When I travel, I like to bring along a few reliable books, which usually means books by authors who have made me smile in the past. On my most recent vacation, I took books by Julia Glass, Jenny Shortridge, Mary Doria Russell and, reviewed here, Seth Greenland.

In discussing The Bones a few months ago, I praised Greenland for giving depth to even his most minor characters. I have a place in my heart reserved for authors who treat their characters with compassion and give them great complexity. Even a villain has an internal logic that comes from somewhere other than an inherent evil. And in Shining City, Greenland’s villains all make sense as people instead of being cardboard cut-outs. While Shining City’s protagonist, Marcus Ripps, is not the most complex man in fiction, he’s got dimension — as does his wife, his son, his mother-in-law, his attorneys, his competitors, his boss, and his “business associates.”

About those business associates — they’re hookers. Early in the story, Marcus loses his job as a factory manager. His wife, Jan, owns a failing boutique, and their middle-class life is about to disintegrate in a flood of debt and over-extension. Conveniently, Marcus’s estranged brother dies, bequeathing to Marcus a business known as Shining City drycleaners, which is really a front for an escort service. In desperate need of both income and validation, regardless of source, Marcus takes over this little goldmine, eventually bringing in Jan as his partner and her mother as their bookkeeper. Of course, this is not a simple business, and the unique twist that Marcus gives it is cause for some of the humor. Greenland keeps the story moving, and I was sorry to see it come to an end.

The only problem I had with Shining City was the appearance of a competitor in the escort service business. I keep mentally “fixing” her interactions with Marcus, which seemed like they could have been mutually beneficial while still allowing Greenland to proceed with the rest of the story as planned. Every novel asks us to suspend belief in at least one spot, but my brain couldn’t let go of this particular passage. That’s not a flaw, however, it’s just an observation. As with The Bones, I strongly recommend this book. If you have to pick between the two, in fact, I suggest Shining City.

As for animals, there is a terrier named Bertrand Russell who shows up periodically and comes to no harm. The death of a goldfish is mentioned in passing, and Marcus feels as if a coyote is following him. So this book is completely SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy!

Pop quiz: I am a slightly fretful and occasionally cranky bookworm who could manage her money better. I also accept myself as such. So … am I enlightened? Yes or no.

See, this is where some of the spiritual quests for enlightenment annoy me, because enlightenment presupposes that you accept yourself as who you are. And to me, this is an excuse for bad behavior. For the record, I don’t think I’m enlightened, whatever that is. This is where Sobel’s delightful and engrossing story of his lifelong spritual quest sort of lost me. I kept wanting to tell him to just shut up and be. On the other hand, I really enjoyed this book, so him shutting up would be against my interests. But … I’m just going to move on to the review.

Sobel has tried it all: est, yoga, various gurus — including Ram Dass — and just about anything you can name, plus a lot of things you probably can’t. He’s spent time in India and Esalen, he’s been thrown off guard by free spirits, he’s risen through various systems’ hierarchies. And all along, he’s maintained just enough skepticism to keep from completely buying what anyone else is selling in the way of spiritual paths. I like this, because I have a hard time believing anyone has all the answers. Skepticism is healthy.

Through it all, Sobel is an engaging storyteller, relaying his encounters with various people in a way that made me feel like I was there with him. I recommend this book.

As for animals, this book is SAFE for animal lovers. There are pet tortoises, personal menageries, references to a couple of quick animal deaths, Sobel’s pet cat, and a bit of wildlife. If the topic interests you at all, you should enjoy this book.

“Loving Frank” received excellent reviews, and it’s easy to see why. (I have some quibbles, but what else is new?) Frank Lloyd Wright’s love affair with Mamah (Mame-a) Borthwick Cheney ended when Mamah and six others died in a horrible crime at Wright’s Wisconsin home. Wright was in Chicago at the time; after his first wife, Catherine, finally granted him a divorce several years after Borthwick’s death, he married twice more. In this novel, Horan goes beyond the limited historical record to imagine who Mamah Borthwick was, both in relation to and separate from her famous lover.

Mamah left a husband and two children to be with Wright. Unlike today, the default custodian in a divorce was usually the husband, and divorce was treated as a scandal that warranted disdain and shunning. Both Wright and Borthwick were hounded by reporters and ripped apart in the press for having deserted their families, though Borthwick’s reputation suffered most. Now, hardly anyone is expected to stay in a loveless marriage, and divorce is mostly sad and little remarked upon past that. So credit is due to Wright and Borthwick for having helped blaze a trail so that the heartsick and miserable are no longer doomed to live unhappily forever.

Past that, however, I wasn’t that wild about the protagonists. Wright was wildly irresponsible with money and thought his contributions as an architect meant others should put up with his idiosyncracies and failures to pay his debts. Borthwick didn’t seem to think things through, and they both appeared to expect others to pick up after them, so to speak. Still, the story is intriguing, Horan writes well, and the well-researched background about Wright is enlightening. I’m recommending it unless you really, really insist on likable characters.

As for animals, there is a dog, Lucky, who disappears after the murders. Farm life, with its pros and cons regarding animals, is recounted with a smattering of detail. Borthwick visits a zoo. And of course there are horses. I am declaring this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

A few months ago, I reorganized the basement, which meant moving all the books and deciding which ones warranted recycling to a charity. In the process, I also picked a few books to reread; Bridge of Birds was one of them. What I remembered about it was that it took place in China, involved a wise man and his sidekick, and made me laugh out loud.

It made me laugh out loud again on the second reading. This book is a delight.

It starts off slow and with a great deal of sorrow, for the children who live in an unnamed rural village have all fallen ill. Without a miracle, they will die in a matter of weeks. So Number Ten Ox, the narrator, sets off in search of someone who can help. In the city, he finds Master Li Kao, consistently described as a scholar with a slight flaw in his character. Li Kao determines that to save the children, they must find the Great Root of Power. He and Number Ten Ox take on this daunting quest, which is, essentially, the story.

And a lively and entertaining story it is! Li Kao and Ox encounter friends, enemies, and ghosts; suffer great poverty and enjoy preposterous wealth; and learn the true meaning of beauty and the beauty of truth, just to start. There are races through underground tunnels, sword dances, angry sages, invisible monsters, lava moats, and just about everything you can think of. It’s a trip — and of course I recommend this book.

As for animals, dogs howl for the village children, a helpful goat, endangered horses and mules, assorted livestock, a sad elephant who dies for a greater cause, and unharmed birds. So this book is MOSTLY SAFE for animal lovers. In fact, I think it’s SAFE except for the brief appearance of the elephant. Enjoy!

I am tagging this as historical fiction because Kate Morton does a fairly good job of evoking the years surrounding WWI. However, this is primarily a story about loyalty, secrets, miscommunications, love — and the frustrating lack of career options available to women until recent decades.

As a teenager, Grace Bradley is sent to work as a servant at Riverton House, one of those British mansions that seem to inhabit most novels set in England. Over time, she and one of the family’s daughters develop a bond, so that when Hannah marries, Grace goes with her. Grace is one of three people privy to what really happened when a young poet supposedly killed himself — and the way this is constantly being referred to, you know that it didn’t happen that way. The book has a frame, in which the elderly Grace is taken back to tell the tale of the death, which makes Grace more knowledgeable than she would be had the entire book been told in real time.

In fact, the narration is a problem for me. I don’t have a problem with the frame, and I don’t have a problem with Grace as a character or narrator. My issue is that Grace learns much of what she narrates by eavesdropping, hanging around, overhearing and, eventually, flat out admitting she couldn’t know what she’s about to tell and explaining how it came to be told to her. It’s as if Morton couldn’t decide between having a first-person or third-person narrator. I do think she made an understandable choice by going with Grace, but I sort of got fed up with the “lingering in the library” excuses. Grace is a participant in the book’s events, but she is not the driver. In fact, I believe Hannah would have been preferable as the narrator.

I also believe that much of the book, especially up front, could have been thinned out. It’s almost 500 pages, and it really shouldn’t have gone over 400. It seems as if Morton wanted to offer a picture of a large mansion and its inhabitants, maybe one of those sprawling family novels, but narrowed her focus too much and ended up with some flab in the story. Again, narration by Hannah might have allowed Morton to do everything she wanted with the plot while eliminating some of the rambling excuses Grace had to give to explain how she learned certain things.

But the ending … wow! And I’m not talking about the poet’s death. The real ending (which still could have worked with Hannah as narrator) packs a whallop, as they say.

I will recommend this to people who like this kind of book to begin with and don’t mind the perpetually lurking lady’s maid contrivance. It’s a good book, it’s just got some flaws.

As for animals, there are a couple of brief mentions of hunting casualties, plus a couple of references to horses and lap dogs, really nothing upsetting. So this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

A few weeks ago, Dave bought me a new camera as an early birthday present (yes, he really is that wonderful). After visiting the Penn Camera store where my friend Melanie works, I settled on a Nikon P90. I wanted a reasonably light camera with a minimum 5X zoom, and I didn’t want to think too hard about lighting. The Nikon P90 has a 24X zoom, though the last 6X is digital, which can be a bit blurry even with all the stabilization settings. Still, 18X is amazing! This camera has so many settings that I felt I had to dedicate an entire day to it. One day wasn’t enough — there will be more “camera days” in the next few weeks. However, I am awed by what this thing can do.

While I could still take the camera back to Penn Camera, I did some test shots to make sure it wasn’t defective. Here, then, is the obligatory “cat on the sofa” test picture:

I then stepped onto the back porch, zoomed to the full 24X, aimed the thing at a neighbor’s back patio, and got an artistically blurry mess because even though I have an extremely steady hand, 24X is hard to pull off without help. A few minutes later, with 1 of the 2 stabilization features in place, I took the same shot as a much less blurry mess. Side-by-side comparison below:

   versus 

Here are some other close-ups of neighbors’ yards, all taken from my porch using the zoom feature:

On to Camera Day! There are about 40,000 different settings on this camera, or so it seems, and I could possibly care about half of them, which is a lot. There are “scene settings” for museums, fireworks, dusk, dawn, indoor parties, etc., etc., etc. Two settings that particularly captured my imagination were Copy and Food. Copy does just that — as you can see from this page in the manual:

Food is just amazing. It assumes a close-up and offers you five possible tints. Here is the bowl of pistachios that lives on my coffee table, shown in neutral, maximum blue, and maximum red:

There are various ways of doing close-ups, too, and here are some from my back porch and a park I visited:

Finally, the zoom feature on its own produces some pretty amazing shots, even without specific scene settings. Below, a caterpillar on a cattail, and a Canadian goose, both taken from a distance.

Thanks again to Dave — and there may be more posts like this one as I explore the camera further.

I’ve long thought of Elaine Viets as one of the better “brain candy” mystery writers, and I have enjoyed her Dead-End Job series quite a lot. When I finished this book some weeks ago, I did not feel enlightened, more knowledgeable, a better person, enriched, or any of that good stuff. Instead, I felt like I’d jammed strawberry-flavored salt water taffy into my brain.

Sometimes, you need a brain full of strawberry-flavored salt water taffy. This is a book for such times. Viets does her research on the dead-end jobs. She does the work herself or trails people doing the work or both. So there are job details. But this is still brain candy.

And what is Murder with Reservations about? Well, the Dead-End Job series tells of Helen Hawthorne’s attempts to make a living while evading her angry ex-husband, who has a fairly substantial court judgment against her even though she only destroyed his precious car after finding him in bed with another woman. And with Google, we can all find out everything about everybody, so in order to remain undetected, Helen has to take some low-wage jobs where she’s paid under the table. In this book, she’s a hotel maid in Florida, where she’s resettled.

(Actually, at this point Helen would be wise to up and move to Montana, with another name change and dye job. Supposedly, there’s a pattern to where “missing” people go when they’re on the run, and Midwesterners like Helen tend to go to Florida. Then again, Viets herself is a Midwesterner who moved to Florida.)

Anyway … the body of another maid is found in a dumpster, there’s a cursed room, and Helen once again learns that people occasionally skip out on these dead-end jobs because they’re dead. Of course, she has to solve the crime in order to keep the police, her ex, and the real criminals from finding out who she is. By now, she’s gotten really good at that. Except this time, the ex has finally found her.

Brain candy awaits — buy this book to have on hand for the next time you need something light and insubstantial to read. You’ll likely enjoy it.

Now, since this blog is for animal lovers, I must talk about the various animals that appear in the book. There’s a parrot, Pete, who’s a regular character. Pete comes to no harm and is often amusing. Similarly, Helen has a 6-toed cat, Thumbs, who will live to see another day. And the dead maid’s cat goes without food for a couple of days, but that is rectified. However, she also misses her owner, which is briefly poignant. Anyway, this book is SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy.

Katherine Neville used to be a favorite of mine, and I wished she were more prolific. Her complicated tales of historical conspiracies played out in modern times are suspenseful and perfect for the thinking reader who likes a nice solid chunk of science, history, and mythology  woven into a book. However, The Fire is a disappointment. I would recommend anything Neville wrote previously, but I had a lot of issues with this book.

The Fire is a sequel of sorts to The Eight, which came out more than 20 years ago and which I loved. I also read The Magic Circle, which I plan to reread and review here. The Fire is the next generation’s take on The Eight, in which a chess set with mystical powers is found and its pieces scattered. Well, guess what? Someone is locating the pieces and the chess game is being played out by humans. The “good guys” have to get moving again, in other words.

And this is where Neville lost me. There was all this talk about danger to the protagonist, Alexandra, and whether she was the white queen or the black queen or whether there were multiple black queens and who else was what chess piece, etc., etc., etc. And yet with all the talk about danger, the threat remained vague. Who is out to get her? What is the threat? And how are they going to harm her? There was no palpable sense of near misses or anything more dangerous than bugged cell phones. It reminded me of why writers are told to show rather than tell. There was too little showing and too much telling in this book.

In fact, Alexandra’s story (there was a smaller, parallel historical story) has a characteristic of romance novels that I particularly dislike: no thought, feeling, or observation goes unreported. This book was thick with detail that added nothing. Like, I know what pancakes taste like, you don’t need to tell me twice, and I seriously doubt Alexandra’s uncle’s pancakes were “famous.” That’s just one tiny example of the kind of thing that bugged me. It was unnecessary detail that slowed things down and made Alexandra less interesting than she could have been. It made pacing a problem, whereas I remember Neville’s other books as moving fast. So I am not recommending this book. I was very disappointed. Just to see what others thought, I checked the reviews on Amazon, and no one seemed to love it. This saddens me, because I loved Neville’s previous books.

As for animals, not much happens. A secondary character has a dog, horses appear in the historical parts, there’s reference to a private zoo in the 1800s, there are a few observations of dogs and birds, and that’s it. So this book is SAFE for animal lovers.

Dan Brown doesn’t care if I think he’s a lousy writer. And I do think he’s a lousy writer. I’m not alone. This article from the London Telegraph shows why, by dissecting 20 of Dan Brown’s worst sentences. And if anyone figures out what on earth Brown meant by “her precarious body,” please let me know! While you ponder that mystery, you can also play with Slate’s Dan Brown Sequel Generator. Plug in Major League Baseball for an especially good laugh.

If that depressed you, try visiting The Manolo’s Shoe Blog for something that will make you smile.

Finally, you can never have too many cats. Or too much bacon.

One of the first things I did when sitting down to write this review was to visit Amazon.com and see if Crusie and Mayer have another book in the works. Great news: they do, to be issued next year! Now, do you really have to ask if I liked this one, their second effort together?

I’ve already reviewed their first collaboration, Don’t Look Down, which I really liked. But that book felt to me like they were trading chapters or segments of chapters instead of writing the book together. Agnes and the Hitman, on the other hand, reads like it was written by two people sitting side-by-side at the same computer. On her own, Crusie writes highly irreverent and hysterically funny romance novels with a mystery or problem-solving element that keeps slamming the two protagonists together in spite of themselves. Bob Mayer writes thrillers and adventure novels. And together, they are an inspired partnership in which Mayer’s fast pacing and aura of imminent danger and pacing adds urgency and heat to Crusie’s hilarious, passionate, and initially reluctant lovers.

So, what’s this book about, anyway? Agnes Crandall is a struggling chef and caterer who has staked her entire reputation and net worth on pulling off a wedding that the mother-of-the-bride seems intent on sabotaging. Enter the Mafia-equivalents and Shane, the hitman. While trying to sort the various heroes and villains from among her friends, acquaintances, and business associates, Agnes falls for Shane, Shane falls for Agnes, an alleged $5 million fortune may or may not be in the basement, the wedding is imperiled, a bridge gives out, and someone tries to kidnap Agnes’s dog, Rhett. And that’s just the outline. Sample passage: “…being shot at by a strange man shortly after having angry sex, shortly after having tried to kill your fiance, shortly after having a dognapper point a gun at you was a bad night for anybody, even a woman as tough as Agnes.” Read this book — you’ll love it.

About Rhett: the purpose of this blog is to steer people away from books in which horrible things happen to animals and towards books in which animals are treated well. So, spoilerish though it may be to say so under normal circumstances, I must say that Rhett comes to no harm. He’s fine. The kidnapper says on page 6, “I wouldn’t kill no dog,” and he doesn’t. Rhett does have some interesting little adventures, but he mostly sleeps. In other words, he’s a dog. There are also flamingoes, which go bonkers when isolated from their kind. Flocking birds need to be in a flock. Rest assured that any flamingo isolation is temporary, however. There’s also an alligator, briefly. I am happily declaring this book SAFE for animal lovers. Enjoy!