But I Trusted You

I love Ann Rule, I really do.  I want to hang with her.  I went through a stage in high school where I read a lot of true crime, but the glorified violence and gore bothered me after awhile.  But Ann Rule is, at heart, an advocate for victims, and her books do their best to save lives.

But I Trusted You by Ann Rule is collection of true crime stories for which Ann has become famous for.  Although she's most famous for having been a friend of Ted.  Not cute funny Ted from How I Met Your Mother, but rather serial killing Ted Bundy.  They actually worked together on a suicide hotline.  Rule had already written several true crime books when her friend Ted was first suspected of being the serial killer hunting co-eds in Washington and Oregon.  She had already been asked to start research on the book in anticipation of a killer being caught.  How's that for irony?

Like her other true crime file books, But I Trusted You starts off with one long story, and then contains several shorter stories.  Most take place in Washington state because that's where Ann lives and writes, and they're cases that she has previously covered or researched.  What I like most about Rule is her attention to detail, she digs into the past of both victim and killer, and shows how they got to point that their life has turned into a true crime case file.  She is a bit soft on the victims at times, but like I said before, she's an advocate of them (by soft I mean that they are almost always described as pretty or handsome, kind of like being airbrushed for a cover of a magazine).  From reading her website forum, I know that she has helped some women realize that they needed to get out of a dangerous relationship.

The title story of the book, But I Trusted You, features a woman as the culprit.  For some reason there are people out there too lazy to divorce a spouse but more than willing to kill them.  Of course this makes them stupid and prone to getting caught.  Although Ann Rule writes mainly about men who kill, simply because men kill more often, she's also told the stories of women like Diane Downs (Small Sacrifices) and Liysa Northon (Heart Full of Lies).  If you like true crime that doesn't focus on the violence, than Ann Rule is the perfect writer for you.  If you like true crime and you haven't read her book on Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, you need to.

But I Trusted You gets a Midnight Book Rating of 11pm.

Where Are You Now? Um, right here?

There was a time that I loved Mary Higgins Clark.  All Around the Town and Loves Music, Loves to Dance were some of my first MHC books and I loved them.  Over the years I've been slightly less impressed with her books, but I have hand it to the lady- she knows how to use red herrings.

Where Are You Now? is a typical MHC book, which is not a bad thing.  The MC is Carolyn, a young lawyer who's brother, Mack, disappeared 10 years ago but calls every Mother's Day.  The book begins with Carolyn getting on the line with her brother and mother and vowing to find her brother herself.  Shortly after she receives a message from her brother warning her to stay away.  She, of course, doesn't listen.

This is not a perfect book, I figured out some things pretty quickly, and I knew who the culprit was, and the "shocking" twist well before I should have.  There were still some surprises and lots of twists.  It's a good, fast read that doesn't require tons of brain power, which is sometime nice.  One thing that I did not like about the book was the constant shift in POV between all the many characters.  Normally I like this style, but sometimes it took me several paragraphs before I realized whose POV it was.

Where Are You Now? gets a Midnight Book Rating of 9pm- it's a interesting enough read to keep you going, but it probably won't have you up all night with bad dreams.

The Curious Incident Of Blogging In The Night-Time

Oh, happy blogging day!  I am almost caught up on my books recently read, and I think I can at least get them all written before 2010 (although many of these will be posted after the new year).

I remember well when The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon came out.  The title, the cover, everything  about it sparked my interest.  But for whatever dumb reason I did not snatch the book up from the shelf and run giddily to the cashier.  I wish I had.

Books like this, characters like autistic Christopher John Francis Boone do not come along often.  Lots of stories have charm, but it is rare that a book is charming due solely to the main character.  Christopher is delightful, simple, complicated, heart breaking, and unique in every way.  It's part mystery (the aforementioned curious incident of the dog in the night-time), part adventure, part magic.  It's just a great book, with a fantastic narrative.

This book gets a Midnight Book Rating of Midnight- You're gonna want to read this book all through the night!

50 Books To Read Before You Die

For my Christmas stocking the Hubs gave me a lovely metal book marker with a list of the 50 books to read before you die.  I was shocked by how few I've read, but glad that I had at least heard of most of them.  I'm making it a goal to read at least 10 the unread books by years end.

Without further ado, here's the list:

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien (read)
1984 by George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (read)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (read)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (read)
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (read)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (read)
The Bell Jar by Sylvie Plath
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (read)
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
Don Quixote by Miduel de Cervantes
The Bible by Various (read)
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Ulysses by James Joyce (read)
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulke
Money by Martin Amis
Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling (read)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (read)
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman (read all but last book)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (read)
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Way We Live Now by Antony Trollope
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (read)
Frankenstein by Mary Selley
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Man Without Woman by Ernest Hemingway
Gulliver´s Travels by Jonathan Swift
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (read)
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
One flew over the Cockoo´s Nest by Ken Kesey
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (read the abridged version)
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Divine Comedy by Alighieri Dante
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

I may have read Hamlet or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland but I can't say for sure and I don't want to tell lies.  Some of these I can't believe I haven't read, and others I've been meaning to read forever.  So how many books have you read on this list?  Any recommendations on where to start? 

What Hearts

What Hearts by Bruce Brooks is one of the many books I culled from my niece Sam's book collection.  It's a book she really enjoyed, and it's a really short book, so after I finished 13 Reasons Why I took What Hearts from the huge Sam pile of books in my bedroom.

What Hearts is written in an unusual style that I haven't encountered before.  It opens up with a young just-graduating-first grader named Asa.  He's carrying home his radishes, something the intelligent little boy grew himself and he's very proud of them and their beauty.  When he gets home his mom is waiting with devastating news- Daddy is gone and she and Asa are moving.  Hours later his mom introduces him to her ex-boyfriend who will later become Asa's step dad.

The book tends to fast forward as you're given little snap shots of Asa's life.  His family moves around a lot, and in school Asa has learned to be whatever the person he's talking to wants him, or needs him to be.  His intelligence only increases, but his home life is floundering.  Step dad and Asa do not get along very well, and his mom has emotional issues. The end leaves A LOT to the imagination, but I'm not a lazy reader and I can imagine with the best of them.

I can't pin point what it is I loved about this book, but loved it I did.  The only complaint I have is the excessive look at a baseball game, but others may not find that chapter as torturous as I found it.

What Hearts gets a Midnight Book Rating of 11pm- start reading it any you might just have it done before the midnight hour has waned.

Serena- the book not the Gossip Girl!

Serena by Ron Rash.
When this book first came out it caught my eye, but I only recently got around to reading it.  I didn't write the title down when I first read about it and although I knew it was a woman's name it alluded me for months before I finally remembered enough about it to track it down.  Sometimes when you go through the effort to track down a book you get rewarded with a gem of a story, and then other times...

I really wanted to like this book.  It's about a man and woman (the Serena of the title) who are young, married, rich and deadly. It takes place in the late 1920's/early 1930's, an era that interests me.  The man. George Pemberton, impregnates a poor mountain girl before marrying the much more suitable Serena.  The pregnant girl and her dad greet the newlyweds as they arrive back from the east coast.  There's a knife fight.  It's a great beginning.

However, the Pemberton's are in to logging.  And the book goes in to great detail about this subject, which I have to admit loss my interest.  Serena, who turns out to be a bit ruthless and crazy- which I love, is not featured nearly enough.  And it takes a lot longer than I expected for the plot to get to what the blurb on Amazon promises- namely Serena loses the ability to have kids and goes after her husband's illegitimate child and baby momma.  There's a weird Snow White parallel to the story, but I don't know if it's intentional or a sign that I just watched to much Disney as a kid.

I ended up getting through the novel, and there was some good to it.  I just skipped the incredibly boring and dull logging descriptions.  In my opinion the story had more promise than what was offered, but Serena is still a wonderful villain.  I just wanted more of her.

Serena gets a Midnight Book Rating of:

it's a good read, but a little on the slow side at times. 

13 Reasons Why and 1 reason this book got to me.

13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher was a tough book to read.  It's a story about a girl named Hannah who, before her suicide, makes several cassettes outlining her reasons why.  She then has them sent out after her death to the people mentioned in the tapes.  We the reader hear the cassettes as Clay, one of the names in the tapes, listens to them.  Asher does an interesting job with having Clay commenting in the present as he listens to Hannah's tapes.

The reasons that Hannah ends her life are laid out before us, and even though some of the issues seem minor, to her they made a huge impact.  And that's the message of the story- that how we treat people can affect them in ways we don't consider.  How gossip and innuendo, and just plain indifference can tear away at someone's soul.  Teenagers often commit suicide simply because they don't have long term vision of their life, most live in the here and now, and they can't picture things changing.

I went to high school in a very small town, and my senior year a classmate ended his life in suicide.  At the time it was shocking, but afterwards the signs were so clear that something was wrong. Even though he was not a friend (he had very few), he was in drama and chorus with me.  There are few things that would make me want to go back in time to high school, but the chance to reach out to D and get him through our crappy, small-minded, backwards backwoods high school would be more than enough incentive.

13 Reasons Why, although flawed, shows how easily and unthinkingly human beings hurt one another.  Every time we gossip, every time we turn our back on someone needing a friendly gesture, every time we just pretend not to see someone's pain we cause damage.  The author, Jay Asher, was inspired to write the book after a cousin of his attempted suicide.  Fortunately she failed, and is alive and well today.  Whether you think suicide is a selfish act, a lonely act, or a desperate act, 13 Reasons Why will make you think about your own actions.  And that's a good thing.

I'm giving 13 Reasons Why a Midnight Book Rating of 10pm.  It's a compelling read, it'll be hard to put down, but not a good book to read in the silence of the night.

Wow, this post has been a downer. I feel the need to watch an episode of Golden Girls to get my happy back! 

Dexter by Design: He's Back!

 First off- Happy New Years!!!  It's the beginning of 2010 and today- 01-02-2010- is a palindrome day!  That's right- today's date is the same backwards and forwards.  Just a little piece of trivia to kick off my '10 blogging adventures.


I'm a fan of Dexter.  I love the Showtime series, which prompted me to read the books the show was based on, and I soon loved the books as well.  The third Dexter book left me a little disappointed, so while I was anxious to read the new book I didn't rush out to buy it as I had the third novel.

Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay is the fourth outing of nice guy serial killer Dexter Morgan.  What's that you say?  A nice guy serial killer?  Well, in a word, yes.  Other than the occasional murder, Dexter is a very likable guy.  Besides, he subscribes to the Harry code -his adoptive father's policeman code of who Dexter can kill (bad guys) and who Dexter can't kill (non-bad guys), as well as How To Blend In As a Normal Human Being

The fourth book opens with Dexter and his new wife, Rita, on their honeymoon in Paris, where Dexter is doing his best to ignore his Dark Passenger's hunger and to put up with Rita's site-seeing requests.  There they get to view a very unusual and disturbing art exhibit.  Then it's back home to Miami and more blood splattering work for Dexter- he works for the police department.

Dexter's adoptive sister, cop Deborah, aware of her brother's killing tendencies is torn between locking him up and letting him stay free.  But in the mean time she enlists his help in tracking down a different type of psychopath- one who likes to carve up his victims into fruit bowls and touristy-like gift baskets and leaving them on display.  After Debs is injured, Dexter must find the killer himself while trying to shake the suspicions of Deb's new partner.  Dexter is also playing daddy to Rita's two little damaged children, mini-Dexter's in the making, and teaching them the Harry Code.

Dexter by Design is classic, awesome Dexter.  Where the third book went off track a bit, Dexter and his dark passenger are now reunited.  As always, the city of Miami is a supporting, if not second main character, in the Dexter books.  One thing I can say from reading the books- I will never, ever, ever drive in Miami.  Ever!

Dexter by Design gets a Midnight Book Rating of Midnight.  Welcome back, Dexter!  You've been missed.