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Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won last year's Newberry Award, and for originality I readily agree with the choice. The story opens with a serial killer slashing the father, mother and older child in a British household. The baby, Nobody Owens or Bod for short, escapes and wanders into a nearby graveyard where he is raised by the resident ghosts. The first half of the book I found tedious and episodic as Bod has adventures with all manner of evil creatures. The second half, where Bod goes after the man who killed his family, was tighter and thus, IMHO, far more interesting.

For the most part the book is well-written and held my attention far more than other books by Gaiman that I've read. Specifics for why:

1) I like writers who play with words. Bod arrives at the graveyard and wakes up from a nap. He's surrounded by graveyard residents. "It (Bod) stared around it, taking in the faces of the dead, and the mist, and the moon. Then it looked at Silas. Its gaze did not flinch. It looked grave." (page 25)

2) I learned a new (at least to me) meaning of the word "amble" A horse "came ambling up the side of the hill. The pounding of its hooves could be heard before it was seen, …" (page 30) To me "amble" has always meant a gentle pace, a soft and quiet walk. So how could ambling cause hooves to pound? Bad word choice, I thought. Then: Maybe not, Martha. Perhaps you should look the word up. So I did. Sure enough, when talking about horses, an "amble" is a specific, measured gait. Our language never ceases to amaze me. Are there people who have mastered knowing everything about it?

3) In the I-wish category: Bod learns he will be taught to read. "He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered." (page 46) Think maybe lots of four- or five-year olds think that way? If so, what have we killed in them by the time they reach thirteen?

4) A not-so-pleasant ghost asks Bod if he can imagine "how it feels to be more important than kings or queens … to be sure of it, in the same way that people are more important than Brussels sprouts?" (page 81) Part of me thinks, "Cool analogy." Another part wonders, "Are we?"

5) Silas, the caretaker of the graveyard (and mentioned above), says, "People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer." (page 289) Let's add to "the impossible," the unfamiliar, the different, or the unknown, and we could be talking about today's reaction to health reform. IMHO, of course.

6) "Bod ate his pizza with his fingers and enthusiasm." (page 290) Cool juxtaposition. Again, IMHO.

7) One graveyard resident says, "Truly, life is wasted on the living." (page 300) Wonder if that's true. The older I get, the more I understand that youth is, indeed, wasted on the young.

Guess I should end with a recommendation. With all I'd heard about The Graveyard Book and its winning of the Newberry, I was disappointed. But I may have set my expectations too high. Like Pride and Prejudice and Ghouls, The Graveyard Book has an amazing premise—and it has pen and ink drawings—but at least I finished The Graveyard Book. That does make them different.

Just a bried update: I'm not dead. I haven't given up on this thread. Fact is that for close to a month I've been plowing through Ken Follett's World Without End. Only 400 pages to go!

Finally! I've managed to finish Ken Follet's Book Without—Oops! My bad!—World Without End, the sequel to his The Pillars of the Earth. I mention both books right from the start because I found it impossible to read and/or review World without making comparisons to Pillars, which really impressed me. Sad to say, World didn't—a judgement I made when I started noticing specific words. Writers of novels and/or play set in a time not the writer's own need to make sure nothing can disturb the reader's or viewer's "willing suspension of disbelief." Language, particularly the author's choice of words, can do that. Then I wondered if I'd noticed the same thing in. Ultimately I decided it didn't matter whether I did or didn't. Truth was: whatever it was that broke my disbelief in [i]World[/i], the story in Pillars was strong enough that the detail didn't matter.

I mention the above because in this review of World my usual "specifics" will be divided into two areas: general stuff and words that made me go "AARGH!"

General stuff: (I started to label this section "general specifics," then thought: No, Martha. The last thing English needis yet another oxymoron.)

1) Merthin, a 14th century architect and the hero in World, is struggling with the local priory for permission to build a bridge. He does not receive it and asks how the town will obtain the much-needed bridge. "Trust in God" is the response from the prior. Merthin counters with "Those who trust in God and sow a seed may reap a harvest. But you're not sowing a seed." (page 80) Interesting idea, but is it too modern? Not in the way the character is developed. But is he too modern? Tougher question.

2) "Caris (Merthin's main squeeze, the heroine of World Without End) stood back, hiding her irritation. Everyone believed the monks were powerful doctors, able to work near-miracles, whereas the nuns just fed the patients and cleaned up. Caris had long since stopped fighting that attitude, but it still annoyed her." (page 507) Modern thought again creeping in? I dunno. I once read a friend's play about a feisty young black woman, a nurse, fighting the army in order to take on nursing rather than cleaning duties during WWII. The play takes place at her trial—I can't remember for what she was on trial—but the writer had her roll-them-shoulders defiant while in the witness chair. The character was from the South, and I mentioned perhaps it would be truer if she was less fiery, considering that such behavior in the 1940's South could have brought about an early death. His defense was along the lines of "guess there were people who defied conditions of any era." Still dunno, but he could be right. Now I'm thinking of Scarlet O'Hara, who was in no way the typical southern belle.

3) "Caris had to fight back her own grief. … She did not know why God so often took the good people and left the wicked alive to do more wrong. The whole idea of a benevolent deity watching over everybody seemed unbelievable at moments such as this. The priests said sickness was a punishment for sin. Mark and Madge loved each other, cared for their children, and worked hard: why should they be punished?" (page 649) And some questions last from era to era.

4) As the plague rips through Caris's Village a second time, "Fury stoked up in Caris as she worked with the other nuns to tend these patients. All their injuries arose from the perverted notions of religion brought about by men such as Murdo (a misguided clergyman). They said the plague was God's punishment for sin, but people could avoid the plague by punishing themselves another way. It was as if God was a vengeful monster playing a game with insane rules." (page 835) And, for many, the times have changed … exactly how?

5) "'I didn't ask your permission,' Ralph said contemptuously. 'I'm your earl, and you are my serfs. I don't ask. I command.'" (page 959) Ralph, always acting on such beliefs, is the super villain of Earth. But evil as he is, he doesn't hold a candle, IMHO, to the super villain of Pillars, somebody's "half crazed mother. Is the difference simply that Ralph is a man and the "half crazed mother" a woman? Our expectations of behavior are often based on sex.

Words (ands other oddities) that made me go "AARGH!"

1) The first word I questioned was, of course, the F word, which was used frequently throughout the book. But did it exist in the fourteenth century? A quick visit to www.dictionary.com revealed it might have existed—but probably not. The source cited the name John le F…er being used in a manuscript in 1278, but claims that today's version of the word first appeared in 1535. Thus the earliest uses remain cloudy. And I started to question every odd word that appeared in World Without End.

2) "'Righto!' the monk called back." (page 251) Righto? Origin: 1895-1900. Seems Ken Follett's research habits take second place to his comfort with more current British slang.

3) "So cocksure were the …" (page 551) Cocksure, 1520s; according, again, to www.dictionary.com. Look out, Mr. Follette, the grammatically picky are closing in.

4) Sometimes Mr. Follett does get one right. On page 914 a listing of the luxurious items found in a villainous clergyman's priory is found. Among them is "silver tableware." I remember a scene in the play Becket where Henry II says he brought forks home from France to his English knights and they were having such fun stabbing each other. So which came first—Becket or the thirteen hundreds? Follett did get it right. Becket lived from 1118 to 1190. But I'm still wondering: Did Follett research the dates or did he, this time, simply guess and get it right?

One good thing—at least I guess it's good—is that I waited too long to write this review. That delay meant that I could remember why I dog-eared pages less than half the times dog-eared pages occurred. Geez! Just think how long this review could have been.

Let's start with an overview of Christopher Moore's. Think of King Lear being run through the mind of Mel Brooks and winding up with something deeper, say, than The Producers, musical version. It's a concept, perhaps better as an idea than Moore's version turned out to be, although still worthy of consideration.

I found it interesting that Lear was more everything (pitiful, ego-centered, bombastic) in Fool than he was in the original. That view is probably based on a statement Moore made in an afterword: "I must have watched thirty different performances of King Lear and frankly, about halfway into my research, after listening to a dozen Lears rage at the storm and lament what complete nitwits they had been, I wanted to leap onstage and kill the old man myself.
For while I respect and admire the talent and stamina it takes for an actor to portray Lear, as well as the eloquence of the speeches, a person can take only so much whining before he wants to sign up for the Committee to Make Elder Abuse an Olympic Sport." (page 306) Does put Lear in a different light, doesn't it?

Reading Fool right after World Without End of course made me want to play the same catch-the-author-on-misuse-of-words game I did in World—again until I read the afterword. "(The time frame of the play ((Lear)) seemed to bollocks up even Shakespeare, for at one point he has the fool rattle off a long list of prophecies and after which says, 'This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time ((Act III, Scene 2)).' It's as if Will threw his quill in the air and said, 'I know not what the hell is going on, therefore I shall cast this beefy bit of bull toss to the groundlings and see if it slides by.'" (pages 307-308.) Convinced me not to play the game.

I was also interested in one specific choice Moore made. In Lear Gloucester was blinded offstage—just like Medea killed the children offstage. For centuries such foul acts were relegated to actions that were discussed in dialogue after they happened elsewhere. But—hey!—times have changed. In Fool Gloucester is blinded on-page—right there in front of the reader where he can see everything. (Even if Gloucester can't. Oops. Sorry.) Geez! Before you know it, we'll be having eye-gouging scenes right before us on stage or screen. (What? … Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten about that scene in Oz.)

And onto specifics:

1) The fool, named Pocket, describes Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester (just a reminder for those of you who may not have been required to read Lear COUNTLESS times in college and grad school). Pocket says about Edmund: "I do admire the bastard's sense of style—simple, elegant and evil. He owns his darkness." (page 21) Love that phrase: "loves his (whatever)." Yes, of course I've heard it before but here it brought to mind all sorts of wonderful things to own. Say: He owns his indecisiveness. He owns the middle of the road. (Not referring to driving, of course.) He owns his insincerity. He owns his shyness. (That would be a character who rarely speaks, and when he tries, he stutters.) Feel free to add your own.

2) Part of Moore's charm, IMHO, is his absolute irreverence. Here's Pocket talking to the Duke of Albany about his wife, Goneril. "That one breast, the way it juts a bit to the side—when she's naked, I mean—does that bother you at all? Makes you wonder what it's looking at over there—like a wall-eyed man you think is always talkin' to someone else? … Mind you, it's obviously part of the pair, not some breast errant off on a quest of its own. I like a bit of asymmetry is a woman—makes me suspicious when nature's too evenhanded—fearful symmetry and all that. But it's not like you're shaggin' a hunchback or anything—I mean, once she's on 'er back it's hard to get either one of them to look you in the eye, innit?" (page 45) I still giggled each time I looked at the paragraph to see which words came next.

3) Materialism. Ya can't live with it, can't live without it. Never could, never will. "After the Thirteenth Holy Crusade, when it was decided that to avoid future strife, the birthplace of Jesus would be moved to a different city every four years, holy shrines lost their geographical importance. There arose a great price war in the Church, with shrines offering pilgrims dispensation of varying competitive rates." (page 54) And so it goes. There's Wal-Mart, offering a piece of the cross at 45% less than the mom-and-pop shop down the street.

4) Moore's seduction scenes are a hoot. Pocket is putting the moves on a woman he's relatively sure he adores and has crawled under her blanket in a section of a church where employees camp out. A bit of dialogue: She does and the scene progresses. I'm always amazed at how much a few lines of dialogue—and dialogue alone—can convey.

5) Pocket addresses Edmund while he's in his rooms, working at a desk. "Thou scaly scalawag of a corpse-gorged carrion worm, cease your feast on the bodies of your betters and receive the Black Fool before vengeful spirits come to wrench the twisted soul from your body and drag it into the darkest depths of hell for your treachery." (page 160) Shame that no one today takes such care with the wording of threats.

6) The really-should-be-offstage scene mentioned above:
Amazing, IMHO. Gross and funny at the same time. Reminds me of scenes in Bonnie and Clyde.

7) "Drool (Pocket's assistant) affected a jaunty aspect, remarkable considering the dark doings he had just escaped, but a light spirit is the blessing of the idiot. He took to singing and splashing gaily through puddles as we traveled. I was deeply burdened by wit and awareness, so I found sulking and grumbling better suited to my mood." (page 241) A seemingly happy idiot has pretty much become a frequent literary devise, but what about a seemingly happy idiot who's actually the villain? Anyone ever run into that?

8) I'm sure there are scads of Shakespeare quotes, from any of his plays, but one I caught was spoken by Pocket: "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones, or so I've heard." (page 236)

So? You recommend it or not? Sure, I'll recommend. Why not? Some parts of Fool may drag but the overall cleverness easily makes up for them.

Christopher Moore is either very very good, or very very bad. His Lamb: the Gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood pal is devastatingly funny, though probably only for those with a rather stretchy sense of irreverence. There are others he's written that never quite seemed to gel.

The problem being I can never remember which is which...but I'll keep an eye out (sorry) for 'Fool.'

SWOOSH! That's the sound of Gregory MacGuire's Wicked sailing across the room. THUMP! And landing in the trashcan. Page 236. That's what page I'm on. Two hundred thirty-six out of 407 and I've had it. Enough!

You see, I read Wicked back when it first was published (mid 1980s) and hated it. Then this past year my friend Tessa read it. "Oh, Martha," says she, "how could you not like it? All that psychology. The philosophical stands the characters take. It was wonderful. So much more than I expected."

What I remembered was a lot of gunk slowing down the story line. But Tessa's persuasive, so Wicked wandered back onto the to-be-read shelf. Shoot. The 1980s were 30 years in the past, and I remember reading some theory holding that particular books need to be read at the "right" time in one's life. Maybe I'd read Wicked at the wrong time.

I started reading this time with a blank slate, telling myself Wicked was a book in its own right, not simply a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. And for a while the reading was great. The philosophical insights were good. The personal oddities of Elpfafa (The wicked witch's first name, at least according to MacGuire, were intriguing because the reader knows what she becomes. Language use was as interesting as it was in World Without End and Fool because in Wicked we're dealing not only with the distant past but the distant past in some far-off dimension. Specifics for any of the above? Okay.

Oops. Not okay. Any page I wrote down now has absolutely nothing of interest. So I'll quote from the paragraph where I stopped. "By the light of sallowwood (Huh? www.dictionary.com doesn't recognize it either.) torches, the camels, in glittering comparison lurched and lumbered (Pick one. Please!) on a worn track. It was like going up and down a staircase at the same time. (Okay. That sentence isn't bad, but Macguire continues.) Elphie sat above the grass, a vantage point over the green flickering surface. Although the ocean was only an idea sprung out of mythology, she could almost see where it came from—there were small grasshawks (another huh?) launching themselves like fish leaping out of the spume, nipping at the fireflies, pocketing them, then falling back in a dry splash. Bats passed, making a guttering, sputtering (Back to "Pick one. Please!) sound that ended in an extinguishing swoop (ialics his). The plain itself seemed to bring forth color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined (huh?huh?huh?) through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar (Phew! That's stretching for a metaphoric image)." (page 236) And there I stopped. Why? you may ask. Two reasons: 1) the parenthetical comments above, and 2) I caught a whiff of a writer lingering over his words—or non-words—and marveling at how wonderful they all were. OMG! Right up there with pretentious poetry, written by high school students and wannabe poets. A perfect reason to stop. IMHO.

Oh, I will have to tell Tessa that psychology and philosophy didn't stop me; instead, the over-written description did.

Oh, well.

Some time ago I lent my copy of Peter De Vries' Let Me Count the Ways to Kathy, claiming it was the funniest book I'd ever read. Periodically she'd report back that she'd read the first few pages and couldn't go on because the narrator was talking about beating his wife—but only when she deserved it. I had no memory of it starting that way so when she returned it, it went straight to the unread shelf. I finished reading it last night, and, yes, it starts with the narrator talking about how stupid his wife is and how he takes care of that. Then I'm sitting there thinking, "OMG! It's as bad as Kathy said. How could I have recommended this book?" Then I tell myself to read a little further.

Shortly after that I run into the following. Stan, the narrator, and his wife argue about the part religion should play in their son's rearing. Stan: "'You want to raise him as a believer,' I says in the bathroom doorway drying my back after a shower. 'I want to raise him as an atheistic. O.K. We'll compromise. We'll bring him up an agnostic. That's my last offer. That'll be middle ground, from where he can make up his own mind later.' Elsie (Stan's wife) said, 'That logic is a little like your logic when we were going together, remember? You said, "You want to get married, I don't. We'll compromise—we'll live together."'" (pages 10-11)

I giggled and read a bit more, coming to a point where Stan quotes a writer: "I read a something in a magazine I'll never forget. It was a quotation from a writer whose name I can't recall. Maybe it was someone named Swift. (Bets on whether Stan remembers correctly or not?) He said, 'You can't reason a person out of a position he hasn't been reasoned into.' Check, but away we reason—to stone walls. What got my cork was Elsie's refusal to be ruffled any more than she could be budged. All my rantings, which finally become blasphemous, were met with the same meek longsuffering; she was witnessing for the truth while men reviled her. Not being able to get a rise out of her was like the frustration of trying to slam a door with one of them suction stops on it—which was the case with the screen door I tried to huff out of. It just sprang back at me with a Christian huff." (page 11) Ah. Humor and the occasional well-expressed truth. I was hooked.

Not unexpectedly, I reacted differently to the book on this my third (fourth?) time through. The sections I found hysterical the first time now produced smiles. But the element of surprise was obviously gone. I do think I appreciated deVries' artistry more this time. The book is divided into three parts, the first narrated by Stan, the second Stan's son, Tom, and the third Stan again. In each section I was amazed at how well deVries steps into each voice. The language used by each does a wonderful job of moving the story and making each character unique.

Let's look at specifics.

1) Tom becomes president of the college where he teaches through a hodgepodge of unexpected events and finds that most of his time is spent writing letters. "I continued (to be?) very conscious of the signature I put to these letters, developing at last one that seemed to me a happy blend of feeling and intellect, imagination and discipline. What do we strive for but these? My t-bars were streaks of bird flight, high above the main body of the letter, which itself, however, indicated both feet on the ground." (page 249) Yes, Tom is indeed a character who would fixate on such things.

2) Tom talks about three fellow professors. "All Harvard alumni, they were known as the Harvard Group, or, by me at least, the Three Little Prigs." (page 251) Got it on the second skim.

3) New word: honyock—a rustic oaf.

4) At the end Stan sums it all up. "If you want my final opinion of the mystery of life and all that, I can give it to you in a nutshell. The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." (pages 306-307) Other books have arrived at similar conclusions. Which is it—I can never remember—42 or 24?

Oh, Martha - honyock! That's an old Czech word, or more likely Bohemian. My grandfather used to aim it at us whenever we got a bit out of hand.

I do recall being told (along with sundry cousins) to "quit that honyockin' around."

Hadn't thought of that in quite some time!

About six months ago Kathy brought me two Ed McBain books. I've now finished the first one, . It wasn't part of the 87th precinct series, but it was still good. Mostly.

1) "… and a man holding a pair of dice in his hand is—for the moment, at least—in control of his own destiny." (page 52) Interesting to think about. And on the flip side, there are those who live their lives believing always that they hold a pair of dice in their hands. Okay. They can be interesting, too.

2) Downtown has one particularly interesting plot choice. The protagonist, Michael J. Barnes—a Florida orange-grower who is in NYC on business—runs into tons of trouble. Each time he's really in trouble, he flashes back to an incident in Vietnam, the explanation of which comes at Michael's most frightening NY moment. Both plot lines build gradually, and the timed crises work well—even if it's pretty obvious what the one in Vietnam will be.

3) And once Michael relives that horrible moment, he's thinking "…because no cause on earth was worth doing something as terrible as that but behind him Charlie kept saying it was okay Yank no need to worry Yank nobody's gonna hurt you Yank. (page 272) I like stream of consciousness in small doses. The above is about right. Novels by James Joyce contain far too much.

4) In McBain's books I always sense the author is having fun. One character, never appearing until close to the book's end, is named Mama. Michael and his cohorts are always guessing what she is like. Plump and jolly is the consensus. It's a good surprise when Mama urns out to be a drug-selling Spanish man with a huge moustache. His actual name is Mario Mateo. You can figure out Mama from that.

5) And then, IMHO, McBain comes close to ruining the whole book with the last sentence. A subplot is that Michael is to fly from NY to Boston to spend the rest of Christmas with his mother. They've had an odd relationship. When Michael left for Vietnam, she donated his clothes to charity, figuring he'd never come home. After he did, she was distant. At the very end of the book he calls his mother to tell her, "I'm alive again." Oh, barf!

Summing up, Downtown's an okay book—when it's not compared to any in the 87th precinct.

The second Ed McBain book Kathy's brought by was The McBain Brief, a collection of short stories. Two were okay. The rest? Absolutely wonderful—for a variety of reasons. The most amazing thing about this book, IMHO, was the number of different voices McBain uses. Whether a story was told in the first person or third person through a POV character, each voice was unique and perfectly suited to the particular story. And there were other things:

1) Speaking of writing, in a story where three bozos are making a porn flick, the narrator compliments the writer of the script. "Solly didn't do what a lot of scriptwriters do, he didn't clutter up the page with a whole lot of unnecessary directions. A sample of his writing from one of the early scenes will explain to you what I mean.
34. THE LOFT—INT—NIGHT
The Girl is becoming acquainted with the Leading Man.
They do sexual intercourse together." (page 31)
And there you have it: two distinctly different voices, each conveying, IMHO, information about each character.

2) In one story McBain is having a character tell another man about a crime and occasionally, with only a few words, indicates how the listener is reacting and, at the same time, reveals something about the speaker. "… I hope you understand that. John, you listening to me, or what? I can't tell if you're listening when you got your eyes closed like that. (page 111)

3) Occasionally, though, McCain makes a statement, in whatever voice, that I have to question. "There is not a bank in the entire United States that will ask you for identification when you are opening an account." (page 115) Book was published in 1982; magazine where the story appeared would have been earlier. Last bank account I opened was in the 1970s, and I had to show ID. Is AL the only state where ID is required to open an account? Even if that's true, McCain is still wrong.

4) Two policemen are staking out a church. One of them recalls, "We didn't talk much. There is something about a church of any denomination that makes a man think rather than talk." (page 159) Interesting. True?

5) On page 159 a narrator refers to San Francisco as Frisco. When I lived in Marin Country as a kid, "Frisco" was considered vulgar. Is it still? Whatever. I can just mark it up as another clue to character.

As with most McCain books I've read, The McCain Brief is well worth reading. IMHO.