The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett, a one-time Pinkerton detective, is the greatest creator of hard-boiled mysteries: his characters Sam Spade and the Continental Op are archetypical anti-heroes of the genre, and his novels regularly make mystery best-of lists (and Red Harvest was featured on TIME's list of the 100 best English novels written after 1923.) His style is spare and economical, free of long descriptive passages. What happens, happens in dialogue and in action. There's little there to distract from his plots--which are clever but never gimmicky, and are just twisted enough to merit a second read.

I forgot a couple characters up there, didn't I? But how could I forget them: Nick and Nora Charles, the married couple who drink their way through solving a mystery mostly for the fun of it, who banter wittily like no other, who were so popular in the film adaptation of the novel they were introduced in that five sequels were produced over the next thirteen years.

I didn't forget, of course. That would be really something, considering I just finished reading The Thin Man, and only just said my good-byes to Nick and Nora.

Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black

I've known that his book existed for a while but only last night did I start to read it--and finish it, at 5 in the morning, having gone through the whole thing in one sitting. Tithe went far beyond my expectations.

So what were those expectations? I knew that there were faeries and that it was supposed to be "edgy" and that there was some kind of romancin' going on. I'd seen a little fan-art online, of white-haired pretty-boys with pointy ears. In my head it was Twilight with elves, a slight fantasy with some mild romance.

Kaye Fierch is our plucky protag, though she resembles the typical teen heroine in he same way a griffin resembles an eagle. Part of hat archetype is there, but there's something else entirely grafted on. She feels like an outcast--par for the course--she's probably half-asian--okay--and her mother is a musician who she travels the States with, and she hasn't been to school in two years and she may have accidentally put some kind of love spell on her best (and only) friend's boyfriend. Things get interesting.

Halloween Reads

Halloween is coming in just a few hours. Do you have something spooky to read?

I've enjoyed suspense and horror for as long as I've been reading, though it's always hard to find appealing books in either genre. I have weird tastes and requirements for what I read. Most books just don't grab me, or some particular aspect keeps me from reading. Here's my list of some favorite creepy short stories and novels, in no particular order:

Montana Royalty by B.J. Daniels

And I apologize again for the stock picture. Sometimes I think I should just break into the school library on weekends. They really should be open more hours.

Montana Royalty by B.J. Daniels is being offered for free, at least at my local Borders. There's a big ol' FREE GIFT emblem on the front cover. I guess it's meant to get people into reading Harlequin Intrigue books, though I'd have thought they would want to pick a more typical example than this one.

Originally published in 2008, Montana Royalty is a sort of twisted Cinderella story crossed with the best kind of soap-opera shenanigans--think Dynasty times Dallas divided by One Life to Live. I'd first read B.J. Daniels with this month's Boots and Bullets, so I sort of knew what I was getting into:  both are an insane combination of mistaken identity, baby-switching, and murder that stands out from the typical Intrigue book.

The Exile by Diana Gabaldon

I've never read the Outlander series, though I know they have quite a following. Maybe the core audience for The Exile, fans of the source material, would like it better than I did.

The Exile is a graphic novel retelling the plot of Outlander from a modified point of view. The main effect of this seems to be that the action is always going on somewhere else. Scenes seem barely connected to one another, and the motivations of characters are not adequately explained.

As with many graphic novels based on other media, and many graphic novels by authors new to the format, the reading experience feels rushed and slight. I read The Exile in one sitting, and when I finished felt like I had barely read at all. I'm not sure if it covers the whole of the first novel, but the disjointed sce
nes and incomplete characterization gave more than a little of the impression that this was more of a cash-in than anything else. Though I can't vouch for how well it accompanies the original novel, as a standalone I can't recommend it.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince, or Le Petit Prince, is a novella by Antoine Saint-Exupéry. I first saw it as a high-school play some years ago, after which I read it in translation. Just this past summer while in Ecuador, I read the novella in the original French. The version before me now that I have just finished reading is a new translation from 2000 by Robert Howard, packaged very nicely in a cloth slipcase for the sixtieth anniversary edition. Saint-Exupéry published the novel in 1943 and his plane went down the next year.

It's the long-favorite novel of developmentally arrested young people, the story of a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a young boy. The boy tells him stories about his home planet, Asteroid B-612, and the other planets he has visited. He complains about grown-ups and their lack of imagination, worries about his planet's sole rose, and asks for a picture of a sheep. The pilot, after a few frustrated attempts at such, draws a box. The sheep is inside, he says. The little prince thinks it is perfect.

Warrior by Zoë Archer

I had made a very nice scan of my copy of this book, which I hope to do for every book I talk about on this blog, but once I scanned it I gave the book to my friend Sarah to read. I got back to the computer, someone had unplugged some vital cord, and biff bam pow my scan was gone. So for the first and hopefully the last time, I'm using the publisher's image of the book. Serviceable, yes, but lacking character.

Serviceable yet lacking character? Sounds like a romance novel. 
 

Not this one, though. Warrior by Zoë Archer, first in the Blades of the Rose series, has enough character--and characters--for a whole month's worth of Harlequin Presents. I picked this one up after reading a favorable description of its first sequel, Scoundrel, and bought both at once because there was a free B. J. Daniels book for anyone who bought two romance novels at once. I'll get to both of those a little later.