Audiobook Auction Happening Now!

Howdy, readers and listeners,

I'm helping to spread the word about a fundraising auction for ALS, organized by members of the awesome audiobook community. A lovely audiobook producer, Bob Deyan, has ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and the goal of the auction is to raise research funds.

If you're in the LA area, there's a fabulous 25 hour audiobook read-a-thon in Burbank. And if you're everywhere, you should check out the silent auction - it's not just audiobooks (though you CAN buy me a personalized story reading by Simon Vance, hint hint) but that's a lot of the organizing principal. Know of a kid who likes books? Bid on the full (and incredibly done) set of Harry Potter audiobooks! Or listen to my wise advice about how wonderful it is, and go for the Bloody Jack series! Get your favorite Nerdfighter a bunch of John Green audios! There are really just a ton of great books available, in addition to services, fun treats, etc. Do please check it out, and spread the word about this great cause. Thanks!

Psuper Pseudonym Psurprise

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith / J.K. Rowling
(Mulholland Books, 2013)
Format: hardback via library

From Goodreads: "After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this. Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith."

Look, I don't want to tell you how to read books or anything. (Well. I "don't". Primarily I just want to tell you what books to read.) But in addition to telling you to read The Cuckoo's Calling (seriously, do), I have to point out these two quotes that underscore Rowling's themes (not too spoilery):

From page 57 - Strike's secretary Robin is reading one of the articles about the famous death he's investigating. Strike is far from impressed with the writer's conclusions.

From page 378 (of 455) - Strike contemplates the burdens of nonconformity and how readily society places its own value judgements on the lives of everyone outside the norm.

I think this notion of tragedy and how it is applied to the 'ordinary' person "tethered... to life with mortgages and voluntary work" versus those who haven't "taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance" is both interesting and very pervasive in this book. The paparazzi are everywhere - the book opens with them surrounding the scene of the death and the cameras never really go away throughout. If a character is famous, he or she is surrounded, hounded, picked over and analyzed and subscribed feelings and motivations and thoughts that don't necessarily have anything to do with that person's reality. It made Strike's task in investigating Lula Landry's death that much trickier, and the details of her life - the tests she used to give her friends to see which of them were selling stories about her, the places she sought connections to a world that was saner and kinder - that much more poignant.

And given the amount of speculation that was everywhere - I mean everywhere, if you were at all tuned into the book world - when the news broke that Galbraith was Rowling's pseudonym, it made for a very pointed commentary about fame, as well. (Not in an 'oh, poor JKR, so sad for her and her millions of fans and millions of bank notes' way, but definitely in a 'yeah, we actually are very quick to judge and to judge harshly, and to gobble up the judgments of others, now that I look at it' way.)

Besides all that, this is a smartly crafted and engaging detective story. There are red herrings; I had to do that thing where I flip back to the beginning or a mid-point to check what the brother or the friend or the policeman said and how that plays into what Strike is then finding out. There were reveals we got to see and guess at alongside Strike, but only he was precise and skilled enough to put it all together in the right way. I wanted to be Robin, his new temporary-agency secretary, watching him work and getting exposed to it all as it unfolded. (Which - great device for expositional purposes, and deftly handled.) I wanted to know Strike, but only if I could swoop in and fix his emotional pain for him, because he is Mr. Wounded Gruff Man, which is a trope I fall for every time.

The only false-ish note for me was the army stuff - I can't say if I'd have questioned it if I didn't know about the pseudonym, but Strike's childhood experiences were so clearly woven through his character and shaped his actions and reactions, and I just didn't get that same feeling from his army days.

But hey, maybe this particular mystery that Strike had to solve just brought up a lot of his early past, and future cases will touch on the war and its aftermath. If there's a writer out there to whom I'm more than ready to extend the benefit of the doubt, its Rowling.

Gritty Realism Doesn't Care that Magical Realism Would be More Fun

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling
(Little, Brown & Company, 2012)
Format: audio CD via library (read by Tom Hollander for Hachette Audio)

From Goodreads: "When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems.

And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations?

A big novel about a small town, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. It is the work of a storyteller like no other."

As my sister-in-law texted me after reading this: I have thoughts.

Now, being the voracious reader that I am, I'm as happy with boy wizards as I am with scheming small-town councillors, so long as the writing holds up. And as anyone would expect from Rowling, the writing definitely holds up. I got a whiff of "after this, no one can accuse me of only achieving success through escapism" out of the plot, but that's the trouble with knowing too much about the author's life instead of taking a book strictly on it's own terms. And what terms they are. Pagford, quiet, idyllic little Pagford, is in fact a seething mass of modern venality under a polite veneer.

My friend S wrote, I think, a perfect review of it, and I'm reprinting this from her:

• "Rowling skips nothing – prejudice, bullying, disillusion, failure, success, rejection, mental illness, drug addiction, and tragedy. All of it weaves together to create a world that we all know but, out of an intense desire to be polite, we ignore. But that world exists and, by not acknowledging it, we condone it."

I will say that this moved a lot more quickly for me once I switched to the audio version. I was completely absorbed in Hollander's narration, and his ability to convey not just the right voice, but the right attitude for each character. It is a great skill, and his light, charming tone carried me inexorably into this often-grim and dismal world. It almost felt like cheating, to allow the narration to be a conduit into Rowling's examination of the underbelly of life, but I think in a way it also kept poor dead Barry around a bit more for me. 

Everything that spins out of control in this novel is a direct result of Barry's untimely death. So often the characters were, in their minds, grasping the baton from him and running headlong into the future. But no one ran in the same direction, and many of them were on crash courses. It's kind of a joy to have been a rubbernecker at the scene.