Believing the Lie – A Review
Title: Believing the Lie
Author: Elizabeth George
Publisher: Dutton, a member of Penguin group
Genre: mystery
Length: 610 pages
Dutton Books, to my surprise and excitement, kindly provided me with a copy of Believing the Lie, Inspector Lynley’s 17th book appearance, just weeks before its official release date. Despite this book being number seventeen in a series, and having never read any of George’s previous work, I often wondered which characters were reoccurring ones and which were unique to this title. The work and the character development was so seamless, this was unclear until nearly toward the end.
“[…] Darling, secrets and silence caused all of this. Lies caused this,” Inspector Lynley summarizes the novel of which he is supposedly the star. It is refreshing to read a crime writer who gives you such a large cast of characters in such detail, its surprising to find that the lead inspector is more like the wood frame that holds a canvas together than the paint that creates the work of art itself. He is ever in the middle of the action, but rarely the focus, he merely serves as the reason for the story’s existence in the first place.
George writes human tension beautifully. More than a typical mystery, George has written a well crafted drama involving social issues surrounding homosexuals, transsexuals, and the families who love but fail to understand them. During all this family drama, international culture issues, marital affairs, and even a child pornography ring, the biggest truth to be revealed of this murder mystery, is whether there has even been a murder at all.
Typically, when I read mysteries I take the cozy, less than 200 page ones for what I call “bubble bath books,” something I can read in one sitting in the tub. As much as I love those (my cotton candy for the soul), I say with the highest compliment intended, George does not write bubble bath mysteries. And quite different from those sorts of books, this one left me wondering: What Next?
How Alcott Raises Little Women
Title: Little Women
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Publisher: Little, Brown
Genre: Young Adult Classics
Length: 502 pages
I don’t remember learning to read, as I did it from such a young age. I do, however, remember the first books I fell in love with and the first books I read that were difficult for my limited vocabulary. Laura Ingalls Wilder I fell in love with first, I read the entire series several times by the end of first grade. Little Women, however, I fell in love with and learned from in second grade. Little Women taught me new words and phrases, culture, and how I wanted to live.
Josephine March has been one of my heroes since I was seven and first read about her chopping off all her luxurious hair. As a young girl, I identified quite well with her “one beauty” (that amazing hair) and tomboyish ways. I myself, was a ruddy, freckled girl, often found either playing tag football with boys at recess or perched in an oak tree reading a book, hair flowing every which way that my mother did not allow me to cut. My first significant hair cut, I donated two feet to locks of love, and who else was on my mind? Jo March.
I re-read the book multiple times before I left elementary school, getting more and more out of it each time as my reading skills improved. And despite cherishing it always, I set the book aside and did not read it again until my twenty-seventh year, this year, to my one year old daughter.
I opened it up a week or so before Christmas, not realizing it would spur a desire to re-read it every Christmas with my kid for the rest of her life if she likes it as much as I do. It’s such a great Christmas book! Upon this fresh re-read, I also discovered many other things that my brain had forgotten, but my soul must have internalized. For instance, the girls are all distraught and Hannah, bless her soul, “came to the rescue armed with a coffee-pot.”
Like every good American, I am wholly addicted to that black magical brew, it’s in our veins and culture, look at how well Starbucks has taken off. But my family did not keep coffee readily available, my dad won’t touch the stuff and my mom’s mother died of cancer the doctors blamed on her caffeine intake so she never kept it around growing up. So part of me wonders if Alcott played a role in my introduction to it, as I don’t remember a time when I did not love it. I remember sneaking cups of it from the employee break room at the bus barn where I waited with my bus driver between routes in elementary school. In hindsight, I believe it was the reverence that writers hold for it, the way it is talked about in books, that drove me to love it so much, and it very well may have begun with Little Women.
Then, there is Theodore Laurence. I believe every guy friend’s worth that I ever had my whole life was measured against the character of Laurie. He is whimsical, gallant, a rascal and a gentleman. Theodore Laurence is handsome, a friend, and all around a good time. Every girl needs a Teddy-Dear in her adolescent life and if you can’t get one in the real world, its time for yet another read of Little Women so you can live vicariously through Jo!
Jo March taught me to love, to read, to pursue life with a fiery passion, and how to pick my friends. It was Jo March that sparked the first desires in me to be a writer. It was Little Women, and the romance of Jo and the Professor, that set the stage for me to fall in love with the art of Jane Austen and the Brontes. It was the pen of Louisa May Alcott that taught me how to really enjoy books and the thrilling life they have to offer.
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson – A Review
Title: Einstein: His Life and Universe
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Genre: Non-fiction, Biography, Science
Length: 675 pgs.
Albert Einstein was a prick. Not the description you were expecting? Me neither. We always hear about how brilliant he was, how much he changed humanity and the world of science with his great theories. We always see images of his goofy, yet charmingly wild smile and hair. We don’t see him through the eyes of the family he abandoned.
Isaacson is thorough in his research and the language of his biography of Einstein is easy and accessible. He sheds a lot of light on physics formulas that I had a hard time grasping in my high school science classes. But he also sheds a lot of light on Einstein the not-so-family man.
Not only did he and his wife abandon their first child, a girl who history has nearly erased,
“[Hans Albert, Einstein’s son] had powerfully conflicted attitudes towards his father. That was no surprise. Einstein was intense and compelling and at times charismatic. He was also aloof and distracted and had distanced himself, physically and emotionally, from the boy, who was guarded by a doting mother who felt humiliated.”
Einstein eventually divorced his wife, but not before maintaining an emotional affair with his cousin Elsa. “Companionship without commitment suited him just fine,” Isaacson writes about how Einstein toyed with both women’s heartstrings by alternating his attentions between them. In the end Einstein and Elsa did marry, but not before a questionable letter was written by Elsa’s daughter to a friend that mentioned Einstein’s true love interest was the twenty year old daughter, not the mother.
Isaacson’s presentation of Einstein is a great book for high school science and history students. Anyone trying to understand the genius’s formulas should also understand the history surrounding their creation/discovery. His life is also one to discuss with your teen touchy topics of worldview and the importance of values; world changing discovery vs. the importance of family, political and religious affiliations and observations. Each family’s opinion of Einstein’s life will most likely be different, and its one that should be surveyed and critically analyzed.
A Fish and a Girl With a Split Personality
Meet Elliot, Sarah, and Molly: 3 characters in a writing exercise.
Elliot
A betta’s side of a story
I look out from my bowl and see Sarah’s eyes. She’s my person. She has large blue eyes always attacked with a massive amount of eyeliner. She reminds me of what I saw of a raccoon in a national geographic magazine she left lying haphazardly by my bowl; among other things she leaves places, like her keys in the sofa and her shoes in the bathroom.
Her eyes are glossy, always, like she’s going to cry. That’s how they were when we met, and how they’ve been ever since. She tends to be sad, and buys betta fish when she is sad, apparently. Just last week she brought Claude in, his bowl is stationed by the television she leaves on too loud. I’m hoping he’ll be floating by the end of the week. He always whines about the noise. Of course, Sarah can’t hear him, just me, andLydia. Lydiais nice; she’s on the other side of the picture frame, a beautiful grayish pink color –Lydianot the frame. Tommy-Tom, I think is too far away, or deaf, because he never answersLydiawhen we call across the room for conversation. He thinks he’s all-important because he has been here the longest, and he has the largest bowl. Mine isn’t bad, though.
She’s a good person, my person. She saves us, like I said, when she is sad, from those tiny cups at Wal-Mart, and picks out large beautiful vases and bowls for us to swim in with ease. She’s a pro at it, and she talks to us after picking us out, asking us what color rocks we would like, what shape of dish shall we go in? And the sort. Other people look at her, some like she’s funny, some like she’s desirable, I can never tell exactly, I’m not a person how should I know what their faces mean if they aren’t my person.
She told me she liked me because I was so red, and that my hint of purple on the tail reminded her of her favorite color orchid. She keeps orchids everywhere too. On every surface there is either of vase of fish or vase of lush purple orchids. I like to think that I am her favorite though, because many of the others she brings home are ugly, brown, the unwanted ones – the fish, not the orchids. I am a fish.
She looks at me now and says, “Elliot, one day, my life will be as beautiful as you.” And she cries. I blow bubbles to make her happy, but she doesn’t see them so I dash in and out of my castle she set up for me. “And maybe I’ll have a castle,” she sobs some more. So castles today are not the key. I rub against my plant, it’s a lovely plant, and when the green reaches the air up top it blooms pretty white flowers. I like the white, it makes my red look more vibrant, and my purple so lovely. I am beautiful, but it’s not enough for her.
Sarah sleeps on the couch tonight. In all actuality, she sleeps on the couch every night because her bedroom doesn’t really exist. She found a door in the alley not long after she saved me. She dragged it in, cleaned it up, stained it the same color as the rest of the woodwork and nailed it to the wall. She tells visitors that it’s the door to her bedroom, but this is a one-room flat, large but still void of extra rooms. When she’s tired of the couch and wants to sleep in a real bed, she unfolds the couch and it becomes a bed. On those nights she also makes a show of getting undressed and putting on her “dainties,” she tells us we’re lucky because we’re the only boys in the world that get to see her do it. Her dainties are kept in a small blue painted bureau, blue to match the rest of her living room, and on top of that sits two vases where Lydia and I live. There is a picture frame between us, but I don’t know who is inside. Knowing Sarah it’s the people that come with the picture as hung above the television and Claude, a couple picnicking in the sun, or possibly some obscure artwork she found at the Goodwill, like the one behind my bowl, a large blazing blue phoenix. Lydiasays phoenixes aren’t supposed to be blue. However, Sarah’s a lazy girl when it comes to nightly rituals, and mostly – like now – she doesn’t bother with folding down the couch or dressing.
Whether she sleeps on the couch as a couch or on the couch as a bed, she always wakes up the same: “anti-meningitis exercises.” She drops her chin to her chest over and over again until satisfied. Then, she quickly pops off the bed and sporadically bends and stretches about the room. She is convinced that this will keep her safe from spiral viruses. She also does jumping jacks in the morning… while she gets dressed. There is a small bathroom I can view the sink from and I watch her hop around while she brushes her teeth and washes her face. She tells us that its good to be active in the morning and that she’ll never have a boyfriend or a room mate because only fish understand her morning necessities. When she says things like this Claude grumbles over the noise of the television that is almost on constantly and tellsLydiaand I that our person is crazy. We tell Claude that she’s his person too.
The problem with all these things, with her sporadic routines, and her desire to swear off boyfriends, is that she never sticks to them exactly. Some days she skips out on her routines altogether, some days she has a boyfriend – he lives across the hall and feeds us sometimes. The problem is, well, Sarah isn’t just Sarah.
Sarah
the obsessive compulsive orphan
Sarah had been staring at the phoenix painting above the fish bowls for nearly an hour. She thought she had seen it move, but of course it couldn’t have, that would just be crazy. Molly said she had painted it a few months ago when they had enough money for groceries and paint, but Sarah could have sworn she bought it for a few dollars at Goodwill. Now, she couldn’t remember. She heard someone turn a key in the hallway and thought for once Molly was going to be home, but instead it was the neighbor across the hall. She got to the peep hole just in time to see him vanish behind the door. He was cute, but too damn quiet. He freaked her out actually, always loitering in the hall near her door before slinking into his own apartment. He was very odd, indeed.
Molly
the artistic heiress
Molly sat up in bed. She didn’t remember coming home last night – or falling asleep. She looked down to see that she was wearing Sarah’s pajamas. That happened a lot – their apartment was dark in the evenings and they often did things by candle light and the laundry got mixed up a lot. Sarah was so paranoid about the electricity bill, as if Molly’s dad didn’t cover it all anyway. Mr. Eugene Pruitt afterall was a multi millionaire and would pay his daughter’s bills whether she liked it or not. She had wanted her parents to disown her and threaten to take everything away if she dropped out ofDartmouthto go be an artist on her own. Instead,Eugenelooked at his daughter and said over the rim of his glasses, “If that’s what you’d like to do.”
Her jaw did not drop, she was not remotely surprised, and he went back to reading Chesterton’s Collected Works from the Illustrated London News and said into his book, “Call us when you get where you’re going and send us your address.” She had called, but did not leave her address, her bills were being retrieved and paid within the month anyway. Automatic transfers through his bank, she noticed when she received her paperwork through the mail slot in the door. She assumed, she had to assume, she was never even given the option to see her monthly statements. Her father had odd connections with important people, and surely had arranged for her mail to be re-routed to him no matter where she had lived or stayed. Her cards from friends always arrived late, with multiple cities and dates inked over the right hand corner, but he didn’t look through it, he just liked having the option to do so. She never had the satisfaction of her father calling her to see what she’d been doing with her time, or why the phone bills were so high (or low). Two years after she’d moved away fromDartmouth’s campus, he’s called exactly at the end of every business quarter, no more and no less. He always left messages like, “Molly, this is Eugene and Meredith, ahem, your parents, ah, checking in. Love you. See you at _______.” Fill in any major holiday, and she dutifully boarded a plane and had lunch or dinner, whichever they could fit into their busy schedules. Once she tried not going, but a limo showed up at the gallery where she worked part-time, along with a well-built body guard named Jim, and carried her away to the airport. She promised her boss it would never happen again, as long as she was guaranteed time off on the holidays. Despite a few small occurrences here and there, Molly was their low maintenance child. Their cocker spaniel Candice was the one they had to fuss over. Meredith took “Candice the widdle baby” everywhere with her, Meredith remembered going places with her mother very few times in her life, she could count them on one hand actually. Instead she always met her mother places, with the nanny, or the limo driver, or the housekeeper. Molly had always been someone else’s responsibility, because of that, she’d turned out very independent, except of course when it came to paying bills.
Molly rolled slowly out of bed, groaning from a sore shoulder. She didn’t know what it was so sore from, and as she shifted, she realized the whole right side of her body ached. She hobbled past the bathroom to the peep hole of the front door. He could see Sean’s door and the purple rope he threw over the knob when he was home, so she would know. His schedule was crazy – what her’s would have been had she been born into a normal life. He went to school full time and worked at a bar downtown. That’s how they’d met, he was her bartender, the first night she’d showed up in this crazy city. He had a friend (his previous neighbor) who was subletting his apartment while he lived inBelize.
“Belize?” she’d asked.
“Sure, why notBelize?” he’d had a bit of a far northwestern accent, Maine, ironed out by years a few years in San Antonio, Texas, and altered even more now in Chicago. She tried to listen to her own voice sometimes, her own words as she stared in the mirror at her lips moving. She couldn’t tell what she sounded like really,Eugeneand Meredith had moved around too much when they were young to teach her any kind of slang from any particular region.
“Is it furnished?” That was so something Eugenewould have asked. Calculating Eugene. Meredith would have piped in, as well, ‘Oh it can’t be furnished, darling, I wanted to decorate it like…’ She would have had the latest designer’s work at the tip of her tongue. She read too many magazines, and talked to too many famous people. Rich snobs, the whole lot of them.
“Why would it be?” Sean had asked. “The guy lives out of his suitcase – he spent all of last year inMilan.”
“So why does he bother having an apartment here?” She was moderately, and appropriately, suspicious. Always be suspicious,Eugenehad taught her, people always just want your money, even if they think you don’t have any.
“Beats me,” Sean answered while he’d poured drinks for three new customers. She watched him and memorized the mixes. She’d never been a bartender before, and wondered if she’d ever want to try. California Dream, said the blonde, and Sean poured tequila, sweet and dry vermouth into a glass with ice cubes. Molly memorized the way he stirred and strained it into a cocktail glass.
“Mmmmm, and a cherry,” the blonde said, looking over her lashes.
“Sure,” he dropped one on the top and turned back to Molly after taking the cash.
She found out later that Trey and Sean weren’t really friends at all – they’d met twice. Sean just didn’t want to straight up ask the hot girl in his bar to be his new neighbor, how awkward would that have been? She would have moved in even if he had said it that way though, she might have even laughed and asked him out. But it had all worked out anyway, he helped her move in and then took her to pizza afterwards, like a true college gentleman.
Now, she went out to the hallway and knocked on his door. When he didn’t answer she went back, got her key from the top drawer of the table under the phoenix painting, and let herself in. There he was, asleep and all beautiful; his lips pouted a bit when he dreamed. She crawled in with him and passed out again.
On Writing, a Review (of King’s Craft)
Title: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Author: Stephen King
Paperback Publisher: Pocket Books
Genre: Non-fiction, Memoirs, Writing Guides
Length: 291 pages
My mother saw me reading Stephen King’s On Writing and scowled at me. “That man is so weird, I don’t know why you would want to read any of his crap.” Says the woman who may or may not have read one of his books. Admittedly, I don’t read much of his stuff. I couldn’t really get into Gunslinger, but I loved Low Men in Yellow Coats from Hearts in Atlantis. I have no desire to read most things published in the horror genre, but On Writing isn’t horror, its not even fiction, it’s an amazing memoir and guidebook to how The King’s mind really works.
On Writing is solid advice from a successful writer to anyone who has ever dreamed of being a storyteller. King is entertaining, down to earth, and extremely informative. He is passionate about his work, and despite many blunt criticisms about typical writing flaws, he offers sound wisdom to budding authors.
I found reading On Writing highly motivating. I’ve always been an avid reader, and I’ve always loved to journal and write tidbits of stories that come to me. But reading this really got me in a dedicated routine. I’d start my day off with a little advice from the master of fiction, write the recommended 2000 words for the day, and then pick up some handy little piece of fiction that took my fancy and read until my daughter woke up from her nap.
Since reading On Writing, I’ve got myself on a more solid path to finishing a complete draft of my novel than ever. King doesn’t offer any kind of magic fix for suddenly getting published; he just reminds you that you already have the tools to do the job. He gives you the confidence to press on and keep writing because you love it, not because someone told you to try to make some money at it once upon a time.
King encourages every writer to keep what he calls a writer’s toolbox. In that box he includes the Elements of Style by Strunk, but I think you’d be remiss not to include On Writing in that toolbox as well.
The Brownie and the Princess – A Review
Title: The Brownie and the Princess and Other Stories
Author: Louisa May Alcott
A HarperCollins Publication
Genre: Children’s fiction
Length: 250 pages
As everyone knows, Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in the 1800’s and became one of the most well-known and timeless children’s literature authors of all time. The story of the March sisters is one that all little girls discover eventually, even if it isn’t until adulthood with the many movie productions (the most recent in 1994 featuring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and many other well-known stars). What a lot of people don’t know is that, just like Jo March, Alcott had many stories published in children’s magazines. The Brownie and the Princess and Other Stories is a collection of those stories.
One of the most delightful things about being a new mom is seeking out children’s books that I either remember loving or discovered later and wish I had owned. This particular collection was published while I was in college, so I missed the joy of reading it as a small child, but am extremely excited about having it available for my daughter.
The story of the Brownie and the Princess teaches good manners and being happy with what you have. Tabby’s Tablecloth is about patriotism and respecting antiques and the sentiments attached to them. The Hole in the Wall is beautifully innocent and romantic in a way. It’s lovely to go back to pleasant stories of gardens and happy moments strung together, skipping, playing, and the teaching of basic goodness, in the midst of a rough day of teething, tears, and tantrums. Books like these help gently aid the teaching of right from wrong.
Anakalian Whims 