Janet Evanovich's latest "Explosive Eighteen", was pretty good, but not as good as 17. She starts out with Stephanie returning from her vacation in Hawaii, where everyone thinks she got married. Stephanie won't talk about what happened out there, but on the impromptu plane ride home she met a man who slipped a mysterious photo in her bag and then didn't make it back on the plane after their layover in L.A. Once she returns to Jersey, she finds out the man was killed in L.A., for the photo, which she threw out when she got home. All of a sudden everyone wants the picture and she's bombarded with people trying to get it from her one way or another.
"Crank" by Ellen Hopkins was about a young girl named Kristina who gets hooked on meth after spending a few weeks with her dad, who was not the best influence he could have been. Kristina keeps getting high once she gets back home to her mom and stepdad, and hooks up with a new crowd. She falls deeper and deeper into the monster that is crank until it threatens to consume her. Very believable, well written, and moving.
"Sybil Exposed" by Debbie Nathan told the true story behind the Sybil scam. I read "Sybil" by Flora Rheta Schreiber years ago as a young adult, about a woman with 16 different personalities, and I had a bit of trouble believing it. Turns out I was right to be skeptical: the whole thing was a lie. Sybil didn't really suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder, although the doctor treating her really believed she did and pushed her to accept the diagnosis. When Schreiber came in to write the book she discovered none of the "facts" were really verifiable and ended up making a lot of the book up out of whole cloth. It's sad that people who need mental help end up being manipulated by others, and vice versa.
Diana Gabaldon's first book in her massive Outlander series, "The Outlander" was very long but I enjoyed it. I wanted to read it because of the historical fiction plotline: the book is set in 1700s Scotland. Claire and her husband, Frank, are visiting Scotland after World War 2, researching Frank's family tree, when Claire falls down a wormhole in time and ends up 200 years in the past. It's dangerous times in Scotland, at war with the English, and for her own safety Claire marries a Highlander laird, James Fraser. They are in constant danger, nearly killed numerous times, captured and kidnapped and god knows what all else. There was a bit too much graphic sex for my taste, but I enjoyed the historical aspects and learning more about Scotland.
"Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind" by Ellen F. Brown and John Wiley, Jr. was a fascinating biography about how the bestselling novel became a cultural icon. They briefly told about Mitchell's decade long struggle to bring the novel to life, then how once it was published it exploded, far beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, ended up having to devote quite a bit of time to protecting her interests, both here in the U.S. and abroad due to silly copyright laws back in the 30s. They both end up looking kind of foolish about the foreign rights, especially during and after World War 2, when Europe was in utter turmoil and they're pestering publishers for her royalties. Don't get me wrong: it was her money and she earned it, but damn, a little compassion for what these people were going through would have been nice. The last part of the book examined the dismal sequel by Alexandra Ripley, "Scarlett", and the much better "Rhett Butler's People" by Donald McCaig. 75 years after its initial publication, "Gone With the Wind" is still going strong.
And that concluded books for 2011, with my total at 180. I hoped to break 200, but alas, life got in the way.
2012 is off to a good start, though. I finished "Three Maids for a Crown" by Ella March Chase yesterday morning. It was incredibly moving, it made me cry, even though I know it's only fiction. Chase tells the story of the ill fated Grey sisters in turn: Jane, queen for only 9 days before being executed by Queen Mary, Katherine, imprisoned for marrying and having a child because of Queen Elizabeth's paranoia and scorn, and Mary, dwarfed and deformed, she manages to find true love only to have Elizabeth yank her apart from her husband and imprison them both, too, until Thomas's death, when she lets Mary free. Of course by that time all of poor Mary's family is dead so she has no where to go. So needlessly tragic.
And I read a book my sister got me for Christmas that I've been dying to read since I found out about it "Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret" by Arthur Jay Harris. Harris is convinced the Hollywood Police in Florida had it wrong when they announced in 2008 that Ottis Toole kidnapped and killed Adam Walsh. There is documented evidence that Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Wisconsin cannibal, lived in Florida not far from where Walsh was abducted during the time period he was murdered. Dahmer did like to cut off heads, something Toole wasn't noted for. Many witnesses to Adam's abduction noticed a blue van at the Sears around the time Adam was taken, a blue van like the one Dahmer had access to through his job at a sub shop. It's hard to know, so long afterwards, what to believe. The simple fact remains that a little boy was brutally and senselessly murdered and that someone didn't suffer for it like they should have. Since both Dahmer and Toole are dead we will probably never know the truth. I thought Lee Standiford did an excellent job making the case for Toole's guilt in his book "Bringing Adam Home", but Harris does a good job of showing how Dahmer could have done it, too.
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