Harry Dresden, Wizard for Hire.

At the moment, I have two guys in my life who are totally addicted to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. One of them is my husband, aged 34 -- he just finished the most recent book in the series. The other one is a patron at the library, aged 14 -- he's desperately waiting for the third book so he can devour it as he has the other two.

And really, how could they not be addicted? Harry Dresden has the voice of a hard-boiled detective AND he's a magic-user. His allies include Bob, a lecherous spirit housed in a human skull; Karrin Murphy, a super-tough homicide detective; Michael, a Knight of the Cross; a vampire named Thomas; and Ebenezar McCoy, a wizard who lives in Hogs Hollow, Missouri. As Harry can hardly walk down the sidewalk without getting into trouble, he has run-ins with vampires, werewolves, the Senior Council (the ruling body of wizards), faerie folk and a plethora of supernatural beasties. The books are smart, hilarious, action-packed and very hard to put down.

If any of that sounds remotely interesting, go ahead and pick up the first book -- you won't be disappointed. I promise.

If you're still waffling, go and read Jim Butcher's mini-bio at his website. That was what hooked me in the first place.

Links to my write-ups of the first five books:

Storm Front
Fool Moon
Grave Peril
Summer Knight
Death Masks

Because we can never read enough about WWII

A. Fortis has some thoughts on two books set during WWII that you might have missed. First, The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho:

Three main characters: a British investigator trying to mask his background as a German Jew; Karsten, an eighteen-year-old German prisoner of war detained in a camp in North Wales; and Esther, a seventeen-year-old Welsh farm girl whose life changes both drastically and subtly in the aftermath of the war. The story itself is musing and pensive in tone--much of the drama takes place within the characters themselves. This is not a novel of battle action, but rather a nuanced portrayal of rural life at the end of the war.

And second, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief:

Told from a unique point of view--that of Death itself--The Book Thief relates the story of Liesel Meminger, a girl from a poor German family who goes to live with a slightly less poor foster family in the outskirts of Munich during the Second World War.

Read this book and save the world

Jackie on Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:

Basically, in the wake of a massive terrorist attack, Homeland Security swoops down into an already security-conscience San Francisco and starts abusing their power, treating citizens (especially teens) as suspects. Marcus Yarrow, your average, everyday computer genius teen, having been kidnapped by the government, tortured, and let go, has sworn that he will fight Big Brother and return freedom to his city. More or less. Mostly he's just pissed that he got tortured, and that no one knows where his buddy is.

Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salisbury

Eddie Okubo lives an idyllic life in Hawaii. He plays baseball, hangs out with friends, and helps with the family business. But then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and everything changes. Eddie and his people are the enemy, and everyone is suspicious of them. Nevertheless, Eddie loves his country and wants to fight for it. Except he's too young. And too Japanese.

With the help of a friend, Eddie finds a way to enlist in the service. He is stationed on the island with other new Japanese-American recruits. But in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the government finds the new soldiers more of threat than a help. After being kept under armed guard, they are shipped off to the mainland. They endure a long train ride to the Mid-west and then are transported to the Gulf coast. There they become part of an experimental program called Dogs for Defense. Dogs for Defense is predicated on the assumption that dogs can smell the difference between a Japanese person and a non-Japanese.

Over the next several weeks, Eddie and the other Japanese-American soldiers are virtual prisoners on Cat Island. They undergo arduous training meant to turn the dogs from family pets to vicious attack animals and to turn the Japanese from soldiers to bait.

Sure to reward its readers, Eyes of the Emperor is a powerful, poignant historical novel that echoes current events on the battlefield and in our society. For more stories about the same characters, check out Salisbury's House of the Red Fish and Under the Blood-Red Sun.

Abu Ghraib by Gourevitch

From the Publisher's Weekly review:
"Drawing from Morris's lengthy interviews with the soldiers who photographed and participated in prisoner abuse, the authors render in clear detail the horror and inhumanity of Abu Ghraib, for prisoner and guard alike: 'Inexperienced, untrained, under attack, and under orders to do wrong, the low-ranking reservist MPs who implemented the nefarious policy... knew that what they were doing was immoral, and they knew that if it wasn't illegal, it ought to be.'
...A thorough, terrifying account of an American-made 'bedlam,' the latest from Gourevitch is as troubling, and arguably as important, as his 1998 Rwanda investigation 'We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families'." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Gourevitch is an amazing writer - "We Wish to Inform You" is one of the most powerful books on war that I have ever read; I'm sure this new book will be equally significant.

The other side of London

Over at Bookshelves of Doom, Leila has some thoughts on Darkside by Tom Becker:

Jonathan Starling's father is back in the asylum. While fourteen-your-old Jonathan is used to being on his own (even when his father is at home he's distant at best, and Jonathan never knew his mother), this time, things are different. He's being followed by some very strange characters, and he has no idea why -- until he stumbles into Darkside, a secret part of London that is populated by villains, thieves, vampires and werewolves and is ruled by the descendants of Jack the Ripper. In Darkside, he starts to put the pieces of the puzzle together: not just in regards to his pursuers, but in regards to his family.

I thought this one was pretty cool too - my review will be next month at Bookslut but be sure to catch all of Leila's.

"Ti-i-i-ime, is on your side"

Lately, it seems like the idea of "time" keeps coming up. Perhaps it's the changing of the seasons, or maybe it's the cicadas that are making their once-every-seven-years appearance, or possibly it's the every-four-years events of the Presidential election and the summer Olympics. Either way, it's gotten me thinking about books that have used time as one of its main themes. For my first post, I'm going to discuss a few of these books that have caught my attention.
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The Time Travelers: Book One in The Gideon Trilogy
Linda Buckley-Archer
Published by Aladdin Paperbacks, Simon & Schuster

When Peter Schock's father breaks his promise (again) to do something special for his birthday, Peter's au pair, Margit, takes him to the country to visit her friends' farm. There he meets strong-minded Kate Dyer. When Kate's father takes Peter and her to his work so they can see the anti-gravity machine that he and his colleague are working on, everything goes wrong. Something happens to the anti-gravity machine and somehow Peter and Kate are transported back in time to 1763. Before they have a chance to learn of their new surroundings, the anti-gravity machine is stolen by the evil Tar Man. With the help of Gideon, Peter and Kate travel throughout 18th Century London fighting thieves, meeting King George, and making random appearances in 21st Century London (at one point, they're floating in a supermarket parking lot). This is an exciting series for younger readers interested in historical England.


London Calling
Edward Bloor
Published by Alfred A. Knopf

When Martin Conway turns on his deceased grandfather's antique radio, through the static he hears a voice from 1940 London calling out to him for help. From here, Martin meets a small boy, Jimmy, who shows him London during the 1940 air raids that crippled the city, but showed England's strength that eventually led to the defeat of Nazi Germany. It is through dreams that Martin travels back in time to witness firsthand the destruction of war and the toll it takes on a city's inhabitants. London Calling is a great look at family sins and redemption.


Slipping
Cathleen Davitt Bell
Published by BloomsburyUSA
On shelves July 2008

Michael Kimmel doesn't feel connected to his family. His father his distant towards him and his outgoing, intelligent sister seems to be everything he is not. The only strong connection he has is to his estranged grandfather. The problem is, his grandfather is dead. Instead of moving on to the "great beyond," Michael's grandfather seems to be trapped someplace in between. Because of their connection, Michael is able to "slip" through the river of the dead to experience the memories of his recently-deceased grandfather. As sort of a bystander, he watches key moments from his grandfather's life unfold. With the help of unlikely group of friends and family, Michael struggles to remain in the land of the living. Because if he can't figure out why he's slipping into the beyond, he may be stuck with the dead forever.

If you like these, try these adult titles:


Einstein's Dreams(1993)
Alan Lightman
Warner Books

While Albert Einstein works on his Theory of Relativity in 1905, he dreams of worlds where time's effects vary. Through thirty nights of dreams, we see thirty worlds each with a different effect of time. For example, time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly." Or another where, "time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze." Another, one of my favorites, where "the world will end on 26 September 1907. Everyone knows it." There is a plot here, but the enjoyment of the book comes from the worlds that Lightman imagines for Einstein.


Flight(2007)
Sherman Alexie
Published by Black Cat, Grove/Atlantic

Zits, the Native American protagonist of the story, is a troubled teenager floating through the foster system until his 18th birthday when he'll be considered an adult and on his own. Hilarious and horrifying, Zits is a "superhero" for the ages. What starts as a bank heist and ultimate act of violence turns Zits into a time traveling hero where he has the opportunity to save the American Indians of the past and perhaps rewrite history. He becomes a corrupt FBI agent involved in Red River, Idaho, then becomes a small child at the Battle of Little Big Horn, followed by a entering the body of a modern day airline pilot, only to return to his today self in a violent ending. The story is haunting, but Zits' take-no-prisoners attitude will have you laughing one minute only to find yourself weeping the next.


Time's Arrow(1991)
Martin Amis
Published by Vintage International

Dr. Tod. T. Friendly dies then wakes up feeling much better. As a passive viewer, Friendly watches his life unfold before him- in reverse. This leads to a seriously warped sense of humanity. Doctors seem to be monsters since the patients come in all patched up, only to have the doctors mangle them to near death. To seduce a woman, you break up with her, treat her like garbage, until she is your lover. Year by year, Friendly's life comes down to one horrifying moment in his younger self's past. One of the coolest books I've ever read, Time's Arrow is sufficiently creepy in all the right ways. A great look at the oddities of humanity when seen in reverse. In Friendly's distance and misunderstanding of how the world works, his role as narrator makes this novel one of the best written in the last 20 years.

A couple of other newer books of interest:

The Midnighter's Club series by Scott Westerfeld
Nick of Time: An Adventure Through Time by Ted Bell

Alternate histories of life on earth

My new column is up at Bookslut and this month I review four new alternate history titles. This is one of my favorite genres; I just loved how authors work within the existing framework of history to create fantastic new stories. In Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist, Napoleon won at Waterloo and it is now the late 1930s and none of the allies are shaping up as you would expect (Scotland and England don't get along for starters). Jay Lake has a literal clock work world in Escapement where America is still a colony of Britain which is embroiled in a tense standoff for global conquest with China (oh - and there's a wall around the middle of the planet!). Elizabeth Bear also writes about an America that never became independent in New Amsterdam (that would be Manhattan for you and me). There are also vampires and sorcerers and Nicola Tesla. Lots of political intrigue in that one, with many horrifying twists.

Finally, Mike Resnick has a collection of amazing stories in the The Other Teddy Roosevelts. There's everything here from vampires to big game hunting, alien invasions to Jack the Ripper. This book is wonderful - lots of adventure but also so smart and so carefully crafted around Roosevelt very real, and very awesome, actual life. Get a copy if you can; you won't regret it.

Judging a book by its cover...

I just started reading Anne Fine's The Road of Bones and I hope to do a longer post about it at some point, but what initially excited me about the book is its fantastic cover by illustrator Danijel Zezelj. He's done lots of comics work that I like (you can check out some of his work on his website for more info), and the arresting image really grabbed my attention.

Most of the time, I think, we find books by recommendation. But there's nothing better than finding that book that grabs us with its great cover, and the pages inside live up to the image's promise.

Like the cover to The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart. That cover by Carson Ellis has just the right amount of intricacy and wackiness to suggest just what kind of a fun, mysterious, and delightful book this is--offbeat, very smart, and full of fun.

Carson Ellis also does the interior art (chapter headings, etc.) which amps up the interplay between good book and good complementary art. I can think of two books that I discovered and loved over the years that might not have stuck out in my mind if it weren't for the spot illustrations inside.

Sharon Creech's The Wanderer is a book I go back to again and again. I love the interplay between two narrators, and the constant questions the book makes you ask: which narrator can I trust and what is the truth? But what blew me away was David Diaz's amazing spot illustrations. Simple black shapes that define objects, but in a way that evokes those same questions: what is this thing I'm looking at? Can I trust what I see? Truly great stuff.

Similarly, The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs was very fun when I discovered it as a pre-teen--full of creepy mystery. Later I re-read it and discovered that the book's hero, Lewis Barnavelt, is something of a whiner. But the world Bellairs created, with hints of magic and horror and tragedy, is worth going back to. And the book transcends the drawbacks with the fantastic illustrations by Edward Gorey, whose name is almost synonymous with all that and more: the mere presence of a Gorey image in a book sets a tone like a soundtrack. You immediately get a sense that the book is going to be humorous, dark, maybe grotesque and possibly filled with terrible people.

Of course, sometimes this match of artist and writer can backfire. For instance, the awesome cover illustration Jordan Crane did for Matt Haig's The Dead Father's Club had me begging to borrow a friend of mine's copy. Unfortunately, she had the paperback edition, which has a different cover. No insult to the artist, but that's now further down in my pile of books to read...

Robots, Fancy Sticks, and No More Humans

You’re young. You want to know what the future holds. You want to know, maybe, what you ought to do with your life. You want to know what your world is going to look like five years from now, or ten, or twenty.

Well, I can’t answer that for you. You might try your parents. Or your guidance counselor. Maybe an astrologer.

But I’ve got a book here which might tell you what a human-free world could look like 100,000 years from now, if that helps, and one that explains what to do with yourself if, like so many sci-fi movies predict, the earth is suddenly overtaken by robots, and one that will help you contend with such common nuisances as nearby black holes. So, that’s something. Doesn’t do much to help you settle on your college, career or stock investment plans, but anyway it’s all danged interesting.

I’m going to look at three books from a sub-genre I call Speculative Nonfiction. Like Speculative Fiction (aka science fiction and fantasy combined), Speculative Nonfiction addresses “what if” questions, but instead of turning to wacky stories about aliens and dragons, answers them with research and facts and just a little bit of educated surmising.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Weisman asks “what if the planet were suddenly devoid of humans? What would happen to it?” The answers are utterly fascinating. For the most part, Weisman explains, nature would quickly topple human made structures. Rust would consume the strongest steel, roots would crumble the thickest concrete and water would fuel bacteria which would consume even the toughest, best prepared wood. Not everything would be so predictable though. For example, Weisman foresees cockroaches and rats, so often touted for their long term survival abilities, becoming extinct shortly after humanity did; they are just too dependent on humans to live long without us.

But the human legacy that nature won’t so easily reabsorb is not so pretty. Our buildings, our statues, our art, our literature, our history—all these lovely things will be lost but what will persist is . . . our plastic. Weisman dedicates a great deal to our legacy of plastic, nearly all of which has been produced in the last ½ century, but will take many thousands of years to finally decompose. Plastic toys, plastic waste from plastic processing factories, and plastic grocery bags, all find their way into earth’s oceans, but for don't find their way out. Unless scientists create some way to clean the oceans out (or teenage human boys do) and we cut out the polyester pollution, the plastics will poison the water and choke the wildlife for a very long time indeed. So stomach-turning are Weisman’s images of the human plastic mess, that you might find yourself avoiding plastic products in the future, at least disposable and unnecessary ones like plastic grocery bags.

Weisman has a few ticks which at times undermine the reading experience. He seems obsessed, for example, with the theory that 10,000 years ago all North America’s prehistoric mega-fauna (woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, terror birds, etc.) were hunted to extinction by primitive humans. This is a highly controversial theory that many scientists find scant evidence to support. But Weisman bandies it about like it’s recorded history. It doesn’t undercut his arguments (he uses it mostly as analogy) but it’s still troubling.

Nonetheless, The World Without Us is a fine read that could alter your perspective on humanity’s place in nature and nature’s reaction to humanity. Prepare to be changed.

THE WORLD WITHOUT US
by Alan Weisman
Hardcover: 324 pages
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (2007)
ISBN-10: 0-312-34729-4

Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson

What would really happen to you if you were getting trapped at the event horizon of a black hole? What could you find out about the cosmos if all you had was a stick? These are but two of the “what if” questions Tyson answers in Death by Black Hole. To the first the answer is: you would get divided in half and then your halves would get divided in half then those parts would get divided and this would go on endlessly until you reach some indivisible quantum particle version of yourself. The answer to the second is: a lot (using just a stick and logic you could establish the orbit of the earth, the tilt of the planet, and whole mess of other stuff.)

Tyson writes lively and interesting prose about the cosmos, delving into such diverse topics from the temperature of the universe to the failure of Hollywood to accurately represent the night sky in its movies. He is free with humorous comments to keep the reading entertaining. At his best he might be described as “wry.”At his worst he’s snarky, even snotty. He also engages in a bit of self promotion, mentioning his role with the Rose Center for Earth and Space a number of times throughout the book. (I don't begrudge the guy a plug, but let's leave it at one.) He has a few pet ideas that he returns to repeatedly and this sometimes gets annoying. The repetition is probably due to the fact that the book is actually a collection of columns written for Natural History, and while each column has to stand alone when first published, each essay collected in a book need not. A little more careful editing might have helped matters.

But these are certainly not fatal flaws and besides preparing you for encounters with black holes or conducting science with only a stick, Death by Black Hole provides a wealth of mind-bending facts, including:

• Contrary to centuries of second-grade drawings, the sun is NOT yellow
• A large asteroid is scheduled to pass frighteningly close to the earth in 2036
• We are all composed, quite literally, of stardust

If you want to find out what color the sun actually is, or what can be done about the killer asteroid, or how stars manage to create the matter that becomes human beings, you'll have to read the book.

DEATH BY BLACK HOLE AND OTHER COSMIC QUANDARIES
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 2007)
ISBN: 9780393330168

How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion, by Daniel Wilson

What if robots got fed up with serving humanity, and instead, turned all their cleverness and machinery against us? Movies tell us we'd have to defend ourselves. Daniel Wilson has written a handbook to help us prepare.

While Wilson claims, jokingly, that a robot uprising is inevitable--after all, how could many thousands of hours of sci-fi television programming be wrong?--he does admit the rebellion is a ways off. Robots, at the moment, aren't smart enough to organize a rebellion, or even think of one. And most of them are bolted to factory floors or blasted into space, two rather limiting factors for conducting a revolution. But robots, warns Wilson, are getting more and more ubiquitous in our lives, and more and more mobile. And smarter. So we best start getting ready now.

And really, if robot engineers achieve even a fraction of what they're planning, humanity will be in real trouble if the machines turn against us. Wilson describes plans for modular robots which can take on any form a la the sexy robot in Terminator 3, robotic homes that will anticipate your needs before you ask for anything, robots that can scurry like cockroaches, swarm like ants, slither like snakes or spy like flies on the wall. Even robots that can mimic human emotion and even manipulate the motions of humans engaged with them, a la the sexy robot in Terminator 3.

Other than the rather amusing premise, the book is based entirely on solid research. Wilson succinctly but thoroughly describes the cutting edge work being done by universities, corporations and the military. His advice on how to evade, battle, or infiltrate robot warriors (e.g., "run" and "don't attempt hand-to-hand combat with several tons of metal") is also based on fact and makes an entertaining vehicle for presenting his research.

He even concludes with some approaches to avoid in the coming robot war. For instance, Wilson thinks it would be silly to make clones to battle robots as in Star Wars. He also believes there are better uses for time travel, once we achieve it, than to chase Austrian-accented robots around the late twentieth century. I tend to agree.

HOW TO SURVIVE A ROBOT UPRISING
by Wilson, Daniel H.
Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (November 2005)
ISBN: 9781582345925