Finished 3/19/01
The Collected Stories
Amanda Cross
Brief Reviews |
I have now read all of this author's fiction. I found the short stories less satisfying than her longer fiction; some of the solutions seemed too obvious, with no red herrings (but of course you wouldn't have as many of those in short fiction).
"Tania's Nowhere"
A female professor disappears without a trace and Kate is prevailed upon to help find her.
"Once Upon a Time"
A toddler appears out of nowhere and her parents cannot be found. She is adopted by a childless couple. As an adult she desires to find her biological parents.
"Arrie and Jasper"
A little girl's dog is kidnapped and returned unharmed.
"The Disappearance of Great Aunt Flavia"
Great Aunt Flavia first muses about suicide, then disappears.
"Murder Without a Text"
A graduate student is murdered in her dorm and one of her professors is accused.
"Who Shot Mrs. Byron Boyd?"
A feminist author and a chauvinist author appear on the same podium. The moderator, the title character, is shot.
"The Proposition"
A painting with a worldly subject is stolen from a convent in Texas.
"The George Eliot Play"
An associate professor tries to get Kate to use her professional reputation to promote a play supposedly by George Eliot.
"The Baroness"
A painting is stolen and is returned.
Finished 2/25/01
Welcome to my Planet: Where English is Sometimes Spoken
Shannon Olson
Excerpt | Book Review
Finished 2/11/01
The Blood of Strangers: Stories From Emergency Medicine
Frank Huyler
First Chapter | Book Review
Finished 2/8/01
Shopgirl
Steve Martin
Excerpt | Book Review
This novella has been receiving positive reviews, so I decided to read it. Using the same x-ray vision into humanity that makes him a good comedian and actor, Martin has captured the post-graduate school twenty-something Mirabella well. She is caught in the boredom and inertia of her day job selling anachronisms (ladies dress gloves) at Neiman's and doesn't have the strength to establish herself in the art world, despite her talent and education.
Quotes
"There are a few late browsers that day, and they punctuate the tedium like drops from a Chinese water torture" (13).
"Tonight's walk past cosmetics and perfumes has special fascination for Mirabelle. Being Monday, there are no customers and the she-clerks are idle. Mirabelle notices that when they are in motion, these perfume nymphs look breezy and alive, but when they are still, their faces become vacuous and frozen, like the Easter Island of the Barbie Dolls. (22)
Finished 2/5/01
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (unabridged)
Stephen King (read by Anne Heche)
First Chapter | Book Review
This was the perfect novel to experience as an audio book. Reading it or seeing it, if it were made into a movie, wouldn't capture it as well as Anne Heche's dramatization. You understand the changes that young Trisha experiences while lost in the woods through the changes in Heche's voice. Given that it is a King novel, the reader is never quite positive that she will make it out alive, so there was that element of suspense. The novel had more depth than one might expect. Trisha, needing someone to rely on, thinks about what her parents have said regarding the existance of God. In a dream or hallucination she sees three priestlike figures and tries to determine which is the most real to her. For awhile Tom Gordon, the Red Sox closer, was her companion, both through games on her Walkman and his imaginary presence with her in the woods. She eventually determines that the God whom T.G. points up to after every save is the God that she needs, someone who is with you in the bottom of the ninth when you really need Him.
Finished 1/29/01
@Expectations
Kit Reed
First Chapter | Book Review
"Can you guess what it's like to love two men at the same time or how hard it is, shuttling between two worlds when you don't know where your heart belongs? The tension is tremendous."
Kit Reed's novel begins in medias res and pulls you into the story of Jenny, a young woman newly married to Charlie Wilder, a Marine officer. Charlie forgot to tell her until just before their wedding that he had two children from his previous marriage. He forgot to tell her how often his military career would leave her alone with the kids, who can't stand her. But she discovers a world where she can be happy: StElene, a virtual community to which she telnets daily, often leaving her sleeping husband to log on in the middle of the night. She makes friends and finds someone who she thinks understands her better than her husband, a man who calls himself Reverdy. Most chapters are from Jenny's point of view, but others are from Reverdy's or Lark's. Lark is a sweet, phobic 19-year-old who functions best in StElene and lives in his parents' basement. The tension in the story is generated as Jenny careens between the real world and StElene. I think there should have been a bit more back story so we'd understand why Jenny ended up with Charlie. I think we're meant to infer that he reminds her of her father, who was in the Navy. But why did she leave her psychiatric practice in New York City to marry him and move to South Carolina? Why didn't she have any friends from her former life? The ending, while plausible, seemed rushed and left some lingering questions.
Finished 1/27/01
Honest Doubt
Amanda Cross
Book Excerpt | Author Interview | Author Interview (audio)
This mystery novel is written in first person, but the narrator is not who you would expect. It is not Kate Fansler, the protagonist of all the previous mysteries by this pseudonymous author, but rather a private detective who calls herself Woody who is consulting with Kate on an academically-related murder case.
I must admit that I didn't enjoy this novel as much as I have enjoyed others in the series. Part of the attraction for me has always been the character of Kate, with her long-winded, literate conversational style. Woody is nice enough, although she belabors that fact that she is fat (her word) and rides a motorcycle. The conversations she has with the suspects in the murder case are just not very interesting. Woody is too self-deprecating; it makes it difficult to reconcile with the fact that she is educated to the level of a law degree. Kate is too young to retire from detective work, too young to merely sit in her apartment and talk over someone else's cases. Bring back Kate!
Finished 1/26/01
In a Sunburned Country (unabridged)
Bill Bryson (read by the author)
Author Interview | Book Excerpt
Finished 1/13/01
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Stephen King
Book Excerpt | Author's Web Site
The first third to one half of the book is more of a memoir of the writer's life, with a few wise observations about writing thrown in. The second half is the book I was expecting. Despite the type of books he writes (horror), King has a real sense of the "craft" of writing, hence the title. He gives sincere advice on everything from grammar and pace to finding an agent.
Quotes
"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut" (145).
"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor" (150).
"Good writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling . . . You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you" (146).
Finished 1/5/2001
Unbeatable: The Historic Season
of the 1998 World Champion New York Yankees
George King
Book Excerpt
This book gives some interesting behind-the-scenes information that I hadn't known before and includes some pictures that I hadn't seen. The production values of this paperback are not very high. The pictures are pixelated newspaper reprints and the text is riddled with errors that should have been caught by the copy editor.
October-December, 2000
Finished 12/25/2000
Lucy Crocker 2.0
Caroline Preston
I read for hours today and finished this enjoyable book. Lucy Crocker, the title character, basically goes through a midlife crisis when she finds out that her husband Ed is fooling around with a 20-something employee of Crocker Software. Lucy has been mourning a miscarriage and pretending to be working on the much-awaited sequel to Maiden's Quest, the popular computer game she created. She is an artist and did all the initial storyline and illustrations for MQ. This time around she has been sleeping late and staring off into space and is not prepared for the big MQII meeting where she is supposed to unveil all the levels of the new game. Her husband basically fires her and kowtows to Ingrid, the younger woman with whom he is dallying. Lucy then finds an incriminating e-mail from Ingrid to Ed and flips out. She finds their 13-year-old twin boys looking at Internet porn and decides they need to experience something other than computer monitors for the summer. She signs them up for canoe camp and takes off for Wisconsin. The boys are miserable at camp. Meanwhile Lucy meets up with her longlost love, Sam McCarty, who broke up with her just before she got together with Ed. She and Sam have a fling and Lucy finds out he is just as loony as he used to be when he involves her in freeing the inhabitants of a commercial mink farm. The boys run away from camp and get lost. Ed comes to rescue the boys after getting a pathetic, manipulative letter from Benjy, the least likable of the two twins. He goes on a journey of his own with Uncle Bo, the head of the canoe camp, canoeing up into Canada to restock the campers with supplies. He and Uncle Bo track the boys, who managed to get themselves to the old family camp at Little Lost Lake. They hoodwink their mother into believing that camp let out early. Benjy recognizes MQII in his mother's paintings of the summer. Ed shows up and makes up with Lucy.
NYT Book Review
Finished 12/21/2000
Intrusions
Ursula Hegi
The first novel by this German-born writer, better known in recent years for Stones from the River set during World War II in Germany. The novel is an example of metafiction (fiction about writing fiction, basically). Instead of straight-forward narrative, the novel is interspersed with the author's musings about her characters or conversations with her characters, who appear in incongruous places such as her grocery cart to lobby for better plot lines. The intrusions of the title are those of her characters into her "real" life and those of her "real" life (her husband and children) into her writing life. The author feels guilty when she closes the door of her study to write, but feels sad when her family keeps her from her writing for too long. It's a very good picture of the balances that women writers must attempt to maintain.
First Chapter
Finished 10/2000
Winter Solstice
Rosamunde Pilcher
First Chapter | Author Interview
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