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Well, it’s the end of June! Did I manage the Summer Reading Blitz hosted by Shauna and complete 30 books in 30 days?
Yes, I did! I’m not going to link any of these to my reviews because I’m exhausted and because I’m a little lazy. Most of them haven’t been posted anyway, I have 20 reviews in the queue and 8 to write. That’s what happens when you read too fast. Dates are finishing dates only, some took me longer than others and I didn’t hesitate to read shorter books while reading longer ones.
119. Songs My Mother Never Taught Me – Selcuk Altun – 1 Jun – 212 pages
120. Joker One – Donovan Campbell – 1 Jun – 307 pages
121. Her Secret Fantasy – Gaelen Foley – 2 Jun – 401 pages
122. The Last Witch of Langenburg – Thomas Robisheaux – 2 Jun – 338 pages
123. Out from Boneville – Jeff Smith – 3 Jun – 138 pages
124. Uglies – Scott Westerfeld – 4 Jun – 425 pages
125. When the Duke Returns – Eloisa James – 4 Jun – 375 pages
126. The wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more – Roald Dahl – 5 Jun – 239 pages
127. The Lieutenant’s Lover – Harry Bingham – 8 Jun – 442 pages
128. The Heart of the Night – Judith Lennox – 10 Jun – 500 pages
129. The Great Cow Race – Jeff Smith – 10 Jun – 132 pages
130. Married By Mistake – Abby Gaines – 12 Jun – 268 pages
131. Into the Beautiful North – Luis Alberto Urrea – 12 Jun – 334 pages
132. My Lord John – Georgette Heyer – 13 Jun – 430 pages
133. Everything and the Moon – Julia Quinn – 13 June – 372 pages
134. Shadows and Strongholds – Elizabeth Chadwick – 14 Jun – 564 pages
135. A Pearl in the Storm – Toni Murden McClure – 15 Jun – 292 pages
136. Slammerkin – Emma Donoghue – 16 Jun – 422 pages
137. The Road Home – Rose Tremain – 16 Jun – 365 pages
138. On Beauty – Zadie Smith – 18 Jun – 422 pages
139. Land of Marvels – Barry Unsworth – 22 Jun – 287 pages
140. Blood Bound – Patricia Briggs – 23 Jun – 326 pages
141. Ink Exchange – Melissa Marr – 24 Jun – 312 pages
142. Crossed – Nicole Galland – 25 Jun – 642 pages
143. Simply Magic – Mary Balogh – 26 Jun – 326 pages
144. The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins – 26 Jun – 454 pages
145. The Incendiary’s Trail – James McCreet – 27 Jun – 356 pages
146. Guilty Pleasures – Laurell K. Hamilton – 28 Jun – 266 pages
147. A Little Bit Wicked – Victoria Alexander – 29 Jun – 359 pages
148. Shadows Return – Lynn Flewelling – 29 Jun – 522 pages
A couple of things please me about this list. First and foremost is that I only read 6 romance novels. That’s the most out of any month this year, but I was expecting to read a lot more because they are quick; I can read an average sized one in about 2 hours. I do have 2 graphic novels on my list as well. I did, however, manage to read 11 books with 400+ pages. I think that’s pretty impressive! I am happy to be able to do something else with my free time though, and I’m very much looking forward to the chunksters I’ve started or am about to start now.
We are also officially at the halfway point of the year. I doubt anyone remembers but I set my goal at 200 books this year. Can I imagine not hitting 200 books at this point when I’ve already read 148? Well, no. It was a challenge at the time though. I’m not sure whether to up my goal or not. Time will tell.
Finally, why am I exhausted today? I went on a field trip with other students at the Centre for Medieval Studies! It was a wonderful day but has left me worn out. Here’s a 13th century manor house, Markenfield Hall, to liven up this post:
 It even has a moat, which you can’t see well in this picture, between the fence and the bushes. I would like to live there but, well, I guess we can’t all marry earls. 
 In 1940, Greek geologist Athos was digging in a war-stricken Polish city when a small boy emerged from the mud; no one realized that he was alive until he started to cry. Jakob was only seven years old and his entire family had been taken and probably killed by the Nazis. Athos decides to risk his own life by taking the boy home to Greece, where they settle, hide, starve, but begin to know each other and develop a relationship and education. We follow Jakob into adulthood, watching him write poetry that reflects their haunted past as well as their uncertain future.
This book may have been slightly too literary for me. I loved the idea of the story but I’m never all that fond of books told in abstracts. Perhaps I read it too soon after The English Patient, which I still haven’t found the words to review; both books are similar in their slow exploration of the effects of war on people’s psyche and in their meandering focus on people rather than plot. I’m not sure I’m always in a mood for such a read. A week later, however, I find myself pondering this book, wondering about Jakob.
Jakob’s transition from lost and lonely boy to educated, confident, loving man is quite a fascinating one. We first witness Jakob’s life, then the life of another man who is significantly influenced by him and by the war. There are multiple threads running through the novel; perhaps the most important, I felt, were the bonds of love. Jakob loves Athos; he loves his wives; he loves his parents and perhaps most especially, he loves his lost sister Bella, who he manages to carry in his heart throughout his life.
I was a bit perplexed by the addition of the second character in the final 100 pages of the book. I wasn’t as interested in him as I was in Jakob. I can see the parallels between them and I understand the effect of showing the significance Jakob had after his death, but I felt there were unanswered questions and I wanted the answers. This book would be better read with other people in order to think and discuss more closely its literary significance. I’m sure there is a great deal here that I am not picking up on my own. I’m planning to read it again and see what I can find the next time.
Available via Indiebound, Powell’s, Amazon, and Amazon UK.
 Or so it feels! But first, a couple of quick notes. If you haven’t seen the book drive Amy and Lenore are having for Nothing But Ghosts by Beth Kephart, go check it out. This is a fantastic way to show our support for authors while having a chance to win some prizes. The book is only $12.23 on Amazon!
Secondly, I wanted to show off my progress in my new quest to read my oldest books while also getting through my library books and review copies. I started two weeks ago, and here’s how the pile looked then:
 Today, this is how it looks:
 I’m a little absurdly pleased with myself! I’m still trying to read my older review copies as well. I’m going home in 2 weeks and will have an avalanche of them to read very quickly, so I have to get these out of the way first. Stone’s Fall has been on the top for a while now because I’m still trying to read 30 books in June. So I’ve pretty much abandoned the pile this week because I actually fell behind and had to try to read 4 books in 2 days. I managed it, but only because I got an order of mainly YA books that I could race through. I have 2 1/2 books to go, but after that I’m going to go right for all of these chunksters.
Right now I’m reading Possession by A.S. Byatt. Jennifer at The Literate Housewife and I are reading and reviewing this together, about which I’m very excited, so I’m attempting to go a little more slowly and actually think more about what I’m reading. It’s not hard with this book, though, because I feel like it was written just for me. Obviously, it wasn’t, as I was probably not even born when Byatt came up with the idea and I was four years old when it won the Booker Prize. I’ve only read 100 pages but already it’s tapping deep into so many things I love. I don’t talk about it much on this blog, but if I’d chosen literature rather than history I’d have gone straight for 19th century British authors. There is something about this century in England that entrances me. To make it even better, the book in the modern day is about two academics researching the lives of two (fictional) 19th century British poets and their possession of their biographical subjects. I’m writing my own essentially biographical study and could completely see myself remaining in this vein in academics should I choose to continue. It’s amazing how you form a bond with people long dead, becoming fond of them despite their faults and feeling that you know them, only to discover someone else probably feels exactly the same way as you with a slightly different opinion that makes you angry. It’s so fascinating. Of course the book is a romance as well, and although I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I can already see who the players are. As I said, it’s like the book was written with me in mind! I adore it already and I can’t wait to read more later on.
Have you ever felt like a book was written just for you?
 Thanks to the flood of illegal immigrants into the US, small towns in Mexico are left with a lack of young men. For Nayeli and her friends Yolo and Vampi, this is a serious problem, especially when banditos arrive in the town to scare the women. After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides that she is going to go to the US, into the beautiful north, to find seven men to protect her town and revitalize the lives of the women therein. Armed with cash, a pretty smile, and three friends, Nayeli heads off on a bus into a journey neither she nor I would have imagined.
With a few notable exceptions, novels set in Latin America tend to frustrate me. Largely, this is because of the magical realism that many of those authors employ. In general, I prefer novels to be either all fantasy or all real, but magical realism treads an uneasy line between the two, and for some reason I just don’t like it. So when my online book club chose this novel for June, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to think of it. In the end, I ended up on the edge myself between enjoying it and finding myself dissatisfied with it.
There are many things to enjoy in this novel. Urrea’s writing is beautiful and evoked perfectly for me small-town Mexico, a garbage dump on the edge of the border, and American cities that I’ve never been to. I was really moved by how difficult life is for illegal immigrants and how cruel the Border Patrol is towards them. I’m not very comfortable with our stance towards illegal immigrants, although I don’t know how to fix it, so the struggles portrayed in the book really made me think about the problem. It was interesting to see how in different locations, Mexicans are treated differently. Lastly, there isn’t really much of that magical realism in this book. Slightly unrealistic situations are portrayed but nothing that is actually impossible. It still has a bit of that feel to it, but overall I was happy about this absence.
On the other hand, certain things bothered me about the book. Nayeli’s journey seemed a little outrageous, especially given that the only threat was two men who refused to pay for their food. We know that they are banditos because we are told, but they did not seem to be terrifying. Other events in this book follow a similar unlikely pattern. Some of the passages in the book are in Spanish, which I don’t speak, although I mostly skimmed them and tried to get the jist of the conversation. Perhaps more fatally, I didn’t really understand or like many of the characters or their motivations. I came closest to liking Nayeli, but then towards the end of the book she has an experience and reacts in a way that saddened me; I felt that for her, the journey was not fulfilling. The secondary characters often irritated me; Nayeli’s friends are largely caricatures and it’s hard to feel that we know anything about them outside of their shell. Even the missionary, Matt, was unappealing once we met him and seemed at total odds with the man all the girls had fallen in love with.
Despite all that, I did enjoy it. I read it in a few hours between errands and never felt bored or that I wished I’d brought another book. It was only afterwards that I began to feel uncertain about it and think through everything that I have mentioned. I would still recommend it, especially if you like novels by other Latin American writers like Gabriel García Márquez.
Our book club discussion was really interesting. More of us than I had expected felt lukewarm about the book; they didn’t like it, or they were like me and liked it but had some problems with it overall. We were all most moved by the issue of illegal immigrants as portrayed by the book; some of us had heard about the garbage dumps and some of us had not. A few of us were stymied by the way that people were able to recognize them as illegals; there are plenty of Latin Americans here legally and there is no real way to tell the difference. We had a great discussion about it and I suspect other book clubs would too.
IndieBound | Powell’s | Amazon
 Mercy Thompson is an auto mechanic. She’s also a shape shifter and lives next door to a sexy werewolf, Adam, in a world where supernatural creatures are being forced out of hiding due to advancing science. When a new, teenage werewolf who isn’t affiliated with Adam’s pack shows up in Mercy’s shop, she finds herself in the middle of both a werewolf war and a love triangle as she goes back into her own past for some answers.
I very much enjoyed this book. I liked this version of AU America; every urban fantasy has a slightly different twist on it and this one is great. It makes perfect sense to me that werewolves, vampires, and the like are about to be outed via modern science. If we can cure diseases, surely we can investigate other physical phenomena. Since most urban fantasy gathers werewolves into packs like this one, it was a wonderful move to set Mercy slightly outside the pack. She turns into a coyote but shares few of the advantages that werewolves have; she is not necessarily more human than they are but she is one step outside of their society while still being in it enough to be a part of the action.
Mercy herself is a great character. She is brave, a bit stubborn, and clearly a tomboy, but still has a romantic heart and is very easy to relate to. I had a soft spot for her the minute I learned she’d majored in history. She’s determined to get to the truth of the mystery she’s unearthed and she doesn’t back down when threats emerge. I think her struggles with the men in her life only enrich her character more; we learn about her history and simultaneously can witness for ourselves just how much she’s grown and changed.
The plot rockets along in this short book, which comes in under 300 pages; there were a couple of times when I felt that Mercy was explaining a little too much but as something of a set-up for the world, I’m used to it in the first book of a series. I’ve been reading a lot of these lately. By the time I hit the middle, I needed to know what happened, and by the end, I didn’t want to give it up.
I can’t wait to read Blood Bound. I immediately went and ordered it online and now I’m just waiting impatiently for it to arrive. I really, really enjoyed this book. I can’t wait for the relationships between the characters to deepen, for another story to start, or to learn more about the world. If you like urban fantasy, I highly recommend giving this series a shot.
Buy it from Amazon, Amazon UK, Powell’s, or IndieBound.
 From the back cover:
John, Duke of Bedford, grew to manhood fighting for his father, King Henry IV of England, on the wild and lawless Northern Marches. He was a prince of the royal blood, loyal, strong, and the greatest ally that his brother – the future Henry V – was to have. Filled with the clash of bitter rivalries and deadly power struggles, this is Georgette Heyer’s last and most ambitious novel, bringing to life a character and a period she found irresistibly attractive.
I really wanted to like this novel. I went into it expecting to like it. I have really enjoyed the other works that I’ve read by Georgette Heyer and as you all know, I love historical fiction. I just could not love this book, though, much as I tried.
First there is the language. Heyer appears to have really tried to write this novel in the language of the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the way she intended. Instead, it feels stilted and unfamiliar, even to one who has spent hours trying to figure out what fifteenth century people meant when they used all these words that have fallen out of the language or when they used words which don’t mean what they now mean. I think the fifty to seventy-five years in between my work and this book make a difference because these are unquestionably proper words, but I was unfamiliar with them and they make the book a slow, slow read.
If a reader of this book has no knowledge of the history or people involved, it will constitute even more of a struggle. Even though I have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Henry IV’s reign, I had to refer to the family tree several times and even wished I’d taken notes so I could keep track of the various names used to refer to one person. This is the first instance that I’ve wished for a character list, which I’ve seen in a few fantasy novels, just so I could remember who people were.
Those two problems combined with the fact that this book has no real plot and is merely a meandering through history, which isn’t even complete, made this book a slow one for me. In the end, I didn’t see the point. I didn’t find it enjoyable and I wasn’t searching for a resolution to a story because I knew there wasn’t one. I think that if someone was extremely interested in the reign of Henry IV’s reign and wanted to read this alongside some comprehensive history over a lengthy period of time, it would work better. It is historically accurate to the best of my knowledge, but I guess this just goes to show that it also takes a well told story for a compelling work of historical fiction. I wish Heyer had applied her considerable talents, so clearly on display in her Regencies, to this novel as well. I would recommend those instead.
IndieBound | Powell’s | Amazon
 First I’m going to start off with Library Loot. This is hosted by Eva and Marg! I got four books out this week, two yesterday and two today. Three were holds and one was a little more spontaneous. I also just realized that now my due dates have fallen into the range of the two weeks I’ll be home, so I really have to start reading those library books!
From the top:
- The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve been feeling a lack of huge fantasy epics in my life lately. I don’t remember where I heard about this one. I’m sure it was on a blog, but I can’t remember which one. If I mentioned it in your comments, let me know, because you probably deserve credit for it.
- Bonk by Mary Roach. This promises to be hilarious non-fiction about the science of sex, everyone’s favorite topic. Again, heard about this everywhere and I’ve been eager to try one of Mary Roach’s books.
- The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett. I’ve seen favorable reviews of this in most places and I know the spoiler that may have made me dislike the book otherwise, so I’m still looking forward to it. Note again what I said about fantasy. Once my challenge to read 30 books in June is over, I’m going to be all about the chunksters.
- Eyes of the Storm by Jeff Smith. This is Bone vol. 3! I’m loving the Bone series. I haven’t been writing reviews of them because I can’t decide how to do it. I might buy the whole thing when I go home, reread, and write a review of that. We’ll see.
 Next up, I was tagged by the lovely Becky at One Literature Nut for the What’s On My Desk? Wednesday meme, which is hosted by Sassy Brit. The rules:
1. Grab a camera and take a photo of your desk! Or anywhere you stack your books/TBR pile. And no tidying!
2. Add this photo to your blog.
3. Tag at least 5 people!
4. Come back here and leave a link back to your photo in the comments section.
Becky specifically mentioned my grad work so I’ve taken quite a few pictures to get the full effect. First, we have the desk.
 I must confess, I cleaned a little, but it needed to be done and it’s still messy. Anyway, we have my computer, propped up because it overheats in my oven of a room. See that pipe on the bottom under all the wires? It’s hot all year round and even though it’s summer and a lovely 70 degrees, my room is basically never comfortable because that pipe radiates heat constantly. Behind my computer are my public library books. Under my phone I have two books that I really should finish one day. On the far right in the back are just a few of my massive pile of research books, and directly in front of them are my review books and the Sims 3, which I’m also intending to review soon. I also have bookmarks to complete the literary aspects of my desk. Otherwise, I have a little rabbit that I crocheted for my mom, lip gloss, hair ties, a glass of water, my glasses, and various crochet and sewing bits that are mostly hidden on the left there.
Then, because you haven’t seen enough yet, we have my tall pile of academic books, with a couple of articles tucked in.
 Why do I have so many books on Richard III? Well, quite a few of them touch on Anthony Woodville, and I take what I can get. He’s not all that popular a subject unfortunately.
Okay, now my actual TBR piles, the arrangement that I’m meant to be reading and my messy shelves with the waiting books on them:
  The books on the bottom half cut off shelf are those that I’ve read.
I’m going to be rebellious and not pass on the tag. I never know who has a camera or is willing to take pictures of what they have at random. If you want to take pictures of your TBR pile and share them with us (you know you do), consider yourself tagged by me.
Apologies for all the posts around here lately. I’m already scheduling my reviews into the distant future, but after this month I plan to read fewer but bigger books and will then spend less time filling up your RSS readers!
 Charles Boutin’s defection to the other side is a serious blow to the Colonial Defense Forces. As a top military scientist, he had access to many of their secrets. As a genius, he’s capable of equipping the enemy with more sophisticated technology than humans, even the genetically modified humans in the forces, can handle. Luckily (or unluckily depending on your perspective) Boutin managed to preserve his consciousness on a computer, something that had never before been accomplished. And so Jared Dirac is created from Charles Boutin’s DNA, a clone which they hope will provide them with answers. When Jared wakes up, he is a newborn like every other newborn Ghost Brigades soldier, but as his experiences in war add up, he finds Boutin’s emotions, memories, and personality emerging, making him both dangerous and essential in the war effort.
Does anyone remember how I said I didn’t like science fiction? John Scalzi has blown holes in that theory. I read this in three hours on a train and the time simply flew by. I often comment on characters in my reviews because I think great, well-developed characters are more or less essential to my enjoyment of a book. I don’t like exclusively plot-driven works. Thus, this book, in which discoveries that relate to the plot are made only when the main character changes enough to trigger his memories, worked perfectly for me. Jared was fantastic. I loved reading about his development from essentially nothing, into this relatively submissive guy called Jared, and then into someone much closer to Charles Boutin. There is plenty of plot here, but there are also great characters and great human emotions that, to me, made this book. There is also a tie-in character from Old Man’s War which very quickly enabled me to build on that book with this one.
There is something else I like about this series that others may not. Scalzi is a little bit merciless with the killing of characters. I may be weird but I love this. I like the unpredictability of it, especially in fantasy or, apparently, science fiction. It makes the world real for me. I can grieve over characters I’ve become attached to but the unpredictability often makes the book that much more exciting for me and elicits more reaction from me. There are no guarantees here. I read enough fiction where endings are assured and I like those in their place, but sometimes I just want something I’m not expecting. Scalzi delivers just that.
Even more amazing for me and science fiction, I like the world he’s created. It’s strong and well-developed. I know which aliens are which and what they’re good at. I understand the technological advancements that have been made. For the most part, we’re acquainted with all these details in Old Man’s War, but with the focus on the Special Forces/Ghost Brigades in this novel, we become more familiar with the oddities of the new developments in body technology. This isn’t at all overwhelming, though. I was astonished by this personally, but I was actually interested in how the science was going. I want to know where it’s going next!
I love this series. I can’t wait to read The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale. If you are in general cool with the concept of alternate worlds, I highly recommend this series.
The Ghost Brigades is available from Amazon and Amazon UK.
As we learned in last week’s Booking Through Thursday, today is Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers day.
When I was fifteen, I had trouble finding new books to read. I was too old for YA fiction, or so I thought, but my introduction into adult fiction had mostly consisted of the romance novels my mom liked and the classics I read in school. The book fairs and book orders had long ended in school and I wasn’t sure where to look to expand my reading tastes. The kid who sat next to me in Russian class was always reading, though. So one day, when he had a big fat fantasy novel in his hand, I asked him about it. He was reading one of the books in the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. He told me about it and I thought it sounded awesome, like the books I used to love as a kid but better. The next time I went to the mall with my parents, I sought out the fantasy shelf and found The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. I stood there and opened it up.
Almost immediately, I was sucked in to the book. I forgot that I was in a bookstore. I forgot that I could be in people’s way. I wanted to know who these characters were and what happened to them. I inhaled that series. I somehow got my parents to buy me the first nine and I read them all in record time. My TBR pile was small back then and right next to my bed; I have a vivid mental image of several of these huge tomes sitting next to me, waiting for me to read them. It was wonderful and epic fantasy has been one of my favorite genres since then.
I have fallen in love with plenty of other genres since then and even returned to reading romance novels. These days it seems that I even like science fiction. Fantasy, though, edged me into a wider world, with huge stories, deep characters, and fascinating new worlds. Around the same time I discovered Japanese RPGs with their own gigantic worlds and complex characters. It was like my world was exploding. It takes an investment of time to read these books, but I’ve found it to be so worth it. As Nymeth so eloquently stated in her post on fantasy today, just because it’s set in another world doesn’t mean it can’t teach us something about ourselves.
 This one is too hard to describe, so I’m going to go with the publisher’s website:
Johnny Truant, wild and troubled sometime employee in a LA tattoo parlour, finds a notebook kept by Zampano, a reclusive old man found dead in a cluttered apartment. Herein is the heavily annotated story of the Navidson Report.
Will Navidson, a photojournalist, and his family move into a new house. What happens next is recorded on videotapes and in interviews. Now the Navidsons are household names. Zampano, writing on loose sheets, stained napkins, crammed notebooks, has compiled what must be the definitive work on the events on Ash Tree Lane.
But Johnny Truant has never heard of the Navidson Record. Nor has anyone else he knows. And the more he reads about Will Navidson’s house, the more frightened he becomes. Paranoia besets him. The worst part is that he can’t just dismiss the notebook as the ramblings of a crazy old man. He’s starting to notice things changing around him . . .
This book is a little strange. Well, a lot strange. This synopsis doesn’t mention that sometimes, the words are scattered in weird shapes across the page. The word house is always colored blue. When Navidson climbs a ladder, for example, the words assemble themselves into a column, forcing you to turn the book to the side and read upwards. When the book references other articles, they are sometimes displayed as cut-outs within the text. There are prodigious numbers of footnotes and about a third of the book is pseudo-academic, breaking apart and analyzing the Navidson movies, which are at the heart of this whole mess. This book is supposedly post-modern at its very finest. I have to confess, I’m not a fan of post-modern. Creepy, yes, science fiction, more and more, stories within stories, yes. Reading a pseudo-academic text when I have enough academic texts to read? Not so much. I can totally see how it builds upon the story and adds to the general atmosphere, but not for me.
This book, originally distributed through the internet and popular through solely word-of-mouth, has now been picked up and published for the world to read. I can see how those who like experimental, questioning, thinky reads can sink deep into this one. I like thinky reads, but I don’t like experimental when I have to turn the book upside-down or try to catch all the clever references in the text to get what’s going on. More, I didn’t like Johnny Truant. Whenever I saw his font, I groaned internally. He’s not even close to a productive member of society. He spends most of the book panting over girls he can’t have, watching his life go to nothing, and complaining that a book has changed his life and scarred him forever. I didn’t find his scary scenes creepy because I didn’t care if something ate him. I would have been happy. I’m discovering more and more that I don’t really like scummy characters who make no efforts to redeem themselves. His life story explains to some extent how he got where he is, but maybe I’m just too much of a goody-goody, because I can’t get into these characters’ heads and I struggle a lot with feeling for them or caring what happens to them unless they make some effort to better themselves.
What I did like, and what I liked a lot, was the story of the Navidson record. I was creeped out by the house and its endless black hallways. I was interested in the development of the relationships between Navidson, Karen, and all the men who help them investigate their strange house. I was perplexed myself by the house and what it all meant. This storyline and discovering what happened to Navy, as he’s nicknamed, was what kept me reading this book until the end when otherwise I’m sure I would have given up. I would have preferred this book to be stripped of all its post-modern, fancy, academic trappings and to just be a regular science fiction novel about a house. It probably wouldn’t have achieved its cult fame that way, but I do think that it would have made a much better story and a more arresting read. Is that just me? Probably.
I was glad I liked some of this book – it didn’t look likely for a while and I abandoned it for about three weeks in the middle of reading – but I can’t honestly recommend it. My fiance also read it and he is the one who urged me to read it myself (it was my book to start with), so obviously it does appeal to some. Just not to me.
Check it out on Amazon and Amazon UK.
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It even has a moat, which you can’t see well in this picture, between the fence and the bushes. I would like to live there but, well, I guess we can’t all marry earls. 
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