Reincarnation Blues (Poore)

Reincarnation Blues, Michael Poore (2017)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

I finished this last Friday, hours before our book club meeting. It was met with unanimous "eh". Everyone liked some parts and didn't care for others, but they didn't all line up. We found comparisons with Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and even Stephen King in different parts of the book.

And then someone joined the chat late and rattled off every plot from every story by the above others that he was ripping off (or "paying homage to").

Milo has lived nearly 10,000 lives when he finds out that his soul is destined to oblivion if he doesn't achieve Perfection in one of the next few lives. He's one of the oldest souls out there. And yet, it seems like perfection isn't an easy thing to achieve, so how does everyone else do it? I don't know.

It starts of humorous where we know that a shark will kill him in a little while (and it does). Then he meets up with Death, who is a woman (like Gaiman's) and he's been having a love affair with for the past 8000 years. Then he's reincarnated again.

Some of the vignettes into past lives are whimsical, even to the point of revisiting that time he died being flung out of a catapult. But then there's a future life where he is a smart child who is in college and gets tried as an adult for assaulting a woman (he did not, the scene plays out) and he's sentenced to a penal asteroid. Once there, the humor stops. It's absolutely brutal, and the tone of the book changes. And yet for all he suffers and manages to achieve despite that, he ends his own life before he can get to Perfection.

Let's face it, when you know that you're only a third of the way through the book, unless there's a major twist, you know he's going to get tripped up every step of the way. Several of the sections just seemed to go on way too long (much like Milo's existence?) and had little point to them.

The lives aren't in chronological order. There's a bit of timey-wimey stuff happening. He's goes from the future to Buddha and back again.

In the end, there isn't much of a payoff. On Good Reads, I was tempted to give it 2 stars, but it was better written (for what it was) than other stuff I'd given 2 stars to. It's not as good as some of the stuff I've given 3 stars to, however. Most of the book group settled on 3 out of 5 for it.

Not the worst book I read for the book club, but far from the better ones.

Ninth House (Bardugo)

Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo (2019)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book group selection. I don't remember what the other choices were, but I think they were all supernatural for October and Halloween. I'm surprised I finished it so quickly after getting off to a slow start. I didn't reference the maps of New Haven at all, mostly because I was reading an ebook, and it's too much of a pain to flip back and forth in an ebook.

The story follows the life of Alex Stern, in a non-chronologocial way. It's not told in flashbacks, but instead certain chapters take place before other chapters, or before the main story of the book. This made it difficult to get into the book. If I went back and reread the first chapter, I'd probably be very surprised because I likely remember none of it. Part of the confusion was the code names uses as titles and the fact that Alex's name is actually Galaxy, not something more obvious like Alexandra. And there is power in names.

The story takes place at Yale University where the Secret Societies are all real and have real magic. Each society has its own House and the Ninth House is Lethe, which watches over, monitoring the other houses. Alex is special because of her ability to see ghosts. And unlike the members of the societies, who can only see the ghosts as "Greys" when they drink certain drugs, Galaxy sees them in full color, and always has.

This obviously led to problems when she was a child because only she could see them, and she saw them all the time. This led to Child Protective Services being involved. We later learn that there was an incident when she was younger where a ghost was able to physically assault her, but no one could see it. This happens again at Yale. She used drugs to avoid seeing the ghosts, and fell in with a drug dealer. We learn that she was the sole survivor of an attempt that left everyone in her apartment dead. It was while she was recovering that this high school dropout was approached about a free ride to Yale.

Alex's title is Dante, who is the apprentice to Virgil, who is Daniel Arlington, known as Darlington. He is always a gentlemen and he is interested in the history of New Haven and the societies. He's preparing Alex to be the next Virgil. Many of the chapters take place after his disappearance, when he's supposedly away in Europe, but the actual disappearance is chronicled much later in the book, along with the attempts to get him back.

One night, a townie by the name of Tara is murdered in New Haven. She's not from Yale, but it was on a ritual night, so Alex investigates in case there was some rogue magic at work. Dean Sandow tells her to stand down because it doesn't appear connected to the societies, and besides, it's a funding year, and the Dean doesn't want to unnecessarily ruffle feathers. Detective Turner, known as Centurion, doesn't know much about magic or really believe in it, but he acts as a liaison between the societies and the law. He starts to reget that position. Alex also gets help from The Bridgegroom, a ghost named North, but you shouldn't call a ghost by its name because it might form a bond or connection with it. The nature of Tara's death connects it with at least four houses, between students on her phone, the text of her tattoo and the kinds of magic in play (both portals and glamors). It's a lot to unravel, especially with Darlington missing.

There isn't much I need to add because it's a popular book and anything I might want to remember is posted is a bunch of spots.

It turned into an enjoyable book but it became obvious that one plot point was going to be left for a sequel (or not resolved at all, but it was heading toward a resolution). That was a minor annoyance.

Spirit Seeker: The Kassandra Leyden Adventures (Young)

Spirit Seeker: The Kassandra Leyden Adventures, by Jeff Young (2016)

Maybe had I read a cover blurb, I might've known in advance that this was an alternate history and not some post-apocalyptic future where society is rebuilding. This impression came from the mix of technology, plus references to New Britain and Londinium. after reading the last entries in the book, I saw that this was actually an America that was founded after the Plague was followed by a worse Black Death, causing survivors to flee across the ocean. (Actually, at the very beginning there is a short blurb about the plague that arrived during the reign of Edward the third of his name -- but it didn't occur to me that that was referring to the actual King Edward III of England, who obviously preceded Edward VIII of the 20th century.)

What I thought was going to be a novel was actually a series of short stories, not tied together other than by the lead character, although the last one calls back the first one.

Kassandra Leyden's was a well-known adventurer, and her father was a spiritualist. She has a bit of both of these, but definitely the ability to communicate with the dead. (They can't talk, per se, but she can read their lips.) Her first adventure involves her mentor Levhoi and following her mother's spirit to a crypt where she makes a shocking discovery (I'll leave out spoilers for people who stumble upon my page.) This is followed by a story where she apprentices to Madam Foss, a medium, where she learns to hone her skills. In the very next story, "Fox Chase", Leyden is already a medium in her own right.

The following story, "Drinking Down Death", was the story that I thought the book was about, because of a blurb on the internet. Mediums are disappearing and Leyden investigates. She encounters Constable Cobham Peckwith, and they solve the other-worldly goings-on and uncover a nefarious plot. Peckwith shows up again in the following story, which takes place, in part, on dirigibles, and the story after that, where the spirits actually affect the real world.

The final story has Leyden back on her own, but her mother Anastasia is whispering in her ear and guiding her along the way.

Overall, an enjoyable collection of stories, including the brief history. Should more adventures be published, I'll likely pick those up as well.

I've read some of Jeff Young's work before. He's had stories published in other anthologies by the same publisher (eSpec Books). The is the first solo book of Young's that I've read. (And I think it may be the only one, at the time of writing.)

Dead Strange (Lamy) -- Summer Reading Challenge

Dead Strange: The Bizarre Truths Behind 50 World-famous Mysteries, Matt Lamy, 2012

I went back to the 000 (General References) shelf of the library and looked through the reference books and the "How To" for different software programs. It looked like I was going to have to take a "supernatural" book.

That said, I like this book. This is the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. I didn't read a lot, and part of the problem in the early grades was that there weren't books like this in my school library. It jumped from the Dr. Seuss level to 100-page novels without any in-between! (I remember discovering chapter books with my children and thinking how wonderful they were.) I remember taking out a book on magic because it interested me, but it was too dense for me to get through.

Anyway, back then, I would have loved books about supernatural stuff, and this book has 50 things in it (although a couple are kind of related). And the best part is that each section is only 2 or 3 pages long. Long enough to give you an idea about the subject. Short enough not to put you to sleep or drag on endlessly.

Using my usual standard, it reads better than a click-bait web article "The Bizarre Truths Behind 50 World-famous Mysteries!! -- (You won't believe Number 23!)". Yes, it could be a little more in-depth, but it's another young adult book meant to get them interested. It's not a college thesis.

Drawbacks? Cross-referencing would've been nice. Also, there's at least one reference to something weird without mentioning that it isn't in the book. A bibliography would've been good, as well as a "for more information..." page.

I read this while sitting in an inner tube floating on my pool on a couple of early summer mornings before the Sun got too high and too hot.

Library reading challenge. Catalogue number YA 001.94L. Young adult.

Some of the choices I had in the 000 series:

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Bray)

A Great and Terrible Beauty, by Libba Bray, 2003

This book came to me via a book raffle at Lunacon, a general science-fiction convention based, for the most part, in Rye Brook, NY. It's the longest running NYC-area con. The actual winner of this lot had already won a pile of books, so when she walked up, she grabbed a pile and came back and gave them to me. Glancing at the titles, she was more the target demographic than I was.

Anyway, after a year or so of sitting on my shelf, I started going through the pile of books. (Another book in that pile was How to Be a Zombie, which I read earlier in the year.) Reading the description of this and another book, I was afraid that I had a bunch of Teenage Paranormal Romances, a genre that didn't exist all that long ago and now has an entire section in the last remaining Barnes & Nobles locations I visit.

I didn't have to worry.

A Great and Terrible Beauty does have some romance, but it isn't the paranormal kind. And it has its own paranormal/fantasy realm, which can be entered from the Victorian era. Other than that, I don't think it fits the genre much.

If anything, my first thoughts were of A Little Princess, the remake of the Shirley Temple movie, which started in India before moving to a girls academy, with its supernatural elements. Those thoughts were quickly dispelled thankfully.

Normally, at this point, I'd make references to the characters because that was the main purpose of this blog initially: to remind myself about the books, not to review them. However, I read this a few months back and much of it has left my mind. Basically, teen Gemma Doyle, after her mother's murder in India, gets shipped off to Spence Academy in London. She's followed there to make sure she doesn't get involved with what she eventually gets involved with -- magic, the other realm. But are these warnings for her safety or to prevent her from achieving what she's supposed to?

Along the way, she has to deal with the mean clique of popular girls -- or is it the popular clique of mean girls -- and their hangers-on. Before you know it, Gemma has worked her way into their graces and brought along her friend and roommate Ann, completing a foursome with Felicity (the leader) and Pippa.

We learn a little more about their families and why they are how they are, and learn how they plan to cope with their existence being groomed to marry rich, old men (possibly to settle debts) or if they're destined to be spinsters, maids or something trivial and menial.

I enjoyed the book. I can't say that I'm going to run out and look for the sequels, nor is it necessary to do so. Whatever nits I could pick, I forgot about months ago. I think I had one about Gemma's brother showing up at the school in the middle of the book when I didn't recall a mention prior to that. Then I thought Bray would set up a romance between the brother and one of the girls, but he sort of faded back into the background after a scene involving Gemma's family. Again, minor -- I've forgotten the details.

Fun read to pass the time on the train. And despite the cover, I didn't get funny looks from anyone for reading it. Well, no more than the usual funny looks you get on a NYC subway.