We’ve had something of a trifecta this evening; our three older kids have all whoopsed their cookies at least once. Amazingly, it’s not from eating too much candy either. Mary’s not likely to have any trouble, but I’m concerned that Jane and I might soon make it five of a kind.

And here I was hoping for a quiet weekend….

Lileks’ previous book, The Gallery of Regrettable Food, nearly
caused me to disgrace myself in a public bookstore. When I heard that
Lileks’ next book (an examination of the most egregious interior design
of the 1970’s) was available, I made for the closest bookstore eftsoons
and right speedily.

And I brought it home, and read it, and laughed far too much, according to
Jane. So later on we sat down together and leafed through it, and we
both laughed too much.

Lileks’ basic shtick, if you’re not familiar with it, is to take
day-to-day images from past decades and ask, “What were they thinking?”
A lot of fun comes in the way he answers that question. You can see it
at work on his website; dig down
until you find the Gallery of Regrettable Food pages for a sample.

Anyway, he’s in fine form here, and I’d honestly like to quote large
swaths of the text to you. It wouldn’t be fair to do that, though, so
I’ll settle for descriptions of three living rooms:

If you had a persistent rash, this would be a good room;
you’d look right at home.

Said of a room where the couch, the wallpaper, and the
drapes all have the same extremely busy pattern: Surrounded and
outgunned, the lamp and the pillow held out as long as they could.

Said of a room where everything was done in
Bright Primary Colors: This room was designed for a blind blues
singer, so that he could hear the furniture.

I’ll probably be giving away at least one copy of this book sometime in
December.

Our new daughter is getting bigger and more mobile and cuter and more interesting, and consequently is becoming more of threat to our older girl, who has begun engaging in a variety of interesting behaviors designed to get her equal time with Mommy and Daddy. The solution to that, of course, is to punish said behaviors–and give her a little extra TLC at other times.

So tonight I took Anne out on a date. We went to Carls, Jr., where she didn’t eat much of her food because she was too excited, and then we went to a local bookstore, where I got her a pink book with princesses in it. Four princesses, to be exact, each with her own wardrobe, color scheme, and accessories, and just enough of a plot to justify examining each of them in detail. Oddly, none of the princesses were named “Barbie”.

When my two boys were this age we came home with books like Diggers and Dumptrucks. I looked for Slippers and Shoes, but Dorling-Kindersley doesn’t publish anything like that. Pity.

I came home with a few gems for myself, too: James Lilek’s new book, Interior Desecrations, the second volume in the Complete Peanuts series, and two more of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels, of which more anon. I’ll give you a bit of preview, though: Lileks rocks.

It was just three-and-a-half years ago that I first made the acquaintance
of Marcus Didius Falco, informer-for-hire and occasional agent for
Emperor Vespasian. And you know how it is when you discover a new
author–you start looking for excuses to visit every bookstore in town
in hopes that they’ll have some volume you’ve not yet devoured.
By October of 2001 I’d read all eleven of the Falco books then available
(you can find the reviews on our Lindsey Davis page). And
then, sadly, I sat down to wait until the next book was published.

And here we are, precisely three years later, and finally, at long last,
amazingly, I have a new Marcus Didius Falco book to review. What
happened? Did Lindsey Davis take a sabbatical? Was she in a horrible
accident? Did I simply grow tired of good old Marcus? In fact, the
answer is “None of the above.”

The plain and simple truth is, the publisher did me wrong. Yes, it’s
entirely the fault of Mysterious Press that the Foothills have been
Falco-less for so long.

You know how it is when you walk into a bookstore and discover that
there’s a new book by a favorite author and you get excited and
then you realize that it’s a trade paperback and all the ones you’ve
bought to date have been mass-market paperbacks and you really don’t
want to spend the extra money just to get a trade paperback that won’t
fit on the shelf with the others and so you decide to wait until the
mass-marker edition comes out? And so you put the trade paperback down
and try to erase it from your mind so that you won’t pine unduly in the
meantime.

You know how that is? Sure, you do. It’s probably happened to you
a dozen or more times.

But what if the book in question is never published as a mass-market
paperback? What happens if the wily publisher discovers that Marco Didius
Falco sells just as well–or better!–in trade format, and just goes on
publishing new books in the series every so often, and only ever in trade
format? And then hides them away with the hardcovers so that (not being
one to buy murder mysteries in hardcover) you never see them again after
their initial release?

What happens is you go for three years without reading any of them, that’s
what happens. Until one day you stumble upon them, lurking shamelessly
in plain site with the hardcovers. And then you have to catch up.

That’s what happens. And it’s all the publishers fault.

(But what about the book, you ask? Oh, the book was great. I read it on
the way home from New Orleans, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Vespasian
sends Falco to Britain to see why a public building project is overrunning
its budget. And for reasons too complex to go into here, he’s
accompanied by his wife Helena, his sister Maia, his two daughters, their
ineffectual and snooty nursemaid, and Helena’s two brothers-in-law. A
foul time is had by all, especially by the older brother and the snooty
nursemaid, the murderer is caught, and all ends happily. More or less.)

So Jane and I went out on a date, as we sometimes do, and we went to a
bookstore as we usually do on a date, and we found a new Discworld novel
as we all too seldom do, and Jane got to drive home so I could start
reading it to her, as we invariably do when we find a new Discworld novel
at the bookstore whilst on a date.

As long time readers know, the city of Ankh-Morpork is ruled by the
Patrician, a (reasonably) benevolent despot named Lord Vetinari.
Lord Vetinari is a practical man; he’s willing to adopt unusual methods
to keep his city working smoothly. Early in his tenure, for example,
there was a terrible problem with thievery in Ankh-Morpork; Vetinari
retaliated by giving the previously shadowy Thieve’s Guild equal standing
with the other craft guilds–and then establishing an official schedule
of rates and fees. Pay your Thieve’s Guild fee regularly, and the
Thieve’s Guild will ensure that you remain untroubled by burglars while at
home or by thieves while out and about. They’d better, or the Patrician
will have words for them. Of course, the new scheme led to the near
destruction of Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch, a situation that has required
a considerable amount of the Patrician’s time (and many of Pratchett’s
books) to put right.

In this book, Vetinari turns his attention to the telecommunications
industry, as it were. The Discworld’s most recent technological
development is the “klacks”, a kind of telegraph system based on optical
semaphores and line-of-sight relays by operators sitting in klacks
towers. In recent books it has even been possible to send klacks messages
all the way across the continent to the distant city of Genua, some
three-thousand miles away, via the towers of the Grand Trunk.

But the klacks is a newcomer to Ankh-Morpork; long before the waving
flags and flashing lights spread across the land there was the
Penny Post and the Ankh-Morpork Post Office. But the Post Office has
fallen on hard times; indeed, it’s been decades since the last mail
delivery. It’s time for that to change, decides Vetinari; it only
remains to find the right man to take on the job.

Enter the unfortunately named Moist von Lipwig. Moist is a con-man, and
a skillful one; it’s a sign of the improved status of the City Watch that
they were able to catch him at all–well, that and the sharp nose of
Lance-Constable Angua. But caught he has been, and Vetinari feels that a
fast-talking con-man is just what the Post Office needs to get back on its
feet. If Lipwig doesn’t want to take the job, of course, there’s always
the scaffold…and should he take the job and then decide to leave town
quietly, there’s always his “bodyguard,” a golem named Mr. Pipe, to fetch
him back.

Meanwhile, there’s something odd going on with the Grand Trunk. A new
company has taken it over, and suddenly it’s become much less reliable.
Line men having been dying with distressing regularity. And they say the
dead men’s names circulate forever in the overhead.

The book isn’t perfect; there’s at least one thread I wish Pratchett had
tied off neatly, and at one point there’s a catastrophe that works out a
little too conveniently for Mr. Lipwig. But on the whole, I’d say it
ranks up there with Pratchett’s best, and it’s definitely less serious
and more funny than the previous two Discworld novels,
Monstrous Regiment and Night Watch. So go read it.

This is a very odd book my sister gave me for my birthday, and as it’s
the first in a series I can see I’m going to have to find the sequels.

It’s sort of a murder mystery, and sort of a science fiction novel,
and sort of a thriller, and sort of a literary fantasy. It takes
place in an alternate universe where Literature is more highly
prized than in our own, a world where criminal fiends might reasonably
kidnap the original manuscript of, say, Charles Dickens’
Martin Chuzzlewit and hold it for ransom–and threaten
to kill the title character if their demands are not met.

Literary detective Thursday Next is detailed to find the Chuzzlewit
manuscript, and before she knows what’s what she’s entangled in
a web of intrigue surrounding general all-around-bad-guy
Acheron Hades, arch-criminal, seducer of college girls, and Thursday’s
one-time literature professor (she turned him down).

There’s a lot of high literary foolishness in this book, and a lot of
plain old ordinary foolishness as well, and I have to thank my sister
because it was a great way to be “unavoidably detained” for a few hours.
And I have to apologize to Craig Clarke, as he reviewed it for
Ex Libris Reviews
just last
February, and I didn’t go looking for it.

But I shall certainly go looking for its sequel,
Lost in a Good Book.

This interview with Neal Stephenson is worth reading even if you’re not a science fiction fan, if only for Stephenson’s take on the deep divide between genre and literary fiction (see question #2). Me, I’ll take Beowulf over Dante most days of the week.

I’m a fan of Lovesey’s Peter Diamond series, as is Deb English; but I’ve
recently discovered that Lovesey has also written a series
of mysteries set in Victorian England and involving a police sergeant
(later inspector) named Cribb. They are long out of print, at least here
in the United States, and I’d never seen any until a recent conference
brought me to New Orleans. The French Quarter has six or seven used book
shops, and I visited all but one of them (occult and new age stuff, not
my thing). And in those six or seven shops I located four of the Cribb
novels, of which this is the first.

The book’s a competently written mystery; had I been in the mood for a
mystery and picked it up at random, I’d not have been disappointed. But
Cribb isn’t particularly interesting, and Lovesey shows little of the
flair I’ve come to expect from his later books. (Great word, flair–I’m
not at all sure what it means in this context, except that Lovesey’s writing
has improved in the decades since 1970.)

The setting, on the other hand, is fascinating. It seems that footraces
of various kinds were popular in mid-Victorian England, and one kind in
particular–the Six-Day Go-As-You-Like, also known, gruesomely, as the
Six-Day Wobble. The rules are simple: the racers have six days to walk
or run as far as they can. That’s six contiguous 24-hour periods–there
are no mandated breaks. You can take a rest whenever you like, for as
long as you like, you can eat whatever you like (provided you have
someone to bring it to you), insecure in the knowledge that while you are
resting or eating that your competitors might still be wobbling along.

Six-Day Wobbles were usually held on the open road; this book concerns
a race held on a track in London’s Agricultural Hall. There are two
favorites, experienced “pedestrians” both, competing against each other
on an inner track, and a number of unproven riff-raff competing on the
outer track, and things look good for the race’s promoter until one of
the favorites collapses on the second day. Enter Sergeant Cribb and his
dogsbody Constable Thackery.

Bottom-line: not bad, and I’m quite curious to see if Cribb develops into
a more memorable character.

This is the kind of book you read while wolfing down a pound of Oreos
followed by a pint of Haagen-Daz ice cream. It’s trash, pure and simple.

Cornwell writes a series of action thrillers based on Kay Scarpetta, a
forensic expert who at one time was the head of Virginia’s state coroners
office. She is highly gifted at her profession, incredibly intelligent and
personally attractive. Her sidekick, a detective named Marino, is also
highly gifted at his profession but is blue collar in his outlook, gross
personally and lacks the finesse that distinguishes Scarpetta. A perfect
foil. She also has an incredibly smart niece, Lucy, who at one time worked
for the CIA as a computer expert, flies helicopters and is now running a
private investigation agency. Kay had a lover, a profiler for the FBI named
Wesley Benton, but he was killed off in a gruesome scene some books back,
leaving Kay heartbroken and emotionally drained. She has left the coroner’s
office after a political fiasco and is now running her own private forensic
consulting agency while trying to put her life back together in the wake of
her lover’s death.

And one of the criminals she’s caught in the past, a psychopath with some
weird physical anomaly that makes him have body hair all over and has caused
facial deformities giving him the name Wolfman, is sitting on death row.
He’s the unloved son in a worldwide mafia type organization based in France
and he’s written Scarpetta offering to come clean on his family if she will
visit him in prison, and administer the drugs at his death sentence.

That’s the set up of the book. The action goes further, bringing (spoiler
here if you plan on reading it) Wesley back from the dead, having Lucy
commit a cold blooded murder described in technicolor detail and a whole
series of grisly murders that Kay has to solve fast to save the next victim,
who just might be herself.

As I said, trash pure and simple. And I am somewhat abashedly waiting for
the next one to come out in paperback.

These are the fourth and fifth books in the Mageworlds series, and I’m
reviewing them as a pair because in an odd way they go together.

The initial three books in the series tell the story of the Second
Magewar from the viewpoint of Beka Rosselin-Metadi, star-pilot and
Domina-in-waiting of the lost planet of Entibor.
The Gathering Flame takes place a generation earlier, in
the opening days of the First Magewar. As the book begins, the known
galaxy is divided into two regions: the Civilized Worlds, and the
Mageworlds. The Mages have begun to raid the planets of the Civilized
Worlds, which remain woefully disunited in the face of the threat.
And so Perada Rosselin, the Domina of Entibor, travels to the frontier
world of Innish-Kyl to seek a leader with a proven capability to unite
disparate forces to take the war to the Mages–privateer captain Jos
Metadi.

The book goes on to relate Perada’s and Jos’s efforts to unite the
Civilized Worlds, and ends with the destruction of Entibor by the Mages.
(That’s not a spoiler, by the way…this is a prequel, after all, and
you’ll notice that Beka is the Domina-in-waiting of Lost
Entibor.) On the way, we also see a number of scenes from their
respective childhoods.

The Long Hunt, by contrast, takes place a generation
after the Second Magewar, and concerns a number of adventures
had by Beka’s son Jens and his cousin Faral. The events of this book
seem oddly detached from those of the earlier book–but in fact they
are not. And what ties them together is the ghostly presence of one
Errec Ransome, star-pilot, adept, hero of the First Magewar, the
Breaker of Circles.

Ransome worked as a star-pilot as a young man, until his talent
manifested and he became an Adept on the planet Ilarna. So great
were his powers that he was sent to the master guildhouse on
Galcen for training. And shortly after his return to Ilarna, the
planet was attacked by the Mages. The other Adepts in his guildhouse
were slain; young Errec was taken captive.

Both Mages and Adepts can sense the currents of power and probability
that flow through the universe, but they have entirely different
philosophies and goals. Adepts do not manipulate the currents of
power, but try to ride them instead. Mages regard power as a garden
to be tended and brought into pleasing order. Not surprisingly,
they don’t get along.

Errec manages to escape, at great cost to himself, and makes his way
back to the Civilized Worlds, where he falls in with Jos Metadi.
Metadi wants to hunt Mages; Errec is happy to help Jos find them.
And therein hangs a tale. One can argue, in fact, that although
he’s rarely on stage all of the Mageworlds books to date are mostly
about Errec Ransome.

I can’t say more without spoiling things; suffice it to say that I
enjoyed both of these books immensely.