Category: Books

Five books!  Only five books!

Read
Othello
Shakespeare
For once the “modern analysis” at the end of the book gave me a very interesting insight into the play.  As usual, I enjoyed the performance much more than reading.

The Fault in our Stars
John Green
Matt and I read aloud
John Green makes for good read aloud.

Liar & Spy
Rebecca Stead
Read for Mock Printz
I enjoyed this book, the last I read for the Mock Printz Workshop, but I think it’s not a YA book. In fact, the library agrees with me, shelving it in the Juvenile section.  The prose was lively, the characters interesting.  I even put aside things so I could finish the book, which is always a good sign.  Also, two boy characters.   Always a good thing for the boy readers. 

Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
Read for Kenton Book Group
I did not like this, Sam I Am, I did not like Hade-re-an.  The first person perspective made me feel as if I was trapped on an endless phone call with someone who never let me interrupt his soliloquy and ask clarifying questions.  There was a lot of surface and not much detail.  When I read historical fiction, I like to learn about the historic period in question. Hadrian’s endless blathering meant that I got a glimpse into things I might find interesting, but there was never any follow up on those things.   The book club member who chose the book began by apologizing for choosing it, because, though it is his desert island book, it is not a “book-club” kind of book, not being very linear.

Days of Blood and Starlight
Laini Taylor
Ah, the tricky “middle book” in a series of three where one must build plot, maintain characters, and juggle what happened in the book before this one with what will happen in the book after this one.  Taylor does a good job on all fronts.  We, who don’t have a clear memory to every plot point are looped back in with grace and there is inner struggle between the two ill-fated lovers.  Even friends manage to make the transition to the second book.  All in all, it was a pretty gripping read.  I’m a bit impatient for the third in the series.

Full-on Mock Printz prep this month. Plus a great non-Mock-Printz-YA Novel which will probably be a top 5 favorite for this year.  And Dennis Lehane’s new book, which I didn’t like very much, alas.

Read
The Brides of Rollrock Island
Margo Lanagan
Read for Mock Pritnz
This is that kind of fiction that I think is supposed to be “literary” because there are a lot of words, and pretty, carefully written words at that, but not a lot of explaining because, I guess, the author thinks the reader should be smart enough to figure things out.  But when it’s not really clear to me from the beginning what is going on, it’s hard for me to attach to the book.  Also, I didn’t find the characters very distinct from  one another, so I was always a bit confused.  That said, there are a few pages in the last quarter of the book that are beautifully written and if you “need” to finish the book, just keep waiting for them. They might make the whole book worth it.

Every Day
David Levithan
A very clever plot device (main character wakes up in a different body every day) executed brilliantly by Mr. Levithan.  This book questions the nature of gender, love, brain chemistry, sibling relationships, family relationships, body type, race, sexual orientation and probably other things I’m forgetting.  I couldn’t figure out how he was going to end the book in a way that made everything okay, but he did it.  I will be recommending this for years, so you should go and read it now so I don’t have to harangue you.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Emily M. Danforth
Read for Mock Printz
I recently lamented that all the up-and-coming actors in my age demographic have either become “too old” and disappeared (mostly the women) or have become established actors, full of gravitas (mostly the men.)  However, it seems the novelists in my age demographic are just now really getting started. Ms. Danforth would be a novelist in my age demographic who has set her story in the same period (more or less) when I attended high school which had a lot to do with my enjoyment of this book.

But!  I also liked that it was set in a tiny Montana town where a friend lived and worked after college and I have even visited that town so I could picture it in my mind’s eye.

And!  I loved it was a coming-of-age novel about a lesbian as those are in short supply (at least I think so, I don’t come across them often.)

Also! I loved the writing–at least three passages made it to my quotes page–and the characters were great. Danforth is quite good at capturing little details that made the story come alive.  The hair tucking of the young minister who looked like Jesus, or Eddie Vedder was one such example. This was one of those books I liked so much I was recommending it to people before I had even finished it.


The Quitter
Harvey Pekar
Read for Book Group
Eh.  It’s a graphic novel, which aren’t my medium.  And I’m not the biggest fan of Harvey Pekar’s schtick.  I thought the art was a good fit for the time period, but I didn’t love this book.

Live by Night
Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, here are the things you do very well as an author:  You create fabulous characters, fully-formed, flawed, smart and smart-assed.  You write plots that are interesting, complicated, a bit dark and have a social justice bent to them.  These things are very good and will keep me always reading your books. But you know what you do better than everyone else?  Star-crossed love.  And when your book, interesting as it might be and this one was, does not have star-crossed love I feel a great sadness and find myself feeling a bit cheated.  So you maybe you want to move away from star-crossed love.  Okay, I’ll still read your stories.  But I’ll be patiently awaiting your next book with star-crossed love.

Ask the Passengers
A.S. King
Hey look, it’s another book about a girl who likes a girl!  And it deals with that whole “questioning” issue.  That’s a good thing.  I think there is a lot of questioning going on.  Overall, I thought this was a pretty successful book. The main character’s relationships with her sister, family, friends and girlfriend felt pretty true-to-life.  The “ask the passengers” device never stopped feeling like a device.  But I kind of liked it.

Started and did not finish
Moonbird
Read for Mock Printz
I get a big heavy feeling in my chest when I read about species in peril because it seems to be too big of a problem for anyone to solve and the whole thing feels hopeless.  This book is about the amazing journey of a bird, but  it’s also about the trouble his fellow birds are in.  I don’t know what to do about that and dealt with my despair by putting the book down and never picking it up again.

Also, I found the prose rather breathless.  And that annoyed me.

Matt and I trade off chapters when we read aloud, usually a chapter of my book and an equal number of pages in his.  My book was the 512-page novel the Art of Fielding.  That meant we burned through a lot of his books this month because graphic novel pages blow by much more quickly than novel pages.

Read
Vision Quest
Terry Davis
I absolutely adored this book when I read it in high school, so much so that it was one of the “books of my growing up” that I stored away in a trunk as I packed up my childhood after high school graduation.  There is also a horrendous movie version, which I don’t recommend.

I didn’t love it as much this time through, but could see why I liked it at an earlier age.  The book took place 20 years before my high school experience and the main character’s life was so much freer than mine was.  His parents were happily divorced, he had a girlfriend who was older, she lived with him, which was absolutely  no big deal, they had a lot of sex which was also no big deal.  The two of them did things totally alien to me like spending the night in the car with the heater running so they could watch the deer come by.  It was a completely different world and I couldn’t figure out why my life didn’t look more like that.

My criticism of this book at my current age (20 years out from when I read it, 40 years out from the book’s setting) is that there is absolutely no conflict.  The main character is great, the girlfriend is great, the dad is great, the wrestling buddies are great, the coaches are great, the wrestling opponents are great, and so on.  That said, I’m guessing this book developed out of a series of essays, because there are some great “living in Spokane, Washington” vignettes which are quite delightful.  It’s also fun to read about the wrestling practices, matches and preparations   I checked to see if Terry Davis had written anything else because I think he’s a good writer, and there are a few that I may check out.

Hey Buddy
Peter Bagge
Matt and I read aloud.
The art in this book was interesting, but I didn’t particularly like, well, anyone and thus was happy when it was over.  Nice slice of life of early 90s Seattle, though, if you are interested.

The  Order of the Stick Coloring Book
Rich Burlew
Matt and I read aloud
Matt insists I review this coloring book.  So here is my review.
Thank goodness Matt had the foresight to give to the Kickstarter campaign which paid handsomely in many ways that I heard about for a good two months, including this remarkable coloring book.  Some people may scoff (as I did, when Matt reviewed this volume) at including a simple coloring book on Goodreads, but clearly those people have not experienced the depth, drama and pathos that Rich Burlew brings to every one of the 32 pages.  My life was changed by the word find, the maze and the other activities included.  My only hope is that there are more coloring books forthcoming from Mr. Burlew in the future as his clear sense of talent shines through.

What’s Michael
Makoto Kobayashi
Matt and I read aloud.
Excellent depiction of cats in graphic novel form.  I don’t like people teasing cats, even in graphic novel form, so I was not a fan of a few of the stories (scaring Michael by wearing a Godzilla mask, for instance) but Kobayashi manages to capture the essence of cat wonderfully.

The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbauch
Matt and I read aloud.
I loved this book so much when I read it earlier this year that I blew through it in a matter of days.  How could I enjoy it even more?  By reading it aloud with my boyfriend.  It was a very long read aloud, but nearly all 512 pages of the book are delightful and this time I was forced to move slowly through the book, savoring each chapter.   My one complaint is that I always read the odd numbered chapters and in this book many of the odd numbered chapters are quite short in comparison to the even numbered ones.  Although, I did get the payoff at the end of the book, getting to read all 20 pages of the chapter with the big game, so I was pretty happy in the end.  I will repeat my hearty recommendation of this book.  You need to read it, even if you don’t like baseball.

Code Name Verity
Elizabeth Wein
Read for Mock Printz
I’m kind of done with WWII fiction, but I had to read this because it was on the Mock Printz list so read it I did.  And I am so glad!  While most WWII fiction is weighty and depressing (yes, I know, it’s not really a cheery topic) this book starts with a firecracker of a main character narrating in the first person.  She’s been captured in Vichy France and is being tortured for information.  Grim, right?  But her headstrong spirit blasts by the treatment by her captors and she overwhelms you with the narrative.

She’s so compelling a character, you might be tempted to read more quickly to find out what happens, but I urge you to pay attention because you are going to need the information she is telling you later in the book.  This novel is intricately plotted, has two young women as the main characters and you get a glimpse into women serving in the British military during the war.  I’m giving this book a rare five star review because it was the perfect book.  Highly Recommended.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chboski
I saw the movie first and felt so-so about it, but the book was a much better medium for this story.  It’s a brief book–perhaps designed for teenagers’ famously short attention spans?–and written entirely in letter form which didn’t come though the movie process so well but worked nicely on the page.  Not surprisingly.  It’s a nice slice of life from a time period that is familiar to me, so I enjoyed it.

The Drowned Cities
Paolo Bacigalupi
Read for Mock Printz
I found this a bit of a slog, due to the brutality of the conditions the characters lived in, but the characters themselves were interesting and it was fun to imagine a swampy Washington DC overrun by warlords.

Tiger Lily
Jodi Lynna Anderson
Read for Mock Printz
Not just a quality female retelling of a traditionally male-centered classic (Peter Pan) but also incredibly well-written, and perfectly captures first love.  I really loved this book in a “skip reading the newspaper so I can read more of the book” sort of way.  That doesn’t happen often.

Started and did not finish
I Hunt Killers
Barry Lyga
This was on a preliminary Mock Printz list so I got a head start on my reading by diving in to this book. But it turned out that it didn’t make the final list.  I was glad, because I wasn’t enjoying the topic: teenage son of a famous serial killer investigates what appears to be a new serial killer on the loose in his town.  There is some good identity formation stuff here, but I’m not a fan of the torture of women, even if it is mostly alluded to, rather than described.

Yes!  Only five books read!  This month has a nice selection of fiction/non/mystery/play and even a frustrated surrender.

Read
Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman
Matt and I read aloud.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a Neil Gaiman book and this was a nice introduction.  I loved the London setting and the fantasy element was just right.

Broken Habor
Tana French
This was another great Tana French novel, I would probably rank it second on the list. (Here’s my rundown:  The Likeness; Broken Harbor; In the Woods; Faithful Place) I had great empathy for the main character and loved how French knows just how to twist the plot at just the right moment.

The Man Who Quit Money
Mark Sundeen
Interesting insight into a guy who hasn’t used money since the early 2000s.

The Crying Tree
Naseem Rakha
Read for Kenton Book Group
This was an okay book, mostly it was a relief to be able to read it after attempting and giving up on the September selection and slogging through–though ultimately loving–the August selection.  In comparison to Midnight’s Children and Jane Eyre, this was a breeze.  I found the writing to be so-so in places, and I sometimes found the characters a bit cliched, but it was a good enough book.

10/16/12–This just in!  Thanks to the Library, our book group was visited by Naseem Rakha, the author of the book and she was rather mesmerizing.  Listening to her talk about her experiences as a reporter and her experiences with people surrounding the death penalty issue gave me a deeper appreciation of the book.  Thanks to the Library and thanks to Ms. Rakha for talking tonight.

Measure for Measure
Wm. Shakespeare
Boy howdy, but I have completely fallen off the horse on the “read before you see” project as we watched Northwest Classical Theater company perform this in the spring.  I did not love this play, with so much moral quandary and double crossing.

Started and did not finish
Midnight’s Children
Soloman Rushdie
Book Group Selection.
I’ve not read any Rushdie before and I still haven’t read any.  I made it to page 94 before giving up.  The prose was too dense, the setting too foreign, the plot too plodding.  Except for one person, the other eight of us in the group didn’t finish this book.  I’ve heard Rushdie’s essays are good, perhaps I will investigate those.

Yes!  A mere six books finished this month!  And with three weeks off from work!  Good job me!

Read
Are You My Mother
Alison Bechdel
This was beautifully drawn and pretty hard to slog through.  Alison Bechdel has done a lot of therapy and thinking about herself.  Her story is sort of interesting, sort of annoying.  Parts are rather funny, but the whole thing is very cerebral, in a distancing way.

The World of Downton Abbey
Jessica Fellowes
This was a “companion book” to the TV series which I totally grabbed from the “Lucky Day” shelf at the library and enjoyed.  Aside from insights about the actors, the book also examined different facets of society and related them to the characters we saw in the series.  It was the kind of “history-lite” learning I enjoy.

Why We Broke Up
Daniel Handler
Matt and I read aloud.
Reading this out loud is a perfect way to capture Handler’s fabulous prose.  I liked it the second time just as much as the first.

Specials
Scott Westerfield
It may have been the wait between the last book and this one or it may be that it took me too long to read it, but I found this book to be less compelling than the first two.  The elements were there, but they had grown stale.

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Read for Kenton Book Group.
By the time I got to the end of this book, I loved it.  This book has everything!  And I mean everything!  At one point I challenged Matt to tell me any fiction plot point that didn’t involve guns or sci/fi and that it would be in Jane Eyre.  And it was!  We played that game for 45 minutes and every plot point he mentioned was in the book which was doubly interesting because he was mostly recounting plots from comic books.  I realized that the book had everything in it when Jane Eyre goes on what would now be termed as a “shopping spree” near the end of the book.

That said, I had trouble getting in to the book. The dense prose and archaic vocabulary was off-putting before I realized that I love dense prose in modern books, why not love it in this one.  Still, I think if I hadn’t been on vacation, I might not have finished this.   And wouldn’t I have missed out?

The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
While I adored Middlesex I found this to be incredibly “eh.”  None of the characters caught my attention which is often the kiss of death for me and a book.  There were some amusing observations here and there, so that was nice, but overall, I was not a fan.

Started and did not finish.
Prince Caspian
C.S. Lewis.
Yep.  I’m throwing in the towel on this series. I just don’t care enough.

Moneyball.
Maybe if I had not already seen the movie I would be more interested in this book?  But the movie so nicely sums things up, I just let this book go after a bit.

Hah! Only 7 books read this month despite being on vacation for a week.  Could some sort of balance be returning to my reading schedule?  Let’s hope so.  Maybe next month I will only read five books.

Read
Bossypants. 
Tina Fey 
I’ve been staring at this book in the Lucky Day section at my library for many months and I just last week noticed that the hands on the cover are man hands and not hers at all.  I would make a horrible FBI agent as noticing is not my thing.  


This is a very funny book, which I read at the same time I read Sleepwalk with Me by Mike Bribigla and while reading both books my laughter echoed through the house often, causing much commentary by Matt. I spared him the reading aloud of multiple pages, but he would have been the better for it.


The thing I liked about this memoir was that it was full of great stories, but Tina Fey still keeps her secrets.  Her reasons why she does not talk about the attack that gave her the scar on her face was one of the most brilliantly reasoned passages I have read in a memoir and I admired how we continually heard about her ongoing state of virginity, but she never tells us the details of when she crossed that milestone.  Tina Fey is a classy lady and proof that feminists and funny are not exclusive.


Sleepwalk with Me
Mike Bribigla
This was sitting on the shelf of the library right next to Bossypants and I grabbed them both.  Both were laugh-out-loud funny.  Some of this book were things expanded from bits I heard of Bribiglia’s act, some were stories new to me.  I loved reading his response to review published in student publications and his tour of college campuses of the northwest.  Matt got to hear that one read aloud.


Plain Kate
Erin Bow
This falls into the “YA strong female protagonist” genre that is publishing like mad right now.  The story was compelling, but perhaps a little too dark for me.


The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Douglas Adams
Read aloud.
The saga of Ford Prefect and Arthur continues as they bring along Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox.  High-jinx ensue, pithy observations are made and funny things happen.

Wonder
R.J. Palacio
Thanks to Sara, I read one of the best books of the year.  This is the story of a deformed child entering a middle school after being home schooled through elementary school.  It’s the awkward middle school transition we all got to experience, but times one-thousand.  The writing is wry and compelling and the characters were very multidimensional.  I am hoping this will win some prizes.

Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
Read for Book Group
Eh.  The prose was dry, the forbidding sense of doom became annoying really quickly and I didn’t really like any of the characters.  That  said, it was an interesting glimpse into homosexuality in Paris in the 1950s.  And I was the only one at book group who didn’t like it.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
So I’m still not sure about Murakami.  As with 1Q84, I enjoyed reading the book, it sort of put me in an altered state.  But when I finished I was again wondering if that was all there was.  I’ll read another of Murakami and maybe that will help me decide if I like him or not.  Or maybe I’ll read all of his books and still have the same feeling.

Started and did not finish.
The Horse and His Boy
C.S. Lewis
Oh god, this series is boring.  Stay tuned to see if I make it through all the books.

Ah-hah!  Only 3 YA (and younger) books this month!

Read
Gay Romance Novel #1
Jan Wilson
My friend gave me a draft of her novel to read.  I loved it!  I’ll let you know when it becomes available for all of you to read.

Pretties
Scott Westerfeld
This is the second book in the Uglies series, we follow along with Tally’s adventures and moral quandaries.  The ending had me reserving the next book in the series.  Unfortunately, there is a line, and it’s proving to be quite long.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Read aloud.
I’ve not read this since Junior High and I greatly enjoyed revisiting the story.

The Sisters Brothers
Patrick DeWitt
I did not like this book and I spent a lot of time wondering why.  I liked the main character, he was quite sympathetic.  The plot was interesting, and the writing quite good.  The San Francisco Gold Rush setting was  to my liking.  But I never took to it, though I read all the way to the end.

Chloe and the Lion
Mac Burnett & Adam Rex
Funny!  This was recommended by my friend Sara and I got it from the library even though it was a picture book and I don’t usually spend time reading them.  I read it and spent ten minutes laughing out loud alone in the house. Laughing out loud while reading by myself is always an odd pleasure for me.  There’s the laughter, which is great, but then the kind of creepy feeling that I might be a little crazy. After I enjoyed it, I insisted that Matt read it.  Now I’m insisting that you do too. It will take 10 minutes.  Laughter is good for you. Maybe you can read it aloud to someone so you can both laugh together and avoid the creepy feeling.  Just do it.

Women of the Silk
Gail Tsukiyama
Read for Kenton Book Club
This was okay.  I liked that it had a setting that was foreign to me.  I liked that it was about women.  The silk work was interesting.  Other than that, the book never grabbed me.  What was interesting was that during the book group discussion, most of the women did not like the book and most of the men did.  Several people in book group (men and women) had read Samuri Gardens by the same author and recommended that book over this one. I shall perhaps see what that is all about.

Arcadia
Lauren Goff
I greatly enjoyed the author’s earlier works, the Monsters of Templeton, and was happy to read this new novel about Bit, a child growing up on a commune during the 1970s.  The book is divided into four sections, checking in with Bit at four different ages.  I found the first two to be the most compelling.  The last two sections were not as magical as the first two, but that might have been by design.  It was still a good read, with some quite funny observations of 1970s hippie culture.

Sister
Rosmund Lupton
Gripping mystery set in London.  A friend at work read it, recommended it to myself and another friend at work and we all read it within a week of each other so we could have a mini book discussion group.

Mockingjay
Suzanne Collins
Matt and I read aloud.
As before, the gripping ending to the story.  In the end, everything works out.  It’s just rough going getting there.

Dear Photograph
Taylor Jones
This is a great concept that became popular because of the internet, but which I discovered in the book store.  The discovery in a bricks-and-mortar store over the bits and bytes cheers me.  At any rate, some of the entries are incredibly moving.  This is also one of those good books where you needn’t read much to read it, as it is mostly photos.


Started and did not finish.
I finished everything I started this month.