08:20 PM
Books Book blog

I've started a blog for the books I read, Past Pages. While I read mostly murder mysteries, I tend towards more introspective ones than Miss Marple stuff and I read the occassional odd thing too.

07:39 PM
Books Story of the Day

artificialbutter: shut up... really? a short story by a friend of Jon's, the husband of dooce.com's Heather B. Go read it, it's got a Twilight Zone type of thing going on.

10:28 AM
Books Tying a string around my finger

There's a review going here of Caleb Carr's Killing Time, this is just to remind me of it. :)

11:33 PM
Books REVIEW | Southampton Row and Death of a Stranger, both by Anne Perry

Southampton Row by Anne Perry, the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series: This was boring. I was so disappointed! The murder victim was totally uninteresting, I couldn't even get involved in the suspects, they all seemed very stupid and one-dimensional, even Emily and Charlotte were very flat. Just no real suspense, all much a forgone conclusion and nothing particularly interesting. Just not like Anne Perry's usual writing at all.

Death of a Stranger by Anne Perry, the William Monk series: Now this is how she usually writes! This book was great and such a difference from Southampton Row! Interesting characters, the historical period well delineated and the plight of the poor and prostitutes well drawn without being sappy or pitying. I like Hester's new friend, Margaret, she's terrific and I like her as a future wife for Oliver Rathbone as well. And it was great to finally get the full story on Monk's background, all the teasers we've been getting for ages finally drawn together and the whole thing uncovered. It'll be interesting to see where she takes him now that he does remember the important parts from his past that had been haunting him.

So one good, one bad, there is another in the Pitt series that I haven't read yet, I hope it's much better than Southampton Row.

10:49 PM
Books REVIEW | Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton

This one is spooky. The ending, not the ending of the story but the part by the author at the end. Turns out it's based on a real murder, a Jane Doe who was killed in August of 1969 and never identified and her killer never caught. In the course of writing this book and going her own way with her fictional Jane Doe, she helped the Santa Barbara police get the real Jane Doe exhumed and a facial reconstruction done to try to help get her identified. There's pictures of Jane Doe at the end. It's just kind of spooky.

The book was good tho, Sue Grafton just keeps writing them well, gradually filling in more of her main character, Kinsey Milhone. This one has quite a bit of info about her parents and her mother's family and there's lots of stuff to fill in the timeline of her mother's life and hers, I had a bit of a struggle trying to figure out when/where/who for a bit, especially since Kinsey lags behind real time, this book is set in 1986. Interestingly, we find out (or at least I finally figured out) in this one that Kinsey's parents were married for almost 14 years before she was born. Kinsey's mother was 18 in 1935 and Kinsey wasn't born until 1949, then her parents were killed five? years later, so they were married almost 19 years. Since Kinsey was so young when they were killed, I'd always kind of figured that they'd only been married six to eight or nine years, I didn't realize that she'd been born so much later after they got married. (This is partly why I like Grafton's books, figuring out all the pieces of Kinsey's life as well as whatever case she's investigating.)

Anyway, case is interesting too, good build-up and I liked the different locale for most of the book. And Rosie's new recipes! I'd have left town too! Stacey Oliphant was a great character, I hope she keeps him around in future books for awhile at least, I loved her turning him on to junk food and enjoying it as much as she did.

So another good book in the alphabet series, I'll have to check Sue Grafton's website to see if there's any word on the real Jane Doe's identity.

11:33 PM
Books Brits' top 100 books

From a friend's blog, the BBC published its survey list of the Brits' top 100 books. It's based on the results of public survey, not critical choice. In alphabetical order:

Bold = Have read.
Italics = Would like to read.

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (well of course I've read my namesake's adventures! :))
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (saw the BBC miniseries years ago tho)
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger (did read Franny and Zooey)
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl (saw the movie!)
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (seen umpteen TV and movie versions tho)
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (or perhaps just watch the movie...)
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (started this at one point years ago but I don't think I ever finished it)
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy (read his A Pair of Blue Eyes)
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson (who the heck is Jacqueline Wilson??? I've never heard of her or her books)
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald (and loved the movie with Redford, too)
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton (oh wow! cool, I read this years ago in HS, I was into historical/romance stuff and her books were terrific)
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (didn't like the book as much as the movies, both Kate Hepburn's and Winona Ryder's)
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding (read this in HS, HATED IT)
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
Magician, Raymond E. Feist
The Magus, John Fowles (loved his French Lieutenant's Woman, I should read this one)
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck (read it in HS, I can't handle animals being hurt or killed, even in books)
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind (read his The Pigeon tho, really good)
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving (read his Hotel New Hampshire which I liked but I never liked any of his other books)
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen (I cannot wade thru her prose, but the movie by Emma Thompson was excellent)
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt (one of THE best books around, I keep waiting for them to make a movie it, she has a new book out which I really want to read)
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (read this in HS, I can still hear the teacher reading the first paragraph out loud, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times...")
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee (read the book after I'd seen the movie)
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams (another one of my all-time favorites)
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Hmmm, 20 out of 100, not too bad, there's some on that list that I don't think really deserve to be there (Harry Potter???, Bridget Jones' Diary??? The Princess Diaries???) and there's several I'd like to read, now that I've got my library card and the neighborhood library is open again, I'm adding them to my list.

05:57 PM
Books REVIEW | Reversible Errors by Scott Turow

I'm finding this book hard to get into, it's peopled with characters that I'm not finding sympathetic and I can't connect to, I had a similar problem with some of the characters in his previous book but it's even worse in this one. It reminds me of John Grisham's The Brethren which featured three repulsive, unredeemable, just plain icky characters and I found myself bored and grossed out from beginning to end and resolved never to read another of his books again.

Up thru The Laws of the Fathers, Turow's books have been terrific, even when the character was the bad guy, there was still something there that I could understand and connect with but his last book, Personal Injuries, there was much that was good, but some of it was just...not right. The FBI agent was two-dimensional, stiff and unbelievable, with the backstory of being a former Olympian that seemed a rather pointless thing to add to the character.

And that seems to have inhabited much of the characters in his latest book, Reversible Errors. Most of the characters are stiff and brittle, with perhaps the exception of the police detective and perhaps the female former judge/now ex-con but her character is so similar to the female prosecutor with some minor differences in their backstory, that it's sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

In the past, the murder has usually not been the central point of his books, it was almost incidental, a pivot used to reveal the characters and their lives. In Errors, the murder is much more central, it's much more a murder mystery than his previous books have been and that's not why I read his books.

Perhaps he's on the downward slide, I find most authors hit a high point and then go back down from there, either just writing badly or constantly repeating themselves. But all his earlier books were very good, so read those, here they are in order of my preference:

The Laws of Our Fathers
When I first started this book, I thought I wasn't going to like it, but the further I got into it, the better it got till it became my favorite of his books. It's long, over 500 pages and it spans most of the last half of the 20th century but really excellent reading.

Pleading Guilty
This one's short and the ending caught me by surprise, not at all what I expected, wonderfully crafted narration by the main character.

The Burden of Proof
This one is a marvelous exploration of a marriage and family, it was made into a mini-series which just couldn't quite capture all the internal dialogue of the characters, but I did think that Hector Elizondo was perfect for the part of the main character.

Presumed Innocent
His first book, made into a big screen movie with Harrison Ford, but again so much of the book is internal dialogue that the movie couldn't quite capture as well. It's a very good murder mystery as well as a marvellous examination of the characters.

Personal Injuries
Not as good as the others, but still very good and some twists in the plot I didn't expect.

10:30 AM
Books REVIEW | Killing Time by Caleb Carr

I haven't finished this book either. I loved Carr's first two books, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, brilliant portraits of early 1900's psychiatry and profiling combined with murder investigations. Fascinating well written books that I couldn't put down.

I haven't finished this book either. I loved Carr's first two books, The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, brilliant portraits of early 1900's psychiatry and profiling combined with murder investigations. Fascinating well written books that I couldn't put down.

I can't say the same for Killing Time. It was syndicated in Time magazine which I didn't realize until I happened on the second installment. I tracked down all the parts on the website and read the first part but it just didn't grab me. But I bought the book anyway. So far it reads like a bad version of Heinlein and not even Heinlein's best books either. It's full of ominous portents, "....but it was nothing compared to what was about to happen..." and the Heinlein requisite beautiful woman willing to sleep with the main character without even the drop of a hat. Bleh.

I keep reading in hopes that it will improve but then it's hard to pick it up and read more because it's been so bad before. I guess three isn't Carr's magic number...

Otoh, Scott Turow has a new book out and his last six haven't failed me, every one of them has been a superlative example of the best of the legal/murder mystery genre.

04:32 AM
Books REVIEW | The Last Time We Met by Anita Shreve

Sometimes her books are a bit slow to get started so I always keep reading but this one just doesn't seem to be going anywhere and it's got an annoying thing of putting all dialogue in italics, not quotes. Seems to be a pointless quirk and it's not doing anything much for the story so far.

Sometimes her books are a bit slow to get started so I always keep reading but this one just doesn't seem to be going anywhere and it's got an annoying thing of putting all dialogue in italics, not quotes. Seems to be a pointless quirk and it's not doing anything much for the story so far.

All her other books have been great, especially The Weight of Water, a brilliant dual story about a disentegrating marriage in the present and a multiple murder on an isolated New England island a hundred years before.

Shreve's books are similar to Sue Miller's but Shreve tends to put more of a dreamlike air in her books, people wandering thru a fog and then terrible things happen.

09:38 PM
Books Beach reading

The Amazon ad on the right showed a book called Beach House by James Patterson and Peter de Jonge so I clicked on it because it reminded me of a better book, Beach Music by Pat Conroy. It's long and rambling covering years and years. It wanders between the main character's current life in Italy with his young daughter and his youth back in the South in the US, both before he married and after. It explores the legacies of his parents, his wife's parents, World War II and being southern.

It is a musical book, a tune that wanders in and out of my head even now, after all these years since I read it. When I moved three years ago, I pared down my library to the bare minimum, keeping only a couple boxes of books, this was one of those books, along with anything written by Scott Turow, that I could not get rid of.

09:26 PM
Books Adverts, Books and more Mozilla

I added some adverts over on the right. The one for getting paid for answering surveys is a good one, absolutely no spam, just their emails once or twice a month with a link to their survey and every so often, they pay, sometimes just for taking the survey, sometimes from winning their drawing from taking the survey. I get checks every now and then for $10, $5, $15 and once I got a check for $100 right when I really needed it, I was on my way to the bank to deposit a loan from my mom and checked the snail mail as I walked to the car and lookie there, just like magic! And they've never spammed me or sold my address, I use a special one just for them and it gets no spam so I know they're safe.

The ads for Amazon, the book one, where it shows a title and book cover, I like that, I can keep up with what's new, it's set to show mysteries, something random each time.

And I added a link at the bottom of the page for Mozilla, I've become a Mozilla zealot. It's a fabulous browser, I was looking thru preferences for something else and realized that, along with blocking popups and new windows and window resizing (common ad tricks) there's a choice to only show images from the originating server. Since ads usually come from external servers, not the one the website is housed on, this would eliminate a whole lot of ad images on website pages! I did find that unfortunately it also eliminated all news photos at CNN since they store their photos elsewhere so I turned that option off.

But I found another way to block ad images, I can right click on an ad image and select "Block images from this server" and that gets rid of all the ads from those servers. This allows me to see news photos at CNN but not their ads. It doesn't stop Flash ads, tho, but it gets rid of alot, the Yahoogroups website loads much faster and I don't have to run some other anti-popup program that takes up memory.

And the tabbed interface has become invaluable, for opening links in the background while I continue to read on the main site or opening up various pages from a Google search in the background while I look for more. As I type this, I have a window open with my blog site, this window for the blog admin to type this entry and the Amazon page to check out a book.

So I'm a Mozilla zealot! I can use an up to date, javascript enabled browser with a tabbed interface that's memory efficient and removes ads! :)