Teaser Tuesday

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.  The idea is to give everyone a look inside the book you’re reading.

Play along: Grab your current read; Open to a random page; Share two teaser sentences from that page; Share the title and author so that other participants know what you’re reading.

I’m starting Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America by Benjamin Wooley today.  I’m trying to read at least one non-fiction book a month in 2011 and this is book one.  I don’t know that non-fiction makes for the best teasers but let’s play anyway.

“On the morning of 20 September 1565, the sixty-year-old carpenter Nicolas le Challeux awoke to the sound of rain pelting down on the palm-leaf thatch overhead.  It had not stopped for days, and a muddy morass awaited him outside.”  (pg. 3)

The Sunday Salon — Book Madness

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It was a quiet week for me blogging but I did get some reading in and came across something interesting on the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy, that made me think about my own reading habits.  The article, The Morning News Announces Tournament of Books Contenders, is about a book tournament modeled on the men’s NCAA basketball tournament.  It starts with a pool of 16 books, one person judges two books and advances one narrowing the books down from 16 to eight to four to two, and finally one winner.   The champion book of the year is awarded The Rooster.  There’s more information on The Morning News site if you want to read the rules.

The books were chosen because they were hyped, celebrated, or someone lobbied passionately for them at some point.   What I found so interesting about the list was that I hadn’t read one of the books.  A few are on my list but I haven’t picked up one on the list, at least not yet anyway.  I have an almost obsessive compulsion not to read books on bestseller lists.  Is it because I don’t like being told what to read?  Or that I don’t like to read what everyone else is reading?  If I do read books off these lists is it akin to drinking the kool-aid?  Maybe.  Then maybe I’m thinking about it too much.

I do like recommendations, let’s face it, thanks to book bloggers my TBR has grown from something manageable into a monster that has taken on a life of its own.  It’s not that I don’t like to read popular books because I do read a lot of them but I tend to stay away from really popular books when they’re being hyped.  I don’t know the reason for this but it’s the way I am when it comes to reading.  If it’s on a bestseller list, I won’t touch it, even if I really want to read it, until it falls off the list or people forget about it.  It’s the reason you don’t see many big books reviewed by me.  It also got me thinking about being well-read.  Eva at A Striped Armchair has some interesting thoughts on the subject which is probably what brought me to the conclusion I came to about the Tournament of Books.  I usually don’t judge my reading against others simply because it’s not a fair comparison.  I read what I like, I always have, and will continue to do so.  It’s not a matter of worrying about how many books I read, I keep track but for no other reason than to drop some books off my TBR, and I don’t worry about hitting certain numbers.  I guess it got me wondering as to how and why I pick certain books.  I don’t have a system for picking books.  I finish one and look around at what’s available to me at any given point in time and make a choice.

After reading all of that you have to be wondering what my point is with all this.  I start out talking about a book tournament and end up talking about how I pick books.  I’m not sure I have a point today other than to wonder aloud at how I pick my books (the well-read part isn’t something I want to get into since it’s something I can only determine for myself but it’s an interesting topic anyway).

So my question is — how do you pick your books?  Do you use bestseller lists?  Prefer recommendations from books bloggers? Another system entirely?

Today’s Book

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Have you ever felt this way — you finish a book you undeniably fell in love with and when the last page is finished, you sigh, reluctantly return it to the shelf, and then wonder what you’re going to read next knowing it isn’t going to live up to the just finished and loved book.  I think Time Travelers Never Die is suffering from this syndrome I will now term book love lag.  I picked this up after reading a book I really enjoyed and sort of felt bad for it in a way.  It was a new genre, which I thought might be helpful, but all it has me doing is wishing it were something different.

It may not sound like it but I am enjoying this book.  It’s good, it’s interesting, and it’s a book I’ve wanted to read.  Right now it’s going very slowly for me.  I know I’ll finish it because it’s fun reading and I like science fiction but I wish I had read it at a different time.  In the grand scheme, it’s not fair to Time Travelers Never Die but I guess it probably would have happened with whatever book I picked up.

Do you ever experience book love lag?

It’s Monday and I got nothin’

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Ok, not entirely true but somewhat.  I’ve been hoping to get back to a regular blog rhythm this year but I seem to have turned into a cold and flu magnet and I haven’t felt like doing much writing.  After two rounds of antibiotics and a few days on the couch, I’m finally feeling good enough to sit up and thought I’d take a minute (a short one) to talk about a few of the books I read last week.

The Last Pendragon: A Story of Dark Age Wales by Sarah Woodbury — This was a Nook read.  I found it while looking at my Nook library online and downloaded it.  My love of Arthurian Legend always compels me to do these things.  It won’t top my best of list but it did help me get out of a slump.  There are some supernatural elements in this one that most Arthurian stories don’t have and while I’m not a huge fan of those additions to this story, it worked here.  It adheres to the basic story and many of the required elements are present — the sword in a stone, love, a merlin-like character, etc.  It was more character than plot driven but I’m all right with that.  All in all, interesting.

 

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill — I love ghost stories and when I found out my library had this one, I wanted it.  It delivered on the creepy front.  It’s tension filled and can make you want to turn the lights on in every room of your house.  On the surface it might seem a bit tame — a young lawyer is sent to handle the affairs of a deceased client who lived on a small, isolated island in the north of England.  What he finds is a town unwilling to share information about the woman whose affairs he’s handling and even less willing to talk about the house and property she owned.  Nothing is explained at first and that adds to the story being this dark spot in a small town’s history.  I loved it.

 

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness — As soon as this book entered my house I wanted to read it.  I put it off at first but then gave in as soon as possible.  I don’t really know what to say about this one because I loved it so so much.  Being sick makes it hard for me to read sometimes but I couldn’t put this book down.  The characters all worked for me, the story was complicated, it mixed science and history, and it was a book about a book.  Books about books always entice me.  It was also about witches, vampires, and daemons.  I thought I was sick of the vampire thing but they worked in this book.  I adored the cover too and yes I mentioned that in another post already.

I think my next book is going to be Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDivitt.  I have a non-fiction book about Jamestown but I don’t think I’ll be able to comprehend that one in my current condition.  I also have Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen so my next few days are happily covered.

Review – The Hard Way

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The Hard Way

By Lee Child

Bantam Dell

ISBN:978-0-440-24103-4

4 stars

I’ve read a number of Lee Child’s books and there is one overriding thing I need to remind myself to do each time I start one — forget reality.  Please don’t take this to mean that I don’t like the books, because I do, it’s just that his characters, Jack Reacher in particular, always end up in the craziest situations that a person, a sane person, would have walked away from or never become involved in to begin with.  But, that is what also makes them interesting, so now I just go with the forget all reality tactic and I find enjoy the books much better.

Jack Reacher is back in New York City and spending time in a café drinking coffee, a favorite pastime of his.  One evening, he sees a man get into a car and drive away.  The next day, he’s approached about the small but rather forgettable event and ends up drawn into a kidnapping case that also involves a handful of rouge mercenaries on call for the U.S. government.  Unsure of how to walk away from the group he’s found himself oddly tied to because he can’t be certain that the kidnapped mother and daughter will be safe, he gets drawn deeper into the case and goes out of his way to help rescue two people he’s never met.

Oh, Reacher, how do you manage to rescue so many people in so short a time?  Also, how is it you manage to always be in the right place when trouble happens?  I want to be annoyed with these books because there is a huge disconnect between what happens and general reality (You know, reality for normal people.) but I can’t be.  Once I let go and fall into these books, I can’t help it, I’m stuck until I find out that Reacher has managed to save someone, stop something from blowing up, or just save the world in general.  I’m not a thriller reader either but these books put me into some sort of catatonic reading mode and I have to finish and find out that everything has worked out fine in the end.  I say that because everything always works out fine in the end.  At least that’s been the case for the books I’ve read in the Reacher series.

A co-worker of mine lends these books to me and I’ll admit there have been a few bombs along the way but for the most part, I enjoy them.  They’re one off books which can be read in one sitting and you don’t have to have read them in any sort of order to understand the plot.  By the way, the plot is pretty much always the same — something bad happens, Reacher shows up, saves the day.  These are books you pull out on a rainy or slow day and you just read.  You’ll be entertained by the end and glad that a co-worker loaned you that book.  You’ll also be tempted to write something nice about their sharing abilities so they loan you more.

Today’s Book with Extra Book Bits

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I’m about to finish The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.  It’s a ghost story and while it has it’s conventional parts, it feels more like a slow moving thriller and it works wonderfully.  She dishes out details slowly, building a lot of tension for the ending I know is coming.  The best word to describe it would be atmospheric.  It has long, lush sentences that evoke a foreboding for the horrible ending.  It reminds me a lot of Shirley Jackson whose storytelling has the same feel.  In case, you’re wondering how I know what’s coming — I read the end already.

I haven’t done a library loot in forever so here goes.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (See above.)

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt (On my list and it fits a challenge, a twofer book.)

Savage Kingdom: The True story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America by Benjamin Woolley (I read a book last year about Jamestown and loved it so I’m trying another.  We’ll see if my interest holds up through this one.)

Also new to me but not a library loaner is A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.  I’ve been craving this one since it came through the door and it’s so my next book.  Admire that cover.  I love, love, love it.  Can’t really say why but the sapphire blue cover is working for me.

Thoughts – The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

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Thoughts – The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

By David Grann

Doubleday

eISBN: 978-0-385-52922-8

4 stars

I’m writing this review several weeks after finishing the book so this is more a few final thoughts rather than a full review.  I wasn’t planning to do a review at all considering I talked about the book a few times already but I kept coming back to it for several reasons so obviously the book made an impression which is why I’m involved in this current exercise.

In case you aren’t familiar with The Lost City of Z, it’s a non-fiction account of British explorer Percy Fawcett’s last expedition into the Amazon jungle in Brazil.  He was in search of the legendary, mythical might be a better word, city of El Dorado which was supposed to be a city of gold.  He disappeared on his final trip and theories abound as to what happened to him.  Grann takes up the story and puts his own twist on it.

Grann is a journalist so the book does in many respects read like a long scientific article.  That’s not a bad thing though because in a non-fiction book I prefer a more straightforward style instead of a writer that tries to woo me with fluffy descriptions.  Also, the Amazon doesn’t lend itself to descriptions of that sort, especially when one is describing flesh eating bugs — in that case, the less fluffy, less descriptive the better.  He does have a very engaging style so please don’t let my scientific article tag scare you off of this one.  Grann has a sense of humor and laughs at himself and his lack of even basic camping skills as he prepares to trek off into the jungle in the hopes of understanding Fawcett’s, and now his own, obsession with the Amazon.  It’s well researched, as far as I can tell but I know very little about the Amazon, and feels complete even for a book on the short side.  When I finished, I did amuse myself with a bit of googling to find out more about both Fawcett and the Amazon so I think he did his job well.

If you’re looking for something interesting, pick this one up.  The story Grann tells is a good one.

Review – The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel

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The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel

By Diana Gabaldon

Illustrated by Hoang Nguyen

Ballantine Books

ISBN: 978-0-345-50538-5

3.5 stars

The Exile is Outlander from Jamie Fraser’s point of view.  Being a graphic novel, it took me a few pages to move past and tell the voice raging in my head that while I didn’t picture Jamie Fraser this way, someone did so get over it.  Once I moved on, it was all good and the visions in my head and those on the page began, inexplicably, to merge.  As a side note, this book is beautifully illustrated so it was hard to be all that disappointed.

However, the story itself didn’t work for me and I think it’s because I know the story too well.  In graphic novel form it feels too light and that too much information is missing.  All the basics are here — Jamie’s story is pretty much the same as Claire’s so there isn’t much that differs — but it’s the little details that I loved about the first book that I missed.  And let’s face it, Gabaldon, if you’ve read any of the Outlander books, likes details.

For those not familiar with the story: Jamie Fraser is a Scotsman returning to his homeland with a price on his head.  Claire Randall is a 20th Century woman who, while visiting Scotland and touring a group of standing stones, passes into the stone circle and goes back in time to the 18th Century.  As two outsiders, Jamie and Claire are thrown together in a marriage of strange convenience but fall in love despite their circumstances.

Jamie and Claire are true to their characters, there’s still a lot of sex, and somehow Claire is much more voluptuous than I ever imagined her to be but that might just be due to the fact that I don’t add extra boobage to female characters instinctively.  Jamie remains the hot Scottish guy in a kilt too so plus for that.

There was one scene from the original book that I wish had been left out.  At one point, Claire tries to escape back to her own time and makes a run for the stone circle that brought her to the 18th Century.  She gets captured by a British Captain who is looking for Jamie.  Jamie is able to get her back before any damage is done but as punishment, he beats her.  I almost put the book down when I first read it in Outlander and hoped that the scene had been expunged from this version.  It hadn’t.  I had an even more visceral reaction to it this time around.  I tried to explain it to myself in terms of the time frame (1700s) but it will never be something I can overlook.  I’m sure many may think I’m making too much of one rather small part of the story but it just soured it for me.

If you’re a fan of Gabaldon’s Outlander series, you’ll probably, like me, want to read this one.  I wasn’t thoroughly sold but it hasn’t ruined the series for me either.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s really beautifully done and worth a look for that reason alone.