Katherine Nabity's Blog, page 207
June 30, 2014
Magic Monday Reviews ~ Houdini: A Life Worth Reading & Vera Van Slyke stories
I like Mondays. On Monday, I am refreshed from the weekend and exhilarated by the possibilities of the week ahead. I also like magic. I like its history, its intersection with technology, and its crafty use of human nature. I figured I’d combine the two and make a Monday feature that is truly me: a little bit of magic and a look at the week ahead.
Houdini: A Life Worth Reading by Higher Read
Houdini was a man of magic and mystery. He was also a pilot, an author, an actor, and a rabid opponent of the Spiritualist movement. He was impatient of charlatans and imitators and loving to his family. He had an impressive ego. If any of these facts are new to you, then Houdini: A Life Worth Reading is the perfect primer on the man who was, by the end of his life, known only as Houdini. (via Goodreads)
I picked this up as a freebie from Amazon back in March. I don’t know what’s up with Higher Read as an “author,” but this short biography was well written and included chapter overviews and study questions. If, you know, you find Houdini to be an important enough guy to study. (Higher Read also has books on Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson.) In fact, I was pretty impressed with how neutral the biography is. It makes no bones about Houdini’s greatness as a showman and publicist or his massive ego. If I learned anything from this Houdini bio, it was that Houdini was sued more often than I had thought!
Publisher: Higher Read, LLC
Publication date: January 30th 2014
Genre: Biography
“The Minister’s Unveiling” & “The Ghost of Banquo’s Ghost” by Tim Prasil
Tim Prasil’s Help for the Haunted stories are based on the manuscripts left to him by his great-grandaunt. The stories involve his great-grandaunt, Lucille, and her friendship with Vera Van Slyke, a journalist and occult detective in the early 1900s. Vera investigates hauntings and tries to put ghosts to rest. She’s smart, if occasionally absent-minded about frivolous details like personal names, and makes no apologies for it. Lucille, a debunked spirit medium, likes adventure a little more than a proper lady should and is game to help Vera in her investigations. There a great Holmesian/Watsonian(?) duo. The stories are fun with an appealing mixture of skepticism and the supernatural. Also it’s nice to see two women *doing things* in fiction. Both of these stories are currently free on Tim Prasil’s website, but only for a little while longer as he offers new stories. The third story “Skittering Holes” was released over the weekend!
Publisher: To be published later in the year in novel form from Emby Press
Genre: Ghost mysteries.
June 28, 2014
Deal Me In, Week 26 ~ “TechnoMagic”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“TechnoMagic” by Kevin J Anderson
Card picked: King of Hearts
From: David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination
Review:
Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
(I would have been disappointed if no one had used this as the basis for a story in a genre anthology about magic.)
Taurindo is not originally from Las Vegas. He is, in fact, a xenosociologist stranded on Earth for twenty-seven years until a rescue mission arrives. What does an alien with “sufficiently advanced technology” do in the meantime? He becomes the Great Taurindo, the most popular magician on the Las Vegas Strip. The beauty of this tale is that Taurindo himself doesn’t understand the gizmo he uses to perform his tricks.
The machine was far beyond my level of understanding and education… The palm-sized gizmo worked, and that’s all I needed to know…
How much of our day-to-day is reliant on “gizmos” that might as well be magical for all our understanding of them?
This was short, completely enjoyable story.
About the Author: If you’re familiar with genre media tie-ins, you’ve probably heard of Kevin J. Anderson. He’s written dozens of novelizations and media tie-ins as well as his own original novels. Currently, he’s probably best known for expanding the Dune universe with Frank Herbert’s son, Brian.
Is This Your Card?
A pretty long, but very entertaining set by Christian Cagigal, who combines storytelling with card sleights. The King of Hearts makes his appearance during the second story.
June 27, 2014
Write On Review-a-Thon {5}
The Write On review-a-thon is a monthly event created and hosted by Brianna at The Book Vixen. It’s 2 days dedicated to getting reviews done, whether you have one review to write or 30+. This edition of the review-a-thon takes place all day Friday, June 27th and Saturday, June 28th. Let’s get those reviews done!
I probably won’t get to reviews until Saturday because I really need to do some writing writing today.
Tim Prasil’s first two Vera Van Slyke stories & Houdini: A Life Worth Reading by Higher Read for #COYER.
Penn & Teller’s How to Play in Traffic
The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert, which I should finish shortly.
Deal Me In post.
What Else in June post.
The Miracle Mongers, an Exposé by Harry Houdini, if I finish it.
June 24, 2014
Review ~ The Quick
This book was provided to me by Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The Quick by Lauren Owen
London, 1892: James Norbury, a shy would-be poet newly down from Oxford, finds lodging with a charming young aristocrat. Through this new friendship, he is introduced to the drawing-rooms of high society, and finds love in an unexpected quarter. Then, suddenly, he vanishes without a trace. Unnerved, his sister, Charlotte, sets out from their crumbling country estate determined to find him. In the sinister, labyrinthine city that greets her, she uncovers a secret world at the margins populated by unforgettable characters: a female rope walker turned vigilante, a street urchin with a deadly secret, and the chilling “Doctor Knife.” But the answer to her brother’s disappearance ultimately lies within the doors of one of the country’s preeminent and mysterious institutions: The Aegolius Club, whose members include the most ambitious, and most dangerous, men in England. (via Goodreads)
I did not finish this book, stopping at about the 33% mark.
Reading that blurb, I am led to believe that I’m going to go along with Charlotte as she unravels the mystery of her brother’s disappearance. In the first 20% of this book, we grow up with Charlotte and James. They’re good kids, though a little strange due to growing up in seclusion in rural England. Shy James goes away to school, while Charlotte stays to take care of things. Upon graduating, James, now a young man, sets up in London. He even falls in love. Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded spending a whole novel living with James in happy domesticity in London. Frankly, the set up is perfect. I care about James. I care about Charlotte.
Then, The Quick utterly changes tone. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with doing bad things to good characters. We expect something untoward to happen to James. It’s there in the blurb. What I expect next is that smart, but unsavvy, Charlotte is going to solve the mystery while being in a lot of danger. I’m led to believe that my entrance into this mystery is Charlotte. We’re going to go together and uncover clues. I know a few mysterious things that Charlotte doesn’t but she’ll catch up.
But, the flow of information is way off in this novel. Owen tells us what’s going on in London. Further, we have to endure a 25 year history of what has occurred. I don’t have a problem with what the novel’s “twist” is. What I don’t understand is why I’m being told this, rather blandly, instead of finding it out within the tension of the mystery I’m expecting.
I really enjoyed the first ~20% of this book. I read that in one sitting. And then spent the next five days grinding through the next ~10%.
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: June 17th 2014
Genre: Horror
Why did I choose to read this book? Combination of cover and blurb made it sound interesting.
June 23, 2014
Magic Monday ~ Illusions and Once Upon a Time
I like Mondays. On Monday, I am refreshed from the weekend and exhilarated by the possibilities of the week ahead. I also like magic. I like its history, its intersection with technology, and its crafty use of human nature. I figured I’d combine the two and make a Monday feature that is truly me: a little bit of magic and a look at the week ahead.
Just a quick semi-magic post while I’m still on vacation. While in San Diego, I visited the ILLUSION exhibit at the Reuben H. Fleet Center:
My favorite was definitely the bugs that would “crawl” from their monitor. In related optical illusion news, OK Go released a new video, an epicly done in one-shot:
Once Upon a Time Challenge
Saturday was the end of Carl’s Once Upon a Time Challenge. I dove in with, as usual, an overly ambitious plan. I had some notion of investigating the intersection between fable and magician’s biographies, which is probably going to be an on-going project for me. I have a lot of on-going projects. ;) In the end, I read three short novels and a few short stories and had a lovely spring!
June 21, 2014
#COYER Summer Vacation
Hosted by Michelle @ Because Reading & Berls @ Fantasy is More Fun
You must create a sign-up post anytime between now and August 15th -on blog, goodreads, fb, google+, etc. Yes, that means you can sign up until August 15th! But don’t wait, you’ll miss most of the fun!
You must link the sign-up post below (don’t link to your blog, link to the sign-up post).
You must post your review books somewhere & link the reviews to the review linky to be eligible for one of the grand prize giveaways.
Have Fun!
A couple of months back, I added the contents of my ereader to Goodreads. It increased my owned-but-not-read number by about 25%. I haven’t participated in COYER before, but now seems to be the perfect time to give it a go!
I have a lot of shorter works that I’ll post together in threes and fours. Here are a few books I plan on getting to:
Deal Me In, Week 25 ~ “The Sepia Postcard”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“The Sepia Postcard” by Steven Millhauser
Card picked: Four of Diamonds
From: The Barnum Museum
Review:
Sometimes, I rather adore Steven Millhauser with his dreamy stream-of-detail “narratives.” Sometimes, not so much. Maybe I only really like his stories when they cross paths with the things I have a particular love for, like magicians and semi-fantastical museums. (I’m looking forward to a story entitled “The Invention of Robert Herendeen.”) Or maybe I just need to read him when my situation is more concrete and less dreamy than a Millhauser story.
Our narrator, in the midst of having problems with his significant other, retreats to a sea-side town named Broome. It’s the off-season and rainy. Bored, he visits Broome’s shops and, at Plumshaw’s Rare Books, buys the titular sepia postcard. The scene in the postcard seems to subtly change in alarming ways each time our narrator looks at it. Having satisfied his need to “get away,” our narrator leaves Broome. “The Sepia Postcard” is an okay story, but is very light on plot and a little muddled in timeline. The town of Broome is very much like any little touristy town you might find yourself in, and the events played out in the postcard isn’t very surprising. As a story, it’s just sort of there.
Is This Your Card?
One of the few David Copperfield clips I have and it’s for a non-Copperfield-anthology story!
The music in the background is from the Young Sherlock Holmes soundtrack, composed by Bruce Broughton.
June 17, 2014
Review ~ The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what. (via Goodreads)
Choosing this book was a synergy between The Estella Project and Once Upon a Time. Neil Gaiman has a great ear for fairy tales and I’ve been eying this one for a while.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane was a nice juxtaposition with The Thief of Always by Clive Barker, which I read earlier in the year for Once Upon a Time. Both Gaiman and Barker are British authors. Both stories have a boy and a mystical girl. Both boys go on a journey and come back to a very changed world.
There are some big differences as well. Gaiman’s story is much quieter with a stronger feminine aspect. The Hempstock women are the lynchpin of this tale. This is also a tale set in retrospect. Our middle-aged narrator is re-remembering these events. For me, this gives Gaiman’s tale more poignancy. Not only is the boy struggling to find out who he is, the classic purview of a YA tale, but the man is reflecting on how be came to be who he is. The over-arching mysticism of the world-building is well and good, but the sublimity of remembering and forgetting is what will stay with me. “You drove to the end of the lane and came here, like you always do,” Mrs. Hempstock tells the narrator, who doesn’t remember visiting the Hempstocks other than when he was a kid. Strangely, that line hit me hard. How many things do we do over and over, things that *mean* something in the moment, that we forget about so easily? That there is a middle-aged* question.
*Not to imply that there’s any thing wrong with this being a “YA” book, if you want to categorize it as such. On Goodreads, the categorization is pretty up in the air. But on the cusp of 40, I currently don’t have much interest in the plight of young people. If I’m reading something “YA,” I need some aspect that will give me and my graying hair a way into the story.
Publisher: William Morrow Books
Publication date: June 18th 2013
Genre: Fantasy, Fairy Tale
June 16, 2014
Magic Monday ~ On Secrets
I like Mondays. On Monday, I am refreshed from the weekend and exhilarated by the possibilities of the week ahead. I also like magic. I like its history, its intersection with technology, and its crafty use of human nature. I figured I’d combine the two and make a Monday feature that is truly me: a little bit of magic and a look at the week ahead.
Last week I took a trip to the Tempe Public Library. I had a list of fiction I wanted (I’ll get to that later), but I also paid a visit to the 793.8 shelves: Indoor games and amusements – Magic and related activities. Along with The Illustrated History of Magic, I picked up a slim volume called All the Secrets of Magic Revealed by Herbert Becker (aka, The Great Kardeen). Being only 30 secrets of magic and not all of them, I read most of it at the library over my espresso mocha and lemon cake.
Joseffy & Balsamo in the 1940s. (photo: The Sphinx, Vol. 45 No. 4. June 10, 1946)
Also this past week, I came across an old discussion at alt.magic about professional magazines and exposures. Of particular interest to me, the subject was Joseffy and Magic magazine’s article on Balsamo the Living Skull. Obviously, this once again led me to mull over the ethics of “secrets.”
It was well-known that toward the end of his life Joseffy sought a successor to take over the performance of Balsamo. Failing that, he wanted Balsamo destroyed. In reality, the skull was acquired by Joseffy’s friend, lawyer Eugene Bernstein, then passed on to Bernstein’s son Stuart, and eventually bought by mechanist John Gaughan in the 1990s. Gaughan refurbished Balsamo and Max Maven was able to perform with the temperamental skull in 1997. Jim Steinmeyer’s article in Magic about Joseffy and the events leading to Max Maven’s performance included a reveal of the act.
The question posed in the forum thread: Was this all a betrayal of Joseffy’s wishes? Or is this business as usual, how knowledge is passed down within the profession? Is this any different than FOX’s rather dreadful TV show with the masked magician exposing tricks?* Magic is a periodical aimed at those in the industry, but it can be had by anyone. I own the issue myself. I also wonder, if Balsamo had been destroyed, what would Joseffy’s legacy be?
On a personal and self-serving level, I found the secret to Balsamo to be a thing of beauty and something quite wonderful. As a writer, it told me more about Joseffy than any article I had read. I’d like to think that, if Joseffy had known Gaughan, Maven, and Steinmeyer, he might have found magicians worthy of Balsamo.
* To be honest, I don’t find that show’s exposé of secrets to be objectionable. What I dislike is how utterly boring it is. There can be beauty and narrative in how secrets are told, which is the gaping chasm of difference between Magic and Breaking the Magician’s Code.
What Am I Reading?I’m terribly fickle. I checked out The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert, Vaclav and Lena by Haley Tanner, and Nevermore by William Hjortsberg. I’ve been looking forward to The Swan Gondola for a while now. So far, so good. Since we’re heading to San Diego this week, I’ve already read my Deal Me In story, “The Sepia Postcard” by Steven Millhauser. That post will go up on Saturday.
What Am I Writing?
Still haven’t gotten into a good fiction-writing groove. I’m considering doing all my blog-writing on weekends to leave more energy for work-writing during the week. In addition to In Need of Luck, I’m also mulling a couple of short fiction projects: a “fan fiction” piece based on Eric’s PHYSIC and a story within the Lovecraft mythos. But this week, I’m mostly going to be on vacation!
So, what are you reading? How do you feel about magic and secrets?
June 14, 2014
Deal Me In, Week 24 ~ “The Purloined Letter”
Hosted by Jay @ Bibliophilopolis
“The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe
Card picked: Nine of Spades – A Wild Card
From: Read online at http://www.eapoe.org/works/harrison/jah06t03.htm
Review:
I had considered reading Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” for this card, but throughout this week and last, Poe was in the air. Aside from my own reading of “The Murder of Marie Roget” last week, Jay reviewed Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd (which sounds promising) and I’ve encountered several reviews of Mrs. Poe which is currently on blog tour (a book I did not care for). I decided instead to read the last of Poe’s trio of C. Auguste Dupin stories, mainly because I couldn’t remember if I had read it or not.
Devoid of murders and the macabre, “The Purloined Letter” could easily be the template for numerous Sherlock Holmes stories. The action: The Prefect of Police, G, comes to Dupin’s drawing room with a problem. A lady of standing has had an indelicate letter stolen and is being blackmailed. The Paris police know who the thief is and have discretely and thoroughly searched Minister D’s apartments. Well, I’m not sure how discretely considering the cops have gone through all of the man’s books, page by page, and examined the furniture and floor with “microscopes” to make sure they haven’t been tampered with. They’ve even robbed/frisked Minister D while undercover. They haven’t found the letter. G asks Dupin what he should do. Dupin tells him to search again. A month passes off-screen. G still hasn’t found the letter and offers a large reward for it. Dupin coolly tells him to write a check and hands G the letter. After the Prefect leaves, Dupin tells his befuddled friend, our narrator, how he found the letter.
This story doesn’t have the wow factor of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but is less dry than “Marie Roget.” There’s a few bits that struck me as particularly amusing:
G is described as having
a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”
Describing Minister D:
“Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he’s a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.”
“True,” said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, “although I have been guilty of certain doggrel myself.”
Which is pretty funny considering Poe’s reputation as a poet.
Is This Your Card?
The Nine of Spades makes an appearance early in this clip. Although the lighting is not great, it’s worth watching to the end.
