132. Where the Hell is Matt?: Dancing Badly Around the World by Matt Harding (2009)

Length: 228 pages

Genre: Non-fiction

Started: 24 October 2009
Finished: 29 October 2009

Where did it come from? Amazon.
Why do I have it? Well, it was on my wishlist because Matt’s videos make me happy every time I watch them (and every time I listen to Praan, the song from the third video)… but to be honest, the book was a total impulse buy when I was ordering something else.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 19 October 2009.
Verdict? Keeper.

Dance like nobody’s
watching… except for all the
people on YouTube.

Summary: I think by now pretty much everyone has seen Matt’s videos, but if you haven’t, do yourself a favor and go watch them. It takes five minutes of your life to watch one of the best things the internet has ever produced, and if it doesn’t make you grin like an idiot while simultaneously tearing up a little bit, you should see your cardiologist to find out how your heart got replaced with a lump of cold dead stone.

Anyways, the story in a nutshell: Matt Harding was just an ordinary guy who decided to quit his job in order to travel – and started taking videos of himself doing a goofy dance in front of various tourist landmarks. He cobbled those together into a YouTube video, which attracted the attention of a corporate sponsor, who funded his further travels to make two more videos, during which he made the shift away from dancing in front of things to dancing with other people all over the globe.

This book is a memoir-cum-travelogue, moving roughly chronologically through Matt’s travels. Each 2-3 page chapter tells the story behind one of the video clips – travel adventures, how the shot was filmed, backstory, anecdotes, etc., complete with a map showing each location and many of Matt’s photos. It doesn’t cover every clip, but I’d say it hits at least half of the clips from all three videos. And, along the way, Matt describes how the dancing went from a running gag to a worldwide sensation, and a statement about humanity’s inherent joy and silliness and brotherhood all over the world.

Review: I had two worries when I started this book. First, concepts that work on the internet don’t always pan out in book form, and in this case, Matt was translating not only from internet to tangible book, but also from video to text. Second, and relatedly, the videos are so wonderful in and of themselves that I was worried that explaining the stories behind them would leach away some of their magic. Luckily, I needn’t have worried on either count; the book complements the videos without competing with it, and knowing the stories and significance of the clips actually makes the video more meaningful, rather than less.

The book itself is also physically lovely – full-color maps or photos on every page. It does seem like the production was bit rushed: in several places the typesetting wasn’t quite right, and the map showing Kuwait City located in the middle of Iraq is an unfortunate mistake that someone along the way should have caught. Still, the book is a nice addition, providing information and context for the quick glimpses of far-flung locations that we can see in the videos.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Harding’s got a strongly-developed snarky sense of humor, can tell an anecdote well, and has a good sense of cutting right to the important bits. The book is not laden with detail – each chapter and each location only gets a few pages (including pictures) – but each chapter contains enough to give you a sense of the flavor of the place, something in there to make you giggle, and occasionally something to make you a little bit misty… so, exactly like the videos. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

And it’s not just structures that have passed away. Over two thousand people danced in the third video, and in the short time since it was recorded, I’ve been informed that several are no longer with us. And it goes without saying: that number will steadily approach zero.

It sounds strange to suggest, but I think a lot of us are at our best in those moments when we’re willfully, unselfconsciously ridiculous. And for me at least, I think it’s a pretty great way to be remembered. (p. 188)

Recommendation: Lovely, funny, and surprisingly moving. I think anyone who liked the videos would probably get something out of reading the book, and it’s pretty enough (and in short enough chunks) to be accessible to almost every world-traveler, wanderlust-y geek, and unselfconsiously bad dancer out there.

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Links: Matt’s Videos, Matt’s Blog

Other Reviews: Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: “Hey, stand over there and do that dance you do. I’ll record it on your camera.”

Cover Thoughts: Very eye-catching, and representative of the production quality throughout the book, I think. I particularly like the little dancing silhouettes in the borders – the same silhouettes that are in the lower right corner of each odd-numbered page, making a flip-book.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 71: “We stopped at a small coral bommie growing on the hull.” – A shallow isolated piece of reef located a distance offshore.

131. Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris (2006)
Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 6

Length: 324 pages
Genre: Fantasy; Mystery; Romance

Started: 24 October 2009
Finished: 25 October 2009

Where did it come from? Amazon.
Why do I have it? I bought the box set.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 10 September 2009.

The Big Easy waits…
and so does a whole bunch of
trouble. Big surprise!

Summary: When telepathic small-town waitress Sookie Stackhouse has to go to New Orleans to deal with her (recently deceased) cousin Hadley’s belongings and affairs, she knows it’s not going to be a picnic. However, since Hadley was 1) a vampire, 2) a favorite consort of the vampire Queen of Louisiana, and 3) murdered for reasons that are unclear but probably have to do with the turbulent state of vampire politics in the South, Sookie winds up dropping herself right in the middle of a hornet’s nest of dangerous plots… and all of this on top of her own supernatural social life, which is not what anyone would call uncomplicated.

Review: Confused readers, take heart! You are not alone! The events of Definitely Dead take place *after* the events of the short story “One Word Answer”, which can be found in the anthology Bite, or in A Touch of Dead. I’ve been reading the Sookie Stackhouse books as a bit of fun when I’m tired, distracted, or otherwise having trouble concentrating. So, when this book assumed that I knew that Hadley was dead, and started bringing up events I didn’t remember and characters I’d never heard of, after checking several times to be sure it really was the next one in the series, I assumed that I was just being thick . Not so! It wasn’t particularly hard to follow the story even without the background information, but it would have been nice to know up-front that the reason it felt like I was missing something is because I actually was.

Other than that, though, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A few sub-plots (including one or two of the supernatural guys who orbit Sookie) are finally resolved, and the pacing and plotting are much smoother here than in the earlier novels in the series. The mystery aspect of the story is not hugely mysterious, but there is plenty of action, plenty of humor, and the obligatory healthy dose of romantic entanglements. Like Living Dead in Dallas, because Sookie spends most of the book out of town, I wound up missing the characters from Bon Temps – Jason and Sam, in particular – but there were some interesting new characters introduced to make up for it. All in all, it was a fast and thoroughly enjoyable light read, which is what I’ve come to expect from the series. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Fans who’ve gotten this far in the series will have just as much fun with Definitely Dead – but if you have a chance to read “One Word Answer” ahead of time, it’s not required, but it will make the beginning of this book go a whole lot more smoothly.

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Other Reviews: Desert Rose Booklogue, Love Vampires, Michelle’s Masterful Musings, Queen of Happy Endings, Racy Romance Reviews, Reading Adventures, Scooper Speaks
I’m sure there are more out there. Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: I was draped over the arm of one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen, and he was staring into my eyes.

Cover Thoughts: Ah, if only Vampire Bill actually would grab Quinn by the tail… and then Quinn would turn around and maul his face off. (You may not be able to tell, but I like Vampire Bill even less after this book than I did previously.)

Happy Sunday, all!

It happens after every read-a-thon: I get buried in reviews to write, I procrastinate, and then I wind up having to remember what I wanted to say about a book that I finished weeks ago. At the moment, I’ve got four reviews to write; I’m going to try to bang out at least two of them if not three today – that should provide a nice excuse to procrastinate my big ol’ stack of grading, since I’ve already used the “I really need to clean the house!” trick.

But, at the same time, It’s kind of nice to be putting up two-week-old reviews, since that gives me a little bit of leeway to re-read an 800-page book (Knife of Dreams, which I may or may not wind up reviewing) without worrying about total blog silence. I’ve also got a stack of non-renewable books out from the library, glaring at me, and distracting me from said re-read. I figure I might get my reviews caught up to the present somewhere around Thanksgiving.

What about you, readers? Do you review books as soon as you’ve read them? Do you post reviews as soon as you’ve written them? And, if you answered “yes” to that first part, do you have some of your magical non-procrastinatory pixie dust to share?

130. Ship Fever: Stories by Andrea Barrett (1996)

Length: 256 pages
Genre: Short stories; a mix of historical and modern fiction.

Started: 24 October 2009
Finished: 24 October 2009

Where did it come from? The library booksale.
Why do I have it? It was mentioned in the “Further Reading” section of The Rough Guide to Evolution as being short fiction about science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How could I resist?
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 12 September 2009.
Verdict? Keeper.

Science, history
are the backdrop; what matters
here are the people.

Summary: Ship Fever is a collection of stories (although the titular story is more of a novella) that revolve around science, particularly science in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the way that the scientific worldview affects the lives of the people who practice it, and the people who come afterward.

“The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” is a story of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and how his disillusionment with science is mirrored by the growing alienation between a professor and his wife. I thought this was an excellent opening story that set the tone for the entire volume quite well: they’re stories about science, but they’re not about science so much as the people doing to the science, and how that science can echo through time, and affect – or reflect – the lives of the people it touches.

“The English Pupil” focuses on the dying days of Carl Linnaeus, as he reflects over all of the eager young naturalists who died pursuing the passion that he instilled in them. This story was very sad, but also very interesting – I don’t think I’d ever learned about Linnaeus’s students, or what happened to them – but it’s no wonder that Barrett chose them as the subject of a story. Full of pathos, and very, very human.

“The Littoral Zone” is a story of memory and relationships and reconstruction, as a married couple think about the events that took them away from their first marriages and brought them together. It’s a story about the tiny threads of regret and sadness that linger even in what we would call a happy life, and the overall tone is almost melancholy. I did love that it was set at the same marine field station where I spent a summer during college, though.

“Rare Bird” is a story of a young woman in the 1760s, interested in science and natural history but kept from their pursuit by her gender. This was easily my favorite story, most likely because I had the easiest time identifying with the protagonist, and of all of the stories, it was the only one that I thought leaned more towards hope than bleakness.

“Soroche” involves a woman cast adrift within a family that doesn’t belong to her, and contrasts her lot with Jemmy Button, one of the native Fuegians who was aboard the Beagle with Darwin. As a story, or a character study, this one was excellently crafted and very intriguing. However, I felt like it had to stretch to draw the historical parallels, and so the message of the story wound up feeling more labored than it needed to be.

“Birds with No Feet” is the story of a young naturalist/collector who was working in the Malay Archipelago at the same time as Alfred Russell Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection contemporaneously with Darwin. I liked this story quite a bit, mostly for the glances it gave us of Wallace, who is a fascinating figure, and has been largely – and unfairly – eclipsed by Darwin in the history of science.

“The Marburg Sisters” tells the tale of two estranged sisters returning home to care for their dying father. It’s the only story that doesn’t particularly involve the history of science, and therefore felt a bit out of place. It was also my least favorite; I didn’t particularly care for either Rose or Bianca, and the inconsistent use of the first-person plural bugged me.

“Ship Fever” is set during the typhus epidemic in Canada following the influx of Irish immigrants during the Great Potato Famine. A young and idealistic doctor is called to help at the quarantine station, only to find conditions worse than he expected and deteriorating rapidly, with no guarantee that help is coming, or that the city he calls home will remain unaffected. Harrowing and thoroughly engrossing.

Overall Review and Recommendation: This is the first of Barrett’s work I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. Her prose is lovely, striking just the right balance between economy and sparseness, and oftentimes cutting to the bone with a single well-crafted phrase. Her characterization, even in the limited space of a short story, is rich and complex, and she’s capable of evoking a surprising amount of emotion in the same short period.

This book probably requires a certain mood to really enjoy – the tone of most of the stories is certainly stark, if not outrightly bleak, and by the time I finished it, I felt like I’d made several passes through the emotional wringer. Still, each of the stories, even the short ones, had a certain heft, a certain gravity to it, and in sum, they added up to a thoroughly compelling read. 4 out of 5 stars.

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Other Reviews: Puss Reboots, Rather Be Reading, A Reader’s Journal (1), (2)
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First Line: For thirty years, until he retired, my husband stood each fall in front of his sophomore genetics class and passed out copies of Gregor Mendel’s famous paper on the hybridization of edible peas.

Cover Thoughts: Peas! Mendel’s peas! I think the old school botanical illustration, the signature-like font for the author’s name, and the muted color palette all fit this volume perfectly. I can easily see a non-biologist going “what is that plant and what does it have to do with ships?”, though.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 51: “Erika Moorhead, Ruby remembers. Talking about the tensile strength of byssus threads.” – a collection of silky filaments by which certain mollusks attach themselves to rocks.
  .
• p. 59: “A handsome house set in the gently rolling Kent landscape a few miles outside the city of London; the sun just set over blue squill and beech trees newly leafed.” – A small bulbous European plant (Scilla verna) having fragrant blue flowers.
  .
• p. 77: “Ships are packed along the waterfront, their sails furled and their banners drooping; here a wherry, there a cutter, darts between them and the stairs.” – a light rowboat for one person; skiff.
  .
• p. 107: “Wallace’s ship, he knew, had caught fire through the spontaneous combustion of kegs of balsam-capivi, but their own fire had no such exotic cause.” – an oleoresin obtained from several tropical, chiefly South American trees belonging to the genus Copaifera, of the legume family, used chiefly in varnishes and lacquers, for removing old oil varnish from or for brightening oil paintings, and formerly in medicine in the treatment of certain mucous-membrane conditions.
  .
• p. 119: “It was Alec’s good fortune to discover they savored cockroaches, and for him to be aboard a battered old barkentine that swarmed with them.” – a sailing vessel having three or more masts, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the other masts.
  .
• p. 134: “The athanor, the furnace of transmutation, was shaped like a giant egg.” – digester furnace with a self-feeding fuel supply contained in a towerlike contrivance, ensuring a constant, durable temperature.
  .
• p. 142: “She left behind a blue hassock embroidered with swans, several sets of expensive sheets, a cabinet full of cosmetics, and a refrigerator full of food.” – a thick, firm cushion used as a footstool or for kneeling; ottoman.
  .
• p. 203: “Then, as now, a fleet of bateaux with great white sails had carried lumber from Findlay Grant’s sawmill at Montmorency Falls to the ships lined up along the coves.” – a small, flat-bottomed rowboat used on rivers.
  .
• p. 235: “Someone said, in French, a sentence that in English defined nephritis associated with dropsy and albuminuria as Bright’s disease.” – the presence of albumin in the urine. (Oh, duh.)
  .

129. The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson (2006)

Length: 178 pages
Genre: Non-fiction; Humor

Started: 24 October 2009
Finished: 24 October 2009

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? All hail His Noodliness!

FSM: it’s the
only faith that’s supported
by science! RAmen!

Summary: Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, or Pastafarianism, originated as a response to the Kansas School Board’s decision to include Intelligent Design in its science curriculum. If the goal of this move was really to expose children to alternative views about the validity of evolution, Bobby Henderson argued in an open letter to the school board, then surely equal time should be given to Pastafarianism, which holds that the world was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and that all scientific evidence claiming otherwise has been manipulated by His Noodly Appendage. This book lays out the basic tenets of the Pastafarian beliefs – including worship services conducted in pirate garb, holy days every Friday, an absolute rejection of dogma, and all of the carbs you can handle – as well as presenting scientific and mathematical proofs of the existence of the FSM, and a guide to converting non-believers.

Review: The Gospel of the FSM is a good example of why I’m not crazy about the current trend of giving everyone with a successful website their own book deal. It seems like too often, the humor that works fine in one medium starts to falter when stretched out over the entire length of a book. I mean, I’ve been a proud Pastafarian for years, and I certainly got more than one chuckle while reading… but at the same time, the book feels like a bit of a rehash of what’s already available on the FSM website, and after it’s hit its key notes a few times, the joke starts to wear a little thin. Conceptually, The Gospel of the FSM is a hilarious, timely, and effective piece of satire, but in execution it winds up feeling over-long and not entirely able to justify its existence as a book separate from the website that spawned it. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Pastafarians will probably enjoy having it around, and it certainly might convert some open-minded non-believers (at least those with a sense of humor), but I’d recommend reading it in small chunks, rather than straight through. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to partake in the holy communion of a pasta dinner…

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Links: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Other Reviews: Largehearted Boy, Necromancy Never Pays
Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: Dear friend, Welcome to the wonderful world of religion!

Cover Thoughts: Having the cover with another book cover printed on it is weird; I’d have liked it better with the solid cover and an actual pasta-looking ribbon bookmark.

Commenters

Many thanks to this month’s commenters, particularly everyone who stopped by to cheer me on during the readathon!

Also: alexandra, Dave, Emily, Gwen, Johanne, John, Jose Luis, Kimberly, Les, liz, opicana

Search Terms

leave dead in the dallas book
I get the feeling that the Dallas libraries and bookstores probably wouldn’t appreciate that.

tbr ii where find lion
Clearly, that’s why I have so many TBR books – I have to have something to keep the lions boxed in.

where does jamie wrap claire in his kilt
Scotland.

what is that movie about a thief made from
Film, I would guess.

amber foot smother smell
Oh, man, that’s rough. While I’m not sure what amber has to do with it, if your feet are bad enough to smother, maybe baking soda? Or see a doctor, if you can breathe long enough to make an appointment.

does the book dead until dark talk
No, but if it did, I’d imagine it would probably say something like “Suckie, I am Vampyre!” Or something.

{searchterms}
Oh, crap, you’re searching my search terms for the search terms “searchterms.” We’re so meta, I think the internet might explode.

Happy Sunday all!

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been around a lot recently – either here or at other people’s blogs. The truth of the matter is, real life events and responsibilities have been a little overwhelming recently, and sadly “visit other people’s book blogs” had to be dropped off my to-do list for a while. But November’s looking like it’ll be a little bit easier (fingers crossed!), and I hope to be back up to full blogging strength soon enough – I appreciate everyone bearing with me!

Ye Grande Olde TBR(e) Challenge Update

I started October with 246 unread books sitting around my house. And I ended with … *drumroll* … 249! Not too terribly shabby, I think. Those extra three books were bought at the library booksale as a pick-me-up at the end of a really rough day, so they don’t even count, right? Right?

…anyways, let’s take a look at the breakdown:

Neutral books – Read, but don’t affect the TBR pile

Audiobooks - The Magicians by Lev Grossman (review coming soon)
Read but not owned - An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon – The Cave and the Cathedral by Amir D. Aczel – Wicked Lovely: Desert Tales, Volume 1: Sanctuary by Melissa Marr – And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer – The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson (review coming soon) – Serenity: Those Left Behind by Joss Whedon (review coming soon)
Re-reads - The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Changes to the TBR pile

Cleared from my TBR pile (huzzah!) – Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick – In the Woods by Tana French – Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris – Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris – Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris (review coming soon) – Ship Fever: Stories by Andrea Barrett (review coming soon)
Added to, then promptly cleared from my TBR pile (um… huzzah?) -Where the Hell is Matt?: Dancing Badly Around the World by Matt Harding (review coming soon)
Added to my TBR pile (shame!) – From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris - People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks - Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie - Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker - The Naming by Alison Croggon (Darla’s fault!) - The Likeness by Tana French – Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen – The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Other Non-TBR Book Acquisitions
- Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates: Festive Meals for Holidays and Special Occasions

128. And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer (2009)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Book Six of Three

Length: 276 pages
Genre: Science Fiction, Humor

Started: 24 October 2009
Finished: 24 October 2009

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? I’ve known where my towel is since I was roughly twelve, so I couldn’t let a new Hitchhiker’s book pass unread. (A hat tip goes to The Book Pirate for alerting me to its existence in the first place.)

Colfer doesn’t quite
nail it, but it’s close enough
to still make it fun.

Summary: By the end of Mostly Harmless, Arthur Dent had finally made it back to Earth – well, an Earth, if not exactly his Earth. However, his being back on Earth made it that much easier for the Vogons to complete their mission of destroying the Earth and all of its inhabitants, in the name of a hyperspace bypass and bureaucratic completeness. Arthur, Trillian, their daughter Random, and Ford Prefect are saved once again, and set out on yet another journey across time and space, meeting up with some old friends (Zaphod), enemies (Vogon Captain Prostetnic Jeltz), gods (Thor, along with the rest of the Norse pantheon), and kneebiting jerks (Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged), and tackling new challenges, like overzealous real-estate-developers-slash-cult leaders, the terrors of dark-matter enhanced love, and a giant wheel of cheese (Gouda… or maybe cheddar.)

Review: When presented with And Another Thing…, the obvious first question is “Can you really have a Hitchhiker’s book without Douglas Adams?” And the answer, I’m happy to report, is “on the ‘mostly’ end of ’sort of’.”

That waffly statement is a result of the patchy nature of the book. There were individual scenes that are funny enough to compete with Adams at his best, and then there were bits that just didn’t work for me at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the parts that worked best were the parts where Colfer took Adams’s characters and ran with them in his own direction, and the parts that felt the most labored were the parts where Colfer was trying to match his humor exactly to Adams’s style, and to cram in as much continuity as possible. For example, in the asides (here set off as “Guide Notes” and in different font), Colfer seemed determined to bring back every random (not Random) alien species Adams ever mentioned, without realizing that the reason those bits were so funny was because they were thoroughly unexpected and unconnected one-offs.

On the other hand, I absolutely laughed out loud more than once, was giggling constantly, and at one point in the middle I caught myself thinking “Man, I like Adams’s books so much better when they involve the Norse Gods.”… before it dawned on me that And Another Thing… was not actually written by the same man who wrote The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. That’s pretty high praise. Colfer undeniably had some huge shoes to fill, and while they don’t quite fit him perfectly (…yet; he did seem to get more comfortable inhabiting Adams’s universe as the book went on), neither did he trip over them and fall down the stairs. Besides, any book that starts with quotes from Douglas Adams and Tenacious D, and uses the word “sarcastigating” in a sentence gets a thumbs up from me.

But, sadly: No Marvin. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you go into this book expecting a Douglas Adams book, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But if you go in expecting an Eoin Colfer book written in the Hitchhiker’s universe, then it’s a fun, enjoyable, and mostly harmless read. (Heh.)

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Other Reviews: OF Blog of the Fallen, Bogormen
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First Line: If you own a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then one of the last things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title of that particular Sub-Etha Volume.

Cover Thoughts: It’s a… Viking Space Chicken? (!) It’s certainly eye-catching, and no more random than the rest of the Hitchhiker’s covers.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 87: ““So underneath all this aloofness is a simple maledicent.”” – One who speaks reproachfully or slanderously. (Could have figured that one out on my own.)
  .
• p. 137: “Random scowled. “So would you, if you’d spent the past while sealed in a tube with a cloud of viridigenous gas that was trying to make you happy.”” – producing greenness. (That one too.)
  .
• p. 138: “Two: They had developed a deeper level of sarcasm which was virtually undetectable except to another master of the form, and that definitely wasn’t the adult being sarcastigated.” – to censure severely with sarcasm.
  .
• p. 235: “Loki, who liked to sneak out of Asgards for a few tankards with the mortals on a weekend, had handed the adiaphorists a gift-wrapped basket of grist for their mill when he had spent an entire drunken evening loudly complaining of his erectile dysfunction problems.” – tolerance of actions or beliefs not specifically prohibited in the Scriptures; indifferentism.
  .

127. Wicked Lovely Desert Tales Vol. 1: Sanctuary by Melissa Marr and Xian Nu Studio (2009)
Wicked Lovely Desert Tales, Volume 1

Length: 176 pages

Genre: Graphic Novel (Manga), Fantasy

Started: 22 October 2009
Finished: 22 October 2009, less than 40 minutes later.

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? I really liked Wicked Lovely and its sequels, and I’m always on the lookout for new graphic novels.

Rika’s got a crush
on a mortal boy, but can
he deal with Faerie?

Summary: Rika used to be human… a long, long time ago. Then she was one of the Winter Girls – courted by Keenan, the Summer King, and then abandoned when she failed the test and winter’s chill took up residence in body, unescapable until the next mortal girl braved the trial. Now she’s one of the solitary fey, and has moved to the desert – far from the cold, far from the poisonous cities, and far from the intrigues of the faerie courts. Rika is happy enough with her solitary life, until she meets Jayce – a human boy who makes her want to reveal her deepest secrets. But even though Rika is unattached to any faerie court, she still has to deal with other fey, and a romance with a mortal is not something that’s likely to pass unnoticed.

Review: The story in this book is pretty simple, sweet and straightforward for the most part, only really getting interesting on the last page. Although Keenan makes a cameo appearance (and I kind of love than he snits his way into scene by kicking up a sandstorm around himself), this book is mostly independent from the main Wicked Lovely storyline. I think the whole idea of what it meant to be a Winter Girl is explained pretty well, so it could be read as a stand-alone, although it’s obviously going to mean more if you know who Keenan is, and what’s happening in the faerie courts.

My real problem with this book was the artwork. Not that it was bad – some of it was very lovely, and the storyboarding was very well-done indeed. It’s just that – with the exception of the animated Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics that aired on Nickelodeon all the time when I was younger – I’m not particularly familiar with anime/manga. In particular, I have a really hard time distinguishing boys and girls, especially when only their faces are showing (or when they’re wearing what appears to be a boat-neck t-shirt, Jayce.) Some of the zoomed-in shots were also kind of hard to figure out exactly what was going on, as well. Still, even with taking the time to admire/decipher the artwork, I zoomed through this book, and while I’m not dying for more, it was a pleasant enough diversion. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: A cute but non-essential addition for Wicked Lovely fans, and probably a fun little read for manga fans as well.

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First Line: It’s beautiful out here. Warm.

Cover Thoughts: Meh. Jayce looks nothing like how he looks in the black-and-white drawings of the book itself… but then, even there, his skin tone would frequently change between two panels on the same page, so.

126. Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris (2005)
Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 5

Read my review of book:
1. Dead Until Dark 2. Living Dead in Dallas		3. Club Dead 4. Dead to the World

Length: 296 pages
Genre: Fantasy/Mystery/Romance

Started: 20 October 2009
Finished: 22 October 2009

Where did it come from? Amazon.
Why do I have it? Bought the box set.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 10 September 2009.
Verdict? Keeper.

Someone’s out hunting,
but they’re aiming at Sookie…
and her shifter friends.

Summary: Telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse is used to dealing with the supernatural – she’s been mixed up with more vampires, werewolves, witches, and other supernatural beings than anyone could consider safe. But now Sookie really has a reason to worry – not for her own safety, but for her brother’s. Jason has been bitten by a werepanther, and so he’s now one himself, transforming every full moon. That’s dangerous enough on its own, but there’s a sniper in town who’s bent on assassinating shifters, weres, and other two-natured creatures…. and the local shifter community thinks that it might be Jason. So Sookie has her hands fully trying to protect her brother both from the shooter as well as from the other Weres… but the sniper might just be gunning for her, as well.

Review: Another fun Sookie Stackhouse book, although I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did Dead to the World or Club Dead. Partly because I thought this one was a little bit more predictable – the solution to one of the mysteries was ringing alarm bells in my head almost from page one – and not quite as fast-paced and action-packed… the plotline involving the Shreveport werewolf pack just wasn’t as exciting as it should have been. I also wished there’d been more Jason – I really enjoyed having him around for more than a few pages of the previous book. And more Eric would have been good, too, but you could have a book full of Eric (see: Dead to the World), and I’d still want more Eric.

On that tip, I’m also starting to get a little bit tired of the constant addition of new romantic interests and storylines, without any resolutions of the previous ones. Sookie seems to be collecting hot supernatural men who are obsessed with getting into her pants at the rate of about one per book, and while I am okay with authors leaving some tangly unresolved emotional threads hanging from book to book, doing so with five (soon to be six) guys at once is getting to be a little excessive. Still, these books are tons of fun to read, and are excellent for unwinding at the end of long, busy days when you don’t have the brain power to devote to something more serious. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Not the best in the series, but still thoroughly enjoyable.

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First Line: I knew my brother would turn into a panther before he did.

Cover Thoughts: Gah. It’s not Vampire Bill who saves her from the fire! Down with Vampire Bill! (He was guilty in this book of one of my biggest pet peeves: the angry jealous freak-out over an ex-girlfriend being with another guy. Just because you used to sleep with her does not mean you own her ass forever, Bill.)

Happy Sunday, all!

I’m sure everyone has heard (once or twice) by now that yesterday was the read-a-thon. This was my third time participating, and I had just as much fun as ever. I didn’t get quite as much reading done as I have in the past; I had a costume birthday party to go to that – while a ton of fun – did mean that I was only home and reading for about 15 hours or so. Of that time, I was either reading or listening for about 12 hours and 20 minutes. Overall, I found it a lot more easy to stay focused for more of each hour than I had – no idea why.

I started and finished three books: And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson, and Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett. I also got more than half-way through Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris (I finished it this afternoon), and did a little bit of browsing through Where the Hell is Matt?: Dancing Badly about the World by Matt Harding, for a grand total of 950 pages.

Today, all I have really been in the mood to do was lay on the couch and watch videos… but instead I’ve spent the day grading papers… and procrastinating while trying to avoid grading papers. Ah well.

Many thanks again to everybody who stopped by to cheer me on, and everyone who participated in my mini-challenge! I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did, and I’m already looking forward to April!

Okay everyone! It’s late (or early, depending on where you are), and most people here have probably spent the last 16+ hours on their butts reading.

But no more! Let’s get that blood flowing! Put down your books! Step away from your computers! Strap on your dancing shoes, ’cause it’s time to boogie!

Steps to completing the Dance-a-Thon Mini Challenge:

1. Cue up your favorite up-tempo, groove-inducing song on your CD player, MP3 player, live bluegrass band, whatever.

1a. (If there are folks sleeping nearby, perhaps plug in your headphones as well. Although if you opt for the live bluegrass band, do not try to plug your headphones directly into the banjo player.)

2. Hit play.

3. For the next three to five minutes, dance like an idiot. Move those feet! Get funky! Shake what your mama gave you! Wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care!

4. If you are feeling truly brave (and camera-enabled), take a video and share it. For the non-exhibitionists in the house, just come back here and leave a comment, letting us know what song you danced to. (First-time comments are moderated, but don’t worry – I’ll get to ‘em all.)

The randomly-selected winner will receive a $10 gift certificate to the iTunes store. (This challenge is open internationally, so if you live somewhere where the iTunes store doesn’t work, I’ll make it an Amazon gift certificate instead.)

Oh, and for the record, I will personally be completing this challenge as well. My late-night-booty-shaking music of choice? Hey Ya! by OutKast, of course.

This format worked really well for me last year, so I’m sticking with it. I’ll be here all day (…and probably at least a few hours of the night!) Updates roughly hourly, running totals at the bottom, commentors always appreciated. Let’s get this nerdfest on the road!
________________________

Hour Zero – 8 am

G’morning, all! I’ve got a stack of books, my audiobook cued up on my iPod, an assortment of quickly-microwaveable food, and a blind spot roughly the size and shape of that stack of term papers that need to be graded this weekend. I think I’m set for the day!

I don’t know why I get so antsy the night before a read-a-thon, but I woke up at least three times last night/early this morning, convinced I’d missed my alarm and it was time to get up and start reading. This is exceptionally dumb for two reasons, namely 1) I never sleep through my alarm on work days, even though it’s set for earlier than I woke up today and 2) if I had overslept, so what? But my alarm went off and I was up like a shot. Ah well.

For once I’m not starting read-a-thon in the middle of a book – I finished two books on Thursday, then spent yesterday writing reviews so that I’m not starting out the read-a-thon with a backlog (note to self: this year, take notes as you go so that you can remember what the hell you wanted to say about a book when you actually get around to writing the review next week.) But it does mean that I’ve got my choice of what to start out with this morning. I think I’m going to pick up Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing…. And, it’s about that time… to the books!
________________________

Hour One – 9 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:58
Pages read this hour: 65
What book(s): And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer
Thoughts: It’s alternating between being in proper, giggle-worthy Hitchhiker’s Guide form, and feeling like it’s trying too hard. Also, reading about Arthur Dent is kind of making me want tea.

_________________________

Hour Two – 10 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:53
Pages read this hour: 63
What book(s): And Another Thing…
Thoughts: Definitely time for tea. I’m thinking heavily-sweetened Early Grey. And maybe breakfast, while I’m at it. Time to crawl out of bed, at any rate.
_________________________

Hour Three – 11 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:48
Pages read this hour: 56
What book(s): And Another Thing…
Thoughts: Still going strong! Can’t believe how fast the time is going, either.
_________________________

Hour Four – 12 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:55
Pages read this hour: 74
What book(s): And Another Thing…
Thoughts: I’m only a few pages from the end of my current book, so I have to pick what I’m reading next. I had been planning on Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia, but I feel like reading two books full of enforced wackiness in a row will probably make my head explode.
_________________________

Hour Five – 1 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:47
Pages read this hour: 68
What book(s): Finished And Another Thing…, and started Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett.
Thoughts: It’s fiction about biologists! How can I not love it? Plus, the story that I’m currently reading is set somewhere I’ve been, which is always a neat little thrill. But before I go back to it, I think it is time to finally put my contacts in and maybe eat something for lunch.
_________________________

Hour Six – 2 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:37
Time spent listening this hour: 0:15
Pages read this hour: 40
What book(s): Dragon Champion by E. E. Knight (audiobook), and The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson
Thoughts: I took a break for some Pastafarianism over lunch, but I’m going back to my short stories, I think.
_________________________

Hour Seven – 3 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:49
Pages read this hour: 62
What book(s): Ship Fever
Thoughts: I caught myself staring at one paragraph for a few minutes without really reading it… the precursor to my favorite weekend afternoon pasttime of napping in the comfy chair with a book in hand. Luckily my watch beeped marking the hour before I could really fall asleep. Still, I think it’s time to take a break, maybe take a shower, and possibly have a second dose of caffeine.
_________________________

Hour Eight – 4 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:26
Time spent listening this hour: 0:09
Time spent showering this hour: I didn’t actually time myself, but it did wake me up a bit.
Pages read this hour: 41
What book(s): I finished the story I was reading in Ship Fever, and then also some Gospel of the FSM
Thoughts: Hee, hee, my book is making me crave pasta. I’ve got leftovers I was going to microwave for dinner, but making pasta wouldn’t take that much more effort. Clearly I’ve been inspired by His Noodliness.
_________________________

Hour Nine – 5 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:48
Pages read this hour: 71
What book(s): Gospel of the FSM
Thoughts: Trucking onwards. Nursing a Diet Coke with Lime. It’s windy and cold as balls outside, or else I’d go for a walk.
_________________________

Hour Ten – 6 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:45
Pages read this hour: 71
What book(s): Finished The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and got through another story in Ship Fever.
Thoughts: Only one novella left (~100) and I will have finished Ship Fever, and thus three books for the day. Sometime in the next two hours, I expect; maybe I’ll finish the book and then make dinner.
_________________________

Hour Eleven – 7 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:47
Pages read this hour: 65
What book(s): Ship Fever
Thoughts: The titular novella is really engrossing, and I’m liking doing short stories during the read-a-thon… keeps my attention from wandering. Last hour’s plan is a good one… I’ve got maybe a half hour of reading left to finish the book, then dinner.
_________________________

Hour Twelve – 8 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:37
Time spent listening this hour: 0:03
Pages read this hour: 60
What book(s): Finished Ship Fever, listened to a few minutes of Dragon Champion while I microwaved dinner, and browsed through Where the Hell is Matt? by Matt Harding as I ate.
Thoughts: Halfway done, woohoo! This hour I think I’m going to start the next Sookie Stackhouse book, and save WtHiM? for when my brain is a little more out of it. Plus at some point soon I’m going to have to call a temporary halt to get into costume.
_________________________

Hour Thirteen – 9 pm

Time spent reading this hour: 0:41
Pages read this hour: 66
What book(s): Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
Thoughts: That’s it from me for a while, folks! I’m off to a joint birthday/costume party, although I reckon I’ll be back around midnight, when – not coincidentally – my mini-challenge starts. See you then!
_________________________

Hour Seventeen – 1 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:19
Time spent listening in the past four hours: 0:21
Pages read this hour: 33
What book(s): Dragon Champion and Definitely Dead
Thoughts: I’m back! The party was a bunch of fun, lots of very good costumes, lots of pizza rolls and cake and inappropriate stories. My Leela costume went over well, and was easy, but required two showers when I got home to get rid of the face-paint and purple hairspray.

Still, I managed to get some reading done this hour, and I had enough Diet Coke at the party to keep me going for a while yet.

Also, my mini-challenge is going well, and I just realized that the subtitle to Where the Hell is Matt?: Dancing Badly Around the World, which I started reading over dinner, is terribly appropriate.
_________________________

Hour Eighteen – 2 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:48
Pages read this hour: 75
What book(s): Definitely Dead
Thoughts: Bleargh, my contacts are getting itchy, and I’ve reached the point of tiredness where I’m not thermoregulating very well, even though the house is plenty warm and I’ve got about a million blankets. Although I do still feel more mentally sharp than I was expecting.
_________________________

Hour Nineteen – 3 am

Time spent reading this hour: 0:32
Pages read this hour: 42
What book(s): Definitely Dead
Thoughts: I’ve hit the wall, falling pretty soundly asleep over my book, so this’ll be it for me for the night, folks. I could force myself to stay up, but I do have a stack of papers to grade tomorrow, and I think my students would probably appreciate it if I were actually awake when I read their papers (although, depending on the quality, maybe not?). It’s been a blast!
_________________________

Total time spent reading: 11:33
Total time spent listening: 0:48
Total # of pages read: 950
Total # of books finished: 3
Total # of books read but not finished: 3

125. In the Woods by Tana French (2007)
Ryan/Maddox Mysteries, Book 1

Length: 432 pages
Genre: Mystery

Started: 16 October 2009
Finished: 19 October 2009

Where did it come from? Bookmooch.
Why do I have it? I remember seeing it around the blogs (don’t remember whose; it was at least a year ago), and people seemed to love it, so I thought I’d try it.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 13 November 2008.
Verdict? Keeper.

A brutal murder
might expose more secrets than
Ryan’s ready for.

Summary: Twenty years ago, three twelve-year-old children ran off to play in the woods near their Dublin suburb. When they don’t return home, a search party is mounted, and only one of the children is found, digging his fingernails into a tree trunk in terror, his t-shirt torn in four diagonal slashes, wearing sneakers filled with someone else’s blood, and with absolutely no memory of whatever happened to him and his friends. That boy has grown up to be Detective Rob Ryan, and although he has never recovered his memories, he’s not particularly traumatized by the event, and he works on the Murder squad with his partner Cassie Maddox with nary a problem. That is, until they get handed a case of a young girl found murdered at an archaeological dig… in the same woods where his childhood friends went missing. Although two decades separate the cases, Ryan can’t quite shake the conviction that they’re connected… and that the latest murder will wind up rattling everything in his life that he had previously thought was stable.

Review: This book affected me more profoundly than anything I’ve read for a long time. I read the first half of the book relatively slowly, taking my time and savoring French’s wonderful way with the language, but then I sat and read the entire second half of the book in one evening… and it may have been the fact that I was up way past my normal bedtime, or the fact that I had been sitting still for so long, or my scratchy contacts, or something, but man, the last hundred pages just absolutely wrung me out, left me feeling sad and heavy and hollow, and with a sore throat like I’d been holding back tears for a few hours. That’s not something I expect from a mystery (not something I expect from any book ever, really), but here’s the thing: relatively little of that feeling had to do with the actual mystery itself.

The wonderful thing about this novel is that while it’s ostensibly a mystery, it’s really a character-driven story dressed up in a mystery’s clothing. I fell in love with Ryan and Maddox very soon after meeting them, and watching the ways the investigation affected them was far more compelling than watching the investigation itself. It’s not that the murder case wasn’t interesting – I’ll cop to watching the odd episode of a police procedural now and again, and In the Woods’s case was well-done, with all of the clues on the table and the solution complex enough not to be obvious, but not so complex as to be implausible. It’s just that Ryan and Maddox are the heart of the story, and they’re enough to keep things ticking along during the inevitable part where the investigation stalls out – in fact, the only parts I thought dragged were the parts where the focus was too much on the details of the police work and not enough on the people doing it. Likewise, the murder is essentially solved with almost 100 pages left in the book, but it doesn’t feel like French is dragging out the denoument – because while the murder’s over, the story wasn’t. The ending didn’t leave me completely satisfied, but it didn’t exactly leave me dissatisfied, either, and I can see that other ways of wrapping things up wouldn’t have had the same narrative power… And judging by how I felt when I finished, power is one thing In the Woods has in spades.

Another thing Tana French has in abundance is a flair for wordcraft. It’s very rare that I write down quotes from the book I’m reading, but this book made me want to. The only reason I didn’t is that I realized by page 20 that there was a paragraph I wanted to copy out verbatim from every page, and that by spending the time copying them down, I was missing out on actually reading them. There’s something about French’s language that is so beautiful and evocative that you just want to roll around in it, let it sit on your tongue and in your brain, wrap yourself up in it like a pile of warm laundry. I can’t quite believe that a story this well crafted and this evocatively written is a first novel – but it is, and I will absolutely be reading the rest of French’s work. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Between this and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I’m starting to rethink my aversion to detective mysteries. Although they’ve got some differences, if you like one, I think you’ll like the other, and if you like your stories character-driven, I bet you’ll like both, no matter what your favorite genre.

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First Line: Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s.

Cover Thoughts: Although the book itself was, at any given point, only very rarely creepy, it did have a sinister undertone running through it that is reflected very nicely by the cover. (We’ll ignore the fact that the trees had leaves on them when both incidents occurred.)

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 27: ““Her head’s smashed in, but Cooper found petechial hemorrhaging and some possible ligature marks on her neck, too, so we’ll have to wait for the post for cause of death.”” – A small purplish spot on a body surface, such as the skin or a mucous membrane.
  .
• p. 36: ““Finds,” said Hunt, flapping a hand at the shelves. “I suppose . . . Well, no, maybe some other time. Some very nice jettons and clothing hooks.”” – an inscribed counter or token.
  .
• p. 105: “A rustle, and the beams skidding up to cross on a pair of golden eyes, rocking wild and luminous only a few trees away; all of us yelling, and Jamie leaping up to fire a spare satsuma as the thing bounded away with a crash of leaves.” – A seedless mandarin orange native to Japan and the hardiest commercial citrus fruit.
  .
• p. 110: ““That _________ lad used to be a bit of a bowsie, so he did, but the moment he got that young one in the family way – sure, he wasn’t the same fella at all.”” – a Dublin term-for a scumbag/Kancker/scanger.
  .
• p. 208: “A drop had got caught in her eyelashes and a black mascara tear trickled to her cheekbone, making her look like a modish little Pierrette.” – the female counterpart of a Pierrot, usually accompanying him, as in an entertainment or masquerade.
  .
• p. 217: ““Little gurriers,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said with relish. “Spitting on the ground and all. My father always said that was a sure sign of bad rearing, spitting.”” – Irish pejorative for a person who is associated with petty criminality.
  .
• p. 248: ““If that motorway doesn’t go through Knocknaree, and fast,” Sam said succinctly, “the boy’s banjaxed.”” – demolished; ruined.
  .

124. The Cave and the Cathedral: How a Real-Life Indiana Jones and a Renegade Scholar Decoded the Ancient Art of Man by Amir D. Aczel (2009)

Length: 242 pages

Genre: Non-Fiction; Archaeology

Started: 12 October 2009
Finished: 15 October 2009

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? I saw the title on my library’s “new books” RSS feed and thought it sounded interesting.

Fiction fans know the
real story of the cave art.
Ayla painted it!

Summary: The prehistoric cave paintings of Western Europe are one of the most enduring mysteries of archeology and paleoanthropology. Painted between 32,000 and 12,000 years ago, the painted animals and symbols are extraordinary – representative not only of symbolic thought in our ancestors, but also of deep dedication – for they are most frequently in deep, nearly inaccessible reaches of caves – surely a daunting prospect for a Cro-Magnon artist lacking modern high-powered flashlights. Furthermore, while each cave varies slightly in its content, the style is remarkably similar, even though two caves may be separated by 20,000 years and half a continent. Many explanations for the purpose of the paintings have been put forward over the years, and in the book, Aczel discusses the merits of several of these hypotheses, but ultimately acknowledges that we can never truly know what these early artists were thinking, and that the caves can only give us the smallest glimpse into the mindset of early man.

Review: I really enjoyed the first half of this book. In it, Aczel describes the various painted caves, and gives a very good overview of the type and variety of its art, as well as a very good impression of its grandeur and wonder – which is especially nice for those of us who have never been fortunate enough to see a painted cave. I do wish there had been more photographs (there *are* 16 color plates in the center), for as well as Aczel tries to describe them, something is always lost in translating pictures to words. Plus, having the pictures as diagrams in the text would have been helpful for times when I was trying to compare his text to actual pictures, and couldn’t make the two match (for instance, he says that one of the spotted horses in the cave at Peche Merle has a red fish on its back, which I am just not seeing at all.) But, overall, I learned a lot about the cave paintings, and since that was my main purpose in reading the book, that at least was a success.

Where it broke down for me is when Aczel started getting into the various interpretations of what the cave art means. Aczel is a man with a point of view. I get that it’s impossible not to have an opinion about the cave paintings; this is not impartial journalistic non-fiction, and there is one interpretation of the cave paintings that he thinks is right, so he structured his book accordingly. However, I didn’t feel like he made his case especially convincingly, often dismissing other theories and theorists out of hand, without fully dismantling their arguments. (He seemed to have a particular bone to pick with Jean Clottes, another scholar of prehistory.) For instance, he dismisses the idea that the paintings were a form of hunting magic because very few of the animals are depicted as wounded. Personally, I think this shows a lack of imagination as to how the hunting magic may have worked; the relative lack of paintings of the most common prey species (reindeer and ibex) is a much more damning argument.

The theory he does favor suggests that the paintings are a representation of a worldview that focused on duality, particularly of sexual duality, with paintings of bison (female) being frequently paired with paintings of horses (male), and with these animals being accompanied by various signs and symbols that have also been classified as male or female. While I have no real opinion on the validity of this or any other theory (not being an archaeological expert), Aczel certainly seems to be more lenient about the weaknesses of his pet theory than he is for any other, and as such, his argument was never entirely convincing.

For example, compare these sets of quotes – one about a theory he’s trying to disprove, and one about the theory he likes:

“There seems to be a deep inner structure to Paleolithic parietal art that is unlikely – in my estimation – to have occurred as the result of a shaman’s requirements.” (p. 151, about the idea that the cave art was part of some religious/shamanic ritual… after a chapter where he goes to Alaska to ask some Inuit peoples about their native art)

vs.

“But, of course, we must avoid making any comparisons or implications based on living societies. And we should only interpret ideas very cautiously and propose theories that can be scientifically supported.” (p. 174)

“Numbers can be arranged in so many possible ways, and there is also the risk that people in search of certain patterns discard or ignore bones or rocks that bear other numbers of markings, leaving them with only the specially selected ones that they think provide evidence for whatever theory they want to prove. [...] There is even a mathematical theorem (Furstenberg’s Theorem) that specifies conditions under which any pattern whatsoever can be found in a large-enough collection of possibilities.” (p. 165-6, discussing a theory that some symbols were arranged in groups of 29, making them either astronomical (lunar), or concerned with fertility (menstrual), or both.)

vs.

“Sometimes this coupling [of a horse and a bison] was easily discerned, and at other times one had to look around – but it was always there. In some cases, the secondary animals intervened and masked this pattern, but once you knew what to look for, you could always find it.” (p. 191)

I also think the subtitle is overblown – the “real-life Indiana Jones” was a French abbé named Henri Breuil, who became the first real expert on paleolithic art; the “renegade scholar” is André Leroi-Gourhan, who I’m certain is highly intelligent, although I’m not sure that having a new interpretation of existing data really qualifies one as a “renegade”. Finally, I think the mystery of the cave art is far from “decoded”… multiple (mostly untestable) explanations for the paintings still exist, and perhaps that’s for the best; I’m okay with leaving human history with a little bit of a sense of mystery and wonder. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: If you’re interested in the topic and are looking for a readable source of basic information, this book will suit your needs quite well. If you’re looking for a balanced or well-argued examination of competing interpretations and theories… not so much.

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First Line: One of the greatest mysteries of the human experience on Earth – if not the greatest mystery of all – is the appearance, around 32,000 years ago, of magnificent paintings, drawings, and engravings of animals inside deep and often almost inaccessible recesses of large Ice Age caverns in France and Spain (and a small number of cases in southern Italy).

Cover Thoughts: I like the shadowy cave paintings at the top, but the light shining through the cave opening isn’t very obvious – they could have found a clearer picture.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 94: “Next to it lies a man, face up with spread arms. His fingers are birdlike (there are four of them), and his face is that of a bird. Next to him, on a pole stuck in the ground, is a bird whose face resembles that of the man. The man is ithyphallic.” – Having the penis erect; used when discussing graphic and sculptural representations. (I figured as much from context, but had never heard the term before.)
  .
• p. 99: “The wide “tectiform” signs he interpreted as perhaps representing traps, because he was convinced that success in the hunt was a key reason that prehistoric man had created the art of the caves.” – having the shape of a roof or dwelling.
  .
• p. 125-6: “As Broderick described it, “There are animals, eland, oryx, springbox, an antelope with man’s arms and legs, an oryx with human hindquarters, a hartebeest with human hindlegs, a man with a crocodile’s head, a white man disguised as a baboon; there are twenty-eight human figures, including the crocodile-man, musicians, and others, steatopygous women; the procession is led by two youth who, like the crocodile-man, are infibulated.” – to stitch the fold of skin that covers the head of the penis. (My, I’m just learning all kinds of naughty words today, aren’t I?)
  .

Happy Sunday, all!

First, a little bit of read-a-thon prep: I am going to try not to overload everyone’s feed readers with constant postings. I really liked the way I did it in spring: one post that I would edit every hour or so with my progress since the last edit. It probably cut down on the number of comments I got, since I didn’t have new posts going up all of the time, but it kept things streamlined, and I like being able to look back and track my progress through time.

On that note, I’m offering up the spreadsheet I use for my Read-a-Thon tracking (which, as a point of interest, I am *still* unable to type as anything other than read-a-thong). You enter in: your local time zone, what books you’re reading, what page number you’ve reached at each hour mark, and how much of each hour you’ve spent reading (or listening to audiobooks), and it tells you how many pages you’ve read each hour, your cumulative page count, and your total reading time. It doesn’t make pretty graphs or calculate lots of stats or anything, but if you’ve got ideas, let me know and I’ll see if I can work them in. You can download it at the link above.

I had big plans to get lots of things accomplished today, reviews to write and work to get caught up on, but my parents were visiting this weekend, which was nice, but they didn’t leave until almost one, and then my book (In the Woods by Tana French) was really, really good. Between this, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I’m starting to re-think my aversion to detective stories and police procedurals. Mystery readers: any recommendations (apart from the sequels to these books, which I’m already on top of) as to where I should look next?

Also, don’t forget that I’ve got an awesome giveaway going; Tor is letting me give away THREE sets of The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan and Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. You can enter (by the end of this coming Wednesday) over at the giveaway post.

122. Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris (2004)
Southern Vampire Mysteries, Book 4

Read my review of book:
1. Dead Until Dark
2. Living Dead in Dallas
3. Club Dead

Length: 292 pages
Genre: Fantasy; Mystery; Romance

Started: 07 October 2009
Finished: 10 October 2009

Where did it come from? Amazon.
Why do I have it? I bought the box set after reading the first book.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 10 September 2009.
Verdict? Keeper.

Turns out it’s not just
Eric’s personality
that makes him so hot.

Summary: Dealing with (and dating) the supernatural community of northern Louisiana has brought Sookie Stackhouse nothing but problems, so she’s made a New Year’s resolution: this year, she’s going to stay out of trouble… and stay out of the business of vampires, werewolves, and shapeshifters. However, that resolution becomes somewhat harder to keep when she’s driving home and sees the viking vampire Eric Northman, mostly naked, along the side of the road, fleeing for his life. He has no memory of who he is, who Sookie is, or what happened to him, and Sookie agrees to hide him while his vampire compatriots work to figure it out, and stop those responsible. But having Eric in the house puts Sookie right back in danger, and when her brother Jason disappears without a trace, it becomes clear that her resolution isn’t working… but staying away from vampires is hard when you’ve got a sweet, gentle, and extremely hot (albeit amnesiac) one following you around like a devoted puppy.

Review: Oh, this one was really, really good. It’s the same fun mixture of romance and fantasy and mystery and chick-lit as the rest of the series, but it comes together much more smoothly here. I liked that Harris continues to expand the borders of her supernatural world; we get our first glimpse of witches and fairies, as well as more information on how weres and shifters work. I liked that Jason got more screen time, as well as some stuff to do, and promise of a more prominent role in future books. I liked that Bill, who in recent books had kind of started seriously sucking (and not in the fun sexy vampiric way), was absent for most of the book, and when he was around, I enjoyed watching him get some small measure of comeuppance. I liked that Alcide was back, although there are definitely some lingering emotional threads with him that could have been better developed. I liked all of that… but I loved amnesiac Eric. While the whole book was good, I found myself getting antsy during the daylight scenes, just because it meant that there was no chance of funny, sweet, and sexy-as-hell Eric turning up. But, really, the book ticked along at a fast pace, the plotting was much smoother than it has been previously, there were lots of individually great scenes, and plenty of interesting set up for future books… so I’m very excited to see what happens next. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Best one in the series so far.

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Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: I found the note taped to my door when I got home from work.

Cover Thoughts: Cute, and actually depicting a scene from the book. I also like that It took me several times of looking at it to notice that there were wolves mixed in among the tombstones.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 65: “They were supposed to look like silk, but I was sure they were some artificial blend. Too slithery for me; I liked percale.” – a closely woven, smooth-finished, plain or printed cotton cloth, used for bed sheets.
  .
• p. 221: ““I abjure you,” __________ said.” – to renounce or give up under oath; forswear; avoid or shun.

121. An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon (2009)
Outlander, Book 7

Read my review of book:
1. Outlander
2. Dragonfly in Amber
3. Voyager
4. The Drums of Autumn
5. The Fiery Cross
6. A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Length: 821 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction

Started: 27 September 2009
Finished: 10 October 2009

Where did it come from? The library. (First on the holds list, woohoo!)
Why do I have it? Please. That’s not even a question you have to ask, is it?

Who knows how the past
would have turned out if Jamie
weren’t there causing it?

Summary: The American Revolution is in full swing, and while its effects haven’t quite reached to Fraser’s Ridge yet, Claire and Jamie know what’s coming. They decide to return to Scotland to get Jamie’s printing press, and help the war effort that way, as Jamie’s feeling a bit to old to be a regular soldier… plus he does not want to run the risk of facing William, his illegitimate son who is now an officer in the British Navy, across the lines of battle. But of course, nothing in Jamie and Claire’s life ever runs according to plan, and they must face press gangs, murderous sea captains, Indians, British troops, blackmailers, supply shortages, medical emergencies, treason, old foes, and new complications before they can face down the spectres of the past and finally begin to realize the future that Claire knows is coming.

Oh, also, Brianna and Roger are readjusting to life in the 1980s, and realizing that history may be more malleable than they’d previously thought.

Review: I read in an interview somewhere that Gabaldon wants to continue the Outlander series until 1800. At the time, I dismissed that as flatly impossible… 1800 would make Jamie and Claire pushing ninety, which seems remarkably unlikely, even given Claire’s medical training and knowledge of nutrition. In An Echo in the Bone, however, it becomes clear for the first time how Gabaldon means to shift her focus to the next generation. Brianna, Roger, Young Ian, and William take much more of the spotlight in this book, and while the book still resolves around the Jamie and Claire – who, let’s be honest, are the characters that everyone loves, and the reason most of us keep reading – it’s clear that the torch is preparing to be passed.

Jamie and Claire aren’t going to fade into the background just yet, however; they’re both still healthy and spry and getting into all sorts of trouble, and still going at it like randy teenagers whenever the opportunity presents itself (I will admit to mentally editing them back down to their Outlander-era ages whenever they were Doin’ It. Plus, there was a rather lengthy discussion on the frequency of red vs. gray hairs above vs. below Jamie’s neck that I just really, really didn’t need. Aaanyways.) Gabaldon’s characters really do feel like family, and while not every episode leads somewhere that advances the plot, almost all of the chapters feel like spending time with old friends.

The exception was William. While we’ve spent plenty of time with young Ian, and Brianna and Roger, and thus love them (almost) as much as we do Jamie and Claire, this is the first we’ve really seen of William as an adult… and we get a lot of his POV chapters, and man alive, did I find them dull. This was also the first time where Gabaldon assumed that her Outlander readers had also read the Lord John books… which I haven’t, and as a consequence, I was almost completely lost for most of Lord John’s POV chapters.

Other than that, though, this book ticked along nicely, with plenty of action, plenty of humor, and more than once where it managed to wring real tears out of my cold dead heart. It’s got all of the things that I love about this series, plus it ends with major cliffhangers in just about everyone’s storylines, so it’s clear that Gabaldon’s not done yet. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Don’t start the series here, obviously. But for Outlander fans, this book feels like a return home, as well as a start to plenty of interesting things to come.

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Other Reviews: Book-a-rama, Books I Done Read, Mom Musings
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First Line: The pirate’s head had disappeared.

Cover Thoughts: Do I know why this is the black book? No… but did I know why Drums of Autumn was turquoise? No. I’m a big sucker for Celtic knotwork, though, so as these series covers go, I like it.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 12: “And a commander given to spitting on the floor – Richard Howe had once spat on Grey himself, though this was largely accidental, the wind having changed unexpectedly – was possibly easier for a young subaltern to deal with than the quirks of some other military gentlemen of Grey’s acquaintance.” – a commissioned officer below the rank of captain.
  .
• p. 42: “The rattle of wood, the clang of a falling pewter dish, and voices raised in adjuration inside saved me from reply.” – an earnest request; entreaty.
  .
• p. 59: “William took the spontoon, seven feet long, its burnished steel head gleaming dully even under the clouded sky, and felt the weight of it thrill through his arm.” – a shafted weapon having a pointed blade with crossbar at its base, used by infantry officers in the 17th and 18th centuries.
  .
• p. 60: “He’d not worn uniform for nearly two months and, rain-damp or not, felt its resumption to be a glorious apotheosis.” – the elevation or exaltation of a person to the rank of a god.
  .
• p. 74: ““Wouldn’t never’ve guessed,” the pipe-smoker said, grinning round the stem of her pipe. “Thought ‘ee was a jakesman, sure!”” – Night-scavenger.
  .
• p. 97: “He’d been fifteen when he left Scotland – a tall, scrawny gowk of a boy.” – a fool or simpleton.
  .
• p. 114: “The baby’s sex was edematous; it did look much like a little boy’s equipment, [...] , but wasn’t.” – effusion of serous fluid into the interstices of cells in tissue spaces or into body cavities.
  .
• p. 124: “He’d not paid much mind to the stars when he was home in the Highlands, and you couldn’t see stars at all in Edinburgh, for the smoke of the reeking lums.” – not clear… is this maybe a typo for slums?
  .
• p. 129: “Hal disliked the man, and hadn’t approved at all of William’s working for him, though he had nothing concrete to adduce against him.” – to bring forward in argument or as evidence; cite as pertinent or conclusive.
  .
• p. 162: ““But they’ve no money these days – no one does. I’ll take a chicken or a flitch of bacon – but half of them haven’t got so much as that.”” – the side of a hog (or, formerly, some other animal) salted and cured.
  .
• p. 211: “This, added to the mephitis still tainting the atmosphere, caused a number of other gentlemen to vomit, as well, and William felt his own gorge rise, but controlled it by vicious nose-pinching.” – any noisome or poisonous stench.
  .
• p. 242: “Glancing toward the sound, he perceived that what he had thought to be merely a heap of rumpled bedclothes in fact contained a body; the elaborately passementeried tassel of a nightcap trailed across the pillow.” – trimmed with braid, cord, bead, etc.
  .
• p. 272: ““Mom would give me laldy if I just went off wi’ no word.”” – to put in 100% effort, pull out all the stops, and do so with great enthusiasm or gusto.
  .
• p. 348: ““We will take some refreshment in the library,” Amandine was saying. “Plainly you are perishing of cold and inanition.”” – exhaustion from lack of nourishment; starvation; lack of vigor; lethargy.
  .
• p. 361: “Your father is commanding a crew of laborers at work on this bridge; I can see him just now, from my perch on one of the fort’s demilune batteries.” – an outwork resembling a bastion with a crescent-shaped gorge.
  .
• p. 371: “Her name had been Margery, and he had written a perfervid panegyric to her.” – very fervent; extremely ardent; impassioned.
  .
• p. 471: “By simple chance, they stumbled upon William’s tent first, and he invited Balcarres to join him in a glass of negus before bed.” – a beverage made of wine and hot water, with sugar, nutmeg, and lemon.
  .
• p. 498: “I was walking slowly across the field, conducting a mental triage – the man on the stretcher there was going to die, probably before nightfall; I could here the rales of his breathing from six feet away – when I caught sight of movement on the cabin’s porch.” – an abnormal crackling or rattling sound heard upon auscultation of the chest, caused by disease or congestion of the lungs.
  .
• p. 510: “Denny’s stomach echoed mine, rumbling with a series of great borborygmi.” – a rumbling or gurgling sound caused by the movement of gas in the intestines. (There’s a word for that? That’s excellent.)
  .
• p. 515: “Jamie had told him about his wife’s experiments with the substance, with a full account of the amazing operation she had performed on a young boy, he rendered completely senseless as she opened his abdomen, removed an offending organ, and sewed him back together. After which the child was right as a grig, apparently.” – a cricket or grasshopper, a small or young eel, or a lively person.
  .
• p. 569-70: “He had met Simon Fraser of Balnain two or three times, but when they were both lads in the Highlands – Simon was a few years younger, and Jamie’s vague memories of a small, round, cheerful wee lad who trotted after the older boys, waving a shinty stick taller than himself, had nothing in common with the stout, solid man who rose now in his stirrups, calling out and brandishing his sword, attempting to rally his panicked troops by sheer force of personality.” – a Scotch game resembling hockey.
  .
• p. 573: “He scrabbled with his feet clawing for purchase on the logs of the abatis, got one hand through a gap and onto a log, but lost his grip on the flaking bark and fell back, landing bruisingly on his rifle and knocking out his wind.” – an obstacle or barricade of trees with bent or sharpened branches directed toward an enemy.
  .
• p. 586: ““Some do. What of it?” I said, taking a good grip on my spurtle and staring him down.” – a stick used to stir porridge.
  .
• p. 594: “Slowly, slowly, he put out a hand to her, the fingers moving without his will, slowly, as though to guddle a trout.” – to catch (fish) by groping with the hands, as under rocks or along a riverbank.
  .
• p. 602: ““Ever heard of coup de foudre, Sassenach? It didna take me more than one good look at you.”” – love at first sight.
  .
• p. 634: “One dealt mostly with cases of venereal disease, another was an accoucher, and the third was plainly a quacksalver of the worst sort.” – a person who assists during childbirth, esp. an obstetrician; a quack doctor.
  .
• p. 640: “Possibly we could acquire a fresh bridie from a street vendor, I thought, hastening in Jamie’s wake.” – a Scottish pastry made of minced beef, sometimes with onions and spices, placed on rolled-out pastry, folded into a semi-circular shape, and finally baked in an oven.
  .
• p. 641: “Applied externally, it is emollient, relaxing, and discutient, and greatly promotes suppuration.” – causing dispersal or disappearance of a pathological accumulation.
  .
• p. 650: “I had a fresh quire of good-quality paper.” – a set of 24 uniform sheets of paper.
  .
• p. 674: ““And now ye come back from America, fardeled up like an English popinjay.”” – No idea.
  .
• p. 691: ““You said it was important, aye? So we’ll have the negroamaro.”” – a red wine grape variety native to southern Italy.
  .
• p. 696: “Ian’s long, knob-jointed hands on the gralloch knife, the wrench and hot metal smell of the blood that smeared his fingers, the look of his brown hair ruffling in the wind off the loch, the narrow back, bent and springy as a bow as he stooped to snatch one of his toddling bairns or grandchildren off their feet and throw them giggling into the air.” – Offal of a deer. So, presumably the knife used for removing of such.
  .
• p. 731: “Rachel Hunter put one hand to her stomach, another to her mouth, and stifled a rising eructation.” – The act or an instance of belching.
  .

If you follow fantasy news at all, you will know that there is Big News happening this month… the publication of The Gathering Storm, the 12th volume of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, on 27 October.

Unfortunately, Jordan passed away before he could complete the series, but the helm was passed to fantasy author (and WoT fan) Brandon Sanderson. Using Jordan’s notes and drafts, Sanderson is completing the final volumes to bring the epic series to a conclusion.

I have gushed about Sanderson on this blog before (my reviews of most of Sanderson’s books), but I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the Wheel of Time, for the simple reason that I read (and re-read) the whole thing several years before I started blogging. WoT has its ardent supporters and its vicious haters, and I fall decisively among the former. It was among the first fantasy I read as an adult, and I consider it to be the series that got me hooked on the genre as a whole. It certainly has its problems (excessive length that drags in some of the later books), but I fell so in love with Jordan’s world, and his characters, and their stories, that they have remained vivid and detailed in my mind, even years after the last time I re-read any of the books.

Aaaanyways. Enough about me. Let’s talk about you… and more specifically, how you can win not one but TWO fantastic fantasy novels.

In honor of the upcoming release of The Gathering Storm, Tor Books is giving away sets of The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, and Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, the first novels of fantasy series by the two great authors completing the new Wheel of Time book. They’ve been generous enough to let me give away THREE sets of both books to my lucky, lucky readers… that means you!

To Enter:
1) Leave a comment below telling me about your favorite bookish first… a first novel, a first scene, a first line, whatever.
2) Make sure that the e-mail you put in the appropriate blank is one you check frequently, as that is how I will be contacting the winners. You do not need to put your e-mail address in the text of the comment, nor will I use the address for any other purpose.
3) Entries are due by 23:59 EST on Wednesday 21 October 2009.
4) Contest is open to those with a mailing address in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K.

These are both great books. C’mon, get hooked on some excellent fantasy series. I dare you!

123. Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick (2009)
Fallen Angels, Book 1

Hush, Hush is published by Simon & Schuster and will be released tomorrow, 13 October 2009.

Length: 392 pages
Genre: Young Adult; Fantasy; I’m sure it’s supposed to be Paranormal Romance, but since I don’t find stalking romantic, we’re going to stick with just YA Fantasy.

Started: 11 October 2009
Finished: 11 October 2009

Where did it come from? From the publishers for review.
Why do I have it? I was hoping for good teen paranormal romance, alas.
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 28 July 2009

Angels are the new
vampires, but stalking still
just isn’t sexy.

Summary: When Nora is assigned a new partner in biology class, she’s pretty unhappy. She’s even more unhappy when her new partner, Patch, seems to know all of her secrets… while clearly hiding more than a few of his own. Patch seems like nothing but trouble, and more than a little dangerous, but he won’t leave her alone, and despite herself, Nora finds herself falling for him. But she begins to suspect that Patch isn’t exactly human… and that there might be more to his pursuit of her than meets the eye.

Review: When I first got this book, read the back cover, and realized it was a straight-up Twilight clone, I was very afraid it was going to be equally silly or rage-inducing, or possibly both. Still, I was hopeful – I thought the same about Wicked Lovely and wound up loving it, so I was willing to be surprised again.

I should have trusted my instincts the first time.

…which, ironically enough, is my main problem with the book. To back up a little bit: Patch is stalking Nora. Nora a) realizes that he is stalking her; b) can sense that he is Bad News; c) knows that she should run screaming in the opposite direction; but d) doesn’t, because he’s also sexy and alluring. Roughly every other paragraph contains some variation on the following internal monologue: “Patch is stalking me. But he’s hot! But he’s dangerous. But dangerousness is sexy! But I’m having serious misgivings about this situation. But he’s really, really hot!”

The idea that anyone would treat Nora and Patch as romantic ideals is what’s making me so angry. I really wish these books came bundled with a copy of The Gift of Fear, or at least with warning stickers that say “ATTENTION GIRLS: If a guy in real life makes you feel threatened or creeped out, no matter how hot he is, get the hell away from him posthaste.” And I’m sorry, but if a guy was physically blocking me from leaving the room, manhandled me up against a wall, and kissed me with his hands wrapped around my throat? “Little shivers of panic and pleasure shot through me.” would NOT be my first reaction. Pleasure?!? That’s not sexy, that’s sexual abuse.

Even divorcing myself from all of the gender politics issues I had with this book, it was still only a passable read. In its favor: it was a very fast read, and I did stay glued to the pages (mostly waiting for Nora come to her senses.) However, I felt like the pacing was off – we got few to no hints about what was going on, or what Patch’s real story was, until almost the very end – and then there was a rush of exposition that didn’t entirely make sense, and then the book ended. I didn’t really connect with the characters, to the point where I had forgotten Nora’s name less than 24 hours after having finished the book. There are some subplots and mythological details that aren’t worked in particularly well, and a number of small but important-seeming details (Nora’s mental connection to her best friend, the persistent fog around her house) that are brought up occasionally but never explained. The writing itself was mostly innocuous, if somewhat repetitive, although it did contain a few utter howlers (“His eyes looked like they didn’t play by the rules.”)

Of course, my feminist moral outrage about this book’s glorifying of sexual harassment is going to matter not one whit in terms of the number of copies it sells. Twilight fans in all their legions are going to snap it up, since it’s essentially the same book. I just hope most of them use their heads and trust their instincts a little more than does Hush, Hush’s narrator. 2 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Pass, unless you’re feeling the need to get angry and morally righteous about something.

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Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: Chauncey was with a farmer’s daughter on the grassy banks of the Loire River when the storm rolled in, and having let his gelding wander in the meadow, was left to his own two feet to carry him back to the château.

Cover Thoughts: This, I actually really like. It’s very eye-catching, and the black and white makes it very evocative… even more so when you realized the uppermost feathers have a blood-red tinge.

**All quotes are from an advance copy and may not reflect the finished text.**