Apology to my mother

Maybe it's because she has rarely read the books she thinks that I should read. Maybe it's because her word choice hardly compels, (e.g. "It's really sad and it's not a great book but here, read it some time," or "It kept making me think of you and all of your poor students that don't want to learn.") Maybe it's because nobody in my family takes suggestions from the rest of my family (ask my brother about Lone Star). Maybe because there are just too many other books waiting to be read in the world. Whatever the reason, book suggestions from my mother often fall to the bottom my list.

This, it would seem, is a mistake. I always like the books my mother suggests. Admittedly, I always find something to like in almost everything I read, but my mother's suggestions are often right on target. While in Italy, I read two of her suggestions. Two for two (and neither a book my mother physically gave me) would make it sound as if I listen very closely to my mother. The truth is, however, that my mother told me to read Doomsday Book sometime in 1994 and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society sometime last year and I would have never bought them unless books i done read awarded both Doomsday and Guernsey 9 1/2 caterpillars. To give me some credit, Raych had read them both and could remember their titles, which is not true of my mother.

Connie Willis's Doomsday Book is ostensibly sci-fi (it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards) but it is not an adventure novel, a futuristic novel or a novel about science/technology/space or robots. It is the kind of sci-fi novel my mother would probably never pick up, but probably would enjoy. It is a character driven story that happens to involve some time travel. Written in 1992, many parts already feel outdated, although the swine flu epidemic felt eerily current, as did reading about the plague deaths in Siena the night before I visited that Tuscan city. Several times while reading it, I kept wondering why nobody had ever told me about it (until I remembered my mother had) and what Irene, J-babes, Beth, Sunflower Spinner, Sally's Sister, Tucson T. and all think of Willis. Friends, if you have read Connie Willis, I want to know what you think, and if you have not, I want you to so we can discuss what this book is about. When asked what he thought the point was, The Mister suggested, "Quarantines are good," while I was thinking something along the lines of, "Faith is important, even when it can do no good," or "all humans have the capacity to serve as someone else's angel." So I need some other thoughts.

"Swine fever" warrants a line in Shaffer and Barrows' The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but I wouldn't have noticed it unless I had swine flu on the brain. None of the bad things that happen in Guernsey are disease epidemics. World War II and regular life provide enough moments for tears in a short, sweet book. My main fault with Guernsey is that it is too sweet (and the end is all wrong. Plot-wise it is obvious, but something strange happens with the last 15 pages that made me wonder if the main author died before re-editing them), which is weird for a book that I cried through. The book-love throughout is a nice touch, too, which gives it a few points for all of my librarian and otherwise bibliophilic friends who smile about Heathcliff vs. Darcy debates. Heartily recommended for both mothers and many other friends.

Good choices Mom!

Romping through the fun books

I've read a passel* of fun books recently. Since I rarely read with motivation other than pleasure, labeling some books as "fun", implying that the others aren't, feels disingenuous, but there is something different about books which are out for an adventurous good time.

Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog was my favorite of the bunch. Very odd, how, being based in the same time-traveling history group at Oxford and written by the same woman in the same overall tone, To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-travelling romp while Doomsday Book is a thought provoking tear-jerker. Overall, To Say Nothing of the Dog is just lots of fun. It would be more fun, perhaps, if one had previously read Doomsday Book, Moonstone, plenty of Agatha Christie, a fair share of Victorian poets, and Jerome K. Jermone's Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) because this is no ordinary time travel book, this is a very literary time travel book. Don't not read To Say Nothing because of lack of Victorian knowledge, but if you are Beth or Irene or Sunflower Spinner you will like it all the more because you can feel smug about all the allusions you get (and conveniently ignore those you don't). SalSis would probably enjoy To Say Nothing (although, like Doomsday, for a book officially "sci-fi" it is short on adventure and still has no space, robots or science involved). Raych on books i done read offers a more descriptive description and this apt comparison of the two Willis books, "TSNotD is ALL romping, and a hefty bit of frolic. Doomsday starts off all fun and games, but the apple is full of worms! Seethy, bubonic worms,"(links for the Moonstone and Three Men reviews are from her also).
I could give Katherine Neville's The Magic Circle the benefit of the doubt and suggest I might like it more if I were not comparing it to To Say Nothing or Neville's romping masterpiece, The Eight. That's not true, however; I liked Magic Circle well enough and don't think other circumstances would make me like it more. It is fun. It's just not very good, and perhaps not good at all.
Knowing that I love The Eight and gave its sequel, The Fire, a thumb's up (with some trepidation), an anonymous book donor (could it be SalSis?) sent me Neville's other two works, The Magic Circle and A Calculated Risk. It seems to me that Neville wrote one brilliant, if very flawed, fun book: The Eight. She attempted to carry the fun to a different venue entirely (no international travel, no murderous back story, the intrigue all financial) with A Calculated Risk. That fell far short of The Eight, so she tried using the formula for The Eight with a new set of characters and symbols (including way too much pseudo-incest for my taste and a few too many connections with Christianity. I have no problem using "the Church" in historical intrigue, but making Christ part of a grand conspiracy just doesn't sit well.) in The Magic Circle. That didn't work, so she re-used the characters and symbols from The Eight in The Fire. Unfortunately for Neville and all of us, she seems to have enough for one really fun book and too many weak ones.
Spook Country by William Gibson contains no frolicking, but somehow it still falls within the range of my recent fun books. The Mister picked it out at an airport because he's a fan, I believe, of Gibson's 1984 work, Neuromancer and the beginning of the cyberpunk movement. I think the Mister was disappointed in Spook Country because it is not cyberpunk, but, being unaware of what cyberpunk is supposed to be, I was not so bothered. I found the back of the book's "urban noir" tag intriguing, and described it to a friend as very tech-heavy, but not futuristic; involving spies and crime, but not a spy or crime novel; and gritty in places, but not glorifying drugs or gangs and almost entirely free of sex and violence. The Mister spent a great deal of time trying to figure it out, ("does the spook refer to spies or to the visions that the three main characters see, one religious, one technical and one drug-induced?") which is probably why I was surprised to find it a fairly light hearted adventure story with three conveniently intersecting plot lines that happens to take place in some dark places. I'm not sure for whom I would recommend it, but it was altogether a fun read.
The Mister also suggested I read Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. Like all good sci-fi, Space Viking (written in 1963) has thought-provoking points beyond the adventure. Through his feudal lord turned space viking character, Lucas Trask, Piper soundly criticizes socialism, feudalism, representative democracy, totalitarian regimes, inactive governments, PR scams, and overly active governments. I'm all for the noble space pirate (I love the Firefly series and Han Solo), but somehow I had a hard time with the guy who was raiding other planets with nuclear weapons while declaring himself royalty over his own planet being critical of almost every form of government. The book is very short and the pacing between raiding, vengeance and governmental commentary becomes awkward, but overall it is a fine read. Irene's friend Daniel should read it, and maybe SalSis.
If crying over the travails of a dysfunctional family is your idea of fun, than Firefly Cloak by Sheri Reynolds fits with this post. Otherwise, the book is just on this post because I'm too lazy to start another. I picked up Firefly Cloak based only on the title at a library book sale somewhere along the way. It is a classic Oprah book: the story of several generation of women in the South with more than their share of problems to overcome. Fortunately, it is well written, it is interesting, the addictions and teenage angst are not miraculously cured, and men are neither the cause of the problems nor the solution. I'm not sure why I would recommend this book over many others in the same vein, but I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it.
Other novels for catch-up: I re-read Antoine de Saint Exupery's The Little Prince for the first time in over a decade and found it to still be delightful, but perhaps not as magical as when I first read it. Despite The Blue Sword being one of my favorite books, which I re-read on a near annual basis, until recently I had not re-read the companion book (and Newberry Award winning) The Hero and the Crown. After re-examining, I can admit that The Hero and the Crown is probably just as good as McKinley's masterpiece, but I still don't like it as well. Aerin is no Hari and while the idea of being able to romantically love more than one man in one's life sits well with me rationally (my life would be far poorer without the men I romantically loved prior to meeting the Mister), it doesn't fit so well in a fantasy novel. The Mister recently read The Blue Sword and, while he thought "it's a fine story" he wanted to know 1) if I have any male friends who love this book and 2) what the point is. So it's not everybody's favorite.

*Assuming that "more than usual" counts for a passel, even if it is fewer than ten.

Time Travel Suggestions

 What are your favorite books and movies about traveling through time?

I have written about a few time traveling books on this blog in the past (Connie Willis's Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog and The Time Machine and mentioned Time Traveler's Wife on multiple occasions).

The Mister and I are starting to list time travel movies we've seen and they range from Star Trek to Looper to Arrival to Interstellar to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. 

Let us know what you think!