When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

Review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

No, this isn't my husband, our dog and me.

My rating scale for books is based on the lengths to which I'll go in order to avoid putting the book down. The other night I was reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 4, 2014) when the dog needed to go out. My husband took him out after negotiating a steep price because I rate Annihilation very high.

You can see why I was riveted from the very first paragraph:

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

Before I talk about VanderMeer's skillful manipulation of the threat, let me tell you about the expedition, the twelfth sent by the Southern Reach, a clandestine government agency. The mission is simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X. While Area X is mysterious, so are the motives behind the Southern Reach's treatment of the expedition sent to explore it. Expedition members are not only forbidden to take cell phones and computers, they don't even have watches or compasses. On their belts hangs an odd measuring device that will glow red to indicate they have 30 minutes to find "a safe place," although they are not told what the device measures. They also carry guns and journals they're to write in without sharing entries with each other.

Members of previous expeditions did not fare well and it's not clear why. Area X exerts a strange influence over people who enter, and they kill themselves or each other or return, like the eleventh expedition, husks of themselves. The current team consists of four unnamed women: the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist and the biologist, who narrates. The psychologist is the team leader. She puts her team under hypnosis to keep their minds from tricking them as they cross the border, which is invisible to the naked eye. If the psychologist becomes incapacitated, the others are to return to the entry point and wait for an "extraction" whose methodology they don't know.

winter in Area X

Everyone on the team assumes the enigmatic psychologist knows more than the others. From very early on, we see that the biologist narrator isn't divulging everything she knows to the group. She tells us she's not sure what they've been told is the truth. We're unsure how credible and objective a witness she is, although it's impossible not to root for her. It's strange that she insists on calling the uncharted structure that disappears into the ground (mentioned in the first paragraph) a tower, while the others say that of course it's a tunnel. Whatever it is, it's a masterpiece at unnerving the reader.

As unsettling events in Area X mount and take their toll, the biologist becomes even more determined to understand what's going on. I rode a roller coaster of dread and paranoia as she continues her investigations and attempts to account for strange, surrealistic animal behavior and to reconcile physical evidence with what she thinks she knows. As she becomes aware that everything is not what it seems and Area X may not be her only source of danger, she begins interrupting the action to recount her childhood, marriage and career as "the queen of tide pools." These suspensions in the plot serve to heighten tension when action is resumed, but her portrait is as fascinating as her heart-stopping Area X exploration. An only child, she became an expert in the uses of solitude and an observer who melts into her surroundings. Her nature is critical to VanderMeer's brilliant plot.

I was engrossed watching the biologist, whose work is her life, tackle the secrets of the intriguing and dangerous Area X. While we learn her secrets, she discovers truths about herself. This uncommon book, with its strange images and courageous heroine, is so suspenseful in so many different ways, I confess I sneaked peeks ahead. What can I say? I was under the spell of Area X.

Luckily, I don't need to wait long to continue VanderMeer's thriller mash-up of horror, sci fi, and fantasy examining reality and perception. Authority, second in the Southern Reach Trilogy, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 6, 2014. The third book, Acceptance, will be out on September 2, 2014.

Map of Area X by Jeremy Zerfoss

Note: Images are from Jeff VanderMeer's page on weirdfictionreview.com.

Then and Now

It is at this time of year when the sunsets come earlier and the stores are filled with displays of glue sticks and binders that I feel some nostalgia for my own school days. Well, my memories are of paste and black composition notebooks, but some things don't change too much. At the beginning of the summer before my freshman year of high school, I received a list of about 100 books, out of which I was supposed to read 10 over the course of the vacation. The list was heavy with classics of literature such as R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone and Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native. I found myself scrambling through the titles to find something I might enjoy. Sometimes I lucked out and found a short book, like George Eliot's Silas Marner, but much of what I read was dry as dust.

These days, young readers are enticed to read by exciting, dramatic and laugh-out-loud funny books, with characters far from the dreary and doomed gents I struggled through. I can recall wading through Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, which is the sad story of a boy whose father died when he is very young. His mother marries an autocratic man who often thrashes David for little infractions and finally sends him off to boarding school. There is a ruthless headmaster at the school, and David’s travails and struggles are the theme of the novel. I rated the book heavy and depressing. Well, I was 13 at the time.

If you want to read a story about a young boy's difficulty in school, as well as life, I recommend instead The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney. In it young Greg Heffley is starting at middle school and his mother has given him a journal to write in. He goes along with this, providing no one calls it a diary and providing he doesn’t have to write down his "feelings" in it. Greg has an older brother, Roderick, whose job in life seems to be to torment Greg in one way or another.

One night, just a few days into summer vacation, Roderick awakens Greg, roughly telling him to get up because he has slept through the entire vacation and it's the first day of school. Roderick is wearing his school clothes and Greg falls for it and scrambles to get ready making quite a clamor and rousing his father, who gives him the Dickens.

Greg's father also would like to encourage Greg to go outside more, but Greg rests assured in the fact that his father will never be able to dismantle his gaming system.

There are about 10 books in this series and I found myself smiling on almost every page.

Another choice classic on my list was the option of reading either Homer's Odyssey or Iliad, an epic poem about the Trojan War, which involved a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by surrounding Greek states. It is famous for the incident of the Trojan horse and the romance between Paris and Helen, who was so beautiful that her face is blamed for the launching of the thousand ships, which precipitated this war. Famous warrior Achilles, a demigod, is immortalized in this poem.

On the other hand, a much smoother introduction to the Greek gods and goddesses is the series about Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan. Percy is introduced in book one, The Lightning Thief. Percy thought he was living a normal life until he was 12 years old. He is a troubled boy who has difficulties with reading and getting into fights. He is expecting to get kicked out of school when, on a school trip to a museum, one of his teachers turns into a maniac and tries to kill him––and somehow the teacher is the one who is vaporized. This is the beginning of a journey for Percy that leads him to who he really is: a son of a god, in the way Achilles was. He is a demigod, the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea. He is accused of stealing Zeus's thunderbolt and he has a quest to find it and to save the world.

There are five books in the series and all are very well written. The stories are exciting and educational. They are much easier to read than epic poetry, in any case.

One book I did enjoy from my summer reading was White Fang, by Jack London, about a wild wolf-dog's transformation from feral to friendly. London explored how animals view their world and how they view humans. It is an intense story, but White Fang ends up relaxing on a porch in the sunshine. Despite my enjoyment, I would recommend, for a lighter read, How to Train Your Dragon, by Cressida Cowell.

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third is part of a group of Viking boys of the Island of Berk, who is going through a coming-of-age ritual. This involves catching a dragon and training it so that will be with him for many years into the future.

Toothless

Failure to accomplish either of these will result in exile, banishment and worse––humiliation. Hiccup is the son of the chief of the tribe and has an even greater burden, since he is small and gets picked on quite a bit.

Nonetheless, he captures his dragon heroically but it turns out to be a very small dragon that hasn't any teeth. Naturally he is named Toothless. One of the things that distinguish Hiccup from the others is that, unbeknownst to many, he can speak Dragonese. He has studied about Dragons for a long time and he knows a bit about them.

One of the other boys, graphically named Snotlout, has captured a Monstrous Nightmare dragon that is fierce indeed, and he has named him Fireworm. Usually only sons of chiefs are allowed to have such fearsome dragons, and Hiccup feels compelled to challenge Snotlout for the ownership of the beast. This small battle is put off until the dragons are tamed and trained.

On the day of the results of the training of the dragons, there is also a competition between similar-aged boys and their dragons from the Meathead Islands. Thus begins the heroic misadventures of Hiccup the Viking. This is a very enticing story about unlikely heroes––and just as unlikely allies––in an unpredictable world.

Lorna Doone, a novel by R. D. Blackmore, is set in the seventeenth century and is about a girl who is supposedly a member of the fierce Doone clan. She is forced to run away to a neighbor who would protect her from the attentions of the heir of Doone Valley. Lorna turns out to be a wealthy heiress and, as such, is a pawn in the machinations of men and politics. A modern twist of this story could be City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare, the first in her Mortal Instruments series.

Clary Fray is a 15-year-old girl, comfortable in her life and with her friends, who goes out to an all-age nightclub called Pandemonium. A very interesting young man catches her eye, and she sees that he might be in trouble. She follows, observes a fight to the death and wants to call for help––when she realizes that others cannot see what she has seen.

Thus begins a new phase of Clary’s life. Even as she is on her way home, she receives a frantic call from her mother not to return home but to go to a friend's house instead. But it is too late, because the things Clary has seen have thrust her into a new world and she cannot turn back. Now Clary needs answers, which she can't get at home because her mother has disappeared.

The new world now open to Clary's vision is one of another dimension in which forces of good, the Shadowhunters, try to maintain a balance between the downworlders such as vampires, werewolves and faeries and, even worse, the demons. This is the first of a series and is an intriguing take on old villains not unlike the warring clans of yesteryear, and is quite entertaining.

Comparing the classics and Young Adult lit is akin to contrasting oranges and lemons with extra points given for tartness, but I take the view that while what you read is important, it's more important that at first you learn to love to read.

So if the adventures of Sherlock Holmes seem pedantic, then try the series The 39 Clues, written by a group of well-known authors, beginning with Rick Riordan. The books tell of the adventures of two siblings, Amy and Dan, who discover that they belong to the Cahill family, the most influential family in history. The main plot concerns Dan and Amy's quest to find the 39 Clues, which are ingredients to a serum that can create the most powerful person on Earth. Each book chronicles one location to which Amy, Dan, and Nellie travel and focuses on one historical character with whom a Clue has a link.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula might be a little stiff, so go for Heather Brewer's series The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, which begins with Eighth Grade Bites. The story is about Vladimir Tod, who has to learn to survive as a vampire while he learns about his destiny.

As far as the classics are concerned, I do recommend reading them as an adult. The novels I have reread as a mature reader held much more significance for me because I saw them in a different light. Although about 50 pages of David Copperfield is enough, even now.