DEBlog

links for 2009-07-16

• Unshelved's Pimp My Bookcart sponsored by Highsmith

Moore, Bob: Don't Call Me a Crook

Dissident Books © 2009 (orig. pub. 1935), 256 pages

Don't Call Me a Crook is probably one of the stranger books I've ever read. The memoir was originally published in 1935 by Bob Moore, whose real name was Robert Macmillan Allison. The author was a Glaswegian and an engineer who wound up traveling around the world while working on various ships. He was also an incorrigible rogue--a thief (despite the book's title and the author's protestations), a drunk, a racist. He stole from people who trusted him. He abandoned his wife and child. (At least, he apparently never gave them a second thought after sending them back to Glasgow when family life became burdensome.) One is tempted, given Moore's immorality throughout the book, to call him a sociopath, but I don't know if that's right: he does show signs of humanity at times in the book.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Biddle, Cordelia Frances: Deception's Daughter

Minotaur Books © 2008, 288 pages

Deception's Daughter is the second book in Cordelia Frances Biddle's series of Martha Beale mysteries. Martha is an heiress living in mid-19th century Philadelphia. Her enviable financial situation has made her more than usually free to determine her own fate with respect to marriage. She has her sights on Thomas Kelman, an investigator working in conjunction with Philadelphia's mayor, despite that he's an unsuitable match for her by society's standards. In this outing Martha and Thomas must contend with a series of problems in addition to their romantic fumblings and misunderstandings--most seriously, the disappearance of the daughter of one of Philadelphia's leading families. The book takes readers from the well-appointed drawing rooms of Philadelphia's finest to the sorry confines of an almshouse to the city's lowest dives, where some of the aristocratic suspects in the girl's disappearance are wont to go slumming.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

links for 2009-07-13

• Crossword Bebop: 2009 LSSU Banished Words List
  Happy news! "Staycation" on the banished word list. Thanks, Douglas!

Crossword: Links to the Past

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS

23 *Boondocks
34 *Ambulance destination
50 *Imam or priest
69 *When the heavens and earth were created
87 *Deputy
103 *Week after Christmas
118 *Lights out in New York City

THE ANSWERS

23 ZVQQYR BS ABJURER [U]
34 ZRQVPNY PRAGRE [V]
50 FCVEVGHNY YRNQRE [F]
69 ORTVAAVAT BS GVZR [G]
87 FRPBAQ VA PBZZNAQ [B]
103 RAQ BS QRPRZORE [E]
118 OEBNQJNL PYBFVAT [L]

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: July 11

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

• Debra --0:43
• Clare -- 2:16
• Maxine -- 1:32
• Karen -- 0:29!

How to participate:

1. Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
2. Post your time in the comments to this post.
3. 3. The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge. This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say, because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<br/><a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html"><img src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a><br/>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Current Reading: DeKok and the Dead Harlequin

Current Reading: DeKok and the Dead
Harlequin
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

I take it that everyone in the world has been reading the DeKok series by Baantjer except me. But finally I'm immersed in my first--though not the first--and I'm pleasantly surprised. I guess I shy away from series of this sort. I'm not sure why. I think in part it's because they tend to be heavy on dialogue. But at any rate, I'm quite enjoying this. DeKok is a great leading character, and the mystery he's faced with in this one, at least, is most compelling: at the outset, he receives a note asking for an appointment from a man who says he has determined to commit murder. I'm more than halfway through and the mystery is still compelling.

Mel, meanwhile, having finished Junie B. Jones Cheater Pants, has moved on to Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus.

Gack!

St. John Mandel, Emily: Last Night in Montreal

Unbridled © 2009, 247 pages

"No one stays forever," reads the first line of Emily St. John Mandel's debut novel Last Night in Montreal. Certainly Mandel's main character can't stay in one place for longer than a few months, if that. Abducted when she was seven by her non-custodial parent, Lilia spent her childhood in a car--nine years of motels and chain restaurants and public parks, dyed hair and name changes, her picture and her grieving mother on their room's flickering TV screen before they fled again in the middle of the night. The book slowly circles around Lilia's story until we get the whole of it, skipping around in time and among perspectives: Lilia's own, when she was younger; and later we see her mostly through other's eyes--the private detective who became obsessed with her case, his daughter, and Eli, the latest of her abandoned lovers.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Current Reading: Killer Summer

Current Reading: Killer Summer
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

I haven't finished Don't Call Me a Crook yet, but I needed a bit of a fiction break, so started Ridley Pearson's latest. And it is good! I forced myself to go to bed at 1:00 AM rather than stay up and finish the last 100 pages.

Melissa, meanwhile, is reading Junie B. Jones, Cheater Pants. The dinosaur is illiterate, but likes to look at the pictures.

links for 2009-07-07

• TechXav » Blog Archive » 30+ Funny & Weird Twitter Applications
  Nice list, and I'm happy TwitterLit made it!

Thornton, Rosy: Crossed Wires

Headline Review © 2009, 352 pages

Peter Kendrick is a charmingly self-effacing Cambridge don who has smashed up his Land Rover's front end at the start of Rosy Thornton's Crossed Wires. The girl behind the phone at his insurance company's call center is Mina Heppenstall, who finds his bumbling and the fact that he'd swerved to avoid a cat charming. From that inauspicious beginning, and after another accident on Peter's part, a long-distance relationship develops between the two, though they're divided by the telephone wires as well as differences in age and station. But they're situations are otherwise similar: both are single parents--Peter's a widower with twins; Mina, now in her 20's, was pregnant at 17.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

The Tornado of 1989 #fb

Ah, the tornado of 1989. I can't believe it was already 20 years ago. It was the summer before I started graduate school. I was in our apartment in downtown New Haven on the 14th floor--well, 13th really, but they didn't have a 13th floor. David was in New York. We had a big plate glass window facing west, so beautiful sunsets. And in the middle of the afternoon it suddenly got very dark and things like plastic bags were flying around outside the window--which I think was unprecedented, since we were up so high. I hadn't had the TV on so I had no clue we were in fact getting a tornado. I was just amazed at how dark the sky was. And I was making runs back and forth to the bathroom with towels because that big window was leaking like crazy along the edges--also unprecedented. Hanging around by the window may not have been wise, in retrospect, but it did save having to clean up a big mess later.

I think that the white house shown at the beginning of this video may have been a friend's house, which was flattened in the storm.

Current Reading: Don't Call Me a Crook [TSS]

Current Reading: Don't Call Me a Crook
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

As I wrote two posts ago, I started Bob Moore's Don't Call Me a Crook last night. It's a new edition of a book that was originally published in 1935. In his introduction the publisher writes, "Don't Call Me never bores. Never." And I thought, uh oh, this is going to be boring. But it's not! Not at all.

Bob Moore--whose real name was Robert Macmillan Allison--was indeed a crook as well as a good many other things. He was an incorrigible rogue. But his memoir has a certain charm to it. The writing is not as polished as it might be, but that's part of the charm too. The style is conversational, and it pulls you in with its simplicity of expression. As well as with the stories that Moore has to tell. Very happy to be reading it today.

Win a free copy of my book! [TSS]

I'm giving away a copy of my book Trying Neaira for BAFAB. Full details of the contest are here but it's super easy to enter. Just Twitter this:

Win Trying Neaira by Debra Hamel (http://snipr.com/neaira) for BAFAB! RT to enter drawing (details http://is.gd/1kWDB). #neaira

Contest ends on 7/7, but you can enter once a day until then. (Open to residents of the US, England, and Canada.)

Current Reading: The Missing Ink

Current Reading: The Missing Ink
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

Alright, I admit it! I'm lying! This was my current reading up until a couple hours ago, but I finished it and wrote a draft of a review. It will be available for public consumption...well, some day. There are five other books I've written reviews for that I haven't posted yet.

Meanwhile, just started a book called Don't Call Me a Crook, which was originally published in 1935. It's the (reportedly) rollicking autobiography of a hell-raising Glaswegian named (pseudonymed, actually, as he didn't use his real last name) Bob Moore. I've only read the introduction by the book's publisher so far, though, so I can't be sure yet whether I'll be sticking with it or not.

Crossword: MNOP

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
23 Give Axl and Pete a break?
33 Tripping over a threshold, perhaps?
45 Pea farmers?
51 Summer apartment with no air-conditioning?
69 Floral Technicolor dreamcoat?
91 Strutting bird on an ice floe?
94 Residents at a Manhattan A.S.P.C.A.?
105 Move a movie camera around a community?
122 Explanation for an interception?

THE ANSWERS

ACROSS
23 FCRYY GUR EBFRF
33 CBEGNY QNATRE
45 GUR CBQ FDHNQ
51 OBVYVAT CNQ
69 SHYY CRGNY WNPXRG
91 FGHQ CHSSVA
94 ARJ LBEX CRGF
105 CNA NOBHG GBJA
122 CNFF PBASHFVBA

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: July 4

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

• Debra --1:16
• Maxine -- 1:24
• Karen -- 0:44

How to participate:

1. Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
2. Post your time in the comments to this post.
3. 3. The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge. This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say, because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<br/><a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html"><img src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a><br/>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Craig, Daniel Edward: Murder at Graverly Manor

Midnight Ink © 2009, 368 pages

Murder at Graverly Manor is the third book in Daniel Edward Craig's 5-Star Mystery series, featuring hotelier Trevor Lambert. Trevor, between jobs and back in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada, comes across a Victorian mansion turned bed and breakfast with a for sale sign in its yard. Intent on buying the creepy house, Trevor agrees to the bizarre demand of its current proprietress, Lady Graverly, that he live and work at the inn for a month while she decides if he's worthy of the property. It's not a thoroughly pleasant prospect: the allegedly haunted manor is saddled with a violent history. Rumors abound that Lady Graverly's husband, not seen for fifty years, was involved in the disappearance of a chambermaid. There are weird noises at night, the staff are hostile or incompetent, and Lady Graverly herself, who is alternately sweet and scary, is less than forthcoming about her plans for Trevor.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Twitter to win a book for BAFAB!

UPDATE 7/8: And the winner is @Susan_Victoria! But it's certainly not the best news she's had this week.

Okay, I've been thinking that for BAFAB Week this time around I'd give away a copy of my book, Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003). It's the true story (hence the subtitle) of a woman named Neaira who was put on trial in Athens in the 4th century B.C. She wasn't tried in connection with her earlier career as a prostitute, but she was dragged through the mud by the prosecutor, whose speech from the trial survives. (The Sunday Telegraph called it a "gripping story of politics, sex and sleaze in ancient Athens...." This is a book that needs to be read!)

So, if you'd like to enter a drawing to win my book for BAFAB, just Twitter this message (you can enter once per day):

Win Trying Neaira by Debra Hamel (http://snipr.com/neaira) for BAFAB! RT to enter drawing (details http://is.gd/1kWDB). #neaira

Fine print:
1. Contest open only to residents of the US, England, and Canada.
2. I'll hold the drawing and contact the winner on 7/8/09.
3. You can enter once per day through 7/7/09. No entries accepted after midnight eastern time 7/7/09.