Hey everybody! I know. It’s been a month. Bad Meagan! I had my reasons? (No, not really.)

All righty. Book number three is a book Iv’e been meaning to read since I saw the Doctor Who episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which is all about Agatha Christie and how awesome she is. And, after reading Murder on the Orient Express, I have to concur.

This is a pretty famous book with a pretty famous ending, but if you don’t know what happens, caution ahead.

So. Murder on the Orient Express is a mystery set entirely on a train going from Istanbul to Paris. Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, has just finished solving a case and is making his way home, when the train is stalled in a snow bank, and a body is discovered in one of the train compartments, the body of Mr. Ratchett.  The victim has been stabbed a dozen different times, seemingly by both a right handed and a left handed man, and a strong man and a weak man. Poirot is asked to solve the case by the passengers and the train conductor, and spends most of the book interviewing the thirteen others on the train, as well as reviewing the evidence.

The structure of Murder on the Orient Express is very straightforward. Unlike some modern mysteries, where crucial evidence or facts could be obscured from the reader, absolutely everything you need to figure out the solution is laid out in the text – the reader stays with Poirot as he reviews every piece of evidence, interviews every passenger and crew member, and talks over the facts with his companions Monsieur Bouc and Dr. Constantine. This sounds like a boring and repetitive structure on paper, but in Christie’s extremely capable hands, the mystery stays fresh enough to keep every question interesting.

Even if you already know what the infamous ending is (‘everybody did it”), the mystery of just how, or more importantly, why this is the solution is enough to keep you reading. I read this straight through in one sitting, and found the conclusion to be more than satisfactory in this regard. Details that seemed insignificant earlier on prove to be keys to the case. But more interesting than that is the way that Poirot handles the revelation that all of the passengers are guilty – his reaction isn’t, perhaps, the one you would expect.

The Murder on the Orient Express was, interestingly enough, inspired by several real life events. Agatha Christie was snowed in on the Orient Express when she was coming back from visiting her husband’s archeological dig, and the story of the Armstrong’s child’s murder is similar to the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindberg’s son in 1932.

Murder on the Orient Express was also fun to read because I’ve never lived in an area where train travel was a very popular or easily accessible form of transportation (I didn’t even ride a subway until I was fourteen), and this book provides a picture of what travel was commonly like before trains.  People from all across Europe met and mingled in the dining car, trains could be stuck on the tracks for days and days because of bad rain, and second class passengers had to share rooms with complete strangers.

All in all, a completely satisfying book. Modern mysteries often leave me wanting, but this was just right, especially for a chilly night or a snow day. It’s not actually that long ( as I said, I finished it in one sitting), and is a refreshing antidote to too many Law and Order reruns on tv.  Agatha Christie is a master storyteller, and everyone should read at least one of her books.

Do you read mysteries? If so, which ones? Do you have a favorite Agatha Christie book?

Anyway, Flora’s Dare is the sequel to Flora Segunda, which was the first book by Ysabeau S. Wilce. I loved Flora Segunda, since it had an intelligent, kind of quirky female lead without the need for her to be super pretty or for guys to be falling all over her. In fact, I find both of these books admirable because, unlike so many books (targeted at both teens and adults), the main plot isn’t about finding a boyfriend/girlfriend. No, Flora has bigger problems.

Both books are set in the imaginary city of Califa, a place where there’s magic, but it’s forbidden, where everybody wears kilts all the time, where there was a war years and years ago against the Mayan stand ins the Huitzils, which the Califans lost. Flora’s mother is the General in charge of Califa’s army, her father is a former soldier driven to drunkeness by his time as a prisoner of war, her older sister is a soldier, and her best friend (Udo) wants to be a pirate when he grows up.  By tradition, every member of Flora’s family becomes a soldier on their fourteenth birthday (the age of adulthood in Califa), but Flora wants to be a Ranger, part of a special division in the army that was disbanded after the war with the Huitzils.

I was  a little hesitant going into this book, because I’d liked the original so much and sequels can often be much, much worse than the first book in a series. But there was the same spirit of fun throughout the book, and even greater odds were at stake in this one (in the first book, Flora almost dies, in this book, the city is threatened with destruction).  Wilce continues to mix the ancient and the modern with devious glee – in this book, there are mosh pits and horse rides, lipstick and swordfights. There’s magical possessions and giant octopusses and earthquakes and red, sparkly, magic shoes. It’s a delightful ride.

I was also happy that we got to learn more about Flora’s family. Actually, the theme in this book seemed to be people are not as they seem. Without giving too much away, almost everyone Flora runs into  turns out to be different than she originally imagined them to be, from the powerful Lord Axacaya to Flora’s sister Idden, to the miscreant Springheel Jack to Tiny Doom.  It’s impressively and subtly done.

I realize that I’ve been blathering on for paragraphs and paragraphs and you probably still have no idea what the book is about, but trust me, it’s good.  If you like fantasy or young adult fiction, or just books that are plain fun, you should pick this (and the previous book in the series) up.

Of course, in the way that I can’t when I move, I’ve been unable to sleep, so I thought I’d do this instead, and read some of Possession by A.S. Byatt, which is turning out to be quite good, but I figured it was time for a break since I just hit a fifty page block of letters between two of the characters. That book, along with the strange newness of my environment and the freezing fog that’s spread over the entire state has made me feel a little bit like I’m in England right now, which is kind of cool and kind of weird.

I have an internship starting on Tuesday, but I don’t know what I’ll do till then – read, I guess.

Red Cross: Text HAITI to 90999 on your cell phone, and $10 will automatically be added to your phone bill. All $10, a hundred percent of that, goes towards the Red Cross, your cell phone provider gets none of that.

Alternatively, if you’re on your parents cell phone plan still, like I am, you can go to this page to donate to the Red Cross over the internet.

Google :Google has set up a really sweet page with a couple of really quick ways to donate money through their system here.  They also have links for up to date news about the situation, as well as a google maps view of the area affected.

World Vision: World Vision is a Christian organization that’s most well known for their program where you can sponsor a child in a developing country for a few dollars a month. They’ve set up an emergency Haiti relief page here.

Save the Children: Another great organization targeted towards mostly helping children all over the world, they’ve worked in Haiti for years, and they actually have people out in the field in Haiti right now, working on helping people there. They’ve set up a Haiti Earthquake Children in Emergency fund.

World Food Program: The WFP is an organization dedicated to helping end hunger for the one billion people who are starving in the world. They’re on the ground right now, and they’ve set up an emergency fund.

Seriously, anything you can give to any of these organizations (which, I”m pretty sure, are all super legit and have been around forever, if they’re not, tell me and I’ll take them down) is needed in Haiti right now. The earthquake hit their capital city particularly badly, and this isn’t a first world country, it’s a country that’s been struggling with a lot of problems, key among them poverty, for a long time.  I know you’ve probably heard way too much about giving to Haiti today, and will for the next couple of days, but problems like this don’t go away. If you can’t give very much or any money because you just don’t have it/don’t have a credit or debit card/are really young (I don’t think anyone reading this is super young, but you never know), then think about blogging or twittering or posting something on your facebook about it.

Are there any great charities out there who are sending money to Haiti that I’ve missed? Tell me about it.  Should I go back to reading books and never discuss world affairs again? Also tell me about it.

A small update: @uncultured on twitter posted a link to an article explaining the dangers of sending material goods instead of money for aid.

Escape Pod

Man oh man, I cannot even tell you how much I love Escape Pod. Started by Steve Eley, and run by a bevy of wonderful people, Escape Pod is a weekly podcast that’s been going strong since 2005. Each week, they record a science fiction story for our edification, and most of them are quite good. It’s kind of fun to have people read short stories to you.  One of my favorite things about Escape Pod is their yearly Mur Lafferty Christmas story, which I listen to while I wrap presents at two in the morning.  Also, every year they record all of the Hugo nominated short stories so that listeners who are WorldCon members can hear the stories for free before voting.

Some of my favorite stories:

As Dry Leaves that Before the Wild Hurricane Fall by Mur Lafferty

Impossible Dreams by Tim Pratt

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty Four Hour Bookstore by Robert Sloan

Will You Be An Astronaut? by Greg van Eekhout

Origin Story by Tim Pratt

All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein

What We Learned From This Morning’s Newspaper by Robert Silverberg

Start the Clock by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons is an awesome all web magazine that’s been going strong for about ten years now. Every week, they post a new short story, poem, and column or article – all about science fiction or fantasy, all excellent. Many award winning stories are originally posted there, and the magazine itself has won a good deal of awards. Strange Horizons also has pretty good reviews on any science fiction or fantasy books, movies, and television currently out, though I don’t always agree with the reviewers opinions.  Strange Horizons is consistently great, and has been for a lot longer than most online magazines have been around.

Some of my favorite stories:

All the Anne Franks by Erik Hoel

Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Leonard Richardson

R^3  by Dennis Danvers

Artifice and Intelligence by Tim Pratt

Painted by Becca de la Rosa

Foam on the Water by Cat Rambo

Drabblecast

The Drabblecast is run and narrated by Norm Sherman, who’s kind of the mad scientist version of Steve Eley.  They promise to bring “strange stories by strange authors to strange people, like yourself,” and boy, do they ever. Stories can be about anything from zombies to worms that infest your cat and turn it to glue, to the Great Pumpkin. You know, from Charlie Brown. One of the coolest things about this podcast is the cool sound effects and voices Norm brings to every story, which makes every reading interesting. Along with a short story, each episode features a hundred word drabble, and sometimes also a poem.

Some Favorite Episodes:

Hello, said the Stick by Michael Swanwick

The End of the Universe by Eugie Foster

Babel Probe by David D. Levine

Far, Far Away by Frank Key

Jelly Park by Aliya Whiteley

Podcastle

Podcastle is Escape Pod’s little sister. Where Escape Pod runs exclusively science fiction, Podcastle runs fantasy. It’s been around since April 2008,  and though I don’t like maybe ninety percent of fantasy in general, the stuff on Podcastle is good enough to break my anti-fantasy bias.

Some Favorite Stories:

Rapunzel by Tanith Lee

A Heretic by Degrees by Marie Brennan

To Do List by Nick Mamatas

The Cambist and Lord Iron by Daniel Abraham

Secret Life by Jeff VanderMeer

Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang

In the House of the Seven Librarians by Ellen Klages

Other Online Magazines You Should Probably Check Out:

Brain Harvest Magazine

Fantasy Magazine

Pseudopod

Clarkesworld Magazine

So that should give you guys enough reading and listening material for a little while. Sorry it’s kind of heavy on the podcast side of things, but there are just a couple of really good science fiction and fantasy magazines that are podcasts. (Also, it helps that the above podcasts mostly reprint stories from other magazines.)  Am I missing anyone? What good online short stories are there that aren’t science fiction and fantasy?

Book #1 for this year is A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. I’d picked this up in a Barnes and Noble when I was Christmas shopping, and it looked interesting enough, but I didn’t get it then. I actually happened across it last night while I was looking for textbooks, and it was at a significant discount, so I figured I’d give it a go.

The basic premise of this story is, it’s New Year’s Eve in London, and four people from completely different walks of life (Jess, JJ, Martin, and Maureen), have, independently of each other, decided to commit suicide by jumping off of the roof of the same building. 

Seperate things draw each of the four to the roof: Martin’s a minor celebrity who slept with a fifteen year old and had his life fall apart as a result, JJ’s a musician who’s lost both his band and his girlfriend, Maureen’s son has been in a vegetative state since he was born and she has no one else in her life, and Jess is eighteen and a mess. So, of course, they all make it off the roof. That was what initially drew me to the book: you know all of these people somehow end up not committing suicide, but I had no idea how that was going to happen. It turns out to be something rather silly – they all agree to help Jess find her sort of kind of boyfriend, who’s been avoiding her for the past few weeks. They all make it through the night, but just barely, and they agree to meet again, on top of the roof, on Valentine’s Day, to see how they all feel, and if anyone’s change their mind about killing themselves.

And so this kind of weird friendship of chance begins. None of them can really fathom why they hang around each other, in fact, numerous times each character remarks the others aren’t “his/her sort of people,” and various times Martin and Jess (the more vitriolic of the lot) comment on how much they hate the others. But they all end up needing each other.  They go on vacation together, end up in the British tabloids, and try to solve their problems with each other.

The reasons that I really liked this book are also probably the reasons that it kind of irritated me. From the beginning, it promises no happy or easy endings, no moments of revelation on top of a roof when you realize you want to live. Like the title suggests, it’s a long way down for all of the characters. Hornby takes the stance that life is hard, life is painful, life does not give us easy answers, and even the “easy way out” (in this case, suicide) is not acutally that easy.  This is an admirable, and true, stance to take. The book is honest, the book does not waver from the harshness of reality. But, at the same time, you really just want everything to work out for these guys – for Maureen to find a way out of the trap her life’s become, for Martin to stop being such an asshole and get back with his wife, for Jess to find her sister Jen, for JJ to get his band back. 

I wouldn’t reccomend this book to anyone who’s feeling especially depressed or down, since, well, it’s a book about suicide and it feels like a book about suicide the whole way through – suicide isn’t even really disallowed as a viable option by the end. It’s a jaded, kind of cynical book, a beautifully written book, but a jaded book all the same.  It didn’t end on a note that I really liked - since Hornby couldn’t neatly wrap everything up with the happy endings he had jst disavowed, the book kind of just stops. All in all, a worthwhile read, if something of a downer. There were a couple of exceptionally beautiful lines that I’ll have to find and write down tomorrow.

Next up: Chaucer, so get excited about that.

I was reading yet another article on io9 about the future/non-future of print books today. I hate reading stuff about the possibility of print book becoming less popular, or the evolving state of the publishing industry, even though it seems like everyone still thinks physical books will be around for the forseeable future. I don’t know why, it just makes me kind of nervous.

I’ll be brief about this, since anyone who follows news about publishing or books at all will have heard the argument for or against ebooks about twenty times already. I’m not a Luddite, and I like ebooks to an extent – I have a folder full of them on my computer, and I’ve been reading short stories online for years. But it’s just not the same experience.

One of the things I like most about books is their physicality. I like smelling books, feeling books. I like piling them on top of each other, I like organizing the books on my bookshelf in endless configuration – by size, alphabetically by author, by genre, by how much I’ve read them. I like the different ways I can hold them, two hands on either side if it’s a new book, or splayed out in one hand if it’s a library book, propped up on my knees, pinned under a hairbrush while I’m drying my hair. 

With ebooks or any kind of digital copy of a book, you lose the marks on a book that indicate what happened the last time you were reading it. Here are the toast crumb from when I was reading this at breakfast on my vacation in Philadelphia, here’s the bent part of the cover because I was hiding the book from my math teacher, here’s the little wrinkled marks on the page from when I cried over the death of a character. You can leave books out in the rain or throw them at a wall or use them to prop up tables and they’re  still  books. Damaged, scruffy, but that can just add to how much you love them.  If you leave a Kindle  out in the rain, that’s it, it’s dead.

There’s a book on my shelf that I’ve never read, and I probably won’t for a very long while. It’s a biography of Eudora Welty I picked up at a library sale, and I’ve kept it so long because the way it looks is so pleasing. The biography is a very solid book – heavy, smooth paper, a pleasingly designed cover, bold text, good square corners. It’s got heft to it.  The book is beautiful.  A computer file can’t be beautiful like that.

Another thing is, I can’t imagine a future where a library is just something on a computer. There’s something very soothing about a library to me – the long row of books, all neatly organized, the hush, the sense of purpose. I couldn’t bear to lose that.

Anyway, I know much wiser and more important people have said the same things in a dozen different ways, but I just love physical books so much, that I had to say that.

What do you think about ebooks and kindles and the lot? Like them? Love them? Have you ever left a book out in the rain? (For me, it was a really beautiful illustrated copy of Oliver Twist when I was seven.)

There’s something about my family and libraries. We cannot keep track of what books we have out, and on whose cards. I mostly blame my little sisters, who often lose books deep in their closet, only for them to resurface years later, and who have cost me many a book in the past. But it’s probably my fault, too. We have had a total of about 8 or 9 library cards during our time at this particular branch, and have either lost the card or goten so many fines on it that it would just be cheaper to buy books than get them from the library. Once, I pretended to be my sister Caroline  to get a card in her name since I was sure if I tried to get a card in my own name, it would send up some sort of flag in their system, and all the librarians would tackle me and take my money.

Don’t get me wrong, I love libraries and librarians. I really, really do. I kind of want to be a librarian, but you have to go to special librarian school where they teach you ancient knowledge and lost wisdom.  But I don’t want to pay so much money to use the libraries. I brought the books back! I did! I didn’t steal or lose them or anything. I just, uh, kept them longer than I really should. But that was mostly because I didn’t have a car for the longest time, or something.

Plus, once I got into a car accident when I was pulling out from a library, so I feel like they maybe owe me something.

Anyway, the point is, isn’t it better to live and let live and let me check out more books? In my college town, the library has no overdue fees, just blocks you out of the system if you have a book overdue, which is cool with me. But overdue fees, maybe, we could just get rid of those. That would be kind of great.

Do you guys max out your library cards? Does your library have overdue fees? What, exactly, do the overdue fees go to? Any librarians out there – I would love to know.

This is perfect reading weather, possibly the most perfect reading weather there could actually be, besides heavy rainstorms.When it gets especially cold, I, like a lot of people I suppose, like to bury deep, deep into my covers with some coffee or tea and read something warm and sort of nostalgic while wating for everything to thaw a little bit.

What do you guys like to read when the weather is super bitter like this? Is it snowing where you are?  If anybody comes up with a good book I haven’t read yet, I’ll add it to the list of stuff to read for the hundred books.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get out of this freezing basement.