Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King

So I was gonna say I haven't read much Stephen King lately, which is technically true, but then I realized that this is my third King book this year! Is it possible I'm coming around to King again, after many many years away? I think it might be.

I had heard of this book but wasn't interested in picking it up, because it's newer and I have this prejudice against "new King" that I picked up around the time I read and was greatly disappointed by Cell. I was like, King has stopped being creepy and spooky and interesting and is instead some crotchety old man and pfft whatever. This may not be a correct assumption on my part, but it's stuck, and so when I saw that this was next up for my book club, I was equal parts "ohhhhh this is going to suck" and "hey, maybe it won't be so bad."

And it wasn't so bad! In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is one of my favorite books out of King, and it is definitely my favorite of his collections (of which I have read not very many). There are four novellas included, though one is like forty pages and seems a little short for that category, and I found all of them to be awesome. And even better, I found all of them to fit in with each other in some way or other, which is a fun thing in a collection — I learned from this one that King has a thing against librarians, a thing for biting, a thing for people getting away with murder, and a thing for making me think a story will go one way and then totally not doing that. Fantastic.

I don't want to say too much about the stories proper, because they are short and I found that the descriptions I read after the fact just did not live up to the stories themselves and I don't want to fail you guys! But if you need something to get you started, I'd summarize the stories as follows: 1922 is a rambling confession letter, Big Driver is the story of an author's trip gone horribly terribly wrong (and then horribly terribly wronger), Fair Extension offers up an interesting way to deal with cancer, and A Good Marriage is about, well, a good marriage that's suddenly not.

Oh, I should also mention that there is rather a lot of violence and horribleness, especially in Big Driver, and so if you are not inclined to appreciate or tolerate such things, I would recommend against this collection. I have to admit I almost quit Big Driver more than once, and at least one person in my book club did give up on it. But in general I don't think it's too much worse than Misery, if that gives you a reference point.

Recommendation: For fans of awful things that aren't happening to themselves and awful people they hope they'll never meet.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

I'm just going to start with this — I don't think I understood this book. I don't think anyone in my book club (for which I read this book) understood this book. I made this discovery at the book club meeting, during which we found some discussion questions including (to paraphrase) "How did Didion use humor in this book?" and "What parts of this book were exhilarating?"

We couldn't come up with humor. We couldn't come up with exhilaration. We came up with introspection, detachment, plodding...

Which is not to say that I disliked this book. I didn't like it, perhaps, but I found it very intriguing, which is more than I can say for some of my fellow readers!

The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's memoir about the death of her husband, which happens suddenly if not unexpectedly at the dinner table, and how she makes it through the first year after his death. This is not easy after forty years of marriage and the rocky previous year in their relationship, and it is especially difficult because Didion's daughter is, from five days before the death to the end of Didion's narration, in and out of the hospital herself with mystery ailments that don't bode well for her.

I did not find it an exhilarating book; in fact, Didion seems to go out of her way to make everything very rational and straightforward, even the things that aren't naturally so, and provide a sort of road map to life as a widow. She speaks of being called a "cool customer" by her social worker, of saving her husband's shoes just in case he comes back, of dealing with the panic that is set off by the most innocuous of memories. I haven't lost a spouse of forty years, but I have lost some loved ones in my time, and I can see a lot of Didion's reactions in my own, if scaled down.

I can only think that I would have understood and appreciated it better if I actually knew who Didion was outside of the scope of this book, and knew the context of her life in which to place all of these events. I felt absolutely lost when Didion would mention friends or locations that meant nothing to me, or when she referenced previous novels by her or her husband. I knew there must be a connection to be made, but I had no idea what it was or how to make it.

So on the whole, I found this book fairly depressing and a bit under-explained in places (and over-explained in others), but I did find it an interesting read for the simple honesty of it all.

Recommendation: I really don't know who this was written for. I'm going to say that if you know Didion or have gone through similar troubles, you might be interested. But I'm not sure.

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See

This is a book that I definitely would never have read were it not for my book club, so... good job, book club!

Why would I not have read it? Well, it sounds like one of them books for ladies, a group I tend to shy away from, with all its dust-jacket talk of "lifelong friendship" and "the joys and tragedies of motherhood." Barf! Also, it takes place in mid-ish 19th-century China, which means it's all historical and stuff, and also FOOTBINDING. Ladies, history, and a practice that makes my size-11 feet go running off in terror? No thank you!

But it was for my book club, and so I set aside my fears and read it. And I will say that even halfway through the book, I was like, eh. The footbinding bits were awful to think about, and there were a lot of very educational passages about China and the Way Things Were Back Then, and also How Ladies are Totes Worthless, Those Worthless Ladies. Yay. But then there's WAR, and running away, and trying not to die in the snow, and that was exciting, and then the lady-ful bickering began and I cracked open a beer (not really) and enjoyed the fallout.

And it was definitely this last part that turned the book around for me. I'm not a fan of the lady-ful bickering as it exists in real life, but I like what See did with it as a metaphor for the rest of the book and for 19th-century China in general. Our first-person protagonist is traditional, her bickering partner is many decades ahead of her time, and the way See made these opposing viewpoints very very obvious without having to resort to "she did this because she was so traditional and rooted in the old ways" (well, most of the time) was very nice. I could see where both parties were in the right and in the wrong, and I wanted both of them to shut up and make up, but I could see why they couldn't do it and I couldn't fault either of them for it! It's easier to make someone very obviously wrong; I liked it better See's way.

So, now that I've read this, I am much more knowledgeable about seven-centimeter feet, traditional Chinese family values, and hypocrisy. There's a lot of hypocrisy in this book. Lots. Would I read this book again? Proooobably not. But I'm glad I did read it.

Recommendation: For people who like ladies, history, and/or very tiny feet. Also people who would like to like ladies or history (tiny-foot-lover wannabes can stay home).

Rating: 7.5/10

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

Another re-read for my book club! Luckily, since I knew going into it that the last fifty pages or so were going to make me bawl my eyes out, I managed to just cry a whole bunch instead. One tissue only, though! Still so, so sad.

This is a book told by Death, beginning with death, and ending with death, but it manages not to be about death.

The first part of that sentence was really difficult for a lot of my fellow book-clubbers, but I think if you're prepared and/or used to odd narrative styles, you'll be okay. Death is an interesting narrator, with its odd little view of the world that mostly involves dead people but also apparently involves being incredibly and possibly overly poetic about everything. I like Death, but it could tone it down a little.

And what's really cool about Death as a narrator is that hey, how does Death even know this story? Oh, right, because our protagonist wrote a story about her life and called it The Book Thief and then Death found it and read it and is now telling us the story. So you've got a frame story and some unreliable narrators and I am SO IN.

The titular thief is called Liesel Meminger, and she's a young German girl who gets sent off to foster care with her brother just before the start of World War II except that she's the only one who makes it to foster care on account of her brother dying awfully on the train there. That's a good way to start off the story, yes? But Liesel keeps going and makes a new sort of family and makes some excellent friends even if she doesn't know it sometimes and even though the war comes and makes everything pretty much absolutely terrible, she still keeps going.

And of course there are stolen books, hence the name, and there's some Hitler Youth fun times and some hiding a Jew fun times and some hiding in basements from the bombs fun times and it's all depressing, really, but you still come out of the book thinking that maybe things aren't so bad after all, and that's really amazing. I adore this book, maybe even more the second time around.

Recommendation: Bring some tissues. And an open narrative mind.

Rating: 9.5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Soooooo remember when I read The Hunger Games and I liked it and then I read the sequels and I did not like them? If you did, you're better than me, because I totally forgot the first part of that. And so when my book group decided to read The Hunger Games I was like, uggggggggggggggggggggh I don't wanna.

And so I sat down and I started reading it, and then I got distracted by other books, and then I decided to just power through it and oh, right, I forgot that this one is actually pretty darn good and so I stayed up until midnight (horrors!) reading it.

In case you also have forgotten this book in the wake of its sequels, the premise is awesome: dystopian future, The Man (well, The Capitol) keeping his subjects down, said subjects unable to rally against The Capitol because they are instead pitted against each other in a yearly deathmatch using children and sadly not claymation. Oh, devious, Capitol. Delightfully evil. Well done.

My favorite parts of this book take place in the arena. Kids killing kids, kids allying with kids who are going to kill them later, kids making up temporary ethics in order to have some semblance of humanity in the midst of all the killing. Watching Katniss devise plans is awesome; watching her carry them out is even more awesome.

The rest? Eh. I had a lot of problems with this book last time I read it because of the love story, which still stinks, and the handful of things that seem super important at the beginning but seem to be forgotten by the end, which still exist and still irk but after reading the whole series I know which ones to just flat-out ignore. I actually got through a lot of the crappier parts of the book that way this time, just remembering that they weren't really important and thus not worrying about them. I highly recommend this course of action.

Another plus side to the re-read is that I could stop being frustrated that Collins chose to create a love story that I find both implausible and annoying and instead just read her story as written. I still found myself rolling my eyes at many turns, but I could appreciate better the interactions and emotions that Collins created. I'm going to maintain my allegiance to Team Katniss Should Grow A Pair, but I guess I can hang out with the other teams if they're having a party or something.

Recommendation: If you like a good (bad?) dystopian future and some excellent fighting and logic-using, you should read this book. Just this one.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

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)

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)

How to Be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen

I was so sure this post was going to go up after my book club discussed it, but unfortunately our discussion has been postponed indefinitely. I say this because I found myself not particularly enjoying the essays in this book, but I am almost positive that I will like them more after I have a chance to talk about them with people who did like them.

And I think my dislike stems largely from something that Franzen mentions in his essay "Mr. Difficult," in regards to a particular woman that once wrote to him. "She began by listing thirty fancy words and phrases from my novel, words like 'diurnality' and 'antipodes,' phrases like 'electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces.' She then posed the dreadful question: 'Who is it you are writing for? It surely could not be the average person who just enjoys a good read.'"

This woman makes Franzen out to be a "pompous snob," but I wouldn't go that far. And I am certainly not afraid of big words or opposed to working through a difficult book that has an excellent payoff. I just found, as I was reading, that Franzen was writing this book for a set of people of which I am definitely not a part, though I couldn't tell you what particular set that might be. Writerly people? Big word collectors? Hipsters?

Whoever it is, it's a group that follows Franzen Logic. To me, his essays tended to ramble on, hopping from topic to topic without terribly much in the way of transition and sometimes without much in the way of sense. I often found myself thinking, "How did we get here? Didn't we start somewhere else? Whatever, I'll just keep going and hope it comes back."

On a small plus side, I really only felt this detachment from the writing in Franzen's more personal essays, the ones where he talks about himself and his life and his opinions a lot. Most of the essays in this book fall into that category. But he also throws in a few journalistic pieces, about things like crappy Chicago mail delivery, the history of cigarettes and cigarette companies, and a high-security prison and the town that surrounds it. And those, I thought, were incredibly well-done, possibly because they required more focus than the personal essays and definitely because I have more interest in strange facts than strange opinions.

Now I'm curious to read some of Franzen's fiction, which I hope to be more like these latter pieces. I suppose I should pick up Freedom anyway, what with all the hype about it, yes?

Recommendation: Again, I'm not really sure what sort of person would like all of Franzen's essays, but I'm pretty certain that everyone can find at least one essay in here to like.

Rating: 7/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Mildred Pierce, by James M. Cain

I am pretty sure that the moral of this story is that I should never ever ever have children. Because clearly they will either be delightful children, in which case they will die awful and expensive deaths, or they will be evil incarnate and ruin my life all while making me think that I'm ruining theirs. I can't have either of these. I renew my No Babies pledge!

Really, though, that's pretty much how this book goes. Mildred has a deadbeat, cheating husband, who once had money but then the Great Depression happened and he's too proud to go out and find some more, and she (fairly rightfully) kicks him out to go live with his sugar momma, only to realize that now she's going to have to go get a job, which she does as secretly as possible because she is just as proud as that husband of hers. But she does find a job, and things start going pretty well for her, until they start going badly. And then Mildred fixes that, and things go well again. Until they go badly. And then things get fixed again. Then broken again. It is a terrible cycle, one that I am not unfamiliar with in my own life (can I have a job yet, economy?).

Mildred's problem, really, is that she puts too much faith in people who are out to screw her (figuratively and other figuratively), and takes for granted the people who are wonderful to her. And what's worse is that she mostly knows it, but lets herself get dragged into it anyway. But she is amazingly resilient, and while I would not like to have her odd thoughts running around in my head, I would be delighted to have her ability to overcome adversity.

And the last few sentences of this novel just sum up all of my feelings about it, so perfectly.

I may have wanted to punch every character (except maybe two or three) in this book right in the face at some point in time, but isn't that how life is? I think that Cain has really hit on a perfect description of a person with a pretty good life in a pretty terrible time, and all of the characters ring true, whether we'd like to know them or not. I have nothing but praise for Cain's writing, and I'm really glad that I got this novel as part of an anthology of his work so I can delve into some more of it soon.

Blast, this means that the rest of my book club is going to hate this book. I'd better start preparing a defense now!

Recommendation: Read this if you can deal with some incredibly frustrating characters and don't mind a story that doesn't really have a plot.

Rating: 9/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk

What a... very odd book. I'm not really sure what to say about it. I definitely would not have picked it up except that my book club is reading it this month, and I almost didn't want to read it anyway.

Maybe it's because I don't follow a lot of celebrity things and have never read a tell-all book, but I really really really hated all the name-dropping, made even more irritating by the fact that every proper noun was in bold face. It's mostly spread out, but every once in a while there's a sentence like, "By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fists around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed." And then I cry.

The really exciting bit (one might call it the plot) doesn't come until halfway through the book, but once it starts it's quite interesting. I was sure the book was going to end one way, and it sort of did but there was more to it that I had not at all anticipated. I like that. But I wouldn't read this again, or make you read it, either.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

Man, I felt like I had been reading this book forever by the time I finished it, even though it was probably only a couple of weeks. And I've read it before! It is not a quick read. I'm warning you now.

The last time I read this book was in 2003, right before I took AP English in my senior year of high school. I remember this because I was, like, super-madly in love with the book and I spent a lot of time trying to work it into the various timed essays we had to write for the class. However, after six-ish years, all I could remember about the books was that there's a kid called Pi who gets stuck on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with a tiger. Which is an apt description, I suppose, but I felt I should read it again to remember why that was awesome. So I made my book club read it. Multi-tasking!

Anyway... I don't really remember what I liked about the book six years ago (if only I had been keeping this blog back then!), but what I like about it today is how informative it is. The story is pretty meh — Pi spends a third of the book dithering about his name and how he's practicing three religions at once, then goes and gets himself shipwrecked and talks about life on a lifeboat for the rest of the book — but Martel puts in all these facts about religions and zookeeping and the training of tigers that is just so interesting that I want to know more. Like the fact that zoos stage their animals' habitats so that the fence is right at the distance where the animals would be all, "Okay, humans, you take one step closer and I'mma eat you." Or that lion tamers at the zoo keep the lions in check by entering the ring first and making it their territory that the animals are trespassing on. Blah blah blah, boy on a lifeboat, whatever, tell me more about how some walls in zoos wouldn't really keep a big cat in if he wanted to get out, but the cat has no reason to leave his comfy home.

The only part of the story itself that I really enjoyed was the very last part, where Pi has washed up in Mexico and is telling his story to the men from the shipping company. I really love the point that is made in this conversation and I think it makes the whole book worth reading, if you can get that far. I am excited to talk about this book with my club!

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2001, A to Z Challenge, Flashback Challenge)

See also:
Jules' Book Reviews
Rhinoa's Ramblings

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

Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley

Oh my goodness, guys, this book was so entertaining. I can't even discuss it.

No, that's not true. I can totally discuss it. This is the first of my book club's picks that I have enjoyed so thoroughly, and that includes the one that I picked to read!

I think I loved this book so much because it was so relevant to life right now and at just the right level of ridiculousness where I was like, "Yeah, I could see this actually happening, but I'm glad it won't. It won't, right?"

The premise is simple: the economy is where it is right now, Social Security is where it is right now, foreign affairs are rather crazier than they are right now, and Generation X and the Millennials are pissed. Especially when the government decides that the best way to make Social Security solvent is to increase the tax by 30 percent for people under 30. Way to go, government. Our protagonist, Cassandra Devine, comes up with an even better plan to fix Social Security — encouraging Baby Boomers to commit suicide at age 70. Oh, yes, you read that right. It's a "meta-issue," but with her spin-doctor job and her prolific blog following, not to mention the government's wish to stop this thing in its tracks, things start to get a liiiiittle out of hand. But it's all delightful.

My favorite thing about this whole book is how well the characters are written. Buckley certainly included some stereotypical characters — the twenty-something blogger, the spin doctor, the old-money politician — but he didn't let them stay flat and he definitely gave them their own voices. You can tell when Cassandra is excited because she "can't even discuss it," you can sympathize with the plight of a man of God as he has to start selling off the nunciature's Mercedeses (that's a word today, okay?) to pay blackmail to some Russian prostitutes. Love it.

On an only slightly related note, Buckley also wrote Thank You For Smoking, which was made into an excellent movie that you should go watch, immediately, if only to hear the best line ever written in a movie: "The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese!" I'm happy just thinking about it, and must now go track this book down.

Rating: 9/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library 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)

Top Producer, by Norb Vonnegut (16 November — 17 November)

Mary: Don't read this. I don't care what Google Reader tells you to do!

So. I, um, I really didn't like this book. To reference my least favorite book ever one more time, because it's just really useful for comparisons: Castle I kept reading because even though the writing hurt my brain, the plot line seemed to be going somewhere. Of course, then the plot line went somewhere worse than I could ever have imagined and then I was rather upset that I'd bothered to read on.

Top Producer, on the other hand... the writing hurt my brain (examples to follow), and the "plot line" was tenuous at best, but I soldiered on because it was a book club book and I was not going to let it defeat me. Then the solution to the mystery was actually pretty okay, and I was not terribly upset about having read the book, and then the end bit was crap and now I'm just feeling incredibly ambivalent about the whole thing.

Right. Story. Grove O'Rourke is a "top producer" (shocking), which I promise you you will never forget because I'm pretty sure those words are placed together at least twice on every page. Ahem. Sorry. A top producer, apparently, works at a... brokerage firm? I'm not clear on that part... and helps people manage their money possibly by trading stocks but also possibly by putting it into funds, but also possibly by swearing at people a lot. Or something. Anyway. Grove's friend Charlie Kelemen throws this big birthday bash for his wife at the New England Aquarium at the beginning of the novel, and pretty soon a bunch of men are wearing burqas and Kelemen is swimming with the sharks. And then eaten by them. Mmmm, finance guru is delicious in the evening.

Grove is understandably upset, as his wife and child were killed in a car accident 18 months earlier. I would call this a spoiler, but as soon as he started being vague about that thing that happened 18 months ago (which continues for many pages before resolving, and then for many pages after that) I knew that his wife had died. Right. So when Charlie's wife Sam phones up saying that she's somehow got just $600 to her name (as opposed to the $53,000 she claims that her husband could spend in a month), Grove naturally dives in to help, both because Sam is a friend and because he has apparently decided that he's a detective. I don't know.

And, of course, as these money things go, not everything is as it seems and suddenly — wait, no, wrong book — very slowly Grove finds out that maybe Charlie isn't the person everyone thought he was. Goody.

I think that the biggest problem with this book, the biggest, is that the finance and lingo in it is really really really dumbed down, to the point where Vonnegut feels the need to explain that "sitch" means "situation" or that holding your hands six inches apart and palms in is a nonverbal indication of size or even (and often) that top producers make so much money because their jobs are stressful and difficult.

Oh, and Vonnegut throws in gems like this, which make me hope beyond hope that he wrote this as a satire: "Brevity was a time-honored tradition on Wall Street. A one-name greeting spoke volumes. It said in effect, I'm really fucking busy. So quit screwing around and get to the point. Time is money, and I'm not here for my health or your small talk. Now, what do you have?" -twitch-

Things I liked about this novel: the end was okay. Vonnegut doesn't really do that red herring thing where everyone is a suspect and then they aren't; he just sort of builds up to the reveal and then the reveal is more than you expect, and I appreciated that. But then he does that thing I hate where he does the "Now, slightly into the future, here's what all of my characters are doing!" rundown, and throws in a completely unneccesary and not fully realized love story that serves no purpose but to help make this book about 200 pages longer than it really should have been. Brevity, my right foot.

Mary: I told you not to read this! No complaining at me, you still have to read the book.

Rating: 2/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2009)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean (14 October — 18 October)

Sigh. I just don't even know what to say about this book. Remember People of the Book? That was a good book, but I would have liked it better if I didn't have to read about Hanna Heath in the present. Madonnas suffers from the same problem, only I don't even care about the parts in the past. Sigh.

Summary: The story follows our protagonist, Marina, in the present day and in her past when she was in Leningrad during World War II. Back then, she was a docent at a museum and was kept on to pack up all of the artwork and ship out what could be shipped out to save it from the German bombs. She also lived with her family and many others in the cellars of the museum, where they could save themselves from said bombs. Sometime during that, another museum worker recruits Marina to remember every single piece of art in the museum, even some that were taken away before Marina started there. So she does. Now, in the present day, Marina has Alzheimer's, and instead of being present with her husband and at her granddaughter's wedding, she flashes back to all these scenes of the past.

It's a pretty flimsy narrative device, especially since more time is spent in the past than in the present, and the past scenes don't tie in very well with the present scenes anyway. And, unlike People of the Book, the past scenes aren't very compelling. I understand why she would want to try to remember all of the works in the museum, but it never really pays off (unless "ironically" getting Alzheimer's counts as paying off). Also, there are a couple of magical/mystical/fantastical elements involving [spoiler?] sex with a god and some soldiers "seeing" the paintings that aren't there that just took me completely out of the story and irked me a bit.

Like I told one of my book club members, if it weren't a book club read I'd tell all of them not to finish it. It just wasn't worth it, to me.

Rating: 3/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006)

See also:
Peeking Between the Pages
Age 30+... A Lifetime of Books

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

The Enthusiast, by Charlie Haas (14 September — 21 September)

The descriptions I've read of this book are very deceiving. I thought I was looking at a light-hearted romp through the life of a guy working for enthusiast magazines (like Kite Buggy and Crochet Life), but it's really only the second part of that.

We meet Henry Bay as an idealistic kid who wants to become a public-interest lawyer because of his dad, who got laid off when his company's management took all the money and ran. Fun! But he gets to college and starts working for a public-interest lawyer and simply isn't happy, so he takes an offer to come work for Kite Buggy, a magazine he once wrote an article for. But enthusiast magazines aren't exactly stable employment, and Henry ends up moving from magazine to magazine, never settling down, never caring much about settling down, and never really happy. Eventually he does settle down, just in time for his brother, the uptight scientist, to start cutting loose, which really changes Henry's perspective on life.

This book kind of reminded me of On the Road, what with Henry's transient-ness and the whole finding-yourself vibe and the real lack of plot. I was rather enjoying that, but then the part with the brother happened, and some really strange things happened that I'm not sure a) made any sense or b) added to Haas's story, except maybe to say that taking risks is bad? I don't know.

I'm actually really excited that this is the first book for my new book club; I wasn't too sure it was going to be good when I started reading it (and am still not sure!), but it's definitely raised a lot of questions that I'll be glad to get opinions on.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2009)

See also:
[your link here]

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