So, I started reading Drew’s Hellboy graphic novels after I saw the movie.  I like the stories, the concept, and the characters, but something about the execution of Hellboy (the art? the spareness of language? I dunno.) doesn’t grab me fully.  I read them because I want to like them, not because I love them.

But I love the BPRD series.  Whatever I was struggling with in Hellboy is not there in the BPRD books, and I am absolutely hooked.  Drew got hooked, too — he bought one, then went and bought eight more.  So I’m happily consuming the entire series from the start, and loving every minute.

BPRD stands for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, and tells the tales of the operatives who usually work alongside Hellboy… now working without him.  Abe Sapien, Kate Corrigan (“try fieldwork, he said.”), Liz Sherman, Roger the Homunculous, Johann Krauss, and others.  Each of them is a tortured personality — it’s not simple or easy being “special” in our world, and they’re fighting off a Lovecraftian evil that no one understands.  The stories are filled with action and heroics, but it’s the small things that keep me coming back.  The small humor (“I’m wearing pants.” “That’s not better.”), the gut-wrenching emotion (the wendigo, Abe’s past, Roger), the extremely smart character development.

And Liz Sherman speaks to me.  Her mantra of “The fire is not my enemy, it is a part of me, it is mine” speaks to me.  Who among us doesn’t have some facet of our personality that causes that kind of conflict? I know I do.  And there are times when I see those facets as the enemy… but times when I need them, when I have to use them, when they’re important and real and right… and they are not the enemy.  They are a part of me.  They are mine.  They may not blow things up or explode in flame, but they’re real parts of who I am, dangerous or not.  Stories that can draw those kinds of very human parallels in such a fantastic setting impress me.

So I’m going to keep reading, oh yes I am.

I am converted: I am a fan of Patricia Briggs.

I finished Bone Crossed, book four in the Mercy Thompson series, with a sense that this might be where she stops for a while — lots of loose ends were gathered up, if not tied off.  And while that’s satisfying on one hand (I dislike series that never end), I really enjoy these characters and the world they inhabit, and would very much like to see more of them.  Mercy is a good, solid, conflicted heroine, doing what she has to, sacrificing herself at every turn while still stubbornly holding onto life and herself as she does so.  She’s been beaten to a pulp physically and emotionally, and she keeps on fighting back, just trying to live her life, fix cars, and occasionally be a coyote.  I really like this series.

When I finished Bone Crossed, I picked up Raven’s Shadow, another Briggs book, this time pure fantasy rather than urban fantasy.  I was immediately hooked by the slightly unexpected plot structure:  40 pages of backstory, then a 20 year time jump, and a change of point of view.  And the way that she revealed history and built the world, purely through characters telling other characters stories and sharing information was incrediby engaging, building a world around the reader in a plausible and enticingly gap-filled way.  The reader is never quite sure about what’s going on, because all history and knowledge are being constructed by the characters from their own incomplete awareness.  And it works, and the book was fantastic, and I want to read the next one.

Add in how much I enjoyed Cry Wolf, and the fact that my only caveat about it was that I didn’t understand enough of the pack structure — a criticism neatly explained by the very compliment I gave above about how she delivers information through character perspective — and I think I’m a fan of Briggs.  The way she builds worlds and doles out information really works in the context of the adventure stories she writes, and the sense that the reader is learning along with the characters leaves us curious, invested in, and engaged by the people she writes about.

I do love finding new authors to follow, particularly when they have backlists I can dig through!

True Blood:  I much prefer the tv series to the first book.  The longer format of a series let them play with the atmosphere and the character development in depth in a way that Harris’s writing style does not.  That said, it’s a fantastic bunch of characters, living out a great story… I may read the rest just because I like the world and the concept.

Cry Wolf:  I think I’m in love with Patricia Briggs.  This parallel story to the Mercy Thompson series, set in the Marrok’s tribe, had all the energy and tight pacing that I came to love in the Mercy series with a lot more depth to the werewolf worldbuilding, which I enjoyed a lot.  I just wished we had learned more about Anna, and what an Omega can do and be, and how she survived her first pack — that felt glossed-over, but I’m hoping that subsequent titles will fill in.

Princep’s Fury:  I KNOW I’m in love with Jim Butcher.  I really adore this series, watching Tavi grow and change, watching his family grow and change along with him.  Butcher has a knack for building secondary characters that are just as interesting as the first, but he also has the more important knack for not letting them dominate his stories (somethng Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin failed at in their epics).  Tavi is always at the heart of the story, and Isana, Amara, Bernard, Gaius, Max, Kitai, and the rest are all acting in his service — mainly because he’s acting in service of Alera, and they all serve their homeland.  But even though he’s the core of the story, it was Isana’s story that really gripped me by the heart in this book — her own realizations of what she’s capable of, her decision to face down her own rank and role head-on, the sacrifices she was willing to make so Tavi could have a chance to succeed, and, most of all, her realization that snow is water… Fantastic, fucking brilliant, and totally worth reading.  (I also have a love for this series right now because it’s set in a fantasy version of Rome, and I’m wrapped up in an RPG which is playing heavily with a fantasy version of Rome… I should read this before every game.)

Artemis Fowl:  I read this in print when it came out, but just listened to it on audio.  Again, clever, humorous, fast-paced, and creative… even if, as my husband said he “fell asleep during a fart joke and woke up during the same fart joke, an hour later”.  It’s a juvenile fantasy book.  It’s got some juvenalia in it.  But it’s still clever and humorous and fast paced and creative… and that’s good enough for me.

Well, I stopped recording what I read, sometime in the summer when things got hectic.  But I managed to make a decent list of what I didn’t record… I know I missed things… but it’s better than nothing.  Here are the numbers:

I started reading Elizabeth George back in graduate school, on someone’s recommendation. I wish I could remember who; I would like to thank them.  A Great Deliverance was one of the best mystery novels I’ve ever read, driven by fascinatingly rich characters working to find a solution to a deeply tortured mystery that I did not see coming.

Each novel since has been a continuation of the characters’ lives, starting with Lynley and Havers and moving on to include a cast of characters whose lives feel as real as any I’ve ever encountered.  George writes people — real people — as well as any of our best American novelists.  The mysteries have continued to be compelling not for the complexity of the confusion about whodunnit, but for the reality of the resolutions, posing murders driven by human frailty and emotion and character flaws none would be surprised to find in their closest friends.

Which is why I was so irritated by A Place of Hiding. It was serviceable.  It was interesting.  I didn’t guess the true murderer, nor the motives behind the act.  From most books, that would be enough, but my bar is set so high for this series that I was sorely disappointed.

The problem was that I didn’t care.  The setup didn’t lead me into the sort of emotional connection — either with the investigators or the victims — that the other books have.  I’m tired of Deborah, frankly, and of her endless whining.  That character needs to evolve, and needs to do it ASAP.  I’m tired of Simon’s inability to help Deborah, no matter how true it is to the character as written, and am losing sympathy for both of them.  And I wasn’t drawn in as far as I hoped by the early promise of the first chapters.  I just didn’t really care about any of them like I should have.  Maybe that was something to do with my mood, but maybe it’s the book.

I’ve already been spoiled on the Big Event that comes in With No One As Witness, but I’m still eager to read on.  If my main concern is that characters aren’t evolving, I’m willing to bet that the next book takes care of that.  And George is too superb a writer to let this group stagnate.  I have faith!

It’s been a stressful time here at Chez Urbanek recently… suffice it to say that I’ve been a little tense. So when I had a free weekend on my calendar — a blessedly free two entire days with no major plans! — I went right out and bought a romance novel. I wanted something that would make me laugh, give me several hours of play in someone else’s life, with a cast of characters I can sink my teeth into, and in the end, be emotionally engaging enough to make me yearn for someone else’s happily ever after.

When that’s what I want, Susan Elizabeth Phillips never disappoints, and is readily available at the vast and varied bookshelf of your local Walgreens. Natural Born Charmer was a great story for all the reasons I listed above — great cast of characters, emotionally intriguing, gutwrenching conflict, funny and smart, and totally engrossing for an afternoon. Blue and Dean were interesting, fun, damaged, vulnerable, and cocky, and April and Jack’s relationships with each other, with their respective children, and with each others’ children was fascinating. Riley was a heartbreaker, and Nita added that splash of disgruntled vulnerability that so echoed my own discontent. (No, I’m not an elderly town matriarch, but I’m still feeling a connection to her. Go away. It works for me.) And, of course, everyone ends up happy in the end, because it’s genre fiction, people, them’s the rules.

What more could I ask for from a romance novel? Other than, perhaps, that it come with a caramel-marshmallow sundae with nuts and whipped cream and lots of cherries? (Which would be unreasonable, but totally awesome.)

Amanda encouraged us all to check this one out. “This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Pop a note in the comments if you’ve done this one (and help me keep the dream alive).”

This list and my bits and pieces about it say interesting things about my leisure reading habits, no? And about my educational reading. I was a lit major at an exclusive liberal arts college… where I obviously did not spend a lot of time reading “the classics”. Ask me about post-colonial literature. Ask me about Caribbean literature. Ask me about women writers of the middle ages. Ask me about science fiction as literature. I’m all good. Ask me about the classics of English and American literature… and, uh, well. Um.

Also, the ones I started and didn’t finish? Big books that meander. Apparently, I can’t do meandering very well.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Why did I not know about Dorothy Sayers? Lord, where have I been?

Amy loaned me several the last time we went through and did a bookshelf swap — I give her scifi and fantasy, she gives me scifi and mysteries. (This? Is fantastic.) And when I said I hadn’t read Sayers… well. Her horror was well-placed.

I read The Nine Tailors over Easter, causing my grandmother much interest, as she apparently is very fond of the book. And I just finished Strong Poison. They are, both and not surprisingly, surpassingly British novels, in tone, pace, subject, and character. But they are nice, cozy, fascinating, and well-written, with an obvious fondness for the places and characters she writes about.

It’s the details that I like, in these older mysteries (Dame Agatha’s books do the same for me). I like that I feel like i have a brief glimpse into a time that’s past, a place that was, and lives that were. If I had a clue of a background in bell-ringing, The Nine Tailors would have been an education-completing experience, but since I don’t, I just enjoyed the village of Fenchurch St. Paul and the souls who abide there, and the mystery they were all hoping to ignore. Strong Poison was a lovely look at aristocracy, the bohemians, and the common man standing in between them — and yet not really about those things at all. And I was happy to wrap myself up in it, because both books were written about a place and time long ago, far away, and still extremely easy to relate to, because the best mysteries are still just about human nature.

In March I read furiously through the first part of the Honor Harrington series, and in April, well, in April I haven’t been reading.  Instead, I spent the first bit knitting madly to meet some impending baby deadlines, then I was traveling at a conference and on vacation.  And now I’m home, and am catching up with my husband and some movies rather than reading much.

I’ll get back to it eventually, though.

For now, I’m slowly reading three books of nonfiction — and have been for months, thus the slowly.  I’m working through Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes by Steven Jay Gould, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and Death By Pad Thai by Douglas Bauer.  Three very different books, equally engaging for different reasons, and probably best consumed a chapter at a time. (For example, I can’t read more than one of Gould’s thoughtful scientific essays at a time, because I like to pause to consider them, and if I read Fast Food Nation from stop to start, I think I’d sink into a deep depression that had me eating home-grown grass for the rest of my life.)

I’m also reading comics – I read through 1001 Nights of Snowfall, the first (much-anticipated) Dresden Files comic, and, of course, the ongoing Buffy Season 8.

So I guess maybe I am reading.  I’m just not sucking down genre fiction like soda pop.

Amy loaned me the first Honor Harrington book a few weeks ago and I’ve voraciously consumed the first 3 (and a half) in the meantime. Space Opera! Heroes on spaceships! Political intrigue! Love affairs! Assassination attempts! Brutal war! Tactical brilliance! Treecats!

There was a point, somewhere in the middle of book three, in which I thought, “If this woman doesn’t stop being so starry-eyed and well-intentioned and DUMB about reality, I’m going to have to classify her as Too Stupid To Live, no matter how tactically brilliant she is.” And then she got metaphorically slapped upside the head, and she changed. Grew a bit. Got better. And I eagerly picked up book four, because all the exclamation points above, plus a heroine who evolves? I’m there.

Jack got his name in honor of a friend, and Miles is named for Vorkosigan. My next cat’s gonna be Nimitz, because, c’mon. Telepathic cat with hands? GIMME.

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Listening to: Bruce Springsteen – Working on the Highway