Book 1: “Moving to Higher Ground” by Wynton Marsalis
This is a combination of a light, brief biography and personal story of what jazz is to Wynton. It’s a breeze to read. I enjoyed it. The nice thing, Wynton was critical of himself when he was younger, describing himself as egotistical and unkind at times.
Book 2: “Buried Prey” by John Sandford.
It’s been awhile since I devoured a book as quickly as this one. The times I put it down, I couldn’t wait to get back to it. John Sandford is one of my two favorite authors writing today. Some of his recent books, though enjoyable, have been a little less compelling. He returned to his earlier form with this one. And when I finished the book, I miss it. I want the next story. I want to return spending time with those characters and get in on the chase.
Some of Sandford’s earlier works were almost too creepy for me. He worked a few villains that were demonic. Then, a few books had closer to typical, but not all that typical, sociopaths – a group of bikers, for example. It’s understandable. If you are trying to make each villain more villainess than the previous, you start getting too far out there. In Buried Prey he returns to a very disturbing pedophile-murderer. He touches on the antagonist just enough to give me goose-bumps, enough to compel me to see that he’s taken down. And out. But not enough where I need to take a shower.
There’s some cleverness in the plotting. It’s a crime that reaches back decades so the first third of the book concerns the main hero’s (Lucas Davenport, the hero and detective in Sandford’s Prey series) early years on the police force.
I’m sorry the book ended. I would have been happy if Sandford threw in a couple more plot reversals and went on for another 100 pages. This is the one advantage of publishers’ push for authors to get two books out a year, I know I’ll have another Sandford within six months. The downside of that, I think the quality may be slipping.
An aside on this topic, I suspect some authors are using co-authors to get the words pounded out. Clive Cussler, a writer I enjoy, does this explicitly. He has separate co-authors listed on his different series. At least he was smart about the choice of co-authors, they were successful authors in their own right. One I read a lot when he wrote under his own name.
Book 3 & 4: I read a couple of technical books that aren’t worth mentioning.
Book 5: I’m also about halfway through a mathematics books about math oddities. Some puzzles with interesting solutions.
Book 6: A history book, “Unlikely Allies”. The book is written by a professor of international law and diplomacy. The main purpose of the book is to resurrect the reputation of Silas Dean, the first envoy to France sent by the Continental Congress during the American Revolution. In the end, Dean was seen as a potential traitor and war profiteer. Being a one time friend of Benedict Arnold didn’t help. Thomas Paine made vicious and unsupported attacks on Dean. The book also includes a couple of other interesting historical characters, including one person who lived half their life as a man and half as a woman. The London Stock exchange took bets on which s/he was. It was only after death with an examination by a doctor (and witnesses) that it seems we know.
Unlikely Allies is an enjoyable book for someone who wants history but not the main story, instead read a little backwater eddy.
On to the big discussion:
Book 7 & 8: I read two books by Laura Lippman. I read two previous books by Lippman. I started reading her books because she is one of the most honored writers in the mystery genre. These are the third and fourth books I’ve read by her, and I can’t figure out why she garners so much acclaim. I acknowledge my comments are about my tastes, not universal truths on Lippman’s writing.
“Girl in the Green Raincoat” I have three major problems with this book. The first is the obvious lifting of plot ideas. The main plot is the heroine is restricted to home and rest which she does, not from her bed but from a chaise longue set in front of a window where she watches the world and observes a mystery. Obviously “Rear Window”. It’s one thing to steal an idea, but it really annoys me to call attention to it in the book which the characters do. They spend a couple of pages talking about acting out Rear Window (and a book with a similar plot by Josephine Tey). Even worse, the author at the end of the book in an end note admits to stealing the idea (wasn’t it obvious?) and offers a quote from T.S. Eliot that says that’s what the professionals do, that while amateurs imitate, pros steal. She says of the book is “felonious larceny by an unrepentant recidivist” (that mouthful phrase is typical of the prose).
Second problem: We’re almost halfway through the book when we finally discover the “crime”. There’s almost no investigation when the criminal shows up at the heroine’s home. While the heroine schemes of a way to save herself, the antagonist spends the time explaining everything that happened. How does the heroine save herself? She uses a broom handle to unlatch a dog crate. The dog bounds out and distracts the women. The protagonist then throws a chamber pot with urine at the antagonist who finally drops her guns and flees the room. Before the antagonist has a chance to regroup, someone drops by the house, captures the woman, and calls the police. It felt completely contrived.
The last problem and the biggest. And I suspect the one with which most people will disagree. I think what I’m about to complain about is what many love about Lippman. In her stories, there are all sorts of inconsequential details are given emotional context – usually nostalgic back-stories. For example, someone can’t simply drink an Arnold Palmer. Instead, there’s a couple of sentences on the origin of the name, and how it’s called different things in different places. Then there’s the back-story of how it was prepared in this family. A description of making the tea. A description of making the lemonade. The family’s discussion of what to name the mixture because it was prior to the popularity of the term “Arnold Palmer”. We needed all that? We don’t learn much about the family that’s important to the plot. And the beverage was not important to the story.
Another example. The heroine’s father comes over to do some handy work. It’s allows for a nice conversation about marriage and having kids. There’s a subplot about marriage in the book and in every chapter someone is talking about how they met their spouse. The author points this out at the end of the book in case you missed it. Before the father talks about his marriage, there are two pages that describe how the protagonist learned to love her father and his practical household skills and forgive him for not being an expert on James Joyce (seriously). This discussion is accomplished with a few examples from the protagonist’s childhood. I kept thinking, instead of telling me that the daughter loved her father’s practical skills with dreamy remembrances from teenage days, there could have been a few lines of dialog that did the same thing. That dialog could provide a natural segue to the father’s story of his marriage.
Teenage days. Lots of flashbacks to teenage days. Half of the second book is a flashback to when the protagonist, a mother, was 15 years old. Shoes, handbags, iced teas, notebooks – item after item has a emotional back-story to when the character was 15 (give or take a few years). I get the feeling this feeling on a regular basis that a 14 year old girl wrote the story and giggle every two pages.
This makes me wonder is the problem me? Or is it a gender issue? Is this something women get that men don’t have a clue about? When I walk into a room, I don’t think about the emotional back-story of everything I touch. I don’t pick up a pan in the kitchen and think about how I might have used that pan when I was 11, and I was making Christmas Norwegian pastries. I burnt my mouth. My mother gave me an ice cube to suck on, then I gobbled down a pint of cookies and cream ice cream. The following winter, it took a lot of coaxing from my mom to get me back on that horse and return to cooking. None of the previous happened to me, really. I made it up. My point: if I someone picks up a pan, or anything, do they recount the full story? I don’t. Not about most things. A few things on occasion – but that’s rare. I’m not thinking about my teenage days or the books I read as a kid even once a week (Lippman refers to children’s books often, and children’s items, like music boxes). Maybe not once a month. In the end notes of the book, Lippman admits to also stealing from Chekov – that the rifle on the wall in chapter 1 has to be fired by the end of the book. I don’t think Chekov meant that you pick one thing you wrote about and make it relevant. I think he meant everything. Yes, the chamber pot mentioned in the beginning is used at the end but what about all the other stuff?
Aside: I wrote the above paragraph, creating a back story like Lippman, with an example of a pan because I picked something that I grab and use all the time and don’t think much about other than whether it’s properly cleaned. Then almost halfway into the new book, something very close to the above paragraph shows up in the book. It’s not a pan, but it’s a tea kettle. We get a full back story of how and why the woman acquired the kettle. Other kitchen items are mentioned such as a can opener. The author then states that the woman “categorized” all the items in the kitchen. Really? This character goes into every room and thinks about every object and the history and emotional context of each item? Still, I was amused by writing a mocking paragraph and seeing something like it show up in the book.
The other book is “I’d Known You Anywhere”. I’ve got one big problem with this book. It starts with a typical mother raising a couple of kids with a dutiful husband. Then we discover that she survived a kidnapping by a pedophile serial killer when she was 15. The convicted killer is in jail, sees a picture of her in a paper, and writes her, some twenty years later. Here’s my problem: the woman writes back! And starts accepting his phone calls. I don’t buy that at all.
It gets worse. Remember the bigger picture. We have a grown woman who was the victim of a kidnapping and rape as a teenager by a serial killing pedophile who’s now in jail and writing her. The jailed man has an accomplice spy and tail the family. The jailed felon then writes to the woman and writes about the woman’s teenage daughter. The woman seems a little peeved by this and when the husband asks what does want to do, the woman responds, “I don’t know.”
What? A convicted serial killing pedophile who kidnapped and held you for a month and kidnapped and killed another girl in your presence begins talking about your teenage daughter and you’re not sure what you want done? You’re confused? You’re worried about what the media will make of this?
And it got worse. The younger son of the family has nightmares about the teenage daughter being endangered. Now I’m pissed, not annoyed. If the teenager daughter ends up in danger, then I’m pissed by this clumsy foreshadowing. If the teenager daughter does not end up in danger, then I’m pissed because of your obvious attempt to manipulate my expectations with the gotcha being “see, you shouldn’t have assumed! I bet you thought they were coming after my teenager when it something else all along. You fell for it!” I’ll get angry if the teenage daughter disappears, there’s an all-out search, and she turns up having run off with a boyfriend or something typical for a teenager.
In the end, there’s no big plot twist. The woman confronts the kidnapper in the prison. She stands up to his manipulations (which she didn’t do when she was 15). This is the big change in her. It comes from an epiphany of remembering it was a rear view mirror she was looking at when she saw the killer chase the last victim (yeah, that’s big breakthrough). The aftermath is she goes home and tells her husband she wants to sleep with the windows of the house open.
And the worst scene for me was when she had to go to a meeting at a school, she had deal with a younger son. So she left him in the children’s section of a nearby Barnes and Noble. That’s a crime and doesn’t seem like the actions of someone who lives in fear of kidnapping. The obvious thing, why didn’t she take her son with her to the school? What was the point of this scene. To show how stupid the woman was?
So I’m left wondering, is this a female/male thing? With Sandford, a male writer whose protagonist is male, you don’t get all this inner dialog, all the reminiscing of teenage days. One of my favorite things Sandford does is when his protagonist hears something interesting, the protagonist will answer with “huh”. I like that. With Lippman, before the conversation starts, there’s a memory about the other person’s shampoo, the smell, the shine of the hair, and a flashback to …. whatever. Annoying.
Also, I still don’t get the awards heaped upon Lippman. The people who give the awards are smarter, more literate, and better readers than me. What are they seeing that I don’t? Do they love all the nonsense back story? Is that good writing to them? Are there secret symbols in the examples that I don’t get?
This is a combination of a light, brief biography and personal story of what jazz is to Wynton. It’s a breeze to read. I enjoyed it. The nice thing, Wynton was critical of himself when he was younger, describing himself as egotistical and unkind at times.
Book 2: “Buried Prey” by John Sandford.
It’s been awhile since I devoured a book as quickly as this one. The times I put it down, I couldn’t wait to get back to it. John Sandford is one of my two favorite authors writing today. Some of his recent books, though enjoyable, have been a little less compelling. He returned to his earlier form with this one. And when I finished the book, I miss it. I want the next story. I want to return spending time with those characters and get in on the chase.
Some of Sandford’s earlier works were almost too creepy for me. He worked a few villains that were demonic. Then, a few books had closer to typical, but not all that typical, sociopaths – a group of bikers, for example. It’s understandable. If you are trying to make each villain more villainess than the previous, you start getting too far out there. In Buried Prey he returns to a very disturbing pedophile-murderer. He touches on the antagonist just enough to give me goose-bumps, enough to compel me to see that he’s taken down. And out. But not enough where I need to take a shower.
There’s some cleverness in the plotting. It’s a crime that reaches back decades so the first third of the book concerns the main hero’s (Lucas Davenport, the hero and detective in Sandford’s Prey series) early years on the police force.
I’m sorry the book ended. I would have been happy if Sandford threw in a couple more plot reversals and went on for another 100 pages. This is the one advantage of publishers’ push for authors to get two books out a year, I know I’ll have another Sandford within six months. The downside of that, I think the quality may be slipping.
An aside on this topic, I suspect some authors are using co-authors to get the words pounded out. Clive Cussler, a writer I enjoy, does this explicitly. He has separate co-authors listed on his different series. At least he was smart about the choice of co-authors, they were successful authors in their own right. One I read a lot when he wrote under his own name.
Book 3 & 4: I read a couple of technical books that aren’t worth mentioning.
Book 5: I’m also about halfway through a mathematics books about math oddities. Some puzzles with interesting solutions.
Book 6: A history book, “Unlikely Allies”. The book is written by a professor of international law and diplomacy. The main purpose of the book is to resurrect the reputation of Silas Dean, the first envoy to France sent by the Continental Congress during the American Revolution. In the end, Dean was seen as a potential traitor and war profiteer. Being a one time friend of Benedict Arnold didn’t help. Thomas Paine made vicious and unsupported attacks on Dean. The book also includes a couple of other interesting historical characters, including one person who lived half their life as a man and half as a woman. The London Stock exchange took bets on which s/he was. It was only after death with an examination by a doctor (and witnesses) that it seems we know.
Unlikely Allies is an enjoyable book for someone who wants history but not the main story, instead read a little backwater eddy.
On to the big discussion:
Book 7 & 8: I read two books by Laura Lippman. I read two previous books by Lippman. I started reading her books because she is one of the most honored writers in the mystery genre. These are the third and fourth books I’ve read by her, and I can’t figure out why she garners so much acclaim. I acknowledge my comments are about my tastes, not universal truths on Lippman’s writing.
“Girl in the Green Raincoat” I have three major problems with this book. The first is the obvious lifting of plot ideas. The main plot is the heroine is restricted to home and rest which she does, not from her bed but from a chaise longue set in front of a window where she watches the world and observes a mystery. Obviously “Rear Window”. It’s one thing to steal an idea, but it really annoys me to call attention to it in the book which the characters do. They spend a couple of pages talking about acting out Rear Window (and a book with a similar plot by Josephine Tey). Even worse, the author at the end of the book in an end note admits to stealing the idea (wasn’t it obvious?) and offers a quote from T.S. Eliot that says that’s what the professionals do, that while amateurs imitate, pros steal. She says of the book is “felonious larceny by an unrepentant recidivist” (that mouthful phrase is typical of the prose).
Second problem: We’re almost halfway through the book when we finally discover the “crime”. There’s almost no investigation when the criminal shows up at the heroine’s home. While the heroine schemes of a way to save herself, the antagonist spends the time explaining everything that happened. How does the heroine save herself? She uses a broom handle to unlatch a dog crate. The dog bounds out and distracts the women. The protagonist then throws a chamber pot with urine at the antagonist who finally drops her guns and flees the room. Before the antagonist has a chance to regroup, someone drops by the house, captures the woman, and calls the police. It felt completely contrived.
The last problem and the biggest. And I suspect the one with which most people will disagree. I think what I’m about to complain about is what many love about Lippman. In her stories, there are all sorts of inconsequential details are given emotional context – usually nostalgic back-stories. For example, someone can’t simply drink an Arnold Palmer. Instead, there’s a couple of sentences on the origin of the name, and how it’s called different things in different places. Then there’s the back-story of how it was prepared in this family. A description of making the tea. A description of making the lemonade. The family’s discussion of what to name the mixture because it was prior to the popularity of the term “Arnold Palmer”. We needed all that? We don’t learn much about the family that’s important to the plot. And the beverage was not important to the story.
Another example. The heroine’s father comes over to do some handy work. It’s allows for a nice conversation about marriage and having kids. There’s a subplot about marriage in the book and in every chapter someone is talking about how they met their spouse. The author points this out at the end of the book in case you missed it. Before the father talks about his marriage, there are two pages that describe how the protagonist learned to love her father and his practical household skills and forgive him for not being an expert on James Joyce (seriously). This discussion is accomplished with a few examples from the protagonist’s childhood. I kept thinking, instead of telling me that the daughter loved her father’s practical skills with dreamy remembrances from teenage days, there could have been a few lines of dialog that did the same thing. That dialog could provide a natural segue to the father’s story of his marriage.
Teenage days. Lots of flashbacks to teenage days. Half of the second book is a flashback to when the protagonist, a mother, was 15 years old. Shoes, handbags, iced teas, notebooks – item after item has a emotional back-story to when the character was 15 (give or take a few years). I get the feeling this feeling on a regular basis that a 14 year old girl wrote the story and giggle every two pages.
This makes me wonder is the problem me? Or is it a gender issue? Is this something women get that men don’t have a clue about? When I walk into a room, I don’t think about the emotional back-story of everything I touch. I don’t pick up a pan in the kitchen and think about how I might have used that pan when I was 11, and I was making Christmas Norwegian pastries. I burnt my mouth. My mother gave me an ice cube to suck on, then I gobbled down a pint of cookies and cream ice cream. The following winter, it took a lot of coaxing from my mom to get me back on that horse and return to cooking. None of the previous happened to me, really. I made it up. My point: if I someone picks up a pan, or anything, do they recount the full story? I don’t. Not about most things. A few things on occasion – but that’s rare. I’m not thinking about my teenage days or the books I read as a kid even once a week (Lippman refers to children’s books often, and children’s items, like music boxes). Maybe not once a month. In the end notes of the book, Lippman admits to also stealing from Chekov – that the rifle on the wall in chapter 1 has to be fired by the end of the book. I don’t think Chekov meant that you pick one thing you wrote about and make it relevant. I think he meant everything. Yes, the chamber pot mentioned in the beginning is used at the end but what about all the other stuff?
Aside: I wrote the above paragraph, creating a back story like Lippman, with an example of a pan because I picked something that I grab and use all the time and don’t think much about other than whether it’s properly cleaned. Then almost halfway into the new book, something very close to the above paragraph shows up in the book. It’s not a pan, but it’s a tea kettle. We get a full back story of how and why the woman acquired the kettle. Other kitchen items are mentioned such as a can opener. The author then states that the woman “categorized” all the items in the kitchen. Really? This character goes into every room and thinks about every object and the history and emotional context of each item? Still, I was amused by writing a mocking paragraph and seeing something like it show up in the book.
The other book is “I’d Known You Anywhere”. I’ve got one big problem with this book. It starts with a typical mother raising a couple of kids with a dutiful husband. Then we discover that she survived a kidnapping by a pedophile serial killer when she was 15. The convicted killer is in jail, sees a picture of her in a paper, and writes her, some twenty years later. Here’s my problem: the woman writes back! And starts accepting his phone calls. I don’t buy that at all.
It gets worse. Remember the bigger picture. We have a grown woman who was the victim of a kidnapping and rape as a teenager by a serial killing pedophile who’s now in jail and writing her. The jailed man has an accomplice spy and tail the family. The jailed felon then writes to the woman and writes about the woman’s teenage daughter. The woman seems a little peeved by this and when the husband asks what does want to do, the woman responds, “I don’t know.”
What? A convicted serial killing pedophile who kidnapped and held you for a month and kidnapped and killed another girl in your presence begins talking about your teenage daughter and you’re not sure what you want done? You’re confused? You’re worried about what the media will make of this?
And it got worse. The younger son of the family has nightmares about the teenage daughter being endangered. Now I’m pissed, not annoyed. If the teenager daughter ends up in danger, then I’m pissed by this clumsy foreshadowing. If the teenager daughter does not end up in danger, then I’m pissed because of your obvious attempt to manipulate my expectations with the gotcha being “see, you shouldn’t have assumed! I bet you thought they were coming after my teenager when it something else all along. You fell for it!” I’ll get angry if the teenage daughter disappears, there’s an all-out search, and she turns up having run off with a boyfriend or something typical for a teenager.
In the end, there’s no big plot twist. The woman confronts the kidnapper in the prison. She stands up to his manipulations (which she didn’t do when she was 15). This is the big change in her. It comes from an epiphany of remembering it was a rear view mirror she was looking at when she saw the killer chase the last victim (yeah, that’s big breakthrough). The aftermath is she goes home and tells her husband she wants to sleep with the windows of the house open.
And the worst scene for me was when she had to go to a meeting at a school, she had deal with a younger son. So she left him in the children’s section of a nearby Barnes and Noble. That’s a crime and doesn’t seem like the actions of someone who lives in fear of kidnapping. The obvious thing, why didn’t she take her son with her to the school? What was the point of this scene. To show how stupid the woman was?
So I’m left wondering, is this a female/male thing? With Sandford, a male writer whose protagonist is male, you don’t get all this inner dialog, all the reminiscing of teenage days. One of my favorite things Sandford does is when his protagonist hears something interesting, the protagonist will answer with “huh”. I like that. With Lippman, before the conversation starts, there’s a memory about the other person’s shampoo, the smell, the shine of the hair, and a flashback to …. whatever. Annoying.
Also, I still don’t get the awards heaped upon Lippman. The people who give the awards are smarter, more literate, and better readers than me. What are they seeing that I don’t? Do they love all the nonsense back story? Is that good writing to them? Are there secret symbols in the examples that I don’t get?
