Musings: Love Medicine

Louise' Erdrich's Love Medicine is an intricate story centered on two Chippewa families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, and the way the family members interact with each other.  The story begins with June, a beautiful woman, down on her luck, whose sudden and accidental death has a profound effect on the lives of the people who knew her.  Readers travel back and forth in time with multiple characters, experiencing their lives as they unfold, watching as they make mistakes, recover, and then stumble again.  We see how the American government impacts their lives, how Christian missionaries abuse their culture, and how, over time, proud people become mistrustful and vengeful, falling into alcoholism, violence and dead ends.

Native American contemporary history is pretty bleak.  It's a story of almost complete annihilation, isolation, broken promises and misguided compromises.  Even using the phrase "Native American" in a way is defeatist- even 100 years ago, people knew tribes as being distinct, having very different ideas about life and how to live it.  Now, there are so few of them left that we group them all together and are completely unaware of the nuances that separate one tribe from another.

Musings: Alexandria

Alexandria is the nineteenth novel in Lindsey Davis' mystery series set in the 1st century Roman empire, starring Marcus Didius Falco and his growing family.

This time, Falco is in Alexandria, Egypt, home of the famed library.  Unfortunately, the head librarian turns up dead in a room locked from the outside and Falco is forced to look into the situation. The head librarian job is a big deal in Alexandria, and there are many who want a chance at it, even if it means murdering other candidates.  But with Falco on the job, you know you're in for a treat, and a funny one at that!

I have read and reviewed every Falco mystery on this blog, so I don't think I will be convincing anyone to read this series with this review if I haven't already managed it!  I love Falco- I love how cynical he is, but how he also is so upset by the corruption around him, and he's always willing to help someone out.  He's such a great character, and I've really enjoyed getting to know him so well over the past nineteen books.  (And there's a twentieth out, too!)

Musings: Little Rock Girl 1957

Little Rock Girl 1957 is a very short book - only about 65 pages long - about the power of the photograph on the left to bring the Civil Rights movement to the world's attention.

The photo is one of the most powerful ones of the 20th century and certainly in American history, describing a time when segregation reigned throughout the country and African-Americans were beginning to fight in an organized way against it.  It was snapped on the first day of school, 1957, after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ruling that separate was not the same as equal and that the education system had to be integrated beginning in the fall.  This decision caused a huge backlash, and it all came to a head in Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine African-American students attempted to go to school, only to be denied admittance by Arkansas state National Guardsmen and a mob-like atmosphere of hate by fellow students and residents.

I thought the book would be very informative about the people in the Little Rock Nine and those intimately connected with all the drama.  I wanted quotes and flashbacks and updates on people's lives.  I wanted to know about the news coverage and political responses.  However, as the book is so short (and much of it is taken up with brief biographies of the nine and a Civil Rights timeline), none of that was available to me.

Musings: Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse is one of the early full-length novels featuring Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet, Jeeves.  The only other Wodehouse I've (tried to) read is The Man with Two Left Feet, a short story collection that I didn't really enjoy.  I laughed my way through this novel, though, so I am very excited that there is so much more in the Wooster and Jeeves pantheon for me to dig into.

Right Ho, Jeeves is a situational comedy.  Multiple friends and relatives of Wooster come to Jeeves for help with their troubles, and Wooster does his best to stick his own two cents in, often with less than stellar results.  I think this is probably the way every Jeeves and Wooster novel goes, so I don't think I would want to read them one right after another.  But this one hit the spot and made me snort on public transit and was just an utter delight.

In many ways, Bertie Wooster's narrative style reminded me of the one employed in Three Men in a Boat.  He is highly conversational with his audience and even more fabulous interacting with his friends and family.  He's also absolutely hilarious.  I loved all of his asides about his family, the way he described different people, and his internal dialogue about the various characters populating this novel.  And his whole lifestyle just fascinates me- here's a guy who can keep himself entertained:

The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn.

 I say I laughed through the whole thing, but I can't find one real quote to share with you about how hilarious the book is because it's not really a one-liner thing.  It's more a contextual thing, and he keeps referencing back to things he mentioned earlier in the book, and it's all wonderful.  I just can't prove it to you, but I hope you take my word for it.  The graduation speech alone had me wiping away tears of laughter.  It's classic.  I hope to watch the TV version of this book so that I can see that scene brought to life.

One thing I found a little sad and probably would care more about if this had been a more serious novel was just how vocal Bertie's aunt is about how stupid she thinks he is.  Granted, her insults are quite colorful and entertaining, but she's very generous with them, and I couldn't help feeling just a little protective over my poor Bertie Wooster, who was just doing his best to help.

What's interesting in this book (and I imagine this holds true for the others as well) is that we don't get a great read on Jeeves.  We get to know Bertie really, really well, and we know how Jeeves stands in relation to him, but we don't get much insight into Jeeves himself.  It is probably for the best as I think we'd lose much of Jeeves' air of competence and mystery if we got inside his head.  But I wouldn't mind knowing just a little more about him.

Overall, a really fun and entertaining read.  I am very happy to have given this series a go, and look forward to the many stories awaiting me.

Musings: The Lost Prince

I didn't bring any physical books to New York with me, and I am still not sure if purchasing books I really want to read in e-book format is something I want to do, so much of my reading while in this massive city has been dictated by what is available on Project Gutenberg or Amazon's free classics section.  This hasn't bothered me at all, though perhaps some of you will be wondering why the heck I'm reviewing some very obscure and random books.  There are more random and obscure reviews to come, I assure you.

I suppose when the author is as famous as Frances Hodgson Burnett (of The Secret Garden fame), the work can't really be called obscure.  But I for one had never heard of her book The Lost Prince and certainly never read it growing up.  But I read it now, and while I probably didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if I had been 12 years old, I still thought it was a good read.

The Lost Prince centers on Marco Loristan.  Marco has had an unconventional upbringing, shuttling about all over Europe with his father and one servant, living a pretty poor life.  He is Samavian, but the country of Samavia is in civil war.  Marco's father, Stefan, is a Samavian patriot and often has clandestine meetings with political figures.  But Marco himself leads a lonely life, with very few friends his own age.  That is, until he meets some street children that practice military drills, headed by a crippled boy who calls himself The Rat.  Marco and The Rat become fast friends and soon are asked to set off on an adventure that is greater than either of them ever imagined.

Musings: The Leavenworth Case

The Victorians were nothing if not really, really dramatic.  Anna Katharine Green was no exception and her mystery novel, The Leavenworth Case, proves it.  There is Fainting.  There is Swearing Before God.  There are Secret Marriages.  Wild Accusations.  Love at First Sight.  And, of course, 11th Hour Revelations.  A Full Confession.  All those things and many more, and all deserving of mid-sentence capitalization.  And all shared with much more wordiness than necessary.

I must admit that the more I read Victorian literature that was popular with the Victorians, the more I judge them (Yes.  All of them).  They seem, on the whole, a very bizarre bunch prone to monologues and lectures and excessive use of italics and exclamation points.  I find it hard to believe there were many sensible people around in the time period, especially as they all seem to conveniently put their every dastardly thought into writing to be found by someone later on at a key moment.

The Leavenworth Case was not my cup of tea.  It centers around a locked-room murder of a very wealthy man whose name, unsurprisingly, was Leavenworth.  Mr. Leavenworth had two nieces, one of whom would inherit all his money and the other of whom wasn't going to get anything.  There was no real reason for this at all- both nieces were very pretty and seemed very attached to their uncle, but he bizarrely only wanted to give his money to one of them.  What follows is a very complicated (might I say convoluted?) mystery involving many people and a whole lot of partially-burnt pieces of paper (really, you'd think one would be more careful) of trying to determine who killed him.

Musings: Camera Obscura

Lavie Tidhar's Camera Obscura is the second book in a series that started with The Bookman.  I did not read The Bookman, however, and did not find it difficult to understand Camera Obscura at all- it takes place in a different country, with an entirely new set of characters, and while it probably mentions some characters from the previous volume in passing, it is not done in any fashion that impedes your understanding of this book.

That said, I don't really think I understood this book at all.  There is a Milady, an agent for the Quiet Council, a group of automatons that has been in charge of France since the Quiet Revolution.  The Quiet Council has set Milady the task of finding an object that was stolen during a gruesome locked-room murder, an object that appears capable of taking over people's bodies and causing them to do strange things.  Concurrent to this is the secondary story of Kai, a young Southeast Asian who gets his hands on a jade statue that everyone in the whole world seems to want.  The two stories converge only near the end, though they reference each other throughout.