A Twofer.  Fangtastic!

City of Ashes
City of Glass
Cassandra Clare
Simon & Schuster

Okay, so I'm going to cheat a little.   I was on holiday a week or so ago and I started my vacation by reading the second installment of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments trilogy.  The flight to St. Lucia is rather long (not that I'm complaining -- I would totally go back), but had the plane gone down, I probably wouldn't have noticed.  City of Ashes was as good, if not better than City of Bones and I was totally hooked.  So much so, that I finished the novel before we disembarked.

As you might have noticed from the entries in the past week, I did a lot of other reading while on vacation.  Is there anything better than a hammock, a palm tree, a good book, and an even better daiquiri?  I think not.  Stupidly, I had decided not to bring City of Glass along for the ride since it is only out in hardback.  If you have read any of my earliest posts, you'll know that I have very specific rules about what constitutes good plane fare.

So, I waited.  And wow -- City of Glass was totally worth it.  Even though it is classified as young adult fiction, the Mortal Instruments series is much like the Harry Potter body of work in that it is consumable by all ages.  I understand that the author is currently writing a "prequel" to the events in this series and as horrific as it sounds, I'm actually looking forward to it.  The Mortal Instruments gets four singing swords out of five.

Pay it Forward

Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin
Penguin

No matter how you look at it, Greg Mortensen is a hero.  Here is a man who, while climbing down from K2, gets lost and ends up in some remote Pakistani mountain village.  While there, he recovers from his mountaineering ordeal and decides to give back to the people who took him in by building a school.

He returns to the States and starts to raise the required funds.  This is a dedicated man.  While he doesn't really have a clue as to what to do and how to do it, he has the passion and determination to move it forward.  At the end of the day, it takes him a couple of years to deliver on his promise -- he raises the money, navigates the hardships of getting something done in a country plagued by war, corruption, and poverty, and manages to mitigate the challenges of a harsh geography.  He is a hero because he doesn't ever stop.  He has built more schools, educated more kids, and expanded his program to include community ateliers.  He has also taken his initiative into additional countries.  Today, he is building schools in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and he is trying to bring peace through education.

Please read this book if for no other reason than to prove to yourself that one person can make a difference.   This is activism at its best and Dr. Greg is definitely an inspiration. 

An Extraordinary Gentleman

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Premier Classics -- Knopf

A few weeks ago, I had one of those nights where no matter what I did, sleep would not come.  Usually when I find myself in that situation, I turn on the radio and listen to whatever programming happens to be on the CBC.  Unfortunately, that didn't work, so I got up, went downstairs, and randomly pulled out a movie.  My pick was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.  If you haven't seen it, it is a wonderfully crappy movie based on a comic that takes characters from Victorian literature and makes then into a sort of Justice League of the World.

My plan worked in that I was asleep about thirty minutes in, but it did get me to thinking.  Of all the characters profiled in that movie, I had never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  I figured they must be classics for a reason, so I set about remedying the situation.  

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is probably best known to modern-day readers for its interesting portrayal of a dual/split personality.  Dr. Jekyll develops a potion that brings out his dark side and comments that it is only when he is Mr. Hyde, that he feels entirely free.  His moral self is quite restricted and he slowly, almost inexorably, loses control to his baser side. 

It is worth nothing that the other stories included with this novella were equally well-written and were as gripping as Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.  In fact, I enjoyed the stories so much, that I might actually go back and dig out a copy of Treasure Island.  I haven't read that since I was a child and I have a feeling that I probably missed the boat.  Pun intended.  Three dastardly villains out of five.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

Bel Canto
Ann Patchett
Harper Collins

Loosely inspired by a real-life 1996 hostage taking in Lima, Peru, Patchett's novel takes place in an unnamed South American city.  A couple hundred diplomats, businessmen and foreign dignitaries have gathered to celebrate the birthday of a Japanese captain of industry.  The Japanese businessman, Katsumi Hokosawa, has been lured to the party by the promise of an appearance by Roxanne Coss, one of the world's best sopranos. 

As she finishes her last piece, the lights go out.  When power is restored, the room has been taken over by a group of young guerrillas.  They have come to kidnap the country's president only to belatedly realize that he has not attended the party.  To make a long, beautiful story short, the guerrillas release most of the hostages, but they keep the men and Roxane Coss.  Over the next few months, relationships develop between the captors and the hostages and even among the hostages themselves.  Roxane falls for the gentle, opera-loving Hokosawa and he, who has a wife and children back in Japan, lets it happen.

I'm not going to tell you more about this book as I don't want to spoil it for those of you who decide to read it for yourselves.  Like the operas it sometimes describes, the book is lyrical, lovely, emotional, and consuming.  Four soaring arias out of five.

Angels from the Realms of Gory

City of Bones
Cassandra Clare
Simon & Schuster

A few months ago, I wrote a fairly scathing review of the last three books in the Twilight series. Aside from the dismal writing, my main issue with Meyer's work was the fact that the main character, Bella Swan, was flat, uninteresting, and almost always defined by her relationship with her vampire boyfriend.  While the dangerous relationship had definite appeal, Bella was horrifically dull and I was glad when I turned the last page.

Not so with City of Bones.  I desperately wanted this book to continue.  Set in present-day New York, the novel introduces us to Clary, a bright, beautiful, artistic girl who likes to go clubbing with her BFF, Simon.  One night while they are out dancing, Clary's world changes forever when she sees the Nephilim -- or Shadowhunters -- who are protecting the city from the threats of vampires, werewolves and faeries.  The thing is, humans aren't supposed to be able to see these creatures and that is our first hint that Clary isn't as normal as she seems.

This book was a fantastic read -- there's teenage angst, unrequited love, jealousy, horror, blood and gore, and definitely lots of intrigue. Like all good fantasy novels, it also explores some pretty serious themes such as racism, homophobia, class inequality, and social justice.   If you liked Twilight, I would suggest that you give this one a whirl.  The characters are more fully drawn, the writing is a hundred times better, and you might just fall in love with an bad-boy named Jace.  Four shining swords out of five.

Flash in the Paan

Flashman
George MacDonald Fraser
Harper Collins

OMG.  I am soooooo behind on this blog.  Since finishing Flashman almost two weeks ago, I have managed to read quite a number of books.  So many, in fact, that my head is absolutely cluttered with thoughts and I'm having some difficulty recalling what it was, exactly, that I hated about this novel.

Let me see  ... oh yeah, the N word.  Fraser uses it quite liberally and it sort of got on my nerves.  Set in Victorian England, the novel's eponymous hero, Harry Flashman, is kicked out of Rugby for public drunkenness and convinces his father to buy him his colours.  Once in the army, he is sent to India and then on to Afghanistan where he gets into heaps of trouble.  He's a complete cad, a total coward, and aside from his handsome frame and knack for languages, has no redeeming qualities.  Because there is an entire series dedicated to Flashman, I thought, mistakenly, that the writing would be good and the character intriguing.  Not so on either count.  This is one example of Grit Lit that I should have left on shelf.  One begruding dueling pistol out of five.