The recovery process has reminded me just how BIG this little blog has gotten. This will be the 225th post (roughly that number of reviews–some posts have multiple books, some are not actually reviews). There are a bajillion tags and categories, of course. And don’t forget the spam love. Comments are disabled while I work on getting things back in order. Then I’m enabling Disqus.

This has forced my hand on the redesign front. Not that I hated the old one, but it was hardly my first choice. Fact is, TWOG needs a branding makeover with consistency across the subsites. Rather than pour a ton of work into RB right now, I’m just going to make sure it functions reasonably. It’ll get a full redesign later. And that is when I’ll worry about possible changes to the tagging structure, etc.

I do want to get back to writing about what I read. It’s been a sort of strange year, and I don’t feel I’ve read nearly enough. Posts may be sporadic and/short, but they will resume.

Here’s to trying.

Why have I been absent? I can’t say there’s one definitive reason. Life got very busy in the fall and I wasn’t feeling myself, so that’s why I haven’t been around lately. But June, July, August? I have no excuse for that except that it coincides with the re-launch of another blog that sucked up a lot of my time.

My first priority is to update my 50 Book Challenge for 2010 and confirm that I read (way more) than 50 books. So here goes, in no particular order.

1. Emily Hudson
2. Dawn of the Dreadfuls
3. Unbecoming Behavior
4. Starting From Scratch
5. Speak
6. The Exile (graphic novel)
7. Earth: The Book
8. Dancing in the Moonlight
9. ?

…is that seriously everything? Shit. Either my memory sucks or I just stopped reading in the last half of 2010.

I’ll see if I can shake the cobwebs out.

And start tracking books again!! I have a TON of great ones waiting.

Chick lit that isn’t all about the romance! It’s a nice change of pace.

Keeley Murdock is an interior designer in the small down of Madison, Georgia. It’s the rehearsal dinner for her marriage to a rich, influential young man from a good family. Then she finds him shtupping her best friend on a board room table and it’s all over.

She pitches a helluva ‘hissy fit’. Personally, I define hissy fits are being over something stupid, which this is not. Either way, she trashed the country club’s hall in front of everyone. When she stalks outside she takes out a key and scratches “ASSHOLE” on her ex-fiance’s car.

There’s some guy laughing at her. Why? She forgot an S. ASHOLE.

Turns out he’s not a bad sort, though. He offers her a ride home. Soon it comes out that this Will Mahoney character is a wealthy lingerie tycoon-in-the-making who’s bought the old bra factory. And he’s just bought a run-down old mansion which needs decorating. But Keeley, you have to understand. This house has to make another woman fall in love with him. He’s never met her, but he saw her on TV and he’s in looourve with her.

Keeley’s damn good at her job so she does it, working to perfect a house for this mystery woman. She wishes she’d stay a mystery. This Stephanie Scofield is a superficial nitwit with no taste, but Will is head over heels for her.

Now, most books in this genre would turn this into a novel about the push/pull between Keeley and Stephanie for Will’s attention. Thank GAWD we can avoid all that! Keeley denies any attraction when anyone suggests it, but we know there is something quiet simmering. She never makes a big thing out of it, and he does very little that’s overt. Just tiny things.

She has other things on her mind. Like completing his impossible project in about six months. (Huge mansion. Addition built. May to Thanksgiving. ACK!) And there’s the matter of humiliating her ex’s influential family… which is now trying to drive her out of business. Everyone in town is looking at her like she’ll go psycho on them at any moment. And she’s still bothered by her mother’s strange disappearance twenty-five years ago.

The book is about Keeley juggling all of this, which she does with great aplomb. Despite the book launching with a hissy fit, she’s actually a very controlled person. Which is probably why she went off in such a dramatic way. She does have a dramatic moment later in the book, which is, again, prompted by something incredibly serious. I would say her ‘hissy fits’ only happen for damn good reason.

It’s a really good story about a woman continuing her life post-failed-wedding, just trying for normal and sane. She wants to HAVE a life. It’s about letting go and opening up.

And at the very end, there’s just enough hint at romance to leave you happy.

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. It helps that there was a lot of Potter and Pratchett on this list. I wish I had more info about the criteria for this list. Perhaps it’s Books People Claim To Have Read?

I have been waiting to read this book since I read The Prince (Jan ’06). I loved that so much that I immediately set my sights on the only other book under this name.

Alas, The Linnet does not live up to The Prince’s standard.

Lady Maude is the daughter of a Scottish laird (and not a nice one). But that’s ok, she’s not very nice herself. In fact, she’s got a reputation as a cold-hearted bitch. It’s revealed that something horrible happened to her in her teens, that changed her from a cheerful child into a harsh woman.

Ronan Fitzgerald was apparently born into Irish nobility, but now makes his way as a minstrel and traditional healer/magician. The why is a mystery to be explained at some later point in time.

The one man who knows Mause’s trauma is now very old, and the book ends with him dying and sending Ronan to her father’s castle, without telling him WHY. Ronan and Maude spar, are attracted, etc. Typical blah, blah. He thinks he’s sensing something she’s hiding, she’s trying to keep her mind in one piece…

The most interesting thing in here is that Maude has a tenuous grip on sanity. Her mantra is ‘keep to the pattern,’ live her days by a predictable routine and nothing will go wrong, no one will suspect, she’ll make it through… This is obviously a result of her trauma. That said, we’ve yet to see her spazz out by page 90.

I am putting it down now because I’m just not interested enough to continue. The attraction between the characters lacks spark. The mysteries are bassackwards–the prologue depicts Maude’s accident (she’s injured during an England/Scotland border raid) and her father (bizarrely) insisting that no one else find out about it. Her fragile state of mind is something she worries about, but there isn’t yet any evidence for what might happen if she loses control.

For his part, Ronan’s character is completely at odds with the narrative. In the prologue, his mentor (the wise man) worries to himself that Ronan is too intellectual, too distanced to be a good healer. They use magic or sommat, and he worries that this young man cannot give himself over completely. So, what does Ronan do? He flirts with Maude and laughs and jokes like nothing’s up.

He’s also a fucking idiot. Apparently he has the skill to hold an object and see its past owner. He picks up something in the laird’s room, while the laird is there, and sees an incident some decades earlier when the laird was being a bad man, indeed. In fact, he killed a guy. Rather than exiting quietly, Ronan promptly starts yelling at him for killing this kid. He’s lucky the laird’s a tired old man, or he’d be gutted on the spot. In fact, if I were the laird, I’d make sure he’s gutted anyway. Can’t have a troubador singing about your criminal activities.

Enough of this. I have other things to do.

I make no secret of my abiding love for Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet. These books embodied The Perfect Read when I was in upper-elementary and middle school. I can still remember declaiming them to my mother, how I was SO happy with them, despite never reading the first…

And I think that makes a difference. I began with #2 of 4. In the Hand of the Goddess covers Alanna’s squire years, ages 14 to 18, the years when puberty makes it presence fully known. She is chosen by the goddess, is gifted with her pet cat Faithful, uses her magic regularly, and falls in love for the first time. I read books 2-4 multiple times before I was able to get my hands on #1, and I was disappointed by it. In the First Adventure Alanna is a child (ages 10-13) and doesn’t yet know what she’s doing. She hasn’t found her confidence yet, she’s ashamed of multiple parts of herself (not just being a girl, she also doesn’t want to be a magic user), and it kinda sucks to read about her being friends with people who later turn on her. It’s not a bad book, and there are phrases and scenes that still resonate deeply with me, but I always thought it was the weakest in the quartet.

I also think the Jezebel review is damn weak. It’s hellishly flippant, and comes off, initially, as a pejorative review.

The deal in Tortall is usually that noble families send their female children to a convent to train to be ladies and their male children to the royal palace to become knights when they’re YA novel protagonist age (11 or so), but Alanna and her convenient twin brother Thom arrange to switch places — not because Thom wants to be a lady, but because the nuns also train people in how to use magic and Thom wants to grow up to be a sorcerer. He and Alanna are both naturally blessed with magical powers — they “have the Gift,” as their village wise woman puts it — but Thom is more into wizardry and Alanna is more into whacking things with a sword. So she cuts her hair and traipses off to the palace in order to get better at swordcraft and concealing her gender and Thom gets to learn how to use magic.

Yup: in the Alanna books, magic exists!

I take issue with this description. Emily Gould (no relation) of Jezebel makes it sound like a cacophany of plot devices and cliches, mixed into a soup of–what? What are we supposed to think from this kind of description? If the latter part of the review weren’t favorable, I would assume she was being nasty.

Her descriptions of the plot are also confusing. I know these books inside out and I was confused–why on Earth would she order her sentences this way? Why throw out huge concepts without orienting your reader at all?

These are minor quibbles, though, which should not make us miss the point of the Alanna series which is oh my god, SEX!

It’s merely hinted at in the first book, of course — well, the first book ends when Alanna is fourteen, so! But early on, “Alan” strikes up an alliance with the heir to the throne, Prince Jonathan (she gets to call him ‘Jon.’) Their friendship deepens when she uses her “Gift” to save him from a magically-induced plague, which requires her to call on the power of the Mother Goddess (Tortallians have a rad polytheistic pagan religion going on) and the one witness to her magical cure hears “a man’s voice and a woman’s voice coming from Jonathan and Alan.” This is the closest Alanna has come to being found out! Then, much later, she and Jon are embroiled in a high-stakes magical swordfight with some evil desert demons (long story).

Wait, plague, demons, goddess, WOT? Yes, it is a long story, but it’s not so long it can’t be summarized in a fashion that makes the circumstances clear.

For that matter, why is Emily confusing gender-sex with sexy-time sex, when each deserves its own space? She’s also confusing books 1 and 2, making the unitiated reader even more perplexed. Do we care that Alanna and Jon get together later when we’re examining just the first book in the quartet? If we do, why?

This hint of rom-com banter foreshadows things to come in the rest of the series, when Alanna and Jon are a little bit older, he’s the only one who knows her secret, and there’s lots of unfettered access to each other’s “bedchambers.” The next two books in the series are basically like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep in the illicit boarding-school boning department, just with more swordplay. Yesss.

I was mad titillated by these books as a nine year old, and also, I suppose, empowered.

Yes, I was “mad titillated” by them, too. I would define these as some of my first ‘grown up’ books. But farking hell, we’re seriously going to describe this as “illicit boarding-school boning”?! This conjures up images of sneaky fraternizing around the palace–Alanna leaves the capital as soon as she has her shield. She spends the next two books questing across the continent. She sleeps with two other men, total. Fuck, she’s afraid of love and the consequences of sex.

By this point, I’m asking when last Emily read the books. I’m wondering if she took the time to skim the descriptions of the other books just to refresh her memory. And I’m remembering why I’m not keen on Jezebel’s pop culture sections.

Clearly Jezebel is more interested in being ‘funny’ than providing a serious second-look at content that has helped shape thousands of young women. They could have looked at Alanna as a person, her culture, her personal fears and how Pierce handles them (She does, after all, get married and have kids–but she doesn’t stop being a knight). They could have examined how other characters treat Alanna. They could have looked at the religions of Alanna world, or compared the gender roles of the nobility vs the common folk. They could have made a study of how ‘preachy’ the books may be, vs. how believable.

Perhaps worst of all, no one in the comments seems to care. Feminsm Ra-Ra.

My senior thesis was a story rooted in Japanese mythology surrounding  sword smithing. I spent years working on this thing, and have done a lot of research. Of course, I wasn’t able to lay my hands on anything really useful in the months leading up to my due date. When browsing B&N’s clearance shelves I spotted this, and had to keep myself from screaming “FINALLY!”

To my great pleasure, the book includes a fairly sizable reprint of the goddess my story focuses on. More importantly, it goes into the lives and traditions of the people who made the swords. I learned a good deal and ideas were sparked.

The book’s downfall is in its format and its editing. I get the distinct impression that the book is comprised of essays Sinclaire has written for other purposes, now brought together in one volume. Facts and phrases are repeated across sections, indicating that little editing was done for cover-to-cover readability. There are also careless typos lying around. I’m left to wonder how involved the editor was at all, as a good number of the photos are of very poor quality and noticeably blurry. These are usually of modern settings and people, not the swords.

But I can forgive this. Because many of the swords themselves are exquisite. I could gaze at those photos for hours.

I feel that I now have a working guide to go forward with.

The field of comics, also sometimes known as graphic novels, is dominated by male creators and readers. However, there’s been increasing push in the last few decades by women to enter the field and make their mark. Though comics drawn by women are gaining popularity, most are classified as “indie,” distributed by small publishers that may not be able to advertise or place volumes in prominent bookstores. Naomi Nowak’s most recent graphic novel, Graylight, is designated indie, though it deserves to be appreciated by a wider audience.

Sasha is a German photographer on assignment somewhere in northern Europe, where the sun stays up all night in summer. She is a mysterious person, a foreigner. She attracts the attention of a journalist, and he invites her to join him on his quest to interview a famous recluse. The woman takes a disliking to both of them and refuses to grant him an interview. But Sasha leaves with her own prize—a book stolen from the house.

The woman’s son follows her home to demand its return, and attraction sparks. But the reclusive old woman is no ordinary woman. She is a witch, with a grudge against women like Sasha, who play with men. When the witch’s son takes an interest in Sasha, his mother takes action to destroy her. The witch’s son is not Prince Charming, but he does save Sasha, changing his relationship with his mother. He asserts his independence, but in the end Sasha, true to form, leaves town to find some other hearts to break.

Read More: http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2010/05/graylight.html

Zombie apocalypse. The scenario has been reworked again and again, and has become pretty predictable. Something spreads through the population, turning almost everyone into shambling, undead creatures in search of braaaaains. A ragtag group of unlikely companions hole up together to beat back the hoard. The odds are stacked heavily against them.

Luckily, S. Dave Shabet has put a new spin on the old story. He’s got one hell of a framing device. A mysterious corporate hotshot is simultaneously playing a game with the dozen or so bounty hunters, vigilantes, and assassins trapped in Zombie Hell. Every one of them has a price on his head. The more they kill, the higher the bounty. Oh, and that includes killing zombies.

Black Monday Blues is one such mercenary. He’s fallen in with the Ragtag Survivors, but he hasn’t let on that he knows he’s being hunted. …his head is worth a lot.

Monday is the mystery. Lizzie is the heart and soul, our everywoman. She’s a writer, but student loans and crappy wages have kept her eking out a living as a diner waitress. Her narration gives the comic weight, bringing out some great metaphors, and the gritty details only internal monologuing can reveal. Like the stink of dead bodies and gas fumes…

Poor Liz was fed up with her life to begin with. She’s sick of being everyone’s punching bag, but she was stuck in her shitty life without an exit plan. Now the world’s fallen to chaos, and she’s fighting an internal battle–pacifism and ethics vs. survival. She’s also taken a lot of hits, and the codeine is the only thing keeping her going, and going, and going…

Lizzie is what makes the comic so excellent. You could change the setting completely, and Lizzie would still carry whatever it was.

The larger arc, about the bloodsports, makes it not just another zombie story (which I find pretty damn boring). There is a larger mystery to be dealt with, and that gives me actual hope that these people just might survive.

The art is really nice, too, done in a soft gray shading, nice round shaping, with a lot of classic cartoon-y elements. But Shabet is setting himself apart by taking advantage of his medium–the internet. Every so often, when big shit goes down, he animates the page.

You don’t need to know what happens here on Page 300 (it kicks even more ass when you’ve read it through and do know), just watch the animation. And be fucking astounded: http://www.deadwinter.cc/page/300.htm

Most pages are static, but every so often, to make a point, one panel will loop, or a whole page will play out like that. Shabet knows exactly how he wants those to look, and he’s got the timing down pat. If you’re at all interested in new media, and mediums, and the potential of the web vs. traditional publishing, you need to read dead.winter.

If you like zombie stories, you’ll definitely like dead.winter. If you’re not overly keen on them, you’ll still like it. There’s a lot of humor without being campy, a lot of realism without weighing down on you TOO much, and the characters are wonderful. Even stereotypes aren’t flat, they’re just part of the character.

Go read it. Enjoy it. Thank me later.

Truly disappointing. I wanted to flesh out my Men In Kilts category, and I just couldn’t bring myself to finish this.

Scotland, approximately Regency-era-ish? Hard to know.

I wasn’t too keen on the opening chapter, but, hey, openers are hard. Kitt’s father, the head of Clan McKlintock, is dying, and he asks her To Do Something For Him. We don’t get to know what. He also names her the new Clan Chief, defying all sorts of convention, etc. She is worried, but determined.

Cut to a ship in the middle of a terrible storm. Alex, lord whatever of Blackthorne Abbey, is being tossed about and could well die. Cue lengthy flashback to the past ten years of his life! He used to a naive romantic, he married a slutty, mean-spirited woman named Penthia (PENTHIA.) and they had twin girls. Penthia’s a bitch, slept with his brother, and told Alex the twins are not his. Alex was all, like, sensible and shit, and shunned the children even though he has adored them since they were born and still does. Love children, hurt by mother, put up giant wall so the kids think you’re a cold bastard. Totally makes sense. In the last few months, Penthia died of drunkenly falling down the stairs (thus completing the unholy checklist of unforgivable sins), and Alex only realized how much he loves and misses his children nine days ago, when he resolved to not be such a dick to them anymore. Then he left for Scotland. Clever.

Wait, where we were? Oh, right, on a ship about to sink! The ship sights land, but the other sailors have it in for him. They beat the crap out of Alex, and toss him overboard. He nearly drowns, but is awake long enough to see that the ship does sink. Fade out to painful oblivion.

Fade in to amnesia on the beach. Who am I? What am I doing here? How do I know some things but not others? Goodness, I am virtually nekkid. And in pain. He stumbles off to find sanctuary. But, this is Scotland, and he is English, so the locals would rather give him another beatdown than a warm meal. Penniless, and looking like a bleeding Quasimodo, he stumbles onward to the nearest English enclave… also called Blackthorne.

Back to Kitt. Six months have passed, and she’s had no real success securing succor for her people. See, a few generations ago, these bastard English fought her people and won, and took over Castle McKlintock, leaving her family landless. The even more bastardy current Duke of Blackthorne has been taxing them all into starvation, and she’s trying to get the courts to overrule something or other. This is too slow. She’s going to have to rely on dead old daddy’s plan. If the clansmen will stop trying to rape her into marriage long enough for her to try it.

Luckily, attempted rape is interrupted by horrifically swollen amnesiac, who is mighty strong for a fop. He’s learned his lesson, and somehow pulls off a flawless Scottish accent. Despite, oh, everything, there is Magic Attraction between them. Kitt hires him to be her impartial bodyguard, or gille-coise. Somehow helping clean him up involves stripping him naked and oggling his muscles. A lot.

Kitt learns that the duke’s ship sank, and his presumed dead. Oh noes! Now what’s she going to do!? Daddy wanted her to marry the bastard so she could win the family home back that way. Amnesiac duke is amazed–she would do such a thing? For her people, yes!

Kitt returns to trying to convince her clan that it’s ok for a woman to lead them. This is supplemented by Alex The Amnesiac doing all her thinking for her, and having the sword and confidence to back it up.

Fuck this shit, I’ve got better things to read. I hope.

Finally, don’t be fooled by that pretty cover up there. It’s got one of those hidden illustrations. And oh, what an illustration. He’s really fuckin’ awful, here let me scan it for y–

AAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

She’s built a Frankenstein monster to serve her sexual whims! Just look at the skin rot! No–no, she’s about to power him on by programming his belt buckle! No! No, mad lady, no! Please, spare us from your Fabio-Bot!!

And, please, please, spare us from really bad printing.You need to click on it to appreciate the graininess.

*shudder* Their undead, malevolent eyes… their awkwardly tilted heads… the horror…