Nobody Knows Anything

Toni tagged me with this meme, which is to write 15 things about books. This is, as far as I know, the first time I’ve ever been tagged with one of these things.

1) I don’t know when I started reading — somewhere between 2 and 3. I don’t remember my parents reading me stories before bed. I think I must have read myself my bedtime story every night.

2) A favorite family story about me is how one day during our vacation in Bermuda I disappeared in the main town. My mother, frantic, asked a policeman for help in finding me. He asked her about the sorts of places I liked. She mentioned bookstores, he took her to the nearest one, and there I was, reading the D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. I still have that copy of the book with its original (though much battered) dust jacket; it’s currently on the bookshelf in Sophia’s and Simon’s room.

3) Darin’s favorite genre is science-fiction/fantasy; mine is mystery. Strangely, if I pick up an SF book, Darin is rarely interested in it, and likewise I am not particularly moved to read Darin’s set of mysteries.

4) I knew Darin was the boy for me when I discovered his idea of the perfect vacation was the same as mine: go somewhere peaceful and beautiful and bring a suitcase full of books along with. We actually brought a bag full of books with us on our multi-week trip to Israel. And we read them all.

5) My favorite book when I was a kid was Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key. I must have read that book ten million times. I saw the movie three times, but I was secretly disappointed because it veered so much from the book. Of course, I had yet to learn that was SOP for book adaptation. (My mother, when cleaning out her house and getting it ready for sale, found my old Scholastic book club edition of this book. We never throw anything away.)

6) I read The Lord of the Rings instead of studying for finals sophomore year of high school. I’m not sure what it means about me that a)I don’t remember a thing about the books except for the bit with the spider and b)I did pretty damn well on my finals anyhow.

7) I have never read Huckleberry Finn. In fact, there are quite a few classics I have never read but expect to before I, you know, die.
There are quite a few classics, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin that I have read and remember absolutely nothing about. I do not feel more educated as a result of reading these books.

9) I loved The Scarlet Letter when I read it in high school. I am undoubtedly the only former or current American high school student to make this claim.

10) How many books do we own? I have no idea. Easily a few thousand, in just about every subject and genre you can name. And we’d have a lot more than that, but we got rid of 26 boxes full of books back in 2001, in order to clean up our house a little.

11) The scariest book I own is Practical Homicide Investigation (the manual of choice for serial killers everywhere). When I finally get around to arranging the books in my office, the sex-related books go on the lowest shelves, and the crime-related books go on the uppermost.

12) Every so often Sophia says, “We need to go to the bookstore. I hear a book calling to me.” Darin and I look at one another knowingly.

13) I get books out of libraries now. If I really like them, I go buy a copy. I buy at least one library book per month (usually cookbooks, but not always).

14) I have read plays and short stories in French and German, but I have never managed an entire novel in a foreign language.

15) I read Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, in English, in one sitting at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Hmmm. I guess I’m supposed to tag someone. Well, I’ll tag the Maitresse, Andrea, and the Piefessor.

Let’s put it this way: after one reading through Hot Chocolate by Michael Turbeck, I wanted to have sex with this book. Not with the author. With the book.

The Amazon page says there are “more than 60″ recipes in this book, which probably means there are 61 or something. It’s a thin book, with a wide range of chocolates for every taste: the thick chocolate from Cafe Angelina in Paris, spicy Aztec-inspired chocolates, a hot white chocolate from Sweden, Frrrozen Hot Chocolate from Serendipity, alcoholic chocolates for adults, side dishes of tuiles and little cookies, coconut marshmallows…

Seriously, depending on how this winter goes my entire running program could be for naught, because I seriously want to try half of the recipes in this book tonight. I’ll leave the lavender-and-pistachio hot chocolate (yup) for tomorrow.

Oh man. Kepler’s is out of business. I can’t believe it. That was a wonderful bookstore, one of the few independents in this area. (For such a literate area, we have a complete Hobson’s choice of bookstores: B&N or Borders. Whee. Ha.)

If Kepler’s couldn’t make it—whenever I went there it was packed—the independent bookstore is truly doomed.

I bought Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay in hardcover. That should tell you how eager I was to read this sequel to Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Because I never buy hardcover.

Sat down. Read it straight through. Wished the next book were out already.

Dexter is the Energizer Bunny of serial killers: he’s still finding bad guys who deserve to be dispatched and, well, takes care of them. His sister is now a homicide detective who gets called to the scene of a particularly gruesome crime (despite the humor of these books, Lindsay doesn’t stint on describing the sort of awful things serial monsters like to do) and she asks Dexter for his particular insights into this crime. Only to discover that whoever’s doing this is wanted by more than the Miami Police—the guys in Washington need to find this guy, and fast.

Meanwhile, Dexter is being followed by Detective Doakes, who knows there’s something Not Right about Dexter and wants to provoke him into acting stupid. So Dexter does: he becomes a couch potato at his girlfriend Rita’s apartment and just the substitute Dad Rita’s two kids need. And then the most awful, unthinkable thing happens: Dexter gets mistakenly engaged.

Several times I read a particularly funny line aloud to Darin, who eyed me warily (I don’t think he quite “gets” Dexter). There are some seriously hilarious parts to this book. There are also some gruesome ones (but hey: you’re reading a serial killer novel), so be warned. Dexter’s voice and worldview are so engaging though—what grosses us out is merely fodder for artistic appreciation to him—that you can get through it.

I still don’t know how Lindsay is going to keep this going, but what he has so far is hilarious and wonderful. Dexter definitely stands out. Though he’s trying his damnedest to blend in with these human weirdoes.

§

Sarah Weinman notes that Jeff Lindsay has sold two more Dexter novels: DEAR DADDY DEXTER and Untitled. Untitled??? Well, some of her commenters have good suggestions. My favorite is DEMONICALLY DIAPERING DEXTER. Because, you know: he could.

Underwhelming.

Okay, I guess that was a little terse. It’s kind of meant to be a joke, given that The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova is 656 pages long. It’s also had one of the greatest publicity blitzes in recent memory—I’d been hearing about this book for weeks before it was published, with articles using such phrases as “one of the rare books that’s worthy of the hype.” I was so excited when it was available at the library. Darin needed something to read; I let him read it first.

He was underwhelmed. If you read EW, he completely agreed with its review, except he said, “I’d give it a B- instead of a B.”

The Historian is the story of several generations of scholars who have been obsessed by who Vlad the Impaler was and what really happened to him. The first problem I had with this book is this: in the first couple hundred pages, there are three narrators:

1. A woman in 2008, looking back to when she was 16, in 1972.
2. Her father, discussing events that happened in the early 1950s.
3. The father’s academic mentor, an Englishman, discussing what happened in the 1930s.

Guess what? They all sound exactly the same. Same stentorian phrases, same high-flown descriptions. I had to pay particular attention to the opening phrase of any given chapter so I could be sure as to who in the hell was speaking, or, in many cases, writing—there are lots and lots of letters that apparently everyone leaves around describing what had happened at some period in the past.

And I get the point, Kostova wants to describe a different, more removed world, but the only detail I remember her including that links what happens in her book to the real world is a passing reflection that after the events that happened here, the Soviets invaded Hungary. Oh, and a discussion of what would happen if someone like Stalin were immortal, the damage he could do. (Were the extent and severity of Stalin’s crimes as well known in the 1950s? I ask because I actually don’t know the answer to that.)

Another problem is the writing about past events. Everyone describes everything exactly chronologically. The problem with this is, in several cases, the writer knows how it’s going to turn out but somehow forgets to put that in the beginning of the letter they’ve left for posterity. Imagine if someone who lived in NYC wrote down the events of their day on September 11, not just as history but as a warning to future readers. Think they might put some of the salient points up front?

Not in this book. No, in this book people will just leave off in the middle of their stories, needing to pause for whatever reason.

Janet Maslin, in her review, mentions the endless travelogues. Yup, gotta agree with her there. Worse than that, however, is that these descriptions go on for so damn long I forget what the characters are doing there. There’s one section that’s an ancient letter describing the pilgrimage of some monks from Wallachia to Constantinople and from there to Bulgaria, and as I started reading it I suddenly realized I had no idea what the point was.

The Historian isn’t terrible; it’s just ponderous. And if there’s one thing a frickin’ vampire novel shouldn’t be, it’s ponderous. So I’m with Darin: I give it a B-. And I want the name of Kostova’s publicist for my own future reference.

Dexter Morgan, the hero and narrator of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, is a guy with a problem: while he doesn’t exactly know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” he’s a serial killer who’s known from a young age both what he is and that murder is generally considered “wrong.” His foster father, a cop, trained him how to channel his impulses toward a fairly narrow set of victims: other serial killers.

In his day-to-day life, the one where he pretends to be human and interacts with humans with complete incomprehension of what they’re thinking, Dexter is a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police department. His foster sister, Deborah, is a cop who really wants out of vice and into homicide. There’s a serial killer preying on the hookers on the Tamiami Trail, and Deb knows this could be her ticket to a detective’s badge. She needs Dexter to give him one of his famed “hunches.” Dexter often has hunches when serial killers are on the loose, because he knows how to think like them better than anyone. But the Tamiami Trail killer is different—not only does Dexter highly admire the killer’s technique, if not his aims, but the killings seem almost like they’re meant to communicate something specifically to him. Dexter, you see, has been having strange, incomprehensible dreams, and he’s been sleep walking. The question he faces is: has he been sleep killing?

I started reading this at 10:30 last night and finished the entire thing shortly after 12, so I rate this one, Two thumbs, way up.

What I especially love in this book is how Lindsay keeps Dexter in character all the time, showing us Dexter’s point of view at all times. Dexter finds humans utterly incomprehensible. For example, there’s the female detective in charge of the Tamiami Trail case who seems to treat Dexter in the oddest way:

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn’t stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don’t buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn’t actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

Lindsay builds the suspense very nicely—Dexter knows he’s off, but how off is he?—and maintains a great balance between humor and horror. Dexter is a great narrator: ironic, charming, confident of his abilities, pathetic in his inhumanity. The ending has a few problems, but the thrill ride to get there, and the unexpected emotional punch of the unusual choice Dexter has to make, make it worthwhile.

The sequel, Dearly Devoted Dexter, is due out next month. I don’t know how long Lindsay will be able to keep up this balancing act, but I’m definitely picking up this book. And according to Lee Goldberg, Showtime has ordered a pilot for a series based on this book. To which I say, !!! I don’t know how they’d do it. Can you show the hero of a series killing people every week in a particularly inhuman manner?—well, I guess cop shows have been doing that for years. I’d at least tune in for one episode.

I fully expect all of my friends to sign up for this in lieu of, you know, developing craft:

Casting Call For Reality TV Show Contestants…

“At Last, You Could Become America’s Next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity!”

The newest reality TV show, Book Millionaire, is providing applications and holding casting calls for people who want to become published authors or those who are published and want to achieve best selling status.

Eight people with dreams of seeing their book ideas become published and being the next author launched to best selling and celebrity status will meet Book Millionaire‘s Publishing Committee during July 2005 to start filming of Book Millionaire Reality TV Show.

Here’s your chance to finally become America’s next Best Selling Author and Reality Show TV Celebrity! We are scouting for the next group of candidates for America’s hottest new reality show. Act now. Picture yourself featured on national television sharing your story, writing, book-to-be or book with millions of people showing you have what it takes to be America’s next Best Selling Author and Book Millionaire.

At last…

Why do I find myself hoping this is some kind of Internet scam and not an actual show?

Update: Lee Goldberg has a longer analysis of this.

I got Baking By Flavor by Lisa Yockelson (which I heard about because it was recommended early and often by Zarah at Food & Thoughts) out of the library today and brought it to the park to read while the kids played and Darin recovered from tandem-bicycling with Sophia. Before I had a chance to read it, though, I had to go do something with the kids; Darin picked up the book to flip through it. When I returned he looked up at me and said,

You need to buy this book immediately.

So, just in case you’re looking for a really good cakes, pies, pastries, and cookies book? Evidently this would be one.

(My friend Otto threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t post, so I got my butt in gear and finished this review.)

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is the latest publishing marvel to come down the pike: it’s twisty and brainy and has puzzles in Renaissance art, like The Da Vinci Code! It’s written by two young punks just out of Princeton! It’s erudite and a gripping read! Yadda! Yadda!

Well, not so much.

The Rule of Four is the story of Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, two seniors at Princeton the night before their theses are due. Paul’s thesis is about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real book from the Renaissance that details something in a strange code that has yet to be broken. Tom’s father worked on the puzzle for years; Paul looked Tom up at Princeton because what Tom’s father did on the book.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. The infatuation with Princeton is overweening—the emphasis placed on every little part of the Princeton experience as though it’s poetic or marvelous or something. (I asked Tamar if students at Harvard are this fatuous. She did say that Princetonians are a lot preppier. Then she snorted when I mentioned that these guys are working on a thesis the night before it’s due.) There is a hell of a lot of emphasis put on eating clubs, for instance. As someone not currently at Princeton or worked up about which eating club I belong to, the awe that “the Ivy” appears to inspire seems, uh, ridiculous.

Paul, the guy working on the thesis (and apparently doing so to the exclusion of anything approaching a life at Princeton), manages not to figure out that what he’s doing might be of some, uh, notice, in academic circles, if nowhere else. (You think some undergraduate working on a paper that happened to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem might have an inkling that what he’s done might be of interest?)

The title is The Rule of Four, and much is made of the four guys at the center of the story (Tom, Paul, and their roommates Charlie and Gil)…except they have no relation to the title, no parallels, no thematic unity.

The puzzles that Tom and Paul figure out definitely struck me as stuff that was reverse engineered to show off how esoteric and cool the authors are and not how well the supposed author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might have hidden whatever secrets the book might contain.

The timeline of the book really bothered me: I believe the entire current storyline of the book covers one night and one day, and there is no way the events described in there could happen.

But what annoyed me most about this book is that it’s not about anything. Or, even worse, I found the theme of the book to be this: it’s all about the bling-bling.

(Yes, the suburban mom in her thirties used “bling-bling,” thereby proving beyond a doubt that phrase has jumped the shark.)

The Rule of Four wants to be The Name Of The Rose, but the biggest difference between that book and this one is that The Name Of The Rose, for all of its puzzleworthiness, is about ideas. What is the secret of the monastery, and why are monks getting murdered for it? The Rule of Four is, in my opinion, pretty much about the stuff. I can’t tell you more without giving it away, of course, but tell me that what you’re supposed to think at the end is: Oh wow, wouldn’t that be cool?

Anyhow, if you want a twisty-turny thriller that makes you feel smarter than you really are, definitely check out The Name Of The Rose (by Umberto Eco, in case you’re wondering). Another one, always fun, is The Eight by Katherine Neville. There are also all the books by Arturo Perez-Reverte, such as The Club Dumas. (I’m not a huge Perez-Reverte fan, but he’s way better than this book.)

But if you want to read The Rule of Four, get it out of the library. Or better yet, read the rest of this entry and I’ll spoil the book for you…
Read more…

There’s an article in today’s Mercury News about a local writer who did what I always thought I would do but haven’t yet (registration required—try Bugmenot if you hate registration):

Lolly Winston’s dream came true.

Her first novel, “Good Grief,” is a bestseller. Lately, life’s been “a surreal string of good news,” she says. But before that, she was living a Silicon Valley nightmare.

The Los Gatos writer always dreamed of writing a novel by 40. So she quit her other jobs to finish the book she’d been working on parttime for four years.

Then the bubble burst. Her husband’s software company went bust. They were paying the mortgage with a home-equity loan. The credit card was maxed. Her stepdad died. Her brother drowned.

“It was kind of scary,” Winston says of trying to finish the book in the face of financial and emotional hardship. Once done, she found an agent who secured a book deal. “It was like winning the lottery to sell the book.”

The novel is the sometimes painful, sometimes humorous tale of a young Silicon Valley widow. After her software engineer husband dies, she suffers a breakdown at her PR job, showing up for work in her robe and slippers. She moves to Ashland, Ore., and rebuilds her life.

“Good Grief” is No. 14 on the New York Times bestseller list. Reviews have been good (“Bridget Jones meets Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.”).

You know what? It’s nice to know that it can be done. For those times when I’m not so certain.