Rage in the Page: August 2007

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Checked out of the library, possibly started, but definitely unfinished

Title: Infidel
Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Biography of a Somali woman now living in the Netherlands and very politically active. Too serious (not that I thought it'd be amusing to read about Islam, female mutilation, politics, forced marriage, and such, but I just got it out at the wrong time).

Title: Sugar Daddy
Author: Lisa Kleypas

Even though I certainly want to find one of these for myself, I never even opened the book.

Title: A Marked Man
Author: Stella Cameron

Max has been framed for the deaths of two girlfriends; Annie has some sort of tragic past; another friend goes missing, so Max is the prime suspect. Annie and Max are just full of way too many issues for me to keep reading.

Title: Bake Sale Murder
Author: Leslie Meier

Despite the cupcakes on the cover, this book just didn't interest me enough to get past page 10. And I love cupcakes.

Labels: biography, Brit lit, mystery/detective, romantic "suspense", trashy romance

posted by ket at 12:49 AM

0 comments

yay! hunky special ops guy!

Title: Innocent as Sin
Author: Elizabeth Lowell

Kayla – banker
Rand – former special ops type, now a landscape painter
Saint Kilda – special ops type consulting company so they don’t have to deal with bureaucracy
Andre Bertone – evil arms dealer now living as rich businessman

Banker framed for laundering money by AB
Rand looking for revenge against guy who shot his twin bro 5 years ago
They come together at art event where St. K brought in R to infiltrate and K’s being blackmailed, he saves her, she joins SK because otherwise she’ll prob go to jail
Her boss betrays her, then gets killed
Ends with massive shoot-out in gun range’s mock city; she ends up killing AB because R’s out of bullets or something (after she manages to contort herself out of restraints, of course, thanks to lots of yoga)
And then they leave Phoenix to go back to the Pacific Northwest to live happily ever after

Labels: hunky armed forces or government operatives, romantic "suspense", trashy romance

posted by ket at 12:44 AM

0 comments

I saw Bernadette Peters in 'Gypsy' on Broadway a few years ago

Title: Everything’s Coming Up Rosie
Author: Kasey Michaels

Doug, a late-thirties bachelor architect gets stuck going to a cousin’s week-long wedding celebration in the Hamptons or a similarly obnoxious location. He meets Rosie, an acquaintance of the bride and her mother, shortly after his arrival, and they come up with the plan to couple off to save themselves from being set up. She’s “significantly” older and more “real” than the women he usually dates (aka not blonde, waif-like, and barely legal), so of course they fall for each other. The bride is unhappy about the impending marriage, the bride’s parents also aren’t thrilled, but being rich, they don’t really talk to each other so they haven’t worked that part out. Really, nobody likes him, so Doug and Rosie work with bride’s childhood friend (aka her true love) to get rid of him. I vaguely remember all three couples (Doug/Rose, bride/friend, and parents) ending up all happy and stuff, and that Rosie, for some reason, would practice dives in bed as a method of relaxation (like tucking and then laying out after visualizing doing a few rotations – super-weird). Also, I apparently have issues typing “Doug” because it always ends up as “Dough.”

posted by ket at 12:43 AM

0 comments

yeah, I still don't really go for historical novels

Title: Lie by Moonlight
Author: Amanda Quick

Concordia is working as a governess in a private residence, teaching four teenaged female orphans; the book opens with them concocting a crazy escape plan that involves setting off smoke bombs and explosions and carrying silverware in their dresses because they all have bad feelings about the men running the place. They run into Ambrose in the stables, he helps them escape and they hide at his house in London. Turns out he’s a private investigator, and the girls were part of a scheme to sell wealthy heiresses as wives to men needing a boost in society. And Concordia has the deep dark secret of being raised as a love child in a weird commune (in the 1800’s!) which she has to hide from all potential employers. Thanks to the liberal parentage, Concordia is, of course, okay with sleeping with Ambrose, and repeatedly assures him that she doesn’t expect marriage. Somehow the woman in charge of the orphanage from which the girls were taken is also involved, and she tries to kill Concordia a few times; Concordia and Ambrose solve the mystery and then get married, and she takes over the orphanage (again the liberalness! Imagine – a married woman working outside the home!).

Labels: history, romantic "suspense", trashy romance

posted by ket at 12:42 AM

0 comments

witty post headings not so much happening tonight

Title: Dead Silence
Author: Brenda Novak

Grace grew up in small-town Mississippi with her mother, brother, step-father (a preacher of some sort), and step-sister. Her step-father disappeared mysteriously, and the town blamed her mother. Grace went away, made good with her life, and became an Assistant DA somewhere. She came back to town for a while because she’s having a life crisis – boyfriend wants to get married, and she can’t commit because she feels guilty for having helped kill step-dad – because he was sexually abusing her. Her mom and brother helped bury the body, and step-sis never knew, and still thinks he’ll be back (she wasn’t aware of the abuse). Grace makes friends with a young boy who lives down the street, not knowing that he’s the son of the former town golden boy, Kennedy – quarterback, etc. – she went to school with and was one of very few classmates she didn’t sleep with (acting out because of abuse, etc.).
He totally falls for her, she fights because she doesn’t want to bring him down, and the whole town thinks she and/or her family killed the preacher, but eventually they fall in love. Collateral damages along the way include her fiancé (he had an affair with someone else while she was back in the hometown) and a lot of Kennedy’s friends (esp. the nephew of missing step-dad who thinks Kennedy’s betraying him by sleeping with Grace because he totally blames her and tries to attack her). The story ends with Grace and Kennedy in love, and he knows about the abuse and kindof about the death; the body’s still buried somewhere on the old family farm, but Grace’s brother moved it after she left, so she doesn’t know where it is. And then there’s a preview for the next book in the series (sigh) where the town’s police chief’s daughter moves back home – she’s a cold case detective from some big city, and she decides to focus on the missing step-dad case, which means, of course, she’ll fall in love with big brother and have the moral conflict between prosecuting true love and covering up the death again (wow, I’m brilliant).

Labels: crap, romantic "suspense", trashy romance

posted by ket at 12:41 AM

1 comments

token non-fiction read

Title: The Blind Watchmaker
Author: Richard Dawkins

The book’s aimed at supporting evolution, and essentially refuting the bulk of the arguments against it. Dawkins presents interesting arguments, and it’s very detailed, but feels like I’m reading the transcript of an entire semester of a college course, esp. since he talks directly to the reader (“when you think of a mutation…”), and therefore I only made it halfway through before finally giving in to the library’s demands to return it, since I had it checked out for about 2 months. Also, the book was written in the mid-eighties, so it’s rather amusing when he talks about writing computer programs in languages I’ve never heard of, and talks about how there’s so much memory or computing power or whatever with like one whole gigabyte of something.

Labels: evolutionary biology, non-fiction

posted by ket at 12:40 AM

0 comments

it's been a while

Some of these posts will be full sentences. Others I think will just be left as the notes I made for myself that were supposed to be used to write actual reviews, as long as they're relatively coherent...

Title: Match Me If You Can
Author: Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Hunky sports agent (Heath) needs wife pronto because he’s having a mid-life crisis or something
Annabelle inherits Matches by Myrna from elderly aunt
Rival matchmaker Portia fires employees for being fat/unattractive
Heath’s bodyguard/partner seduces/rapes rival anorexic matchmaker Portia
A secretly falls for H, hates when he starts to fall for her friend
Makes H jealous with footballer who’s really just friend and looking to escape media attention
Hosts stupid testosterone-filled parties at her house
A friends with Phoebe, owner of Stars (football team), who hates Heath, so he tries to use A to get in good with her and family
Phoebe’s toddler daughter is klepto, but only with Heath’s phonesConfusion settles, A and H get married and make babies, Phoebe decides to tolerate him

Labels: trashy romance

posted by ket at 12:33 AM

0 comments

Friday, August 03, 2007

how i learned to stop worrying and love the Zomb

The Zombie Survival Guide
by Max Brooks

Seems I stumbled upon this book too late. By the time I found it, curiously misfiled in the humor section of a long-derelict bookstore, most of it was already over. The zombies had come, eaten, chased off or claimed most of the people I had known, the town had been reduced to rubble and shit, and I had almost lost Dad. Twice. Still, it was nice to know that working on instinct and stubborn rage alone, we had done most everything right. On the other hand, do we need a book to prove that? We're still alive, aren't we? We must have done something right.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was wrapping up college when the outbreak went semi-public. Sure, it was public knowledge that some sort of shit was going down, but at that point, nobody had a very clear idea of what, and if they did, they weren't sharing that part. The school stubbornly held that we were under no immediate threat for over a week after the news broke, but by that time so many students had left, going to visit "sick" friends and family in all parts of the globe, that we were really just going through the motions. Some of the profs kept laptops up on the lectern, stealing glances at live news feeds and occasionally going silent for several moments before looking up, remembering where they were, and turning haltingly back into a lecture that had long since lost interest for even them. Others declared "reading time" and left radios tuned to news channels turned up just loud enough that we could all hear what was going on. A friend told me her religion prof had disappeared entirely, leaving the words "they are come unto us" and some biblical apocalypse passage scrawled across the chalkboard. For the first time since September 11, the school shut down entirely.

A lot of us had nowhere to go. I lucked out; I had the Jeep on campus with me at the time, and after throwing my bike and the biggest duffel I owned in the back and a sack of pilfered dining-hall food in the front, I started driving south. The radio told me that most of the main roads were backed up, so I took surface-level streets. It took me the better part of the morning just to get outside the city. Usually it took me three and a half hours to get home. That time, it took over two days. I didn't sleep much in that time, and yet I never felt tired until I got to Dad's house. Then I was safe. He told me later I was out for 18 hours. We didn't discuss the drive much. Not until a couple years later, when the worst was behind us.

We knew a little by then. Enough to know that it would be a long time before things were normal, and that whatever our attackers were, headshots were important. Most people by now were raiding the groceries, gas stations, and any place that sold camping or travel gear. Dad and I went to the hardware store, the lumberyard, and the garden center. I'd made fun of Dad's stash of canned goods for a long time, and still do, but more for the sake of tradition. We could never figure out where everybody else was hoping to run. For as long as it took me to get home, we knew they were really only setting out to camp in their car, somewhere on a gridlocked road. We decided instead to go on the defensive. We put in long days, as we always do when working in the yard, and ran a fence around the house, garage, and Dad's garden. We tripled the size of the garden. Later, when we had more time and needed to fill the hours, I started digging a trench outside the fence, five feet deep and four wide. we reinforced the inside wall of it to make sure that side wouldn't crumble away with weather and... clawing. When the days grew long in the second year, the depth of the trench meant that most zombies who stumbled into it would be lined up perfectly for a head shot. If they were shorter, or missing legs, we'd go out to the fence and finish them.

Dad lives in a one-story ranch house. We figured water and power would be out soon, and probably for a long time, so we ran power tools as much as possible at the start cutting everything we'd need. Then we started building a second story. Just a simple one, strong enough to take storms year-round, large enough for us to live up there as long as we needed. It really looked like a treehouse was squatting on Dad's roof. An ugly combination, to be sure, but it kept us busy when we needed distraction, and kept us safe high above the ground. That is, if anything ever got past the trench and the fence. And the rifles. Dad has two bolt-action .22s, and taught me everything I needed to know about them soon after I got back. His aim was always better than mine, but I could draw and fire quicker, and usually noticed them coming sooner. That helped when we were still working on the fence.

Once our fortifications were up... we waited. We're far enough from the center of everything, and anything interesting, that we were never completely overrun by Zach. We had a few bad days, here and there. Filling the trench with fire and spending three straight days, nearly sleepless, shooting anything that got through it from our rooftop fort comes to mind. The day when we ran too low on ammo and had go out to the perimeter with crowbars and homemade pikes to stab through the fence. The occasional forays into the world for restocking. I loved those trips for the break from the monotony, but keeping yourself keyed up and ready to kill for 16 hours straight while simultaneously thinking carefully and logically about what you need to find, where you might find it, and how much you can carry back while remaining too mobile to eat takes a lot out of you. I was actually relieved when Dad decided I could handle trips alone sometimes. I recovered faster than he did, and it also meant that at least one of us was still functional afterwards. He still went on some of the trips--cabin fever--but I did as much as I could on mine to make his life easier. Then I'd carefully avoid telling him about my closest calls, but I think he could tell when I'd had a bad trip. Like the times I had to kill something that used to be a friend. Or family.

We never heard from my brother. I wondered, sometimes, but never brought it up. Whenever Dad talked about him, he'd use the past tense, talking about old times. Sometimes I wondered if he knew something I didn't. I was just glad Mom didn't have to see any of it.

Two weeks ago, the Sweep came through. Riflemen from horizon to horizon. We thought about joining them, helping somehow, but they were getting steady rations, and we were still trying to nurse some carrots out of the ground. I'm down to 155, and Dad lost forty pounds himself. We joke about the zombie siege diet. The power's supposed to be up soon, and they say we'll be back to "normal" in a few more months.

I don't even remember what "normal" was anymore.

Labels: how-to, zombies

posted by reyn at 4:11 PM

2 comments

Thursday, August 02, 2007

A year in the strife

One year ago today, I opened up two chat windows and ran an idea past the people I thought would be most interested: Let's start a book blog where the only rule is that you post about every book you read. Ket thought it was a fantastic idea, and pondered whether it would force her to start reading a bit more highbrow. You be the judge.

The idea actually took hold three days earlier, when I sent an email to three people (only one of whom became a contributor). When that contributor finally responded, she was the first chat window I opened. Ket came immediately after, and helped name the blog. By the end of that day, she had added two more people as contributors, changed the color scheme and template no less than 34 times, and thereby brought the great towering bureaucracy of her employer to a crushing halt still referred to in hushed tones as "Black Wednesday."

October 8 marked the one and only time we've all been in the same room (state and local agencies have requested that this happen as little as possible, or in international waters). Ket put the meeting together, was the last to arrive, and found that we had already managed to find the other strangers in the bookstore. She had lost her status as the only person who had actually met all the other contributors.

My first post was meant to serve as an example, and as a beacon of poor taste. If I could admit that I had read something so terrible that its memory haunts me to this very day (I gave the book away at the first opportunity, and an argument ensued after the receiver read it and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince me to take it back), then certainly none of the other contributors would worry about having anything to hide regarding their guilty reading pleasures. Looking back, I sometimes fear that I had awakened a dragon. However, our second post, coming only hours later, and culminating the work of at least six minutes, actually garnered our fledgling project citations and traffic from sources we never would have suspected (Later, we started getting hits from some rather bizarre Google searches). For the first time, we realized that we were not the only people who read our blog. Of course, that was before we started to get some very telling comments--sometimes from the authors we had reviewed.

Since our inception, there have been over 158 posts, a few ~~attacking~~ er, reviewing multiple books. That's over three books a week read by five busy professionals, but in a few cases, we are so intrigued by each other's reviews that the same book gets posted more than once (this happened often enough with romance novels that I'm not linking to those--I can't keep all of those titles straight).

Some of us happily read whatever we can get our hands on. Some have more discerning tastes. Most of us like others to think we have more discerning taste, but given the rules of the blog, everyone knows better. Occasionally, we have to read something for work. Everything gets posted. From classics to contemporary to camp to kid's stuff (because who doesn't love a good monster poop poem?), and plenty of fascinating non-fiction, too.

I'm thrilled to see that this blog has become everything I'd hoped that it would. We read good stuff, we read awful stuff, and end up spending an inordinate amount of time sniping at each other for our choices (in literature and in life). We claim two industry professionals (a librarian and a bookseller), a legal mind in case we ever get sued for defamation after a particularly nasty post, and two engineers who by usual standards have no business being well-read enough to start a project like this. Some of us hope to write books (and hide them from the hyper-critical eyes of our own blog), some to sell and share books, some to find something suitable to prop up a coffee table, but we all keep reading them.

Here's to many happy returns, and scathing reviews. Happy Anniversary, Ragers.

Labels: comments, essays, history, humor

posted by reyn at 8:00 AM

2 comments

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Harry Potter and the Ultimate Bedtime Story

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
By J. K. Rowling

Yes, I realize that I finished the book (Tuesday night around 10:20) nine days after anyone who considers themselves to be a "true fan," and long after anybody on the planet needs a review of the book. But this isn't a review. The book is fantastic, and ties up all the loose ends, and gives great background on characters about whom we always wanted to know more. I loved it. But, as I said before, this isn't a review. It's a paean.

I was late in finishing for two reasons. First, I didn't even get the book (my copy was legit) until last Friday night (I had far more interesting plans on the release date--yes, more interesting even than dressing as an overgrown boy wizard and pushing small children out of my way to be the first in line), and to slow myself down further, I chose to finish the series as I had started it: reading aloud.

When Harry Potter first landed stateside, I was in high school, and still bristling from the popularity of ridiculous fads like Beany Babies and Pokemon. I refused to join these camps, and regarded young Harry to be a similar obsession. Later, after I had entered college, a family friend gave my mom the first two books in paperback, telling her how much fun they were.

(this is the point where I'm going to lapse into the sentimental crap I usually reserve for my own blog, because it scores well with the Chick Demographic. If you'd prefer the sort of scathing commentary commonly dished out in fat, steaming piles here on Rage in the Page, I'd suggest you skip this and go read one of Ket's posts.)

Less than halfway into my freshman year, my mom was diagnosed with inoperable, incurable, Stage Four lung cancer. She had never been a smoker. In the summer following my second year, after losing her hair for the second time, she was hospitalized briefly with double pneumonia. She used a wheel chair for a bit, and I quit my job that summer to push her to work, doctor appointments, and movies. A couple weeks after I returned to school, one of the metastatic tumors in her spine (they were also in her skull, hip, and ribs) grew to the point that she became paralyzed from her hips down. The short version of the story is that I dropped out of college to become Mom's 22-7 primary caregiver. (I walked the dog for an hour a day, and left the room for various other small tasks, but for the other 22 hours, I was right there, handling medicines, visitors, and menus) Nobody else could take the time off, and we couldn't afford to pay somebody. It wasn't a hard decision to make.

We soon realized that we both ran out of things to do, even with a steady stream of well-wishers and actual medical personnel dropping in to see her. One of the nurse's aides lent us movies ranging from Simon Birch to Deuce Bigalow. At some early point, I grew hungry for some text, and started looking for a book in the house I hadn't already read (not an easy task). I found the paperback copies of The Sorceror's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets. I asked Mom if she was interested, and so began Story Time. After whatever routine we had for the day, I'd pull out Harry Potter and a glass of water, and read aloud to my mom.

I'm not sure how far I made it before I started doing voices. Certainly not long; after a childhood spent with two or three Monty Python audio tapes (yes, children, it was a long time ago) and the complete Weird Al collection, I was doing strange voices and accents most of the time anyway. Later, when the movies came out, I was elated to discover that I had gotten them all right. Except I mispronounced "Hermione." Every character had their own voice, and I managed somehow to keep them all straight. Whether this added to the experience for Mom, or was just irritating, I'll never know. At one point, a second-degree friend brought over audio tapes for the Goblet of Fire, knowing that we had been reading the books. I never told anyone before, but I was a little insulted. What right did she have to tell me I was getting the voices wrong?? Maybe it was because I backed my Jeep into her car the previous summer.

We made it through the first two and a half books together. We loved the imagination and humor, and I clung to puns like "Diagon Alley" and the Mirror of Erised. I was even convinced that some of the jokes were so subtle that they might not even have been intentional. As Mom grew more drained and spent more and more time asleep, I started cheating on her, reading ahead and keeping two bookmarks. Many times, I stopped reading, thinking that she was asleep, only to have her ask me why a moment later, after she realized that I wasn't just pausing for a drink or dramatic effect.

When we first plunged into the books, neither of us realized what a permeating theme death would be. We both knew that it was coming, though we never talked about it, and that acceptance helped me to keep my voice steady when Dumbledore told Harry that "to the prepared mind, death is but the next great adventure."

We only made it through the first two and a half books because Mom was eventually sleeping through so much of the day that she was really only awake for food and drugs. She slept through a couple visits from the nurse while I handled all the questions and requests for an increased dosage of painkillers. I finished the third book on my own, a little before Mom died. By then I was reading only to myself, and Mom never found out the truth about Remus Lupin's time at Hogwart's. When I started the following books, I always felt like I should be reading them out loud, and I never did, until the last book. And I'm glad I did. I had forgotten how to do some of the voices, but they came back to me. The book begs to be read out loud, and sounds great--much better in my voice than in my head. It forced me to slow down and appreciate how much emotion is in Rowling's words, because I heard that emotion in my own voice, without even meaning to put it there. She's a fantastic writer, and proves that by bending you to her will and making you feel, or at least empathize with, the pain and joys of her characters. I love when I have a physical reaction to something I'm reading, whether it's sudden laughter or a gasp when I have a moment of epiphany and realize what's going on, and Rowling manages this constantly. It's something I strive for in my own writing, often irritating people who read my stuff by asking them why they laughed or threw up.

I love Harry Potter because it's a great story, and a thoroughly-realized world wrought by a master hand, but I also love it because it was one of the last things my mom and I shared. It spoke frankly of death, pain, and sacrifice, but it also revealed joy, humor, and hope. When I finished the last chapter (and epilogue) and finally closed the last book in the series... I think I'm man enough to say that a tear may have found its way to my eye. Maybe a couple. But they weren't entirely for Harry and his friends. I had finally finished telling Mom the story. Now I may have to go back and read her the rest, too.

Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for making this fantastic world. Thanks for sharing it. And thank you, most of all, for being so honest about the subjects that scare us the most.

Labels: autobiography, Brit lit, children's literature, demonic possession, dragons, fantasy, murder, series