Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

When I heard about the movie coming out (which I still haven't seen... is it any good?), I realized that I had never actually read Alice in Wonderland, despite being very familiar with the various adaptations and references on the teevee. So when I found it as a free e-book, read by Michael York (swoon), I thought that this was as good a time as any to rectify that situation.

The story itself is pretty simplistic, as you probably know... Alice falls down a rabbit hole, drinks some stuff, gets small, eats some stuff, gets big, consumes various other things that make her big and small and big and small and big and small again, talks to a caterpillar, a hare, a cat, a griffin, a mock turtle, and various members of a deck of playing cards, and then wakes up from her dream.

The dialogue is very entertaining, with puns and allusions and poems abounding, and it's even better when read to you by Michael York, who has much more of a range of character voices than I'm used to in my audiobooks. It's also very short, so you should really just go listen to it for yourself. Have fun!

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

See also:
book-a-rama

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Orbis Terrarum Challenge

Orbis Terrarum! I did it last year with awesome results, so here I go again!

The rules, if you want to play along at home:
*For the challenge each reader is to choose 8 books (for the 8 months of the challenge).
*Each book must from a different country, I have decided to go by the country of origin of the author, or the country he/she lives in is fine as well-meaning NOT the country the book is set in!!
*You don’t have to have a list, that means you can change your mind at any time. As long as there are 8 books you have completed the challenge.

So between 1 April and 31 November, I will be reading delightful books from around the world! I think this is a good idea. I didn't do too well with last year's list, though I did read a lot of good non-list books, so I'm going to put the ones I missed back in the pot for this year:
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones (New Zealand)
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia)
The Story of the Cannibal Woman, by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe)
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (Italy)
One More Year, by Sana Krasikov (Ukraine)
Let Me In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Sweden)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera (Czech Republic)
From Sleep Unbound, by Andree Chedid (Egypt)

If you've got any other recommendations, let me know!

The list, as I read them:
1. The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, by Alan Bradley (Canada) (Review)
2. Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan (Australia) (Review)
3. Death Note, Vol. 1, by Tsugumi Ohba (Japan) (Review)
4. Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers (England) (Review)
5. The Chalk Circle Man, by Fred Vargas (France) (Review)
6. The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares (Mexico) (Review)
7. The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist (Sweden) (Review)
8. The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (Brazil) (Review)

Musing Mondays — On Deck

Today's Musing Mondays question is, "Where do you keep the books on the top of the tbr pile? Not the bunk of the mountain, but just the tip of the peak – the ‘almost up to’ books?"

Um. Well. I think that would assume that I have any sort of notion of what book I'm going to read next! I guess that generally, the books I'm going to read soon live under my desk, since that's where all of the books I've borrowed from the library or from friends hang out. But, of course, some of those books have been there for a while, and some don't stay there very long. I am definitely one who reads on a whim, so any sort of TBR pile would get upended pretty quickly!

The Clue in the Diary, by Carolyn Keene

Hey everyone, it's Ned Nickerson! Yippee! The whole Nancy Drew cast is finally together! Helen Corning, who?

And, seemingly in honor of this momentous occasion, this book is pretty boring. There's only one explosion and that's right at the beginning, no one gets kidnapped, there's no body-switching, no one goes anywhere near the water... what's going on, writers? I kind of like it! This book is more like The Secret of the Old Clock — in fact, very like it. Nancy gets attached to a cute little girl and wants to help her family out, and when it turns out that there's a mystery around why the girl and her mother aren't getting money from the father, who is meant to be working in another town, Nancy is totally on the case. The melodramatic writers, not to be left out, have thrown in the explosion at the beginning and a convoluted patent-stealing operation, but the main focus of the story is classic clue-finding and mystery solving, not running from counterfeiters. And, of course, the mystery gets easily wrapped up by full confessions from everyone involved, which is delightfully quaint!

However, things are only going downhill for Nancy's bad-ass-ness. After being rescued by a man at the end of the last novel, it seems no one wants to let Nancy do her thing anymore, and now that Ned's on the scene it looks like he's going to be Nancy's default bodyguard. Mrs. Gruen even says at one point, "Shouldn't you take a man with you?" Crap. If Nancy starts turning into Bess, I'm going to be less than pleased.

Rating: 7/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Booking Through Thursday — Sensual

Today's Booking Through Thursday question is, "Which do you prefer? Lurid, fruity prose, awash in imagery and sensuous textures and colors? Or straight-forward, clean, simple prose?"

I can be a fan of both. I think I tend to prefer clean and simple prose, though — not overly clean and simple, like Hemingway, but just straightforward writing. Too often an author can get carried away trying to write "fruity" prose, like in Life of Pi, which I'm re-reading right now. The story is interesting, but every so often I find myself staring at the page and wondering what Martel was smoking when he wrote, "Tell me I'm still happy. Mother, my tender guardian angel of wisdom, where are you? And you, Father, my loving worrywart? And you, Ravi, dazzling hero of my childhood? Vishnu preserve me, Allah protect me, Christ save me, I can't bear it!" Yeah. It's a little much.

But sometimes a little flower in the prose is a good thing, like in my dear The Manual of Detection. I'm still in love with Berry's writing a year later. Check out that link for a delightful passage from the novel.

The Secret of Red Gate Farm, by Carolyn Keene

It seems, at least according to the Nancy Drew canon, that owning an inn is a really terrible idea. You'll end up going broke and then crazy people will show up at your door demanding that you sell your inn to them for more money than they'll get after you lose the inn and it goes up for auction or whatever (this is terrible business sense on the part of the crazy people) and when you refuse they'll yell and scream and (in the case of Lilac Inn) maybe even try to blow you up!

Nothing that drastic happens at Red Gate Farm, thank goodness, but there is someone demanding to buy the inn, and there is a nature cult renting some land belonging to the inn's owners, and there is totally a counterfeiting operation going on in a cave. No, really! Nancy gets all up in this particular business because Bess(!!!) spends a crap ton of money on some perfume and then spills it all over a train. No. Really. A man smells the perfume and comes over all, "What's going on in our secret club?" and Nancy's like, "Um, what?" and the man suspiciouses away. Meanwhile, a woman on the train, called Jo, has fainted and Nancy decides to take overly good care of her, to the point of becoming a lodger with Bess and George(!!!) at Red Gate Farm, which Jo's family owns. And then see the aforementioned cult and the counterfeiting.

Interestingly, this is the first book wherein Nancy doesn't get her own darn self out of all the trouble she gets into... she actually has to be rescued by a man. Does this spell trouble for our kick-ass heroine? I hope not!

Rating: 7/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Musing Mondays — In Pictures

Today's Musing Mondays question is... "Do you have a favourite picture book, either from your own childhood, or reading to you children?"

Hmm. I'm not sure what qualifies as a picture book... if it's all pictures, or very mostly pictures, I don't think I can remember that far back to come up with one!

But the earliest books with only a few words in them that I adored were the Sherlock Chick mysteries. That's right, I've been a mystery fan since forever! If I remember right, these are super-easy-readers, so I'm totally counting them as picture books.

Now, strangely enough, I have read an entirely-made-of-pictures book recently, straight out of the children's section... it's called Mister O and is about a little blob dude just trying to cross a gap. Is that so much to ask? Yes, yes it is. :) I highly recommend this for little kids who like to cheer for an underdog!

Booking Through Thursday — Pretty Pictures

Today's Booking Through Thursday question is, "How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches?"

I don't read many novels that have any sort of illustration, so I guess I'm okay without them, but I do love pictures! My favorites are all of the little illustrations in Roald Dahl's books (Quentin Blake is spectacular), and other similar incidental decoration, but I also highly recommend the illustrations in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, drawn by Keith Thompson (a couple images are on Westerfeld's blog). Because the world is so fantastical, I felt like I had a helping hand in figuring out what all those weird machines and animals "actually" looked like!

Across the Nightingale Floor, by Lian Hearn

This was my second foray into "long" audiobooks — the first being The Picture of Dorian Gray — and I must say that I was much better able to focus on these eight hours of storytelling. Maybe all those tiny audiobooks are doing some good! I'm sure I still missed some important things, but I don't feel nearly as lost as last time. :)

Across the Nightingale Floor is the first in a series called The Tales of the Otori, and is a fantasy novel set in feudal Japan. The main protagonist is called Takeo, né Tomasu, who is a member of a group called the Hidden who are not liked by the current ruler of the area. Early in the novel, he finds his entire village slaughtered and then makes an enemy of the ruler, Iida, and his mates before being rescued from certain death by Otori Shigeru. Shigeru names the boy Takeo and adopts him as his own son, but not without cost — Iida also happens to hate Shigeru and has some delightful plans for getting rid of him. The other narrator and lesser protagonist is Shirakawa Kaede, a beautiful girl held hostage for some reason (see, there's an important thing I missed!), whose life soon intersects with Takeo's in similarly delightful ways.

The writing was beautiful, as were the audiobook readers, and the story was engaging, but I have to admit I don't remember much of it past what I listened to a couple of days ago. I didn't end up really caring about any of the characters except maybe one, and when that character died with next to no fanfare I was rather miffed. I probably won't be continuing this series, but I am glad that I listened to this book for the writing if nothing else.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
medieval bookworm

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert

I am a bad friend, clearly. A long time ago (almost six months!), my friends Laura and Deborah gave me lots of books to read. I finished Deborah's book within the month, but had barely looked at Laura's pile until a week ago, because I was looking for something else entirely to read. See, I wanted to start re-reading the delightful Thursday Next series, but realized that I had lent the first book out to a friend and hadn't gotten it back yet. Then I realized that I hadn't given Laura's books back yet, and hadn't even read them yet, and I went, "Oh no! Time to read some books!" I don't think I'll be able to read them right in a row now, but I think I can get them back before she graduates in May... -fingers crossed!- I need you guys to keep me to this! Yell at me if I don't mention Laura and her books for a while! Yell at me anyway for being a terrible book-borrower!

Anyway, on to the book!

The Last American Man was actually the book that Laura told me I didn't have to read, but I was intrigued by the subject — it's about this real person (non-fiction what?) called Eustace Conway who lives off in the woods and makes his own clothes and shoots his own dinner, but who also spends a lot of time booking speaking engagements and running a summer camp and trying to convince other people that they should run off to the woods and make their own clothes and shoot their own dinner.

Gilbert talked with pretty much everyone in Conway's life, including his overbearing father (is there any other kind in a story like this?), loving mother, indifferent siblings, friends, workers, and many, many lovers. I thought a lot of book was repetitive — there are only so many ways to talk about one person — but it was useful to see how set in his ways Conway is, how he's not really thrilled with the life he's living but can't figure out how to change it without changing his entire personality.

I was reading my school newspaper the other day, and every article on the front page had one of those ledes that's like, "Joe isn't your average sophomore" or "Sue-face looks like a normal college student, but..." or "You think Steve is crazy, but he's really just a normal kid" — emphasizing the oppositeness of a person's self to his/her reputation. Gilbert could certainly have done this in her book, because she does make the point that for as much as Conway seems like a mountain man, he's really just a good businessman who has the same insecurities we all do. But she doesn't start with that observation; she lets you learn all about Conway's mountain man life, how it started for him as a kid and just kept going, and then she starts dropping in the business man vignettes and the insecurities and the amazing contradictions of Conway's life, and she gives you a minute to figure out the importance of these stories before she tells you what she thinks of them. I was delighted.

One Laura book down, four to go!

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002, A to Z Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

When library policies ATTACK (your ability to browse the shelves)

I found this post on a very odd library policy via @maureenjohnson yesterday, and found myself very confused. If you don't want to click the link, the idea is that there is at least one library out there (probably more...) that enforces age-restricted access to the children's and young adult sections. As in, if I, as a 24-year-old, went to this (these?) libraries, I would have to ask for special permission to browse around (retrieving specific materials is okay, apparently) the children's and young adult sections unless I brought my youngest brother or borrowed someone's teenager. Um, what?

The first principle of the ALA Code of Ethics espouses "equitable service policies" and "equitable access"; this policy seems to maybe a little bit totally break that principle.

It's like the opposite of what happened in Wisconsin last year, where some of the adult patrons wanted to move the "inappropriate" books from the YA section to the adult section, making it harder for the young adults to find them.

This particular age restriction policy also makes it more difficult for children under the age of 13 to get at the young adult materials — they seem also to have to go get a librarian to escort them, though young adults can use the children's section as they please. As a person who was reading at an eighth-grade reading level by first grade and who was also painfully shy until about the age of 19, I can't imagine that I would have read nearly as many books as I did in my childhood if this policy had been in place at my library.

I don't know what the staffing situation is at this particular library, but this policy doesn't seem to be very friendly to any situation. If there are plenty of librarians and staff in all sections, this policy seems to say that teen and children's area staff aren't competent enough to keep the area a comfortable space for the teens without age-restricted entrance. If there are fewer librarians and staff floating around the library, escorting through the YA section adults or children who could take care of themselves takes away time that could be used to help less knowledgeable library users or to work on making the library better. If this policy completely replaces a librarian or staff member in these two sections, well, that just doesn't bode well for the future at all.

In short, this sort of policy affects a lot of people, is silly, and is antithetical to good library service. What are the upsides?

Wife of the Gods, by Kwei Quartey

Wife of the Gods is a pretty neat little mystery novel set in present-day Ghana, where Western culture is starting to move in on traditional ways. When a woman in a remote village is found dead in the woods, a detective from Accra ends up being called in (for various reasons) to take care of the investigation. Conveniently, the detective, Darko Dawson, has been meaning to head to this village anyway, to find out what happened to his mother when she disappeared more than 20 years ago. Dawson's priority is the newly dead woman, of course, but it soon turns out that the cases are connected and Dawson is able to solve them both in one go.

But this novel is more than just a mystery. It also gives a critical look at the aforementioned traditional ways and how they can continue under Western influence. In particular, Quartey takes on the concept of trokosi, which he translates as "wife of the gods" and which is the practice of a fetish priest helping a family to get out from under a curse by taking a young daughter from the family as his wife. There is also friction between traditional and Western medicine in both Dawson's life and the dead woman's, and some talk about the roles of women in the culture.

I'm not really well-versed in such discussions/arguments, but I felt like I understood all sides a little more after reading this book. I highly recommend it as a quick but very interesting read.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading
She Is Too Fond Of Books...
Maw Books Blog
My Friend Amy

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.