Valley of Silence

by Nora Roberts
Book 3 of the Circle Trilogy

It's never a good idea to stay up late reading a book when you've just started a new job. You run the risk of waking up late the next morning with horrible black bags under your eyes, hair sticking up at odd angles, and the title of a book creased into your cheek. It was worth it though. It's safe to say that Valley of Silence was the best book of the trilogy.

Cian and Moira's story was a much more compelling read than the other two; the love story more moving; the danger more urgent. It still suffered from the problems of the other two books: i.e. too much dialogue and not enough action. There were more conversations on why Moira and Cian couldn't be together than was needed. But because the love story between Cian and Moira was so great, those problems were less annoying than in the other two. I enjoyed reading of their struggle to love each other, knowing that it could go nowhere and would end in pain. I also enjoyed reading a story in which the characters were emotionally honest with each other and with themselves. Those are the type of characters, the kind of people, I can respect.

I also respect, Roberts' willingness to show the gray area that lies between good and evil. Roberts, as so few popular authors do, has the courage and the wits to show that what we would call evil can have sympathetic facets. "Evil" can love, it can know pain, it can know fear, it can feel the need for family. I appreciate Roberts including the sincere affection between Lilith, the Vampire Queen, and Lora, her companion.

What I didn't appreciate, however, was the detail that Lilith sleeps with the five year-old vampire "son" Davy. I didn't see the point in including such a nasty detail. In particular I could have done without this sentence: "In the moonlight he [Davy] saw the battlefield, and the beauty of it made him shake as he did when his mother let him put himself into her and ride as if she were a pony."

I had to read that sentence at least twice over to make sure I'd read it right. When I was sure I had, I wished I hadn't. I mean really Nora, was that necessary? I can handle uncomfortable plot lines but that little detail just wasn't needed. I'd gathered that Lilith and Davy were "lovers" already, I didn't need it thrown in my face. And it just seemed incongruous with the style of the rest of the story. In many ways, this trilogy is a way for Roberts to push the envelope but I think she pushed it a little too far with Davy's storyline.

In any case, I suppose I should also add that the conclusion of the book, and the trilogy was satisfactory but predictable. But then what popular romance story isn't predictable? They all mostly end one way, happily ever after, which is why I read them when I just want to feel good. After all, I saw the resolution to Cian and Moira's love story coming a mile away. But it was great romance reading nonetheless and one I'll return to again. I wish the other books had been as good as this one, I wish this trilogy had been as good as the Three Sisters Island Trilogy or the Key Trilogy, and I wish there was time enough to stay up reading all night and still get a good night's sleep. On a completely unrelated topic Cian says, "But the hours mattered, every minute of them." Damn right they do. Now, I'm off to get some sleep.

Dance of the Gods, pt. 2

by Nora Roberts
pgs. 125-316 (End)
Book 2 of the Circle Trilogy

Still a lot of talk...Yadda, yadda, yadda. Blah, blah, blah. I don't have a problem with dialogue at all. What I do have a problem with is with dialogue that is repeated over and over again for - I don't know - space? How many conversations must the members of the circle have about how they need to stick together and tell each other everything? It was a concept I grasped quite well in the first book; why do the characters need to be reminded of it every other page? Why do I have to read about it every other page?

And Blair's repetitive inner dialogues grew, well, monotonous. I appreciate getting a glimpse into a character's head. It's one of the things that makes Roberts' characters come alive and something at which she usually excels. I can't figure out exactly what happened here. It could be that, because Roberts had to spread the action out over three books, there was less action in each and more dialogue than was needed or wanted. Yet, that argument becomes difficult to make when one considers that this isn't Roberts' first trilogy. She's done several, most of which are much more compelling reads than the Circle Trilogy thus far.

It's interesting too that, despite all the dialogue - inner and otherwise - I didn't understand the characters all that well at the end of the day. As characters in a book, I liked Blair and Larkin perfectly well. As people I could imagine actually existing, they fell fairly flat. And, I said it before, Blair is simply too much of an Eve Dallas rip-off for me to really appreciate her as a separate character. There were some differences, i.e. Blair doesn't mind doing typical girly things; Eve doesn't even have an idea what that is. But those differences weren't substantial enough to make me feel as if wasn't reading the story of a poor and uninteresting descendent of Eve.

Despite all of that, I do look forward to reading Valley of Silence. I can't wait to read Cian and Moira's story. It is my sincere hope that it turns out to be worth mostly uninteresting reading I've had to put up with so far.

Collapse, pt. 1

by Jared Diamond
pgs. 1-156

I'm trying really hard to get through this book - I really am. The premise - a study of collapsed societies and the factors that led to their downfall - is right up my alley. And, though it was slow going in the beginning, I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel. Granted, there were some parts that I thought were eye-crossingly boring, especially that parts in which Diamond discusses the pollinization and fertilization process of plants. It was enlightening but it wasn't the most exciting reading I've ever done. And anyway those parts were few and far in between. So I made the mistake of assuming that just because I enjoyed one Diamond book, I would enjoy another. Thus far, that just isn't so.

I keep pushing myself to make it to just one more chapter, hoping that the next one will be better than the last. I can't say it isn't interesting reading; like I said, the premise is right up my alley. I absolutely love reading about the history and collapse of Easter Island and the Pitcairn Islands. What I don't care to read about, in detail, is the scientific methods archeologists used to come to their conclusions. I don't need a two page explanation on how dendrochronology (tree ring dating) works. A short, simple, one-paragraph summary would work just fine for me. Anything longer and my eyes begin to roll into the back of my head with boredom.

There's a lot of method detail in this book which leads me to wonder if this book is really meant for a layman reader like me. I think it is, but I also think that, by including the scientific methods and terminology, Diamond is attempting to attract the experts and scientists as well. So then maybe I shouldn't feel bad about skipping the methodology parts. Then again, maybe I feel guilty because I'm not too long out of college and Collapse reads so much like a text book, I feel as if I'll be quizzed on the parts I skip. Of Collapse, "BusinessWeek" wrote, "It's [also] the deal of the year - the equivalent of a year's college course by an engaging, brilliant professor, all for the price of a book." Now it all makes sense, so that's the reason why I'm determined to finish this book - if I don't, I'll have failed my first history course. Because at this moment "BusinessWeek" and I disagree on whether Diamond is an "engaging" professor, I'll just do what I've always done with a long class and a boring professor: buckle down, stick it out, and pray for the end.

The Innocents

by Gipi
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading

I'm indifferent about this graphic story. It's not bad but it isn't particularly moving either, though I think it tries to be. My largest problem is I didn't connect at all with any of these characters. I didn't understand the little boy. Just how old is he anyway? Why does he look like he's twelve and act as if he's five? And what's up with the uncle? Does he even like his nephew? Are the insulting comments simple joking around or am I supposed to take him seriously? I thought the point of graphics was to illustrate and answer some of these questions but guess I was wrong. If the uncle is joking, he definitely isn't showing it in any of the graphic frames.

And what I am supposed to feel for Valerio the friend? Should I empathize with him? It certainly would have made the graphic story more interesting if I had. Yet, how can I, when the reason for his anger and fear is never clearly explained? Given that the uncle is telling this story to his nephew, it's understandable that he didn't explain the gory details, but couldn't he have given them to me, the reader, in a thought bubble or something? As far as I can tell, Valerio is just a scared boy who went to prison for attacking abusive police and came out a psychopathic man. That's a bad deal but I don't really care.

Nor did I care for the art. It was a tad too bleak and full of angles for me. Perhaps, it works to fit the dour story but it didn't work to appeal to my eye. I found myself speeding through the frames to get to the end, rather than studying them for hidden, revealing secrets. If "Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea" is the reason why I should read more comics, then "The Innocents" is the reason why I wouldn't.

The Insurgent's Tale

by Tom Downey
from The Best American Nonrequired Reading

In the beginning, I thought this was a fictional piece. No one, I assumed, could tell an actual Iraqi insurgent's story in such detail without making it up. Apparently, I was wrong. "The Insurgent's Tale" is the actual life story of an actual Jihadist. Needless to say, it was engrossing reading. It's always enlightening, I think, to hear the story of someone from the "other" side tell their story honestly. It helps to remember that the people fighting on the other side of the war in Iraq are just as human as the warriors that hail from America. It helps to remember that Jihadists are more than the evil, robotic suicide bombers that the Bush regime would have you to believe. In the words of Downey, ""To hear a polite and thoughtful man talk casually about his friends in Al Qaeda is to have the whole enterprise reduced to a more fragile, human scale."

"The Insurgent's Tale" does just that. It reminds us that the "War on Terrorism" is "not a mythic struggle between our supermen and their ghosts." It serves as a perfect juxtaposition to Military Blog excerpt by Zachary Scott-Singley (unreviewed by me) included earlier in the compilation. Yet, it also confuses me, or rather, it doesn't enlighten me as much as I would like to be enlightened. It shows me how a Jihadist is born - in this case, through anger inspired by a video showing Muslims being slaughtered in Afghanistan - but it doesn't really take me inside the insurgent's heart, which is where I really want to be. It doesn't tell me how Khalid, the insurgent, feels living peacefully among Londoners who trust him more than they do their own children one month, and fighting those same Londoner's children in Iraq the next. Is there ever a conflict of emotions; is there ever a moment of hesitation, of self-doubt? What is his actual stance on the American forces in Iraq? Does he have a position, or does he simply go where he's needed, questions un-asked?

I don't assume I know the answers to any of these questions but it would have been nice to see those questions answered in "The Insurgent's Tale." Again, my problem seems to be that I simply want this piece to be longer than what it was. Maybe if it was as long as this war is turning out to be, I'd be satisfied. Maybe.

The New Yorker, Winter Fiction Issue

The Nobel Lecture
by Orhan Pamuk;
The Bible
by Marguerite Duras;
On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan

When I can, I try really hard to read my New Yorkers from cover to cover. It is a rare occasion when that happens. The fiction section gets me every time. Most of the time, I just don't get New Yorker fiction. It just never goes anywhere. At the end of a typical New Yorker piece I always feel as if I've wasted ten minutes of my time reading great writing that has absolutely no point. And it is great writing - that's undeniable. But what I want is a story. I get bored with reading great writing just for the sake of great writing. I read because I love a great story just as much as I love great writing - maybe more.

But occasionally, I try. I do try. I started with Orhan Pamuk's 2006 Nobel lecture "My Father's Suitcase." It was an amazing contemplation on the writing life; on how writers are shaped by their country and culture, and how they shape the world around them with their words. There are some wonderfully crafted sentences that clearly express the reason why he was the deserving recipient of last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. A sentence like, "A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is," will have me thinking for hours. That sentence is just one of many that will get written on an index card for further contemplation.

The one thing that troubled me about Pamuk's piece was that it made me question why it seems that great writers are always unhappy, depressed, and/or addictive. At the end of a beautiful paragraph on why he writes - why we all write - Pamuk says, "I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy." Is tortured unhappiness a job requirement? I understand that great writing can come from angst and pain but does that disqualify me, the chronically content and generally well-adjusted, from writing the kind of literature that will win me a Nobel Prize? I sincerely hope not.

"The Bible" and "On Chesil Beach" was typical New Yorker fiction fare, i.e. a supermodel all-dressed up with nowhere to go. "The Bible" I found bearable simply because it had a short running time of two pages. "On Chesil Beach" on the other hand, was too long with a running time of nine whole pages and ends right at the moment when things are starting to get interesting. Whatever my problems with Chabon's Thrilling Tales, Chabon and I certainly agree that the now-popular in-the-moment revelatory fiction "pieces" are an annoying turn-off for readers like myself. Maybe it's an acquired taste but it's one that I will gladly do without.