Books on a Blog

The Final Frontier

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:04:00 +0000

[Composed 6/27/2007--Ed]

I've not a read a straight science-fiction novel in a long time. I had picked up Chindi in hardcover on the sale rack at Barnes & Noble and it has been sitting on my shelf for a while [Part of the back catalog that Eliel was supposed to read before buying any new books. That didn't work out so well...--Ed].

I had forgotten how compelling and how much fun a well-plotted and conceptualized Science Fiction work could be. The last work of science fiction I read was a grim piece of work written by Stephen Donaldson. It was more a study in perverse human psychology then a work that let itself fall into the place of wonder where we humans think about what the day after the day after tomorrow will look like.

I will have to write more on this when I've given myself some time to let the story sink in, but in general, I can highly recommend this one.

Technorati Tags: Books I like, More on this later

C E Murphy: Charles Dickens called and he wants his word count back

Eliel Mamousette — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 02:27:00 +0000

Okay, so a little while ago I finished Coyote Dreams, the 3rd installment in the series now being referred to by it's publisher as "The Walker Papers" [Eliel thinks that sobriquet sounds lame and would prefer The Urban Shaman series, but alas, he's not in charge of such decisions--Ed.].

As I noted here, the second book gave me faith in C E Murphy's writing chops and ability to keep me reading (and buying) the new installments in her series. I still think that's true, but this most recent entry in the series was the weakest so far.

Not because the plot and it's elements were weak or annoying in any way, but because Ms. Murphy just used too many damned words to describe Joanne Walker's trips into the realms of Magic and Sleep. I found myself wondering if she was trying a "show don't tell" exercise by using enough somnolence inducing words to put the reader into the dreamlike state that the characters in the book were experiencing.

Yes, that's a little harsh, but this is tough-love time for this series. Having three books of this series in print, we've been exposed to enough now to know what Ms. Murphy does well (plotting the complicated life of a woman who is stumbling through being chosen to save the world [Sometimes from herself, --Ed]) and what she does poorly (edit down descriptions of mystical places that her protagonist travels to to the point where the descriptions are informative, but not overly long).

Here's to hoping that the next book in the series keeps the latter and shows improvement on the former: The bottom line is that this is an enjoyable read, but compared to the first two works, it is by far the weakest of the trio.

Technorati Tags: CE Murphy, More on this later, Urban Shaman

Second time Charm

Eliel Mamousette — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:15:00 +0000

Last weekend, I finished reading Thunderbird Falls, which is the sequel to Urban Shaman.

It was great.

I think that C. E. Murphy has done a great job of creating a believable character in Joanne Walker. I am not sure whether to call this series plot driven or character driven. Joanne Walker's weaknesses drive the plot in an almost tragedy-like fashion. During parts of the book I found myself suffering from that same pressure to scream "stop! you're going the wrong way" much in the same way I would want to shout at Othello or Lear. So I guess that would put it in the character driven box?

The best news I got this evening is that the next book in the series has been picked up by the publisher this month and I might have to break my "no buying new books" rule to pick that up in May. [Eliel held off on posting about it while waiting for Barnes & Noble's Affiliate.Net site to correct a bug that kept him from getting that lovely book cover graphic and link to the "buy the book" page--Ed.]

It's also good to finally find her official website. One somewhat puzzling bit of information is that apparently Ms. Murphy's books are categorized in the Romance genre. Per her website:

URBAN SHAMAN was also nominated for the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice for best modern fantasy. I'm told if I haven't heard from RT by now, I didn't win, but I'm genuinely delighted to have been nominated.

Go figure!

Technorati Tags: CE Murphy, Books I like, Urban Shaman

A Superstore on a Bookshelf

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:47:00 +0000

Okay, so after cataloging some books this evening, courtesy of my new CueCat barcode scanner [more still available on eBay--Ed.] and my ever-trusty copy of ReaderWare, I realize now that I have no excuse to buy a book at the bookstore for the next 6 months.

I have enough reading material to choke a python [Don't click if you fear snakes--Ed.], so no more going out shopping for books for a while.

Except, of course, for the sequels to the books I mentioned here that I liked so much.

Mind you, the six months also corresponds quite nicely to the next library sale....

The Highest form of flattery

Eliel Mamousette — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 04:36:00 +0000

I just finished reading Brimstone, one of the Special Agent Pendergast series from Preston and Child.

I found myself drawn to write about it because the authors include An Aside to the Reader at the end of the book in which they admit to using a character from a novel written in 1860. What amuses me to no end is that in acknowledging this character, they fail to mention that for most readers my age and older, the allure of this series is the fact that Agent Pendegrast is a bold revisiting of a character who first appeared in 1887 [According to the Wikipedia article, that is--Ed.]: None other than the occupant of 221B Baker street himself.

Pendergast's deductive reasoning, his constant ability to be one step ahead of everyone (including, on occasion, this humble reader), his diction and his mannerisms all smack of Watson's senior partner to me. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. The books are all great fun, albeit more gruesome than Arthur Conan Doyle's work.

Nano-Genres? Must be the coffee....

Eliel Mamousette — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 04:08:00 +0000

Last week I read Greywalker, a first book by the author Kat Richardson. I think I may have spoken too soon with regard to the baton being passed from Laurell Hamilton to Kim Harrison in the genre of "women detectives who investigate supernatural occurrences". Ms Richardson's first foray into the genre comes replete with a heroine sporting a hallmark terseness that I find appealing (it reminds me of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone). Combine that with an ability to describe a place (in this instance, Seattle) with enough detail to carry this story forward while hinting at more details to be revealed later on, and one can only come to the conclusion that Ms. Richardson is a great writer just discovered.

I thought that I was only going to be writing about how great this book is and that I might spend some time comparing Greywalker to Kim Harrison's works. But to be fair:

it is not clear yet where this series will head

Kim Harrison has a 3 book lead on Kat Richardson at this point, and

(most significantly) after an excursion out for latte and reading this evening, I might be comparing apples to oranges.

I mean, the italicized phrase in this posts first paragraphs describes a genre that at first blush one would imagine consists of fairly small collection of works. Imagine my surprise to discover that the book I picked up at Barnes & Noble over the weekend and started reading this evening seems to narrow even further the genre of "women detectives who investigate supernatural occurrences" to "women detectives who investigate supernatural occurrences in Seattle".

That book being Urban Shaman, by C. E. Murphy [Eliel was only able to find a third-party URL for Ms. Murphy. If anyone knows if she has her own site, please let him know --Ed.]. I am reading along the all-too-familiar saga of airline travel and the story-line-starting viewing of what looks like an attack on a lone woman by a pack of hounds and a knife-wielding man, when the protagonist mentions that she's headed to Seattle. I had to stop and look at the book again to make sure I was reading the right one. [Well, not really, but it is a nice turn of a phrase that we'll allow Eliel to use for dramatic effect. --Ed].

So there you go: two different writers of genre fiction about women private eyes and beat cops who get drawn into the world of the paranormal, and they both set their tales in Seattle.

Now I have to go remind myself of exactly where it is Laurel Hamilton and Kim Harrison's characters hang out to see if there's another sub-genre brewing there. I know they are both mid-western cities, but so as I don't offend those that live there, let me not say their names without verifying this first.

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:49:00 +0000

I used to be a fan of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series until the author decided that she'd stop writing mysteries with some complicated relationships thrown in and instead moved to writing about complicated relationships with a lot of sex thrown in and, oh yeah, there's some kind of mystery to solve here, too.

The apparent heir of the throne once so closely held by Laurell Hamilton is none other than Kim Harrison. Her work has been engaging, she's a more-than-competent writer, and she's proven that she's got some staying power, having (so far, I'm only half way through it) written a great fourth book in the Hollows series.

So if you're a fan of alternate earth, just add witchcraft, vampires, and werewolves, mystery series, then do yourself a favor and start with Dead Witch Walking, and let me know what you think.

Here's an idea I could run with

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:47:00 +0000

This (appropriately short) essay on the difficulty of finding the time read the classics from the Christian Science Monitor's Books page made me laugh.

But in all seriousness though, given how many books I read and my advancing years, I might have to start a filing system of this type to just to be able to easily recall what some of the books I read are about without having to read the jacket for reminders.

To wit: I just finished [accidentally, for the second time] reading Tony Hillerman's Wailing Wind. The 3x5 card summary would go something like this: "Cop finds body in car. Body turns out to be murder victim. Cop makes mistakes at crime scene. Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn get involved. Murderer uncovered. Murderer suffers incredible loss through avarice. Jim Chee falls in love with cop"

I guess the only thing to add to the 3x5 card description would be the Peter Tirrell-inspired phrase: "I didn't suck".

Adeo Interruptum

Eliel Mamousette — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 02:39:00 +0000

Elizabeth's trek to the Big City netted me a fresh new copy of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, which has paused the project I mentioned at the end of this post to re-visit The Hades factor to determine if my memory of it being leaps and bounds better than the TV movie that bore the same name.

[Eliel can so far report that his recollection is correct. The book is better, and (as usually happens when doing a second reading of a text) he has proof. We can expect more on that subject from him later --Ed.]

Freakanomics is a great read. "Freaky" economist Steven D. Levitt, having apparently proven his economic chops early on, is now in the enviable position of being able to apply the tools of economic analysis to social questions where many fear to tread.

So far, his focus seems to be on (as is most of economics, when you think about it) what motivates humans to take the actions they do. The introduction provides brief overviews of the specifics covered in the book. It meanders around, providing anecdotal stories that show the way that looking at the world through an economists eyes can be revealing of what factors really effect change in society. But I'll touch more on that in another post.

I'd like to draw attention to the very first chapter where he explores a study that determined what effect the introduction of standardized testing (of the sort that affects a school's standing in it's district, in the model of the "No Child Left Behind" Act) had on teachers and students in a Chicago school district. The conclusion: a good number of bad teachers will cheat to improve their students scores. As Levitt explains, the punitive nature of the testing, and the unsupervised application of them, provides motive and opportunity, respectively, to those teachers whose students are generally underperforming for their grade level. Worse yet is that what to them might seem like a petty "crime" in fact has devastating consequences for their students:

There are two noteworthy points to be made about the children in classroom A [the cheating teacher's students--Ed], tangential to the cheating itself. The first is that they are obviously in terrible academic shape, which makes them the very children whom high-stakes testing is promoted as helping the most. The second point is that these students would be in for a terrible shock once they reached the seventh grade. All they knew was that they had been successfully promoted due to their test scores. (No child left behind, indeed.) They weren't the ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade--and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.

It's great to see this type of analysis done on this issue. The rhetoric for and against the Act has been pretty harsh. This study shows the problems inherent in this type of evaluation system, and it's not too hard to imagine a solution: All it would take would be the creation of a professional circuit of exam administrators to handle the test-giving. But I find myself asking: who's going to take the responsibility now to address these types of abuses?

Of course, in a few years, someone like Mr. Levitt would be able to tell us exactly what types of incentives it would take to bribe one of these professional proctors, but at least the classroom could be a place of learning again for a short time instead of test-rigging.

Closing the book on The Closers

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 16 May 2006 02:43:00 +0000

I finished the The Closers last week. As usual, what the book seems to be about at the beginning proves not exactly what one's left with at the end.

In many ways, this book ends up being about people using people. Bosch does some soul searching when a plan he thinks up to use a criminal as bait to flush out the person he thinks is the real killer of a young girl ends up getting someone killed. At the end of the day though, the corruption scandal that Bosch uncovers in the course of his investigation gets solved in a way that leaves him feeling somewhat used as well. I would recommend this book to any fan of the kind of police procedural that actually take some time out for character development.

I have started reading Number9Dream. So far so good: the first few chapters seem to be a cross between Memento, Bladerunner, and Lost In Translation. I wasn't expecting the kind of day-after-tomorrow sci-fi aspects of it, so I'm pleasantly surprised. More on this one later.

Shopping from my bookshelf

Eliel Mamousette — Tue, 09 May 2006 01:42:00 +0000

One of the deals I've made with myself in the last few weeks is that instead of going to the book store and dropping a significant amount of spending money on new books, I would instead make an attempt to finish all the "filler" books I'd bought "for later".

[Filler books are the books purchased when buying one or two items from B&N and needing to add a few more to make sure one qualifies for free shipping.--Ed]

So, now that later has come, I have been reading a period piece set during the Olympic Games during the Nazi Regime written by Jeffrey Deaver entitled Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936. So far, it seems to be one of those "what-if" type books about an American hit-man [yes, the idea of killers for hire goes way back: look up the definition of assassin in a good dictionary--Ed] impressed into taking a mission to kill one of Hitler's military leaders. An interesting read given the current climate of conflicts in which the US is involved.

I'm only a few chapters in, and already one of the odd things about the book is the way that it portrays Nazi Germany as being a very violent place where people are killed just on the merest suspicion of not being loyal to the party. For some reason, that does not ring very true to me, but I need to do some research and see if Deaver is taking liberties ore accurately capturing the moment. I know that the Brownshirts had a reputation for violent thuggery, but I didn't realize that it went as far as shooting people who tried to avoid checkpoints and random checks of identification papers.

But that book being too large to comfortably carry on the train, I am also reading another book by Michael Connelly. The Closers. This one is another Hieronymous Bosch book, in which Bosch returns to the force to re-unite with his old partner Kis Rider. This time to right what are called "Open-Unsolved" cases. Those are murder cases for which no arrest was ever made, revived by new evidence of one kind or another. In this case, it's a DNA hit identifying a suspect who has at least fired the gun used to kill a high-school girl abducted from her home and left dated in the hills behind her house. I have just started in on it, so there's no clear picture yet of where this is going. The DNA hit is too simple-seeming, and Harry Bosch's gut is telling him there's more to it than this. And Michael Connelly tends to trust Bosch's gut, so we'll see where this takes us.

Elizabeth once asked me why I read crime novels like this one. I have a bunch of reasons, but mainly I think it's because ultimately, the better police procedurals are resolved with justice being done. More on this another time.

Where to Begin?

Eliel Mamousette — Thu, 04 May 2006 03:28:00 +0000

I thought this was a good idea. And of course, as with most projects whose end result should be growth of some kind, it's proving more difficult than I thought it would to be.

So, I'll keep it simple to start. I just finished reading Gayle Lynds' book The Coil. It is a book that falls squarely in the category of international espionage thriller. Add a twist of globalization angst, and you get a light read that makes you go "hmmmm".

I discovered this author because she's written some books the in the Covert-One series (the first of which, incidentally "co-written" by Ms. Lynds, was recently made into a miniseries on CBS). I think hers are the best of the series, but more on that on another date. [Remember, Eliel is going to keep this simple to start--Ed]

As to this book, there are some good passages that lay out the issues revolving around globalization and it's effect on world economies that are pretty bluntly put. During the climax of the novel, one of the main players in the book, whose clandestine organization has been involved in manipulating world economies watches anti-globalization demonstrators do their thing and it provides reason for this exchange:

"... To be against globalization is to want to turn back the clock. To believe the earth is flat. To believe in fairies and witches, and to pray to pagan gods." He sighed.
"What do these demonstrators want?" he demanded

Pretty much the view of captains of industry these days. And his response from his chief of security is pretty on point as well with regard to presenting the oppositions view:

"To re-create the IMF and World Bank", Duchesne said. "To end all Third World debt. To put a one percent tax on speculative financial transactions worldwide in order to raise a trillion-dollar fund for underdeveloped countries to direct their own growth. To bring to a Nuremberg-style trial those they hold responsible for the new global economic disorder and vast shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the already rich."

Pretty well on point and worth some thought. Of course, as with any book, there are some predictive misses that are a little distracting in the book for those up on current affairs: several characters complain about oil being at thirty-five dollars a barrel and how that's causing a global recession affecting all of the world's multinationals. Needless to say, 35 dollars a barrel would be nice to see again in the next 30 years. But while the number is off, Ms. Lynds got the culprit right.

All in all, it's a good read for those who enjoy spy novels that are more plot driven than in-depth looks into an individual character's minds (a la early Ludlum). This book has a cast of dozens and sometimes keeping them all straight drives one to distraction.

Finally, I should point out that this is really a sequel to another book of Ms. Lynds that I have not yet read, but will soon.