"The Almost Archer Sisters" by Lisa Gabriele

Published by Random House of Canada.

The Almost Archer Sisters is a smart novel about the dysfunctional relationship between two sisters. I really enjoyed this book. The characters are complicated and endearing, and their problems intertwine in such a way as to provide a realistic vision of sibling relationships.

Peachy and Beth are sisters who grew up on a farm in a small town just north of the U.S. border. While Beth left for New York to go to college, Peachy stayed, having gotten knocked up by Beth’s old high school boyfriend, Beau. Peachy married him and bore two children, Sam and Jake. After the first chapter, a recount of Beth leaving for college, we find Peachy in the park with her sons. Later, we find out she’d gone there at 4 in the morning after finding her Beth and Beau going at it in the pantry. Flashbacks abound in the first half of the novel, retelling key occurrences in the girls’ lives⎯their mother’s suicide, their estrangement from their grandmother, Beth’s shady birth (her mother and Lou, with whom she grew up, crossed the border just after Beth was born, Lou dodging the draft; her real father had been killed in Vietnam). These tales come naturally, like a stream of memories rather than the insertion of plot exhibition. Later, the story continues: Peachy returns from the park, and determines to continue with her and Beth’s planned trip to New York⎯without Beth. Effectively, the girls switch roles, Peachy going to the city and spending time with Beth’s New York friends, and Beth left behind to care for Peachy’s family, but the fact that they learn to appreciate each others’ roles in life is beside the point.

What Gabriele managed to do in this book, is to create a realistic vision of interfamilial conflict. Peachy, instead of dropping everything and running off to New York (the crazed, scorned woman), has responsibilities to tend to. She has to return from the park, ensure her children are taken care of while she’s gone, give instructions to Beth, left behind, on how to complete her normal household duties (this results in two pages of detailed instructions, Beth attempting to interrupt the while, ending with Peachy’s hilarious finishing remark, “And kudos to you if you can find the time to fuck my husband again in between all that” [123]). These details put the reader right in with the conflict⎯nothing is assumed. It’s not just there-was-a-fight-now-the-obvious-follows kind of writing. Despite conflict, there are still things to be tended to, still people who need to be dealt with. After Peachy leaves, she doesn’t go on a vengeful tirade against her sister to her New York friends; she remains loyal to her sister, covering up for fibs Beth has told and refusing to disclose what Beth had done (until she figures out that everyone already knows, at least).

The book maintains an internal logic. The eccentric characters are eccentric, without being archetypes; the college dropout housewife is still allowed to be smart and insightful. The plot is completely unforced. The Almost Archer Sisters is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while and contains some of the most realistic female characters I’ve encountered.

"Proof of the Illuminati" by Seth Payson

Pubished by Invisible College Press

I have the heart of an infidel, and here’s proof:

[Premise 1] Seth Payson asserts on page 184 that, “the man [or woman, I assume] with whom these considerations have no weight, is a stranger to the nature, excellence, and importance of Christianity, and has the heart of an infidel.
[Premise 2] I am a woman with whom these considerations have no weight.
[Conclusion] Therefore I have the heart of an infidel.

Of course, I can only say this is because I believe in reason, as instanced in logic, which Payson states is an enemy of the Christian faith (along with philosophy, by which I’ve been corrupted). Payson would rather our beliefs were governed by the only true authority, revealed religion.

This book was originally published in 1802 under the title “Proofs of the Real Existence, and Dangerous Tendency, of Illuminism”. The topic of the book extends beyond Illuminism, as Illuminism is only a symptom of a more general tendency of modern society to conspire against Christianity. The true conspiracy began with Voltaire’s writings; Voltaire used his reason and philosophy to seduce the public away from the virtues of Christianity. Payson attempts, with this work, to uphold Christianity against the immoral attitudes of the Illuminati, stated to be “to prevent political and religious oppression” (26), which he interprets as an effort to abolish religion and the state (“the subversion of every social, moral, and religious obligation” [26-7]).

The further I read into this book, the more I identified with the Illuminati, whom I began to see as the victims of oppression, as the rightful revolutionaries, as the proponents of the intelligent use of reason. Payson’s main goal of this work is to defend Christianity against these evil-doers. To say that Illuminism is evil is all well and good until we attempt to define evil. Payson seems to take it as given that certain dictates of Illuminism are self-evidently evil. By doing this he assumes a value-set with which I cannot agree. Payson describes the evils of the lodges: “sensual pleasures were advocated, and self-murder justified. That death was represented as an eternal sleep; patriotism and loyalty were called narrow-minded prejudices, incompatible with universal benevolence. Nothing was so frequently discussed as the propriety of employing, for a good purpose, the means which the wicked employed for evil purposes” (88). In order to agree that these are evils, we must hold the opposite assumptions, i.e., that sensual pleasure is bad, suicide is wrong, death is punishment for sin (heaven and hell exist), etc.

The book does not give any real proof of the Illuminati per se, but descriptions of the organization of the Illuminati as branching off of Masonry. For this he relies on two main sources, Robin and Barruel, from whom all his information is taken. It seems an incontrovertible fact that Illuminism did exist (founded by Weishaupt in 1776), but the question that remains is whether they were, in fact, evil and, as we’ve seen, that depends on how we define evil. Payson lists, towards the end of the book, some practices of the Illuminati (like drowning priests and babies) intended to horrify the reader, but it seems like he’s reporting on Satanic cults—no actual instances of such practices may have ever occurred.

Payson has some recommendations to prevent the Atheist revolution from coming about. Of course, it is of the utmost importance that anyone who is not a loyal Christian be denied employment in a pubic office (178). That would allow them to spread their evil further. Nor should clergymen attempt to convert them by making Christianity amenable to their views: they must accept Christianity as Seth Payson believes it to be. Children should be educated at home in the ways of religion and morality, as in the German universities “the chief study is the new system of philosophy, by which the mind is totally bewildered, and at length deprived of every solid principle of religion, morality or sound politics” (136, quoted from Appendix to Anti-Jacobin Review).

In short, I found this book to be less about the Illuminati than about how Seth Payson hates Atheists.

"How to Be Single" by Liz Tuccillo

Published by Simon & Schuster.

This book was a fun read, but it's by no means a pinnacle of literary achievement. The characters are consistent, the plots make sense (most of the time), and everything wraps up in the end. I can't shake the nagging feeling, however, that I'm being written for. We come to expect, with television and film, that whatever makes the most money is what's going to be what's released, and I know this happens with books as well, but somehow I like to think that books are above all that.
No great insights will come from reading this book. At no point did I have the distinct feeling that the author really has something important to convey. The characters are not so complex, which I believe is a mistake. The point of a character is to have them represent, if not a real person, a person that could potentially be real, whereas Julie (the narrator) and her friends are all one of a type--the divorcée who just wants to let loose, the depressive, the lawyer on a manhunt, the uptight yoga swami who just wants to let loose...
The novel begins: Julie introduces five women in New York (strangers), whom she convinces go out for a (disastrous) night on the town to cheer up her recently divorced friend Georgia. After that, Julie departs for a trip around the world (to research writing a book about single women), and the other four women's stories are followed. For some reason, in any situation, they end up contacting each other. I assume they have no other friends. They each encounter some kind of crisis, summed up on page 339: "Alice just called off her wedding, Julie had an affair that went very badly, Serena watched someone die, [Georgia] almost got [her] children taken away from [her], and Ruby is clinically depressed." Meanwhile, Julie's experiences in France, Italy, Brazil, Australia, China, India and Iceland are reported, making generalizations about each country's women--I should note that the author realizes they're likely overly general. Still, the women she meets during her travels seem to be perfect representations of these generalizations. The character I related to least was Julie, the self-deprecating, supposedly typical American woman who, beyond all reason, becomes the object of an ideal (but married) man's affections. I say beyond all reason because she exudes typicality at every opportunity, and yet he's supposed to find her absolutely enchanting. She spends a lot of time complaining about her thighs and making not so groundbreaking observations about love, life, and whatever. It seems to me that, in an effort to make Julie a broad enough character to be able to relate to women ages 23-49, she's lost any real character.
I've come to the conclusion that this book would make a great movie or miniseries. It really needs real people (actors, actresses) to fill in the personality gaps. That, and I'm more willing to be interested in pretty, neurotic single women on film. I have to put less effort into it. Tuccillo was an executive story editor for Sex and the City, which I admit to watching from beginning to end (and then again). There are some similarities between this and that (some women who are friends, a red-headed lawyer, a character intent on finding a husband--Charlotte-style, a main character who's a writer and makes broad generalizations while learning life lessons), but it's just better on film. On film I wouldn't notice all the sentence fragments.

"Tailchaser's Song" by Tad Williams

I received this book as a gift, because I'm one of those people who might be called a "cat person"; I have cats (two), and I like them. The book advertises itself as having an "understanding of the nuances of feline behavior and psychology" (Cat Fancy Magazine) and that it's "for anyone who loves and understands cats" (San Diego Union). But it doesn't, and it's not.
This is a fantasy novel. That's it. The characters happen to be cats. They lick themselves from time to time. They sniff things. They have more catlike names than characters would have if they weren't cats. But don't let that fool you. It's just an unremarkable fantasy novel.
Fritti Tailchaser sets off on a quest to find his girlfriend (with whom he fully plans to engage in a joining ceremony, the first attempt being incomplete). He suspects the same evil force that's been worrying the Clan as of late is responsible, but he's too young to join their expedition to the Court. He's joined by an excitable youngster, who followed him discreetly. He meets some animals, forms some alliances, gets to the high court, reports his girlfriend missing, finds the Court has been corrupted by the comforts of "M'an" (I'll explain the apostrophe later), leaves again on his own with the youngster, now joined by a tomboyish girl cat, finds the source of evil in a valley (it turns out it's Hearteater, one of the Firstborn, about whom legends have been told), gets captured, is not killed for some incomprehensible reason (it's hinted several times that there's something special about our main character, but this never comes into play), escapes, sends a squirrel brigade to warn the Court, goes back to save his friends, escapes again during a final epic battle between good cats and evil cats, where eventually Tailchaser conjures up Hearteater's good counterpart, who saves the day and disappears again after telling Tailchaser where to find his girlfriend (oh yeah, his girlfriend). It turns out she just moved, and he doesn't like her that much anyway.
Or I could sum that up by saying, "It's a fantasy novel."
Don't be fooled by the cats on the cover. They'll seem a lot less cute when they're inconsistently using their made up fantasy language--a straight up substitution for about 50 words. For example, north is "Ue'a", but a lot of the time they just say "north".
In the introduction, Williams makes a little jab at a publisher who refused to have anything to do with his "talking animal" book. I would like to emphasize that it's less of a "talking animal" book than it is a "human characters who happen to have fur and silly names" book, and I would like to commend that publisher for keeping it off the market for yet another day.

"Almost Green: How I built an eco-shed, Ditched my SUV, Alienated the In-Laws, and Changed My Life Forever" by James Glave:

The title of this book (the one I received, which I believe was revised from “Almost Green: How I saved 1/6th of a billionth of the planet”) is actually very descriptive. Glave describes exactly how he built an eco-shed, how he sold his SUV, and how he (somewhat, not really) alienated his in-laws⎯that he changed his life forever can be assumed.
The cover of the book would lead one to expect a series of comically absurd situations that some quirky but loveable characters get into along the way to becoming more environmentally friendly. This is somewhat misleading⎯it is, actually, just what it says. The story is a first-person tale of how James Glave built an eco-shed. While the back cover displays a quote from “Padre” (the author’s father-in-law) recommending against buying the book, the character Padre is not so over-emphasized as one would think. In fact, the in-laws are never really alienated⎯in the book, Glave dismantles a car port, a gift from Padre, and worries that Padre will be upset, but he isn’t really.
The book contains a lot of discussion regarding building materials and their assembly, energy ratings and the companies that have them, and green building methods to reduce energy consumption. Glave is a journalist, and this book is a report⎯but a somewhat funny report. The situations he gets himself into are realistic (I assume they are situations he actually found himself in while constructing an eco-shed); the humour is in how he describes them, often using plays on words and other such high-brow humour, other times pointing out little quirky tendencies of humanity in general (like how men working in construction eventually learn to speak solely in sexual innuendos).
I don’t know if I’m the intended reader of this book. Perhaps I will be in 20 years. At times, however, I couldn’t relate to Glave’s suburban problems. For instance, the book makes much of the idea of being green on a budget, but this budget is by no means as low as most families would have (Glave’s eco-shed budget was $75,000, which he extended by about $15,000 by the end, I believe). I did, however, enjoy playing voyeur to his adventures.

"Breathe Smart" by Aaron Hoopes

This is a neat little book that explains some easy breathing exercises and, most importantly, what they do. It’s a pretty widespread rumour that consciously altering one’s breathing brings about almost magical results with regard to one’s well-being or fitness or harnessing the world’s energy for our own gain or whatnot. This practical little guide explains the how and why.
The point of the story is that our body becomes habituated to taking in oxygen in a certain way (what the author calls subsistence breathing). By consciously altering our breathing, we can increase lung capacity and increase oxygen intake as well as how our body uses that oxygen, increasing energy and reducing high levels of cortisol (which the author attributes to high stress levels, and which he also states prevents weight loss). Also, conscious breathing involves exercising the abdominal muscles, and is supposed to massage inner organs (which is apparently a good thing). The author explains specific breathing exercises (simple breathe in, breathe out kind of stuff) and what they do. If you ever wanted to know why athletes yell while exerting themselves, this book explains why.
My criticisms all relate to its format. There were a couple of punctuation mistakes in the introduction, which led me to expect more throughout the book (this expectation was disappointed, however). The book totals 80 pages, but it’s about a 20-minute read. I’d suggest adding some diagrams. The type is double-spaced, such that each page actually holds about 15 lines of text. The fonts don’t work well together, and there are page numbers on pages that shouldn’t have page numbers (the title pages and cataloguing data, plus the chapter title pages). The graphics on these pages are pixelated⎯probably clip art. So, if you’re out there, Aaron Hoopes, and you want some help with this, email me.

McGraw-Hill’s German Student Dictionary for Your iPod

This dictionary is really a bunch of mp3’s, formatted as 10-second songs. There are three “artists”, a German-English dictionary (with 26 album names corresponding to the letters of the alphabet), an English-German dictionary (formatted in the same way), and lists of commonly used words, where the album names are set to various popular topics.
Installing the mp3’s requires that they be imported to iTunes, which meant I had to set up separate playlists for the dictionary and for my regular music, else if I wanted to shuffle, I’d have 5000 tracks of dictionary entries interspersed with my songs. I tried to avoid this difficulty by copying the “Copy to iTunes” folder on the disc directly to my iPod, but it didn’t work, so I instead followed the directions (which were to restructure my music library). The directions suggest using the Sync option, but I have way too many songs to possibly fit on my 1GB iPod, so I used the manual sync and dragged over my new German Dictionary playlist. The German-English translation and the English-German translation are separate tracks, as are the words in the topical playlists, so if I word happens to be in all three, that’s three separate tracks.
The dictionary is pretty impressive. The words (i.e., the “song titles”) scroll across the screen while the voice speaks the English text, then the German, then the German again, then the English. The voice also includes the German articles, which I greatly appreciate. Scrolling across the screen is the word, the plural form, and the part of speech (e.g., prep. for preposition). That being said, I had to set my backlighting to turn off “never” and stare at the screen continuously to get all the information I would need.
What attracted me first off were the lists of commonly used words (e.g., clothing, food, transportation, etc.). I played the “Town & City” list and the “Transportation” list continuously on the way to write my German test (on “Travel”, which was not an option). With these two lists, still about half the words my textbook thinks I should know were not included, nor were they in the iPod’s regular German-English dictionary (I’m using “Wie Geht’s, 8th ed.). Of course, I don’t think McGraw-Hill would be allowed to correlate their dictionary with a Thomson-Heinle text, and choosing what words are going to be more “important” to include is certainly not going to be simple. One odd choice, however, was to include “merry-go-round” (das Karussell) amongst things I might like to inquire about while I’m in a town or city. I’m sure there’s something that should have been prioritized above that (e.g., “Restaurant”, while in the dictionary, is not in this list). There is, among these tracks, perhaps more repetition than there should be; for instance, in transportation, I have two tracks corresponding to two English words for the same one in German⎯gas and petrol, “das Benzin”, are two separate tracks, as are “gas pump” and “petrol pump”.
The disc itself made a worrisome grinding noise in my MacBook, as tends to happen with discs that are slightly warped. It took half an hour to copy the tracks off the disc into iTunes (which is standard, according to the instructions). I don’t want to have to do that again, so I’ll probably leave the dictionary in my iTunes forever. It takes up more than half of my 1GB (912MB) iPod, though (at 490 MB), so it will likely be prioritized off of that in the near future.