Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book #74)

So. Our copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows finally arrived from England Friday afternoon. (Ever since we happened to buy the first two in the British edition while [whilst?] in Canada, my husband has ordered our copies from amazon.co.uk to keep our set matching.) I started reading Friday evening and finished yesterday afternoon.

There's really not a lot I can say without going into spoiler territory, which I don't want to do while the book is less than a month old. Suffice it to say I thought it far better than Books 5 and 6, and that I wish I'd been able to bring myself to re-read those two, because she does a good job of tying this book back to what happens before, and my memory was fuzzy in spots. There's this one bit early on where the characters are wandering aimlessly where the pacing lagged, the characters she kills aren't the ones I would've offed, and I would've written a different sort of epilogue, but hey. That's why I write my own books, to have the pleasure of making things turn out EXACTLY the way that most satisfies me. Among other reasons.

For the rest? I'm not going to give anything away. Go read it yourself, if you haven't already.

Survival of the Sickest (Book #73)

Survival of the Sickest (Sharon Moalem w/ Jonathan Prince, 2007) tells of the evolutionary biology of disease, focusing largely on how the adaptations your ancestors evolved to meet the hardships of their environment can make you sick centuries or millenia later. To pick a simple example, as a person of Northern European descent, I'm more prone to skin cancer because my ancestors evolved light skin to make vitamin D more efficiently from weak northern sunlight. But on the other side of the coin, African-Americans who live in places like Seattle are more prone to certain cancers than those living in Miami, because the darker your skin, the more likely you are to have a vitamin D deficiency if you live in the north, which increases your predisposition toward cancer. And it's speculated that I'm more prone to type 2 diabetes because elevated blood sugar may have helped my ancestors survive the cold of an Ice Age winter close to the glacier line. Super-tasters? Less likely to accidentally ingest poison.

It's a fascinating read, and a quick one due to an unusually chatty and informal style--Moalem's co-author/ghostwriter is a speechwriter. The tone took a little adjusting to--I'm used to my popular science a little more scholarly. But it's a true page turner.

Privilege and Scandal (Book #72)

I've never been fascinated by celebrity for its own sake, particularly the kind where the person is born or marries into his/her fame. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed Privilege and Scandal: The Remarkable Life of Harriet Spencer, Sister of Georgiana (Janet Gleeson, 2007), especially after the cover quotes made a point of noting the Spencer sisters' distant relationship to Princess Diana. I can understand why the publisher wanted to advertise it, but I can't help rolling my eyes all the same.

Anyway. It's not that Harriet was so fascinating herself, but she lived at the epicenter of English power and either saw or was close kin to someone who saw pretty much every major event from 1780-1820. So her biography is a wonderful snapshot of public and private life during a tumultuous era.

New books!

I always feel vaguely dirty when I shop the Edward R. Hamilton remaindered books catalog. I get the impression it's a one-man shop, and that one man has strong political opinions which he expresses in his book descriptions. He'll sell books from all sides, but it's clear that he's a serious conservative with a special hatred and fear reserved for Hillary Clinton.

But I keep getting his catalogs. I look at them, see the latest tasteless vitriol spewed at Senator Clinton, and think, "I can't give this man my money." Then I'll see, on the very same page, a book on the exact topic I most need to research for my WIP, for $5 or less. This time the bait was Napoleon's Troublesome Americans, because I'm researching America's relationships with France and Britain at the beginning of the 19th century. So I bought it, plus four others, all for barely $40 including shipping.

So. Show me cheap books, and my principles fly right out the window...

Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby (Book #71)

Off and on since 2000 or so, I've been a member of an online forum that started out as a discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but turned into an all-purpose international community. Now there's a book about my mostly-virtual world: Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? True Adventures in Cult Fandom (Allyson Beatrice, 2007). It's a series of well-written essays, by turns snarky and touching, on how what starts as a simple online discussion on a specific topic can turn into a real community, warts and all.

I honestly don't know how the book would read for someone who's not a part of that tribe, but I'd recommend you try. Allyson has a flair for dead-on description that make her voice a pleasure in itself. Reading it had an impact on my life: it made me decide to return to one of the online forums she discusses after an absence of nearly two years. I'd left after finding myself at the center of a kerfuffle. It was a great big mess, and I decided the only sane thing to do was walk away from it. I still think I did the right thing, but reading Allyson's book made me miss the place. These are the people I talked with on September 11, when we were scrambling for information and comforting each other and trying to make sense of our suddenly shifted world. These are the people who anxiously awaited updates when I was in labor for four days. They're the ones I shared my triumph with when I finished my first manuscript. And they consoled me through my father's terminal illness and death. So I decided to dip a toe back into the waters there and see if I still belong there in any way. It's still early in the toe-dipping process, but I'm glad I read this book and glad I decided to give it a try. Because internet communities are as real as any other kind. They're not always easy, but a good one is worth fighting for.

The Boys Next Door (Book #70)

The Boys Next Door (Jennifer Echols, 2007) is my latest foray into the world of YA. Like me, Echols is from a small town in central Alabama, and so far both of her YA romantic comedies have been set in that world. They don't drip with Southern culture or anything, but there are just enough little touches there to give me the pleasure of reading about my old world.

In this book, the tomboy heroine/narrator is trying to learn to act like a "real" girl, both because she thinks that's what her dead mother would've wanted for her and because she's trying to draw the eye of her favorite of the brothers who live next door. Of course, she's overlooking the OTHER brother, the one who's always been her best friend and who values her the way she is, tomboy tastes, waveboarding prowess (they live on a lake), and all. It's a standard story, but told freshly and without the cloying wholesomeness of the YA romances of my day. (That would be the 1980's, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.)

THAT book...yeah, that one

I am surrounded by Harry Potter frenzy. It's all over all my internet forums, my husband was reading a spoilery summary on wikipedia last night, and I even ended up in a conversation about it while waiting for the bus after work yesterday evening. But I don't have my copy yet, because ours is coming from England. You see, we bought the first two books in Canada, and they happened to be the British rather than the American editions. My husband has ordered the new ones from amazon.co.uk ever since, because he wants them to match.

In some previous years, I've went out and bought the American edition too just so I won't have to wait. But I'm not going to this time. I enjoy the books, and I think it's fun and wonderful that the debut of a book is such a Big Event. But I can wait to find out what happens. I just don't feel the urgent passion for them anymore. I have plenty of other things to read while I wait, after all.