Incognito

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Incognito started out strong as a generalist's introduction to recent advances in the study of cognition. The author's enthusiasm for his subject was contagious, and he wrote with a great balance between explaining the subject and illustrating points with interesting case studies. Near the end of the book the author's thesis veered from general interest in cognition, to a passionate case for altering the criminal justice system. The end of the book really went wild, becoming more and more off tone and off topic from earlier chapters.



Eagleman explored the justice system by making an interesting case for punishment based on reformability instead of culpability. He began with extreme examples of brain damaged criminals physically incapable of controlling their violent behavior, and stated that it was cruel to punish such criminals, as they were not able to change their own behavior in response to the punishment. So far, so good.



Then my skin began to crawl as Eagleman extended the definition of brain damage to include criminals who had genetic tendencies toward depression, had suffered lead poisoning as children, or were raised in abusive households. The goosebumps did not come from the idea of a society in which crime goes unpunished- Eagleman was careful to state he intended to contain and/or behaviorally recondition all offenders to protect the general populace. I was creeped out by the broad definition of brain damage (nearly any history of physical or emotional trauma of significance qualifies you as brain damaged by Eagleman's definition). And if a criminal is identified as brain damaged, the idea of their correctional reconditioning was also creepy and ill-defined. The lobotomy as correctional reconditioning, Eagleman concluded, was no longer a socially acceptable form of reconditioning. That leaves correctional therapists with drugs and other shadowy brain reprogramming techniques to reshape criminal brains. Yikes.



Further, Eagleman hopefully anticipated a future when brain scans are used during sentencing to help determine the extent of a criminal's brain damage. Based on the scan, the criminal would be diverted to either punishment, correctional behavioral reconditioning, or indefinite containment. Eagleman claimed that taking the human element out of sentencing, and replacing it with science, would take the cruelty out of the justice system and make it more efficient. I think his hope for the future looks like a nightmare scenario rife with potential for abuse. The best biometric scans of the future will provide a stream of information that will be interpreted by human brain scientists, or by programs written by human brain scientists. That means the human element would still be alive and well, rife with prejudice, corruption, self-interest, and pressure from exigency (hmm, these results could go either way, but our reconditioning facility is overcrowded...). And the worst part would be, the justice system and our whole society would be pretending that we were perfectly impartial, purely scientific. Giving human foibles the face of absolute, impartial legitimacy is a dangerous, frightening, and downright threatening vision of a future criminal justice system.



And to end this book with a truly crazy bang, Eagleman knocked Occam's Razor, and made some pretty broad claims about science in general that I don't have the scientific background to agree with or dispute. But the remarks seemed quite off topic and out of keeping with the rest of the the book.



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Murder Past Due

Murder Past Due by Miranda James

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Maine Coons seem to be popular cats in fiction these days. This was a cozy whodunnit featuring a librarian and his Maine Coon cat. While the amateur detective's library skills were key to his ability to help solve the mystery, the Maine Coon cat was not. I expect the cat in a feline mystery series to be integral to the plot. Take the cat out of Murder Past Due, and you still have the exact same story.



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The Tiger's Wife

The Tiger's Wife: A Novel by Téa Obreht

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a very rare case of a book I planned to give three stars, but was so impressed by the ending, that I upped it to four. So often I'm loving a book, only to be disappointed by a clumsy ending, or an overly explained ending that takes something magical and tries to make it concrete, reducing it to dust with the heavy hammer of rationalization. The Tiger's Wife built up a beautiful, crumbling, European folklore ambiance. It blended past with present, reality with fantasy. Most importantly, it explored what it means to find and hold onto humanity in a world of loss and death and horror. Obreht captured the magic that is our willingness to find a sense of wonder in a world of senseless violence and aching loss. And she was able to blend reality with magic, magic with reality, in a memorable and beautiful way.



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Unfamiliar Fishes

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


As always, Sarah Vowell's enthusiasm for her subject succeeded in getting me excited about history- this time about the history of Hawaii. I listened to the book read by the author to get the full effect of Vowell's deadpan humor. I came away from the book intrigued by whale oil and sugar, and, for the first time in my life, excited about reading Moby Dick. Some Cherokee blood runs in Vowell's veins, and she makes a very personal connection to the fate of the native Hawaiians who lost their land and lives to the unfamiliar fishes that washed up on their shores. If anything, her genuine feeling for the loss of the Hawaiian way of life saps a little of her normal humor, takes just a little of the edge off her funny, sarcastic voice.



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Zen and the Art of Faking It

Zen And The Art Of Faking It by Jordan Sonnenblick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Good book. Sonnenblick was able to use techniques I'm familiar with from Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie to create a completely different protagonist. As I neared the end, I was really hoping there would be no neat ends, tying everything up, resolving all the protagonist's problems- because that would not be appropriate to this protagonist. Although not all the loose ends were cheerfully tied, I would have liked to see just a few more left loose. To me that would have taken the story from good to great.



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The Dream of Perpetual Motion

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A surreal, dark fantasy.  Thrilling, fascinating, horrible.  Great use of language and theme.  Beautifully brutal world-building.  Confident writing voice that can tell the reader what will happen chapters before describing the journey, heightening, not decreasing, the tension.


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A Memory of Wind

A Memory of Wind by Rachel Swirsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Poetic retelling of Iphigenia at Aulis.  The vivid sensory detail fades as the novella progresses, but that may be less an inability to sustain, and more intentional depiction of flesh and blood girl dissolving into spirit wind.  Swirsky circles back again and again to two key familial moments in Iphigenia's life, fleshing out the memories a little at a time to emotionally coincide with the story's climax.

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Jennifer Egan takes Pulitzer prize | Books | guardian.co.uk

via guardian.co.uk

For the second year in a row my favorite book I'd read in recent months won the Pulitzer. This year was Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad." Last year was "Tinkers" by Paul Harding.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan- best book I've read so far in 2011

via amazon.com

I love the way the characters' lives intersect and intertwine without ever really connecting. The writing style translates detailed, direct experience into clear prose. Though there is no through narrative, the constant reappearance of characters we met before in new contexts keeps things interesting.

Zombies vs. Vampires

Last week I finished two books, each a hallmark of the vampire or zombie craze.  The vampire book was Breaking Dawn (book 4/4 in the Twilight series) by Stephanie Meyer.  Zombies were represented by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (although Jane Austen gets first billing).

I've already discussed my thoughts on the Twilight series, and I don't want to give any spoilers.  I'll limit myself to saying that Breaking Dawn shared many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the first three books in the series, except that Book 4 did no tip-toeing around adult issues.  If anything, protagonist Bella grew up at lightning speed over the course of the final book in the series.  I was shocked that Meyer didn't spread Bella's journey to adulthood over a few more best-selling books.

As for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the idea of the sister warriors was comical, but entirely unbelievable.  Grahame-Smith made no attempt to offer readers a reason these young ladies had the raw material to be so suddenly transformed into effective zombie-killers.  But with a healthy dose of suspended disbelief, their training scenes were amusing.  The narrative was at its best when it was the most gruesome and gross.   Any time the storyline veered away from rotting carcasses it reminded me entirely too much of the original.  I think I might prefer having my brains eaten to spending an afternoon with Mary and Kitty.

Of the two books which did I prefer?  It's hardly fair for me to choose based on the merit of the books.  I'm all about vampires.  Zombie stories are okay, but they just don't hold the same appeal for me as vampires.

Vampire stories are psychological.  They touch on emotion, instinct, desire, hope, fear.  They touch on what it means to be human, but more than that, speculate on what it would be like to be more than human, to have great power, strength, and longevity, to see what man might be capable of if he were more. Zombie stories also explore the human condition.  Zombies show us what it is like to be dead, what it is like to be nothing more than a body, a shell, without any spark of consciousness.  Zombies get into the nitty gritty of mortality: rot, decomposing, loss of body parts.  Zombies often lose thumbs, shed limbs, eat their own tongues.  They shamble on, asking us how much we can lose and still claim to be ourselves.

Vampires let us experience immortality, zombies rub our noses in the reality of our mortality.  I guess between eternal life and putrid death, I find eternal life more fun.

Breaking Dawn ranks #59 in Books on Amazon.com.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ranks #540.  Both books are available in Kindle format.

Tinkers

On the rare occasions that Paul Harding tries to state in plain language the theme of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, the sentences become complex, requiring the reader to wade through parentheses and vague pronouns to grasp at its elusive meaning.  Fortunately Harding has lots of other methods in his literary toolkit to help us understand what he is saying: metaphor, motif, character, description, mythology, plot.  His use of language as he employs these tools is mesmerizing.

Tinkers doesn't question the meaning of life; it asks, what is life and how does life feel?  The novel addresses how we experience our existence as human beings: how we perceive life in our own skin, how we sense a link to something greater than ourselves, and how we relate to that link.  It is a novel of direct experience, beautifully written so that the reader shares the experiences of the characters in a very visceral way.

In one of my favorite passages of the book, one of Harding's characters describes how the blind eat:

"That's how the blind know where the food is on their plates, like a clock, ham at six-thirty! biscuit at four! just like that, that's how Helen Keller did it, I bet, just like that, potatoes at high noon!"

Not only does this passage tie in with the clockwork motif that runs throughout the book, its chatty text defines the heart of the novel.  We all come into the world blind, told by religion, local culture, and the experience of those who come before us, to expect ham at six-thirty, biscuit at four.  The father and son protagonists of Tinkers are blind men engaged in direct experience of life.  They rely on no road maps, assumptions, or conventions.  Not only don't they know where the ham is on the plate, they aren't taking anyone's word on what ham is.  Their knowledge of ham comes from their groping contact with it- the smell, the slippery grease on their fingers, the salty taste, the resistance of the meat on their teeth.

For me this rendering of direct experience makes Tinkers more than worthy of the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded in April.  Literature is a rendering through the art of language of how we experience the human condition.  Solid grounding in the reality of our condition is the ironic ignition to transcendence, allowing us to touch something ethereal and magical that defines new planes of reality.

Tinkers is ranked #13 in Amazon's print literary category, and ranks #228 on the Kindle best seller list.

The Potter's Field

The Potter's Field nestles into the category of comfortable detective story that titillates just enough to keep the reader interested, but throughout reaffirms warm, safe, hearth and home values.  Although this was the first Brother Cadfael novel I've ever read, it is actually book 18 of 21 in a series that definitively ended with the death of the author, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters is a pseudonym).  

Pargeter was an accomplished historian and linguist.  Any hopes I had of language playing a role in the mystery were disappointed.  However, the detective plot is inseparable from its historical setting, and that inseparability is a hallmark of how successfully Pargeter blended mystery and historical fiction.

Certainly this Brother Cadfael novel pales next to it's monastic medieval mystery cousin, The Name of the Rose.  But taken for what it is, The Potter's Field is a pleasant, logically satisfying, and harmless read.

The Potter's Field is currently unavailable on amazon.com in either print or Kindle format.  The audio book is available at audible.com. 

The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi strikes a sweet spot for a brand of fiction I like to call survivalist SF. He starts with a premise that's been used since the Golden Age of science fiction: humanity is on the brink of extinction. Not only does Bacigalupi use this familiar predicament to write a super exciting story with great characters, but he builds an intriguing history of how humanity has gotten itself into such a mess.

Bacigalupi does a far better job than I ever could detailing the privations suffered by survivors in Bangkok, and dropping intriguing nuggets of information on blister rust, cibiscosis, Calorie Men, White Shirts, and Yellow Cards. I'd rather focus on what makes the Windup Girl stand out in the field of survivalist SF.

When reading science fiction about life after large scale disaster, I sometimes end up depressed, dreading the story, and counting the pages until I make it to the grueling end. I didn't have this reaction to the Windup Girl because the story is just as much about the beginning of a new chapter in humanity as it is about the end of the old. As in much survivalist SF, most characters in the Windup Girl are motivated to save their own skin, and convergence of their struggle to survive meets in vicious conflict. But not all characters are driven solely by the urge to save their own lives- some are worried for their families, their friends, their people, their country, and some even risk their lives for personal and religious values.

And perhaps the thing that tickled me the most about the Windup Girl was Bacigalupi's use of motif. From the dangerous, coiled DNA of a mutating plague, to kink spring energy technology, to the stutter-stop movements of the title character, to the tightly wound plot, Bacigalupi really embraced the idea of winding things up- and the repeated motif brought a touch of literary quality that put his book above much of the other survivalist SF I've read.

There were a few minor disappointments as I read the novel. Bacigalupi's portrayal of Buddhism proved that he has observed the difference between street Buddhism in Thailand and the Western intellectual interpretation practiced, for instance, at a well-to-do Zen center in downtown San Francisco. However, Bacigalupi's attempt to make Buddhist characters despise engineered beings based on lack of a soul was not at all consistent with Buddhism, and seemed a little silly to me. And one final point: although the prose was good throughout the novel, the use of the word "blossom" to describe every blow, gunshot, or injury drove me a little crazy.

The Windup Girl ranks 2,918 in Books on Amazon.com. It is not available for the Kindle.

The Dark Mirror

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Second Helpings in which I expressed my disappointment that some of my favorite authors are turning out "new" books that failed to say anything new. So I picked up The Dark Mirror by Juliet Marillier with a certain amount of trepidation. Marillier writes romantic fantasy series based on Celtic history and mythology. There are certain hallmarks I expect from a Marillier novel: I expect her protagonist to have a deep respect for nature, I expect druids and supernatural abilities, I expect Celtic folklore and mythology, I expect a conflict between nations, I expect a conflict between the native religion of the land and Christianity, I expect the protagonist to be socially exiled, and that some kind of romantic relationship will sustain her in the final struggle to achieve her goal.

In The Dark Mirror Marillier delivered all these trademarks, and at the same time managed to do something new. How did she make the familiar exciting and new? By developing minor themes from her previous work and making them the major themes of her new book.

For instance, toward the end of Marillier's first book, Daughter of the Forest, readers are introduced to the idea that a community may reject and be afraid of a nubile young outsider, tying this fear to stories of mermaids or other mythological creatures who lure young men from their communities, or simply drive them mad with their beauty. This theme, which did not appear until the final chapters of Daughter of the Forest, was central to The Dark Mirror. War and political intrigue, which played the role of setting in Daughter of the Forest, were crucial to the plot of The Dark Mirror. And, appropriate to the role of battle and political plotting, the primarily female perspective of Daughter of the Forest was replaced by evenly split scenes from the point of view of the hero and the heroine. The Dark Mirror did not have the fairytale quality that made me fall in love with Daughter of the Forest- it felt more like a history, rooted in court life with professional bodyguards, tasters, and men and women angling for power. Marillier changed the tone and character of her followup without losing her voice- and she remained consistent to her world, and made all the changes resonate with elements of her previous work.

The result was a novel that I was just as enthusiastic about at the end of the read as I was when I bought it.

On Amazon the paperback edition of The Dark Mirror ranks #51,413 in Books, and the Kindle edition ranks #9,328 in the Kindle Store.

Blossoming is a pain

Why does pain always have to blossom? Why do gun shot wounds blossom red on white shirts? I've read this "blossoming" description so many times in spec fiction books that it's starting to annoy me, and has officially made my list of expressions I want to avoid in my own writing.

Isn't blossoming a gentle, slow-motion process, anyway? I wonder what attracts writers to this description for being on the receiving end of sudden acts of violence . Perhaps it is the juxtaposition between the beauty of a blooming flower and the horror of intense pain.

Second Helpings

I just finished two novels that I was really looking forward to reading because of how much I enjoyed the author's previous work. Earlier this week I finished The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, and yesterday I turned the last page on The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. In both cases I found myself a little disappointed by how much the new book reminded me of the previous work I'd already read. My first thought was, what's wrong with these authors? My second thought was, what's wrong with me?

Historically I can't get enough of books by my current favorite authors. I ate up Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew mysteries the summer after third grade. In junior high I read the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. As an adult I've been in love with many fantasy series. Zafón's The Angel's Game can be read as a prequel to The Shadow of the Wind (a book which I read with rapt attention), so I should expect to find many similarities in character, tone, and setting between the two novels. Yet it was this very similarity that disappointed me. So what was I expecting?

In The Angel's Game, Zafón delivers a new story rife with all the trademarks that made me love The Shadow of the Wind: bringing the magic of books to life; the dark and beautifully twisted backdrop of Barcelona; the youthful frustration of fighting against poverty and a chance at love; a fiery, demonic antagonist. But the similarities were so close that they irritated me, made me feel as though I was reading the same book a second time. I found myself almost viscerally disappointed as I entered the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, nonplussed to meet this book's devil-antagonist, completely unenchanted by the growing parallels between the protagonist and his ill-fated forbearer. With The Angel's Game, Zafón offered me second helpings of everything I loved about The Shadow of the Wind. But taken together as a series, I didn't feel that The Angel's Game went anywhere, or took me anyplace new. I gained some insight on events that led to The Shadow of the Wind, which was neat, but was not enough a journey to satisfy me as a reader. I wanted The Angel's Game to add a new dimension to a great author, and it did not.

My experience with Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol was similar. I enjoyed the read, the puzzles, and appreciated Brown's enthusiasm for mythology and symbology. But I was very frustrated by the tight parallels between the plot patterns of The DaVinci Code and The Lost Symbol. Yes, of course, they featured the same protagonist, that's fine. Did Robert Langdon have to team up with a pretty woman with whom he would run from the police? Did Langdon have to run from the police, at all? Was it necessary for both his antagonists to have self-mutilating tendencies? Did we have to wonder whether the cops were part of the evil conspiracy? And did Langdon really have to go for asylum to a wise old man with a disability?

Maybe the answer is, yes. Maybe an author with a fan base needs to continually push the same pleasure buttons on his audience so he's not ripping his fans off, not depriving them of the second helping they were craving. For me, the best part of The Lost Symbol took place when its plot pattern diverged from that of The DaVinci Code. I was craving a story with a similar blend of suspense and mythology, a similar voice, but a different plot structure.

What if, as is the case for me, the tastes of audiences are changing? When I was in the third grade, my choice of mystery books was contained on three, two-yard-long shelves on the children's floor of the public library. Now if I want to read a mystery story, say of the type that would appeal to a girl who likes Nancy Drew, I'm a few keystrokes away from thousands of titles, thousands of choices. Modern readers have the option of selecting from a smorgasbord of authors and voices. Do they have room for seconds of the same author they enjoyed before? Right now the answer is, yes. A big yes. The number of choices becomes so overwhelming, that the majority of readers prefer a known quantity. But as readers have more and more choices available to them, and more sophisticated tools to filter the choices that would appeal to them, I don't think it's a bad idea for writers to consider what they can offer to their readers that is new, that takes them not just through the familiar journey of the last book, but takes them somewhere unexpected and interesting. I don't read books by the same author just for second helpings- I want to see how they've grown, how they've changed, I want to share in their evolution, and the evolution of their characters.

I say, if you have leftover mashed potatoes, don't just microwave and eat them again. Make twice baked potatoes. Make gnocchi. Try something new!

Dandelion Wine

For longer than we've been married, my husband and I have been trying to finish Ray Bradbury's summertime classic, Dandelion Wine. We started reading the slender volume of summertime, Americana-drenched vignettes aloud together one summer, long ago, but never finished it. Several summers later we tried to read the book again, but didn't get past chapter three. Our third attempt was no more successful.

In the time it has taken us to *not* read Dandelion Wine, we have finished many sprawling series, such as The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Harry Potter. We read the Iliad out loud, sitting side-by-side at the dining room table in Turin. We read fiction and non-fiction, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream. We read newspapers, magazines, novels, instruction manuals, and poetry. We read books aloud together in English, Italian, and French. We read at least four other books by Ray Bradbury.

So why did we repeatedly fail to finish Dandelion Wine?

Dandelion Wine is the distilled essence of summer: sunshine and sneakers, hot kitchens, porches, lemonade, and ice cream parlors. It isn't best read cramped in a suffocating, miserable apartment, in a land where everyone flees from their hometown during the month of August, or in a bustling city. It's easier to see The Swan in a quiet, small town where people sit on their porches late into the evening. It's easier to sense the Lonely One behind you when the cicadas and crickets have worked their hypnotic song deep into your dreams.

But, no matter where you're living when Dandelion Wine slides between your hands, the magic won't leap off the pages until you can quietly follow the residents of Green Town through the summer of 1928 as June ripens to July, bakes into August, fades to September. It's time to read Dandelion Wine when the reader is ready to accept, along with the residents of Green Town, that what makes life so beautiful is the fact that it's all only temporary.

Throughout the book we say hello, only to say good-bye. As Mrs. Bentley cherishes childhood memories she comes to the realization that she was never a child. Miss Fern and Miss Roberts are thrilled by the the Green Machine, but soon vow never to drive it again. The trolley goes on its last ride. John Huff leaves Green Town for good. We say good-bye to Grandma.

Half of summer's glory is knowing that it fades, turns into back-to-school notebooks and ten-cent erasers. If the seasons never changed, if children never grew into withered old men and women, if even the people we loved never died, would any of our experience be so precious? Finding the summer where it was okay to love things and lose them all at the same time wasn't easy- at least, it wasn't easy for me.

This summer my husband and I began Dandelion Wine in June, and finished the last chapter during the last dusty days before September. We wanted to read the paperback copy we started all those summers ago, a copy which followed us from apartment to apartment and across the ocean (twice) to return to us when we were finally ready to read it. The book is also available in Kindle format, and ranks #38,084 in the Kindle Store.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (the Movie)

On Sunday morning my husband and I were standing outside in the bright summer sun, waiting for the movie theater to open. We weren't the only moviegoers up early on a weekend morning in eager anticipation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Opinions on the quality of the Harry Potter movies swing from ecstatic to sarcastic, as fans of the books are either swept up in the magic of seeing their fantasy world come to life, or bitterly disappointed by the differences between the movie and the book. My first thought on emerging from the dark theater back into the blazing afternoon sun, was that the Half Blood Prince was a particularly good adaptation of the book into movie format.

Simply by using the word adaptation, we are accepting the fact that the content of the book must undergo some alteration, some screenwriting metamorphosis that allows the moviegoer to share approximately the same experience as the reader enjoying the book. In early films we saw screenwriting that attempted to scrupulously preserve plot points and world building details. In later films, we saw mad efforts at condensing huge, sprawling story lines into one film, that usually resulted in awkward, hectic pacing. It is already common knowledge that the seventh film will be broken into two parts, to avoid giving the audience the sense that they are simply skimming over, or reviewing major plot points of the book, instead of enjoying a movie. Given that, I wasn't sure what to expect from the pacing and enjoyability of the Half-Blood Prince.

In my opinion the screenwriters did a brilliant job of capturing the emotional journey of the story's characters. By loosening their grip on exacting loyalty to the plot, they were able to focus on character growth and development. The movie skipped important plot points, added a major scene that wasn't in the book, and changed around the order of events- but the result was a beautifully-paced movie, in which I felt I could sit back and follow the characters as they adventured and interacted. The movie version of the book was like an impressionist painting of the book- leaving me with the same feeling that I had reading the book- even if the film was a slightly fuzzy Monet instead of a crisp, digital photograph of what I had read. The ending of the movie, which I can imagine disappointed some viewers, nevertheless produced exactly the same sentiment I had upon the conclusion of re-reading the Half-Blood Prince for the second time: that this had just been our last year at Hogwarts, and hadn't it been a lovely place to grow, to be together, and enjoy.

I think fans of the characters in the book- people who read because they love Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the dozens of other touching and memorable characters that populate Rowling's world- will have a great time watching the movie, despite (and of course because of) the plot changes.

Roan Stallion

I am considered the member of our household least likely to appreciate reading or writing poetry. I find the position rather ironic, as the first thing I ever wrote was a poem, and throughout most of my childhood and adolescence I wrote far more poetry than fiction. A few hot, summer nights ago, we sat down to read the icy, Christmas-time poem, "Roan Stallion," from a book of selected poems by Robinson Jeffers.

The poem is a beautiful epic. Its heroine, California, embodies her dual heritage (and the poet's love of the West Coast) with only her evocative name. Although the poem was written in 1925, California's quest is so easy for the modern reader to grasp. I loved the scene in which she gathers her daughter's Christmas toys to keep them from getting wet (perhaps because, if I'd been in her place, I, too, would have been more worried about the gifts than drowning or freezing). The mystical scene which follows this is a vivid mix of naturalism and Christian mythology, again reflecting California's dual heritage. And the end of the poem was a strong union of spirituality and animal nature, in which California once more embodies two different natures.

The experience of reading "Roan Stallion" has me wondering our small town, composing impromptu poems on the voice recorder of my iPhone. Fortunately no one has come after me with a straitjacket, yet

The Neil Gaiman Audio Collection

I just finished a delightful audio collection of children's short stories written and narrated by Neil Gaiman. The collection includes three short stories: "The Wolves in the Walls," "Cinnamon," and "On The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish." It ends with a poem called "Crazy Hair" and a darling interview with Gaiman conducted by his young daughter. During the interview Gaiman discusses his then upcoming project, The Graveyard Book.

Two of the short stories are prime examples of Gaiman's talent in creating a magical, fairy tale atmosphere using children with modern attitudes who live in modern homes with modern parents. "Cinnamon" is a more exotic fairy tale, in which a young woman comes to terms with her blossoming womanhood through the intervention of a tiger.

The Audio Collection was released in August 2004. It is currently #41,448 in Books on Amazon.