Merry Christmas!

Book review: Inverted by Tom Ellsworth

The sixty-fifth and final book I read in 2016 was Inverted: Living Out the Perspective-Changing Parables Jesus Told by Tom Ellsworth. This book was the basis for a sermon series our new pastor preached, so I picked it up to go to the source.  Ellsworth examines eight of Jesus's parables, pointing out the twists that were shocking to their original audience but to which familiarity has dulled us today.

Book review: One Nation Under God by Kevin M. Kruse

The sixty-fourth book I read in 2016 was One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse.  I looked forward to reading this book for quite a while and unfortunately found it a complete disappointment due to its misleading subtitle.

The book promises to explain the post-war boom in church membership and civic religion by connecting it not to anti-Communism but to capitalism, particularly to corporate interests opposed to FDR's New Deal.  What is actually is, in fact, is a history of the aforesaid religious boom, particularly in regard to adding "In God We Trust" to US bills and "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.  Without the subtitle, I wouldn't have experienced such cognitive dissonance as I tried to detect the nearly-nonexistent fingerprints of "corporate America" in the narrative; granted, I also would have been much less interested in reading the book, so score one for capitalism, I guess.

Kruse's narrative continually undercuts his assertion that the concept of the United States as a Christian nation originated among anti-New-Deal businessmen in the 1930s.  He openly admits that right-wing interests copied the playbook of progressives who had been promoting their own political ends under the aegis of the Social Gospel since the 1890s.  The proposal to amend the Constitution to declare America officially a Christian nation, by his own admission, had been kicking around Congress since the Civil War in the 1860s.

I kept waiting for the nefarious corporate interests to emerge and start manipulating religious organizations, but the best Kruse could offer was the National Association of Manufacturers being approached by an activist minister and lobbied for support for an anti-FDR movement which he had already launched and continued to run, which seems to me more like a religious organization co-opting the deep pockets of corporate interests.  How this is morally distinct from any other charity or political cause seeking underwriting from large business and wealthy donors, a process which takes place literally all the time, Kruse never makes clear.

Ultimately, this is a much less interesting story than advertised.  The 1950s did coincide with a huge upwelling of church attendance and membership,  a conflation of patriotism with Judeo-Christian theism, and massive popular support for religious observance, but Kruse's attempt to explain it all by reference to Depression-era businessmen falls flat.  The thesis, rejected by the author, that it was a reaction to "godless Communism" is far more convincing, particularly given that one of the rallying calls to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was the assertion that the pledge didn't sound that different from one spouted by "little Muscovites."

A tidbit that stood out to me: Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, part of the court which struck down school prayer, was a deacon and Sunday School teacher for decades at a Baptist church while being an open agnostic.  If such was common in church culture at the time, it makes Sparky Schulz teaching a Sunday School class for years without either joining the church or, indeed, attending worship services more understandable (if still nuts).

Book review: The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith

The sixty-third book I read in 2016 was the seventh installment in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series, The Charming Quirks of Others.  Isabel and Cat argue over their respective love lives.  A woman comes on to Jamie, because have we mentioned he's young and hot?  Isabel is asked, despite her complete lack of qualifications, to investigate three candidates for headmaster at a boys' school, one of whom, it has been insinuated in an anonymous letter, has a scandalous past.

Book review: But Where Is the Lamb? by James Goodman

The sixty-second book I read in 2016 was But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac by James Goodman.  It's kind of an odd book.  Ostensibly, it's an analysis of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis, but Goodman opens the narrative by anachronistically assuming that the originator of the story knew he was writing for publication, knew he was filling in a gap in the already-circulating Abraham stories, wrote the story of the (near) sacrifice of Isaac, was dissatisfied with it, and was dismayed to find out that the story had already gone to print before he could tinker with it. I suppose it's an interesting conceit, but the author fills two chapters with a concept that is not only speculative but verifiably untrue.

From there, Goodman goes on to examine different readings, interpretations, and/or spins that have been put on the story from the intertestamental period (Jubilees and Philo of Alexandria) through the Holocaust (the sacrificing of innumerable Isaacs) to the present day.  The overarching consensus is that Abraham, as written, is the bad guy of the story for not choosing his child over his God.

Book review: The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

The sixty-first book I read in 2016 was The Lost Art of Gratitude, the sixth installment in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series.  This book features the return of Minty Auchterlonie, whom I must admit I didn't really remember.  Isabel doesn't like her, but then, Isabel doesn't like so many people, it's hard to keep up.

Minty, seemingly oblivious to the other woman's dislike, asks Isabel to look into a series of harassing incidents, which she attributes to a discarded lover, but Minty has more and different motivations than those to which she admits.  In a far more interesting story line, Brother Fox, the sometime resident of Isabel's back garden is injured, and Isabel and Jamie arrange for veterinary assistance.

Book review: Deadly Valentine by Carolyn G. Hart

The sixtieth book I read in 2016 was the sixth book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, Deadly Valentine.  It marks the unwelcome return of Bryce Posey, and this time around Annie's mother-in-law Laurel is the suspect the necessity of clearing whose name precludes Annie and Max from washing their hands of the affair and letting the professionals handle it.

Book review: Much Ado About Anne by Heather Vogel Frederick

The fifty-eighth book I read in 2016 was the second book in Heather Vogel Frederick's Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Much Ado About Anne.  This time around, the book club is tackling one of my favorite books, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.

The mothers insist on a new member joining the book club: Becca Chadwick, class queen bee, Emma's nemesis, and villain of The Mother-Daughter Book Club.  It's an annoying development, not least because Becca spends most of the book trying to break up the friendships among the girls in the club and reclaim Megan as her own sidekick.  Also, former supermodel and present cooking-show host, the one-named Clementine (yes, really), is getting remarried, much to her daughter's dismay, and, Jess's mom having given up her soap opera career at the end of the previous book, their family now faces the possibility of losing their farm due to money troubles.

Book review: Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

The fifty-seventh book I read in 2016 was Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw.  McGraw is best and justly known for her book, The Golden Goblet, and this is another historical children's story, this time set not in ancient Egypt but in the American West.

The main character is Jim Keath, a young man who ran away from his family's home in Missouri looking for adventure in the west and was taken in by Crow Indians.  Living in Oregon territory as a trapper, he receives a letter from his long-lost younger siblings, now orphaned and in need of their older brother who is old enough to claim a homestead for the family.

The story is wildly politically incorrect for the present day, contrasting the ways of the Native Americans with those of the white settlers and coming down in favor of the latter every time.  Jim has to reject his savage ways to become a responsible provider for his estranged family.  Given that, however, it's a powerful and exciting story of adventure in the American West.

Book review: Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones

The fifty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Stalking the Beast by Howard Andrew Jones.  Set in the world of Golarion, the setting of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, it's an adventure tale about a small holding in the River Kingdoms, a sort of lawless, up-for-grabs area of the world not unlike the early days of the American frontier, that is beset by a mysterious monster.  The local lord assembles a posse to track and kill it, just as a gunslinging bounty hunter arrives in town....

This is an exciting, if not especially unpredictable read.  The posse is whittled down one by one, as in any given action movie; the bounty hunter has, if not a heart of gold, scruples that leave the reader guessing which side she'll end up on.  If you have ever played Pathfinder, the supposed enigma of the mysterious beast is fairly obvious, leaving you only to wonder how long it's going to take the supposedly experienced protagonist to figure it out.

Book review: A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

The fifty-fifth book I read in 2016 was A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch, another mystery recommended to me based on my previous reading.  It is the first in a series about an amateur detective named Charles Lenox, set in 1860s London.

Like Lord Peter, Charles Lenox is the younger brother of an aristocrat, in this case a baronet rather than a duke, which provides him with the wealth, social pull, and life of leisure necessary to the amateur detective.  In a near embarrassment of riches, he has a Bunter and a Watson: a resourceful valet whose personal loyalty is beyond question, and a dissipated Scottish doctor with a hobby of collecting obscure poisons and a flair for postmortems.  He also has a rival/uneasy ally on the force, à la Sugg or Lestrade, in Inspector Exeter, an ambitious if unimaginative policeman, and a romantic interest in Lady Jane Gray, who, despite the unreasonably historic name that no one ever remarks on, is no Harriet Vane.

If you're thinking that this cast of characters makes the novel sound a bit overstuffed, well, it is.  In my opinion, Finch would have done better to have introduced Lenox's various sidekicks over the course of the series rather than drop them all into the first book, fait accompli, although in fairness, I suppose he couldn't have been assured that the novel would be successful enough to spawn a series before its publication.  Lenox introduces his hero in medias res, having already successfully solved many cases, rather than on his first murder.  (In a fit of hubris, he even projects into the future with one character, telling the reader that he will again assist Lenox in a very important case years later.)

The murder victim in this case is of a maid in the home of a prominent politician, and the means is bella indigo, a rare and expensive poison which provides the title of the book.  The death is staged as a suicide, but neither Lenox nor McConnell are fooled for a moment, in stark opposition to the legal authorities.  Therefore, Lenox is forced to investigate sub rosa, in the face of both the police who are jealous of their jurisdiction and the politician who desires to avoid scandal.

I went back and forth on this book a bit and ended up with an opinion of it a bit on the negative side. The romantic angle is unnecessary and unbelievable: Lenox and Lady Jane have been friends since childhood, neighbors for most of their adult life, and have had a thing for each other basically always. There are no obstacles or misunderstandings that have kept them apart all this time, only the fact that the author wanted a romance in the book so ensured that nothing happened between them for twenty years.

In addition, Finch seems to have a hard time ending the story.  Once Lenox has delivered his summation to his admirers, the book keeps stumbling on for six more chapters, as those involved are brought to justice.  The main perpetrator meets a sort of poetic-justice comeuppance about which I'm not entirely sure how I feel, given that it seems rather callous to a minor character who gets the raw end of the deal all the way around.

I'll probably give Charles Lenox another chance if and when I find the second installment of the series at Half Price Books and see if Charles Finch's sophomore effort shows improvement.

Book review: A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson

The fifty-fourth book I read in 2016 was A Man of Some Repute by Elizabeth Edmondson.  It popped up as a recommendation, either on Amazon or Goodreads, in response to some of my recent reads, so I looked for it in Half-Price Books every time I was in one for several weeks before a copy turned up.

I was recommended the book based on either the Maisie Dobbs series or the Grantchester Mysteries, or possibly the combination thereof.    Like them, it is a mystery (this book in particular being the first of a series) set in early-twentieth-century England; being post-World-War-II, it shares a setting more with the Grantchester Mysteries than with Maisie Dobbs, who is between the wars.  If the first book is anything to go by, these Very English Mysteries should be far superior to either of the other series.

The protagonist is Hugo Hawksworth, a spy who took a bullet to the leg in East Germany and has been forced reluctantly to settle down to a desk job.  He is the sole guardian to a thirteen-year-old sister, Georgia, both parents having been killed in the war, and the two of them move away from London to the sleepy town of Selchester.  They take up temporary residence in the Castle, the home of the late local nobleman who disappeared on a stormy night shortly after the war.  Lord Selchester's daughter is champing at the bit to sell the family pile but, in the absence of a body, has been forced to wait seven years for her father to be declared legally dead before she can take possession of her inheritance.  Of course, the arrival of Hugo and Georgia is swiftly followed by the discovery of a skeleton beneath the stone floor of the Castle, and the missing persons case turns into a murder investigation, one all the more delicate because Lord Selchester was a member of the foreign office and Cold War politics come into play.

I have a few quibbles with the book.  The chapters are broken up into "scenes," which strikes me as odd.  A few of the minor characters feel like lazily drawn types straight out of Central Casting.  But the main characters of Hugo, Georgia, Freya Wryton, the dead man's niece, and Leo Hawksworth, a Catholic priest and Hugo and Georgia's uncle, are both likeable and believable.  The author leaves a few clues unsolved at the end of the book, presumably to lead into the sequel(s) and create a series that is less episodic than Maisie Dobbs or Lord Peter Wimsey.  I look forward to following her trail of breadcrumbs into the next installment.

Book review: The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick

The fifty-second book I read in 2016 was the first book in a series of tween-y novels, The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick.  The schtick is that the characters in the book read a girly classic over the course of a school year and life imitates art, as events in the girls' lives roughly parallel situations in the book they are reading.

The four girls are Emma, the overweight, bookish one; Jess, the smart one;  Megan, the popular girl; and Cassidy, the jock.  They alternate narrating the chapters.  Their mothers, who have no more in common than the girls do, are a librarian, an actress on a soap opera, an activist, and a retired supermodel (yes, really).  But they all take the same yoga class and come up with the idea of forcing their daughters into the titular book club.

Verisimilitude-wise, the series might as well be set in Sweet Valley, but I guess the literary tie-in gives it some educational value.  Over the course of their sixth-grade year, the girls (mostly under duress) read Little Women and slowly build (or repair) relationships with each other and their families.  There's a little too much focus on boyfriends for twelve-year-olds for my taste.

Book review: The Samaritans by Reinhard Pummer

The fifty-first book I read in 2016 was The Samaritans: A Profile by Reinhard Pummer.  Apart from the "good" one and the woman at the well, despite the prevalence of the Samaritans in first-century Judea, I knew next to nothing about them before reading this book.

Did you, in fact, know that there are still Samaritan communities in the world today?  I certainly didn't.  Historically, the Samaritans can be traced back to the people relocated into the northern kingdom of Israel after its defeat by Assyria.  According to the Bible, these transplants were savaged by a plague of lions due to their lack of reverence for the local deity until the king of Assyria returned an Israelite priest to the land to teach its new inhabitants the ways of YHWH.  The southern kingdom of Judah had long viewed its neighbor as heretical, due to the fact that they didn't worship in the temple in Jerusalem, and their replacement by "people from Babylon, Cutha, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim" (2 Kings 17:24) certainly didn't impress upon the Judahites to look upon them more favorably; hence, Jesus and the Samaritan woman could debate whether God was to be worshiped in the Jerusalem temple or on the mountain of Samaria.  Indeed, not long after the events of the gospels, actual violence broke out between Jews and Samaritans over the Jews passing through Samaritan territory to celebrate religious festivals in Jerusalem.

This is not the origin story told by Samaritans, however.  They trace their division from the Jews back to the time of the Judges, when Eli, recast as a villain in this telling, was priest at Shiloh.  According to the Samaritans, Eli rejected the true high priest at Mount Gerizim and led away a schismatic following to found his own heretical shrine at Shiloh.  The Samaritans consider themselves the true descendants of those who followed Moses out of Egypt and reject the books of the Old Testament after the Pentateuch. 

While there are some fascinating facts in this book, it is a detriment to the lay reader that it is written in academic prose.  In addition, Pummer's diction and style are quite stilted in places.  I wondered at first if the manuscript had been written in German and then translated to English, accounting for the infelicities of phrasing, but according to the author's biography, he teaches at an English-language university in Canada; given that there is also no mention of a translator, I must assume that he is merely a clumsy stylist. 

Book review: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

The fiftieth book I read in 2016 was Vinegar Girl, a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew in the Hogarth Shakespeare series by Anne Tyler.  First of all, with the possible exception of Isabella's sudden command marriage at the end of Measure for Measure, there is no Shakespeare that has aged less well.  The gender politics on display in Shrew are violently unpleasant to the modern sensibility, and Tyler deserves respect merely for taking on the challenge of a modern retelling without subverting it by turning it from a comedy to a tragedy and the Petruchio figure from the hero to the villain of the piece.

Above and beyond that, however, Tyler deserves accolades not merely for tackling the story but for knocking it out of the park!  Vinegar Girl was one of the best books I read all year.  In this version, Kate is a twenty-something college drop-out, splitting her time between almost getting fired from her job as a teacher's assistant at a preschool for not being polite enough to the parents and taking care of the home she shares with her workaholic scientist father and remarkably pretty (and remarkably entitled) fifteen-year-old sister.  Petruchio is Pyotr, a Russian lab assistant working with her father on an important experiment whose visa is about to expire.  The obvious solution to Dr. Battista is that Pyotr should marry Kate and get his green card.

When Kate objects to marrying a complete stranger, her father is shocked that she could be so selfish not to make his scientific work a priority; after all, it's just a legality.  Pyotr, however, expects Kate to be his wife in more than name only, an eventuality that never occurred to the work-obsessed Dr. Battista who objects to his live-in housekeeper moving out; and Kate begins to see marriage to Pyotr as a chance to escape her father and sister and live for herself for a change.

Both Vinegar Girl and Shrew deal with a situation which was common in Shakespeare's day but is considered barbaric in modern American culture: the arranged marriage.  It is to Tyler's credit that she explores how such an institution can work, as it has at least as well as the love match throughout history and in some parts of the world today.  The slow warming of Kate toward Pyotr, who initially seems to display no attractive qualities but makes a real and touching effort to make a welcoming home for his new wife, is emotionally stirring.  Perhaps it is only because it's so rarely depicted, but I found the growing affection between two people who make an effort to be kind to one another more moving than yet another story of irresistible passion and immediate chemistry.

Book review: The More of Less by Joshua Becker

The forty-ninth book I read in 2016 was The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own by Joshua Becker.  Becker is a minimalist by both conviction and trade, running a blog/website on the subject.

Under the influence of Marie Kondo, I picked up this book hoping for more tips for decluttering.  Ultimately, however, I felt this book was a waste of time when I'd already read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  Becker spends most of this book arguing why minimalism is a helpful philosophy and recounting anecdotes of people who have adopted it: he focuses on the why rather than the how, whereas I stand already convinced of the usefulness of decluttering but need bite-sized chunks of strategy to motivate me to get at it.

In the end, if you've already decided to downsize, Kondo's books are more helpful, as she provides a step-by-step method to get where you'd like to go.  If you want a infomercial for minimalism, go with Becker.

Book review: Conspirata by Robert Harris

The forty-seventh book I read in 2016 was Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome, the second in Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy.  It picks up where Imperium left off, with what should have been Cicero's greatest triumph, his election as consul. 

This volume deals with the Catiline conspiracy.  Steven Saylor addresses the same events, in what he admits is a revisionist manner, in his Gordianus the Finder novel Catilina's Riddle.  Harris takes the traditionalist view: that Catiline was both guilty and dangerous.  The emphasis here, however, is less on Catilina's plot and more on Julius Caesar's political manipulations, the eventual outcome of which will doom both Cicero's political career and, ultimately, his beloved Republic.

Book review: Emma by Alexander McCall Smith

The forty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Alexander McCall Smith's Emma: A Modern Retelling.  Having been a longtime fan of McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, I can't tell you how excited I was to discover that the same author had produced a modern retelling of Emma.  Nor are mere words enough to tell you how disappointed and disgusted I was with the project.  If I thought that Isabel Dalhousie was an unlikable character, she's Elizabeth Bennet compared to McCall Smith's Emma Woodhouse.

McCall Smith, in my opinion, utterly fails to translate Emma forward two centuries.  Rather than trying to get Harriet Smith married so she can have her own household and some security, McCall Smith's Emma is only trying to set her up with a rich sugar-daddy so she can have an exotic gap year abroad before dumping the man who paid for it.  Pretending these two goals are morally equivalent is ridiculous.  In addition, Emma gets Philip Elton drunk on purpose in hopes of his coming on to Harriet, which leads to him being arrested for DUI, losing his license, and being humiliated in the press.  (All Austen's Emma did was reject his proposal.)  Austen's Emma was self-centered and vain, but her heart was in the right place.  This Emma is just a horror show.

Book review: The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett

The forty-fifth book I read in 2106 was Blue Balliett's sequel to Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3.  Having moved back from New York with his mother, Tommy Segovia had hoped that everything would go back to the way it had been before they moved away; however, the house they lived in before is occupied by a new family so they have to move into an apartment.  Worse, he finds he now has to share his best friend, Calder Pillay, with a girl, Petra Andalee, who with Calder recovered a stolen painting in his absence.

Balliett resists the urge to merely add a third character to the pairing from her earlier book, like Brains Bellingham and Mari Yoshimura to the McGurk Agency.  Tommy's resentment of Petra's relationship with Calder is true to life.  In addition, he is not as good a student as the other two and doesn't find the same enjoyment in Ms. Hussey's unorthodox sixth-grade class on which they thrive.  He has bigger problems in his family past than Petra's too-many-siblings or Calder's only-child syndrome, and it's not entirely surprising that he lies about a carved stone fish he found in a place he wasn't supposed to be.

Where in the last installment, the artist around whose work the plot twists is Vermeer, in this book, it is Frank Lloyd Wright.  The Robie House, owned by the University of Chicago, is set to be sectioned and sent to four different museums around the world in parts.  Ms. Hussey feels that to tear apart a work of art like that equates to murder and leads her class in trying to find a way to change the university's plans. Tommy's new apartment is right across the street from the house, and the house itself seems to choose him -- and the two other children who together make up the Wright 3 -- to save the structure.

Book review: Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-fourth book I read in 2016 was Messenger of Truth, the fourth book in the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.  In it, Maisie is hired by Georgina Bassington-Hope to look into the death of her artist twin brother Nick, a death which has been deemed an accident by the authorities.  The Bassington-Hopes are a wealthy, artistic family haunted by (what else?) World War I, in which the oldest daughter's husband was killed.

There's a lot of kerfuffle about the youngest Bassington-Hope, a jazz musician, and gambling debts he owes to the criminal underworld; Nick's American client; the gallery owner; and even Georgiana herself, a writer who has been artistically blocked since the war.  When it comes down to it, however, the story behind Nick's death is somewhat less dramatic than Winspear sometimes leads us to hope during the narrative.

There's a B-plot about smugglers, which feels a bit Jamaica Inn but serves to bring Detective Inspector Stratton into the story.  Maisie finally breaks up with Andrew Dene, who has to have been among the most underdeveloped and uninteresting romantic attachments ever to have stretched lifelessly over four books of a series, the Steadman Graham of 1930s British detective fiction.  And there's a heartbreaking development in Billy Beale's family, which is supposed to make the reader feel the need of Clement Attlee and his Public Health Service but only makes me question why Maisie Dobbs, while she's swanning around England visiting country houses and jazz clubs in her MG, doesn't pay Billy enough for him to take his children to the doctor.

Book review: Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett

The forty-third book I read in 2016 was Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett.  I have enjoyed sharing with Faith and Eric the JFic series of my library-haunting childhood, like McGurk and The Three Investigators.  Blue Balliett's contemporary series is in the same "kid detective" genre, but where the older teams of investigators were white kids in the suburbs, Calder and Petra are mixed-race children living in a diverse neighborhood next to the University of Chicago, where their parents are employed.

Both feel like misfits and outsiders at the progressive school they attend, Calder even more so as his one friend has recently moved out of state.  Initially hostile to one another, the pair are drawn together when a Vermeer painting on loan to the Art Institute in Chicago from the National Gallery of Art disappears en route and a series of coincidences leads them to believe they are the only ones who can find it.  The text is accompanied by illustrations with a built-in code for readers to decipher.

My biggest problem with the book are the coincidences.  The "kid detective" series of my past were of the old-school Scooby-Doo philosophy that, if there appears to be a ghost or a monster or some sort of supernatural phenomenon involved, there's a bad guy in a rubber mask or a hidden tape recorder behind it; the protagonists solved the case with determination, logic, and bravery.  Balliett's world is in the magical-realism genre: Yes, the subject of A Lady Writing really did communicate with Petra through a vision, and the pair unravel the case not because they were clever and determined but because they are special children magically chosen by the universe for greater things.  The message is not, like in Encyclopedia Brown or Harriet the Spy, that anyone can, with ambition and attention to detail, set up their own neighborhood detective agency; it's that, if you're "special" (with specialness seemingly determined by being unpopular), you can do things that the great unwashed mass of children cannot because you really are Better Than Them.

Also, while the main characters are well-developed, the secondary characters are disappointingly flat.  Petra, in particular, is unhappy about being one of five children in a chaotic household, but apart from her original complaints about how much time she has to spend helping take care of her younger siblings, they don't interfere in her activities for the rest of the book; I don't think we even learn their names.  Parents are only slightly more visible and relevant than in Peanuts cartoons.

Despite my qualms, however, the story is enjoyable and holds together, once you've accepted the premise that  the universe is collaborating to empower the protagonists.  There's a great deal of information on Vermeer and his paintings, which is not merely educational but really intrigues the reader to learn more about him.

Book review: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp

The forty-second book I read in 2016 is one of those books that was everywhere when it was new.  EVERYWHERE.  It spawned: a study guide, a devotional, a "selections from" if you just weren't up to reading the whole thing, a copy in baby-blue imitation leather with a ribbon bookmark, not one but two Christmas-themed companion products, a ... DVD? really?  Okay.  And I did not buy it.  I so did not buy it.  I did not buy it with conviction.  It was too popular, and I did not trust it.

Well, now, five years later, I looked it up in Half Price Books, figuring that the malign influence of its ubiquity must have dissipated, at least in part, and I have finally read One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp.  For those of you who, like me, have avoided it (or, unlike me, don't live in the evangelical subculture where it was impossible to miss), the author, Ann Voskamp, with a house full of kids, a bank account full of farm-based anxiety, and a haunting childhood tragedy hanging over her head, was challenged by a friend to list one thousand things for which to be thankful -- and actually to be thankful for them, not in a rote "yes, lots of people in the world are worse off than I am" way, but sincerely thanking God for each and every one of them.  She found that it transformed her perspective on life, changing her default mode from defensive worry to enthusiastic embrace of each moment.

There is some really good stuff in here, particularly in the early chapters, including commentary on 2 Kings chapter 20 by her bereaved brother-in-law that I copied into my Bible notes.  There's also the reminder that being thankful because things could have been worse doesn't help when things are the worst: if her son escaping permanent disfigurement after a serious accident is the grace of God, then what is there to tell the family whose son died in an accident the same day?

The language is really dense, almost twee.  It's like Gerard Manly Hopkins for over two hundred pages of prose.  I occasionally had to stop and take a break from hacking my way through the poetic expressions.  And, frankly, there are times I think she goes too far: when one child throws toast at another and rages upon being reprimanded, "Why don't you ask what he did to me first?" I have no interest in taking his words as a deserved rebuke.  I think the correct parental answer is "I don't care who did what to whom when; using food as a projectile weapon is never appropriate," and I don't apologize for it.

At the end, however, I agree with Voskamp's critics who say she goes too far in describing her intentional gratitude as "making love to God."  There is an orthodox window for erotic language applied to man's relationship to God that is almost completely filled by some interpretations of Song of Solomon and the description of the church as the Bride of Christ.  Where I believe Voskamp steps over the line into well-intentioned heresy is her statement that she (we) can know God as Adam knew Eve.  No, the church is the Bride of Christ, not the husband.  In relation to God, we are all feminine, receptive.  We are never the active seeker, but the lost one who is sought.  At best, we can know God as Eve knew Adam, but even the Bible's marital language puts the consummation at the end of days.  Ecstatic union before the Marriage Supper of the Lamb is illegitimate.

Book review: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp

The forty-first book I read in 2016 was The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp.  Yes, that Maria, as in How Do You Solve a Problem Like.  This is the memoir she wrote which, as the cover page asserts, "inspired The Sound of Music."

Note that word: "inspired."  Yeah, you've got the nun-to-be, the widowed Navy Captain father, a house full of kids, and Hitler looming in the background, but the musical is heavily fictionalized.  First of all, there's not one of the movie kids that has a real name.  (Pre-Harry Potter, Hedwig wasn't going to fly in Hollywood.)  Baron von Trapp wasn't actually to blame for the children not having play clothes; there was an aristocratic woman running the household who felt it her duty to make sure the children behaved properly (e.g., didn't wear play clothes, didn't sit on the floor, didn't play outside).  The children knew how to sing; they just didn't know all the folk songs which Maria had learned in the Catholic Youth Organization.

The film's timeline is heavily compressed, as well.  In actuality, Maria and Georg didn't return from their honeymoon, incorporate the family singing group, and flee Austria in the space of about a week; they had been married ten years and had been performing for two before the Anschluss.  And they didn't have to hike over the Alps, though they did use the fiction of a mountain-climbing trip to Italy to leave Austria by train before the borders were closed.

Probably the biggest difference between the book and the musical can be grasped from the fact that the big wedding scene (where the nuns, thankfully, did not actually sing about the bride being a "clown" and a "problem" to be "solved") takes place on page 61 of a 312-page book.  Clearly, the real Maria didn't feel that her story ended with her marriage, or even with fleeing Nazis!  Transitioning to America , and to Americans, is the main piece of her story.  There's a charming scene with Maria on the ship crossing the Atlantic for the first time, learning English by approaching American passengers:

"Please, vat is fat?" pointing to my watch.
"A watch," a gentleman answered, looking very friendly.
"E Votsch," I wrote down seriously.  "and fat?"

There's a terrific pay-off to the story later on when the family is in America.  One of the passengers does his part to teach Maria popular slang, so when a nun at a Catholic college where the family is singing is nervous about the concert, Maria kindly advises her to "keep her shirt on," and when she is politely motioning a bishop to go first through a doorway they have both reached at the same time, she says, "Please, Bishop -- scram."

A side note: the movie's Baroness, in Maria's memoir, is the Princess Yvonne.  She comes off even worse in the book than in the movie, though one must keep in mind that the source was her romantic rival.  Captain von Trapp breaks the engagement upon receiving a letter from Maria and tells the princess that she put him off too long and should have agreed to marry him two years earlier when he first asked.  Maria lays a rumor that the Captain married her because she was pregnant at the princess's feet, a breathtaking act of pettiness, if true.

And yet ... according to Wikipedia, there is a question about the birthdate of Maria and Georg's first child.  When answering questions upon immigrating to America, Maria gave her wedding date as November 1927 and Rosmarie's birthdate as February 1928!  It's always possible that between the language barrier and the stress of travel and financial hardship that she misspoke, however.  The Trapp family insists Rosmarie was born in 1929, and the ship manifest from their first visit to America in 1939 lists the child as being ten years of age rather than eleven.  More to the point, existing wedding photographs provide no evidence that the bride was six months pregnant at the time.

Book review: Leepike Ridge by N. D. Wilson

The fortieth book I read in 2016 was Leepike Ridge by N. D. Wilson.  Faith finished The Golden Goblet yesterday, and I had to pick her next book for her daily reading comprehension questions so I read through this quickly in a few hours yesterday afternoon.

I ended up not including this in her lessons.  Although it's a fine adventure story for free reading, it's not up to the quality level of 100 Cupboards, in my opinion.  Tom Hammond is an eleven-year-old boy with a dead father and a mother who may be getting serious about one of the teachers at his school.  Acting out in rebellion, Tom ends up in a dangerous situation and must find a way to survive and return home.

It's a boys' adventure story, a little too much of a boys' adventure story, if you ask me.  Tom is right about everything.  Bad people are ugly so you can tell who to trust.  The mom, however, is clueless and doesn't recognize the danger signs of unattractive people; if only she let her young son make all her decisions, she'd be fine.  This is a dangerous worldview to hand to a kid who is already getting to the age where he thinks he knows better than his elders about everything.

The setting is interesting; the action is exciting; Tom turns out to be impressively resourceful in a dire situation.  But there is literally one female character (the mother) who gets damsel-in-distressed, has to be rescued by males, and then is married off to a character she's known for, like, a week maybe. Disappointing.

Book review: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks

The thirty-ninth book I read in 2016 was Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks.  I was astonished to see a "new" Jeeves book on the shelves at Half Price Books and was willing to pay half-price to see how well the author managed to replicate P. G. Wodehouse's inimitable writing style.

The cover describes the book as a homage to Wodehouse; the author's note calls it a tribute.  Faulks doesn't overpromise but professes humility in taking on the task of the authorized sequel and in the most worthy of causes: that of directing new readers to the Wodehouse oeuvre.  Within reason, he succeeds admirably.

He does very well at recreating Bertie's distinctive narrative voice, full of '20's slang, abbreviations, and laugh-out-loud metaphors.  The plot, as per usual, involves Bertie's romantic entanglements, but in a sharp departure from Wodehouse, in this book, Jeeves schemes to make sure his employer makes it down the aisle rather than masterminding an honorable way out of an engagement.  As Wodehouse's modus operandi in the Jeeves stories was to preserve the status quo, whereas this follow-up is intended as a capstone on the series, it's not a terrible idea to give the protagonist a happy ending, but the tone shift is jarring.  The problem isn't that Georgiana Meadowes is Honoria Glossop; instead, she's likeable enough that the prospect of her spending several decades wed to eternal boy-child Bertie Wooster makes you feel a little queasy for her.

In addition, while Jeeves's methods have put Bertie in a tight spot with an aunt or two before, I don't believe he would put his employer up to such clearly dangerous and illegal acts as he does in this installment.  Moreover, I categorically deny that Jeeves would ever countenance misrepresenting himself as an aristocrat to innocent outsiders (i.e., not aunts or Drones) for days on end to gain another man's hospitality under false pretences.  It's simply not cricket.

In the end, while Faulks succeeds in writing a perfectly amiable book, it suffers from the same defect which afflicts Jill Paton Walsh's pseudoWimsey books: the desire to pair everyone off.  If Lord Peter marries Harriet Vane, well, then, Bunter must obtain a wife of his own.  Paton Walsh's books suffer from numerous other flaws which make them unbearable; I certainly don't mean to equate Faulks's book with them.  But the concept of Bertie and Jeeves having a double wedding and then living happily ever after in a country house with their wives is a curiously flat ending to their story.  I prefer to imagine the ageless Bertie ever-bumbling and the inimitable Jeeves living only to serve.

Book review: A Little Class on Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-eighth book I read in 2016 was the fifth book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, A Little Class on Murder.  Annie is invited to teach a class on mystery novels at a local college.  In the journalism department.  You know, how establishments of higher education are always asking local business owners to teach classes in subjects they're unqualified in and which don't even fall under the aegis of the department.  Happens all the time.

Inexplicably, some of the rest of the faculty of Chastain College (who, presumably, are trained educators or have experience in the field or are teaching actual journalism classes) are of the opinion that Annie's hiring is a travesty which cheapens their profession, but they are distracted from the ludicrous development when an anonymous source starts to spread their dirty laundry in the campus newspaper.  There is a suicide; the newspaper office is bombed; and the department head is murdered.

Thankfully, there is no Bryce Posey in this book; the heavy is Police Chief Harry Wells, making a repeat appearance from Design for Murder.  Hart does people Annie's class with her favorite eccentrics, Max's mother Laurel and mystery lover/nutcase Henny Brawley, and completes the crazy-older-woman triumvirate with Miss Dora, from the aforementioned Design.

In addition to the laughable situation that turns Annie into a college professor, the book is notable for its appalling portrayal of Emily Everett, an overweight college student and secretary to the head of the journalism department.  Hart writes about her appearance with the same gusto she expends on homes and gardens but with visceral disgust rather than admiration.

"Slowly, an enormous creature, bulbous with fat, wedged sideways through the doorway.  She -- it was a woman, perhaps even a young woman -- was a mass of flesh almost lacking in definition, a bloated moon face atop a swollen body, chest and girth and hips merging into a mountainous whole that moved and swayed within a huge yellow caftan.  She clutched a handful of tissues in bratwurst-sized fingers."

That's frankly a repugnant description that denies the character's humanity -- and Hart clearly enjoys every cruel, fat-shaming syllable of it.

It's things like that which make me not feel bad at all about mocking her about things like Annie's course's name: The Three Grande Dames of the Mystery.  She means, of course, grandes dames, but neither Annie nor Hart knows any better.  I bet she pronounces it "grand dames," too.

Book review: Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

The thirty-seventh book I read in 2016 was the third book in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, Pardonable Lies.  I haven't been a huge fan of the series thus far, but this installment was particularly lackluster.

Maisie is hired by a friend of her patron, Lord Julian Compton, to investigate the supposed death of his son in -- wait for it! -- World War I!  A pilot, his plane went down in occupied France, but his body was never recovered.  Sir Cecil Lawton was satisfied with the official report which declared his son killed in action, but his late wife never stopped wondering if Ralph might still be alive somewhere.  On her deathbed, she made her husband promise to look for him so, against his better judgment and his own wishes, he feels honor-bound to put an inquiry in motion.

Unfortunately, Maisie's investigations take her to France, which is tedious for many reasons: first, because we are introduced to one of the most annoying/precocious French children since Adèle Varens in Pascale Clement, whom we are obviously supposed to find enchanting despite her general unbearableness; second, because Maisie is still suffering from PTSD due to the experiences during the war she hasn't properly processed so we get a lot of blah-de-bloo where she passes out from the trauma of standing on the very ground where she got blown up good as a nurse and has to go through a delicate convalescence because she's just so sensitive; but third and most importantly, because that's where Maisie's horrible college friend Priscilla Evernden now lives and we have to put up with her for far more chapters than I ever wanted to see Priscilla again.

Pris, of course, is rich!  and happily married to a poet!  and living the glamorous expatriate life in Biarritz! and KILL ME NOW she is so insufferable.  I hated her in the first book when she was just a character in an overlong flashback; having to put up with her in real time is cruel and unusual.  Now, of course, she has the extra added allure of being tormented by her past!  Unable to face the deaths of her brothers in the war (what war would that be, I wonder?), she lives on perpetual vacation in the south of France, and we're supposed to find her sympathetic, rather than just pathetic.  Besides running away from her problems, she also smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish, both of which were utterly commonplace in the time period, but since Winspear is anachronistic about mores in the books so that Maisie can be a woman ahead of her time, I'm hoping that lung cancer or liver disease will strike down Pris before her time and give Maisie's psyche further battering.

Apart from the presence of Pris, the overall lameness of the main plot, and the overused girl-power protofeminism which is getting wearing, two facets of the book are particularly egregious.  The first is Maisie's sudden obsession with her dead mother.  Her mother's passing was largely passed over in the first book, except for its use as a plot device to get Maisie into Lady Rowan's household.  In the previous two installments, Maisie's closest and most influential relationship was portrayed as being with her father, so it comes out of nowhere here for her all of a sudden to be pining for the mother she has never mentioned before.

Of course, the reason for the abrupt focus on Maisie's mother (aside from the aforementioned feminism: perhaps Winspear took some criticism about the most respected influences in her character's life being men?) leads into the second facet I disliked: Maisie is said to have inherited her psychic abilities from her mother's side of the family, and psychics play a large and rather awkward part in this story.  Ralph Lawton's mother was encouraged to believe that her son might still be alive through consultations with psychics after the war, and Maisie mentions that she and Maurice Blanche were instrumental in testifying against and shutting down psychics who preyed on the bereaved -- the false ones, that is.  Because, of course, Maisie truly has 'the gift.'  It's dissonant, like "real" extraterrestrials debunking all the charlatans who are hoaxing the world, or like someone denouncing the Nessie photos while claiming actually to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.

Book review: Nancy and Plum by Betty MacDonald

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2016 was Nancy and Plum, a children's book by Betty MacDonald, author of the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series.  Unlike that series, this book hasn't stayed in print since its original publication in 1952.  This is a reissue apparently inspired by a few of the biggest names in modern children's literature: Jeanne Birdsall of The Penderwicks, who wrote the introduction to this edition, and Mary GrandPré, illustrator of the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter series, who provided new illustrations.

It is, in my opinion, a travesty that this book was allowed to fall out of print. It is a delight, if tropey as all get-out.  Nancy and Plum are orphaned sisters who live in a boarding house run by the evil Mrs. Monday.  (Are there any good people who run orphanages in children's literature?  They're neck-and-neck with stepmothers in the evil sweepstakes.)  Mrs. Monday mistreats the two, knowing that she'll never have to answer for it, going so far as to steal the Christmas gifts sent by their only distant relative to give to her spoiled niece Mirabelle.  Nancy and Plum are, in the tradition of mistreated orphan girls everywhere, both good and clever and well-liked by all their non-evil peers.

Discovering the existence and vague benevolence of their Uncle John, Nancy and Plum attempt to contact him secretly and tell him how they are being mistreated.  When Mrs. Monday and Mirabelle conspire not only to keep them from him but also to persuade him that Nancy and Plum are spoiled, ungrateful liars, the sisters run away and find sanctuary with a childless farm couple.  When Mrs. Monday, with the deceived Uncle John, tracks them down to force them to return (both for the money Uncle John pays for their board and just for the continued pleasure of being mean to them), it's up the farmer and his wife, the town librarian (as guaranteed to be good in a children's story as a stepmother is to be evil), and a school teacher to reveal the truth and expose Mrs. Monday's perfidy.

Everything turns out exactly as you expect it to, which is both a feature and a bug in a story of this type: It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to see virtue rewarded and evil punished, but an adult reader can't help but feel the loss of any complexity to the narrative.  In addition, GrandPré's illustrations fail to match the text.  Like Quentin Blake, her pictures are notable for their lived-in messiness, but when the book mentions on more than one occasion how tightly the girls' hair is braided so that no loose strands can escape and yet every picture shows them with loose and messy braids and hair falling in their face, it's on the illustrator to convey what the author intended, not just to draw stuff the way she wants to.

Book review: Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2016 was a birthday gift from my friend Leslie, Full Dark House, the first in a series of Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries by Christopher Fowler.  In the present day, Detectives Bryant and May are octogenarians with a long and successful partnership investigating "peculiar crimes" behind them.  When an explosion rips apart their office, the surviving Detective May must pore through his memories to determine which of their old investigations may have left a loose end which resulted in violent revenge, served decades cold.

I did not particularly like this book.  Too much about it failed to ring true to me, beginning with the very first page, in which the explosion is said to recall the London Blitz.  Really?  Intervening decades of terrorist blasts, first from the Irish Republican Army and then from radical Islamists, and a sixty-year-old war is the first thought of a Londoner when a bomb goes off?  I grant the author that it makes a neat segue to his extended flashback to WWII, but he had me on the defensive from that point on.

The blurbs on the cover refer to the series as "deadpan, sly," "madcap," "completely crazy and great fun," descriptions that led me to expect a series akin to Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, but I never got the "comedy" in the mystery; rather, the tone seemed uneven, with the eccentric office politics of the Peculiar Crimes Unit jostling uncomfortably next to gruesome deaths and characters who seem designed to evoke sympathy or pathos.  While most of the victims of the killer in the novel seem portrayed to "deserve it," one man in particular is a mere innocent bystander, and his death is the longest, most-drawn-out, and most bloodily and brutally portrayed in the book.  How the reader is meant to retain any sympathy for the killer's point of view after that episode escapes me.

And now I have to leave some space for spoilers, because I can't fully express my dissatisfaction with the book without discussing the solution to the crime:

|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|

Okay, so Elspeth has sex one time (she is raped) and gets pregnant.  Biologically possible, but very unlikely.  Elspeth goes through nine months of pregnancy, gives birth, and hides a baby/toddler/child/grown man in her workplace for almost twenty years, and no one ever notices.  I call shenanigans.  Can we declare a moratorium on the magical symptomless Hollywood pregnancy for a while, particularly when employed by male writers?  And the Emma Geller-Green syndrome wherein small children only exist when they are plot-relevant but never interfere with their parents going out, traveling, working, or engaging in child-non-centric activities?

That hoary saw in the flashback investigation, combined with the author actually employing amnesia (amnesia!) as a plot device to explain the present-day mystery, really precludes me from having any respect for his work as anything beyond the shallowest melodrama.

Book review: Honeymoon with Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2016 was the fourth book in the Death on Demand series by Carolyn G. Hart, my semi-nemesis from The Village.  In Honeymoon with Murder, Annie and Max's wedding has come off (thankfully between books so we don't get a blow-by-blow à la Jan Karon, an author for whom I have a much higher tolerance for self-indulgence), but their departure for their honeymoon is postponed when (this time) Annie's friend and employee Ingrid Jones telephones in a panic and then vanishes from the line.  When the pair investigate, they find a dead body on Ingrid's floor and no sign of Ingrid.

Unfortunately, this installment features the return of Brice Posey, who insists that Ingrid is the murderer and a fugitive from justice.  Yeah, it meets my requested criteria of Max and Annie investigating when it's not their neck on the line, but just barely.  Mrs. Brawley, still in her mentally-worrying habit of taking on the personae of different fictional detectives, is left to organize a volunteer search for Ingrid, whom the locals are convinced has been kidnapped, and Laurel Darling teams up with a self-proclaimed psychic to try to solve the crime herself.

Hart gets all activist-y about battered women, insisting that an abused woman with a police witness to her injuries doesn't have a chance of winning in court.  No one even bothers to argue the point (including the police officer); instead, it's Max's money to the rescue once again, providing round-the-clock security for the poor woman whom the system has failed!  The author's constant harping on the theme that rich people are evil oppressors, except for her rich protagonists, is getting old.

The denouement of the mystery revolves around a character with a certain almost-unbelievable talent that was used in the course of the crime, yet which the same character smugly flaunted in public for no real reason.  So the perp is smart enough to plot the crime but dumb enough to demonstrate how it was done to the very people trying to solve it.

Faith asked me why I keep buying these books when they annoy me so much.  I think I'm partly doing so to vindicate my poor opinion of Carolyn G. Hart from more than twenty years ago.

The world's most incompetent scammers?

I am delighted by the subject line of an email in my Junk Mail folder:

"Not a Spam,Kindly Treat as Urgent."

The fact that it's from "UNITED NATIONS" is just icing on the cake at this point.

The body is even more delightful.  I am to be sent a Visa card pre-loaded with 9.25 million dollars. The "Contact Information Officer" has a Yahoo email address.  You know, as UN officials do.  And it's signed by Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, secretary general, himself!  

I only have to pay $235 for postage.  What a deal!

Chalk talk

Faith drew Squirtle, Bulbasaur, and Charmander on our driveway in chalk...

...and Jigglypuff, Butterfree, and Psyduck on our front porch.

Book review: Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones

The thirty-third book I read in 2016 was Beyond the Pool of Stars by Howard Andrew Jones.  It's campaign setting fiction in Paizo Publishing's Golarion setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.  Campaign setting fiction, as exemplified by the novels set in the Forgotten Realms, has a pretty terrible reputation and, from the limited examples I've read, usually earns it.  I was surprised, therefore, to find a positive mention of this book in World Magazine's book review section and intrigued enough to pick up a copy.

The story is set in Sargava, a colony of Avistani (read: European) people on the continent of Garund (read; Africa).  The main character is the mixed-race daughter of a white man and his black wife who has returned home for the funeral of her father.  Discovering that the family business, a salvaging operation recovering valuables from sunken ships, is on shaky financial footing, Mirian Raas agrees to take on One Last Job to honor her father's last contract and save her mother and brother from ruin. Of course, the father's death, which appeared to be accidental, turns out to have been not an accident at all, as there are powerful enemies eager to see that this One Last Job not succeed.

This novel presents a diverse set of characters without bludgeoning one over the head with it politically.  In addition to The Race Thing, one of the members of Mirian's expedition is gay, and the author goes beyond human-ish issues with the clients for the One Last Job, the remains of a once-populous tribe of lizardfolk, dwindled to only three individuals.  The lizardfolk have petitioned the government of Sargava for help in retrieving artifacts from the ruins of their ancestral city, in exchange for a percentage of the valuables.  Agents in service to Cheliax, the mother country against which the colony rebelled and declared its independence, were behind the elder Raas's death and now threaten the members of Mirian's expedition, in order to weaken the colonial government, which is on no firmer financial footing than the Raas family.

The characters are well-developed, avoiding the missteps of stereotypes, and genuinely engaging the reader's affection while leaving him on tenterhooks wondering how many of the expedition will survive.  Each death, rather than coming across as the inevitable winnowing of the redshirts, leaves the reader feeling sorry both for the victim and because he is deprived of their further company.  Up until the last chapter, I thought that this would be a five-star rating.  Unfortunately, the end of the novel falls a bit flat.  It feels like the author got rushed, ran long on word-count, or merely settled for quickly setting up the next adventure rather than taking the time to give the characters the time and space to react as realistically and emotionally to the events of the denouement as they did to the earlier action.

Still, I'm pleased to note that a sequel to this book is in the works and look forward to reading more of the advetures of Mirian Raas and her crew.

Words mean things, Part Deux

4-foot-8 Simone Biles poses next to Olympian nearly twice her size

David Lee of USA Volleyball is 6-foot-8.  That's two feet taller than Simone Biles.  Two feet is not really "nearly" four feet, eight inches.  But, hey, it wouldn't be the internet without an inaccurate and misleading click-bait headline, right, Yahoo Sports?

Washington and the Cherry Tree

At Walmart last week, I committed the misstep of letting the kids go to the Lego aisle while I was shopping elsewhere in the store.  When I went to get them, Eric had a Lego set in his hand and a puppydog expression on his face.

"I'm not buying Legos today, Eric,"  I told him.

"You always say that!  You never buy me Legos," he sulked as we left the toy section.

"I bought you a Lego set last week," I countered, "and when I did, you said you wouldn't ask for anything again until Christmas.  Remember that?"

Cheerfully and matter-of-factly, he replied, "Sometimes I make promises I can't keep."

Words mean things

Is it just me, or is this not a sundress?

Birthday boy

Eric's tenth birthday

Book review: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

I read glowing reviews of Amor Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility, when it was new five years ago and came this close to ordering a copy, but I had a pretty full reading shelf at the time and didn't. When I saw a couple of copies at Half Price Books marked down to three dollars, therefore, I snapped at the chance, and it became the thirty-second book I read in 2016.

A few chapters in, I didn't think I was going to like the book at all and was feeling very happy I hadn't sprung for a copy back when it was new.  Katey Kontent, apart from the dumb name, is one of those annoying self-effacing cyphers of a narrator who barely seems like a character in her own story.  At first, I thought she was going to be a Nick Carraway, a character so bland and colorless that I barely remembered The Great Gatsby was written in first person, despite my affection for the novel.   (When the Leo DiCaprio version came out, I was at first flummoxed by the news that Tobey Maguire was playing Nick, since I didn't remember Nick even existing.)

It turns out that Katey's just a bit introverted and stoic.  Clear away some of the characters that overshadow her, and she turns out to have a few ideas and emotions of her own, if she does tend to be a bit of a martyr.  Civility reminds me of Gatsby in some other ways, however, that are more thematic.  It's a bit about reinvention, a bit about the second-generation immigrant experience, and a lot about parties with the rich and beautiful.  Frankly, if you took the dates out of the book, I would have identified the setting as the 1920s; however, the actual setting is the late 1930s, which strikes me as odd.  The tropes tell us that the Twenties were about frivolity and wealth and irresponsibility, while the Depression was about desperation, poverty, and despair, but the action of this book involves Katey (poor-ish but never in want for a meal or a roof over her head) going from club to fancy restaurant to country-house party with a wealthy crowd of carefree young people with trust funds. I'm not going to say it's wrong for the era, but it's certainly not the received wisdom.

The early turning point of the story, and the action which drives the main characters for the rest of the narrative, is a car accident.  Oddly, while it is clearly depicted in the text as being the fault of a milk van, everyone in the book acts as if the main character who was driving the car that was struck is completely responsible, both morally and financially.  Was there no auto insurance in 1938?  Could not the milk company have been sued or the negligent driver arrested?  My guess is that, in an earlier draft, the main character was at fault and the author chose to soften the fact in revision, for fear that a drunk driver wouldn't retain the reader's sympathy.

The greatest misstep of the book, in my opinion, is the character of Eve Ross, and I didn't really begin to enjoy the book until she had departed the action.  The author is clearly besotted and presents her as someone we're supposed to like and admire, but her actions are thoroughly selfish and manipulative. She keeps swearing her undying devotion and unending friendship to the narrator, a protestation that never once results in her acting in any way that shows the slightest bit of regard for Katey's well-being.  Perhaps the worst part is when the gold-digging Eve allows working-girl Katey to pay for champagne on Eve's birthday, promises to return the favor on Katey's birthday, then instead ditches her to go to Europe with a man she knows Katey is a bit in love with. Towles seems to think that everyone finds this sort of behavior forgivable if not flat-out endearing.  Unfortunately, he has written a sequel that is "all about Eve" after her plot-line thankfully diverges from the narrative.

If Katey never quite manages to ring true and her background remains frustratingly un-pinned-down, Wallace Wolcott is the best character in the novel.  Much like Katey, he appears bland and uninteresting when he is introduced, overshadowed like her by Eve and Tinker Grey, but his serendipitous reappearance reveals a charming and fully-realized personality.  He disappears from the narrative yet again afterward, but he has a final unexpected coda which provides one of the few unambiguously heartwarming moments in the story.

Book review: Pompeii by Robert Harris

I was a few chapters into the thirty-first book I read in 2016, Pompeii by Robert Harris, before I made the connection to the movie of a few years ago which was criticized for unbelievability and a tacked-on romance.  Now that I look it up, I find that the film wasn't based on this book, which I guess only goes to show that creators of historical fiction in general can't resist the urge to tack on an unnecessary romance (Hi, Jack and Rose!).

You've got Pompeii.  You've got Vesuvius.  You've got Pliny the Elder.  We all know what's going to happen while they don't, and that's not enough tension for you?  You've got to throw in a romance and an assassination attempt as well?

The book starts promisingly, with the aquarius, or chief engineer, investigating some unusual behavior by the aqueduct which carries water to the cities around the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius towering silently in the background.  A slave is put to death for killing a rich man's valuable fish, screaming that it wasn't his fault but something wrong with the water.  It is reminiscent of the beginning of Eruption or of a Michael Crichton novel: random people going about their ordinary day just before all hell breaks loose.

It's hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote Imperium, though.  This is an airport novel of a book, full of squalid sex scenes, many more instances of harsh language than the book about Cicero, and the aforementioned romance, which seems to be based on nothing more than the fact that both participants are young and the girl is good-looking.  (I was going to say they were both young and good-looking, but it's only Corelia's legs and breasts that rate a description.)  Much like Jack and Rose, we seem to be supposed to believe they're meant for each other only because they are our designated hero and heroine.  I don't recall who it was now, but I recall reading about an actor who said he alternated blockbusters, for bankability, with movies he wanted to make for art's sake; perhaps Harris works on the same principle, with a beach read like Pompeii giving him the leeway to write his Cicero trilogy.

The bits about Pliny the Elder and the looming mountain are brilliant, as are the technical descriptions of the Aqua Augusta and its repair, but the romance and the plots of the villain against the aquarius Attilius merely distract from the real drama of the eruption.  A fictional digression which does pay off is the mystery of the disappearance of the previous aquarius; the scene where his whereabouts are finally discovered is worth the price of admission and even partially justifies the murder-for-hire angle, which ties in with it.

The villain Ampliatus is a bit unfortunately-drawn, I think.  He is a freed slave and a self-made man and owes a great deal to Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now.  As he is the only freed slave in the narrative, his grasping villainy and his daughter's contempt for his vulgarity come across as classist.

A commonality with Eruption is the vanity of the human species vis-a-vis nature.  In the Mount St. Helens account, it's the conservationists desperate to protect old-growth forest from the rapacity of the lumber industry; in this book, it's Rectina, willing to die herself if only she can preserve her husband's invaluable library of irreplaceable books in Herculaneum.  In both cases, the mountain destroys what human beings feel so responsible for stewarding.

"[Human beings] always had to put themselves at the center of everything," Harris has Pliny muse in his last moments, as he faces the oncoming pyroclastic surge.  "That was their greatest conceit.  The earth is becoming warmer -- it must be our fault!  The mountain is destroying us -- we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little -- a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded.  But here was nature, sweeping toward him -- unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent -- and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretension."