Book review: Unequal Affections by Lara S. Ormiston

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most common category of Jane Austen fiction is the sequel: Elinor and Marianne are married off so let's get to Margaret, or Mr. and Mrs. Darcy solve murders in the English countryside in the manner of Nick and Nora.  Another category which seems to be growing, however, is the "counterfactual" retelling of the original novels, diverging at a certain point in the narrative and imagining how events might have ensued if the characters made different choices.

The sixty-second book I read in 2015 is just such a novel: Unequal Affections: A Pride & Prejudice Retelling by Lara S. Ormiston.  The author posits that Lizzy accepts Darcy's first proposal in Kent rather than telling him off and imagines how their engagement might follow.

For about the first half of this book, I expected that it might join Pamela Aidan's Darcy trilogy at the top of my list of Austeniana.  The writing and characterization are largely consistent with the original (though surely it should be "Miss Bennet and Miss Elizabeth Bennet" when Jane and Lizzy pay a call, not "Miss Bennet and Miss Bennet"), and the story it tells, of a woman who accepts a proposal of marriage based on the advantages of the man making the offer and her doubt that she'll receive a better rather than overwhelming love, is both undertold and undoubtedly more common to the era than the marriages of true minds that Austen chronicles.

As the engagement drags on, however, Ormiston falls into the fan-fiction trap of letting the characters talk too much.  Jane Austen can be infuriating about not reporting exactly what is said between Emma and Mr. Knightley, but leaving the reader wanting more is better than having them wish Darcy and Elizabeth would just shut up about how wonderful the other partner is.  Ormiston's Darcy requests a short engagement of only a month, but when the betrothed pair spend the entire time talking to or about one another, it's too long for my tastes.  Elope, already.

Lydia's honor is saved in this retelling, despite her best efforts, but we are deprived of Elizabeth's visit to Pemberley.  She won't see it in Ormiston's world until after her marriage.

Book review: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey opens the fifth book in her Inspector Alan Grant series with a swipe at series of novels: "Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.  ...  Their interest was not in the book but in its newness.  They knew quite well what the book would be like."  With such a knowing remark as that one, it should come as no surprise that Tey consciously breaks the expected pattern in The Daughter of Time, the sixty-first book I read in 2015.

Alan is laid up in hospital for the entirety of the novel, recovering from a broken leg suffered while chasing down a suspect.  Bored beyond words by the books sent to him by friends to pass the time (hence the remarks about formulas), he is encouraged by Marta Hallard to explore the coldest of cold cases: historic unsolved mysteries.  Inspired by this contemporary portrait by an unknown artist and aided by a young American scholar, he takes up the rehabilitation of Richard III, whom Shakespeare indelibly marked as a villain.

Richard III is clearly a hobbyhorse of Tey's, and while her arguments that he wasn't the murderer the history written by his enemies portrayed him to be are persuasive, I find Alan's reasoning specious. Tey once again relies on the proposal that a person can be reliably judged by his demeanor, and since Inspector Grant, with his canny sense of people, thinks Richard looks honest, he can't possibly be a devious plotter and premeditated murderer.  Add to this that Alan is basing his judgment on a portrait, rather than a photograph or first-hand sight of the man in question, and that, moreover, he questions the talent and ability of the unknown painter competently to portray the king, and his basis for taking up the investigation in the first place is unsound, no matter how logical the rest of his deductions may be.

Book review: The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff

The sixtieth book I read in 2015 was The Shining Company by Rosemary Sutcliff.  While not part of the Roman Britain trilogy which The Eagle of the Ninth opened, it is a historical novel set on the same island some centuries later, and it's interesting to see how the place names have changed from the map in that book to this one.

Like The Eagle of the Ninth, this book opens with a set of three characters: two boys, one the slave of the other, and a girl.  For a while I was afraid that the character development would parallel that of the earlier book -- that she has a "formula" -- but the triangle in The Shining Company heads in different directions than Marcus, Esca, and Cottia.

Prosper, the younger son of a chieftan, lives in the absence left behind by the Roman Legions, his closest companions his bondservant Conn and his kinswoman Luned.  His childhood is irreversibly marked by two encounters; one with a traveling merchant, Phanes of Syracuse, and his tales of the emperor's court in Constantinople, and the second with Prince Gorthyn who comes to his father's lands to hunt a rare white hart and inspires a lifelong loyalty.  When Prosper comes of age, Gorthyn remembers the boy's impulsive request to ride at his side and takes him as shieldbearer when the great king Mynyddog calls for warriors to repel the Saxons.  Based on the medieval Welsh poem, Y Goddodin, the remainder of the novel imagines the preparation for and carrying out of the Gododdin's attack on Catraeth.

While I didn't enjoy it as much as The Eagle of the Ninth, The Shining Company was an interesting and affecting read and shines some (speculative) light on a period of history about which I know very little.

Book review: To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

The fifty-ninth book I read in 2015 was To Love and Be Wise, the fourth Alan Grant novel by Josephine Tey.  Inspector Grant is picking up recurring will-they-or-won't-they character Marta Hallard for a not-a-date when he happens to meet an arresting American photographer, whose sudden arrival in London upsets the lives and loves of the artsy crowd Tey loves to chronicle.  The upheaval is only exacerbated by the sudden mysterious disappearance of the American, under circumstances that throw suspicion in all directions.

Actress Marta Hallard really comes into her own in this book, having been a recurring character from the beginning of the series.  For the first time, one truly hopes that she and Alan might get unPlatonic.

Tey's grasp of American geography is a bit suspect.  For one thing, she seems to think it entirely reasonable that a photographer of Hollywood stars would live in San Francisco, as if there weren't 400 miles separating it from Los Angeles; for another, she refers to Peoria and "Paduca" (rather than Paducah, Kentucky), at least in my paperback edition.

Book review: The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

The fifty-eighth book I read in 2015 was The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey.  It is, technically, an Inspector Alan Grant novel, in the sense that Grant appears in the book, but he plays a very small part and is, in this case, the enemy.  The sleuth we're following in this book is a small-town solicitor, Robert Blair, pulled into "the Franchise affair" quite against his will.

The Franchise is a house outside of the village, the home of a single woman and her mother who inherited the property a few years earlier.  By the standards of the village, this still makes them newcomers and outsiders, so when the pair are accused of a serious crime, the locals are all too eager to believe ill of them.

With all the resources of Scotland Yard and Inspector Alan Grant arrayed against him, Robert Blair rallies to cast off quotidien affairs, call in favors, and discover resources he never knew he possessed to prove Mrs. and Miss Sharpe innocent.

The book is relentlessly relevant to today's media cycle, with the damage that a mere accusation can wreak painted in vivid detail.  Tey is merciless against do-gooders with various progressive "causes." Unfortunately, there is also a very ugly eugenicist streak on display in her writing, particularly the revelation that the accuser is adopted and the natural daughter not of a respectable middle-class woman (in which case her veracity could not be questioned) but of an unfaithful lower-class wife (in which case she could clearly be nothing but a criminal and liar).

While truth eventually triumphs, Tey is unsentimental about the power of legal vindication to eradicate the effects of prejudice.  (As Mark Twain is rumored to have said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on," and the fact that Twain almost assuredly didn't say it but is still credited with the quotation only proves the point.)  The ending is hopeful, if not traditionally happily-ever-after, and everyone involved with the Franchise affair becomes a better person due to their involvement.

"But they're cousins! Identical cousins, all the way!"

So, yeah, there's this little movie that just opened called "The Force Awakens": you may have heard of it.

No, I haven't seen it yet.  We sat on the sidewalk for hours to see an opening Saturday showing the "The Phantom Menace" back in the day, and that convinced me that seeing a Star Wars movie on opening weekend isn't worth the hassle.  We will see it, but it might not be until after Christmas.

Anyway, obviously, everyone everywhere is doing some sort of Star Wars branding, which led to me reading this analysis of the success or lack thereof of the post-Star Wars careers of the actors involved, which led to me only just now realizing that the fake Amidala/lookalike handmaiden from "Phantom Menace" was played by Kiera Knightley.  All these years, I thought Natalie Portman was doing a Patty Duke/Samantha Stevens lookalike cousin thing with a split screen.

So what lesson can be drawn from this?  Heavily made-up women are interchangeable à la Robert Palmer videos?  Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman ought to play twins?  "The Phantom Menace" explained way too much about midichlorians and trade agreements and used too much CGI and didn't spend enough time on the main characters?  All of the above?

OMG OMG OMG you guys!

Took Eric to Target yesterday for him to pick out a Christmas gift for Faith, and I saw this on the end cap.  He heard my audible gasp of delight as I picked it up and asked what the deal was.

"I loved this doll when I was a little girl!  I had all of them!*  And it's exactly like the one I got when I was seven!"

"Ah," he answered wisely, "childhood memories.  You should buy it!  It will make you happy."

I bought it.  I am happy.

*Technically untrue.  I never got Plum Pudding, which rankled for a while.

Book review: The Martian by Andy Weir

No, I haven't seen the movie, but the hype over the Matt Damon film did motivate me to pick up a copy of The Martian at Half Price Books.  The self-published phenomenon turned bestseller turned box-office smash was the fifty-seventh book I read in 2015.

For the most part, I have to say that the hype is justified (for the novel, anyway; as I said, I haven't seen the movie).  This is a really good book that reminds me of pre-blockbuster Michael Crichton, back when he was writing The Andromeda Strain.

A six-man crew of astronauts on the third manned mission to Mars is forced to evacuate due to a dangerous storm on the surface.  As they are making their way to their ascent module, one man is struck by flying debris.  Unable to find him in the dust storm and convinced that he could not have survived his suit being pierced, the commander gives the order to launch to save the lives of the rest of the crew.

Due to good luck as freakish as his accident, however, Mark Watney survives and returns to consciousness to find himself alone on the planet, with no way home or even to let anyone know he is still alive.  The early chapters of the book, when Mark has to rely completely on his own ingenuity, are the most enjoyable of the book.  Meanwhile, back on Earth, NASA officials first brainstorm a way to wangle the tragedy into funding for another mission; later, satellite pictures show activity on the Mars surface, and they turn their ingenuity to the near-impossible task of a rescue.

A couple of quibbles: first, the depiction of women in the book.  There are two in the crew of the Hermes, and both are competent and capable; the women back on earth, however, fare more poorly.  There are only two named women involved at NASA, one a young functionary, the other in public relations; all the scientists and department heads are men.  Worse, the former, Mindy Park, is depicted as being insecure and envious of the latter, Annie Montrose: "She was everything Mindy wanted to be.  Confident, high-ranking, beautiful, and universally respected within NASA."

I once read a book about the making of Star Trek that I got at a used book fair as a kid.  It described a scene in which the Enterprise was under attack and the crew facing almost certain death, then asked what was wrong with the scene.  The answer?  The captain hugged Yeoman Rand comfortingly as the enemy missile approached.  One of the bylaws of TOS was that female crew members should be treated no differently than male (could have handed down that rule to the costume designers who put them in mini skirts and thigh-high boots, but whatever): if Kirk wouldn't comfort Spock or  Chekhov by cradling them protectively in his arms, he shouldn't do it to Rand or Uhuru.  Would Weir have included an aside where Dr. Venkat Kapoor expresses a pang of envy because Bruce Ng is so handsome and buff?  Then don't depict women as insecure creatures who obsess over physical appearance, either.  (Ahem.)

Worse, confident, high-ranking, universally-respected Annie Montrose insists that they ask Mark Watney to pose for a picture with his faceplate open to distribute to the media and has to have it explained to her that if an astronaut opens his faceplate on the surface of Mars, he'll die.  Does a woman really have to be the one to be so idiotic?  Couldn't she report to her NASA coworkers that a reporter asked her for such a photo and she had to explain that it was impossible?

Second quibble: This book has a lot of cussing in it.  A lot a lot of cussing.  The first sentence is unprintable in a newspaper.  This is a terrific story to inspire young people to take up a career in science, but it's not a book you can give a twelve-year-old to read.  And there's no reason for it.  The few times that sexual intercourse is obliquely referenced, it's "making love" or something similarly unobjectionable, but the other word is used for literally everything else in the narrative just to demonstrate how cool and edgy Mark Watney is.  I can't help but feel that this is a huge missed opportunity for Weir, who is clearly an enthusiastic evangelist for science.

Book review: A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

The fifty-sixth book I read in 2015 was A Shilling for Candles, the second Inspector Alan Grant novel by Josephine Tey.  Famous film star Christine Clay is found drowned on the beach in what at first seems to be a tragic accident, but when the press spies Inspector Alan Grant at the inquest, it becomes clear that it must have been murder!

Tey has a genius for minor characters.  In The Man in the Queue, I was charmed by the artist known only as Struwwelpeter and was disappointed when he had no further role to play past the chapter in which he assisted Inspector Grant in breaking and entering; in this book, Robert Tisdall, similarly sympathetic, has a larger role to play, but the real delight is Erica Burgoyne, she of the hearty appetite and the dogged determination to procure chocolate with raisins.  I'd happily read a book just about her driving around the countryside in Tinny.

Book review: The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

The fifty-fifth book I read in 2015 was The Man in the Queue, an Inspector Alan Grant novel by Josephine Tey.  The first Tey book I read was sent to me by my friend Leslie, probably her most famous book, Brat Farrar.  Having finished the Lord Peter Wimsey books, I decided to move on to more of Tey's genre.

The Man in the Queue is the first Inspector Alan Grant novel, but I don't think it really matters which order one reads them in.  This isn't his first case, and the narrative introduces him with the implication that he is already a well-known figure.  The murder in question was committed in a line for theater tickets.  Despite being surrounded by witnesses, no one noticed the death or the perpetrator, and no one comes forward to identify the victim.

Despite sharing a setting and milieu, Tey's mysteries and Sayers's are very distinct from one another.  It's difficult to imagine Lord Peter working with Inspector Grant in the way he does with Inspector Parker.  Sayers began writing six years before Tey did, and that has made all the difference: her London has a much more old-fashioned feel than Inspector Grant's city.  In addition, Sayers is writing from the point of view of an aristocratic dilettante, Tey from the perspective of a working (though still independently wealthy) common C.I.D. agent.  Tey allows Grant to be fallible -- to suspect the wrong man, even to make a false arrest -- where Lord Peter is more circumspect.  In the language of the game of Clue, Grant suggests and learns from his mistakes; Lord Peter accuses and wins the game.

Book review: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

The fifty-fourth book I read in 2015 was The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.  Another serendipitous find on the clearance shelves of Half Price Books, it's an old-fashioned (1954) historical adventure novel of the kind that used to be in vogue for boys.  I'd heard of the book and didn't see a reason not to take a chance on it for a dollar, and now I'm quite glad I did.

Marcus Flavius Aquila is a Roman centurion in his first command on the British frontier.  He contemplates a long and successful military career and hopes, in the course of it, to uncover the mystery of his father's disappearance.  He led a legion into the north of Britain on a mission from which no one ever returned.

Marcus's chance to recover the lost eagle from the standard of his father's legion comes sooner than he expected and under circumstances he doesn't expect.  With a native gladiator he purchased from the ring, he goes undercover past Hadrian's wall into territory hostile to Rome to discover the fate of the lost Ninth Legion.

The characters of this book are very well-drawn, particularly Marcus's Uncle Aquila, and it's utterly fascinating to my American mind to keep reading the Romans as settlers and the native tribes as Indians and then get drawn up short by the realization that these "savages" are blond and red-headed British and Scots.  Marcus and Esca form an old-fashioned bromance to rival Frodo and Samwise.  This book is the first in a sequence about Old Britain, and I intend to seek out the rest of the series.

The book was recently (2011) made into a movie called "The Eagle," and I shudder to think what a mess it must be, with modern racial resentments read back into it.  It may well be more historically accurate, but it's no longer an adaptation of this book.  Make your own movie about how the Romans mistreated the British tribes, but don't twist someone else's narrative into something it's not and use a familiar title to gain an audience.

Book review: Have You Seen Dawn? by Steven Saylor

The fifty-third book I read in 2015 was Have You Seen Dawn? by Steven Saylor.  Saylor takes a break from Ancient Rome to set a mystery in small-town Texas.

Rue Dunwitty grew up in Amethyst, Texas but now lives and works in San Francisco.  Returning home to visit her aging grandmother, she sees a flyer in the supermarket window about a missing teenager.

There is no shortage of suspects, and it's to Saylor's credit that I never stopped suspecting any of them, so much so that when Rue ends up with one of them, it feels slightly creepy and disturbing rather than an earned happy ending.  The TV-preacher angle was lazy and overdone by the 1980s, and it's disappointing that Saylor couldn't come up with a more compelling motivation for horrific crime than Judeo-Christian Sexual Values.

While the book has a contemporary, Saylor is clearly influenced by the feel of the small-town Texas he knew as a boy.  It's very strange for an Austinite to think of the possession of an SUV or a cell phone as flaunting debaucherous luxury in 2003, and even more so for a San Franciscan to conclude that only a remarkably unfriendly or private person might have Caller ID; it may have been twelve years ago, but I'm pretty sure it came with most phone packages even then.

In addition, the bias of a man who got out of small-town Texas when the getting was good and has never looked back is on emphatic display.  Everyone in Amethyst is fat, old, stupid, closed-minded, unhappily married, or some combination of the above.  As Rod Dreher learned, people can live full and meaningful lives in fly-over country even without escaping to one of the coasts -- or at least to Austin.

On the plus side, Saylor's descriptions of cold Texas days in December were so evocative that while I was reading, I was shocked to walk outside and find it warm, I had been so drawn into his narrative.  That  hasn't happened since I read The Long Winter on a hot summer day as a child.

Book review: The Song of the Quarkbeast by Jasper Fforde

The fifty-second book I read in 2015 was The Song of the Quarkbeast, the second book The Chronicles of Kazam, by Jasper Fforde.  In this sequel to The Last Dragonslayer, Jennifer Strange and the motley crew of wizards at Kazam must win a magical contest against rival group Industrial Magic to protect the separation of magic and state and prevent iMagic's unscrupulous boss, Conrad Blix, from being named Court Mystician.

Unfortunately, Blix is unscrupulous enough not only to claim unearned accolades -- promoting himself from the Amazing Blix to the All-Powerful Blix -- but also to cheat.  Along the way, Jennifer learns the secret of longevity, meets the formerly-Magnificent Boo, goes behind the Troll Wall to rendezvous with the mostly absent Great Zambini, and finally holds a conversation with the Transient Moose.

The book ends with what feels like a farewell to Kazam -- a list of "where are they now" of the main characters -- but the third book of the series just came out last month, so there's still more chronicling of Kazam to come.

Book review: Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips

The fifty-first book in read in 2015 was Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips.  A slim volume first published in 1952, the book purports to examine unsatisfactory conceptions of God commonly held and contrast them with the sufficient God which Phillips claims Christianity, when rightly understood, provides.  I picked up the book as a result of reading Christianity on Trial, the best parts of which were references to this older text.

In the first half of the book, Phillips tears down false images of God, often held, if unexamined, by "churchy" people.  These include God as policeman, parent, or other authority figure, "Jesus, meek and mild" or "the pale Galilean," a pie-in-the-sky God to whom his followers can retreat from the difficulties of the world, and many others.  I found this part of the book the most enjoyable, if not particularly ground-breaking.

Phillips devotes the second half of the book to constructing a representation of God able to meet the needs of modern man.  As he starts from first principles and builds rather predictably toward the Incarnation, this part of the book was less interesting to me.

What I took from this book was something that the author never intended.  In rejecting the conception of God as "Grand Old Man," an old-fashioned type who was greatly influential in His day but out of touch with modernity, Phillips writes, "So great and far-reaching have been the changes in modern life that the young man of today cannot see any but the slenderest connection between what appears to him the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation and the highly-complex fast-moving life of the world today."

The irony!  Because one could quite readily find such a sentence in a contemporary text, with "the slow simple and secure life of a bygone generation" applying to 1952, the very era which Phillips judged "highly-complex and fast-moving!"  May it be a lesson to us today, that there is no notion so transgressive, no technology so bleeding-edge, that a future generation won't find it backward and provincial.

Book review: Just William by Richmal Crompton

The fiftieth book I read in 2015 was Just William by Richmal Crompton.  Published in 1922, it is the first in a series of William Brown books, about a Dennis-the-Menace-type boy and his adventures, most of which heap embarrassment on his hapless family.

These stories are very dated, so much so that one can't help but see them in black-and-white in one's head.  What they remind me of more than anything is the old "Little Rascals"/"Our Gang" serials.  Really: one story deals with William getting a crush on his teacher that could be Jackie Cooper mooning over Miss Crabtree.  Interestingly, the "Our Gang" shorts began filming in 1922 as well.

I read the book wondering if it might be something Eric might like, but the language and conventions are too old-fashioned for him to grasp.  Crompton apparently spent most of her life churning out new installments of the series, with the last published posthumously in 1970.  I wonder if William changed with the times as much as did Ramona Quimby.  Whatever the social problem du jour was, the poor Quimbys always seemed to suffer from it....

Book review: Come Rain or Come Shine by Jan Karon

I began reading Jan Karon's Mitford series more than fifteen years ago, and a new installment is always anticipated.  Come Rain or Come Shine, the thirteenth book in the series, was the forty-ninth book I read in 2015.

It is, in one sense, the spiritual successor to A Common Life, in that it aims to do nothing more than tell the story of a wedding, in this case, that of Dooley Kavanagh and Lace Harper; unlike the tale of Father Tim's and Cynthia's wedding, which was told "out of order" from the ongoing timeline, this story fits right onto the end of the series and thus is free to advance the narrative arc more than the previous book did.

It's a truism that, in a Mitford book, "Jack shall have Jill and nought shall go ill."  God knows one doesn't read them for action or drama.  Yes, Dooley and Lace get married, without any of the kidnappings, disasters, deaths, terminal illnesses, mad wives in attics, cases of cold feet, or bouts of amnesia that so often derail intended weddings in more volatile genres.

But Karon is comfortable leaving a few loose ends, particularly around Dooley's mother and her attempts to reconcile with the children she abused and abandoned.  Everything doesn't get wrapped up in a neat little bow, leaving storylines open for, God willing, a fourteenth Mitford book.  I'll preorder.

Book review: Roma by Steven Saylor

Picking up The Triumph of Caesar on clearance inspired me to begin seeking out the rest of Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series.  While looking for Gordianus books, I ran across Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome.  Not part of the mystery series, Roma is historical fiction which looks in on the descendants of a particular family at certain crucial moments from before the founding of the city to the rise of Octavian through an heirloom passed down over the course of a thousand years.  It's also the forty-eighth book I read in 2015.

On the whole, this is an excellent book for an overview of Roman history.  As a novel, it has some weaknesses, however.  Most of the characters suffer as a result of the short amount of time the narrative focuses on them and, as such, fail to be fully developed.

Woman, in particular, are flat and passive, largely serving to explain the production of the next generation, and those who receive more attention aren't very well-written.  In part, I think this is due to Saylor's desire to combine a realistic narrative with the well-worn legends of Rome.  For example, the chapter which recounts the tale of Verginia also features an unmarried friend who has quickies in the alley of a crowded marketplace with her suitor.  Would a patrician maiden really engage in such casual sex in a society in which a father could perform an honor-killing after his daughter was raped and be lauded for it?  The desire to depict modern sexual relationships conflicts badly with the (probably mythical) purity of the Old Days Livy was harking back to some four hundred years later.

I most enjoyed a demythologizing chapter explaining what might be the origin of the myth of Hercules and Cacus.  The chapters describing the old Republic and how quickly political differences devolved into mass violence and bloodshed, particularly the fate of the Gracchi, make the rise of Julius Caesar and the birth of Imperial Rome seem a blessing.  Historical figures such as Sulla also feature in the Roma Sub Rosa series, and the separate genre allows Saylor to characterize them differently.  Sulla certainly appears less vile in Roman Blood than he shows himself in the chapter "Heads in the Forum."

Book review: 100 Cupboards by N. D. Wilson

The forty-seventh book I read in 2015 was 100 Cupboards by N. D. Wilson. Faith read this one before me; I'd heard good things about the trilogy and picked up a copy at Half Price Books.

Henry York is sent to live with an aunt and uncle in small-town Kansas when the overprotective parents he has never been comfortable with disappear in South America.  At first, his new living situation seems to be a welcome second chance at normalcy.  That's before the plaster in the wall of his attic bedroom begins to crack, to reveal the first of ninety-nine small cupboards, which don't open onto the Kansas prairie but into separate worlds.

There's a lot of Narnia in this book, particularly the Wood between the Worlds of The Magician's Nephew, a bit of A Wrinkle in Time, and several sly Easter eggs to The Wizard of Oz.

Book review: Mr. Monk and the New Lieutenant by Hy Conrad

The forty-sixth book I read in 2015 was Mr. Monk and the New Lieutenant by Hy Conrad.  This nineteenth installment of the Mr. Monk series serves as a sort of a reset on the Monk universe, realigning beloved old characters alongside the mainstays, so it's a disappointment that this is, barring an unforeseen revival, the last of the Monk novels.

As a result of the events of the previous book, Amy Devlin, Leland Stottlemeyer's second-in-command, resigns her position to move back nearer her family, and the "new lieutenant" of the title is an old irritant to Monk.  The action of the story centers around a judge and Captain Stottlemeyer himself being targeted for murder.  While the captain recovers from the attempt on his life, Monk and Natalie have to work with Lieutenant Thurman, a situation to which Monk responds with authentically Monk denial:

"No, that's unacceptable.  What about Lieutenant Devlin?  She can come back, at least until the captain is safe."
"I already asked her.  She said no."
"What about Randy Disher?  He can come back."
Randy had been the captain's number two for years, until he'd found a better job on the other side of the country.  "Randy's a police chief in New Jersey.  He's not coming back."
"You don't know that.  Okay, what about Lieutenant Devlin?"
"I just told you."
"What about Randy Disher?  I'm giving you all these options."

When it appears that the attacks are related to an old case, Randy Disher does make an appearance and becomes thoroughly depressed that apparently he wasn't important enough for the killer to target him as well.

While it's disappointing that there won't be any more Monk mysteries, all good things must come to an end, and this is a satisfying conclusion to the story, one that leaves the characters refreshed, reunited, and primed for new adventures.

Book review: A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers

The forty-fifth book I read in 2015 was A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers.  My opinion of Paton Walsh's continuation of the Lord Peter Wimsey series has not improved since Thrones, Dominations.  Rather, in fact, the opposite.

Notice the reversal of the authors' names in comparison to the first book: Sayers's sole contribution to this volume, which earns her the byline, is a collection of wartime letters written to and by her characters.  I found them rather off-putting and was unsurprised to read that they were, in effect, war-effort propaganda published in 1939 and 1940, in some of the darkest moments of World War II for Great Britain.

Paton Walsh's mystery story centers around the effects of the war on the homefront in Paggleham, where Lady Peter is living with her children and nephew and nieces in the country while Lord Peter and Bunter are spying on the Continent.  The village is having a practice air raid, for which they prove remarkably ill-prepared.  The complaining of the village folk, whom Paton Walsh clearly wants to denigrate as selfish and provincial, stands in stark contrast to the flood in The Nine Tailors, where Sayers depicts the capable and self-effacing populace rising to the occasion with aplomb under more dangerous circumstances and with less advance notice.  During the practice air raid, a young woman is killed on the streets, a murder which Harriet is obliged to investigate on her own unless and until her husband returns.

I suppose it's not spoileriffic, considering Paton Walsh has already written two more "New Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mysteries," to reveal that he does, in fact, finally return, but I don't really need to know how many times he pleasures his wife before taking his boots off.  Paton Walsh includes a lot more sex (and gore) in her books than Sayers, which is unsurprising considering the age but still disappointing in light of the fact that these are meant to be a continuation of the same novel line and not a new series set in the same time period but with modern literary sensibilities.

What really annoyed me was this thought Paton Walsh placed in Harriet's head on page 331: "And there was a conundrum here: who had he killed?"  I hope that both Sayers and Harriet Vane, as writers, would know that the question should be 'whom had he killed!'

As stated above, there are two more books in the series at this point, both of which are attributed solely to Jill Paton Walsh.  I began reading The Attenbury Emeralds and did not finish.  The list of books I began reading and didn't finish is a short one, short enough that those books I set down in disgust, unable to finish or unwilling to subject myself to the misery of continued reading remain ready to hand in my mind, for the most part.  The Ambassadors by Henry James: just too mind-numbingly boring.  The Walrus and the Warwolf by Hugh Cook: I despised every character in it and couldn't stand to spend any more time with them.  The Pickwick Papers: God forgive me, I enjoy almost everything Charles Dickens ever wrote in spite of myself, even the blatant heart-tugging sob stories, and the March girls loved it so, but Pickwick and his friends are the Dumb and Dumber of their age.  Well, add to that short list The Attenbury Emeralds.

Where to begin with the sins of The Attenbury Emeralds?  Well, start with the fact that it opens with a list of characters, a crutch Dorothy Sayers never felt the need for as she respected the intelligence of her readers.  Go on to the fact that first several chapters are nothing but Peter, Harriet, and Bunter sitting in a room talking at each other, just clever dialogue atop too-clever dialogue.  And the reason for this logorrhea?  Because in all their years of courtship and marriage, Peter apparently never told Harriet about his first case, the one that got him started detecting.  Likely, no?

Add the unbearably anachronistic classism (reverse classism?) where all the aristocracy are unbearable snobs who have nothing but contempt for the lower classes except for Peter, noble, shell-shocked Peter, who prefers the company of servants to that of his own social milieu because they're so salt of the earth.  And the absolute nadir is Paton Walsh dropping The Honorable Freddy's "The Honorable" and actually allowing a character to refer to Lord Peter as Lord Wimsey, with no one raising an eyebrow or correcting his appalling faux pas.

We get it, sweetie: You're democratic, progressive, anti-establishment, probably socialist.  Go fight the system in your own darn books instead of using Dorothy Sayers's name and reputation to ride your hobby-horse.

Book review: Mr. Monk Is Open for Business by Hy Conrad

The forty-fourth book I read in 2015 was Mr. Monk Is Open for Business by Hy Conrad, the eighteenth in a series of novels based on the successful USA network detective series.  We were big fans of the show during its run, and I've enjoyed the book series.  (Tommy felt the idiosyncrasies of the main character diverged too much from the baseline established in the TV series.)

To be fair, he's not wrong.  The Mr. Monk of the novels is even more crippled by his phobias than his depiction on the show, largely because the author has more time and space to demonstrate, say, that Monk is afraid of elevators due to claustrophobia and acrophobia by having him go to great lengths to avoid riding in one whereas, in an hour-long show, the writers are more concerned with covering all the necessary bases of the murder investigation and are happy to put Monk in an elevator just to get to the money scene.  The most egregious discrepancy that comes to mind is that novel-Monk has a positively crippling case of coulrophobia while TV-Monk has interacted with clowns at carnivals and circuses while demonstrating only minor annoyance.

(And, to be fair to the novels, it's not like the TV writers were unswervingly consistent with his quirks from week to week, either.)

Despite the fact, the great thing about the novel line is that it was written by two men -- first Lee Goldberg, then Hy Conrad -- who were both writers on the show.  As a result, all of the dialogue is just right for the characters: you can actually hear the actors from the show saying the lines as you read.  Since the novel line began during the show's original run but continued after it ended, the books not only gave the characters further development but introduced new ones that (mostly) feel organic.

One of the new characters that didn't work, from my perspective, was a new love interest for Adrian Monk.  This novel opens having gotten rid of her, which is always a good thing.  The premise is that Natalie has gotten her P.I. license and is opening their own business rather then depending on consults with the Police Department.  The show flirted with the idea in the 5th-season episode "Mr. Monk, Private Eye," and it's somewhat surprising that the book doesn't acknowledge the fact, though less surprising that Natalie doesn't bring it up, since neither of them considered the endeavor a great success.  The cases in the book are brought to them by two recurring characters new to the novels, Natalie's AA sponsor and Randy Disher's replacement as Stottlemeyer's lieutenant.

Book review: Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh

When I read The Nine Tailors and the last stories in Lord Peter, in one sense, I had read all there was to read about Lord Peter Wimsey.  However, I already knew that a contemporary novelist, Jill Paton Walsh, had been given permission by the Sayers estate to write more.  'Authorized sequels' can be a dubious proposition (Scarlett, anyone?), but I thought I'd give them a chance.

As a result, the forty-third book I read in 2015 was Thrones, Dominations, with the double by-line of Sayers and Walsh.  According to Wikipedia, Sayers began work on Thrones, Dominations with a view to comparing Lord Peter's and Harriet's new marriage with that of two other couples but abandoned it in the face of political events in Europe in the latter half of the 1930s after completing approximately the first six chapters.

That's where Jill Paton Walsh comes in.  I'd like to say the transition is seamless, but....  Her command of the language is admirable: Lord Peter and Harriet, in the main, sound like themselves.  I suspect Paton Walsh of being the hand behind the excerpts from the Dowager Duchess's diary, which are distractingly of-the-moment, mentioning then-current events and personalities with a specificity Sayers avoided.  I hope she is the originator of some glaring new characters, including Harriet's lady's maid and Bunter's sudden and distracting love interest, who seem to be introduced with a passion for making things fair: If Lord Peter gets a romance, so must his lower-class right-hand man, and if Lord Peter has a live-in assistant, so must Harriet.

More unforgiveably, both Lord Peter and Harriet are much less intelligent and able in this novel than in the previous Sayers-penned ones.  Harriet convinces a neglected wife to take a weekend in the country; when something unpleasant occurs and everyone is trying to figure out why she was there, it's a whole chapter before Harriet suddenly recalls the fact; later on, Harriet notices a clue as Lord Peter and Inspector Parker discuss the case and begins to raise a question ... but Inspector Parker talks over her, Lord Peter allows him to (out of character), and Harriet doesn't bother bringing the point up again (even more out of character) until the men handle it chapters later and she says oh, yes, I thought that was strange but didn't say anything.

Paton Walsh has produced a serviceable detective novel set in the 1930s, but it is, in the final analysis, not a Lord Peter Wimsey novel.

The Sexy Dinosaur

On the subject of the depiction of women in fantasy art, in one of these pictures Wonder Woman is wearing, well, as many clothes as she ever does, and in the other she's entirely naked, save for a strategically-placed sheet; and yet, the "fully-clothed" Wonder Woman is far less offensive (also, far less top-heavy).

Blogger David Brothers compares art of the same character as drawn by different artists -- Wonder Woman, here, and Psylocke (who, frankly, I've never heard of, but whatever), here -- and demonstrates that it's not about how heavily-clothed a female character is (contra those who shout that those who object to women being sexualized in popular culture want to put them in burqas) but about depicting women as competent independent agents rather than pin-up dolls that exist to be super-sexy.  It's like Halloween costumes for women: Sexy Pirate, Sexy Minion, Sexy Dinosaur, whereas men can just be Pirate, Minion, Dinosaur.

And, just for fun, here's what one of the most reviled comic-cover poses really looks like when modeled in 3D.

Book review: The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor

I was browsing the clearance section of the local Half Price Books when I spotted a familiar name on a spine: Steven Saylor.  In my first year of college, spring semester of 1992, I took a Roman Civ & Culture class that had, as one of its requirements, to read a work of fiction set in Ancient Rome.  The book I selected was a detective story starring Gordianus the Finder, Roman Blood, by a first-time novelist named Steven Saylor.

I knew Saylor had written some sequels, as I kept up with them for a book or two, borrowing them from the library in my hometown during vacations, but after moving away for grad school, I completely forgot about them until I saw this hardcover on the shelf.  Could he possibly still be writing Gordianus books? I wondered.

The answer, as it turns out, was yes.  The forty-second book I read in 2015 was The Triumph of Caesar, the twelfth in the series.  Despite not having given the series any thought in twenty-odd years, I remembered Gordianus, and even a few of the supporting characters seemed familiar from the first three books.  Set more than thirty years after the first installment, The Triumph of Caesar finds Gordianus nearing the end of his career.  His career as Finder has proved relatively lucrative and has won him powerful friends; the story opens with Julius Caesar's wife seeking Gordianus's help in uncovering what she believes to be a threat on Caesar's life during the week of his Triumph, a series of parades celebrating his victories in Egypt and elsewhere.

A bit too much of the didact comes through at times -- dialogue in which the characters over-explain everyday habits to each other, "As you, of course, know, it has long been our custom to...."  Still, to reacquaint myself with Gordianus after such a long time in such a serendipitous way was a delight, and it motivated me to seek out the rest of the series, both the ones I read twenty years ago and have largely forgotten, and the ones I missed.

Book review: Death by Living by N. D. Wilson

The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.
As a little kid, I had a job: Obey my mother. Don't lie. Play hard. Be nice to my sisters.
At the time, that job was actually difficult. My mom kept saying things like, "Come here." And, "No jumping on the couch." Or, "Don't stand on the doorknob and swing on the door." And, "No hitting."
But my sisters were there, and so were my fists. The couch was bouncy. Doors are cool to swing on.
Man, I was bad at my job.

The forty-first book I read in 2015 was Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent by N. D. Wilson.   Wilson is best known, I would imagine, as the author of young adult fantasy, including the 100 Cupboards series, but this is a devotional book.  Or possibly "Christian living."  I've never been entirely clear on the distinction between the two.

Wilson's thesis is that we ought all to live in consciousness of the inevitability of death.  Not only does it orient us to live less self-centered lives ("If you were suddenly given more than you could count, and you couldn't keep any of it for yourself, what would you do?  This is, after all, our current situation."), it is a positive mercy to mankind struggling to overcome his sinful nature: "In the ancient myths, Tartarus is where the revel Titans were tortured forever, where they struggled to complete tasks without any end, without any completion.  Without death, without mortal time, this earth would be Tartarus."

A life well-lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.  The last enemy to be conquered is death.

Book review: Lord Peter by Dorothy L. Sayers

When I read my last Lord Peter novel, it wasn't my last Lord Peter mystery.  Dorothy Sayers also wrote several short stories starring the noble sleuth which are collected in Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories.  The collection isn't the fortieth book I read in 2015, as I read the stories folded in with the novels in the order of their publication, but it was the fortieth book I finished.

A Lord Peter short story is a very different experience than a Lord Peter novel.  There just isn't room enough or time for the multitude of clues and characters that accrue in a longer work, and there's less of a deductive unraveling of the case and more of a flash of inspiration that solves it.  As such, the Lord Peter of the short stories comes across significantly more superhuman than he does in the novels.  The plots are rather more sensational, as well, perhaps to quickly seize the attention of a reader flipping through the pages of a magazine.  On the whole, I much prefer the novels.

The collection is chiefly notable for the last two stories, which take place after the last Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane novel and give us a glimpse of life after their honeymoon: "The Haunted Policeman" takes place the night their first child is born, and "Talboys" is set some years later when they have three young sons.  "Talboys" in particular sets the mind at rest about whether letting the romantic leads get married means the end of the line creatively; had Sayers chosen to continue writing books about Lord Peter, the quality of the story is reassuring that she could have done so with no drop-off in quality -- even if the mystery in question is only who stole the local farmer's peaches rather than a murder.

Book review: The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2015 was The Bookseller by Cynthia Swanson. Set in Denver in the early 1960s, it tells the story of a woman living two lives: in one, a successful single career woman running a bookstore with her best friend, in the other, a happily-married mother of small children.  When she falls asleep in one life, she wakes up in the other.

For a while, she merely enjoys what she considers to be a vivid recurring dream, exploring the road not taken, but eventually she must decide which of the two worlds she is experiencing is the real one -- and which she wants to be.

Apart from the implied supernatural element, I was also drawn to this book because my mother was a single woman in Colorado for a while in the 1960s, albeit in Boulder rather than Denver.  I very much enjoyed it.  Each of the realities the protagonist (Kitty in one life, Katharyn in the other) experiences is rich and believable, and I went back and forth in my own mind over the course of the narrative over which one was "real."  Even more impressive, the final resolution felt earned, rather than a cheap or trite cop-out ending.  This was Cynthia Swanson's first novel, and I'll certainly be interesting in taking a look at her second.

Book review: City Beyond Time by John C. Wright

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2015 was City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis by John C. Wright.  I read it on my Kindle, drawn in by a free preview of a non-linear story which jumped forward and backward in time in the telling.  "Murder in Metachronopolis" begins

16.

Third beginning:
I woke up when my gun jumped into my hand.

If you can resist trying to unravel a noir detective story told out of order, you're a better man than I.

"Murder in Metachronopolis" is by far the best story of the six, but it was worth the price of the e-book, particularly since I paid most of the $4.99 with promotional credits I'd accumulated from various other Amazon purchases.  The protagonist of "Murder," Jacob Frontino, returns in the last story, "The Plural of Helen of Troy," which is the second best of the collection.  The stories that don't feature him are standard "Twilight Zone"/"The Outer Limits" fare.

At the time I read the book, I was unaware of the Hugo Award kerfuffle.  I can verify that Wright's female characters are underwritten and antithetical to the Bechdel test, as they're defined entirely by their relationships with men.  The Jacob Frontino stories suffer least, as -- hello!  they're in the noir detective genre, where women are femme fatales, hookers with hearts of gold, girls-next-door, or gals Friday.  

I don't take a side in the actual controversy.  I liked this book a lot, but I also loved Redshirts by John Scalzi, who is on the opposite side of the argument; and both the dinosaur stories are execrable, but the Sad Puppy one at least has the distinction of actually being science fiction.  

Book review: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2015 was The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers.  It's not the last of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but it's the last one for me, as I read the Harriet Vane books first before going back to fill in the rest of the Wimsey oeuvre.  It actually has nothing to do with people who make or mend clothes for a living, although the misunderstanding does arise in the course of the story.

Lord Peter, traveling to Duke's Denver with the faithful Bunter, runs off the road after dark in the village of Fenchurch St. Paul and manages to get involved in a series of events surrounding a missing necklace which bankrupted an aristocratic family and an unidentified body interred in someone else's grave.  I'm not altogether convinced by the medical science which finally explains the death, but the circumstances are convincingly horrific and the fellow who suffered them suitably dastardly almost to deserve them.

Sayers's picture of parish life, and the care the parish priest provides to the souls in his neighborhood, is touching enough that even this devoted nonconformist got a little nostalgic.  One of the highlights of the book is a flood, to prepare for the arrival of which the whole village cranks into highly-efficient gear, under the direction of the rector, to turn the church into an emergency shelter.  The portrayal of pre-WWII stiff-upper-lipping and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on indicates all that was admirable about British character in the early twentieth-century.  The fact that Sayers apparently felt it morally necessary to punish the innocent victims of the villain's perfidy, in connection with the do-the-right-thing-and-kill-yourself-to-avoid-shame trope that appears in a couple of her books demonstrates the less-lamented aspects of the same period.

Reviewing a book review: In the Beginning Was the Word by Mark Noll

I quibble with Peter Thuesen's review of Mark Noll's book, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783, in the November/December 2015 issue of Books & Culture.

Thuesen reports

...during the American Revolution, ... clergy of many stripes, along with secular pamphleteer Tom Paine, appealed to Scripture to justify the Patriot cause.  Ironically, the same Bible had been used earlier in the colonial era not to attack the British monarchy but to defend it as a bulwark against Catholic (especially French) tyranny.

Is it really ironic, though?  If a text is in favor of liberty (and any reading of the Pauline epistles can hardly help but come away with the impression that the New Testament is), can it not be profitably employed against a more authoritative regime in favor of a less, as well as against the less authoritative in favor of the democratic?  One can plausibly use medical research to argue that steak and mashed potatoes make a more healthy meal than a fast-food hamburger and fries, even if grilled fish and rice with steamed vegetables are more healthy than the steak and potatoes.

Later, Thuesen (and presumably Noll) bemoans that the freed slave and abolition activist Olaudah Equiano wrote an autobiography which, while rich with biblical allusions and quotation of Scripture, was "overwhelmingly a story of personal redemption.  As such, it typified the mostly apolitical uses of the Bible by other 18th-century evangelicals."  This is one of the rare instances I've seen of scholars criticizing people for failing to exploit Christianity for a political end.

Thuesen concludes that the book under review is "the most profound treatment ever written of the Bible in public life" [my bold].  While this may well be true -- I certainly haven't done the research to contradict it -- the extravagance of the claim gives one pause, particularly when the reviewer follows up by strawmanning, "All too often, histories of the Bible in America have uncritically glorified the American project, stopping just short of assuming that Moses and Jesus were Americans whose teachings were everywhere in harmony with the nation's imperial ambitions."  Such hyperbole demands citations to back it up, or it didn't happen.

From today's Parade Magazine, where journalism goes to die

From this puff piece on Daniel Craig, promoting the new Bond film:

...film biographer David Thomson claims that Craig is the "least handsome" of the actors who've played the spy....  Thomson also says Craig is the most taciturn, "almost as if he had always wanted to be an actor instead of a star."
And yet from his very first outing in Casino Royale (2006), Craig has been a very believable Bond....

[My bolding]

Thomson's kiss-up to Craig (and snide implied put-down of the other Bonds) aside, it's "nice" to see the same bland incredulousness that was applied to Colleen McCullough in her obituary can smack men upside the head as well.  "Gosh, Daniel Craig's no George Clooney, and yet he's a good actor! It's almost as if a person's physical attractiveness has no relation to their value in other elements of life at all!"

Halloween montage

 In 2012, Eric was Captain America, and Faith was Cleopatra.

Then, in 2013, Faith was Pikachu while Eric was, once again, Captain America.

In 2014, Faith was Pikachu again, and Eric was Emmet from The Lego Movie.

Book review: The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2015 was The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley.  Once a month, I'm offered a free e-book to download for my Kindle as an Amazon Prime member, and this was one of them for February.  Many months, none of the selections piques my interest, but for the low, low price of free, I was willing to give this one a try.

The book is set in the First Bank of Cleveland, both in 1978, when it's a bustling high-rise, and in 1998, when it's a derelict building, on the verge of renovation.  Our heroines are two, as well: Beatrice, a young secretary in 1978, and Iris, a recently-minted structural engineer drawing up a floor plan for the building's owners.  The two women are at either end of a mystery involving the sudden closure of the bank and the fate of unclaimed safety deposit boxes.

This was an exciting read.  There was one error in which one of the protagonists was called by the other one's name.  There were a couple of completely unnecessary sex scenes, which were doubly annoying due to the Hollywood/romance novel convention that the sexiness of an encounter is inversely proportional to the physical discomfort its location involves (desks, kitchen counters, stairs, etc.).  In this case, it was the bare tile floor of a bathroom.  The bathroom is directly off an office with normal furniture, presumably including some sort of couch, but, no, they go at it on the hard, cold tile floor. That can't be comfortable for either one of them.

The resolution of the mystery doesn't quite manage to measure up to my expectations, and I felt the author pulled her punches in exactly who ends up dead.  Still, it was an enjoyable read.  This is D. M. Pulley's first novel, and I'll certainly give an interested glance at her second.

Book review: Pioneer Girl by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2015 was Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  This was Wilder's "first draft" of the Little House series.  The South Dakota Historical Society Press published it in December 2014 and immediately sold out of the first printing.  Did they really think they wouldn't?  Tommy ordered it for me at Christmas, but it ended up being a birthday present, as the order wasn't filled until March, when they finally started to catch up to demand.

If you've read the Little House books (and if you haven't, go read them first before turning to this), there will be very little to surprise you here, and if you've done any supplemental reading on Wilder's life, such as Donald Zochert's biography, there will be even less.  To me, the greatest value of this book is the revelation that Wilder's first draft was, in fact, so similar to the finished product, not the barely-literate oral history that Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, transformed into a literary classic and patronizingly allowed her mother to take the credit for, as many literary historians have asserted. Their evidence for doing so seems to be outright bigotry: that a woman who lived virtually her whole life as a housewife on a farm couldn't possibly have produced a work of such talent or lasting influence.  Much more likely that it was the extensively-traveled, feminist, divorced daughter, though it's puzzling why she never broke out any of that literary genius on a book published under her own name.

J. I. Packer on cynicism

"Feeling disillusioned, discouraged, and hurt by their experience of life, their pained pride forbids them to think that others might be wiser and doing better than they themselves have done.  On the contrary, they see themselves as brave realists and everyone else as self-deceived."

-- J. I. Packer, "The Joy of Ecclesiastes," Christianity Today, Sept. 2015, 58.

Tidy-up follow-up!

I have made it through the first five sub-categories of the first category, which is clothing: tops, bottoms, hanging clothes, socks, and underwear.  I got rid of two large boxes of clothes.

A helpful question,  as you're sorting: If I saw this in a store instead of in my house, would I want to buy it?  If it wouldn't tempt you in a window, you don't really love it.

There were a lot of "But I used to love this" items.  "Used to" love isn't the same as loving it now. You can enjoy the memories of wearing certain clothes without having to keep them in your home.

"But what if this comes back in fashion?"  Am I really going to live long enough for green-and-purple checked, pleated, high-waisted pants to come back in fashion?  And if I do, why wouldn't I have learned my lesson the first time around?

"If I lost ten pounds, this might fit again."  So every time you see it in your closet, it'll make you feel fat.  Toss it, and if you actually lose ten pounds, celebrate by buying something new.

"But I just bought this not too long ago."  And if you keep it in your house another four years, you'll learn to love it?  Cut your losses, and get rid of it.  I found a bra, with the tags still on it, in the back of my lingerie drawer, the elastic already deteriorating from age.  Give it away while someone else can still get some use out of it.

I'm stalled out right now on the next subcategory, bags, because I most likely have tote bags, backpacks, and purses scattered in various closets all over the house.  Making the mess that will result from hunting for all that stuff will have to wait for next weekend.

Book review: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2015 is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  I have a long history with various decluttering schemes because I have always come from a house with clutter, a fact I attribute to a father who remembers the Depression and war rationing, a mother who grew up poor, and what I firmly believe to be a genetic predisposition to hoarding via my maternal grandmother's family.  Will this book make a difference in my life that its predecessors haven't?  Time will tell.

To begin with, Marie Kondo comes at the problem from the point of view of traditional Japanese Shintoism.  She preaches that clutter and unwanted/disused items have an actual negative energy that interferes with one's home and life and that clearing them out can directly affect one's health, career, and relationships.  I can't go there.  However, I know exactly what she's talking about when she writes that having items in our home that we don't really want negatively affects our mood and energy. There are things in my house that make me feel guilty when I look at them: I don't like them, but I am loathe to get rid of them because: someone gave it to me / I spent good money on it / what if I got rid of it and then found I needed it (after literal years of never touching it)?  Would my life and home be happier if I didn't have things I shut away, avert my eyes from, or try to avoid?  Yes, absolutely.

The heart of Kondo's system is picking up every item you own and asking yourself, "Does this spark joy?"  In a less precious wording, "Do I really love this, or is it just here because of inertia?" Life is too short (or, more to the point, one's available storage space is too small) to keep things one doesn't really love.  If you don't love it, toss it.

By this point, you've probably picked up on the catch.  Kondo's program is clearly pointed at single people in small apartments, a pretty good demographic in Japan.  But if you're a family of four in a suburban house, the biggest problem is going to be finding the time to touch every item you own and ask yourself the question.  (On the flip side, once you've successfully completed the system, having too much stuff shouldn't be a problem anymore.)

The problem is exacerbated by her insistence on decluttering by subject rather than by room, i.e., get every book in the house together and sort through them at once rather than running across as you move through.  This actually makes a great deal of sense: as she points out, it gives you an idea exactly how much of everything you have (and how much you need to keep/discard), and it also allows you to store all items in a single category together rather than scattered throughout the house. It also, of course, makes getting started a larger hurdle.

Another hurdle is her instruction not to let anyone else watch.  Again, this makes perfect sense.  The whole point is not to feel guilty about getting rid of what you don't want; someone saying, "But I like that. But I gave you that. But you can still use that," is counterproductive.  But for someone with a family, it limits when you can actually get anything done.

Although I haven't yet had the chance to begin her system by the book, due to the aforementioned hurdles, just reading the book inspired me enough to go through my closet and drawers and sort out a sizeable stack of things I don't really like wearing but have been keeping because it seems wasteful to give away perfectly good clothing.  I'm not sure I'm ever actually going to get a chance to do it her way, at least until I have an empty nest, but perhaps doing a bit in fits and starts will result in, if not "life-changing magic," at least less stuff in the house that makes me feel bad.

Book review: My Lucky Life by Dick Van Dyke

The thirty-third book I read in 2015 was Dick Van Dyke's memoir, My Lucky Life: In and Out of Show Business.  I have been a huge fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show since we got free cable, and thus access to Nick at Nite, in college, and once I convinced Tommy to give the old, black-and-white show a chance, he quickly concurred.  We binge-watched through all 5 seasons when Faith was a toddler, and she loved the episodes when Rose Marie sang.  So when Tommy saw this volume on the clearance shelves at the used-book store, picking it up for $2 was a no-brainer.

Sadly, Dick Van Dyke is no Rob Petrie, though he believes he is.  This memoir is self-justification, writ large.  Things he's proud of, like refusing to do family-unfriendly material, redound greatly to his credit; things like his alcoholism and his extramarital affair ... well, those are just unfortunate natural occurrences, like earthquakes and hurricanes, that could happen to anyone at any time.  He praises himself for helping other men with drinking problems by acting in The Morning After, a TV movie about an alcoholic.  By his own admission, however, the advocacy group, the National Association of Alcoholism, asked that the ending show the main character recovering, to give hope to those who recognized their own trajectories in the story; Van Dyke insisted that his character fail despite repeated attempts to beat his addiction, backing up his rationalization that alcoholism is a random disease that he couldn't do anything about and certainly can't be blamed for contracting.  Some guys, like he, are "lucky" enough to beat alcoholism, and some, like his character in the Movie of the Week, aren't.

This same pattern of rationalization and self-justification repeats throughout his life.  He feels guilty about having an affair only until he explains to his wife that falling in love with another woman was just something that "happened" to him; after that, it becomes her problem that she can't accept the truth, and he placidly moves in with his girlfriend while still married to her. When he argues with other leaders in his church over the civil rights movement, he walks away from organized religion forever without looking back, judging it to be worthless: this, despite the fact that he has just lovingly described two men who worked within the organized church whom he greatly admired.  If Dick Van Dyke doesn't get his way, well, he's taking his ball and going home.

Like most celebrities, I suspect Van Dyke has been surrounded by groupies and sycophants for so long that he has no idea how he comes across to "ordinary" readers.  Toward the end of the book, he describes getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and recalling that he spent the evening of his 14th wedding anniversary working late with Mary Tyler Moore on a song for The Dick Van Dyke Show.  He never called home to let his wife know where he was or that he was going to be late or to apologize or to acknowledge the occasion in any way.  When he finally arrived home that evening, he found her dressed up in an evening gown with a candlelit dinner on the table, ruined.  There was no mention of the incident when he was actually recounting that period of his life, nor does he seem to feel particularly bad about it in retrospect.  It was just one of those things that "happened," and, as Morey Amsterdam points out, all the neglect of his family worked out in the end because he got his star.