Things I've Noticed: Picking a book for book club can be tricky

My problem with choices has always been finding some way to narrow them down – I’m not good with having dozens of choices, I like having three – do this, do that, or do something else.

I’m pretty sure that just a few days from now I’m going to have to have a selection for my book club’s April book. The problem is that I’m not entirely sure what I want to read. I could go for a comic book series (I did that with the Greg Rucka series Queen & Country a few months back) or perhaps a new genre book I’ve been looking forward (I did that with the then new Stephen King book Under the Dome last year), or maybe I could just randomly pick a book from the dozen boxes of old Fantasy/Horror/SF paperbacks I’ve got sitting in my basement.

I already have a pretty good idea of the books I’ll be reading for the month of March – I have a little song that reminds me of my seven categories, it goes;

Horror, SF, Fantasy

Book Club, Book Club, Jeeves and Me

Which represents my tactic of reading one book from each of my favourite genres, one book for both of my book clubs, the next in the Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse (3 more to go and I’m finished) and finally one book that merely tickles my fancy.

The problem is I’ve read a lot of books over the years and most of what I’m reading these days falls into the “hard to find” category, a category you specifically do not want to use for a book club selection. So now I’ve got to think about which book I would like to read that is a) available in sufficient numbers at my local library, b) of interest to the members of the club (who range from being interested in Classic Lit and Non-Fiction to Archie Comics), and c) hopefully an overlap with one of my regular monthly books so that I can double up on some genre reading.

In the end I’m leaning towards either some dark fantasy (I’ve always meant to start reading Charles de Lint, and his earlier stuff was pretty dark) or maybe one of those Young Adult books I was going on about last week.

You know, being in a book club is trickier than you think.

Genre Character of the Week: Tiffany Aching

When you talk about a writer who has books numbering in the dozens it can be tricky to find the character you feel most connected to (especially if he has more than one main character). In the case of Terry Pratchett’s discworld series of novels there are at least half a dozen characters I’m very attached to, but as this is genre character of the week not genre ensemble of the week, I have to pick favourites, and in terms of discworld, my favourite is a girl we met at age nine in the book The Wee Free Men, Tiffany Aching.

Through four incredible Young Adult novels (being, in order, The Wee Free Men, A Hatful of Sky, Wintersmith, and I Shall Wear Midnight), author Terry Pratchett has created a young girl who is both sympathetic and terrifying. Tiffany begins her journey in pursuit of a missing younger brother, ends up fighting faerie queens and the personification of Winter and eventually ends up featuring in what might be my favourite ending of a fantasy book I’ve ever come across.

At her heart, Tiffany is a young girl from a small rural community who is quite talented at making great cheese (a talent she never downplays, regardless of how formidable her witching prowess becomes), she is very focused on getting things done and has the ability to not just think about things, but to think about the way she thinks about things.

If you’ve never cracked a Discworld novel before, and don’t want to start way back at the beginning (the books are a shared world series, so with some exceptions you can read them in virtually any order) the four books featuring young Miss Aching would be a wonderful place to start exploring the series.

Book Review: The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Last week I read something I had never expected to come across in Young Adult (YA) fiction - a really great zombie apocalypse novel. Although I'm sure there are many others out there, I have personally never come across a book aimed at teens that shows so effectively the relentless terror of a world overwhelmed by zombies and the people who have somehow managed to survive.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan is really, really good. If you've never read a zombie novel before I can't think of another that would be a better introduction to the sub-genre. The novel focuses on a young girl, Mary, who lives in a small forest village surrounded by walls that are in turn surrounded by the undead (BTW - I love the fact that my computer's dictionary still doesn't acknowledge the word undead as being legit; somehow the fact that it appears on my screen underlined in red makes me feel like my genre tastes are still edgy and not necessarily accepted as the norm).

Without going into a synopsis, I can only say that Mary comes across as a fully realized three-dimensional character; her wants and dreams are easy to relate to and her wish to see the ocean (something she has only ever head about, as a sort of legend), is heartbreaking in its innocents.

The book has a sequel and I will definitely be checking it out. This is one of those few books that I knew I would need to own within the first hundred pages. Seriously, it's that good.

Things I've Noticed: Keeping your blog clean can be tough

On Tuesday I was speaking to my BFF Mike for our regular coffee break chat when he let me know that he could no longer access my blog from his place of work. When he tried to go to my site he was met with the message

THIS SITE HAS BEEN BLOCKED DUE TO QUESTIONABLE MATERIAL

HATE : OTHER

So of course I immediately went through my last weeks worth of tags to see what I could have done to trigger such a response from his IT department. Here's what I found

* Book Reviews, Haunted Houses, Dollhouse Murders

* Things I've Noticed, Young Adult Fiction

* Amy Carter, Ann Reed, Curse of the Cat People, The Sixth Sense, Val Lewton

* E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Favourite Kisses, The Princess Bride, Valentine's Day

* Colin Farrell, Planning, Ryan Reynolds, The Fly, Valentine's Day

So assuming that it wasn't any of these, it must be the title of my blog (maybe Wisdom, Books or Monkeys represent hate for some people?)

Anyway, now that I have this new bad-boy blogging reputation I've got to figure out what I should do next... should I make my posts really dark and whatnot (no... my mom read this), or attempt to clean up my tarnished image? Maybe I'll just try to find a new font for my blog title.

Genre Character of the Week: Detective Dan Atwater

One of the things that have always interested me in stories involving telepaths is the question of how they interact with other people. In some cases, like Sookie Stackhouse, the telepath effectively becomes a hermit (and the town crazy), while in cases like that proposed in the novel The Demolished Man, they become a terrifying police force.

Last week I read the book Through Violet Eyes by Stephen Woodworth, and the book deals with a very similar question. In the world of the novel, a small group of people (163 in the USA), are born with violet eyes and the ability to become possessed by the spirits of the dead. These peoples (called Violets) are used in solving murder investigations, communing with the spirits of the departed and even helping artistic geniuses continue their work from beyond the grave.

The main character of the novel, Detective Dan Atwater is a Los Angeles cop who has worked with Violets in the past but does not enjoy their company, the reason being that Violets commune with the dead by using touchstones, items which hold an intense emotional connection to the spirit, and as Dan was responsible for the accidental death of a man a few years ago, he doesn’t want to confront his victim again.

What I like about Dan is pretty simple, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, even when that includes working very closely with a Violet who has issues of her own. Dan’s approach to his work is straight-forward and unending, he simply works the clues until something comes loose – not unlike Robert B. Parker’s Spenser.

I hadn’t actually heard of this series before last week, but after the great time I had with the first book, I will definitely be looking for the rest of the series.

Book Review: The Dollhouse Murders

This is a sad place, she thought, as she had before. The sadness was not just upstairs in the dollhouse; it was all around her.

I am a huge sucker for Haunted House stories, from the Haunting at Hill House, to The Shining, and my personal Favourites Hell House and Burnt Offerings, there is just something about a creepy old house that really gets to me.

The story follows a twelve year old girl named Amy Treloar, who after having a fight with her mother moves in to her aunt’s old house for a week to help with the clearing and cleaning so the house can be sold. The house is big, filled with old furniture (no one has lived there for years) and in the attic Amy finds a dollhouse, one that matches the actual house down to every detail.

As with any haunted house story, the old place has a dark history, one involving murder, and very slowly the dollhouse seems to be re-enacting what happened...

Considering that this is a young adult novel written in 1983 for Scholastic books (you know, the ones that you could order from your class room in Elementary school), I was pretty darn impressed with the books atmosphere and its building tension throughout. Although it was a pretty fast read (I read it on my communte and during my lunch hour on Friday), I found it to be a pretty cool horror story for younger girls.

Things I’ve Noticed: It is not a good idea to ignore YA Genre Fiction

Next week I’m planning on checking out a Young Adult (YA) mystery novel suggested to me by my friend Trish. It’s called The Dollhouse Murders and she recommended it as it has a lot of horror elements she thought I might like to check out.

As I placed her copy of the book on my “To Be Read” Shelf, I wondered about which other young adult books I’d been meaning to read, so I checked out my 13-year-old daughter Kaia’s room.

Wow.

Last October, in a desperate bid to keep up with what my kids were reading I decided to spend a month reading the Twilight Saga, and afterwards I figured it might be a good idea to continue checking out some of the books my daughters are raving about.

Here’s the problem, between The Hunger Games, The Gone Series, The Redwall Series, The Mortal Instruments Series, and many, many one shots I’ve been meaning to get around to (after The Dollhouse Murders, I’m moving on to a book called The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which my wife says is right up my alley), I’m wondering how much time I’ll have for my regular fiction.

Also there is the question of reading order – where do I start with all of these books? I’m not even getting into the comic book series Kaia owns or the significantly larger YA collection my 18-year-old daughter Lorisia has downstairs.

It’s kind of funny, but right now the scariest books in my house are the steadily growing collection of books meant for kids.