I’ve never really gotten into non-Doyle Sherlock books, for whatever reason, and even though I’ll watch any of the film and television adaptations I can get my hands on. Maybe I just have lower expectations for films (or maybe the new BBC version is the most amazing thing ever)? Whatever, the point is that I can’t even remember reading any non-Doyle Holmes before falling in love with “A Study in Emerald” during the Fragile Things readalong last fall. So good, and I don’t even know Lovecraft! So when I saw this collection of stories inspired by Sherlock and Doyle, and also saw that it had a second Neil Gaiman Holmes story in it, I was like, yoink!

And then I remembered what I dislike so much about short story collections, which is that they always contain super awesome fantastic stories and also stories where I think to myself and to others, someone got paid to write this crap?

There is such a piece of crap early on in the book that I read, and stared at, and wondered if maybe I shouldn’t keep reading if all the stories were going to be like that, and then I remembered I was reading it on an airplane and I might as well keep going. Thank goodness for airplanes.

I’m not going to call out the stories I hated, because there were plenty that were awesome and thus deserve my words more. In order of appearance:

“You’d Better Go in Disguise”, by Alan Bradley
Of course the creator of Flavia de Luce is going to get a place on this list. It’s practically fate. Bradley presents the opening story of the collection and it gets quite to the heart of the matter — we meet a mysterious man who meets a mysterious man and they get to profiling people in the park for fun and perhaps profit, and the reader wonders whether one of these men might be Holmes, of course, and what the point of this conversation might be, and it is all very intriguing and delightful.

“The Startling Events in the Electrified City”, by Tom Perry
This might be my favorite of all of these stories, as it recasts the assassination of President McKinley as a case for our favorite detectives, one that was put away in a box for many years until the characters involved were long gone. I don’t know terribly much about McKinley’s assassination outside of what I learned from Sarah Vowell, but the interesting circumstances presented by the story — the World’s Fair, other assassination attempts, weird Italians — have me searching the internet for more info.

“The Mysterious Case of the Unwritten Short Story”, by Colin Cotterill
I was sure this was going to be one of the stories I would hate when I started reading it. It’s in a pseudo-graphic-novel style and is super meta, with the author explaining how he came to write this story (and confusing Laurie King with Larry King) and then telling the story he is trying to write but interrupting with complaints about how much effort it takes to appease the nitpickers in the audience and it all seems so whatever except then he does actually finish the story he’s writing and it’s kind of adorable and amusing. Cotterill wins this time.

“The Last of Sheila-Locke Holmes”, by Laura Lippman
This is a sweet and sad story that I think everyone can relate to. It starts off all happy-like with our hero Sheila being a detective like Holmes or Harriet the Spy (but definitely not Nancy Drew, who’s totally stuck up), and it’s all fun and games until Sheila uncovers a secret that she doesn’t like or really understand.

“The Adventure of the Concert Pianist”, by Margaret Moran
Look, I just really like Mrs. Hudson, who narrates the heck out of this story, in which she and Dr. Watson team up during Holmes’s dead period to solve a case of poisoning. I would like this kind of story to show up in the next season of Sherlock, if they haven’t already written all those episodes.

Recommendation: Definitely check out at least a few of the stories, if you like Sherlock and things based on Sherlock.

Rating: 7/10

Well, it’s not really like Inception or Before I Go to Sleep at all. And it doesn’t have Nicolas Cage in it, so it’s automatically better than Face/Off, although I won’t swear to the “more plausible” part.

What it reminds me of very much is One of Our Thursdays is Missing, in which a written Thursday Next must pretend to be the real Thursday Next. This is probably a bad example if you’ve never read a Thursday Next novel, which, if that’s the case, go do that now and then come back and we’ll continue.

Right, okay, so now we’re on the same page. In this particular novel, our protagonist, Myfanwy (rhymed with Tiffany because Welsh is hard, dudes) Thomas, comes to devoid of all useful memories, like who she is or what she’s doing in this park surrounded by dead people. Conveniently-ish, she’s got a note in her pocket that tells her her name and also that she is in Terrible Danger and that the former occupant of Myfanwy’s brain has made dual plans for New Myfanwy — she can either pretend to be Old Myfanwy and solve the Mystery of the Missing Memories or she can run and hide where no one will find her. This no-brainer gets ruined, of course, and New Myfanwy is totes on the case.

Oh, but, p.s., Myfanwy has superpowers, and she works for a secret government organization that employs most of the superpower-having people in the tri-state area and also, like, investigates supernatural happenings and junk. No big.

And Old Myfanwy is this total Type A organizer and she’s left a literal suitcase full of letters to New Myfanwy that explain more or less everything that NM is going to need to know if she can ever find the time to read all of said letters. The narrative pops back and forth between the New Myfanwy action and the Old Myfanwy exposition as smoothly as one can expect, and I quite like the way the two sort of storylines fit together.

I also really like New Myfanwy, who’s all, “Am I doing this right? Am I saying the right things? Is this the way Thomas would — oh, fuck it, playing it safe is for losers.” This whole idea of a person unhampered by her past is really well imagined, so much that I still feel bad for Old Myfanwy that she could never have been as awesome as her clean-slate counterpart.

Of course, while NM’s awesomeness is, well, awesome, it does so while sticking its tongue out at plausibility. The problem gets swept away near the end by a, “Well, what kind of impersonator would do such a terrible job of it?” which, maybe, if you’re not part of a secret government organization that kind of deals in body-snatchers and whatnot. I mean, seriously.

But then again, who cares about plausible impersonation when you have a novel that includes people with weird X-Men powers, a duck that predicts the future, dragons, and crazy Dutch Dr. Frankensteins? Not me! File this under Books I Would Totally Read Again.

Recommendation: For those that liked the preceding paragraph and also people who like weird stuff in general.

Rating: 9/10

This expectation was not helped by the fact that I heard Black read most of a chapter called “I Hate My Baby” on NPR a few days before I started the book. I thought that that chapter was greatly amusing and chuckle-inducing, and I appreciated Black for affirming my belief that I am going to want to kill my hypothetical child for not sleeping like a human. (He says it gets better but I totally don’t believe that.)

That chapter was awesome. The rest of the book? Not a lot of funny. Black talks a lot about how he met his wife as the “other man” and got married and made babies and stopped wanting to be married so much and took to drinking and became addicted to Ambien and if any of it is supposed to be funny it is not coming across in the text. The blurbs say it’s funny! Does Black read his own audiobook? -checks- He does. Maybe I should go check that out.

I can definitely see how I would have liked this book more if I had known how it would go and planned accordingly, like not reading it on a long boring road trip. If anyone listens to this, let me know if that’s a better idea!

Rating: 7/10

But I need something to show for all this librarian-ing I did, so here are a few stories I think we can all relate to:

Students really don’t like to expend effort: One of the rules we have at the library is that everything you borrow has to be officially checked out to a student ID card. This includes things like whiteboard markers and textbooks that can only be read in the library, and there are a lot of students who don’t seem to realize that these IDs exist until they need to borrow a calculator for their test that starts in 15 minutes. But when I tell them that they need to go over to another office for ten minutes to get an ID, many of these students are like, “Well, nevermind, I’ll just try to do calculus without a graphing calculator.” Similarly, our printers only take payment in the form of money put on that same student ID, and if I had a dime for every time someone asked me to print “just one page” on my “secret free printer” or told me it was ridiculous that they should have to plan ahead to print their term paper that’s due right this very second, I would have enough to put the five-dollar minimum on my own ID.

The school really doesn’t like to be reasonable: So, yeah, it only takes like ten minutes to get an ID, but it took me four tries of going to the student ID office to find someone there to make one for me! In that same office is the place where students can put cash money on their IDs (plastic money is done online), but it’s not open until 11am, a full three hours after the library opens and after I’ve already had six questions about how to put money on a card.

Students have a weird definition of weird: I could also make some money off of the number of times students have come up to me with a “weird” or “strange” or “stupid” question that is completely reasonable. Examples include “Do you lend out calculators?” “Where is the printer?” “Where is [insert office here]?” and “Can I borrow a pencil?” These are just regular questions, people, I promise. Asking if you can use our computer classroom’s projector so that you can trace snakes for your art class is a little weird, but also kinda cool. Asking if you can store breast milk in our staff fridge is really weird (but I said yes anyway). Pencils? Those are okay.

Students like our books: The rule at our campus libraries is that we don’t charge overdue fines; if you return a book we’re happy and if you don’t we ask for a ridiculous amount of money ($50 for any book, even a little paperback). That big fine goes on your student account and you can’t graduate or register for classes if you haven’t paid it or returned/replaced the book. People come in every once in a while returning stacks of overdue books or asking about how to pay for books lost last semester or last year, and less often asking about books they lost two or three years ago. But since about February I’ve been reassuring everyone about their overdue books because of a guy we’ll call Bob. Bob came in to ask how to pay for a lost book, since he was coming back to school after a long break and was sure the book was long gone. How long gone? It was due back in December of 2000. Even better, he managed to find the book hidden in some un-emptied moving box in his basement and returned it, at which point we promptly discarded it because we really didn’t need a 15-year old book of resume examples!

Being a good librarian can earn you cookies: I spent a few hours over the course of two days working with a professor and her English for Speakers of Other Languages students to get the students registered with the college portal system and teach them how to use the catalog on a basic level — here’s how to search for Florida, here’s how to find the book about Florida on the shelf. It was super slow going and it was hard for me not to use words these guys didn’t know, but it was heartening to watch them figure it out (especially compared to watching English speakers totally ignore my help and have no idea how to use the library!). A couple of days ago the professor came back to the library and said, “I was teaching my class about measurements, like cups and tablespoons, using a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Then I found out that some of them had no idea what a chocolate chip cookie is, and that just could not stand, so I made them some. Would you like the extras?” Heck yes! It’s nice to get an tangible reward, especially an edible one, for doing a good job.

I didn’t know much about Kaling outside of, “She’s that girl from The Office, a show I used to watch,” but like Tina Fey before her I’d heard enough vague statements about her awesomeness to be convinced. And apparently so had the rest of the world, with that long line ahead of me! Luckily she totally lives up to that reputation.

The book is a collection of short essays about Kaling’s life: growing up as a chubby Indian kid, working in show biz, what she looks for in a guy, how she sees herself. Mostly topics I can relate to, except for the whole “writing for a popular TV show” thing. Some of the essays are a little boring, like, unfortunately, that picture-based essay I waited all these months for, but some are absolutely fantastic.

Awesome essays:

“Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Or How I Made My First Real Friend)” — Here Kaling talks about friends and cliques and how things that seem super duper important one day can seem totally unimportant the next. Especially in high school.

“Day Jobs” — In which Kaling takes on a few less-than-ideal jobs but still manages to get herself some pizza bagels and a free ride to work.

“Guys Need to Do Almost Nothing to Be Great” — This is a chapter that all guys should make copies of for themselves and all their friends.

“Married People Need to Step It Up” — As a person in a happy marriage, I have been called upon by Mindy Kaling to tell you all that it’s totally possible. Being pals is the best.

“Strict Instructions for My Funeral” and “A Eulogy for Mindy Kaling, by Michael Schur” — It worries me a little bit, the amount of thought that Kaling has put into her funeral. It’s maybe a little weird that I laughed the most at the part of the book not written by Kaling, but of course it wouldn’t be funny at all without the rest of the book as a primer.

Recommendation: Do read, or definitely listen if you have that option. Kaling has a great voice.

Rating: 9/10

It’s wonderful, as though you’d expect me to say anything else at this point. It starts with a heist, which is one of my many story-related weaknesses, and then it reminds us about Tom’s effed-up childhood, and then it lays out some very intriguing backstory for Tom’s dad, and the cabal people are killin’ lots of other people and there is a child made out of comic-book superhero (yes, you read that right) and it is cah-razy up in here.

I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a bumper issue or whatever you might call it at the end of this volume, something like the Mr. Bun tales or the creepy Choose Your Own Adventure that would give me a diversion from the fact that I have to wait months for the next set to arrive in my library! But, on the other hand, extra story and extra questions just waiting to be answered those many months from now.

Recommendation: Seriously, why haven’t you already started reading this series?

Rating: 9/10

Those jobs, always getting in the way! But it’s true, I do sometimes find myself not reading even when I’m not getting paid to do other things… Usually the distraction is in the form of television shows, like when I spent most of December getting caught up with 30 Rock (only to fall behind again in January) or like last month when I discovered Community, or probably like next month when I’ll be recovering from jetlag with something completely mindless on Netflix. Suggestions?

The other thing that takes me away from reading, though less often, is video games. I’m not like the hubby who spends inordinate amounts of time shooting people and then shooting them again when they come back to life (seriously, if you think about Call of Duty too hard it breaks your brain) or building civilizations and making treaties and stuff, but if you give me a good tower defense game like GemCraft or a game I actually have to play with other people like Draw Something I can forget about books for hours or days at a time.

Thank goodness books don’t hold grudges…

When I finally started reading the book, less than 24 hours before club time, I was already mentally preparing to come here and be all, I wanted to like this book but I really just couldn’t. The whole first chapter, which is like 100 pages long, is a Franzen-esque stream of big words that I had to look up and heady philosophical musings that seemed more than a bit out of place in a book I knew to be about ZOMBIES. I thought maybe this was going to be one of those books that’s just smarter than I am.

And it is, a little, because first chapter wow, but once Whitehead gets out of Friday and into Saturday (another 100-ish pages) and Sunday (the last 50), things pick up. The words get smaller or at least more commonly large, we start learning more about Our Protagonist Mark Spitz’s background, and the focus shifts from “This is the world now and this is what Mark Spitz is doing in it” to “Mark Spitz is wondering if maybe the world isn’t exactly what it seems oh here come the ZOMBIES.”

The aforementioned one-star-giver and other clubbers took issue primarily with the fact that Whitehead introduces a lot of stuff and brings up a lot of questions and basically the only one he answers is why Mark Spitz is called Mark Spitz and yes, it’s always Mark Spitz and never Mark or Spitz or whatever. On the one hand, I agree and am like “But wherefore zombies and also why do these ‘stragglers’ exist and what is the code on the highway and what the heck is Mark Spitz’s real name and and and….” On the other hand, with the different fingers, I am like, “So why are there zombies? I am intrigued by these stragglers and would like to know more. This book has left me with many things to think about.”

It’s a subtle distinction, sure, but I feel like I’ve learned enough about the situation as it stands over the three days of the novel that I don’t need to know why everything else exists or happened or whatever, because that’s not the point. The point is that Mark Spitz is living a really weird life and it concerns him a little bit but what is there to do about it, and at the very least the book makes me very glad I live in a world without zombies. For now.

Recommendation: For people who studied lots of SAT vocab, who are intrigued by the undead, and who don’t mind a book that doesn’t resolve itself in any useful way.

Rating: 8/10

Hmm. If we’re talking in terms of when I picked it up for the first time and when I put it down for the last (well, I hope not last ever), I think that would be The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which I started in the spring of 2007 and didn’t finish until the end of December 2009. That was a while. But in that case, I read a few of the short stories when I got it and then just didn’t read it until I was motivated to read it again, at which point I read all the stories in like two weeks. Not very long.

If we go by length of time spent actively reading a book, I’m pretty sure that would be Pillars of the Earth, a thousand-page book that I read a page or two at a time over the course of two months. It was intense, but ultimately worth it, and actually worked much better than that time I listened to the sequel over five weeks. In both of those cases, it was definitely the number of pages (or discs) that made the book take so long, both in that it just takes a long time to read that many words and because after an hour or so with no end in sight I needed a break!

Anyway, it’s a book! About puzzles! So I had to have it! And I was excited to read it! Until I started reading it! Sigh.

It’s super interesting on the surface; it’s meant to be a “fresh look at classic conundrums of logic, mathematics, and life.” It starts off with the story of the guy what designed the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and how he managed to dedicate the thing to himself while at the same time dedicating it only to Ptolemy II, which is TOTALLY AWESOME even if it’s really only apocryphal because, you know, can’t go check on that one.

The book also introduces conundrums I had never heard of, like one where there’s an island and the people on it have blue eyes or brown eyes but aren’t allowed to know the color of their own eyes or they have to leave the island. And there are, say, 100 people with blue eyes, but of course no one talks about that, except one day this explorer fellow shows up and is giving a speech and is all, “You guys are awesome, and it’s nice to see blue-eyed people like me this far from home!” And then 100 days later every person with blue eyes packs up and leaves the island, which makes no sense but then it kind of does once it’s explained to me.

And Niederman also talks about puzzles I have heard of but gives me more and interesting information about them, like the Monty Hall problem which I had no idea never actually happened on TV, and the island full of people who either lie or tell the truth and you can only ask them one question to get the answer you need, and those crazy puzzles where you get a bunch of letters like EOEREXNTEN and you’re supposed to figure out the next letter in the sequence and how sometimes these puzzles have more than one answer.

So this is good, right? Puzzles! Answers to puzzles! Strategies for solving puzzles! I really did enjoy this book, for the most part. The problem was that interspersed with all the good stuff was a bunch of problematic writing. Sometimes Niederman would explain something and it would still make absolutely no sense, or he’d give an answer to a problem that didn’t actually answer the problem as given, or he’d go off on a tangent about politics that had really nothing to do with the cool puzzles (he even ends the book on one, which is just uggggh). Even worse, there were a couple of illustrations in the book that had… typos? Whatever the image equivalent of a typo is, these illustrations had them and I spent too long being absolutely baffled by what I was looking at versus what I was reading. It was rough going, and it was only the promise of more puzzles that kept me from just tossing the book off to the side and moving on with my life.

Overall, I would recommend the concept of the book, but I might try to find something more polished and focused were I to do it again.

Rating: 6/10