Dancing with Cats

Dancing with Cats

This falls into the "I think this is a joke" category. It's written by Burton Silver and Heather Busch, who brought us such wonders as Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics, Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics, and The Naughty Victorian Hand Book: The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation. I never know what to expect from these people. Well, actually, I guess I do.


Update:

"Last year, when we had the feng shui catman in....."

My absolute favorite sentence in this book started out something like that. Dancing With Cats is a fun book, a parody, and a delight for anyone who loves cats or is forced to live with someone who does.

It's full of that special blend of Burton Silver/Heather Busch humor that's so delightful in their other books. Amazon Reviewers can't seem to agree on just how "real" the pictures are. (My personal opinion is that a lot of them are probably authentic photos, but taken when a cat was lying down and stretching, and then made to look as though they were in mid-air. A few of the pictures look as though a leg might have been repositioned courtesy of PhotoShop, but I don't know -- cats do get into some kind of weird positions sometimes.)

Anyway, it's a fun book, and it's currently an Amazon "Bargain Book", so you might be able to get a good buy on it. Christmas gift, anyone?

Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves

Oh, my, this was fun!

Hide Me Among the Graves is a new novel by Tim Powers and a distant sequel to his The Stress of Her Regard, which was first published in 1990. The Stress of Her Regard is apparently about Keats, Byron, Shelley -- and vampires! (I say "apparently" because I haven't read it yet, but you can be sure I will.)

Hide Me Among the Graves takes us into another generation of vampire hunting. This time the chief bad guys are the spirits of John Polidori and Boudica. (Polidori was Byron's personal physician and the author of the short story that helped to inspire Dracula. Boudica was 1st century British female warrior who led an uprising against the Romans.) The vampire hunters are veterinarian John Crawford (who is also a main character in The Stress of Her Regard) and former prostitute Adelaide McKee. Other significant characters include Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, and author/adventurer Edward Trelawny. And there's where the fun begins.

I found the shenanigans of the Rossettis' totally convincing, given what little I know about them. One of the most well-known acts in Dante Gabriel's life was his romantic burial of the only copies of his poems in the grave of his wife. Some years later, he changed his mind and had her dug up so he could get them back. This book actually presents Rossetti in a more favorable light than history does. And I totally believe that Algernon Swinburne would have sold his soul to write better poetry. Oh, yeah!

Other than that, the book has us wandering through the streets and sewers of Victorian London, and the action gets pretty exciting and scary at times -- I actually found myself biting my fingers. A terrific read that I highly recommend.

(Now I just have to find a copy of The Stress of Her Regard.)

The Kingmaker's Daughter

The Kingmaker's Daughter

The Kingmaker's Daughter is the latest in Phillipa Gregory's "Cousins' War" series -- what most of us probably think of as The War of the Roses. It was the 15th century conflict between the two branches of the Plantagenet family, the houses of York and of Lancaster.

The title character in this book is Anne Neville, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, popularly known as the Kingmaker for his power and political maneuvering. Anne was married, first, to Edward of Lancaster and heir to the throne of England after his father, King Henry VI. After his death she married Richard of Gloucester, who later became Richard III. Thus, Anne was at various times allied with both the House of York and the House of Lancaster.

Gregory's earlier books in this series, The Lady of the Rivers, The White Queen, and The Red Queen are rather interesting in that they treat many of the same events from differing points of view. The books are told in the first person by the title character, which tends to give them all the same voice -- Gregory's -- which is sort of a problem for me. Nevertheless. I find the series fascinating, and will no doubt continue to read it.

Gregory says that her next book will be called The White Princess and will be about the Princess Elizabeth of York, daughter of Henry IV, niece of Richard III, wife of Henry VII, and mother of Henry VIII. I can't wait.

Un-Spell Book

The Un-Spell Book

You can call it Magick, but it's really just about focusing your energy.

As such, I suppose it's valuable to be reminded that in attempting to achieve things it's necessary to be clear in your intention, focused on the result, and always grounded. What is perhaps not quite as valuable is Mya Om's recitation of spell after spell after spell, all dealing with essentially the same elements. She criticizes other books whose "spells read like recipes in a cookbook", but that's essentially what she's given us.

It took me forever to finish this book. A book about Magick should be a lot more fun, don't you think?

Divergent

Divergent

In post-apocalyptic Chicago, citizens are required to join one of 5 "factions", each representing and serving a different virtue. There's Abnegation, Candor, Amity, Erudite, and Dauntless. On one day of the year, all 16-year-olds are required to declare themselves, and join one of the factions. If they choose a different faction than the one they grew up in that means leaving their family forever. There's no turning back.

Divergent is the story of Beatrice (Tris) Prior, a young girl brought up in an Abnegation household. She opts for the Dauntless, and immediately begins a rigorous training program, where success and failure could be literally a matter of life and death. Tris also has a special ability -- one she must keep hidden at all costs.

If you think this sounds a little bit like The Hunger Games , you're not far wrong. There is, however, one important distinction between Divergence and The Hunger Games. I actually liked this book.

I don't remember exactly what I didn't like about The Hunger Games, and I wasn't doing reviews then, so I can't just look it up. I do remember that I decided, after reading the first book in the series, that I wasn't going any further. It seemed an important thing to remember -- I didn't want to read that series again by accident.

I checked Divergent out of the library the other day, read half of it before I went to bed, and then finished it up the next morning. That afternoon I ordered the sequel. It's a quick read, and very absorbing.

There is one little thing about this book that bothers me, however. It's the name of the factions: Abnegation, Candor, Amity, Erudite, Dauntless. They're not even all the same parts of speech. I suppose you could argue that the adjectives can be used as a noun -- the Erudite, the Dauntless -- but then you have 2 factions with names that describe the people, and 3 that describe the quality. The lack of symmetry distresses me. I'd even accept it if four of them referred to the adherents, and only Abnegation the quality, because -- well, you know how those Abnegation people are, never wanting to draw attention to themselves.

Now, if only there was a faction for the anal-rententive.

Forbidden Area

Forbidden Area

A while ago my reading list included Pat Frank's class post-apocalyptic novel, Alas, Babylon. It was better than I had expected, and had the interesting factor of having been first published in 1959. If you want to get a good idea of the kind of thoughts that were going through Americans' heads during the cold war, Alas, Babylon is an excellent resource.

Forbidden Area is more of the same. It was published a few years before Alas, Babylon and is not quite as good a novel. In this book, the Soviet Union has planted sleeper agents in the U.S., with a sabotage plan that will make possible the conquest of America by nuclear weapons. One of the characters in the book at one point asks what on earth they would want with a continent covered with radioactive waste. "Maybe they'll just put a fence around it with a sign saying 'Forbidden Area'," is the answer.

This isn't a very long book, but I felt at time that I was never going to finish it. There are a lot of characters, few of whom have particularly distinct personalities, and eventually I just gave up on keeping most of them straight. (It's pretty clear what the role of each character is, anyway, so I just treated them as though I was meeting them for the first time whenever I encountered the name. It didn't really matter, in terms of understanding the book.)

I was in elementary school during the '50's and '60's, and I found this book to be pretty indicative of the attitudes of the time. I had pretty much forgotten how frightened we were of the USSR in those days, but this brought it all back. It's an interesting look at a slice of the past, and I recommend it for historical perspective if nothing else. As a literary piece, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

Some Kind of Fairy Tale

No matter what you might think, I'm not actively looking for novels about girls who disappear. Although this book would appear to have quite a similar plot line to The Uses of Enchantment (reviewed previously), the fact that I've read two such novels in the same month is purely coincidence.

I picked Some Kind of Fairy Tale up off the New Book shelves at the library. I read the introductory paragraphs, found them rather intriguing, and decided to give the book a try. I was actually more attracted to the language than the plot line.

Good thing, too, because the story wasn't all that much. In a nutshell: 16-year old Tara Martin disappeared from the Outwoods, an old, old forest in the heart of England, 20 years ago. No one ever knew what had become of her. Now she has come back.

Tara has scarcely aged at all in the time she's been gone. To anyone at all acquainted with English folklore, it's perfectly obvious that she's been stolen away by the fairies ("Don't call them that! They don't like to be called that!" she keeps insisting to everyone.) Her family, however, flat out doesn't believe her.

The story had promise, but ultimately it doesn't really go anywhere. We have flashbacks into her time in Faeryland (which put me in mind of a 60's hippie commune). We have interviews with her psychiatrist. We have discussions about how her disappearance effected her brother, her parents, her boyfriends. And we have a whole lot of shifting around of points-of-view. None of these aspects of the novel are really anything to grab the attention. It's not a terrible book, but it's not a terrific one, either.