Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

I. Hate. Epilogues. Hate hate hate. Hate. I want to be all "This book is AWESOME" and "Holy heck this is one of the best books I've read this year" and then I remember the epilogue. -muttergrumble-

However, this book is awesome, and it is one of the best books I've read this year, if you stop listening or reading when the story should end. In fact, I was thinking about how sad and awesome that ending was when I heard "Epilogue." come out of Lisa Genova's mouth (she reads the audiobook version). So I'm just going to pretend the epilogue didn't happen and tell you about the rest.

-pretends-

This is definitely the Alzheimer's novel my previous book club should have read. So it is fitting that I've read it for my current book club, which hasn't met yet so I can't tell you what they think. But for me, it was amazing.

Well, not at the beginning. The beginning part, the background part, was kind of boring to me — it sets the scene of a high-achieving Harvard linguistics professor, Alice, and her equally high-achieving husband who is growing more and more estranged from her, and their kids, one of whom has pretty much totally written off Mom and has Dad helping her out behind Mom's back. And it feels like Genova, a neuroscientist by day, is just trying way too hard to be deep and meaningful about everything.

But then we get to the important and scary part of the story, which is that Alice starts forgetting things — a word here, an assignment there, how to get home from practically around the corner. Like anyone (well, I) would, she denies her problem until she can't anymore and finds out that she has early-onset Alzheimer's, at the age of 50. I've seen regular Alzheimer's in my family, and I can't even imagine having it at 50.

Well, no, now I can, because this book is told from Alice's point of view, generally as it happens so that the reader can watch her do something and forget it, and sometimes do it again and forget it, all while being otherwise extremely intelligent and rational. Listening to this book made me incredibly aware of any time I would forget anything, which is a regular occurrence in my brain, and wonder what that would be like on a much larger scale. Terrifying, I think.

And deeply depressing. I had to listen to Alice step down from her job, give up her running, start forgetting her children, and attempt to maintain control of her brain without exploding. I am tearing up a little just thinking about this book, which I finished a week ago, and of course last week at work I was just hoping no one would walk by my desk and see my depressed face. That would have been fun to explain.

I absolutely can't wait to talk about this at my book club, especially with those people who are a bit closer to 50 than I am...

Recommendation: Absolutely recommended, but only when you're in a mood to be depressed and worried.

Rating: 9/10 (I really hated that epilogue.)
(A to Z Challenge)

Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, by John Grisham

I... ugh. I don't usually regret reading books, but this one? This one I do. I have never read a John Grisham novel, so I don't know how this compares, but on its own? It's not good.

So why did I listen to it? Well, I've got five hours of tedious work everyday that is made better by the presence of audiobooks and podcasts. And I was out of podcasts. And audiobooks. And I knew that a friend had read and at least moderately liked this, so I figured it would be okay.

Well, I guess it had its okay moments. Let me think of them. ... Um. ...

Okay, let me take a different tack. Here's why it should have been good: I adore Veronica Mars, which is about a high-schooler that kicks some butt in the private investigation department. Theodore Boone is about a middle-schooler who kicks some butt in the law department, and throughout the book I felt a distinct VM vibe from the story, with fellow students and even adults coming to Theodore with their problems and Theo solving them right quick.

But it turns out that the conceit doesn't actually carry over very well. For starters, I'm pretty sure it's not completely illegal to practice private investigation without a license, and even when it is, the nature of being a PI lends itself to a little rule-breaking. Theo Boone apparently thinks it is totally okay to practice law without a license as long as he doesn't charge for it (very very wrong), and when he's all hacking into computer systems and lying to school staff and whatnot I am like, "ARE YOU SURE IT IS A LAWYER YOU ARE TRYING TO BE." I know lawyers are not all fine upstanding citizens, but the ones in Grisham's novel here at least try to be, so all of this shenaniganizing kills me.

Other things I did not like: the central bit of the story is this big murder trial, and the prosecution has absolutely no case but everyone thinks the guy is guilty anyway but it doesn't matter because reasonable doubt blah blah blah. And a convenient way for the guy to be convicted would be for a surprise witness to show up, like they do on TV. So when several characters informed me that a surprise witness NEVER happens because it is NOT ALLOWED... I figured there was going to be a surprise witness. And (spoiler!) there is, and he blurts his whole story to Theo (OF COURSE), and much of the book has Theo dithering about whether and how to get this dude into the trial.

And it's just so... tiresome. I didn't really care whether this guy's testimony could or would be used, and I really didn't care about the seventy million other legal troubles Theo helped in, but I was curious to see how it would all turn out and then the ending just does something else entirely!

On the plus side? It's not Castle.

Recommendation: I think that if you are more willing than I am to suspend your disbelief and/or you are a precocious 7-year-old who thinks that law is pretty neat and wants to read books about kids and law, you will like this book.

Rating: 2/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Booking Through Thursday — Age-Inappropriate

Today's Booking Through Thursday question is... "In contrast to last week’s question–What do you think of censoring books BECAUSE of their intended age? Say, books too “old” for your kids to read?"

There are two components to my answer. The easy one first — I absolutely do not believe in blanket bans on books that are "too old" or "too young" for a certain age group. Kids should have the opportunity to read what they want.

The second one is in regards to my own hypothetical children, or even my kid brother who is twelve these days, which is astounding. As I've mentioned before, I take a lot of care in picking out books for William, largely because I want him to like what I get him and thus like reading. Which he seems to, so excellent. He's not the best reader, and reads a lot of things I would have been well past at his age, so I try to strike a balance between things that are written for kids his age and things that he is capable of reading without giving up on. I won't buy him the little-kid books he loves because I think he can do better, but I do try to find similar stories in a higher reading level.

On the opposite side, you can take my reading habits as a kid — I started reading The Baby-sitter's Club books in kindergarten and was reading Sweet Valley University when I was ten or eleven. I bring up this latter because I distinctly recall asking my mother what condoms were after reading about them in an SVU book, because from the context I thought they might be snack food and maybe we could get some. Yeah. Gross. I am certainly glad that my parents never kept me from reading whatever the heck I wanted, because I read a lot of great books that way, but I know that my hypothetical children will not be getting books with sex in them for Christmas when they're eleven. And if they're reading them on their own, they will be informed that I expect to be able to a) read that book and b) discuss it with them after they read it. It's not that I want to keep my kids from reading things that are above their age-appropriateness; I just want to make sure they understand what they're reading, because that's really the important part.

My poor, poor, hypothetical children.

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote

I had meant to post this last week, but with Blogger acting up I figured I'd wait until I was sure everything was fixed. This turned out to be an excellent idea, as a) Blogger ended up eating a couple of my posts and b) by waiting, I made it to the book club meeting for which I read this book AND we watched a companion movie. So I have lots to talk about!

So, the book. I'd been meaning to read this, oh, forever, so I'm glad the book club made me do it. Before reading it, though, I just knew it was an important book that people read, and also a true crime story, another thing I've never read. The reason it's important is because it is a true crime story written as non-fiction but in the style of a novel, with people doing things and talking to each other and expositing their own story. This was apparently a very new thing, and the conceit does fall apart in places, like any time Capote includes an entire letter or confession or whatever that just goes on for pages and pages or when there are scenes where you know Capote had to be making some stuff up because he just couldn't have that information.

The story itself is about the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, who in 1959 were murdered quite unexpectedly and brutally in their own home. Capote's novelization presents the murder and investigation in a really interesting manner, as the Clutters die fairly early on in the story and the rest of the book is spent first in figuring out the whodunnit and then in pondering about the whydunnit. The book jumps back and forth between the Kansas investigation and the murderers on the run until, of course, the two meet, and then there's a bunch about jail and the trial, which is more intriguing than I originally thought it would be.

I quite liked this book even with its problems, and so did the rest of my book club, and after we talked about it we watched Infamous, which is a recent movie about Capote and how he managed to actually write this book. I thought it was a perfect complement to the book, as it's structured similarly and touches on the unreliable narrator problems of In Cold Blood while taking its own liberties with Capote's story. Brilliant, really. And it was really the unreliable narrator parts that intrigued me most — the movie brings up the fact that Capote never took notes during interviews, preferring to write things down with 99 percent accuracy later (mmhmm), and that he reworked "quotes" until they sounded better, which did not surprise me in the least. The movie even points to one bit of In Cold Blood that is just outright fabricated! I may need to go read the book that Infamous is based on.

Recommendation: For the Criminal Minds/Law and Order/other crime procedural lover in your life.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge What's in a Name Challenge)

Booking Through Thursday — Age-Appropriate

This week's Booking Through Thursday asks... "Do you read books “meant” for other age groups? Adult books when you were a child; Young-Adult books now that you’re grown; Picture books just for kicks … You know … books not “meant” for you. Or do you pretty much stick to what’s written for people your age?"

Well. Let me do a bit of a longitudinal study here... -examines Goodreads-

Okay, so. I was going to say that I read a lot of YA and children's books, because they are short and quick and usually delightful, but it turns out that I read way more adult-age-group (as opposed to "adult," which sounds skeezy) books in general. But I suppose I read more books for young'uns than the average 25-year-old? I don't know what the average 25-year-old reads. Nothing?

Anyway. Back to the point. In high school, I read a lot of YA, of course, but I also read a lot of adult-age-group books, including some that I still love today. Excellent. Then, in college, I didn't read, like, at all for the first few years, except to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth, continue A Series of Unfortunate Events, or read through A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. Those were some fun library trips!

So the first three or so years of college were about kids books. The summer before my senior year, though, I tried really hard to actually read books over summer break instead of working myself to death, and so I managed quite a lot of adult-age-group books, and then I read lots of stuff for classes during my senior year, and then when I got out of college I continued on that path.

The reason that I think I read all of these YA books is that after I got laid off and started reading ALL of the books, reading more book blogs, and going to library school, I found a lot of cool YA books I had never heard of and therefore devoured. Especially last year, when I took a whole class on YA services and had to read 21 books for it... a lot of my reading time after that class was spent reading the rest of series and other books by the same authors.

So far this year my reading is back to where it was a couple years ago, probably because I've burned myself out on YA books, and because I don't have people constantly recommending new awesome ones to me! And on the flip side, I have lots of people recommending excellent adult-age-group novels to me every day, and my list is just so full! Of course, there's plenty of year left and this could still change — got any books to recommend me? :)

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell

This is the last Sarah Vowell review for a while, I promise! It turns out that I can only take so much of the same kind of book. Also, I didn't like this one very much, which is disappointing because I actually own the print version, but which is less disappointing because I only paid a dollar for it.

Anyway, this book is Sarah Vowell doing her Sarah-Vowell-iest to describe early Puritan America, specifically the set of Puritans that came over in 1630 to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There's lots of stuff about religion, of course, and Indian relations, but mostly what I remember is the politics (of course) and the fine lines everyone had to walk to attempt to make this whole colony thing work.

And this is interesting, sure, but unfortunately it seems that I am less intrigued by Puritan politics in the 1630s than I am about current politics and presidential assassinations, and so I must admit that I didn't pay that much attention to this audiobook. Well, except when Vowell went on her tangents — I will forever be amused by the idea of her explaining to her small nephew why the Puritans were still killing the Indians long after the "first Thanksgiving." Poor kid; his aunt is ruining everything for him!

Also, I may try actually reading this one again in the future; I think that part of my problem here was the fact that I know so much less about this aspect of history than I do about presidents and politics, and so I kept getting all the Johns confused, among other difficulties. Maybe if I can flip back and forth to remember who everyone is, I'll have a better time of it? Eh, give me a year or so and we'll see. :)

Recommendation: For history lovers who don't mind a little whimsy in their historical narratives.

Rating: 7/10

Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell

I mentioned re: The Partly Cloudy Patriot that I thought that Sarah Vowell's sarcastic nature might come across better in audio form over print form, and I think this is where I can say that that's true. I tried to read Assassination Vacation once before, a couple of years ago, and gave it up almost immediately for being odd and confusing. This time, though, I was better prepared and had Sarah Vowell reading it to me as it was meant to be read, and so it went down real smooth-like. Or whatever.

This book is similar to The Partly Cloudy Patriot in that it is a) about politics and b) liberally (ha!) sprinkled with Vowell's personal anecdotes. It is, as you might guess, about various assassinated presidents (but not JFK), but it's not so much about the assassinations themselves as about what the assassinations meant at that point in history and mean now and what happened as a result.

So, for example, Vowell talks about her favorite president, one Mr. Lincoln, and how his assassination was meticulously planned by Booth to happen on a laugh line to cover up the whole assassinating bit as much as possible. And then she talks about how Booth ran ostensibly without forethought toward a friend's place, and moves into a personal anecdote about how she and a friend tried to follow Booth's path, failing miserably even in a car with maps from MapQuest, like, come on, this was not an accidental hiding place.

In another amusing example, Vowell talks about Teddy Roosevelt succeeding the assassinated McKinley, and how he was out hiking in the Adirondacks when the whole dying thing was going on, and also how when a messenger from the White House came running up a mountain to find him and bring him back to Washington, Roosevelt was like, "Nah, I think I'll eat some dinner first." Priorities, right?

And then there was the only problem I had with this book as an audiobook... Charles Guiteau. He's the guy what shot James Garfield, whose monument in Lake View Cemetery I adore, and it turns out that he is really really annoying. Every time the voice actor playing him started talking, I found myself moving my headphones away from my ears and just waiting for the annoying to stop so I could listen to Sarah Vowell again. Part of this was the shouty quality of the actor (of Guiteau?) and part just how insane Guiteau's words were. He was a crazy person, I have found out.

But aside from Charles Guiteau, I quite liked this book. Assassinations are interesting creatures, and I liked the many and varied perspectives Vowell brought to them, from first-hand accounts of contemporaries to first-hand accounts of Vowell getting seasick on her way to the Dry Tortugas. Sometimes her tangents got a little out of hand, and sometimes she got too much into the minutiae of politics, but on the whole I think it struck a good balance.

Recommendation: For lovers of politics and murder most foul. Or just kind of foul, I guess, depending on your viewpoint.

Rating: 8/10

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

After living in Jacksonville for eight months already (holy HECK), I've realized that I still barely get out of the house except to hang out with my husband, which is not a bad thing in the least but still I need some more friend-type things. So I've joined a book club! Huzzah! And I made it really easy on myself by waiting to join until they had picked a book I've already read, this here Middlesex.

Of course, I read it like seven years ago and so I had to read it again, but if you've ever read this book you will understand that it goes much more quickly and easily the second time.

It's amazing, re-reading a book. When I decided to join in on this discussion, I was like, "Oh, Middlesex. That's the one about the girl with the boy chromosomes who runs away and joins some crazy freak show. And yet I remember liking this?" I do remember liking it quite a lot, but it wasn't until I started reading it again that I remembered the other, oh, 99 percent of the book which is the actual good portion of it.

Because while Middlesex is, in fact, about a girl with boy chromosomes, and toward the end our fine protagonist does temporarily join a freak show after running away, these are not really the things the book is about. It starts off right from the beginning to be a sweeping epic tale of mythology and family and what it means to be any kind of person in a culture predominated by dichotomies.

Obviously I don't remember how I read this the first time, but I can tell you that my fellow book-clubbers were generally dissatisfied with the first half of the novel, which focuses heavily on our fine protagonist's grandparents and parents and the family history that leads to the birth of Calliope Stephanides, she of the XY chromosomes and love for "girly" things. After this opening, after Eugenides gets to talking about Calliope's life, that's when the story starts moving along at a faster pace as we try to catch up to Calliope-the-narrator's present-day life.

But actually I rather liked this first half, maybe because I knew I'd eventually get to the more exciting things and could relax and enjoy the writing. I could see more of Eugenides' work on making a mythology, putting the grandparents up on a hill and the vices at the bottom, setting them off on a seafaring voyage in which they fashioned new lives for themselves, meeting other secret-keepers and shape-shifters and disembodied voices — it was all just so perfectly Greek.

The second half is more like your average novel, as it gets into the more "important" themes of the story, which include the fight between Nature and Nurture and the question of how to be true to yourself. And then there's a freak show, which gets back into that mythological aspect with now-Cal playing Hermaphroditus. And I hadn't thought of it until just now, but it is perhaps fitting that people (including me, re: the freak show) had a harder time accepting the less "normal" aspects of this book.

Overall, then, I think that this book does accomplish what it sets out to accomplish, and does it with some really wonderful writing and imagery (and some clunkers, of course, but that's to be expected). And it's really perfect for a book club discussion.

Recommendation: For fans of mythology, science vs. tradition, and gender and sexuality issues.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)