Book Reviews: Ladies #1 Detective Series

June 23, 2006

I have finished three more books in The Ladies' No. 1 Detective Series by Alexander McCall Smith, and I have to say I just love these books. I asked a friend of mine recently if she'd read these, and she said she'd read the first one and it was "Cute." Wow. That had to have been a surface-level read, because this series is so far from being "cute." There is wonderful language in each novel, and this beautiful river of tradition flows through every chapter. To only read this as a plot book--a fun summer beach novel--is a shame. So much is missed by skimming. Mma Ramotswe is a wonderful character, and Botswana comes to life under McCall's Smith poetic writing. Read it as "cute" if you wish, or read deeper and be mesmerized by the theme of people, family, and country.

Book Review: Brave Enemies

June 10, 2006

I loved this southern novel by Robert Morgan, also the author of Gap Creek, another of my favorites. This is a fascinating story of a young mountain woman during the Revolutionary War who, after a series of extremely unfortunate events, decides that her best chance for survival is to pretend she’s a boy. What happens in the hills between the rebels and the loyalists and those suspected of being a spy or seditionist on either side is pitiful and shocking. Ultimately Josie unintentionally joins the militia and fights at the fateful battle at Cowpens in January 1781. This is a fast-paced read. I’m glad to know Robert Morgan has several other novels I’ve not yet read!

Book Review: Monster

June 9, 2006

Frank Peretti's Monster is a good summer read. I remember Peretti's other novels as being much more visual and spiritually impacting. This novel is just a satisfying "Sasquatch" read, for those of us who have been fascinated with Sasquatch since watching the Six Million Dollar Man face off with the critter. This book goes on my list as a good plot read, but the writing itself is lacking and the dialogue is stilted. He also got quite preachy at several points; in fact, my eyes started glazing over at times. That said, if you've always had an interest in Bigfoot, this is a fun read.

Book Review: Storming Heaven

I’ve experienced the “you can’t judge a book by its cover” syndrome. Since I am currently blacklisted at the library until I pay my rather hefty fees, my friends have been supplying me with books. Amy loaned me Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven. When I looked at it, I thought: “A romance novel? How weird for Amy!” The cover looked all sunset-like and pink. (It wasn’t until I was a quarter of the way through the book that I realized this cover was actually a rendering of a coal-mining town.) Au contraire—this is not a fluffy book in any fashion. In fact, it reminds me a lot of one of my all-time favorite books, Richard Llewelynn’s How Green Was My Valley. Storming Heaven is the story of people whose way of life was altered forever when the coal company came in, taking their land and robbing the mountains—people who fought back ultimately by trying to organize a union. It is just hard to even comprehend the events that took place on Blair Mountain in West Virginia, when the U.S. Army was called into “disband” the pro-union miners with guns, bombs, and poison gas.

Reading this book is for me like going to the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge and reading about the families whose farms were ripped out from under them when the Secret City was built. It’s just all so heartbreaking. Mountains stripped; old home places tossed aside like scraps of lumber; family farms buried under asphalt.

Book Review: New Stories from the South, 2005

For the past many years, Randy buys this year's edition of New Stories from the South for my birthday. I love southern fiction. There is just nothing like it. I love what Jill McCorkle has to say in her introduction to this collection:

Pain, sorrow, grief--isn't that what we really want to see, to experience and learn from? Who wants to read a story where everything is perfect and nothing whatsoever happens? It would be like an endless pile of those holiday brag letters where no one tells of the year's misfortunes and losses but only of brilliance and success and good times. Who wants to read such? Give me something that will break my heart. Make me ache. Make me laugh and weep simultaneously. Make me feel and care. That is what a story should do, and oftentimes a story is as much about what has come before as the situation at hand. There is history and nostalgia. There are regrets and losses. There are joys that in hindsight take on a different level of pain. Read a story that really works and you will find that dark taproot.

These are good stories. Nothing stands out as terribly memorable, but good, solid stories. I was sad when I came to the end and look forward to next year's installment.

Book Review: 2 By Dan Brown

Dan Brown's Deception Point and Digital Fortress are both great plot reads. I can't remember which is which now by the titles, but I think Deception Point was slightly better than Digital Fortress. They aren't deep and the dailogue is tiresome, but they are great reads for those weeks when you don't want anything more than plot.

Book Review: Eats, Shoots and Leaves

How could I not love an author whose rallying cry is "Sticklers unite!"? For I am a grammar stickler, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss just makes me feel so happy!

I love this introduction to the chapter "The Seventh Sense":
"Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. 'Come inside,' it says, 'for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's.'
"If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated."

Obviously, to read a book subtitled "The Zero Approach to Punctuation," one would have to be somewhat of a grammar freak. And although I have tuned it down tremendously in the past couple of decades, the truth is that I used to find it almost impossible NOT to correct one's grammar.I used to get such incredible joy from my editorial days! How I LOVED to make those copy editor's marks.

And grammar classes in high school and college! I can't even express the pure joy in diagramming a sentence. (I am REALLY coming out of the closet now!) The satisfaction in a sentence well-diagrammed must be akin to the feeling a mathematician has at solving a big fat equation. It's all so strange, I know. It's what Lynee Truss calls "The Seventh Sense." She writes, "No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggresively instructed to 'get a life'...Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions."

I loved this book. It simply made me really happy. And I am so looking forward to getting out my red pen for RICK LANEY, our support group's next newsletter editor! Knowing Rick, he will take it upon himself as a personal challenge to present the newsletter needing absolutely no editing....