It’s that time of year. I’m reading Christmas books. In fact, I was reading them before Halloween! (And you thought the stores got Yuletide cheer going early?)

I resisted the first book. Not because of any flaw in the story. But because it was a Christmas story. In October! To get myself in a more festive mood, I dug out the Christmas music. (As some of you may know, I have a rather terrifying extensive collection.) A little dose of Dr. John’s “Silent Night” and some Stan Kenton did the trick. I am ready to deck the halls!

Or at least read about things like tree-trimming, mistletoe, sledding, Santa and the Nativity.

Now– when I’m grumpy at these Christmas books, it’s on the story’s merit, not my own personal rebellion at being dragged kicking and screaming into the season.

A plea to authors everywhere. And, for that matter, filmmakers and musicians.

“Christmas book” does not need to be confused with “so sweetly sentimental I’m getting a toothache.”

“Holiday cheer?” Not a synonym for “crank the romance and the cuteness all the way to eleven.”

That’s lazy cliche, not holiday spirit!

The books that do Christmas spirit right focus on telling a story, with strong characters and great prose— that just happens to be at Christmas.  Warm descriptions of holiday traditions? Sure- but they’re there for the story, not to yank on your heartstrings so hard you feel played.

Some of my favorites:
Miracle and Other Christmas Stories Connie Willis has a goofy and wry sense of humor. Her Christmas stories are sometimes absurd (I love her sendup of It’s a Wonderful Life) and always terrific fun. But even while she’s making fun of things like Christmas letters- she’s got a terrific, respectful warmth for holiday traditions.

The Handmaid and the Carpenter: A Novel I read this one, by Elizabeth Berg, for the Ledger last year. Berg did a beautiful job of creating Mary and Joseph, their doubts, their customs, their world. I was totally swept away. If I say “magical” please don’t take it as holiday hyperbole.

The copy of A Child’s Christmas in Wales I have is this edition. Out of print, which makes me sad. I love these particular illustrations, because I grew up with them. (I also love it as an audiobook.)
Reading The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits made me happy. It dug into the history of printing, literature, Christmas itself, and how the short story “A Christmas Carol” shaped what people expected from the holiday. Cultural history, Christmas cheer, and a good book… that’s pretty much my literary yuletide sweet spot.

So maybe it’s early to deck the halls and the bookshelves, but writing this helps me get ready to finish tackling this year’s holiday books. I’ll post my review when it runs in the Star-Ledger.
In the meantime- got a favorite holiday book? Leave a comment.

These reviews originally appeared in the Star-Ledger on October 25, 2009. Wordcount: 860

Sense and Sensibility
and Sea Monsters
Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Quirk Books, 344 pp., $12.95 paperback

Following on the success of the monstrous mash-up of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (Quirk Books, April), another Austen classic gets the B-movie treatment. This version of the struggling fortunes of Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters takes on a maritime flavor that is both suspenseful and outrageously comic. Some of the nautical touches are moderately plausible.

Sensible Elinor includes carving driftwood among her hobbies. The seafaring aspect enhances some of the original’s plotlines, like a rough sea journey to the Dashwoods’ more modest lodgings, marking the transition more definitely. Potential suitors can prove their worth in fights with sea beasts. The fit of some of the maritime touches makes the more fanciful additions jarringly ludicrous.

The sea monster battles are gripping and fun to read, while Willoughby sporting tentacles of his own is cartoonish in the wrong way. Although the fusion of Austen and campy monsters is still fun, this particular combination gets uneasy.

The Casebook
of Victor Frankenstein
Peter Ackroyd
Nan A. Talese, 368 pp., $26.95

Imagining Victor Frankenstein’s university days, Peter Ackroyd stays faithful to both Mary Shelley’s original soul-searching character and to the language of the classic novel.

The young Victor, awestruck by the urban bustle of London and the fledgling science surrounding voltaic power, or electricity, befriends fellow student Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here, Frankenstein begins his chilling investigations into the scientific nature of death, even gruesome possibilities for reanimation.

Not only Ackroyd’s writing style, but also his attention to detail complements Mary Shelley’s classic novel and fuels an utterly believable vision. As Ackroyd’s narrator, young Victor has an urgent anxiety, pushing and questioning what he learns, while also pausing to savor rare moments of natural beauty, like the mountain ranges of his boyhood home or the open space of the English countryside.

Ackroyd’s vision of the troubled, questioning student foreshadows the classic novel with a subtle menace. This captivating tale would work in its own right, or read as a companion piece to amplify the themes and questions raised in Shelley’s literary classic.

A Monster’s Notes
Laurie Sheck
Deckle Edge, 544 pp., $30

Laurie Sheck’s hauntingly surreal poem-novel imagines a rich interior life for Frankenstein’s monster. It reveals the voice of Frankenstein’s creature, as if he had been physically created and met Mary Shelley as a young girl, then lived on to ponder the workings of 20th-century science and the human soul. Veering back and forth across time and place like a series of poems, the lonely imagery is gorgeous, although sometimes confusingly disjointed.

It’s too frustrating to aim for a linear path through images that catapult from astronauts to the Arctic to Wollstonecraft and Shelley family history, complete with imagined letters between the siblings. Instead, read this as an evocative collage of twisting digressions. Sheck’s voice for Frankenstein’s creature resonates with ageless loneliness and sometimes philosophical dreaminess.

Before this book, it would have been impossible to picture Frankenstein’s monster writing about Chinese philosophy or the traffic of a bustling city. These innovative riffs on Frankenstein’s monster are so dense with images, the book demands re-reading.
Grimoires:
A History of Magic Books
Owen Davies
Oxford University Press, 384 pp., $29.95

Grimoires are texts said to contain powerful magical lore. Owen Davies’ fascinating book traces their evolution from ancient Persian tribes, to lost books of Judaism and Christianity, through to World War II Germany to modern magical lore in fiction, like Harry Potter. Davies’ study is more than a survey of written magical traditions.

It traces historical and cultural perceptions about magic, as well as scholarship and the transmission of knowledge in a more general sense. Although the prose itself gets dryly academic in spots, the extent of Davies’ study is impressive, countering assumptions a curious reader might have taken for granted.

From the suppression or destruction of magical texts, to cycles of reverence or persecution of those who held that knowledge, Davies examines who practices what kind of magic and how they are regarded by the larger society. Grimoires, in Davies’ context, work toward a bigger picture of what knowledge is prized or feared, and how it is transmitted.

Johannes Cabal,
The Necromancer
Jonathan Howard
Doubleday, 304 pp., $25

Necromancer Johannes Cabal traded his soul to Satan years ago. Now, he wants it back. The bargain he makes with the devil sends him on a macabre adventure that’s as farcical as it is Faustian. Hoping his vampire brother won’t hold a grudge after years of imprisonment, Cabal journeys across the English countryside, hawking his twisted and spooky carnival amusements. And collecting the souls of anyone who signs the right paperwork.

Jonathan Howard’s dry, absolutely British narrative voice will appeal to fans of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Howard deftly combines the macabre with the patently absurd in his small-town settings.

All of his descriptive passages are wonderfully chilling, from the carnival staffed entirely by ghouls and zombies, to Satan’s hilariously bureaucratic realm of lost souls. Howard’s tone is so wry that it nearly deflects some of the tense and ghoulish scenes of attempting to collect souls, or the cautiously emerging respect between the Cabal brothers.

I have never read Dorothy Sayers. I know. I really should.

My friend Terri just sent me a magnificent review.

Hi there! Just finished a book recently that sounds about your bag — which means you’ve not only read it, but your master’s thesis was probably about subtext in the third chapter, right? Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers? It’s a 30’s mystery, so British it bleeds tea, and no one actually dies. The mystery bit is tied into some very interesting proto-psycho-feministy sort of mentality, and at the end of it, you’re left more with Sayer’s musings about the higher education of women than with a good plot. I did some digging after I finished it and found that she wrote it to deal with her own conflicted feelings about creativity vs. matrimony vs. security vs. personal freedoms. Somehow the combination of all of that just made me think of you and what you write about.

If you’ve already read it, I wondered what you thought of it? I feel like it’s a pretty lousy mystery plot, but that seems the least important element of the book ….

Going to the library tomorrow.  “Bleeds tea?” Perfect turn of phrase!  I’m delighted, intrigued, and flattered.  Very cool!

So Dorothy Sayers readers, where should I start?

Didn’t write this for Women’s Voices For Change. It’s a good read— makes me want to read her novels!
Lisa Genova is the author of the novel Still Alice. She is working on her next novel, Left Neglected, which is coming from Simon and Schuster in 2011. Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University. She spoke with Women’s Voices For Change about her writing career and upcoming projects.

Read the interview at Women’s Voices For Change.

A chill in the air (sometimes) and leaves turning color. Cider, fuzzy sweaters, and the Halloween-themed book reviews for the Star-Ledger. This year I’ve had the chance to do multiple roundups. First off, there was the generally spooky, featuring a history of grimoires, a necromancer or two, a tentacled take on Jane Austen, and not one, but two, tremendously creative takes on Frankenstein.

From there, it was right into five vampire books. Some of which meant to be funny. (But it was the unintentionally funny ones that really made me laugh hard. I feel that the Twilight phenomenon has done more for comedic vampire angst by accident than Joss Whedon did on purpose.)  Writing this, I mistyped vampire as campire… I feel that it might be an accurate name for the subgenre of Twilight’s swooning vamps.

And now, the zombie roundup is full of delights- some finding the humor of the undead, one anthology so scary I would rather not read it in an empty house at night. Also, I got a friend’s comic collection into the roundup. Awakening, Volume 1. Alex Eckman-Lawn is a friend’s son, and his artwork blew me away. Intense, nightmarish, warped photographs fused with dreamy painted panels.

My editor wants me to ponder the zombie phenomenon, maybe get a bookstore owner or comic shop owner, to comment on how zombies are the new vampires, how they’ve become The Monster du Jour.

Yes. I love my job.

In the reading queue after this- two sets of Christmas books! I can feel the big, sweet, culture shock just waiting to happen.

I am a freelance writer, a features journalist, a blogger, a book reviewer, and a beer and food pairing writer.

My writing has appeared in the following print outlets:

The Newark Star-Ledger

Newsday

As a contributing editor at Women’s Voices For Change, a nonprofit web magazine focused on the interests of women over 40, I edit and publicize content, using mirror sites and SEO. I work on site maintenance as well. I have written a number of articles for the site.

I am the editor for PinkyShears.com, a new web magazine about the business of fashion and garment manufacture.

I write about beer and food pairings as the NY Beer Pairing Examiner for Examiner.com It’s terrific fun. And tasty!

Welcome to my personal blog.

Writing Experience and Resume

Just finished writing the Kids’ Book Round-Up for 2009.

I’m not sure it’s my absolute favorite part of the year. But it may come close.  And this year, it was expanded to 36  books: Twelve each of picture books, tween books, and YA.

Which were my favorites? So many of them.  But here are the ones I’m thinking of buying in bulk so I can give to people, for various reasons:

1. Beautiful- a category for illustrations AND language: Tie between two that bowled me over with lovely illustrations and poem-like language I almost wished I could set to music:
Before You Were Here, Mi Amor, by Samantha Vamos.  The illustrations by Santiago Cohen are all joyful in warm oranges and reds and magenta.
Blueberry Girl, by Neil Gaiman with Charles Vess.

2. Whimsical: Wink! The Ninja Who Wanted to be Noticed by JC Phillipps. Again, it’s a dual prize, for the premise, and the fun illustrations.

3. Adorable: But Sugar Would Not Eat It.  Sugar’s a kitten, with great big eyes, and a plaintive mew you can practically hear rising from the page.  Sweetest kitty ever.  Sugar, indeed.

Best of Tweens:

Confetti Girl- Diana Lopez. Lina has a collection of funny socks.  Those who know me know that’s almost enough to make this a favorite.  Added bonus- one of the better balances of real life sadness (grieving her mother’s death) with heart and humor, first crushes and confetti-filled eggs.

Best illustrations in tweens:Where the Mountain Meets the Moon Written and illustrated by Grace Lin, this isn’t one you read in one sitting.  Treat it as a collection of short stories, for browsing and savoring.

The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour. Michael Biehl. Again, not a surprise that I loved this. It’s set in a Catholic girls’ school in New York, and follows four excellently snarky girls solving trivia puzzles to find the ring.

Best of YA:

I’ve already been recommending Wings, by Aprilynne Pike, to any and everyone.  The writing is gorgeously visual, and the blend of modern day high school with an innovative spin on faerie mythology.  Laurel doesn’t think much about the fact that she’s a strict vegan, loves the outdoors, and is adopted.  But, when a bump on her back turns into a giant flower, she realizes she’s something decidedly other.  Magical.  Go read this!

How could I not love Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd?  Edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci, and contains all kinds of wonderful nerdity, from Buffy, to band geeks, to theater, to a Klingon and a Jedi getting it on at a scifi convention.

One I hope has a sequel: The Oracles of Delphi Keep, by Victoria Laurie.  It’s very British and spooky, has a definite Joan Aiken feel.

My first clip from Newsday.   “Brooklyn couple first to marry in zero gravity.” September 13, 2009.  Explore L.I. Weddings section. 450 words.

It can be said that Erin Finnegan and Noah Fulmor got a little carried away with their wedding.

On June 20, the Williamsburg couple went to Titusville, Fla., to board a modified 727-200 plane, which allows its passengers to experience reduced gravity in flight, and said, “I do,” making them the first couple to get married weightless.

What’s it like to be weightless on your wedding day? “The closest we’ve been able to describe the experience is that it is like floating in a dream, except you aren’t dreaming,” says Noah through e-mail. “You feel superhuman! It’s kind of like the feeling of being in love.”

The couple took only 12 people with them, so they are having receptions in New York and Michigan. One of the venues they are considering is the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City.

Erin, 30, and Noah, 31, have been fascinated by space travel since they were children. Erin attended space camp in Jackson, Mich., and Noah volunteered at his local planetarium in Denver. They met in 2000 at a science-fiction event and began dating in 2002. When they decided to wed, both agreed that space travel should be part of the ceremony.

“We wanted to get married in space or on Mars,” says Noah. “But that just was not possible.”

Simulating it was. The couple contacted Zero Gravity Corp., a Vienna, Va., entertainment company specializing in weightless travel.

On their wedding day, the couple and their party boarded the plane, which flew through a series of parabolas, a flight pattern of roller-coaster-like curves between 24,000 and 36,000 feet. Over the course of the two-hour flight, the plane did 15 of these maneuvers. At the top of each, the couple and wedding party went through the ceremony in segments as they bobbed weightlessly through the chamber.

Laughing bridesmaids and other attendants helped hold the floating couple in place to get good photographs and video.

Richard Garriott, son of an astronaut, Owen Garriott, officiated.

The total cost for the ceremony was $60,000.

Erin’s wedding gown by Japanese designer Eri Matsui, had a fitted top of cascading ruffles, and pants covered with a layered skirt that billowed out when she became weightless. The tails of Noah’s tuxedo were made extra long, so they would billow out also.

Erin’s hair, which was done by Lambs Eat Ivy Salon in Orlando, was straightened, wrapped and pinned up with sculpting wire.

The rings, attached by filaments, were made from meteorite fragments by jewelry designer Chris Ploof, so that, unlike the couple, they wouldn’t float away during the ceremony.

“Everybody was laughing and having a great time,” says Erin. “And I thought this is the most fun wedding ever.”

Hey- wasn’t it June? About 15 minutes ago?
It has been a very, very long time since I updated. I’ve been reading books, thinking about them. I’ve been writing. Just- not particularly here.

I’ve been having entirely too much fun as the New York Beer Pairing Examiner. As I’d hoped, it’s challenging me to teach myself to be a better food writer, to articulate tastes and recipe instructions more clearly. (I’m also trying out new recipes, and photographing my dinner.) The Examiner.com community of food writers is a great resource too. It’s become a great source of new recipes to try. I’m looking forward to some festivals and fun in the fall. For the writing experience as well as the delicious beer.

Book reviewing for the Ledger is picking up. A bunch of reviews are due for the fall. (I swore October was farther away than this! Yikes!) I think the best part is getting to do another Kids and YA roundup! I’ve got two glorious tote bags overflowing with picture books and teen novels. I really can’t believe the gorgeousness out there in kids’ picture books. And I find teen novels tremendously relaxing. (Maybe it’s knowing that I’ll never have to suffer through an algebra class, or play volleyball ever again.) I think they’re soothing precisely because the social drama is so overwrought.

Still blogging and doing housekeeping for Women’s Voices, and helping launch a fashion industry blog.
And– look for a couple other bylines to appear in the fall.

Even though humid weather makes me feel like a zombie, I can look back and say, I’ve gotten a lot done this summer. Go me!

Black and White and Dead All Over
John Darnton
Anchor Books
Paperback, August 2009 351 pages
$16.00

When Theodore Ratnoff, assistant managing editor of the New York Globe, is found murdered in the newsroom, the murder weapon, an editor’s spike, seems a particularly grisly bit of poetic justice for a little-liked editor. Virtually everyone in the newsroom could be a suspect, even as the bodies, and tensions, mount. Covering the story for the Globe, reporter Jude Hurley is as stumped for ledes as the police are for clues. Jude works uneasily with Priscilla Bollingsworth, the officer assigned to the case, to chase a killer, while meeting deadlines, and finding a way to keep the imperiled paper running.

Darnton’s fictional New York Globe newsroom is absolutely right. Eccentric columnists and veteran editors combine nostalgia for the paper’s heyday with anxieties about dropping sales figures and the role of bloggers or the Internet. Without getting in the way of the mystery. Each character is perfectly New York, from Bashir the coffee vendor’s quips to Officer Bollingsworth’s awkwardness about her privileged uptown past. At times, the cast of characters is so crowded it’s like a confused Dickensian parody, but it’s hard to pinpoint any one character whose loss wouldn’t reverberate.
Betrayal, corrupt cops, old grudges and bloodshed keep the suspense churning frenetically in this well crafted and riveting tale.