anna genoese

Hi! I'm super late tonight, I know -- but I spent all morning writing (since Monday, I've written almost 30,000 words on the sequel to Salt and Silver), and then all afternoon and evening with the wonderful dianafox, talking about books and watching fanvids. (Um, why didn't anyone tell me Legend of the Seeker had a bunch of hot women in leather wielding sharp objects? I will be getting that from Netflix immediately. This is... not the first time a fanvid has convinced me to consume media. That's all I'm saying.)

On the train on the way into Manhattan and again on the way back, I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and. Holy. Shit. I am about halfway through (I just finished the funeral scene in the middle) and I can't wait to read more. I'm glad, though, that I didn't pick up the book before I felt ready -- there's a lot of violence, racism, sexism... A lot of sad shit, a lot of abuse, a lot of mistreatment of patients in mental hospitals. It's really incredibly upsetting to read, especially because the narrator is, most of the time, really matter-of-fact. This is life, this is the way it is, no point in getting angry or upset. And I get that, but that doesn't make it hurt less to see/read.

I recommend the book, though. I'm not even going to complain about all the incorrect/missing punctuation! That's how good it is!


Anyway, I am almost positive that you know what my answer for today's prompt is going to be...

Day 29 - Saddest character death OR best/most satisfying character death (or both!)

MATTHEW CUTHBERT. Need I say more? Okay, I will: It continues to be the saddest character death for me, because I read the Anne books when I was so young that I imprinted on it. Only a few people in my life that far had died -- Matthew's death was the first time someone I cared about who was important to me died. It hit me pretty hard.

Sometimes, when I am rereading, I skip over those bits.

Only one more prompt! I'm going to miss doing this every day, although it will be nice to take a rest from blog posts and focus on the SSalt and Silver sequel for a while.

( Other days of the book meme )

Yesterday I acquired rhubarb, and last night I chopped it up -- most of it went into the freezer to store while I wait for my pectin to arrive. (Mail ordering pectin. I can't believe it's come to this, that grocery stores no longer stock it. What a world.) I took this opportunity to practice my brunoise skill. Brunoise is a type of cut -- first you julienne whatever you're cutting, which means to cut it into sticks that are 1mm x 1mm. This itself is incredibly difficult. Then, to brunoise, you cut the sticks into a cube that is 1mm square.

I am not very good at this, but it's fun to practice. (It is fun for me any time I get to wield a sharp knife and chop things.)

Some of the rhubarb indeed went into the freezer to await the pectin that will turn it into jam (well, strawberries will also be involved); the rest of it, though, went into a bowl with cornstarch and sugar and powdered ginger, and was baked into Smitten Kitchen's rhubarb coffee cake, which was a big hit when I served it to guests this morning. That recipe calls for the rhubarb to be cut into 1" slices -- but I did that when I made this recipe for my birthday, and found that such large pieces of rhubarb stay too tart/sour, and get a little too stringy and slimy for my taste. The rhubarb I cut into an imperfect brunoise was exactly right, though -- a little tart, a little sweet, not at all stringy or slimy. Highly recommended.

Day 27 - If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!

This might be my favorite prompt in the whole meme. Here are things I love in books:

• Lesbian detectives! Bonus points if she falls in love with a reformed criminal (a la fandom's version of White Collar). (Oh, gosh, if White Collar was about a lesbian FBI agent with a significant other and they ended up in a poly relationship with a female con artist, I would... well, I'd be thrilled, but also shocked as hell, since that would never end up on TV!)
  
• Mossad agents. Bonus points if they are hunting down Nazi WWII criminals.
  
• CIA agents. Bonus points if they team up with the Mossad to hunt down Nazi WWII criminals. (Triple bonus points if the CIA agent and the Mossad agent are lesbians who fall in love.)
  
• Diners. I love diners. I want every book to be set in a diner. Okay, maybe not every book -- but I will definitely pick up almost any book if the main character owns a diner, works in a diner, or frequents a diner so often it's mentioned in the cover copy. (A million bonus points if the book is about a lesbian CIA agent and a lesbian Mossad agent who fall in love while catching Nazi criminals while... running a diner? Perhaps time travel is involved so there can be a WWII setting...)

Okay, looking at this list, I realize it is much more of a wish list than a list of things that books I've read have actually contained/been about. I mean, I have never read a book with a lesbian CIA or Mossad agent, much less one in which they fall in love while running a diner and hunting Nazi criminals. If you have, please share the title!

So here's a new, real list:

• YA set during WWII. I read a lot of this when I was growing up, thanks to the huge library at my shul. My favorites in this genre include:
  
  
  • Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family (that's the first book; I love the whole series)
    
  • Renee Roth-Hano's Touch Wood
    
  • Ian Serraillier's Escape from Warsaw
    
  • Budge Wilson's Thirteen Never Changes
    
  • Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic
  
  
  
• Books with diners in them. Seriously! Like Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen -- or, oh! Salt and Silver by Anna Katherine!! (Haha.) (But seriously.)
  
  
• Secret agents. CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Mossad, MI5, MI6, I don't care. Give me a secret agent -- particularly with a romance. I'll read action-adventure books, too, but I am much more discriminating about the action-adventure/espionage books than I am about romance novels. I will read any romance novel with a secret agent romance, especially if the romance is cross-agency or happens on a mission. My favorite is probably All the Queen's Men by Linda Howard -- yes, please! Or Shining Through by Susan Isaacs, which incorporates many of my favorite things, including spies, fighting Nazis, a WWII setting, and a heroine from New York City. Thumbs up! I actually read Shining Through at least four times when I was nine years old. It is very important that neither of the secret agents die at the end of the book, and that they do end up together, not fighting or betraying each other! They don't need to get that "traditional romance novel happily ever after" (which I often loathe anyway!) -- I just want them to be semi-committed to a relationship (polyamorous is fine, monogamy not required!) with each other and not be killing each other or killed themselves. You see? I don't want a lot!
  
  
• Dystopia. Although... I am not sure this really belongs here. I will read any fanfic that has a dystopian setting (especially if it's set in the near-future or in the present with a slightly alternate history), and I will watch any dystopian TV show for at least a few episodes, but those, to me, require less of an investment than novels. And dystopian novels, as we all know, can be very very very awful. So I am partial to dystopian novels, but I will not read just any dystopian novel. However, obviously, if you write a dystopian novel about a lesbian Mossad agent fighting Nazis and falling in love with a lesbian CIA agent whilst running or spending a lot of time in a diner, I will absolutely read it with no hesitation.

Your turn! What gets you going every time? Any book recommendations for me?




( Other days of the book meme )

Remember when my dear friend doll_revolution sent me rhubarb for my birthday? I used it to make a rhubarb coffee cake for my birthday cake, which was delicious -- and I chopped the leftover pound of rhubarb into 1" pieces and froze them in hopes of making jam. Well, I have the recipe for jam that I want (which is actually a rhubarb-strawberry jam originally made by _artemis's mom), and I have the rhubarb -- and after a trip to the hardware store, I have the 4 oz jars I wanted, as well as the tongs specially made for jam-making.

Now I just need pectin. I have been to every single store in my zip code, and more than a few outside it, and no one sells pectin. I am resigned to having to order it off the internet. But then! Then I will have jam, and nothing will stop me!

Day 25 - Any five books from your "to be read" stack

Ooh, my TBR stack is huge. Plus I am currently in the middle of five different books. I never used to read more than one book at one time, but right now I have a book in the upstairs bathroom, a book in the downstairs bathroom, a book in my bag, and two books by my bed.

Okay, five books from my TBR stack (in no order), annotated:

• Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages by Diane Duane -- technically this is three books in a collection, but whatever. All bound in one paperback = one book. I've had this for months already, but I've never started it. It's so huge that it will be difficult for me to hold in my hands, much less tote around. Eventually I'm going to read it, though.



• Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy -- this was recommended to me by a dear friend who knows the sort of thing I like, and it looks pretty amazing just from the summary (30-something Chicana woman committed to a mental institution is actually not crazy at all and is talking to two different futures -- one beautiful and one horrifying!). I am super excited to read it -- it's what I'm bringing with me on the subway the next time I go into Manhattan. (From where I live now to Union Square is about 200 pages of a paperback, so one round trip = one book.)



• The Collector by John Fowles -- this was recommended to me as something I'd enjoy since I like Criminal Minds. I admit, I've started it a couple of times and then shunted it right back to my TBR pile. It seems sort of... masturbatory. And they didn't have shows like Criminal Minds in 1963, so I can see how a book like this would be shocking or whatever to the average person, but I'm sort of like, "Oh, it's a book about a serial killer with OCD who's kidnapped a girl to keep? Ho-hum." Eventually I'm going to read it, though.



• Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner -- I love stuff about spies and the CIA, what do you want from me? It's totally bulletproof -- put a character in the CIA and I will read your book. (Especially if it's a romance novel. What? It's good to know yourself, right?) I'll watch any movie about the CIA, too; it is no surprise that I've seen The Good Shepherd a whole bunch of times. (Well, I'd've seen it anyway -- Alec Baldwin in a dapper hat and suit? Yes please!) Anyway, I'm looking forward to this one, but it seems like it will be a bit of a slog, so I'm sort of putting it off until I can properly sit down with it and devote some time without having to stop after an hour or two to do work or cook supper or whatever.



• The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth -- I've read this before and loved it and don't remember anything about it. I mean, I must have been... nine? Ten? I'm looking forward to reading this again and remembering it this time (I hope!). Fighting the Nazis, here I come!!

Plus, two books from my virtual pile of pre-orders:

• Grace by Elizabeth Scott -- by far this is the book I am most excited about this year. The eponymous main character is a suicide bomber! Who runs away! Dreaming of freedom! And it's set in a dystopian near future! And it's by Elizabeth freaking Scott, one of my top three YA authors of all time!!!!! Um, give it to me now. (You cannot hear it, but my breath has sped up just typing these words!)



• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins -- yeah, yeah, I didn't really like the first two books in the Hunger Games trilogy. So what? I still want to see where she's going with it and what she's going to do and I want to know what is actually going to happen in the canon! Plus the whole internet is reading it, and I don't want to be accidentally spoiled. Blah blah blah. Team Haymitch! (Well, and Team Cinna!!)

Okay, you guys! Now you: what is on your TBR list/pile? Even if you aren't doing the other prompts of the book meme, you should drop by and talk to me (and the other people reading this!) about what you're going to read soon -- and why!



( Other days of the book meme )

Day 23 - Most annoying character ever

Wow, this is hard. I would probably have to say Holden Caulfield... or Sal Paradise. Like I've said, I can recognize the historical importance of books like The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road -- but I don't think they're amazing now, and their narrators are so irritating, so ridiculous, so self-obsessed...

I read both books when I was a kid (maybe I was twelve or thirteen) on the recommendation of adults in my life, and (I know I've said this before!) it took me a long time before I could trust those adults again. Did they really think I would like those characters? Did they think I was like those characters? Did they think I would learn something from those books, or find something of my life in them?

(They should have given me Ginsberg if they wanted me to find something of my life in writings from what, to me, at twelve, was "a long time ago" -- now, Ginsberg I could relate to! But I didn't read him until I was fourteen and "Howl" was referenced in a pop song I liked.)

Anyway, those characters. Yes. Most annoying!

How about you guys? Don't let your energy flag -- this is the home stretch, and talking about books is awesome! What character do you find the most annoying of all time?


( Other days of the book meme )

It's only 8 a.m., but my sister and I are watching Nigella make pistachio fudge, and I have a craving now! Not for fudge, but for pistachios. Mmmm, salty green pistachios. Or salty dyed-red pistachios! In the shells, preferably. Not quite a typical breakfast, I don't think, but I may have to buy some to nosh on later in the week.

Day 21 - Favorite romantic/sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)

Oooh, I don't know! I don't tend to get attached to relationships in fiction -- I usually get attached to a character, and by extension I enjoy that character's relationships.

As I've said before, I was convinced of the romantic relationship between Anne and Diana in the Anne books -- but that was pretty quashed by Diana marrying Fred. I always thought Anne ended up with Gilbert just because Diana had ended up with Fred, so what was left? (Miss Stacy! But, you know, I don't think L.M. Montgomery was writing the queer version of a Harlequin Presents novel!)

So I think I'm going to go with Min and Cal from Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. I like both characters and I like their romantic relationship -- and I like that despite the huge misunderstanding plot arc, when it really matters, they don't misunderstand each other or talk around the issues. I think she writes adult relationships really well sometimes, and this is one of those times.

I love that book a lot, and reread it a few times a year, just for comfort -- Min's arc of learning to cook chicken marsala and being okay with eating carbs and ice cream and hot dogs makes me really happy. And the way she and Cal both love her quirky shoes is awesome.


( Other days of the book meme )

Yesterday I...

1. Saw Inception with a friend of mine. Neither of us were impressed at all. At least I stayed awake! (She fell asleep.) I just don't get all the hype; this isn't stuff that's exactly complex, complicated, or new, and the whole thing was so painfully predictable. Plus it struck me as very much a "form over function" movie -- literally all about creating an idea (haha) that is supposed to look a certain way, often at the cost of the plot making sense and the characters being interesting.

I am of the opinion that there was a really cool idea for a movie at the core, but that movie should have been about Joseph Gordon-Levitt and mostly an intense character study, not worldbuilding and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Sorry, I don't remember their characters' names.)

NB, I did absolutely love JGL -- and Ellen Page and Ken Watanabe -- and would happily watch seven million movies in which they are action heroes and awesome.

2. Read Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. This I definitely see the appeal of -- particularly for kids. Had I read this series when I was nine, I think I'd've been a lot more willing to overlook structural, plot, and story flaws in favor of how great all the imagery is, and how creepy the story is.

Since I am not nine, I have a hard time getting over the flaws. ( Cut for spoilers and a frank few sentences about what I did and did not like. )

...Okay, and now the book meme!

Day 19 - Favorite book cover (bonus points for posting an image!)

I want to pause here and differentiate "favorite book cover" from "favorite book cover artwork" -- and also from "most effective book cover/book cover artwork"! They are all different things -- bad design on a book cover can ruin really good art, and bad art can ruin a good design, and sometimes good design and good art do not make a book cover that is effective in getting people to buy the book. That's just how it happens. (Of course, there's the argument to be made that by definition "good design and good art" is art and design that make people want to pick up the book. That is totally fair, too, but not my perspective -- hence the separation between "good" and "effective.")

I Love You Like a Tomato by Marie Giordano was the first book I acquired and edited myself -- a really amazing literary historical novel -- and it took us a long time to find the right cover. It turned out, too, that what looked good on the hardcover and trade paperback was not the cover we wanted for the mass market edition of the book. I loved the hardcover and trade editions (still have my copies!), but the mass edition's cover really shines:


(click to embiggen)

As far as artwork goes... I cannot tell you that The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass is a really good book, the kickoff of a really good series, or that the cover has an amazing design -- all of those things would be lies! But the artwork is awesome, especially the image of the heroine, and I am pretty sure that it's the first time I ever was really struck by great book art. Low res internet images are not the way to see this artwork -- it's in high res that the details are really beautiful. But whatever, here's a low res internet picture anyway:


(click to embiggen)


Feel free to, as always, share your opinion in the comments, or link to your own blog post! Please do not embed images in the comments section, but regular links are fine.

( Other days of the book meme )

Last night I wrote emails to Target and Best Buy, explaining why I won't be shopping at their stores anymore. It didn't even make me feel better, though, since I know no one except an unpaid intern is going to even look at them. But what else to do? I mean, besides actually not shop at their stores anymore.

I joked yesterday that eventually I'd have to learn how to make my own everything, because there won't be a place left for me to shop -- I'll be boycotting everywhere. It feels pretty true lately, I've got to say.

Something less unhappy: book meme!

Day 16 - Favorite poem or collection of poetry

I talked about my favorite poetry collections last time, actually! I love Candas Jane Dorsey's poetry, and Neruda. Most recently, I am working my way through the three published books by Maya Stein. That first link goes to her page where you can buy her books and pay via PayPal, and the second link goes to her blog, where she posts poems fairly regularly.

I found her because someone whose journal I read posted "alliance" and I thought it was amazing. I experience poetry that I like as a great and painful whack to the back of the head, or sometimes the bottom falling out of my stomach, like riding on an amazing roller coaster.

( Alliance by Maya Stein )

...and, of course, we all remember when I went out and got three lines from one of Candas Jane Dorsey's poems tattooed on my arm. Here's that poem, too.

( untitled, from page 19 of Leaving marks by Candas Jane Dorsey )



...Now you. Tell me about your favorite poets!



( Other days of the book meme )

Last night for dessert we had caramel sticky buns. The caramel welled up out of the bottom of the pans and went all over the sheet pan I had cleverly remembered to put the pans on! Phew. Cleaning the oven is definitely not in my future, thankfully.

Food photography is not my forte, but don't they look delicious? (And don't think I didn't scrape all that caramel you see at the bottom of the pan onto a spoon for a cook's treat.)

Day 14 - Favorite character in a book (of any sex or gender)

Whoa. I've been thinking about this, and I just can't pick one. Also, I don't always connect to the characters in books I read -- even when I love the book. I just don't fall in love with characters as much as I fall in love with worlds and storytelling and the way everything comes together.

I really like Peabody from the J.D. Robb books; lately she's sort of on my nerves, but when she first shows up in the series, I think she's really charming and great. I'm also a big fan of Vic Warshawski! She's so fabulous. (Disclaimer: I haven't read any Vic Warshawski books since the early 90s, so anything after, like, Guardian Angel, I don't know about.)

Oh, and, of course, the obligatory Green Gables reference: Mrs. Lynde. I really really really love Mrs. Lynde and her gossipy, sharp-tongued ways. I wouldn't want to hang out with her in real life, probably, but I enjoy reading about her!

( Other days of the book meme )

I hope this past weekend treated everyone nicely! I spent pretty much all day Saturday babysitting my neighbor's five kids, all of whom are sweet but rowdy. Once she came home, I just fell over onto my bed and didn't get up again until Sunday. I don't know how single parents do it -- eight or nine hours and I am ready for a dark, quiet room to get my Garbo on in. I want to be aaaaaaalone.

Today's exciting event is going to be a new recipe for making eggplant parmigiana in which the eggplant is baked instead of fried. It's an America's Test Kitchen technique -- and my experience with America's Test Kitchen anything is that sometimes it is amazing (like their fluffy buttermilk pancakes recipe), and sometimes it is just. Freaking. Awful. (Um. The list is huge.) Fingers crossed, people! I hope I am not wasting eggplant here!!

Day 11 - A book that disappointed you

Blah. Do you want the list in alphabetical or chronological order? The first book I ever remember being deeply disappointed in is the Christian Bible. My dad's family are a bunch of crazy Italian Catholics, many of whom have converted to a different type of Christianity (like Jehovah's Witness), or were born again evangelical-style, so I have always had a copy of the Christian Bible, starting with, you know, My Little Golden Book of Crucifixion or whatever. (My dad even had a special bible in comic book form for us.) When I was finally old enough to realize what it was and what was going on, I sat down and read it. And I was like, "What? Really?" From the way people were talking about Jesus, I thought it would be, like, his diary. Super interesting, right? But it is not Jesus's diary and thoughts about the world. It was actually like a supermarket tabloid, but from 2,000 years ago. (Or, you know, whenever. Depending on your world view. Which I am not critiquing.)

Anyway, I must have been, like, seven or eight, and I pretty much immediately lost interest in Christianity. Perhaps if Jesus had worn eyeliner and the Christian Bible really was his diary, I'd've been more interested. You know, like:

Dear Diary, Today I am gonna give a speech and tell people to quit judging each other and just, like, love each other or whatever. I hope a lot of people come. Can you believe that, like, they want proof of God's love? What jerks. Of course, I love them anyway! Then I'm going to turn water into wine and do some other stuff, I think. Well, really I just like to go with the flow, but these dudes need some head-slapping to get them in the mood to rebel against the idea that in order for God to dig you, you've gotta follow the rules. They're all like, blah blah, Judaism, keep kosher, the letter of the law, and I am all like, you must chill! Okay, I've gotta go and, like, heal the sick now. Peace out.

You know, like a combination of Angela Chase and Pete Wentz -- or Anne of Green Gables. Haha.

I ended up being a religious studies major and doing a lot of studying of Christianity and reading the Christian Bible a bunch more times anyway, but, yeah, the Christian Bible was a huge disappointment from the point of view of a non-Christian seven year old.

More recently! I was disappointed by the Harry Potter series (I think there were only two or three books when I started reading it, and I wasn't surprised that people liked the first one -- but I thought, and continue to think, that they are terribly written, kind of boring, and get most of the fun/interesting stuff from other authors), and Anita Blake (seriously? a prudish, religious heroine takes on vampires and werewolves who all want to do her or kill her? I read that fanfic when I was in single digits), and, of course, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. From all the hype, I'd expected something awesome -- or at least enjoyable. Sigh for the millionth time.

As a genre, I am disappointed almost entirely by post-Cold War espionage novels. They're either ridiculous or boring (or both!) with bland heroes and a faceless "Middle Eastern" villain, and the story almost invariably stars a white man who is embroiled in something either terribly low-stakes or unbelievably silly, the highest stakes evarrrrrrr omg!!

As a kid sneaking the Cold War espionage novels out of my mom's bedside table, I found spies and spying to be incredibly glamorous and simultaneously tragic -- and eminently relate-able. The villains were almost always given names and faces and that might actually be (I am realizing right at this minute) where I developed my tendency to sympathize with villains. What I took away from those Cold War novels was that sometimes regular people become villains through circumstances and bad decisions and poor judgment, not just because some people are "just evil."

And then, of course, there's the WWII espionage novels I also read a lot of and loved. Those aren't about fighting a faceless evil either -- and again a lot of the "villains" of those are sympathetic, but, actually, some of them are just evil. Just horrifyingly evil, just terrifyingly evil -- but for me that was a real terror, a terror I knew all about. I was one of four Jews in the small town where my family lived for five years (hint: I was related to the other three) and regularly came up against anti-Semitism, and people who hated me just because I was Jewish. Not just adults either, but children -- who I guess were just aping their parents, but that's not how it felt when I was a kid under attack by brutal classmates who never pulled their (mostly metaphorical) punches.

So reading those books was in a lot of ways wish fulfillment for me -- and, of course, the Resistance!!! Heroes of my childhood in many ways. (And I wish I hadn't been an adult before I learned that there was a Jewish resistance, too. Jeez.)

Anyway, these (interesting plots, sympathetic -- or, at least, three-dimensional -- villains, relate-able heroes) are things that are missing for me in post-Cold War espionage novels, to the point where I've given up and quit reading them. There was a brief period in the early 90s where there were a couple of "cyber terrorism" novels, but they were less about spies and more about action heroes defeating hacker nerds, which I was not very interested in back then, and am definitely not interested in now. I am totally open to recommendations, though, if you have a particular favorite modern espionage novel. Or, hey, if you have a recommendation for a good WWII or Cold War espionage novel -- they've all run together in my mind, since it's been about twenty years since I've read one; I can't even think of any authors or titles!

So tell me -- what books have disappointed you? Oh, and I wanted to mention that even if you're not doing this meme in your own journal, or at all, you can still comment on a particular day if it interests you! Everyone's comments are welcome all the time.

( Other days of the book meme )

Ugh, what's with today today? I think I am ordering pizza for supper. Some days, cooking is just beyond me!

Day 09 - Best scene ever

I know that I put together this meme, so I could have edited this day's prompt to be whatever I want. And I did do that with some prompts, but I've met a lot of people who actually have favorite scenes that they read over and over again -- and I want to know about them! I personally do not have a favorite scene, though, not from any book. (I do have a favorite kissing scene, though, which I'll talk about on Day 20!)

There are types of scenes, though, that I almost always love. They are the scenes in which a character demonstrates knowledge of a field. For example, I am reading the new Nora Roberts, The Search, right now, a few chapters every night before bed. (I am deliberately spreading out my reading of it, so that I have it until Faithful Place by Tana French gets here.) The heroine of this book is a dog trainer, and is helping the hero train his new dog. Above and beyond that, she also trains Search and Rescue dogs and dog teams, and quite a few scenes in the book are set during the training of various dogs. And people! She's very specific about how she also trains people, and there is a great scene where she teaches the owner of a yappy dog how to be the alpha dog in the pack.

I love scenes like that. Scenes where I know that the author is demonstrating the competency of a character while at the same time also demonstrating that they did their research -- and it all ties into the book, is all exposition and character development combined. (I think a reader can tell a lot about a character by the way the character reacts to being taught something. Ditto people in real life.)

Yeah, there are some books/authors who go overboard on this kind of thing for my taste -- particularly in historical novels, I sometimes feel like I am being given a history lesson instead of learning about the world and the characters.

Another book I am reading right now is Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell, which, of course, I've read before, as it's the first Kay Scarpetta book, and I love Kay Scarpetta. Medical examiner mystery/suspense novel!

(Clicking through to that Amazon page, I read the Publishers Weekly review, which calls Kay's "self-aggrandizement and interminable complaints" "annoying flaws" -- and I am sort of baffled. Kay's really good at her job, and she knows it, and life for a woman who is good at her job in a male-dominated field wasn't exactly easy in 1989/1990. Not that it's easy now either, but come on! I actually find Kay's struggles with men who won't listen to her or take her seriously to be remarkably realistic -- depressingly so. But I like the books, so I guess I'm biased? Except those things really contribute to how much I like the book and the series, rather than detract.)

Anyway, Kay explains a lot of medical and criminal stuff -- and, okay, yeah, nowadays we can all armchair profile a serial killer, thanks to Criminal Minds and Profiler and Bones, but when I read this book for the first time, I think I was probably around twelve years old, and I was really into the explanation about how profiling works, which was pretty new to me then. Reading the book again now (although this isn't the first time I'm rereading it -- just the first time in the last five or six years), I am again enjoying that scene, even though I know how profiling works, and I read lots of books about serial killers (and medical examiners!).

What's especially nice about the scenes in Postmortem is that they are discussions between professionals who each have a separate area of expertise. So each professional is bringing something new to the table, explaining what they know to the others, and figuring out how the information locks together. It's awesome. I love it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to Postmortem -- they've just discovered that over the weekend someone used a modem to dial into their "data base" and print out information about a case they're working on. They only found out, though, because the computer analyst left the "echo" on -- so all she had to do was scroll up on her computer monitor to see the records. Am I glad it's not 1989 anymore or what?

So how about you guys? Gimme those favorite scenes!


( Other days of the book meme )