Helplessness

To watch family and friends go through a tragedy is a special kind of hell. Watching the devastation from a distance, suffering from a broken heart as an echo, helpless. Even a year later, the sense of standing by as others' lives go up in smoke remains.

The Wisdom of Children

Have our children always been so wise?

They wish to eat only when they're hungry, go to bed when they're tired, read a book when they wish to relax, or run and dance with abandon when they have energy.

We work our schedules and errands around their moods and schedules, often commenting how irritating it is that we have to be home by a certain time or there will be a meltdown...

We run ourselves into the ground trying to ignore the needs of our bodies and minds, much less our spirits, and wonder why we feel tired and cranky.

Let's take a moment and breathe... how much do we really need to cram into today? Perhaps the dry cleaning can be picked up tomorrow, the laundry can be done in the morning, and the floor vacuumed on Saturday. That's of course, not to say all can be abandoned! But it certainly does not need to be done all in one day...

Every once in a while, I'm reminded to stop and watch the children, and in doing so, watch how life could be...

Why, hello there!

I've been gone for quite a while, but, as I only had one post, likely nobody noticed... which, as with all things, has its good points and less-than-optimal aspects.

When I still lived near friends who I would accompany on book-buying trips, or peruse their shelves, I would find many new paperbound friends... now that this a more rare occurrence, I look for more ways to see if an author I'm not familiar with will become a new friend. As you may have noticed, I'm one of those risk-adverse types...

This, paired with my long habit of organizing my shelves by the books I read together, brought a realization. Nobody talks about similar books and authors, aside from the very occasional awesome Amazon review.

I know, Barnes & Noble has a little note at the bottom of their receipts that says "If you like this..." but... it usually just lists other books in the series (and on more than one occasion the very same book I just purchased). It is getting better, thanks to all those loyalty-card and online purchases that let them make those sorts of links algorithmically. But they're not quite there yet.

So, here I am.

My continuing journey to seek out new authors and pair with old favorites, to torture the randomly lost reader with my musings, and, eventually, perhaps make new friends with bookcases that threaten to take over their homes, too.

Visiting the Nightside

While I've read this series before, Simon R. Green's Nightside series started out as one of those books I picked up because I liked the cover...

I know, I know, never judge a book by its cover... but I often feel like I've read so many books and am familiar with so many works of cover art that I can do just that... sometimes... for example, anything with Michael Whelan's cover art will tell you about the book inside. He reads the book and picks out either a significant scene from the story, or creates a collage of images within images that elegantly embodies the tale. Often I will find myself checking out the cover art to confirm something was included (think Summer Queen and Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge for great examples of the collage-type covers), and it always is. Books with cover art by Michael Whelan are definately ones where you can get a good feel for the book just by perusing the cover...

Now, the Nightside books are thin books with vaguely disturbing cover art. The figures on the front have a tendency toward shadowed faces with barely more than a hint of features, the colors are pratically monochromatic, and the titles are a a splash of color in a kind of creepy I-wrote-this-in-blood-in-a-hurry sort of font. How intriguing! The font is actually what made me pick up the book... and after devouring it, I went on to the next one, and the next one... the cover art gamble worked well for me this time!

Short version of the series: John Taylor is a private detective.

Too short? Okay, John Taylor is a private detective in a more-or-less current-day London, in which exists a chunk of space/time called the Nightside. The Nightside is the far less sane and far more dark version of the city where cars are not always cars, houses are not always houses, and people are not always what they seem... or are far more... Everything can be found in the Nightside, and often is. Nothing can be taken at face value and no-one is to be trusted. John Taylor uses his gift of finding anything (from cars to "what she wants" to a way out of an impossible situation) in the Nightside while fighting known and unknown enemies, and working with and for a wide variety of interesting characters.

While there isn't a whole bunch of interconnected spiraling plot lines (and really, who needs that hanging over their head in every book?), there is action, smart-alec commentary, and a main character that keeps me wanting to read (I really like smartmouthed main characters...). There is rather a bit of vagueness regarding the main character's history, but that fits rather well with the whole world anyway. The series actually can be read out of order due to that undefined history thing going on, but the I found it more satisfying to read the first four books first.

Recommendations: if you like Neil Gaimon's Neverland, the Borderland books edited by Terri Windling, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, or PN Elrod's Vampire Files, or the Rachel Morgan series by Kim Harrison, I would recommend this a something to check out. If you have issues with random wierdness, things that don't always make sense, or a bit of blasphemy, you may have issues with this series.

Read on!