The Plot
John Hodgman continues his neverending quest to provide the world with all possible bits of information, an effort begun in his first book, Areas of My Expertise. In More Information Than You Require we learn the secrets of the presidents, the secrets of the mole-men, and the sad history of the weather in Richmond, VA.

My Thoughts
I can no longer remember precisely how John Hodgman came to my attention. I have to assume that it was during his first appearance on the Daily Show and yet I did not read his first book until September 2006, so I think it cannot have been. I do know that before I knew he was he, I had heard him on This American Life and enjoyed some of his tales.

In any case, I have been a fan for several years, though I cannot claim the distinction of having discovered him when he was not yet a Minor Television Personality.

Hodgman’s humor can be very dry at times, and some times becomes a little to surrealist for me to find it very funny. On the other hand, sometimes he’ll come out with something so freaking clever that you can’t believe it. Overall, there’s a good baseline amusement factor here, periodically interrupted by some excellent stuff.

And now, in honor of the book, the list of thoughts I compiled as I read:

1. First, the hoboes; second, the mole-men; third, ???. I spent some time considering this important question and can only speculate as to the answer. Perhaps a race of creatures living in the air? Futuristic aliens?
2. While I found the list of mole-men generally more interesting than the prior book’s list of hoboes (why YES I did read EVERY SINGLE ONE), there were a number of the names which confused me. I am interested to see if anyone else had the same question I did.
3. Rap-Around. Ah, Rap-Around. If Hodgman was truly on this show, I now regret having missed it. Because, of course, I grew up in range of the Boston stations, and I remember this show well. Or, rather, I remember the ads for this show well, along with the opening. I seem to remember it coming on around noontime on a Saturday, signalling the disappointing end of morning cartoons and the beginning of an afternoon of televised sporting events. These would begin with the channel being changed from Rap-Around to Candlepin bowling.
4. The story about him and his girlfriend in Portugal is very sweet. I’m afraid I have nothing witty to say about it, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
5. All through the book Hodgman does a truly excellent job conveying his (I believe) genuine bemusement at his sudden celebrity. The story of his visit to the Apple store was truly priceless; I can completely picture the scene and I laugh every time I do.

In Short
Anyone who read Hodgman’s first book and enjoyed it will certainly feel the same about this one — as the page numbers indicate, it is a literal continuation and he is in good form here. For me, this one was even better than the first, because I am a nosy twit and I enjoyed the more personal sections this book contained. I’m looking forward to the third volume at which point all useful knowledge will have been recorded and we can pitch the whole reference section of the library to replace it with endless copies of these three books. That is all.

After the poor showing of the last mystery series I tried featuring someone in the book trade, AND the poor showing of the last series set in New Hampshire I was a bit nervous (and yet still excited) to pick up a new book I spotted on the shelf at the library.

The Booktown Mystery series, by Lorna Barrett
In this series, the author imagines a small town in Southern NH which has decided to remake itself as the local Hay-on-Wye. Stoneham, NH is a fictional place (if only it weren’t) which seems to be located near Brookline and Mason, a bit west of Nashua. Unlike the Josie Prescott novels, this author seems to have done more homework in properly portraying the size of populations involved, and though I was alert through the whole first book for egregious errors, nothing really leapt out at me. The protaganist, Tricia Miles, the owner of a mystery book store in Stoneham, is considerably more likable than Cliff Janeway, and there’s an interesting set of supporting characters who also get some actual development. The weak point was the mystery itself, which literally involved an evil twin and a few highly questionable bits where a previously normal character was somehow sensed to be creepy and unstable then subsequently became so. Even with that, though, it was good enough to keep going with the series.

I’m looking at my reading list from this year and I read a completely pathetic TWO books in July. TWO.

This doesn’t count the 30 times I read Princess Baby or the 25 times I read Wocket in my Pocket, but there is no excuse. Well, actually, there is an excuse, and that excuse is the Nintendo DS. I started replaying Phoenix Wright, and consequently all of my spare time was absorbed by that. I finally (re)finished the fourth game in the series around the beginning of August.

I’ve been reading more in August, though still not nearly as much as usual. However, just two more books (1.1 books, really, based on how much I’ve read already of both) and then I am going to start my Vorkosigan reread, September’s tripletake book be damned. I just need to finish those books before Professor Layton 2 arrives from amazon, or I am sure to be sidetracked once again.

Fail 1: Biker Cop
Sitting on his 10-speed with his little bike-cop uniform.
Perhaps a useful sort of cop in a city, but in a sprawling bedroom community where it can take a half hour to -drive- from south to north?

Fail 2: Annoying Radar Cop
Staking out the Hudson side of the bridge right next to the spot where the speed limit inexplicably drops to 35mph.
Fortunately in spite of his attempts to hide, highly visible from before the speed limit changes.

Fail 3: Lady at Checkout.
Sitting on her motorized cart thingee.
I have no problem with you because of the cart but rather your inability to count. 25 < 14 = FALSE

Fail 4: The Josie Prescott mystery series, by Jane Cleland
I was so excited to discover there was a mystery series set on the seacoast of New Hampshire. I remained thrilled and excited right up until page three of the first book, where the city of Rocky Point, located approximately where Hampton is in the real world, was described as having a population of 100,000. Do you know how many cities of that size there are in the ENTIRE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE? ONE. Even Nashua is still working on breaking into six figures. I tried to continue after that, but the lack of basic research evidenced by such a stupid population figure made it impossible for me to get in to the story.

Fail 5: The Jersey Barnes mystery series, by T. Lynn Ocean
I picked this up at the library because the cover made it sound interesting. And it seemed promising through the first couple of chapters — Jersey, unlike many recent series detectives, is a security consultant and has a lot of training and knowledge, so it doesn’t stretch plausibility that she would become embroiled in mysteries. But before too long the repeated references to her ginormous boobs and shounen anime figure had forced me to abandon all hope of continuing.

Fail 6: The Lomax & Biggs mystery series, by Marshall Karp
A blogger I’ve read for years had spent quite a bit of time gushing about this author and how much she adored the series. But the victim in the first book is a child molester, and even though he did die, I was turned off after all the waxing eloquent about how much fun he was having copping feels from little kids. It was too disturbing and it felt creepy.

The Plot
It’s 1816 and Patience White is a spinster whose father saw to it that she’d not be depentant upon the charity of her brother after his death. With food, money and a place to live assured, she should be content and able to enjoy her life, but she is restless. She finds herself interested in one Sarah Dowling, a daughter of a man with only girl children who has been trained up to be his “son”. The two form a plan to move away together, but Patience loses her nerve and Sarah attempts to go west (from Connecticut to upstate New York) without her.

My Thoughts
I’m going to try something different this time and write a running review as I make my way through the book.

I’ll be upfront: I was reluctant to read this book in the first place, but eventually capitulated. So I had a prejudice against it from the get go. This was not improved upon seeing the book’s cover, which for some reason turns me off utterly. The image is not actually that awful — two women, presumably Patience and Sarah — in somewhat cartoony form, standing next to one another. It generated instant hate in me and destroyed any possible urge to want to read the book.

So I didn’t. Eventually putting it off added its own block to my resistance to reading it and it became extremely difficult to pick it up. I finally forced myself to do so by bringing only it to work with me and reading it during my meal break.

The book thus far is decidedly mediocre. I venture to say that had this book not involved two women, it would have been long forgotten and weeded from any library collection. But it does and so achieves a status I’m not sure it really deserves.

Patience and Sarah inhabit an intensely chauvinistic world, where women have little value other than as baby machines. Their opinions are neither respected nor sought and they are made old before their time with repeated childbearing. The menfolk around them seem aware of the strange difference in status between men and women, mildly puzzled by it, but not especially driven to fix it. The women seem aware as well, but again, have no interest in fixing it. I’m sure this is a true description to some extent, but something about it just feels… off. Almost everyone around them seems beaten down and lifeless — Patience’s sister-in-law Martha, Sarah’s mother and father — unable to take joy in anything at all without the assistance of Patience herself.

Patience and Sarah find each other seemingly by chance. I found the development of their relationship to be too quick for my taste. First they’ve barely met and then suddenly they’re going to run away together and Sarah is enduring multiple beatings from her father because of her flaming passion for Patience? Eh. (Let it be said that I find this sort of goings on in heterosexual relationships twinky as well.) Perhaps it was meant as some kind of lame Romeo and Juliet metaphor (see previous comment about heterosexual twinkiness).

In any case, because they know each other hardly at all, they end up essentially breaking up over a misunderstanding (now there’s a plot I love. Not.) and Sarah sets off on her own disguised as a boy. Except that she doesn’t really have any idea of what ’setting off on her own’ entails and she ends up wandering around western New England with a Minister who apparently has a weakness for young men. Huck Finn she is not.

Eventually Sarah returns, having failed at accomplishing much of anything, and Patience, who mysteriously has been allowed to work as a school teacher (this also struck me as odd; it had been my impression that the teaching profession as staffed mostly by young women was a post Civil War innovation) decides that they are going to get back together. By this point I was finding it really hard to muster any sort of interest at all in their doings, so their subsequent naughty make-out sessions at Patience’s house did little for me.

As the book continued, it seemed more clear that their relationship, while it may have had physical attraction, didn’t really seem founded on any sort of rational basis. They still hardly knew one another at all, and there was very little mutual respect or trust. One or the other of them seemed to be constantly in a panic that the other was no longer interested in them or would be mad about some random deception. Which deception would never have been necessary had they been actual friends who had real conversations.

That they had started to develop this sort of by the end of the book was good, except — it was the end of the book.

In Short
I didn’t go into this book with a good attitude and the book didn’t manage to erase my prejudice with its sheer awesomeness. The relationship between Patience and Sarah was poorly developed and I never managed to find myself concerned about their well-being or their eventual success in life.

So my gmail address is a very simple one. First initial, last name. I love having it, because it’s easy to tell people. No numbers, random letters, underscores. One downside to it is that for some reason a lot of other people think it’s their email address too. I’m not just talking spam — I get random personal emails and lots of e-commerce confirmations to my address.

What I do with these things depends a bit on my mood. If someone has used my email to sign up for something, sometimes I will go in and delete their account, or change their password to something random. Especially if it’s a myspace account. Personal emails I generally delete, after making sure it wasn’t really meant for me. Some of them make me feel bad, because they’re things like ‘here’s your son’s progress report’ or ‘do you want to go to the movies?’ and stuff people might actually miss.

So the other night I got a personal email for a girl (not me). It was from a job recruiter guy and said, basically, “Your dad told me you’re looking for a job, send me your resume and I can give it to the executive director at [Location]“. I read it, at first curious to see if it was actually a cleverly disguised piece of spam. But [Location] appeared to be a real place and the qualifications he listed seemed like real ones someone might have gotten from a person’s dad.

At that point I started to feel a little bad. Here’s this girl looking for a job, no easy task in today’s economy, and her dad cares enough to do a little networking for her — but somehow doesn’t actually know her email address.

Then I looked more closely at the email. I checked something on Facebook.

I realized I knew who the email was for.

And unlike my uncle, I actually know his daughter’s email address.

The Plot
Cliff Janeway is a Denver detective with a weakness for book collecting. He likes to read, too, though that’s not a given. The year is 1986 and eBay and the internet have not yet transformed the antiquarian book market into something completely unrecognizable from its previous incarnation. A book scout — a person who makes the rounds of yard sales and thrift stores in search of underpriced used books — is murdered, and Janeway finds himself oddly determined to find out who was responsible. The path he takes to the answer puts his career and even his life in danger.

My Thoughts
This was not a mystery series I had ever heard of until it was suggested for one of our reviews. I suspect it was the alleged subject matter — the book trade — which was the attraction. And I freely admit, had I found this on my own, I might well have been tempted to pick it up.

And it succeeded in one goal at least: I was able to finish the book. In spite of my near obsessive need to finish things like books, there have been quite a few mysteries that I’ve picked up off the shelf at the library due to an interesting cover blurb which later proved to be entirely unreadable for a variety of reasons. (Off the top of my head, the recent failures include The Rabbit Factory, Southern Fatality and Consigned to Death.)

The story centers around one Cliff Janeway, who seems to be writing or telling this tale from some unspecified point in the future. At the time described at the beginning of the story, he is a police detective who has been having some problems with a wealthy scumbag to whom no charges will stick. He’s also involved with another police officer, Carol, supposedly to the point of considering marriage with her. But it’s telling that the author lavishes far more time and effort in detailing Janeway’s feelings and emotions toward the scumbag than his relationship with his girlfriend. She remains a non-entity and pretty soon they randomly break up and she disappears from the narrative altogether. Janeway, in fact, is really a loner in spite of a superficial effort (purposely superficial? It’s unclear) made to give him connections and friends and other contacts. And honestly, loners can be hard to make interesting.

The mystery itself doesn’t really ramp up until the second half of the book. The first half, though the mystery is presented on the very first pages and there is some desultory detective work put in, is totally there to explain how Janeway came to leave the police force and enter the book trade. I would have liked to have seen this fact a bit more well camoflaged, because as it stands, there’s a very clear break in the middle of the book where this tale ends and then suddenly the real detective work begins.

I also found some of the writing and characterization to be sloppy. In the middle of the book especially, Janeway starts to make sweeping statements about the passage of time which makes it seem as if years have passed. But then when we move in to the second half of the book, it’s clear that this is taking place just a few months after the first section. So where did those statements come from? Is he narrating this from a time far in the future? This could be made more clear. As it was I spent several minutes flipping back and forth trying to figure out how it could work that there wouldn’t be a contradiction.

And then the characterization. Janeway was all right; by the end of the book I did feel like he was starting to take shape, if a still nebulous one. But the secondary characters were very vague, and many of them (like his police detective partner) never made it past cardboard cutout. I also felt cheated — one expects to lose secondary characters in a mystery, that’s a danger of the role, but if you spend the first half of the book tearing apart the character’s life, you tend to expect that when he finally begins to rebuild it that you’re going to start meeting the characters who will people the series from here on out. This is obviously not the case here, as by the end of the book there’s perhaps only two people other than Janeway who seem likely to return in any future stories.

The mystery itself was pretty weak. The author dropped enough hints about who the culprit was that he might has well have erected a sign. That he managed to spin it out over half the book was impressive; it just wasn’t complicated enough to go on longer than that, so it’s a good thing there was all that other stuff to occupy the other half.

In Short
This was an okay, but not stellar mystery book. It was made more interesting to me by its description of the used book trade of two decades ago. The author could have done more to tie the two halves of the book together, and there were some sloppy phrases that made the timeline of events confusing to me. The secondary characters were also pretty weakly drawn in several cases, with little to make them memorable in any way. I probably won’t be continuing with this series, though I may check out the jacket summaries just in case.