Book Round-Up: Emily Edition

 Twelve Percent Dread by Emily McGovern: I generally love McGovern's comics but I couldn't get into this one. I did appreciate her satire of modern technology  and relationships, however.

The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones: The Welsh mythology-based story -- about a gravedigger who has to figure out why bodies are crawling out of their graves -- was great; the overwrought, angsty, YA prose was not.

Funny Story by Emily Henry: It seems I'm destined to love every other Emily Henry novel, which means I found this one completely delightful. I really enjoyed the development of the main characters' relationship.

The Wood Wife by Emily Terri Windling: My second time reading this. It's a wonderful story about artists, fairies, and the desert, inspired by the art of Brian Froud.

The Museum of Lost Quilts by Jennifer Chiaverini (pretty sure there was a character named Emily): The latest contemporary novel in the Elm Creek series (I've been skipping over the historical ones). It was fine. I admire Chiaverini's commitment to writing about social justice issues, particularly given how conservative a segment of her audience is, but her approach can be didactic.

Book Round-Up: Quilty Edition

The Wedding Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini: Like her last few Elm Creek Quilts books, Chiaverini uses a framing device -- here, the wedding of Sarah's daughter, set in the future -- to tell the stories of different characters. It's a structure Chiaverini has used a lot, and I did not find it as effective. Some of the stories were perfunctory and expositiony; others were engaging, to the point that I think they would have worked better fleshed out into proper novels. I wonder if Chiaverini intended this to be the last one; by setting it in the future, and "recapping" the lives of the major characters, it had the feel of a finale. But it wasn't!

The Giving Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini: This appears to be the final novel, and again Chiaverini used an event -- a week-long charity quilting retreat -- to tell the stories of various women (this time new characters). This worked better than the previous one, more akin to a collection of short stories, although I didn't find the characters all that interesting. What's more interesting is the negative reviews on Goodreads, complaining about Chiaverini injecting politics into the narrative. While she did use the stories as soapboxes, I'm both amused and troubled that her opinions (Greed bad! Libraries good!) are considered controversial by some.

Wild Goose Chase by Terri Thayer: The first novel in a quilty mystery series, this novel was overall entertaining and well-written, although I wasn't thrilled with the rivalry between the heroine, Dewey, and her sister-in-law, Kim. Kim engaged in objectively awful behavior, but Dewey also has a huge chip on her shoulder regarding women who are traditionally feminine. Perhaps as Dewey begins to understand the art of quilting, she will mature over the course of the series.

Apart at the Seams by Marie Bostwick: Normally I like to read a series in order, but having been in a reading emergency (I finished my book before my commute home and needed to download something quickly from the library's website) I skipped over books 2-5 and read this one. Which isn't a big deal, in this series: while the books center around a quilt store in a small town in Connecticut, each novel focuses on different characters with only minimal continuity to worry about. Bostwick's novels are your standard women-dealing-with-marriage/career/family-problems stories, but the characters are smarter and more insightful than usual.

Book Round-Up

There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Troubleby Laurie Notaro: Notaro is a comedic writer, mostly non-fiction, in the style of Dave Barry, and it shows in her first novel.  The book is loaded with broad jokes and funny scenarios -- a bit too loaded for my tastes.  But the story itself is fun and the characters are engaging.

The Amelia Peabody series (first through fourth books) by Elizabeth Peters: I first read these as a girl (I think the second volume, the first I read, was in a book club mystery series my father got; each volume was in a different color striped with white, and contained three novels), and inexplicably wanted to read them again.*  They take place in the Egyptology world just before the turn of the last century, and increasingly serve as satires of adventure novels from that time.  Amelia is a hoot, the first novel in particular has a great romance as a sub-plot, and they combine two of my favorite things -- mysteries and Egyptology.  What's not to love?

Reading the Peabody books made me want to reread Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, partly to contrast the styles.  Only, it turns out I don't have it and have never read it.  I was getting confused with:

Murder in Mesopotamia: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries): Potato, Potahto.  The plot is superficially similar to Peters' The Curse of the Pharaohs, with a beautiful but difficult woman married to a brilliant archeologist, a murder, a house filled with suspects, unscrupulous antiquities dealers, superstitious locals, and so on.  They are completely different in style, however, with Christie displaying the prejudices of her time (prejudices which the Peabody series acknowledges, even if Amelia is too enlightened to have them).  Also, Hercule Poirot could not be more different than Amelia.  As with all Poirot stories, it is a highly enjoyable book.

I'd feel remiss if I did not also mention Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist: A Novel, for a third take on archeology.  It's about an Egyptologist who is equally convinced that he is Carter's superior and that he is on the verge of a huge discovery.  It features multiple unreliable narrators and narrative styles, and is satirical, funny, pathetic, confusing, and disturbing.  I highly recommend it.

A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (Elm Creek Quilts Novels)by Jennifer Chiaverini: Chiaverini's prolificness and my lack of interest in historical novels means I'm now only reading her contemporary Elm Creek books.  While this novel was enjoyable and contained one of my favorite characters (Anna), I'm noticing a stylistic quirk Chiaverini relies on too much, especially in the novels with multiple points of view taking place over a few days.  Instead of showing the action, she tends to have her narrators recount what happened, or their life history, as if it were a kind of biographical summary.  Occasionally such a technique makes sense or is at least necessary, but I wish she wouldn't use it quite so often.

The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio: Livio is an astrophysicist who takes a detour to write about ϕ, a.k.a. 1.61803.... This is the number that shows up in the Fibonacci series, the Golden Rectangle, the Pentagram, the Golden Spiral, and so on.  Livio starts off with a history and explanation of the number, addressing the mathematical and geometric concepts I just listed, before going on to explore ϕ's role (actual and purported) in music, art, nature, physics, and even the nature of existence itself.  It's a great layman's discussion of the number.

*Oddly, just as I finished, Peters passed away.

The Aloha Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

I have a minor little obsession with fiction that has a "craft" theme of some kind, so of course I have read Jennifer Chiaverini's Elm Creek books, which center around a fictional quilt camp in Pennsylvania. The books are decently written and well-researched, although to be honest it's the kind of fiction I generally would not be too interested in if it were not for the quilting connection. While most of the books are set in the present, Chiaverini has written several taking place before, during, and after the Civil War. And while good for her for her depiction of slavery and racism and the abolitionist movement, I generally don't enjoy reading those books, because it is too depressing.*

So I was excited that the most recent one, The Aloha Quilt, was set in modern times. Unfortunately, it centers around Bonnie, a character I never found that interesting and who is pretty insufferable here. She goes to Hawai'i for several months to help a friend set up an inn and quilt camp, but also to get away from her awful, soon-to-be-ex-husband. And that was a major flaw in this book -- in the first book Craig appeared, he was a decent, if flawed, man who was deeply contrite over his almost-affair. In the next book, he was a conniving jerk who tried to hide assets in preparation for a divorce. In this book, he is an irrational, controlling, violent lunatic, who apparently never once behaved like a decent man (and so what does that say about Bonnie, that she chose to marry him anyway?). People do occasionally point out he is not a bad guy, but that is hardly credible given how cartoonishly evil Chiaverini has him behaving. I know that in real life some people do behave this way during a divorce, and that the adversarial legal system brings out the worst in divorcing parties (a rant for another day), but that does not make for interesting reading. Especially when Bonnie is such a whiny doormat about it.

Moreover, she is ridiculously judgmental of her friends. When Craig threatens to claim half of Bonnie's ownership in the quilt camp and her friends act quickly to help her sell her share to another member, so that the camp cannot be touched by him and she can continue to work there, Bonnie instead complains about how betrayed she was because her friends did not allow Craig to destroy the camp in a show of loyalty to her. Really. And when another friend admits to a long-ago infidelity, Bonnie completely overreacts, supposedly because it reminds her of Craig's actions (except he never actually cheated on her until long after their separation and her refusal to have anything to do with him again). In short, Bonnie was kind of a pill.

On the other hand, I learned quite a bit about Hawai'i (I so want to go) and Hawai'ian quilting, and it inspired me to try some Hawai'ian appliqué myself. I have a breadfruit pattern from a magazine, but I decided to try my hand at designing my own, a Hibiscus pattern (common in Hawai'i, but also in Puerto Rico; my mom had some in her garden). I folded a 15 inch square piece of freezer paper into eighths (as if I were cutting a snowflake) and drew a design of half a flower and half a leaf:
I then cut it out, but apparently not carefully -- I guess the folds were not precise enough, because one portion ended up too thin. I'm not sure how I want to proceed; the traditional method says to cut out the drawn eighth and pin it it to fabric folded and ironed in eighths and cut around the shape to create the applique. However, I'm afraid I'll make the same mistake, and the inner folds will be cut too narrowly, especially because my pattern is quite a bit smaller than traditional (no way am I attempting a bed quilt). The alternative is to iron the whole paper pattern onto fabric (brightly colored batiks, by the way), which would work because it is freezer paper and it would allow me to correct mistakes and be more careful cutting, but it would also take a tediously long time to cut it out, and I am not a patient person. I have to think about this.

*I had the same problem with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, an excellent book that had me cringing throughout the first half, because yes I get it many early comic book writers were Jewish and of course a story like Superman kicking Hilter's ass is the ultimate wish-fulfillment and yet the worst supervillain could never compete with real, actual evil in the world, et cetera et cetera et cetera, but stories involving the Holocaust NEVER END WELL, and I don't want to read fiction that makes me want to curl up in a corner and cry, no matter how good it is.