A check-outable feast

There's just a month to go before the next Key West Literary Seminar and just in time, we at the Key West Library have received a shipment of books by writers appearing at the Seminar. This year's subject is The Hungry Muse: Food in Literature and the offerings are indeed appetizing. (It's not, by the way, the much-feared "cookbook seminar" and it's not just straight-up food writing, either -- our panelists will include novelists and poets and historians as well as some of the finest food writers in the nation.) We already had a bunch of books by these writers in our collection but the new ones are most welcome, including Eating by Jason Epstein, Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. Jaffrey, by the way, will be at both sessions, as will be Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount, Jr., and Billy Collins. If you're interested in attending, there are still spots left in the second session -- and if you're in Key West, don't forget the Sunday afternoon panels and readings are always free and open to the public. Bon appetit!

And if you're wondering what's up with the slide show below -- well, I'm not much of a cook, to be honest. Given a couple free hours I will invariably spend my time reading instead of shopping for and preparing food. But these are some recent culinary creations of mine worth note -- the Swedish family recipe cake I made for our Stieg Larsson Book Bites session at the library, two pies I made for Thanksgiving (the inevitable pumpkin and the always popular apple-cranberry-raisin from the Fanny Farmer Cookbook), a batch of liebkuchen from another family recipe (and my favorite Christmas treat of the many, many kinds of cookies my grandmother used to make every year) and a cocktail, a Pisco guava punch prepared at the long-distance direction of Embury Cocktails impresario and New York Times-certified cocktail expert Jason Rowan. And all of them turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. Recipes available on request.

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The girl who finally got around to reading Stieg Larsson

It's taken me years to get around to reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the international bestseller by the late Stieg Larsson. There are a few reasons for this. For one, it's a pretty big book. For another, it was reputed to be an addictive page-turner and I'm wary of taking those on without a good chunk of free time ahead of me. Third, I'm always wary of massively hyped bestselling books, especially genre thrillers. I'm still getting over having read Angels & Demons and I still want those four hours of my life back. And finally, I knew the tragic backstory -- that Larsson died of a heart attack, at 50, before the books were published -- and without a will, leading to a so-far-unresolved conflict between his father and brother, who inherited his unexpectedly valuable estate, and his longtime partner, with whom he lived for decades. Ugh. BUT. I do like Swedish crime novels -- my favorite so far is Kjell Eriksson's "Princess of Burundi" -- and these had gotten well reviewed enough that I thought it was safe to give them a try. Plus, Larsson is the subject of our Book Bites book club at the library this month. And I had a couple days of post-Fantasy Fest downtime. So I figured now was the time.

I actually had started this book once or twice before. It was one of the first that I bought when my husband got me a Kindle. But I had bounced off the beginning section and figured it wasn't the right time. This time, I stuck it out and by 30 pages in (a guesstimate, actually, since the Kindle doesn't give you a page number) I was hooked. The writing is nothing spectacular and I suspect the translation was clumsy at times -- either too literal or veering between British and American English -- but the plot and characters are so strong that it didn't matter.

Several friends have said they had trouble with the Swedish names, both for people or places. I don't speak or read Swedish but I am of Swedish descent, on both sides of my family including two grandparents who were raised there, and the names didn't faze me at all, except sometimes making me feel inadequate when I wasn't 100 percent sure on pronunciation. Oddly, since I have never been to Sweden, I had strong visual images of the island and guest cottage where a lot of the book's action takes place -- I guess I've seen enough photographs of the place, plus watched the BBC's excellent adaptations of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. And the characters, especially the hero, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and heroine, hacker/investigator Lisbeth Salander, were very strong. And the coffee! They're always drinking coffee. At all hours, at every meal and meeting. I was craving it even more than usual. That, and a liverwurst sandwich on rye.

And I appreciated Larsson's prescient and sensible attitude toward the financial industry, both the much-hyped billionaires who make their fortunes off what are, essentially, shell games instead of old fashioned industries where they made stuff -- and the financial journalists who hype them. Larsson goes out of his way several times to unfavorably compare financial reporting to the more skeptical treatment given other kinds of crime stories or political figures. And he's absolutely right.

There was yet another reason I had put off reading Larsson -- I had heard the books were incredibly violent, specifically violent towards women. The original title of this novel, in Swedish, was Men Who Hate Women. And it definitely featured some sadistic psychopaths who have it in for women but ... I didn't feel like Larsson was celebrating the violence or getting off on it in the way you sometimes do with thrillers. He, like his hero, was a lefty investigative journalist and is decidedly on the side of the underdog -- specifically Salander, who is both a victim of violence and adept at fighting back and protecting herself. And I appreciated that he provided plausible reasons that she would not seek help from the authorities, thus liberating her from the situation of the Too Stupid To Live romance novel heroine who is always getting herself into idiotic trouble for no good reason.

So I definitely plan on reading the rest of the trilogy -- even though several reliable sources have already told me the first is the strongest of the three. I just don't want to start the next one ... until I have another free day or two ahead of me.

Win a free book! Plus some thoughts on vampire lit

I tried to resist the vampire lit thing. I really did. I have successfully avoided reading a word by Stephenie Meyers. I haven't even seen any of the movies. Then True Blood came out. Curse you, Alan Ball! I was hooked. So hooked I read the first of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, on which the series is based. It was a fun read -- very different in tone and even in plot from the series but still, I quit reading after the first book because I didn't want to spoil plot points from the show.

Over the summer, lured by Salon's first online reading club, I read The Passage, Justin Cronin's big (in many ways) dystopian page-turner. The vampires in that are in no way sexy -- they're predators, infected with a virus in ... wait for it ... a military experiment GONE HORRIBLY WRONG. No tuxes or seductions for these vampires -- they're just the enemy for the few remnant regular humans left in North America. It's a good book, and I'll definitely be reading the next installment.

So after Cronin's dark dystopia I was ready for the lighter side of vampire lit -- and along came Key West's own Meg Cabot with Insatiable. I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't previously read anything by Cabot, who is an extremely nice and generous person. So I figured this was my chance to start making up for that.

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. Insatiable is a bit of an homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula, with a heroine named Mina Harper who has a brother named Jonathan (and a dog named Jack Bauer). It's a bit of a romp, something of a romance and a great send-up both of pop culture (besides Jack Bauer, Mina is a scriptwriter for a soap opera) and vampire lit. And it'sfunny. If you like Jennifer Crusie, chances are pretty good you'll like this, too.

When we decided to focus on vampire lit for the October Book Bites book club at the library, we contacted Cabot with some questions about the book. She was extremely generous in her response -- answers to our questions can be found here on the library website -- and in giving us two signed copies of Insatiable.

And if you're in Key West and you're interested in reading the book, here's your chance: Cabot generously donated two signed copies of the book to us. And we're giving them away -- all you have to do is come to the library and fill out a form with your name and contact info. Winners must collect the book from the library -- we can't mail them out. So stop by, and take a chance -- and try out some other vampire lit while you're here. We have a big display up with all kinds of vampire books.

Mock-ing-jay, yeah!

It's always fun to get caught up in one of those mass movements of reading -- that way you can discuss books with complete strangers and/or friends on Facebook. Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy, suddenly became one of those books this summer. This seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise ... but not those of us who had read the first two installments, Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

The popularity of YA literature in general and dystopian YA lit in particular was recently examined in an insightful essay in the New York Times. I thought this had just dawned on me since I started working in a public library and suddenly had daily contact with YA books. But now that I think about it, I have been reading more stuff intended for young readers since the Harry Potter phenomenon hit the bigtime -- especially Phillip Pullman's magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy (though I feel like I need to go back and read Paradise Lost to really understand it and, darn it, I just haven't gotten around to that). I've also read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1, and enjoyed it.

But The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, were on a whole different level. They're set in an unspecified future, after the nation has destroyed itself via nuclear weapons and is divided into impoverished districts that are all governed oppressively by the decadent Capitol. One of the methods and symbols of oppression is an annual spectacle called the Hunger Games in which a pair of kids from each district are sent into an arena to fight to the death. Naturally, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is chosen in the first eponymous volume. Actually she volunteers -- she's a skilled hunter and outdoorswoman and it's her timid and beloved little sister's name that is drawn on the horrible day.

The final volume is a showdown between the rebel districts and the Capitol and our heroine has become the symbol of the rebellion, the Mockingjay. I'm not going to reveal any further plot points but I'll say that the book is, like its predecessors, compulsively readable and thought provoking at the same time -- more nuanced and multi-level than a lot of your good-versus-evil fantasy tales. I felt a slight sense of letdown for two reasons, neither of which I can blame on Collins. 1) I had elevated expectations, from my own anticipation and abetted by all the public excitement -- I had a similar issue with the final Harry Potter volume. In the future, I'll have to try to wait until after all volumes in a series get published before jumping on the bandwagon. (Yeah, right.) 2) A related problem -- I was reading too fast. I do that when I'm gulping down a book purely for plot, which I was here. I'd like to go back and re-read -- maybe all three volumes since there's only three and they're reasonably sized, not Harry Potter-like tomes. Overall, though, I'll give this one 4 stars and the series as a whole 4 1/2.

Queening it up

I've had an Eleanor of Acquitaine thing for a long time. It hasn't been as virulent as my Elizabeth I thing, probably because there are a lot fewer novels, movies and TV shows made about the Plantagenets than the Tudors. The 12th century was a long time ago and we have a lot less to go on about how they lived, what they wore, said, ate, etc. Still, there's some good stuff -- the book that got me started was A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by the great E.L. Konigsburg. She's better known for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the story of two kids who run away and spend a week or two at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (how DID that woman get away with those crazy hard-to-remember titles???). But her book on Eleanor is superb, especially for a kid who's into history and appreciates a strong woman character. And what a woman! Eleanor was a significant landholder in her own right -- her holdings dwarfed the smaller lands that then made up the kingdom of France -- and she was queen of France AND England, annulling her marriage to Louis of France in order to run off with the future Henry II of England, 12 years her junior. It was an alliance of power and property, to be sure, but appears to have been a love match, too, at least in the beginning. By the end, Eleanor joined her sons in rebellion against their father and when that rebellion failed, was imprisoned by him. After he died, her son Richard the Lionheart let her out and she kept the country together while he went off on crusade, got himself held captive then was killed. Very dramatic all around.

Eleanor is probably best known fictionally via Katharine Hepburn's portrayal in the movie version of The Lion in Winter and that's good, too, though I've always thought the movie came off as one of those stagey let's-take-a-play-and-perform-it-outside-and-call-it-a-movie movies. I prefer the younger Eleanor, the one who insisted on joining her first husband on Crusade and on dumping him for the more suitable young Henry Plantagenet. Now that would make a great movie. Starring Cate Blanchett.

It looks like Eleanor might be coming in for a Tudor-like popular revival -- there are several new novels out about her and I snapped one of them up as soon as it arrived at the library, especially since it was by Alison Weir, a historian/novelist I knew had written a well-regarded popular (as opposed to academic) biography of Eleanor. But I'm sorry to say Captive Queen was a severe disappointment (2 stars). More on that later -- I'm reviewing it for Solares Hill and don't want to scoop myself here -- but it just wasn't good. I checked A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver out of the library just to check up on my Eleanor and found that it holds up very well and was a good reminder of a good fictional treatment (4 1/2 stars!).

I would still like to read a good one meant for adults and I keep seeing references to Sharon Kay Penman's trilogy on Eleanor and Henry II -- When Christ and His Saints Slept, Time and Chance and Devil's Brood. We have all three of them in the library collection -- but they are big books, especially the first, and I just haven't been in the right place to take them on. So instead I went with Penman's mystery series set in the same era, featuring a bishop's bastard son named Justin de Quincy. The first is The Queen's Man (the queen of the title is Eleanor) and found it was a very capable historical mystery. So if you like that Ellis Peters sort of thing, check out this series. (3 1/2 stars). Another enjoyable medieval mystery featuring Eleanor (this time as a murder suspect after the death of Henry's mistress Rosamund de Clifford) is The Serpent's Tale, second in Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series. Finally, one I haven't read but that is recommended by a library patron with whom I am sympatico in literary taste is Eleanor of Acquitaine and the Four Kings by Amy Kelly.  Unfortunately it's not in our library collection but this patron got it via Interlibrary loan -- and you could, too!

I've also started Weir's own biography of Eleanor and am finding it very informative and enjoyable -- which just makes it all the more heartbreaking that the novel turned out so badly. It shows, too, how difficult historical fiction can be. You can have all the settings and facts right, but if the characters are wooden and implausible, it just doesn't work. I should have realized this was a possibility -- Weir's first foray into fiction was a novel about Elizabeth I, whom she has also written about as a biographer. I started that book with the same sort of high hopes and could not proceed past about 50 pages, which is very unusual for me. But I thought her novel about Lady Jane Grey, Innocent Traitor, was just fine, so I thought she'd figured it out.

One last queen: Tudor popularizer extraordinaire Philippa Grey's new series ventures back into Plantagenet territory, with the Wars of the Roses between the Lancasters and the Yorks, the wars which were finally resolved with the arrival of the Tudors.  The second installment arrived at the library recently and I grabbed that one, too. The first in this series, The White Queen, focused on Elizabeth Woodville, who married Edward IV (York).  The second is called The Red Queen and its narrator/heroine is Margaret Beaufort (Lancaster) who was mother of Henry VII (Tudor). It was OK -- better than Captive Queen -- but something of a slog, because Margaret just isn't a very compelling character. She's pious, cold, and ambitious, all of which I'm sure was perfectly normal and appropriate for her time and station but who wants to spend all that time inside her head? I'll give that one 3stars. And I'm looking forward to a small break from all this queenship and a return to the dystopian YA world of Suzanne Collins, with Mockingjay, the final installment in her excellent Hunger Games trilogy.