Book Review: The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers

Title: The Stress of Her Regard
Author: Tim Powers
Published: San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008 (1989)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 427
Total Page Count: 91,619
Text Number: 262
Read Because: lent to me by century_eyes
Review: The night before his wedding, Michael Crawford loses his wedding ring—and finds himself married to a jealous, powerful, ancient vampire. His journey to understand and break this connection leads him to follow suffers Keats, Byron, and Shelley and on a torturous path across Europe. The Stress of Her Regard is ambitious historical and literary fantasy of mixed success. Pulling from mythology, history, and Romantic literature, it's dense and wide-ranging, a challenging book for both reader and writer. But there's something in the writing style—which is skillful, but also deceptively straightforward almost to the point of being blasé—which makes the premise unconvincing: the narrative takes revised history and reinterpreted literature at face value, with inadequate justification and without addressing any of the reader's (and, presumably, protagonist's) reasonable doubts. The premise is unique, the plotting is smart (although the ending is at once too big and too simple), but nothing is real enough that the book hits home.

At least, that's how it went for me. I suspect that this may simply have not been the right book for me, at least not right now. I applaud Regard's ambition, and found it interesting and ultimately satisfying, but I never quite enjoyed the book, was never compelled to read it, and never accepted Shelley as vampire-haunted victim, Romantic poetry as remnants of a vampire legacy. I floated through the book vaguely dumbfounded, and I feel my opinion is too weak for me to recommend for or against the book either way. Regard was, for me, unsuccessful—may other readers have better luck!

Review posted here on Amazon.com.

About chocolate, apparently: a quick review of Trader Joe's Handmade Chocolate Ganache Torte

I just had my birthday dessert with Devon's family, a Trader Joe's Handmade Chocolate Ganache Torte which I am pleased to say was actually pretty good. As we know I prefer my chocolate simple, pure, and dark; I dislike the texture and dilution of cakes, and I'm actually not a fan of ganache (again, I don't like the texture). This torte is chocolate mousse (fairly dense, and stored frozen which only makes it thicker) sandwiched between chocolate cake (low on flour, but not flourless—it's a dense cake without the crumb-texture of most cake) glazed with bittersweet chocolate ganache. It's dense and flavorful, rich chocolate without too much sugar, and the combination of textures makes for a lovely midpoint between creamy and chewy. I would still prefer a simple flourless torte (or chocolate souflé), but for something store-bought this was surprisingly lovely.

I finally instituted an obsession: chocolate tag. It's about time!

I sat down not to write about this, but about something else entirely. I'll get to that post soon. In the meanwhile, a blurb about chocolate. So there we go.