Year of 25 Books: #25 - It's Kind of a Funny Story

Well, it was definitely down to the wire, but I have accomplished my goal of 25 books this year. I stayed up a little later than I probably should have the night before last (considering how early I had to be up yesterday morning) finishing the last book of the year, Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story. Heidi picked this book up for me in late October because she thought it sounded like something I might like. Not surprisingly, she was right.

It's Kind of a Funny Story tells the story of Craig Gilner, a 15 year-old guy from Brooklyn who is, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of messed up. He's depressed and way too hard on himself and ends up attempting suicide - only he calls the suicide hotline before he actually goes through with it. On the advice of the suicide hotline counselor, he goes to the local ER and checks himself into a the hospital's psychiatric wing.

A young adult novel, It's Kind of a Funny Story is a pretty fast read and overall quite enjoyable. The major arc of the book is watching Craig change, realizing that he's not the only one in the world that's screwed up and actually, many are in much more dire straits that he is. I think that's one of the funny parts of adolescence - the fact that no matter who you are or how great you teenage experience was, we all felt a little bit isolated. I remember thinking that there was no one on Earth who could understand what I was going through as a teenager (that is to say, the normal process of growing up and figuring out who you are.) That was compounded by the fact that pretty much everyone around me was doing the same thing. For Craig, this glimpse at others' realities provided him with a valuable tool to fight his own depression and anxiety.

I have to give Ned Vizinni credit - it's hard to write a character like Craig and make him both realistic and likable. Most teenage protagonists of books like this come off as very Holden Caulfield-ish - whiny, self-absorbed and completely unsympathetic. Craig was at times all of these things, but ultimately, I rooted for him because his character was very "everyman" or rather "every broody teenager." I really enjoyed watching his transformation. Everyone's screwed up - we just have different ways of showing it.

A good novel that is an easy read. It was a nice way to round out my 25 book challenge. I don't know that I'll do this on the blog next year - the book posts seem to be the least read - but who knows, maybe I will keep on blogging the books I read but just not in this form. We'll see what 2011 brings.

Year of 25 Books: #24 - Methland

Methland was one of the last books I read this year and was the direct result of a recommendation a pharmacy classmate of mine made to me on Facebook. Before I read this book, I was not exceptionally knowledgeable about the meth epidemic. I knew that it was bad, that rural America had been hit disproportionately hard by it and that the pseudoephedrine laws in Iowa were a direct response to the rising number of meth labs. I figured that I would get an education. I didn't know the half of it.

What drew me to this book was the local connection. While it speaks about meth in general, author Nick Reding followed the meth problem in the eastern Iowa town of Oelwein. Oelwein is like a hundred other rural Iowa towns in that it has been pretty much forgotten in the new economy. Now that family farming is becoming a thing of the past and most of the money that is made from farming is not spent in the small towns surrounding the land, it was in danger of drying up and blowing away or alternately, exploding like so many of the meth labs inside its city limits.

Reding introduces us to a cast of characters in Oelwein - the mayor, the doctor with a serious alcohol problem and the county prosecutor whose parents still farm the land outside Oelwein are the main players in Oelwein's battle with meth. We meet meth addicts and meth producers. And what's amazing is that Reding treats all these people with compassion. He doesn't really make excuses for them, but he does understand that what's happening to rural America is very much a chicken/egg situation. Is rural America deteriorating because of drugs or are there drugs because of the deterioration? It's hard to tell.

But Methland is so much more than a story about meth in the Heartland. It's a scathing indictment of current economic policies. Reding is pretty ruthless in his indictment of "big food" - corporate farms that have bought up most of the land and the big conglomerate food producers that are now the only game in town. His tale of how Ottumwa became the meth capital of Iowa is all too familiar. Meat packing plant consolidated, union dismantled, wages slashed to 50% of what they were, benefits stripped. That hits right to the heart of a town's economic base. It's no wonder that many turn to drugs - either using or selling or both - in such a hopeless environment. (An aside: I've been to Ottumwa. It does not appear to be as bad as Reding paints it, but hey, what do I know.)

A riveting book that deserves to be read (despite a few factual details that this Iowan picked up), this was more than worth my time. Thanks to Alisa Shields for the recommendation!

Year of 25 Books: #23 - Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

When I read Rob Sheffield's Talking to Girls About Duran Duran this summer, my friend Mary was never very far from my mind. This is the kind of book that I knew she would eat up (although not as much as Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, which she got for Christmas.) I had really loved Sheffield's bittersweet memoir of his young wife's death in Love is a Mix Tape and just reading about his newest book made me convinced I would love it just as much as I did Love is a Mix Tape.

Was I right? Yes and no. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran lacks the cohesiveness of his previous effort. Rather than tell one big story, Sheffield settles for telling a bunch of little stories from his adolescence and young adulthood. Each chapter is a new story and a new song. Sometimes the song relates specifically to the story, other times not. The thing I really appreciate about Sheffield is that he really really loves pop music. Reading his words, there's no mistaking it. He grew up just slightly ahead of me (he is six years my senior) so his pop music experience is one that is very different from mine. Additionally, his musical taste has a small sliver of overlap with mine. Even so, I related to it not so much based on the specifics of his story but because pop music was really in his genes. I recognized myself in more than a few spots.

There were so many different stories that to try to distill them into a short blog post is folly indeed. However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the chapter that made me think of Mary the most - the chapter on the cassingle. Sheffield makes a strong argument that the short-lived format was an absolutely perfect format for the type of music that it contained. Introduced in 1987 and pretty much extinct by the mid 90s, songs like Tone Loc's "Funky Cold Medina" and Kriss Kross' "Jump" are as throwaway as the cassingle itself. I still remember the first cassingle I bought - Fleetwood Mac's "Everywhere." Why I did that I have no idea as I had already bought the album. The reason the chapter made me think so much of Mary is because one night nearly a decade ago, Heidi and I visited her at her apartment to ask her to be a godmother to our then unborn child. At some point during the night, she pulled out her cassingles and well, I was amazed. She had an amazing collection of cassingles, one that I'm pretty sure she still has.

My cassingles were taken to Good Will in a fit of decluttering madness several years ago. Sometimes I kind of regret doing that, but mostly I don't.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran is an uneven but still worthwhile read. Lovers of pop music everywhere will find something that they can relate to. All I know is that anyone who can write so much about cassingles is on my list of "guys I definitely want to hang out with."

Year of 25 Books: #22 - Summer Song

I've read a lot of m/m fiction between reading my wife's work for Dreamspinner and doing galley proofs for them as well. Summer Song was a book I had the distinct pleasure of proofing earlier this summer before life became so insane that I had to back off almost completely from doing any kind of proofreading. That said, I can't recommend this book highly enough. First time Dreamspinner author Louise Blaydon tells an intriguing story set in 1950s California, back when LGBT was just a random set of letters that don't carry the meaning they do now. Best friends Billy and Kit are returning to high school after a summer apart and something seems off, especially when Billy starts acting strangely around Leonard, the new student at their school.

So frequently in romantic fiction - not just m/m fiction but also heterosexual romance - the romance is so much the central relationship, that the other relationships in the story suffer. Friends and family members do little more than take up space on the page and are so often pulled from stock that the characters are cliched and frankly, not very believable or interesting. Not so with Summer Song. What I loved most about this book was how it effortlessly blended the story of Billy's love for Leonard with its ramifications on his friendship with Kit. I felt very invested in both relationships and thought that Blaydon did a exceptional job of showing how a close friendship between men - regardless of orientation - can be frought with some of the same difficulties that you see in romantic relationships.

This was one of those books that really made me feel good at the end because ultimately, it really was a love story that involved all the characters in some way or another.

Summer Song is Blaydon's first book for DSP, but I'm eager to read more from her.

(Yes, I really am going to get to 25 before the end of the year. I'm starting 13 days off right now and it WILL get done.)

Year of 25 Books: #21 - Charile & the Chocolate Factory

Anna and I read this book over the course of about three weeks this summer. We read a chapter or two before bed nearly every night. Although she'd seen the movie (the Johnny Depp one, not the Gene Wilder one), I wanted her to be familiar with the original book. I remember back when I saw the 2005 film, I wanted to keep Anna from seeing it until she read the book, but I think someone bought the movie for her for her birthday or Christmas one year and well, there went that idea. (PS - I'm not as keen on the movie now as I was in that blog post. Both the 1971 and the 2005 versions have their merits.)

I was in third grade when I was first exposed to this book - our teacher read us a chapter a day. I'm having a hard time remembering if I had seen Willy Wonka & The Chocoloate Factory but if I recall my reaction to the chapter that ends with them about to step into the chocolate room, I'm thinking I hadn't. The story is, of course, well known. Chocolatier (and general weird guy) Willy Wonka invites 5 children into his chocolate factory. The five kids are picked by luck of the draw. Concealed inside five ordinary Wonka bars are five golden tickets. The first four tickets go to kids that are of the least-deserving ilk. Appropriately, they are all gluttons to some degree. Then there's sweet innocent Charlie who lives in a one-room shack with his parents and four bedridden grandparents. It appears through most of the first third of the book that he will not get a golden ticket, but based on the title alone, you know that he will.

The shenanigans inside the factory are more than worth the price of admission. Roald Dahl's imagination ran wild on this one. It is in this respect that the 2005 film adaptation of the book is superior to the previous because the technology allowed for more of this to be seen. But what it really is at its center is a morality tale - bad behavior is punished while patience and perseverance are rewarded with the keys to the factory.

I enjoyed this book this time around because it reminded me of how easy of a read it is for kids in the 8-12 range. I think that a lot of kids would really enjoy reading this, especially if they've seen either film version. I think it serves as a really good example of comparing movies based on books to their source material. Generally, they are never as good and it comparing the two really started a good conversation with my own kid. Even though I tried to convince her that when you read the book, you get to see whatever you want, I fear reading is way too solitary of an activity for my little social butterfly (how did two introverts birth an extrovert?) plus who among us isn't drawn in by CG effects and the ability to put anything on the screen these days?

Still, worth a reread.

Year of 25 Books: #20 - Rats

Think of the things that would make a perfect book. Mutant rats? Check. Mutant MAN-EATING rats? Double check. Mutant man-eating rats headed from a dump on Staten Island towards Manhattan to feast on limitless flesh? Triple effing check. How could a book like this go wrong, especially when it's written by esteemed Pulitzer Prize winning young adult author Paul Zindel?

Let me count the ways.

As I alluded to, Rats is all about gigantic mutant man-eating rats that bred underneath a Staten Island dump that had been sealed over with asphalt. I guess it was the buildup of methane that caused them to mutate, but they escape and much calamity ensues. I'll admit that I picked up Rats partially because it is a paltry 203 pages, but I thought that with a set up like that, I couldn't miss. I'd have an easy entry into my 25 books AND have an enjoyable time. It sure starts out with a bang as a landfill operator on his last day on the job decides to take his BB gun out to kill some dump rats. Like something out of Creepshow, the rats descend on him until he is nothing but pieces. All of this is described in great gory detail as if this were a Stephen King or a Brian Keene novel.

Then the main characters got introduced and it was all downhill from there.

Because this is a young adult novel, the main characters are teenagers, the son and daughter of the widowed landfill director. When the rats start coming up through toilets and other pipes, they know something is wrong. What follows is a confusing and nearly unreadable mess that I'm not sure I would have even been terribly interested in as a 14-year-old boy. Plot lines show up and then are dropped. Things are never adequately explained. There's some business with their pet rat Surfer - does he or does he not communicate with the rats? The world may never know.

There is the inevitable meetup with the king rat but at that point, the book is so cartoonish I half expected him to be wearing a crown and holding a scepter. The ending is nonsensical and abrupt and left me scratching my head.

Needless to say, I don't recommend this book at all to anyone of any age. The gory parts were cool, but the parts with the whiny kids and the ineffective adults more than canceled that out.

I expected much more out of the man that gave us The Pigman.

(I know I promised the NaBloPoMo wrap up post tonight, but it's going to have to wait till tomorrow. The plague is descending on me and I want to do that one up right.)

Year of 25 Books: #19 - Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

This book had me at the title. I was powerless to resist it. It pulled me in like a tractor beam on an alien spaceship.

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim - better known as her alter ego Nellie Oleson of Little House on the Prairie fame - is one of those books that I lap up like a kitten at a milk bowl. I love a good dishy celebrity tell-all. It probably started with Joan Collins' Past Imperfect which I read in the 9th grade (this would be the point at which Heidi would say "and you turned out straight exactly HOW?") Since then, I have always loved those books that tear back the curtain on bits of the pop culture. There's always more going on than what we're allowed to see. And what could possibly be a more wholesome subject than Little House?

The book starts out with a bang as it describes Arngrim's hilarious encounter with a woman at the L.A. County Fair where she was signing autographs alongside other former child stars. I won't give it away, but her husband sums it up best by saying "we need to start bringing video cameras to these things." As it turns out, Nellie Oleson still elicits strongly negative reactions in people, even though Little House has been off the air for nearly 30 years. Everyone identified with Laura "Half-Pint" Ingalls and in so doing, everyone hated her nemesis, Nellie. I was not a religious watcher of Little House by any stretch of the imagination, but even I knew that Nellie was the spoiled brat foil to Laura's good-hearted eagerness.

Arngrim's life is fascinating and as expected, the bulk of the book encompasses the Little House years. The stories from the set are always interesting and are told in such a funny and readable way that even if you had no interest or exposure to the show, you still can't quit reading. She is a natural storyteller and relates incidents like Michael Landon's failure to wear underwear on the set and the enigma of Melissa Sue Anderson with great flair. She even explains why Carrie Ingalls falls into the grass in the opening credits of the show (you'll never guess) and talks at length about her life-long friendship with Melissa Gilbert.

But her life was not all great. Her youth also involves a heartbreaking story of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member. We also learn of her devastation at the death from AIDS of the man who played her Little House husband. His illness launched her into the next phase of her career - AIDS activism - which then led naturally to activism on behalf of abused children.

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch contains material that Arngrim uses in her stand-up act of the same name. What I loved is how at peace she seems to be with everything - with Nellie Oleson, her connection with the character and with her life in general. She has really lived her life and now she's happy. This was one of my favorite parts of the book.

"...I'm happy, I'm just that. There's no static on the line now. It's not 'I'm happy but...' or 'I'll be really happy when...' I am just ridiculously, stupidly happy. I am often cheerful to the point of being annoying as hell. I don't know if this is a sign of good mental health or recovery, or if it means I've finally snapped and just gone the rest of the way to completely batshit crazy."

Whatever it is, she's got it figured out. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Year of 25 Books: #18 - The Old Neighborhood

I have a real fondness for books about our modern age. The only trouble is, as I have mentioned before, that there is so frequently a temptation to write about a period of history before a sufficient amount of time has elapsed to really see it objectively. I found this to be a bit true with Ray Suarez' The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999. For the 1966 part, yeah, I think we have good perspective but not so much for the 1999 part - especially considering the book was written in 2000. I sometimes think I missed my calling as a social scientist, but really, it's better that I just read about it in my spare time rather than try to make a living at it. And I'm much better with pharmaceuticals than I would be with the statistics that are required for this kind of research.

The Old Neighborhood examines the late 20th century phenomenon of "white flight" - the exodus of middle class white people from the cities to the suburbs. Their departure was frequently prompted by the arrival of minorities in the neighborhood. In what was really a vicious cycle that fed on itself, the first minority families would move in which would prompt the original white residents to move before their property values went down. More minorities moved in, more whites left as did local businesses and a neighborhood that was once was solidly middle class went into free fall. The subsequent loss of tax revenue affected local schools and other public services. Those left behind lived in an area that was a mere shadow of its former self, largely due to the fear of the unknown and the different.

What I liked about Suarez' take on white flight was rather than take a grim, textbook-like approach, he made it very personal. He examined many different cities in the book and in each, he interviewed many people that lived in the city or in the neighborhoods that had deteriorated. I also appreciated the short history lesson that he gave about each of the cities he stopped in - I learned a great deal from this as the only city in the book I claim any kind of real familiarity with is Chicago and even there, I learned something. The book did get bogged down in the interviews a little bit. They SO could have been edited, thus making the book a little leaner and more effective.

I've find it sad what has happened to our cities over the last 50 years. Across the nation, miles and miles of suburbs surround donut holes. Thankfully, this has been improving some as reinvestment in city centers has been occurring. Even in our capital city of Des Moines (not featured in the book, obviously), there has been a vigorous attempt to revitalize the downtown area and draw residents to the area vs. the daytime population of office workers. This has met with considerable success, so much so that downtown Des Moines is no longer a ghost town. I wonder how different things are in the other cities profiled in 2010 vs. 2000 when this book was written.

An interesting book, but again, could have been much shorter and would have gotten the same point across. That's kind of the trouble with books like these - they really overdo it after a while. I found myself skimming toward the end of the book which is never a good sign.

PS For those keeping track, I am only 2 books away from my 25 book goal for the year. I am totally going to make it.

Year of 25 Books: #17 - A Gathering of Crows

We've all seen them - those rural small towns that seem to be hanging on by a thread (and likely a prayer.) Western Iowa, in particular, is littered with them. But what makes a a struggling town a ghost town? If you believe horror writer Brian Keene and his latest release, A Gathering of Crows, it's five otherworldly creatures that can shapeshift between a human-like form and that of a crow. They gut (both literally and figuratively) those small towns that have been completely forgotten. And tonight, they're headed into Brinkley Springs, West Virginia.

I've read Brian Keene's zombie fiction (most notably, The Rising and City of the Dead) but had not branched out into his other horror fiction. I saw this at the library and was intrigued enough by the premise that I picked it up and started reading that very day. In 3 days, I was finished - that's how sucked into the story and characters I was.

The story starts by introducing us to some of what will become the main characters. We don't know it yet (although you can guess it) but all their stories will intertwine in some way by the time the book is over. Sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the locals is traveler Levi Stoltzfus, a formerly Amish man who has been disowned by his family for dabbling deeper in the dark arts than his father would allow. As these five demons arrive in Brinkley Springs to feed on the souls of everything that's living, he's their Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is their only hope.

Keene will be one of those writers that's dismissed because he writes genre fiction, but really, he's a great storyteller and fantastic at setting up a story. He makes the characters very real and believable. Sure, it's an easy read, but what's wrong with that? Is there a law somewhere that says that everything good has to be "literary" and "mature"? If there is, I'm not interested. Keene's writing is over the top and gory and stomach turning at times, but THIS IS HORROR FICTION. What do you expect?

Like most horror stories, I felt like the resolution of the novel was a bit underwhelming - Mushroom World really didn't work for me, but oh well. Keene is good at what he does and I applaud him for daring to set up a Lovecraftian mythology that spans most of his novels to varying degrees. That is no small feat (says the husband of an author that has a 7 book series she wants to write.)

Horror fiction can be so bad, but Keene is definitely the cream of the current crop. And A Gathering of Crows (incidentally, known as a "murder") is well worth the time of anyone who likes a fast paced story with more scares and gross-outs than you can count. I heartily recommend it. I actually recommended it to a friend while I was reading it, telling him "if I knew how to buy this for you and send it to your Kindle, I would so be doing that right now."

And when you want to buy the book for someone else, that's how you know you've found a good one.

Year of 25 Books: #16 - Lips Unsealed: A Memoir

Although this is only entry 16 for the Year of 25 Books, I'll have you know that I'm all the way up to 20 as far as reading them goes. Clearly, I'm behind on blogging the books. Yes, I'm behind on reading as well. Only 8 weeks left in the year and 5 more to go. What can I say? The last half of the year has been a bit busier than I expected.

When I first heard about Belinda Carlisle's memoir, I knew that it would be a must read. The advent of Belinda's solo career coincided with my musical awakening which, in layman's terms means the point at which I stopped listening solely to Olivia Newton-John records. The Go-Gos actually predated me musically a little bit, although I was swift enough to figure out that she was the lead singer of the Go-Gos and "Our Lips Are Sealed" - the hit song from which the title of the book takes its name, was one of the first music videos I remember seeing (on HBO's Video Jukebox, no less.)

Belinda's solo work was such solid pop that I had no choice but to love it pretty much unconditionally. So the revelation in the book that she really is more of a punk rocker at heart was a bit of a surprise. The Go-Gos always seemed to flirt with punk, but they were grounded in such a pop sensibility that calling them punk would have certainly not been accurate. The book follows Belinda from her beginnings in southern California to the formation and break-up of the Go-Gos. It includes the years of her solo career which peaked in the late 80s with the album (and Dan favorite) Heaven on Earth only to see her fortunes fall steadily through the 90s. It is a pretty standard music autobiography - trials, tribulations, love, heartache and above all, drug use.

Belinda's drug use during the 80s is no secret. I remember reading or hearing somewhere (although now I am hard pressed to find the source) that there are some Go-Gos videos that she has absolutely no recollection of doing because she was so high on various drugs. Listening to Carlisle weave her tales of drug use in the 80s rock and roll scene makes me wonder how there were any drugs left in Los Angeles after she was done. The most amazing thing was that her drug use continued up until just a few years ago, although there were periods of sobriety, she's only been drug free for the last 5 years. And here I thought she'd left her drug habit in the dust 20 years ago! After reading the book, I think it's only her marriage and family that saved her from ending up dead from a drug overdose. In many ways, she's lucky to be alive (but not as lucky as Stevie Nicks - talk about someone that probably shouldn't have seen their 60s based upon the amount of drugs they did.)

The book is, like most rock-star memoirs, an incredibly easy read and I have no idea how much of it was ghost written, but it's very readable and entertaining. I have a love of biography because I am, by nature, just a bit of a snoop and just love to hear other people's life stories. And even though they are celebrities, they're still people. I think that's the thing that fascinates me the most. She does not, however, address the plastic surgery tragedy that is her face now.

I can't wait till Madonna gets around to writing her inevitable autobiography, but by then, will there be anything left to tell?

Year of 25 Books: #15 - "The Call of Cthulhu"

Including this short story in my yearlong challenge to ready 25 books is, admittedly, a bit of a cheat. After all, it IS a short story and not a novel. But I purchased a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories for the Kindle app on my Droid phone awhile back. 67 tales of Lovecraftian goodness without the heft of the physical book - what more could you ask for? Well, I've determined that it's going to take a millennium to finish all 67 stories because in the month since I bought it, I've finished exactly four, the most recent of which is "The Call of Cthulhu." (a word that I will never be able to spell for as long as I live.)

I've been interested in Lovecraft for a long time and appreciate his place in the canon of horror fiction, but had never really gotten around to reading him. A friend of mine in pharmacy school recommended Lovecraft to me during the summer of 1995. He was not a guy that I was close with by any means during pharmacy school, but he was one of the few people that remained in Iowa City after graduation, so he initiated me into films like Evil Dead and Reanimator. After watching Reanimator, I headed down to the Iowa City library and picked up a Lovecraft collection. I surrendered after half a story - a complete and utter fail.

Despite that, I'm still intrigued by the Lovecraft mythos and even though his writing is still as dense as I remember it being, I really wanted to cross "The Call of Cthulhu" off my to-be-read pile this year. It's an essential Lovecraft story and references to Cthulhu, a gigantic winged and tentacled beast from another world that is pure and unadulterated evil, populate the internet and pop culture in everything from web comics and plush toys to oven mitts and ukeleles. Since it seemed to be one of Lovecraft's more enduring tales, I figured it would be one of his best. After reading it, my verdict was "not so much."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" is the famous first line of "The Call of Cthulhu." I think my mind lacked the ability to correlate all the contents of "The Call of Cthulhu." I wanted to like this, I really did. But I just kept thinking about how I liked the three stories that I read prior to "The Call of Cthulhu" so much better than this one. I felt like Lovecraft's prose was more obtuse than usual and for being a horror story, it was really not all that scary. Creepy in places, yes but scary? Not by a mile.

I will keep plugging through the 67 Lovecraft stories that are on my phone. I figure if nothing else, there will always be reading material with me. But I've determined that I really do appreciate Lovecraft more than I enjoy him. And I'll still think that anything Cthulhu related that I find on the Internet is cool - the more tongue-in-cheek, the better - even though I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never completely get it.

Year of 25 Books: #14 - Strawberries for Dessert

Full disclosure: The author of this book is a family friend and all around cool person.

I'm not sure why I'm still calling this the Year of 25 Books. It's becoming painfully obvious to me that I'm going to fall short of my goal. Oh well, there's always next year. Until December 31st, we're going to see how close I can get. I have two books I've finished but haven't blogged and my vacation is only half over so who knows.

In honor of Heidi's road trip with her friend and fellow m/m author Marie Sexton, which has been dubbed Heidi and Marie's Excellent Manlove Adventure (or HAMEMA for short), I decided to pick up her most recent book, Strawberries for Dessert. Heidi had raved about it and I'd seen the paperback sitting around the house for so long that I figured why the hell not? It's the first m/m book I've read in a while that was not written by my wife. I always like to see how other authors approach this genre because there are as many ways to tell these stories as there are authors out there. Some are very good and others are pure crap. Fortunately, Strawberries for Dessert is one of the former and I'm not just saying that because I know Marie will be reading this!

Strawberries for Dessert features two very real main characters that couldn't be more different. Jon Ketcher is a career driven, Type A personality guy that let his last serious relationship wither and die. While not a man's man in the traditional sense, he's definitely more of one than Cole Fenton who is flamboyantly out there in ways that make Jon very uncomfortable. They're set up on a blind date by mutual friends and it doesn't go well. Jon's cell phone keeps ringing at dinner and what's worse, Cole is embarrassing to Jonathan. Normally, this would be the end of it, but they give it another try despite Cole not being Jon's "type."

I would offer this book up as evidence to those that argue that all m/m fiction is thinly veiled porn. There is excellent character development in not just Cole and Jon but also in secondary characters, most notably Jon's widowed father. Some characters we don't see enough of for them to get beyond stock, but it's really okay. It doesn't detract from the enjoyment of the book. Additionally, the sex in this book is not very graphic so those that usually shy away from books like this due to the sexual content will find this more their speed. There is sex, no doubt (moreso than in Libby Drew's State of Mind which I also really enjoyed) but I would classify it as more the sensual type.

As usual, my litmus test for these kinds of books is whether or not the guys really act like guys. Nothing annoys me more than seeing the men in these books NOT acting like men. Fortunately, Sexton knows her way around these characters and makes them both very emotionally honest to the levels where I would expect them. Sometimes, Jon and Cole are as dumb as mud posts, especially when it comes to their relationship. However, it fits in because the set up is so good. The behavior naturally flows from the set up to the conclusion. In the end, it all makes sense.

I heartily recommend Strawberries for Dessert to fans of m/m fiction and to those that enjoy a good love story.

Year of 25 Books: #13 - City of the Dead

I am three books behind in blogging which puts my grand total for the year up to 15. Only 10 more to go in the last 12 weeks of the year. This seems like a tall order and truthfully, it is. But if I read everything else as fast as I read Brian Keene's City of the Dead, it should be a snap. I started this book Saturday night, read 280 pages on Sunday and finished it after work on Monday. It was that good.

City of the Dead is the sequel to Brian Keene's Bram Stoker Award winning novel The Rising. I read The Rising a couple of years back after I picked it up at a used bookstore here in town. I knew that it was a zombie book, but I was hesitant. Zombie fiction is a notoriously tough nut to crack. Most of what little I have bothered to read has been dreadfully boring. Even World War Z didn't really do it for me, which is really saying something. But The Rising, simply put, rocked. It was gory and scary and intriguing and had a killer opening scene. It had zombified animals as well as humans. And these zombies were not your typical slow, lumbering Romero zombies, but they also weren't the Danny Boyle 28 Days Later fast zombies either. These zombies were smart. They could talk. They could drive cars. They could shoot guns. They broke ALL the cardinal zombie rules according to Dan. It was a recipe for failure that instead, served up something so delectable that I could hardly believe it.

City of the Dead picks up right where The Rising left off, and because it had been so long since I had read The Rising, I had to go read the plot recap at Wikipedia. With it all coming back to me now, I dove into City of the Dead. A group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse has made their way from West Virginia to New Jersey in search of Jim Thurmond's young son. By the time City of the Dead opens, the undead population outnumbers the living by a staggering proportion. However, these zombies are not what they seem. As it turns out, a particle acceleration experiment has ripped an interdimensional hole in the universe which has allowed a demon race known as the Siqqusim to enter our world and possess the dead. The fact that the reanimated dead are possessed by demons is a cool idea and goes a long way toward explaining the intelligence that the zombie hordes possess.

Surrounded on all sides in the suburban New Jersey home where they find Thurmond's son, Danny, they make a narrow escape (an absolutely thrilling series of scenes) that eventually leads them to lower Manhattan and Ramsey Tower. It's designer, billionaire Darren Ramsey, declares it to be completely impregnable and therefore, the perfect fortress against the 99.9% of the Big Apple that is now rotting and possessed by Siqqusim. Clearly, Ramsey has never heard of the unsinkable Titanic because the building is not quite as sealed off as it might appear, especially once the leader of the Siqqusim, Ob, starts rallying heavy artillery and tanks.

The chain of events in a novel like City of the Dead is completely predictable, but you're not there to be surprised by the plot. In the hands of a lesser writer, it'd be a tosser. But Keene has mastered this kind of writing. Instead of being bored by the predictable plot and characters that veer a little too hard into cliche at times, I was intrigued not so much by what-happens-next as by how what-happens-next happens. The smart zombies really work even though for me, they really shouldn't. Their intentions are clear (kill all humans by whatever means possible) and they really are pure and unadulterated evil. The writing is graphic and bloody and gory. So vivid are the descriptions of what's taking place in the novel that what's usually necessary to really seal the deal with zombies - the visuals - are rendered superfluous. You can see it in your head. And that is why good zombie fiction is so hard to find. Usually, you need the visuals. With Keene's zombie novels, you simply don't.

It's been a long time since I read a book this quickly - it really held my attention and interest. It's not great literature or anything, but who says a good book has to be? Fans of zombies and horror fiction in general will certainly enjoy both The Rising and City of the Dead. They are leaps and bounds better than some of the other mid-level horror fiction I've read and the best zombie fiction I've read. Of note, Keene has also written another unrelated zombie novel, Dead Sea, which features more traditional slow zombies which is a hell of a read as well.

I was originally supposed to read this book last summer when we were on vacation, but it disappeared part way through the trip and I couldn't find it. I found it under the driver's side seat when I was looking for my sunglasses. Clearly, we need to clean the car more frequently.

Year of 25 Books: #12 - The Day of the Triffids

I picked up this book entirely because of Brendan - a guy whose blog I read and book reviews I enjoy on GoodReads. He reads at about 100 times the rate I do. I haven't counted, but I'm pretty sure he's already read at least 50 books in the time its taken me to get to twelve. But anyway, he read and reviewed John Wyndham's sci-fi classic The Day of the Triffids and I'll be damned but I didn't even know it was a book. I figured it was just a bad 60's monster movie that probably ran on late night TV a hundred times a year when I was a kid - back in the days before late night TV was sold to the highest bidder.

The Day of the Triffids is, as Brendan said, a good post-apocalyptic thriller. The book opens with the protagonist, Bill Masen, in the hospital with his eyes bandaged. He tells the story of how triffids - 8 foot mobile plants that display semi-sentience and also carry a dangerously poisonous sting - came to be. While the origin of triffids is deliberately vague, the theory that Masen (who happens to be a biologist who specializes in triffid behavior) puts forth is that they were genetically engineered by the Soviets, with their seeds inadvertently released into the world. Eventually through the pruning of the triffids' stings and the creation of triffid nurseries, mankind and triffids learn to occupy the same space, but it always seems an uneasy peace. In fact, the reason for Masen's hospitalization is a triffid sting to the eyes.

He also explains how the night before, a brilliant green meteor shower lit up the night sky, which has now led to the blinding of anyone who witnessed it. Fortunately for Masen, he is left unaffected due to the fact that his eyes were bandaged. The hospital is eerily quiet, as are the London streets surrounding the hospital. He eventually removes his bandages himself and heads out. While the vast majority of the population has been blinded by the meteor shower, there remain a handful of sighted people left to pick up the pieces of civilization.

Brendan points out several commonalities between this novel and the zombie/infected movie 28 Days Later (which I am due to rewatch at some point - my favorite part being the scrawl on the side of the church wall THE END IS INCREDIBLY FUCKING NIGH.) Nowhere is this more evident than in his initial venture into the all-but deserted London streets, save the blinded people trying to make their way around. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the similarities between the two were intentional.

Those expecting a traditional sci-fi yarn with the evil plant-monsters deliberately bent on world domination will be sorely disappointed. Triffids, rather than intentionally bringing about the end of human civilization, appear to just be taking advantage of the tragic blindness to befall the human population of the planet. Without the human caretakers to cut out the stings and tether the mobile triffids in place, they simply fill in the gaps that are naturally left for them. While they are malevolent, they are, as I said, not deliberately so. Because of this, they seemed a little bit neutered to me and not as effective as sci-fi monsters as they otherwise might have been.

Instead, what we get is what amounts to a character study in how people would respond to an apocalyptic event and how civilization would persist. Much of the human interaction proves that even in the face of a world-changing event with deadly moving plants on the loose, our worst enemy is still us. I found this an interesting take in what would otherwise have been a by-the-numbers monster novel, but I also found myself longing for a little bit of nasty monster vs. human action. I didn't feel like the book ever truly gave me that - rather, as I said, it just showed the triffids naturally taking advantage of our disadvantage, turning violent only when they had to.

I realized while I was reading this book that the 1981 BBC miniseries of The Day of the Triffids is streamable on Netflix. From everything I've read, it's a faithful adaptation of the book. I'll be streaming this very soon and may even report back on how it compares to the book. From everything I've read, the 1963 film adaptation that I was familiar with is apparently a bastardization of the book and one best avoided.

As an aside, this was the first book that I purchased as a Kindle edition from Amazon. I don't have a Kindle, but read this book about 50% on the iPad and 50% on my Droid phone, both of which have free Kindle apps. I enjoyed the Kindle eBook reading experience. However, publishers and Amazon need to get their shit together and not charge MORE for the Kindle version than the print version. The Day of the Triffids was something like 4 bucks, but I noticed that MANY Kindle versions are at least 2-3 dollars more expensive than their print counterparts. Amazing.

Year of 25 Books: #11 - The Seventies

We're officially halfway through the year, which means I'm officially behind on my quest to read and blog about 25 books this year. For those who may have forgotten, it was my resolution back in January to spend more time reading (and writing) and less time mindlessly surfing the net. So far, I've been pretty successful despite my being behind. I have read a lot of proofs for Dreamspinner that I haven't blogged about so in truth, I'm actually ahead. But what I blog about is where the rubber meets the road, so I have work to do.

I actually read The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics a while back, but just haven't blogged about it. I've read countless books about the 1970s - specifically the 1970s in America. It's one of the most fascinating periods of history to me. It was a time period during which I was alive, but not really aware. I remember some of these events like you would remember a conversation that was going on in the background of your life. You would think that after reading so many books on the 70s, it'd just be the same thing over and over again. While there's an element of truth to that, I am never bored by books on this topic (unless the writing is awful) because even though the events stay the same, each book has a slightly different take on it, each focusing on something different.

This book took an interesting approach to examining the 70s and in many ways, showed the parallels between that time and the time in which we are living now. Schulman's argument is that the main outcome of the 70s was to serve as a counterpoint to the 60s liberalism and the Great Society. With the economy tanking, the oil embargo and general dissatisfaction with what was perceived to be liberal elitism, the 70s actually represented a reversal in the misfortune of the Republican Party, despite some very visible failures in the early part of the decade. Even though 1976 brought about the election of a Democratic president, the seeds of a conservative revolution were sown in the discontent of the early-to-mid 70s, most surprisingly in a rather savvy way by Richard Nixon. It wasn't until the late 70s that the seeds bloomed under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and formed what seemed like a conservative majority in America.

It was during the chapter on tax revolts and railing against "big government" that I felt like I could have been reading a history of the last two years. So many of the things described in the book felt like they were lifted from a Tea Party rally. It made me think of that oft-repeated phrase "those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Hopefully we will learn from that history but I don't hold out much hope.

But as everyone knows, the 70s were not all about the rise of conservatism. There was hedonism aplenty - a hedonism that may have been directly related to the economic struggles that also define the period. There were chapters that focused on the rise of women's movement, especially how it related to readily available oral contraceptives which allowed women to take control of their reproductive cycle for the first time. The gay rights movement is also examined and surprisingly, the changing roles of men and the definition of masculinity were addressed in the chapter on the "battle of the sexes." Other touchstone events were also mentioned, but despite its title, I felt this was much more a political book than a comprehensive cultural history of the decade.

I enjoyed this book, but my favorite book on this subject is still It Seemed Like Nothing Happened which is probably due for a reread (but not now.)

Year of 25 Books: #10 - The Bell Jar

I first read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar when I was 15. I don't recall why I picked it up - probably because I was "supposed to." I wrote a book report on it for my 10th grade English class. Up until a few years ago, I still had it. When I was getting ready to type this post, I looked for it (a bit half-heartedly, I'll admit) but couldn't find it. I presume it's lost to the ages, but that's not altogether a bad thing. It is probably, if you'll pardon the pun, rather sophomoric. I thought I knew everything then and that everything I put on paper was perfection. Oh, how little I knew.

Anyway, I was talking to my friend Mary over Memorial Day and was saying how I'd really like to reread The Bell Jar. I remembered precious little from it apart from the fact that it involved a 20 something woman who was slowly but surely descending into mental illness. I also remember it being a rather thinly veiled autobiographical account of the author's own struggle with mental illness. Not the most uplifting of subject material, but as I so frequently say, "a little advice about feelings, don't always expect them to tickle." (credit where credit is due.)

The novel's main character, Esther Greenwood, is in New York City as the the story opens, participating in an internship for a women's magazine. But it's not until the internship ends and she arrives back home in Massachussetts that the trouble really starts. Having anticipated being accepted to another internship under the tutelage of a famous writer, she starts to lose her grip upon learning that she was rejected. This is compounded by troubles in her love life and the antagonistic relationship she has with her mother. She can't sleep and flits from one project to the next without finishing anything. Soon, her situation becomes dire, with her thoughts consumed by the idea of suicide. After a nearly successful attempt, she lands in the hospital - referred to in the book by the slightly un-PC and definitely out of date word "asylum."

The story is told from Esther's perspective, so the reader gets a good glimpse as to what depression might feel like. And that's just the thing. Esther really doesn't seem crazy or insane to me. Rather, she appears to suffer from severe clinical depression. She compares her mindset to living inside of a bell jar - a piece of lab equipment in which vacuums can be created. One of her most telling quotes comes during toward the end of the book, one I distinctly remember pulling out as the "required quote" for my 10th grade book report. In it, Esther is confronted with by the kindess of Mrs. Philomena Guinea - a successful author who was her benefactor during the summer internship and who also ends up footing the bill for her hospitalization.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

We all know how Sylvia Plath's battle with the noonday demon ended - with her head in an oven while her children slept in the next room. The Bell Jar is a cautionary tale - one that was well worth the reread even though its approach to mental illness is quite dated.

Now to try to find that 10th grade book report!

Year of 25 Books: #9 - Something Wicked This Way Comes

Lest you think I'm behind on my reading goal for the year - never fear, for I am right on target. The end of the 5th month saw me finishing my 9th and 10th books for the book challenge. What I'm really behind on is blogging the books and here's my attempt to remedy that.

I picked up a lost book of my childhood in May - Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I remember being a kid of maybe 11 or 12 and checking it out from the public library. I read the first couple chapters and then abandoned it. The prose was too thick, the story to moribund. It just seemed like nothing was happening. As a horror novel, it failed for me, which is no surprise since I probably had just finished reading The Exorcist. I was expecting something a lot, well, scarier. So it's a book that I'd been meaning to revisit for a long time, but as these things tend to go, I just hadn't gotten around to it.

A book with a serious autumnal feel, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic in its genre, but what exactly that genre is is hard to pin down. It has elements of a horror novel, but also of fantasy and science fiction. A carnival, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show arrives unseasonably late in the small town where Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway live next door to each other. Jim & Will are the best of friends, born minutes apart on each side of midnight. They are quintessential boys, especially of the time period in which the book takes place (1940s or 50s by my estimation.) They are thrilled that a carnival has come to town in late October. Naturally, there is much more to this carnival than meets the eye. Jim's father is absent, while Will's is an 50-something man with whom he has only a passing relationship.

Their boyish curiosity leads them to the carnival after hours where they witness a carousel that, while purportedly broken, actually can age the rider one year for each revolution it makes. Conversely, it will shave a year off their age for every revolution backward. There is a circus full of freaks and Mr. Dark himself is "The Illustrated Man" (a direct reference to one of Bradbury's earlier works) covered in tattoos - tattoos which have a darker, more sinister meaning that unfolds slowly as the book progresses. With each passing page, another evil aspect of the carnival is revealed, but even at the end of the book, much remains shrouded in mystery.

I had very mixed feelings on this book. As a horror novel, I felt it failed miserably. It was never scary. I chalk that up to the time period in which it was written. It had a VERY "literary" feel to it - as if to say, look-at-me-I'm-an-important-book. I can see why I was never able to read it as a kid. Even at nearly 38, there were times I considered bailing and I even started another book before I was finished with it, which is usually the death knell to the temporarily abandoned book. But I persevered and ultimately I appreciated the novel more than I enjoyed it. I feel like the writing was just far too turgid for me to really get into it.

Having said that, Bradbury is a master at setting the scene. Although the weather was warming up and we were headed into summer as I started reading the book, I felt like it should be fall. His descriptions are good without being overdone and I liked how not every little tiny detail about the carnival was revealed all at once. The slow reveal helped make the pay off worth it, even though I felt like the end was a bit of an anticlimax.

But what I loved most about this book was its commentary on accepting one's place in their life. Jim wants nothing more than to ride the carousel so that he can hasten his growing up, while Will's father pines for his younger days. It's only Will that sees the folly in this and serves as the conscience of the story. When both Jim and Mr. Halloway inevitably accepted that life progresses as it does, relationships all around were strengthened and became more authentic. As someone who is only a few years from the end of his 30s, this spoke loud and clear.

I would overall recommend Something Wicked This Way Comes, but I think I would have enjoyed it more as a 16-year-old, even though I have no doubt I would have still had trouble with the writing style. And I know that had I read it then, I would have identified much more with the boys rather than seeing myself in Will's father, despite the fact that I am smack dab in between them in age.

Year of 25 Books: #8 - Warriors: Into The Wild

When Anna heard that I was trying to read 25 books this year, she 1) thought that sounded pretty paltry because she had to read 100 chapter books in order to get her iPod touch and 2) jumped at the chance to pick one of the books when I gave her that option. What she came up with was the first book in Erin Hunter's Warriors series, Into The Wild. She had just finished it and had been regaling me with tidbits from it and thought I would enjoy it as well.

The Warriors series is told from the point of view of wild cats that make up four forest clans - ThunderClan, WindClan, ShadowClan and RiverClan. The clans coexist rather uneasily, with the forest hunting grounds divided up amongst them and rules in place that keep them from hunting in each others' territories, with specially trained warrior cats patrolling the clan boundaries. But times are hard in the forest. Prey is scarce and hunting grounds are shrinking due to "twoleg" (human) encroachment. ThunderClan in particular is in trouble as they are outnumbered and lacking in kittens to train to become warriors in comparison to the other clans. Into all this comes an ordinary house cat, Rusty, who enjoys his "kittypet" status but also longs for a freedom that he can't articulate.

After getting into a skirmish with a ThunderClan cat on the edge of the forest, clan leaders Bluestar and Lionheart invite Rusty to leave his privileged life behind and join the clan. He does so, is given the name Firepaw, thus setting the stage for the rest of the book.

Into The Wild is, for the most part, pretty well written. It has a strong narrative but I'll admit that I had a hard time getting into this book. However, I'm not exactly the target demographic. I can see why kids like it, especially those that like animals (cats in particular.) It's a quick and easy read that's filled with action and adventure while making sure to get some good lessons on loyalty, friendship and facing your fears in for good measure. In many respects, it reminded me of a cat version of Watership Down, a book I have never read all the way through but watched the animated movie of a million times as a kid.

A couple things bothered me about the book. The first was the excessive use of strange names for the cats. For example, we have Bluestar, Lionheart, Firepaw, Ravenpaw, Graypaw, Tigerclaw, Runningnose, Yellowfang, Longtail and Brokenstar, just to name a few. How kids can tell all these cats apart is beyond me. Even toward the end of the book, I was having a hard time figuring out who was who. It reminded me of when I was reading Lord of the Rings and trying to navigate all the similar names in order to figure out why I should care about any of these people. The second thing that bugged me a little bit was the amount of violence. Several cats do die in this book, frequently rather unexpectedly. The descriptions were not graphic by any means, but frankly, I was surprised that didn't bother Anna more than it did. I can see a sensitive kid being disturbed by it.

Anna is trying to get me to read the next book in the series, but I think I'm going to take a pass on that one. I have more books than I can ever possibly read in my to-be-read pile, and 272 pages of talking warrior cats was more than enough for me.

Year of 25 Books: #7 - 1959: The Year Everything Changed

Whenever I read a book that is devoted to a single year, it is so frequently accompanied by the implication that no other year could possibly match it in terms of change that I really don't believe it any longer. There is, in fact a book written about 1969 that uses the exact same tag line as Fred Kaplan's intriguing 1959: The Year Everything Changed.

I mock the drama of implying that the history of the world hinged on a single year - really, it's never that simple. But 1959 was a unique year, one that I really didn't know all that much about until I read this book. In truth, while I am fascinated by later 20th century history, the 50s don't interest me much. I'd much rather read about the turbulent 60s or the stagnant 70s. I was a bit suspect of this book, figuring that it might start out with a bang and then peter out quickly or worse, be full of facts and figures that I couldn't care less about.

What I got instead was a interesting run through some of the highlights of the year. While many books of this ilk limit themselves to talking about either politics or world affairs or cultural events, Kaplan discusses a wide array of topics. You get the obligatory chapters on US-USSR relations, the space race resulting from the Soviet launch of Sputnik and how the seeds of the race riots of the 60s were actually well planted by 1959, but there is also a healthy dose of the unexpected. There is a whole chapter on Motown and how it came into being as a direct result of African Americans drawn to Detroit by the promise of jobs in the auto industry. The origin of indie film is traced (somewhat spuriously, in my opinion) to John Cassavettes' improvisational film Shadows. Finally, at least three chapters were devoted to the evolution of jazz music.

The Beat Generation plays a large role in the book as well. I've always been only mildly interested in this topic - the antics of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg just never really held all that much appeal to me. That said, the chapters about these men were fascinating. It almost made me want to go and try to read Kerouac's On The Road again - a book I have started twice and abandoned twice. I know better than that though. On The Road is just a book I will die not having read.

1959: The Year Everything Changed reminded me a lot of my favorite book on the 70s It Seemed Like Nothing Happened in that it gave a really good overview of the time period, sprinkling in just enough detail to keep me engaged but not so much that I was overwhelmed. It painted the era in wide brush strokes, covering a lot of ground in a short period of time, but I also didn't feel cheated. Ultimately, recent history is hard to write about because we're still too close to it. I would argue that we're just starting to get enough distance between us and the 50s such that our experiences now are not coloring our recollection.

Despite that fact, I really do recommend this book to those that are interested in not just recent history but pop culture too. It may not have really been the year everything changed, but it's certainly a year worth reading about.

Year of 25 Books: #6 - Double Blind

For those of you that are not our Facebook friends our follow us on Twitter, Heidi's third full length novel in 4 months, Double Blind, was released today. Of course, I read this book in its beta draft and then was required had a chance to do the galley proof a few weeks back. It hit the internet a week ago Friday in both paperback and eBook format and already, it's already climbing the Dreamspinner best seller charts (#9 overall today.) I thought since 1) I just got done working overnights and 2) I'm a bit behind in my challenge to read 25 books in the year I would do something on the blog to celebrate its release.

Double Blind is the sequel/spin-off to her well-received novel Special Delivery. When she finished writing Special Delivery, Heidi declared to me that Randy really needed his own story. Randy enters Special Delivery towards the end of its second act, and I'll admit, the first time I read it, I didn't really find him incredibly sympathetic - at least not initially. But I was willing to go with it - her instincts are rarely wrong when it comes to her writing. And so Double Blind was born, written in November of 2009 - the month to which we are used to losing Heidi to NaNaWriMo.

Double Blind opens in Herod's Casino in Las Vegas with Randy watching a video feed of Ethan Ellison at the roulette table. He is betting on black over and over again, and he is also losing over and over again. Randy is well known for his ability to read people, he makes a bet with Billy Herod, the owner of the casino, that he knows exactly what Ethan's story is. But has Randy finally met his match in Ethan?

While the book is, as most of Heidi's books are, a romance between two people - and, more abstractly, four people as Sam and Mitch from Special Delivery are back for an encore performance - it also throws Mafia machinations and Vegas' games of chance into the mix. There's quite a bit of poker in the book, and for those that might be afraid to wade into it because of the poker - trust me, you don't have to worry. The rules of the game are explained very well and in such a way as they contribute to the story. Somehow, even when explaining the rules to a game, Heidi still manages to show rather than tell.

I mentioned that Double Blind is a sequel of sorts to Special Delivery, but what I love about Double Blind is that it doesn't suffer from what I refer to as "The Mummy 2 Syndrome." It resists the temptation to take what worked in its predecessor and dress it up with more bells and whistles until it collapses under its own weight. Rather than rehash the past, what happens is that the familiar shows up and goes off in new directions. Consequently, it's not essential to have read Special Delivery to enjoy Double Blind (although reading the former is highly recommended.)

As I said when I reviewed Libby Drew's State of Mind, I really like it when the main characters in m/m fiction read like real guys as opposed to (as Mrs. Giggles said in her review of Special Delivery) "little girls with a pee-pee." Nothing bugs me more than seeing these men act as if they were somehow not men - as if by virtue of their orientation, their masculinity necessarily has to be ratcheted down several notches. This bounces me out of the story and mostly just makes me angry. So when the characters seem authentically written as men, I'm in. The flip side of that is that the emotional connection between men, regardless of orientation or the presence of absence of sex, is the draw for me in these novels, and that can sometimes seem not-very-mannish. Randy even thinks this during a particularly intense scene with Mitch "What the fuck, guys don’t talk like this, not even gay guys!" But as I have said a million times, although that may be the rule, it doesn't mean that it HAS to be that way. In fact, I feel like we would all better served if we banished the kind of statement that Randy made from our collective definition of masculinity. Men of all orientations have so few examples of real emotional connection and if m/m fiction can provide this, so much the better. Too bad that straight men (who, arguably, could use the education the most) will be the least likely to read it. If anyone ever asks me why I enjoy reading m/m fiction, those are the reasons I cite.

And even if I weren't married to the author, I think Double Blind is a more than capable entry into the genre.