February 2007 50 Books

Category: 50 Books

 

12. The Guardian by Dee Henderson
Look, every one loves a good series, right? If we didn’t we wouldn’t watch so much damn television. This is part two of the O’Malley series. In this epitomb we get Marcus’s story, but we also get snippets of the other family memebers too. It’s sweet and happy and I’m terrified that Jennifer is going to bite it in the next book.

Marcus O’Malley is a U.S. Marshal and he has to protect people. He ends up protecting a lady named Shari. They end up falling in love. I know. The love story is fairly trite compared to the peripheral story going on with Jennifer and the spine cancer. I actually had tears in my eyes during some of the Jennifer parts. She’s not dead yet, right? But the parts where she’s still trying to plan her wedding? YOU ARE KILLING ME. And I’m not sure if the author is going to make it a miraculous healing or if she’s going to die.

It’s seeming like the series is all taking place within the same year. Like this one picked up a week or two later from the first one, The Negotiator. And like that one, it’s not preachy. Maybe a bit hokey, but not preachy.

11. Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
Ah, thank God for something with some substance, huh?
This book is fantastic and impossible for me to describe as I’m just not smart enough. It reminded me of Jorges Borges’s work and how he uses fiction (as in books) within his fiction. I love that stuff.

Every sentence this guy writes is amazing. Like he takes sentences and grinds them with on grinding wheel and shapes them into beautiful things that you want to look at.

The story is like metahpor, or maybe I should be using the word metaphysical? it’s just meta. totally meta. I’ve not read much of Mr. Auster’s work, just a couple of short stories and The Brooklyn Follies. But while reading the novel you get that Mr. Blank is the author and that he’s kind of trapped by his characters. Anyway it’s amazing, and even the bit of story (the typescript) itself is engaging and you really want to know what happens in that story too.

I thought that the authors’ names were clever in that Fanshawe was also the name of the first book that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, and that John Trause, the name of the other author in the book was the novelist in Oracle Night and that Trause is an anagram for Auster.
Clever, beit good or bad, i enjoy it.

10. The Negotiator by Dee Henderson
I thought I should start reading some of that christian fiction that has become so very popular lately. And since lots of old ladies come in the library all the time asking, “You know of any good books?” and since I can’t reply with, “Yes, you should try Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It’ll change your life.” I figure I should read some of that happy, positive christian fiction and hope for the best. Because that and Nora Roberts is all the southern biddies read. Oh, and Fern Michaels.

I have the same trepidation of reading christian fiction as I do the chick lit. (Why does chick lit have it’s own name? why can’t girls write books and just have them called “fiction” like when guys write books? and why do they all have clever titles but dumb covers with pants and shoes and purses on them? Fuck you, the namers of chick lit.)

I want to be open and positive about it all, “Yay! I’m glad there are so many books to read!” But I can’t help myself to be all jaded and thinking, “Great. Fiction for Christians. What the hell does that even mean? Are the characters Christian? Are the stories preachy? Is there any sexxing?”

So anyway, The Negotiator is part one in the O’Malley series. The O’Malleys are a family of seven orphans who grew up together in a group home and decided to take the same last name. Now they are all grown up and one of them is a doctor and one is a forensic pathologist (as they are) and one is a psychologist and one is a fireman and one is a paramedic and one is a U.S. Marshall and one is a…
negotiator.

So Kate O’Malley is a negotiator. And she gets sent in to talk to a guy who’s at a bank, and he’s going to blow up the bank and some hostages. One of the people trapped in the bank is an FBI guy named David. David is amazed by Kate’s ability to be so calm and awesome and how she saves the day being calm and awesome. David and Kate become friends and they want to date each other but Kate is too badass and she “doesn’t date cops” (as they don’t) and he can’t date her because…she’s not a Christian.

Sigh.

And it was here at this point that I wanted to get real pissy and be all, “Way to be all loving and such, fella.” But then I got to thinking about it and in all honesty I’m not sure I would date someone seriously if they weren’t Christian. I’m not sure what to make of that, really. So I’m giving the author a break on that one.

Anyway lots of drama in the form of mystery solving and family cancer and such and they figure it out and save the day and Kate eventually believes in Jesus and they finally date and you get the feeling that they’ll get married within the next year.

Look, it’s fiction okay? I never said literature.

Anyway, it was a pretty good story and while there are a lot of characters in it they weren’t confusing (like in the Grafton novels) and it wasn’t preachy like I thought it would be. So I’m giving it 3 Cansecos for being pleasantly readable and surprisingly unpreachy.

HOWEVER, Ms. Henderson, throughout the book Kate and David are enamoured with each others’ accents (hers is southern and his is british) and yet NEITHER ONE OF THEM says anything even remotely southern or british. There’s no dialectic spellings or words or anything. You should’ve left the accent thing out because it added nothing to the story and was actually kind of disappointing. I blame your editor mostly.


9. D is For Deadbeat
Deadbeat? Really? Because I think I could come up with like, a dozen better D words for a murder mystery title.

So in this one Kinsey gets ripped off by a dude who ends up dead. So she then solves the mystery for the dead dude’s daughter and it turns out that the killer is one of the 742 characters in the book.

Meanwhile she finally does it with Jonah!

But to me that kinda sucked because even though his wife is a conniving tit wank, she’s still his wife. It’s HIS problem that he TOOK HER BACK even thought WE ALL KNEW that she was going to be a HUGE TIT WANK and that he would be SO MUCH BETTER OFF if he had just divorced her in the first place so he could be with Kinsey.

But no, he tried to reconcile for the sake of the kids. Which, while noble and probably worth some adult points, never works and now he’s lost any acrued adult points he may have had. Because you know that somehow the tit wank is going to find out about it. THEN she’ll divorce him and take the kids AND all his money.

8. C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton
More like C is For Can You Believe I Read the Third One?
This one was better than the second one because it had a really neat character in it…whom she kills off, but still, a pretty good character. Lessee, Kinsey helps a rich kid who was in a bad accident and was all broken up and had some amnesia figure out who was trying to kill him. Only, she solves the mystery too late and the kid gets killed anyway. Still, there is justice.

I really like how the books flow into each other. In fact, the fourth book kinda starts in the third book, but not really. I like continuity like that, I wish more shows and series-es would do that.

I’m wondering though, if Kinsey gets shot/beat up/drugged and beat up/whatever at the end of every book? If so, you’d think she’d start to pack some heat again. Pattern, is all’s I’m sayin’.

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