Lucky number 13 is The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore.

We once again visit with Pocket, the protaganist of Fool, who has gone to Venice on behalf of his Queen, Cordelia, and has of course, gotten himself in trouble. He ends up falling into a situation that combines the Bard's Othello and the Merchant of Venice, and somehow, this works surprisingly well.

There's the usual mad, bawdiness of Pocket (who could definitely become annoying, but it's testimony to Moore's craft that he never does), lots of violence and plotting, and of course, there's always a bloody ghost.

Only Christopher Moore could take a tragedy and a psuedo comedy and make a definite comedy complete with happy ending. And a dragon. Cause Shakespeare could actually use more dragons.

Death and the Beta-Male

50 Book Challenge, Book #18: A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

I enjoy Christopher Moore's darkly irreverant humour a lot, yet somehow I'd never gotten around to this one. So finally I did :)

Charlie Asher is a 'beta-male'. He's owns his own businesss (a second hand store in San Francisco), he's married to a woman who loves him, they're expecting their first child, he has a good life overall. And then everything changes when his beloved wife dies shorty after giving birth and Charlie is enlisted into the ranks of the Death Merchants.

Like a lot of Moore's books, this one is bitter sweet. I mean, how can it not be, the main subject is death. But of course he injects his own, strange humour into it to soften the hardship of Charlie raising his daughter Sophie and trying to just go on after his wife's death. Oh, and learn the ways of being a Death Merchant as well.

I loved the Morrigan, the Hellhounds, the two older ladies who help Charlie look after Sophie (I think I must start appending half of what I say with 'like bear', cause yeah, that's funny). And Charlie himself who is a hero despite his beta-maleness :)

Also it's always good to see the Emperor and his two faithful dogs again. Didn't like? Having recently finished Moore's vampire trilogy, Lily felt very derivative to me (and had I read this before those books, then Abby would've felt derivative). I get that the two characters are friends, but they also share the same basic personality it seems.

And... well, I admit it's not the ending I wanted. It honestly felt a little rushed. But overall though, still a good read and as usual for his books, had me laughing out loud quite a few times.

Sex and violence and art history

50 Book Challenge, Book #14: Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore.

If Tyrion Lannister were a French, Post-Impressionist painter, he would be Henri Toulouse-Lautrec as written by Christopher Moore. Urbane, intelligent, witty, of short stature, a big drinker and having a great appreciation of working girls of all kind, it was a little hard for me not to draw the parallel. It doesn't take anything away from Moore's new book, in fact it is Moore's characterization of the various famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters that I liked the most. Especially his Renoir.

In crafting his tale of art and Bleu, the near immortal muse who inspires it, he gives us a wonderful walk through art and inspiration and the terrible price that inspiration takes from those she inspires. I wasn't fond of Bleu herself, she made not a bad femme fatale, but not a great one. Her accomplice, the Colourman, is a sinister little creation though. There's the usual Moore bawdy humour, mad-cap hilarity and great one-liners.

For me this isn't quite up there with Lamb or Fool, but better than his vampire trilogy and Fluke.

Book # 5 - Bite Me by Christopher Moore.

I love Christopher Moore. He is irreverent, smart, funny and completely twisted sometimes. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal is also one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

Bite Me is the third of Moore's vampire novels centering around Jody (vampire newbie), Tommy (Jody's boyfriend and even newer vampire newbie), Abby Normal (goth girl extrordinaire) and the crazy cast of the San Francisco they inhabit. There's a nice progression of character in the books (particularly Jody as she definitely embraces being a vampire), and a nice lack of progression (Abby is entrenched in being Abby). This time, they're up against vampire cats, which is just bizarre. I loved all the dog inner dialogue we get, and the Emperor remains one of my favourite characters.

I always find Moore's books a quick read, but not because they're fluffy, but mainly 'cause they're just so funny it's easy to plow right through them.

Books have been read, but not blogged, so let's do a catch up post:

Number 3 of the year is Some Great Thing by Lawerence Hill. Saw this book for cheap, and since I enjoyed his Book of Negroes, thought I'd give something else by him a shot. This book tells the story of the unlikely named Mahatma Grafton, a young, rather aimless black man who returns to his hometown of Winnipeg and gets a job as a reporter with the Winnipeg Herald. He doesn't partcularly care about the job, nor about Winnipeg, nor about his father's ambitions for him. Hat is like a lot of his generation, he just doesn't really care about much. But that changes over the course of the book as he gets involved with racial tensions and the entire Manitoba language-rights issues. It's a very interesting read because it's something I really knew nothing about. Oh sure I remember language-rights as an issue overall, plus of course the Referendum, but this book is a nice microcosm of the unrest that was happening over a lot of Canada at the time. The characters are all well done, and, despite being a large cast, quite memorable. There's some oddities that make it really fun (the exchange reporter from Cameroon for one) and overall, it's a very clever novel.

Number 4 of the year is Gwenhwyfar by Mercedes Lackey. Not a bad book. I definitely like books where Gwen isn't a whiny bitch, but this also felt like Lackey had watched that horrendous King Arthur movie (y'know, the one with Clive Owen) and decided that Warrior! Gwen needed some backstory. So yeah, this Gwen is a warrior, which is fine and dandy but doesn't really bring that much new to the character. I did like that Lackey brought the idea of the 'three Gwens' that Arthur marries into one tale (this is something that isn't dealt with much in most of the Legends) and I liked that she gave Gwen some interesting sisters. But overall, the 'Arthurian' part of the story isn't dealt with at all so the book actually feels strangely disconnected from what it should seemlessly be a part of. As a look at gender roles and equality in early Britain, it's a great book, as an Arthurian tale? Not so much.

Number 5 of the year is Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. This is the first book of his tale of Jody and Thomas, and the one I should've started with rather than You Suck. So it was nice to get the backstory down and how it all got started. Fun as always, Moore is rarely disappointing. Best line? "He's doing rather well for a non-swimmer".

Ok, gotta get reading some more it seems.

Number 22 is You Suck by Christopher Moore. I picked this up mainly because it was cheap and because I like Christopher Moore. I like his books a lot. Problem is, I didn't realize this was a sequel. Oops. I'm not sure if that's why I didn't like this one as much as I've enjoyed his other books. I definitely felt like I'd missed a lot as there is a lot of reference to what happened in Bloodsucking Fiends and that's also where most of the characters were introduced. For some reason I felt the... danger in this book lacking. The main bad guy didn't come off as all that scary.

However, there were still fun moments and I especially liked the chapters told from the POV of trying-to-hard-to-be-Goth teenager Abby Normal.

Guess I'd better go and read Bloodsucking Fiends at some point.

They're coming a bit quicker now since I put down the huge book and picked up some fun stuff. Number 4 this year is Fool by one of my very favourite authors, Christopher Moore. When I spied this book at a bookstore in Buffalo (there for a lovely day trip to the Albright Knox Art Gallery), I knew I had to have. Christopher Moore doing a retelling of King Lear? I am there. And he did not disappoint.

Moore's books are often hilariously bawdy, and in this one, he gets completely carried away. There's lots of shagging and snogging (this is England afterall), but of course, most of it is in the darker context of the tragedy that is King Lear. It's a very well done juxatposition, managing to make a comedy out of one of Shakespeare's biggest tragedies.

The tale is told (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead style), by King Lear's fool, Pocket. The Fool in Shakespeare's play doesn't even get a name, but here, he gets a name, a background and one hell of a personality. Pocket is completely immersed in the polictical machinations of Lear's horrid daughters (Cordelia excepted of course) and in fact, it is him that causes much of the action to start and finish. Well, he's partly goaded on and aided by Macbeth's Three Witches (seems those girls get around... like most of the other women in this book. heh)

I started trying to remember where and how Moore deviates from the play, but as the man himself said "that way lies madness" (oh, and Moore quoted that too), so I stopped, because it is indeed pretty impossible. So I just let go and enjoyed the ride for what it was, a journey into the bawdy, hilarious, tragedy laced world of Shakespeare but filtered through the wonderfully wicked mind of Christopher Moore.

Number 9 of 2008 is The Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore. You got to hand it to Moore, he comes up with the greatest titles.

The other thing you have to give to Moore is that, despite writing really funny books, he also manages to imbibe them with some rather dark moments that don't manage to completely wreck the tone of the book, but rather contribute to the overall sense of zany. And Moore's books are zany. They're zany but strangely plausible. The man's brilliant.

In this book we meet Tucker Chase, 'geek in a cool guy's body'. Chase seems to be a bit of a loser, a womanizing drunkard who's background story sounds strangely like Hamlet's (but without the whole Danish royalty thing); a good looking guy who seems to just float through life. When we meet Tuck, he's romancing a girl in an airport bar. Tucker's managed to find a gig as a private pilot for the head honcho of a cosmetics company (Mary Jean a thinly veiled Mary Kay), but within the first chapter, he completely blows this as he takes the girl for a tryst on the company Learjet, crashes it and gravely injures his man parts in the process. Mary Jean, not wanting to deal with the negative press Tucker has so kindly provided for her, 'disappears' Tucker to a tiny island in Micronesia, where he will now be a pilot for a Methodist missionary, flying medical supplies to and from Japan.

So Tucker, after surviving a typhoon in a row boat with only a (talking) fruitbat and the last navigator, a transvestite named Kimi, finds himself on his new home, a tiny island called Alualu; home to Dr. Sebastian Curtis and his wife Beth, a bunch of ninjas and the island's idingenous folks, the Shark People.

The Shark People are a little primitive, living on a rather sequestered island, but the Western World forcibly forced itself on them during WWII, when the Japanese built a small outpost and airfield on the island, and then the Americans took it from them. Due to these experiences, the Shark People have become what's called a 'cargo cult', the worship the American airman (a flyboy named Vincent) as a god who delivered them from the Japanese, and who gives them treasures from the Sky Priestess (Vincent's plane).

But it doesn't take long for Tucker to see that all is not right on AlauAlau. He is paid an exhorberant amount of money to take Beth Curtis to Japan where she drops off a small cooler and then heads right back. And when Tucker sees Beth's performance as the Sky Priestess (the Sequined Love Nun of the title), where she 'chooses' one of the Shark People, well, Tucker knows he has to figure out what's going on. Of course, this urge to know also stems from the fact that he's not allowed to drink and he's bored.

But somehow, Tucker knows that the Shark People are being exploited, he's just not sure how. He and his navigator Kimi befriend the Shark People, and he soon discovers just how badly the Curtis' are exploiting the Shark People, they're harvesting organs from them and selling them in Japan. Something awakes in the normally selfish, sodden and pitiful Tucker, and he realizes that he must help these people.

And help them he does. In an extremely over the top ending (which is something Moore does so very, very well), Tucker steals a 747 (no, he doesn't hijack it, there's an important distinction) and relocates the entire tribe of Shark People. It's all terribly satisfying.

Tucker Chase is a great character in the mold of 'pretty normal guy that has all sorts of weird shit happen to him and still manages to come out all right'. His exploits are fun because they are so bizarre and you really can't help but wonder how he's going to get out of it. True he's a pilot, but that really is the only remarkable skill about Tucker Chase. He's not a spy, he's not a ninja, and other than his ability to get into trouble, he's pretty unremarkable. But still, by the end of the book, he has grown as a character. Not hugely so, but just enough.

It's a fun book, like all Moore's books, complete with good lines, laugh out loud sections and improbable action scenes. They're always a good read.

Number 17 of the year is Fluke by Christopher Moore. I love Christopher Moore, I've read quite a few things by him and Lamb has become one of my favourite books.

Fluke is about whales. Its about a whale researcher, Nate Quinn, and his motely crew of fellow researchers. Life with the humpbacked whales in Hawaii has been going on without real incident for years now, but Nate is no closer to learning why they sing than he was when he started, and he's starting to feel discouraged. Then, one day, he notices a whale exhibiting some distinctly un-whale-like characteristics, specifically the words "Bite Me" written on his tail.

Moore's books are always odd, humourous and a little... not disturbing, but definitely always thought provoking. They're also lovely little fantasies set in the real world, and Fluke is no different. Nate ends up 'kidnapped' by the whale, discovering that there are actually whale 'ships', ships designed to look and behave exactly like real whales. Who are they designed by? Something called Gooville, which has the ability to write its genes into anything, including the whale ships, and their pilots, the genetically unique, humaniod whale-like whaley-boys.

This book is a bizarre romp, and its hard to really describe what this book is about, as it gets almost science-fictiony, which I think is a bit of a departure for Moore, its usually magic he incorrporates into his books. But the characters are a lot of fun, and his research and respect for the whales comes through swimmingly.

I liked it a lot, but not as much as Lamb.

I'm... hesitant to claim number 18 of the year, but well, it is a book and I did read it... Yeah, its a cheesy little romance-type novel, but I finished Fluke and my re-read of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the cottage, and so I was searching for something to read, and all I could find was Late for the Wedding, by Amanda Quick. Guess its not too bad, cheesy romance novels really do lend themselves nicely to being read while sitting near the water. So yes, this was... ok. It was basically a Regency-era romance where the two main characters are running a 'private inquiries' business, basically meaning they're P.Is. I have a weakeness for 80s private investigator shows (LOVE Magnum P.I and Simon and Simon and Remington Steele), so I did find this one kinda a hoot. Won't go into the plot, there's no point, but the characters weren't too annoying, and there was a good amount of action in it, so it was a fun read at least.

But now I'm onto Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I'm looking forward to it!

I loved Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It was a tremendously funny, touching and deep book. It humanized Christ in a way that I, someone who doesn't really count themselves as a Christian, never thought was possible. And as I've always thought that Christ, despite his divine connections, was supposed to be the human side of God, he always felt so... untouchable to me in the Bible. There was never anything that made me want to follow his teachings in the Bible, but that may be because the Bible is presented as this 'authority', and I don't believe that anyone other than Christ himself could be the 'authority'. But anyway, I'm not about to run out and become a true believer, but I just really liked the way Christopher Moore characterized Christ, or Joshua as he is called throughout the book. Even just calling him Joshua instead of the more familiar, Jesus (which Moore has Biff point out to us is the Greek form of the name Joshua) goes so far in humanizing Christ. As does the first time we (and Biff) see him, in a scene that made me fall in love with the book nearly right away; Joshua is around nine years old and he has a squirming lizard in his mouth. He takes the lizard out of his mouth, hands it to his younger brother James, who proceeds to smash it with a rock and kill it. James then hands the lizard back to Joshua, who puts it in his mouth again, and brings it back to life. Biff cannot help but think there's something different about this kid.

The main crux of the story is that Joshua passes those 'missing' years, the ones none of the Gospels cover, but going to learn how to become the Messiah. He does so by finding the three men who believed he was the Messiah right from his birth; the Three Wise Men. He (and Biff) journey to China, India and what would be modern day Afghanistan to learn the ways of magic, the Buddha and some Hinduism/Yoga. Its fascinating and a wonderful idea.

But most importantly along the way to learning to become a Messiah, it is Joshua's best friend Biff (Levi who is called Biff, named so because the sound of him being repeatedly slapped upside the head by his parents is the sound 'Biff') who teaches Joshua to be human.

It is a wonderful book, and even though the ending is such a foregone conclusion, I couldn't help but be sad at the end because for the first time, I felt I connected to Christ not as the ideal, or the sacrifice or the martyr or what have you, but as a person.

So yeah, plowed through that one and now I'm onto Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure.