The book is about a man named Viktor who is a writer that is incapable of writing anything of length. He adopts a penguin when the local zoo gives away animals that it can no longer afford to feed. Viktor submits a sketch to a local newspaper and then lucks into a job with them. He is to write obituaries of notable people that the newspaper can have on hand, in case something unfortunate happens to them. I was okay with this premise because I’m pretty sure this is something that actually happens.

Then the story takes an interesting turn, the people in the obituaries start turning up dead. At first, Viktor doesn’t think anything of it. But, as the tale goes on it becomes more and more clear that the people Viktor rights obituaries for are people who have been marked for death by some secret organization. During the tale, we are introduced to Sonya, a little girl that ends up in his care, a local militiaman named Sergey and Sergey’s cousin Nina.

It was an interesting little book that, if I’m being honest, I liked at the beginning and at the end but I didn’t really care for in the middle. Viktor doesn’t seem to know what he wants out of life and would have no direction if it weren’t for his job and the people who enter his life. Viktor’s attempts to play house and into involve himself in the lives of those around him seem half-hearted and wasted. And, reading this book I felt a little lost sometimes myself. I think it was meant to be funnier, satirical, and either I didn’t get it or the humor didn’t quite translate. The ending was unexpected and a little abrupt, but provided an interesting conclusion to the novel. I have Penguin Lost and I will read it soon, but I’m not dying to dive into the book.

The format of the tales was also nice because it presented each case separately, allowing me to read a tale or two before going to bed. I love when author’s create works that conveniently fit into my own habits. I liked the tales so much I bought (for a whole 99 cents) the complete Sherlock Holmes collection for my nook. I haven’t decided which nookbook to read next. I have it narrowed down to three: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (I just finished the mini-series starring Richard Armitage on Netflix), Silas Marner by George Eliot (from the rolled over book challenge) and by George Alan England (about which I know nothing other than it is the book that immediately follows Sherlock Holmes in the collection.) Any thoughts, my dear readers?

So, this was a fun little book. It is mostly about Connie, researching, living in this little town, meeting an interesting man, and being tormented by her advisor who may or may not have gone completely off the rails. But, there are interludes in the book that go back in time to look at Deliverance Dane and her descendants who are introduced to us in the present through dry documents as Connie tries to hunt down the book. I really enjoyed the idea the discussions about what life must have been like before the scientific revolution and how if you’re not making the distinction between correlation and causation that the world would truly be a mysterious and hazardous place. And, I liked the feminist take on the Salem Witch trials and the idea that all of these women describing their worlds in the idiom of the time and that what looks like hocus-pocus or silly to us was a real way of organizing and understanding the world for them. If I have any complaint, I think it would have to be that Connie, who was really on the ball, didn’t seem to catch on to the connections between the present and the past as I’d have liked her to. But, we all have those moments where we realize something that is completely flipping obvious and that we’ve overlooked or taken for granted.

This was a pretty quick read, and you have to love that if you don’t have a lot of spare time to invest fiction.

And, then I didn’t get around to picking it up until the following December.

And, then I put it down again in January and didn’t pick it up until the summer, at which point I decided that I needed to read at least five pages a day in order to not take a whole year in finishing the thing. The book starts out slow. Since it is an autobiography, Mandela starts at the beginning and, maybe this makes me a terrible person but I was looking for the action, the politics, the rebellion, the prison term which you don’t get to until at least 100 pages into the book. But, as I read further I was glad to have had all of that background. First of all, because I know nothing, less than nothing, about African history or family structure, unless you count the occasional paper on kinship terms one reads in Linguistics classes. I don’t know how the tribal system works (Mandela was originally brought up and trained to be an advisor to the King) and I certainly wasn’t aware of how bad it got in South Africa before apartheid was actually ended. The government opened fire on unarmed civilians non-violently protesting. And, in later years factions of the apartheid government covertly funded organizations opposed to unity that went out and slaughtered civilians. That is horrifying. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to live through that. And, to have been in prison for 27 years, missing the childhoods of your children, not being there to take care of your Mother before she died, not being able to go to family funerals, all because you wanted a government where every person, regardless of the color of their skin, has a vote. So, I guess the answer to the question is Nelson Mandela an amazing forgiving machine or is he a man is this: He is a man, a stubborn man, but a man who wanted the freedom that was his. But more than that, Mandela wanted freedom not just for himself but for every South African. As he says at the end of the book:

“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.”

Freedom is something that must be protected and we must be mindful of all of the things that we do or say that can take that freedom away, from others and from ourselves. This was an amazing book and Nelson Mandela is a truly inspiring man.

But, there is some to recommend it, for one thing the characterizations of the gods are a lot of fun. As far the descriptions of the magic tricks that are Shadow’s head-clearing nervous habit. I’ve never wanted to learn magic tricks more. I also enjoyed the constant characterization of America as being a land that is bad for gods. However, it sort of annoyed me that the gods didn’t evolve as their people did. (I might not perform blood rites, but I certainly knew where Easter comes from.) So, I guess if this were a paper and I were grading it, I’d give it a B+. It is good, but quite frankly I expected a little more from half of the team that brought us Good Omens and the author that brought us Coraline.

The first book of the first volume is 20,000 leagues under the sea. I remember having a “children’s classic” copy of this when I was little (also part of a collection) and I couldn’t remember if I’d read it or not. But, I was in a steam-punk, sea-faring mood, so I delved into the novel. This novel was not as awesome as I wanted it to be, but it is still more awesome than I gave it credit for while I was reading it. Jules Verne was the sort of author who wanted a lot of science in his science fiction and he endeavored to not include any kind of invention that wasn’t possible in the near-ish in his novels. The tale is told from the point of view of Professor Arronax, who is a natural history scientist. The professor, along with his servant Conseil and a Canadian harpoonist named Ned Land find themselves abroad the nautilus after being thrown overboard during an attack on their original vessel. The nautilus is captained by a man the Professor calls Nemo. They take a fantastic voyage under the waves, encountering sunken treasures, underwater forests, Atlantis, angry cannibalistic natives, the South Pole and gigantic, submarine eating squid. These are the awesome part of the book. The less awesome parts of the book (and there are many of them) include a number of descriptions of the various fish and other flora and fauna encountered on their voyage. These parts of the novel go into detail, but not the sort of detail I was looking for. Instead of describing the species they encounter so that the reader can conjure up a mental picture, the characters list the family, genus, and species of the plants and animals they encountered. Even though I own an encyclopedia (and know how to use google) and could have looked up the animals and not needed to conjure mental images, I found these parts of the book incredibly tedious. I had to keep reminding myself that Jules Verne wrote for a different audience in a different time who didn’t have the attention spans of goldfish.

Even though there were parts of this book that were tedious, I have to say that over all it was enjoyable and I’m glad I read (re-read?) it. Even though Jules Verne was trying for the possible, his imagination still outreaches the current limits of our science and that makes this novel pretty badass. For all we have achieved since it was written, we still have much more we can reach for.

So, this book started off slow and made Eva look like a petulant pre-teen. However, as the story unfolded, Eva Nine became more likable and I began to care for her, Muthr and Rovender, hoping that they will survive their little adventure. Eva Nine is an interesting young girl and I look forward to the next books in the series so that I can test my hypotheses about where she came from and why she was born in an underground facility and raised by a robot to begin with. The descriptions of the world were nice and gave you enough detail to imagine the strange new world that Eva finds herself in. And, the illustrations in the book were fun. I can imagine this being the sort of book that you’d want to read outloud to a child.

So, I don’t want to give too much away. These books are incredibly entertaining. Cassel is a sympathetic main character who has been raised to basically be a con-artist by his emotion working mother (who, by the way, is incredibly emotionally abusive with her powers and every time she turns up in the narrative she does something that makes me super mad) who is at a private school and just trying to get along in the world. Cassel is funny, incredibly smart and quite charming. And, his friends, in particular his roommate Sam (who he runs a bet-making business with) and Sam’s girlfriend Daneca, are awesome. It probably didn’t hurt, as well, that I pictured Cassel’s brothers Baron and Phillip (who aren’t twins) as the Phelps twins from the Harry Potter franchise (but with their natural hair color.) I really enjoyed these books and I look forward to reading the next installment in this series.