Category Archives: Meme

Booking Through Thursday: Crappy

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btt2

On Thursday, December 9th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Do you ever crave reading crappy books?

On the surface this seems like an easy question, akin to, “Hey do you want to wake up with cerebral palsy tomorrow morning?” You’d think the answer would be a resounding “No.” You’d think anyone would have to be nuts to want to read a crappy book.

And yet…

It all depends on how we define crappy, doesn’t it?

I mean, there are times when I get great enjoyment from reading those really bad bodice ripper romances (generally because I’m reading them aloud, in the car – smut becomes comedy when you read it aloud in the car) and there are all these painful euphemisms for body parts. “Quivering members” and “Soft folds” and all that. I think my favorite referred to a woman’s “hot center” as of she was some kind of walking, talking, chocolate lava cake.

Not that the authors of those books are writing drivel. And even if they are, does it matter? If it gets people reading, it’s not really a bad thing…and hey, they’re getting paid to write, and the fact that I find most smut to be incredibly comical says more about me than the books, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

But then, I also have this thing for Star Trek books, and while some of the writers of those have written their own original-universe stuff, I know a lot of people treat their work with derision. I don’t. I like most of their ideas, and I think it takes MORE talent and skill to write someone else’s familiar characters in a way that is true to the franchise AND true to your own voice, not less.

But I can’t deny that some would consider them crappy.

As for me, I find that there are a lot of free Kindle books that are free not because the author’s are being generous, but because they really are, if not crappy, than at least, not good in any definition of the word that equals “saleable.”

Teaser Tuesdays: Slipknot

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Slipknot

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
– BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
– Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I’m still in the mood to read books that involve the ocean in some form. I suppose at some point my mood will shift and I’ll want books full of pretty clothes and romance and bridal gowns, but right now, seafaring stories are making me happy.

Recently, I started reading Linda Greenlaw’s fiction, but even though I began reading this book last month, I’ve had NO TIME to read in the last several days, so it’s taking me longer than any book generally does. In any case, since it’s the Kindle edition, I can’t give the page number, but my teasers are from “locations 527-40.”

“That larger island is Acadia, right?” I asked, pointing offshore.

“Yes. Look, you can see the houses. Only see them when it’s wicked clear. The eastern shore is where all you Bunkers are from. That great span of open water to the right of Acadia is known as Penobscot Ridges.”

“Isn’t that the proposed site for the wind farm?” I asked, ignoring the comment about my family. I knew the answer but was looking for an opinion, or at least another detail.”

“Yes. That tiny puddle of the North Atlantic Ocean is causing quite a ruckus around here. It’s been the most productive bottom for cod since before I was born. Green Haven’s bread and butter for decades. It’s been closed to fishing for the last five years or so, to allow the fish a breeding ground. Now the fishermen want to harvest what’s there, and the wind farm people want it for their own.”

— from Slipknot by Linda Greenlaw.

You can buy the book from Amazon or read the first chapter for free.

The Sunday Salon: Venus Among the Fishes

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Wild Sea

Photo by Krysta | Source: MorgueFile.com | Click to embiggen

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

This week has found me reading sea stories almost exclusively, and while they have not been about whales, mostly, it’s whales and sharks that populate my dreams, gentle dreams where I’m floating on the waves, and the big mammals and big fish are my guardians.

It began with Susan Casey’s The Wave which I reviewed the other day. Wanting to stay in the world she painted so vividly with her words (though with the jarring intrusion of a guy on a jet ski looking at his iPhone for Surfline details at one point, and then never being shown to put it away before they were IN a wave – I had to wonder: does insurance for ipads or iphones cover replacement if you lose your device in 70-foot seas?), I went looking for similar tales.

I’d hoped that one of my favorite sea stories, Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi, who, when she was just eighteen, sailed around the world in a wooden sailboat, was available for Kindle. Alas, it’s too old – it was published in 1985, when I was just fifteen, and I read it three or four years after that.

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s
fathomless body.

Instead, however, I was reintroduced to Linda Greenlaw, whose name you may know from either the movie The Perfect Storm (She was Captain of the Hannah Boden then, sister ship to the lost Andrea Gail.) or as the female captain in last year’s first season of Swords on the Discovery Channel. I’d read some of her work before, and enjoyed it – the stuff about giving up long-line fishing for lobstering off the tiny Maine island where she lives – but the book I downloaded was Seaworthy about her return to long-line fishing. It’s a more detailed account of the same trip highlighted in the Discovery Channel show, with a lot of details that the show never, well showed.

I downloaded that book on Friday, and finished it just before I went to bed that night. Some people say I read too quickly, but, I don’t mean to. Really.

Anyway, I was spurred on to download two of Greenlaw’s mystery novels about a Florida police detective who quits her job and moves to Maine to be a marine consultant (and solve mysteries). I’ve only read the first few pages, but I think I’m going to love these books.

And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

I also read the sample chapters of a book, a memoir, called The Cure for Anything is Salt Water which I really enjoyed. I’ve wishlisted the book, because I can’t afford another book for a couple of weeks, but if no one buys it for me, I have no issue with buying it for myself.

I’ve always had an affinity for the ocean. I was born so close to it, and lived within easy access to it most of my life, so I suppose I read these books to help me miss it less. Sometimes it works, sometimes it makes me miss the ocean, and the way the surf chases my bare toes as I dance back and forth on the sand. I miss the way my hair would feel sandy and salty after a day at the beach, and the way my skin would feel slightly tingly. I miss the ship-y tar-y smells of docks and harbors, and the sight of fishermen, commercial or recreational, coming home with their day’s catch.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

Last year, my mother had the pleasure of spending a day with Jacques Cousteau’s widow, taking her around places in La Paz (BCS, Mexico) and chatting with her, and she told me how very connected to the sea she felt, and how Madam Cousteau was the same.

That connectedness is stretched for me right now, but it’s an elastic stretch, not a fine filament that could break. Some day, the sea and I will be close friends again.

In the meantime, I have books.

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

** The quoted passages in this post are from “Whales Weep Not!” by D. H. Lawrence.

Booking Through Thursday: Thankful

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Sailboat Race

Sailboat Race | Source: Morguefile.com | Click to embiggen

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On Thursday, November 25th, Booking through Thursday asked:

It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S. of A. so …
What authors and books are you most thankful for?

I was born within the sound of the ocean if not the sight, and one of the first sounds I remember is that of foghorns. Now, living hundreds of miles from the sea, I’m thankful for authors like Susan Casey who write about some of my favorite things (sharks, rogue waves) and make me feel like I’m tucked into a tiny bunk on a rocking sailboat, and not in a suburban home, where I’m more likely to hear karaoke songs than the songs of humpback whales.

I’m thankful for other tellers of sea stories from Hemingway to Tania Aebi, whose memoir of circumnavigating the world in a wooden sailboat when she was just eighteen is a longtime favorite of mine, and has been since I first read it, when I was not much older than eighteen.

I’m thankful for Cleo Coyle in all her guises, because no one does cozy so well, and I’m thankful for all the authors who have asked me to review their work.

Mostly, I’m thankful that my brain is wired the right way to let me find joy in the printed word, and to let me completely immerse myself in a good book.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

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The Wave

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
– BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
– Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

When I confessed that my favorite birthday present this year was the Kindle my aunt bought for me, a friend of mine asked me “Why do you hate books, Melissa?” but the reality is that I’m spending MORE money on reading material since having the Kindle than I did when I bought only paper books. I mean, we all have either iPhones or ipods, as well, and no one asks, “Why do you hate CDs?” In truth, I still buy paper books, so I can read them in the bathtub.

In any case, my teaser this week comes from the very beginning of my current read, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. As it’s a Kindle book, I can’t tell you the page number, but it’s from location 45-50.

The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality – or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave’s deep trough, it heeled twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incoming seas.

Booking Through Thursday: Borrowing

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Shakespeare & Co

Shakespeare & Co | Artist: Ray Hartl

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On Thursday, November 18th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Who would you rather borrow from? Your library? Or a Friend?

(Or don’t your friends trust you to return their books?)

And, DO you return books you borrow?

I could not begin to tell you what diet pills really work but I can tell you that my friends and I share books all the time. What I like about this is that we’re generally lending or borrowing books that we like – they come with the Friend Seal of Approval. What I don’t like is that I have a dog who sometimes steals books and gnaws on them, and I live in terror that he’ll do this with someone else’s books.
Most of my friends are good about returning the books I want back, and passing on to others the books I enjoyed, but have no need to re-read.

As to libraries…as a child, the public library was one of my favorite places on earth. In one town, the librarian often had several of us kids over to play at his house, with his girlfriend’s son (it was the 70’s…hanging with the librarian or your preschool teacher wasn’t alarming, then). As a young adult, I also frequented the library, often with my mother, later with my husband, but he’s so bad about returning books that it’s expensive and embarrassing.

Also, our local library is pretty awful. Oh, I mean, it’s pretty, and there’s free coffee and a bunch of comfy chairs, but the collection is appallingly bad in the branch near our neighborhood, and the main branch smells like old people, and not in a “I love you, Grandma, you smell like roses” way, but in a “this could be a really bad nursing home” sort of way, and it’s dark, and has miles of empty shelves, and it’s just too SAD to go there.

And, in truth, I get enough quiet working at home as a writer, so when I go out I don’t want to go to a place where anyone thinks they have a right to shush me. Bookstore-cafes, where there are lively discussions and froufrou espresso drinks are MUCH more my style.

Teaser Tuesdays: Six Clicks Away, by Bonnie Rozanski

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

It’s a chilly November Tuesday with a slate-grey sky promising a cold rain. I am working from my kitchen table today, a fall bouquet smiling at me, and one of my favorite mid-weight sweaters keeping me warm, so I can leave the back door slightly open. It’s the perfect day to alternate working with reading lovely books (although, since I’m wading through a stack of review books, that IS working).

Right now, I’m reading Bonnie Rozanski’s latest offering, Six Clicks Away, which she kindly sent me to review. In fact, she sent it in electronic format, and I transferred it to my Kindle. I’m enjoying it immensely, so thought it would be an appropriate teaser today:

Way in the back of the Second Cup Coffee Shop on College Street off of Spadina in Toronto, at a tiny table hosting one laptop and a grande latte, sat Julia, frizzy-haired, frenetic and angry.

“Is this Amazon Customer Service?” Julia was yelling into her cell phone. “Hello? Hello?”

The guy in back of the counter flashed her a dirty look and a wave to keep it down. He had nothing against a moderate amount of white noise. After all, the whoosh of steam from the espresso machine, the surround sound of low conversation, rustling papers, and tapping of keys were all integral to the Second Cup experience. But he had to remember that his clientele was mostly University of Toronto types: studying, preparing lessons, or writing papers, and they wanted some modicum of quiet. Anyway, he had a sneaking suspicion that this loud, aggressive lady was American. Canadians would know better.

Sadly, I can’t give a page number since I don’t have it in bound format. Still…it’s a great book, and it’s making me smile.

It’s also making me desperate for a venti, soy, no-water chai.

After we vote, I guess.

Feeling Bookish: Craving Dick Francis

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A friend and I went to see Secretariat tonight – in fact I got back less than an hour ago. I loved the movie to bits – loved the way they built suspense, so that even though you KNOW what the outcome of all those Triple Crown races really was, you’re still completely invested in the story, and bouncing in your seat, waiting for the caller to utter those famous six words: “And down the stretch they come…”

As the credits rolled, I told my friend that I really wanted to curl up with a Dick Francis novel. Those are about the British version of horse racing – steeplechase and grass tracks, not the fast sprints on turf that American racing – but it doesn’t matter. They’re cozy, horse-y novels with great characters, and just enough mystery to be compelling.

Sadly I have no Dick Francis in my library – at some point I must have purged them all…

Time to check the Kindle options, I suppose, because sometimes the best multivitamin there can be is an evening with dogs to cuddle and books to read.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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On Teaser Tuesdays readers are asked to:

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between 7 and 12 lines.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

If this was something I planned to submit to directories of book reviews, I’d have to confess that my “current read” really isn’t a book, but a 23-page long short story. But it’s a famous short story, and one most of us never read any more, learning the legend only from movies. Nothing against Johnny Depp’s performance – I own Sleepy Holloy on BluRay, after all, the original is better, moodier, darker, and, well, authentic.

So, for this Teaser Tuesday, which comes during the Halloween week, I offer this excerpt from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war; and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper, having been buried in the church-yard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head; and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the church-yard before daybreak.

I should add: this is the piece I gave the young man I tutor in English for his assignment this week. He loved it. And you will too, I’m sure.

Booking Through Thursday: Rewrite

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btt2

On Thursday, October 14th, Booking through Thursday asked:

If you could rewrite the ending of any book, which book would it be? And how would you change it?

Even though I have a laptop and a netbook and an iPhone and a Kindle already, I spent a good part of last night surfing laptop deals lusting over the newer tech I don’t have. I say this because it’s the reason I’m answering “Booking through Thursday” on Friday morning at eleven.

As to rewriting the ends of novels: Sometimes I wish Jane had not returned to Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre, because I don’t think their relationship was terribly healthy. I maintain that J.K. Rowling’s final chapter of the Harry Potter saga, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was a cop-out meant to appease fan-girl shippers. (I also maintain that Snape would have known how to avoid death by snakebite, and in MY world he’s alive, but that’s not the actual ending, just the precursor to it.) I don’t believe that most people marry their high school sweethearts, and I think Hermione would have quickly outgrown Ron – or, as often happens – Ron would have embraced adulthood and grown beyond Hermione – he’s the more well-rounded of the two.

It is Dracula, however, that has an ending which really irritates me, although it didn’t do so until I read Fred Saberhagen’s series of post-novel pastiche/sequels, beginning with The Dracula Tapes. Why does it it annoy me? Read the passage again:

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweet and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.

If you read it carefully, you note three things:

1) Dracula’s throat was sliced, but he wasn’t beheaded.
2) His heart was pierced by another knife – NOT a wooden stake.
3) He crumbled into dust.

A casual reader would dismiss this as a death scene, except that earlier in the novel when listing Dracula’s powers, Stoker tells us that he can crumble into elemental dust. I maintain, therefore, that the ending of Dracula is flawed because Stoker did not follow the rules of his own world – rules he created. Either the scene needs to make it explicit that the Count’s head was separated from his body, OR, Stoker was leaving it open for a sequel, and I just can’t credit Stoker with that much forethought.

So, yes, I would rewrite Dracula.