Sarah (I like big books and I cannot lie)

Really, Sherlock Holmes --> The Three Little Pigs? That's precious, Goodreads.

So this contains a lot of Dickens’ not-so-well-known shorter works, published in the Christmas numbers of his publications, All The Year Round (which he amusingly refers to in “Somebody’s Luggage”) and Household Words. The first four are kind of weird (see individual notes below). Just when the stories start getting longer and better, there are many that Dickens wrote with other authors, mainly Wilkie Collins, and the editor of this volume, or publisher or somebody, decides we only need the bits of stories that were written exclusively by Dickens. Which leaves a lot of stories with holes in them. This book would have gotten a higher rating from me if all the stories had been complete. This would have made for an even longer book, but it could have been published in two volumes. Instead, we have stories with a beginning and end but the 30 pages or so in the middle is summarized in one sentence, or we have a single chapter plucked out of a longer work. Thankfully “No Thoroughfare” is intact, since Dickens and Collins worked together on most of it, rather than just taking turns on the acts. Why anyone would think people would only want to read partial stories is beyond me. Maybe if you are studying Dickens’ writing, but if you just want to read, you’re SOL. Luckily, all the collaborative stories have been published as standalone books, and most of them can be found online for free through Project Gutenberg or Open Library.

 

A Christmas Tree  - not really a story but a bazaar list of what seems to be every toy the narrator has ever seen.

 

What Christmas Is As We Grow Older – not much of a story either, and I read it only two weeks ago, but don’t remember it at all.

 
The Poor Relation's Story  - has an unreliable narrator who tells one story, then starts over telling the opposite, so we can’t be completely sure what to believe, but it’s probably the version where he is poor and lonely.

 
The Child's Story – reads like some sort of parable of the stages of a man’s life, from childhood to old age. Not really sure what the point is, though.

 
The Schoolboy's Story – a nice story with a happy ending, which implies that good people will always be rewarded. Shades of Nicholas Nickleby  in the description of how poorly treated boys could be in private schools.

 

Nobody's Story  - this story gave readers a jolt, and according to the introduction, left them disgusted with Dickens for trying to open the eyes of comfortable middle and upper class people to the realities of life being poor, and how unfair it is for those who are well off to actually blame the poor for being poor, uneducated and unhealthy, when it is often so hard to break the cycle of poverty without outside help.

 
The Seven Poor Travellers – this is the first of several stories in this volume that use the story-within-a-story structure, and in this case, the characters in the inner story are better characterized than those in the outer story.

 

The Holly-Tree – another story-within-a-story that is really more interesting than the outer story. The inner story, “Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn” was published by itself as well, and it is worth a few minutes of your time to check the adorable color illustrations in this online edition.

 

The Wreck of the Golden Mary – only contains the first part, which I didn’t know until I finished the excerpt, and exclaimed “this can’t possibly be the ending!” and it wasn’t. I have downloaded the whole story, but not read it yet. The ending, as presented here, is a big cliffhanger, and while many modern stories and novels end that abruptly, that wasn’t how Dickens worked. My download of the complete story does not say who the second writer was, but it may have been Wilkie Collins.

 

The Perils of Certain English Prisoners  - another collaboration between Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and only chapters 1 and 3 are printed here. Chapter 2, by Collins, is summarized in 1 sentence by the editor, which does it nothing resembling justice. I found the whole story and went back and read chapter 2, and despite the narrator’s racism against the “Sambos” and Indians, this was one of my favorite stories in the volume, second to “No Thoroughfare,” and the ending just about broke my heart.

  
Going Into Society (from A House to Let) – there was no indication that this was part of a longer work, and I didn’t see this note in the description until just now, when I copied the story list for my review. There is a house which two men are looking at buying, which must have some superstition tied to it, or for some reason people must be warned away from it, since these men are looking into the previous occupants of the house to find out what is wrong with it. In this excerpt, we get the story of the owner of a freak circus (you know, giant man, bearded lady, etc.) and the dwarf from the circus who wins money in a lottery, quits the circus and “goes into society,” only to find that people are mercenary, and everyone who befriends him does so because of his money, so he comes back to the circus, as poor as he was before winning the lottery.

 

The Haunted House – I completely skipped this one, since the editor bothered to put a footnote saying that only two of eight chapters are included in this volume, the others having not been written by Dickens.  

 

A Message From the Sea  - I skipped this one too. This was written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins and is also not complete here, missing chapters 3 and 4, which the editor doesn’t bother to note until the beginning of chapter 5.

 

Tom Tiddler's Ground – Another one I skipped. The original has seven chapters, but only the three written by Dickens are included, and at least the editor mentions this on page one, rather than in the middle.

 

Somebody's Luggage – This one is also incomplete, but I read it and you can too without being lost, since the outer story is complete, but there are missing I don’t know how many stories-within-the-story which are all written by the Somebody who left the Luggage to be called for, but disappeared into the ether. Again, the editor doesn’t bother to mention that it’s not all there.

 

Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings – an amusing story, narrated by the rambling Mrs. Lirriper, who rents rooms to a young married couple who turn out not to be married, and Mr. Edson abandons his pregnant “wife” (and if there is any indication that she is pregnant before the baby pops out, I missed it), she dies in childbirth, and Mrs. Lirriper raises him as her grandson, not telling him anything of his parentage.

 

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy  - a sequel to the above, when the “grandson,” young Jemmy Jackman Lirriper is about 12-14 years old. Mrs. Lirriper receives a mysterious visit from a Frenchman saying that someone in France is dying and is leaving her all his money, but they don’t know his name. Mrs. Lirriper, Jemmy, and the Major (a longtime boarder), take a trip to France to find out who the man is, and it turns out to be Mr. Edson, Jemmy’s father. Mrs. Lirriper and the Major still manage to keep his identity a secret from Jemmy, Edson dies, and Mrs. Lirriper gets his money.

 

Doctor Marigold – this was a very sweet story with a happy ending.

 

Mugby Junction  - also incomplete, so I didn’t read this one either.

 

No Thoroughfare – my favorite one. The ending was pretty easy to predict early on, but not the roundabout way in which we got to it. A lovely, classic Dickensian happy ending.

 

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices – this one started off well enough, but it’s like Dickens and Collins couldn’t figure out what to do with it. This could alternately be called “Thomas Idle’s Series of Unfortunate Events.” The inner stories get in the way, reminding me of The Pickwick Papers, the only one of Dickens’ novels that was a struggle to read, and then there’s several pages listing what Francis Goodchild sees out the window of the hotel for a few days, and then it just ends. I did like Goodchild’s character, but the story was mostly a disappointment. I would have been far happier if “No Thoroughfare” had been the last story in the volume, ending it on a high note for me.

This post is by Ceridwen, in case that gets reblogged out. 

 

Now, I know that resident BookLikers are likely sick of the recent influx of the Goodreads diaspora and all our shouting. I've been involved in in-groups on social media long enough to know how irritating n00bs are with their casual galumphing over social standards developed and maintained by the invested members of a platform. So to you BookLikes Golden Agers, I apologize for continuing to complain about my Goodreads ex-boyfriend while I'm on a date with BookLikes. 

 

That said, I have released the database that collects 12 of the 21 delete lists in Goodreads's recent policy change, in addition to an analysis - with charts! - of the data. Goodreads has been frustratingly vague in what they consider actionable; here are the book reviews that they have taken action against. I would seriously love it if folk would use this database to find out more about what Goodreads deems actionable. 

 

Science is sexy, friends. 

 

Go to page 9, if the link doesn't work right. People buy books and don't read them. Who are those people?

"But a personal boycott is not censorship because the reader isn't saying author A with the bad attitude shouldn't be published... Deciding not to read a particular author or buy a particular author does not suppress the author's right to publish (particularly in this day and age). Concerted boycotts can have that effect but only if the numbers are large enough which is highly rare in the case of a reader and an author."

-- Jane Litte, Dear Author
http://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/the-personal-boycott-and-how-its-not-censorship/

In short, being boycotted won't destroy your career, so stop claiming that it will. Only what YOU say/do will destroy your career. But that's just my opinion.

 

Dawid Piaskowski boldly says what no book site CEO has said before.

 

 

"We would like also to confirm that BookLikes is independent, doesn't support or is linked in any kind with STGRB community, or any other."

 

Thank you, Dawid, a million times thank you for this safe place. I will cheerfully follow the Guidelines and help make BookLikes the best positive place for book lovers!

 

http://sockpoppet.booklikes.com/ 30 September 2013

So everyone's page is called a blog, even if they don't write blog posts, and what appears to be your username (i.e., your name that is visible to other people) is actually called your "blog title." Makes perfect sense. And even though my books have all (or mostly) imported from Goodreads, all my shelf counts and my total book count say zero. What the hell?

I read this book after seeing it mentioned on the Agatha Christie Facebook page, as "a book Agatha Christie read as a child and one of her many influences." I didn't pick up on any influences, but I still enjoyed it. It is a children's story, although I'm not sure what age group it would have been for, but probably not teenagers. It contains more serious subject matter than I might have expected in what would nowadays probably be considered a middle grades book, beginning with Violet falling down the stairs at the age of two after her oldest brother Edmund trips and drops her. She becomes paralyzed from the waist down, apparently (her condition is not really described, just that she can't move around on her own, and has to lie down most of the time). The story gets rather religious in places, but it is cute rather than cloying. The author does a good job of giving each child a distinct personality in a short number of pages - no small task when there are eight(!) siblings, and all close in age. The kids are the stars of the book, and the adults have small parts; the parents show up occasionally, usually with presents or treats, and the nurse and governess are in charge of most of the discipline. There isn't really a plot; the book is basically a series of anecdotes of the kids' adventures and normal occurrences, such a birthday parties and getting the Measles. Violet is a little too good to be true, but I liked her anyway. Poor Edmund blames himself for dropping her, leaving her unable to walk, and becomes her slave and companion for life, even when all the other kids go out to play and forget about her, so it's a good thing she's not a brat, or his life would really be miserable. I admit that I was crying at the end when Edmund is presumed drowned but then turns up alive, after getting home by a very roundabout way. Also amusing is the list of books in the back from the publishers. Some of the titles sound very amusing, and I hope I can find them, such as: Fickle Flora and Her Seaside Friends, Stolen Cherries; or, Tell The Truth at Once and The New Girl; or, The Rivals. A Tale of School Life.

I didn't like this book as much as the previous ones in the series, since it was about Faith's friend, next-door neighbor and now employee, Pix Miller. Faith phones it in, literally, and only appears on the scene in the last ten pages. I checked the font cover, and it doesn't say "A Faith Fairchild Mystery," but it is part of her series. The mystery was decent, although Pix doesn't come close to actually solving it, but just stumbles blindly into the path of the murderer holding a gun. I do like Samantha's character, however. I tend to like kids and teenagers in books, as long as they're portrayed realistically.

Iolani is interesting to read through the lens of it being Wilkie Collins’ first novel, especially as it was “lost” for 150 years, but it not his best book to start with if you don’t want to be turned off by the writing here – it gets much better! Like in Antonina, Collins manages to take usually exciting and urgent events like war and death and make them boring. One redeeming factor is that this book is a lot shorter.

The prose tends toward purple in many places, and there were many times when I got to the end of a paragraph and realized I had no idea what I’d just read. The introduction is correct when it says that there are confusing shifts in time. In the first three chapters, I had to revise my idea of what was going on twice. At first, it seemed (to me anyway) that the scene with Iolani and Idia walking along the lake was the first time they have sex, then it became apparent that she was pregnant, and then she is actually giving birth, and it sounded like this was all happening in a 24-hour period.

The characters are all pretty much one-dimensional, so there is little room for character development, and I didn’t really care very much about any of them, even the poor baby who doesn’t even get a name. There is almost no dialogue, either, so it hard to get much of a sense of anyone’s character.

This isn’t a great novel, and there’s a good reason it didn’t find a willing publisher, but it’s not bad for a twenty-year-old’s first attempt, written when the boss wasn’t looking.

I am a candy store owner, and as such, I try to read at least one candy-themed book a year. This was my candy book for 2013. I was a bit wary, due to some of the more negative/critical reviews here, and I recall (but can’t specifically find) a less than glowing mention on The Candy Blog. However, I did not realize until I physically had the book in hand, that the author was British. His candy world view is therefore a bit different from we Americans’. I did not notice a problem with commas, or lack thereof, as mentioned by another reviewer, but I was bothered by Robinson’s overuse of the word “nice.” As in things tasting nice. That is not something Americans typically, or maybe ever, say. We say things taste good. “Nice” has a connotation of sarcasm or belittlement. I was also annoyed by Robinson’s use of “sweetie” for candy or sweet, and he uses “sweet” and “sweetie” interchangeably, even in the same sentence a few times. Another was the “Lucky Dip,” the author’s name for the little bonus bits of information about different types of candy at the end of each chapter. If someone British can explain how that makes sense here, please do.

I am sorry to say that I was rather bored with this book. I am most interested in the last 100 years or so of candy history, and that is not the focus of this book, which mainly covers pre-history through the early 1900s. But that’s not why it was boring. Instead of being captivating to read, it read more like a text book or a series of encyclopedia entries than a book one would read for fun and entertainment. The author makes some attempts at humor: “munchurian candying candidate” (351) was pretty bad. Others are actually funny, but not enough to redeem the whole work, and there some phrases that I just didn’t get, which I will blame on them being lost in the cultural translation. I am rating it a 3, not because I can really say I liked it, but I give the writing and presentation a 2, and the sheer amount of research (the bibliography is the longest I’ve ever seen at over 4 pages) a 4, averaging a 3. I don’t like the book, and I was glad to be done with it, but I respect it, and the staggering amount of work that must have gone into it.

For a more amusing and entertaining look into American candy, I highly recommend Steve Almond’s
[b:Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America|50906|Candyfreak A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America|Steve Almond|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328875030s/50906.jpg|513080]

This looks adorable and made for me, even though I'm not 12 anymore.

My, but this book has a lot of characters. Too many, in my opinion, because I couldn’t keep track of them all. And then at least two of them have aliases. It’s Dickensian in a way, but most of Dickens’ minor characters are just one and done, and don’t pop up 50 pages later expecting me to remember who they are and why they’re important.

I was excited when I read in the description that this was taking place in an English boarding school. As an American, the differences between the American and British systems intrigue me, and I enjoy books largely set in British schools: the whole Harry Potter series, [b:A Tale Etched In Blood And Hard Black Pencil|289172|A Tale Etched In Blood And Hard Black Pencil|Christopher Brookmyre|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1173447889s/289172.jpg|2712214], [b:Cat Among the Pigeons|16342|Cat Among the Pigeons|Agatha Christie|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1275665326s/16342.jpg|2728434], [b:Nicholas Nickleby|325085|Nicholas Nickleby|Charles Dickens|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352758388s/325085.jpg|4993095]. So I felt a bit gypped when most of the kids are sent home before we’ve even been properly introduced after the murder which occurs almost immediately. Also, the majority of the novel is set off school grounds. Too bad.

One further gripe, and this is relatively minor, but probably should have been caught in the editing stages: you have a character who is an alcoholic, whose stash of liquor is found and destroyed, but then a day or two later whiskey is easily found when needed for medicinal purposes.

I disliked most the parts toward the end where Symons brings in all the espionage/spy/double agent/war-related bits, which were what I disliked about his [b:The Broken Penny|2805528|The Broken Penny|Julian Symons|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1255806682s/2805528.jpg|2831414], and it has the two main characters fall in love and decide to get married when they’ve only known each other a few days, which is apparently the natural conclusion in these stressful life-and-death situations, but I enjoyed the treasure-hunting parts the most, and when Charles and Hedda are talking to the locals, tying to find information about Johnny Bogue.

As Britt Montero says on page 158, “this is getting confusing.” Indeed. I was all ready to give this book a two-star rating until I learned that the book was originally published weekly (making this a real serial novel), so I decided to be generous and throw in an extra star for the authors having to solve other people’s literary problems under pressure, along with whatever else the authors were all working on at the same time. Props especially go to Carl Hiaasen for making pretty good sense out of it all in such a short time frame.

Manatee as a character? Booger was cute, and worked surprisingly well, except in John Dufresne’s weird chapter, where Booger “talks” completely out of character and starts waxing philosophical. Fidel Castro (and an ever-growing number of Castro look-alikes) as a character? Not so much. Not that I’m a Castro scholar or anything, but it just didn’t seem like how he would act at all. Take a bribe from the US government to pretend to be dead, but really live the rest of his life in hiding, receiving top quality cancer treatment? Not bloody likely. The movie Sicko hadn’t come out yet, showing how Cuba’s health care system is better than ours.

Despite my cutting of slack over the limitations of writing well in a time crunch, it still seemed like this could have been better. There are some timing issues (on page 54, it’s 8am, then on 59 it’s 2am), where I couldn’t tell if we were jumping around on the same day, or if it was supposed to be a new day, but those inconsistencies hopefully could have been cleared up better. As some people have said before, there are a lot of characters introduced over a short number of pages, making it hard to keep everyone, especially the minor characters, straight, along with the shell game going on with Castro, the Castro impersonators, and the heads that may or may not belong to some of the above. And what is up with so many Americans being able to travel to Cuba without any apparent trouble? Even President Jimmy Carter gets sent over there in the end. I also wonder if Les Standiford regrets writing his star character John Deal into the story, and if the events herein are explained or simply forgotten/ignored in later John Deal books, if there are any.

The Detection Club did it best in [b:The Floating Admiral|719399|The Floating Admiral|Detection Club|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1324235251s/719399.jpg|2742444], although they weren’t on a strict deadline that I know of. [b:Naked Came the Phoenix|451023|Naked Came the Phoenix|Marcia Talley|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312000060s/451023.jpg|439658] is a bit silly, and almost as ridiculous, but I liked it a lot better, because I wasn’t thinking “now what the hell is going on?” every few pages. Now, nearly 18 years from when the first chapter was written, Manatee can be looked back on as an interesting alternate history.

There are a ridiculous number of dead bodies piling up in this book, but that is nothing compared to all of the characters who were given up for adoption as infants. It makes one’s heap spin keeping track of all the characters’ ever shifting relationships with one another. Murders aside, everything else that goes on is very similar to a soap opera, except in a soap opera all the secrets would be revealed over the course of about five years, rather than a few days. There are a few plot inconsistencies, but nothing too major, or bad enough to really hinder my enjoyment of the novel. It was a funny and entertaining book. The best example of a serial mystery I have read is [b:The Floating Admiral|719399|The Floating Admiral|Detection Club|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1324235251s/719399.jpg|2742444], which started it all, and is mentioned in the introduction. That one was very well done, and I highly recommend it.

I first learned about Brock Clarke, and subsequently his novels, because he was my creative writing professor for four quarters at the University of Cincinnati. Therefore, having known him personally, I had preconceived notions about what his writing might be like. He was an enjoyable teacher, and I found him funny, and because I liked some of the books I had to read for his classes ([b:Motherless Brooklyn|328854|Motherless Brooklyn|Jonathan Lethem|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348254729s/328854.jpg|1971553],[b:The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie|517188|The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |Muriel Spark|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1307465236s/517188.jpg|6132856]), I really hoped I would love his books, but because of other books I read that I really didn’t like ([b:Jesus' Son|608287|Jesus' Son|Denis Johnson|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1176258175s/608287.jpg|1033961], [b:Willful Creatures|46205|Willful Creatures|Aimee Bender|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320541822s/46205.jpg|2386]), I was equally afraid I would hate them. What I was not prepared for was, dare I say it, boredom.

First of all, to me, Lamar is not an ordinary white boy name at all. I cannot recall ever having heard of a white man named Lamar. But anyway, Lamar Kerry, Jr., the ordinary white boy to which the title refers, just wasn’t a character I could care much about. He is a lazy slacker with the notion that he is better than just about everyone in town, but does nothing to prove this. He works part time at minimum wage for the newspaper his father edits (how can he possibly support himself on those wages?), after he went to college and majored in Russian Studies, “maintained a gentleman’s C average, and acquired a barely working knowledge of the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks,” (7). With a useless degree (how many Russians does Lamar encounter? Spoiler alert: it’s zero.), he manages to be both overeducated and undereducated. Despite sounding like he’s proud of his educational mediocrity, Lamar sometimes comes off as sounding smarter than he should, like referencing Mae West, Lana Turner, W.C. Fields and [b:An American Tragedy|331319|An American Tragedy|Theodore Dreiser|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309283443s/331319.jpg|6170936]. Lamar comes off as the type of person who is aware of hardly anything that happened before he was born, so all these references to the first half of the century surprised me. But none of these things are the real reason the book didn’t work for me. There were some lines that I could hear in Brock’s voice, but too much of it I found flat or clunky. Lamar’s narrative voice just didn’t work in my brain for some reason. Since Lamar is the first person narrator, the narration should sound something like his normal voice, but I can’t imagine any real person talking this way. It may be the scarcity of contractions:

I go down to the station after I am done with Jodi Ramirez. I have some questions for Uncle Bart about the official police investigation. My uncle is sitting behind his big wooden desk. He is sweating through his uniform shirt. It is July, after all, and nearly ninety outside. The police station does not have air-conditioning. But my uncle has been known to sweat through his shirt even in the heart of winter. In a family of rail-thin men with low blood pressure, my uncle is the one fat, hypertensive Kerry. [39]

The novel is loosely based around the mysterious disappearance of Mark Rodriguez, the lone Hispanic person in their gringo town. Lamar starts off outraged that Mark is missing and no one other than Mark’s wife and daughters seem to care, but Lamar’s actions quickly turn back to apathy after he does nothing but interview his fellow townspeople about Mark’s disappearance, and he finds out no one else feels anything but apathy too. He keeps telling us he cares about finding Mark, but his actions prove otherwise, and the last time he speaks to Jodi is less than half-way through the book. Mark’s disappearance is finally solved off-stage, which I found unsatisfactory. This book is like an anti-mystery novel: not only do we have a crime which the main character fails to figure out, but once Lamar abandons his nearly nonexistent crime-solving career to go on an “adventure” with Andrew, the importance of the crime to the plot takes a sharp nose-dive.

The book ends on a positive note, but it didn’t really leave me feeling any better. In fact, I felt depressed the whole time I was reading this book, and I was glad to move on. Since I put off writing this review for a week, I have in the mean time read Brock’s other two novels, and I am very glad to say that the writing gets progressively better in [b:An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England|733462|An Arsonist's Guide To Writers' Homes In New England|Brock Clarke|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348359572s/733462.jpg|1893490] and [b:Exley|8184157|Exley|Brock Clarke|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348453944s/8184157.jpg|13030829].