Showing posts with label 2019 Series Challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2019 Series Challenge. Show all posts

Monday, December 16, 2019

Wrap-up of the Series Reading Challenge

I read 7 books for the Series Reading Challenge. They include the following:

• 'Til Debt Do Us Part

• Self Employee of the Month

• The Miracle of Creation

• The Concubine's Tattoo

• Death by Disputation

• The Widow's Guild

• Publish and Perish

The first three books listed are graphic novels by Dan Dougherty. They are the final three books in his Beardo series. My plan was to then work on Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series from feudal Japan. However, I did not like The Concubine's Tattoo and decided to forego reading the rest of the series. I came across Anna Castle's Francis Bacon Mystery series by chance and loved them all. There are two more books in the series that I need to read and then I will have finished the series.

It is pretty hard to select my top book for the challenge. All of them were good.

My Favorite Book: Publish and Perish

My Least Favorite Book: The Concubine's Tattoo

Monday, November 11, 2019

Publish and Perish

Publish and Perish is the the 4th Francis Bacon Mystery. It takes place in 1589 when Francis Bacon is 28. The story concerns a year long war of words between a Puritan pamphleteer Martin Marprelate and several of England's more famous writers of that era. When 2 writers are murdered Lord Burghley asks Francis Bacon to find out who the killer is, a task made difficult by the fact that no one knows the identity of Martin Marprelate. Bacon enlists the assistance of his clerk Tom Clarady to help him solve the crimes.

I have come to love the regular characters in this series. Bacon is still a young barrister here but his intellect is getting noticed by the Crown. Tom Clarady is a lovable character.  He is a witty, 20 year old, bar hopping lady's man. His buddies Tom Nashe and Christopher Marlowe make a great crime solving threesome or just a fun night out at the tavern. They have a female friend Alice Trumpington who they call Trumpet who adds a delicious flavor to this group of friends. She is known to dress as a man so that she can travel the streets of London freely. These four friends are a riot when they get together. Bacon's mother and aunt, both ardent Christian reformers, play a prominent role in this installment of the series. Both are well educated, wealthy widows who basically do whatever they want.

Publish and Perish, and all the earlier books in the series, is written with suspense. Clarady and his pals run into dilemma after dilemma and its not just about solving the crimes. Trumpet needs to marry but also needs to turn away suitors. Clarady is now a ward of the Crown since his father died and has to file a lawsuit in order to obtain his inheritance. Nashe cannot get work. Bacon thinks his cousin might be the killer but wonders if he is just angry that his cousin has received every advantage in life. Both Bacon and Clarady return to the same group of suspects several times. They are stumped with this case and finally decide they must determine who Martin Marprelate is first before determining who killed the writers.

The Marprelate Controversy actually happened. In the author's Afterward she wrote that the Puritans wanted to replace the religious aristocracy of the church with religious democracy. The Crown looked upon that viewpoint as treason but was still never able to figure out Marprelate's identity. Over time 22 people were suggested to be him, but all of them denied it.

5 out of 5 stars!

Sunday, November 3, 2019

The Widow's Guild

The third book in Anna Castle's Francis Bacon Mystery series opens with Lady Alice Trumpington, "Trumpet," hastily arranging her marriage to the ill and elderly Ralph Gumery, Viscount Surdeval.  Friends Tom Clarady and Ben Whitt are invited to the wedding but Tom gets a special invitation to stay for the wedding night. Trumpet has plans to provide Surdeval with sons but through Tom. However, as much as Tom desires her, he will not sleep with Trumpet. In the morning they find Surdeval dead in his bed with a cross carved into his chest.  Surdeval's nephew enters the bedroom, sees Tom and Trumpet together, accuses them of murder and they are sent to the Tower. Barrister Francis Bacon's aunt, Lady Elizabeth Russell, hires him on behalf of the widow's guild that she runs, the Andromache Society, to defend Trumpet. Bacon soon learns that there are two other victims, all lords who were nominal Catholics and had crosses carved into their chests, and that their private chapels were robbed on the night of their deaths. He must determine why and how these lords were killed and whether the robberies are connected to the deaths.

I am enjoying reading this series with its well developed characters and information on the English legal system. With character Francis Bacon taking the lead in this novel, the reader learns how barristers are educated, the law on widows benefits, the selling of wardships, and who can be tortured for being Catholic.  Trumpet is an interesting character. She occasionally dresses as a male in order to publicly meet with friends Tom Clarady and Ben Whitt. In prior books she dressed as a man in order to attend law school with them. As a woman in Elizabethan England she was prohibited from attending school but almost finished her education before she got caught. I admire her spunk. She doesn't want to be married so she chooses an elderly, rich man as a husband with the plan that he will die soon after the marriage leaving her a wealthy widow who can live however she desires.

The Widow's Guild is a fabulous installment in the Francis Bacon series. I rate it 5 out of 5 stars.

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Death by Disputation

Death by Disputation is the second novel in the Francis Bacon Mystery series by Anna Castle. It is 1587 and Francis Bacon is a fairly new barrister at Gray's Inn when he hires college boy Thomas Claraday to determine who the front man is for the Puritans at Cambridge University. Claraday transfers to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge to finish his bachelor's degree while he conducts his investigation. However, soon after his arrival he finds his tutor Bartholomew Leeds dead, hanging from the roof beam of their sleeping loft. Leeds' apparent suicide is quickly deemed a murder. Claraday then is also tasked with finding Leeds' killer.

As with the first book in the series, Murder by Misrule, the author has followed the mystery formula perfectly. The murder occurred early in the book, in fact on the first page, leaving the remainder of the book for solving the crime. Both the clues and red herrings also began on the first page and continued throughout the story to keep the reader interested. The book is written more like a straight mystery that just happens to occur in medieval times. It is not written in the style of a historical mystery.

Tom Claraday, the main character, gets himself into plenty of scrapes to keep the reader on their toes. He is a likable character who tries to fit in with his classmates all while he conducts an affair with his headmaster's wife, Margaret Eggerley. His initial suspect is Christopher Marlowe, a classmate who was asleep in a drunken stupor in the loft when Tom found the body. Tom cannot figure out whether Marlowe is with or against the Puritans and his suspected homosexuality connects him to Leeds, another suspected homosexual. Francis Bacon is not featured much in this installment of the series. It is really all about Tom, although Tom is required to write Bacon daily with his progress notes on the investigation. This is a little odd given that the series is called a Francis Bacon Mystery.

The historical aspect of the story was written well. The writing was done in contemporary English so the reader can get through the book quickly. The characters and descriptions were definitely Elizabethan and a few Elizabethan words were added to contribute to the mood.

Death by Disputation is an engrossing historical mystery and I highly recommend it.

Saturday, September 28, 2019

The Concubine's Tattoo

The Concubine's Tattoo is the fourth Sano Ichiro mystery by Laura Joh Rowland. It takes place in Tokyo in 1690 under the reign of Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.

In this installment of the series Sano gets married to the feisty Reiko who wants to  help him with his criminal investigations. Before the wedding celebrations can begin, the body of the shogun's favorite concubine, Harume, is found dead. The shogun decides that he needs Sano to begin investigating this death ASAP. The honeymoon is abruptly cancelled as Sano and his assistant Hirata begin their work to determine how the concubine died.

I was surprised at the amount of sex in this book. Prior books in the series did not have any sex.  This one had explicit descriptions of sexual encounters, including kinky sex and gay sex. Every character was described having sex. Even the concubine's tattoo is in a sensitive area. You don't expect that in historical fiction.

Aside from that, the author presented a colorful picture of life in the women's quarters at Edo Castle. It was noisy, vengeful, had rich appointments and extravagant kimonos but the women were kept behind screens so that they would not be seen by men. My impression was that they were prisoners. I don't know if that is what the author intended but wealth never makes up for freedom.

Sano wanted a compliant wife but Reiko was raised to be independent and refused to sleep with him until he relented in making her a work partner. I didn't see this as plausible. It just wasn't Sano's character to be anything but a traditional samurai. In prior books he never had thoughts about treating women differently than society dictated. It didn't fit his character to suddenly jump into being a women's rights samurai.

The investigation and resolution of the murder was outstanding. There were plenty of suspects and red herrings. However, as I write this review I cannot escape my overall impression that I just read a romance novel, not a historical fiction story.  It's romance in feudal Japan. When I bought this book I expected to read the 20+ novels in this series.  Now I am not so sure. I like history, not romance.

Sunday, March 24, 2019

The Miracle of Creation

This is the 5th and final book in the Beardo series. The comic strip has ended. The series is autobiographical and covered ten years of the author's life. The Miracle of Creation was published in 2016.

The story begins with the newly pregnant Meg (Beardo's wife) counting up the number of days she can take off for maternity leave. Their two dogs see the baby as competition for attention but once they realize that she will throw food on the floor for them to clean up they are happy. Beardo is still attending many Comic Cons throughout the year and brings the baby along after she is born. He is teaching at the International School of Comics as well as continuing to write his Beardo comic strip.

This book is more of a poignant end to the series than a humorous book. There is humor here, just more poignancy as the story is really about becoming a parent. Beardo, however, is supposed to be a funny comic strip.

I hate to rate the book 3 out of 5 stars as each of the other 4 books were 5 star books. It just wasn't as funny as the earlier books. However, as I was reading I felt like I was witnessing a friend having a baby. I have come to love the Beardo and Meg characters in the series and am sad that it is over.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Self Employee of the Month

Self Employee of the Month is the 4th book in the Beardo 5 part comics collection by Dan Dougherty. It was published in 2015. At this point there are only 5 books in the series but as Dougherty's life progresses I am thinking that there might be more coming in the future.  I hope so.  I love this series which is autobiographical.  I met Dougherty a few years ago at Chicago's Printer's Row Lit Fest.  He hasn't been there the past 2 years but I hope to see him there next month.  I will have read all of his books by then and have many questions to ask him about his work and about cartooning in general.

The story opens with Beardo writing an agenda for a self employed staff meeting. Interspersed throughout the book there is a roll call, productivity report, advertising report, an accounting report, a self employee of the month award presentation, and an annual Christmas party that gets changed to a holiday party in order to be open minded.  He attends Comic Con with the first 3 books in this series but only sells books when he is in the bathroom and his attractive wife is handling the sales.

The author shows the reality of life as an artist when he shows Beardo denying friends' attempts to get free art jobs out of him. The reality of being a cartoonist in the 21st century is also discussed with newspapers turning away cartoons that they like due to dwindling budgets. Of course, the need to get a "real" job comes up when Beardo begins substitute teaching in elementary school.

I loved when he and his wife Meg went on a date to the Art Institute in Chicago where I live and visited one of my favorite exhibits, the Thorne Miniature Rooms. This exhibit has been open almost 100 years and has 68 miniature rooms decorated from time periods covering the 1600s to the 1930s. Chicago is the setting of the story probably because the author lives in the suburban area. Part of the setting included our town's first polar vortex in 2014.

I think this book is the funniest one in the series. With Beardo's sarcastic quips about working from home, his imaginary alcoholic cat friend Whiskers, and comments about being at Comic Con, he had me chuckling throughout the book.

This is the best book in the series. Way over 5 out of 5 stars!

'Til Debt Do Us Part

'Til Debt Do Us Part is the 3rd book in Dan Dougherty's 5 part Beardo comic book series.  I read the first two books in the series last year and loved them.  I just had the next three books in the series delivered in the mail and immediately began reading.

The story opens with Beardo and his girlfriend Megan getting engaged while on a cruise. Upon their return to work at a coffeehouse, Beardo quits his longtime job as a barista to focus on his cartooning. Meg continues to work there as a manager. With wedding bills piling up, the wedding planning going awry and his art business not taking off as he expected, the stress mounts and Beardo considers joining another band and getting a bank loan. Before the big day arrives Meg thinks she has become pregnant.

I love the  Beardo and Meg characters. They seem perfect for each other. When one is down the other is up and vice versa. The secondary characters from the coffeehouse and the band are sufficiently weird to bring humor to this book.  Beardo himself is hilarious and is definitely the star of the series.

The author uses bright colors with oversized fonts in a horizontal comic strip format that is traditionally used in Sunday newspapers. It makes for comfortable and fast reading. I love that Dougherty uses vivid colors in his comics. In fact, I try to only select graphic novels with colored graphics to buy.  When I am feeling down, the colors on the page just speak to me. I am an artist on the side as Beardo was for many years so perhaps that is why I love to see those vivid colors.

This installment of the series is a great addition to the series.  Beardo's life moves along at a quick pace and he makes everything about life seem funny.  5 out of 5 stars!

Sunday, December 16, 2018

2019 Series Challenge

I have a couple of lengthy series that I need to work on. I am not sure that I will have time for more than one of them. Laura Joh Rowland's series on feudal Japan is a favorite and probably will be the one that I will read next year.  I believe there are 18 books in the series and I have only read 2 of them.  Ms. Rowland is no longer writing this series. She has begun another one set in the Victorian era.

The Sharon Kay Penman medieval fiction series is another option. Again, I have only read 2 of her books but there are many more for me to catch up on.

I have a 3rd option and it is a 6 book graphic novel series called Beardo. I have read the first 2 in the series but since there is only a 3 book minimum for the challenge of any genre this option will work.