J: John Grey

Lord John Grey series by Diana Gabaldon
Genre: historical mystery

This is more about a character than an individual book, since I’m recommending every book he’s in. Lord John Grey is my favorite character over the age of 30. In him, Gabaldon combines every trait I eat up in fiction – brilliance, wit, caution, bravery, a certain level of reserve, and built-in conflict.

John Grey is the younger brother of a duke who (for reasons entwined in the plot of one of the books) prefers to use his father’s lesser title, something that occasionally leads to awkward moments during introductions. John is rich, cultured, good-looking, and a commissioned officer in the English army, everything a man wants to be in mid-18th century England. Being an English soldier is a core part of his identity.

Grey is also gay, at a time when “homosexual activity” is punishable by death. And he’s in love with Jamie Fraser, a married (and hetero) Scotsman who was an officer on the opposite side during the Jacobite Rebellion (or Jacobite Rising). They get to know each other (no, not in the Biblical sense) when Grey is put in charge of Ardsmuir Prison, where Fraser is a prisoner for some time.

Grey is a minor character in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, where (to me) he takes over every scene he’s in despite sharing pages with some of the most dynamic characters I’ve had the privilege of reading about. He’s the protagonist in the Lord John books, solving mysteries that bring him in contact with different branches of several militaries, different echelons of society, and in and out of Jamie Fraser’s presence.

We first meet Grey in the Outlander series as a sixteen year old. Attached to his older brother’s regiment, he’s captured by the Scots, and would rather have the laird in charge shoot him than answer any questions. But believing the English woman with the Scots is also a prisoner and in imminent danger, he offers information in exchange for a guarantee of her safety, information that leads to the Scots finding and attacking his own regiment. That laird was Jamie Fraser, and that English woman was Fraser’s wife, Claire (who is the point-of-view character with her own amazing story in Outlander, and one of several POV characters in the rest of the series).

I actually prefer the Outlander books (I’m not as much of a mystery genre reader, and the Outlander books are more historical fiction with a dash of fantasy and lots of medical emergencies, covering pretty much every war England was involved in at the time), but I recommend both series. More John Grey is better for everyone. J

I: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? & I Do Not Come To You By Chance

My “I” titles are super long!

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
Genre: memoir

Mindy Kaling is an actor (and a writer and producer) for the American version of the TV show The Office. I've only watched the British version (which the American version is based on). Still, the title and cover grabbed me, and the book was sooo worth it.

Kaling talks about everything from being bullied by the popular Senagalese boy in her (Cambridge, MA) high school class to accidentally breaking her best friend's nose during a play, only to have the producer force them back on stage to perform the last ten minutes for the horrified audience. She describes a guy as being really cute, in a "hottest guy in AP-calculus kind of way." READ. THIS. BOOK.

For a rather awkward segue, I’ll throw out that Mindy Kaling says she was conceived in Nigeria, which happens to be the setting of the next book… 

I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Genre: general fiction

Kingsley graduates from university in Nigeria with an engineering degree, and struggles to find a job in a terrible economy. But then his father, who had been ill for years, dies in the hospital. The family is left with hospital bills they can’t pay, and as the oldest child Kingsley is now expected to support his mother and help clothe, feed and educate his younger siblings. Kingsley also wants to get married, but his girlfriend’s parents aren’t interested in her being with someone with no income or prospects.

So Kingsley takes up his uncouth cousin’s offer to become a 419 scammer (419 is the article of the Nigerian Criminal Code against financial fraud), and starts spending his days sending scam emails (with just the right number of misspellings and grammar mistakes) off to foreigners. He becomes a rich man. And then his troubles really begin…

I was so impressed with this book. Nwaubani managed to make Kingsley sympathetic without ever sugarcoating the fact that he was a criminal. Kingsley, Cash Daddy (the uncouth cousin), and the other 419ers are villains to their victims, heroes to those they help, irredeemably tainted to their more honest acquaintances – and altogether very human in their struggles.

And the book is funny!

H: How To Ditch Your Fairy & Hounded

This may say more about my reading habits than about what’s actually available, but today’s books have concepts I haven’t seen some version of a million times…

How To Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

Genre: MG/YA fantasy

Charlie (short for Charlotte) goes to a sports high school, and has a personal fairy, like most people she knows. Unlike Freedom's good-skin fairy, or Rochelle's clothes-shopping fairy (the perfect outfit's always on sale), fourteen-year-old Charlie has a parking fairy. Page 17 quote:

I'm always being borrowed by Mom, or one of her sisters, or her best friend, or Jan, or Nana and Papa, or just about everyone in our neighborhood, whenever they're going to the doctor's, or grocery shopping, or anywhere that parking might be a problem. Every single day of my life someone asks me to get in their doxhead car. I hate cars. I hate drivers. I hate their little squeals of joy when they find a parking spot. But mostly I hate my benighted parking fairy.

Each chapter begins with stats: how many days since she's been in a car, the number of demerits she's racked up for being late now that she's trying to walk everywhere, the public service hours she's done to work off her demerits, how many times she's spoken to Steffan (the hot new guy with a get-away-with-anything fairy). But when Charlie teams up with Fiorenze (every-boy-will-like-you fairy) who is also on a quest to get rid of her fairy, she finds herself in far more trouble than before.

I like this lighthearted book. It's out-of-the-box, but still within range of why-didn’t-I-think-of-that. I love that it’s set in our current world, but on a continent that doesn’t currently exist. Frankly, I’m surprised there isn’t tons of fantasy like this. After all, we have alternate histories. We have portal stories. We’ve told stories about Atlantis for at least a couple thousand years. I’d love to see more fantasy set in current times, but not having to fit itself into the way currently-existing places have actually developed.

Hounded by Kevin Hearne

Genre: urban fantasy

I usually write my own summaries because too often whatever the publisher decides to put on the back cover seems to have little to do with the actual plot. But in this case, I think the publishers came up with the best possible description of the book, so I’ll quote it:

“Atticus O’Sullivan, last of the Druids, lives peacefully in Arizona, running an occult bookshop and shape-shifting in his spare time to hunt with his Irish wolfhound. His neighbors and customers think that this handsome, tattooed Irish dude is about twenty-one years old—when in actuality, he’s twenty-one centuries old. Not to mention: He draws his power from the earth, possesses a sharp wit, and wields an even sharper magical sword known as Fragarach, the Answerer.

Unfortunately, a very angry Celtic god wants that sword, and he’s hounded Atticus for centuries. Now the determined deity has tracked him down, and Atticus will need all his power—plus the help of a seductive goddess of death, his vampire and werewolf team of attorneys, a sexy bartender possessed by a Hindu witch, and some good old-fashioned luck of the Irish—to kick some Celtic arse and deliver himself from evil.”

This is probably the first story I’ve read where the protagonist is pretty much perfect and invincible (he’s witty, he’s cute, women of all ages fall for him, he wins most fights, he adores his dog, etc) and it actually makes sense. Usually irresistible, all-powerful fictional men who can do no wrong make me roll my eyes. But in this case, with twenty one centuries of experience behind him, as a druid who draws his power from the earth, it would just be silly not to make him pretty close to unbeatable, and it makes his weak moments that much more powerful. I think the author handled that extremely well. And it’s funny. Good stuff all round.

G: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Ghost Brigades, The Giant's House

This is becoming a (bad) habit. I dug through all my print books, then realized just before midnight that the reason I couldn’t find my print copy of Guernsey was that I don’t have one. But I do have an archived ebook. Grrr.

Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows & Mary Ann Shaffer

Genre: historical, general/literary

This book combines elements I wouldn’t have thought could be combined in one book. I certainly would never have picked it up on my own, but my “literary” book club read it, and I’m glad we did.

General premise: In a series of witty letters, it tells the story of some Guernsey folk who formed a book club while under Nazi occupation. Guernsey is an island between England and France, and I believe was the only part of the United Kingdom actually occupied by the Germans during WWII. Much like the kids in the Narnia books (I'm assuming people are more likely to be familiar with those than with English history), the kids on the island were evacuated to live with strangers in England just before Guernsey was attacked.

The word I’ve heard used most often to describe this book is “charming”. And it is. It’s amazing that one could maintain such a lighthearted, humorous tone in a book about people trying to hold onto something approaching a normal life while starving alongside ill-supplied invading forces and watching their neighbors be carted off to concentration camps. I’m not describing it very well. Just give this amazing book a shot.

 

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Genre: SF

General premise Jared Dirac is a member of a unique military unit nicknamed the Ghost Brigades, cloned from the DNA of dead recruits and then seriously genetically enhanced. Unlike the others, Jared was cloned from a living person, Charles Boutin, who has defected to the enemy with secrets the Colonial Defense Force is desperate to keep. At first Jared seems like a failed experiment as he has none of Boutin's memories, but slowly they start to filter into his brain, creating conflict between the viewpoint he inherited with his DNA and the soldier he has to be.

The Ghost Brigades comes after Old Man’s War and is one of my favorite SF books. I believe it’s the only SF that’s made me cry (and no, that’s not why I love it). When people who have never really read science fiction ask for recommendations, I suggest Ender’s Game (profiled earlier) and Old Man’s War.

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Genre: literary/general fiction

The general premise is daring – a twenty-five-year-old librarian named Peggy (who fits all the stereotypes of a librarian, except for her sly wit) falls in love with one of her students. James, like Peggy, is a lonely misfit. When she first meets him, he’s eleven years old, already 6’4”, and would never stop growing.

There are plenty of stories about men falling in love with inappropriately-young women. Very rarely do we see the reverse, and the author wrote a fascinating story without going anywhere gross with it, focusing more on the growth and tragedy both characters experience over the course of a decade as giantism takes its toll on James.

F: The False Prince, Firefly and Freakonomics

The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen
Genre: fantasy

I actually bought this in hardback while browsing through a store last week. I don’t remember the last time I bought fiction that way (I still buy print books, but usually nonfiction for research, sometimes from Bookins (a book swap website), but I loved the concept of The False Prince so much I was afraid I would get home and find out it wasn’t available on kindle.

First the General premise: The royal family has been murdered, and soon the nobles will no longer be able to keep it a secret. To avert a civil war, a nobleman named Conner finds four orphans who look like the younger prince (who disappeared many years before, believed to have been ambushed and killed by pirates). Connor’s plan is to train all four to impersonate the prince. Whoever does it best will gain the throne and a life far beyond what a child from an orphanage can imagine. The others won’t live long enough betray the plot.

Jennifer Nielsen didn’t disappoint, y’all. She handled her plot (and her plot twists) deftly, and the book is imbued with all the fast-paced freshness one expects of young YA. YA has gotten really dark lately. That’s fine, but that makes books like this so much more special. I highly recommend it.

And then there’s

Firefly created by Joss Whedon
Genre: Television SF

Joss Whedon is, of course, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Dollhouse. He also wrote and directed the movie adaptation of The Avengers, coming out later this year.

Firefly is the greatest television show ever, so amazing that even after it was canceled, overwhelming fan support led to Serenity, a movie based on the show. According to Wikipedia (the only place I could find all the awards listed together), “Serenity won film of the year awards from Film 2005 and FilmFocus. It also won IGN Film's Best Sci-Fi, Best Story and Best Trailer awards and was runner up for the Overall Best Movie. It also won the Nebula Award for Best Script for 2005, the 7th annual "User Tomato Awards" for best Sci-Fi movie of 2005 at Rotten Tomatoes, the 2006 viewers choice Spacey Award for favorite movie, the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form and the 2006 Prometheus Special Award.“

And, IMO, Serenity wasn’t even as good as the TV show it was based on (or maybe I’m just mad at Joss Whedon for killing off my favorite character in the movie).

I would say more, but thinking about the fate of Firefly, which was canceled before its first season even ended, depresses me (for comparison, the reality TV show Jersey Shore is entering its sixth season. Sixth. Words fail me).

Besides, the very fact that Firefly couldn’t be reduced to a pithy sentence or two was the beginning of its marketing problems. So I’ll just post a picture of The Official Companion, Volume One (it has the scripts, which I reread when I’m looking for something with great dialogue) and give it a tearful moment of silence…

Yes, that's Nathan Fillion, currently starring in Castle

…There.

One more F book!

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Genre: nonfiction (economics/psychology)

Written by an economist and a journalist, it was getting lots of press when I read it a few years back. What I liked most about it was the authors’ way of looking at the same scenarios as everyone else, but seeing them from a completely different perspective. It wasn’t necessarily the conclusions they drew (which were always unconventional) but the process they went through to arrive at those conclusions that fascinated me.

Some of the questions they addressed: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?

And that's it for F!

E: Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

I’m a sucker for books about brilliant, analytical kids. I also love books that cover the same plot and characters from dramatically different points of view, which is what we get today.

As it turns out, I can't find my copy of Ender's Game. That's all right - it's probably the most famous "accessible" science fiction novel (as opposed to famous SF books written by people clearly more interested in physics and engineering than in garnering a large readership), so I don’t need to say much about it.

I do, however, have Ender's Shadow in front of me - in print, no less. I'm the only person I know who prefers Ender's Shadow to Ender's Game. Still, I (and many millions of readers) think they're both great books.

Now that The Hunger Games has managed to put kids killing kids on the big screen and get a PG-13 rating, maybe we'll finally see an Ender's Game movie. Though as far as I know, Orson Scott Card didn't intend Ender's Game to be MG or YA. It ended up being marketed as such because of his writing style and the age of the protagonist.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Genre: science fiction

Ender's Game doesn't need much introduction, but I'll give it a shot: Earth has been warring with a hostile alien race for about a hundred years, and needs to decisively end the conflict before the aliens come back and wipe out the population. As part of the plan, the smartest kids on the planet are selected for Battle School (in a ship orbiting the earth - though I guess it's technically a satellite if it's permanently in orbit? Wow, this is hard to do when I can't just flip through the book).

Ender is the smartest of those kids, but he's also among the youngest and smallest, making him an easy target for bullying. And while he's up there playing battle games and figuring out how to save everyone, his older brother and sister (also very young and ridiculously smart) are back home, setting themselves up to take over the world.

Ugh. That's the last time I sum up a book I can't look through to refresh my memory.

Fortunately! I also have

Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card
Genre: science fiction

Maybe I liked this book better because I read it right after reading Ender's Game, when it was in fact written over a decade later. I felt like it filled in and fleshed out all sorts of things that were just alluded to in Ender's Game. The two books cover the same time period, but...

General premise Bean, an orphan surviving by his wits on the streets of Rotterdam, is discovered by a recruiter and selected to be part of Earth's plan to defend itself from enemyaliens. Bean is easily the most brilliant student at Battle School. Too brilliant to be trusted to follow the rules and toe the line the way most of the other kids are doing.

While Ender is more preoccupied with his personal and philosophical struggles, Bean wants to know why they're all there and what the adults are hiding from them. And unlike Ender, Bean knows how to look for the truth, because he's already spent most of his life fighting for survival.

I paused to get details from the book, and now I’m 124 pages into Ender’s Shadow. Must…resist…temptation…

D: The Demon's Lexicon and Dragon Bones

I think this officially marks the highest number of blog posts I’ve ever made in a week, so yaaay for the A to Z Challenge!
 
Now on to two of my favorite "D" books:
 

The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

Genre: urban fantasy

General premise Nick and his older brother Alan have spent their lives running from magicians who want the charm keeping their mother alive. When Mae and Jamie arrive on their doorstep looking for help, Nick wants to kick them out, but Alan's attempt to help leads to his being marked by a demon. Now the only way to save his life is to fight the magicians hunting them.

And

 

Dragon Bones by Patricia Brigg

Genre: fantasy

General premise For most of his childhood, Ward pretends to be less intelligent than he is, so his father won't accuse him of treachery and kill him. When his father dies and Ward becomes ruler, he learns the family secret about the power available to him from the ghost that isn't a ghost. But Ward's also played an idiot for so long that he's now a target for nobles who think he's incapable of ruling.

 

I love both of them, but these two protagonists couldn’t be more different. Nick seems like a psychopath at first glance. I believe the author of The Demon's Lexicon said that her idea with Nick had been to write the hot, bad boy that is so common in fiction, without giving him a fairy-tale heart of gold (even though everyone around him wants to think he has a hidden, softer side). Unlike true psychopaths, Nick never lies (and therefore always keeps his word and never makes excuses), and he loves and protects his older brother Alan wholeheartedly. With Nick, what you see is what you get. At least, until you start to understand him. At which point what you see is still what you get, but now there’s nuance and shading to the stark lines of his personality and world view.

 

Ward, on the other hand, spends a good chunk of the book sacrificing himself for other people, and has cultivated a persona of being both nice and a little slow, so that no one ever actually knows what he’s really like. People don't think he's smart enough to have hidden his real self all those years, and he finds out the hard way that getting a reputation is much easier than changing one.

Both books have humor to balance dark circumstances, great sibling relationships and fascinating family problems. And Patricia Brigg’s unique take on the “family ghost” in Dragon Bones deserves special mention. Writing this reminds me how long it's been since I reread it. If I didn't have a bunch of blog posts to write (and a few letters to read books for asap - K, P, Q, X, Y, and Z, to be exact), I'd reread Dragon Bones right now...