The Plot
Jeff Deck, feeling motivated by his recent college reunion to get out and do something, embarks on a months long journey across the country to correct ‘typos’: errors in punctuation, spelling and grammatical style which plague our signs, pamphlets and menus. The road trip ends up taking a turn he never saw coming.

My Thoughts
When you graduate from a college like the one I did, you know you’re expected to do great things. World-changing, exciting, inspiring things. This expectation is constantly reinforced by the glossy alumnae magazine sent to you several times a year featuring stories about the latest alumna astronaut, or author, or Secretary of State. At some point, you start to realize that most of the people being described as doing all this cool and exciting stuff are either your age or younger. That’s when the feelings of inadequacy really hit hard, and you question whether or not you’re really making the most out of your life.

So when the author arrives at his Dartmouth college reunion to find himself surrounded by budding surgeons and newly minted PhDs and millions of lawyers and non-profit do-gooders, I can completely understand his frame of mind when he looked at his own life and felt he had gone off course somewhere.

But what impressed me most was not so much that he then proceeded to come up with a plan by which he might measure up to those he considered to be doing more worthwhile things with their lives, but that he actually followed through with it. He saved his money, quit his job, and embarked on a three month long road trip around the country… correcting ‘typos’.

Now, this is an idea which, probably, had I ever had it, I would have dismissed as not grand enough. And really, deep down, I don’t think it’s very grand. But it’s interesting. It has a whimsy. It’s not without potential.

Is it an idea that can sustain a blog? Heck yeah. In fact, it seems ideally suited to blog form, where each entry can be a tale of an error corrected with pictures provided. Is it an idea that can sustain a book? Even after reading, I’m not so sure about that. In fact, quite a lot of the actual error correction was glossed over for the purposes of the narrative — during the trip upwards of 400 ‘typos’ were corrected, but we only hear details of a few dozen. Instead, there are lots of details about the road trip itself, little anecdotes (such as forgetting the tent poles) and lots of internal philosophizing on Deck’s part as he attempts to figure out why correcting these errors is worthwhile, and if it’s even morally right to try and do so.

I’m more tolerant of his metaphysical meanderings than I would be if I didn’t identify with him so strongly. The conclusions he reaches make sense to me. But I think the book would have been stronger had its direction been more clear. Is this a fun road-trip-slash-blog-project turned into a book, or is it a thoughtful opinion piece on how clarity in communication is at risk due to ignorance of spelling and grammar? It’s trying to be both and the end result is that both halves are weakened. There’s not enough anecdotal fun to support a whole book, and the opinion piece doesn’t take on the strength of a full blown essay with a proper amount of supporting evidence.

Another weak spot, for me, was the writing itself. Almost as soon as I began to read this book I had a sinking feeling. The writing was, in a word, uneven: flowing nicely along and then, abruptly, veering left into flower-ville there to get lost in its own cleverness. But I read on, because I’d committed to reading the book, and because in spite of our language incompatibility, I was enjoying the tale being told. I’d like to say the language problems improved or that it grew on me, but that would be a lie. The writing was, as I said, uneven. It never quite went over the cliff into unreadability, but it skirted the edge a few times before pulling back.

But in the end, what won me over was Deck himself (and his companions in what turned out to be literal crime). As mentioned before, I can really truly understand what motivated him to do this. And as I read, more interesting tidbits emerged to make the book even more engaging: his childhood in my own southern NH, the random shout-outs to places I’ve been (Molly’s) and local papers (Nashua Telegraph), and even down into Somerville where he was living at the time of the book (where I went to grad school). So though the book had many issues, on the whole I enjoyed reading it, and I’ll be interested to see if anything more comes of TEAL.

In Short
Though this isn’t the greatest tale ever told, the authors are relatable and the concept has a unique feel. For me, the book was made more interesting by the appearence of familiar places and institutions and elevated to likeability not by the writing, the style of which I did not 100% approve, but by the authors themselves, with whom I felt I had a lot in common.

The Plot
Zoey Zinevitch is an almost eleven year-old fifth grader who suffers from the condition of being not cool. She isn’t quite sure why, as she also isn’t entirely sure what makes one cool in the first place — she just knows that whatever it is, she doesn’t have it. But she has 186 days left to become cool before the 6th grade, or she knows she’ll never manage it in her life.

My Thoughts
I hadn’t read the description of this book very well before I read it, so I was a bit surprised by the young age of the protagonist. Somehow I had been expecting her to be 13ish, so 10 was a shock. After thinking about it, though, I think 10 was the right choice; solidly pre-pubescent, the author avoids having to deal much with body issues and hormones, and can keep the narrative focused without adding extra complications.

The story takes the form of a sort of diary/journal created by the main character Zoey. Zoey feels that she is not cool, but would like to become so, and that this needs to happen before the start of sixth grade or else she’ll be permanently slotted into her current classification in the school’s social structure. (Which is probably true.) She has only the vaguest of ideas as to how this might be accomplished, however, and seems to rest most of her hopes on just magically waking up one day and finding she’s been transformed.

And this is fine by me. Because in my experience, in most stories that involve girls trying to transform themselves, the results are one or more of the following: their best friend is hurt or alienated because they’re no longer okay to associate with, they start behaving in a fashion that makes them completely miserable, they become ‘friends’ with people who really don’t care about them at all, or they make a big giant fool of themselves in the end. Zoey avoids all of these pitfalls; there were no parts of the book that were agony to get through because I wanted to strangle someone. Instead, most of the incidents are just day to day things where the reader gets to know Zoey being herself.

The incident that stuck most with me was where Zoey and Venus find themselves sitting at the Bashleys’ table and end up in a discussion about their long-term science project. During the course of the conversation, Zoey and Venus misread the situation and begin to expound upon their genuine enthusiasm for frogs. The Bashleys, arbiters of cool who seemed perhaps mildly interested beforehand, are disgusted, and Zoey and Venus are taken off guard by this abrupt rejection. Their confusion was so realistic, and I almost wished that the book would have focused more on this subject: even at over 30, I’m still not sure how the cool kids became ‘cool’ and why they were the ones who got to determine what was a popular thing to do and what wasn’t. But somehow they were, and everyone knew it.

The book seems fairly complete in and of itself, which is a big change from what I’ve been reading lately which is almost all series. I would read a Zoey sequel, but I’m not sure there needs to be one.

In Short
The quest of teens and tweens in literature to make themselves popular or their constant angsting over dates to the prom never fails to offend me, because I personally view both of those goals as a waste of anyone’s time or energy. Zoey does not quite fall into that trap, because I don’t get the impression that her vision of ‘cool’ is automatically equal to ‘popular’, nor does she seem interested in compromising herself in some way to achieve it. Though some of the incidents in the book are unlikely enough to be absurd, overall this is an excellent and not ridiculously preachy story about learning to appreciate your own quirks. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to any elementary school aged kid.

The Plot
Theodosia Throckmorton spends most of her days at London’s Museum of Legends and Antiquities, where her father is the head curator. In her time there, she’s discovered she has a talent which allows her to see the curses placed on the artifacts that arrive at the museum. Safely dispelling these threats consumes much of her time. When her mother returns from Egypt with an exceedingly curse laden shipment of newly discovered Egyptian items she finds out there are quite a few people with interest in these ancient magics and not all of them are nice.

My Thoughts
Though this series may have been mentioned to me before, I truly discovered it for the first time while standing in line at the bookstore vendor at the NH Library Association conference in May. There it was, lying on the table, looking very much like an adventure book with a female lead. Further perusal of the table revealed it wasn’t just a book, but a series, and unfortunately book 1 was not there for sale. Impulse buy thwarted!

The first book, Serpents of Chaos, was shortly acquired. The book introduces Theodosia Throckmorton, an intelligent girl with an unusual magical gift: not only can she sense and see curses that have been placed on people and objects, but she’s quite adept at figuring out how to remove them, as well. This is fortunate, because her father is the head curator at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities and her mother is an archaeologist. As a result, she finds herself constantly surrounded by objects infested with ancient Egyptian magic. Mostly hostile. And her parents haven’t the slightest idea.

During the course of the book, Theodosia finds that she isn’t the only person aware of the magical properties of these objects. We’re introduced to two warring factions — the evil Serpents of Chaos, and the seemingly good Brotherhood of the Chosen Keepers. I say seemingly because I just feel like in the end they’ll turn out to be evil too, or at least have an agenda that doesn’t quite mesh with hers.

In any case, the book itself was fine. The plot ended up a bit thin, mainly because of the need to introduce all of the characters — quite a bit of time was spent going back and forth between locations and providing information about what one expects will be the main settings of the series. Understandable, though perhaps not as seamlessly done as it could have been. And the settings themselves are marvelous; I love London, and the author did evoke a good feel for it as Theodosia walks (or is otherwise transported) from place to place.

Unfortunately, I didn’t come away with nearly as much engagement with the characters. The villains are as yet cardboard, and I still harbor too many suspicions of the Good Guy adults to feel safe to have any attachment to them. Theodosia’s two child companions, Sticky Will (Street Urchin and Thief with a Heart of Gold) and her brother Henry (Pesty Brother and Schoolboy) are not developed enough to transcend their stereotypical backgrounds. Mr. and Mrs. Throckmorton do not fare much better, being very uneven — they seem almost aggressively uninterested in anything Theo has to say to the point where it strains credulity; one would expect that most academics would at least be mildly interested in a child of their own who seemed so interested in their work. Theo’s grandmother showed some hints of promise, but she was not on camera enough to be certain. So that leaves Theo herself as the only person to receive enough depth to emerge from this book as a round character, one with motivations and interests which the reader has explored in detail. And perhaps that is enough, for a first book, but I rather wish it had been at least two.

On the other hand, the book was well-paced, and in spite of the constant scene shifts, the book manages to hang together as a whole, rather than feeling like several separate adventures shoved together. And it’s good enough for me to check out the second book, which should provide me with enough data to decide if I’m ultimately going to like the whole series or not.

In Short
Theodosia is interesting, smart and determined. It’s a shame that she couldn’t have a female child companion (by the end of the book it’s looking like her primary assistants will be two male children), or that the other female characters weren’t a bit more memorable or well developed, but one can’t have everything. This book mainly serves to set up what one assumes will be the central conflict of the series going forward and to introduce characters, but is not bad for all that. The idea is a good one and the pre-WWI British setting is a nice departure. This series has a good amount of potential to which it will hopefully live up.

Hikaru no Go
I caught up with this series after having not read it for a couple of years. The volumes are just coming out that slowly. I’ll reread it through again once the final few volumes are out — hopefully soon. It remains excellent. Go is a very complicated game, but it’s still a board game, and I’m still impressed at how dynamic the artwork and the story make it feel.

Fruits Basket
I started this series when it first came out, then started hoarding and waiting for it to be finished. I finally got around to acquiring the last few volumes over the winter. And then, a month or so ago, I realized I hadn’t read any Fruits Basket in FIVE YEARS. Holy cow. That was enough to get me going and I read through the whole series. I have quite a few thoughts on it as a whole which I plan to expound upon in another post.

Sookie Stackhouse
In spite of my continuing interest in fantasy and witches and dragons and even fairies, I’m not at all a fan of contemporary urban fantasy or supernatural romance. I make individual exceptions to this (why hello Harry Dresden) but they’re few and far between. After True Blood became so popular, I watched this book series go in and out of the library for months, and I resisted reading it because it wasn’t really my cup of tea. But I don’t know, somehow recently I got the urge to try it out. I think that came about when I found Charlaine Harris’s first series of books was about a mystery solving librarian. She couldn’t be all bad then, could she? I’ll have more to report when I’m further into the series, but so far they are far more light and fluffy than I imagined.

Aurora Teagarden
The aforementioned mystery solving librarian. Amazingly, the library also has the whole of this series — they are notoriously poor at having whole series, especially when the earlier volumes are older than about 10 years or so, but this one appears to have been an exception. Again, more to report after I finish it. I’m not impressed with the character as a librarian, but Harris’s writing seems to agree with me for the most part.

Encyclopedia Brown
I don’t know why but I have had a hankering after these books recently. I picked up a few of them at a used booksale a year ago and more and more of them have been making their way into our house since then. The character of Sally is remarkably progressive considering the first books were written in the early 60s. My question: Why does the bully constantly try to get Encyclopedia in trouble with the police? And why do the police believe him? Encyclopedia’s dad is THEIR BOSS. Does not compute.

So, I have this automatic reaction to things that are overhyped — I instantly develop an aversion to seeing or reading them (this mostly applies to television, movies and books). Sometimes this can be avoided if I see/read/watch the thing before the hype attains mammoth proportions (as with Harry Potter).

Once in a while, even if something is promoted to the point of disgust, I’ll eventually think that maybe I should take a look at it, just so I can have an informed (and hopefully negative) opinion.

But everything I’ve heard about the Twilight series told me it was just so awful and ridiculous that it wasn’t even worth it to spend the 2 hours it would take to watch the movie.

So I haven’t read the books and I haven’t seen the movies. But I pretty much know the broad outlines of the plot, because a) it’s not exactly original and b) it’s been so pervasive it’s nearly impossible to avoid absorbing at least some partial knowledge of it.

Anyway, I found out they were adapting Twilight (and presumably the rest of the series) into a graphic novel. Why? Presumably to force everyone to buy it again so they can make more money. And if people want to buy it again, I can’t really blame them for taking advantage of the fact. I decided that we’d finally come to a format where the length of time it would take to read it was an amount of time I was willing to sacrifice out of my life.

My running commentary as I read [unfortunately, the book does not have page numbers].

And so.

Image 1: a partial face, female, her mouth open
Image 2: someone’s crotch

An auspicious beginning.

Ah, Bella the martyr. I have to leave, because mom needs her space, but I don’t want to go and I’m making a Big Sacrifice Here People. LOOK AT ME.

Wow, you bought me a truck dad? How nice of you. Too bad it’s old and I hate it here even though it was my idea. Sigh. *more passive-aggressive crap*. ADMIRE ME.

You’re so cool Bella, calling your dad Charlie. That’s a real mark of maturity.

If there’s “only” 357 students, why the hell do you need a map?

Ohnoes!! People are being nice to me! I better whine about this too.

Whatever Bella. Your name may be common now, but the names are hardly any more odd than yours would have been when you were born. (Aside: in tv shows, books and movies which star people my age, why are there hardly any characters named Jennifer? That is totally unrealistic.)

Soda at lunch? Calling Jamie Oliver! What kind of school sells giant bottles of soda at lunch?

OMG! How did you know to call me Bella?! Did you hear the 355 other students in the school calling me that or CAN YOU READ MINDS?!?!?!?! So creepy! And yet somehow, hot. PITY ME.

How dare you besmirch my martyrdom?

Is this supposed to be flirting?
I’m easy to read
No, you’re actually hard to read, I’m just awesome.

…the safety hazards that dancing presented? What?

You’d think someone hundreds of years old would be more mature than a whiny-ass teenager, but clearly not.

I’m tired of trying to stay away from you Bella.
Wow, Edward. 6 whole weeks! If the groundhog hadn’t seen his shadow, would you have managed even that long?

Strike a pose, Edward.

I’m annoyed this book has no page #s.

Look up vampires on the internet. Somehow the sites she found were far too heavy on the information and far too light on the slashy fanfiction.

In too deep? Dude, you’ve talked to him for like 5 minutes.

Ah, now we find Edward’s problem. Ha ha. How long have you been 17? What an awful curse. Forget turning sparkly in the sun, he has to be 17 forever.

How did Bella survive to age 16 if she is constantly needing to be rescued like this? She didn’t need to leave Phoenix because of her mom, she was probably thrown out for destroying too much of the city.

And now they’re in LUV. Awwww. Except Bella had to tell us, ’cause it sure as hell didn’t come through any other way.

And after all that, it’s only half the book! Work faster, Korean artist. Even though you don’t even own the copyright to your own drawings.

The Plot
After the death of her mother, Yeine is summoned to the capital of the world, the city of Sky where her grandfather rules. She finds herself installed as his heir — one of several who might inherit his position — and thrown into a situation where the politics only get murkier the more she finds out. She attempts to stay alive while she pursues her own agenda, to find out who murdered her mother.

My Thoughts
I’ve spent the past few days (weeks) trying to come up with a coherent sort of review. I know that I liked and enjoyed the book, but my thoughts beyond that are sort of a jumble, and I’m afraid as a result that this is unlikely to be a very flowing review. When I dislike a book it’s usually easy for me to pinpoint the main reasons why. But when I like a book, it tends to leave a more generalised impression of pleasure.

Good Idea:
The author didn’t feel the need to dumb anything down for the reader. There were no info-dumps: we learned about the world through organic revelations. By the end we’d learned just exactly enough to make this part of the trilogy make sense and very little more.

Bad Idea:
Though the ending clearly sets up the next book (and the excerpt obviously does the job even better than that) this book had enough of a satisfying conclusion that I’m not burning to read the next one. This is good since it doesn’t come out for months, but the lack of urgency might be a bad thing.

Good Idea:
The setting (what we’ve seen of it so far) is engaging. There are nations/countries/cultures where the differences are more than cosmetic and yet it feels that thought has been given to each so that it makes sense. I was not left with the nagging feeling that I’d better not think too hard about the fabric of this universe, lest it dissolve.

Good Idea:
All the way back to my early obsession with Greek and Roman mythology, I have always loved stories where the gods walk among humans and interact with them; where the gods have weaknesses and personality beyond ’supreme being’ or even just ‘vengeful dick’. This one hits all of those buttons and then some.

Not Sure:
There’s an undercurrent in the book about the fluidity of the gods: their appearences change depending on their whim or the situation, their sexuality is not tied to any sort of rigid code, and their morality certainly isn’t either. In the end, it seems like the one thing about them that is fixed is their gender. Which is neither good nor bad, but an interesting choice.

Good Idea:
The novel is told in the first person, as if Yeine, the main character, was explaining her experiences to another. This may be a first novel cliche, but it works here, and the ‘present’ asides were far less intrusive (and non-annoying) than I’ve seen in some stories (*coughPolgaracough*).

Bad Idea:
At certain points (to be spoiler-free and vague), I had trouble figuring out who was speaking and was forced to resort to the annoying practice of counting out lines of dialogue to keep track. This was a stylistic issue which could have been fixed by putting someone’s speech/thoughts into a different font face or style.

I don’t take to new fiction series and authors easily. On my bookshelves I have quite a few books I’ve purchased because the cover or the summary looked interesting, and yet I’ve never quite been able to bring myself to read. (I do the same thing with food and clothes.) I don’t have as much of a problem with non-fiction, oddly enough. Perhaps it’s less personal. It doesn’t touch the imagination as much. I don’t know. But the first hurdle has been achieved with this one: I read it and I enjoyed it. And more, while I was reading it, I was able to lose myself in the story to the point where I had no desire to stop reading.

What it hasn’t managed yet is to elevate itself to an obsession — either for the author or the world — and thus guarantee that I’ll immediately consume the next which comes out. But it’s pretty unusual for an author or a world to do that on a first outing; I’m about the same place here as I was with the first Harry Potter book, and that certainly turned the corner into something more. There’s potential here.

In Short
Once I was reading it, I was eager to keep reading. And I’m definitely interested to see the next book — there was a little preview of it in the end, and I found it intriguing. I can’t say I’ve been totally sucked in by the world yet, but I’m thinking that’s probably because we’ve actually seen very little of the world itself: this book was confined to a very small area with a couple of brief excursions. The second book promises to expand on that.

The Plot
Miss Mina Murray has been tasked by the mysterious M to collect a group of the world’s most famous ‘heroes’ to work on behalf of him (and perhaps the British government) in reclaiming the stolen wonder-item cavorite. But said ‘heroes’ are reluctant to join in or cooperate with anyone and things do not go as smoothly as they might.

My Thoughts
I feel like a broken record in some of these recent reviews. What I great idea, I say. But what a disappointing execution, I conclude. Unfortunately, that’s my ultimate opinion with this work as well.

I knew going into this that Alan Moore and I do not get along. I find his female characters at best ignorable and at worst actively offensive. Yet he has such a huge fanbase, I continue to return to his work, expecting… I don’t know. Expecting to find it something else. Expecting to find it the work of staggering genius other people find, people whose taste I mostly respect. But every time I’m disappointed and more disgusted by the flagrant misogyny and pointless violence against women.

The main woman character here is Wilhelmina Murray, now divorced from Jonathan Harker and fresh from her adventures in Dracula. She wears a scarf to hide the bite marks on her neck and is reluctant to discuss any details from her past. Though she’s been tasked to collect the men who will assist in recovering the cavorite, it’s not clear to this reader why at all she was chosen. She exhibits very little by way of personality or engagement, nor does she actually attempt to assert any kind of authority over the men. By the end of the story I still had no idea what her purpose or function was, as she mostly seemed used as a prop or someone to be rescued from the raping hordes. Unlike the male characters, who are defined by the deeds and achievements which they actively courted, she is a most famous victim. In the artwork her figure is grossly distorted, with a waist the size of a toothpick and a bulgy top. This may be an attempt on behalf of O’Neill to create a more period feel to the art, by mimicking advertisements and drawings of the time, but it looks ridiculous compared to the more reasonably shaped and varied men.

Allan Quatermain is Mina’s first recruit, in an opium induced haze after some rather incoherent adventures he experienced and which are recounted in the back of the book. She then proceeds to collect Jekyll/Hyde (busy raping and murdering prostitutes), and the Invisible Man (busy raping and impregnating schoolgirls). At least Captain Nemo isn’t off on a rape spree, but then again, who knows what kind of buggery he’s up to on that submarine of his? Perhaps we just don’t get to see much of anything about his crew because it’s not nearly as much fun to rape sailors.

Characterization issues aside, the plot is standard enough: Supervillain has stolen/acquired an artifact of awesome power that will allow him to achieve global domination, and our heroes are tasked with recovering it and foiling his plans. There are some slight variations, but no new ground is broken on the plot itself.

The main attraction of this work, I think, is the central idea: that Stoker and Haggard and Verne and Wells and Conan Doyle weren’t writing fiction, but were recounting (and exaggerating — perhaps) the exploits of actual people and actual adventures. The world thus created, where fiction and reality are one, is an interesting one.

But (and you knew there was a but coming) there are some issues, perhaps exemplified most simply by the episode which took place at the girls’ school. The team goes out to investigate reports of the “Holy Spirit” impregnating girls and discovers that no, it is not the Holy Spirit but rather the Invisible Man who is raping and molesting the schoolgirls. A random aside from the Headmistress at the end of this episode suggests that one of the victims was Pollyanna. And why is this an issue? Well, for the most part, the fictional characters who are now ‘real’ seem to have their histories intact. Quatermain did experience the adventures Haggard attributed to him; Nemo has the Nautilus, the Invisible Man is invisible, Moriarty is a super genius nemesis to Holmes. And then we have Pollyanna Whittier, a little girl from Vermont, suddenly appearing at a random (reform?) school outside of London. What? Oh, I’m sure the impulse to include the reference was too much of a joke to resist, but surely there were English schoolgirls it would have made much more sense to include.

But I found the disrespect to a work that I happened to enjoy (written by a woman and fellow New Englander) a bit galling. I know there are quite a lot of asides and in jokes that I probably didn’t pick up on in the book, because while I’m familiar with a lot of these stories, I’m not actually a huge fan of Victorian supernatural or speculative fiction. So points which would only be appreciated by fans or people widely read in that genre are lost on me. I didn’t notice (aside from Pollyanna, and I could have done without that one) many asides directed toward the kind of literature from that time which I have read, namely children’s books, or books by women authors which are now classified as children’s, though they were originally intended for all ages.

In Short
The idea of this book is a great one, but the comic itself suffers from a poor representation of women overall and the weakness of its one main female character. (And I do wonder why, with all of literature to choose from, we once again end up with a team of all men save one token — very token — female). And the relatively pedestrian plot doesn’t do much to redeem these problems. For the ardent fan of Victorian speculative fiction there are probably enough references and in jokes to get over these issues, but I’m uncertain whether it would be worth it to read further on in the series in hopes of improvement or if I should just give it up now as a bad business.

The Plot
The year is 1624 and a plot has been hatched to kill the Prince of Orange. Gilda Beresteyn, the former fiancee of the lead plotter has inadvertently found out about their plans, and in order to prevent her alerting the authorities, the conspirators hatch a scheme to force her silence. Hired for the job: Diogenes, penniless mercenary, otherwise known as the Laughing Cavalier.

My Thoughts
In the nearly twenty years since I first read The Scarlet Pimpernel for school, I’ve never quite been able to work up the ambition to reread it. I’m not sure why: I’ve always remembered it fondly, I went to see the Broadway musical when it came around on tour, and I still listen to the soundtrack. But it’s always been in the back of my mind that I would read it again.

I think I was still in high school when I discovered there were sequels to the book, and that moved it higher on my radar. A stand alone novel is okay, but a series — a chance to find out more about the characters, to revisit them time and time again — that’s for me. But in the early 90s, pre Amazon, pre Alibris, pre Abebooks, pre eBay, pre WWW, there was no other place for me to find out of print books than the library. And the library didn’t have it.

Now, with print on demand and ebooks and Project Gutenberg and Google Books and all the other ways to find out of copyright texts and low-demand books, the Pimpernel series is pretty easy to acquire.

The Laughing Cavalier is chronologically the first of the series, part of a prequel duology to the main Pimpernel arc. The male protagonist, who goes by the pseudonym Diogenes, is an ancestor of Sir Percy Blakeney. This reveal doesn’t officially occur until the end of the book, but is touted on the back and in the author’s forward to the story, so is not really much of a spoiler or a secret.

The action here takes place in The Netherlands, and quite a bit of Dutch is sprinkled throughout the text. In other books I read random bits of French or sometimes German is very common, but Dutch is new and I found it very interesting. Even if most of what was said was implied to be swearing — that’s one way around the censors. And though the book itself is a reasonably good length (roughly 400 pages), the plot flows along at a very nice pace without dragging.

Since I know next to nothing about the history of The Netherlands, I really can’t say whether the political situation is realistic or not. One supposes that it is at least as believable as that surrounding the activities of the Pimpernel himself. In any case, the bulk of the plot surrounds the kidnapping of the main female character, Gilda, in order to prevent her from reporting the nefarious activities of her former fiancee and her brother. Diogenes is hired for this task, a fact which he finds utterly ridiculous — what sort of a brother entrusts his virginal sister to some random mercenary?

Gilda is a pretty good female character for an adventure book of this sort. She’s mostly a victim, shuffled back and forth between various captors, but she is at least able to speak her mind on more than one occasion and doesn’t spend all her time in a swoon or crying.

The setting is very well developed, with lots of cultural bits to make it interesting. There’s plenty of windmills and even a lot of long distance speed skating which anyone who watched the Olympics knows is a local obsession. Orczy includes the real world painter Frans Hals, who actually created the painting known now as The Laughing Cavalier. This, she suggests, is a portrait of Diogenes himself.

I did find Diogenes’s constant laughing to be a bit grating at times — though not nearly as much so as that of Mrs. Bradley in the series by — but by the end there was at least some explanation for that and I found it less irritating. Perhaps the banter helped negate the irritation.

It appears that the story picks up almost immediately in the next book, The First Sir Percy, but this one does contain a complete and self-contained story arc.

In Short
My memory of The Scarlet Pimpernel novel has grown somewhat hazy over the intervening years, but it was always in my mind that I had enjoyed reading it. The Laughing Cavalier, a prequel novel to that one by the same author, was a breezy, fun adventure. After reading it, I’m not entirely sure why the Pimpernel is known mostly for just the one book rather than as a series; it certainly looks like it’s going to be worthwhile to go through them all.

Going on four years ago now, a bunch of us signed up for LibraryThing. After an initial fit of adding stuff by hand, I slacked off. Then Dorrie happened and I had an excuse to slack off.

But a year or so ago, J and I bought one of the cheap little barcode readers that LibraryThing sells themselves, hoping that would inspire us to come back to it and perhaps help us to figure out what books we actually owned. (Both of us have unintentionally purchased duplicates in the past).

Finally, last week I went in and deleted my old library holdings because I couldn’t remember what I had cataloged and what I hadn’t. In the years since I last used it, they’ve added the ability to put books into separate collections, which is ideal. I can fill in a collection (manga, scifi, etc.) and not feel that I have misrepresented my entire personal library by implying I only own mysteries or whatever I have managed to add to the catalog.

The barcode scanner helped quite a bit too, and I started readding things over the weekend. I made good progress, though I didn’t quite get through all the manga before my free time was over. Hopefully now that I’ve got going I’ll be able to carve out time here and there to continue.

This came out of an interesting conversation earlier tonight. J noted that the movie of Game of Thrones is coming out, and wondered if it would be worth it to read the book before then.

This is a series I had heard other people praise, and from the summaries it looked as if I’d like it. So a few years ago, I checked the first book out of the library. I managed to get through a few chapters, but I never got to the point where I was compelled to keep reading and eventually I returned it without finishing.

Sometimes there are writers whose prose just leaves me cold. Gregory Maguire is one such, and even though I think his plots are interesting, the actual act of reading books written by him turns me off.

Sometimes there are writers whose concept actively offends me.

And sometimes there are series where the writing is fine, perfectly readable, but in the end I’m left with a feeling of ‘eh’. It doesn’t turn me off but it doesn’t turn me on, either. There’s no squee.

Quite a few very popular series hold no squee for me. There’s nothing that excites me, makes me stay up waaaay past my bedtime to finish, think about the characters when I’m not reading. Many times this is a result of a lack of/poor characterization of female characters, but not always.

Lord of the Rings
I have tried so hard to love these books. They’re adored by so many people who share similar tastes with me that I couldn’t understand why they didn’t click with me. At various times I have managed to get through The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring. Barely. I think the movies are wonderful but the books are not for me.

Wheel of Time
In a fit of ambition 12 or more years ago, when people I knew were still excited about it and Jordan was still very much alive, I bought the first three books of this series. I got through the first book and a half before I set it down one night and never felt like picking it up again.

Song of Ice and Fire
See above — I think I probably got about 75-100 pages into Game of Thrones before my flicker of interest was extinguished and I couldn’t go on.

Temperance Brennan Mysteries
I started watching Bones because it was David Boreanaz’s new show. I kept watching because once they found their groove, it became quite a good show in the ‘procedural-with-a-twist’ genre. I was interested enough to take a look at the book series that supposedly inspired the show, but after reading the first two books I never got around to reading the third. I may go back to it eventually, but there’s absolutely no urgency.

Anyone else have a series which you should like but find lacking in that certain something?