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Last year around this time, I re-read Stephen King's IT as part of a group read-along sponsored by Softdrink, and, through this read-along, was introduced to Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings and his annual R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge. Constant readers may also recall that last year about this time I was in the midst of preparations for the Big Atlanta Move, and therefore did not take part in R.I.P. VII, although I really wanted to. (I did contribute a blog entry to help folks find books they might want to read for the challenge.)

True to the word "annual", Carl is again hosting R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril, the VIII of its kind, and this year? I'm all in! I'm so in, in fact, that I'm going for the top challenge:
in which I pledge to read four, count'em, four books of the scary-ish variety between September 1 and October 31 (although Carl says we can start now if we want).

My chosen four are:

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm taking my own advice from last year's blog entry and pulling this one out for a re-read.



• Breathers by S.G. Browne. I loved Browne's writing so much that I ran out and bought Breathers before I was even half-way through his other novel, Fated.



• The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I bought this one maybe a year or two before the movie was released, so it's been sitting on Mt. TBR for several years. Time to dust it off and take a road trip.

And finally:

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Another book that's been languishing on Mt. TBR for several years. RIP VIII is the perfect time to read it because it's also been chosen for a read-along by The Estella Society. These folks are new to me, so I look forward to making their acquaintance as we explore the Dracula myth together.

So, my reading material has been planned for the next two months. I need to finish up my current read (A White Wind Blew by James Markert) before I get started. I may be able to do that today, since I'm home rather than at work (feeling a little puny, but nothing serious). Of course, I could spend the rest of the day catching up on writing reviews of the over 30 books I've read since last October, too. Yeeesh. Self-induced guilt trip. I think I'll read instead.

Should you care to join us, click on any of the badges above to be magically whisked away to the host blogs where you can sign up. And, of course, stay tuned for progress updates.

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This entry was originally posted on Avanta Knits, which is where I usually blog these days. Come pay a visit!

And I wrote about it here, if anyone cares to take a gander.

The following books were consumed in 2011. The reviews were all posted in LJ as they were read, but consolidated here for your convenience.

1. In the Company of Angels by Thomas E. Kennedy
   
2. The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor (tied with The Map of Time as my favorite read of 2011)
   
3. Fated by S.G. Browne
   
4. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez
   
5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
   
6. Headcrash by Bruce Bethke
   
7. The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma (tied with The Anatomy of Ghosts as my favorite read of 2011)
   
8. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin
   
9. Heads You Lose by Lisa Lutz and David Hayward
   
10. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
    
11. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
    
12. Half A Life by Darin Strauss
    
13. The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll
    
14. The Likeness by Tana French
    
15. The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams
    
16. Ill Met By Moonlight by Sarah A. Hoyt
    
17. Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad
    
18. Faithful Place by Tana French
    
19. The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman
    
20. The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
    
21. Sepulchre by Kate Mosse
    
22. Discovering the Body by Mary Howard

22 total, far better than last year's dismal showing. I wished I had liked many of them better, but maybe it's reflective of stepping a little outside my comfort zone and reading things I wouldn't normally have chosen. Growth? Perhaps.

Sepulchre by Kate Mosse

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I picked up the Sepulchre audiobook from the bargain bin at the local megachain bookstore because I wanted something to listen to on a cross-country road trip and I didn't want to spend a lot of money.

Let's just say I'm glad I didn't. Spend a lot of money, that is.

As with Mosse's previous novel, Labyrinth, I wanted to like this story. Historical setting juxtaposed against modern setting, with a supernatural-ish link between them: just my cup of tea. As with Labyrinth again, the premise was better than the execution.

17-year-old Léonie Vernier and her older brother Anatole leave their mother behind and flee 1891 Paris for the country at the invitation of their Aunt Isolde, widow of their mother's estranged brother. Anatole has some rather nasty people after him, and Léonie just wants to get out of the city for a while. Upon arriving at the country estate, the Domain de la Cade in Rennes-les-Bain, they settle in for a long visit. But all is not as it seems at the Domain, and the siblings, along with their aunt, may not have left all the danger behind them in Paris.

Jump to modern-day France, and meet 26-year-old American graduate student Meredith Martin, who is researching a biography on Debussy as well as her own family history. She has also come to the Domain de la Cade, now an exclusive hotel, in search of both a family connection and a Debussy connection. She is eerily familiar with the Domain although she's never before visited. And soon she also discovers danger lurking for her in the recesses and grounds of the estate.

The story pops back and forth between these eras in a fairly logical pattern and is entertaining enough. I had some difficulty with character differentiation: the reader, whose name escapes me at the moment, had a convincing French accent although she made little distinction between the female voices. She did not give Meredith an American accent, which did not help. I found Léonie annoying, whiny, and overly childish for her age. I didn't care much for any of the female characters, which is unfortunate since the story was essentially theirs. In fact, I didn't care much for any of the characters. If I'd had been reading a hard copy rather than listening while driving across Oklahoma, Texas, and the desert Southwest, I'd have put it down and found something else. As such, I was a captive audience. But I breathed a sigh of relief -- "Thank heavens that's over!" -- when I finished the last disc just as I pulled in front of the hotel where I would be staying in California. It's hard to say whether the relief came more from the drive being done or the book.



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Faithful Place by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Tana French takes on Frank Mackey in her third outing with the Dublin Murder Squad. Mackey, as you may recall, is with the Undercover division of the Dublin police department, and takes his responsibilities as the coordinator of undercover operations and operatives very seriously. In Faithful Place, however, his work gets shunted aside as he is sucked back into his old neighborhood to deal with family drama and his own history.

At 19, Frank was prepared to run away to London with Rosie Daly, the love of his life, and together take the music world by storm. But she never appeared for their rendezvous and, although Frank himself left the neighborhood soon after, he never left Dublin. He never heard from Rosie again. Frank spent many years wondering where she was, imagining her life, while he married and had a child and divorced and built his career with the Dublin police, and eventually stopped wondering. Then one day, his sister calls to say the wreckers had found Rosie's suitcase in an abandoned house on their street, and would he please come back home to help them decide what to do.

Frank, desperate to know what happened to Rosie, allows himself to be pulled back into the sick family dynamic he fled more than 20 years previously. And, try as he might against it, he easily falls into the old pattern of family interaction as if he'd never left. Ah, Irish guilt. Nothing like it. As he investigates the discovery of the suitcase and comes to a conclusion about what really happened to Rosie, Frank struggles also to deal with the legacy of his family and his neighborhood: the reputation, the history, the neighbors, the bad blood...so much bad blood.

With Faithful Place, Tana French again creates a taut mood and tight story, and three-dimensional characters who live and breathe and bleed and grieve. Wonderful stuff. I can't wait for the next book.



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Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The person you love is 72.8 percent water and there's been no rain for weeks."

With that opening sentence to set the tone, Johan Harstad moves us gently into the world of Mattias, age 29, a gardener, a resident of Stavanger, Norway, a man who wants nothing out of life than to be unnoticed and unnoticeable.

I was the kid in your class in elementary school, in high school, in college, whose name you can't remember when you take out the class photo ten years later...the one you didn't miss when I left your class and started at another school, or when I didn't come to your party...the one you thought didn't have a life....I was practically invisible, wasn't I? And I was perhaps the happiest person you could have known.

Mattias lives with his girlfriend Helle and works at a nursery. He idolizes Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, because he was second. One fine day, he loses both job and girlfriend and decides to accompany his friends' band to a gig in the Faroe Islands as their sound tech. But something happens....and the next thing both we and Mattias know, he's in a residential psychiatric facility in Torshavn.

Mattias spends the next year navigating his new surroundings and coming to terms with his illness. During that time, he integrates himself into a community, making a human connection, with his psychiatrist Havstein, with the other residents, for perhaps the first time.

Havstein runs the facility with a loose rein and dreams of moving to the Caribbean. Ennen listens to The Cardigans and rides buses obsessively and believes she isn't real.

Ennen gets it into her head that she is, in fact, that person, that person from nowhere, the person who looks at you that way, on a bus, on a train, or catching a plane, the woman you never see again, she's convinced that anyone who mentions such an experience has in fact seen her, which is why she doesn't exist.

Palli, a welder and sailor, barely speaks. Anna is the mother hen, the domestic goddess, the quiet center who keeps the household running. Together with Mattias, a family of sorts forms...or, more accurately, Mattias is adopted into the family already formed, each member with a weakness, a fragile hold on reality, each strengthened and perfected by the solidarity of the group.

Mattias's thoughts tell the story, streaming in clear, spare prose and paragraphs punctuated almost solely by commas. This run-on running train-of-thought style provoked the occasional "Oh, come on, give me a period already!" response, but for the most part was unobtrusive and served the story well. The bleak far northern European locale -- unfamiliar enough to this untraveled American that I had to find it on a map -- is so fundamental to the psyche and behavior of Mattias and the others that it can be considered a character of the novel itself. And the story is bleak, gray, cold, like its locale, locked in a perpetual winter, but in the end, spring comes round again, and there's warmth and sweetness and just the merest hint of sunshine for Mattias.



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The Hair of Harold Roux: A Novel by Thomas Williams

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Aaron Benham, writer, professor, husband, father, is having a midlife crisis.

He's stalled on his latest novel; he's dealing with the hysterical mother of a missing student as well as the worried wife of a doctoral candidate who won't finish his thesis; and he's disappointed his family once again by forgetting about the family trip they had planned. During that long weekend alone, while his family has gone on without him, Aaron wrestles with age-old questions: Who am I? How did I get here? What is my purpose?

Set in New England of the early 1970s, the novel ranges through time and memory and fiction itself. We are treated to Aaron's stream-of-consciousness reminiscences of WWII Army life, the goings-on of the present day, and his struggles with his novel. In fact, we spend a lot of time inside Aaron's novel itself..."a thinly disguised memoir of his college days," to quote the back cover. And even some time inside the novel's novel...each story interconnected by outside events, haunting regrets, and foolish young decisions. Aaron's world allows him to be selfish and self-indulgent -- a guilty flaw he fully recognizes and explores at length through his own internal dialogue and that of Allard Benson, the alter ego of his novel. By the time we reach the conclusion, Aaron may or may not be a better person, but he's certainly aware.

Although it took me a little while to get into the rhythm, the story flowed easily, with beautiful language, well-drawn fully-fleshed characterizations, and smooth transitions. Well worth reading.

Thank you, LibraryThing Early Reviewers for the opportunity to read this book.



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The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Miranda Romanae is a successful thirtysomething woman in today's modern word, yet she feels alone and adrift on the sea of her life. At her high school reunion she makes a shattering discovery that further undermines her already shaky sense of who she is and where she is going. When she meets the remarkable Hugh Oakley, her life takes a 180-degree turn for the better -- but at what price?

When they move to a house in the country to start a new life together, the reality Miranda had once known begins to slip away. Miranda is haunted by alarming, impossible visions and strangers whom she feels certain she has known, although they are all from other times and places. As these phantom lives consume her own and begin to affect all that she knows and loves, Miranda must learn the truth to reclaim it. But sometimes the hardest truth to accept is the knowledge of who we really are. (cover blurb)

Jonathan Carroll's novel of love and loss and memory and life is wonderfully told for the first 200 pages, with his trademark strangeness tiptoeing in bit by bit by bit. I thoroughly enjoyed Miranda's story until I turned that one page and suddenly found myself in an entirely different novel...and one I didn't care for at all. The break was so abrupt, so jarring, it took me completely out of the story...and the big twist as revealed in these last 70 pages was an overdone plot device and a tremendous disappointment.

Despite this major shortcoming, several of the characters Carroll has created are simply marvelous. I loved Frances, the old woman who leads Miranda to her truth. I really liked James, the high school boyfriend, until the point he turned into a whiny git and blamed Miranda for his poor choices. Hugh was interesting but not sympathetic. And given how the story turned out, I'm rather conflicted about Miranda herself...in a way that's impossible to discuss without spoilers.

Don't get me wrong: The Marriage of Sticks is not a bad novel, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone. It's just this particular tired plot twist is one that sets my teeth on edge, and I'm dismayed that he employed it. I suppose if this had been my first Carroll novel I wouldn't have been so disappointed.


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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Madame Renée Michel is the widowed concierge of an apartment building in Paris. On the surface, and to the casual observer, she is the epitome of such an individual: cranky, dim, and interested only in her soap operas and her cat, Leo. In private, and apparent only to those who know how to see, she feeds her amazing intellect by devouring art, music, and literature while secretly looking down upon the less intelligent but vastly more wealthy social elite who inhabit her building. Since her husband's death several years ago, Renée shares this side of herself only with her friend Manuela, a housekeeper in the building, and thus her social equal, although not her intellectual equal. Renée wants desperately to maintain her disguise of dull mediocrity. She is petrified of being found out; she cloaks the fear with pungent disdain to hide it even from herself.

Paloma Josse is the the youngest daughter of one of the families in Madame Michel's building. Behind her disguise as a typical vacuous 'tween, she is full of herself as only a 12-year-old can be, especially one who is vastly smarter than the rest of her family. She cannot see the point in life. She intends to commit suicide by burning down the building on her 13th birthday, but she keeps a journal in which she writes her observations and thoughts in case she finds some reason to continue living.

Renée and Paloma have much in common -- their intelligence and the disguising thereof chief among them -- but it takes a new resident to bring them out of their protective shells and, eventually, together. When wealthy Japanese businessman Kakuro Ozu buys one of the apartments, the whole building is abuzz with gossip and speculation. Monsieur Ozu is polite but distant. A shared involuntary flinch at the misuse of language during a conversation with a fellow tenant brings Renée to Kakuro's attention, and Paloma endears herself to him when she addresses him in schoolgirl Japanese while they are stuck in the elevator.

Alternately told by Renée's inner dialogues and Paloma's journal entries, the story of how these three disparate individuals become friends and confidantes is a marvel to discover. Renée begins to blossom, Paloma becomes open to possibilities: even the abrupt and unexpected tragedy that ends the story does nothing to diminish the hope and joy Kakuro brings to these two lives.

A beautiful story, beautifully told. And more than occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I loved it.



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Heads You Lose by Lisa Lutz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Take one mystery involving marijuana-cultivating siblings in Northern California. Add two dueling authors writing alternate chapters. Throw in a headless corpse, a cat with an unnecessary backstory, a mysterious plane crash, snippy footnotes, and increasing disagreement over the direction of the plot. Mix thoroughly.

This is the recipe for Heads You Lose, a new laugh-out-loud entry in the cozy mystery shelf of your local book store.

When siblings Paul and Lacey Hansen find a corpse on their front lawn one night, their first thought involves law enforcement, but not in the sense of "Quick, call the sheriff!" Instead, their first thought is, "Quick, get rid of this body so no one finds the pot plants in the basement!" And so they trundle the corpse into the back of the pickup and dump it in a remote area of the county. Cue one verse of "The cat came back, he wouldn't stay away..." and the corpse reappears on the lawn within another day. This time they decide to hide their cash crop and call the sheriff.

Thenceforth, our hero and heroine get pulled in multiple misdirections depending on who wrote the chapter. Authors Lisa Lutz and David Hayward write notes to each other between chapters, and footnotes in the chapters. Said notes begin in a civil enough manner, but quickly become snippy, rancorous, and even downright rude, but they're funny as hell, especially when they begin to reference events from their past romantic relationship which apparently ended rather badly....Ms. Lutz accuses Mr. Hayward of pretentious literary aspirations and Mr. Hayward dismisses Ms. Lutz's chapters as "Nancy Drew escapades". New characters show up as a deus ex machina with a tidbit of necessary information. Established characters are killed off in retaliation for events in a previous chapter. And just what exactly is going on with the folks in the assisted living facility and what about that plane crash?

All these questions, including whether or not the authors can satisfactorily finish the book with sanity and plotline intact, can be resolved by setting aside a few hours and tickling your funny bone by reading this highly entertaining and original novel.

Thank you to Goodreads First Reads Program for the opportunity to read this book. It was pure delight.



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