I recently reviewed a book, that I said would meet your needs if you were in a Lifetime movie kind of a mood. Well today I've got one for you for more of a soap opera day. Its got orphans, Texas high school football, a love triangle, sex,  murder, paternity confusion, and a catholic priest. Seriously, what more could you ask for?!

Given all that, Tubleweeds was much better than I expected. Sure its melodramatic and overly detailed, but I was invested in the characters and it moved along and kept me reading. It is the story of three orphans, two boys and a girl, growing up together in the Texas panhandle. Sappy me like them and wanted them to succeed. I wanted the girl to fall for the good guy even though I knew she wouldn't. etc etc. It lost me a bit towards the end with all the murder mystery stuff, but hey, its a soap opera. 

Long Story Short: I hear the ghost of some tween girl past screaming "DRA-MA"

What could not be thrilling about a book about writing a dictionary?! Right?

Well, OK, maybe its not everyone's thing. But if you stop to think for a minute about what a dictionary is, how many words are in it, its pretty astounding that they exist at all. And even more so that they were created prior to modern databases. To sit in a room, reading books, making words lists, and writing definitions for years or even decades.. you might just have to be a little bit mad.

The Professor and the Madman is the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Its a love story to words and how language evolves. Its also a story about the people involved, their lives, and idiosyncrasies. Its a story about what it means to be mad now and what it meant in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s.

Long Story Short - For anyone who has ever had in interest that absorbs than more than what might be deemed healthy, you might find yourself in this story.

Believe it or not, The Magician's Assistant is not my normal fantasy fare involving magic and fairies (although for full disclosure there is some magical realism in there). It is the story of Sabine who was in fact a magician's assistant performing in Vegas, on Johnny Carson, at the Magic Castle in LA, etc. She falls in love with her magician, Percival, but he is gay. He finds a life partner, but she is never able to move on, preferring to keep Percival as a friend/co-dependent. When Percival's life partner dies of AIDs, Sabine and Percival marry so that she can inherit their possessions when he dies as well. But then he has an aneurysm and ends up dying sooner rather than later. That is the beginning of the story.

Percival had always said he had no living family, but it turns out that he has a mother and two sisters living in Nebraska. Sabine is depressed and reeling from his death, and she decides to get to know this family to try to understand him better and feel closer to him even though he is gone.

So. The book is just watching a moment of this woman's life as she gets to know the family. If you're looking for action, keep looking. If you want emotion and melodrama, you have found it. I found the book tolerable. I finished it; I wanted Sabine to get better; I wanted her and her new family to learn from each other. That said, I often wanted to slap her upside the head - never the magician, only the assistant. Lover? No, just companion. Budding career as an architect? Nah, better to quit and just build architectural models of someone else's design. Certainly I could be accused of being too achievement focused in life, not able to just relax and enjoy things. But I really wanted Sabine to find a way to take ownership of something in her life and really go for it, but no.

Long Story Short: If you're in the mood for a Lifetime movie but your cable's out, you have found your novel.

I'll tell you a secret. Generally speaking I have no sustainable interest in the law or politics. Being a lawyer or politician sound like terrible, awful jobs to me. Presumably being an environmental engineer / hydrogeologist sounds equally horrible to them. However, somehow I have developed a deep love of the Supreme Court. Thinking about it, I can attribute the beginning of my interest directly to Emily Bazelon

I liked what I have previously read about Justice Sotomayor and I have heard her interviewed on NPR and been completely charmed. So when her memoir of her youth (life up to becoming a judge) appeared on sale on amazon the other day, I jumped on it.

Not surprisingly, Sotomayor is an inspiring woman. She came from a disadvantaged background and rose to well, the Supreme Court of the US. But the the book is not just a list of her accomplishments, it also includes very personal details of her struggles. The most obvious are from her childhood. She had type 1 diabetes as a child at a time when treatment was not well understood. Spanish is her native language, and schools were not well equipped for non-native speakers. Her father was alcoholic and died when she was in grade school. Her childhood best friend and intellectual twin becomes a heroin addict while she succeeds academically. But it also includes things from her young adulthood - looking for meaningful mentors, maintaining her career at the end of her first marriage, deciding whether or not to have children, etc.

The memoir was readable and engaging. Like in her interviews, I was charmed. I finished the book really wanting to be this woman's friend. I also liked her overall thesis in that innate intellectual ability and a healthy amount of luck are important, but the key to success is incessant hard work. Throw in humbleness and a commitment to being a lifelong learner and you'll do even better.

Long Story Short: If you've ever felt ill equipped to meet a challenge in your life, read this book.

Scent of the Missing is a dear memoir. Charleson is grieving from her divorce and figuring out what her new life will look like. She finds two things - flying airplanes and search and rescue. Always a dog lover, working with search and rescue dogs is an easy fit.

It was pretty shocking to me to learn that search and rescue dogs and their handlers are an entirely volunteer organization. These people are not paid for their time or personal costs to train the dogs or perform actual SAR. I was also amazed at how much of a time investment it was. Charleson spent 3 years as a assistant handler before she was invited to train a dog. Then 1 year looking for the right dog, Puzzle, And finally 2 years to train Puzzle to be certified to search for missing people. Searching for cadavers as well takes additional training. They may be volunteer, but the organization is certainly professional.

Wizard's First Rule is the first in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It is reputed to be one of the classic epic fantasy / coming of age series, so I figured it was worth a read. And when I say epic, I mean it. My kindle predicted 14 hours + of read time, and I'm a pretty quick reader.

For the first 10 hours or so I though it wasn't terrible, but was aimed for a specific adolescent male audience. We all know those guys who see the world in black and white in whose fantasies everything is a life or death decision,  intentions must be scrutinized to the nth degree, but in the end true friendship (love) can trump any mistakes. It could be a bit painful but there were wizards and adventure and the book was at least encouraging understanding of shades of gray.

The book was originally published in 1994 and there are some parts that are blatant anticommunist reference. That could be OK, but they were also completely unnecessary. The bad wizard wants to have absolute power or destroy the word, regularly kills children to be his spirit guides in the underworld, and does a type of reading of tea leaves but instead of using tea he uses human entrails. My point is that he sucks. He really doesn't have to suck more my creating a "people's army" that takes food from the countryside to give to the wealthy in the interest of the "public good".

All that I could have dealt with and still overall given this an OK rating until the (almost) end - a torture scene. Really a torture chapter, maybe even a novella. I'm talking it took my over on hour on the train to get through it and I was skimming. Truly gratuitous and unpleasant.

Long Story Short: The wizards first rule is that people are stupid. The author actually meant manipulable, but I feel stupid for finishing this book, and he should feel stupid for not getting an editor.

The Immortal Circus is a tasty tapas of a novel. I am in Spain at the moment, so its not a morsel, but a tapa. It had been floating around on my goodreads and amazon recommending that I would enjoy it, so, finally I gave in.

The plot is a bit muddled - a but of murder mystery, a side of fairy battle, some circus acts, a few lovely descriptions of  circus bodies, and a swirl of love triangle. It reads a bit of a muddle as well. We are not talking great literature here - the plot wanders here and there, the main characters inner dialogue is definitely YA, and there is no reason for the fairies to be plotting against each other other than they are fairies.

That said when I found myself on a five hour train ride, I zipped through this rather than reading my guidebook. And I really wanted them to get together. If you read it, you will know who.

Long Story Short - Its a murder mystery about fairies in a traveling circus. What you see is what you get.

Monster Hunter International is a book about people who, well, hunt monsters. Owen Zastava Pitt, "Z", was a CPA and a (mostly) regular guy until his boss turns into a werewolf and they have an epic showdown. His victory catches the attention of MHI and he joins their company as a professional monster hunter.

First off, the name. Owen happens to be one of my all time favorite names for men. Pitt reminds me of Dirk Pitt, the misogynistic hero of the NUMA/Dirk Pitt books that I loved in middle school. Lastly, Zastava is supposed to be a Czech family name, so another random connection. Z is not unlike Dirk Pitt in personality either. Every time I read it, I could hear the loudspeaker on the tram announcing stops in my head. A tram stop is a zastavka. Zastavka apparently means a pledge.

Back to the story. Its a pretty fun adventure story with some fun surprises. The elves for example are not exactly ethereal. That said, Z likes guns. A lot. Really. There are luscious descriptions of guns described in utmost detail. What they look like, what they fire, how they feel, smell, taste, etc. If you happen to like both monsters and guns, this is definitely the book for you. If you're buying for an impressionable YA, maybe not.

Long Story Short: Brain candy overall enjoyable if you're into this story of thing. 

I have an upcoming trip to visit Spain, so I wanted to read some books set there to get in the mood. I ordered a bunch of used books to be delivered from Better World Books, but this one wasn't available so I got it right away on kindle. It was a failure on multiple fronts as this book (or at least the part I read) takes place in Sweden and my physical book order hasn't arrived yet. Oh well.

Back to our Andalucian Friend. In our post Girl with a Dragon Tattoo world,  thrillers by Swedish authors are all the rage. This one is full of morose, depressed characters. The only ones that show a spark of life you know are going to end up being terrible people. There are also so many characters with so little personality it was impossible to track who was who.

I have had the pleasure to meet several people from Sweden here in Brno and they are lovely, upbeat, optimists with a great outlook on life. So I can't recommend this book as a thriller or to give any insight into Sweden let alone Spain. Ouch.

Long Story Short: Let me know if you read this and make it more than a third of the way through to find something redeemable.

I found an English language book club at the library here in Brno. Snowdrops is the book for April, so I read it just in time for the meeting this week. It was nominated in 2011 for the Man Booker Prize and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger award.

The story focuses on a late thirties English laywer, Nick, who is living in Moscow and going through an existential crisis. It is written as a first person narrative, him portraying the worst thing he did in his life to his fiance before they officially marry. 

The book is an interesting account of ex-pat life in Russia in the early 2000s. There is corruption, there is hedonism, there are plenty of cynical expats, and plenty of snow but the plot and the characters just didn't ring true to me. For all of the detailed dialogue, Nicks romantic relationship just didn't have any meat beyond sex. I just don't understand what they had that he is still mooning over all this time later. As for his indiscretions  they are fairly obvious since you know the story ends poorly. But in real life, I'm pretty gullible, so I can see myself not seeing it coming either. I felt like the confession to the fiance is more that as a man he can't own up to his mistakes than that he made them.

Long Story Short: OK crime story if you're interested in expatriot life in Russia. If nothing else it was surreal to read such detailed descriptions of snow in my first sunny days of spring.