The Women of the Copper Country (a book review post)

As I've mentioned many, many times before, Mary Doria Russell is one of my favorite authors. I've read every book she's written and am fully invested in reading anything she publishes. In fact, her book, The Sparrow, is one of the three books I think everyone should read. And you should read it. Make it next on your list. Seriously.
Just be ready to cry.

All of that said, I had a really difficult time with this book, and I'm not really sure why. Well, as with most things, it was probably a multitude of reasons, the primary being that, when I first started it, I wasn't really having much time to read, so I was reading something like two to three pages every three or four days. That can make it really difficult to find your place in a book, but there wasn't really anything there driving me to get back into it, either.

Maybe it's that it resonates so much with things going on today, which may or may not have to do with why she chose to write this book at this particular time. You can look up a synopsis but, in brief, it's about a labor strike at a copper mine in the early 1900s. As with all of Russell's historical fiction, the book is extensively researched and as close to fact as you can expect to get in a work of fiction. She even tells you where she bent the facts to fit into a novel structure so that you can avoid presenting the novel as literal truth.

Being about a labor strike, there's not much positive going on in the book for the protagonist and her friends, especially in the time period that this happened. At the time, labor unions had no legal protections and, well, all sorts of stuff that I don't want to spend time writing about. It's all history, and you can look it up. At any rate, it resonates very strongly with our current political climate, one in which labor unions have the least power that they've had in almost a century and workers are constantly exploited. In fact, my wife was listening to something from a law firm just this morning where the lawyer was talking about how they hire virtual workers in other countries because they only have to pay them about a third as much and don't have to pay for health care and all sorts of other things for employees they have in other countries. It was very sad to me to listen to her go on and on about the benefits of exploiting workers simply because they don't live in the United States.

So, yeah, exploitation by the rich. The whole thing is depressing, and it really made much of the book difficult to get through. For me, anyway. My wife had much less of a problem with the book.

It does pick up... hmm... I don't know, somewhere past the halfway mark. Not that it gets better for the characters, but the pace of the book picks up, and it became a more compelling read.

I guess the real question, then, is whether I think you should the book, and my answer is yes. Absolutely yes.
Just because it's difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It's a very timely book and should be read. Just be prepared to struggle with it. And to struggle with the ending. I can't promise any good times from this one.
But, you know, maybe it will inspire some action.

Winchester (a movie review post)

Let me start this off by saying that I am not a horror movie person. But, then, that was not my motivation for watching this movie and, now, having seen it, I'd have to say that this is barely a horror movie, which was probably the cause of its poor reception. When you have something billed as a horror movie, the people going to see it want horror. At best, this can only be called a spooky movie. In fact, it was rather reminiscent of the TV show Ghost Whisperer.

That being said, my family largely enjoyed the movie, but, then, none of us are horror movie people so, if it had actually been a horror movie, we, as a family, wouldn't have watched it. I would have been doing that on my own because, like I alluded to, I had other motivations for watching the movie. The main one being that the house in the movie is a real place, the Winchester Mystery House, and we had been talking about going to visit it for years. When the movie came out, with Helen Mirren, no less, I figured I'd watch it since we still hadn't been to visit the house.

But I never got around to it.

Then, we went to visit the house, finally!, back in September, and that provided the motivation to watch the movie, as a family, no less, though that took some convincing because of its "horror movie" status.

As I said, my family largely enjoyed the film. Easily, the best bits were when they used rooms we had seen on our tour, at night by candlelight! (new this year), which gave the movie some personal emotional connection. The acting was fine, Helen Mirren perhaps a bit wasted in this particular role, though, since the movie didn't really rise above the ghostly mundane.

I think the biggest failure of the movie was its lack of focus on the house itself. Sure, the house features into the movie, but it's really only ever a side-effect. It's like the filmmakers couldn't decide whether they were making a horror movie or a historical movie and, so, fell somewhere in the middle, a middle which didn't really work for the public in general since, I'm sure, most of the public doesn't realize the house is real and, certainly, most of the public has never been there.

Anyway, if you like a little bit of spook, especially since this is October, this could be worth watching. If you like a lot of spook, this is not for you. If you like a little bit of history and a lot of history-fiction (shut up, I don't want to say "historical fiction," right now), this could be worth watching. If you like a more in depth look at your history in your history-fiction, this is going to disappoint, as it doesn't really ever tell you anything more than that there was a woman named Sarah Winchester who built a weird house.

And more on that tomorrow.

Dreamers of the Day

"...the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible." -- T. E. Lawrence

The Cairo Conference, the one in 1921, is one of the most pivotal points in modern history in that it set the stage for much of the world's current problems in the Middle East. Possibly all of them. The best thing that can be said it about it is that, thankfully, the United States wasn't involved in what happened. It's difficult for me to understand how it is that any man or group of men can think it's okay to determine the destiny and place in the world of people who have not agreed to that. That would be rather like me coming into your house, organizing it to meet my own needs, telling you which parts of your own house you were allowed to be in, and which possessions were still yours. Let me give you a hint: it's not the oil.

This is the backdrop against which Mary Doria Russell sets her historical fiction novel, Dreamers of the Day. And what a great title. Have I mentioned how much I like a good title? Not today? Well, I do, and that's a great title. Fortunately, it's from a quote by T. E. Lawrence, so, you know, if I ever decide I want to use it, I can, and I won't even have to feel bad about it. Lawrence, of course, is a central figure in the book.

I've been fascinated with Lawrence for a couple of decades at least. Probably longer. He's such an interesting person in history, and, I think, Russell did a more than admirable job of portraying him in the book. He certainly "felt" right based upon what I know of him. Not that it's easy to know what a person was like from reading about him in history, but, still...

One of the things I like most about Russell is that her books are not all cookie cutters of each other as is the case with many authors. Each of her books has a unique feel and perspective, often unsettling at first when you go in expecting something resembling a previous work of hers.

In The Sparrow we have third person past from one character in two different time settings. There's the story of what's happening now and the story of what happened in the past, and the thing that makes it so captivating is that you can't figure out how what happened lead to what's happening.

Children of God (sequel to Sparrow) is also third person past but has multiple perspectives and is, kind of, what's happening now and what's happening in the future. It's an interesting shift.

A Thread of Grace is third person present with multiple perspectives, and it really through me off when I started it. After her other two books, it just felt sort of wrong. Until I got into it.

Dreamers of the Day is first person past but also break occasionally for the narrator to speak to the audience. The beginning is very much a "let me tell you how this all started" and was kind of weird, and, again, I wasn't sure I was going to like it. But I did. If you have any interest in history, the book is especially fascinating.

At any rate, she has not satisfied herself with having any particular style that is recognizably hers other than having superb writing. She tries new things every time, and I like that.

Dreamers also has an interesting ending. There are hints all through the book, but, for me, I kept thinking, "Nah, she wouldn't do that," but she did, and it managed to add extra weight to the book. I'd tell you about it, but I don't want to ruin it for anyone.

The Sparrow is still my favorite book by Russell, but each of her books has been excellent, and I'm looking forward to working Doc into my reading schedule.

Oh, and, now, once again, I want to read Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. One of these days, I need to get around to that.

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."

Lawhead's Skin Map

One of the authors I mention on my Of significance... page is Stephen Lawhead. He's long been one of my favorite authors and has some wonderful books. I got my introduction to Lawhead through his Pendragon Cycle which I read because I was interested in the Arthurian content. Prior to reading Lawhead, my exposure to the Arthurian legend had been things like Excalibur which, although full of knights in shining armor and all of that, were not very historically accurate. However, The Pendragon Cycle, although a work of fantasy, was being presented as historical fiction, and I wanted to see what it was about. The original Pendragon Trilogy remain my favorite Arthurian books to date (Jack Whyte's series comes close, though).

If you are at all interested in the Arthurian mythos, I would highly suggest Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur, the original trilogy. Lawhead did go back later and add in a few more books. I don't remember liking Pendragon (the 4th book) very much, and I can't remember how I felt about Grail, so, maybe, I need to go back and read that again. The 6th book, Avalon, is not technically part of the series. It takes place in the near future and is about the return of Arthur and was quite good. Darn... now I'm wanting to go back and re-read all of them.

Lawhead is not always a great author. Some of his works are tremendous, but some are... less than good. The works that are great, though, are really, really great and make him an author I follow. My favorite book by him is Byzantium, also a work of historical fiction. More recently, he wrote a trilogy about Robin Hood. Prior to Star Wars, Robin Hood was my childhood hero. The first two books of that series, Hood and Scarlet, are great, although I felt he dropped the ball a bit on the final book, Tuck. It's probably a good book, but Hood and Scarlet are great, so I was let down when I got to Tuck.

All of that to say that I was very excited to hear about his Bright Empires series, especially since the title of the first book is so good: The Skin Map. What a great title! [And the next book, The Bone House, also has a great title.]  However, The Skin Map is somewhat of a departure from his usual style of writing. Lawhead generally sticks to just one POV at a time, even in books where more than one POV is used. Often, he will divide a book into sections so that each section is done from a different POV. Probably his most effective style is when he uses a narrator from within the story to tell the story about a different character. It's kind of a 1st/3rd person blend with a singular POV and most of his best books have been written in this style. [Now, I'm trying to think of other novels written this way, and I'm completely drawing a blank. Well, other than the Sherlock Holmes stories which are narrated by Watson.] The Skin Map, though, has five separate POVs (that I can remember off the top of my head) that he bounces between with no discernible pattern. I found this, from him, distinctly less effective than his style in his other novels.

I also didn't particularly care for his main character, although I am somewhat hesitant to call Kit the main character; he was, nevertheless, the central character around whom the story revolved, which may have been my issue with all the different POVs. We just spent too much time away from Kit for me to become invested in him. Since it seems apparent that Kit is the main character (based on the ending), it would have been nice to have more from him. Of course, like I said, I didn't much care for him. At the beginning of the book, he is a character to whom things happen only. He has no initiative, no ambition, no opinions. My response to him was, repeatedly, "Oh! My! Gosh!" There was an inkling of a change in him by the end of the book, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I read The Bone House.

So, yes, it was good enough that I want to read the next one, although I can not deny that part of that is on the strength of the author, not the book itself. It's hard to say whether I would want to read the next book if I didn't like Lawhead so much. The end of the book does open up a bit more, so to speak, but the first 2/3 were a real struggle to get through. A greater mystery is revealed towards the end, and there are some rather unexpected twists, so that may have been enough to make me want to go on even if it wasn't Lawhead. Since it is Lawhead, I'll be looking to get the next book soon.

At the moment, I'd give The Skin Map a "C," mostly because I struggled with it so much. It just seemed pretty typical. However, given that it's part of a series, my opinion on that may change as I read the next books. If, in retrospect, I can see that this was a great set up for what's going to happen, my opinion may change.

Note:
I ended the freebie special on "Part One: The Tunnel" (see the Shadow Spinner tab up top) a bit early. The first two days, it had brisk downloads, and it peaked at #26 on Amazon's contemporary fantasy list, which, I think is pretty good. However, the third day, the downloads dwindled, so I'm guessing that everyone that's going to download it, right now, has pretty much done so. I'll save the other two free days for a later date. Thank you to all of you that downloaded it! I hope you enjoy it.
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table" will be available Monday, August 13.