Bloody Scotland; 13 Things Mentally Strong Women Don't Do

I read a fun collection of mystery short stories set in Scotland. They were all pretty good, some better than others, of course. What I found interesting was that a couple of them were about cannibalism, which isn't a topic I run across a lot in fiction.

Self-help books are like workout equipment: they only work if you actually use them. I found this book to be quite useful and full of nice, common sense tips, but of course the challenge is remembering them. I made notes of the 13 things I'm not supposed to do any more (luckily some of them I already don't do, so hooray!) and I'll try to review them and stick to it.

The Hamlet

I have a million and one library books checked out, but I got a bug to reread "The Hamlet" by the incomparable William Faulkner, and I did and I'm not sorry :) "The Hamlet" is the first of the Snopes trilogy. Frenchman's Bend is a little town (or hamlet) in Mississippi, mostly owned by Will Varner. Varner owns the store, the cotton gin, the blacksmith shop, the school, and holds mortgages on most of the farms. One day his son Jody rents out a tenant farm to a man named Ab Snopes. Will and Jody learn that Ab has a reputation for settling disputes with landlords by lighting barns on fire. In an effort to prevent that, Will offers Ab's son Flem a job in his store. Before you know it, Frenchman's Bend is overrun with Snopes relations. There are Snopeses everywhere. And then Flem marries Will's youngest daughter, Eula, cementing the alliance. It was such great fun to reread, I love how darkly funny it is.

Rust & Stardust; Bestseller

This one made me cry. I know, I read the "Real Lolita" a few weeks ago, but somehow this fictionalized version was even more heartbreaking. Sally Horner is kidnapped by Frank La Salle and taken from New Jersey to Baltimore, Texas, and finally California before Sally has a friendly neighbor call her sister and brother in law, who call the FBI and rescue her. Poor tragic girl. It was extremely well written, I thought Greenwood did an excellent job.

This book could have benefited from an editor. It was insanely repetitive. Did you know that Mary Higgins Clark's books come out around May each year? I do, because he mentioned it no less than seven times. He summarized "Misery" by Stephen King three times in three pages, using basically the same verbiage. I had to keep checking to make sure I wasn't going backwards instead of forwards. And he referred to "From a Buick 8" as "From a Buick 6". I'm sure there were many others I didn't catch. It wasn't as interesting as I hoped it would be, all it did was add to my "to read" list, which is already at approximately 8,000,000 titles and I'll have to live another 500 years to read them all. Oh well. What was interesting was how the list has changed in the last 20 years or so, with the rise of the internet. Books are no longer on the bestseller list for months at a time, they change much faster. I think (this is just my opinion, he didn't offer one) that publishing goes faster. Back in the day, an author would have to type out his manuscript and send it to the publisher, who would send it back with edits and changes, and back and forth and back and forth, and now all that's done much quicker in email.