Twelve Sharp

Have you ever laughed so hard you couldn't breathe or so hard that your eyes watered and couldn't see? Well, that is the normal reaction to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. These books are for the fun of it all, a means to get away, however briefly, from all the serious business in this world.
Janet started this series back in 1994 with One For The Money and has hit a bull's-eye with each succeeding book right up to the recently published Twelve Sharp. This book was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 5 weeks plus is #1 on our own library's most requested book list.
Stephanie Plum is a former lingerie buyer turned woman bounty hunter out of Trenton, New Jersey with a cast of characters, that in my mind, are typical New Jerseyites. With Stephanie's friend and co-worker, Lula, a former 'Ho, Vinney (the pervert) her boss, Office Manager Connie, her Grandma Mazur, Stephanie's parents and the two To-Die-For Hunks in her life - Joe Morelli and Ranger there are never ending high jinks. From Stephanie's aversion to guns to the long list of bad guys who have jumped bail, Stephanie and her cohorts keep the laughs rolling right off the page.
In Twelve Sharp, we go along with Lula and Stephanie to visit an adult bookstore called Pleasure Treasures to find a bail jumper. They find much more and since Lula "likes to keep up with the technology", well, you might be able to imagine this created the funniest scenes in the book.
But apart from the laughter, this book showed us a side of Ranger we have been waiting a long time to see. According to Stephanie, Ranger is a former Special Forces Super Hero who lives in the Bat Cave. What we see is a concerned father with vulnerabilities we all have. This is the most serious book in the series. And in the end, Stephanie helps Ranger make all things right after much mayhem.
I highly recommend this book and all the books in the series. Reading them in order isn't a must but you will miss a lot of the background if you don't.
Take a few minutes and visit Janet's website at http://www.evanovich.com. There you can enter a contest to name the next book, find out all kinds of fascinating information about Stephanie, for example, Stephanie has wreaked or has been involved in wreaking 18 vehicles in this series, there is a recipe for Stephanie's Mom's Pineapple Upside Down Cake, Lula's Words of Wisdom (Wow), all the information you would EVER want to know about Grandma Mazur plus all the delicious information on Ranger and Joe. This is a really fun site.
When a I hear that someone I know is ill or in the hospital, I always send them a copy of One For The Money, I have heard that laughter is the best medicine and I believe it. I do wonder sometimes if some have ever burst a few stitches from laughing while reading these books. I think it would be worth it.

The Illusionist

I haven't seen the movie The Illusionist yet, though I intend to. I think Edward Norton is a great actor, and Jessica Biel is certainly easy on the eye, and the setting in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its long, slow decline is one of the most interesting periods in history. The same setting has provided some great literature, such as Musil's The Man Without Qualities or Roth's Radetzky March. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the movie is based on a short story by one of my favorite authors, Steven Millhauser.

Millhauser is known as a 'writer's writer,' by which we usually mean a writer so accomplished that only other writers understand how good he is. Or, to put it another way, a writer that only other writers bother to read. His stories are usually set in fantastic realms of the imagination, and Eisenheim the Illusionist is no exception. It is an excellent example of Millhauser at his best.

The only problem is that even though I haven't seen the movie, I know it largely concerns the unrequited love between Eisenheim and the Jessica Biel character, who is the fiance of a prince or something. In the original story, there is no love interest at all. No fiance, no prince. In fact the original story would probably not have made a very good movie. So Hollywood has to tart it up with a love triangle and a juicy role for a pretty young starlet. And that's okay, that's how movies are made. The only question is, why start with this story, if telling this story doesn't make a good movie? Does it even lend the movie literary credibility if it's based on a story by an author nobody knows and nobody reads?

The only good thing is that I just had to return a copy of The Barnum Museum, the book that the original story was in, because several people had requests on it. I'm betting readers will be dismayed to learn how much the story diverges from the movie. But if even a few readers are surprised and thrilled to discover the unique voice and distinctive imagination of Steven Millhauser, and go on to read more of his books, then that's a good thing, right?

Reading Too Much Into Reading?

I just finished reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. One of the collapsed societies he studies is the Norse colony on Greenland. He tells how these stubbornly Europeanized settlers eventually succumbed to starvation because they would learn nothing from the Island's native Inuit population, who lived rather well on fishing and hunting abundant seals and other aquatic mammals. The Norse settlers despised the Inuit, whom they referred to as 'skraelingar,' which means, more or less, 'wretches.' But the wretches thrived on traditional ways while the Norse eventually starved.
Just prior to that book I had read Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick. What a different story he tells, of how the English Pilgrims would never have made it through the first treacherous seasons on the rocky coast of Plymouth Colony, except that they adapted many ways of the native Americans they met. They learned from, traded with, socialized with, and drew up treaties and agreements with the peoples and their leaders, a process of assimilation that set the early colony -- and others that were to follow -- on a sound footing.
It was just a coincidence that I read these two books back to back. But the difference between the two historical incidents was immediately apparent to me, and put a satisfying spin on my last month's reading. This sort of synthesis, this sort of realization, is what I think I get from reading that I could not get from any other experience. When you read a book, as opposed to any other form of gathering information, you get time to think and reflect and put together your own thoughts, and then to form new thoughts and move on from there.
Perhaps that's why the cultures that developed print early on are the ones that became the greatest civilizations, or why religions based soundly on sacred writings endure as the most influential. Perhaps I'm reading too much into my own personal experience.
What do you think?