Enough's Enough/Calvin Trillin/251 pp.

Syndicated columnist Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native and sometime visitor to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, offered this 1990 collection of some of his best columns from the late 1980s. While Trillin is not a political columnist per se, some of these columns do deal with the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) administrations and political campaigns, along with such 80s figures as Michael Milliken, Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Imelda Marcos, and Manuel Noriega (not to mention Noriega's red underwear and his evil voodoo tamales). Trillin also covers more everyday topics, like family vacations (and Packing Greatness), empty-nest syndrome, and three a.m. car alarms. Since this was written over 20 years ago, some of it was a little out-of-date, but some topics were strangely similar to issues being dealt with today - the invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration, and of Noriega's Panama by the Bush administration, bring to mind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in our recent history, for example.
I enjoyed Trillin's easy-going, dry sense of humor, and the shortness of the columns (average of 2-3 pp.) lends them to easy reading. Trillin is one of my favorite columnists, and I recommend the book. By the way, this was another MULSA book sale remainder!

The Warden/Anthony Trollope/214 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder...

In the grand Buddhist tradition, I needed to balance my previous read (Shakespeare Undead) with something a little more... upscale. Hence Trollope. Rev. Septimus Harding is a clergyman in mid-19th century England, precentor (choir director) at the local cathedral, and warden (director) of a small charity home for elderly working-class men. The residents of the home receive a small monthly stipend, but Warden Harding receives a salary of 800 pounds a year (at the time, a pretty hefty sum). A local progressive convinces the residents that they should be receiving the profits of the charity, and they hire a lawyer to sue the warden and the church. The meat of the story is how Warden Harding comes to realize that he doesn't deserve all the money he's been receiving; at issue is the difference between what is legally allowed and what is morally right.
Considering the novel was written in 1855, I found it to be a fairly easy read, especially as compared to someone like Charles Dickens. The author of the critical afterword in my edition says that, unlike many of Trollope's other novels, The Warden is "one of those small novels [...] in which every word has weight." Trollope uses a minimum of words to express his ideas, so we don't get a bunch of extraneous extra descriptions of blue skies and meaningful glances. Trollope definitely has a message he is trying to convey, but he doesn't take the usual "preachy" approach that so many of his contemporaries seemed to.

Shakespeare Undead/Lori Handeland/291 pp.

William Shakespeare, actor, playwright, zombie hunter. Don't judge me. He's also a vampire necromancer, with the ability to create zombies, and an affinity for talking with ghosts. (That's where some of his best dramatic plots have come from, after all.) There's a zombie horde on the loose in Elizabethan England, and Shakespeare joins forces with a young hunter named Clay (who turns out to be a young lady named Kate, natch) to destroy the zombies and find out who's creating them, and for what purpose. Handeland, whose background is in romance, spends a bit too much time on the romantic/sexual relationship that develops between Shakespeare and Kate, but otherwise this is a fun, tongue-in-cheek romp in the same "vein" (sorry, I couldn't resist) as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell/Susanna Clarke/782 pp.

Mr. Norrell is the only practicing true magician in pre-Victorian England. We're not talking about side-show hucksters and scam artists, but true magicians. Sure, there are quite a few theoretical magicians, scholarly types who have studied the history of magic in England but, as gentlemen, would never dream of actually performing magic. And that's just how Mr. Norrell likes things. When young Jonathan Strange has the audacity to begin performing magic, Mr. Norrell has two choices - remove Strange as a threat, or take him on as an apprentice. He chooses the latter, and that decision ushers in a new age of English magic. The Duke of Wellington uses Strange to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo, which causes a rift between Norrell and Strange, but they eventually join forces to defeat a powerful faerie magician who wants to destroy George III and replace him with a cabinet minister's butler.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories/Susanna Clarke/235 pp.

This anthology presents more stories from the world of Clarke's 19th-century based magical novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The stories take place in and around the village of Grace Adieu, and include among the characters not only magicians and faerie princes, but also such historical figures as the Duke of Wellington and Mary, Queen of Scots. I made the mistake of reading the book before reading the novel, so I didn't recognize some of the references to characters and action in the novel. But all-in-all, this was a fun visit to the world of Victorian magic.

Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files / Jim Butcher / 418 p.

All but one of these short stories have been published before, in one or another anthology, but I don't read a lot of short-story anthologies, and picked this book up only for the sake of the final story, which takes place a few hours after the end of Changes, the latest full-length novel in the Dresden Files series that I am addicted to, the story-world within which all the stories take place

Jim Butcher uses several of these stories to bring out elements of the series that have not appeared in the novels - to narrate from the perspective of characters other than Harry Dresden (Harry's half-brother, the vampire, and Harry's bff Murphy, the cop), or to tell a story with a lighter tone than the nail-bitingly suspenseful and high-stakes novel series.  Other stories just read like shorter versions of the kinds of problems Harry deals with in the novels: a crime or spate of magic/monster-related crimes occurs in Chicago, Harry the wizard PI, with help from one or more of his sidekicks, confronts the perps and removes the menace.

The only short story in this collection that didn't thoroughly please me was "Last Call."  Not that it was awful, but it just didn't seem all that fresh.  I like the Dresden Files series for Harry's mixture of doofus and daredevil, and Murphy's strong action-heroine mojo, and even some of the amusement of recognizing a genre cliche...but I found "Last Call" a little too strong on the latter.

"Aftermath," the one previously unpublished story, written from the perspective of Murphy, performed pretty much as expected.  It added new action and developed some key character relationships in the series, while leaving the reader in the dark about the major unresolved question at the end of Changes.

Warmup Over...Now It's ON!!!

All book review entries will now count toward the MU Libraries' entry in the Missouri Book Challenge!  Go team!