After the Ball by Patricia Beard is subtitled “Gilded Age secrets, boardroom betrayals, and the party that ignited the Great WallStreet Scandal of 1905.” It’s not as exciting as it sounds. The book is mostly about an insurance tycoon named James Hazen Hyde who inherited majority shares in the Equitable Life Assurance Society. He then proceeded to live like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and made the mistake of mixing his money with the life insurance company’s money, making questionable loans and transfers of huge amounts, and being generally irresponsible. The final straw was a party he hosted on January 31, 1905. The theme of The Hyde Ball was Versailles in eighteenth century France, there were 600 costumed guests, and the party was rumored to have cost $200,000, a great deal of money for a ball in any day, but especially back in 1905. Soon after his lavish ball was over, James Hazen Hyde was accused of using money that belonged to the insurance to finance his grand life style, and he had to defend himself, first before his own board of directors, and ultimately in Congressional hearings. The ball was determined to have been financed by Hyde’s own fortune, and its cost was far less than the rumors said, but so many other accounting irregularities and corrupt deals were uncovered during the investigations that James Hazen Hyde had to resign from the board of the life insurance company that his father founded, sell all his shares, and move to France for the rest of his life. There he lived a decadent life and carried on a grumbling correspondence with his mother concerning the amount of money she sent him for his expenses. Ah, how the mighty have fallen! It reminds me of Martha Stewart, but she hasn’t absconded to France and may even be making a comeback.

I also read Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult,. The setting for this fictional lawyer/murder mystery is about as far away from Wall Street and the Gilded Age as one can get and still be in the good old USA. Plain Truth is set in Amish country, Paradise, Pennsylvania, and it tells the fictional story of a young Amish girl accused of killing her newborn infant and of the lawyer who defends her. Because of the setting and some of the issues (law vs. grace, religious vs. secular values), this book is easy to compare to compare to Levi’s Will by Dale Cramer, a book I read earlier this year. Although I only know what I’ve read about Amish life and culture, I think Cramer gets it more right than Picoult. Picoult spends the entire book trying to convince readers that the Amish are nearly perfect, that their deep religious convictions and their strict upbringing means that they cannot commit murder or other heinous crimes and still remain Amish. Then she throws in a plot twist at the end that undoes anything that she’s managed to persuade us to believe about Amish sinlessness. The story itself is good, kept me guessing until the end, and the writing is better than adequate. But her premises are flawed and undermined by the plot itself.

Next I read a YA novel called Pagan’s Crusade by Catherine Jinks. I can’t decide what I thought about this one. The writer really likes to use sentence fragments, and it’s sort of effective in a strange way. I got the idea that this was the way the young protagonist of the novel, Pagan, thinks. An example chosen at random:

“My pleasure. Following Rockhead as he pushes his way to the door. Squeezing past great slabs of hot, sticky flesh through steamy clouds of garlic and onions and spice and sweat and hot peppers. Whoof! What a stew! Rockhead uses his elbows, his knees, his shoulders, his fists. Yelps and squeaks from the targets. Then into the sunshine–and a sea of heads stretching out across the square.”

Not every paragraph was like this one , but plenty of them were. As I said, it’s somewhat effective in conveying the fragmentary nature of Pagan’s thought processes, but it’s somewhat distracting, too. I had to get used to Ms. Jinks’ writing style. The story takes place during the Crusades, late 1100’s, as Jerusalem is about to fall to the forces of the Turkish Sultan Saladin. Pagan, the young hero of the story, is a street urchin who’s become squire to Lord Roland de Bram of the Knights Templar, protectors of Jerusalem and of all the holy places and of the many pilgrims who come to visit them. Pagan is an irreverent sort; his life hasn’t taught him to honor anything or anyone. And as Pagan is beginning to admire and respect Lord Roland and to believe (sort of) in the mission of the Knights Templar, his master, Lord Roland, is losing his faith in God and in the Order to which he has dedicated his life. Interesting story. Very violent. I may have to read the sequel just to find out what happens to the two main characters.

Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books focus article on Catherine Jinks and her series of four Pagan books.

Now I’m reading The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood. I’ve seen it on various lists, recommended several times, but I’m just now getting around to it. Have I ever said that I really enjoy YA literature? It’s just ambiguous enough for me, but YA authors are not so caught up in trying to be pretentious that they lose the story–most of the time. The Shakespeare Stealer is the story of an orphan boy who is sent by his master to copy out the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to steal it for another company of players. Instead of stealing the play, the boy, Widge, gets himself taken on as an apprentice actor, but he must keep a watch out for his evil master who still wants the play. It’s a fun story with all sorts of good Shakespearean details, details that I assume are authentic. (Were Shakespeare’s players really accused of motivating the Earl of Essex to mount a rebellion when they presented a special performance of Richard II, a play about a king who is deposed?) This one has sequels that I’m definitely reading as soon as I can get them from the library. I’m also going to recommend it to Brown Bear Daughter and Karate Kid.

Next book on deck: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 by James Shapiro

A new study shows that nearly half the young families who live in San Francisco are planning to move within the next three years. The city already has the lowest population of children per capita of any big U.S. city. From All Things Considered, NPR, December 6, 2005

No comment.

You may have heard of Book Crossing, a website which tracks books that you “release into the wild,” hoping that someone will claim and love them as much as you did.

Pass the Book is similar, but different. With this book giveaway plan, you give the book to a friend who agrees to read the book and pass it on to someone else. Eventually, if you put your name and address in the book, you get it back with comments and a list of the names of all who have read it and passed it. It sounds like fun to me.

Bookins is a book trading site. List the books you’d like to trade and list the books you’d like to get. Registration is free, and all it costs to trade is the postage. I haven’t signed up yet, but I think I’m going to do it and see how it works. Oh, and if you sign up, put my email (sherry DOT early AT gmail DOT com) in as your referrer, and I’ll get extra points.

Operation Paperback is a non-profit, grassroots program founded in 1999. They collect gently used books and send them to American troops deployed overseas.

I think it’s time for me to share some books –and make room for my Christmas gifts???

“If I could show you a way back to your friends from the theater, what would you do?”

“I’d hold–I’d do–I wouldn’t do–oh damn. You want me to tell the truth, don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“I don’t know what I’d do. I want to say I’d be a different man; that I’d care for people and keep them close and keep Christmas in my heart every day of the year. I want to do that. But I’m not sure I can. I’m still Will Sverdrup, who’s terrified of commitment.”

“That is the right answer. If you’d made promises you couldn’t keep, you’d have stayed in this passage for a very long time.”

“I can promise even less if you like.”

“The point is to recognize that you cannot rescue yourself.”

“I can’t.”

“Then you must turn to the One who can rescue you.”

Blood and Judgement by Lars Walker is a really weird mythology/fantasy novel with flashes of profound insight–like the one above. To tell the truth, as much as I hate to admit it, I got lost several times during this novel, almost as lost as the characters in the story, but I loved the flashes. I’m not sure whether my getting lost was due to the complicated nature of the plot and its philosophical, literary, theological, and scientific premises or whether there were real gaps in the logic of what was happening, causing me to lose the the thread of the narrative. I’m not even sure if the preceding sentence made any sense.

However, I’m still thinking about this book and trying to figure out everything that happened and why it happened and what it means, so there must be a lot of stuff there. Let’s see if I can explain a little of it. Will Sverdrup, an amateur actor who’s afraid of commitment and love and getting close to people, falls through a trapdoor in the theater where he’s practicing to be the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He ends up in Denmark in the 6th century, and he’s inhabiting the body of the original Hamlet whose name is actually Amlodd. Amlodd, on the other hand, has exchanged his warrior body for Will’s weak twenty-first century body, But he’s not in the twenty-first century. He’s in some kind of alternate universe along with the other actors from Will’s play. (Are you confused yet?) The other actors and Amlodd are supposed to be re-enacting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but they’re not sure they want to do that since they all die in the end. Will, back in Denmark in Amlodd’s body, is re-enacting his own saga–an ancient version of the Hamlet story that comes out of some source story by a guy named Saxo.

The purpose of all this is to talk about, explore as they say, purpose and pain and revenge and forgiveness and blood and judgment. One of the chapters toward the end reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. The whole book reminded me of the TV series LOST, probably partly because the entire Semicolon family is absorbed in LOST right now, but also because of the multiplicity of overlapping themes and the fact that the characters in the book are stranded in an alternate reality sort of like the people in LOST. It would have been interesting to have developed some of the other characters in the book besides Will Sverdrup a little more, but maybe each one would have required his or her own book–or TV series. Also like with the people in LOST, the future of the characters in this story depends to some extent on how they deal with their past sins and issues.

If you like Hamlet or LOST or medieval historical fiction or action swords and sorcery or Norse sagas or some combination of all the above, you’ll probably like Blood and Judgement–unless you don’t like them all mixed together. For what it’s worth, Hamlet will never be the same.

And I always did wonder if Scrooge really would be able to keep Christmas in his heart from then on.