I'll Go Home Then: It's Warm and Has Chairs; China Study; Taco USA; Gone; Divorced, Beheaded, Survived; Lady, Go Die!; Jeneration X; Case of the Runaway Corpse; Case of the Horrified Heirs; Case of the Dangerous Dowager

Whew, okay. I guess I've been reading a lot :)
"I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs" is David Thorne's second book. I've read most of his first, and I keep up with him on his website. He is hilarious, and this book is full of his email dealings with people who just don't get his sense of humor.

"The China Study" by Dr. T. Colin Campbell was an amazing eye opener about the dangers of eating the typical Western diet and how, by introducing animal products into the rest of the world, we're starting to see rise in chronic illnesses that the native people didn't suffer from before. He certainly knows his stuff: his credentials are impeccable and he's been studying the topic for decades. On an unrelated side note: how frustrating is it to rent a library book and discover some moron has penciled or penned their idiotic remarks all through it? Seriously? Take 20 seconds and Google Dr. Campbell. If you don't realize that he's a prominent vegetarian author and don't agree with his views, then stop reading his book. Don't write your half-assed, unintelligent commentary all over his book. Do you think you're going to persuade me? I'm going to listen to some anonymous idiot with a pencil over a renowned medical doctor?. Luckily it was all in pencil (this time) and I have a big eraser :)

"Taco USA" by Gustavo Arellano looked at the rise of Mexican food in the US and the debate over what is authentic and what isn't (basically all of it). It was interesting and fun, he has a good sense of humor.

"Gone" by Michael Grant was really great. It's a YA dystopian novel I've been meaning to read for years and haven't gotten to until now. In the tiny coastal town of Perdido Beach, one day everyone over the age of 15 disappears. Left alone to their own devices, the bullies start picking on the weaker kids and everyone in town turns to Sam, who has always been sort of a natural leader, to help them figure out what to do. Then the kids from Coates' Academy up the hill show up and their charismatic leader, Caine, starts taking over. Like Sam and many of the other kids, Caine has special powers that have magnified since the adults disappeared. It doesn't take long before chaos ensues, fights break out, and Sam and his group are just trying to stay alive long enough to figure out what happened, if they can reverse it, and if they can keep Sam from disappearing on his 15th birthday in a few days.

"Divorced, Beheaded, Survived" by Karen Lindsey toted itself as a "feminist" interpretation of Henry VIII's six wives. Well, not really, and no new information for me here, but it was still well written and would be a good introduction for someone who hasn't read as much as I have. The problem I have with interpreting behavior based on our social mores is that things were different back then. You can't look at Kathryn Howard and say "oh, she just liked sex and Henry was an impotent old man". Yes, that's true and nowadays most of us wouldn't judge her too harshly, but Kathryn was a product of the 16th century and how they were brought up to think is very different. Not that I'm making excuses for Henry, because Lord knows I'm not, I'm just saying.

"Lady, Go Die!" by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins was good Hammer fun. Mike and Velda are on vacation in Sidon, Long Island, when they run across a group of cops beating up a little defenseless guy. Mike makes quick work of those punks and discovers the guy is a local beachcomber a little on the slow side named Poochie. Mike and Velda take him under their wings and get him the medical help he needs. Mike starts digging and discovers that the cops are up in a twist about a local wealthy widow who has gone missing, Sharron Weasley, and since Poochie is the closest person to her house they thought he might have seen something. Sharron turns up dead, and with the local corrupt police force in way over their heads, Mike dives in to sort things out. He kind of lost me when he introduced some other murders that were supposedly related, but the ending was great.

"Jeneration X" by Jen Lancaster was a bit disappointing. Most of the book seems to have been already discussed on her blog, which I read, so a lot of it wasn't new. It was funny the first time I read it, but rereading it a few months later had me wondering why she put it on the blog first. The new stuff was incredibly funny, as usual, and I enjoyed the overall snarky tone that she's so great at. I just wish there would have been more original stuff.

Reading Mickey Spillane put me in the mood to reread some Perry Mason mysteries. I don't know why, but it did, so since they're short I polished off three yesterday while relaxing in the sun. Can't think of a better way to spend a day off!
"Case of the Runaway Corpse" by Erle Stanley Gardner involved a presumed dead man crawling out his motel room window and escaping to parts unknown, leaving behind a letter supposedly implicating his wife as his murderer.
In "The Case of the Horrified Heirs", it looks like Lauretta Trent's greedy relatives are trying to poison the old girl by slipping arsenic into the spicy Mexican food she loves so much. When that doesn't seem to work quickly enough, they stage a road accident that leaves Lauretta's car in the ocean and Virginia Baxter holding the keys to the car that ran Lauretta off the road.
"The Case of the Dangerous Dowager" has Matilda Benson hiring Perry to pay off her granddaughter's IOUs with the shady businessmen running a gambling boat off the coast. Perry tries, but dealing with Duncan and Grieb isn't going so well. Dealing with them gets even worse when Grieb turns up shot dead with Sylvia Oxman's fingerprints all over his desk.

Okay, well that's it for now! Glad I got caught up and hope I don't get this far behind again anytime soon :)

My Extraordinary Ordinary Life; Death in the Air; Ice Harvest; Stunning

I like Sissy Spacek, and I liked her autobiography "My Extraordinary Ordinary Life". She's not likely to win over too many fans of women who had trouble losing the baby weight, though, as she brags about fitting into her blue jeans a few hours after giving birth to her second daughter and then going home, but other than that, I found her writing to be very down to earth and likeable.

"Death in the Air" by Shane Peacock is the second in his boy Sherlock series. I didn't really care for it too much. There was just a lot going on and I was having a hard time following the plot. And this is a children's book, which makes it even worse! From what I was able to figure out, Sherlock witnesses a trapeze artist fall to his death and determines the bar was sabotaged. While investigating who could have wanted him dead, Sherlock discovers that a large sum of money is missing from a vault in the adjoining room to where the trapeze artist was performing, and decides the dead guy saw the crime and that's why he was killed--because the thieves realized in advance he's be able to see them and cut his bar? I think? Yeah...I'm not too sure. Also, a gang was involved somehow. Anyway, I couldn't figure it out.

"Ice Harvest" by Scott Phillips was great, dark humor and lots of fun, a quick read. I've been wanted to read it even since I saw the movie (BBT whoop whoop!!). I'll have to watch the movie again (damn :) ) because I think the book was different. Anyway, Vic and Charlie have been stealing from their boss Bill for awhile now and have decided to blow town on Christmas, 1979. Everyone is double-crossing everyone else in this deal, and no one knows who to trust. Eventually Charlie ends up just killing everyone because he can't be bothered to sort the mess out. The ending was absolutely perfect, and I discovered there's a sequel. Great!
And finally, the next to the last PLL book, "Stunning" by Sara Shepard. Damn, I'll be sad when these books are done, as much as I'm dying to know who A is. I really have no idea! In this one, the girls thought that Gayle, Tom Martin's new wealthy benefactor, was A, after Emily told them about how Gayle tried to buy her baby from her over the summer. Turns out it wasn't Gayle, though, and now the girls are back to square one.

The Seven Per-Cent Solution; Another Scandal in Bohemia

So my Sherlock Holmes kick continues. Despite having about a billion (I could be exaggerating ever so slightly) library books with due dates stacked up, I pulled two books I own off the shelf to read. They were both very good, so I can't get too angry at myself for ignoring the others.

"The Seven Per-Cent Solution" by Nicholas Meyer is written in the style of a lost Watson epistle with Meyer serving as the editor. Watson comes clean, saying he lied in "The Final Problem" (in which Holmes and Moriarty are presumed dead after a fall from Reichenbach Falls) and "The Empty House" (in which Holmes returns to London and explains he faked his own death). Watson admits he made these stories up to cover up what was really going on at the time. He and Mycroft, Sherlock's brother, coerced Sherlock into following Moriarty to Vienna so Watson could get Sherlock to see Dr. Sigmund Freud. Watson is concerned over Sherlock's growing cocaine addiction, and implores Dr. Freud to cure him. Freud successfully treats Sherlock, and then asks a favor of him: he has a patient who cannot speak, and under hypnosis is giving very odd answers to questions about her identity. Sherlock questions the girl after Freud puts her under hypnosis again, and determines she is the wife of a recently deceased Baron whose son, the new Baron, is determined to get out of the way so he can take over his father's vast business interests. The book was a thrill ride at the end, complete with a rollicking train chase that had Holmes and the Baron dueling with swords on top of a car, going through tunnels. It was a great read.

Carole Nelson Douglas writes a series of books with Irene Adler as the main character. Irene, you will remember, was the woman who bested Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia". Afterwards, Holmes always refers to her as "the woman". In Douglas's fourth Irene Adler book, "Another Scandal in Bohemia", Irene and her trusty sidekick Nell are going back to Bohemia, to Prague, to help the King's new wife Clotilde, with a rather personal problem, as well as seeing if they can shed some light on the Golem that has been terrorizing the city. I love Nell, she is full of completely deadpan, dry humor that had me laughing out loud. Irene is charming, Douglas does an excellent job portraying these characters. The plot was a bit thick for me, but I did enjoy it, especially when Sherlock himself made a guest appearance. I didn't know this was the fourth one until I started reading it (and how I managed to buy the fourth without buying any of the others, I have no idea) and unfortunately my library doesn't own the first, so I have a friend getting one from another library for me. Looking forward to it!

L.A. '56; Wentworth Hall; The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes; Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?

"L.A. '56" by Joel Engel was brilliant true crime that read like a thriller. During the summer of 1956, a serial rapist is on the loose in Los Angeles. The LAPD is convinced they have the right suspect in custody: a former officer named Todd Roark. However, one of the detectives, Danny Galindo, isn't so sure and takes it upon himself to hunt down the real rapist. Powerful and edgy, it just goes to show that when you think things can't get any worse, they sure can.

"Wentworth Hall" by Abby Grahame was supposed to be like "Downton Abbey" for the YA crowd. I thought it overshot the mark. Grahame tried way too hard to copy the show and it came through and just struck me as silly.

"The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" edited by Leslie Klinger is sort of a reread. I've read all the stories within (from "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and "Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes") I just hadn't read the annotated version. I've been wanting to, ever since it first came out, I just haven't gotten around to it. Since I've gotten into the new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes on TV (amazing!!!) I've been itching to reread the stories, so I checked out the annotated version. It was fun, very clever footnotes and quite interesting. I learned a lot :)

Jeanette Winterson's memoir "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?" was very good. She is a positive, optimistic individual that triumphed in the face of adversity. Jeanette was adopted when she was six weeks old by an older couple. The wife, who she refers to as "Mrs Winterson" was very religious and cold, and things only got worse when teenaged Jeanette started a relationship with a girl. She went on to become a well regarded author and eventually met her biological mother. I haven't read any of her fiction, but I've been meaning to ("Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", her first, is on my list 1,001 books to read before I die). I loved her positive attitude toward life. It was very refreshing.

Hanging Hill; Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey

"Hanging Hill" by Mo Hayder blew me away. The ending was WOW x 10. I can't wait to read some more of her books! A young girl is raped and murdered, and detective Zoe is on the case. While everyone else on the police force thinks the murderer is Lorne's boyfriend, Zoe doesn't buy it and goes digging deeper, into a world of illegal pornography, and discovers a likely suspect, David Goldrab. Zoe's long estranged sister, Sally, who is recently divorced and in deep financial straights because of it, is working for Goldrab. The twists and turns that follow are suspenseful and shocking and like I said, the ending floored me. It was perfect, brilliant.

"Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey" by Fiona, Countess of Carnarvon, was an interesting look at the real life inspiration for the TV show. Lady Almina was the rich bastard offspring of Alfred de Rothschild, who married into nobility and used her father's fortune to restore the title and Highclere Castle (as seen on the TV show, that's where the exterior shots are filmed for "Downton Abbey") to its glory days. During WWI she turned the house into a hospital until a more permanent one could be built, and nursed soldiers back to health. Lady Almina seems like a nice person who did a lot of good with what she had to offer.