Red Mars, You Kind of Suck

Is it May again already?  No one has called an RRT* on this blog? It's still breathing... barely.  I'll try to get it stable again here, I don't want to have to move it to the Intensive Care Unit for blogs (wherever that might be), or - God forbid - have a funeral for it.

I guess I should start by making my excuses.  I've been training at a new job that is in a city an hour away from the one I live in.  I'm tired a lot and busy a lot and I haven't been reading a lot.  And the book I have been reading, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, left a lot to be desired.  It took me two months to get through it.

I've been wanting to read Red Mars for many years.  It won a Nebula Award for best novel in the early 1990s and the concept is compelling: this is a story about how Mars is colonized and the different personalities who envision different fates for the planet.  Robinson does a great job of imagining what the science and politics might look like in that eventuality and he creates a lot of conflict.  So you might think this five hundred-plus page book would be a page turner.

It is not.

The major problem I had reading through this book is that, despite a huge cast of characters, I felt indifferent toward all of them.  Much more time is spent on what the characters are doing with their work than anything else.  It's hard to feel anything for anyone when all you know about them is that they are brilliantly intelligent and hard-working. 

The book does try to hook you in with a love triangle between three of the protagonists, Frank, John, and Maya.  Within the first thirty pages or so you know that Frank is angry about something, enough so that he kills John.  This frames the book and we are taken back to the beginning of the colonization, but it's never clear why Frank committed murder (was passion or jealously over Maya?  professional envy?  politics?  who knows!).  Neither is it clear to the reader why any of these three characters would be attracted to the others.  The descriptions of sex on the flight to Mars or on Mars read to me like really boring robots engaging in sex.  No offense to robots but that is just not hot.  Or interesting. 

Other characters in the book have strong points of view; Ann believes Mars should be left alone entirely and merely studied, while Phyllis, a business-minded Christian, pushes for it to be utilized as a new resource for the overflowing population of Earth.  There is a woman named Hiroko who creates a secret, hidden colony on Mars. 

Part of the problem is that there are so many characters that you get to know very little about any of them, and part of it is that so much is written about what they do that the reader never understands why they feel how they do. 

There are two further novels in Robinson's Mars trilogy, Green Mars and Blue Mars.  I'm curious to see if they are better than I thought Red Mars was, but that assessment is going to have to wait.  I have a lot of other stuff right now on my Shelf of Ten, and a lot of it looks a lot better than reading more of Robinson's vision.

The next book on my Shelf is Stephen King's Blockade Billy.  It should be a much faster read.


*Sorry, I really can't give up the health care metaphors at this point, apologies to anyone reading this blog, most of whom probably have no idea what I'm on about.

The Other Side of Nonsense

When last I blogged, I was responding to Julia's "eight books by March 14" challenge. Austin has, of course, already read well past eight, and is being appropriately gloaty. Julia has read five. I'm... slower, but my books are longer (really) and I have this whole "new job as a nurse in a town an hour away" thing going on. So every day is an adventure, but I try to get a little reading done anyway.

I finished Stephen King's 11/22/63 weeks ago, and damn... this one is a good one. I feel in love with Stephen King's work when I was fourteen and I have never given up on him (no, not even after Gerald's Game). 11/22/63 is probably his best work in years, and I say that as someone who really enjoyed both Duma Key and Full Dark, No Stars. Did I have some quarrels with the new novel? Yes. The basic concept is a time travel book - the protagonist goes back in time to try to save JFK from being assassinated. Most of the story is set in the past, and most of it rocks along compellingly. It drags a bit at times when King offers too much detail about Lee Harvey Oswald's politics and associations, and I have a quarrel with the heavy-handedness of aspects of the end of the story, but overall this one deserves an A. Note to those of sentimental disposition: having several tissues handy for the last few pages is helpful. This book will have a permanent spot on the bookshelves at my house. Not surprisingly.

I moved from the sublime to the ridiculous next, picking up The Other Side of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon. I remembered enjoying it when I was in high school... and it is compulsively readable, but for all the wrong reasons. It's entertaining but stupid, and I spent most of the book wondering just who the protagonist was even supposed to be.

There's nothing particularly believable in this (or any book by Sidney Sheldon, as I recall); it's full of rich, beautiful, wildly talented people, all of whom are having an unrealistic amount of badly described sex. The main character, Noelle, becomes rich and famous with almost no effort, and of course she's luminously beautiful, a fantastic cook, and no man she's ever been with can forget her. Her only motivation in life, though, is to get revenge on Larry, the first man she ever loved, a cocky playboy womanizer pilot. This book is set mid-twentieth century, and much of it is set against the backdrop of World War II. There's one minor character that can be described as a hero (a doctor who fights against the Nazis), but everyone else is consistently out for themselves. This flaw might make the characters likable if they had any other flaws... they just seem like paper dolls.

Curiosity compelled me to finish, and it is amusing, but this book is going in the donation pile. A better title for it would have been The Other Side of Nonsense.

I'm currently reading two more books; Diana Gabaldon's The Scottish Prisoner and Max Brooks' World War Z. I'm still hoping to get those eight books read by March 14... three down, five to finish.

The Bad Mother's Handbook and Julia Challenges Me

So I finished reading The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long; cute and has some great moments. Not as hilarious as the title's premise might suggest, but still... three generations of women in one house, all of them sort of trying to figure out their lives... not bad. The worse thing about it is that each of the women acts as narrator at times and that means that figuring out who is "speaking" can be a challenge. I find that distracting. It's also by a British author and the characters are Brits, so that's also a bit of a challenge sometimes if you, like me, are unfamiliar with Britisher slang.

This book isn't going to have a permanent home with me; either it will be donated to the big Northfield used book sale that we have here every April (which benefits the local hospital) or I will pawn it off on a friend.

But anyway. Finished a book, moved another book onto the Shelf of Ten and on we go.

Julia, my energetic 9 year old, has been pining to go to our public library lately, and I'm planning to take her tonight. She is required to read books off of a Maud Hart Lovelace list that her teacher gave her - and J's goal is to read 8 of these books by March 14. We'd better get to the library, stat....

I showed J my Shelf of Ten, and she and I cooked up a plan for me to also read 8 of the books by March 14. I'm in, but did I mention that a lot of these books are really, really long? I'm currently into Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63, which is over 800 pages long. I have Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars on my Shelf right now... that one must have 500 pages. And the new Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner, which will likely have great moments (swoon-worthy Jamie is in it, not just interesting-but-gay-so-somehow-less-interesting-in-a-romance-series Lord John), but sometimes her focus on historical detail takes time to absorb. Added to all this is the fact that I actually start a new job on Feb. 15, in a different city, and orientation will be full time.

But... I agreed to the challenge and I'm weirdly excited about it. Julia wants Austin to participate, too, and he seemed willing (it's a little difficult to know just what he is reading, since half the time he's using a Kindle at this point, but whatever). Julia did not want to invite Alex, which is just silly brother-sister stuff I'm sure, but it's not like Alex needs the motivation anyway. Alex is more interested in reading than in eating. (Alex is more interested in almost everything than in eating, but nevermind.)

So. The gauntlet has been thrown down... and I'm in. We'll see how far this takes me.

Oh Hello, Blog. You're Not Dead Yet? a.k.a. Shelf of Ten

No, my blog isn't dead. I've just been super busy with my Real Life for the past few months - giving vaccinations and trying to not starve to death or let my family starve to death and executing the necessary holidays that everyone expects (because we all know that the world will end if I don't send the right number of Christmas cards or whatever). So my writing time has been limited and I haven't been reading nearly as much as I should. My most utilized recreational activity has actually been working New York Times crossword puzzles (another obsession) lately.

But here I am, back at this blog, administering Blog-CPR and doses of epinephrine and atropine and whatever else I'm supposed to remember from that ACLS class I took last May.

So. Where am I? Well... I actually acquired four or five books for myself (yes, I said I wouldn't, but hey at least some of them were gifts!), so I'm probably not moving in the right direction in that regard. AND the last book I read was actually a re-read (the fourth in Stephen King's Dark Tower series; Wizard and Glass... which wasn't as astonishingly awesome as I remember it being, but it's still my favorite in that series up to that point). So no progress on that front, either.

But new hope has arrived somehow, as it always does, and I have a new scheme to get reading the giant stash of books in my home (and get rid of many along the way). I was reading my Twitter feed (yes, I know, shut up) and one of the many people I follow is Joe Hill. Hill is an entertaining writer (check out his Locke and Key graphic novels, stat) and he is also quite funny, so his Twitter feed is often full of good thoughts and ideas. And the Shelf of Ten is an idea I stole from him.

What is the Shelf of Ten? Essentially it is a shelf you can create in your home that contains only the next ten books you plan to read. The idea is to read them in the order you choose, but not to deviate from reading them. I take that to mean I can still read other books simultaneously (as if anyone could stop me anyway), but I'm willing to commit to reading these ten books, in order. And it's weirdly fun to choose them and make a little shelf, and I have to say that I get enthusiastic all over again every time I see my "shelf" (really a section of the floor next to a bookshelf in my bedroom, but nevermind).

So this is my current plan and I'll see where it takes me. The first book I'm tearing through is a weird one, The Bad Mother's Handbook by Kate Long. It was one the free book exchange shelf at the clinic I'd been working at and I couldn't resist that title. It's not what I expected it to be (sadly, it turns out that it is a work of fiction), but it's not bad. Happily, it's also not good enough that I'm going to feel the need to keep it on my bookshelf forever, either.

Okay, that's the update. Hopefully that's enough chest compressions and epi for this blog to last a few weeks.

Terrible Books That Need to Go... But Where?

Somehow it has gotten to be September already, and so obviously it's time for another blog entry. It took me forever to finish reading Catherine Coulter's masterpiece of idiocy, The Hellion Bride, but I finally have done so. This is the kind of book that I need to get out of my house, but where to go with it is a bit of a mystery. Yes, it really is that bad.

The first half of the book is bad, but the negative aspects of it are often humorous. The romantic hero, Ryder Sherbrooke (no, I'm not making that name up), is sort of fun, and determined to figure out what is going on with romantic heroine Sophia Stanton-Grenville. The year is 1803, it is a very hot summer, and Sophia is known as the whore of Jamaica, because she is alleged to have three lovers and everyone on the island knows it.

Sophia is actually a 19 year old virgin, being oppressed and beaten by her malicious uncle, who has ruined her reputation as well for his own nefarious purposes. Ryder is predictably intrigued when he meets Sophia.

Actually, that's not a bad start to a story, and parts of it might have worked if Coulter's writing wasn't so hilariously dumb sometimes. Perhaps my favorite passage (and when I write "favorite," I mean "the one that made me laugh the hardest") is as follows:

Ryder hated to brood. He'd done very little of it in his life for the very simple reason that he'd never felt the need to take himself apart from his fellow man and commit himself to brooding. It had always seemed to him to be a singularly boring way to pass the time. But now he felt the need and it was sharp and deep inside him. It was also unexpected and unwelcome and made him uncomfortable; nor did he particularly know how to do it properly. (p. 169)

I'm not even sure where to start with how absurd that passage is - it's both badly written and ridiculous in every way. It did make me chuckle, though, and it made me think - hey, maybe someone, somewhere should be offering classes in how to brood properly. Maybe there is money to be made here!

If this book had just stayed hilariously stupid, I would just donate it to next year's used book sale and not think much about it. But unfortunately the second half of the book evolves into being offensively stupid and it ceases being funny. Ryder somehow finds himself obligated to marry Sophia, which isn't a terrible romance set-up (it worked very well for Jamie and Claire in Outlander), but Coulter writes the absolute worst story for these characters that I can think of short of making them both into some kind of sociopathic killers.

First of all, Ryder leads Sophia to believe that he has taken her virginity while she was under the influence of a drug and he does not communicate with her that this is not the case. So already this is problematic. Worse, in the context of the story Sophia is terrified of sex, and Ryder's solution to this is basically to force himself on her every night until she likes it. Yes, this is a book that tries to make marital rape sexy.

Not only that, but (and maybe this is trivial), Ryder does something to Sophia that made me shriek "okay, so that's going to be an instant yeast infection!" to myself. And in 1803 I don't know what one would have done about that. But it freaked me out.

This is a romance novel, so of course everything eventually works out for Ryder and Sophia, but not before a lot of scenes that either made me angry or made my eyes roll out of exasperation.

I'm not a person who approves of censorship in any way, but this isn't the kind of book that I would want passed on to, well... anyone. It's just that terrible and offensive. And I would hate to think that young romance readers would get the idea that Ryder's tactics with Sophia would work.

So... do I toss it in the recycling bin or what? I'm still not sure. But I want to get it out of my house soon, because it is very possibly the most magically stupid book that I've ever read.

August 2011, Progress (Or Lack Thereof)

How did it get to be August already? This summer has simultaneously flown and crawled by; while I can't believe it's actually August, every day does have a dragging quality to it. This is typical for me for summer these days.

As a child, I loved summer. I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and when that wasn't going on I had the television and the Country Club swimming pool (complete with a somewhat creepy salamander population, but it was what it was). I was a self-entertaining child. I could make a project out of anything, and I still have notebooks full of recipes I copied by hand or cut out of my mother's Good Housekeeping magazines. Those magazines kept me fairly entertained with their weird stories, too, especially the medical ones. I remember reading one that was titled something like, "My Body Was Rusting!" I mean, who could resist that?

My son, Alex, is like me in this regard; he will sit and read all day, or play video games, or watch television, and if I take him to the pool or for a bike ride, he's pleased, too. My daughter, Julia, though, is another story. She's a hyper extrovert and she has enough energy for ten children. Actually, I suspect she might have enough energy to light up the entire Eastern seaboard, but I haven't figured out how to make that happen. No matter what we do, it's never enough, and she's just exhausting to be with constantly. I love her so much, but there's no way can I keep up with her. Our personalities clash somewhat, and she just overwhelms me. So having her constantly in my care is part of why I haven't gotten a ton of reading or blog writing about books done lately.

But I have done a bit of reading, my project isn't totally dead. Maybe it's on life support, but I have hopes of a complete recovery.

Here's what I've managed this summer:

1. I re-read the first Hunger Games book by Suzanne Collins in early June. So, so great.

2. Finished Julia Gillian (and the Quest for Joy). Good.

3. Finished reading Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde. This was a library book that I requested after a friend suggested that it might be a fun read. It was, but I didn't totally love it. And it didn't help with my Read These Books In My House project. Fie!

4. Finally, read the second volume in Joe Hill's Locke and Key graphic novel series, Head Games. This series is so fantastic and creepy, and the concept is just brilliant. The artwork is great. I can't wait to read the third volume, but I have to wait because Austin owns these books, they were gifts from me, and he's sort of pacing out his reading of them. (*taps foot impatiently in direction of husband*). In some ways, this book shouldn't count for my "read 100 books here before I buy myself another one" project, because I did buy this one for Austin for some holiday - maybe Christmas. But... I'm counting it.

Now I'm on to really starting Hellion Bride by Catherine Coulter, definitely a title that will be read and disposed of, I suspect. I'm only a few pages into it, and so far it's nothing like what I expected. It's a period romance set in the West Indies, and the language is more complicated than the title would suggest it would be. I'm curious to see where it's leading anyway.

And that's it for now. More reading, more blogging to come.

I Share A Poem

Not everyone knows that I am a writer of poems, usually of the terrible variety. In late high school and much of college, I wrote many. This was an ongoing effort to express emotions (often a combination of hurt and absolute rage), so what appears on those pages is not something I share. Much of it is not only bad, it's frightening. A few are better than others, but still not something I'm apt to let most people read unless they are very much in my inner circle.

During my final semester of college I had finished my biology major and was close to wrapping up my women's studies major. I had time and inclination in my schedule to not only spend many hours in the dance studio (I often wished that I could have majored in dance), but also to take a creative writing class. Jim Heynen, a phenomenon writing instructor, would sometimes give us cues in class for ideas for poems. The following poem (one of the few that I am actually willing to share publicly) came out of that.


My Mother's Voice

Cats carry disease. If you get one I
won't come visit you. They're sneaky.
When you have children you should stay home with them -
at least until they're old enough to go to school.
You seem thin - are you sure you're well?
It's that goofy diet of yours. Are you sure you're getting enough iron?
You could stand to lose
five pounds.
You should have your children early
and then
have your ovaries removed.
No man would want to marry
someone who acts like you.
Drive carefully.
Of course you can both stay in the house while we're gone.
Just make sure you sleep in separate rooms.
Your uncle's very sick, but I don't think you're supposed to know.
Do lesbians have periods?
My family never talked about cancer, even when my mother was sick.
No one talked about sex. I found out from
my little sister.
Those clothes aren't very feminine.
Madonna is a bad influence
on the young people of America.
Don't you want to look nice?
I wish you were back with those nice girls at St. Mary's.
Women are less stable than men because women have periods.
Why don't you get your hair cut?
You're good for our family - if you weren't here
we'd never think
about these things.
You write mean things about me in your journal,
don't you?
When I'm dead, you'll regret it!