of it. 

Richard Lloyd Parry tells a riveting story with access to all sides--Lucie's father and mother, who split in an acrimonious divorce years before her disappearance and whose mutual hatred of each other caused a great deal of pain and complication for their children; Lucie's siblings, a brother and sister who loved but at times barely knew their older sister; Lucie's friends, some of whom knew her better than others and watched her become someone difference the closer she got to leaving for a foreign country and the deeper she fell into debt; and the man accused of causing her disappearance in Tokyo. Stories sometimes mesh and sometimes are hopelessly far apart, and Lloyd Parry does a good job of keeping all the balls in the air and keeping the reader interested.

This is essentially a true crime story with a lot of history and sociology thrown in as necessary, due to most Western readers' general unfamiliarity with Japanese life and customs. Many Americans and Europeans may not have any idea about the sort of hostess bar where Lucie Blackman worked, or the feelings the Japanese have about Westerners in general and Western women in particular. The section about Lucie's accused kidnapper also deals with the plight of the ethnic Koreans of Japan and the racism they still face even in the modern era. It is much to take in, but Lloyd Parry weaves everything in without making anything boring or too much like a lecture. Lucie is at the center of everything and we are never too far away from her and the search for where she has gone.

I'd recommend this book for any fans of true crime or Japanese culture. The Japanese police don't get a shining grade in this story, but one could easily argue they probably shouldn't. Lloyd Parry is English and may not have all the cultural facts or understanding as an outsider, but I think he did a pretty good job reporting overall and I don't believe he set out to insult anyone. 

Methland

Title: Methland
Author: Nick Reding
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
Nutshell: The effects of crystal meth on one small town in Iowa and on the US as a whole.

This is the rare piece of factual reporting that is so easy and quick to read that it doesn't feel like it's factual or reporting. For the subject, it isn't dry or particularly tragic or preachy. Reding manages not to demonize anyone or make anyone into a helpless victim or a villain. Meth changes people, and he just eloquently charts those changes.

Most of the stories take place in tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a place few of us could find on a map but which serves as an excellent microcosm for middle America as a whole. Once a prosperous farm and railroad town, the local meat packing plant eventually got taken over and started offering substandard wages before finally shutting down entirely, putting the majority of the town out of work and into meth. Meth is, as Reding puts it, a quintessentially American drug. It helps you work harder for longer. It's seen as a route to success. And with our Puritan work ethics and appetites for having the finer things, we are easy pickings for addiction.

Reding charts the move from homegrown "batchers" who make their own product in their kitchens, often blowing up their own houses in the process, to the more sinister encroachment of the Mexican cartels, who have no real organizational structure and are much more dangerous than the more familiar specters of the South American drug smugglers from several decades ago. We are left with the very real threat of the Mexican VTOs teaming up with terrorist organizations, each getting funding from the highly lucrative meth trade. It's a sobering thought.

Overall, this was a fascinating read. It covers so many topics, from the drug trade to the changes of small town life to the problems of policing in the 21st century. And Reding does it all with a light hand, never getting bogged down. He obviously comes to care about all his subjects, meth user or law officer or doctor or whoever. Everyone is a human and deserving of their own story. It's a remarkable book.

The Astronaut Wives Club

Title: The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story
Author: Lily Koppel
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: History, Biography
Nutshell: The stories of the women whose husbands went into space.

So, you probably don't know this about me, but I'm a big space dork. I know way more than the average person my age about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. I wrote papers about the Saturn V rocket in school. So this book was more or less in my area of interest.

This is a pretty easy book. You don't have to know much about the early space program to understand the book, which is mainly about the wives of the astronauts and what they had to deal with. These were mostly all military wives, and the wives of test pilots to boot, so they were already used to quite a bit of pressure before their husbands were ever chosen to go into space. But once the men became astronauts, they also became famous, and women started coming out of the woodwork, adding a whole new stress to their lives and marriages. NASA was also a difficult organization to work for in the 60s, for both the astronauts and the "astrowives." This is basically a story of those issues and problems, and how the women handled them.

Some wives are better profiled than others. Obviously, the Mercury wives get the longest stories, since they were around first. Women like Annie Glenn, Betty Grissom, Marge Slayton and Rene Carpenter are characters in their own right and are duly focused on. Some of the later wives get much shorter shrift. Names become hard to remember, although there are plenty of photos of the astronauts and their wives and families for reference, which help. 

I suppose I wanted this book to be a bit more interesting, but I'm not sure what I was expecting. The life of an astronaut's wife wasn't all that exciting. It was a life of waiting and consistently being left behind. And occasional press crawling through the windows. I can't imagine what it must have been like, but this book does give a fair idea. But it did take me a while to read because it wasn't really gripping, but you can't expect that from this kind of history. If you have some spare time and are interested in women's history or the little-known history of the early space program, this is an interesting read.

The City & The City

Title: The City & The City
Author: China Mieville
Pub Date: 2009
Genre: Crime, Science Fiction
Nutshell: A murder occurs in a fractured town, resulting in more questions than answers.

This was a recommendation from someone I met at a Netrunner tournament, so definitely not the kind of book I probably would have found normally. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

This book is, at its heart, a pretty standard procedural. It's the story of a cop trying to solve a murder. The twist comes with the city where he lives. 
[Here be sort of spoilers, though nothing that will ruin the plot.]

See, Beszel and Ul Qoma, they're different, but they're the same. The city is shared and divided, and residents live in one place or the other, refusing to see the inhabitants of their sister place. It is definitely a novel concept, and while I sincerely doubt it would work in actual life, it might be a darn sight better than some of the ways divided areas operate now. 

So a young woman is murdered in Beszel, and Inspector Tyador Borlu is tasked with finding out what's happened to her, and whether or not Ul Qoma has anything to do with it. His investigation becomes weirder and more complex with each new lead, and the story's end reveals as much about the rest of the world as it does the dealings between the two main entities. 

This is a weird book, and it started off a bit slow, for all it began with a murder. You're probably going to need to like procedurals to really like this. The stuff about the cities is strange, but it's not that hard to get around if you just maintain a willing suspension of disbelief. But if you don't care about police stories, you're going to be struggling. Overall, this was definitely well-written, but a bit slow at times. Probably because police fiction isn't really my thing. But it held me to the end, and not every book can do that, so it's worth checking out if you think you're curious. I'm going to try some more of Mieville's work (Perdido Street Station was on my radar before) and see what else he does.

Hild

Title: Hild
Author: Nicola Griffith
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Historical Fiction
Nutshell: The speculative childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, an English woman living in the 7th century

So, one thing about me is my weird love of the so-called "Dark Ages" and early medieval times, especially in and around what is now Great Britain. So this book, purporting to be about St. Hilda, a woman who really lived in the 600s in England, was definitely interesting to me. England at the time was a weird amalgamation of two types of Christianity (Irish and Roman), along with the native Romanized British religion and the imported Anglo-Saxon faith. It was a time when it was perfectly reasonable to have two or three altars to two or three different gods, because you never knew. The Christ seems to forgive fairly easily--Woden is a bit more of a grudge bearer. Best to be safe and appease both. The monastery at Whitby was crucial in the decision of whether England would declare itself a Celtic or a Roman Catholic country. It may seem like a little thing now, but this was a huge deal back then. The fact that it was settled more or less without bloodshed is a testament to the skill with which people like Hilda were able to negotiate.

Not a lot is known about Hilda's early life. She was a woman after all, so there's only so much written down. She was the daughter of a minor Angle king in the northern part of England. These Germanic kingdoms were constantly fighting with each other, and her father was killed by another minor king (her uncle) who eventually became a sort of overking of the Angles in the area. In addition to the fighting between the Angles, there was also fighting between the other two Germanic kingdoms (Saxons in the south, Jutes in the east) and a couple groups of native kingdoms, which can loosely be broken down along lines of the Irish, the Picts (native Scots), and what we would think of as the Welsh. And then you had the Frankish kingdom in France, which in the next century would gain ultimate ascendancy under Charlemagne. It was a complicated historical moment, and one in which anyone with royal blood wasn't particularly safe, depending on who was in power at the time.

As far as the historical research goes, Griffith definitely did her work. This is a dense book full of information about the time period, what Hild saw, what she smelled, what she knew, what she felt. There is a glossary in the back for the period vocabulary, and a pronunciation guide for the names. There were as many languages as religions, so it can be a struggle, but there's no quiz afterward and you don't have to have them exact. If you're interested in an overview of this complex period in English history, you could certainly do worse than this book. I think she does her best to divorce modern thought from how people's minds worked back then, but that's probably the most difficult task for any historical author. The medieval mind, while of course human and much the same as our own, also traveled along very different paths to what we're used to. At times that can be jarring, and our normal reaction is to clean it up and make it palatable for a more modern eye. 

I would say the first two-thirds of the book were more or less what I was expecting, if it was much slower than anticipated. This is strictly Hilda's early life--nothing about her more documented adulthood within the church is touched on. I was thinking it was going to be an entire history, but this is Hilda as child and teenager. About which period there is no information at all. Griffith does well with the more usual tasks that would have been appointed to a young woman of royal blood, but once Hilda starts growing up, things start taking a turn. Sure, there's no proof that Hilda wasn't a natural warrior who fought as well as a man might, just not with a sword. Warrior women were not unheard of in Hilda's time and before. But it seems rather a stretch, and something perhaps more in line with the story Griffith would like to tell, whether in Hilda's guise or someone else's. The nature of Hilda's romantic relationships are also a bit, well, speculative. Again, certainly not anything that is counter-historical, but not what I would call the easiest assumptions either. Of course, this is historical fiction, and nobody, including Griffith, claims that these are the actual events that took place in Hilda's early life. But if you have a historical grounding in the time frame, it may seem a bit reachy, let's say. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It is LONG--530 pages or so. And dense. There are times when the story seems to stall, and there's a lot of politics, as is fair for a book about this time period. The fighting is well-described and she pulls no punches about what the wounds caused by the weapons of the time would have looked like. It was not an easy era to be a warrior. If you're interested in the history, you could do worse. But there are also shorter books that may not be as full of ancillary facts that are a quicker read.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Title: The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Author: Neil Gaiman
Pub Date: 2013
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy
Nutshell: A man remembers his childhood friend and her family, and the unlikely experiences he had with them

So, as a self-respecting geek and lover of books, why is this the first Neil Gaiman book I've ever finished? Not sure. I suppose all the hype was part of it, the enthusiasm, the comic booky sort of aura that surrounded his work. It just kind of turned me off. Plus I tried to read American Gods a while ago and just couldn't quite get into it. If I'm remembering correctly, there was a sort of masculinity to it that I just wasn't able to get hold of for whatever reason. I liked the prose, but the subject matter just didn't entirely work for me.

This, however. This book. I am an American adult woman, and far, faaaaar past the point when the ideas of magic or faeries or any of that should be even remotely credible. And yet, this book tapped into that part of me that still absolutely believes in all of that. I can't entirely explain the feeling I had reading this book, other than to say that it almost felt like I'd read (if not actually experienced) something exactly like it before as a child. It felt familiar in a way that very few other books ever have. I don't know if any book has ever felt so innately perfect to my mind. Obviously, nothing in this book ever happened to me, but it feels almost like it did, because I had such a similar imaginative narrative growing up. It felt as though Gaiman tapped into my kid head and extracted exactly what I always suspected was out there. It was really a remarkable experience, reading this. 

I don't want to ruin any plot. Suffice it to say that an unnamed narrator returns to the home of his childhood friend Lettie, who was more than she seemed, and he has a very vivid memory of some events that happened when he was 7 years old that involved this girl and her family and his family and things that lived outside but got in. If children in peril aren't your thing, you might steer clear, but honestly it's all handled so deftly that it's there and gone. And, as the book's opening quote by Maurice Sendak rightly declares, "I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them."

I read this book in a matter of hours. I couldn't stop. It was so gorgeous, so ephemeral, so perfect. It is not snarky at all. I'm currently listening to the Secondary Phase of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show, so I know snarky geek. And I love snarky geek. But this isn't that. It's just beautiful and haunting and just the faintest tinge of disturbing. Like something out of a Celtic myth, which I love precisely because they are so...the world is almost mundane in them until suddenly something is just slightly, but perceptibly, off. Like a dream. 

I know I would have loved this book as a child, but I'm glad I read it now as well. It reminded me of what I believed then and what I believe still, somewhere.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Title: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Author: Rebecca Skloot
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Biography, Medical
Nutshell: The story of the nearly forgotten woman behind some of the most famous cells in science

This book has been on my radar more or less since it was published. I'm a sucker for approachable medical matter, and I like a good biography. My family has also been--well, "touched" wouldn't quite cover it...smacked?--by cervical cancer. I lost a grandparent to it and nearly lost a parent. So I have kind of a weird relationship to the subject matter that sort of made me interested but weirdly repelled. But it was available as an ebook from my library, so I thought I would finally give it a shot. 

And I'm pretty glad I did, actually. This is, as the praise will tell you, a well-written history of a lot of things. Cancer research, medical ethics, one woman's unwitting contribution, and the resulting fallout for her family. Obviously, the "human elements" are most compelling. Henrietta's life was short, but she left a legacy behind with her cells but also with her children. 

There are a couple disturbing things that the book reveals. One is the overwhelming amount of fear and paranoia that the Lacks family and other older black residents feel about the white medical community. But if you look into the history, as Skloot does, you definitely see some of the reasoning behind it. While this is ostensibly a medical story, it really brings an era of terribly destructive racism into sharp focus. I was born well after the peak of the civil rights struggle, but I do understand a fair bit about it. I knew about the Tuskegee experiments, for example. But the overwhelming fear that Baltimore residents had of Johns Hopkins was new to me. Most of their fears were unfounded, but the paternalistic view that so many doctors had of their black patients went a fair way into creating some horror stories all the same.

The other troubling thing is how cavalier many researchers are toward the concept of who owns a person's tissues and blood. Members of the Lacks family donated blood without ever being clearly told what it was for, and their genetic information and names were subsequently made public without their permission. Doctors and researchers either assumed that the family knew what they were involved with or directly tried to keep them in the dark as much as possible. One researcher hands Henreitta's daughter a dense medical textbook and tells her that all her questions are answered there. These are very poorly educated people, and the way many medical professionals handled them was certainly enlightening. 

Now, HIPAA and other laws have made some decent strides toward preventing some of what happened to the Lacks family. You can't just publish names and information now, you can't have access to medical records without direct permission. But doctors can still use or sell your tissues and blood for medical testing, and while it would be nice if they informed you what it might be used for and whether money might be generated from it, they certainly don't have to, and many don't. Your tissues aren't really you anymore. Which might not seem like a big deal, until you look at a family like the Lackses, who could not afford medical care while their mother's cells were selling for $100 a vial. They certainly felt it was unfair that they were in poverty while research companies had made billions selling what they viewed as parts of their mother. And while eventually most of them came to terms with the knowledge that there was really nothing that could be done, and that at least their mother was still helping people, there's still a stark and pretty inequitable contrast between a donor or a donor's family and the medical establishment.

There is also the matter of Henrietta's oldest daughter Elsie, who was committed to an asylum at a young age for what was probably epilepsy and mental impairment. Skloot uncovers details of her time at the Crownsville Hospital, and it is truly disturbing. It is a fairly small piece of the story overall, but what occurred there should not be forgotten.

Overall, this was not a hard book to read. Medical terms are explained, history is recounted, and stories are told fairly. There are no real bad guys in the story of Henrietta Lacks. There are certainly misguided people--products of their time who failed to uphold the standards of care we recognize today. There are careless people--professionals who did not do due diligence in obtaining even the slightest amount of informed consent, people whose zeal for discovery overwhelmed their better judgement. But there are no real villains, and that's probably a fair assessment. Henrietta was treated the same as any woman with cervical cancer would have been then. Her case was already far advanced and horribly complicated. My grandmother died over 20 years after Henrietta of the same disease. Doctors did their best for her person while she was alive (their best being rather primitive in today's terms, but still). It was after she died that they got a bit out of hand, but I don't believe there was evil intent behind their actions. It was standard practice for the time, and luckily for all of us, standard practice has improved quite a bit since then.

I'd recommend this book if you're interested in medical history, or just fascinated with the life of one woman who changed the world and never even knew.

House of Prayer No. 2

Title: House of Prayer No. 2
Author: Mark Richard
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Memoir
Nutshell: A writer's story of his childhood in the south and his life before becoming a writer

This is a guy very obviously influenced by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and the other big American writers, especially the southern ones. That's not a bad thing, mind. Richard's writing is definitely of a style, but not hard to read or uninteresting. 

He tells his story from the beginning, growing up in Texas and Virginia as a "special" child with deformed hips. He details his repeated visits to the crippled children's hospital, where surgeons hammered nails into his bones and predicted he would be in a wheelchair by 30. He writes about his friends, the petty crimes they engaged in, the adventures they had, his troubled father and his Catholic mother. In the end, he talks about deciding to become a writer, his crisis of faith and eventual return to the church. 

This is in many ways a story of faith, but in others just the story of a southern kid who becomes a writer, because Richard's early life is certainly something less than holy. It is not a preachy book, and there's plenty to recommend it even for those who aren't necessarily looking for a narrative on religion. If you like the memoir genre and are particularly drawn to the sort of masculine, southern style writing you find in a lot of the American classics, you will probably find this enjoyable.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Title: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns)
Author: Mindy Kaling
Pub Date: 2011
Genre: Memoir
Nutshell: A very funny memoir from writer and comedian Mindy Kaling

I'll be honest: I've never seen anything Mindy Kaling has been in. I haven't seen one episode of the American version of The Office. I no longer have cable. TV is not really something I do anymore. But I had this weird job a few years ago wherein I basically had any random celebrity's face committed to memory, plus Mindy has been in the news recently for daring to be semi-famous and normal-sized. So I know who she is. And I'd heard this was funny, and I wanted something funny and easy to read that didn't suck. This fit the bill perfectly.

Mindy and I are the same age, so we remember some of the same things. Also, we are both nerds. She is funnier than me, though. But not so much funnier that I hate her. This book is basically a series of essays about random things. Some are about her childhood, some are about living in New York and Los Angeles and working on The Office and other life events. Some are lists or anecdotes about dating or friends. All are funny and well-written, and I laughed several times. I normally don't laugh when reading, so that's a compliment. As an author, she is personable, engaging, cute, and self-deprecating enough to be funny without becoming tragic. I recommend this for anyone who wants something non-taxing but still well-written and funny.

The Winds of Marble Arch: Personal Correspondence and Travel Guides

Title: The Winds of Marble Arch (Personal Correspondence and Travel Guides)
Author: Connie Willis
Pub Date: 2007
Genre: Science Fiction; Short Stories
Nutshell: The second and third sets of short stories in the collection.

Each of these sections had two stories, so I combined them.

First, Personal Correspondence, which is comprised of "A Letter from the Clearys" and "Newsletter." Second, Travel Guides, which includes "Fire Watch" and "Nonstop to Portales."

"A Letter from the Clearys": Another teenage girl as narrator, this time in a post-apocalyptic future living somewhere around Pike's Peak. It centers around a trip to the post office and the letter she retrieves there.

"Newsletter": A humorous one, wherein people start acting entirely too nice around Christmas, and of course, there has to be something wrong.

"Fire Watch": This is a prequel to the Time Travel series, where some of the ins-and-outs of the program are detailed. It takes place in London, 1940, during the Blitz, which is also where the last two books also occur. The main characters from Doomsday Book are present, and Kivrin's trip to the Middle Ages may have already happened.

"Nonstop to Portales": An ode to sci-fi author Jack Williamson.

I enjoyed "Fire Watch," but I'm not nearly as interested in the Blitz as Willis obviously is, so it always takes a bit of effort to get through those. "Newsletter" was funny, and was probably my favorite so far.