Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent:

• J.D. Robb's Innocent in Death. Apparently this is the twenty-somethingth book in a series of crime mysteries set several decades in our future. I'd never heard of this series before but I might have to read more than just this excerpt; I like the science-fictiony aspect of the setting as well as the mystery. This future isn't overpoweringly different from the current world; Detective Eve Dallas is here investigating the sudden death of a history teacher in a private school who turns out to have been poisoned, and little differences such as "a tube of Pepsi" are the greatest reminders in the three chapters I read that this isn't modern-day New York. But writing a consistent slightly-different setting takes as much or more skill than creating a place where nothing at all is the same, and like all long-running series, the characters are what draw the reader in. The detective, her husband, the ex-girlfriend of his who turns up when they're out to dinner -- they incite as much curiosity as the murder investigation and I want to see how it all turns out.
• Steven White's Kill Me didn't really grab me at all from the excerpt. In what I read, we see an unnamed man come to see Dr. Alan Gregory, a psychologist who is apparently a regular in White's books -- but nearly everything is told from the point of view of his "anonymous rich white guy" patient, who likes skiing unbroken slopes (even after getting caught in an avalanche) and driving fast cars and has a friend become a vegetable in a diving accident. It wasn't enough to give me any clue about what was going on. The Amazon reviews filled me in that the guy will be creeped out enough by his friend's condition and his brother's death from Lou Gehrig's disease that he will hire a group called the Death Angels to kill him if his own health and quality of life ever goes that far downhill. And he then he finds out he has both a possibly fatal health condition and some new reasons to want to stay alive. I suppose I can see where that could make an interesting thriller, but the supposedly-exciting scenes of the avalanche and avoiding car accidents and so forth in the excerpt didn't thrill me.
• J.R. Ward's Lover Revealed didn't grab me either. Partly this is because it's book 4 in a series, and it doesn't seem like a series that one can pick up in the middle. I couldn't keep track of most of the characters, other than the protagonist, Butch O'Neal, apparently a human in the weird situation of working with vampires, and his ex, Marissa, herself a vampire and an unmated outcast in her own society. Everyone else swirled together; this might not have been the case if I had read their stories from the start.
• George Saunders' In Persuasion Nation is a collection of short stories, so what I read was two stories, both of which I enjoyed, just as I enjoyed Saunders' The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil before. All of Saunders' work that I've read is absurdist and satirical and wickedly funny, whether it's a story about a device that makes babies seems to talk ("I CAN SPEAK(TM)," in this collection) or a country so small that only one of its citizens can actually fit into it at a time (Reign). Lots of pointed fun.

There isn't really just one version of the Robin Hood story. The one I'm most familiar with is Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from 1883. In retrospect, it seems a little self-consciously archaic, with its thees and thous (but at least they're used correctly, unlike most people trying to fake archaic English, while still being easily readable to modern people, unline actual English of the period). However, having grown up with one version of the story can make it very difficult to accept a different variant. While reading Jennifer Roberson's Lady of the Forest, I kept having "But that's not how it's supposed to be!" moments. The major one is the origin of Robin himself. Pyle has Robin as an ordinary yeoman who's particularly good at archery and becomes an outlaw when he's goaded into shooting some deer which turn out to be the King's and thus off-limits to all others. Roberson takes the tack familiar to viewers of the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin was born a nobleman and comes back to England after fighting in the Crusades to find that England is a harsh and unfair place, so he takes the side of the ordinary people, even if it means breaking the law to do so. I don't know if I prefer the version where Robin is of ordinary birth because it's most familiar to me, or because it doesn't seem to me that it should take a nobleman rebelling to lead a band of outlaws -- the idea of the yeomen being able to stand up for themselves appeals to me more. I guess what appeals to others is the self-sacrifice of a nobleman in abandoning his birth status and all the opportunity that might come with it -- more in Roberson's version, where Robin's father is alive and the family castle is intact, then in the Prince of Thieves version where the father has died and the castle is in ruins when Robin comes home from the Middle East. But stealing and giving the loot to those who truly needs it is self-sacrifice enough for one character, I'd say.

Other characters in Roberson's version differ from the way I expected them to be enough that it irritated me -- it just seemed wrong for Guy of Gisbourne to be an insecure knight in love with Marian, rather than the cold-blooded hired killer sent after Robin Hood, or for Friar Tuck to be an idealistic young monk who can't even ride a horse instead of an independent friar who carries a sword and threatens to use it on Robin at their first meeting. And I'm not sure whether to trust Roberson or Pyle on one issue -- Pyle specifically has Friar Tuck perform a marriage, while Roberson just as specifically has Friar Tuck state that as a friar rather than a priest he doesn't have the authority to perform a marriage. (I'd be more inclined to trust Roberson, who seems to have done so much historical research, if it weren't that her book has an abbot and an educated woman talk about "adultery" when the subject is actually "fornication.") In a way, though, this difference says a lot about the difference between the the two approaches to the stories -- Pyle focuses on the simple lives of people in the forest and Roberson deals with the never-ending manipulation of nobles and gentry to get themselves status, money, power, or they woman they want to marry.

And a woman is the focus of the novel, and its sequel Lady of Sherwood, as the titles indicate. Marian doesn't even appear in the earliest Robin Hood ballads -- she is a late addition, but a story without romantic love is unpopular these last few hundred years. Here, Marian is the only surviving child of a widowed knight who has died on Crusade, which makes Marian a ward of the King of England. She is a grown woman without control over her future; the only other major female in the first book, the Sheriff of Nottingham's daughter Eleanor, is a grown woman too, but with no more control because her father has the power to manage Eleanor's future as he wants to. As a woman, I became frustrated on these characters' behalf to see the men around them treat them like chess pieces. Robin is the exception, but Robin's father, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne all have other plans. Again, this is more of a reflection of nobles' lives. Ordinary people -- the Saxons who were there before the Norman Conquest killed of many of the Saxon leaders -- didn't come across Normans under normal circumstances. When they did, the results were often unpleasant: pressure to pay higher taxes, or worse. (Perhaps this is why Roberson is careful to establish Robin and Marian both as of Saxon ancestry -- though being a Saxon doesn't make Robin's father any more pleasant or less manipulative.) Roberson's books spend some time on the concerns of others' lives, but they are instances like Will Scarlet, who here became an outlaw for murdering the Norman soldiers who raped and killed his wife. Pyle's version shows a few of the more pleasant sides of life outside the castles -- I expect both approaches have some truth to them. I found Lady of the Forest and Lady of Sherwood well-written and interesting, and they did make me think about the older versions too, but I doubt they can replace the stories I grew up on completely in my affections.

Another set of excerpts from Penguin and BzzAgent.

• The first excerpt, from Unwound by Jonathan Baine (who turns out to be filmmaker Gorman Bechard), was a bit difficult to look at as part of a novel for me; it seemed nearly complete in itself. So I can't quite vouch for whether the book is a twisty-turny thriller later on, though the Amazon reviews seem to imply that it is; what I read is the semi-normal setup that has to exist before shocking turns of events can shock anyone. The setup is that author Peter Richardson has flown to another city to see the premiere of a play based on his popular book "Angel," the story of a teenage prostitute, and meets a girl named Dina who seems to have taken on the persona of Angel and everything about her is created from his own fevered dreams, so of course he is attracted to her to the extent of cheating on his wife. It sounds like it could turn into "Fatal Attraction," but one Amazon reviewer says it's "not Fatal Attraction at all. Not even the same genre." I don't know if I am curious enough to see how it comes out.
• The next excerpt is from Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty, the most recent in his Dresden Files series. Weirdly enough, these stories of Harry Dresden keep getting compared to Harry Potter (BzzAgent's blurb for Proven Guilty starts off "If you loved Harry Potter, but wish he had a little more edge and a few years on him, this is your kind of book.") Yes, Dresden and Potter are both good guys who can do magic in a modern world where some magic is evil. But I've read some of the earlier books in the Dresden series -- they have more in common with hard-bitten detective stories than the teenagers-in-a-boarding-school-fight-evil (though still lots of fun) Potter novels. The Sci-Fi Network's Dresden Files show is probably most like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer's spin-off Angel would probably not make anyone think of the Harry Potter movies either. But this doesn't mean the Dresden books aren't good.

  Proven Guilty is book eight in a series, so it might not be the best place to start, but some backstory is given as to the war going on between the White Council of good wizards and the Red Court of blood-drinking vampires (no, that isn't redundant; this universe also has life-force-sucking vampires). Harry Dresden is a wizard and a consultant for people who need a sort of detective in magical matters, and he hasn't always been on the White Council's good side, to say the least, but as of the time this book starts he's their Senior Warden for the Chicago area and int the excerpted five chapters, has been charged with looking into some black magic going on there. And he's been asked to talk to the leaders of the Faeries and see what their positions in the war are. And someone's tried to run his car off the road. So there's a lot on his plate -- and that's without his half-brother, the life-force-sucking wizard, and mental visits the dark angel trapped in a coin buried under his basement. There's guaranteed to be a lot happening in the rest of this book, and I expect I'll read it -- but I think I'll borrow my stepmother's copies of the earlier books I haven't gotten to yet before I do.

• The last book excerpted was Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back by Anya Kamenetz. I myself have generally lived within my means even though I didn't earn much, but I can see how a medical or other emergency would screw up my finances completely and I don't like the picture. The excerpts were the chapters on marriage/family choices and worker organizations, which I found very interesting as sociology but not completely applicable to my life; I don't know how the rest of the book would strike me. It is written in a very readable style, though, unlike what one might think of books dealing with economic and political subject matter, and whether or not you agree with the suggestions for solutions, definitely makes the reader think.

And finally, a book I chose myself and have read all of: The Golden Key by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott, who are all fantasy authors in their own right but who I've never read anything by. Their work together, however, was seamless; a fascinating novel set in a sort of alternate Italy where some Renaissance-equivalent art masters can work magic with their paintings, and since paintings are how contracts and treaties are recorded, they have a lot of opportunity to do so. The book covers centuries of history of the city-state of Tira Virte, its ruling dukes and their official painters, and the women they love, since both ruling and professional painting are limited to men, and the twists and turns of the plot were unexpected but completely believable. The characters are also believable and well-drawn, and I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to people who don't like "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy, as this is something very different.

This Christmas, one gift from my dad was the science fiction novel Variable Star. The names on the cover are Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson, but the circumstances of authorship are a little unusual, since "Grand Master" science fiction writer Heinlein died more than 15 years ago. The outline and notes for this novel were found in Heinlein's papers after the death of Heinlein's wife Virginia, and Spider Robinson, a well-known sf writer who was once called "the next Robert Heinlein" in a review that has probably been quoted on every one of his book jackets, actually wrote the book. My father, a dedicated Heinlein fan since childhood with no special preference for Robinson, said he found the book depressing -- not because of the events in the book (though some of them admittedly are depressing) but because it wasn't Heinlein. And it isn't Heinlein, though there are references and turns of phrase that will certainly recall his work. (The plot, however, is definitely 1950s/early '60s Heinlein, as well as many of the characters -- I can see echoes of Citizen of the Galaxy, Time for the Stars, Space Cadet, and even the much later Friday in it.) I enjoy both authors quite a lot, and I enjoyed this book. But if both men get credit for this novel, then John W. Campbell's name should be on the cover of Heinlein's Sixth Column, as the magazine editor Campbell gave Heinlein the plot outline for that book (which first appeared as a serial in Campbell's magazine, Astounding Science Fiction) with a request to write it. If Heinlein gets solo credit for that one, then Robinson should get sole credit for this book -- but Heinlein did not keep Campbell's contribution a secret and Robinson would not want to hide Heinlein's. However, the reader who looks at this as a Robinson work will probably enjoy it more.

I read a lot of history and a fair amount of medical books, so the combination of the two is something I particularly seek out. So I was particularly pleased to see one in the latest set of book excerpts I was provided by BzzAgent, Molly Caldwell Crosby's The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History. I knew a little bit about yellow fever from the section on it and Walter Reed's proof that it was carried by mosquitoes in Microbe Hunters, but Crosby's book gives a lot more historical surroundings for the disease. She opens in 1878, an extremely virulent year in the Americas for a disease that affected those of European ancestry far more than those whose African ancestors had developed the ability to deal with the virus, and affected those moving into the South more than those who had grown up there. The description of the great Mardi Gras celebration inaugurated that year gives a deeper understanding of what it was like for the people living in that time and place and the doctors faced with the epidemic. And the situations described once the epidemic hit Memphis resemble something from a horror novel. It is, however, a story I want to finish, rather than just reading the excerpt.

Bill Lamond's Born to Lead: Unlock The Magnificence In Yourself And Others was the next excerpt in the set, and it was definitely not my cup of tea. It is mostly aimed at women, to help them lead and accomplish things (the introduction says "You have a new assignment -- to save the world by ensuring that it goes on for your children and grandchildren.") through "a new style of leadership" that "combines the strengths of the feminine and masculine models to become whole." I've got no problem with any of those concepts, and I am a dedicated believer in women's equality. I just wouldn't normally choose to read a book about learning to lead and act -- I see myself as a member of the "geek" subset of humanity, where male and female stereotypes have less hold on our behavior and the difficulty in dealing with society is more likely to be learning to speak non-geek than crossing the gender divide. I agree with most of what Lamond says; it's just not all that new to me. This is a book for someone who hasn't read stuff about models versus reality, or about how gender differences may or may not be culturally prescribed.

Elliot Perlman's The Reasons I Won't Be Coming is a story collection; the excerpt I read was the story "I Was Only In A Childish Way Connected To The Established Order," narrated by a middle-aged poet who has had some psychotic episodes that landed him in a mental hospital -- but he doesn't sound all that abnormal to me. Stuck in a life where he doesn't fit in, certainly, but comprehensible and sympathetic. I read reviews on amazon.com which praise Perlman's ability to create distinctive voices in his work, and this story definitely fit the bill there; I believe I will have to seek out more of his work.

Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent and Penguin. The only one I liked enough to talk about is Charlaine Harris's Grave Surprise, the second in a series starring Harper Connelly, a woman who can supernaturally find bodies, or if their location is known tell how the person died. I haven't read the first book, but I have enjoyed Harris's Southern Vampire series starring Sookie Stackhouse as a Louisiana waitress who has a lot of vampires and similarly supernatural creatures in her life. This series seems to be set in a more normal setting, meaning that Connelly is surrounded by people who may not believe in the supernatural (rather than the supernatural being accepted as it is in the other series) and closer to a sort of detective story, though most detectives can't actually sense when they have found a buried body. The excerpt I got (the first four chapters, 68 pages) definitely made me want to read the rest of the book and find out what happens, or what happened, since the book opens with the discovery of a modern body in a centuries-old cemetery where Connelly is giving a demonstration of her ability for a college class.

I've been a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold since I read her book Barrayar serialized in Analog magazine in, I think, 1992. That was science fiction, of course (or it would not have been likely to be in that magazine) -- the story of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony dealing with her new husband Aral Vorkosigan's backward home planet of Barrayar and the harsh politics of the aristocracy she's married to.

Bujold's newest, Beguilement (The Sharing Knife, Volume 1) is a fantasy novel, but it has a lot of similarities to Barrayar. It is, essentially, the story of a man from one culture and a woman from another figuring one another and developing a relationship. Here, though, it is magic rather than technology that forms part of the difference between Dag, a patroller from the Lakewalkers, and Fawn, a girl from an ordinary farm in a medieval or Renaissance-equivalent world. The other difference is that the Lakewalkers are a mobile force that protects people against soul-sucking monsters, and the rumors about Lakewalkers among the rest of the population suggest that they're nearly as bad as the creatures they fight.

The comparison that actually came to my mind after finishing this novel was to Jean Auel's historical (or more accurately pre-historical) Earth Children's books, the series that started with Clan of the Cave Bear and continued with The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, The Plains of Passage, and The Shelters of Stone (with one more eventually due). While Bujold is only supposed to make two volumes out of The Sharing Knife (and boy, is it obvious that the end of this first volume is far from the end of the story), the coming together of two people who originate in different cultures with deep distrust or even fear of each other is common to both authors' series. I found the views inside the main characters' heads to be very interesting as they figure out how to interact with each other and those who are close to their new friend, and Bujold's settings to be very well-thought-out and believable (so is Auel's, except for her tendency for Ayla and Jondalar to be the center of every new invention or advance in the entire prehistoric world, but then Auel has archeology to rely on while Bujold has to create everything). I will definitely read the sequel to Beguilement as soon as it is available.

A completely different kind of story is found in Julia Fox Garrison's memoir Don't Leave Me This Way: or When I Get Back on My Feet You'll Be Sorry, the story of the stroke she had at the age of 37 and the process of trying to get as much of a normal life back afterwards as possible. There are a lot of autobiographical books about recovering from physical problems, but this one has a black humor that isn't often seen in such "inspirational" stories. Nicknaming the professionals she deals with "Dr. Jerk" and "Nurse Doom," cursing at the aide who reprimands her for trying to get a drink of water during a transfer out of bed, and generally refusing to be treated like a child or an idiot, Ms. Garrison is much more how I would expect a normal human to act under the difficult circumstances of suddenly being half-paralyzed, and that makes her more interesting to read about than a saint who accepts every difficulty quietly. She makes jokes with family, friends, and hospital/rehab center staff and only cries in private, and so the doctors (and even one friend) feel she's in denial, rather than just trying to salvage a bit of dignity. This is difficult in a place where the start of menstruation makes the nurse get a diaper rather than a tampon. But Garrison is persistent and refuses to accept blanket predictions as to her future, and indeed is able to fight those of her doctors who want to push her into treatments for conditions she hasn't been shown to have. (And she and the one doctor who treats her like an adult turn out to be right, too.)

Coming home to her husband and preschooler son is not the end of difficulty, either. Her problems include dealing with a wheelchair, needing help in the bathroom in public places, not having her driver's license automatically revoked, and her husband having to be her caretaker ("The insurance company is unwilling to offer home nursing unless there is no other avenue for household needs. In other words, if you have relatives, you don't need a nurse.") Just making a bed is a major triumph. Getting more physical therapy than the doctors and insurance companies want to offer is a long battle. But she walks again, cooks again, and does nearly all the things that she was originally told she would never do again. Not everything -- eventually she accepts that she and her husband will not have any more children, for example. But her achievements make her an impressive example, and her advice at the end of the book on how to deal with medical professionals (and her open letter to doctors asking for patients to have an equal voice in the treatment of their own bodies) is a truly nice touch.