When Nights Were Cold

When Nights Were Cold by Susanna Jones (2012)

In the early 1900s women are not encouraged to pursue higher education, never mind embarking on dangerous journeys of exploration, but Grace Farringdon dreams of doing both. She defies her mother's wishes and begins college, where she quickly forms an Antarctic Exploration Society with other like-minded women. Fast forward 15 years and Grace is a virtual prisoner in her family home, the only survivor of her Society. Haunted by the ghosts of her past, her mental health deteriorating, Grace may finally be ready to confront the terrible events of her youth.

Growing up, Grace plays an exploration game with her father where they move objects like buttons and thimbles across a map, representing the explorers Shackleton, Scott, and Wilson who were at that time exploring the Antarctic. Grace's older sister, Catherine, was usually at the piano, though her dreams of being a concert pianist were ultimately crushed when her parents refused to let her go to music school. It was a strange family, loving in some ways, and completely stifling in others.

The book shifts back and forth in time, the past slowing work itself towards the present we keep seeing glimpses of. We know at the very beginning that Grace has lived through some sort of tragedy. She hasn't seen her sister in years, though they used to be so close. Grace keeps trying to write Catherine a letter inviting her to stay, but struggles to finish and send it. She is clearly worried about writing it exactly right and enticing Catherine to come live with her, and afraid of just pushing her away forever. The tragedy that claimed the lives of her college friends hovers nearby and we learn more and more as the back story progresses.

As you can see from that big red dot on the cover, the Guardian called this novel "A gripping psychological thriller." This description is baffling because, although there are psychological elements to the story, this is no thriller. There's also a quote on the back cover of my edition that refers to a scene that never took place. Perplexing. Not to mention that the Goodreads description and jacket copy sound like two different books. Never mind - I heard great things about this book in a podcast - I think it was The Readers - and I'm very glad I read it.

I was entrance by the very idea of a woman at that time who was so interested in exploration and who felt compelled to climb mountains. Many parts of the story were murky and dreamlike, either because they held the quality of memories or were illustrating Grace's mental decline. It was pretty fantastic. Her relationships with her mountaineering friends Cicely, Leonora, and Winifred - all dead now - were complex, to say the least.

This is my first book for the R.I.P. VIII Challenge and although it didn't turn out to be a thriller, it was certainly dark. Death, doomed romances, and a whole lot of crazy combined to make a pretty compelling story. If I was young again and could stay up until the wee hours reading, I would have done so. As it was, I sat in bed desperately trying to keep my eyes open while I read the same sentence over and over because I couldn't admit defeat and put it down for the night.

I ordered When Nights Were Cold from Amazon UK because, tragically, it's not available in the US. I cannot imagine why. It was absolutely worth the price of postage and I recommend it to any of you who can get your hands on a copy.

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp (2008)

Sutter Keely is a fun-loving guy. He's the life of every party, the ladies love him, and if he's barely making it through high school, that's ok - it will all work out in the end. He even has the best girlfriend a guy could want. But things take a nose-dive in the relationship department and next thing he knows, Sutter is single again, and wakes up hungover on a strange lawn. He is greeted by a girl from school named Aimee, a quiet and pale girl who likes science fiction and horses (preferably together.) Sutter decides to do her a favor by pretending to like her, thereby boosting her confidence and putting her in a better position to find a real boyfriend. He just keeps saying what he thinks she wants to hear until he's in way over his head.

This book is very thin on plot. I kept waiting for something to happen and nothing really does. It really is just a story about his love life (with a tiny, tiny subplot about his absentee father). It didn't go anywhere, and I didn't feel like Sutter grew or changed or learned anything during the course of the book.

But I enjoyed his voice. Sutter is drunk, grandiose, and philosophical. He wants people to feel better about themselves, and truly does see the good in most people. He is one of the least judgmental characters I've met, but he's not very realistic, and is prone to lying if he thinks it will make someone feel better. He very earnestly wants everyone to be happy, but doesn't foresee the consequences of his actions. He's so laid back that he doesn't understand why others get jealous, for instance, and somehow he makes it seem like they are the unreasonable ones just for being human and somehow he's a better person for not letting things get to him. I wouldn't want to date him, but feel a little bad for saying that because, although he's a directionless mess, he has the very best of intentions.

The story takes place in Oklahoma and the audiobook narrator has what I must assume is an authentic accent. I wasn't sure how I'd like listening to it at first, but ultimately I couldn't imagine Sutter sounding any other way (and based on the trailer, the movie Sutter Keely is all wrong. He doesn't look right, either.) This book was all about the character, and I think the narrator made me like it more than I would have if I had read it in print. I probably wouldn't have picked this up if it wasn't chosen for my book group, but I found it pretty enjoyable even though it didn't really seem to have a point.

Sunday Knitting

I now have two completed sleeves, and both are attached to my Humboldt Raglan.

I'm now working on the raglan decreases, and the project is encumbered with a variety of stitch holders and markers.

The pattern instructs us to place removable markers in certain stitches, but I have terrible luck with those markers. The first time I turn the project a bit, the marker will come out and I won't realize it until I knit past the point where it should have been and then I have to do lots of counting to figure out where it should be. But I have learned from my mistakes. This time I have put TWO markers in each of those stitches and check frequently for the spots where one has fallen out. I grab my container of markers, put in another one in the spot (which is still clearly marked with the back-up marker) and then when I'm done knitting for the evening, I stand up and retrieve all the stray markers from my clothes and couch cushions and replace them in my marker container. It is a system and it works. 

I'm in the home stretch now! My only worry is the shortness of the sleeves, but given my yarn quantity restraints I don't think that can be helped. I knit the sleeves to the length specified, but I would have liked them to be longer. I believe they'll go just past my elbow and feel a bit annoying. Hopefully they're longer than I think they are.

Copycat Covers

Remember a few years ago when seemingly every single book cover had a picture of a woman's legs on it? You would think publishers would learn from this and try to make their books stand out by creating unique covers, but the situation has only worsened.

Recently I've seen some covers that aren't just similar, but use the exact same photo.

Here's a young adult book called The Ruining:

And the nonfiction book Shouting Won't Help:

Oh sure, the color has been altered and the background is different, but you don't fool me, book cover designers. At least they are geared towards totally different audiences.

Not so with the next two.

Here's one of the covers for My Notorious Life by Kate Manning (which, by the way, I want to read):

And another fiction book called A Fatal Likeness:

Ok sure, one is the British edition and one is the American kindle edition, but that doesn't matter much in an age when we can just go on Goodreads and see ALL the covers.

The excuse for this is that they all use stock photos, which isn't much of an excuse if you ask me. It's just sloppy. (This sloppiness isn't just restricted to cover art either. Earlier this year, two books came out within weeks of each other with the exact same title: Life After Life. One by Kate Atkinson and one by Jill McCorkle. At least they had different covers.)

But there ARE still good covers being designed that don't look like replications of other covers. Take a few of my favorite books from last year: Where'd You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and The Snow Child. Those covers were clearly designed rather than just assigned a photoshopped stock photo. So it's definitely still possible, and I would really like to see this be the norm rather than the exception.

Some have recently claimed that book covers will become less important now that we're all reading ebooks, but I remain unconvinced of that. First, we're not all reading ebooks and they are unlikely to completely replace paper books anytime soon; even teenagers prefer print. Second, if it wasn't for cover art, how would we make impulsive decisions about what to read? I don't care how judgmental it is, even librarians like me choose books by their covers.

With so many books being published it's difficult to make yours stand out. But it seems like publishers aren't even trying. Creating a unique cover would be an obvious way to do this and yet book covers are looking more and more the same. Of course I realize it's what's inside that is more important, but shoddy marketing is a real disservice to an author's hard work and I really hope this trend changes.

For those who would like to see more book cover lookalikes, I leave you with this Buzzfeed list of Book Cover Cliches. Do you have any to add to the list? And what do you think of this issue? Do you even care?

Bootleg

Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition by Karen Blumenthal (2011)

From the very earliest days of our nation's history, liquor has played a role in American life. By the mid-1800s, however, some began to take note of excessive drinking and so launched the temperance movement. Originally intended to reduce liquor consumption and public drunkenness by encouraging moderation, eventually proponents called for a complete ban on alcohol. Although many laughed off the efforts, eventually the idea took hold and resulted in the eighteenth amendment to the constitution, which prohibited the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Bootleg recounts the story of this movement, the strange decade of the 1920s, and the eventual repeal of Prohibition.

The opening pages describe the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, immediately pulling the reader in before taking a step back to the earliest days, and most important leaders, of the temperance movement. Along the way we learn about trends in liquor consumption (averaging as much as 9 gallons per year per person), the politics of getting a constitutional amendment passed, and the relationship between temperance and the suffragist movement. I've always been interested in the 1920s, but Blumenthal's focus on bootlegging and crime (including an entire chapter devoted to Al Capone) was simply fascinating. Each chapter is packed with facts, but uses actual people - famous or not - to bring the stories alive in a way that helps the reader imagine what it was like to live during that time. She even mentions the difficulty faced by librarians who had to choose whether or not to keep books on the shelves that described how to produce alcohol at home (some did, some didn't.)

Prohibition was clearly a very loosely enforced set of laws, which brings home some important points about legislation and social culture. Although the constitutional amendment passed, buy-in wasn't strong from law enforcers or the general public. For it to work, the larger culture would have had to change. Before the law, everyone drank and heavily, including small children. Parents even gave liquor to babies, and doctors and pharmacists regularly prescribed it to patients. Once Prohibition went into effect, the only thing that changed was the quality of the liquor and the difficulty of getting it. Instances of drunkenness reportedly went down, but all sorts of mayhem took its place and the result was illness from bad booze, the rise of organized crime, and more than a few murders. I couldn't help but think about gun control while reading this. The two issues are very different in a lot of ways, but what is the same is that both alcohol and guns are deeply embedded in our culture. As much as you may to rid ourselves of the disastrous effects, outlawing something that is such a part of people's lives just isn't going to be very successful - the culture itself has to change.

This book was chosen for my Not-So-Young Adult book group at work and it's our first nonfiction selection. Under 150 pages (not including the glossary and bibliography), this was a great overview of this fascinating time in history, packed with information and photos, and written in a clear, simple style. This is exactly how I like to read nonfiction.

Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma

Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson (expected publication 2014)

Janie Ryan is born to an Aberdeen fishwife in the early 1980s and right off the bat the two of them end up in a women's shelter. This is followed by a succession of shoddy council housing and a string of unsuitable boyfriends for Janie's Ma, bumping them from one situation to the next so quickly that change is the only constant.

This isn't a plot-driven story, but more like a slice of life. We follow Janie from birth until she comes of age, all in first person. It seems like this narration would be hard in the infant stages, but it was actually quite clever. I liked seeing working-class people and their lives through the eyes of a child who doesn't know any other life. Her outlook was so positive and happy despite conditions that others (including me) would find downright depressing. As she grew up, she learned a lot from her experiences and I feel like it just made her stronger.

Janie's Ma is a heavy drinker who regularly makes poor life choices, but is devoted to her daughter and strongly determined to make a decent life for her. She was fairly resourceful and quite resilient, putting up with a lot of crap along the way. I found everything about the British welfare system quite interesting, like how they lived in B&B's a number of times for instance. That sounds very posh (to borrow a British term), but it really wasn't at all.

The language might be difficult for some readers, but I got used to it after a page or so. (I've also spent time in Scotland, which may have made it easier.) "And" becomes "an'", "you" is "yeh", and there is a lot of British terminology, which I think just gives it an extra genuine flavor.

Despite the poverty and other hardships, for the most part I found the story fairly upbeat and optimistic. Janie didn't dislike her life, aside from her mother's boyfriends, or spend too much time wishing she had more. She was around a lot of poor people so they were all in the same situations. I think this might be the first book I've read about people living in poverty that wasn't completely bleak, and I really enjoyed it a lot. Kerry Hudson has proven herself a fresh new voice and I look forward to see what she brings us next.

This novel has been available in the UK for a while, but will be published in the US in early 2014.

I received this galley free from Penguin First Flights, and was not compensated for this review.

R.I.P. VIII Challenge

You may have noticed the new image on my sidebar - that's because I'm participating in a reading challenge called R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril which is hosted by Stainless Steel Droppings. It's all about spending September and October reading dark books - horror, mysteries, thriller, anything along those lines. I'm participating in Peril the First, which is to read four such books in the two months. This shouldn't be hard for me as I do love those sorts of books the best.

I've already planned to read The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins this fall, as well as the new Stephen King book Doctor Sleep. Perhaps this would also be a good time to finally read 14 by Peter Clines, which has been on my to read list for a while. Another one lurking on my to read list is a short novel called Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye. It doesn't have very good ratings on Goodreads, but it sounds very intriguing to me. (And some of my favorite books aren't very popular, so those ratings aren't necessarily a good indicator of what I'd like.)

But I think I'm going to start with When Nights Were Cold by Susanna Jones, one of the books I ordered from the UK a while back because it's not available here in the US. I remembered it as a story about a woman ahead of her time, who went an arctic exploration in a time when women's lives were mostly confined to the domestic sphere. Upon reading the description again, however, there is much more to this story - something terrible happened on that expedition and our heroine must face up to it years later. What I thought was a just a historical novel is in fact a psychological thriller. Now I'm even more eager to read it.

Since I haven't participated before, I don't know if there are contests or prizes or anything like that. I'm just looking at this as extra incentive to catch up on my horror/mystery/thriller reading.