A-Z Wednesday: The Letter "T"

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

My choice this week is Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. This one is yet to be read. It is on deck for a few challenges in 2011 (What's in a Name 4, Off the Shelf, Outdo Yourself, & Victorian Lit).

Link at Amazon

My copy:

Paperback: 288 pages

Publisher: Puffin Books (1981)

ISBN: 0140305343

Genre: Literature, Classics

Synopsis: Recounts the adventures of a young English boy at Rugby School in the early 19th Century. Although nowadays he will not be tossed in a blanket or roasted over the fire, every boy will have his own memories of his first days as a new boy, and most boys will now the equivalent of the hated bully Flashman, and have a hero who measures up to Brooke.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter "S"

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in, here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

My choice this week is Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin (click title for review).

Info from Amazon:

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st edition (November 20, 2007)
• ISBN-10: 1416553649
• ISBN-13: 978-1416553649
• Genre: Autobiography

Synopsis: At age 10, Steve Martin got a job selling guidebooks at the newly opened Disneyland. In the decade that followed, he worked in Disney's magic shop, print shop, and theater, and developed his own magic/comedy act. By age 20, studying poetry and philosophy on the side, he was performing a dozen times a week, most often at the Disney rival, Knott's Berry Farm. Obsession is a substitute for talent, he has said, and Steve Martin's focus and daring--his sheer tenacity--are truly stunning. He writes about making the very tough decision to sacrifice everything not original in his act, and about lucking into a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Show. He writes about mentors, girlfriends, his complex relationship with his parents and sister, and about some of his great peers in comedy--Dan Ackroyd, Lorne Michaels, Carl Reiner, Johnny Carson. He writes about fear, anxiety and loneliness. And he writes about how he figured out what worked on stage.

A-Z Wednesday! The Letter R

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in, here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

My choice this week is Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deanna Raybourn (click title for review).

Info from Amazon:

Publisher: Mira; Original edition (October 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0778328201
ISBN-13: 978-0778328209 Genre: Mystery/Thriller/Historical Mystery


Synopsis: Set in 1889, Raybourn's sharp, surprising fourth Lady Julia Grey novel (after Silent on the Moor) finds Julia thoroughly enjoying her honeymoon with her detective husband, Nicholas Brisbane, in the Himalayas, where her brother, Plum, and sister, Portia, show up unexpectedly with startling news. Portia's former lover, Jane Cavendish, is convinced that her husband, Freddie, has been murdered in India. Brisbane, who reluctantly joins his wife and her siblings in their search for Freddie's killer, gets quickly drawn into a web of intrigue that's long on suspects and short on evidence. The mystery deepens as Grey and Brisbane explore India's colonial tensions and realize that everyone has a motive for murder. Raybourn skillfully balances humor and earnest, deadly drama, creating well-drawn characters and a rich setting. New readers may want to go back and start with the series debut, Silent in the Grave, which won an Agatha Award.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter Q

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in, here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

My choice this week is A Puzzle for Fools by Patrick Quentin

It's been quite a while since I read this and the review that I put up on Visual Bookshelf (in my pre-blogging days) was short and to the point: Decent. But I'm not sure that Quentin is my cup of tea. This has a little bit more of an edge than the usual "country house murder."

Synopsis from the Amazon Review by Marjorie James: A Puzzle for Fools is essentially a country house murder with the twist being that it's set in a mental hospital. It has the set group of people who could be suspects, the limited setting and the basic interactions.....The story is narrated by Peter Duluth, a recovering alcoholic who is among the more sane of the inmates of the asylum. By virtue of his sanity, and the fact that he discovers the bodies, Duluth is taken into the confidence of the authorities and tries to solve the mystery on his own. The murderer starts with a campaign of frightening various inmates and using their neuroses to his advantage. He (and I should mention that I'm using the indefinite pronoun here) then moves on to a particularly gruesome and brutal murder.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter P

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in, here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

This week the letter is "P"

My Pick: The List of Adrian Messenger by Philip MacDonald
Info from Amazon

• Mass Market Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books / Random House; 1st Vintage Books ed edition (September 12, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394717120
• ISBN-13: 978-0394717128

Synopsis from Jeanne Tassotto's review on Amazon: Author Adrian Messenger has come to a friend with a request, a rather strange and mysterious one. He wants his friend, a police detective to investigate a list of names, a list that encompasses a seemingly unrelated group of individuals scattered across the UK. All Messenger wants to know is if those people are still living in those cities. Messenger would return to collect the results of the search when he returned from his business trip in a few days. But Adrian Messenger would not return to ask his friend about the results because the plane he was on crashed in the Atlantic. By chance Messenger and a fellow passenger were adrift in the ocean awaiting rescue. The semiconscious Messenger babbled a few random phrases over and over before he died, words that meant nothing to the other crash victim but would come to shed light on his odd list and have shattering impact to Messenger's family.

It's been a while since I read this one and the book's buried in a box in storage--otherwise I'd give the blurb from the book. I do know that I like Philip MacDonald's mysteries a lot and I have all of his titles (at least the ones I don't own) on my list of books to find & buy. This is an intriguing mystery from its time. It is only dated because today's technology would simplify the mystery so, well, there wouldn't really be any mystery. But if one is willing to time travel to a less advanced age, it's a pretty little problem indeed.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter O

It's A-Z Wednesday! Hosted by Reading at the Beach. To join in, here's all you have to do.

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

This week the letter is "O"

The Future on Fire by Orson Scott Card

Publisher: Tor Books

ISBN-10: 0812511833

ISBN--13: 978-0812511833

Category: Science Fiction, Short Stories (and for some reason, according to Amazon: YA)

Description from Amazon: A provocative collection, edited by one of science fiction's best-known names. Of particular interest are several stories from the cyberpunk school, as well as Pat Murphy's Nebula award winning "Rachel in Love" and Ursula LeGuin's wonderful "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?"

The review from the School Library Journal calls this YA. And says "Unfortunately Card takes the opportunity afforded by the introductions to the stories to lecture mercilessly. The quality of the entries, however, makes it worth overlooking this flaw, as YAs will quickly discover how to skip the 'boring parts.'" My rebuttal: YAs who are interested enough in science fiction ought to be intelligent and curious enough to WANT to read the introductions by a master of the field. My recollection of the book (it's been a while since I read it) is that his introductions are informative (as they are meant to be) and well worth the time spent. The stories are fabulous too.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter N

It's A-Z Wednesday!! by Reading at the Beach.

To join in, here's all you have to do:

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading at the Beach and link up your post

This week the letter is "N"

Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century by Richard Nash

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813921651
• ISBN-13: 978-0813921655
• Category: 18th Century Studies; British Literature & Culture

Synopsis (from the U of Virginia Press site): Wild Enlightenment charts the travels of the figure of the wild man, in each of his guises, through the invented domain of the bourgeois public sphere. We follow him through the discursive networks of novels, broadsheets, pamphlets, and advertisements and through their material locations at fair booths, the Royal Society, Court, and Parliament. He leads us on in various disguises: as Tyson’s Orang-Outang, Swift’s Yahoos, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Yet Richard Nash is not primarily telling a story of the English gentleman abroad in the realm of the wild man; instead Nash explores the wild man abroad in the realm of the English gentleman. His is the tale of the wild man as complex alter ego to the idealized abstraction of “the citizen of the Enlightenment.”

My Review:

This is Richard Nash at his best. Superb research, combined with the author's wit makes this scholarly work a delight to read. There are so many bits of this work that I love. A few quotes:

"Indeed such is Montagu's enthusiasm, and so engaging is his undisguised admiration, that one is almost obligated to overlook the aside on page 311 where Montagu acknowledges indirectly that Tyson was almost entirely in error in all of his conclusions."

(about Robinson Crusoe): "Throughout his twenty-eight years on the island, goats are as wild as it gets."

(a footnote): "There are, of course, cannibals; but strictly speaking they are foreigners--nonnative natives, as it were--who only venture to Crusoe's island when dining out."

(About the "Anti-Saccharine Society"): "an unfortunate acronym, but that may not have been so relevant in a society that had not yet developed the marketing refinements of T-shirts and bumper stickers."

I was particularly intrigued by his focus in the beginning chapters on the difference between spectacle and curiosity and would like to read more. That, I think is one of the marks of very good writing (research)--it always leaves the reader wanting more...or wanting to learn more about the subject. This is one of my all-time favorite "intellectual" reads.

***And, just so you know, Richard is awesome in person too. I've worked in the English Department with him for ten years. But I haven't given his book a five-star review just because I know him. This is truly the best book I've read on 18th C studies.

A-Z Wednesday; The Letter L

It's A-Z Wednesday!! by Reading at the Beach.

To join in, here's all you have to do:

*Go to your stack of books and find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week.

*Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ a link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc)

4~ go back to Reading At the Beach and a link to your post.

This week's letter is: "L"

Hanged for a Sheep by Frances & Richard Lockridge (click title for review)

Info from Amazon:

Publisher: Perennial, April 1994

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0060924888

ISBN-13: 9780060924881

Price: $11.50

Catetory: Mystery

Synopsis may be found in my review.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter K

It's A-Z Wednesday!! Sponsored by Reading at the Beach.

To join, here's all you have to do:

Go to your stack of books find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week

Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title & synopsis

3~ link (amazon, barnes & noble, etc.)

4~ Go back to Reading At the Beach and leave your link in the comments.

If you've already reviewed the book, add it of the link to your post.

This week's letter is: "K"

The Bohemian Girl by Kenneth Cameron

(Click Title for my Review)

Info & Synopsis from Amazon:

Hardcover: 320

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0312538979

ISBN-13: 978-0312538972

Price: $24.99

Category: Historical Mystery

Synopsis: When Denton, the famous American author and expatriate in turn-of-the-century London, receives a letter from a young woman saying she's in danger and needs his help, he doubts there's anything he can do. The letter is months old, and was only forwarded to him when the buyer of a painting found it stuck behind the frame. But why did she hide the note instead of sending it? The search for answers leads Denton into the heart of Bohemian London--the world of artists and their models, of brilliance and depravity, where the border between genius and madness is hard to discern but easty to cross. And before he has learned the shocking truth, Denton will discover what it's like to be the object of a lethal obsession and endure a terrifying confrontation with his own demons.

A-Z Wednesday: The Letter J

It's A-Z Wednesday!!

To join, here's all you have to do:

Go to your stack of books

Find an author whose first or last name starts with the letter of the week

Post:

1~ a photo of the book

2~ title and synopsis

3~ link(amazon, barnes and noble etc.)

4~Go back to Reading At The Beach and leave your link in the comments.

If you've already reviewed the book, add it or the link to your post.

This week's letter is: "J"

Robert F Kennedy: A Memoir by Jack Newfield (Click the title for my Review)

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (August 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560255315
• ISBN-13: 978-1560255314
• Category: Biography/Memoir

Blurb (from Amazon): As one of the most complex, charismatic and controversial figures of our times, Robert Kennedy occupies a remarkable and paradoxical place in the American imagination. On the right he has been idolized by Rudy Giuliani and memorialized by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who renamed the Justice Department after him. On the left, his admirers say he represented the last hope of revitalizing the liberal tradition. But who was Robert Kennedy? To acclaimed reporter Jack Newfield, who worked closely with him during his last years, RFK was a human being far different from the myths that surrounded his name. In this haunting and memorable portrait we see what kind of man died when Robert Kennedy was shot. And what kind of leader America lost.

Soulless

As I mentioned in my WWW Wednesday post, I kind of stumbled on to Soulless by Gail Carriger. I found Carriger's books mentioned on another blog site (Adventure Into Romance) and it sounded so good, I just had to run right out to the library and grab the first two of the series. This series stars Alexia Tarabotti, a preternatural--born without a soul, and takes place in an alternate Victorian era where vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures have been accepted into mainstream British society. After accidentally killing a vampire who so forgot the rules of etiquette to neglect to ask before attempting to bite her neck, Alexia finds herself drawn further and further into a plot that involves the disappearance of known vampires and werewolves and the appearance of unknowns. Who is behind these disappearances and to what purpose? Soon Alexia finds that she knows more about these questions than may be quite safe. Helping Alexia get to the bottom of the mystery (and vice versa), we have Lord Macon (the loud, messy, gorgeous Alpha male of the London werewolves). When these two forceful characters get together, the sparks fly. In more ways than one. The romantic interplay is also a draw for this series.

This book is way outside my usual comfort zone...I don't usually do the supernatural/steampunk. But the description on the back of the book and the fact that it plays on one of my favorite time periods lured me right in. And I'm glad it did. This was such a fun book and a fast read. Alexia Tarabotti is a very forthright young woman and holds her own with the Alpha male of the werewolves as well as bearding the queen of the local vampires in her den. Cliches may abound, but they are used to such humorous effect that they don't jar the nerves.

One thing that does bother me though....what's up with her posture on the cover? People just don't stand that way.

If you're looking for something a little bit Victorian, a little bit sassy, a little bit sexy, and a whole lot of fun, then this just may be the series for you. The vampires don't sparkle...but a few of them do wear lace. Three out of five stars on Visual Bookshelf.
This book also qualifies for Reading At The Beach's A-Z Wednesday. This week's letter is "G." To play along, you read a book from your stacks where the author's name (first or last) begins with the posted letter. Then go to the link and post your review in the comments. Go check out what other bloggers have read. And have fun!