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I reread, and finally decided to abandon to other readers, the Steve Perry trilogy.
Simply Wonderful, by Shelby Lewis
Another Arabesque novel, and while I likely won't keep it, I'd willingly read more by Lewis. The plot was pretty silly, and the resolution even more so, but the characters were sharply drawn, with wonderful little details and a redeeming sense of humor.
Heart's Desire, by Monica Jackson
I think this is the only one of the interconnected Jackson novels I had not yet read, so now I'm stuck waiting for her to write more. While later is better (Too Hot to Handle is good by almost any standard), even the older ones are fun to read, and of course it's nice to get to know more of the characters better.
The Fitness Factor, by Lisa Callahan, M.D.
I think the next fitness book I buy will be Strong Women Stay Young, but I'm not sure. This one isn't bad, altho Callahan is a bit more of a fan of milk products than I think a white woman, in good conscience, should be. It comes off as racist ignorance. Whatever. Other than that, she's put together a reasonable overview to help women become fit as a lifestyle. She specifically addresses eating disorders and unrealistic expectations, which is a minimum standard. She advocates a combination of flexibility, strength training and cardiovascular exercise, and she encourages a minimum level of fitness before tackling sports and other athletic efforts. She includes gear selection, and sport selection criteria as well. The inevitable nutrition chapter is mediocre, but offset by some sensible use of height-weight charts on her part almost exclusively to encourage people with eating disorders to gain weight. Her home fitness evaluation is interesting -- the legs are single leg squats, done for each side, intending to determine leg strength, asymmetry and balance. I think it's also likely to expose incipient knee problems (hopefully not contributing to them).
Best of all, I was motivated to do some research on shoulder injuries; hopefully I can keep my incipient swimmer's shoulder from becoming a truly serious problem. With luck, this will even improve my stroke.
I think it was allergies. All I know was I had an overwhelming desire to do nothing whatsoever for two days. And I sneezed a lot.
In the Hands of the Goddess
The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
Lioness Rampant
Wolf-Speaker
Emperor Mage
The Realms of the Gods by Tamora Pierce
I don't know what happened to my copy of Wild Magic (I do know what happened to my copy of the first Alanna book). I need to replace both. The series survive multiple re-reads really, really well.
Words Were Originally Magic, by Steven de Shazer
I used to date a guy who loved Neal Stephenson novels, and so thought he was interested in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I kinda like Stephenson (but am troubled by some of his themes), but wasn't really interested in NLP at all. To find out what the fuss was all about, I looked at the books on the appropriate shelf at Powell's. The then-boyfriend bought some. I bought some. I only bought Bandler and Grinder books (since they appear to have invented the term). He bought a mix. I have since decided that (a) NLP has a lot going for it, particularly as a way to denature phobias, (b) Bandler and Grinder themselves are kinda nuts, (c) people who follow Bandler and Grinder are quite scary but (d) NLP is just one of a number of brief/quick therapy strategies that are actually a lot more interesting than NLP itself. Along the way, I picked up books aimed at clinicians doing brief/quick therapy, and this is one of them.
The beginning sucks. It's barely coherent. However, if you can slog through his description of a life spent navigating Lacan and Deleuze, and an eventual (partial) disillusionment with (Milton) Erickson's style of therapy, the transcripts are extremely worthwhile. de Shazer's minimalist therapy style relies heavily on paying close attention to exactly what the client says (text-focussed), which I'm hugely in favor of, and then assuming the client is capable of figuring out how to help herself (ditto) and will know when she is better (ditto). The therapist's main job is to avoid getting in the way and to help the client stop doing things that don't work.
Strong Women Stay Slim
Strong Women Stay Young by Miriam Nelson
I wanted the second one, but it was easier to lay hands on the first, so I got it, too. Nelson sets it up so it's easier to stick with her program and progress than not. I looked it over carefully, started higher than she recommended and advanced a lot faster than she recommended. That said, I like her a lot, and would recommend her to anyone, male or female, of any age, who has an interest in beginning weight training. You can do it all on your own without anyone knowing, but still avoid injuring yourself.
On Basilisk Station
The Honor of the Queen
A Short, Victorious War
Field of Dishonor, by David Weber
Sandry's Book
Tris's Book
Daja's Book
Briar's Book
Magic Steps
Street Magic
First Test
Page
Squire, by Tamora Pierce
Nobody's Baby But Mine
This Heart of Mine, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Manhunting, by Jennifer Crusie
Using Your Brain for a Change, by Richard Bandler
Well, for one thing, I just didn't read that much, and then when I did, I didn't take notes. My bad. Here's what I can remember.
Armed!, by Cates and Gary Kleck
Lady Knight, by Tamora Pierce
I loooove Pierce novels, of course, and I had been waiting for this one a while. I enjoyed it enormously, and of course can't wait for the next one, hopefully about Keladry or Daja, but I'll take what I can get. I particularly like the continuation of Kel's crushes and their evaporation, and her realization that as strong as she feels in the moment, she has other things she wants to do far more than marry and have kids just yet, and, furthermore, that she hasn't yet met a right guy for her. Given her parents' relationship, I hope that she continues on her path -- they set a high bar, but one worth striving for.
Given that September 11 hit right at a spot that fit in Pierce's plot, I'm impressed with the way she handled it, and that she didn't let her vision be derailed when she used her own reactions at the time to influence her descriptions.
Too Much Temptation, by Lori Foster
This was a loaner and, as promised, some good sex in this one. Best of all, no overt creepy abuse themes -- just the subtler issue of emotional abuse through descrimination against the fat.
Foster, unfortunately, is clever enough to irritate. While our heroine Grace is fat enough to have always been upset by it, she's within the range of the existing waitress uniforms at Ben's diner in the hotel. We never do get a number on either her size or her weight. What we do get is far more damning: she's only varied five pounds up or down (no matter how you read that, a cumulative total of 10 pounds max) from her weight in high school. I didn't catch how old she is, but she's young enough to still have children, Noah isn't described as appreciably older than her and he's 32, and 20 was apparently a while ago for her. I don't know about you, but the number of women who weigh within 10 pounds of their high school weight 10 years down the road are vanishingly few in my experience.
Furthermore, Grace is sweet and unfailingly kind and/or protective and nurturing (so the only time she attacks is on someone else's behalf), a fat-stereotype (or ideal) we could pretty much all do without. She's an uninhibited virgin, just waiting for the right man to come along and cut her loose. It's clear, if not outright stated, that she's a virgin because she can't get the kind of man she's attracted to until Noah picks her up on the rebound. She loves his very tall, very hard, very well-dressed, well-groomed and well-off body (altho it is noted she's oblivious enough to not know how wealthy he really is), which leads one to wonder if she doesn't engage in a lot of sizism herself, and it isn't just self-loathing.
While they consistently use condoms (until the very last bit, but that's a whole other issue) with penetrative sex, one act of nominally non-penetrative sex is portrayed with his penis rubbing against but not into her vulva, coming on her stomach. Since it's been well-established by this point that he pre-cums relatively generously, you'd have to be an idiot to consider this even remotely safe sex, and unless they're using an (unspecificed) form of back-up birth control, they could also have gotten pregnant. Tsk. This is a man who in his younger days engaged in a lot of mindless screwing while more or less living on the streets. Tsk tsk. And no one ever gets tested for STDs before engaging in all that licking. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
Surrender None, by Elizabeth Moon
One of the prequels to Deed of Paksenarrion, bought long ago used and never read. Not as good as I remember Deed, being, still, I see a lot of the problems I have with Moon rampantly present here, particularly in the climax. I frequently feel (guiltily) like chanting, "Take it all, take it all!"
And really, that's a big chunk of why I limit my Moon novel consumption these days. That said, I thought the handling of Gird's problems with alcohol very, very, very good, especially the set of events causing him to stop abusing alcohol (repeated efforts by friends/family, culminating in one particularly egregious event).
Low Life, by Luc Sante
Great book. An impressionistic, but well-researched book about the usually undocumented unwashed masses of NYC, from about 1820 to 1910, focussing mostly on 1870-1900. Through Sante's prose, the Bowery Boys become more than a vaudevillian cliche, and the reader gets a sense of just what those reformers who passed laws about tenement construction were up against. It turns out things were, indeed, much worse before reform, difficult though it may be to believe.
The King in Yellow, by R. W. Chambers
Sante touches on the bohemians. Chambers (not noted in Sante's book) apparently was one. Who knew? I certainly didn't. To me, he's an influence on Lovecraft, and this is a classic of early horror. It's not a novel, but a series of mediocre to awful short stories that recognizably, in many cases contribute to some of the lamer cliches on horror (and in some cases, other genres). I don't find any of it particularly effective, altho the two short stories about Clifford, Elliott and Rowden towards the end are entertaining little tidbits. The one about the siege of Paris could have been a terrible Stephen Crane short story. I wish I could remember who wrote the electroplated couch murdery mystery story, so clearly inspired by the marbleizing solution.
Tangled Up in Love, by Hailey North
Dear Love Doctor is still clearly her best work. It must have been a fluke, as earlier and later work is worse. Oh well.
Catching Kelly, by Sue Civil-Brown
Eerie to read this soon after. You'd almost think North and Civil-Brown were the same person. Similar dating-someone-with-kids story lines, complete to whoops-miscalculated in my efforts to manipulate my ex-husband moments.
That said, this one is freakishly like Alcott's stories about Rose, the girl who wishes she has talent but doesn't realize she has "domestic" talent. Fortunately, Kelly has additional abilities of a business and technical nature, and the hunky ex-pro-football player she's dealt plays along.
And while we're at it, that bore an uncanny resemblance to Susan Elizabeth Phillips, with her straight-laced-business-women nailing pro ballers. Do we really believe that? And they're all white, too. Whatever.
Arctic Adventure, by Midas Dekkers
Another one sitting on the shelf a long time, bought through the Hamilton catalog, I think. Dekkers is Dutch (part of the appeal). A heavy-handed plug for Greenpeace mixed with a lost-in-the-wilderness-sorta-rescued- by-a-mysterious-native story. Creepily patronizing in a well-meaning way.
The Man Made City: The Land Use Confidence Game in Chicago, by Gerald D. Suttles
Picked up in a used book store somewhere in the Berkshires, read in the wake of Sante. I guess I'm in a big-city mood of some sort. I may dig up a copy of Turow's novel based on the Greylord investigations next.
Chicago's a fun town, but more than a little weird. Predictably, most of my visits have been associated with trade shows. Equally predictably, I tend to wind up at a bar in the Gold Coast, drunk off my ass. Most recently, not there on business, I found it impossible to convince the woman hitting on my boyfriend or the guy hitting on me that my boyfriend and I were in fact together.
Digging around on the web found no substantive reviews (one hatchet job that bitched about typos, and other minor issues, at least some of which weren't accurate, and the major one -- timeliness -- was irrelevant) but a lot of syllabi including this as a reading.
Nowhere near as entertaining as Sante, and I feel almost as suspicious about Suttles's prejudices as I did about those twits in the bar that night a couple years ago. That said, a glimpse into the inner workings of decision making and persuasion in a city until very recently dominated by very old-style machine politics, and still apparently riddled with corruption and graft.
Nice timing on reading it. Cabrini-Green is finally going to be demolished.
two omnibuses, by James White
Camper's Companion, by
Beyond Backpacking, by
The New Diet Revolution, by Atkins
I'm glad I read it. I know a number of people who have tried Atkins with varying degrees of success, and after a lot of thought, I have to say that physicians are basically too fucking clever for their own good. Atkins figured out a way to exploit a trivial metabolic trick (if there are no carbs, your body will burn fat in an unbelievably wasteful way to get carbs) to literally piss away what was eaten and not consumed in physical activity. It's not a safe trick (this is one that, done too long and/or too thoroughly will result in massive organ failure). It's not compatible with aerobic exercise. It's probably not compatible with a large muscle mass.
Dot.Con, by John Cassidy
Cassidy is a gullible fool (took stock picks from people met at cocktail parties) and his economic analysis is risible. Gut-bustingly funny, in fact. But he rallied the events of the day in an orderly fashion and is therefore worth reading.
Forces of Habit, by David T. Courtwright
Courtwright's look at the history of drugs, regulatory and taxation schemes is well-researched and insightful. Unlike simpler studies that contrast prohibition with legalization, Courtwright defines three campes, those two and harm-mitigation, arguing that most looking to legalize actually are harm-mitigators, and why the distinction is important. Good stuff; better than Buzz at explaining effects, appeal, demographics and what happens at different levels of taxation, and depending on who gets hooked on a drug -- and also on what happens as science publicizes effects on non-(or unwilling) partakers.
Tales from Gavagan's Bar, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
The last reread. It was a lot of fun sitting at my computer looking up drinks and trying to make sense of why the authors had characters ordering various drinks. On the whole, I don't approve of de Camp and Pratt's choice in liquor (despite the whisky flowing freely, either as itself, or in Manhattan, Rob Roy or Boilermaker, the obligatory gin-based Tom Collins and Martini, the occasional rum based beverage, usually a Presidente, yet a lot of the drinks are things like Angel's Tit, Angel's Kiss, Stinger, Slivovitz, Tokay, Kummel, Kirsh, Zombie, Yellow Rattler, schnapps), any more than I do of the sexism, racism, or mindless adoration of what even in the 50's was a bygone era. Thanks to Sante, once again, for opening my eyes. Bye-bye. I suspect the Callahan's books will be following, and this may yet lead to further house-cleaning in the sf/fantasy shelves.
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, by Spider Robinson
As preposterously much as the regulars (and visitors) to Gavagan's drink, they drink insanely more in the brightly lit Callahan's (the Doc, who still practices surgical medicine, puts away beer mugs of blended scotch). Insanely more.
I'm doing the same kind of reread with online fact checking I just went through Gavagan's with. Everyone at Callahan's is drinking some form of whisky or beer or both (so far). The comment about no one dying of malaria any more, they licked that one years ago is profoundly disturbing. At the time the story was written (and set) the US had only recently announced eradication within its borders, and people in the South continued to die of it over the years. Certainly the world wide south continued to suffer with no noticeable hiatus. The story doesn't improve noticeable: Mary's sister Corinne is a fiery redhead and the government whose instability leads to tragedy for them all is mocked shamelessly (while in town, no less) and Corinne apparently didn't give them any warning, despite knowing things were going downhill fast. De Becker fans take note. Denial is everywhere. Bobbi Joy is stunningly passive over something I have a really, really hard time imagining a black woman being passive over, and she is presented as not having a domestic service option in the 1970s because no one has maids anymore. Which is weird, because black women have being doing domestic work through companies and even as liveins all the way through into the 21st century. Where did Robinson live, anyway? He's so unremittingly middle class in his sentiments and blind spots it is disturbing.
Time Traveler's Strictly Cash, by Spider Robinson
Only a few Callahan's stories here, along with a truly awful fantasy story, the RAH review I always get a kick out of and a few other odds and ends. The absence of women is slightly ameliorated (altho the women who show up are pretty appalling -- Josie offering herself to whoever wins Tall Tales and Punday), but someone actually shows up at a Halloween party in blackface, the phrase Chinese Fire Drill is used casually and I won't even get into how appalling the viewpoint character looks in his extremely brief non-relationship with Mary. This is fat-friendly? I think not.
Callahan's Secret, ditto
Why does everything have to be the biggest and the best in this series? And it does just get more cartoonish as it goes along.
Planet of the Damned, by Harry Harrison
Something about my boyfriend's description of XXX made me think of this novel and its sequel. I pulled it down for a reread and, in common with the bar books, I think it'll be heading out the door, soon. But first, a moment to appreciate its pervasive theme: ultimate exertion and death.
The book begins with the last day and competition of the Twenties, which isn't so much about ultimate sports as the ultimate multi-sport tournament, something popular in science fiction a decade or so back (I know Piers Anthony had stuff like this too, and both Harrison and Anthony's games feel very derivative to me), which a previous winner attempts to interrupt, claiming he's got something much more important, which turns out to be saving a bunch of people from being destroyed and Brion Brandd, ridiculous name and all, is the only guy to pull it off (turns out the fact that he wins is largely irrelevant -- a psi ability not unlike Deanna Troi's is what makes him so desirable, plus some mutations everyone on his home planet shares). The normal mindlessly feisty chickie is picked up along the way to the designated planet(s) in need of rescue (and the pickup involves an egregious instance of space-littering. Why oh why did people do this? How fucking hard is it to bring the shit home and recycle it? Hunh?). A series of not-particularly-compelling physical challenges ensue, including a few hand-to-hand combat bits that are risibly bad (see, this is where studying for three years gets you; takes all the fun out of a badly constructed fight scene). Brion is attractive (tall and strong with a full head of hair) and demure (on his planet, the women choose) and remarkably foolish (in the desert bit he carries chickie in his arms -- waste of fricking energy). That combined with his never say die willingness to save the unattractive and unremittingly hostile natives from certain doom at the hands of a bunch of pacifists (let's just say that some parasites are involved), his empathic ability and his approach to romance should make him a symbol of life, virility, etc. Also, authorial narration about medvirk vs. umedvirk.
And yet it doesn't. Nope, not at all. Turns down chickie in an offer of marriage because they won't be able to have kids together. And he won the Twenties (and repeatedly gets that extra little bit of effort out of people) by goading them beyond what they are able to bear. Lea is woman enough to take the damage, but, like him, it repeatedly hospitalizes her from near-death fatigue. And all of this is signalled right from the beginning with Anvhar's short, hot, aggressively alive summer and long, cold, corpse-like winters. Also by Brandd's strategy of studying juramentados, berserkers and others who tapped hidden reserves of the human body only to die. Brandd (Lea, and Dys itself) repeatedly do the same thing.
It's this kind of embedded contradiction, not to say hypocrisy, that just rubs me the wrong way. And, it's a little dull. It's vaguely like a video game. Off we go to the used book store from whence we came.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created June 2, 2002 Updated December 9, 2002