Almanac for July 24th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 24th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-24-Dawn-L4L71HQFRA

Artist Birthday: Alexandre Dumas, pere

My Count of Monte Cristo sticker at Redbubble

It's also the birthday of Jennifer Lopez.

Bummer July 24th

July 24, 1913: Donald A. Kenny and Christopher Gustin die during a hazing ritual performed by the Loyal Order of Moose in Birmingham, Alabama. Told they’re going to be branded, the men are touched with a rubber brand attached to an electrical current. Apparently the current is much stronger than intended, and the two men die of electrocution.

July 24, 1915: The Western Electric Company charters four ships to sail passengers consisting of its employees and their families to Michigan City, Indiana, for a company picnic holiday. One of the ships, the SS Eastland, is loaded with passengers and crew members when it suddenly rolls onto its side, trapping many of those onboard underwater. An unfortunate 844 people die.

Andre Braugher: May His Memory Be a Blessing

All right, 2023 and I are officially fighting now. First it had the audacity to take away Tina Turner. Now I find out the sublime actor Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine Nine has passed away at the too-young age of 61. He had lung cancer.

March 14, 1998: Therese and I went to Scotsdale Mall [in South Bend, Indiana]...went to the Hacienda restaurant, ate fried ice cream, then went to the movie theater, where we saw The Man in the Iron Mask. Set in the 1660s and based on Alexandre Dumas’s 1850 novel, this is a good, old-fashioned story. Great ending, beautifully filmed, good score. My one complaint was that I had to see Gerard Depardieu’s bare ass. 

One of the movie trailers I saw was for a movie with Nicholas Cage and Andre Braugher. It looked like an American version of Faraway, So Close. [Wikipedia calls City of Angels a “loose remake” of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, of which Faraway, So Close is the sequel.]

From this point on, beware of spoilers for Homicide: Life on the Street.

April 26, 1998: I was looking at the listings from the Sunday paper and I saw this on the Friday listing for NBC: 

"Homicide: 'Fallen Heroes:' A suspect in a judge's death sprays the squad-room with gunfire (part 1 of 2)"

I heard that Andre Braugher is leaving the show, and I wonder if [Frank] Pembleton is going to be killed of. I seriously hope not. What would Bayliss be without Pembleton? Just a tall, sad queer guy.

May 1, 1998: "The Day We Prayed Would Never Come." I'll get right to the point. Ballard and Gherety got shot; they're off the show. Gang war with Georgia Rae Mahoney. Next week, part two: [Tim] Bayliss gets shot! That's not a guess; there were previews. Bayliss will get shot next week. He'll probably die too; they said something about "the final farewell." I hate season finales, I swear to God. When Kyle Secor gets written off Homicide, I'll cry as if someone I know died. No matter what happens next week, I'll cry. I'll especially cry if I have to wait until August to find out if he's dead.

I tell you, Homicide can hardly go on without the Pembleton-Bayliss partnership.

May 2, 1998: I went to my [parents'] house for awhile. I ate dinner and read next week's TV Guide. I've surmised this: next Friday [on the Homicide season finale], Kellerman will be fired, Pembleton will resign (thus removing Andre Braugher from the show, as I mentioned on the 26th) and Bayliss, though shot, will survive. It'll probably be like when Pembleton had a stroke--after three or four episodes, he'll be like new again. Now I just hope Ballard won't have to quit. She could be Bayliss's partner. They would have good conversations.

May 8, 1998: The event I've been waiting a week for: The 100th episode/season 6 finale of Homicide. As predicted, in the search for Georgia Rae Mahoney (high-ranking gang member), a Georgia Rae associate takes a shot at Frank, but Tim takes the bullet for him. G wants Frank to find someone to blame, so he chooses Kellerman (who shot Georgia Rae's brother/fellow gang member Luther Mahoney, but Lewis and other detective witnessed this and have said nothing). Kellerman gets fired but takes all the blame. 

Kellerman asks Pembleton, "If it were Bayliss, wouldn't you do that same?" Which leads Pembleton to wonder if he did the right thing by Kellerman, and then to resign. 

Meanwhile, Bayliss will live, and Ballard will be all right too. The last shot of the episode tracked from Tim's mom to the faces of all the detectives to Mary Pembleton*, who put her arms around Frank, who leaned forward and picked up Tim's hand [while Tim Bayliss was unconscious in the hospital]. The final frame of Pembleton's hand on Bayliss's looked like the ads from Jungle Fever. 

Friday, November 27, 1998, South Bend: ...I watched the PBS show Anatomy of a Homicide, about the filming of an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street with Vincent D’Onofrio as the guest star. D’Onofrio plays a man who’s been pushed off a subway platform and suffered the kind of horrible compression injury that means he’ll die as soon as paramedics try to move him. Andre Braugher, as Detective Frank Pembleton, stays with the dying man while his colleagues attempt (unsuccessfully) to find the man’s girlfriend so she can say goodbye while he’s still conscious. I hadn’t seen the episode, which aired in December 1997, but it looked intense.

*Mary Pembleton was played by Amy Brabson, who married Andre Braugher in real life. They have three sons.

The Best Books I Read in 2013

To catch up on previous years:

The Best Books I Read in 2012
The Best Books I Read in 2011
The Best Books I Read in 2010
The Best Books I Read in 2009

If you want to, you can even go to Goodreads and see all the books I read in 2013. Now my favorite reads from 2013, in very particular order:

10. Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris. I didn't want the Sookie Stackhouse series to end - at least not before Sookie and Bill reconciled and Bill made her his vampire bride - but since it had to, I'm glad Harris did it her way.

Full review here (contains spoilers). This was a book I checked out from my local library.

9. Finding Esta by Shah Wharton. I was pleasantly surprised by this fresh take on contemporary vampire mythology, the debut novel by a talented writer from the U.K.

Full review here (contains minor spoilers). This is an e-book I downloaded from Smashwords on a day when the author gave it away as a free promotion.

8. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  I didn't give this one a full review, but the weekend I checked it out from my local library, I could hardly put it down until I was finished. It's nonfiction, the story of a woman who changed medical history without knowing she did so. Henrietta Lacks was a poor, uneducated tobacco farmer who was pregnant with her son when doctors discovered she had a cervical tumor. After she gave birth, doctors treated her cancer with radiation and, without her knowledge or consent, took a sample of her cancerous cells and kept them alive in the laboratory. This was the first time human cells were ever able to be made "immortal," or grown perpetually in the lab. These cells made a wide variety of medical research possible, and companies profited from that research while the Lacks family was too poor to even afford health insurance. Sadly, Henrietta died an awful, painful death when her cancer rapidly came back despite the radiation treatment - which, in all honesty, was fairly horrific itself - while her children were all still small.

This book is an investigation into the woman behind the cells (known in medical literature as HeLa cells, after Henrietta), her legacy, and how medical science as a business and as a pure science can improve its ethics and treatment of human beings. I chose this because it was the book of the year at the college from which I graduated.

7. In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler. This one is also nonfiction, and again it deals with cancer, although this is a memoir written by a survivor. It's infuriating, difficult, and inspiring.

I didn't write a full review of this one, but you can read a blog post on it here. This is a post about Ensler's spirituality in her memoir. I got this book free from the Amazon.com Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

6. Dreams of Joy by Lisa See. This is the sequel to See's Shanghai Girls, a work of historical fiction set in 20th-century China and then in the United States, exploring the world of two immigrant sisters, Pearl and May. Shanghai Girls is a beloved book in my family, read first by my grandmother, then by my mother, then by me. At the end of the first book, Pearl's daughter Joy impulsively moves to China. Dreams of Joy relates the story of what happens to her there, and what happens to Pearl as she goes to (she assumes) rescue Joy. I never wrote a full review; I don't know what to say except it was very good, and also very hard in places.

I purchased a used hardcover of this book at a library book sale.

5. Lover at Last by J.R. Ward. I'm hopelessly addicted to Ward's paranormal romance series with the warrior-vampires. I love all the couples, but I was SO ready for this, the only book in the series to focus on a male-male couple. They're Blay and Qhuinn, and their partnership gives me a lot of feels. I've wanted them to be together since Blay first expressed feelings for his friend, but Qhuinn was being such a jerk about it. All that angst is resolved now, though, and Team Qhuay is officially a thing.

Full review here (includes spoilers). This is a book I checked out from the public library. 

4. The Divergent Trilogy (I'm kind of cheating here, but I'm going to count them all as one book) by Veronica Roth. For those of you fresh to this young adult/dystopian series, I'm not going to spoil anything here. Let's just say that if you liked the Hunger Games trilogy, you're going to be equally enthusiastic about young Beatrice "Tris" Prior and her cohort.

Divergent review here (spoilers)

Insurgent review here (no real spoilers, just a basic plot outline) 

Spoiler-free Allegiant discussion post

Allegiant review (spoilers)

I bought a paperback Divergent at Barnes and Noble, checked out Insurgent from the local library, and bought Allegiant as an e-book for my Nook. 

3. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Hazel Grace Lancaster is just a normal teen with cancer, a young woman who's already outlived her life expectancy thanks to a "miracle drug." She doesn't love the cancer support group, but she does fall in love there, with Augustus Waters, a brilliant, witty, kind young man who lost a leg to bone cancer that's now in remission. This is an important literary novel disguised as YA fiction, and I cannot wait to see the movie.

I never wrote a full review of this novel, mostly because it gives me so many feelings, I become an inarticulate sniffling mass. I paid full retail for this hardcover at a store that was not a bookstore, because I had a gift card. After I read it, my grandma read it. She liked it, too, and she's not one to read YA books normally. 

2. Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck. Historical fiction set in Key West in the 1930s, with a Cuban-American protagonist who's kind of in a love triangle with Ernest Hemingway? It's perfection.

I didn't write a formal review of this book on this blog, but I did discuss the first half of it here. I received this one through the Amazon.com Vine program in exchange for a review.

1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Without realizing it, I checked an abridged version out of the library. I wish I'd read the unabridged version, because after 800 pages, I still wanted more of this classic. The story is compelling and the characterization is interesting. It's everything you could ask for from a dead Frenchman.

Full review here (contains spoilers). I read this as a library book, and then subsequently purchased a used paperback of the unabridged version at a library book sale. 

'That Girl Started Her Own Country' by Holy Ghost Writer

In January, when I read The Sultan of Monte Cristo by Holy Ghost Writer*, I didn't quite know what to make of the modern sequel to Alexandre Dumas' classic The Count of Monte Cristo (which I also read in January of this year). Recently, when the author approached me on Goodreads about reading the sequel, That Girl Started Her Own Country, I didn't know what to expect.

I was pleasantly surprised by That Girl Started Her Own Country; I really enjoyed it. It appears to be only loosely linked to Sultan - the main character, Zaydee, is the great-granddaughter of Raymee, an original Holy Ghost Writer (HGW) character introduced in Sultan. Early in That Girl, Zaydee is arrested and taken in federal custody in the United States. She won't reveal her real name, and lets the authorities believe she's royalty from another country (a very Count of Monte Cristo thing to do). She intends to become just that - the sovereign of her own micronation, which will be largely a gynecocracy.

It's strongly suggested that Zaydee is the real-life inspiration for Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy that starts with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. HGW makes mention of time Zaydee has spent in psychiatric institutions; since this is the reader's first introduction to Zaydee, it appears that HGW assumes the reader is familiar with Lisbeth's story (which includes psychiatric hospitalization) and can make the connection. Zaydee also uses the nickname "Pippi Longstocking," which is likely another reference to Lisbeth, who is sometimes thought to be an adult version of the beloved children's book character. I am a bit of a disadvantage here as a reader, since I haven't read any of Larsson's novels. (I did read the summary of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo on Wikipedia, though.)

Larsson himself becomes a character in the novel; he's Zaydee's former boyfriend, a journalist who wrote the Millennium books under a Swedish pseudonym, but who is actually an American named Steve Larson. In this novel, he's investigating the Bilderberg Group (a favorite topic of conspiracy theorists, or individuals we might categorize by the less-pejorative term "proponents of non-mainstream theories"), and Zaydee is giving him false leads so that his real investigation does not endanger his life and his work.

Granted, this novella suffers from some of the same faults as its predecessor: HGW gives us tantalizing bits of information, but those hints don't necessarily get fully explained by the end of the novel. The narrative doesn't always flow very smoothly, jumping from place to place and introducing new characters without much transition. That said, all of the various theories and characters who pop up in these books may very well be explained and unified by the time this series is concluded. I'm more confident in the author's ability to pull off an overarching storyline than I was when I'd only read Sultan.

I also happen to know from conversing with the author and glimpsing a later volume that the Sultan (the former Edmond Dantes), Haydee and Raymee make an appearance in a later volume.

The next book in the series is The Boy Who Played With Dark Matter.

Disclosure: The author provided a paperback copy of this book to me at no cost. The opinions presented here are entirely my own. I am an Amazon.com affiliate; if you make a purchase from Amazon after clicking through a link on my site, I'll earn a commission of a few cents.

*HGW sponsors an ongoing contest; whoever can guess his true identity wins $1,000!

This is an affiliate link:

Erinyes by George Saoulidis. $4.99 from Smashwords.com
When a sheltered teenager starts noticing a hazy face following her in her photographs, she begins to investigate an urban legend. But will she uncover the truth when she gets in trouble with a technology corporation, when an enigmatic hacker starts telling her conspiracy theories and when the hazy face becomes all too real and starts chasing her non-stop?

Currently Reading: 'The Sultan of Monte Cristo'

This is a short e-book I found by searching the Count of Monte Cristo tag on Tumblr. You can read the review by The Fashion Insider here (the link died, unfortunately). It is exactly what I wished for: a continuation of Alexandre Dumas' classic, beginning with Edmond Dantes and Haydee as a newly-engaged couple. Under 75 pages, the e-book costs only 99 U.S. cents.

But I am highly unsatisfied by this "honeymoon" scene. (It doesn't actually say that they got married, just that she asked him to ask her to marry him.)

She also realized that it would be hard to break through the Antarctic shyness that had frozen Sinbad's ability to ravish the woman he only knew how to protect; so she would have to use more than her charm, beauty and new found prowess, she would have to make him unable to resist. 

But how did Haydee, the sheltered young maiden, develop this "prowess?" On whom has she been practicing? (Valentine, perhaps?) How did she get it in her head that she would drug him with spiked tiramisu and a hookah full of marijuana? I get that the Count would approach the virgin Haydee with some delicacy, and that she would approach him with some anticipation, but this totally seems like a role reversal.

For the first time Edmond notices that Haydee is voluptuous as she takes his virgin hands and places them on her bare breasts. "Do you know the French kiss?"

"Teach me," requests Dantes. 

Haydee leaned her mouth onto his and taught him how the French kiss.

Let's forget for a moment that we've switched from the past to the present tense and then back again. His virgin hands? Is Edmond Dantes a 40-year-old virgin? I think not; I think in The Count of Monte Cristo (the chapter titled "The Betrothal Feast") when Caderousse says, "Act towards her as if you were her husband, and you will see how she will like it," and Mercedes blushes, Dumas is delicately trying to tell us that Edmond and Mercedes have kinda already been acting like they were married. (This is far more explicit in the movie, of course, wherein Mercedes is already pregnant with Albert when she marries Fernand, and Edmond is Albert's bio dad.)

One would really imagine that Edmond and Mercedes had figured out the French kiss as teenagers.



The chapter ends with:

"No, my lover, that is only a small appetizer, the nectar is reserved for later, first enjoy the main course," as Haydee began to undulate her hips over Dantes' submissive body in gentle rhythm to the ebb and flow of the Mediterranean.

The night ended in a wonderful catharsis for the newly-weds.

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgh*. Awkward, and not nearly detailed enough even its awkwardness. Is the implication that they're both virgins, and the first time they had sex - him heavily under the influence of narcotics - they both had orgasms? Unlikely (at least for her). And awkward. And badly punctuated. (I added the possessive apostrophe to "Dantes," because bad punctuation hurts my brain.) Now I see why reviewers are comparing this to Fifty Shades of Grey - it's not intended to be a flattering comparison.

And also, they're not "newly-weds." He did not put a ring on it. I imagine he's a nominal Roman Catholic and she's Greek Orthodox, but they probably would've had a Catholic wedding service, on the presumption that the husband's religious preference takes precedence over the wife's. I want to read about that part.

I totally want that romance-novel cliche of the virgin in white on her wedding night - I just want it to be well-written. Or, so help me Jebus, I will write this thing myself. But I will read the rest of this book (apparently the first sequel in a 12-part time-travelling series leading up to the present day) and I will tell you how it goes.

*That's a completely legitimate book reviewer word.

P.S. Apparently by reading the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo, I missed a lesbian subplot, wherein one of the daughters of the villains dresses like a man and runs off to Italy with her piano instructor (another woman). I have got to read the unabridged version!

I have 'Count of Monte Cristo' Withdrawal

I finished Alexandra Dumas' classic last night, despite my previous insistence that I wasn't going to read it. Reading The Black Count by Tom Reiss changed my mind, and I'm glad it did, because The Count of Monte Cristo is great. I wish I hadn't read an abridged version, but I didn't notice until after I checked it out of the library.

I didn't want this book to end.

But it does, in a really romantic way, like Romeo and Juliet if, instead of committing suicide, each realized the other was still alive and they got to be together. The young couple in question is Maximilian Morrel, whom the Count thinks of as a son, and Valentine Villefort, the daughter of the judge who threw the Count in prison when he was but the sailor Edmond Dantes. Edmond also has a beloved:

"Alone in the world?" repeated a voice behind the Count. "Why?"

Monte Cristo turned round.

Haydee was standing there pale and motionless, looking at the Count in mortal dread.

"To-morrow you will be free, my daughter," answered the Count. "You will then assume your proper place in society; I do not wish my fate to overcloud yours. Daughter of a prince! I bestow on you the wealth and the name of your father!"

Haydee turned pale, and, in a voice choking with emotion, she said: "Then you are leaving me, my lord?"

"Haydee! Haydee! You are young and beautiful. Forget even my name and be happy."

"So be it!" said Haydee. "Your orders shall be obeyed, my lord. I shall even forget your name and be happy!" and stepping back she sought to retire.

The Count shuddered as he caught the tones of her voice which penetrated to the inmost recesses of his heart. His eyes encountered the maiden's, and he could not bear their brilliancy.

"My God!" cried he. "Is it possible that my suspicions are correct? Haydee, would you be happy never to leave me again?"

"I am young," she replied. "I love the life you made so sweet to me, and I should regret to die!"

"Does that mean to say that if I were to leave you...?"

"I should die? Yes, my lord."

"Do you love me then?"

"Oh, Valentine, he asks me whether I love him! Valentine, tell him whether you love Maximilian!"

The Count felt his heart swelling within him; he opened his arms, and Haydee threw herself into them with a cry. 

"Oh, yes, I love you!" she said. "I love you as one loves a father, a brother, a husband! I love you as I love my life, for you are the noblest, the best, and the greatest of all created beings!" 

Haydee is the daughter of a prince of the Ottoman Empire; her parents were Christians from Greece. Her father, like the Count himself, was betrayed by the Catalan fisherman Fernand Mondego, later known as the Count de Morcerf. Haydee's father was murdered, her mother died of grief, and Haydee was sold into the slave market at the age of four. The Count rescued/purchased her (for the purpose of taking the young noble out of the slave market) when Haydee was eleven, and was a foster father to her since then - she's about 18 - roughly the same age as Valentine - at this point in the story. It's a bit odd that she has romantic feelings for a guy who's been her dad for seven years, but then, the extremely sheltered Haydee hasn't had much chance to meet many other men. 

Of course, I saw the movie before I read the book, and I have to come to the conclusion that book and movie are different animals, enjoyable in slightly different ways. In the movie, rather than Maximilian as a foster son, the Count has Albert de Morcerf as a bio son, and after Albert's stepdad Fernand is dead, the Count and Mercedes live happily ever after. (The 2002 movie, with the screenplay by Jay Wolpert, ends with Dagmara Dominczyk as Mercedes standing with the Count looking out at the ocean, resting her hand on her belly; I presume that Albert is getting a little brother or sister.) 

There's really no reason in the book why Mercedes and the Count can't be together in the book - Fernand's death is in both versions. He dies by duel in the movie, by suicide in the book. The widowed Mercedes, Dumas makes a point of telling us, is not only still beautiful but quite possibly more beautiful at 40-ish than at 19. She's just sad, that's all. Still, the Count leaves her behind in the book, to wait for Albert to possibly come back from a military deployment, unless he gets killed. 

We don't know - the ending doesn't tell us a) if Albert gets killed or lives, b) if Haydee and the Count get married, and if they ever have any children, c) if Maximilian and Valentine ever see the Count and Haydee again, or d) what the Count is going to do in Italy. I really wish this book hadn't ended. 

I like both endings, though. They're both good in their own ways. I like the movie ending a tiny bit better, because it has a nice symmetry if the young, happy couple from the beginning of the story gets to become the older, wiser, sadder but ultimately fulfilled couple at the end. 

Haydee's dramatic "I'll die if you leave me" reminds me of this, my current song crush.

(Make allowances for an Irish chick - it'll probably be whiskey AND his name on my last breath.)