Welcome Hoppers!  The Friday Book Blogger Hop is a chance for book bloggers to visit new blogs and spread the word about their own.  Hosted by Jennifer at Crazy-for-Books.  Visit her blog for rules!

This weeks question-who is your favorite "new-to-you" author?

My favorite new-to-me author has been around a long time, Octavia E.Butler.  She's a black, female, science fiction author, making her rather unique in the science fiction world.  So far I've read and reviewed The Fledgling, Wild Seed, and Mind of My Mind for my adult blog, Book Addict Reviews.

Thanks for "hopping" by!

Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane

While cleaning out bookshelves in preparation for a trip to my parents' place (and therefore the certainty of bringing home a box full of books graciously donated to me by my mother), I came upon Shutter Island.  It perhaps says something about my current ability to stay up on pop culture that I had to ask my 16 year old daughter, "Hey, didn't they make a movie called Shutter Island?  What's it about?",  to make sure that my book and that movie were the same.  Once she confirmed (so at least I'm not completely unaware!), I decided it would be my next read, on the very remote chance I might actually make it to the movies.

Shutter Island tells the tale of US Marshall Teddy Daniels.  He and his partner Chuck Aule were called out to Shutter Island, a hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the escape of a prisoner named Rachel Soldano.  It is in the years after World War II, and Daniels feels haunted by his experiences liberating the concentration camps.  He is also mourning the death of his wife, Dolores, two years before in a fire.  While he was sent to the island to investigate the escape, he jumped at the assignment because Shutter Island is the place where Andrew Laeddis, the man that Daniels believes started the fire that killed his wife, is being held.  Daniels plans to execute his own justice on Laeddis-the ultimate justice.

I've never read Lehane before, though I did see the movie of Mystic River.  I suppose that should have prepared me for the dark nature of the story.  Shutter Island is seriously creepy!  I mean, take an old fort on an isolated island, add criminally insane patients who have done unspeakable things, mix in a hurricane, marinate it in reminders of the horrors of the camps, and you create a pretty twisted sort of mood.  At times this thriller feels almost supernatural, but in the end we discover just how real it is.

I found the discussions on the state of psychiatry at that time in our history really interesting.  Remember, the setting was somewhere 15 or so years in advance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,  so conditions could be pretty deplorable.  Dr. Cawley, the chief of staff, had some pretty liberal ideas about the barbarity of lobotomies and shock therapy, but he was in the minority.  Daniel's reflections on liberating the concentration camps, and the things he had seen in the war, were also really interesting.  I'm not sure I've ever read a piece of fiction that told the story of the camps from the liberators point of view, and while that was not necessarily central to this story it did add to the general mood.

I am not surprised that they made a movie from this novel.  Lehane's writing style is pretty cinematic, with concise descriptions, evocative settings, and emotional moments that just beg to be played out on the big screen.  When I teach writing to my students, we work a lot on a concept called " show, don't tell", and if Lehane were in my class he'd get a big fat A+.  Even the necessary background information on the debates going on in psychiatry at the time of the novel are written in such a way that they create a picture for the reader-though I suppose it helps to have read/seen works like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to get a true sense.

Saying any more about the plot would only lead to major spoilers and angry readers, though I will say that the resolution of the book did remind me of another movie, and if you've read Shutter Island I bet you know which one!  If you haven't, and you like creepy thrillers, you should!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Happy Monday, everyone!  I hope that you all had a successful reading week, as I did!

Books read last week-

Duma Key, Stephen King

The Missing, Book One:  Found, Margaret Peterson Haddix

(Review Coming Soon on Second Childhood Reviews)

Mind of My Mind, Octavia Butler

Ten Things I Hate About Me, Randa Abdel-Fattah

I just started Shutter Island by Dennis Lahane.  I was cleaning out bookshelves last night in preparation for visiting my parents in Michigan (and likely coming home with a new box of my mom's cast-aways), when I realized that I had the book version of that movie getting all the good buzz.  This week I will also try to get to:

Bait, by Alex Sanchez (YA)

Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer (YA)

The Battle of Jericho, Sharon M. Draper (YA)

The Law of Similars, Chris Bojalian

In a Perfect World, Laura Kasischke

Life As We Knew It and In a Perfect World are my book club's books for August, so those are for sures.  Everything else is subject to change without notice! One of the advantages of not getting those fancy ARCs from the publishers is I don't have any obligations to read anything!  Of course, I also don't get ARCs...oh, well, life is a series of trade-offs sometimes!  The week after this one I have a much more ambitious list.  I should be able to get lot of reading done sitting on the beach/boat in the lovely Sleeping Bear National Forest area of Michigan!

Oh, Uncle Stevie, How I've Missed You!

Dear Uncle Stevie,

I don't know how it happened, but somehow we lost touch for a few years.  I mean, you were always my favorite uncle, and I made sure to read every one of your stories as soon as it came out.  I even spent an amazing eight weeks or so traveling with you and Roland Des Chaines through the wilderness chasing the man in black (that's right-I read all seven books in a row).  After that, you mysteriously disappeared from my thoughts (perhaps there was something that didn't want me to remember!).  Did I know that something was missing from my life?  There must have been hints, little tugs at my consciousness-why didn't I pay attention?!?

We can give credit for my sudden reemergence into your world to a book blog challenge.  I was cruising through my book blogs, randomly reading here and there the witty, insightful words of my fellow bloggers, and suddenly I stumbled upon it-the Stephen King Challenge.  Did you know that there are otherconstant readers out there trying to read every word you ever wrote?  I thought, "Now there's a challenge I've already completed, since I've read all of his books!" (Please mark the smugness in my tone.) But then, I looked at the list of your complete works.  And there were five, count 'em, FIVE titles on there I had never even heard of, much less read!  Oh, clearly there were dark forces at work, if I could somehow miss FIVE of your masterpieces.  I needed to read my Uncle Stevie, and I needed to do it NOW!

So, I just finished Duma Key, and I am as happy as a pig in, well, you know...Don't get me wrong, I love all of your books, but my favorites are the straight-up ghost stories, and this one is a doozy!  Poor Edgar-losing his right arm in the accident like that.  But, it did give him that amazing power.  It reminded me a little bit of the painter on Heroes, but without all of the Sylar-is-trying-to-steal-my-power, will-I-be-good-or-bad drama!  The descriptions of the island itself were wonderful, and even with all of the craziness going on there I still wanted to see it!  I wanted a Big Pink of my own to hole up in and escape from the rest of the world.  When Edgar meets Wireman and Elizabeth, and starts to learn about her family's tragic history, I was swept away in the creepiness of it all.  And unlike certain TV shows that want to make everything as confusing as possible before revealing that everyone is really dead (yeah, I'm still a little bit bitter), your story wraps up so perfectly, with everything accounted for-so satisfying!  Thank you, Uncle Stevie, for another fabulous tale.  How I've missed you!

Your (nearly) constant reader,

Heather

Welcome Book Blog Hoppers!

In the spirit of the Twitter Friday Follow, the Book Blogger Hop is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and find new book-related blogs that we may be missing out on!  This weekly BOOK PARTY is an awesome opportunity for book bloggers to connect with other book lovers, make new friends, support each other, and generally just share our love of books!  It will also give blog readers a chance to find other book blogs that they may not know existed!  

The Hop lasts Friday-Monday every week, so if you don't have time to Hop today, come back later and join the fun!  This is a weekly event!  And stop back throughout the weekend to see all the new blogs that are added!  We get over 200 links every week!! 

To add your own link, go to Crazy-for-Books

This week's blogger question: TELL US ABOUT THE BOOK YOU ARE CURRENTLY READING!

I am reading Duma Key by Stephen King right now. I was horrified to discover that somehow I had missed three or four of his books.  I'd always prided myself on having read every, single one.  I guess my book supplier (known as Mom) must have stopped reading him, since so much of what I read comes from her.  At any rate, I'm loving it as usual.  I love the way he writes his characters, and the story is pretty intriguing as well.

Mind of My Mind, by Octavia Butler

I think that the reason that I like fantasy and science fiction so much is because I am so intrigued by the way the author's mind works.  I mean, when I read Neil Gaiman or Sheri S. Tepper, I marvel at the places their imagination takes them.  To take our ordinary world and change it into something marvelous/wondrous/horrible/terrifying/magical takes skill.  Since so much fantasy and science fiction these days seems targeted at a younger audience, I'm always glad to find mature, thoughtful stories.

And this week it is Octavia Butler that I am thanking the sci fi gods for.  I read Wild Seed, the first book chronologically in her Patternist series earlier this week, and last night finished Mind of My Mind.  Mind of My Mind takes the story of Doro and Anyanwu and fast fowards it 150 years.  Anyanwu and her family are now living in California, and Doro continues to pay visits to the only other immortal he's ever found.  On this trip, he is planning to take Mary, one of his many experiments in creating telepaths, and marry her off to Karl, another of his creations.  She is about to go through her transition, the time when those with latent telepathic abilities either learn to control their talent, or go crazy or die in the attempt.  When Mary transitions, Doro finds that her power is new, different-and potentially dangerous to him.  Since this is a fairly rare occurrence in his almost 4000 years of life, he does not kill her, but watches to see what she will do.  She is at the center of the Pattern-a psychic link to other strong telepaths.  While she does not control the Pattern itself, she can control the people in it.  She soon builds an enclave of other powerful telepaths, all of whom answer to her.  Soon enough, Doro realizes his mistake in not killing her when her new power first asserted itself.

As I was reading I was alternately drawn to the mission that Mary took on, and terrified of what it would mean if it was real.  Her telepaths can control anyone not a telepath, forcing them to do things while making them so content with their servitude they think they are doing them out of their own free will.  This is slavery of a different sort-one with fairly benign masters, assuredly, but slavery nonetheless.  While Mary has a symbiotic relationship with her telepaths, they all use the "mutes", as they call non-telepaths, to support them in creating a small empire, while helping them stay hidden from the rest of the world.  This reminds me of the relationship between the Ina and their symbionts in Fledgling, the first of Butler's books I discovered.

Mary and her "First Family" of telepaths (those she drew to her first), are at times sympathetic characters, and at times ruthless killers.  Mary's mission to save latents from themselves seems admirable, but when they do not abide by the rules of her little community they will kill them without much remorse.  It seems that ordinarily, telepaths cannot abide each other's company, since they cannot abide mind to mind contact with each other.  They also cannot abide children, because no one, not even Mary, can completely block the psychic noise that constantly streams from young minds.  This is another reason that they need the mutes-if their "race" is to continue, they must have someone who can take care of the children without abusing or killing them.  Butler blurs the line between good and evil, highlighting the relative nature of so many of the rules of human society.  She also examines the very idea of race as a construct, since Doro has been trying for millenia to create a new "race" of people like himself of which he can be a part.  Color has nothing to do with it in Doro's worldview-talent is the great dividing line, the one thing that determines a person's worth.  There are two more books in this series, and I almost don't want to read them, because then I will have read them-I like thinking about the pleasure I will have in the future from this always surprising, though provoking author.

Wild Seed, by Octavia E. Butler

Sometimes you find something amazing in the most random ways.  I first discovered Octavia Butler while waiting in a mall.  I haven't really been a mall person since I was about 17, but it was Christmastime, and I suppose malls are unavoidable.  While listening to a band play holiday tunes in the center of the mall, I noticed a small bookstore I had never noticed before.  Well, the band was pretty good, but they had nothing on a store full of books.  Walking in, right on the first shelf I saw, was the book Fledgling, which promised me a vampire story.  Having barely recovered from my Twilight daze, I eagerly picked it up.  Little did I know how different this writer and this story wold be from anything I had ever read before.  When I finished Fledgling, I knew that I needed to read more of Octavia Butler's brilliant prose!


Wild Seed is the first book in Butler's Patternist series.  Well, the first book chronologically in the arc of the story, though not the first to be published.  Wild Seed tells the story of Doro and Anyanwu, two immortal beings.  Doro is amoral, surviving by casting off and taking new bodies at will.  He has traveled the world for thousands of years, finding others with special talents and breeding them to try and create someone like himself.  Anyanwu is a shape-changing, self-healing mother who has lived over 300 years as the story begins.  Her people revere her as a healer-and fear her as a witch.  When Doro senses her while traveling through Africa, he is drawn to her as to no other before her.  While Doro wants to use her for his own purposes, and seeks to control her, Anyanwu wants nothing more than to protect her people, her grandchildren and great-grandchilren.   From Africa to the American colonies, the story of Doro and Anyanwu is one of lust, power, and destiny.

Despite the amoral nature of Doro, one can't help but feel sympathy for a being that has lived for thousands of years, watching everyone he has ever cared about die.  One of his sons warns Anyanwu that without a companion Doro will lose everything that makes him human.  What is it to a being like Doro to take one life or a hundred, since he has seen thousands come and go like so much smoke in the wind?  The irony is that while he feels desperately lonely, he is not really comforted by the people he finds and manipulates.  They fear him too much to be true companions for him.  Anyanwu, on the other hand, needs to be surrounded by her family, those descendants of her descendants that give her a reason to continue living.  As much as she comes to resent Doro, her irony is that he gives her the reason to keep herself young and healthy.  When you are the only two immortal people in the world, who else do you have but each other? 

The issue of race is also present in the book, as it always is in Butler's work.  The fact that Anyanwu is a black African brought to America on a ship in the late 1600s is not coincidence, and regardless of her actual legal status as free, she feels the figurative shackles of slavery in the way that Doro is able to manipulate her.  Throughout the book, Butler points out the issue of race in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  Doro will only take white bodies when traveling through the American south.  Anyanwu herself becomes a white male landowner to protect her people, white and black, from suspicion.  The fact that Doro uses his talented people as breeding stock much as white slave owners bred their slaves for certain traits is not an accident, I'm sure.  This novel is thought-provoking, well-paced, and so intriguing that I plan to read the next book in the series immediately.