Dawn's Reading Blog

I’ve read two others of hers, one unexpectedly a sequel to the other. The first one had a romantic sub-plot that was surprisingly captivating. The other, I don’t recall. Dark Horse also had a romantic sub-plot, one you could see coming from a mile away but that was ultimately touching. It had a complicated plot-plot and a complicated detective-protagonist.

The protagonist was torn up about a decision she’d made in the past that had caused someone’s death, but the decision wasn’t convincingly the cause of that death. And then at the end of the book she chose to make the same decision again, only this time without causing a death. So . . . lesson learned? Guilt resolved? Seemed like a push. Other than that quibble, I enjoyed the book.

Elizabeth George writes an erudite mystery. Her vocabulary is impressive and her willingness to believe you share it is unmatched, even in more literary works. Her paragraphs are pleasantly long and the criminals don’t go after the detectives because “this time it’s personal.” She’s low on police procedure and legal process–once you’ve been a McBain fan, you’ll never buy into a unilateral search warrant again–but then they’re in Britain. Maybe the rules are different there.

The thing is, she’s depressing as hell. Her principal characters are realistically multidimensional, but they’re depressing (and depressed). I don’t want to be these people. I don’t even want to know these people. They live in a drab, unhappy world–a world I’m trying to escape when I read–where loved ones, even the good guys, aren’t always kind to each other, a truism I know too well.

I’m not insulted by George’s works, but I can’t bring myself to seek them out either. In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner was a long read without ever being a slow one, but I’m not sorry it’s over.

At some bookstores at the airport they have a display of books you can buy now and sell back later for half the price at some future airport. It looks like a limited display of exclusively hard cover books, but perhaps the offer applies to any book. Browsing such a bookstore, I found a wire rack hidden at the back with the results of that offer: used books, presumably at something like half price. There were lots of paperbacks there, though mostly the nicer trade editions.

So I picked up I Heard That Song Before, an MHC I hadn’t read before from the used rack and read it at breakneck speed on the plane and in the airport and on the plane back, and then added it to the box of books I keep for Sheila who eBays things. On my next trip, I happened to notice the same book, this time as a new mass market paperback, at the same price. In other words, if you’re buying it to read it, not to own it, just start with the mass market paperback. Same diff.

About the book I have not much to say except that I’m going to have to add MHC to that list of authors I just can’t read anymore, even when I read them really, really fast.

I wish Next Man Up was written about a team other than the Baltimore Ravens. I don’t care about the Ravens and they’re not even in the same conference as the team I do care about. So I know little about their schedule, history, rivalries or players. And didn’t much care to learn.

Nevertheless, this was an excellent, enthralling book. Feinstien’s writing is highly readable with enough detail to provide context but not enough to drown out the drama. I do love behind-the-scenes NFL books to begin with and this was a superb example. Please go write one about the NFC East!

You know I’ve hit bottom when I’m reading Mary Higgins Clark. I don’t mean that in a bad way to her. She writes really entertaining, face-paced stuff. But I’ve read each book several times and since they’re really all the same book, that’s a lot of times. I’m busy, I’m tired, and I still don’t find TV very entertaining. I have to have something. Thus, Loves Music, Loves to Dance.

Executive Privilege was fast-paced with no outstanding idiocy. It was unfortunately unmemorable, despite involving the president, and I guessed the murderer very early on. In an attempt to be fair, Margolin provided us with unnecessary detail that pointed to the perpetrator. In an otherwise tight novel, there were scenes that shouldn’t have been included. Their insignificance spoke to their significance. But I prefer transparency to the hateful “What she saw now made the whole plan clear,” followed by not revealing what she saw.

I once went through a True Crime phase that eventually waned, but in looking through my books for something mindless to read recently, I stumbled on Everything She Ever Wanted. The cover promised a lot more mayhem than was delivered, but isn’t that always the way? The dissatisfying part of true crime is that you can never really be sure that “he dunnit” or what he done or why. People are the real mystery, which is why mysteries are better without real people.

Judy Blume wrote my adolescence. Everything I knew about menstruation, masturbation, and dealing with your parents’ divorce, I learned from her. It was her fictional scenarios that persuaded me from ever stuffing my bra, despite a lot of provocation. As a young adult writer, she was an icon in my era. She wrote some great younger books too, full of humor and a similar understanding of how hard it can be to be young (Blubber, for instance).

Her grown-up books aren’t as good. They don’t resonate. Of course, I read them much too young. I couldn’t be expected to relate to women contemplating divorces or second marriages when I was a teen. I still can’t contemplate either a divorce or a second marriage, having never found the resolve to contemplate even a first marraige. And yet, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t speak to me no matter how targeted my demographic. I got more out of that book with the teenage boy protagonist than I did on a recent re-reading of Wifey and Smart Women.

I don’t know what Blume is up to these days, but I hope she’s writing back down to her level.

More low-effort entertainment. I love that old English life–so full of gossip and leisure. I’d have made a bad debutante myself, but I can relate to their overblown anguish. Who hasn’t made more of love than it deserves?

These are three of the less memorable Austen books (the more memorable being rather too memorized). Northanger Abbey stands out as her first, and therefore lightest and funniest, novel. The heroine is not particularly to be admired, unlike future heroines. She’s simple and silly and humorously human.

Persuasion and Mansfield Park fade to black almost as soon as you’ve finished reading them, though I’ll propose that the heroine in Persuasion doesn’t really deserve a happy ending (she’s righteous but not not right) and that the hero in Mansfield Park is merely settling. If that story took place today, there’d be a sequel where he divorces Fanny and moves in with a bottle-blonde to puruse all he’s “missed”.

Well, you knew it was coming. I read The Hobbit so the Lord of the Rings Trilogy was the next logical step. I suppose I read all this as a child or young adult. I own the books and that usually means that I read them. After the Hobbit, LOTR wasn’t very familiar though, so perhaps I didn’t.

The obvious comparison to make is to the Harry Potter series. I guess I must be jaded by today’s fast-paced world because I found LOTR slow and uneventful. They spend an awful lot of time walking around. Tolkien must have had some kind of name fetish because there are entire paragraphs where he seems to do nothing but name things, in different languages and different times. So that Aragorn and Strider and Elfstar (or something like that) are all the same person in addition to more oblique references like “the Lord of Rohan” that I’m always a little vague on.

Then there are the pages of environmental description. I’m sure it was all very beautiful and clear in Tolkien’s mind, but in mine it’s murky and unnecessary. I think that if you described my own living room to me I wouldn’t be able to picture it and I wouldn’t care either. Tell me about the people in the living room and what they’re thinking and doing, please.

So LOTR has got a lot of lore. It’s a treasure trove of lore. You can map it and analyze it and create alphabets and languages, and people have done all that. But it’s lacking the human angle (and not just because they aren’t all humans). The characters perform amazing feats of bravery by the end of the series, but it feels more expected and less a result of character growth than in the Harry Potter series.

I enjoyed The Hobbit the most. It was less grand and more personal and we were inside Bilbo’s head as a part of the adventure. Nevertheless, I had no trouble finishing the trilogy despite its great length and I can understand why it has endured for so long.