All The Books!

This week has been interesting to say the least. The air outside needs to be taken in with a straw, and the air inside my office has to be taken with many grains of salt. That leaves only the air in my apartment which smells like weed thanks to my neighbors. All of this is to say I have been sweaty and annoyed most of the time.

This is actually another one if my favorites in the series because it is different in another way.

The last one had a beloved victim who turned out to be alive, this one has a victim where everyone in the village shows up to his funeral just to make sure he's dead!

When the Foregate priest passed and Abbott Radulfus, on his way back from another council involving the civil war, and brings back a priest who was previously a clerk to the bishop to take care of the parish.

The problem is that as good as Father Ailnoth was with clerk duties he is awful with people. He's mean, he hits the kids, refuses to do basic things for his parishioners, in favor of keeping rules and for the benefit of his own soul.

He came with his own housekeeper and her nephew , he is no more warm feelings for them than he does anyone else.

His housekeeper's nephew starts working with Cadfael and Cadfeal, while not being overly fond of the way the new priest does things, is also starting to suspect that there is something more to the young man than meets the eye. This gets put on the background when Father Ailnoth comes up dead in the mill pond.

Considering that the priest had pissed off the whole Foregate, there is no shortage of people with motive, but Cadfael and Hugh Barrigar have to narrow it down.

Book is a lot of fun simply because there is a bit of a bait and switch. The victim in this case has no love loss between him and practically anyone he meets, but nothing is what it seems and the way it unfolds is really satisfying.

I have read this book many times, it is one of my comfort books.

What happens when a comedian decides to write a novel, but the internet gets in the way?

Well, if the comedian is Dave Gorman and you add a bottle of tequila, you get a story that no novelist could think up.

Back in the earlier days of Google it was possible to have a search turn up just one result if you typed a term that only appeared in one page of the entire internet. People being people, a game was invented.

If you could get google to return one result with two words recognized by doctionary.com the that website is, and you have found a Googlewack.

Dave discovered this game while trying to write a novel and leave his tendency for silly adventures behind him (such as traveling the globe trying to win a challenge his roommate levered to meet 52 other people named Dave Gorman).

An Australian man named Stevo emailed him to inform him that his website contained a Googlewack.

Well, that started a remarkable series of events that lead to accidentally accepting another challenge from another friend:

If Dave himself found no more Googlewacks but if every Googlewack he meets finds him two more Googlewacks, he couldn't meet ten Googlewacks in an uninterrupted chain before his next birthday.

One of the things I love about Gorman's work is that it is layered. The one man show of The Googlewack Adventure is hilarious, and so is the book, but the book goes into more detail including parts that were less than fun.

I once read somewhere that Gorman's style is comedy mixed with Anthropology, because the humor comes from interacting with people who willing to meet with someone and do something objectively silly, Gorman's willingness to see where the project takes him. Sometimes where it takes him is frustrating, or scary or leaves him in self doubt.

The funny is important, but the story is paramount.

I love all of the goofy situations Gorman gets himself into, such as finding himself trying to explain the concept of Googlewacking to an 80 year old creation scientist. Or getting into an argument with a bouncer in Austin, Texas over his ID.

I cannot think of a way to talk about this one without spoilers, so if you want to read this, stop now!

This is another one recommended to me by my chaplains at work. They both described it as a story that messes with your mind.

Jason Dessen is a science professor at a Chicago college, he is married to an artist named Daniela, they have a 15 year old son named Charlie.

They are happy, though both husband and wife wonder what could have been. Jason was a rising star in the scientific field before marrying Daniela, and she was an up in coming artist.

One night, after learning that an old college roommate recived prize for his work, Daniela encourages Jason to go talk to him.

The short drink turns into a harrowing journey when, on his way home, Jason is jumped, held hostage and drugged by a man who is very interested in his life.

When Jason wakes up, he is in a reality where he had never gotten married, never had Charlie. In this world he had pursued his research. Research that evidently proved the existence of the multiverse and allowed travel between different branches of it.

The man who mugged Jason is him from this alternate reality. The book calls him Jason2. Jason2 has decided he wants the life he didn't have, and sends that reality's Jason back to live the life of a successful scientist.

Okay, here's the thing. This book isn't *terrible*. The story is interesting. At the core it is just Jason wanting to get back to his family. He has to travel through countless alternative Chicago's to do it. Some are utopian, in some, his counterpart there never met his wife, in others they met and the marriage took a different path. It is all very "What if I had picked a different major/moved to another city/gotten drinks with that that person? How would my life be different?" Every decision makes a different universe.

The way Jason travels between these realities is in what the Jason2 created, the characters just call it The Box though most of the book.

It is literally a metal box where someone steps into it, takes a drug that turns off their conscious mind, and then it moves the person through realities until the drug wears off and then the box stops and they open the door to a new branch of the universe.

This is based off the idea of Schrödinger's cat. That until one looks in a box with a cat and poison, and a radioactive atom in it and observes the cat either being alive or dead, theoretically the cat is both alive and dead.

I don't understand quantum physics enough to say whether or not the science in this book is sound, but I do have some questions.

Since the observer influences reality, Jason2, with help from his old college roommate, develops a drug that turns off the conscious mind, therefore removing the observation from the equation and making the travel possible.

Okay. 1. The drug turns off the conscious mind, but while on the drug Jason is still able to talk, make judgements, and most importantly, remember what happened after the drug wears off. So how is that possible?

2. What does this mean for someone who is asleep? Knocked out? In a coma? Blackout drunk? Are these people at risk of accidentally traveling to another reality? Is this what happened to that FEMA guy? Are Waffle House restaurants quantum gates?

3. A little under halfway through the book Jason discovers that what the person in The Box is thinking, just before it stops moving, influences the universe they end up in. For example, he was traveling with a woman from Jason2's reality and just before The Box stopped she mentioned being stuck in whiteout conditions. When the box stops, they are spit into a world where snow has buried everything and the only shelter they can find is in a house with a family of four that had starved to death.

Okay, so couple things... if the conscious mind is what enables the observer to influence reality, and these characters have their conscious mind turned off, how are they influencing the reality they stop in? (It is stated later that they are unconsciously influencing it which makes no sese to me at all because if that is the case then doesn't that mean that this whole thing can't work at all because the unconscious mind is observing and influencing? I can't even get into that). Even if you make the argument that the drug is wearing off and so cousiousness is slowly coming back and be considered the observer again, isn't the concept that the observer *influences* reality, not *makes* reality?

This implies that it isn't decisions that make universes, it is thoughts. It implies that every dream you have that you were kinda sorta aware of, becomes a branch of the multiverse.

If that is the case, then I would like to visit the reality where my toaster sang Queen songs. I wanna see if the water heater can recite Shakespeare.

4. What counts as an observer? This book implies that it has to be a human mind. Otherwise, the cat in the box would be the observer and the reality would be solidified. Okay, so, does that mean everything before the human ancestors evolved, was kept in this nebulous state? When did reality stabilize? With austropithicus? Homo Habulis? Neanderthals? When is the consciousness conscious enough?

5. How the fuck does the universe know when your brain is online anyway? Is it uniquely tuned to this box with it's massive magnetic field?

Yeah, okay, maybe.

But that is an awful lot of energy focused in one place.

I don't care that the box is supposed to be bomb proof and all that. You got a box that can slide through gaps in reality by focusing the universe 's energy on a metal box, and something somewhere is either getting sucked into a void or exploding, right?

Am I nitpicking? Yeah, probably, because the why of the science isn't really the point.

The point is to think about all the decisions in a life and how they culminate, and it is about Jason realizing that what he had was what he wanted, all along.

And that's cool, you are rooting for Jason admittedly, I did ask myself why a few times and I came ro the conclusion it was because he was telling the story, and the reader didnt have anyone else to root for.

The writing isn't awful, but it is inconsistent. The book seems to forget things.

As he is going through all of these worlds he is getting increasingly desperate because he has only managed to steal so may doses of the drug he needs to make the box work. He considers, more than once, when finding a world where things are close enough to his own life, killing the Jason native to that reality and replacing him.

Except that as the story goes on, Jason is getting thinner and dirtier because he has limited money for food and shelter. See, the box travels through realities, not time, so as he is trying to get home, months have passed since Jason2 put all this in motion.

So he wants to take over this other Jason's life, looking very different from the person he is trying to replace. And how is that supposed to work?

That question came up practically when he finally gets back to his own reality. He is able to get his wife to come to him, and she doesn't notice that he seems noticeably thinner than he was when he left the house that morning.

I don't want to go into the end, because things get slightly goofy from my perspective. I will say that I didn't hate reading it but it was far from the "mind-fuck" that my coworkers described.

I mean, this is essentially a time travel story, except that the travel is being done sideways instead of backwards and forwards. It hits the same beats:

Every action has consequences

Every discision can be a turning point

The main character's goal is to get home.

I think the biggest issue here is that I grew up on stuff that is in the narrative neighborhood.

Quantum Leap

Sliders

Back to the Future

Some Simpsons episodes

Futurama

Even StarGate SG1 and SeaQuest played in the area of "what if things had evolved differently?"

And I read Choose Your Own Adventure books like mad when I was in grade school. Decisions taking you on different paths is the whole point of those books.

Okay, this is a bit of a cheat, but I have had one of those weeks where I have several books going but between work, jury duty, and fireworks, I haven't been able to finish any of them.

This is annoying because when you consider that all I did for jury duty was sit in a room and wait, I should have been able to read. But the florescent lights and the constent announcements actually made it impossible.

Fireworks make sleep impossible.

And work is just impossible.

So what I did finish was the first story in this collection, and I am going to write an entry about it because it manages build a world, deliver memorable characters, and a satisfying ending in fifteen pages. I've read stories with over four hundred pages that can't do that.

This story is, first and foremost, really fun.

Ron Swimble is a magician of the slight of the top hat and slight of hand variety. He performs at birthday parties, with his daughter Lucy and a parrot as helpers. He also annoyed a local witch and now can't touch anything without it vanishing or turning into something else. This, of course, freaks him out, and is wildly inconvenient. He, Lucy, and the parrot must figure out how to convince the witch to take the curse off of him.

I enjoyed this so much, because it does one of my favorite things in general that Pratchett does so well. Mixing magic with the mundane. It is all over Discworld, of course. Vimes works with dwarves, trolls and werewolves, but he still has to deal with not dealing with paperwork. Death is the personification of the border between life and after, but he still gets pulled into a conversation with a kid about socks. And Ron has found himself able to do real magic, but he still needs to figure out how to pay for a cab when his wallet turns into a cheese sandwich.

The story ends a little abruptly, but it isn't all that surprising when you consider it is for younger readers, and it is structured to be a very quick tale. But even as short as it is, it still has a handful of footnotes, which I love just because.

This is my favorite of this series, because it is so different from the rest. It is more about people and callings and internal conflicts than it is about whodunit.

It all starts out with the civil war. Brothers from other Benedictine monasteries have been scattered. Two brothers find their way to the Abbey of St. Peter and Paul. One who took the name Humulis, was noted for valor during the crusades and came home wounded, and took the cowel. The other is a young brother, by the name of Fildelis who is mute ; he took vows around the same time as Humulis. The two became close and the younger brother became the one to care for the other's wound that would not heal.

When Cadfael meets the pair he knows that the older of the two is not long for this world, but does his best to help with the pain.

Meanwhile, Nicholas, man who served with Humulis comes to see him. It seems that before he was Humulis, he was Godfrid and was engaged to the five year old daughter of a land holder, with the idea that he would marry her when he served his ten years in the crusades. Ten years stretched into thirteen and when he came back he had decided to become a monk and so released the now 18 year old Julian from the engagement.

Nicholas was the one who delivered the news to Julian and her family, he was quite taken with the girl and even three years later, wants to court her, but he wants Humulis's permission first.

The brother gladly gives it, and off Nicholas goes, only to find that after having the engagement dissolved, Julian had decided to go to a convent. With all the upheaval in the area Nicholas wants to make sure that Julian is safe, and that is when everyone finds out that she never arrived at the convent and there are whispers that she was murdered.

Nicholas and Hugh Barrigar take up the task of solving the case, while Cadfael and Brother Fidelis care for the weakening Brother Humulis

This story is so cool, because nothing is what it seems, I am going to spoil it going forward so look out.

Humulis didn't just take vows because he found his calling, he took them because his wound left him unable to have children. He wanted to do right by the girl who was raised with the idea that her future was secure and predictable. So he ended the engagement so that she could find another husband, and have a family.

It is a kindness that is all the more important when we learn that from the time the five year old Julian was given the ring from her fiancé 's family her family reported that she was solidly enamored with the idea of being a wife, and even as she grew up, was content with the idea of following this exact path once Gottfrid came home.

It wasn't until the engagement was ended that she mentioned taking vows herself.

It isn't a huge surprise when we finally discover that Brother Fidelis is Julian. She was commited to being Godfrid's wife, and from there the plan was hatched to join the same monastery as a young man, born mute, and care for Humulis without his knowing who she really was.

This is not the only thing happening in this books and the odd side plot of an angry brother named Urian is instrumental in Fidelis 's true identity being discovered by Humulis, just before he passes, but I am more interested in how Julian's character is presented.

Most of the time, in these books the love story is such that the couple has to face long odds just to be together, and more than once it has been the goal to get out of one engagement to find one's true love.

This one is interesting because, to me, it shows an element of the culture that stories don't often deal with.

Sometimes people were fine, or even happy to just do what was done at the time.

Marriage wasn't always a love match, and in fact, was often simply a contract between families. It wasn't abnormal in this period to have children engaged with the idea of becoming a husband or a wife when they reached marriage age.

You have to think that at five years old Julian, who is described beloved by her family and a favorite of everyone in the household wasn't presented with the idea of being engaged as a scary thing. The little girl got a ring, and was told that when she grew up she was going to be married to this brave man who is going off to fight a holy war. From that time forward this girl knew what her life was going to be, and was happy with the idea. So when, after Godfrid ended the engagement, she was already commited to him, and saw no reason not to follow through.

She seemingly wasn't looking forward to marrying him to have a household, or to have children, she was wanting to be a companion, to care for him, basically, to love and be loved in return. And that is what happened. Humulis trusted and loved Fidelis, and even when he discovered that Fidelis was Julian the feelings didn't change.

I was going to read this after I finished all of Discworld, but I have run into a problem.

I kinda don't want to finish? As in I want to read the rest of the books, but then I'll be done meeting everyone and that will be sad.

I think every reader has had the experience of finishing a series and mourning that the story is over. For me, the idea of finishing Discworld feels less like finishing a story, and more like being made to move away from a town you love due to unforseen circumstances. No one's fault, but it just must be done.

All if this is to say, I am stalling on reading the last six books.

Anyway, this book is a lot of fun, a fly by summary of the Disc's witchcraft as told by Tiffany with commentary in the margins by all those who taught her, including Rob Anybody.

The voices of the characters in are spot on, I could imagine any of the margin comments being said by Granny Weatherwax or Nanny Ogg in any of the other books. Most of the book is told by Tiffany, and by the end I felt that you could hear the maturity she had gained through the series.

We also got a little bit from Witch apprentice Geoffrey, who I wish Sir Terry had had a chance to follow more.

The art is amazing and may or may not have given me a new tattoo idea.

Two days late, 40 hours a week in a place I hate makes me tired, who would have thought?

Anyway, this one was recommended to me by my office's other chaplain. If nothing else, my coworkers are pretty cool.

This story starts during the Veitnam War. A soldier named Casey comes into a hospital with massive trauma to his head and brain, and surely at death's door. However, as the staff watch, his injuries repair themselves.

The doctors isolate Casey and one waits at his bedside to ask him questions.

Casey, upon regaining cousiousness, reveals his story.

His name is Casca, and he is the Roman legionare that drove the spear into Jesus's side when he was on the cross. Jesus cursed him to live the life of a soldier until the Second Coming.

This book is weird and I am not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand it is an interesting concept, on the other ot is pretty much the sword and sorcery books that the first Rincewind books parodied.

Casca is essentially cursed to remain alive and fundamentally unchanged until Jesus's return. This doesn't mean he can't learn things and grow as a person, but it does mean that every time he gets close to bettering his lot in life, something comes along and fucks it up.

He is also not the deepest character even when he does learn some lessons. Much of this book is him getting continually enslaved and doing the work with "head empty, muscles big" being the sum of it, until after about 30 or 40 years he realizes something really bad could happen so he decides to fix it.

He worked in a mine for decades and then suddenly the thought floated to the top of his brain that, he can't die so if there was a cave in, that would be exceptionally bad for him. So, when a cave in actually threatened where he was working, he rescued the overseer and used him to clear his path to the surface.

Later, he was a gally slave on a ship, he did that for a long time, and then suddenly realized that if he was chained to an oar and the ship sank, that would also be bad. It happened but he managed to get free.

Because there isn't a lot of thinking happening in Casca's head, the book is very discription heavy. Sometimes it is just pages about the landscape, or the sounds of whatever environment he happens to be in. Other times it is of people or attitudes. The latter gives the whole book a bit of a grimy feel. Everyone and everything is blood, sweat, and dirt covered, very much in line with movies or shows about war where it isn't enough to have the actors act overheated and miserable, they have to slather everyone in Vaseline to make what you are seeing feel some how greasy and sticky at the same time.

The insides of people's heads are also grimy. Women are seen as property at best, only useful for sex at worst, throughout most of the book. There is not one person who is not opportunistic, blood thirsty, driven by violence, or spite. And that includes Jesus.

I should preface this with the fact that until I finished this book, I was not aware of the Wandering Jew story, about a man who mocked Jesus and was cursed to wander the world until the Second Coming.

When I started reading this and Jesus cursed Casca, this is how I read it:

Jesus told Casca that since he was content with what he was he would remain that until he and Jesus meet again.

Jesus says: "As I now go to my Father, you must one day come to Me."

So, my thought was: Ah! This is the classic double meaning! Casca interpreted as he has to live until he and the man on the cross physically meet again, but that isn't what was said! Casca's going to get to a point where he stops killing people for a minute, reflects, and accepts Jesus. It will obviously take a long time since we are starting in Vietnam, but eventually, he will get Saved, and drop dead.

Because, why would Jesus cursed someone? Why would he take revenge for something that helped him die? He chose to die, that's sort of the point of the New Testament. So obviously this is a lesson that only looks like a curse. Which makes sense, I mean he was teaching right up to the end, he converted one of the criminals being crucified next to him, after all.

Then I went to look up the rest of the series... 60 books... I looked around at the basics of the series...

Nope, I was thinking to hard about it. This dude who, at times has a mind that works like a hamster running on a wheel, is literally stuck until Revelations is carried out.

Okay then, shift in perspective, this is not a philosophical book, this is a way to look at history through Casca's eyes. This is like in Forrest Gump whe he met Elvis and JFK. Got it.

With that perspective shift, it was interesting enough to get me to finish the book and even get me fairly curious about the other books. What are some of the historical people and situations that Casca is going to run into?

But I will have to be in the mood and I will have to overlook the the racial stereotypes that I can't tell yet if they are meant to indicate time frames or if they are a part of the style.

A day late, know what makes writing difficult? Two days worth of insomnia.

I skipped Dead Man's Ransom because it dreadfully boring and only serves to get the Shariff out of the way so Hugh Barrigar could take over.

Anyway, The book opens with Father Abbott, Prior Robert and his Toady Jarome discussing whether or not to take very young children in as novices. It is something of a tradition in some families to give children barely weaned to the monastery.

The Abbott has misshivings about this as children that young can't make an informed choice to join the monastic life for themselves.

It is decided that the Abbey will no longer take these children.

The Abbott may have regretted making that call as the Abbey rejects the four year old postulant but accepts the teenager Meriet Aspley

Meriet is quickly nicknamed the " Devil's Novice" because of his next terrors and withdrawn mood both of which make the other novices very uncomfortable. After he attacks brother Jerome in a rage, he is sent to St. Giles hospice. He attacks Brother Jarome because he burned a keepsake the boy had, but let's be fair here, Jarome has been building to someone trying to kick his ass since he encouraged religious hysteria in a sociopath way back in the first book.

Cadfael suspects that there is something off about Meriet's devotion to the cowel, and it soon proves true when a couple of murders come about and the boy seems to be tangled up in the plots.

This is another one of these books that is just sort

of - there?

It might be because of the hospice setting, but it strongly reminds me of The Leper of St. Giles. Brother Mark works magic on troubled youngsters, and one thing that bothered me at the end if St. Giles, I felt like Joscelin Lucy really should have entered the Benedictine Brotherhood. There was just something about the tone that made me feel like, that was where the character wanted to go, but he had strayed away from what the plot needed so it didn't happen.

I felt a little like that in this book, though it would habe really thrown things into a mess had Meriet decided to do that.

Reading this, I felt like I was back in my first Anthropology class in college, which was the first time anything outside of a history channel documentary even hinted at a historical reading of the Bible.

My professor looked at a lot of stuff that the Bible was supposed to be against and put into historical and cultural context, and it was fascinating.

This book was recommended to me by one of our chaplains who has a wonderful and unorthodox approach to faith, which is honestly what you want for a hospice chap., in my opinion.

The author looks at a bunch of things that the Bible "says" and examines them linguisticly and in the context of the culture of the time. Looking at everything from slavery, abortion, and homosexuality to woman's rights, the form, and mindset God and the nature of Hell.

This book is fantastic, shining a light on circular logic, readings and translation choices that likely would have made no sense at all to the people who were contemporary to the text.

I love that the author acknowledges his bias up front, and makes no excuses for when the Bible doesn't agree with how he feels. And through all of it the absolute respect and affection he has for the text shines through. This is not a man arguing with, or trying to force the shape of this book. His passion is to understand it, learn from it. He doesn't feel that to have faith he needs to agree with everything nor does he seem to feel that trying for force the culture of the time from the text somehow negates any wisdom that the Bible has.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with analyzing a text while still believing in the value that it has. Now granted it is a hard balance to walk, but the author does it.

The first time I read this I found it boring - I’m not sure why.

The second time it caught my attention more.

Before the events of the story the Civil War claimed the life of a knight loyal to Empress Maude who saved a messenger of King Stephen's wife from a group of his fellow Maude loyalists.

It is once again time for the celebration of St. Winifred and the Abbey is preparing for the flood of pilgrims that come to honor their little Welsh saint.

The story mainly focuses on two particular travelers.

The first, Rhun - a teenage boy who was born with a bad leg and can only get around on crutches and with the help of his older sister and his aunt.

Cadfael takes him under his wing and helps him with his leg hoping to at least help the boy sleep without pain. Rhun is reluctant to ask for a miracle, for himself. Generally he is far more concerned with the impact that caring for him makes on his family.

The other pilgrim (Ciaran) is a young man who has vowed to make the journey to a holy site in Wales without shoes and with a heavy cross around his neck. Ciaran claims that Wales is his goal and that his intent is to die there in peace. It is assumed that he has some sort of fatal disease. This is reinforced by his friend Matthew who is at his side every minute, seemingly to make sure that Ciaran completes his journey.

Cadfael finds the pair to be odd, and can't put his finger on just what is off.

Along with the faithful, gatherings like the one the Abbey is preparing for attracts the unsavory element as well and when the ring given to Ciaran by the bishop to travel safely in the war torn country goes missing, Hugh Barrigar is already setting a net for a group of theives.

There is also a call out for a missing man, and Cadfael's son makes a short appearance.

More information comes slowly to light about Ciaran and Matthew and it isn't pretty.

Honestly, there really isn't anything wrong with this one, though it isn't the most riveting.

The biggest issue I think I have with it is that the focus is very fractured. You have the murder of the knight, you have Olivier making an appearance, you have the group of theives, you have Rhun's pilgrimage and Ciaran's journey.

And I find Ciaran and Matthew (especially Matthew) to be really irratating.

Rhun and his family are much more likable and how they get tangled up with Ciaran and Matthew feels forced.

I felt like there was a story hidden with Rhun, his sister, and his aunt and I wanted to know that rather than deal with everything else.

Okay, I had a free book on Thriftbooks so I ordered four of this series. For a series aimed at kids, they are very well written. Makes me wonder when quality started showing up in kid lit, or if maybe my local and school libraries in the 90's just sucked.

Anyway this one is the diary of Remember Patience Whipple. It opens with Mem on the Mayflower on her way from Holland to The New World. Mem, her parents and little sister are Puritans and heading for a life of religious freedom.

The voyage is not easy, and is full of sickness, conflict, and eventually death. When they finally reach land, things are really no easier. Mem faces loss and changes along with adjusting to the hardships of settling in a land new to the settlers.

The whole story is a lead uo to the first Thanksgiving.

Honestly this story lacks the deep character development that Standing in the Light had. For the most part, Mem does mature and grow, but other characters don't. In Standing, through Caty we saw development in her brother, in her Lenape family, in her parents. We don't see a lot of that through Mem's diary. What we do see that I think would be helpful in a classroom is the fact that it points out things I was not taught in school.

I was taught that all of the passengers of the Mayflower were Pilgrims, and that they came from England. I didn't learn until I found it myself that they came from Holland after leaving England, and that they were backed by merchants in England who expected a return on their investment.

The underlying message of teaching that all of those aboard were Puritans was that the country was founded on religious freedom. For some reason we were supposed to forget about Jamestown which was established to find gold, which suggests that the country was founded on the search for money.

This book points out that most of the people on the Mayflower were not Pilgroams, but people not of that faith looking for new beginnings.

I think this kind of context is important. I don't know about anyone else, but growing up in a small town that had 15 churches and one bookstore, and being one of the only kids who did not go to church, I noticed that when they spoke of religious freedom, and how it applied to every American I thought that it was strange that for something so baked into our culture, it really wasn't true from a social standpoint.

I was seen as weird for not going to church to the point that some kids simply refused to believe it because they were told that everyone had to go to church.

So the idea that a large portion of the Mayflower passengers came for non religious reasons was comforting to me when I learned it as a teenager.

Okay, going to preface this one with a couple of things.

1. I went into this book expecting not to like it much, but it has been everywhere for years and I was curious.

2. I am not in any way well versed enough in psychology or domestic violence to make comments on how the characters act in this story and will be sticking to how I feel about the writing

3. I have read more than once that the author romanticizes abuse, in general. I didn't get that from this book. Don't get me wrong, the book being billed as a romance is misleading in the extreme, but I don't see any romanticizing of abuse... minimizing, trivializing, yeah, but that's a different thing.

Now, all that being said:

Guys, what the fuck was this?

On the one hand, it feels like the author is trying to be earnest in her discussion of a very serious issue. On the other hand she is doing it with the most hackneyed characters and tropes. Which, to me, makes the issues seem like plot points, rather than serious commentary.

Let's start with the start, shall we?

Our main character Lily is up on the roof of an apartment building, sitting on the wide ledge thinking about thr funeral sge just went to, and about life and death in general.

Next a guy comes up on the roof and before seeing her, beats up on a deck chair before lighting a joint.

When the guy sees her he gets all tense and demands she get off the ledge because she could fall.

Couple of things so far. We find out that Lily isn't sitting on *her* roof, she has climbed to the top of an apartment building she found on Google earth

Um... okay, I have never attempted to climb a building I didn't live in, is this something that is done, or is this manic pixie dream girl logic at work?

Also? The response to a guy demanding she get off a ledge because it is making him twitchy is "I was just leaving." And then *leave* because dude who goes berserker on a lawn chair and then gets all intense at a stranger is not a guy who considers what he just did odd, or even socially out of place once he realizes another person is there. This is a guy who finds this *normal* and is ready to impose that normal on someone else.

Instead of leaving, Lily and Ryle have an exposition off. Each telling the other the highlights of their life story.

Lily: father just kicked it, was an asshole who beat her mother, disaster of a eulogy at the funeral. She once fell in love with a homeless guy, Wants to open a flower shop.

Ryle: neurosurgeon, doesn't do romance, does one night stands, wants social and financial success, wants to be the best doctor in his field. Tells a story of a dramatic case where two little boys were playing with a gun and the younger of the two accidentally shoots and kills his brother. Sister lives in the building, she is married to a millionaire. Oh and he flat out tells Lily he wants to fuck her. This is not me going blue for the sake of humor, he says those words.

Side note, Lily is shocked because she says you never think of doctors saying "fuck" so casually. This actually made me snort. Clearly, no one involved in this book has ever spent ten minutes in a medical environment when there are no clients around. I would lay bets that it is said more than "STAT".

Course "fuck"is usually said in frustration, while laughing, or just as verbal scenery. Not as a creepy proposition, so I can see how it sounded wrong to Lily.

The two talk, end up making out before he gets called back to work. Before he leaves he takes a picture of her.

So let's unpack this.

First, from the way Lily reacts to Ryle, the author is not trying to craft a serial killer. However, this just makes Lily seem monumentally stupid.

This is Bella Swan level of stupid

It is "dude does unhinged stuff, but... he's so CUTE!"

Whatever, this kind of brain dead is typical in romance books built on shortcuts.

However, it is also typical for the bad boy to actually end up being just a whiny tool that everyone thinks is profound.

Don't get me wrong, other genres have the "don't think too hard about this" tricks as well. This one just layered it on top of other things that annoy me.

Lily thinks or says that her father just died three or four times before we even get off the roof. What kind of short term memory loss does the book think we have?

The exposition vomit, gotta front load all the stuff into the first scene because we can't have character development get in the way of the detailed texting descriptions later.

Stories that I think are supposed to be set ups for dramatic reveals are not dramatic. They are visible from this rooftop. Hell, they are visible from space.

I knew from the second Ryle told the story about the kid dying, that Lily was going to be shocked to discover that it was Ryle that had accidentally killed his brother.

Also, this might be part of the unintentional "I have body parts in my basement " vibe that was built, but my first thought was the "I had this case at work..." story was likely something he trotted out to pick up girls. Didn't rope them in with handsome neurosurgeon, he would go for the pity bang.

When we finally leave the roof, we go to Lily's apartment, her roommate is very insensitive about the death of the father that Lily hated, which serves to remind us that he did, in fact, die.

Whew, that was close almost had some forward momentum there!

And then we have the weirdest framing device, that I have ever read. At least I can say I didn't see it coming.

We meet teenage Lily and the story of her first love, a homeless boy named Atlas, from her school, through a journal 15 year old Lily wrote... to Ellen DeGeneres.

Yep, when I think traumatized kid writing out her feelings to an imaginary confidant, I think Ellen. What? You don't? What are you? Normal?

I will admit that I almost stopped reading after this. The writing doesn't know what it wants to be. We have melodrama pulling against rom com beats, with the tone of serious themes. This is the reading equivalent of manic violins playing on a movie soundtrack.

I had to change perspective and I figured out how, by considering the characters' names.

Lily Blossom Bloom

Ryle Kincade

Atlas Corrigan

These are soap opera names.

Lily who loves flowers

Ryle who seems to have trouble with emotional regulation

Atlas who has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

These are soap characters

This means that the story isn't about them. It happens to them.

For this type of thing to work at all, the characters need to be believable as people who can do a quick personality change in a phone booth. They have to be flexible to the point of silly putty, and able to pick up whatever the plot presses into them.

This is why, (along with suspension of disbelief) you can buy that a soap character can be kidnapped multiple times, go to prison, end up possessed by a demon, and still be a practicing doctor. Honestly it takes some skill to write a character like that without them simply becoming the human equivalent of a loading screen. Soap writing isn't amazing writing, but it is comfortable with what it is.

Once I tried that lens, the story became easier to read, I only sprained my face a little rolling my eyes when, after buying a building to open her flower shop Lily has a woman who just happened to be walking by, who just happened to be a hobby interior designer, comes in and asks for a job.

Alyssa is character equivalent of a lock pick. The story put Lily into the role of business owner who has a dream, but no help to actually make it happen.

Enter Alyssa who not only can offer that help, but only works because she is bored, so Lily doesn't have to pay her! To add to the ridiculous amount of serendipity, I bet you can guess who her brother is!

Anyway Lily falls off a ladder, twists her ankle, so Ryle enters stage drunk.

Ryle, by the way exhibited extremely normal behavior in regards to Lily, like knocking on 29 doors to try and find her.

Yep, that's a thing she finds out.

The two eventually start dating.

One night, Lily runs into Atlas, her first love, but he's involved with someone.

Ryle and Lily get married in Vegas after 6 months together.

The soap lens stops being effective around the time things try to get serious. Things like domestic violence do show up in melodrama, but it is done with an exaggeration that makes sure it is never grounded in reality. This is not how this story feels to me

First came a hit.

Then came a push down the stairs.

Then came an attempted rape, a headbutt and six stitches in Lily's forehead.

In between the first and the second, there were apologies.

Between the second and the third, Ryle is set off by finding out about Atlas. Ryle also reveals his traumatic past.

After the third, Lily leaves and finds out that she is pregnant.

Much of this echos Lily's mother and father's relationship.

I get what the story is trying to do here, but while the characters can swing between convenient personalities, the tone is still pulling against itself.

It is all at once, a story about lost first loves, messy romantic relationships, childhood trauma, and domestic violence.

That is a lot to shove into one plot line with a bunch of characters who are not crafted in a way that you don't notice when they have decided to change who they are for a few pages.

For me, the writing is just too clunky, too forced to allow for me to believe that Lily would behave this way.

The writing doesn't allow me to believe that Ryle is emotionally stable enough to have these bouts of rage and be stable enough to be a *neurosurgeon*.

And Atlas? At best he's a martyr with a problem feeling inferior which would cause a whole different set of problems. At worse he's just a cardboard cutout "nice guy" which from a writing standpoint is just annoying.

Think about it, he promised he would come back for Lily. And he did, but what stopped him?

Saw her when she was in college with a guy and didn't even go over and say hi because she "looked happy". Dude, entered and exited her life in very dramatic ways and you don't even go and say "Hey! I'm alive, nice to see you!" If she is truly happy with college boyfriend, you existing wouldn't derail her.

Sees her years later, talks to her this time, but she "Looks happy" so he makes up a girlfriend? Jesus you ever consider that maybe looking a certain way doesn't indicate a deep core truth? Maybe she looked happy in college because the guy she was with was a nice guy, but she was psyched because they were going to go to a great concert, or because she passed a bitch of a test.

And the next time? Maybe she was happy just because her happiness isn't tied to your "I'm good enough for you now" ass.

The rest of the book is just bad. Between Ryle running off to England, Alyssa being the emotional backbone with the "don't take my brother back" and in the next breath going all rom com best friend about Lily's pregnancy, Atlas being "For the love of you, I shall be emo" and Lily losing every ounce of personality she had to begin with.

Like everything else, the end was telegraphed hard.

If she would have gone back to Ryle, this would have been a prequel to a book where a handsome neurosurgeon moves to England with his daughter after his ex-wife "runs off" and popular local restaurant owner goes missing...

Ending with Lily leaving Ryle for the best of their daughter and her running to Atlas is how this was always going to end.

I respect what the author was trying to do, but this just felt like a book written by two different people who didn't talk to each other.

Obviously I’m not against melodrama, and I’m not a reader who needs every book to be an expression of pure craft. Melodrama has its place, and it can be incredibly effective, when a story commits to it and uses it consistently.

That’s really the issue here. Not the tropes, not the genre, but the lack of consistency in tone, character, and logic.

This book never quite decides what it wants to be.

I was spacing out after work and I thought of an old show I found when I was a teenager.

Dear America and Royal Diaries were interesting to me because at the time, I was a couple of years into my time in hybrid home schooling through a Christian private school. I was getting more and more interested in history because what I was learning at the Christian school was slanted very differently than what I had learned in public school. This was my first experience having something I learned presented in a different way. I started seeing history as stories, and started studying it for fun. So when I came across the series on HBO that told a story from history through diaries and letters, it caught my attention and gave me more things to look up.

Not sure what made it pop into my head, but I do what I always do, I took to the library, and lo and behold, they are a book series!

Am I going to read a bunch of books meant for grade schoolers? Damn right! I was 12 going on 13 when these books first came out and had I known they existed, I would have totally read them.

Anyway, forward with the nostalgia!

Standing in the Light follows Catherine (Caty) a young Quaker girl living in Pennsylvania in 1763. The Quakers are a religious community who doesn't approve of the settlers treatment of the native American people. Caty's father in particular is affected by how the people are treated. Caty tries to feel the way her father does, but she, her younger siblings and her mother live in fear of attacks by the local tribes in retaliation for what other white settlements had done.

When not worried about being attacked, Caty is a typical 13 year old. Dealing with school, family and community expectations. She struggles with the strict social rules of the Quakers and worries for the health of her siblings.

The entries in the diary cut off abruptly with only a sentence stating that she and her younger brother Thomas had been captured.

It picks up again, without dates, as Caty writes of her time in the camp with the Lanape. The story unfolds that she and her brother have been adopted into the community. She is scared and very resistant, venting her anger at a teenaged Lanape named Snow Hunter who she soon realizes understands English, and an fact had been taken from an English settlement and adopted by the tribe years before.

Slowly, Caty and her brother adjust to their life with the Lenape and bond with them. Caty realizes that the God the Quakers speak to is the same as The Great Spirit and she loves the Lanape as she loves her family.

The diary continues, detailing every day life in the camp, until the conflicts find Caty and Thomas and turn their lives upside down again.

These books seem designed to get kids interested in history, and I think it does a great job of putting human faces on historical happenings. This book was also very well written. Caty isn't just a flat cut out, she struggles with things, she holds contradictions in her mind without really seeing tension. She knows that the Quakers believe that all people and things have God in them, that it isn't only the Quakers who are chosen. However, when she is faced with the fact that she is in love with Snow Hunter, she knows that she will be rejected by the Quakers if she marries him. Both of these things are true, but she doesn't examine how they don't line up. Teenagers generally, sort of do this, they are at the age where they still see the world through the lens they are brought up with, but they also are noticing new and different perspectives. Some will butt right up against a belief or norm, while others will just start to add dimension to the way those beliefs and norms are considered. And so, you have this messy period where "My Quaker family loves and sees God in everything" and "My Quaker family would excile me for marrying a savage" are two things that can exist because Caty has started to realize that there is a difference between their view of God in theory, and their view in paractice.

The book also does a very good job of providing a compare and contrast of everyday life in a Quaker settlement and a Lenape camp. Both have daily chores and rituals, they may be different, but serve the same functions - to ensure that food, clothing, shelter, and we'll being are maintained.

Because Caty spend so much time, at first, being afraid and angry, the reader is really invited to see the similarities before she is ready to acknowledge them. I feel like this could be used as a way to educate kids not only in tolerance, but also in analytical reading and critical thinking.

I mean, a discussion question about what the the kid reading might have noticed that Caty hadn't, and why might it have taken Caty longer to notice these things could help kids to think of stories, and history beyond what is written on the page. The very human way the characters are present could be used to apply this line of thinking to the real world. Maybe realize that when someone is upset, they might not see things in the same way as someone who isn't and maybe they should keep that in mind when someone is emotional and not seeming to listen.

This is all the was I think this book could be used in an educational way. As a story, I think it is well worth the read. It is interesting that other than the Nameless almost faceless people who commit violence, this book has no villian, it is just an examination of life at the time from two different perspectives, and though written in a straightforward style, I never feel like it is talking down to the reader.

New book from one of my favorite authors!

I love Jenny Lawson, I was recommended her second book Furiously Happy by my library app, I think sometime in 2016. Even though her depression and anxiety manifest in different ways than mine, I had never felt so seen reading about these topics. And the book was fucking hilarious. That book lead me to her first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, which lead me to her blog. I have been following her books and her blog since.

This new one is a bit different from her three memoirs and her coloring book.

This one is really more of a book of strategies for when your brain is being an asshole.

It is still darkly hilarious and even takes a swipe at Freud, which is my favorite!

This isn't a typical "you should do this with these things in mind because I know about these things" and more "My brain likes to glitch and be mean to me, this is shit helps, also, you are up right today, that is amazing!"

This book is so cool!

I have always loved the con man makes good plot line, and I have always enjoyed a conman who does it for the love of the game more than any financial gain.

And in Moist Von Lipwig, we have precisely that, and when the Patrician "executes" one of his alternate identities and gives him the choice of either actual death or revive the Ankh-Morpork postal system as himself, Moist, being an intelligent man chooses the latter. Of course he has an eye on returning to his old ways, if he can just shake the Golem that the Patrician has rented to keep him in line.

Of course, this being Ankh-Morpork, the decades and decades worth of undelivered mail has grown consciousness, there is a secret society of postmen, and other than the two odd(er)balls that work in the post office, anyone who tries to come in and clean things up, tend to end up meeting Death a lot faster than most.

I love that while Moist does end up seeing the error of his ways, he doesn't *become* a different person. He still manipulates situations, and people when it suits his needs, but his needs are no longer to fool people, commit the crime and get away clean. His needs go from doing what he has to to stay alive, to doing what he has to do the job he has been tasked with, to finally doing what is right.

And the whole time he was still himself, he was still reading people and figuring out the best way to make things go his way. In short he started to use his abilities for good of others and not just for himself.

And all of this plays out in the Discworld way. No preaching, no cheesy redemption moment. Just a guy realizing that the people he conned weren't pieces in a game.

Basically he stepped back from the trap of evil that Granny Weatherwax told us about - seeing people as things.

I would argue that he didn't realize he was doing this., Moist seems like he had a rule to never physically hurt anyone, he isn't amoral, he is incomplete moral. When he is confronted with the fact that his actions can cause harm without leaving a mark, is is like his conscience stopped playing solitaire, sat up and took notice.

And he tries not to realize that playing a situation to benefit others is more satisfying than conning. Because he is self aware enough to know that if he is going to keep being effective in his new role, he basically has to pull a long con on himself.

I love that because the crux of Moist's character is to observe, plan, and adapt, the reader is watching him actively learn. When something new hits him, it doesn't shake his foundations like it does Vimes, Moist has no foundations, so he just incorporates the new information into the roledex of his mind. Like when he learns about Golems, their function, and their belief system, even his first mocking jokes about all of it read less like distain and more like someone trying to find a slot to put this information so it could be built upon later.

You have to hand it to Vetinari, acknowledging that there is a fine line between being in public office and being a con man, and knowing that to best design a system crooks can't manipulate, have a crook design it.

It is all very Catch Me if You Can in feel.

I am currently reading the second in the Flavia de Luce series, but this short story popped up on my Kindle app.

11 year old Flavia's Sunday chemistry experiment is interrupted by a letter from a boy at Greyminster, the local boy's boarding school. The letter begs her for help on a murder.

Flavia jumps on her trusty bicycle, Gladys and the game is afoot!

Once she sneaks into the school, she is met by the student that wrote her, and the investigation into a dead faculty member begins.

Honestly, this was a good bite sized tale, but I am more impressed by the way it managed to capture Flavia's personality, and skill as a detective, and be a mystery that could keep you guessing - all in only 25 pages. In fact, this one could technically be read before the first book and it would be a decent introduction.