Unnecessary But Lovely Things for Book People, Part 3

Instead of virtuously finishing up the novel edits (oy vay, why did I write so many words?), I've been window-shopping over at etsy again. I love that place. It calls to me. Especially when I'm supposed to be doing something else. :)

Thing 1: Bookshelf Print:



I like the artist's style a great deal. I wonder if she'd be willing to do a custom job with just titles of my books? It could be called, "Modesty, Thy Name Is Kate."

Thing 2: Come fly with me:



I spent quite a bit of time browsing in this artist's shop, because in addition to these reclaimed book page prints, she has an amazing selection of collages and multimedia artworks. I came this close >< to owning a triptych involving fabric hair. Only then Visa would have likely owned me. Sigh.

Thing 3: What page are you on?



I've had this bookmarked as a favorite for at least a month, and I'm amazed no one's snapped it up yet. It's just so cute! It's also what I suspect my Rottie Miss Mimi gets up to when I'm not home...

Today's Final And Most Awesome Thing: "Hang on, Nancy!" Tex shouted.



Okay who among us does *not* want a Nancy Drew themed tote bag? That is a-number-one adorable with a capital A in both cases. And the cute themed print fabric on the inside is a touch of genius. There are others in her shop too, in case you hate horses or something, but I'm kind of sold on this one. Makes me want to reread the book, too.

Allright, back to the editing board...

Review: After Dark and After Glow, by Jayne Castle

Okay, Oddmonster's making me look like a slacker here, and theoretically this is my reviews blog, so a couple days ago I went searching through a friend's bookshelves for something quick and easy to get through. And I found it! Or them, rather.

After Dark and After Glow are Books 1 and 2, respectively of Jayne Castle's Ghost Hunters series, romances that take place on Harmony, a colonized planet whose previous inhabitants left mysteriously and in a hurry. The current inhabitants have been trapped there by events that took place before the series begins, and some of them spend a lot of time investigating the first civilization's ghost-infested ruins.

Lydia Smith is one of those para-archeologists, who, at the beginning of After Dark has awakened from a lost weekend trapped in the ruins and at the mercy of the ghosts therein. When she's finally rescued and brought topside, she finds her professional academic archeology career in tatters and, still shaken by the experience, is forced to find employment at a second-rate ruins museum, which may or may not be involved in the illegal antiquities trade. And then she meets a powerful and mysterious man...

Okay these are just fun. They're fun and sort of mindless and for me, at least, what I qualify as perfect beach reading. The romance is believable and the setting's intriguing, and best of all, there are carnivorous rabbits on Harmony. Lydia has one as a pet. It has six feet and tries to eat her new boyfriend. Loved Fuzz. Love him!

After Glow is the second book in the series, and I'd pretty much have to give away a ton about the second book to summarize it, but suffice it to say, Lydia's back, and Fuzz gets lucky.

Light, fluffy, interesting paranormal romances.

Frankenstein: Dead or Alive, by Dean Koontz

From grandmother to neighborhood bully, to Antoine, to Evangeline, Bucky and Janet Guitreau went through the Arceneaux family like a school of angry piranha through anything that might piss off killer fish.

Synopsis: Victor Frankenstein, alive and well in modern-day New Orleans, is having a spot of trouble with his army of killer zombies. Also, his wife's adopted a half-human albino dwarf.

There's so much to say about a book I had to wait FOUR LONG YEARS for Koontz to get around to writing that it's hard to know where to start. Okay wait, I'll start here: I tore through this thing in an evening and a half, and cursed work in-between times. It was clever and visceral and deadpan funny, and sadly, I want O'Connor/Madison stories. And while I'd seen a couple of previous reviews label it as sort of meh, I have to say, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Victor Frankenstein has set up camp in modern-day New Orleans, and is cranking out perfectly formed replicants to take the places of highly placed people around the city, with the aim of one day having his "New Race" eat and kill every last human being on the planet, while simultaneously chanting his name. A bit much to do all at once and with a full mouth, but you know, I admire his goal-setting.

Book 1 launched the idea and introduced Frankenstein and his original monster, now a tattooed 200-year-old monk, as well as Carson O'Connor and Michael Madison, two hardboiled New Orleans homicide detectives. Also, a portion of the book was narrated by a very determined severed hand.

Book 2! Things have started to go wrong: the replicants are experiencing difficulty staying with the plan (Eat humans, chant "Victor! Victor!", which just goes to show that if you're going to take over the world, you need really simpleminded replicants to do it) and there's O'Connor/Madison along with lots of my beloved placeporn.

Book 3! (This book.) I have to agree with the reviewer elsewhere on lj (whose name I have shamefully forgotten), that one some level, Koontz wrote this book because his agent scaled the fence and made it past the dogs and appeared on the front lawn with a sharp and pointy stick. "Four years, Dean! Contract!" But the best part of this is that Koontz appears to have taken out any frustrations he might've had at having to actually finish the trilogy by inserting snark whenever possible. This, for example:

When she reached the door, however, and turned around to gaze in at Arceneaux, her expression was convincingly that of a frightened and helpless woman desperate to find a strong man to lean on with her ample but perky breasts.

He's enjoying himself on some level, I maintain, and that makes it a better read for me. Also, he tosses in everything but the kitchen sink: mutant genetics monsters, shapeshifting mindless killers, Du Maurier's Rebecca, a sarcophagus filled with blood. It's quite an awesome lack of restraint.

The majority of this book, however, is dominated by the relationship between Frankenstein's wife and her pet albino dwarf, which, however wrong that sounds, is delightfully funny and touching all at one go. He's experienced four days of life as a reviled and hunted monstrosity, she's beaten and lonely and desperate for a child. It's an odd dynamic that Koontz pulls off with above-average flair.

My one complaint--I know, I have them every single time--is that the climax is not in the least climactic, and the main characters from the preceding books have basically been ordered on stage at gunpoint, which is less fun than you might think.

Still, highly recommended for fans of the macabre.

Review: Biggie and the Fricasseed Fat Man, by Nancy Bell

The day it rained feathers in Job's Crossing, J.R. and Rosebud were gathering pecans in the front yard.

Synopsis: In rural Texas, the tiny but imposing Biggie Weatherford does her best to raise up her grandson, J.R., while keeping a handle on everybody else's business. All the murdered bodies, though, make that a bit challenging.

Texas is all kinds of dangerous, it turns out.

Good book. Not an awesome book, but a good solid mystery. I'd read an earlier one in the series, Biggie and the Poisoned Politician which was a little better, but still, a quick and solid read. Bell's strength is really her characters, and specifically that each book is narrated by ten-year-old J.R. I think it's hard to write really convincing kids, but J.R.'s voice always sounds spot-on.

Technically a culinary mystery, since it includes one recipe in the back, but as with Politician, it was not the recipe I'd been hoping for.

Review: Garden Spells - Sarah Addison Allen

The tree was situated toward the back of the lot. It wasn't very tall, but it grew long and sideways. Its limbs stretched out like a dancer's arms and the apples grew at the very ends, as if holding the fruit in its palms. It was a beautiful old tree, the gray bark wrinkled and molting in places. The only grass in the garden was around the tree, stretching about ten feet beyond the reach of its branches, giving the old tree its room.

Claire didn't know why, but every once in a while the tree would actually throw apples, as if bored. When she was young, her bedroom window looked out over the garden. She would sleep with her window open in the summers, and sometimes she would wake in the morning to find one or two apples on the floor.

Claire gave the tree a stern look. Occasionally that worked, making it behave.

Synopsis: Two sisters bring their secrets to the old ancestral home and cause all kinds of magical upheaval in a small North Carolina town.



Beach reading. That's what this is, beach reading. It's sunny and light and romantic and...uplifting. This book has not one iota of dark in it, despite the fact that one sister is on the run with her daughter from an abusive, controlling boyfriend, and one's an emotional shut-in. Everyone gets what they want, and moreover, what they need, which is rarely the same thing. There's also a wonderful little old lady wandering around giving people things without knowing why, and eventually she attracts a passel of wistful gay men looking for love. Which is how life should be, I feel.

When Claire Waverly's grandmother died, Claire stepped right into her footsteps and turned the family's magical recipes into a catering business, bringing the people of Bascom fine, gourmet charmed foods. After all, cooking and hiding in the Waverly mansion, tending the magic garden and resolutely refusing to interact with the rest of the world are what Claire does best. Right up until her prodigal sister Sydney returns, bruised and shaken, with her daughter Bay in tow. And then there's the staunchly oblivious, madly in love artist who's moved in next door.

So, I've seen this book listed as culinary fiction on more than a few sites, but for me this isn't a book about food per se, but being fed, and who you let feed you. Technically, there's food everywhere in the book, and yet no one really seems to eat, unless it's narratively important. A nifty trick, but one that wears thin about the middle of the book. It's a good thing that Allen can back up the relatively light weight of the narrative with prose that positively sparkles, leaping right off the page.

Oh and ? This house is haunted in a *good* way.

Review: Sandman Slim - Richard Kadrey

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will.

New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is criss-crossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber.

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam away from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

Synopsis: Just how big of an asshole do you have to be for your friends to pay demons to come drag you down to hell for 11 years?

This is a really great book. For a start, it's completely insane. Wild Bill Hickok's last living descendant takes up black magic in Hollywood, only to be betrayed by his Satanist friends one night and cast into Hell. When the book opens, he's escaped after making a living there for 11 years: gladiator by day, unholy assassin by night. Which makes waking up in a North Hollywood cemetary the day after Christmas seem real fucking nothing much.

From there he acquires a bitter, depressive severed head, goes on a revenge-rampage and discovers that Homeland Security's in league with a secret society of angels, doing the Lord's work by locking up anyone with the slightest natural inclination to magic. Add in the world's weirdest brothel, an immortal French alchemist and a cult of Lovecraftian glow-in-the-dark slugs and the book simply *rockets*.

It's like Daniel Pinkwater on a bad heroin jag.

Two minor complaints:

Dear Author,

Women don't exist solely to motivate or piss off your hero. They turn out to be living, breathing people. Totally not kidding.

And two, the whole book is set in LA, yet I really didn't get an authentic LA feel from it. The LA descriptions read like someone who took a high-toned author's grant and rented a North Hollywood apartment for a month before returning to Portland. It's a visitor's LA, a shadow or a caricature, unlike the real thing in all the most important kinds of ways. Disappointing.

Still, the dialogue rocks and the plot is surprising; this is easily the best urban fantasy I've read in about four years. Highly recommended.

Review: Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson

Now, I'm not much in the way of reading "business books" myself, and fortunately for me as an IT professional it's rare that my boss pushes one on me, but a year or so ago everyone in our team was encouraged to read this book, and I had to fly halfway across the country the next day, so I went ahead and read it on the plane.

And I'm glad I did!

Who Moved My Cheese? is a short book, about a couple of mice and a couple of littlepeople who live in a maze. Every day they eat cheese, until one day - the cheese disappears!

It's a fantastic parable about what happens to us when the rewards we expect suddenly dry up, and about how we can go on banging our head against a brick wall, expecting to receive something that simply isn't there any more.

I found the story amusing, thought-provoking and extremely relevant. It's a short read, and a very enjoyable one, and if you're looking for something to read on the train, or on a flight, I'd say go for it.

One quibble: the edition I have, and likely it's the only one available these days, has a boatload of introductions and case studies in which various people bang you over the head with parallels and uses for this book. If you're into that, great, but I'm not, and my advice is: Don't be put off by them. Simply skip straight to the story, read it and go ahead and draw your own conclusions.

Review: Wicked Gentlemen, by Ginn Hale

The night hung in tatters. Gas streetlamps chewed at the darkness. Candles cast dull halos through the dirty windows of the tenements across the street. Heavy purple clouds pumped up from smoke stacks and patterned the sky like ugly patches on a black velvet curtain. A few fireflies blinked from what corners of black velvet curtain. A few fireflies blinked from what corners of blackness remained.

A pair of them invaded the darkness of my rooms. I watched them flicker, darting through their insectile courtship. They swooped past my face, circled, and then alighted inside the fold of my shirtsleeve.

They crept close to on another, brilliant desire flashing through their tiny bodies. Their antennae touched and quivered. The female firefly reached out and stroked the male. He rushed into her embrace. Holding him close, she crushed her powerful mandibles through his head. Their flickering bodies blinked in perfect unison as she devoured him.

Some romances end more badly than others.

Synopsis: Gothic fairytale meets steampunk murder-mystery.

So good. Sooooooo good. About 100 pages in, I realized that this was the book I've been trying to write for the past year and a half. I can hang up my keyboard and move on. It's just so....lovely. The book has two protagonists, one from the dark side and one out to prosecute his kind, and Hale makes both of them incredibly compelling and sympathetic and I would cheerfully sell my soul for more of their story. The world-building--sort of 18th century London or Boston steampunk with a unique class system--is intense, and goes light on the supernatural, which worked for me.

Okay, there was one moment where Belimai Sykes is described as walking into a stiff breeze, stiff enough to make his scarf billow out behind him all Romantic-like while puffing cigarette smoke enough to form a cloud in front of him. Yeah no.

Totally made up for by the fact that the romance is both incredibly poignant and believable and so so hot.

This will definitely be a re-read, and has knocked Scales of Justice off of my list of favorite novels

I genuinely can't say more about this book without ruining several surprises, but really. You should read it.

Unnecessary But Lovely Things For Book People, Part 2

Etsy: It's a problem.

I am, yet again, not working on line edits for the current finished novel, or revising Ch 7 of the next novel or even writing wee short pieces to keep me from losing my mind and yelling at the dogs for eating the last of the cork coasters. No, instead, I'm cruising etsy for all the latest in Unnecessary But Lovely Things for Book People. Hee!

Thing 1: Bookmaking Kit:



Oh if only it was this easy to get a book in print. And yet, who doesn't want to feel bindings under their fingers and lace a tiny secret story around their throat? Tempting. Very tempting.

Thing 2: Book Earrings



Oh dear. I am *such* a girl.

Thing 3: (and be still my beating heart) Hollow Book



Most useful thing ever. Especially with 18 more chapters of line edits to go. Oh my goodness. I wonder if they do overnight shipping?