December Wrap-up

Wow, another month gone! And another year at the same time! My year-end review will be up tomorrow to start the year off right, so let's look at the lovely month of December today. I finished up my second semester of grad school, maintained an awesome 4.0, and still managed to read 11 books. Basically, I'm awesome, is what I'm saying (and modest?).

It wasn't an especially delightful month of reading; I felt pretty lukewarm about most of the books I picked up, even the ones I was excited about. Oddly, my favorite, Shutter Island, almost went back to the library unread because I didn't have high hopes for it. That should teach me, right? Maybe.

My greatest personal reading accomplishment this month was finishing off all of my challenges — it was looking a little iffy there for a while, but I did manage to defeat Sir Arthur Conan Doyle yesterday, finally, to close up the Case of the Baker Street Challenge. With any luck, next year's challenges will go as well.

Now to the numbers...

Days spent reading: 29
Books read: 11
...in fiction: 11
...in mystery: 3
...in fantasy: 1
...in classics: 1
...in short stories: 1
...in young adult: 5
...in children's: 1

Series reads: Unfortunate Events

Favorite book: Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (Review) 9/10

Challenges
My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge: +3 books for 12/12 Completed!
The Baker Street Challenge: +1 books for 3/3 Completed!
Back to School Challenge: +3 books for 4/4 Completed!
Critical Monkey Challenge: +0 books for 1/6
Countdown Challenge: +7 books for 27/55

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (? — 30 December)

I'm finished! Woohoo! I started reading this book shortly after I bought it in 2007, and then left off for two years, and then finally picked it up again... sometime earlier this year, and then ignored it again... goodness. But I have been making my way through the bulk of it over the last two weeks, and I can now say that I sort of know what this Sherlock Holmes fellow is about. Sweet.

I had read A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four in my mysteries course senior year, and The Hound of the Baskervilles a few months back, and found them delightful, but I wasn't really prepared for these short stories. In both the novels and the stories, Holmes gets called on a case, checks out the scene, makes some deductions, and solves the matter in a rather quick fashion, but in the stories, that's it. There's not a narrative to go along with the detecting; Holmes just does his thing and Watson reports it.

That's not to say I didn't like the stories. I just had to get used to them. :) And... I don't have much else to say about them! If you want a quick little reminder of how incredibly stupid you are, I recommend finding a Holmes story or two online and enjoying.

Rating: 7/10
(Baker Street Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (23 December — 24 December)

I'm starting to think that there's a curse on all of the books I read for my book club. The first one was okay, the second and third were terrible (to me, not to everyone else), and now this one, the fourth, is just okay again. But maybe that means the next one will be awesome? I'm going to trust in the math. :)

The conceit of this novel is that it's told from the point of view of a murdered girl. That's pretty cool, right? The girl, called Susie, is all dead and stuff, but she's looking down on her family and friends and even the guy who murdered her, watching them deal with the aftermath of her death. Her parents grow apart, her siblings try to deal with going to the same schools Susie went to and being "that dead girl's little siblings," which isn't easy, of course.

When the book starts out, it seems like it's going to revolve around the living people figuring out who killed Susie, but the murderer is pretty savvy and the trail grows cold pretty quickly for the police, if not for Susie's dad. Once that happens, the story's more about how people deal with death, and it's actually rather interesting to see how Susie's friends grow up and how her parents start to drift apart. But then... then. There's a part toward the end where Sebold gets all supernatural and briefly brings Susie back in her friend's body while her friend goes and hangs out in heaven for a while, and it just completely ruined the book for me. I was okay with Susie's friend being able (or thinking she's able) to see spirits after Susie's death; I am not okay with her being able to go muck about in heaven without being dead. And this whole development is really not important to the story at all except for maybe giving a couple of people closure and providing a sex scene for the novel. No, really. I have no idea.

So. I give Sebold props for writing a convincing portrait of a family after a brutal death, but I would like her to never write such a creepy sex scene ever again, kthx.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002)

Happy Christmas!

This is my Christmas tree this year... Scott and I made it together! Last year I made our tree myself out of construction paper, but this year we wanted to take it to the next dimension! This was actually the third or fourth design that we attempted for the tree — do you know how difficult it is to make a pipe-cleaner tree look halfway decent? I mean, unless you're Martha Stewart. Then it's easy. Whatever, ours was made with love.

I'm not really big on Christmas, but I will enjoy spending today with my dear parents and brothers and tomorrow with whatever family members stick around at Scott's house (they are a very come-and-go bunch, which is odd to me). I will also enjoy watching this video probably, oh, five hundred times in a row. I am such a sucker for Muppets.

Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane (22 December — 23 December)

I had seen a commercial or twelve for the movie adaptation of this book a while ago, but I decided I'd rather read the book instead, though I can't remember why I decided that. So I got the book from the library, and then it languished on my shelf for three months, and then I decided the library would probably like me to stop checking books out for months on end and so I read it. Good job again, self.

The premise of this novel is that there's a US Marshal called Teddy (short for Edward) Daniels who hops a ferry to Shutter Island with another Marshal to look into the disappearance of an inmate at the hospital/mental ward/jail-type institution on the island. The woman, called Rachel Solando, managed to escape from a teeny-tiny cell and past several guards without anyone noticing, so Daniels and Aule (the partner) think it was probably an inside job. As they're looking into this case, Daniels is also looking into some retribution — he's heard that the guy who set the fire that killed Daniels's wife is locked up on Shutter Island, and he'd like to give him a little what-for. But neither investigation is proving easy, what with how everyone on the island is being a little secretive about just what exactly goes on there, and how there's a convenient hurricane keeping Daniels and Aule stuck on this island for maybe a little longer than they thought...

I hate to admit it, but even though I should have seen the ending of this book coming, I did not. Not at all. And I liked that. I was so drawn in by Lehane's storytelling that I forgot to be looking for all the inconsistencies in the stories told by the characters. So good! And so I don't want to say too much about this book, because I want you to go read it and be surprised as well. Or you might not be surprised, because you're keener than I am, but you should still enjoy the plot twists and turns without my help.

One thing, though, for the people who have read this already... what do you think of the choice of Laeddis for a surname? It's either incredibly uncommon or nonexistant, which made the ending seem a little forced. If it had been the other way around, I would have believed it more.

Rating: 9/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2003)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (21 December — 22 December)

I... didn't get this book. At all. I even did something crazy and went and read the SparkNotes after I was done with it to attempt to figure out what the heck had happened, but I'm still not satisfied. I didn't not like the book, but after reading it I just had absolutely no idea what I was meant to have taken away, and now that I know what I'm meant to have taken away, I'm disappointed.

See, the plot of this book... well, there's not really a plot. But there's a protagonist, so that's good, and he's called Okonkwo and he lives in Africa and he aspires to great things. His father was a loser, so Okonkwo fashioned himself a winner, to good results. But then he kills this kid that was sent to live with him and who called him "father" and who liked living with Okonkwo, and then things seem to start falling apart, as they do.

And I thought that maybe that was the point of the book, because it's pretty emphasized — that Okonkwo did a bad thing by killing a boy he thought of as a son, and now he gets to be punished. And he does get punished, in various ways, including being exiled for seven years for inadvertantly killing some other guy's son. But then Achebe completely ignores all of that and starts in with some missionaries, who come to the villages and start converting people to Christianity, and then things seem to start falling apart, as they do.

Wait, what? Okay, fine, so things are falling apart for a different reason now, that has nothing to do with Okonkwo. But Okonkwo, whose life was already falling apart, doesn't want it to fall apart anymore so he tries to bring an uprising against the missionaries, which totally fails, and [ending alert] then he kills his real son (who's a convert and who is "not his son anymore" and cetera) and then he kills himself. Or is said to have killed himself. And SparkNotes says he did it. But I don't believe that.

Anyway, so I finish reading the book and I'm like, okay, this plotline that I've just outlined makes sense, but I've only included, like, less than half of the scenes in the book and what were those supposed to be for? So I ask SparkNotes, and it tells me that this book is really about showing the Western world that Africa is a real place with real people with real emotions and religions and languages and customs and such and that colonization sort of makes those things fall apart and also the colonial nations are pretty stupid for not realizing that Africa is a real place etc.

And then I go, oh. That makes sense. I get that. I would feel stupid for not seeing that while reading it, except that I was too busy trying to follow the story Achebe was telling, and not the one he was implying, which is unfortunate. I guess if I had known in advance that the written story was merely a vehicle for a bigger statement, I would have liked it better. As it stands, I am just confused and disappointed.

Rating: 5/10
(Back to School Challenge)

See also:
an adventure in reading
Books 'N Border Collies
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Let it Snow, by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle (18 December — 20 December)

I picked this book up both because I like John Green and Maureen Johnson and because it's practically Christmas and I wanted to get some of that proverbial spirit going. Well, I still don't have any Christmas spirit, but I did have a good time reading about people who do. :)

The book is three shorter interconnected stories: Johnson's, the first, tells of a high-school girl called Jubilee who ends up stranded on a train in western North Carolina. Because of the scary cheerleaders who are also stranded with her, she treks away from the train as fast as she can, which is of course not very fast in snow that can strand a train. Jubilee ends up at a Waffle House where she meets a cute guy who offers her his and his mother's hospitality for a few days. I think we all know what a mother's "hospitality" is like. -eyebrow waggle-

Then Green comes in to tell the story of three kids who are friends with the manager at said Waffle House, who, by the time he calls, is looking at a room full of cheerleaders and wants to invite along Tobin, JP, and the Duke to ogle them. Of course, the Duke being a girl, she'd rather ogle maybe one of the other people I've already mentioned, so there's awkwardness there, and oh, did I mention the snowstorm? Because there is some slow-tastic adventuring out in Tobin's mom's SUV just to get to the Waffle House. Current me is like, "Why would you go out in the snow like that???" but high-school me is like, "ADVENTURE!"

Myracle's story is about a girl called Addie who is devastated over her breakup with Jeb, a bit player in the two previous stories (stuck on the train and then stuck in the Waffle House), even though it was all her fault. She's pretty self-absorbed, but when her best friends and her manager and the old lady that comes in to Starbucks all the time all tell her so in the span of a couple days, she starts to take it to heart and tries to make up for all of her mistakes.

I'm always a little wary of teen romantic novels, because they're always a little implausible, but this one is just completely implausible so it worked for me. :) I don't think any girls are going to be looking for romance in a snowstorm at the Waffle House (though, maybe), and after Addie is portrayed as a bad guy for wanting a storybook/movie romance... well, there's a chance for teens yet!

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008)

See also:
Library Queue
an adventure in reading
Book Nut
Blogging for a Good Book
things mean a lot

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (15 December — 18 December)

The Kite Runner is one of those books whose name I have been hearing since it came out, but which I have also managed to avoid reading or even knowing anything about. I'm just talented like that, I guess? So when I saw it on my Back to School Challenge list, I was like, "Eh, okay, I guess I can read this."

Unfortunately, that's sort of still how I feel. The cover blurbs promised adjectives like powerful, haunting, riveting, extraordinary, unexpected... I'm not convinced. I called most of the plot "twists" ages before they happened, and even though they weren't really presented as twists, per se, they felt imbued with a sense of "Look at what I wrote! Isn't it ironic and also incredibly clever of me?" whether Hosseini intended it or not.

The story was interesting, at least. It follows the life of our protagonist, Amir, from his childhood in Kabul through his emigration to America in the midst of Russian occupation and on to his return to Kabul to atone for past sins. These sins were against Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, who considered Amir his best friend and stood up for him against bullies but whose friendship was never quite reciprocated. When Amir witnesses an atrocity against Hassan, he takes the coward's way out; running away from the scene and later running away from his guilt by getting Hassan and his father sent away. This event becomes a big old rock that weighs Amir down for the rest of his life, as we get to read!

I loved how Hosseini handled the friendship between Amir and Hassan — how they were friends by circumstance and how the power dynamic between them kept Amir from really accepting Hassan's friendship. I thought all of the childhood scenes in Kabul were really well-written and believable. It was the rest of the book I was not so enamored with; the move to America and Amir's marriage and difficulty having children took a long time to read but still seemed to be superficially written so that Hosseini could get his story back to Kabul, where Amir goes to find Hassan's son and do that atoning thing. And then from there everything seemed to fall apart; it takes only a chapter or two for the son to be found, and then an entirely implausible scene occurs that gets the son into Amir's hands, and then the process of getting the two of them back to America is meant to take forever but then is conveniently sped up, but then we have to keep reading to get to the kite running tie-in from the beginning of the novel.

Certainly the themes of the novel are good; friendship and betrayal and how our lives are so based on our childhoods. But I've seen these in other places and I found nothing unexpected or haunting or extraordinary about this treatment.

Rating: 6/10
(Back to School Challenge, My Year of Reading Dangerously, Countdown Challenge: 2003)

See also:
The Bluestocking Society
Blue Archipelago

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (3 December — 15 December)

Criminy, this was a hefty book. Not really in length, though 400 pages is nothing to sneeze at, but more in that there was a lot of stuff happening all at once!

Meyer Landsman (or just Landsman, really) is our protagonist, and he starts the story off by being called out of his fleabag hotel room to another fleabag hotel room a few floors down to check out a dead body — because he's a cop, not because the hotel staff are weird or something. Landsman is off duty, but when he notices the chess board set up in the room, he takes the case anyway, due to his longstanding hate-hate relationship with his father and chess, among many other family issues. Of course, when Landsman goes to investigate the death, it turns out that the body didn't belong to just some random person, and in fact the biggest of the bigwigs in the area might not be pleased that Landsman is poking his nose in.

The first thing you need to know about this book is that it's got an alternate history going on. I may have known that at one time, but I had forgotten, and I spent a few pages trying to figure out why Chabon was insisting that three million Jews lived in Sitka, Alaska. When he mentions that, oh, there also aren't any in Jerusalem, I said, "Ohhhhhh," and was much better able to follow the story from there. So, yes. Israel hasn't happened, Sitka is where the Jews live because of some American niceness that is about to end and leave said three million Jews looking for somewhere else to go, and Landsman only has a few weeks to tie up (or, if need be, "tie up") all of his unsolved cases before he doesn't have a badge anymore. Woohoo!

Also, this book is less about the "who killed Mr. Dead Person" mystery than I would have liked, and much much more about all of Landsman's problems — a chess-wizard dad who didn't pass those genes on to his son, a sister that died in a plane accident a few months back, an ex-wife who once aborted a fetus for him and who is now his commanding officer, a cousin who once looked up to him enough to become his partner but who now just pities him, the alcoholism that lets him live with all of these people... the list goes on and on. Some of these problems intriguingly work themselves into Landsman's Dead Person investigation, some of them just hinder it.

I was kind of dissatisfied with the ending for reasons that I keep attempting to type and then erasing, because I'm not really sure what I didn't like about it. The various threads get tied up, for the most part, but I can't even remember what happened at the end even though I keep going back to it right now! I guess that's the moral of Chabon's story... weird things can happen, but at the end of the day it's unremarkable business as usual.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007)

See also:
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Bermudez Triangle, by Maureen Johnson (10 December)

I first heard about Maureen Johnson and this book back when it was all a-being banned over the summer, and I thought to myself, "Banned book? I like reading banned books. Give it here!" and then I requested it from the library and then I got it and then I didn't read it for, like, three months and then I suddenly had a craving and I read it! Good job, self.

And in the first few pages, I was like, "Oh, no. This book is overdescriptive and overexpositive and if this keeps up I am going to just throw its hefty self¹ across the room because I can't deal with that again for a long time.

But it did not keep up, thank goodness, because I might have dislocated my shoulder in trying to heave it, and it was actually a very fun read!

The eponymous "triangle" is three high-school-senior girls who have been bffs(aeae) for some relatively long period of time. The summer before senior year, Nina goes off to a pre-college thing at Stanford, meets a guy, has a great time, and comes back to upstate New York ready to get her party on with Avery and Mel. Except that while Nina was gone, Avery and Mel met... each other, and now it's all sorts of awkward-pants up in this triangle. Nina tries to figure out how to deal with her two best friends dating, Avery tries to figure out why a straight girl like herself is dating a girl, and Mel sort of gets left out in the process.

Obviously, the whole book-banning thing is on account of the < whisper > lesbians < /whisper >, but except for the fact that Avery and Mel are girls, it's pretty much your basic high school story of one or more friends finding significant others and totally ditching Friend One. And even more so the story of two friends hooking up and then trying to figure out how to make the relationship work. And doing these things all while trying to graduate from high school, because that stupid homework never stops coming.

I thought this book was delightful, and I recommend it if you're in the mood for a reality-infused tale of love and friendship.

¹ As you can see from the image of the book cover I've included, the copy I ended up with is a "splashproof beach read!" with 100% waterproof cover and ridiculously stiff pages that must have been printed on, like, sixty-pound paper. It's intense, and I'm not sure that I would be willing to lug this thing to the beach anyway. But someone must have!

Rating: 8/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously, Countdown Challenge: 2004)

See also:
things mean a lot
Book Nut

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Booking Through Thursday (10 December)

Today's Booking Through Thursday: "What items have you ever used as a bookmark? What is the most unusual item you’ve ever used or seen used?"

Oh, bookmarks. I love bookmarks. I think they are lovely. But it seems that every time I use a "real" bookmark, especially one that someone has given me or one that has special meaning, it manages to fall out of my book and I lose it forever! So even though I still love getting bookmarks and have a good collection of them, I won't use them if I plan to take the book out of my house (which I do for almost every book I read).

So instead I use... anything that's handy. Restaurant menus, receipts, envelopes, bills, checks (that I need to deposit!)... anything that is the right size to fit in the book I'm reading. I don't know about "unusual items", but I'd have to say that the oddest things I've ever put in my book were my and Scott's plane tickets to Florida in July, and that's because of the reason I put them there. See... I figured that I would keep better track of my library book than the very expensive pieces of paper I was using as a bookmark. This is my life. :)

The Reptile Room, by Lemony Snicket (4 December — 7 December)

Oh, audiobooks. Scott and I listened to about 2/3 of this book driving from Pittsburgh to Cleveland on Friday, but then we totally neglected it until yesterday. And then, when I was playing it on my computer and had lots of distractions? Terrible! I had to fold laundry just so I could focus on the book. Moral of this story? Save the audiobooks for the car. :)

But anyway, this is the second in the Series of Unfortunate Events, which I am apparently very slowly catching Scott up on. (Is there a rule about ending sentences with two prepositions?) Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, having recently avoided Violet's marriage to Count Olaf, get to go live with their herpetologist uncle, Montgomery Montgomery, and his large collection of snakes. Uncle Monty is everything that Olaf is not, and the orphans have a lovely time for the few days until Monty's new assistant, "Stephano" (really Count Olaf) shows up. Unfortunate things then happen to the kids, as you may have guessed.

This audiobook was a lot different than the one for The Bad Beginning; instead of different actors for all the voices, Tim Curry took on all of them, which made the tone rather a bit darker than in the first book. Curry also employed a hacking cough every time he spoke as Poe, which is correct, I suppose, but incredibly annoying (especially to Scott). It was still delightful, however, and I highly recommend again the series and the audiobooks.

Rating: 7/10

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Should you become a librarian?

Not if you believe this. This makes me a little sad. But a little more mad.

Firstly, and most obviously, because I am in library school. I'm certainly qualified to do other things, I like respect, and my cat has a historical cat name — crap. I guess I should just quit now, right?

That's the secondly: Seriously? Seriously? Because I want respect as a librarian (this seems to be the overarching theme of the flowchart), I can't be a librarian? So we're going to leave the profession to people that don't want respect anyway? This seems a little bit off to me.

Some of the commenters on the post find this flowchart funny, and maybe that's its intent. Because while I'm sure that public librarians, especially, find themselves feeling like overpaid babysitters at times, I'm also sure that there are times that make those librarians say, "This is why I became a librarian." Because otherwise, why would they still be going to work every day? But to have this flowchart out there, where non-librarians and potential librarians can see it (potentially) taken out of context... that's going to drive away some really great future librarians.

Other commenters note that librarians are going out of style, that they're being replaced by paraprofessionals, that soon enough everything is going to be automated so why should anyone enter library school right now? To that I say, because library science and information science are changing, too. MLIS students don't just learn how to shelve books. They learn how to use new information tools and how to teach others to use them. They learn how to put together and maintain digital libraries. They learn how to be a librarian of the future, not of the past that these commenters seem to be living in.

If your boss doesn't respect you, and especially if you don't respect your boss, figure out why not. If it's a personality clash; find a new boss. Get out of there. If you're doing something wrong, make it right. If your boss is doing something wrong, make it right. Take initiative.

If the customers are fighting you, and you are doing your best to help, you need to find a new way to help. Ask more questions. Put yourself in the customer's shoes. Don't be confrontational. Make the customer happy, even if you can't answer the question.

If your coworkers despise you, you are probably doing something wrong. Fix it. Or possibly you are doing everything right. Fix them, but be respectful about it.

If your mother cries and begs you to join a religious cult, your mother is crazy. Get her professional help. (Okay, this one's obviously meant to be humorous. But just in case.)

I agree with one (sadly anonymous) comment: "Instead of whining about being a librarian, go be something else." If you don't, there's a chance you'll soon become the disrespectful boss or co-worker that ruins things for everyone else. There are plenty of excited young students (I am one of them) who want to change your profession for the better. Let us do it.

Google vs. the Dewey Decimal System

The other day I found myself a bit confused by a question from a relative: "Do we even need the Dewey Decimal system anymore, now that we have Google?" Her question was mainly based on not knowing what Dewey Decimal is at all, but might it be a valid question?

Well, let's look at this. Google is, as I'm sure everyone who can read this knows, a search engine. If you're looking for, say, information on whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain (this is an example given to me by the aforementioned questioner), you can use Google to find the answer, or at least potential answers on a variety of websites.

The Dewey Decimal Classification system, on the other hand (and along with its friend the Library of Congress Classification system, among others), is an organizational tool. It says that if you are looking for, say, an item about whether you get more wet by running or walking in the rain, you can find it on the shelf in probably the 530s (that's the lovely physics section) or so. But the trick is that sure, you can find books on physics in the 530s, but you might find the answer to this particular question somewhere else entirely. Like in the 613s in a book on health... I suppose you'd want the best way to avoid a cold, after all. You're really better off finding the book you want via the catalog (or Google, as I did here) and then heading for the shelf with decimal in hand.

So you cannot use Dewey directly to find an answer; that's what the books are for (which you can locate in your library using Dewey). You cannot use Google to find a book on a shelf (unless, of course, it gives you a call number), though you could use it to find a digitized book pretty quickly.

And that's another thing. Now that Google is digitizing books like a madsearchengine, I can see why Dewey and other classification schemes would be falling out of style. Who needs a call number for something intangible? But even with this mass move to the Web, libraries are still housing books that need to be organized. And even on the Web, people are interested in finding items that are related to the ones they are looking at now.

Why else would we have social bookmarking sites or an online encyclopedia that has at least a few good articles or even Google image search? Clearly, information wants to be organized (or at least we silly humans like it that way). Is there really a difference between using Dewey to sort books into categories like Technology and History and using tags to sort blog posts by the celebrities they mention?

No. Not really. So maybe Dewey and his decimals aren't going to prevail in the world of digitized books, where books can be "shelved" next to any other book that shares a tag (and really, that is a much nicer system to use!), conflicting topics be damned. But the concept behind Dewey, that of being able to sort and organize information, of being able to figure out which darn Google link is going to give you the answer you want... that's definitely going to stick around.

Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie, by David Lubar (2 December — 3 December)

I would never have picked this book up except that it was on my Back to School Challenge list, but I am really glad I did! Super cute.

Scott Hudson is a new freshman at a slightly stereotypical high school — the upperclassmen are bullies and lunch money thieves, the gym teacher is brutal, the Spanish teacher doesn't speak English. That's fine, because Scott is a pretty actual-typical guy. He's moderately into sports, he has a few close guy friends, and he loves to read lots of wonderful books. I like him already! The story follows Scott's escapades through freshman year, starting with a failed attempt or two or three at getting close to his crush, Julia, and also includes some diary entries written to Scott's unborn new sibling, Smelly (not its real name), on how to survive high school.

While it's true that Scott gets into a few more weird situations during his first year in high school than most people get into in four years, I liked that he kept a level head about all of them and dealt with them in a very adult manner. A few times that he acts like an idiot about things, but he figures that out pretty quickly. This is the kind of book I might get for my little brother in the future to keep him from getting in trouble. :)

And, of course, the best part of the book is all the English stuff! Scott's got a very "O Captain, my Captain" English teacher who is awesome and whom Scott also enjoys, so Scott gets into writing newspaper articles in various styles, from Tom Swifties to a diary entry, and Lubar works a lot of book references and name-dropping (The Princess Bride, anyone?) into the story.

I feel like this is one of those books that even people that don't like to read would get into as well, which is probably why it's on my high school's 9th-grade reading list. Perhaps we should experiment on a few non-readers... anyone know a fourteen-year-old with too much time on his hands?

Rating: 8/10
(Back to School Challenge, Countdown Challenge: 2005)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding (24 November — 1 December)

This book would have been better with cannibalism.

No, seriously. I was promised cannibalism, and there was none. Hinted potential cannibalism? Yes. Actual eating of humans? No. Totally unfair.

For this review I'm going to assume that a) you are unlike me and actually had to read this at some point in your schooling or b) you are like me and the book was spoiled for you by a person of the A persuasion. If neither of these are true, well, now you know there's no cannibalism?

Tiny plot summary: a bunch of boys get stranded on a jungle island after some mysterious circumstances. They start off working toward rescue, but then some kids break off to have fun on the island or hunt the native pigs. The latter group gets bigger, the former group gets smaller. The hunters get all worked up in a tizzy one night and kill one of the other boys, who they thought was a beast at the time. Oops. Then they get worked up in a bigger tizzy about wanting to run the island and they on-purpose kill the fat kid with the asthma. Mmmm, dashed brains (and still no cannibalism!). Then. Then. -twitch- Then, right before they kill (and possibly eat? Cannibalism, please!) the last of the relatively sane people, they get frickin' rescued. WHAT.

I mean, yeah, the book is old and British, and the writing is difficult to understand at times, and there is NO CANNIBALISM, but I was pretty much on board with the book the whole way through. I was intrigued by the slow descent into madness (well, faster for some) of the boys, especially the one who's trying to keep everything together. I was horrified but admiring of the sow "rape" scene (no, there is no sex with pigs. Or cannibalism). But then, right when we're about to find out just how deep into evil 12-year-olds can get... they get frickin' rescued. Jeez. The one time they keep the fire lit. Especially after all of the stuff in the beginning about how maybe there was an atomic bomb and probably everyone else is dead and all, the rescue really seemed completely out of place. I get it — the kids are all crazy and stuff until a real voice of authority comes, at which point they become good little Brits again. But I think the drama, the horror, and the irony would have been just that much more delicious if Golding had at least waited until AFTER Ralph was dead for the rescuers to come. Seriously.

The other problem I had with this book is that while I liked specific scenes (the "rape", Simon talking with the Lord of the Flies, the parachutist/Beast nodding in the breeze, any time Ralph says "sucks to your ass-mar"), I had a lot of trouble remembering any character that wasn't on a page for a while. Jack, Ralph, Piggy, sure. But everyone else I had to flip back and re-learn who they were all the time. I don't know if that was Golding's intention (kids are interchangeable?), but it was really rather confusing.

But I did actually like this book, possibly because I didn't have to read it for school. :) Funny how that works.

Rating: 7/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously)

See also:
Rhinoa's Ramblings

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Invisible I, by Stella Lennon (30 November)

One (the only?) good thing about Scott getting sick on vacation is that I got to spend yesterday finishing up some homework and reading! Yay, reading. I hope he's not still deathly ill today, but I did bring a lot of books with me....

Right. Anyway. The book I decided to curl up with yesterday is called Invisible I, and I had not heard of this book before I saw its bright pink cover on the YA shelves at my local library. As you might know, I am attracted to shiny things and things in neon colors, so clearly this book was for me! The inside cover sounded cool, too, talking about a high schooler disappearing and her only friend(s) (more on that in a second) having to go out looking for her. There is also an interactive website for the book, where apparently people can go to pretend to be Amanda's friends and potentially change the outcome of the series. I declare that pretty cool.

The plot! Our protagonist, Callie Leary, is called into the vice principal's office one day, and though she thinks it might be news about her disappeared mother, it's not. No, instead, Callie's friend Amanda has cut school and played a prank, which is not unusual except that this time Amanda has implicated Callie in the crime. Oh, and these two other people that Callie once associated with before she became an I-Girl (read: Heather [read: Mean Girl, if you're a young'un]), but whom she'd rather not be seen with anywhere, let alone the vice principal's office. The veep wants info on where Amanda went, but the three kids just don't know... until they start getting clues from Amanda, who has apparently not run too far away and who apparently has plans to make Callie, Hal, and Nia BFFs for life. The search begins!

It's a fun book. I remarked on the Twitters yesterday that it reminds me of Paper Towns, Mean Girls, and Veronica Mars rolled into one — Paper Towns for the friend what runs away and leaves clues behind, Mean Girls for the clique aspect and the "let's wear green on Saturday" note (though there are some things that make a couple of I-Girls more Heathers than Mean Girls), and Veronica Mars for the disappeared mother and the multi-layered mysteries that it seems our intrepid heros will be solving. This is a good combination, but it does make the plotting a little choppy as the author jumps around.

Speaking of the author, I guess I should have added The 39 Clues to yesterday's list, because a) there's a different author for every book (though in this case there's a pen name for the series) and b) it's all interactive and stuff and some clues show up on the aforementioned website. Now I'm wondering what a collectible card game for The Amanda Project would look like. I am intrigued.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2009)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.