White Magic Five & Dime

The White Magic Five & Dime by Steve Hockensmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Athena Passalis, Tarot reader and con artist, has been murdered, found brutally strangled in her Arizona establishment by her teenaged assistant. Although Athena's daughter Alanis has been estranged from her mother for many years, Athena has willed everything to her, including the White Magic Five & Dime.

At first, Alanis assumes that her mother's shady dealings have caught up with her, that Tarot-reading was merely the last of her mother's many schemes to pry money from gullible souls in this Sedona-Lite town. Not all is as it seems, though, and Alanis decides to take on her mother's last career choice to help a delectable police detective find the killer.

Armed with a deck of Tarot cards and a puckish Tarot guidebook (Infinite Roads to Knowing by Miss Chance), Alanis employs imagination, intuition, and the ability to spot "tells" that she learned in her peripatetic childhood, when she, her mother, and Athena's partner comprised a travelling scam circus. Suspects are plentiful. Was it the husband of a woman whom Athena had urged to buy a herd of llamas? The family of an aged woman who had been convinced to let Athena take away her "cursed" jewelry for her own protection? A bumbling bail-bondsman who was ridiculously easy to identify after a threatening phone call?

Miss Chance's book gives Alanis the basics of Tarot meanings along with asides that appeal to her own cynicism. (As in, yes, the symbolism on the cards could seem overblown enough for a Lady Gaga video.) The Hermit, muses Miss Chance, may seem like an isolated crazy in Idaho who writes anti-government screeds in a cabin, but the card-reader still should listen and learn. Likewise the muumuu-wearing Justice, or the Wheel, which might bring treasure, or might bring a winged cow. Listen and learn...

Alanis begins to feel an unaccustomed pleasure in the life of a small town. What am I really doing here? she asks the cards. The 8 of Pentacles hints at the value of learning a useful trade that could benefit a community. Perhaps, she thinks, she could stay and use the Tarot for good instead of for scams.

Yes, Alanis solves her mother's murder. (That fact really isn't a spoiler in a cozy mystery.) The reader is in for an enjoyable beginning to a new mystery series. Recommended.  Why only 4 stars? Because this reader guessed two plot points a bit too soon. I chalk it up to the authors' need to establish the who and where, and I forgive. I'll certainly read a sequel.

I received a reader's copy of this book from NetGally. This is a fair and unbiased review.



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Thrive

Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is a mishmash of pre- and re- digested advice about getting enough sleep, becoming mindful, meditating, and changing one's value system to honor "the third metric": a redefinition of success to include values beyond money and power.

Ms. Huffington spends many pages telling the reader to unplug from digital devices, and then spends as many pages listing and annotating apps to meditate by, unplug by, control one's multi-tasking by, or even do nothing by. **

She praises and damns social media, makes generalizations about what physicists believe about time, and makes enormous generalizations about being guided by one's intuition or inner sense of rightness.  (Note: terrorists believe in their sense of rightness, too.) Other generalizations are more annoying. Sorry, I don't buy the idea that sleep is a feminist issue, and I disagree strongly that people do not bond over moments of shared mortality. Our national experience and personal experience belie that assumption.

Much of the book is not this annoying, but so much of it is that the reader almost misses some genuine insights - such as the observation that the algorithms that govern the user's "personalized" experience at sites such as amazon.com provide a very shallow interpretation of who the user is.

Note to Arianna's editor: Metaphors work better if they're not, dare I say, counter-intuitive, or downright wrong. The iceberg did not hit the Titanic. The Titanic hit the iceberg. Just saying.

I received this book as an ARC. This is my honest review.



**Literally. As in, watch this app for 2 minutes if you want to do nothing.


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Lost Lake

Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another lovely story from Sarah Addison Allen!

Highlights:

Lisette: a mute French woman who senses others' emotions "... slipped straight to her as if through mouse holes..."

A woman named Bulahdeen, whose grandmother used to say that old hands make the best food.

A lake described as "a dense round plop of gray-green water surrounded by trees with Spanish moss hanging from their limbs, like the long hair of ladies dipping their heads to sip from the lake."

All this, plus redemption, courage, love charms, food, and a talking alligator...


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Beautiful Wreck

Beautiful Wreck by Larissa Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"as though we'd run out of original things to be..."

Historic reenactments are no longer hobbies for the few in 22nd-century Iceland, where all now pursue their favorite eras in costume, interacting only in the recreated past. Jen, a young linguist, brings her expertise in Old Norse language and gestures to a bold, new, fully-realized Viking longhouse scenario in a full-sensory sim "tank," where participants will be immersed in their beloved era, "minus the messy beauty of a real farm, the stink of animals and work of many hands." After they leave the tank, they will re-enter the city, where the only birds left in this dystopia are crows, and the sky glimpsed only  between tall, tall buildings.

Jen's translation of a Viking woman's diary has given her a glimpse into the reality of one farmer's wife, whose sensibility seems, to Jen, more modern than most of her time. "The sky was big today, all ice and violet," wrote this woman, who also penned a lullaby to "woods and whales and sea. Goodnight to the circle of young girls, their long braids lit by fire..."

Jen's familiarity with the language and lore gives her enough of an edge to survive when the sim tank malfunctions and flings her onto a black beach, half-in and half-out of a freezing sea, half-conscious and half-aware of the song of a whale. Rescued by two Viking men whose stinking breath shocks her ("a breakthrough in the design quality"), she begins to understand that she is not dreaming -- she truly is living the life that most of her countrymen long for. She has been transported through time.

Most of the novel takes place in that very real past, where Jen (now called Ginn) becomes a member of a clan in a longhouse ruled by a young chieftan, Heirik. His fearsome birthmark represents mystery and power to his people, but Ginn learns the facts behind the lore that has defined him. She falls deeply in love. Heirik's reluctance to love becomes clearer as Ginn's immersion in this new life becomes deeper and more dear.

The reader learns about the dynamics of the varied, gritty, loving clan members as their stories intertwine, clash, and mesh. Larissa Brown's scholarship is worn lightly. The Vikings feud, gather, and love against history and folklore, like the runes, cables, and braids of Viking design. Each character and plotline is deep and real, especially those of the the displaced, beached Ginn and the women she joins in the chores, sorrows, and dreams they share.

Readers who are fiber enthusiasts will be delighted as Ginn masters the art of the spindle from the accomplished Hildur: "she showed me how the thread was forming, how to feed the fiber, like spun sugar in my hands." Images of whiteness form the background of the story: white fleeces, like the clouds that the Norse goddess Grigg spins, the white snow that piles high outside the longhouse, the snowblooms that are harvested to make mouthwash, and the disorienting whiteout that nearly costs Ginn her life. Against this whiteness are golden vistas, green swaths, and the immense blue sky.

I was as immersed in this wonderful novel as a 22nd-century Icelander would have been in the sim tank. As a modern woman, I wanted to cut through the myths and hesitations so that the characters could live their dreams, love whom they wished, and thrive. As a modern reader, I was satisfied with the way the stories unfolded, and happy with the vivid, engrossing, well-written story. Larissa Brown has taken elements of romance, history, and science fiction, and blended them into something new, vivid, and wonderful.

(Note: I was given an ARC to review. I will definitely reread the published novel - it's that good!)


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The Missing Ink

The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Handwriting is good for you,” says Philip Hensher. “It involves us in a relationship with the written word which is sensuous, immediate, and individual.”

(The incontrovertible truth of the author’s conclusion is made so much more endearing, to me, by the nonchalant use of the Oxford comma.)

This is not an author who shies from his opinions, or from sharing his vocabulary. Haruspication! Really? Oh, Philip, how do I love thee?

The Missing Ink is a very personal amble with handwriting and pens. You get history, style, art, practice, and glances into strange places, real and virtual. How delectable to learn that there is a “gloriously mad blog” out there that teaches how to improve your penmanship by changing your menu? Or that the Prince of Wales writes long letters to various government ministries, imparting his philosophy in purple ink?

The subject of handwriting analysis yields treasures. What does one have to see to believe that the penman “would jump out of an aeroplane… and drink the homebrewed absinthe of a Serbian warlord”? (And what, I wonder, would that do to my own handwring?)

Hensler devotes an entire chapter to the pen that has been my own guilty pleasure for over half of a century: the Bic Cristal. How many of these have I used until the last of the black ink, long disappeared from view and confined only within the oh-so-solid confines of the point, finally discharges its last, perfectly-black line? I hoard them against the day that some scribbling tyrant decides these pens are no longer necessary in the corporate line.

I love to read about ink colors. Hensler says, “I am not quite convinced about writing with blue ink… It is cozy and friendly, but perhaps not very serious… Beyond [blue-black or black], we are really into exotic and faintly frightening territory.”

Were I to write to the author, I would respect his preferences, but in (almost) all other ventures, I profess a great love for the purple, the turquoise, the sepia – even the occasional oxblood.  I am, in most things, a child of the sixties.

(I do admit to having been chastised by a pen friend, once, for writing a red letter on yellow paper. Point, as it were, taken.)

Oxblood brings me back to Oxford. Yes, I love this book with all its whimsy, chattiness, and excellent punctuation. You – you know who you are – will also. I promise.


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Maisie Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Somehow, I managed to read some of the later books before I read the first. This book explains a lot about the characters, especially Maurice and Billy, and how some of Maisie's techniques developed. Two good storylines, excellent writing, and an engaging introduction to a period in English history that may seem less dramatic than actual wartime, but shows the long-term effects on the military, the civilians, and the disparate socio-economic classes.

I listened to the audio in the car, and read the e-book where the audio left off at home. Gotta love technology!


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The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book was like exploring an impossibly-intricate pop-up book that had been cut by the most enchanted scherenschnitte artist who ever lived. The detail, delicacy, endlessly-fascinating characters and scenes and situations -- amazing.

You can read the plot details elsewhere. I'll add one comment: the only film director I would trust with this wonder is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose "Micmacs" and "Amelie" are filled with the gentle, magnetic magic this book deserves.


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How I Killed Pluto

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mike Brown is a fluent storyteller and a scrupulous scientist, whose insistence on a high standard of proof led to him nearly losing the credit for one of his discoveries. Who would think such skulduggery exists in the community of astronomers?


As a boy, Brown discovered his passion for planets when he noticed two moving, night after night, through the constellation Orion. "It's always hard not to feel that in some ways, for me at least, maybe the early astrologers were right: Perhaps my fate actually was determined by the position of the planets at the moment of my birth."


As he recounts the discovery of Pluto, and his own role in the wildly unpopular decision to decertify it as a planet, he describes his exploration of the cosmic ocean, wherein asteroids are "schools of minnows swimming among a pod of whales. Planets were the whales of the solar system." When the Kuiper Belt was discovered, he says, "Pluto and the Kuiper Belt were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea."


The boy's interest in celestial motion grew into the man's quest to discover new objects in the relatively-unexplored area beyond Pluto. His tools ranged from an archive of photos from older telescopes that had imaged wide swaths of sky to the newest digital technology in telescopes and data manipulation.  The wider images were more likely to include artifacts from the process of creating glass plates, while the precision of digital imagery was offset by the relatively small expanse of sky that could fit in one image.


His first discovery, named Quaoar, was "a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet." Only slightly smaller than Pluto, the chunk of icy methane was bound to be the first of many objects that would be larger than Pluto. Along the course of his discoveries he found Sedna (named for an Inuit goddess of the sea), Haumea (Hawaiian goddess of childbirth), Xena (with her satellite, Gabrielle!), and many other intriguing objects that began to fill in some of the creation story of the solar system.


He also found the aforementioned skulduggery: an Italian astronomer, who cyber-stalked his use of telescopes while he was tracking Xena, and tried to claim credit for the discovery, earning Keith Olbermann's dreaded soubriquet, "Worst Person in the World." The committee in charge of the naming conventions for new objects in the solar system were not always happy with the names he chose.  (Personally, I wish that some of his working names could have been kept. It would have been delightful to know that an object named Easterbunny hopped through the heavens.)


What is a planet? Must it be spherical? A certain size? A stint of teaching geology gave Brown a glimpse into the problems that exist in other disciplines. What is a continent? A big, coherent piece of land? How big? (In fact, he learned, some Europeans do not consider Australia a continent, Argentina teaches that North and South America are one continent, and New Zealand is on its own continental plate...)


Ultimately, Pluto, "everyone's favorite runt planet," was reclassified (along with newcomers Xena and Ceres) as a "dwarf planet." Brown calls the new rules "a slew of unscientific clutter," but agrees with the decision that continues to make Pluto lovers unhappy.


One day in 2004, he took time out from staring at large computer screens and looking for new and distant objects to look at a smaller screen: a sonogram of his daughter. "Hey," he said, "It looks like the Venera lander pictures of the surface of Venus." "You're insane," replied his wife.


"That night," he writes, "as the clock struck twelve, my five-year bet [with a colleague] came to an end. I lost the bet, but I didn't feel so bad. Instead of seeing the end of the solar system, I saw that everything was just beginning."


I loved every page of this book and recommend it to anyone who has ever looked at the night sky.



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The secret world of slugs and snails

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane by David George Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now I know...

--what a wild snail eating sounds like: "... a cross between a bastard file and a chainsaw - like something out of Evil Dead II."

-- Some snails have elaborate mating rituals that involve kissing.

-- Speculation about Cupid's arrows in Greek mythology being inspired by the "love darts" that snails shoot into each other if they go the male/female route instead of using their hermaphroditic prowess.

-- that Darwin observed another scientist's experiment in which a sickly snail and its healthy partner were placed in an ill-provided garden. The healthy snail crawled away, over a wall, into a better garden. 24 hours later, it "returned and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall."

-- That David George Gordon is one of the best nature writers ever.

Did you read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating? Read this next. Really.




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A Jane Austen Education

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Take one intellectual graduate student, force him to read  Emma, add one professor whose technique is styled as "stripping the paint off our brains," and mix in some Austen plot synopses. What do you get? In this case, you get a quasi-memoir-cum-appreciation of Jane Austen's major novels that (I believe) would make Austen wince and Oprah applaud.

Bleah.


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The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a little less in love with this book than with his others - maybe I was uncomfortable with the immediacy of his own vision loss, since that hits closer to home than many of his other case studies? I don't know. I was fascinated, of course, with many of his patients, especially the ones who discussed stereo vs. mono vision, and the blind patients who disagreed with each other about whether they still used visual cues to navigate the world. 



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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wonderful, beautiful, quiet, contemplative, exciting, all small-scale and manageable, both for the author, whose snail arrived in her life during the early time of her convalescence from a debilitating illness, and the reader, who will focus and fall in love.

When did I fall in love with the snail? When it was so delighted by a slice of portobello mushroom that it slept with it, so that it could wake, nibble, and fall asleep again, perfectly content.

When did I fall in love with the book? Immediately on reading the first page and leafing through to see the soft-yet-accurate drawings of the snail.

I fell so in love with this author, this book, and this snail that I bought the ePub version after I returned the book to the library.


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Crossing Washington Square

Crossing Washington Square by Joanne Rendell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A hoot! Really well-written, funny, with digs at academe, and three love stories, including the awkward relationship between two very different but similarly-vulnerable women.

The premise of the novel highlights one of my soapbox issues: intellectual snobbery, especially at the expense of scholars (and ordinary folks) who take popular culture seriously. Rachel is a young scholar whose unexpected bestseller on popular women's fiction has earned her an invitation to teach at a prestigious Manhattan college. (Think Camille Paglia, younger and cuter, and definitely less frenetic.) Diana is a Plath scholar whose disdain for Rachel's specialty extends to Rachel herself.

Throw in celebrity twins, a Dylan Thomas-Ted Hughes womanizer, a trip to London, and truly-evocative descriptions of interiors (apartments, an airplane, an academic conference room) that utterly remove the distance between reader and story, and you have a very enjoyable read, indeed!

(My only regret? Alas, Rachel's book is not, ahem, in print. I'm sure I'd love it.)

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Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind Little Women

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If American Bloomsbury was the appetizer, then this book is the meal. Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, was a true American original: a deplorably-bad writer and a sensational orator who travelled the country speaking about Transcendentalism in-between living in disastrous utopian communities that were based more on philosophy than the mere, mortal details of farming and human nature.

Louisa's life flowed from that childhood, both the joyous (loving Henry David Thoreau) and the horrific (near-starvation and grisly poverty). Her talent for writing potboilers saved her and her family from the ruinous debts that had been incurred by Bronson's inability to provide for his family. However, not until she acceded to her family and editor's desire for her to write for children did she find the voice that would bring her unimaginable wealth and fame.

Harriet Riesen's book is nicely done - factual without droning, and admiring without doting. I greatly enjoyed the details of Louisa's trips overseas, partly because the writing is so wonderful, and partly because (warning: subjectivity ahead) it made me happy to know that Louisa had been happy.

(Note to Riesen's editor: Daisy and Demi were Meg's children, not Jo's. Ah well.)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Elegance, from Webster's Online:A quality of refined gracefulness and good taste.

A hedgehog is elegant. Its spiny defenses are attached securely; they do not shoot in all directions to injure at random. Each spine is a dull camouflage, not garish or multicoloured like the feathers of a tropical parrot or the scales of a tropical fish. Predators and passers-by trot past apace.

Both Madame Michel and Paloma, the narrators of this novel, are hedgehogs in a ritzy Paris apartment building. Madame Michel, the concierge, appears to be a drab, slightly slow sterotype, a disguise that she has perfected over the years since her husband died. To the residents, she is a plodding prole: a presence to be summoned and directed, nothing more. To her diary, she reveals all: her autodidact past and her desperate need to hide a sensibility that encompasses Purcell to Tom Clancy. She needs to survive, and she writes of her need in prose that ranges from literary and witty to heartbreaking.

Paloma, a brilliant 12-year-old existentialist, studies manga, writes witty and erudite diaries, and plans to commit a flamboyant suicide when she reaches 13. Part sophisticate, part little girl, she writes a good deal about irritants (including her noisy older sister whose expensive schooling seems to be quite, quite pointless) and moments of grace, which, she hopes, might form an anodyne to her bleak world-view.

Were it not for a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, these lives might have progressed (or detonated) according to their carefully-constructed camouflage. Ozu realizes quickly that each is not as she appears. The below-the-stairs drab is teased out by a reference to Anna Karenina, and the little girl soon finds that the concierge shares her own refined and cynical sensibility.

Since the stories of all three characters play out through the two diaries, I was happy to have listened to the audiobook. The two narrators capture the intelligence, wit, blindness, and grace behind characters who might have seemed too unappealing to follow long enough for a reader to glimpse, truly see, even though Ms. Barbery's writing is smooth and compassionate and - elegant.

How I long to read French well enough to read Barbery in the original!)

If I decide to re-learn French when I retire, my goal shall be to return to the Hedgehog. Even if I don't, I know I'll reread this book, slowly, spine of book (or glowing reader) in hand, teasing out the true spine of each character.




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