read as many books as possible, starting with all the books I own but haven't read

Where to begin, without too terrible spoilers?

Wow, this is my favorite Septimus Heap book yet. The action is very fast-paced, and Angie Sage sets up all the preliminary plot lines very nicely, without being too heavy handed about it. (I can think of many books that have forced expository conversations at the beginning; this one doesn’t.) The book brings in several minor characters we have met before, this time as more prominent roles. There are a few plot lines that I thought would be resolved by the end of the book, but aren’t. There is also one obvious sequel door left open. I just can’t believe I have to wait for over a year the next book!

One final thought: I felt very frustrated with the previous book, Queste, because it moved so slowly. I am starting to wonder if that was the point of the book, that life in the House of the Foryx moves slowly like a dream, and therefore the book did too. Or maybe my original thoughts stand.

Sage, Angie. 2009. Syren: Septimus Heap Book 5. Katherine Tegen Books, New York.

This is a very good book. It is written by one of the current day’s biggest experts on Cahokia, a prehistoric city near Saint Louis, Missouri. The people of Cahokia built huge mounds made of earth (including the third-largest in North America), elaborate naturalistic-style artworks, and elaborate “woodhenge” calendars to observe the sun, moon, and stars. They also may have had a seamy underside of human sacrifice and an exploited under-class.

The book is a quick read- I finished it in only one day. The author blends a combination of anecdotes about the archaeologists and early explorers who described Cahokia and its surrounding suburbs with descriptions of what life was like for the average and not-so-average Cahokian.

I think that this is a very accessible book to people who have an interest in archaeology, but not a lot of formal training. The book avoids technical language, and presents everything in easy-to-understand terms. I only found one mistake, in which the author says that the supernova petroglyph at Chaco Canyon is above Penasco Blanco. The petroglyph is actually below Penasco Blanco, but he can be forgiven for that because perhaps he hasn’t been to Penasco Blanco. I’ve been there, and it’s really hard to get to.

My big criticism is that there are no pictures! I would have liked to see maps of various mounds and archaeological sites in relation to each other, as well as pictures of the artifacts he discusses. (He is very good at describing them in words, though, so that they are easy to picture in your head.)

Pauketat’s writing style is to go for the wow factor up front. Most of the book talks about the fancy constructions and burials in downtown Cahokia. Only at the very end does he briefly touch on what daily life was like for people living in the suburbs of Cahokia. It turns out that their life wasn’t so great- their diet wasn’t very nutritious, because they didn’t have access to choice cuts of meat, and they may have been sacrificed by the rulers who lived in downtown Cahokia. I really wish that there had been more about daily life of “regular people” in the book to balance out the focus on the important people.

I do give him props for avoiding the standard “collapse” theory that you see so often in the popular media, of people who just “vanish.” (Like Jared Diamond’s books.) The Cahokia people didn’t “vanish,” although they did get up and move away. Pauketat admits that he can’t make a direct relation of descendants to Cahokia ancestors, but he puts some good hypotheses out there.

Pauketat, Timothy R. 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. Book club edition. Viking Press, New York.

I got this book for Christmas, but it’s taken me a while to getting around to reading it. I’ve read the other books in the Septimus Heap series, and I think I like this one the best. Some of the characters are purely good, and some are purely evil, but the characters that are gray areas, like Marcellus Pye, are the most interesting. (I hope I haven’t given too much away here.)

Life has been pretty unsettled on this end for the last month, and this book was the perfect escape. I didn’t read it in one sitting, but read some each evening. I caught myself thinking about it at work a lot- I couldn’t wait to get home and read the next section! I’m still trying to decide how this series compares with Harry Potter. Right now I’d say it was not as good, but Physik is up there with the HP books’ quality. I highly recommend this book, but read the first two books in the series first, or else a lot of it won’t make sense.

Sage, Angie. 2007. Septimus Heap Book Three: Physik. Harper Trophy Books, New York.

I heard about this book a while back on Marketplace, and immediately got in the very long queue to check it out from the public library. Eventually I went online to check my status on the waiting list and found that they had reserved it for me a month before, and I never got it. I really need to get my dog to stop answering the telephone, I think. (We’ve been getting collections calls for someone who has racked up huge amounts of library fines, so sometimes the library robo-dialer gets hung up on.)

This book is very good; I would rank it up there on my bookshelf of essential world-view changing books. The principle behind the book is that the author went to some of the richest neighborhoods in the US, and then knocked on people’s front doors and asked them how they got there. Amazingly, people actually talked to him!

The book is divided into six chapters, each with an over-arching theme distilled from his interviews. Within each chapter are “nuggets” of advice and a story to go along with them. This book is inspiring; at the same time it makes me feel horribly inadequate. I think to myself, “There’s no way I can possibly do all the things those people are doing!” but then I think, “why not? Who says I can’t do all that?”

I heartily recommend this book. I’m even going to keep my eye out for a used copy so I can have my own.

D’Agostino, Ryan. 2009. Rich Like Them: My Door-To-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods. Little, Brown, and Company, New York.

I got this book from the library because I heard a review of it on APM’s Marketplace, and the concept sounded really intriguing. The book was exactly as it was billed, a chronicle of Harry Truman’s road trip the summer after he left office.

The problem with the book is in the execution of the concept. The author set out to recreate the road trip and follow in Harry’s tire tracks (instead of footsteps). He would often make comments such as, “here I stopped to take a picture of [landmark],” but neither a picture of the original landmark in 1953 nor the current state of the landmark was given. The book also tended to go off on tangents, such as Harry’s involvement in Project Blue Book and a Ku Klux Klan member’s sensational trial for murder in Richmond, Indiana, none of which really seemed to have anything to do with his road trip, except that he drove through Richmond, Indiana, and past Dayton, Ohio. My husband suggested that perhaps the author was trying to pad a thin manuscript, but I think a better route would have been to pad the manuscript with “then” and “now” comparison pictures. As one who grew up riding the backroads like US30 and US40, I’m always interested in the history of time before expressways. But oh well, I guess I’m just a backseat driver.

Algeo, Matthew. 2009. Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip. Chicago Review Press, Chicago.

This book can’t decide whether it is going to be a comedy book, or an actual office advice manual. As it stands, the book leaves me vaguely unsatisfied, wondering whether it is teasing or if I truly am woefully un-hip for wearing pearls or stockings to work. Sorry, Mr. Flocker, but sometimes people who work for non Manhattan or LA companies have to dress a little more conservatively than you’d like. Another disconnect was when the writer used British slang (snog, shag) to describe office life in America. Huh?

Flocker, Michael. 2006. Death by Powerpoint: A Modern Office Survival Guide. Da Capo Press.

This book is a quick read. The description of the burning of Columbia is rather compelling. The book has some ironic humor at the end when you read all the rumors flying about recognition of the Confederacy by European powers even down to the final days of the war.

Miers, Earl Schenk, ed. 1987. When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte. Reprint edition. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

I don’t have much insightful to say about this one. I inherited it from my grandparents. The ways of categorizing mushrooms were pretty interesting; I didn’t know what the names of all the different parts of a mushroom were, or that you could make a “spore print” to identify them. I’m still going to be a little nervous whenever I eat mushrooms for a while, though. My husband did find the book helpful in identifying some club mosses at his grandmother’s place.

Shuttleworth, Floyd S. and Herbert S. Zim. 1967. Non-Flowering Plants: Ferns, Mosses, Lichens, Mushrooms and Other Fungi. Golden Press, New York.

In many ways, I thought that this book was a better epilogue for the Harry Potter books than the epilogue that JKR wrote for Deathly Hallows. When I was a kid, I was never satisfied with “And they all lived Happily Ever After;” I needed to know exactly how many kids Cinderella and Prince Charming had, and what their names were. That is the function of the epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Her Beedle The Bard is more like an Appendix, explaining a lot of concepts in further detail. It is like reading the footnotes of a textbook and getting a reward of a hidden scrap of information that makes you think- “Oh, I think I get it now!”

In this way, the footnotes to the story are some of the more interesting and more puzzling bits. Rather than enlightening, they only lead to further questions. For example, in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” footnote #3 mentions a Hector Dagworth-Granger. Is he a relative of Hermione, or is this a Mark Evans red herring? Another footnote that at once tells too much and too little is #1 in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” which makes mention of a “Sack of Bouncing Bulbs.” What are bouncing bulbs, and how does one put them to unsavory purposes?

I was thinking of how to categorize this book, and it is interesting that in writing the fairy tales, JKR’s voice is much more like that of Angie Sage’s books than in Harry Potter or traditional modern fairy tales. (Is that an oxymoron?) Beedle the Bard and the Septimus Heap books do not use as much the old-style fairy-tale language like in The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye or Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13.

Finally, one last parting thought and I’ll stop. Does anyone else see any parallels between the Warlock in “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” and Fitzwilliam Darcy? I’ll leave it to you to compare and contrast, rather than spoil things for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Rowling, J. K. 2007. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Scholastic Inc., New York.

This book is a tongue-in-cheek How-to-Guide on how to feed and care for dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. It lists diet suggestions (cat food to herds of lambs), housing requirements (anywhere from a simple dog crate to an aviary 13,000 ft tall for the Quetzalcoatlus), breeding protocols, and locations to buy them.

My favorite parts of the books are the little touches. Mash uses non-standard translations of the dinosaurs’ scientific names, to comic effect. It seems that he takes the names and goes for the most outrageous combinations in the dictionary, like when I took my second foreign language and we always translated the word for “hit” as “smite,” because it sounded cooler. Mash tucks little jokes into the text, many so subtle that I’ve probably missed a bunch. For example, on the Dsungaripterus (p.35), he suggests that in order to distinguish friends from door-to-door salespeople, “Tell your friends to whistle a well-known tune, like ‘My Way’, ‘I do like to Be Beside the Seaside’ or John Cage’s ‘4’33” (tacet)’.”

The one drawback to the book are the little icons indicating suitability (or not) for the dinosaurs for various situations. These were hard to remember what they were; I had to flip back and forth a lot to the key. (But perhaps that was the point.)

How does the book compare with my gold standard of satire, Molvania: a Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry? It is good, and had many good chuckles here are there, but it was not hilariously bizarre like Molvania was. The author does have a very dark sense of humor.

Robert Mash. 2003. How to Keep Dinosaurs. Second Edition. Weidenfield and Nicolson, London.