c'mon ketchup

And look at me forgetting to mention Christmas in my last post. On Christmas Day. Shabby! This year I got no books for Christmas, possibly because my poor husband is too down about me not reading the Hilary Mantle he got me for my birthday (Wolf Hall). I've read about two chapters and Am Not Keen. Maybe it picks up. I'll get there.

Anyway, I've read some Charlaine Harrises: Dead Reckoning and Deadlocked from the Sookie series, and see that she's writing the FINAL  novel now, due next year. I think this is a good move, it's gone far enough. I also read an Aurora Teagarden (A Bone To Pick) I managed to get a hold of, have been interested in that series for a while and can now understand why it's not more popular. Also read her free-standing novel about a rape/a serial rapist, A Secret Rage - not brilliant but clearly based on true experiences, which is, as I've said, why Harris's books work despite everything; the darkness is real (sorry for the dwama phrase but it is). She could definitely do with more analysing, better editing and more depth as a writer, but she pays her bills and I think she's pleased and works hard. Good for her.

I read an Elaine Viets mystery shopper novel which was fucking terrible, Murder With All The Trimmings. Skimmed it more like. Bloody awful, disjointed stuff. I thought they were a little fun before? What was I thinking? It wasn't even light entertainment. No excuse for sending this off to the printers. None.

I also read a HEAP ( a HAPE) of Patricia Wentworths. The Case Is Closed, Danger Point, The Chinese Shawl, The Clock Strikes Twelve, The Case of William Smith, The Catherine Wheel, The Brading Collection, Anna, Where Are You?, The Benevent Treasure and The Alington Inheritance.They're oh so formulaic, with Miss Silver's annoying cough, the convoluted plots that are not ashamed to include hidden passages and treasures, the strong men who grab their beloved by the wrists and say "don't be a damned little fool, can't you see I want you to stop working and take care of you!". Vomit vomit vomit. Yet I wish I had more. I was so in the mood for vintage crime. I started noticing how she often spends a lot of time describing what the women are wearing, so thought that this was worthy of an email to one of my favourite blogs, A Dress A Day. I probably won't get around to sending her the tip, but I'm going to try, There were at least two books in which the heroine worked as a fashion model for a designer, wearing fabulous clothes and displaying them with great effect so middle-aged frumpy women with more money than sense would be fooled into thinking that they, too, could look equally ethereal. It's really very interesting and revealing of the times. Ha.

I re-read some more Laurie King, and I read some Jim Butcher, Dresden Files. Death Masks and Changes. Another series which has gone a little too far, but we'll see. I also read Sacrifice, the latest Charlie Higson "zombie" book. He's beginning to go soft now because quite a lot of children survived, but hey I'm not complaining. Quite like how he's pulling it together.

I'm really really hoping I can start blogging more next year.

En man som heter Ove

Fredrik Backmans bok lånades på biblioteket, vilket jag är rätt nöjd med, för i det långa loppet vill jag inte äga den. När den är som bäst är den fantastiskt rörande och empatisk, när den är som sämst är den skakig faktamässigt (har mycket svårt att se att brandmän står bredvid ett brinnande hus och utreder om det hör till deras kommun, samt har aldrig hört talas om att äldre tvångsintas på äldreboende - det brukar väl vara motsatsen som gäller) och lite för välbekant för den som läser Backmans blogg.

Men grattis till erbjudandet till filmmanus, som lär komma som ett brev på posten! Håll bara kontroll över projektet Fredrik, så de inte byter ut iranierna mot vilken utlänning som helst som råkar finnas i rullorna, och så vidare. First we take Trollhättan, then we just might take Hollywood om filmen blir bra och de vill göra en remake!

I övrigt har jag läst MYCKET, men jag ska se om jag hinner sammanfatta i ett blogginlägg innan året är slut.

Books you can't read in public

Noticed the paperback covers on the novels by Markus Heitz (the dwarf stories).

Well.

I'd feel really conspicuous. I mean really.

A whole great load

Ages ago I read a book called Min pappa är snäll och min mamma är utlänning by Emmy Abrahamson. It's handy to note that down, because I suspect I might want to be able to tip someone off about it sometime. It's a book for teens about a girl whose mother is Polish and how this makes her feel like the world's greatest outsider - pretty funny, not bad at all. Absolutely no point at all in writing this in English, but I don't like mixing in the same post.

I've read Laurie King's short story Beekeeping for Beginners - honestly, wasn't that sold on it, felt a bit unfinished? I have a reserve on Pirate King at the library, so should get my hands on it in about SIX MONTHS. Longest queue ever, like. Not as long as Jonas Gardell's Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar mind, which I gave up on getting my hands on before my book club, so I merrily joined in the discussions sans a clue. But I will read it. (Just didn't want to buy it.) I read the short story collection  An Apple for the Creature, edited by Charlaine Harris, which was trivial but fun. I have no patience with most fantasy after Tolkien, but I seem to have more tolerance for urban fantasy. Odd that. I'm not saying it should win awards, but I can leaf through them on trips. You know. I also found as an ebook a bizarre science fiction tale marked "erotica" by a Randall Garrett - Pagan Passions. It's about the Greek gods returning to Earth. Some decades after their return society is completely different, all centrered around the needs and whims of the Gods. That bit is quite amusing, the descriptions of New York with temples to Athena and an orgy to honour Pan in Central Park. The "hero" of the story gets to be a stand-in for Bacchus and have loads of sex. Awful, but amusing. In an awful way. But I'm not starting an "erotica" tag... Oh and I got Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris at the library, which is the third latest Sookie Stackhouse, and I read it just after reading three Ngaio Marsh novels back to back, Dead Water and Death in Ecstasy and a re-read of Artists in Crime,  and I was struck by a similarity oddly enough, namely the obsession with politeness. LOL to me I said. Oh, in Death in Ecstasy I was tickled to bits by several references to detective stories. I'd quote for you if I could copy and paste but I can't. At the moment I'm reading a disturbing R. Austin Freeman novel, The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant's Vendetta. About some lunatic who believes in "physical anthropology" and goes on a vendetta to kill criminals (examples of degenerate humans) after his wife is murdered. It's all goes remarkably and disgustingly unchallenged, almost as if the author has an axe to grind, but I'm not finished with it yet. Yuck.

"Det går inte att tänka sig fram till ett människovärde.

Det måste erövras genom handling.Du är och blir - eller inte."

Han kan han, Kristian Lundberg. Läser uppföljaren till Yarden, Och allt skall vara kärlek.

Men ändå. När jag är på sidan 140 av drygt 170 och han återigen lovar mig att han ska berätta: ja snälla, gör det. För all del. Jag väntar.

Yashim the eunuch

I know I've read about this series somewhere before, but for the life of me I can't remember where. Anyway - pretty colourful covers caught my eye and I borrowed a few in a heap - The Janissary Tree (no 1), The Bellini Card (no 3) and An Evil Eye (no 4). They've won loads of awards and they're ever so exciting, say the reviews.

Frankly, they're a bit rubbish. I can't speak for the plots, because they end up not interesting me. What I can say is that orientalism is still alive and kicking. Although ... that is perhaps a little unfair. Goodwin limits his orientalism to womankind I think. What could you call that? They're all beautiful and lithe and so on and so on. In more than one place he lets Yashim reflect on how Westerners imagine the Sultan's harem to be like an orgy (if such a collective noun there be) of gorgeous females just lounging about half-naked, whereas in reality it's more like some sort of English boarding school (Yashim doesn't say that, but it's written somewhere else). Well, frankly Goodwin's descriptions all lie on the houri side of the spectrum more than anything else. Good Lord. Follow Austen's example and don't describe what you don't know.

Bonus for great descriptions of cooking and I like the Polish ambassador, the ambassador without a country. Otherwise more than a little meh. Although I did maybe learn about the Janissaries. Okay then.

A bit of Harris

I've been mostly re-reading Ngaoi Marshes, including library ones, but I also found the missing books from the Sookie Stackhouse series last time I was at said book temple so I got them. Including the first one, much to my pleasure, because it always does seem a little off to not read the first one in a series doesn't it. So now I've read Dead In The Family, Dead and Gone, Dead Until Dark, Dead As A Doornail. In one of them, well, Sookie meets vampires 'coz Bill comes to town, in one there's the fairy wars and she's tortured (pretty gruesomely), then one is the follow-up to that and she's with Eric and... well, to be honest all I remember off-hand is that she first doesn't get a kick out of sex the way she used to because, hey, torture but then she does and all is well and there's a load of sex, but there was most likely some sort of plot too. In one of them her telepath five-year-old little relation comes to stay together with her fairy cousin, and in one her sister-in-law gets crucified, in one the were-wolves come out of the closet, in one Tara's vampire boyfriend gambles her off to a vampire psycho, and in one Eric's maker comes with the Tsvarevitch of Russia.

Oh, they all run together. I remember first one best, because it is the best. The longer the books run the more unbelievable the Sookieverse becomes. The supernatural beings are so unable to be discreet that no-one can credit that they were ever hidden. I appreciate the plot changes made in the tv show - they most often were for the better. Tara is an incredibly lame and uninteresting character in the books, whereas Tara on the tellybox is pretty fabulous.

Still get a kick out of them. But nonetheless I shall prolly be sticking to my re-reads for a while, mostly because I don't have the computer access to blog mostly. This post was brought to you by four interruptions. FOUR. (One was admittedly my own, I had to bitch about something.)

Pithy quotes

I'm re-reading all my Ngaio Marshes, and the library's too (except the earliest ones that are a little crap). And in A Surfeit of Lampfreys I read the following:

Maternal anxiety, he thought, was the emotion that human beings most consistently misrepresent, degrading its passion into tenderness, its agony with pathos.

I done gone reflected then that this is perhaps the point of Majgull Axelsson's Moderspassion, that we read for the book club. But I still don't think it came across very well in that book.

yada yada yada

I have been reading, but mostly re-reading. I felt like loads of Laurie King, so I've re-read everything I had bar Touchstone which I wasn't that keen on, and borrowed whatever was at the library - not much, sadly, people read crime fiction when on their holidays, right? So I didn't get to read The Moor or Justice Hall... I put in a reservation for at least one though. We moved this summer, so I wasn't in the mood for new stuff, I wanted oldies and goodies. I don't think I ever blogged about To Play The Fool - but there seem to be several I never wrote about when I go back to check. Odd that. I think I've read them all bar the two newest ones and the collaborations and e-pubs. I also re-read some Jasper Fforde, and found one I hadn't read, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, which is too clever for its own good. When I compare it to the The Eyre Affair, The Fourth Bear (re-read) and Shades of Grey, that all manage to touch on real pain and human problems in between all the puns and jokes ... too much BookWorld is not a good thing.

I've been re-reading Laurie King

but now all our books are packed for the move. I might have to stop by the library.

The anachronistic bits are more noticeable when re-reading, but she's still my friend.

I read my sister's books and returned them

And checked and I'd missed writing anything about the Wil Wheaton ones. Well, she lent me Memories of the Future and  .... Just A Geek it was I believe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first, and look forward very much to the rest of his Star Trek NG reviews. Surely he must do them all? Just A Geek was a little slower in bits, but I appreciate the honesty. I'm really pleased that he's carved a proper new career for himself. And apropos honesty ... he could do with being even grittier. Just saying fuck doesn't cut it. A bit deeper, a bit more introspective? He tries to protect his family, which is laudable, but to be a great writer you have to be able to get really private I think.

Note

Not one copy of Wuthering Heights will survive this purge.

Janet Evanovich

Found Plum Lucky at the library, it's the one about the leprechaun. One of the supernatural ones, with Diesel. Ok. And I forgot I'd read Plum Spooky so got that too, and read it for lack of anything else to do while lounging next to the playground.

Sue Grafton: V is for Vengeance

This is the one I forgot about the other week! And this is really the one that sort of re-awakened my fondness for characters I thought I'd stopped loving. I liked Kinsey in this one. I was also sort of amused by how made-for-80s-tv the main story was - the gangster-gone-good who falls in love with the mother of a young man his henchmen killed a few years ago. With the descriptions of clothes and all you could almost picture the screenshots. Nuff said.

Stephen Fry: The Liar

What is the point of this book I asked myself after reading a quarter of it, and considered not bothering with the rest. But I kept going, largely because I was in bed sick Wednesday (food poisoning probably, woe me) and ended up reluctantly reading the whole thing. But what was the point remains the focal question. He's put in a caveat on the first empty leaf thingie before the actual book (I forget the word for those empty pages): "Nothing here is true" it says or something to that effect. Having read the second part of his autobiography though I can see that the book echoes his life, so it's sort of true. But of course the book is called The Liar, and in his autobiography he writes how he's been afraid all his life of being discovered to be a fraud and trickster so ... I dunno. It doesn't grab me. The bits that are supposed to be more sincere are not. In a way, perhaps, it perfectly illustrates what Fry tries to say in his autobiography - that he isn't really terribly intelligent, he just has a good memory and is sort of a wit. Being able to see that automatically makes you of more than average intelligence of course. Ta-daa.

On the whole though? Dull. I just didn't enjoy it. Fittingly, it felt insincere and fake. But what's the point of that.

Majgull Axelsson: Moderspassion

Kort inlägg följer: det här var bokcirkelns senaste. Sist jag läste Majgull Axelsson måste varit i högstadiet eller gymnasiet möjligen, och det var nog Rosario är död. Jag minns det som en av de hemskaste böckerna jag läst, och det var nästan första gången det gick upp för mig att det fanns vuxna människor som gjorde barn så illa.

För mig är hon en barn- och ungdomsförfattare alltså (eftersom jag läste boken när jag var ungdom - dålig logik, men sån är jag) - så jag var alltså, i enlighet med Poängen med Bokcirkel, fullt beredd att omvärdera detta. Inledde med avsikten att låna boken på biblioteket, men den är konstant utlånad, så jag skulle köpa den online, men jag glömde, så med typ tre dagar på mig köpte jag den på Akademibokhandeln (som jag normalt inte vill handla i längre - vi saknar alla RIKTIGA LundeQ) för åttifem spänn - hutlöst. Men nåväl. Jag hann! Tur man har semester.

Boken är skriven huvudsakligen från Minnas synvinkel. Minna är ensamstående och föräldralös med en dotter i gymnasieåldern, och man förstår ganska raskt att något hänt denna dotter. Romanen äger rum, med vissa återblickar, under stormen år 2000 som översvämmade Arvika, och en skara människor samlas på Minnas vägkrog den natten och bevittnar den olycka som kommer att avslöja lögnen hon burit för sig själv under det senaste året. Minnas synvinkel är dock som sagt inte den enda, utan varje kapitel byter berättare. Det är ju helt okej. Ett problem är dock att det inte alltid känns så självklart vilka som fått vara berättare. Varför den men inte den. Varför inte dottern? Varför inte läkaren som utnyttjar dottern? Osv. Det finns fler aber, men det mynnar ut i en känsla av att boken blivit klar för snabbt, och inte bearbetats klart. Låt den ligga i byrålådan i fem år till, och ta fram den och skriv lite mer. Utveckla, jobba om. Det kunde blivit så. himla. bra. Nu är det okej. Bitvis väldigt gripande, men mer för att det ÄR det när det handlar om att barn dör än för att BOKEN blivit så fantastisk.

Nåväl, kul att läsa men inte riktigt värd 85 kr helt enkelt. Men jag är nöjd med läsandet.

Catchupcatchup

Janet Evanovich: Twelve Sharp
Refound my love for this series a little.

Lindsey Davis: Alexandria
Ditto. I liked how the big war in the great library is between weeders and non-weeders.

There was a third, but I can't find my note of this at the moment ... I had to return them all to the library you see.

Ray Bradbury is dead.

His books meant a great deal to me when I was a teenager. I've re-read them sporadically, but only blogged the once. Neil Gaiman has something nice up on his blog though, worth looking at.

Nurse Ratched.

That's who the train conductor reminds me of! Beautiful but stiff like.

What? It's a literary comment!

What did I get for my sister then?

Since I had to write about it here? Well, Jenny Lawson's book of almost course, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Don't come here and accuse me of not being au courant with the blogging world. (But I'm really not.) Bonus: I get to read it later too.

She's not very quick, is she?

My sister, that is. Who clearly doesn't have my blog on a feed because no comment as of yet on the parcel that has arrived. Lordy lord.

The last exclamation brings me to the Sookie Stackhouse novel Living Dead in Dallas, which was part of my last library haul. This is the one where Sookie infiltrates the church belonging to The Fellowship of the Sun, also the one that finds Lafayette dead. The tv series really does a better job of that (I like Lafayette). No. 2 in the series.

Happy birthday little sister!

The other day I wrote a post on my phone...

... but the phone sorta ate it. You have to get it just right when blogging via the Blogger app, I'll have you know. It breaks down and just keeps asking you to switch accounts. Useless thing. Anyway, the post is gone, but what I wanted to tell you was that I went to a second-hand book shop and saw these super-darling paperback editions:

But at 50 kr apiece I'm not buying them, since I'm not, after all, very keen on Agatha Christie. But they were sweet. The next day I went to the Red Cross and checked out their selection and they had NOTHING. I was utterly disappointed.

I've read the new hit fantasy novel Cirkeln (it's being translated and will probably be called The Circle, right?) by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren - it's a breath of fresh air on the Swedish fantasy scene, but mostly for doing a great job on describing the kids that make up the coven of witches. The actual witchy bits are so-so really. But worth a read! Very exotic to foreigners I'm sure. Then for the book discussion club we read Sommarboken by Tove Jansson. It was okay. Didn't sing to me. Then I know I've read some other things that I've forgotten now. A shame that. Today I went to the library and I got a heap of paper-back crime fiction I hadn't read - I'll be back.

Bigamy

So I read Jane Eyre, and then The Nine Tailors because I felt like it, and I was reminded that I hadn't blogged about my new Victorian discovery - Wilkie Collins. I downloaded some ebooks because I kept reading that his novels were examples of early detective fiction; and not only that, he wrote about social injustices. Which I felt might be interesting. Oh, and bigamy: Jane Eyre - Mr Rochester wants to be a bigamist, in The Nine Tailors a woman is an unintentional bigamist and her presumed dead husband an intentional one, which is an important part of the plot (the woman is religious and doesn't want her daughters to be bastards for one), shich leads us to Collins's novel No Name from 1862, about a gentleman's daughters who discover, to their shock and surprise, that their parents were not married and that they have no right to their father's anything, including his name. Do you follow my train of thought? Bigamy?

So I'm re-reading Jane Eyre

And there is always something new to discover in good books isn't there? It hasn't been that long ago since I read Bryson's At Home,  and there he writes about how dark life was before electricity. Literally. Whole big rooms lit only by a fire,  a passage from someone's letter or journal describing a dining room dazzlingly illuminated by four candles. For some reason, now, I'm seeing this all through Jane Eyre. So many winter evenings spent in the dark indoors with only firelight. Getting dressed with only the last rays of moonlight to see the buttons by. It's so very specifically described: the school rooms at Lowood with long tables crammed full of girls of all ages, lit by a pair of candles per table. That scene where she meets Mr Rochester at the stile - it's almost dark then; my memory has been fooled by films I think into remembering it as daylight. When Jane returns to Thornfield she goes into Mrs Fairfax's room and sees Pilot by the light of only the fire. Everything so shadowy, always. She needs a candle, and rings for the servant. A candle. To walk upstairs with and change by.

The Farseer Trilogy

My colleague, who is totally into fantasy and science fiction (more Star Wars than Star Trek, sadly), said I should read Robin Hobb. So why not, I said, borrowed the first Farseer book (Assassin's Apprentice) and really liked it. Then I wanted to read the rest, and they were lost in the library. Sigh. My little sister had them though, so I made her bring them to me. Win! Exstatic review can be found here. Myself, I shall confess to becoming a little bored. It went on and on towards the end. Props for a sad, melancholy ending, but it took longer than it should have. I lost the magic. I made my sister bring me the other books set in that universe, and now I'm not feeling so inclined to read them, which makes me feel bad. I'm a selfish, bad person. I'll make it up to her with chocolate pie on Easter Monday.

When in doubt...

... re-read Jane Eyre.

Dr Thorndyke

This has been my Ebook reading project, y'all. I spent my winter commutes reading Thorndyke novels like crazy. Everything Aldiko had to give me, I believe. Let's make a list first.

Three books in three days. Or maybe it was closer to five. And other stuff.

I am, at a guess, thirty books or so behind. It's so much it isn't even funny. I should just write the title and the author in a post, and leave it at that, instead of saving it and thinking I'll catch up - how can I? I also have a few on the draft list actually, so maybe it's more like forty. I honestly find this very depressing. I have no internet persona at all these days, apart from a Facebook account. And let's face it (hardehar), no internet persona is more boring than the Facebook persona. It's not cool at all.

My husband told me once that I moaned too much on my blog about how bad it was and how I never had time to blog. Well let's face that too - he's right, yet the heart must say what the heart is full of to paraphrase a Swedish saying. Where the bloody hell else am I to give out about this? I've been really grumpy these past few days and snapped today with Maxima, telling her how I never got any computer time at home and she lost patience with me and said I should stop being such a martyr and just ask instead. But I don't want to have to ask. Feels like I have to ask to do everything, I can't just do stuff. Need to sort this out.

Right, Livejournal part over. Good Friday today. Mr Bani is watching the Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of  Christ. Minima is sitting in the armchair next to him with headphones in her ears. Watching but not listening, I suppose. I have not given up the internet for Good Friday. I can't find the post where I did.

The last three books I read where three paperbacks I picked up in Myrornas, where you can still on occasion find second-hand paperbacks at a decent price (which means no more than ten crowns, thankyouverymuch. Fecking Stadsmissionen think they can get away with thirty. I'm all for charity, but I'm not buying Lee Child for more than ten crowns.) So one of them was a Lee Child, one was a Charlaine Harris, and one - oh joy! was an Ellis Peters.

I want to read some of these alright

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/07/lloyd-shepherd-top-10-weird-histories

The Mortal Engines series

Let's save some time and assume I'll read all of these eventually, although now I've only read the first two. I got Maxima the first one for Christmas and she liked it so much she used her Christmas gift vouchers to buy the next two. I'd have read the third except she's plodding through them slowly herself. In an hilarious aside, we learnt yesterday that Minima has struggled through book one when she was in Tunisia last summer - you could've knocked us over with something quite light when she told us. She's normally so anti-fantasy and science-fiction. But she had nothing else to read when her friend had dropped off for the night, so she succumbed. And hated it.

I'm not completely sold either. It reminds me of a bunch of other stuff, ideas slightly cobbled together, and it lacks a little bit of that character depth you need in books of this sort, otherwise it's just cool imagery. Cool here means, like, steampunk. Which is so wow. Second book gets better though. Bonus points for author not being afraid to kill characters. And of course for concept, which is municipal darwinism in extremis and literally so.

It's being filmed, apparently - what isn't, these days? It'll probably end up loud and annoying. 

2 x Diana Wynne Jones

Borrowed two children's books to read during my Christmas holidays - The Magicians of Caprona and Eight Days of Luke. Alright. The former could make a great film in the right hands. It would have to be in Italian, and it would be so much fun with a good Italian fantasy film for kids wouldn't it? Make a change from the anglocentricity of the genre. The latter was amusing with its take on Norse mythology. I liked the open, slightly ambiguous ending.

End of the world

What better way to start 2012, after such a long hiatus, than with the myth of Cthulhu? Apparently (I read this somewhere) the alleged Armageddon of this year as "foretold" by the ancient Mayans has been linked by some to the entirely fictional Cthulhu monster. Who'd have thunk.

So, The Call of Cthulhu by Howard Phillips Lovecraft then. I'd never read this before, and I must say that I expected more given how influential the concept became in popular culture. The short story is written in that sort of documentary fashion of somebody piecing together notes and snippets of information. I think it workable in say Dracula, but it's not very scary here. Didn't grab me, didn't scare me. A little dull, in fact. Also, don't really see why the freed Cthulhu should so easily be re-imprisoned by a mere earthquake. Hrmpf.