Book Reviews, Gothic/Horror, Mystery, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Young Adult

A Vacation Within the Pages

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Time, as it always does, has rushed on, and our annual May trip to the rolling hills and lush green valleys of eastern Missouri’s wine country has come and gone. It was a wonderful, restful vacation despite a few less than ideal circumstances. One of these being the fact that I got some kind of intestinal bug on Tuesday, the day we left, that brought with it a two-day fever and off-again, on-again stomach cramps that didn’t go away until Saturday morning. The other was a week-long rainy forecast.

Don’t feel bad for me though, we really did have a relaxing and refreshing time together. I didn’t get any pictures to share this time, just the mental ones I took of the beautiful green countryside that we drove through each day on our outings. We did a lot of exploring, and a lot of reading. I decided to let this post serve as an “I’ve returned” message followed by some mini-reviews of the books I managed to get through over the course of this past week.

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Film

Iron Man 2

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I have to admit, I have a big man-crush for Robert Downey Jr. as an actor. Since reviving his career with the film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, he has had a knack for choosing roles that best allow him to display his strengths. The strength of 2008’s Iron Man was due in large part to the choice to cast RDJ as billionaire playboy Tony Stark.

I also have to admit that when I saw initial trailers for Iron Man 2 with Mickey Rourke as the villain, I was concerned. It isn’t that I don’t like Mickey Rourke, in the rare role–like Marv in Sin City–he is brilliant. I just did not see him carrying the evil mastermind role in this film. Thankfully, he did not have to. Director Jon Favreau and his writing team made some very good choices with this second installment in what one assumes will be a franchise.

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Book Reviews, Mystery

The Man in the Brown Suit ~Agatha Christie

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The Man in the Brown Suit ~Agatha Christie

–published 1924, audio version published 2005
–BBC Audiobooks America
–read by Emilia Fox
–4.25/5 stars

Anne Beddingfeld is a young woman who longs for the kind of adventures she sees when she goes to the theatre to view The Perils of Pauline. One afternoon in the tube station she sees a lone man fall to his death on the tracks after apparently being startled by some unseen menace behind her. When a suspicious doctor suddenly shows up on the scene and then quickly rushes off, Anne follows him and sees a piece of paper fall from his hand with an enigmatic code on it. Her senses come alive and she believes she has found her adventure, an idea further fueled by a murder allegedly committed by the unknown “man in the brown suit”, a man Anne believes is one and the same with her suspect physician. What follows is a charming whodunit with Wodehousian overtones that takes Anne Beddingfeld away from England, by boat, to the country of South Africa.

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Book Reviews, Nonfiction, Young Adult

More About Boy ~Roald Dahl

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More About Boy ~Roald Dahl, illustrated by Quentin Blake

–published 2008 (25th anniversary edition of 1984 book)
–Farrar, Straus and Giroux
–240 pages
–4.5/5 stars

I wish I could say that I grew up reading Roald Dahl…and perhaps I can, but not in the traditional sense. While I did not meet any of Mr. Dahl’s wonderful characters as a child, I became acquainted with him while working in a bookstore in my early 20’s, and I’ve certainly ‘grown up’ some since then. But not so much that I have lost my childlike enthusiasm for good childrens stories, or for the authors who create such works of magic. Roald Dahl is one of those magicians, in his stories for children and his adult short stories.

I have wanted to read Boy since I first watched Meg Ryan read from it in the film, You’ve Got Mail. There are a couple of really enchanting moments that happen in her small bookstore in the film, and the reading of The Great Mouse Plot was one of them. The desire to include some nonfiction in my own personal Once Upon a Time IV quest made this the perfect time to pick up this delightful, and sometimes disturbing, book.

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Book Reviews, Short Stories

Dangerous Laughter ~Steven Millhauser

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Dangerous Laughter ~Steven Millhauser

–published 2008
–Alfred A. Knopf
–244 pages
–4/5 stars

With this volume of short stories, author Steven Millhauser proves that triskaidekaphobia is not in his vocabulary. Dangerous Laughter gathers together 13 examples of Millhauser’s unique voice into a collection that is wildly unpredictable. I recently read and reviewed Millhauser’s novella, Enchanted Night, which, while wholly satisfying, merely whet my appetite for more of his work. Though I would have said with all sincerity after reading his novella that Millhauser is now on my list of favorite writers, it helps to know that, for me at least, he is not a one-hit-wonder.

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Eclectic Musings of a Renaissance Geek