The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Here's a true story for you: The Hobbit is the first book I ever lied about reading, way back when I was but a young Alison looking to score some Summer Reading Club points. My parents totally did not believe my lies, but they allowed said lies to stand anyway, leading to DECADES of shame and regret. Well, not really. Most of the time I forget it even happened. But I've never lied about a Summer Reading Club book since! (Summer reading in general, yes, totally.)

But now I have read it, and I can speak with authority on the subjects of Misplaced Heroism and Wizards That Are Not Very Nice. Seriously, I had no idea Gandalf was such a jerk! Blah blah blah, grand adventures, blah, self-confidence, blah, endless treasure, whatever. No means no, Gandalf!

I know I'm not the last person to read this book, so here's the plot: jerky wizard recruits homebody hobbit to go help some dwarves steal all the treasures from a talking dragon. Said gang wanders toward dragon and gets swept up in some side-quests along the way; a ring is tricked away from a creeper. The gang finally gets to the dragon and fails at stealing all the treasures until someone kills the dragon for them. There is fighting. Eventually, Homebody Hobbit returns home with a handful of treasure, which doesn't last long for an amusing reason.

So. It's a Quest Novel. I'm not always a big fan of these, and I'd have to say this one is all right, I guess. The scrapes they get into are interesting, especially when they ignore directions and go wandering in the woods, and of course I was intrigued by the Gollum aspect of things having seen the LOTR movies (I'll get around to the books someday, maybe). I was a little concerned by the GI-Joe-like refusal to let anyone die, but then everyone started dying and I was like, hey, hold on, this is going a little overboard. But it's really not a quest until someone dies, right?

Of course, the best part was that the audiobook cover had the same picture that graces my engagement puzzle (read: the puzzle my then-boyfriend and I were putting together when I completely ignored his proposal [accidentally, I swear!]), so when things got boring I could just think back on adorable times. I may be a huge sap.

The second-best part was that ears-reading the book meant that the narrator SANG to me, which was absolutely fantastic because a) I always want to know how songs in books go and b) Rob Inglis is probably a way better singer than those dwarves and goblins and whatnot. If he could have sung the whole book to me, that would have been just fine.

And even though I wasn't a huge fan of the book, I liked it enough that I am very interested in seeing the movie — I was going to watch it eventually if only for Martin Freeman, but now I might actually pay to see it, which is just ridiculous. There had better be singing!

Recommendation: You probably already know if you want to read it, but if you're on the fence you should think about how much you like quests, goblins, and riddles.

Rating: 7/10
(TBR Challenge)

Overture to Death, by Ngaio Marsh

Ngaio Marsh and I are totally BFFs, even if she doesn't know it, largely because a bunch of her books are on OverDrive and so it is SO EASY to listen to them! After Death of a Fool, I was like, give me more! And so I found this little number, which promised music and therefore I was in.

There's not really music. Unfortunately. But there is a FANTASTIC murder device, which is a gun attached by pulleys to the soft pedal of a piano, such that when our murderee sets down to play some Rachmaninoff, she shoots herself in the face. WHAT.

I am loving Marsh's ability to murder people.

And then the story is even better — it's established in the lead-up to the murder that this woman, called Miss Campanula, and her BFF/arch-enemy Miss Prentice, are not well-liked by anyone. And it is Miss Prentice who is meant to play the overture at the play that night, except that she has been injured and while she really really means to play, no one will let her and Miss Campanula takes her place at the last minute. So, first question: who was meant to be killed that night?

There are red herrings and seeming red herrings all over the place, and pretty much everyone is like, "I wouldn't mind if both of them were dead, except I don't really mean that, or do I," and "everyone" is SO MANY PEOPLE and I suspected all of them at one point or another but only one person did it and it's sort of interesting who and how that happened.

I'm learning Marsh's tricks, so I'm not quite as awed by her mystery-weaving abilities this go-round, but trust me, she's got them.

Recommendation: If you like a whodunnit, you're gonna like this.

Rating: 8/10
(Vintage Mystery Challenge, RIP Challenge)

Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy Sayers

I found this book in Mac's Backs when I was up in Cleveland for New Year's, and since I've never seen any other Sayers novels there (and because I still have some store credit there), I snapped it up right quick! It even took precedence over my library book for in-flight reading material, because I liked Gaudy Night so much I wanted my Sayers fix pronto!

This was, for the most part, a very good idea, especially the plane part, because I might not have been able to focus on this book were it not for lack of anything else to do. The story is interesting, don't get me wrong, but Sayers buries the whole thing in so much train timetable nonsense and sometimes indecipherable Scottish dialect that more than once I found myself a bit confused by something but too overwhelmed to go back and figure it out. So I may be missing any subtler parts of this mystery.

But basically, you've got a dude. A belligerent dude, who is not terribly well liked by most of his friends. And so then he dies, seemingly accidentally, and that's all well and good until one Lord Peter Wimsey is like, "Oh, ho, but this one piece of evidence that would totally make this an accident is missing!" and Dorothy Sayers is all, "But I'm not gonna tell you what that evidence is because where's the fun in that?" except she actually writes, "(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)" Which is both sexist and unnecessary, because I sort of knew what she was talking about but it didn't help me figure out whodunnit any faster, so whatever.

Ahem. Anyway, dude-face is dead, and it's an artist what killed him, and in particular one of six potential artists who had the motive and means to do it. Interestingly, most of these artists have gone missing, so it takes rather longer than it probably should to round them all up, figure out their stories, and solve the case. And even then, the case takes a while to solve, because it gets all Clue up in Scotland. Or, I should probably say that Clue gets all Five Red Herrings up in Mr. Boddy's mansion, but I saw Clue first and I'm sticking with it. What I mean to say is that several people offer theories of what might have happened, and then Wimsey is all, "Nuh-uh, you're wrong and I'm right like Sherlock Holmes!" and then, and I am not kidding about this, Wimsey stages a real-time reenactment of the crime that is, again, totally unnecessary but which is in fact delightful.

So. Minus points for the incredibly dense writing, but super-awesome plus points for lines like, "'You shut up,' said Wimsey, 'You're dead, sir.'" and, "'Now, corpse, it's time I packed you into the car.'" Though I admit that if anyone had ever said, "To make a long story short," I would have had to shout, "TOO LATE!"

Recommendation: For fans of classic-type mysteries who are not adverse to a little translation in their reading or a little math (for the timetables).

Rating: 8/10, mostly for the delightful ending
(A to Z Challenge, Vintage Mystery Challenge, What's in a Name Challenge)

Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain

Another Cain! I really like this guy's work.

This book is more like The Postman Always Rings Twice than Mildred Pierce, because there's more murder plotting, but it of course still has that don't-trust-charismatic-people aspect to it. So good.

And the murder plotting here is EXCELLENT, because the murderer fellow, who is again offing a lust-object's husband, is an insurance agent and he knows what has to be done to make a murder play out like an accident. So there is lots of planning and trickery and secrets.

But of course there are more secrets than just this planned murder, as our murderer discovers AFTER he's done all this work, and those combined with the fact that he works with at least one good insurance agent who has totally figured out that there was a murder but can't quite prove it make this novel wonderfully suspenseful.

The ending is great as well; it combines a few excellent surprising endings that I've read before and makes them more interesting. It's just a good time all around!

Also, just a few pages into this book I realized that I had watched the movie version in my freshman English class, though I didn't remember it terribly well because I'm pretty sure the noir voice-over aspect put me to sleep. Definitely a more gripping book.

Recommendation: Good for those who like suspense and slowly unveiled evil characters, and also those who would like tips on planning a perfect murder.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

I read Mildred Pierce for my book club a little while ago and loved it, so the fact that I had a couple other Cain works sitting in anthology form turned out to be an excellent thing.

Of course, The Postman Always Rings Twice isn't really anything like Mildred Pierce. In Mildred, Cain writes a moderately creepy story about the power of especially charismatic people, while in Postman... no, wait, it's still about the power of especially charismatic people. But here there be MURDERERS. That's the difference. Not such a big one, really.

Postman is about a drifter fellow who very quickly falls in love (well, lust) with a married woman and just as quickly they are planning her husband's death. They try once and fail, then try again and succeed, but of course murdering someone isn't really something you can get away with so easily, especially when an insurance company is involved.

The trial bit is what I think I liked the best... my husband's in law school so he's always coming home with very strange hypothetical and real cases, but this one takes the cake, especially in the way the lawyer uses all sorts of lawyer-y tricks that baffle and confuse and amaze me in the end.

I also liked that the narrator turns out to be possibly unreliable (not even definitely unreliable, how cool is that), and also the way the whole ending plays out, from the betrayals to the justice.

But it is a short book (~100 pages), so really you should just go read it.

Recommendation: Not for people who love their characters, but definitely for people who love their plots. Also for budding lawyers who want some true genius to aspire to, but not for those who want to have, like, integrity.

Rating: 8/10
(RIP Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

Before we even get into the story here, let me tell you that I. Hate. Acid paper. My copy of this book is the 1974 movie tie-in edition, and although I thought they were done with this terrible paper by then, they were not. So now my copy of Murder on the Orient Express is technically two half-copies of Murder on the Orient Express. Sigh. I suppose that it could have been worse, that I could have lost a page without noticing and be missing 1 percent of the book — possibly an important 1 percent!

But there were no missing pages, and every page was delightfully intriguing. This book had been an option in a mystery novels class I took in undergrad, so though I read a different book from the list (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, another Christie novel with a crazy ending) I knew how this one ended. Even still, I was drawn in to the story and the odd detecting skills of M. Poirot.

The story starts off as a classic locked-room problem — a Mr. Ratchett is found dead in his compartment on the Orient Express train. The chain is in place on his side of the door, and the communicating door between his compartment and the woman's next door is also locked. His cause of death is twelve stab wounds to the chest, of varying levels of severity. The doctor on board the train immediately presumes a crime of passion perpetrated by a woman, but the pipe cleaner left behind at the scene says perhaps a man. But the handkerchief also left behind says a woman. And while most of the stab wounds say right-handed person, one definitely says left-handed person. And, everyone on the train has an alibi for the presumed time of death. Poirot gets dragged into solving this impossible problem, and of course he does, because that's sort of his job.

I greatly enjoyed finally reading this novel, which is similar to a Sherlock Holmes story but with better showing of clues to the reader. I felt like I could have solved this case myself even without knowing the final result, and I liked watching Poirot come to his realizations mostly along with me (he is a bit smarter than I, unfortunately). I also absolutely love the ending; not the solution bit, but the bit right after that.

Rating: 7/10
(RIP Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading

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

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers

This was a weird pick for my book club, largely because we all liked it. :) When we hopped on Skype to chat about it, we were all like, "Um, it's good... and stuff... can we read some more Dorothy Sayers now?" Which is interesting, because it's not really a straight-forward mystery novel like others of Sayer's, it's more of a treatise on marriage with a mystery thrown in. You'd think that three marriage-age women (with me married!) could have come up with something to say about that!

Of course, I had only just finished the book before the club, so I hadn't had too much time to think about what I might want to say about the institution of marriage (not that I've got any ideas now!). I was still all, "I can't believe that that was the murderer! I'm so terrible at guessing these things!" The mystery part goes as follows: Harriet Vane goes to a reunion at her college, and while there picks up some not-very-nice notes. She ignores them and goes home, but soon gets a call from the Dean or the Warden or someone from the college asking if Harriet might oh-so-kindly stop by and help them with this mystery, since she did so well solving that other mystery and also in writing all those mystery novels. The mystery is, of course, that a bunch of other people at the college are also getting these terrible notes, and also some manuscripts are being defaced, and it would all be such a scandal if the real police found out about it.

Harriet takes her sweet time (500 pages!) to figure it out, because there's also a bunch of stuff in there about Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective who has been attempting to woo Harriet for a very long time, and his relationship with Harriet, as well as many, many long, tedious discussions about whether women should marry and if they do should they have jobs because they're just going to flake out on their jobs every time their kids hiccup and if you feel you really just must marry someone should you pick someone you actually like or someone who is convenient for you and oh my goodness.

Sayers seems to side with those who choose to marry, seeing as how the women who argue against marriage read as more uppity than those who are for it, but she does throw in a woman for nearly every stereotype — the married and happy, the married and unhappy, the unmarried and happy, the unmarried and unhappy, the completely apathetic — and they all felt pretty real to me.

And of course I can't argue against marriage, being married myself, but I can certainly see the downside to a woman who gets a wonderful education and then abandons it to motherhood. Of course, I am also in awe of people who can spend all day with multiple children and not want to strangle them, so it's not like motherhood is all bonbons and soaps, right? So really, I am very unopinionated about this topic! Or possibly my opinion is "do whatever makes you happy." Yes, that's it. I like it.

I also like the ending of this mystery, but it's a hard slog to get there — take it on at your own risk!

Rating: 8/10
(Orbis Terrarum Challenge: England, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
Of Books and Bicycles

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

The Clue of the Broken Locket, by Carolyn Keene

It was kind of a bad idea to read this book basically immediately after reading In the Woods, but it was all I had left to read so that's what happened!

It's your average Nancy Drew story... we have doubles, and a sinking canoe, and someone trapped in a house... I could probably go on, but I just don't want to think about this too hard.

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to call it quits on the Nancy Drew Challenge. I've gotten through 11 of the 56, and I think the other 45 are just going to have to wait until next year. Or the year after. Or when I'm really old and can make my descendents read them to me — they are so much easier to take in audio form!

Rating: 5/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Password to Larkspur Lane, by Carolyn Keene

Did you know that there is an International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers? Neither did I, until I read this book! Oh, homing pigeons. You're so useful for nefarious purposes.

Right, so, Nancy manages to intercept one of these delightful pigeons as it falls out of a plane, and it has a cryptic message about blue bells and whatnot and therefore Nancy just knows it's a mystery! Fun times! And then her dear friend Helen Corning (now Archer) comes to Nancy with another mystery happening to her relatives out on their estate, and Nancy's all, I can solve both of these at the same time! But, if you've been following along, you know that these two cases end up intertwined.

Sadly, there is no chloroforming or drowning. But there is disguise and escape and Nancy being thrown into a hole, so we know it's still our Nancy Drew. :)

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Sign of the Twisted Candles, by Carolyn Keene

I was so right, Nancy totally does get chloroformed again! Oh, Nancy, you gotta stop killing those brain cells.

Hanyway, the mystery in this book is a little different from Nancy's usual... here she starts off with a seemingly simple mystery in hand — is Asa Sidney, a relative of George and Bess, being taken care of in his inn (another inn? seriously??) as he is supposed to be? Of course, he isn't, and soon some of his other relatives are after him for his oodles of money, and Nancy tries to protect him, but then he dies and suddenly George and Bess are upset that Nancy is protecting all that fortune what was meant to go to their families, and Nancy gets chloroformed, and so does a crappy guard, and it's all just a mess until Nancy ends up solving a mystery no one even knew existed! Goodness.

I have to admit I didn't like this one as much as I liked the eight previous... I need more intrigue in my Nancy Drew. :) Let's hope that Password to Larkspur Lane is more to my style!

Rating: 6/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Nancy's Mysterious Letter, by Carolyn Keene

More recycling! Nancy has a double again, except this time the double is in name, not in appearance. After a series of events that gets a bag of mail stolen, Nancy finds out that one of those stolen letters was for her, from a law firm in Britain. Her lawyer dad manages to get a copy of the letter from the firm, and though it is a really exciting letter about getting a huge inheritance, it is for a different Nancy Drew — who conveniently happens to be in the River Heights area just now. Nancy tries to track down this other Nancy, but of course there's someone else out there who wants the inheritance and thus doesn't want our Nancy finding other Nancy and blabbing about it. Confusing? Yes.

In exciting news, Nancy gets chloroformed, which if I recall correctly is going to happen about a billion times more in these books. I guess as long as she doesn't go out on a boat anymore, her chances of danger will be about the same.

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

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.

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.

The Secret of Shadow Ranch, by Carolyn Keene

George and Bess! George and Bess! George and Bess!

No Helen Corning this time. It's all about my favorite cousins, George and Bess if you didn't figure that out, and the mystery at their uncle's ranch. Nancy has conveniently flown in to visit with George and Bess in Phoenix, where she finds out that their uncle is ready to pack all of the girls onto the next flight back to River Heights because his ranch is... wait for it... haunted. Were people in the 1930s really this gullible? Apparently.

Anyway, Nancy does some good sleuthing and gets to stay on to find out who is doing the haunting, and it turns out that it's probably some bank robbers who have coincidentally kidnapped another of George and Bess's uncles and brought him to Phoenix, where they discovered that there was treasure buried in them thar hills of Shadow Ranch and set out to find it. Of course, Nancy makes sure that doesn't happen, but not before she has a few brushes with kidnapping herself.

Oh, and Nancy doesn't do anything silly on the water in this book, but she and George and Bess do run out of it on their drive back to the ranch at the beginning of the book. Close enough?

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Mystery at Lilac Inn, by Carolyn Keene

Okay, seriously, Nancy, stop going out on the water! This book begins with Nancy's canoe getting overturned and ends with her imprisoned on a freakin' miniature submarine. I don't know what to do with this girl.

The melodrama heats up some more in this book and the plotlines start getting recycled — I don't know how that's possible four books into a series, but apparently it is. In one mystery, Nancy's friend Emily is living in a haunted inn (see The Hidden Staircase) which is of course not really haunted but which is having bad things happen to it for not really a very good reason in the end. In the other, which is vaguely connected to the first, Nancy has a double (see the end of The Bungalow Mystery) who has stolen a bunch of her stuff and is making charges to her... not credit card, but whatever they had back in the 30s.

The bad stuff that happens to the inn is crazy — stuff gets stolen, employees quit, a time bomb is placed under Nancy's cottage, a simulated earthquake almost knocks down the main building — and I don't really know how the Keene writing team could possibly have made this seem like normal happenings in rural Illinois, but they made it work.

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Bungalow Mystery, by Carolyn Keene

Another Nancy Drew book, because it's way easier to "read" these audiobooks on my drives than to read a physical book right now! But they're still delightful, so that's good.

In this one, things really start heating up for Nancy. First of all, she and her friend Helen get caught in a storm while in a boat (she also gets stranded in a boat in The Secret of the Old Clock; I think she should really avoid the water) and just when Helen is telling Nancy to save herself, an attractive (because everyone's attractive in these books) 16-year-old called Laura shows up in her own boat to save the both of them! Huzzah!

The three of them take refuge in the titular bungalow (which we hear about all of maybe twice more in the book), and Laura tells Nancy her life sob story, which includes being a newly minted orphan and having to go live with new guardians soon.

Meanwhile, the lovely Hannah Gruen has sprained her ankle, so Nancy cuts short her adventurous vacation to go home and take care of Hannah while Carson Drew is off lawyering. Carson soon phones to get Nancy involved in his new embezzlement case, and while she's investigating she also gets drawn in to Laura's Case of the Really Crappy Guardians. These two cases [spoiler alert? I think not] end up being related in the end, and Nancy and Carson even find themselves in roles reversed from The Hidden Staircase, with Nancy all locked up and Carson attempting to rescue her.

These books are definitely getting more fantastic and melodramatic as they go; it kind of entertains me but at the same time I'm like, "Oh, come on, this totally does not all happen to the same attractive eighteen-year-old girl in the span of a few weeks!" But I guess it does, if said girl is Nancy Drew.

A fun note on the feminist side: Nancy Drew is such a threat at one point that she gets knocked unconscious by the bad guy. That's pretty bad-ass.

Rating: 8/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Hidden Staircase, by Carolyn Keene

Oh, I am so excited about listening to the rest of these Nancy Drew books on audiobook. They are just the perfect length and easy reading level for me to enjoy them in the car and while I work out. Sweet!

The story: Shortly after the Secret of the Old Clock case, Nancy finds herself itching for a new mystery. (Un)luckily for her, she gets two: the first in the form of a haunted house, the second in the form of a threat against her father. That second one is not so delightful. However, Carson convinces Nancy that he's a grown man and can take care of herself, so Nancy goes off with her friend Helen to Helen's family's apparently haunted house. While there, Nancy meets up with the same person who warned her about Carson being in danger, and soon after Carson is totally kidnapped! It, of course, turns out that the two mysteries are actually one big mystery, and Nancy saves the day with her attractiveness and persuasiveness.

I don't know if I noticed it more because I was listening, or if it's just more in this book, but it seemed like there were a lot more references to Nancy's attractiveness in this book. It didn't affect her mystery-solving ability, though, so I guess that's okay?

Another thing that's more in this book is the extreme helpfulness of the police, who offer up an officer to watch the haunted house among many other services they provide for Nancy. I don't think an eighteen-year-old would get away with that these days. "What's that you say? That crazy old lady's 'haunted' house might just have a thief sneaking into it from some hidden passageway? Well, in that case, let's just send out an officer to earn quadruple overtime all night!" Yeah, no, not really.

Nancy is also slightly more amazing with her persuasiveness in this book; after the police have questioned a couple of people without getting any answers, Nancy just tells them that they should do the right thing and that they won't get in too much trouble (like she can promise that?) and the people are just like, "Oh, right then. Confession time!" As though the police didn't try that? I guess that's where the "attractive teen" bit comes in, yes?

Whatever, I still want Nancy on my team when there's a mystery to solve!

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Secret of the Old Clock, by Carolyn Keene

Man. I don't think that getting through 56 of these books is going to be very difficult; I tore through this in less than two hours! I've requested the next one from the library in audiobook form; it'll take longer to get through but I'll be able to listen to it on my commute! Genius!

I mentioned on the Twitter that "I swear the Nancy Drew books were less hokey when I was six," which is obviously not true but it certainly seems that way! Take, for example, the first two paragraphs of this little book:

"Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible. She had just delivered some legal papers for her father.

"'It was sweet of Dad to give me this car for my birthday,' she thought. 'And it's fun to help him in his work.'"

Oh, dear. Luckily, once I remembered that I initially read these books starting when I was six and that therefore I could not expect terribly complex writing, I was mostly able to ignore how formal/stilted/duh the narrative was.

If you've never read this (shame on you!), the story is thus: Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, has a lawyer father who lets her help out with some work he does. One day, after delivering some legal papers for her father, she rescues a girl who has fallen off a bridge (no, really) and returns her to her guardians, who, in 1930s fashion, are delightful and hospitable and go telling all their business to random teenagers who rescue small children. Nancy learns that the family was thisclose to getting some inheritance money, but the will they thought existed never turned up and some bratty rich family is getting the entire estate instead. Nancy, ever the optimist, sets out to see if the dead guy, Crowley, really did write another will.

That's... pretty much the whole idea. Nancy finds some clues, goes looking for a clock, gets locked in a closet, finds the clock, and [spoiler alert?] saves the day. It was exciting when I was six!

I wish I could have read this book in the original 30s version; I know that the books were rewritten in the 60s much like Goosebumps and the Baby-Sitters Club books are being today and it would be interesting to see what the "real" Nancy Drew is like. But definitely this Nancy is a decent female role model — although her outfits and appearance are often mentioned for no apparent reason except to tell us how pretty she is, never in this book is she derided for being a girl or for being too young. She helps out several families and interacts with the police on a few occasions, and everyone just goes right along with it. I love that. What's crazy is that according to Wikipedia, which knows all, people felt that the "real" Nancy was much more outspoken and authoritative. How do I get my hands on one of those, outside of finding a will conveniently hidden in an old clock?

Rating: 8/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, A to Z Challenge, Flashback Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
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Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (30 July — 1 August)

Oh, Brave New World. I was all prepared to come here and write about how weird this book is and how I didn't like it all that much, but then I got to this quote near the end of Chapter 17: "You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy."

And then I realized that, while this book is preachy and antiquated and kind of boring, well, so was The Handmaid's Tale, in its own way. And so was The Stepford Wives. And definitely so was 1984, and I count that among my favorite books. So. One set of postulates it is.

Brave New World is a dystopian novel about a far-ish future wherein people are decanted rather than born and it is decided in the test tube whether each person will be an Alpha-plus intellectual or an Epsilon-minus one-of-ninety-six drone worker. Everyone is conditioned to like being at their own level and like being part of the greater society. This is all well and good, but some improperly decanted types, like Bernard Marx, feel that they could do something more with their lives than be happy.

Yeah, that's kind of the whole novel. Huxley brings in a "savage" in the middle, a man actually born outside of this happy society, and he remarks on how ridiculous it all is for a while, and everyone else remarks on how ridiculous he is for a while.

There's not really any sort of conflict in the novel, which I guess makes sense when everyone is happy, but it makes the going rather slow. And this future isn't really terribly dystopian; even the people who don't like the society get to have their own place to live in the end. I'm really lukewarm on this. If you've got more fiery comments to make about the book, please do so!

Rating: 6/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge)

Cause for Alarm, by Eric Ambler (3 June — 6 June)

Generally, I follow the good ol' 50-page rule for books, but something told me that this book could be good if I just gave it a few more, and sure enough, I was totally invested around page 75. So don't give up on this little book!

It's 1930s England, and Nicky Marlow's just been laid off from his engineering job. It takes him longer to find a job than he'd expected (boy, do I understand that feeling! I need employment!), so he ends up taking a job in Italy as a business manager for a firm that sells machines that make weapons. From the start, the Milan job is a bit dodgy — odd people in the office, even more odd people striking up conversations with him, his passport being "mislaid" by the government. When one of his odd acquaintances tells Nicky that he'll be getting an interesting proposition from another, Nicky discovers a whole new side to engineering.

I really liked this book once I got into it. Because of the way the book is written, you know that Nicky's going to be mostly all right in the end, but Ambler still makes it interesting to find out just how he gets out of the scrapes he makes his way into. And in proper thriller fashion, there are some good chase and deception scenes. I'm rather surprised that this was never made into a movie, though other Ambler works have been. I'll have to check those out.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)