Kam

As children, we grow up with stories of mythical and folkloric creatures. Oftentimes, these monsters exist in fairytales: the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, for instance, or the tragic mermaid princess in The Little Mermaid, or the dragon that always seems to be getting into trouble for hoarding gold and/or stealing a princess and sticking her in a tower. Many more of us grow up with a list that goes beyond the standards of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen - things like the kapre and tikbalang, which populate the stories told to Filipino children (if they're lucky enough to have a grandparent, parent, and/or nanny who is familiar with these stories and is willing to tell them). When we go to school, we learn about other creatures: the monsters of ancient Greek myth, in particular, like the hydra and the pegasus. Of course, there are television shows and movies and video games, all with their own takes and variations on the monsters children read about - and this fosters a lifelong fascination in them, whether we are aware of it or not.

Explaining why people are fascinated with mythical creatures would take an entire book (likely more), but for my part, it's mostly to do with the fact that they could have been alive at all - a holdover, I suppose, from when I was a child and believed they were actually real. I know better, of course, and after reading quite a bit of science and being friends with scientists I know how impossible a lot of these creatures are, but that still doesn't make them any less fascinating. I still joke that my ideal pet would be a dragon, after all - the velociraptor is second-best, and only because it's entirely possible for scientists to eventually come up with one (I suggest taking a look at Jack Horner's How to Build a Dinosaur for how this might happen).

Of course, there are now a lot of books out there that play with the idea of these creatures being alive in the first place, existing as if they were real all along, except invisible or hidden from most human eyes (like the creatures in the Harry Potter novels, which are deliberately kept hidden by the wizarding community from Muggles in order to protect the secrecy of the magical community). But there are not many books that play with the idea of creating these creatures and bringing them into a world where they did not exist in the first place. It plays with the question: if one could create such creatures, if one could make them real, what would it be like? What would it take to make them? And, more importantly, what are the consequences of doing such?

It is these questions that are explored in The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black by E.B. Hudspeth. The title tells the reader everything he or she needs to know about this novel, which is split into two parts: the first is the biography of the aforementioned Dr. Spencer Black, and the second is the “lost work,” which consists of images a la 19th-century scientific illustrations of the experiments Black carries out throughout the course of the first half.

The very best part of this novel is, of course, the artwork. Since I am interested in both science and art, scientific illustration draws me in like nothing else. Indeed, it was seeing samples of Hudspeth's artwork for the book that prompted me to acquire it in the first place. While I cannot attest to how scientifically accurate the illustrations are, I will say that they are exquisite to look at. Of course, those who aren't comfortable with looking at bare bones and musculature may find the images discomfiting, but I, for my part, am ridiculously pleased that Hudspeth did not stop at just the skeletons. Nothing about scientific illustration, much less scientific illustration portraying the anatomy of a mythical creature, is easy, but it's one thing to just show a skeleton, and another thing entirely to cover it in musculature in such a manner as to look somewhat-logical. The set of illustrations for the mermaid and the harpy are my favorites, partly because they are the most complete of the set, including not just the skeleton and musculature but also internal organs and “species variations,” and partly because they are probably the most elegant in their composition.

While I really like the artwork, and enjoy looking at it for the pleasure of looking, the same can't quite be said of the biographical part of the book. The story of Dr. Spencer Black's life begins with a great deal of promise, and follows a trajectory similar to the “mad scientist” types present in a lot of horror fiction, albeit hewing more closely to the model provided by Marry Shelley in Frankenstein than to later models. That Black hews closer to Frankenstein is a good thing: I am rather tired of the all-out crazy, completely amoral scientist types who unleash some horror upon the world “in the name of science.” That Black is driven by reasons other than just the pure pursuit of knowledge, and later comes to regret what he has done, is rather refreshing.

While the above is well and good, the novel still feels too thin: too little story for all the promise it has. The best horror writers are capable of leaving a lot of things to the reader's imaginations, which is good because the most frightening things are those that the mind conjures up on its own. However, there is also such a thing as providing too little information - and this is where the first half of the novel kind of sinks. A little more character development and plot would have gone a long way towards making this an intriguing novel - maybe not the kind to leave me sleepless, but certainly the kind to make me contemplate the depths of depravity a person is capable of descending to, if given the right reasons.

Overall, The Resurrectionist is not a bad read, but it isn't a totally satisfactory one, either. The reader will certainly take pleasure in Hudspeth's beautiful illustrations, but the same might not be the case for the fictional biography of his titular character. While it's true that the story has massive amounts of potential, resonating as it does with Frankenstein, it does not quite get there because there is far too much left unsaid. Leaving certain gaps to be filled up by the readers' imaginations is one thing; leaving too much unexplained is another thing entirely. Had the biography been expanded just a little bit more - not very much, maybe some five to ten pages more of character development would have sufficed - then this could have been a far more complete story. As it stands, I find myself trying to understand what is really going on in Dr. Black's head as his life spins out of control, and thinking that perhaps, there are deeper reasons for the way events play out - though I never do find them, which is rather disappointing.

I like to think that I???m not afraid of the dark. I prefer to sleep in total darkness, and if I can???t have that (and I really can???t, as my bedroom doesn???t have blackout curtains), I make-do with a blindfold over my eyes to simulate it as best as I can. Throw in some white noise (I prefer the sound of rain, but I???m happy with the sound of a television with the volume turned down low), a cold room, blankets, and my favourite pillows, and that is, in essence, my perfect idea of going to bed.

But I also like experiencing horror in the dark - and by ???horror???, I mean horror novels. I find that, while horror movies and video games can scare the bejeezus out of me in broad daylight, novels don???t seem to do that. However, novels do tend to linger with me, whereas the fear generated by horror movies and video games lasts only as long as the movie does, or as long as I choose to play the game. This means that, when I judge a horror novel???s ???scare factor???, I tend to base it on whether or not it scared me enough at night to force me to read it in broad daylight, followed by whether or not it kept me scared for a period of time after I finished the novel itself. If a novel can scare me enough to read it only in broad daylight, and linger in my mind for some days afterwards, then it is, most definitely, a very good horror novel.

This year, the only novel that has managed to do that was Jeff VanderMeer???s Annihilation, the first book in his Southern Reach Trilogy. It was almost hot on the heels of the last novel of the trilogy - and, perhaps in the spirit of the approaching Halloween weekend - that I chose to pick up Grady Hendrix???s Horrorst??r.

The story starts out simply enough: something strange is going on at the Orsk store in Cuyahoga, Ohio. Employees come in during the day to find merchandise damaged or destroyed, but nothing???s showing up on the security cameras to indicate that there???s anything unusual going on. In order to get to the bottom of it, employees Amy and Ruth Anne, along with their manager, Basil, stay behind to put a stop to everything once and for all. Unfortunately, it turns out the problem runs much, much deeper than some people pulling a prank, and what starts out as a rather irregular investigation turns into something much, much more horrific and deadly.

What drew me to Horrorst??r, at first, was the concept: a haunted house-esque story, but set in an IKEA clone. It doesn???t take much imagining to see how creepy big-box stores can look late at night - indeed, anyplace that looks welcoming and familiar by day generally tends to look eerie once the lights are off and the doors are locked - so I thought Hendrix was actually on to something. In fact, I rather wondered why no one before Hendrix had thought to take the same concept and play with it, considering how much potential the idea has. (Of course it???s possible that someone already has, and I just haven???t come across it yet.) I also liked the layout, which presented the novel as a catalog for the big-box store in the novel.

At first, the whole thing was rather charming, with some hints of satire in the form of its characters and the work environment as a whole. The character Amy, in particular, is used to point out the hidden truths about what it???s like to work in retail in a big-box store, as well as the kind of culture and educational and economic climate that forces people to work at such a job in the first place, even if they don???t want to. I liked these insights, especially since I generally like Amy???s wit and have some sympathy for her, as well.

However, towards the middle of the story, when the action really gets going and the satire of the first half of the novel veers wholly into horror, something gets lost along the way. I suppose I should have expected it, given that this is supposed to be a horror novel, after all, but I rather missed the satire of the first half, found myself wishing that it had gone on just a touch longer.

But I suppose I say that only because the horror part of the novel isn???t all that horrific - or at least, to me, it isn???t. I found this rather surprising, as I really, really like the idea of authors who play around with a specific environment, who can twist it around and around and make it the kind of creepy that lingers for days and days and can potentially shadow me in my dreams. Mark Danielewksi managed to do it in House of Leaves, playing around with the concept of the never-ending labyrinth in a house that was bigger on the inside that it was on the outside - a concept that had me looking behind furniture to make sure that there weren???t any doors that led to nowhere lurking behind them. VanderMeer also managed to do that in the Southern Reach Trilogy, but to greatest effect in Annihilation, turning the wild spaces of Area X into the key element behind his Lovecraftian nightmare of a series.

I was fully expecting Hendrix to do the same thing - in fact, the idea was all but served to the reader on a silver platter in the first few pages of the novel, with the maze-like map of the Orsk showroom, and then in the first third of the novel with several discussions about how architecture and layout can produce certain psychological effects. This was reinforced in the middle third, when the other characters begin to experience disorientation and the feeling that the rooms are actually changing in order to confuse them further, as if the structure itself is fighting against them.

That is, pretty much, the sort of thing I was expecting to find throughout the rest of the novel: some kind of explanation would be given, of course, perhaps a nice throwback to the way such companies, economic conditions, and so forth can ???eat??? people and turn them into nothing more than cogs in the system. And that is, in a way, what the reader gets: the whole storyline about the prison and the panopticon and the sadistic warden can indeed fit into that scheme. There was even a reference to ???Arbeit macht frei???, the motto above the entrance gate to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, that I thought was an especially nice touch, enhancing the sense of fear to razor sharpness when one is aware of the history of Dachau and what it stood for during the time it was in operation. But for all that the above would have been a spectacular thing to read about, and may have even deterred me from visiting the local furniture store for a good long while, I didn???t particularly care for how they were all used. I was hoping for something more subtle - something flitting at the edges of the characters??? vision, for instance, even as they disappeared or were found in horrific situations as the store ate them up one by one - but I wasn???t really expecting the warden and his ghostly victims to really make an appearance at all. I was expecting the building itself to do most of the ???heavy lifting???, in terms of the scares, especially because of that labyrinthine layout that gave me chills just looking at it. I would have enjoyed it more if the area???s history had been used more lightly, functioning as a chill in the foundations, so to speak, instead of being placed front and centre as it was in the novel. As a result, the whole thing wound up feeling like it should be something I would prefer to watch, or play, as opposed to simply read. The second half of the novel would work quite well as a movie, given the visuals involved, though perhaps some viewers might see it and think ???Saw in IKEA??? which would probably be off-putting for some. However, I think it would make a spectacular horror video game; I imagine that a great many people would enjoy playing it, especially if they are given no weapons and must either run, hide in the furniture, or die. If the developers could make it that the layout changed subtly from time to time, the same way the showroom???s layout seemed to change in the novel, then that would be even better.

But in doing so, I would be speaking of a hypothetical video game, not a novel - and I think that if I look at a story, and wished it existed in another format as opposed to the one I was currently experiencing it in, then there must be something wrong with the way the story is told to make it feel unsuited to its current medium. That, unfortunately, seems to be the case with this novel.

I did appreciate the ending, however. I like it that Amy and Basil didn???t give up on their friends, only to have the horror of what they left behind follow them elsewhere (as is so often the case in other horror novels, and movies, for that matter). I liked that they were willing to endure the horrors they'd escaped, if only because they felt responsible for those they'd left behind. It's a nice touch of humanity that I didn't expect (considering how the trope is usually to just leave them there and move on with one's life), but I appreciated nevertheless.

Overall, Horrorst??r is a potentially interesting and terrifying novel: the layout and concept are intriguing, and there is so much there that could have been used to ensure that people who read it don???t feel tempted to visit an IKEA or similar establishment anytime soon - or at least, to do so in broad daylight and with company. But while the thread of satire that runs through the novel is evident in the first part of the book, and runs throughout the rest of it before reemerging in the last few chapters, the horror aspect of it doesn???t feel very satisfying, at least to me. That part of the story feels like it would do better as a video game, or maybe a movie, but as a novel, I didn???t find it particularly frightening, even while reading it in ideal conditions (late at night while alone). If the same story and been presented as a video game, I think I would have found it much, much more fun. In fact, I think the author should consider taking this book and its concept to a video game developer and see about that; it would be a thoroughly enjoyable thing.

As a novel, however, I think it could have been more subtle, with fear being generated without once showing the ???monster??? at all except in brief glimpses. The mind, after all, does a fine job of escalating terror on its own with just a few nudges and hints - mine, in particular, appears to do a spectacular job of scaring me just fine even without the help of graphic visuals to lead the way. So I would have appreciated a little more subtlety, fewer visuals and more of the other senses - sound, perhaps, or smell, or even just describing the dizzying, sickening feeling of being utterly lost in a space one should know like the back of one???s hand. That???s scary enough, I think, without the need for everything else.

But I suppose others will enjoy the more overt horror, and if so, they will probably enjoy Hendrix???s different take on the haunted house - and maybe stay away from IKEA for a while yet.

I think it's safe to say that the phenomenon that is Harry Potter is practically inescapable, especially for people coming from a certain generation. I remember the first time I encountered the series: I was around fourteen or so, and an uncle had brought home the first three books for me to read. At the time, no one in the Philippines knew what Harry Potter was, and though I fell in love with Harry and Hogwarts and all the rest, there wasn't anyone I could really talk to about it - until finally, the phenomenon reached our shores, and soon, pretty much everyone was talking about it, too.

Harry Potter did much to revitalize the reading habit, especially amongst young adults - and as a result, threw wide open the floodgates that would pave the way for things like Twilight and, in essence the enormous industry of young-adult fiction. All of a sudden what was once a tiny section of a bookstore suddenly became a marketing goldmine, and pretty much everybody has cashed in.

They say that imitation is the best form of flattery, and I suppose in some ways the fact that a large number of Harry Potter-type variants that emerged in the few years after it became a huge hit (but before Twilight) certainly testify to that. But the problem with a lot of literature is that, while it's all right to follow in the footsteps of a trailblazer by taking elements from that trailblazer and using it in one's own work, total and utter imitation does not get one very far at all. After all, there are only so many ways one can take the idea of a secret wizarding school without having other readers look at it askance as a Harry Potter ripoff.

These were my fears when I was recommended Lev Grossman's The Magicians by a colleague at the department. It had been about a good year or so since I last finished rereading the series, and I really was rather convinced that no writer could take the wizarding school concept without me thinking of Harry Potter right from the get-go. But the one recommending The Magicians to me also happens to be a notable Harry Potter scholar, and (naturally) a fan, so I thought, well, if she thinks it's not so bad, I suppose I could do worse than read it.

I am now rather glad I took the time to read it, even if I didn't pick it up at the precise moment it was recommended to me. In fact, the delay was a good thing, as it allowed me to cleanse my mind of all possible Harry Potter prejudice and see the novel for what it is. After all, the novel starts in more or less the same way as Harry Potter: Quentin Coldwater has special powers, and he is selected to attend a secret magic school hidden somewhere in upstate New York. There he makes friends, enemies, and meets a villain he must defeat.

Now, when this was recommended to me, I was told that it was a “Harry Potter on vodka and crack,” and I will admit that I was rather leery of this. I felt that any attempts to give Harry Potter an “edge” was something better left to fan fiction. Fortunately, Grossman is a good-enough writer that, while it's true that my colleague's comparison point to Rowling's series, with the addition of drugs and alcohol, was appropriate, I think she also referenced, in that one statement, the “realness” of the story.

Now, there is no denying that there is a rather fairytale-ish quality to Harry Potter: I think many readers will admit (some freely) that they have wished they could escape to Hogwarts, escape into this parallel universe because the real world is just too boring or too dangerous or just makes them plain unhappy. In the magical world, the reader might, just as Harry Potter did, find acceptance and purpose. Sure, he nearly gets killed on his first year, and it's certainly no fun having a Dark Lord on one's tail, but those are just the attendant hazards of entering a magical world. Everything else - spellcasting and Quidditch and friends and magic - makes up for it.

In many ways, these same sentiments are mirrored by the main character of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater. He wishes to escape his mundane, boring, complicated world, initially by desiring to go to the land of Fillory (a land described in a series of Narnia-esque novels he read as a child), and then later on by going to Brakebills (the magic school hidden in upstate New York) and learning magic. For a while, everything seems to go well for him: he learns a lot of magic at the school, and gets rather good at quite a bit of it. He even manages to get himself a girlfriend. But then he realizes that what he has is really actually rather hollow, that he is unhappy with what he has. But a discovery by an old school friend (of a sort) then leads him to his wildest dreams: to enter Fillory, and there go on an adventure like none other.

At this point, the reader expects Quentin and his friends to go a-questing to save Fillory, and they do - just not in the way Lewis or even Tolkien portrayed it. In fact, a lot of what's portrayed in the book, particularly when referenced to Narnia and Harry Potter, just doesn't seem quite right. And that “something wrong” can be summarized in one word: reality.

What Grossman has accomplished here is take all the idealism of the Narnia books and Harry Potter books and rip it out of the fabric of the stories. The magical world, then, is no longer a place where one goes to escape, because it's pretty much like the real world, except maybe far, far more dangerous precisely because it is magical. While there are indeed penalties for doing dark magic or being involved with evil, both in Narnia and Harry Potter, in The Magicians magic is neither good nor bad - it's about how you use it. And sometimes, even when one thinks one uses it for good, it often turns out that, no matter what one's intentions might be, someone, somewhere, suffers for that casting. It's simple physics: action, equal reaction. But since magic is well beyond normal physics, the application of that specific Newtonian law tends to end in strange, dangerous - and often heartbreaking - results.

No wrong deed goes unpunished, and more often than not, no good deed does, either.

Quentin is a classic example of this result. He just wants to go to Fillory and escape his dreary, mundane existence - what could be so wrong with that? Everyone wants to escape. But in doing so, Quentin realizes - too late, unfortunately, for his lady-love, Alice (who sacrifices herself at the end to save him and the rest of their friends) - that he can really never escape himself, and if he's ever going to be truly happy, then he must learn to live with himself. Only then will he be able to find his place in the world - regardless of where that world might be. But his actions before that realization create a large mess of his life. There is some good in it, true, but there's a lot that's bad, too.

If any of this is beginning to sound depressingly familiar, that should come as no surprise. This is what happens when one takes away that veil of idealism over the magical world (whatever it might be: Middle-Earth or Narnia or Hogwarts) and applies the cold, hard eye of reality to it - as it probably should be, anyway. Just because there is magic in a world does not mean that the world will be any happier or less complicated than a world without magic. Likely magic will just complicate matters.

So where does the vodka and crack come in? Well, the characters do seem to consume a lot of it, both within the school and later on outside of it. To be fair, the lush of Quentin's group of friends, Eliot, has very fine tastes and is a bit of a wine connoisseur, but still. The characters are not shown actually using drugs, but the narration says they do so, off-screen, as it were. And this, I think, makes sense, given that the magical school of the novel is more like a university than a high school, with the first-years being around seventeen or so.

While I'm sure all of the above sounds depressing, if not outright objectionable, I will say that they are the primary reasons why I enjoyed the novel in the first place. While I really, truly appreciate the idealism of Rowling and Lewis's works, I also appreciate Grossman's attempt to throw a cold bucket of water into his readers' collective faces - most of whom would have walked into this novel expecting it to have the same idealism as Rowling and Lewis - to remind them that there is such a thing was reality, and while good things, like miracles, happen in reality, a lot more happens that isn't quite so nice, either. It's rather like reading the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales after seeing their Disney versions first: a bit of a shock, but for the right person, a reasonably enjoyable one.

While I found this novel enjoyable enough to read, for the reasons I mentioned above, I do advise caution. The Magicians can be rather depressing because of the absence of idealism (in fact, it's about the destruction of idealism), but if the reader is in the right frame of mind, it's really a rather good read. Just be prepared to look at the world with a cynical eye for a few hours or days; it seems rather unavoidable.

One of my favorite sayings nowadays, especially when talking about true stories that are seemingly too good to be true, is: “This has to be true, because Hollywood can't make this up.” Even Hollywood seems to be aware of this, given how eagerly producers snap up life stories of interesting people, eager to turn their too-true-for-Hollywood tales into the next blockbuster or award-winner.

Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately - Hollywood has trouble telling true crime stories. For some odd reason, film is too distancing a medium for true crime. Even television has a similar effects. One would assume that, with all that violence up close and personal, as it were, right there for the viewer to see in all its gory glory, film and television would actually be more immediate, not distancing.

And yet it is in literature and journalism - perhaps the most “distancing” of storytelling mediums because of the absence of concrete images - that convey true crime with the most disturbing and chilling immediacy that film and television have difficulty accomplishing. I suppose the same rule that applies to horror and erotica applies to true crime as well: if one does not see a concrete image, the imagination goes to work, and when the imagination goes to work, what it produces is generally more terrifying or erotic than any image that can be produced by artist or director.

However, never let it be said that film and television have not left their mark on storytelling - whether that story be fiction or nonfiction doesn't really matter. Increasingly, writers of the 21st century write in a manner that reflects the principles of storytelling as seen in movies and television shows: cut-scenes, jump-cuts, cliffhangers, and all the rest - though, to be fair, these principles were already present in the popular serialized novels of the nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. A story that once might have been told in a straightforward manner, from Point A to Point Z, may now be told somewhere at Point M, with flashbacks showing what has gone before, and, maybe (depending on the writer and the story, of course), dreams and premonitions showing what might happen from Point N onwards. Even in nonfiction, this cinematic sensibility for telling a story has become quite prevalent, and, in the writing of true crime stories, it works quite well - most of the time. The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo, for instance, however, did not belong to those books that get this right “most of the time,” it took me a while to realize that what I was reading was nonfiction, and not fiction, after all.

In truth, the whole concept behind it struck me as something that might have come out of the mind of some semi-inspired, novelist or screenplay writer: a group of the best detectives in the world (though mostly from the United States) come together on a regular basis to solve cold cases - the cases that are deemed unsolvable. No case is too cold, no victim too small, and no criminal too cunning for the men and women of the Vidocq Society, hailed by Capuzzo in the subtitle to this book as “The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes.”

Perhaps that subtitle contributed to the idea that this was a work of fiction. While I understand - and enjoy - the hyperbolic nature of the titles of some nonfiction books (take The Grand Inquisitor's Manual as a title for a historic overview of the history of the Inquisition, for instance), this one caught me off-guard. Was it the link to Sherlock Holmes? Perhaps it was, to a certain degree. The question of whether this was fiction or nonfiction extended into the first two chapters: Capuzzo's style was such that I almost wondered if these people he was mentioning were real. It was not until I'd cleared the second chapter that I'd realized what Capuzzo was doing. In writing this nonfiction account of a real-life society, Capuzzo had chosen to write in the style and format akin to that of detective fiction - specifically in the style of Doyle and Poe, with just a little Hammett and Chandler thrown in for variety. Once I had figured that out, I gave myself room to settle into the book and accept it as a creatively-told tale.

While this book could have been written as a straightforward casebook of the Vidocq Society's most notable cases, telling each story in the same manner that Doyle told the Holmes short stories, Capuzzo does something different. Instead, he chooses to tell the beginnings of the Society via its three founding members: William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter. In what might be called a semi-biography of sorts, Capuzzo writes about how each man found himself involved in the acquisition of justice; the cases that led them to find each other; and later on the crimes that they, along with key members of the Society, would solve when nobody else could.

It helps that each man is quite the character unto himself. Fleisher is often described as a big softie, prone to shedding tears of emotion - the classic bleeding heart, one might say - and yet also capable of getting just about anyone to like him and work with him, too. Bender is described as a mystic, mercurial and unpredictable, but with an uncanny ability to reconstruct the faces of the long-dead, using just a few bones and his intuition. And then there is Walter, Bender's direct opposite: cold and calculating, and yet possessed of the deepest insight into the evil lying in the darkest corners of the criminal mind - “a living Sherlock Holmes.” On Fleisher's initiative, they set up the Vidocq Society (Walter joined, despite his reluctance), and gathered together the most brilliant minds in criminal investigation in the United States to solve, free of charge, the cases no one else could solve.

I do not know, however, if this is really how these men are in real life. There is an aspect of the mythic archetype here, something which comes out in the last few chapters of the book as a joke at a Society meeting. Nevertheless, they do make for very engaging characters. Some readers may find themselves drawn to Fleisher and his bleeding heart; others may find Bender's intuitive creativity and free-wheeling lifestyle to be more to their taste. For my part, however, I have a marked preference for Walter: cold and calculating, perhaps, but he has stared into the abyss, the abyss has stared back, and Walter has walked away with a knowledge of the criminal mind that he wields like a blade. His cynicism is shocking, and some might say to be pitied, but I do think he is rather the optimist, in his own way: he views the world in sharp black and white, and is aware that if there is evil in this world, there must certainly be good, and since he knows what evil is, he will use that knowledge to protect what is good. If that is not optimism, I do not know what else it might be called.

Interwoven with the personal stories of these three men are the cases they and the rest of the Vidocq Society have worked to solve. Although the Society's members have worked on some very notable cases, the cases that have been for the most part documented in the book appear to be the ones that are the most personal to Fleisher, Bender, and Walter. I suppose this should come as no surprise, since they are the “protagonists” of this book, but I also appreciated the fact that Capuzzo includes cases that I had not encountered before, which had all the power and impact of some of the more notorious serial killings that the Society members (both before and after they became Society members) have helped solve. The stories also serve as an excellent vehicle for meeting the other members of the Society, some of whom turnout to be quite unique characters as well, though they do not stand out as much as the three founders.

And here is where I run into a bit of a concern with the book: it does not quite comfortably straddle that line between casebook and biography. This manifests in the rather confusing way the cases in the book are organized: a case may have been introduced in an earlier chapter, and then so much more happens before the reader gets to the resolution of that case. In the meantime, two or three more other cases may have been introduced, or a digression into the personal lives of Bender or Walter or Fleisher, or other Society members, or even the victims or criminals, occurs. This has left me rather dizzy in trying to determine what case the Society is on and who is currently on it, and being dizzy in what I think of as something of a mystery novel is not pleasant in the least.

There are also some issues regarding repetition. More than once I had a sense of deja vu when a chunk of dialogue I had read earlier in the book suddenly makes an appearance, almost word for word, in a later chapter. I do not know if this is a flaw of my copy, or if this was deliberate, but just like the disorganized nature of the rest of the book, it rather stood out in an uncomfortable manner.

One final thing that I noticed was that there was not much on Fleisher. Though it might be argued that, as the Commissioner of the Vidoqc Society, he must have a rather large role to play in the story, the book mostly revolves around Bender and Walter. I do not know why Capuzzo did this, but it does seem rather odd to me that only Bender and Walter would get the spotlight. Surely Fleisher was doing something interesting at more or less the same time that his colleagues were solving their cases? Surely he was good for more than just bringing people together and sending them out into the world to dispense justice? While I am rather biased to Walter, I would have liked to see more of Fleisher.

To say that this book is a Hollywood movie in the making is a bit of an understatement. In fact, I rather wonder if Capuzzo did not write it with that goal in mind. While it is quite an entertaining read, and insightful in its own way, the lack of organization is quite distracting, and irritating on more than one level. I would have vastly preferred it if Capuzzo had just done a straightforward casebook of the Vidocq Society's most notable cases - that, I think, would have been far more enjoyable.

 Man, local folk horror sure hits vastly different compared to all the other (foreign) folk horror out there. But that makes perfect sense; after all, it's always different when you're familiar (ish) with the traditions being presented, when they inhabit, or are very close to, the spaces one actually lives in. Even as a Manile??a and therefore very much an urban child from the imperial center of the country, Molo's tale feels close enough to home because of the familiar setting and plot. The black-and-white art gives this story a nice eerie feel, and the pacing is perfect for letting the horror creep up on you. 

Okay. OKAY. This was an interesting ride. And I honestly don???t know any other term to describe it except that. 
First things first: the author is VERY egotistical. Like, his ego is large as a planet and it permeates EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. The ENTIRE FIRST FOURTH of the book is just him explaining (though some might argue he???s actually just whining) about how he fell into a deep Catholic fervor for around two years before he drifted out of it after a while. 
But, once one gets past this part (or even while reading it), one will also have to deal with the author???s many prejudices, including: misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, ableism, and imperialism. These, on top of the author???s aforementioned ego, will DEFINITELY grind on a reader who tries to get into this based solely on the premise that the book???s blurbs present: that this is a book about the history of the early Church. 
If the above two points don???t make a reader drop the book, then this third one probably will: the author???s utter disregard scholarly responsibility. Oh sure, at first it seems like he cares about it, but it quickly becomes clear that he doesn???t really give a damn. He constantly throws out pronouncements that will read like he???s stating fact, when he really, really isn???t. He also has a tendency to pick and choose which version of an idea or theory he prefers, and THEN puts that forward as fact, just because he likes the way it comes together in his head, or supports some prejudice he has, or some other, silly reason that will definitely raise the blood pressure of any scholars who read this book, no matter which subject they study. 
There is a moment in the book where, after he claims to have read all the important texts related to early Church history, he says that, like a chef who???s read many cookbooks, he is now ready to do away with the experts and write what he wants. Which, if the reader approaches this book as a nonfiction piece of work - and it certainly feels like it at the beginning - will be utterly rage-inducing because who the hell claims to have read EVERYTHING in terms of scholarly documentation? This is especially true when it comes to a subject like history, which is constantly changing and being updated as discoveries are made and previous evidence is adjusted and altered. 
Which brings me to the question of narrative style. This book reads A LOT like nonfiction: like an autobiography at first, and then nonfictional history of the early Church. But there???s a reason why this book is categorized as “fiction”: precisely because of the author???s aforementioned tendencies to play VERY fast and loose with facts, both about himself and the story he???s trying to tell about Church history. For a while I contemplated calling the narrative slightly Borgesian, because Borges does a similar thing with his writing where he blurs the edges of the fictional and the nonfictional, but I quickly withdrew that notion. The comparison would be an insult to Borges??? work, not least because his technique is far more subtle than what???s going on here. 
Honestly I think the best way to actually get through this book is to think of it as absolutely fictional instead of nonfictional. As in: do not even consider the facts to be facts, just presume they???re all made up. When I started viewing the book that way it became a bit more tolerable because then I could consider the author/narrator as a fictional entity, instead of a real life person who is also an absolute shithead. This also has the benefit of making all the scholarship-related bullshit a bit more tolerable too, because then one can approach the material in the same way one would a historical novel: with some grace to allow for artistic license. 
But despite ALL OF THAT, there is something very compelling about this book, and it has to do with reading how the author grapples with his Catholic faith. It???s fascinating to read how the author goes from falling in, then out, of love with Catholicism, and how he basically uses this entire book to wrestle with how he feels about it, struggling to come to a conclusion about how to answer the question: ???Do you believe in God???? 
Overall, this is definitely a read that will require immense patience, and many readers will give up within one-fourth of the book, maybe even after the first five chapters. But for readers who decide to be stubborn mules about it and hang in there (if for no other reason than they don???t want to be beaten by this asshole of an author), they might find a read that???s complicated and also interesting. There is PLENTY to dislike about this book, very many reasons to put it down before I actually finished it, but as I said, it???s immensely compelling. I attribute that a little bit to the writing style itself (which is a credit to both the author and - especially - to the translator), but I think the main reason I stuck around to the end is because I???m a lapsed Catholic myself and related, in some small way, to what the author was going through when he was struggling with his faith. The final line is the answer to his main question of ???Do you believe in God????, and I have to say: it???s an answer I agree with. 

Any responsible fur(or feather, or scale)parent will tell you that their vet is probably their best friend. For a lot of pet owners, if something goes wrong with our pets, they're the first people we turn to; I'm pretty sure my mom has our vet on speed dial, especially so since one of our dogs is already pretty old.

Which is what makes this book such an interesting read: it's a behind-the-scenes look at the things that go on in a vet clinic, and insight into the things that go on in a vet's head when they look after our pets. While such subject matter is usually pretty interesting on its own, what makes this particular memoir especially readable is Trout's dry British humor, and his obvious and sincere love of his job and the animals that he cares for.

Circuses and carnivals are a deep and powerful crucible of memories for a great many people, despite the variations across the globe. In the Philippines these memories equate to going to what is called a peria,from the Spanish feria, or fair. Like traveling carnivals and circuses in the United States and Europe, they set up rides and sideshows in an open field for a week or so during the summer, and then pack up and move on. I had been to precious few of those, since my mother didn't entirely approve of them (the rides were notoriously unsafe, and the food was never quite as clean as she might have liked), but I do have some memories of them: the smell of pork barbecue and popcorn mingling in the air, and the whooshing and clanking of the rides.

However, the old-fashioned traveling carnivals, circuses, and their cousin the state fair seem to be dying out, as more and more people turn to technologies such as the Internet as their primary source of entertainment. In this interesting article from the 2009 issue of National Geographic, Garrison Keillor talks about the state fair with a sense of nostalgia. as if aware that, give or take a few decades, it will all be gone. As people turn increasingly to technology to entertain themselves, state fairs, carnivals, and circuses will gradually disappear.

The situation in books, however, is different. In novels the circus is definitely back in town, though not as a mirror image of the circuses and carnivals in people's memories. The circus as interpreted in novels appears to have become significantly darker, significantly more evil and wicked, and significantly more mysterious. There are degrees, of course: Erin Morgenstern's interpretation in The Night Circus is indeed mysterious and somewhat dark, but its purpose is relatively innocent, as opposed to the circus portrayed in Jonathan L. Howard's The Necromancer.

Anyone familiar with the character of Dr. Faust (Goethe's version is the most famous, but Thomas Mann and Christopher Marlowe both have their own versions), or at least with the concept of the Faustian deal, will recognize the core storyline at the heart of The Necromancer: a man named Johannes Cabal has made a deal with Satan in exchange for greater knowledge - except he has realized that, in order to reach his goal, he will need his soul back, and so he renegotiates with Satan for another deal. The deal is this: if he can take one hundred souls in the space of one year for Satan, he can have his soul back. In order to do this, Satan has allowed Cabal the use of an abandoned carnival as a means of attracting possible souls for collection. He has also given Cabal a budget (in the form of a lump of his own blood) as a source of power for the carnival and whatever else Cabal might deem necessary.

This, of course, sounds very intriguing. There is something to be said, after all, about using a carnival to collect souls, given how most of the typical associations one makes with a carnival are those of innocence and childhood. Even in Morgenstern's Night Circus, the circus in question is hardly sinister, only a little odd. Cabal's carnival, however, is another story: dark and twisted, with one singular purpose: allow Cabal a chance to gather the one hundred souls he needs in order to win his own soul back from Satan.

This is where trouble begins. Interesting as the concept might be, the rest of the novel just doesn't seem as fun as that one idea. I was already getting a hint of that in the first one-third of the book, but I constantly let it slide. I was rather hoping, I suppose, that things would get more interesting down the line. I am, after all, a veteran of similar novels: The Fellowship of the Ring started out incredibly slow, but after I got through the initial slog, everything was pretty much great from then on out.

The Necromancer did not turn out to be that way. A large part of it has to do with Johannes Cabal himself. To be fair, he is quite a tolerable character - at least for the first one-third of the book. After that, he is just so utterly colorless that I really stopped caring about him after a certain point. It could be said that since he has no soul, he really can't have much of a personality, but at the very least he should be interesting in his lack of a soul, which he isn't. He only gets interesting again at the very last part of the book, when the reader finds out the real reason why he has gone to the lengths he has in order to discover the secrets of necromancy. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to guess by the first third or the middle portion of the book at the very latest just what that motivation is, so the impact of finding out is significantly reduced.

The other characters are rather interesting, but either do not hold the reader's attention for very long, or are really side-characters and so disappear fairly quickly. The exception to this is Johannes' brother, Horst. Horst is far more interesting than his brother, and though he is a bit of a jerk, he does prove to be quite the nice guy in the latter part of the book. In fact, reader sympathy is likely to increase for him even as the reader's interest in Cabal decreases as the novel goes on. I think he is the only character who receives any real, perceptible character development, because Cabal really doesn't change much for the reasons I gave above.

As for the members of the circus, it might be supposed they would provide the color that Cabal lacks, but they are not in the least fascinating. Their creation might be, to a degree, but otherwise they hardly hold the reader's attention for very long. They are there, and they are part of the machine that allows Cabal to collect souls, but that is all. Some might stand out for a while, like Layla the Latext Lady, but otherwise they are as colorless as Cabal himself - rather sad, really, since people who work in carnivals are supposed to be some of the most intriguing and fascinating characters a reader could ever encounter in fiction.

Aside from the lack of any true strength in the characters (save for a few), the plot itself takes time to build, only becoming really interesting towards the latter third of the book. In fact, I rather think this book could have been a bit shorter, with a big chunk of the middle portion being taken out to make room for the action that comes towards the last part of the book. Now, while in some other novels this would not have been a problem, in this novel I find that it is. Most of the time the initial slog is devoted to world-building, which is perfectly fine by me, but in The Necromancer it doesn't come off as very interesting. To be sure, Johannes comes across some rather funny characters (Rufus Maleficarus instantly springs to mind), but otherwise they are occasional highlights in a truly sloggy portion of the novel.

All in all, The Necromancer really is not a great variation on the Dr. Faust story, nor is it a great introduction to a series. The lead character simply isn't strong enough to hold the reader's interest, and much of the book isn't quite fun to read, being as it is as colorless as the protagonist. It is only in the latter portion that anything interesting really happens, and when any sympathy for Cabal is built, which is rather unfortunate because I would have preferred to like Cabal at least by the middle portion of the novel so that I could go into the second book with some good cheer. As it stands, I don't think I will be picking up the next book in the series without looking at it warily. It just might turn out to be better than the first book, but at the moment I am not very encouraged to read it anytime soon.

... I won???t say anything further in order to not give away spoilers, but suffice to say that Emer???s longing for that deep, intimate connection with another person ??? in other words, her desire for an anam cara ??? quickly becomes a chain on the person she decides to associate that term with. Though the term is meant to be one of affection, of closeness and trust, it is also incredibly easy to take those ideas to dangerous extremes and transform them into a form of abuse ??? not physical, perhaps, but certainly emotional.

The idea of desire that can turn dark and dangerous, that can turn into a chokehold, is another key theme in the novel. In Emer???s storyline, her desire for connection ??? filial, platonic, romantic ??? does not quite turn into an obsession, but it does become a dark, dangerous thing that, in a crucial moment in the plot, becomes ruinous. The same kind of desire appears in Brigid???s storyline; though the object of her desire is different from Emer???s, in some ways the kind of connection she desires is no different ??? and no less potentially dark and destructive.

Full review here: https://wp.me/p21txV-Gj

I love to eat, and I come from a family that loves to eat, as well. This has nothing to do with wealth, because my family is hardly wealthy - comfortably well-off, yes, but not wealthy. We simply enjoy good food, and are not above spending a little more than usual if it means the food will be excellent. Oftentimes, though, the best food is relatively inexpensive, and there is certainly a lot of “gourmet” food that is hardly worth the money spent on it. In fact, it tends to be an even greater disappointment for us when we spend a lot of money of a meal that isn't really worth it.

This insistence on good food (preferably inexpensive good food) is not just some family quirk: it is culturally ingrained. Filipinos are like Hobbits in that we are constantly eating, and food is inevitably at the heart of many social gatherings and personal memories. Friendships and romantic relationships are formed and solidified over food; heartbreak and arguments are often helped along to their resolution by food. Every important landmark in one's life - from birth to death - involves the preparation, consumption, and appreciation of food.

This also explain my fascination with television shows about people who travel around the world, eating their way through it and commenting on what they find. That is my dream job: I love to travel, and I love to eat - and despite what my father says to the contrary, I am far more adventurous now than I was when I was a child. I dream of one day having enough money to travel the world and taking my time at places I've always wanted to go - and eating my way through every stop I make. I've watched shows like No Reservations and would love nothing more than to live Anthony Bourdain's life.

When I discovered Simon Majumdar's Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything, I was immediately interested. At first I assumed Majumdar was some kind of celebrity chef I had not heard about, trying to do his own version of Bourdain's A Cook's Tour, but then I read the back blurb and found out that Majumdar was really just an ordinary man who quit his job and set out to “eat the globe,” as the title of the book proclaims, in one year. This immediately piqued my interest: unlike Bourdain, Majumdar is what might be called an enthusiastic amateur. He is not a chef, but has been raised in a family similar to mine: a family with a great appreciation for food, and which likes to talk about food, as well.

In short, Majumdar had done what I always dreamed of doing: dropping everything for a year to travel and eat. And not only has he managed to do just that, but he has been generous enough to share his experience with the world in a book.

To be fair to Majumdar, though, he does not truly claim to have gone absolutely anywhere and eaten absolutely everything. In his introduction and first chapter he describes what he had to do before he went on his trip, and what sort of emotional turmoil he underwent in order to not only find it in himself to quit his job, but to find the fortitude to actually push through with it. One would think that any person would be right happy to drop a job and just traipse around the world, but actually making that idea into reality is not quite as easy as it seems. What is more important is actually getting out there and doing it - and that is a constant theme, repeated over and over again in many variations throughout the book.

Once he had begun, though, there really was no turning back, especially once he had left the United Kingdom. His choice of destinations is quite eclectic, not least because he takes the time to visit the Philippines - or at least Manila and Pampanga, which is a great deal more than some of the snootier travel writers and foodies ever do. While he does not really “go everywhere,” he does try to “eat everything” wherever he does manage to make it, and, more importanty, he is not shy about saying exactly what he thinks about the places he's been and the food he has eaten.

Take, for instance, the chapters about his trip to China. Chinese food seems to be a bit of a hit-and-miss thing for him, with some really, ridiculously good meals alternating with some absolutely godawful ones, but he seems to have one, very solid, unshakeable regarding many of the Chinese tourists - and it's hardly a very flattering take on them. I will not go into too much detail about what he says, but I do find his commentary on them to be painfully true. I have traveled out of the Philippines often enough, and even in Hong Kong and Singapore the tourists from mainland China aren't exactly the best kind of people one wishes to encounter. Even the locals agree.

This bluntness is something that, I think, will likely offend a lot of readers. Majumdar makes no attempt to “cushion the blow” of his opinions, especially when he finds things disgusting, offensive, or plain out-and-out unlikeable. I have read a few reviews that have found this particular trait of Majumdar's to be a deal-breaker, but I do not find it so. To be sure, he calls Manila “a rejected set from Blade Runner,” but I hardly find this offensive because it is true. It is also as dirty as he claims it is, and the way he speaks of the poverty in the city is absolutely true, as well.

But, unlike other writers, Majumdar has seen past the grime and the poverty to the heart of what Manila can be: a place to eat great food that is not quite like food in the rest of Southeast Asia, or the rest of the world, for that matter. As so many other foodies, Bourdain included, have discovered, the Philippines has great food, and a lot of people really don't know what they're missing out on. To be fair, Majumdar was fortunate to have an “in” to the foodie scene here: family who were only too happy to show him around. This is, in truth, the best way to get to know Manila and the food on offer here. Discovery of the cuisine on one's own is possible, but the best places are either well-kept secrets known only to locals (the Chinese cuisine of Binondo, Manila's Chinatown, for instance), or are, in fact, homecooked meals prepared by someone's family. To be sure, Filipino food is not as well-known as the cuisine of neighboring Southeast Asian countries like Thailand or Vietnam, but that is only because no one else besides Filipinos themselves have ever really cared about it - well, until recently, anyway.

The essays (for that is what the chapters are, technically) that Majumdar writes are not solely about food. The enjoyment of food is not just about what is being eaten, but is about the people one meets and the experiences one has along the way. In the introduction, he claims that his family tends to treat food like signposts to the events of their lives: no one really remembers a particular event until someone else brings up what they ate on that day. He proves this true throughout the book: he speaks of friends he's made and the experiences he's had, and how those are just as important as all the food he has gotten to try. Through food, he has made new friends and broadened his horizons - something that myself, and likely a great many Filipinos, will nod to sagely in agreement.

But what I find even more valuable about Eat My Globe is that it was written by an ordinary person: ordinary in the sense tha Majumdar has no “serious” culinary training in the same way that Bourdain has culinary training. He is, as I mentioned earlier, an enthusiastic amateur, and he proves that, yes, without a degree from the CIA and a television network backing one up, it is entirely possible to live like Bourdain. It takes guts, it takes gumption, and it is a very, very difficult thing to do. But Majumdar proves it is entirely possible, and that, more importantly, the rewards are far greater taking the risk than not at all.

Late last year I, along with my mother and father, took a blood test to check for any health issues that might have cropped up over the previous year, as well as to check up on pre-existing conditions. The latter was mostly for my parents, but it was also important that I get my blood tested to make sure I hadn't developed any conditions of my own. My tests from the year before last, when my mother started encouraging us to do this, had come back clean, and I was fully expecting these tests to come in clean, too.

That was not the case. My sodium levels might have been within normal tolerances, and my sugar was a little high for comfort, but my cholesterol gave me great cause for alarm - my doctor told me that I had the cholesterol level of someone twice my age. I was given two choices: either start medication, or adjust my diet. I took the diet option without even thinking twice.

Now, the word “diet” tends to imply that one is about to starve oneself in order to lose weight, but to my mind, that's not what “diet” means - and I think my doctor is rather proud that I do not define “diet” in that manner, either. “Diet” has, to me, never meant that I ought to go hungry, but simply that I alter what I consume to silence that hunger. So: less junk food, less soda (very much less soda, now), and far, far less fast food. All of these were easy decisions to make, especially when I started packing lunches instead of buying them - which, of course, meant home cooking.

And it is home cooking - or cooking from scratch - that is the central focus of Michael Pollan's latest book, Cooked. Divided into four sections named after the four classical elements - Fire, Water, Air, and Earth - Pollan talks about his journey of learning how to cook, apprenticing himself to a Southern barbeque pit master; a Chez Panisse-trained former-student-turned-personal-cooking-instructor; a baker; and a cheese-maker, and learning from each of them various methods and traditions of cooking, while at the same time contemplating on where these methods fit in our lives, how they affect us, and what losing or continuing them might mean for humanity as a whole. The result is a fascinating sequence of anecdotes, interspersed with a great deal of science, history, and philosophy, all told in Pollan's eminently readable narrative style.

Those who have read The Omnivore's Dilemma will, in all likelihood, be comparing it to Cooked, and will find a great many similarities between them - perhaps too many for some. The Introduction, in particular, will read very,very similar to the content of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and some readers have taken a set against Cooked for this similarity. I, for my part, do not take this against Pollan at all, since I've come to view Cooked as a natural extension of The Omnivore's Dilemma: an expansion, so to speak, of the ideas and philosophies Pollan expounded upon. In Omnivore's Dilemma he concludes that cooking one's own food, as well as taking great care to source ingredients from responsible growers and animal raisers, is one of the keys to a better life, and is in many ways the key to a healthier one. Cooked demonstrates, far beyond the four meals Pollan describes in The Omnivore's Dilemma, how to go about doing just that, as well as showing what humanity lost when it handed control of food production to corporations.

As expected, it is in his anecdotes that Pollan truly shines. In the course of his various apprenticeships he explains a whole host of other aspects related to the type of cooking he is doing. For example in the section titled “Fire” he discusses the concept of barbecue from the perspective of Southern whole-hog barbecue, interweaving various bits of research and musings on the cooking style's politics (class, race and gender being some of the more interesting angles from which one may approach the concept of barbecue as a whole, and not just whole-hog) and history, all the while telling the story of his brief apprenticeship to pit master Ed Mitchell, and then his own subsequent attempt at doing whole-hog barbecue. He repeats this in his discussion of braising, baking, cheese-making, and beer-brewing, always ensuring to tackle the social, political, historical, and gender-related aspects of each method of cooking.

What I found especially fun to read, mostly because it's related to my own interests, was the section on baking. I can do stovetop cooking, but I have something of a fear of spattering oil, so I don't do much of it if I can. Baking however - that is an entirely different story. There is something comforting and magical about combining a set of raw ingredients, putting it in an oven, and more or less leaving it there until the nose (and occasionally the eye, but more the nose) judges it the right time to pull out whatever has been cooking - and while waiting, nothing is more pleasurable than to catch up on my reading. Every year around December I bake chocolate-chip cookies as Christmas gifts for family members, and it is easy to read a chapter or two before smelling that delicious, mouthwatering scent of chocolate, butter, and vanilla and pausing a while to pull out the cooked batch to put in a new one, before settling down to read another chapter.

Pollan, however, goes much further than simply making cookies - he bakes what I (and many other bakers) consider to be the ultimate baking accomplishment: bread. Though I come from a country and culture whose staple grain is rice, bread is still an important food item in the Philippines, and we do still eat quite a bit of it (mostly for breakfast and merienda - the Filipino equivalent of afternoon tea), so the idea of baking my own bread is incredibly appealing. Therefore, reading about Pollan's attempt to culture his own sourdough starter, and his discourse on bread of the past, present, and perhaps of the future, made for thoroughly enjoyable reading.

And here is what I think is the most enjoyable aspect of this book, aside from Pollan's anecdotes and narrative style: the fact that all of this encourages the reader to try their hand at cooking for himself or herself. Pollan even includes the recipes in the book's appendix, though by the time the reader gets to them she or he is aware that a recipe is not a hard-and-fast rule when it comes to cooking - something Pollan learns throughout the course of the book. As I mentioned earlier, The Omnivore's Dilemma makes the case for home-cooking, but Cooked shows the reader how one may make that case - and cause - one's own. Pollan makes it clear that it is not going to be easy, that there will be many mistakes along the way, but they do give the reader hope that perhaps it is not as daunting as one assumes it to be (something Pollan specifically tackles in “Water,” the section dealing with the slow-braising of food). To be sure, Pollan has the advantage of access to some of the best people in their field, but he makes it clear that just because he has access to the experts does make him as good as they at their own specialty. That takes time and practice - and it is something Pollan himself recognizes, and encourages the reader to have in any future cooking endeavors.

Overall, Cooked is, at its core, no different thematically from The Omnivore's Dilemma, but it should not be viewed as a rehash of that book - rather, one should approach it as an extension of what Pollan was trying to do in The Omnivore's Dilemma: that it is better to cook one's own food. The Omnivore's Dilemma explains the greater cultural and health-related reasons for home-cooking; Cooked emphasizes that but also adds a far more personal dimension. It will not be easy at first - Pollan's stories about his apprenticeships make this clear - but if one keeps at it, one is sure to reap the benefits of that time and patience, not only in better health or a clearer statement about (or against) the world, but also something that will bring great personal satisfaction - something to do, first and foremost, for oneself.

Since I picked up the Nancy Drew books in third grade, I have been fascinated by crime - not to commit it, but to solve it. In the Nancy Drew books, the eponymous heroine always seemed to be able to figure out who committed the crime, and the process of solving the crime was always the most fascinating bit for me. And then I graduated to Sherlock Holmes, which proved to be even more fascinating and involved than Nancy Drew, and this, along with a steady diet of Agatha Christie and some of my mother's pulpy thriller novels, have ensured my lifelong love with the mystery genre in all its forms.

But for all my love of fiction, I also have a deep, abiding love of science and history, both of which constitute the bulk of my non-fiction reading whenever I get the chance to come across books that pique my interest. I am, however, at my happiest when I can find something that combines as many of my favorite subjects as possible, so when I came across The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum, I knew I had to give it a shot.

New York during the Jazz Age (the late 1910s into the early 1930s) was simultaneously dazzlingly brilliant, and also dangerously dark. It was during this time that the myth of New York as a place of new beginnings and dreams-come-true first began to take shape, as industrialists made their fortunes and immigrants, drawn by the wealth and business made by aforementioned industrialists, came to the United States seeking a better life, hoping to gain a slice of that seemingly endless good fortune for themselves. And yet all this light cast a very dark shadow: New York was (and still is, in the way of all major metropolises) riddled with crime. There was thievery and rape, of course, and the knifings and stabbings and mysterious disappearances that are part and parcel of any major city's underworld, but there were the more sensational killings, many of which had to do with poison. And during these dawning decades of the 20th century, poisoning became a favored method for murdering people, mostly because criminal investigation was so inept as to allow many poisoners to go free if they were careful enough - and many were careful enough.

Exacerbating the crime-related deaths was the sheer number of accidental deaths caused by using poisonous substances in commercial and industrial products. In a time when the FDA was still a new agency and had none of the powers it does today, two-bit hucksters and big corporations alike were able to market products that, more often than not, had the potential to kill their consumers. If anyone complained, the corporations were known to hire lawyers who could - and did - do everything they could to ensure a case went in favor of their employers.

And then in 1918, after a rather scandalous case that exposed the dark underbelly of criminal investigation in the city, the city hired Charles Norris, a pathologist, as its first trained medical examiner. Soon after Norris hired Alexander Gettler, an immensely talented toxicologist. Norris was high-minded and idealistic, but possessed of a drive to see those ideals carried through, no matter what. Gettler, on the other hand, was quiet but incredibly brilliant, having the same dogged determination that Norris did when it came to answering whatever question was presented to him. Over the next two decades, the two of them would work together to build the United States' first truly reputable forensic toxicology lab, and train the men who would later go on to become the country's first competent medical examiners.

Though the book deals with some sensational crimes committed during the period, much of the focus is on Norris and Gettler and the politics of their era. A huge chunk of the book is devoted to Prohibition, that period of time when the US government decided it would be a good idea to make the consumption of alcohol a crime. As my friend Hope likes to say, “Hindsight has 20-20 vision,” and today many Americans look back at the Eighteenth Amendment as a very big mistake. But at the time, a great many people believed that Prohibition would somehow cure the country of its various social ills (or at least make them more manageable) - except for a certain set of people who were pragmatic enough to see that Prohibition would be nothing but trouble.

Amongst them were Gettler and Norris: they predicted that Prohibition would kill more people than save them, as the populace began to find substitutes for liquor. They were right: they and their employees were the ones who had to deal with the daily influx of people killed by alcohol poisoning, many of whom died by consuming deadly concoctions made with methyl alcohol. While Gettler quietly fumed in his lab, Norris was more vocal, haranguing every possible government official he could about the effect of Prohibition - in particular, when the government itself started mixing up its own extremely lethal alcohol as a” deterrent”. It didn't matter: people wanted to drink, and if they couldn't have a safe way to do it, they'd find other ways - the rich by illegally purchasing alcohol from abroad, and the poor by making-do with whatever they could get their hands on. Obviously, it was often the poor who died and came through Gettler's lab, making both Gettler and Norris even more determined to find a way to end Prohibition as soon as possible. And when it finally ended, both of them were happy to report the sharp decline in methyl alcohol poisoning-related deaths - an event they had long predicted would happen if Prohibition was finally lifted.

There were also the other cases: people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, which occurred as a result of faulty or ill-maintained piping. And then there were the Radium Girls: young factory women who'd been slowly poisoning themselves while working with paint mixed with radium. That case in particular was sad and disheartening, not only because of the horrific ways the Radium Girls suffered because of their intake of the deadly radioactive substance, but because of the way the corporation they were working for tried everything to get the case dismissed. I am aware that this (corporations doing their level best to get cases against them dismissed) is still something that happens to the present day, but it does not make this event any less tragic or sad, in my opinion.

For the most part, the book is an interesting, engaging read: Blum's writing is lucid and her tone casual enough to be engaging without being unnecessarily so. I found it easy to sink into the book, to get lost in the world Blum recreated, and this is no mean feat, especially when a writer is trying to be interesting and not boring. I liked the way she presented Norris and Gettler; I found that discussing them in relation to each other an effective technique, pairing Gettler's quiet competence with Norris' charismatic leadership, and using their dedication to their work and to society as a whole as a means of tying them together. Blum also surrounds them with an equally interesting cast of characters, ranging from the criminals their work helped catch and indict; to the politicians they were frequently at odds with; to the handful of lab assistants and research partners who would eventually become known as the “Gettler Boys.”

However, there was something I found wrong with Blum's narrative organization. While the chronological order of events is quite clear, she also divides the book into chapters based on a certain stretch of years, and titling each chapter with a specific poison that features prominently in a case that is the centerpiece of the chapter itself. This is all well and good, and indeed I see the merits of attempting that particular kind of organization, but what I do not appreciate is Blum's constant dropping of information from previous cases into the newest chapter. Say, something happens in Chapter Two: the case related in that chapter is partially resolved, but it is time to move on to something else. Somewhere down the line, perhaps in Chapter Three, say, or Four, there will be a set of paragraphs relating some new development in the case mentioned in the previous chapter, because those developments occurred in the particular span of years that the current chapter deals with. The Prohibition issue also kept drifting in and out, regardless of which poison one was dealing with in a particular chapter. It is a credit to Blum's writing that it is not that difficult to figure out what she is talking about, but I do wish things could have been tidier than they were.

Overall, The Poisoner's Handbook is an insightful read for anyone who has wanted to know how the real world behind TV shows like CSI came to be. While it's true that shows on forensic science are starting to wane in popularity, the concept that made them popular in the first place - that science and logic can be used to solve crimes, to bring order to chaos, to make sense out of the illogical - is still something that fascinates many people, and The Poisoner's Handbook helps in understanding how the concept of forensic science and forensic toxicology first gained prominence and, more importantly, credibility, in the United States. Blum's writing is easy to read and get lost in, but some readers might find themselves being sucked out of the experience against their will by certain organizational problems within the text. Apart from that, however, The Poisoner's Handbook is a fine and not-too-demanding read.

Food: one of the three most important things that human beings need to survive. It's usually the first thing mentioned in that all-important three-item list of what humans need in order to be able to live - the other two are clothing and shelter, in that order. The list is often amended to include water before food, but it was the original three-item list that was drilled into me since grade school (though sometimes religion classes will insist that God is more important than those three, since the teachers insisted that it was God that provides them). Animals need to eat, after all, and humanity is no different in this regard.

It's one thing, though, to say that one must eat; oftentimes, the more interesting - and more pressing - question is what one eats, especially in the context of everyday living. Does one go for cheap fast-food, or splurge a little for a salad? Does one order food to be delivered, or try to cook something instead? Vegetables or meat? Butter or margarine? Non-fat or full-cream milk? Sugar or no sugar? No fat, low fat, or regular fat content? The decisions to be made when considering the question “What to eat?” can be pretty confusing and overwhelming if one considers the full implication of the question. This issue is something Michael Pollan addresses in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, and is also what he calls the problem omnivorous humans have when confronted with the wide range of choices available to them when it comes to food.

In order to answer “What to eat?” Pollan realizes that before he can answer that question he needs first to find the answer to: “What am I eating?” In some ways the questions are similar, but at a fundamental level, they are not. The former is simply a question of choosing from a wide selection of possible foods; the latter requires a greater amount of involvement in one's food far beyond simply choosing what to have. In order to answer that question to the fullest, Pollan decided to structure his quest for answers around four meals: one from a drive-through fast-food joint; another by cooking a meal made from ingredients from Whole Foods; yet another by spending a week and then cooking and having a meal at a “beyond organic” place called Polyface Farm; and finally, by cooking a meal made up of food he either hunted or foraged himself. Pollan's plan was to trace the most important ingredients of each meal before they ended up on his plate, thus figuring out precisely what it was he was putting into his body. The answers, of course, were not as comfortable as they might seem on the surface.

Now, to be fair, not all of Pollan's book was revelatory: a lot of what he talks about regarding how animals are processed industrially I've already read about in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. What I did find interesting, though, was how Pollan pointed out the predominance of corn in processed food, and not in a form that the average shopper in a grocery store would recognize, either. By untangling the mysterious ingredient lists on the labels of common foods like soda, Pollan reveals that almost all processed food contains corn in some way, shape, or form. He also points out that lots of animals are in some ways corn, too, since many animal feeds used in commercial animal production are corn-based. He then reveals what this dependence on corn is doing to the farmers that grow it, and from there the health of the animals that eat it and on to the people who consume all that corn-based food and drink. He concludes his meditation on the corn-based industrial food chain (and corn-based economy) of the US while eating a fast-food meal with his family, consumed in a car while driving.

Reading this portion - the first fourth of Pollan's book - is uncomfortable, to say the least, mostly because I know I consume quite a bit of that corn-based processed food Pollan describes. It also makes me look askance at the meat I've been eating. I used to imagine that animal feeds in the Philippines were rice-based - that's what's easily available, after all. But now that I think about it, the country still has to import rice, so I doubt any farmers are going to waste rice by giving it to animals. I now have the sinking feeling - more like a sinking certainty - that the animal feeds in this country are corn-based after all. And although it may have very little to do with the greater issue of what's going into the pork and beef and chicken I eat on a regular basis, I can't help but think of all the soda I used to drink, and wonder if the subsequent weight gain was in any way connected to the amount of corn (in the form of high fructose corn syrup) sweetening the drink. I haven't given up soda entirely, but I've stopped drinking so much of it, and I've actually managed to lose some of the weight I gained. After reading Pollan's book, I rather like to think the weight loss, however minimal, is because of the amount of corn I've cut out of my diet.

The second and third parts of The Omnivore's Dilemma are actually kind of linked, because they're both a response to the question of “organic food.” The first part of the book is about industrial processed food, and after reading that I think the obvious response is to say: “Well, all right, what if I were to go organic? Would that mean I can avoid all this high fructose corn syrup and mysterious preservatives in my food?” Pollan reveals, however, that the word “organic” is now fraught with complications, since the question of how it's defined is no longer what it used to be. In the sixties and seventies, “organic” had a very specific meaning: food produced without chemical pesticides or fertilizers, and with minimal processing. This is still the meaning that the average eater still has in his or her mind when he or she thinks of the word.

Unfortunately, this is no longer what “organic” means, especially if one sees it on the label of a can of soup or a box of cereal in a grocery store. In fact, the so-called “organic” soup or cereal in a grocery store might be made from “organic” ingredients in the sense that the wheat or carrots were not sprayed with chemical pesticides or given chemical fertilizers while they were being grown, but the subsequent processing they undergo is really no different from their industrially-grown cousins undergo. To be sure, not using chemical pesticides and fertilizers is a good thing, especially for the environment, but only marginally, and the health gains are actually minimal compared to what one would get from industrially-grown raw materials. As for so-called “organic meat,” well, it's really not that different from industrially-raised meat, with the exception that the cows and the pigs and the chickens are given feed based on organically grown corn. In the culminating meal, involving a home-cooked meal made from produce and meat bought from Whole Foods, Pollan comments that, while there was something to be said about the taste factor when it comes to what he calls “industrial organic,” the gains are in fact minimal: the industrial-organic food system actually costs more in terms of petrochemical usage than the industrial food system that he first tackled.

So where, then, should one go if one is looking for the original meaning of organic? The answer to this question leads Pollan to a farm all the way out in Swoope, Virginia, called Polyface Farm, which practices something called “beyond organic:” a term adopted by the owner of the farm, Joel Salatin, and other like-minded folks in order to distinguish themselves from the industrial-organic movement currently embraced by the mainstream. At Polyface Farm, Pollan discovers food grown and raised according to the original spirit of the word “organic:” a farm that operates like an ecosystem, with the plants reliant on the animals, who are in their turn reliant on the plants, and as minimal input in terms of animal feed as the farmer can possibly get. Pollan also confronts the reality of having to kill an animal before eating it when he has to slaughter a chicken.

This is the first time Pollan has to confront the mortality of his food. In the US this is very common: most people never give a second thought to the fact that their pork chop used to belong on a live pig. This is the same problem a growing number of Filipinos have, though there's still a large part of the population that's very aware of the fact that in order for one to eat barbecued pork ribs or deep-fried chicken thighs, someone had to kill a pig or a chicken first. I belong to that section of people: I've witnessed a chicken go from walking around to having its throat slit and its feathers plucked and its innards cleaned in preparation for the cooking pot, so seeing an animal die so it can feed me does not bother me in the least. As long as it wasn't someone's precious pet; it's not going to go extinct any time soon; it was killed humanely; and it was raised well, I will cheerfully consume a chicken - or any animal, for that matter - with very little to no weight on my conscience.

It is at this point that Pollan addresses the issue of animal rights and veganism and vegetarianism - and does so admirably well, defending the position of that large section of humanity that likes meat a little too much to want to give it up. It's a rather involved portion of the book, since Pollan addresses this issue in light of killing the chicken, and it takes reading that portion to really understand it. I will say this, though: Pollan does a good job reminding his readers that a single example of a species is not the entirety of the species itself (a single chicken as opposed to the entire species of Domesticated Chicken, or Gallus gallus, to use the scientific name), and that domesticated species would actually go extinct without humans (except the pig, and he explains why). He pretty much takes the same stand I do: as long as it was raised and killed humanely, and is not about to go extinct, there really shouldn't be any guilt at all in consuming an animal - especially if one has already seen an animal killed for just this reason and so knows exactly what it means to take an animal's life to feed oneself. If one does feel this guilt, however, then one is free to go ahead and go vegan or vegetarian - just don't force the entirety of humanity to adopt the same practice (and don't do it to your cats, for heaven's sake!).

The final fourth of the book is, quite possibly, the most intriguing. In it, Pollan decides to go take the shortest route to his food, which also happens to be the oldest: to hunt his own meat and gather his own vegetables - or mushrooms, rather. He shoots a wild pig (which causes an even greater emotional crisis than his slaughter of the chicken did), and goes mushroom-hunting with a few friends (this part is particularly interesting, if only for the insight into the culture of mushroom hunters), using everything to cook a pretty spectacular meal. The conclusion he comes to is this: the last meal, by and far, was the most difficult in terms of time and skill to create, and yet it was the most satisfying, mostly because he knew where everything had come from, and what each part of the meal had undergone before it got to the table. On the opposite end of the scale, the fast-food meal, Pollan finds that while it was, hands-down, the easiest to obtain, and also the cheapest, it was the least satisfying of all four meals. This leads him to his conclusion that eating a meal is not just about the taste of the food: it's about everything else that brought that food to the table, and having a true awareness of where each part of the meal came from adds a certain special dimension to the food, and to the act of consuming that food, as well. And this, Pollan says, more than any fancy diets or medical studies, is what people should really take into consideration when eating and preparing food.

Overall, The Omnivore's Dilemma is an incredible, fascinating attempt to answer the question “What am I eating?” which then answers the question “What to eat?” Pollan's language is clear and lucid, and the narration of the book is entertaining even when it tackles some of the more scientific aspects of Pollan's search for answers. The last fourth of the book is, in my opinion, the most entertaining, and if it elicits cravings for wild mushrooms or fresh berries, then that's only a sign of the effectiveness of Pollan's prose. Most important, however, is that this book makes the reader ask questions, and that, I think, is precisely what Pollan hopes to do - and in writing the book, offer some possible interesting answers.

I am one of the fortunate few people who's never been stung by a bee, and I hope to continue that streak for the rest of my life, because if Schmidt's account is any indication, my wimpy self would not be able to tolerate even that XD. Still, just because I'm slightly scared of being stung doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by Schmidt's book, which offers an explanation for why stinging insects exist in the first place. The best part, though, is at the end, where Schmidt includes his now-famous pain scale, which makes for hilarious and uncomfortable reading.

One of the many gifts I bemoan not having, including the talent for drawing and painting and a gift for singing, is the lack of a green thumb. This has not, of course, been for want of any attempts to cultivate it. My grandmother raised prize orchids in her garden when I was a very little girl, and she encouraged an interest in this (very fiddly) aspect of horticulture. Later on there were many attempts to grow vegetables and kitchen herbs in pots - none of which worked out. My mother often tells me: “Mainit ang kamay mo sa halaman.” The literal translation of this is that I have “hot hands” when it comes to plants, but the actual meaning is that I simply do not have a green thumb.

But despite having no green thumb, I have a great appreciation for plants and gardens, and the people who have the gift of raising them. Fresh flowers are a joy, if a bit expensive in the tropical climate of the Philippines, and if I had a kitchen garden (or at least access to one) I think I would eat more fresh fruits and vegetables more often.

And there is no denying that plants are just interesting. Aside from the obvious aesthetic and culinary value many of them possess, there is no denying that they are important for more than just food and decoration. Many plants are the source of important medicinal compounds - aspirin, one of the most important over-the-counter painkillers, is derived from a compound found in willow bark, which itself was used as a painkiller in the form of willow bark tea. Digitalis is a compound derived from plants commonly called foxgloves, and helps in the treatment of irregular heart rate. And there are probably thousands more plant-derived compounds that have yet to be discovered, and which will undoubtedly play a role in the treatment of various diseases, chronic or otherwise, in the future.

But for all their potentially useful properties, there is also no denying that plants also kill. Digitalis, though helpful in controlling irregular heart rate, is a dangerous poison if ingested without supervision. Plants from the genus Colchicum, which include a variety of plants commonly known as crocuses (such as the autumn crocus) produce an alkaloid called colchicine, useful as a treatment for gout. However, that same alkaloid is a deadly poison: Catherine Wilson, a notorious 19th century murderer, used colchicine in just such a capacity to kill seven people - but not before getting those people to change their wills so that she would stand to benefit from their deaths.

It was because of these strange, and exceedingly interesting, connections between medicine, science, history, and plain out-and-out weirdness that I chose to pick up Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities. I will also admit that the spectacular, over-the-top title was part of the appeal: it's hard to think of an “atrocity” being “botanical,” but Stewart is quick to prove that there are sometimes, the most innocuous-looking plants might also be the deadliest.

Wicked Plants is, in essence, an encyclopedia: an organized collection of information about some of the deadliest plants Stewart thought would be worth mentioning. In the introduction ominously titled “Consider Yourself Warned,” Stewart clarifies that her book is not meant to scare people out of enjoying the outdoors or gardening, but is meant to act as a field guide for those who do enjoy such pursuits. This bears itself out in the entries: while Stewart is always quick to point out the obvious dangers of such plants as poison ivy (which isn't really a species of ivy) and deadly nightshade, she also includes some less notable (but no less deadly) examples, such as the castor bean and the habanero chili. Also included as “deadly” are the plants that have given humanity some of the most addictive drugs currently known, such as tobacco (though it is included for reasons other than just smoking) and the opium poppy, as well as invasive species such as the kudzu vine and the water hyacinth.

Supplementing the wealth of information that Stewart provides are the lovely etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and illustrations by Jonathan Rosen. They give Wicked Plants a vastly different feel compared to some of the other plant encyclopedias currently available, hearkening back to the old-fashioned botanical illustrations that dominated similar texts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the etchings and illustrations are so well done, with great attention paid to detail, that it doesn't really matter that these are hand-drawn illustrations and not glossy photographs. Morrow-Cribbs' etchings, in particular, are simply a joy to look at: a clear illustration of how science and art are really kin to each other, a reminder that for science to advance, it must look upon the world with the wonder of an artist's eye, and for art to advance, it must approach the craft with the discipline of a scientist.

This book was as informative and enjoyable as I had hoped it would be, despite its focus on plants in temperate climes. This is only natural, as this book was obviously intended for readers in temperate climes, and in that sense it functions just fine as a field guide. A few exotic tropical species are included, but it is apparent these made the book only because they are particularly grotesque or particularly lethal. The inclusion of invasive species as dangerous plants is a fine idea, in my opinion, especially considering what invasive species are doing to native species, both in North America and elsewhere.

As a whole, this was a very enjoyable, educational read. The illustrations are lovely, and the text informative without being overly technical or mind-numbingly boring. While it is fun enough to read it for its own sake as a popular-science text, it also functions quite well for the purpose Stewart intended it: a guide to poisonous plants, a means of gaining knowledge to protect oneself and those one cares for. That it educates while entertaining is merely the icing on the cake.

Steampunk is one of those genres that I think is amazingly fun and interesting, but at the same time, it can be quite frustrating. Most writers playing in the steampunk sandbox are quite happy to celebrate all the technological advances of the aforementioned time periods by filling their stories with as many steam-powered contraptions and tight corsets as they possibly can, but at the same time, they are reluctant to discuss the darker side of all that innovation. Many of them ???politely??? ignore, or outright refuse to tackle the fact that all the great Western powers (the United States included) were involved in brutal colonial campaigns abroad - and where they could not colonise (such as in China and Japan), they manipulated and undermined local power in order to get the concessions and privileges they wanted.

Fortunately, there are some writers who are trying to work against the tide. Authors like Sam Starbuck (The Dead Isle) and Elizabeth Bear (Karen Memory) are starting to show that steampunk not only can, but should be used to address such pressing issues as racism, classism, and of course, colonialism and imperialism - in fact, their works prove that steampunk as a genre is especially qualified for such questioning. While writers can certainly do the same with sweeping sci-fi space operas or grand epic fantasies, there is still something to be said about using alternate history to tackle such themes.

But aside from the need to write about such themes, it is even more important to hear those stories from those very same people who suffered the colonial yoke in the first place. Nowhere is this more true than in Southeast Asia, where various Western powers once held sway - and where, some might say, they still do to this day, though they are no longer a physical presence in their former colonies. Colonial powers linger in history, in memory, and their legacy continues to shape the countries they once occupied - for better and (some might say ???more often???) for worse. While many Southeast Asian writers have indeed tried to address such weighty themes in fiction, almost none of them have tried to address them in genre fiction.

This, of course, explains my excitement when heard about The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia. At the time it was a Kickstarter project, with the editors requesting funding so that they could cover publishing costs and author payments. At the time I was a little short of funds, and so could not contribute even a minimal amount to the project, but I promised to myself that, as soon as I had sufficient funds and it was on sale, I would pick up the collection for myself. That has finally come to pass, and I have practically swallowed the collection whole.

The Sea is Ours is a collection of twelve short stories, edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng. Each of the contributors comes from a particular Southeast Asian country; some of them are still living in the countries they write about, while others are part of the diaspora that live elsewhere. Whatever the case may be, they all look back to their own history, their own mythology and folklore, and filter that through the steampunk lens to tell stories of love and hate, peace and war, subjugation and revolution. Since each piece is unique, I have decided to review them individually.

On the Consequences of Sound by Timothy Dimacali

???To fly,??? he said, ???You must learn to surrender yourself to the music.???He touched a finger to my forehead.???Trust the music. As long as you hear it in your head, you???ll be fine.

One of the best features of steampunk is a sense of wonder: a sense that the world is opening up to the reader, of breathless excitement at what lies over the far horizon. Dimacali captures that sense of wonder right from the get-go, with a description of flying, singing butanding (whale sharks) and a child - the narrator - looking up at them in awe. His chosen setting of an alternate-universe Philippines where the skies are dominated by airships driven by engines that run, not on steam, but on music, plays well into the musicality and love of music that Filipinos are known for. It also offers a type of technology that has nothing to do with the steam-driven machines of Western steampunk, and thus distances Dimacali somewhat from the ???brass gears and corsets??? imagery so often associated with the genre.

But quite apart from the setting is Dimacali???s theme. I???ve read a lot of Filipino short stories, especially while at university, but one theme a majority of them seem to tackle is ???sacrifice???. I do not know if this is a culturally-embedded sort of thing, or if it is one introduced by Western colonisation, but it is a hallmark of a great many Filipino short stories. Dimacali???s story is no different. It is a story of sacrifice - on one hand, a child sacrificing their innocence to finally grow up; on the other, a parent sacrificing their place in their child???s world as said child enters adulthood. Dimacali???s plot acts as a beautiful frame for those themes: just big enough to hint at a larger, more wondrous world, and just small enough to frame the coming-of-age drama at the heart of the story with a proper delicacy.


Chasing Volcanoes by Marilag Angway

Volcano chasing was illegal in the south, and meeting up with a sheltered Cebu City woman might bring with it a fleet of soldiers waiting to confiscate what energy they???d siphoned. Hypocrites, the lot of them, Caliso thought.

Angway???s story is more ???typically??? steampunk than Dimacali???s, in that it features an airship and steam-powered machinery. However, the highlight of Angway???s story is the intense regionalism that is deeply embedded in Filipino culture. Though she does not mention it directly, Angway demonstrates throughout the story how it is this regionalism that prevents her alternate-universe Philippines from recuperating from a major geological disaster - and that only cooperation, and putting aside personal gain for the greater good, can bring the country together.

Angway does not, of course, frame any of this on a grand scale, choosing instead to play it out as the interaction between the story???s two primary characters. The interactions could, perhaps, be tightened somewhat, and the world could probably be broadened a little bit, but on the whole the story works wonderfully, and is an excellent commentary on the things that keep a people divided when they should, by rights, stand together.


Ordained by L. L. Hill

???Sometimes, even the proudest people have to get close to the Lord Buddha.???

Some readers might wonder what Hill???s story is doing in the collection. It is, after all, a very quiet piece, more like a parable than anything else. The only thing that the reader might recognise as ???steampunk??? are the windup mechanisms mentioned throughout the story.

But Hill???s story also shows that steampunk, as a genre, is not limited to high-flying adventure and action stories. ???On the Consequences of Sound??? shows that steampunk can work in quieter stories, but ???Ordained??? is perhaps the clearest example of what steampunk is capable of accomplishing, even at its quietest and most meditative. There is tension here, and hints of a larger conflict at its edges, but its heart is calm - or mostly calm. It also tackles the interesting tug-of-war between Buddhism and the wider world, as well as the ancient traditions of Thailand and the lure of the West. In capturing both conflicts - one spiritual, the other socio-political - Hill is able to contain a deeper story in a small, tidy package.


The Last Aswang by Alessa Hinlo

The ambassador had been gone a long time. No matter how good her intentions, growing up on foreign soil changed you.

Hinlo???s story plays with an aspect of colonialism that a lot of people seem to forget (not least writers of steampunk): colonies do not exist in isolation. In referencing the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade in her story, she reminds the reader (especially the Filipino reader) that the Philippines was not alone in its struggle against the Spanish, that there was a parallel struggle across the vast Pacific, and that struggle was, in many ways, similar to ours. The story also poses an interesting what-if: had the Philippines been able to repel the Spanish, but continued to trade with them and their other colonies, could we have offered those colonies aid in throwing off their colonial masters? If so, what kind of help could we have offered them? And what could they have offered us, in return? When one includes mythology and magic into the mix, then one can see just how fascinating and entertaining Hinlo???s story can be.

But what really makes ???The Last Aswang??? so delightful is how Hinlo uses folkloric figures like the diwata and the aswang as a way to discuss the struggle between pre-colonial culture and tradition versus the new Western customs brought in by the colonisers. The tug-of-war between the old and the new, the local and the foreign, the pagan and the Christian, is presented as a conflict between two worlds - and what happens to those who are caught in between. They are the ones who must make a choice, and in many ways, it is their choices that shape the course of history, alternate or otherwise. I hope Hinlo chooses to expand this story, because I would absolutely love to read a sequel or a prequel to it.


Under Glass by Nghi Vo

If I walked faster, perhaps I would be able to outpace the memories that seemed to crowd close whenever I thought of An and of the six years we had spent together. The memories weren???t as sharp as they where, but as my father had always told me, dull knives are the most dangerous.

Like ???Ordained???, it can be hard to see what makes ???Under Glass??? steampunk. There are a few touches, here and there, that suggest a steampunk world, but since the story does not draw much attention to those details some readers might wonder how in the world the story made it into a collection dedicated to steampunk.

However, like ???Ordained???, Vo???s story shows how the typical, Western understanding of what steampunk is can be altered and redefined. As I mentioned in my discussion of ???On the Consequence of Sound???, one of the key features of steampunk is a sense of wonder, and that is precisely what ???Under Glass??? focuses on: the importance of wonder and discovery, and how it can change a person. Sometimes that change is negative, but in Vo???s story the change is positive. It also emphasises the importance of moving forward, of not being bogged down by one???s past - of being aware enough to know that the past shapes us, will always shape us, but that it does not define us.


Between Severed Souls by Paolo Chikiamco

The future???s the only thing worth going to war for.

Chikiamco???s story is, in many ways, what most readers think of when they think of steampunk: action, war, and flying machines galore, set in a world that is almost-but-not-quite reminiscent of actual history. But the best stories are more than just the sum of their set dressing - something that quite a few other steampunk writers seem to forget.

Chikiamco, however, is entirely aware of that, and though his setting feels deep enough and roomy enough for a longer piece, he chooses to focus on what matters: the characters and the themes. The former are interesting because of the their hinted backstory, though I do hope that Chikiamco will expand on them further, because this is an interesting world and an interesting bunch of characters, and it would be fun to return to them when they have a bigger, heftier story in which to grow fully.

As for the latter, they are not quite as well-developed as I might like, but again, I attribute this to the fact that this is a short story, and hence there is a limited space in which to develop the grander theme of revolution that interest me so much about this story. However, it is just long enough to talk about the story???s emotional heart: what it means to love deeply, both as a husband and a father.


The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso by Kate Osias

Our end began not with the unwitting discovery of our secret, but with music.

The nature of genius is a theme that steampunk touches upon quite frequently. Many a steampunk novel will feature engineers and scientists who always seem to be several steps ahead of their peers: sometimes they are villains, sometimes protagonists themselves, and other times they are nothing more than names mentioned in passing, but whose influence still touches the story???s characters.

Osias tackles a similar theme in ???The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso???, but the angle she takes is somewhat different. Geniuses are people, after all, and in many ways more vulnerable than regular folk. She describes what it means to be a genius in a world where everything comes with a price - and what a world like that can do to geniuses. She also describes the power of love and art: how they can bring out the best in people, as well as the worst, and how they can bring down an entire regime.

The only problem I have with this story is that it feels a bit too short for the kinds of ideas that Osias tries to tackle. Plot-wise it is as long as it needs to be, but in terms of handling its themes and developing its characters I feel like it could do with being a bit longer. Hopefully Osias will expand this at a later date.


Working Woman by Olivia Ho

?????? These things make sense to me???more than words, or numbers, or cooking???gears always speak the same language.???

The interesting thing about this story is how it reminds me, not of the typical steampunk story, but of a sibling genre: cyberpunk. Anyone who has seen the movie Blade Runner or played the Shadowrun tabletop games or video games knows that ???cyberpunk??? mixes advanced technology like cybernetics with organised crime and a world undergoing social breakdown. This is not a bad comparison, by the way: after all, other steampunk stories have focused on similar settings and plots.

But what makes Ho???s story enjoyable is how it focuses on women, race, and power. Set in British Malaya, it tells the story of three different women from three different races and walks of life, who must somehow deal with the consequences of what happens when their paths cross. While there are other stories in this collection that focus on women and womanhood in relation to other themes, I just find Ho???s female characters utterly delightful - particularly Ning Lam.


Spider Here by Robert Liow

???This is Khuai Boey. Ask you, who last night cannot sleep????People tittered, and some of them yawned.???Ya. Me too, so I made this.???

It is not very often that I come across short stories that know how to play with tension while using very few words, but Liow succeeds in creating tension in this story. The entire story is strung tight with it: none of the characters knows what will happen next, so they do the only thing they know how to do - and even that provides them with only very scant relief.

What really makes this story work, though, is how subtly Liow handles the conflict at the heart of the story. By only giving glimpses and hints of what???s really going on, he lets the reader piece the whole situation together for himself or herself, based on the actions and reactions of the characters in the story. Also, it is a quiet tribute to the children who suffer under the conditions of war, who must learn to live their lives as best as they can when they are victimised by conflict, whether psychologically or physically.


The Chamber of Souls by z.m. qu??nh

???It is time for a new era, a new focus, one that will bring us back where we belong. Your memory and your contribution will be priceless, and your place among us cemented.???

I am not quite sure what to make of this story. On one hand, I think it is quite fun: qu??nh???s setting is interesting - more sci-fi than fantasy, actually - and the plot has the potential for being even more interesting than it already is.

Unfortunately, qu??nh does not reveal enough about the protagonist/narrator for the reader to really get attached to said character. It is entirely possible that I am missing something in the story, but at the same time I cannot help but think that qu??nh has actually held back more information than necessary. I have a similar problem with the setting: by eliding certain details, or obscuring them, qu??nh makes it rather hard for the reader to grasp just what is really going on. Again, it is entirely possible I am missing subtler cues for world-building and characterisation, but nevertheless, I still think that qu??nh could have added some more details in order to really develop the story to its fullest extent.


Petrified by Ivanna Mendels

It was all a game, and Biwar was not good at games.

This is another one of those stories that I wish was longer, because while it works well the way it is, there is just so much hinted at around the edges of the story - both in terms of world-building and of characters - that I found myself turning my Kindle over and shaking it in the (vain) hope of finding more to read. Mendels??? characterisation is strong enough to get the reader attached to her characters in a short amount of time, but again, the reader gets the sense that there is more waiting in the wings.

It also helps that Mendels has chosen to tackle the nature of heroism as a theme. After all, steampunk is populated by characters that aspire to heroism, but there are many ways one many define the concept, and Mendels chooses to investigate how one may define a ???hero???. However, as with ???The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso???, I find myself wishing that this story had been longer, because it would have given Mendels more room in which to expand upon not just her chosen theme, but upon the setting as a whole.


The Insects and Women Sing Together by Pear Nuallak

Oh, men can speak of women???s gossip, but what is gossip but knowledge, and what is knowledge but power?

What does it mean to be a woman? More importantly, what does it mean to be a woman with aspirations, dreams - even a desire for power? Those are the questions Nuallak tries to tackle in this short story, which also tackles the place of women in revolution and in war. While the other stories in the collection play with similar ideas, Nuallak???s story attempts to do so more-or-less head-on. It certainly helps that the characters are all remarkably easy to get attached to, and while some of them might not necessarily be ???good people???, they are all good characters.

Nuallak also incorporates the theme of sisterhood, elaborating via subtle details in the story what it means to have that kind of relationship not only with one???s biological sisters, but with the women one chooses to share that bond with. It is this notion of women???s shared sisterhood - a bond that cuts across race, religion, and politics - that holds the story together and forms its backbone.

Overall, The Sea is Ours is a strong collection of stories that take the (typically) Western notion of what steampunk is, and reshape it in order to tell stories that matter to those of us who live in Southeast-Asia, or who used to live here, but have since gone elsewhere. Those stories might have a wide range of tones, settings, characters, and themes, but one quality they do share is that they all break down the notion of steampunk as an exclusively Western genre, criticising the genre???s colonialist and imperialist leanings while still telling entertaining tales of wonder and adventure.

 Not bad, not bad at all! I guess the overall choppiness of the narrative is attributable to the fact that this is a collection of short essays, but otherwise it???s pretty fun! I liked how it wasn???t just things like statues and coins and jars and such, but included literary works and even a menu. The connections he drew between artifacts, history, and culture make for some very interesting reading, and really live up to his aim of making these ???mute??? artifacts ???speak??? in the same way that written history does. 
I noted though that he seemed to get a wee bit defensive on the matter of repatriation. He makes a good point about how several of the artifacts he mentions were spared from destruction because they weren???t in the country when the Battle of Manila happened (because the Americans practically leveled the city - it was the second most-devastated city, after Warsaw, at the end of World War II), but at the same time I kind of think this question of repatriation is one that should be revisited and reconsidered in the current period. Maybe not for all artifacts currently out there, but for a few. 
I also noted how Ocampo pecked at contemporary political and social issues here and there, wherever they were relevant to a particular artifact. For example, when discussing the Murillo Map that helped bolster the Philippines??? territorial claims against China in the UN arbitral court, he briefly tackles the Philippines??? ongoing dispute with China over the West Philippine Sea. It would have been interesting if he???d been able to expand a bit more on those political ideas, but I also recognize that this book might not be the best place for them; besides, he???s got columns and socmed accounts on which he can expand on his ideas as he wishes. 
Another thing that Ocampo points out regularly, especially when discussing precolonial artifacts, are the efforts of local archaeologists to preserve remnants of the Philippines??? past before the colonizers arrived. Between the less-than-ideal preservation conditions and looting both past and present, being an archaeologist in the Philippines is a very difficult and dangerous job, and Ocampo makes note of that in the essays accompanying many of the precolonial artifacts featured in the book. Their persistence and oftentimes downright heroic efforts are the main reason why the enormous gaps in our knowledge of the Philippines??? precolonial past are slowly but surely getting filled in. 
So overall, this was a nifty and informative read. While there were times when I wished Ocampo had gone into greater detail and depth into the history of a particular artifact, for the most part the essays were fine on their own as starting points for creating greater interest in Philippine history as a whole. 

I picked this book up on a whim. Admittedly, the cover had a lot to do with it: a carnival-like mish-mash of notable historical figures, and the promise of history's “best bits” somewhere in there. As a historical buff, there was absolutely no way I would not pick this up, and I did.

After having just finished reading it, I'm rather on the fence about this one. I see it's merits, to be sure, but at the same time, I do see where a reader might not be happy with it.

First, a caveat. I might just be nitpicking here, but when Magellan's death is brought up in the book, it is mentioned “he was eaten by natives.” This is quite sensational, but not true - there is no historical evidence of pre-Hispanic Filipinos practicing cannibalism in any way, shape or form, and in fact Magellan was killed in a skirmish against a native chieftain named Lapu-Lapu, in waist-deep water around the island of Mactan. Pigafetta's account of the battle, along with his observations of the pre-Hispanic Filipinos, clearly indicates that though Lapu-Lapu and his men might have killed Magellan and refused to return his body to the Spaniards, they did not eat him. The cultural milieu of the area was more akin to their Malay predecessors and neighbors, who did not practice cannibalism, as opposed to the natives of distant Papua New Guinea.

But that is a simple, minor error, and can be ignored in light of other, more positive things that can be said about this book. Its best feature is its sheer readability: none of the weight (literally and figuratively) usually associated with textbooks is to be found anywhere in it. There is also a sprinkling of interesting facts that do not normally show up in standard history textbooks, which are handily tied up with the main body of the topic. Each chapter begins with a set of important dates, and ends with a set of important numbers - these are usually the hardest parts to remember when it comes to learning history (for me, at least), so to have them handily book-ending each chapter is quite convenient.

Another good thing about this book is its tongue-in-cheek humor, though given that this is from the people at Mental Floss, that is pretty much par for the course. Nevertheless, it does take away a lot of the tedium that comes along with reading a standard textbook version of history, and there are quite a few moments that will make the reader chuckle. Not outright laugh, since the humor verges on the rather corny, but chuckle.

On the downside, though, this is a very “lite” version of world history. It does not cover the main events with any great depth, and some minor (but still important and still fascinating) events are not covered at all. Then again, this is to be expected: the book itself is only a few hundred pages long, and to cover all of history with any greater depth would mean publishing either an impressively long book (“the first book visible from space,” as the authors cheekily mention in the introduction), or publish several volumes. I would have liked a multi-volume version of this, with each book going over a specific period of history with more depth, but this is merely me as a history buff speaking.

But then again, this book was not really meant for serious history buffs in the first place. For those of us who loved history before coming across this book, this is nothing more than a quick reference, something to turn to when one needs to confirm something and access to Wikipedia is unavailable. It's possible to find amusement in it, especially if one is of a mind to treat history a little less seriously, but for true depth, the history buff might have to look elsewhere.

For the layman, however, or for someone who doesn't like history but wants to, then this is a great introduction to the joy, drama, and outright weirdness of history. Like a sports highlights program on ESPN, this book really does cover “the best bits,” and quite a few of the important ones, too. The cheeky treatment of history in this book makes history more accessible, and (hopefully) will lead to a greater interest in the subject.

So I read romance novels as a way to escape. They're one of my favourite “bail out” buttons when I just can't anymore with life and need something happy for my brain. But that doesn't mean that romance novels can't deal with some very tough IRL issues - and the Rock Kiss series just proves that. This particular one tackles a very tough one indeed: sexual abuse. Putting that out there right now as a kind of trigger warning because I know some people are sensitive to that sort of issue. But: if you're willing to pick this up, I can say that it's not portrayed graphically, and is handled very well (in my opinion, anyway). But also this novel (and this series as a whole, really) proves that it's possible to make a romance novel that checks all the boxes (squee-worthy, sexy, HEA), while still handling some tough IRL issues - and quite well, too.

In this story, of course, it is quite clear that these fathers have not done right by their daughters at all. But that is not what matters; what matter is how each woman is able to distinguish and separate herself from her father???s legacy, no matter how much that legacy continues to control her in the story???s present. This is especially true in the case of Diana, Justine, Beatrice, and Catherine: for them, there is no escaping their fathers??? legacy, for they are that legacy, for better or for worse. Despite that, though, they try their best, each in her own way, to live with their lot in life and make the best out of it. Their fathers will forever exert an influence on their lives, but that does not mean they cannot carve a slice of freedom and joy out of the world now that they are (mostly) free of their fathers??? control. This is as true in fiction as it is in the real world: sometimes all a person can really do is to break away, and find such happiness as he or she can, making the best of what already is.

Full review here: https://wp.me/p21txV-Gf

Trying to knock down this reading slump I'm in by reading more novellas, and this one seemed like a really good place to start :D. But man, Wallace sure knows how to drive the stakes ever higher in this series. There aren't a lot of laugh-out-loud moments in this instalment, but it's still pretty funny in a lot of places. It's just...IDK. I think the stakes have gotten so high at this point that I'm really more worried about what's going to happen to the characters, instead of all the funny things that are happening. Makes me kind of worried about what's going to happen in the next novella in the series. Don't get me wrong: this is still a very good read, it just isn't as funny as the first few ones have been. Which again, I guess makes sense, given how high the stakes are now.

On a happier note: I think Wallace has a tendency to have certain people make “special guest appearances” in this series, and this book is no exception. Given the cover, I think you can guess who makes that appearance.

 Huh. Not sure how to feel about this, to be honest. On one hand, the romance wasn't all that interesting, but on the other hand, everything else kind of was? Like: I was intrigued by the introduction of magic as a potential element in this world, as well as looking into the Book, Devina, and Lassiter's potential roles in a post-Scribe Virgin, post-Omega World. So I suppose the best part of this is really the worldbuilding, but not so much the romance. Which WORKS, to be fair; it's just not as interesting as everything else.

Oh well. Maybe the next romances will be a bit better, now that a pretty large chunk of worldbuilding's out of the way. 

In the Philippines, we grow up hearing tales of the supernatural - and not in the same way as our Western counterparts. Oh, to be sure, we grow up hearing all the same fairytales and watching all the same Disney movies as Western children do, but alongside those stories, we hear stories of another sort. These are the stories we hear from our grandparents (if we are lucky enough to have them nearby), or from our nannies or other members of the household help (for those who are lucky to have them). Sometimes we hear them from our aunts or uncles, or from playmates and classmates who, in their turn, heard them from other people in their lives. It is from these stories that we learn to be cautious of balete trees (genus Ficus), and to say ???Tabi-tabi po??? (translated: ???Please step aside???) when passing by a termite mound or crossing a grassy field. It is from these stories that we learn to turn our shirts inside-out if we get lost, and to walk faster if we hear a crying baby while out and about alone at night. Incidentally, these beliefs do not in any way conflict with the prevailing Christian practice in the country; instead, they cohabit quite comfortably, side-by-side, in the Filipino mindset.

Things are different in the West. If one professes a belief in, say, fairies beyond a certain age, one is bound to be considered ???crazy???, with subsequent reactions depending upon whether or not that ???craziness??? is viewed with tolerable fondness or otherwise. This is not to say that belief in the supernatural is considered acceptable by all people in the Philippines, but the acceptability of such beliefs depends more upon class and social status (i.e. such beliefs are considered more ???prevalent??? in people who are from more rural areas and/or belong to a lower socio-economic class, but supposedly less so in the urbanised, Western-thinking upper class) than on a person???s mental state. In the Philippines, belief in the supernatural is considered a symptom of inadequate education and/or poor socio-economic standing; in the West, it is generally considered a reflection of a person???s mental state.

One of the things that makes Mishell Baker???s Borderline so fascinating is the play between mental states and the supernatural. It begins with the main character, Millicent ???Millie??? Roper, being invited by one Caryl Vallo to join the mysterious Arcadia Project. However, Millie isn???t what most people would consider ???normal???: after all, Caryl meets her at the Leishman Psychiatric Center, where Millie has been living for the last six months because of her attempted suicide - an attempt that might have left Millie with her life, but without both her legs. Millie also has borderline personality disorder, or BPD: a mental illness that is difficult to manage and difficult to live with. Despite all of this, though, Caryl convinces Millie that she should at least try to work with the Arcadia Project, and Millie decides to give it a shot. As it turns out, however, the Arcadia Project is not quite what it seems to be, and Millie walks right into a situation that might shatter a fragile peace, and begin an otherworldly war.

One of the things that makes this novel stand out from the many other urban fantasy novels is the way Baker has chosen to characterise Millie, and many of the other characters involved in the Arcadia Project. Keeping the supernatural a secret from the rest of the mundane world is practically a trope of urban fantasy, but the main characters of those books can still function in the mundane world without being made into pariahs for their belief in the supernatural. These characters, therefore, never have to fear being called ???crazy??? as long as their secrets remain secret; any difficulties they encounter tend to come from putting themselves between the mundane and supernatural worlds in the name of that secrecy.

Millie, however, is different. Her BPD means that living a normal life is difficult, as she points out throughout the novel. Take this excerpt, for example:

One of the fun bits about BPD is a phenomenon shrinks like to call ???splitting.??? When under stress, Borderlines forgets the existence of gray. Life is a beautiful miracle, or a cesspool of despair. The film you???re making is a Best Picture candidate, or it???s garbage. People are either saints, or they???re scheming to destroy you.

Or this:

When you???re Borderline and want to survive, you learn to shrink from guilt, because it can spiral out of control and leave you staring down a bottomless void. People throw around the term ???self-loathing??? without really knowing what it means. I wouldn???t wish it on my worst enemy.

Or this:

Borderlines are not good at patiently earning things; we tend to take ???no??? as a personal insult and feel driven to turn it into a ???yes??? on the spot.

There are several more of these explanations about what it is like to live with BPD, and it is made quite clear to the reader that even Millie herself has a hard time managing it. And yet, despite this, when she is thrown headlong into an assignment for the Arcadia Project, with very little explanation about what is going on and what she can and cannot do, she still manages to handle the situation with some aplomb. A part of it can be attributed to BPD:

But that???s a weird side effect of BPD; your perfection of truth shifts so often in the normal course of daily life that crazy talk doesn???t automatically trigger your bullshit reflex.

This ability to keep her ???bullshit reflex??? from going off proves crucial to Millie???s ability to think through some otherwise absurd situations - and is, therefore, crucial to being able to work in the Arcadia Project at all:

I stared at the shimmering swirls on the paper; they moved as though they were alive. I???d misplaced the speech center of my brain again. When I found it, I said a little drunkenly, ???What kind of glasses are these???????It???s like an advanced version of the fairy ointment from the stories,??? he said. ???One side of the lens shows you what kind of magic a thing has; the other side shows you things as they really are.???I waited for my rational mind to put up a fight, but it rolled over and showed its belly.

This characterisation stands in direct contrast to the way other urban fantasy protagonists are portrayed, many of whom are either aware from childhood that the supernatural exists (and why it needs to be kept secret), or learn about it but manage to accept its existence with an admirable (and in some cases slightly unrealistic) calm. Millie???s BPD is far from glamorous, and Baker does not ever once portray it as such, but it does offer a plausible explanation as to why she can so readily roll with the punches thrown at her worldview throughout the novel.

Another thing about the way Millie has been characterised is that she does not use her mental illness as an excuse when she???s behaved poorly. While she often acknowledges that her BPD can and often does lead her to do and say very ill-considered things, she does not use it to excuse any poor behaviour on her part. Though she has a hard time apologising (partly because of who she is, and partly because of her BPD), she does acknowledge it when she realises that she has done something wrong (even if it takes her a while to do so), and tries her best to make amends. I personally find this very refreshing, having had to deal with a former friend who used her own mental issues (not BPD, as far as I know) to excuse hurtful behaviour, and I am glad Baker has been careful to depict this particular line between what the mentally ill do because they???re sick, and what they do because they are who they are.

What makes Millie stand out even more as a character and narrator is the world she inhabits, and the story that plays out. Like many urban fantasy worlds, there is nothing significantly different between the reader???s reality and the reality in the book, save for the addition of supernatural elements; the plot is also quite similar to other plots in other urban fantasy novels. This means, therefore, that Borderline is similar to many other urban fantasy novels out there. However, that works to the advantage of character-building: since the overall set dressing and plot isn???t really all that different from many other novels in the same genre, the reader can focus on reading how the characters grow and develop. This is a novel that is very much driven by its protagonist, after all, and though Baker does bring the setting of Hollywood to life, in all its contrasts, contradictions, and neuroses, the focus remains on Millie, and how she sees the world, what she thinks of it, and how she grows into the character she is at the end of the novel.

Aiding all of this is Baker???s writing. I enjoy characters that have distinctive voices, especially when they are the ones narrating the story, and there is no denying that Millie is definitely one of those characters. Take this excerpt, for example:

At eighteen, I drove two thousand miles west toward the siren call of Hollywood, hoping it would drown out the cruel voice in my head that I thought was my father???s. By the time I found out that the cruel voice in my head was my own, my father was two years dead and I???d already let the voice talk me off the roof of Hendrick Hall. Whoops,

There is a hard-bitten edge to Millie???s narrative voice, and a touch of sarcasm that I find enjoyable to read. To be sure, there are many other urban fantasy protagonists that try to come off just as hard-bitten and sarcastic, but very few of them make it come off as naturally, as believably, as Millie. Again, I attribute this to Baker???s skill as a writer, that she can make a character???s personality come through so well in the written word. Indeed, it makes me wonder if there is an audiobook of this book already out, because I think it would be interesting to actually hear Millie???s story, told in her ???own??? voice by an expert narrator.

Overall, Borderline is one of those novels that definitely lives up to the hype surrounding it. Millie is an interesting and atypical urban fantasy protagonist, who portrays what it is like to live with disability and mental illness in a way that I think is respectful to those who must deal with such conditions in their own daily lives. Even better, Baker does not glamourise or victimise Millie???s problems, showing instead how they can be both help and hindrance in a world where the supernatural exists, but needs to be kept as secret as possible. I now look forward to reading the next book, which, in my opinion, cannot come soon enough.

Hurley???s take on grimdark, as has been showcased in her other works besides this novel, has more to do with the violence and bloodiness of being a woman. On one hand, a woman can be a destroyer, as the excerpt and many other scenes throughout the story show, but she can also be a creator ??? but that process of creation means to be wracked with the pains of childbirth, and covered in its blood and muck. In other stories, pregnancy and birth are portrayed as miraculous, even magical (consider the virgin birth narrative in mythology and Christianity), but that is not the case in [this novel]...

Full review here: http://wp.me/p21txV-AO

I think it's pretty safe to say that, right now, Loki is a hot commodity. Say the name, and a thousand fangirls (myself included) will likely pop their heads up from whatever it is that has us occupied, and we will pay attention. Of course, a whole lot of us will do so in anticipation of seeing Loki as interpreted in Marvel's movies, though I'm sure there will be quite a few who will be looking for the comic book interpretations of him (especially his teenage self in the recent issues of Young Avengers). An even smaller handful might be looking for his interpretation in Tri-Ace's Valkyrie Profile video games, though those will be few and far between, as the game is quite old. And there will be those who will be looking for all those interpretations, plus the “original” take of him in the Norse myths from which he, and the many other pop culture interpretations of him, are derived.

I'm one of the latter. I first read about Loki in Bulfinch's Mythology, and though I didn't like him, he did stand out - mostly because Greek mythology doesn't quite have his equivalent. Pan might come closest, but he doesn't have the same influence that Loki does on the goings-on of the Greek pantheon - in fact, Pan tends to stay on the sidelines, for the most part, leaving godly affairs to the gods and spending most of his time and influence amongst mortals and lesser deities.

Loki, however, is another story: his influence amongst the gods of Asgard is quite large. There are quite a few stories of the gods blaming Loki for a whole host of things that go wrong or go missing, and around seventy percent of the time, the stories indicate that the gods are correct to blame him. It gets to the point that the reader rather wonders why it is that the Norse gods haven't just kicked Loki out and spared themselves the trouble of his presence.

The thing is, though, Loki isn't all about trouble. In fact, there have been moments when Loki's mischievous tendencies have proven beneficial to the gods of Asgard - after all, if it wasn't for Loki, they wouldn't have Sleipnir, Br??singamen, or Mj??lnir, or even the walls around Asgard itself. He comes up with the most ingenious plans, because the other gods are simply incapable of thinking the same way he does. The only one who can parallel Loki's cleverness is Odin, but he rarely interferes with anything going on in Asgard or even in the realm of mortals.

This, then, begs the question: who is Loki? When some myths say that he was evil, and when others say that he wasn't, this can be quite confusing, especially if the reader is trying to get a more comprehensive image of who he was as distinct from the many interpretations of him in pop culture.

The Gospel of Loki, by Joanne Harris, is an attempt to answer that question. In it, Loki retells a huge chunk of Norse mythology's most important, most notable moments - but as he saw them, as he experienced them. In his own, unique voice, he describes everything, from the creation of the Nine Worlds, to the most important events he participated in, all the way to Ragnar??k. Along the way, he shows that the stories told about the Norse gods aren't quite what they seem. After all, history is written by the victors, and it's quite obvious that Loki is the farthest thing from a victor.

Before anything else, I'm going to say that I'm relatively familiar with Harris' work. I saw the movie version of Chocolat, and was charmed enough by it to read the book, which I felt was better than the movie itself. I then read Gentlemen and Players, which encouraged me to read Holy Fools; I found both to be really enjoyable reads. And then I found out that there was a sequel to Chocolat, titled The Girl with No Shadow, which did not have quite the same magic as its predecessor, though they did share the same lovely language. So I can say that, to a degree, I'm familiar with Harris' writing, and love it best when she uses her writing to not just paint settings, but personalities, as well.

She makes quite the attempt at it in The Gospel of Loki. Her Loki speaks with a thoroughly familiar, contemporary tone, one that anyone who has been on the Internet for any amount of time will recognize immediately. Hope (who read this book along with me) dubbed it “Rumblr:” a portmanteau of Reddit and Tumblr, the two main websites where this type of language is used most often. Harris' language is, of course, only tonally similar to Rumblr: her take on it is far more refined, and contains fewer unconventional paragraph breaks and far less keysmash than anything one can find on Tumblr or Reddit.

But anyone who frequents either website will recognize the snark, the irreverence, and the general undercurrent of strong emotion (tending towards anger and/or extreme excitement), and will likely derive quite a bit of pleasure from it. For the most part I enjoyed Loki's language, though I did rather miss Harris' usual language, the one that tends to the more poetic, the more contemplative. But then again, could one expect such language from Loki, of all people? Certainly not, and one should not expect that here. Loki is in the driver's seat now, and he's the one telling the story, so he'll tell it his way.

And this is where I run into something of a problem. While the language is quite fun initially, it does lose its shine after a while. This isn't to say that Loki himself isn't engaging; it's just that I've read myths retold in Rumblr language already, in Corey O'Brien's Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes. That book is a retelling of a collection of world myths - including Norse ones - using Rumblr language, complete with caps lock and awkward paragraph breaks, and a whole lot more swearing and gross imagery than might be considered completely acceptable by some readers. This means that, tonally at least, The Gospel of Loki has lost a bit of its novelty. I've heard this kind of storytelling before, and Loki isn't the first one to have done it; he's just far tidier.

And speaking of that notion of “something new”, the novel as a whole has a bit of a problem with that. When authors rewrite or retell stories, especially myths and fairytales, I tend to expect a fresh take on the material. When I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, for instance, I was expecting something about the story to relate back to the original Scottish ballad, but I didn't expect it to do so word-for-word, so to speak. And it didn't: Tam Lin is, above all else, a slice-of-life college story with a touch of myth and magic at its heart. The story as told in the Scottish ballad did make its way into the story eventually, but for quite a bit of time, that wasn't what it was about.

There is also Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which is a feminist retelling of the Arthurian legends, drawing mostly from Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and assorted legends not included in Malory's work. Told from the perspective of the female characters, particularly Morgaine (more famously known as Morgana le Fey), Bradley retells the Arthurian stories, not as tales of heroic knights going on epic quests, but as the slow destruction of an entire culture, an entire way of life, by a new religion. It is also tells the stories of women who struggle with themselves and those around them, trying to find out where they fit in a world that is in a state of rapid flux.

Because of these precedents (and a few others), I was expecting The Gospel of Loki to be somewhat similar. I was expecting a narrative that would turn the Norse myths inside out, something that would reveal some idea or theme that I had missed before, or which would be revealed in the retelling.

But that's not quite what happened. Despite Loki retelling the myths, the myths themselves didn't seem all that new. There was nothing new about most of the stories, except towards the end, but that's only because Loki's abandoned the gods of Asgard in order to play his role in Ragnar??k. Most of the stories are already familiar, and if they aren't, a quick check will usually show that Loki's retelling of them isn't all that different from what appears in the source material (in this case that would be the Prose and Poetic Eddas). The themes, too, are the same for the most part, with no new take on anything. There is an attempt made to tackle the concept that the pursuit of knowledge can be one's own downfall, and about prophecies being destructive whether or not one tries to avoid them, but they're not really tackled as fully as I might like.

As for the rest of the gods, they weren't any different from the way they were depicted in the original myths, though they did have an extra trait or two thanks to Loki's opinion on them. I was hoping there would be a deeper characterization of the gods - or at least, if not all of them, then at least the major ones, but that didn't happen. The only one who occasionally escapes this is Odin, but every time it felt as if the story was going into some sort of deeper characterization, the narrative backs off and he goes back to what he was in the myths: powerful, but mysterious and isolated. This is disappointing, because if anything was going to be different about The Gospel of Loki, I was expecting it to be the characterization. However, aside from a few reconciliations regarding otherwise conflicting aspects of character (like in Freyja's case), there's not much that's new or deep about the gods.

Overall, The Gospel of Loki showed much promise, but didn't quite live up to it. Loki's narrative voice is fun to read, but it may turn out to be nothing new, depending on the reader's previous experience. That, though, is a minor issue; a bigger one would be the lack of any real depth of storytelling or characterization. Retellings may hew closely to the original material, but there is always something new, something different, about the story that reveals a hidden or perhaps even a new aspect of it that the reader would have otherwise missed or not even considered had the retelling not be done.

But the retelling of Norse myths in The Gospel of Loki doesn't really reveal anything new about Norse myths at all: rather, it reads more like a primer, something for those who want a quick entry into Norse mythology that's more reputable than Wikipedia. This is a fine read for anyone whose only experience of Norse mythology is limited to Marvel's take on it, or to The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim video game, but for someone with a working knowledge or higher of Norse myth, this book might not prove as substantial as they might like.