Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, by David Sedaris

I got to this book in a somewhat roundabout way... my Mary recommended it to me as a Read-a-thon possibility, but then my library didn't have it and I had a whole host of other books to read anyway and I figured I'd get to this one eventually. Then I went up to Pittsburgh for a weekend to visit Scott's family and one of the first things I hear from Sister-in-law the Elder is, "Do you like David Sedaris? Have you read his new book? No? I will lend it to you!" Amazing how these things work.

I busted it out on the plane ride back to Jacksonville, which was both awesome and terrible because dude, the pictures in this book are not all safe for work. I was moderately concerned that my seat neighbor would turn out to be some sort of PETA member who would throw red paint on me after seeing a picture of a dying lab rat or a lamb with its eyes plucked out.

Ugh, right? The stories in this book are, I think, meant to be like human mythologies as told by animals. Some of the stories are a little banal, like the title story which tells of a budding relationship between a squirrel and a chipmunk that goes poorly when jazz is mentioned. Some are tales of really stupid animals, like "The Mouse and the Snake," in which a mouse thinks that a snake will make a very good companion for her, or "The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck," in which being incredibly mean to someone is fun until racism gets involved. And some, including "The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat" and "The Crow and the Lamb" are kind of disgusting.

It's a short collection, just about 150 pages of large-type stories and cool illustrations, and while I'm not over the moon about all of the stories I think that they work well taken together, and of course you don't spend too much time on the ones that flop. And it's probably perfect for that plane ride where you really don't want to talk to your neighbors.

Recommendation: Good for the not-squeamish and those who have some schadenfreude. Also good for those who like Sedaris.

Rating: 8/10

See also:
[your link here]

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

She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan

I've finally read another one of Laura's books! Good job, Alison. And it was really good, so I'm glad I did.

She's Not There is Jennifer Finney Boylan's memoir of first being a transgendered person, and then finally going through with the surgery to make her a woman. What makes it especially interesting is that even though James Boylan had always known himself to be a woman, he had felt cured when he met his wife, Grace, and shoved that part of himself aside until well into their marriage. So when he realized he couldn't live as a man anymore, it sort of threw the whole world upside down for everyone.

Boylan throws in a lot of anecdotes about being a boy who knows he's a girl, but I was most interested in her stories of being a woman. I found myself nodding my head at her unconcious adoption of feminine conversational traits, like turning facts into questions (we talked about this a lot in my favorite gender studies class), and lamenting the fact that once Boylan started dressing as a woman she suddenly had to protect herself from jackasses who wanted to take advantage of her. And Boylan makes it clear how difficult it is to transition — one thing I had never thought about was the fact that for a transgendered person, any sort of affectations that are too male or too female are perceived as the person's bad impersonation of the other gender, even if those affectations in a cisgendered person would be accepted as a normal variation.

This book was really illuminating and I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered just how transgendered people can know they are transgendered, because Boylan does a pretty good job explaining it.

Rating: 8/10

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert

I am a bad friend, clearly. A long time ago (almost six months!), my friends Laura and Deborah gave me lots of books to read. I finished Deborah's book within the month, but had barely looked at Laura's pile until a week ago, because I was looking for something else entirely to read. See, I wanted to start re-reading the delightful Thursday Next series, but realized that I had lent the first book out to a friend and hadn't gotten it back yet. Then I realized that I hadn't given Laura's books back yet, and hadn't even read them yet, and I went, "Oh no! Time to read some books!" I don't think I'll be able to read them right in a row now, but I think I can get them back before she graduates in May... -fingers crossed!- I need you guys to keep me to this! Yell at me if I don't mention Laura and her books for a while! Yell at me anyway for being a terrible book-borrower!

Anyway, on to the book!

The Last American Man was actually the book that Laura told me I didn't have to read, but I was intrigued by the subject — it's about this real person (non-fiction what?) called Eustace Conway who lives off in the woods and makes his own clothes and shoots his own dinner, but who also spends a lot of time booking speaking engagements and running a summer camp and trying to convince other people that they should run off to the woods and make their own clothes and shoot their own dinner.

Gilbert talked with pretty much everyone in Conway's life, including his overbearing father (is there any other kind in a story like this?), loving mother, indifferent siblings, friends, workers, and many, many lovers. I thought a lot of book was repetitive — there are only so many ways to talk about one person — but it was useful to see how set in his ways Conway is, how he's not really thrilled with the life he's living but can't figure out how to change it without changing his entire personality.

I was reading my school newspaper the other day, and every article on the front page had one of those ledes that's like, "Joe isn't your average sophomore" or "Sue-face looks like a normal college student, but..." or "You think Steve is crazy, but he's really just a normal kid" — emphasizing the oppositeness of a person's self to his/her reputation. Gilbert could certainly have done this in her book, because she does make the point that for as much as Conway seems like a mountain man, he's really just a good businessman who has the same insecurities we all do. But she doesn't start with that observation; she lets you learn all about Conway's mountain man life, how it started for him as a kid and just kept going, and then she starts dropping in the business man vignettes and the insecurities and the amazing contradictions of Conway's life, and she gives you a minute to figure out the importance of these stories before she tells you what she thinks of them. I was delighted.

One Laura book down, four to go!

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2002, A to Z Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

So, remember when I read The Hunger Games and I thought it was an okay read but I wasn't thrilled and I said count me out of the love story? Well, certain people convinced me that the sequel wasn't really a love story, regardless of Teams Peeta and Gale, and so I read the sequel. In an evening. Collins can really write an engaging plot line.

But maybe not a good one, as I got to the end and was like, "Um, what? What? What??? No freaking way!" with a grumpy look on my face.

I told my Amy earlier that this book suffers from serious Book Two of a Trilogy Syndrome, in which the author has come up with a good beginning, and also a good (one hopes) end, but can't really figure out how to connect the two and thus crams too many things into the middle book. In this case, the middle book covers the span of an entire year, from shortly after the end of Katniss's Hunger Games and straight through the next year's Games. Because of this, there's necessarily a lot of jumping around — Katniss and Peeta prepare for the Victory Tour, Katniss gets the lives of her family and friends threatened, they start the tour in District 11, some stuff of importance happens in a couple other districts, the Victory Tour is over, more threats, vague notions of rebellion/escape... you get the idea. It's not very well connected and I personally felt almost more interested in what was happening in the parts that got glossed over than the parts that were written in detail, which is not good.

And the next Hunger Games... there seemed to be way too much time spent on it for how important it really is to the story, especially after finding out what happens in the end. I think that Collins could have left out some of that boring action and thrown in some more of the rebellion and intrigue that she ignored in the beginning, and I would have been much happier.

Since I've now read the first two books, I'll probably read the third just for the closure, but I wouldn't really recommend reading the second one right now. If the third one is awesome, I'll let you know it's safe to read this one. :)

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

See also:
Jules' Book Reviews
book-a-rama
The Bluestocking Society
dreadlock girl
Midnight Book Girl
books i done read

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

The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa (24 September — 26 September)

This was one of those books that I don't really get, but it redeemed itself by being all about math. :) Yay, math!

The unnamed housekeeper of the title tells the story of how she came to work for the unnamed professor, who is an older man who has only 80 minutes of memory for anything that happened after an accident several years previous. The professor, a mathematician, can still play with his numbers, so every time he "meets" the housekeeper he asks for her shoe size and birthday and various other numerical things and finds interesting connections between those numbers and others. The housekeeper and her son (whom the professor nicknames Root for his flat head [like the square root symbol]) become friends with the professor, even if the professor doesn't realize it.

That's really the whole story; there's not much in the way of plot but it is a very interesting character study of a man with little short-term memory and how people around him react to him. The housekeeper at first finds him a little off-putting, but soon learns to like him and even math because a) he's a great teacher and b) he can't get exasperated with you for taking a long time to learn something. And the professors cares very much for Root, as a ten-year-old boy, even though he can't remember him in particular.

And there's math, and you can't go wrong with that! :)

Rating: 7/10
(Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Japan, Countdown Challenge: 2009)

See also:
BookEnds
an adventure in reading
Thoughts of Joy

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

The Long Tomorrow, by Leigh Brackett (25 August — 27 August)

I love the blurb on the cover of this book:

"By far Leigh Brackett's best novel to date and comes awfully close to being a great work of science-fiction." — New York Times

When I saw that, I thought, "Hmmm. What does that mean? Is this just an okay work of science fiction?" And I'm still not sure what the Times reviewer was thinking fifty years ago when he wrote that, but I can certainly make a hypothesis.

The only real science-fiction-y aspect of the novel is the fact that it takes place in the future, after a World War III nuclear holocaust has destroyed all the cities in the world. After this catastrophic event, the government has outlawed cities (too much of a target) and pretty much everyone has taken to being a New Mennonite and living just like the Amish do today. Part of the new religion preaches the comfort of being ignorant, thus keeping people from wanting to invent another nuclear bomb.

But a couple of kids in the Youngstown, Ohio area (not sure exactly where they're meant to be, but I recognized a couple of city names nearby, Andover and Canfield) are more curious and less mindful of their parents than they should be and end up hearing about and lusting after a forbidden city called Bartorstown, where men are purported to be able to learn things and to be allowed to remember what the world was like 100 years ago, before the bombs and terror and whatnot. These kids set off to find the city, but since no one talks about it for fear of being stoned to death, and they can't even really be sure the place exists, the quest is a little harder than they expect.

I rather enjoyed this little book! It has just the right combination of adventure and reality, and the main character, Len, is really easy to relate to. The novel is really more about Len's physical and emotional journey rather than his destination, and there's a lot of really good commentary about the human condition. And, for a dystopian novel from the fifties, the writing is pretty darn clear and concise. Good marks all around. (Also, Brackett's a chick and worked on The Empire Strikes Back, which is like plus ten more points.)

Rating: 7/10

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (4 July — 5 July)

I was on vacation at the beach for four days last weekend and brought only two books with me. A serious mistake! I was done with them by the morning of the third day. Luckily, Scott's family are voracious readers as well, and the beach house (which they own) was stocked with books. While I could have read A Very Naughty Angel (no really, I did find such a book on the shelf!), I chose to go with something a little deeper. I had been meaning to read The Handmaid's Tale anyway, so good job, me.

Let me just start with this: this book is disturbing. Seriously disturbing, in that way where the premise seems implausible but then you start to see how it could maybe be plausible and then you think it might be a good idea to rally against a cash-less society because it could lead to you becoming a handmaid. Yeah. Think 1984 or The Stepford Wives if you've read them. Disturbing.

All right. So this book is, as you may have guessed, about a handmaid. But in this (disturbing) dystopian world, a Handmaid doesn't do, you know, maid things. See, the American birth rate has dropped below a replacement rate, partly because pollution is causing "shredder" (deformed) babies. So a Handmaid is brought in to a household when a Wife can't provide her high-ranking husband with a child, because children are very important, unless they're girls. Once a month, the Wife sits behind the Handmaid as Mr. Man-pants does his thing, and the Handmaid hopes beyond hope that Mr. Man-pants's man-parts work and that she gets pregnant and that she never gets sent away to the Colonies as an Unwoman who gets to clean up toxic waste. Also, women aren't allowed to read or own property, and Handmaids don't even get to use their own names.

It takes a while for the story to get that far. Atwood sort of eases the reader into Offred's (read: of fred's) world, interspersing the dreary present with the past that looks suspiciously like America in the 1980s (when this book was written) and the interim in which Offred is taken away from her life and her husband and child. I wasn't thrilled with the first few chapters, but since I knew better was coming I held on, and then the book got really good and really, you know, disturbing.

Rating: 8.5/10
(My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge)

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

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

Rating: 7/10