Hanna’s Daughters

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by Marianne Fredriksson

Hanna, Johanna, and Anna – three generations of Swedish women, grandmother, mother, daughter. This novel by Marianne Fredriksson was an impulse buy – I’d just come home from ten days with my mother, and missed the mother-daughter dynamic. I expected something light and fluffy, instead, I got to read the histories of three fictional women, and about how their social inheritance of manners and gender roles informed their lives and choices.

Anna’s story really bookends the other two, for the novel is her interpretation, first as a thesis then as a novel, of the women who raised her, but taken as a whole, it’s a fascinating look at how in some fashion we are all our mother’s daughters, even when we don’t wish to be.

The first third of the novel was difficult to read, both because of the content (there’s a rape of a very young girl) and because the grammar reflects the uneducated way of speaking Hanna had, with funky verb tenses. Until I got to the next section, I was almost convinced that this was just a really bad translation, but it was done for effect.

I wouldn’t recommend this as a light reading, but if you’re in the mood for a respite from dealing with small business phone systems and endless faxes, and want to really explore generational culture…this book is a great addition to the pile.

Tales from the Captain’s Table

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edited by Keith R. A. DeCandido

Easing back into the SEO world of cpm and cpa, and various other acronyms, after ten days of beachy bliss was difficult, so I did what every avid reader does: I bought some comfort books. One of these was a Star Trek book: Tales from the Captain’s Table. It’s a collection of short stories from various ship captains in the Trek-verse – Picard, Riker, Demora Sulu, and others, and they’re tied together by the fact that they’re all told in the Captain’s Table, a special bar with entrances from many worlds, where only ship captains are welcome.

Cap, the bartender, is glimpsed in small interludes, and the bar itself reforms to the specifications of whatever a given patron expects. I like storytelling, and I like the concept of the neighborhood cafe / bar / pub, so this book appeals to me on many levels.

While I don’t always like short stories, in this format, they’re the logical choice.

After reading this book, I felt much more at home inside my head.

The Tipping Point

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by Malcolm Gladwell

I was first introduced to Malcolm Gladwell’s work via my stepfather, who left me his copy of Blink when he was visiting us over Christmas in 2006. I thought that book was amazing, with all of the insights about the first few split-seconds of every encounter.

The Tipping Point is amazing, but in a quieter way. It’s about social and medical epidemics – about how word of mouth works, about the different types of personalities that drive hot-or-not trends, and about how the two merge in almost every aspect of society. In the journey of this concept, the author talks about needle exchanges, AIDS Patient Zero, vintage shoes, Paul Revere’s ride, and various examples of information collection and critical mass.

There’s really no way to review it without spoiling the experience. Read this book.

Common Themes: Mysteries and Cars

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It’s a classic scene. The young woman is driving down a twisting road with her long blonde hair streaming behind her, and suddenly, she realizes she’s going too fast. She slams her feet down on the Corvette brakes, but nothing happens – the brake lines have been cut!

For my last “common themes” list of the year, I offer five mysteries with cars involved in them:

1) Swapping Paint: A Stock Car Racing Mystery, by Jim Lavene
2) The Muscle Car Mystery: From the Case Files of Private Investigator James Mitchell, by M. L. Angell
3) The Keys To The Car, by Robert P. Robertson
4) Last Car to Elysian Fields, by James Lee Burke
5) The Clue of the Phantom Car, by Bruce Campbell

Many car-related mysteries are in series, of course, and most seem to be targeted toward young readers, probably to attract boys to books (this is a guess), so I decided to give you a double list, and mention some of my favorite cars in fiction.

My favorite fictional car is probably the title “character” in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, which was written by Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. His fondness for cool gadgets is evident even in this classic work of children’s fiction.

Cars in detective fiction include poor V. I. Warshawski’s vehicke, which is forever being left in odd places, and never seems to work terribly well, and then there’s also Harry Dresden’s Blue Beetle. (These two characters belong to Sara Paretsky and Jim Butcher, respectively.)

In one of my favorite books ever, two of the characters, Lily the female chessmaster and Nim, the mysterious mentor, both have ragtop sports cars and like to drive with the top down in winter, which behavior I completely fail to understand.

Although, I completely understand the appeal of ragtops in general.
At least, when it’s warm.

Home away from Home

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If Barnes and Nobel was closer, it might well become my second home. It’s already my favorite weekend destination. Oh, we have a library in the neighborhood, and I used to be a frequent haunter of libraries, but used books smell funny, and I don’t like to have to give things back.

We have a new Borders that is slightly closer than the B&N, but I don’t really like it as well, and no, it’s not because they serve non-Starbucks coffee. It’s just…not as warm, not as inviting, doesn’t have comfy chairs, and seems too bright somehow.

I like Half Price Books, despite the funky used-book smell, because they do encourage lingering and lounging, but they don’t generally have cafes, and I think they’re the poorer for it. Books and coffee go together. So do books and tea.

So, for now, since our town lacks ANY decent independent bookstores, I shall stick with Barnes and Nobel.
And their green comfy chairs.

Scenes from a Bookstore

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You’d have thought, by listening to the intensity in his voice, that the old man was trying to find a decent New York Moving Company willing to transport a grand piano between boroughs, but no, he was merely consulting with the Barnes and Noble info-desk dude about a book he really needed to have. “Can you hold this while I run to the car to get money?” he asked? Of course the answer was yes.

A bit later I approached the desk myself, asking sheepishly, “I need you to look up a title. I know the first four words are ‘On the beach with’ but I don’t remember the rest, and I know you hate it when people do this because I managed a bookstore in college and hated it, too.”

We couldn’t find the book.

It’s from an interview with Julianna Margulies in the December 15th 2007 edition of the American Airlines magazine.

Oh, well.

Browsing

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Hola, everyone. I’m back from Mexico, where I barely had time to read, though I did finish The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell who also wrote Blink, and re-read a good portion of Anne Rivers Siddons’s Outer Banks because a weathered copy was in the casita and I needed something in the bathroom.

Bathroom reading is a thing. If you don’t do it, just nod, smile, and move on. If you do, well, you understand.

Friends, who were in La Paz for the holiday as well, mentioned looking at pens, and I remembered my grandfather once ordering a case of personalized pens with his name and phone number on them. I’m not a fan of ballpoint, being a retractable roller-ball sort of person, but I still have a couple of those pens.

Escapism

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While packing today I’ve been feeling rather like I’m planning an escape, except that all I’m escaping is the winter doldrums, and the not-even-terribly-cold weather that I really can’t complain about. I don’t really travel to escape.

I read to escape. When life feels like one endless treadmill, albeit one without the benefit of granting exercise or physical fitness, I pick up a good book. If I’m cold, I read about somewhere warm, if I’m missing the beach, I read a novel that takes place on the shore.

Sometimes I’ll make the bed with fresh sheets, brew tea, and read for an entire blissful afternoon or evening, coming out of the book mood as refreshed as if I’d been napping – perhaps more so. Other times, I’ll read in fits and snatches only, but always, always, there are words and books and pages.

It’s my favorite form of escapism.

E-bookish

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An advertisement for Amazon’s “Kindle” e-book reader has me contemplating e-books again. I go through stages where I almost like the notion of reading via screen, keyboard and fiber cable, but then I come back to my love of printed covers and textured pages, and the fact that even the most expensive e-book reader isn’t designed for use while soaking in a tub.

(Not that conventional books are either, really.)

Somehow, I can never immerse myself into an e-book the way I can with paperbacks or hardcovers. It’s not the physical presence, as there is something to hold in either case. I think it has to do with the way we read computer text, not blinking fully and staring at certain parts of the page, being different from the way we read text on paper.

Or it could just be that I like the smell of paper, and the smell of a book should be associated with that papery scent. Dusty, dry, crisp, ancient, magical paper.

Sailing through the Pages of Fiction

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At the dinner-party we attended earlier this evening there was some talk of cruises, and specifically Alaskan ones. We all agreed that a cruise of the Inside Passage would be fabulous.

On the way home, singing Christmas carols with Fuzzy, I thought about the collection of books I have that involve cruise ships. Most, of course, are related to the Titanic:
– Something’s Alive on the Titanic, by Robert J. Serling
– Ghosts I Have Been, by Richard Peck
– Her Name: Titanic, by Charles R. Pellegrino
– Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan Robertson
– Raise the Titanic, by Clive Cussler

If it seems like I have an unhealthy obsession with that ship…I have no answer. I don’t really. I’m fascinated by all cruise ships because they are self-contained microcosms – floating cities, with all the services one might need – and both connected and disconnected from reality at once.

I don’t think I’d want to work on such a ship, though I do love reading about them (they’re the perfect setting for mysteries), but that Alaskan cruise is calling my name ever louder.