Year in Review

I've been doing my Summer Reading Project for a few years now, but since I graduated, I realized I had so much more time for reading that I wanted to keep recording it through the year.

I started this blog at the end of August and retroactively put up all of my summer reviews to start it off. Then I started reading like crazy, apparently! It really amazes me that for the past two months I've read two books per week, and most of them fairly long books at that.

Not counting all of the books I read for my spring semester classes (and there were a lot!), I read 41 books in eight months. Thus, using my math-jitsu skills, I'm going to set next year's goal at the same pace, 60 books in one year. I think I can totally do it.

Without further ado, because lists are awesome...

2008, in review
Books read: 41
Favorites:
The Sparrow (Rating: 9.5/10)
The Likeness (Rating: 10/10)
In the Woods (Rating: 9.0/10)
The Palace of Illusions (Rating: 9/10)
Right Ho, Jeeves (Rating: 9/10)
New favorite authors: Tana French and Jasper Fforde
Authors I'll be keeping an eye on: Mary Doria Russell, John Green, Neil Gaiman


Month by Month

May
Books read: 3
Favorite: The Philosopher's Apprentice (Rating: 8/10)

June
Books read: 4
Favorite: The Palace of Illusions (Rating: 9/10)

July
Books read: 2
Favorite: Storm Front (Rating: 8/10)

August
Books read: 6
Favorite: Right Ho, Jeeves (Rating: 9/10)

September
Books read: 5
Favorite: The Sparrow (Rating: 9.5/10)

October
Books read: 5
Favorite: Misery (Rating: 8/10)

November
Books read: 8
Favorite: The Likeness (Rating: 10/10)

December
Books read: 8
Favorite: The Shadow of the Wind (Rating: 8/10)

My New Year's resolution for this blog is to do a wrap-up at the end of every month. Maybe I can keep this one!

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman (27 December — 28 December)

Ah, a nice quick read to cleanse the mind. I borrowed the movie version of Stardust from the library maybe a month or two ago and loved it, so I obviously had to go out and get the book, which had to be better.

It wasn't. But it wasn't worse, either. Just different and equally awesome.

Stardust, the book, is a wonderful fairy tale. Tristran Thorn, who lives in the English town of Wall and doesn't know that he is the product of a liaison between his father and a woman who lives on the other side of the wall, in Faerie (apparently because he can't do math), falls in love with a Wall girl called Victoria and promises to bring Victoria the shooting star they've just sighted. He goes on a journey into Faerie and finds the star, which happens to look rather like a beautiful and ticked-off woman, and sets to bringing her back to his town. Unbeknownst to him, there are several other people looking for the star as well, for their own nefarious purposes, making his trip a bit more difficult.

Although I liked the theatrics of the movie quite a bit (who doesn't like Robert DeNiro in a dress, eh?), I also appreciated the simplicity of Gaiman's novel. Things happen, they're taken care of, good wins out over evil without having to try terribly hard.

Rating: 8/10

p.s. This was my first foray into Gaiman. What should be my second?

My Year of Reading Dangerously

You know me, I like to live on the edge a little... or not, probably, but I'd say reading dangerous books is the safest way to do it! As such, I'm joining in on the My Year of Reading Dangerously challenge and sticking to banned/challenged books that I've been meaning to read forever.

The goal is to read 12 books over the whole of next year. Here is my preliminary list of books I think I might read, though we'll see how that goes. Please give me suggestions!

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson


Books I've actually read:
1. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (Review)
2. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (Review)
3. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, by J.K. Rowling (Review)
4. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (Review)
5. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (Review)
6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky (Review)
7. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (Review)
8. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman (Review)
9. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (Review)
10. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding (Review)
11. The Bermudez Triangle, by Maureen Johnson (Review)
12. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (Review)

Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (19 October − 27 December)

Good job, Alison! I finally (finally!) finished this book, which, as you can see, I've been working on for two months. Now, obviously, I've read maybe a few other books since I've started this one, so two months is not terribly pathetic, but it certainly feels like I've been reading this forever.

Pillars of the Earth tells the stories of a whole bunch of interconnected people — Tom, whose life goal is to be master builder on a cathedral; Phillip, a monk in a small cell who hopes to make his priory strong; William, whose marriage to a girl called Aliena is called off by the girl herself and who decides to take revenge on, well, everyone; Aliena, who vows to right the wrongs done to her family; and Jack, who loves Aliena from the moment he meets her. It's all set over many years in the 1100s and brings in a lot of history, like the fighting between King Stephen and Empress Maud and later the murder of Thomas Becket.

It's really very good. The problem I had with it is that it's just so long! At 983 pages, it's definitely the longest novel I've ever read. I just could not focus on it for more than an hour at a time when I started it, so I relegated it to my at-work bathroom reading since the book is surprisingly small and easier to fit in my bag than many of the books I read. Hooray mass-market paperbacks.

Brilliantly, though, and as I would have hated had I read this more quickly, Follett spends more than a few sentences of the novel reminding the reader what has happened in the past. I caught myself a few times going, "Oh, right, Ellen did curse that fellow at the beginning of the novel!" and such.

You should read this if you have a few months to spare, or a long weekend with nothing to do.

Rating: 7/10

Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher (20 December — 27 December)

This is the first of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series, not about wizards for hire but about a fantasy world where people can control the elements through spirits called furies.

In this first book we meet Amara, a Cursor (still not clear exactly what that means) of the First Lord of the Aleran people. She is performing her Academy graduation exercise of infiltrating a rebel camp and finding out what they are planning when she is thwarted by an unexpected source — her mentor, who has been by her side in planning the investigation but also by the side of the rebels in leading Amara into a trap. She escapes to the Calderon Valley, where...

Tavi, a teenager who is well past the age for coming into furies but who does not have any. Tavi has let some of the sheep from his uncle Bernard's farm stay out all night, impressing a girl instead of herding them as he is meant to, but when he and Bernard go to find them in the morning, they find instead a Marat soldier, something not seen in the Calderon Valley for years. Bernard is nearly killed and Tavi must figure out how to survive a violent storm and return to the farm to warn everyone of the impending danger.

Along the way he meets up with Amara, she explains what's going on, and adventures are had, as they are in any good fantasy book.

I quite liked this book. The pacing was decent, the plot connected well, and the characters were interesting. There wasn't any of the "and then Tavi comes into his furies right when he needs them most!" that I was expecting, and little details fell into place really well. I especially appreciated the fact that the book was only 450 pages long, because those epic novels (see next post) can get a little tedious. Butcher cut out the fat but left in all the tasty protein (whoo metaphor!) I was looking for.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2004)

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne (18 December)

Well. Hmm. I was home sick yesterday and watched about 12 episodes of How I Met Your Mother (awesome show, btw) instead of starting this book. I felt silly at the time (I haven't spent so much time watching TV since I had finals to procrastinate!), but I think I'm pretty glad I didn't read this until I felt less like vomiting.

Note: John Boyne (the author) thinks that books should be read without knowing what's going to happen in them. In the case of this book, I would agree. If you're planning to read this with or without my notes, please go do that now. It won't take long.

This is a very short book (200 pages of large type, YA reading level, took me 3-ish hours to read), so I can't say much about it without giving away the whole darn thing, but here's a synopsis: our protagonist, Bruno, moves to a place called "Out-With" in 1943 as his father, a newly promoted commandant, has been assigned to a new job there. He's not terribly pleased at leaving Berlin, but learns to get along in his new home with only three floors and not five, especially after he goes on a walk along the fence by his house and discovers a new friend called Shmuel, who wears striped pyjamas* like the rest of the people on his side of the fence. Then the climax happens and the book is over.

When I heard about this book, I didn't realize it was YA (and apparently young YA, at that), so I guess I was expecting a little bit better characterization and plot — the characters are very flat and the plot saves itself all up until the end — but I did rather enjoy it nonetheless. I also would like to see the movie (is it out yet/still?), because I think that might help me out a bit — the author also doesn't do much with descriptions, though I think there might be a point hidden in there about all of us being the same. Subtle.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

*So this book is totally supposed to be called The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but for some reason (the fact that it's YA?) it's been Americanized to "pajamas." Strangely enough, the word "tyre" appears several times, and two instances of "pyjamas" are left unchanged. Is that "y" so difficult?

Looking for Alaska, by John Green (13 December — 16 December)

I'd been pondering purchasing a John Green novel for a certain friend of a certain name, but I didn't want to do that if the book turned out to suck. So I was going to read the book first, but then I found out that it was Green's second book, and you know how much I dislike reading things out of order (lest I read the best things first, Jodi Picoult, cough).

So, even though Looking for Alaska has sod-all to do with that certain other book (okay, whatever, it's called An Abundance of Katherines, like you didn't Google it already), I popped in a request to the library and found out that it's somehow quicker to get books from places two counties to the west of me than from my own friggin' library. A complaint for another time.

Back to the book! The titular Alaska is a girl called Alaska Young, who befriends our hero, Miles Halter (whose name I had to look up because he is called "Pudge" pretty much everywhere else in the novel), who has just arrived at boarding school to seek his "Great Perhaps." Pudge falls in love with this girl, who is kind of bipolar but also super awesome. SOMETHING BIG HAPPENS in the middle of the novel, which you know is coming because the little chapter sections are all labelled, like, "one hundred thirty-six days before" and "the last day" and "one hundred thirty-six days after" (see the symmetry!), but you have (or I, at least, had) no idea what that's going to be until it does happen.

This is definitely one of those bildungsroman novels, and it has one of those overarching morals based on death and dying (Pudge is obsessed with people's last words), and it is really quite good. The book is funny at times, sad at times, and definitely reminded me of coming to college and having to meet all new people and fit in. I just wished I'd pulled a prank or two like these guys. :)

Also, there's a preview of that other book at the end of this one, and I totally have to read that, too.

Also also, John Green has worked for mental_floss and NPR, so really, you know he can't be all bad.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005)

Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi (7 December — 11 December)

I'd seen this book making its way around the various blogs I read, and everyone seemed to like it, so I picked it up from the library. It's not quite what I was expecting, but it was definitely good.

This is a book in Scalzi's Old Man's War series, but I haven't read those so I can't comment too much on how it fits in, except that Scalzi writes in his acknowledgements that the book runs parallel to the events of The Last Colony. Sweet, I guess?

This novel is the story of Zoë Boutin Perry, a teenager who is part of the first colony of colonists — where her planet was settled by people from Earth, she and a bunch of people from other planets are settling a new one. The problems start when the Colonial Union, who is sanctioning this colonization, informs the travellers that they are being hunted by a group called the Conclave who don't want anybody but themselves colonizing anything.

Things get worse from there, with all of the colonists forced to give up on electronics (gasp!) and the weird animals of the new planet — Roanoke — trying to kill the settlers and vice versa. Zoë is also told by her bodyguards (read the book!) that she may personally be being hunted, so she has to step up for some intensive combat training in addition to school and founding a civilization without a PDA.

I liked the book quite a bit; it was very light-hearted and definitely sounded like it was narrated by a teenager. And Scalzi really makes the characters real. I had cried twice by the end of the book, and I don't care what you think! I will definitely have to pick up Old Man's War at some point in the future.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2 December — 7 December)

This book was on my "To Read" list two summers ago, but didn't make it onto this year's list, probably because I couldn't remember why it was on my list in the first place — that's the problem with having so many good books out there! But, fortunately (or was it fate...), I saw it again on another blog and was reminded that I wanted to read it because it was a book about books. So brilliant, right?

Very right.

So our protagonist is Daniel Sempere, a boy living in Barcelona just after the Spanish Civil War. His father, a bookseller, takes his almost-11-year-old son to a place called the Cemetary of Forgotten Books, where Daniel is told to select a book that he will adopt to make sure it never disappears and will always stay alive.

Daniel finds a book called The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax, which turns out to be pretty much the best book Daniel's ever read. When he learns that Carax's books have been forgotten not just because of their limited publishing but because a mysterious stranger, going by the name of Shadow's protagonist, has been collecting and burning the novels, Daniel sets off to find out the truth behind the rumors of Carax's life.

I very much liked this book. It is a translation from the original Spanish, so a few of the turns of phrase are a bit awkward, and a couple things don't quite line up, fact-wise, but all in all the book has a solid plot and an excellent story. I have to say also that I had the big twists figured out from the beginning, but I still had an excellent time finding out just why those twists happened. There are so many lives intertwined in this story, and all of them are interesting.

Rating: 8/10

The Tenth Circle, by Jodi Picoult (29 November — 1 December)

You know, I really don't know why I keep reading Jodi Picoult. I mean, My Sister's Keeper was awesome, and so were a couple other of her novels, but after reading something like six or seven of them those fancy plot twists are getting a little predictable and also contrived and annoying.

And yet I still enjoy them. I think it's the same love I have for watching Law and Order on Sunday nights... I know that I'm probably not going to learn anything in the end, but it's just so nice to let the story flow over me.

This one, though, I don't know. It's about a 14-year-old girl called Trixie (no, really) who gets dumped by her boyfriend, Jason, and then has some breakup sex with him at her friend Zephyr's (no, REALLY) party, after not playing a game of "let's be whores and give everyone blowjobs."

That's where the bad started, I think. The book was written in 2006, so this girl and her schoolmates would be around my brother's age, and unless things really changed in three years or that's just how they do it up in Maine, I can't really be convinced that giving blowjobs is a party game. I guess maybe my brother and I just weren't popular enough to be whores. Crying shame, that.

But! Taking that as fact, we then have Trixie coming home and declaring that Jason raped her. Okay, that sucks. And since Jason is the star of the hockey team, everyone (including 13 anonymous teachers at their high school) supports Jason over Trixie. That's also bad news.

Oh, and at the same time, Trixie's dad, Daniel, is coming to terms with the fact that his wife had an affair and also penning a comic book/graphic novel (not really clear which) called The Tenth Circle about a dad who loses his daughter to hell and has to find her with the help of Virgil. Did I mention that his wife is teaching a class on Dante? And, of course, Daniel is also worried that his wild, ass-kicking past is going to come back in full force if he ever has to see Jason.

There's just... there's a lot here. And while the story is definitely engrossing, as are all of Picoult's stories, it's just not satisfying in the end.

Well. Anyway. To be honest, I really should have stopped reading when Picoult claimed there were yellow Pixy Stix. Let's get some fact-checking up in here, people.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde (25 November — 28 November)

Something Rotten is the last of the first four books of the Thursday Next series... I figure that since Jasper took a few years off, I can take a break now, too. :)

This was definitely a great conclusion for the set... basically, a whole bunch of odd things that happened in the previous books were recalled and sometimes explained here, and, of course, even more odd things happened!

It's a hard book to summarize, though, because so much of what happens here is tied to things that happened in other books — a fictional character comes to power, Thursday's husband is reactualized (or is he?), Thursday's friend's wife is an assassin out to kill Thursday... yeah.

The new things in the story are a plot by the aforementioned fictional leader to convince England to hate Denmark, going so far as to claim that Volvos are both unsafe and Danish; Thursday's acquisition of the Swindon Mallets croquet team which needs to win the SuperHoop to take down the Goliath Corporation; and that Thursday needs to find a new Shakespeare to rewrite Hamlet after its characters wreak havoc on the piece.

Basically, if you've liked the previous books, read this one. But do not under any circumstances read this first.

Rating: 7.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2004)

The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde (22 November — 25 November)

The Well of Lost Plots is the third book in the wonderful Thursday Next series in which our hero, Thursday, vanquishes foes who seek to upend literature.

The previous book focused on time travelling; this one is mostly about book travelling. Thursday has entered the world of Jurisfiction, those in charge of policing the fiction shelves both published and in progress, and is at the same time taking a respite from the Goliath Corporation who are still out to get her. She and her pregnant tummy are hiding out in an unpublished book called Caversham Heights until Thursday can figure out how to get her husband back — if she can remember him.

Yeah, it's pretty much that confusing. Thursday is also out to solve the mystery of several dead and missing Jurisfiction agents and requite the love of two generic characters. I love it.

It wasn't quite up to the standard of the first two books — a little too much babying of the reader with unnecessary repetition, and also a few too many typos! — but it was definitely intriguing enough (along with those two books) to cause me to move the next book, Something Rotten up to my new current read. Then I'm going to have to take a break from all the alternate universe-ing, I think. :-D

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2003)

The Likeness, by Tana French (18 November — 21 November)

Just go read this book right now. Seriously. Well, actually, read In the Woods first, and then read this one.

The Likeness is vaguely related to its predecessor, In the Woods, in that the main character in this new one, Cassie Maddox, was a secondary character in the first one and sometimes references the events of the first book. You could definitely read them out of order, but I really think I liked this one so much because of the way it follows off the first.

Anyway, what we have here is Cassie Maddox, a recent-ish transfer from Dublin's murder squad to its domestic violence squad, called in on a murder case because, well, the girl that got murdered looks exactly like her. Also, the girl is identified as Lexie Madison, the name that Cassie used during an undercover operation a long time ago. Cassie is naturally drawn to the weird coincidence of it all, and when her old undercover boss asks her to pretend to be a recovered Lexie for a while to find out who killed her, Cassie's in.

It's not easy, of course; Lexie lived with her four best friends who knew nearly everything about each other, and it could have been one of them who stabbed Lexie. As Cassie settles in to her undercover role, she also settles in to her Lexie role and loses that objectivity that is so necessary to solving the case.

This book. Was. AWESOME. Whenever I wasn't reading it, I was wondering what was happening to Cassie and how the heck she was going to pull it off. I was very seriously anxious about getting back to read the book as soon as possible. If that's not a good recommendation, I don't know what is.

Rating: 10/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher (16 November)

Man, what a crappy weekend for reading. I mean, it was a good one in that I read about 700 pages and finished two books this weekend, but I was really disappointed by those books.

This one especially! Grave Peril is the third in Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, and I very much enjoyed the first two books. Sadly, this one just did not work for me.

The plot here is that Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire, gets drawn into a case where ghosts are attacking people, someone is probably attacking the ghosts, and there's a demon that attacks people in their nightmares. Not a bad premise.

But! There are about eleventy bajillion red herrings in the book that don't all sort themselves out in the end, there's at least one continuity error, and in the end everything is solved by love or something stupid like that. Butcher is an engaging writer, for sure, and I definitely wanted to know what happened in the end, but then it was stupid and I was sad. It's sort of like when VeggieTales is on TV and you know that there's going to be a corny tie-in to God at the end of the episode, but those vegetables are just so darn cute that you keep watching it anyway.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series in the hopes that it will get better, but if it doesn't I guess I'm done. Sigh.

Rating: 6/10

The Countdown Challenge

Another challenge that seems fun and easy! This one requires participants to read nine books published in 2009, eight published in 2008, etc., back to one from 2001. It runs from 8 August 2008 to 9 September 2009, so I'm getting in a bit late, but I think I can handle it since I mostly read newer books anyway!

My list (45/45)

2009 (9/9)
1. The Pluto Files, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Review)
2. Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell (Review)
3. We'll Always Have Paris, by Ray Bradbury (Review)
4. The Composer is Dead, by Lemony Snicket (Review)
5. The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (Review)
6. Fool, by Christopher Moore (Review)
7. The City and The City, by China Miéville (Review)
8. Free Agent, by Jeremy Duns (Review)
9. Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke (Review)

2008 (8/8)
1. Dictation, by Cynthia Ozick (Review)
2. Superior Saturday, by Garth Nix (Review)
3. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Review)
4. The Likeness, by Tana French (Review)
5. Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi (Review)
6. Just After Sunset, by Stephen King (Review)
7. When We Were Romans, by Matthew Kneale (Review)
8. Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory (Review)

2007 (7/7)
1. In the Woods, by Tana French (Review)
2. First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
3. The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond (Review)
4. The Last Colony, by John Scalzi (Review)
5. The Book of Murder, by Guillermo Martínez (Review)
6. Bookhunter, by Jason Shiga (Review)
7. Captain's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)

2006 (6/6)
1. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Review)
2. The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (Review)
3. The Tenth Circle, by Jodi Picoult (Review)
4. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne (Review)
5. The Adventuress, by Audrey Niffenegger (Review)
6. Cursor's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)

2005 (5/5)
1. The Twelfth Card, by Jeffery Deaver (Review)
2. Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (Review)
3. Looking for Alaska, by John Green (Review)
4. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi (Review)
5. Academ's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)

2004 (4/4)
1. Afterlife, by Douglas Clegg (Review)
2. Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
3. Furies of Calderon, by Jim Butcher (Review)
4. Cadillac Beach, by Tim Dorsey (Review)

2003 (3/3)
1. The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
2. Out, by Natsuo Kirino (Review)
3. The Weatherman's Daughters, by Richard Hoyt (Review)

2002 (2/2)
1. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
2. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman (Review)

2001 (1/1)
1. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde (Review)

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (10 November — 16 November)

I put this book on hold at the library some very long time ago, after I heard an interview with the author on NPR and thought the book sounded decent. I finally got it last week, and was possibly over-excited to read it.

The premise of the book is a sort of updated version of Hamlet. Edgar Sawtelle is a mute 14-year-old who breeds dogs with his family in far northern Wisconsin. His uncle, Claude, comes back into the family after a long leave of absence, but sibling rivalry sort of explodes and Edgar's father, Gar, sends Claude away. Soon enough, though, Gar ends up dead in the kennel and Claude starts moving in on his sister-in-law. Gar's ghost tells Edgar that Claude is the murderer, but Edgar can't tell anyone — not just because he can't speak but because he's pretty sure they won't believe him.

More Hamlet happens — the Polonius character dies, Edgar goes off on an adventure, et cetera.

And I think that's my problem with the book. I liked the beginning of the novel, wherein we learned about training dogs and Edgar's relationship with his mother. I liked the part when Edgar runs away and has a great woodsy adventure with his dogs. But I didn't like the parts where I said to myself, "Oh, look, Polonius is dead now! And hey, I thought Laertes was supposed to kill Hamlet!"

Ah, well. It doesn't follow Hamlet to the letter (see Laertes comment), so there's quite a bit of wondering how the plot will turn out, which is good. And those parts that I liked, I really did like. I just don't think that the book as a whole really fit together well.

Definitely a good read if you're a Hamlet scholar or dog enthusiast.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

Support Your Local Library Challenge

This looks fun and easy! J. Kaye at J. Kaye's Book Blog is hosting this challenge, wherein you read books from the library. Simple, yes? The challenge is for 2009, so I can't start counting all of the library books I have right now, but as soon as New Year's rolls around I'll be keeping track of the ones I've read at this post. I'm going to commit to 50 books since that's about how many I expect to read next year and I tend to get my books from the library anyway.

1. First Among Sequels, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
2. The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond (Review)
3. The Adventuress, by Audrey Niffenegger (Review)
4. Out, by Natsuo Kirino (Review)
5. Plain Truth, by Jodi Picoult (Review)
6. Just After Sunset, by Stephen King (Review)
7. When We Were Romans, by Matthew Kneale (Review)
8. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi (Review)
9. Academ's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)
10. The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
11. Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell (Review)
12. Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory (Review)
13. Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (Review)
14. Coraline, by Neil Gaiman (Review)
15. Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn (Review)
16. The Drunkard's Walk, by Leonard Mlodinow (Review)
17. Cursor's Fury, by Jim Butcher (Review)
18. The Pluto Files, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Review)
19. Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell (Review)
20. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (Review)
21. The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi (Review)
22. Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black (Review)
23. The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde (Review)
24. The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by J.K. Rowling (Review)
25. We'll Always Have Paris, by Ray Bradbury (Review)
26. The Composer is Dead, by Lemony Snicket Review)
27. The Last Colony, by John Scalzi (Review)
28. Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (Review)
29. More of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (Review)
30. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (Review)
31. The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (Review)
32. Fool, by Christopher Moore (Review)
33. Mistborn: The Final Empire, by Brandon Sanderson (Review)
34. Things That Make Us [Sic], by Martha Brockenbrough (Review)
35. Mister O, by Lewis Trondheim (Review)
36. Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld (Review)
37. La Bête Humaine, by Émile Zola (Review)
38. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green (Review)
39. The Book of Murder, by Guillermo Martínez (Review)
40. The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, by Laurie Notaro (Review)
41. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris (Review)
42. The Weatherman's Daughters, by Richard Hoyt (Review)
43. Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld (Review)
44. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?, by Maryse Condé (Review)
45. People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Review)
46. Specials, by Scott Westerfeld (Review)
47. Cause for Alarm, by Eric Ambler (Review)
48. Woman With Birthmark, by Håkan Nesser (Review)
49. The Oxford Project, by Peter Feldstein and Stephen G. Bloom (Review)
50. The City and the City, by China Miéville (Review)

Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde (8 November)

This is the second in the Thursday Next series of awesomeness, and I must say this one is even better than the first.

After sending away a Goliath Corporation employee to live in a copy of The Raven, the company is understandably upset and asks Thursday to go back and get him out, please. She refuses, and Goliath goes back in time to kill off her new husband before he can become three years old. If Thursday will go get their employee, they'll bring back her husband. She's sold. Unfortunately, her uncle Mycroft has conveniently retired away with his Prose Portal and Thursday has to figure out how to get into the book herself and also figure out why a bunch of weird coincidences keep cropping up at inconvenient moments.

The book was great and mostly easy to understand in spite of all the weird time-travelling and odd coincidences. I really love how everything ties in with books, even when the books in question are ones I haven't read yet (but should! I'll get to it!). Definitely a must-read if you're into befuddling plots and funny talks with Great Expectations characters.

Rating: 8.5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002)

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman (1 November — 5 November)

Finally! I've been meaning to read this book ever since I bought it a couple of years ago, but I've always been reading something else instead. A lull in my library book stream led me to pick it up, and I'm really glad I did.

If you've seen the movie, you pretty much know how the book goes, interruptions and all. If not...

The Princess Bride is a "classic tale of true love and high adventure" featuring the titular Buttercup, who falls in love with her farm boy, Westley. Westley leaves for America to make his fortune but his ship is taken over by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who takes no prisoners. Disconsolate, Buttercup — who also happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the world — allows herself to be engaged to the prince of Florin so long as she doesn't have to love him.

Unfortunately, that whole not-loving thing is pretty real and the new Princess finds herself kidnapped by a Sicilian, a giant Turk, and a wizard Spanish swordsman. She is also being followed by a man in black who wants to kidnap her from her kidnappers...

The greatest part of the book is its really tongue-in-cheek feel. Goldman wrote it as an abridgement of a great Florinese novel (which, of course, it's not) and there's an entire chapter devoted to talking about why he loves the book and how he ended up abridging it. He also cuts in throughout the novel to talk about why he cut 15 pages here and 87 pages there. Of course, Goldman leaves in all of the "original author's" asides, which are equally ridiculous.

I read the 25th anniversary edition, so there's also a bit in the back about Goldman abridging the sequel, Buttercup's Baby, and how Stephen King was going to do it but he said Goldman could abridge the first chapter, and then there's the first chapter, but at that point I was really just done with the conceit. Part of that first chapter is really engaging, but most of it just doesn't make any sense and I'm not sure where Goldman was going with it. Alas.

Rating: 8/10

In the Woods, by Tana French (31 October — 1 November)

What a great book! Just go read it.

Our narrator, Rob Ryan, was found in the woods at the age of twelve with blood in his shoes and without the two friends he was meant to be with. He has no memory of what happened, and has mostly gotten along in life, until now.

Now Ryan is a detective who is put on a dead-twelve-year-old case in the same tiny Ireland neighborhood he once lived in, in the same woods he was once found in. He hopes both that the case is and isn't related to his, but it doesn't really matter — this murder is practically unsolveable. All leads point to nothing, there are no suspects, and Ryan is having a bit of trouble keeping himself distanced from the case.

Of course, then something clicks and the mystery unravels, and you see all the clues you should have seen before, and the solution is pretty darn cool. I'm definitely excited to read the next in the series, The Likeness.

Rating: 9/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007)

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (25 October — 29 October)

One last book for the RIP Challenge before it ends! This one was on my original list, but I didn't think it was going to make it here in time for Hallowe'en. Luckily, it did, and I quite enjoyed it, though I thought it was going to be more scary than gothic. Alas.

The Thirteenth Tale is two stories — the main story is that of Vida Winter, a prolific author à la Stephen King or Jodi Picoult, who is dying and wants to tell someone her true life story. The second is that of Margaret Lea, the woman Vida chooses to be her biographer, who is slowly coming to terms with the secret of her twin lost at birth.

The secondary plotline I don't care for much, but Vida Winter's tale is incredibly engaging. Born into an incredibly dysfunctional family, she learns to cope with a lot of insanity and hide a few dozen secrets in the process.

I recommend this book for Vida's story alone; even though I figured out the twist halfway through I still didn't know how they'd pull it off. Well told, Setterfield.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer (13 October — 18 October)

Twilight. Oh, Twilight. I wasn't going to read this book, but I was recently visiting with my spoon (read: best friend) and she was shocked that I hadn't read it. When I left her place, I had all four books of the series in my hands and instructions to read them so that I could go see the movie with her.

And, of course, the book fit with the RIP Challenge, which I have now completed. Hurrah! My first challenge, complete.

So I read this one. And it was okay, I guess.

The premise is somewhat clichéd... girl (Bella) meets boy (Edward), boy hates girl, girl falls in love with boy, turns out boy is actually in love with girl but doesn't want to get too close because he's a vampire. Oy. There's also the usual "creating a new vampire mythology and then making fun of the girl for not knowing it" bit and the "but don't worry, we don't usually bite humans" bit.

The part I did like about the book was later on, when a second pack of non-"vegetarian" vampires comes along and one of them decides he's going to hunt Bella. Complex escape plans are made, futures are seen, minds are read, a vampire comes to kill Bella... and then nothing. All the action takes place off-screen, as it were, and the reader finds out about it through lame exposition.

If I want a vampire love story in the future, I'll just go watch Buffy. At least there are some good fight scenes there.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005)

Afterlife, by Douglas Clegg (13 October — 15 October)

I found this book on one of my local library's blogs and I thought it would make a good RIP read — it's a horror novel and it's available free online. Brilliant!

Or not so.

The novel opens with a few brief glimpses of its themes: a scene at a government school called Project Daylight, a woman suffocating, a man being killed by someone reading his thoughts.

Then we meet the main character, Julie Hutchinson, a woman with some marital problems but an undying love for her kids. We soon find out that the dead man is Julie's husband, "Hut" Hutchinson, which sucks for her. She goes through some depression about his death, seeing a shrink and trying to make sense of life without her husband. She also wants answers about his life — Was he cheating on her? To what lock do a strange set of keys belong? What really happened in the childhood he avoided talking about?

As Julie searches for answers she learns more about psychics, Project Daylight, and the weird things her husband can do, even after death.

This all sounds good, I guess, but I found it poorly executed. Clegg could have used an editor or three to clean up his sentences and check for continuity errors that can be glaring throughout the novel. I would have stopped reading it, but I really wanted to understand what was going on — but I still don't know. Sigh.

Rating: 3/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2004)

Misery, by Stephen King (4 October — 12 October)

My second book for the RIP Challenge... I'm a little bit behind in getting to four, but I think I can make it yet, as I've just started two challenge-appropriate books.

Misery is about an author called Paul Sheldon who gets into an horrific car crash and wakes up as the ward of a nurse, Annie Wilkes, who just so happens to be Paul's self-proclaimed "number one fan." Unfortunately, her love of Paul — and his series of popular fiction novels about a woman called Misery — coexists with a fragile mind that isn't prepared to let Paul go any time soon. She also has a bit of a mother mentality — when Paul does something bad, like, say, kills off Misery or tries to escape his captor, he's in for a world of hurt, both mentally and physically.

I very much liked this book. At first, I wasn't sure it would really classify as an RIP Challenge book, as there wasn't anything particularly scary or gory about the storyline, just a crazy lady keeping an author hostage. But when it started getting creepy, it was creepy. I was constantly stopping in the middle of a paragraph, looking at my man, and yelling, "This woman is CRAZY!" Let's just say I'm glad I'm not popular enough to be kidnapped any time soon.

Rating: 8/10

Keeping Faith, by Jodi Picoult (25 September — 3 October)

I love Jodi Picoult, but I did not particularly like Keeping Faith. The premise is interesting; a little girl called Faith is seeing God, even though she's been raised essentially without religion by a Jew and a Christian. She performs some awesome miracles, like bringing people back from the dead and curing a baby with AIDS. It's the rest of the book that's rough.

Faith starts seeing God after she sees her father, Colin, with another woman. Colin goes off with the other woman, Jessica, to start a new family, and leaves his wife (or, after six weeks, ex-wife), Mariah, in the dust. Mariah is a doormat and has to figure out how to live without Colin without falling into a deep depression and also has to take care of her seemingly crazy daughter.

The press gets wind of Faith, and suddenly everyone wants to meet her, from reporters to rabbis and priests to Ian Fletcher, a tele-atheist. Ian is out to prove that Faith is a hoax all while Colin is out to prove that Mariah is an unfit mother so he can get custody of his daughter.

There are a lot of stories here, just as there are in all of Picoult's other novels, but I don't think she does as good a job juggling them here. A lot of people come in and then get ignored, and some very interesting plotlines never get resolved. Pooh.

Rating: 5/10

Banned Books Week

I am having the darndest time finishing my book right now. It's Jodi Picoult, and I love her, but I do not love this book... but I have to know what happens so I read anyway. Until that's finished, I'll leave you with the top 100 challenged books of the 1990s, apparently taken from the ALA website. Bold I've read, italics I've tried to read.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett -- This one's on my list to read!
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Clearly I'm not controversial enough.

Superior Saturday, by Garth Nix (15 September — 20 September)

This is the sixth of seven books in the Keys to the Kingdom series, and as such it's hard to talk about this one in particular without spoiling the others. So. The general idea of the series is that a 12-year-old boy called Arthur Penhaligon is whisked out of his normal life and charged with saving the world.

To do this, he must go to a world called the House, built by one called the Architect, and free the separated parts of the Architect's Will. He must also defeat some upstart Trustees and take control of their Keys (hence the series title). Each Trustee rules over one of the days of the week on Earth, though that period of time is much longer in the House. As the Trustees mess with the house (essentially tearing it down in their need to fight with each other), things on Earth aren't going so well, either.

In this one, obviously, Arthur is out to rescue part six of the Will and wrest the Sixth Key from Superior Saturday. There is also a plague in Arthur's hometown, and Superior Saturday is readying to attack at the stroke of her midnight.

These books are meant for younger YA readers (I found this one in the children's section, sigh), so they are very short and very formulaic. I quite enjoy them for both of those reasons, and because they are entertaining.

Superior Saturday irks me a bit because, as the penultimate book in the series, it breaks from the mold and does not resolve the capturing-the-keys part of the story, leaving that for the next book, Lord Sunday. I've waited a while for this book to come out, but if I'd known it would have that ending, I'd have waited a while longer — there's not enough story in these large-type 250 pages to really satiate me.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

Booking Through Thursday (18 September)

This week's question:

Autumn is starting (here in the US, anyway), and kids are heading back to school–does the changing season change your reading habits? Less time? More? Are you just in the mood for different kinds of books than you were over the summer?

This is a question I'll be better able to answer next year... Now that I'm done with school my annual Summer Reading Project is essentially extended indefinitely. In previous years, I've barely read anything during the school year that wasn't assigned, except for short kids books — the Wrinkle in Time series, the Lemony Snicket books, Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom (the newest of which I'm reading right now!).

Now that I live in summer vacation land, it's much easier to keep up with books, so we'll see how that goes. I've been reading more slowly than I thought because I have started a few new fall endeavors like orchestra and swing dancing, but I think I'll be much better off without homework. :)

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (9 September − 13 September)

Read this book. Seriously.

The Sparrow mostly follows the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest who, through coincidences (or God's work?) ends up on a mission to a just-discovered planet near Alpha Centauri. The book follows two timelines, one starting when Sandoz returns to Earth, as the last surviving member of the crew, several years after some very embarrassing and horrifying information about Sandoz has made its own way back. He is to report on the mission to his superiors, but has to get over what happened to him before he can face the other priests.

The other timeline starts back at the beginning, with the events leading up to the discovery of the planet, then details the mission and what happens after the crew lands on Rakhat. This second timeline slowly fills in the large number of blanks left in the first, and helps make Sandoz's alleged crimes understandable.

I don't want to be too specific here, because a lot of what I loved about the book was the way Russell would bring in a fact without explanation, causing me to say, "What? When did that happen? Why?" and then a little while later the narrative would answer my question.

I loved this book a whole ridiculous bunch. It's an interesting take on what would happen if we found life on another planet and went out to meet it, and if meeting that life would go just how we might expect it. I'm a big fan of the dual timeline, and Russell uses this to her great advantage.

The one thing I didn't like terribly much is that the ending happens so fast − you spend a lot of time leisurely following the stories and then all of a sudden Russell is throwing in forced exposition in order to tie up the story. I would gladly have read another hundred pages (the book is about 400); the rushed ending was unnecessary and made the religious tie-ins at the end seem a bit trite.

Rating: 9.5/10

Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle (3 September − 8 September)

My first book for the RIP Challenge, and a great one, at that!

Tamsin is the story of a girl called Jenny (not Jennifer) Gluckstein, who is forced to move from New York City to a farm in Dorset, England, when her mother marries an English bloke. She thinks it's going to be really boring, but it gets pretty exciting when she discovers boggarts, ghost cats, and the titular spirit. Jenny befriends Tamsin and works to help her get free from 300 years of wandering around the farm.

The book is written from the point of view of Jenny at 19 looking back on herself at 13, so a lot of the text is riddled with "Meena told me to write this," and "I'll come back and fix that sentence later," and after reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics I was feeling a little overloaded on self-aware novels.

It also takes a little while to get into the real story − there's lots of mostly-unimportant backstory at the beginning about Jenny's home and school life and how much she whined about moving to England − but once Beagle gets to the good part, it's really good. I appreciated that with 30 pages left to go I had no idea how the book was going to end, and the end of the real story didn't disappoint. There's a bit of a where-are-they-now epilogue after that which did, but let's ignore that, shall we?

Rating: 8/10

RIP Challenge

So apparently in the book-blogging world there are these things called "challenges," in which readers challenge themselves to complete a group of books within a set of parameters. I like it. I'm going to do some. :)

Since I'm nearly finished with a ghost story, my first challenge will be the RIP Challenge hosted by Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings.


Pretty picture!

I'm challenging myself to Carl's "Peril the First": Four books from any subgenre of scary stories, to be read between now and Hallowe'en. Those subgenres include mystery, suspense, thriller, dark fantasy, gothic, horror, and supernatural.

My pool of books to choose from:
Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle
Ritual, by Mo Hayder
Misery, by Stephen King
Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher
The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
...and possibly others yet to be determined.

Books actually read:

1. Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle (Review)
2. Misery, by Stephen King (Review)
3. Afterlife, by Douglas Clegg (Review)
4. Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (Review)
bonus...
5. The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (Review)

Booking Through Thursday (4 September)

To break up the monotony of book reviews, let's try a Booking Through Thursday question:

I was looking through books yesterday at the shops and saw all the Twilight books, which I know basically nothing about. What I do know is that I’m beginning to feel like I’m the *only* person who knows nothing about them.

Despite being almost broke and trying to save money, I almost bought the expensive book (Australian book prices are often completely nutty) just because I felt the need to be ‘up’ on what everyone else was reading.

Have you ever felt pressured to read something because ‘everyone else’ was reading it? Have you ever given in and read the book(s) in question or do you resist? If you are a reviewer, etc, do you feel it’s your duty to keep up on current trends?

I don't think I've ever read a book that "everyone else" was reading... I've certainly taken recommendations from friends, but not from "everyone." I started reading Harry Potter after my grandmother gave the first three books to my brother, but I'd never heard of the series before that.

And the Twilight series... I still don't know much about it. No one I know reads them, and from what I hear they're super over-hyped. Maybe someday I'll read them, but not today.

There are also all those really big names out there, like The Lovely Bones or The Kite Runner or The Da Vinci Code, that I refuse to read until the hype dies down. I'm not the type that has to read all the popular books, and I don't want to be mistaken for that type, either.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (18 August − 3 September)

Ugh. This book. I can't really decide whether I liked it or not, because I'm not entirely clear on what actually happened in the book.

Basically, you've got your protagonist, Blue Van Meer, an extremely smart and overly educated 16-year-old who travels around the country with her professor father, never living anywhere for more than a semester at a time as he moves on to bigger and better professorships. For her senior year, her dad gives her a gift − they settle down in Stockton, North Carolina for the whole year. She gets reluctantly adopted into a group of friends by request of the teacher they hang out with, Hannah Schneider, and she proceeds to have a really really weird year culminating in the death of Hannah and Blue's investigation into it.

I can tell you that with no reservation because Blue tells us on the first page that Hannah dies... but the woman doesn't actually croak until page 335 out of 514. Lovely. There's certainly some interesting character development in those three hundred pages, and a lot of really good clues that build up for when we get to the mystery part, but oh. my. god. I really was just waiting for Hannah to die the entire time.

The story really drags up to page 335, and then all of a sudden it's riveting, and then as soon as Blue figures out the mystery we jump ahead a couple of months and learn about those months through poorly exposited backstory. Sigh.

I'm not upset about having read the book, but I'm not thrilled about it either.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde (28 August − 1 September)

The premise behind this book is an alternate universe in which weird things happen regularly − time gets out of joint, extinct animals can be cloned, religious fighting is replaced by "Who was the real Shakespeare" fighting. As in this universe, the government has a lot of bureaus to control its constituents, among these SpecOps 27, the literary division.

Our protagonist, Thursday Next, is an operative in this group who gets lured into a big investigation by the fact that she's seen the bad guy involved, Acheron Hades − few others have because he doesn't resolve on film. He is out to make a name for himself by stealing an original manuscript to Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit as well as a machine called a Prose Portal invented by Thursday's uncle, Mycroft. With it he can enter original manuscripts, kill a character or two, and completely change every copy of whatever story he's gotten into.

Thursday works to rescue her uncle, restore a failed relationship, and save Jane Eyre from destruction, all while battling the forces of evil in Hades and government corruption.

I really liked this book. Fforde makes the alternate universe seem very real with little details (an ongoing Crimean War, Jehovah's Witness-like "Baconians") and writes entertaining characters. A couple of times, when time-travel and manuscript-revising were involved, I thought too hard about how things could actually work and lost the story a bit, but otherwise it was great. This is the first in a series of Thursday Next novels, and I will definitely be looking for the second the next time I hit the library.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2001)

The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin (25 August)

I needed to take a break from Calamity Physics − it's pretty long and even though I'm halfway through I'm still not entirely sure what the book is about − so I decided to take a quick romp through the 1970s. This book, at only 145 pages, didn't take very long to read and was pretty entertaining.

I've seen both of the Stepford Wives movies and they're pretty different, so I wanted to know just what the book was about. If you haven't seen them, what we have here is a town called Stepford wherein all of the wives are subservient and domestic, convinced that their only purpose in life is to keep the house clean for their husbands. New arrivals Joanna and Walter Eberhart are part of the women's-lib movement and, once they realize the dominance of the men's club in town, plan to convert the husbands over to their side and open up the association to women as well. Joanna makes friends with a couple of other independent women, Bobbie and Charmaine, and they try to gather the wives of the town into a women's club, with no luck.

Soon after Charmaine spends a weekend alone with her husband, she becomes one of the Stepford wives herself and Bobbie and Joanna worry for their safety. Their husbands reassure them that nothing's wrong, but something very clearly is.

The book is really a lot more vague than I thought it would be − I ended up filling in a lot of blanks with scenes I remembered from the movies. It probably would have been better had I read this first and filled those blanks in on my own. The ending of the book is much more open-ended than those of the movies, but it's still quite sinister. I like the fact that Levin leaves these things open to interpretation, but I wish I didn't already have some interpretations in my head.

Rating: 7/10

Right Ho, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse (13 August − 17 August)

It struck me that I'd seen all of the Jeeves and Wooster series, but I'd never actually cracked open one of Wodehouse's books. Clearly, this needed to be rectified.

If you don't know Jeeves, he's the butler to a bit of a ditz called Bertie Wooster. Bertie thinks he's the brains of the operation, but it's always Jeeves who comes to the rescue when Bertie's plans go awry. In this novel, we have relationships being weird everywhere -- Bertie's cousin breaks off an engagement over a tiff, a friend of his can't talk to the woman he wants to marry without bringing up newts, and Bertie's aunt loses her husband's money at baccarat and can't bring herself to ask for more. Bertie, in trying to help, makes it worse, but in the end it is all resolved in a properly oojah-cum-spiff way. I loved it.

Rating: 9/10

Dictation, by Cynthia Ozick (7 August − 13 August)

This is a book of four short stories (less than 50 pages each) that weren't really connected in any way, as I thought they were going to be when I picked up the book.

The first is about the amanuenses (typists, basically) of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. James's girl has a plot to hatch, and by golly she's going to seduce every girl she needs to to get it done. No, really.

The second is about a bit actor who gets a leading role but has to change himself to do it, and oh, also he's being sort of stalked by the father of the woman who wrote the play he's in. Hmm.

The third is about an American writer type who goes off to a conference in Italy and gets himself married to the chambermaid four days later. This one I understood the least.

The final story is the one I enjoyed the most; it's about a girl who, through her mother and her mother's crazy universal-language-loving cousin, learns a lot about lies and deception.

My problem with the set was really that the stories were a bit too literary -- they reminded me of trying to decipher Hemingway and I just wasn't in the mood.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

The Twelfth Card, by Jeffery Deaver (11 August − 12 August)

I picked this up for a go at a mystery book discussion group, so I wasn't really sure what I was in for. Luckily, I was not disappointed.

Here we have a quadriplegic detective, Lincoln Rhyme, who picks up a seemingly simple case to avoid a doctor's appointment (great idea!) and gets way more than he bargained for. The case involves a clever girl called Geneva who avoids an attack in a library by putting a mannequin in her place at the microfiche. Unfortunately, the bad guy is out to kill her, so that's not the last she's seen of him. She can't figure out why he'd be attacking her -- is it because of what she read? Something she might have seen out the window? Something she got involved with earlier? There are a lot of possible motives, a lot of potential killers, and a whole slew of red herrings to confuse the crap out of you.

But it's good. Every once in a while Deaver throws up a dossier of facts and clues that Rhyme has collected so that you don't get too lost, but he also writes from nearly every character's point of view at some point in the story so you've got extra clues floating around that may or may not be useful. Deaver gets a little preachy about African American Vernacular English and the plight of blacks in Harlem, but the story is engaging enough that I didn't feel too smacked in the face by it.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2005)

The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo (3 August)

I saw a trailer for a movie based on this book when I went to see WALL-E. It looked adorable, and I like an adorable story. This book definitely fit the bill.

There's this mouse, Despereaux, who lives in a castle and doesn't act like a mouse − he can read, he likes music, and he's not at all afraid of humans. When he is caught at the foot of the king, the other mice send him off to the dungeon to be eaten by rats. We follow the mouse for a while, then move on to a rat, the princess, a serving girl, and various other players in the huge series of coincidences that makes up this story. It's very cute, but the author tries a bit too hard to be Lemony Snicket with a couple of definitions and a lot of talking to the reader and I have to say that Daniel Handler did it much better.

Rating: 5/10

Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher (30 July − 3 August)

This is the second book of the Dresden Files series. The supernatural culprit this time is werewolves, as you might have guessed by the title. A few people show up dead, ravaged by not-quite-wolves, and Harry is called in to figure things out. He is first lead to a gang called the Streetwolves, nerdy college types who have decided to become werewolves and who are led by a not-at-all-human werewolf called Tera with a proclivity for walking around naked. He also finds a businessman who is cursed to become a wolf at the full moon and who has irked the mob boss from the previous novel. Also, a misunderstanding leads his cop friend to arrest him as an accomplice, making finding out which wolf did it a little more complicated.

Rating: 8/10

The Reincarnationist, by M.J. Rose (6 July − 24 July)

You know, I really liked this book, but it took me forever to read it, due to a combination of business, tiredness, and the 450 pages I had to get through.

The premise of this one is that there's a guy, Josh, who has "lurches" that take him back to his previous lives as a pagan priest and a rich kid. Other people have these lurches, too, so he's not completely crazy. The story starts off in Rome, where an archaeological dig is going on to find these things called memory stones that, with a mantra, allow the holder to go back to his past lives. They are found but quickly stolen by one of the guards at the site, and Josh and one of the archaeologists, Gabriella, are off to get them back − Gabriella because she spent so much time finding them and Josh because he really wants to use them to prove this whole reincarnation thing. The story is told partly in the present, partly through flashback, and both sides are equally engaging to read. Some of the writing is a little shady − misplaced punctuation and odd grammar − but bad editing aside it's a good book.

Rating: 7/10

Storm Front, by Jim Butcher (4 July − 6 July)

This is the first book in a series called The Dresden Files, about a wizard who investigates paranormal crimes. It was recommended to me by a librarian, and I quite enjoyed it.

The wizard is called Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and he's got a lot of baggage − he has killed a few people in his time, had some uncomfortable interactions with black magic, and has a pretty crappy love life. In this book, he's out on two weird cases: in one, people are dying by having their hearts explode, and in the other, a guy who is sort of into magic disappears and his wife wants him found. The Chicago mob gets involved, and also demons, and a skull that contains a spirit who knows all about potions. It's a little bit all over the place, but it's totally fun. I've got the next book in the series lined up on my shelf.

Rating: 8/10

The Palace of Illusions, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (21 June − 29 June)

After an aborted attempt at reading The Other, I abandoned realistic fiction and picked up another book about deities. I was not disappointed.

The Palace of Illusions tells the story of an Indian princess who was born out of a fire as a sort of throw-in with the son her father asked for. The son, Dhri, was called upon to kill his father's greatest enemy, but it is the daughter, Panchaali, who is to be the catalyst for the event. The novel tells the story of Panchaali from her youth until the end of her life, and it tells it in a really engaging way by giving away the ending and most of the important points of the story really early in the book. Panchaali, the narrator, goes to a fortune-teller early on who tells quite a bit of the story, and at the end of each chapter she says things like, "Later, when this REALLY IMPORTANT thing happened, I understood why I shouldn't have done this stupid thing here" that totally spoil what's going to happen. I kept reading because I needed to know how it happened. Really cool.

Rating: 9/10

A Fractured Truth, by Caroline Slate (12 June − 14 June)

At the beginning of the story, this chick Grace is out of jail on parole after 7 years served for the murder, and she's trying to readjust to life -- including e-mail, because this book was published in 2003. There are some fishy things about Grace's life before this event: her father is killed or possibly has just gone missing, he was involved with some loan sharks and some iffy money practices, her husband caused her business to go bankrupt... it's not a good time. She's also now being followed around by a reporter that wants to write the "true" story of her husband, which Grace doesn't even know because he was basically a pathological liar. This is a pretty good novel -- the conceit of a liar's history is neat, and I definitely wanted to find out why Grace killed her husband (it's revealed at the end of the book, no worries), so it went fast.

Rating: 7/10

Change of Heart, by Jodi Picoult (6 June − 8 June)

So... yeah. I think we established a long time ago that I love Jodi Picoult. This is her newest book, and I waited a few weeks in a library queue for it. Unfortunately, the book was okay. I was expecting awesome.

The premise of the book is that the hired help kills a woman's husband and daughter and is given the death penalty for it. He seeks to atone by donating his heart, after his execution, to the woman's other daughter who has some heart condition or other. The catch is that he can't give his heart after dying by lethal injection, so an ACLU lawyer starts up a fight to get him hanged instead using some laws about religion and a lovely court battle. Along the way miracles happen. Like, miracles miracles − water into wine, feeding many with a little, curing the sick/dead (very Green Mile), etc. Some people think the murderer is a second coming, others don't, religion starts fights again.

Like I said, the book was okay − I saw a couple plot twists coming a hundred pages ahead, and the religion thing got a bit heavy-handed, but I still stayed up until 4 in the morning finishing it, and that's got to be a good sign.

Rating: 6/10

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan (27 May − 6 June)

By request of the boyfriend, who is in love with epic fantasy series. In this one we have an attack on a farming community, after which three boys must leave the village and go on terrifying adventures in order to save the world. You know how it goes. This book was kind of disappointing in that the mysteries that crop up throughout the novel are not all taken care of by the end. This is clearly so that you'll read the next one, but I'm almost disinclined to do so. I don't mind getting a new mystery at the end, but when I've been waiting for nearly 800 pages to find out Rand's true lineage and I don't get to find out? Boo on that.

Rating: 7/10

The Philosopher's Apprentice, by James Morrow (12 May − 25 May)

I read this book in 15-minute intervals on the train to and from work, and it was actually the perfect book for it. Just engaging enough to make me want to keep reading it, but not so much that I couldn't put it down. Even when I had the weekend to finish it up, I was reading it in small doses.

This book is one of those with three "books" in it -- three stories taking place at different points in the characters' lives. It begins with a philosophy Ph.D candidate walking out on his dissertation defense. As he drowns his sorrows in a pub, he is offered a job -- creating a conscience in a girl who has lost hers to amnesia. This, of course, is not the real reason for the lack of conscience, and the book takes you through all sorts of ethical dilemmas in attempting to account for this girl's life and the lives of a heck of a lot of people. Highlights include a cloning experiment, an army of fetuses (feti?), and a trip on the Titanic Redux.

Rating: 8/10

Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips (6 May − 9 May)

Another book picked for its interesting title. This book answers the age-old question: "What would the world be like if the Greek gods lived in a house in London?" Yes, really. There's backstabbing and revenge and a mortal love story in the middle of all of it. The end is trite, but the path there is really entertaining if not intriguing.

Rating: 7/10

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards (1 May − 5 May)

A bit of backstory: I bought this book a while ago at the university bookstore because I had a gift card and the title was interesting. Also, there was a positive comment from Jodi Picoult on the back and I was intrigued. Then a friend told me that her mother hated the book and it went on the back burner. The other day I saw that the book was being made into some Lifetime movie or something and I decided I needed to read it before I spoiled it for myself by channel-surfing.

As it turns out, I quite liked the book. The premise is that a doctor delivers his own twins in a blizzard in 1964, but has his nurse take one away to a home because she's born with Down's syndrome. The nurse can't do it, and raises the baby herself. The book explores the relationships between the doctor, his wife, their son, the nurse, the daughter, and the people they interact with. It was very engaging (only moving and job-searching kept me from the book) and the twists of the book were just the right mix between predictable and unpredictable to keep me on my toes. Some of the writing is a little iffy, and the metaphors can be heavy-handed, but it's all in all an enjoyable read.

Rating: 7/10