The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

Dudes. Dudes. How did you let me not read this for so long? I picked it up because a) it has to go back to its library home soon and b) I hadn't read anything in a week and it looked like it would go quickly. You should pick this book up because it turns out to be pretty fantastic!

I guess there are some caveats to the fantastic, as you kind of have to like a few different kind of things to get into this story. For one, it's a semi-dystopia — "semi-" because the world isn't ever really advertised as utopia, but it's definitely got that dystopian/apocalyptic air to it. Two, it's written as a series of blog posts, which I of course think is delightful but maybe you read enough blogs already? Three, for a book about quasi-immortality, a lot of people die in it, and not very nicely at that.

So. Yes. The background to the story is that some ginger guy invented the cure for aging instead of the cure for gingerness (sorry, Mary!) and everyone is like, "I gotta get me some of that." And that's kind of the story itself, too. We follow this guy John's blog posts as he guides us through 60 years of almost no aging, from right before The Cure is legalized to everyone getting them some of that to those who aren't everyone beating up/throwing lye in the eyes of everyone to some people deciding that cure, whatever, it's time to die if that's cool to government-sponsored bounty hunting to government-sponsored murder. It's pretty intense. And of course the whole time the population is increasing like crazy and all the countries are freaking out at each other and a plane ticket costs $12K because there is no oil left and the lines just to get on the highway (in your plug-in, of course) are hours long because America still won't get behind useful public transportation.

That last is probably (and sadly) the little detail that makes this story ring most true to me, but there are plenty of those little details in Magary's story. This whole book, although it's told as John's story and follows his generally poor handling of all the crazy going on in the world, is really about those details and how on earth the Earth is going to handle a population that suddenly can't get old. And Magary does a great job of showing every facet and really making you think about how this universe is going to play out.

And I really like the blog conceit, which exemplifies the intense nose-to-smartphone social media obsessiveness that Magary predicts will only increase in the next seventy years (right, the book starts in 2019, which is not that far away oh no!). There's a brief intro at the beginning that sets up the story as coming from a hard drive on a discarded old smartphone, with the entries in this book selected to construct a narrative, so right away a couple levels of unreliable narrator, which is excellent. But also I like the blog posts because they convey the right tone for the story, which is this sort of personal-but-one-level-removed, kind of journalistic, kind of diary-ish tone that, and this is key, doesn't really allow John to go exposition crazy because he's nominally writing for people who know what the hell is going on. It would be so easy to go exposition crazy in this kind of story (see Torchwood: Miracle Day, which I would compare and contrast to this except it would end in me yelling), but for the most part Magary avoids it (except for a stray "as you know," which, yelling).

It's not a perfect book, and I found myself super-annoyed with John at many points in the story, some of which were probably not supposed to make me annoyed, but on the whole I found it quite intriguing and thought-provoking. In fact, I had to stop more than once along the way to play "what-if" with my husband, who was trying to play a video game and is probably now trying to figure out how to get one of those cycle marriages all the fictional people are talking about, only maybe five years instead of forty because he's not going to live forever.

Recommendation: For enjoyers of dystopia, sad truths, and a little gratuitous violence (not too much).

Rating: 9/10

Go the Fuck to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach

Sorry for the swearing, up there, but what can you do? Actually, since I read this book while I was, um, cataloging it, I know exactly what you can do — the catalog record offers up a second title of Go the Fok to Sleep because the cover has a convenient moon in the middle. And maybe people don't know what it really says?

But I do! Oh, I do, because after all the internets hullabaloo about this book I couldn't help spending a couple minutes paging through this before sending it out to be processed. That's right, a couple minutes. I was thinking about not even writing up for the blog, but I realized that I could maybe save a few of you those couple minutes that you could use to, like, sleep in a bit one morning, or something.

Yes, indeed, this book is not nearly as exciting as the internet made it out to be. I can hear your shock from all the way over here!

You've probably heard the premise of the book, but if not — it's in the style of a kids' rhyming book, and ostensibly of the go-to-sleep genre of such. I've seen it compared to Goodnight Moon, but it's not quite the same tone. I would say it's trying very hard to be more Dr. Seuss-y or somesuch, but Seuss is a way better poet.

And maybe that's a weird thing to be picky about, but, I mean, the book is like ten pages long and it's entirely made up of these little poems, and the poems are not very good! Mansbach forces words into patterns where they do not fit, and I found myself having to really think about how to make a line go "ta dum dum ta dum dum" more often than I'd like.

Unrelatedly, I just tried to Google some of the lines to show you what I mean, and I discovered that Google won't let me see the results for "go the fuck to sleep," though it will allow "go the f to sleep." Anyone know how to fix that?

Right, anyway, some of the rhymes were off, and also, for as short as this book is, it seemed like Mansbach ran out of steam after the first few poems, because they become increasingly nonsensical and also more "angry" than "tired and frustrated and irritated," which is how the book begins and ends, so I'm not sure what happened in the middle there.

Now I've spent more time writing this book up than reading it! Nuts! Uh, sorry, I guess I didn't save you any time after all!

Recommendation: If you're gonna read it you're gonna read it. At least it's quick!

Rating: 5/10

Regarding Ducks and Universes, by Neve Maslakovic

How could I not read this book, with a title and cover like that? Impossible.

It also helps that the book is a bit of a sci-fi romp, a biiiiit like Shades of Grey or The Android's Dream with the science and the touch of satire and the all-around amusement the author obviously has with his/her own book. I'm a fan.

The fun science here is a bit baffling, but once your head gets around it it's pretty cool. Basically, in the late-ish 1980s of an alternate history (I mean, already alternate before this crazy thing happened), there was a Mad Scientist type who managed to split off the universe into a Universe A and a Universe B that share a timeline and population up to said split, but then anything that happens after the split is one-universe-only. So if this split happened tomorrow, there would be a You A and a You B who are exactly alike tomorrow, but in thirty years maybe one of you is a movie star and the other is not, or one of you lives in Iceland and the other in California, whatever. Awesomely, the Mad Scientist (I think, it could have been someone else) also invented a transporter thing that allows for people from the two universes to travel between them, provided they don't go seeking out their alters (i.e. You A seeking out You B) without permission from said alters.

Are you confused now? Good!

Because of this crazy science, the book is pretty exposition-heavy at the beginning, which is slightly annoying. But then you start getting into the plot part, and that's pretty darn interesting too. Here we have a Felix Sayers (who totally wishes he were related to Dorothy) off to visit Universe B ostensibly for funsies, but actually because he's just found out that he's really Felix A and that his parents lied about his birthdate for some unknown reason. He'd like to figure out why the lying, of course, but he'd also like to make sure that Felix B hasn't gone and written the mystery novel that Felix A has been meaning to get around to, someday, you know, maybe. Things only get stranger when two competing research teams start following Felix A around and he finds out that he might already be a bit more important to history than he ever hoped to be.

I had a lot of fun with this book. There's confusing science, of course, but there's also a healthy dose of vintage mysteries with Sayers and Christie, and some social commentary on environmentalism and social media and e-books that is amusing in small doses, though Maslakovic goes a little too far every once in a while. But! Anyway! Otherwise delightful. Also, there are fun side stories including some corporate espionage, violations of the Lunch-Place Rule, and illness by almost-dog. You know, normal stuff.

"There is something to be said about being unreachable, especially when you are trying to avoid being prodded by your boss to engage in regulation-breaking activities of the sourdough kind."

Recommendation: For fans of the sci-fi romp, Agatha Christie, and sourdough bread.

Rating: 9/10
A to Z Challenge

Juniper Berry, by M.P. Kozlowsky

One of the nice things about putting the stickers on library books is that I get to see these books before they make it out to the shelves, and often before regular library-goers even know these books exist. Sometimes I have no idea why the library buys some of these books. At better times, I go "oooooooh shiny want" and pull out my smartphone and put the book on hold so I can get it first!

This is, obviously, one of those books, and what struck me about it first was the cover, which is delightfully stylized. Then I saw the bit about "a tale of terror and temptation," and then I looked at the back which reads only "Be careful what you wish for." I didn't even have to read all the way through the book flap to know I wanted this book to come home with me. Phone! Hold!

Now, the book is not quite as exciting as all that, unfortunately, but I still found it rather adorable and worth a read by the braver children in your life. Juniper Berry is our protagonist of the amusing name, and she's the daughter of some very busy acTOR parents who have been acting increasingly weird of late. She is isolated in her giant house surrounded by forest, but one day she meets a boy called Giles in her backyard who is worried about his own strange-acting parents. He followed them to Juniper's yard, where they disappeared. Juniper and Giles set off to find out what their parents are doing, and it turns out to be a lot more creepy and sinister than they might have imagined.

It's sort of like a Coraline, I'd say. Very sort of, actually, but the mood is similar and I think it is looking for the same audience. In this case, it's the parents who have gone off looking for that elusive greener grass, but Juniper is still the one who has to set everything right because, you know, parents are useless. This book is also a little more obvious with its message of "no seriously just chill and make the best of the life you have because the life you want can kind of suck," but it's still a totally valid message.

Recommendation: For those who like kick-butt kids and creepy demon types.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor

A couple weeks ago, when I had run out of audiobooks to listen to at work (and just one day before a bunch of audiobooks I'd put on hold came in, of course!), I made an emergency trip to the library with my husband to find something to fill my time. I had no idea of what I wanted, so I just told Scott to grab the first thing that looked interesting. It was this, and I must say that Scott chooses very well!

Well, maybe. I adored this book, but from what the internets have told me, this is the kind of book that you're going to love or loathe, so be prepared!

What this is is a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I also liked quite a lot, largely because of Michael York. You know how it goes. Anyway, in Beddor's version, Alice is not just the overactively imagination-ed daughter of a friend of Charles Dodgson, but also Alyss Heart, Princess of Wonderland. After her not very nice aunt, Redd, comes out of exile, has Alyss's parents beheaded, and takes over Wonderland, Alyss is secretly shepherded out of Wonderland by Hatter Madigan, a Heart bodyguard and elite fighter. She ends up in late 19th-century London, where her story is mangled by Dodgson, and since no one believes her anyway she decides to forget all about having been a princess once. As these things go, of course, once she's grown up and about to be married, her wedding is crashed and she ends up back in Wonderland, where she has to fight Redd and try to win back the kingdom.

Or, to be brief, what this is is Alice with more action sequences.

And I liked it a lot. I'm always a fan of this kind of "true story" of a popular story, and I think Beddor does it quite well. Some of the conceits are a bit of a stretch (Dodgson inventing the White Rabbit from an anagrammatical counterpart, Bibwit Hare? Alyss and a boy being in love-ish at the age of, like, seven?), but for the most part I was totally on board with Beddor's world. I've seen some complaints about the writing, but I wasn't distracted by any of it while I was listening to this at work, so it can't be that terrible. If I ever get through all of the audiobooks that have subsequently arrived for me, I'm sure I will be dipping back into this series.

Recommendation: For readers of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland who thought, "Not enough heads are coming off, here."

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

I downloaded this from OverDrive at the same time as The Phantom of the Opera, and started it right after I was done with the novel. It is, shall we say, not the same.

I actually remember seeing this at my local Borders way back in the day when it was the place for me and my friends to hang out. So, like, eight years ago? I was amused by the cover, but was also not at all a non-fiction reader, so it stayed on the shelf. Now that I'm trying to learn more facts (and need things to listen to at work), this book seemed perfect to read!

And it's quite interesting. I... did not know that you could apply that word to salt before listening to this book. I had no idea that salt was ever considered something valuable, or that wars were fought partially on account of salt, or that the Morton salt I put on my food is, like, intensely uniform. I thought it was just salt!

I also didn't know a lot of things about salted fish, but that whole section of the book did not interest me, either, so I can't tell you much except that apparently the Vikings started their slave trade partially because they did not have salted fish to trade with people. Salted fish, humans, same difference.

SPEAKING of salted fish and humans, did you know that when they first started bringing mummies into... what was it, Britain?... the customs people or whoever taxed them as salted fish for lack of a better way to make money off imported dead people? So maybe not so different after all...

This is what I love about non-fiction books these days. Even if the subject seems completely odd or boring, in the right hands it can have me spouting off strange facts for weeks. I'm sure my husband approves.

Recommendation: For anyone who has ever eaten salt, which is, by the way, everyone.

Rating: 8/10

Zombie, Ohio, by Scott Kenemore

I'm not gonna lie — if this book had been Zombie, Iowa or Zombie, Florida, or Zombie, Texas or whatever, I would have been about 1 percent as likely to pick it up. I mean, I like zombies and all, but they're getting a little overdone these days. But combine them with Ohio, my home state for almost 25 years? And make the story told from the point of view of a zombie? I am so in.

So, yes. This book opens with a guy wandering around amnesia-full after a car accident. He finds his wallet and driver's license, finds his way home, and discovers that there are zombies — I'm sorry, "moving cadavers" in government-speak — wandering around. He is understandably confused and worried, and gets a friend to drive him over to his girlfriend's house to hole up and wait out the storm or whatever, but during all this excitement he takes a bathroom break only to find that the back of his head is kind of missing. Better keep that hat on!

At first, the dude, Peter, is like, "Well, I'd better hide this zombie thing," but then he realizes he totally can't and so runs off to be a zombie in the woods of Ohio. He has "fun" zombie adventures — eats some brains, kills some people, kills some zombies, becomes a legendary zombie by shooting at military helicopters and flipping soldiers the bird... you know. Normal stuff.

It's actually a lot more intriguing than I was anticipating it to be. Peter is pretty self-aware, and being an amnesiac gets a lot of digs in at general human behavior. And also he's pretty much the smartest zombie around, with the others being more like "regular" zombies, so there's a lot of protecting of the zombie herd going on that is kind of sweet. On the downside, there's a bit of a plot line revolving around the fact that Peter's car accident was not so accidental, and although the resolution is interesting, the whole thing could have been edited out and I wouldn't notice a lack in the rest of the story.

On the whole, then, I'd say this book does what it says it's gonna do, and does it pretty okay.

Recommendation: For those who want a different perspective on the zombie novel craze, and people who have always wondered what Knox County, Ohio would look like zombified.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi

My main reaction to this book is this: WHAT.

I picked it up knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it had a neat cover and a strange title. The "jacket" copy (I grabbed the audio version) was interesting enough, with its promises of a kid living underground and busting out and discovering new and interesting things, that I figured I could give it a listen at work. So onto my iPod it went.

Listening to it, though... eh. I missed the part on the box where it said that Teri Hatcher was narrating, and that was a pleasant surprise at first, since I do love Hatcher's voice. But I quickly discovered that I do not like Teri Hatcher's robot voice, or her "Dory speaking whale" voice (from Finding Nemo, of course, and which Hatcher uses for a different, alien large animal) or, in fact, her teenage girl voice, which is possibly more that I hate teenage voices and inflections in general, see that link above. Uggggggggh.

So the story, then. There is a teenage girl — well, a twelve-year-old, so almost teenage — called Eva Nine (another narrating beef: Hatcher can't decide if it's pronounced eh-va, ee-va, or ay-va), who lives underground with her robot MUTHR, who is, obviously, her robot mother. It's just the two of them, and they're training Eva to go wander around Earth, or something, I'm not quite clear on this, but the training gets interrupted when a Bad Guy comes and burns up their hidey-hole. Eva runs off, then gets captured by the Bad Guy, then escapes with a couple of friend-types who are decidedly not human, then goes back to rescue MUTHR, then decides to figure out why she is not on Earth with the humans, and then there is more travelling and adventuring and oh, the title comes from some picture that Eva finds that has just the letters WondLa visible around the picture. Uh. Huh.

I guess this is a children's book, though I found it in the YA section (I imagine it's for older kids, younger teens), and so I guess I can forgive a lot of the telegraphed information and things that seem obvious to me but come as a "surprise" at the end. And one of the things that I absolutely did not see coming actually makes the book make a whole lot more sense, and makes it possibly better, and I wish I had figured it out sooner so I could have appreciated it while it was happening. But I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the story; I wondered how DiTerlizzi's version of a Babel Fish actually works or why the Bad Guy shows up in the first place or why certain things that seemed incredibly important got completely ignored for the rest of the book.

Oh, and then at the end something completely out of left field happens so that I will read the sequel. Not gonna happen.

I don't think I would read this book again, but if I were going to go back in time and pick this book up for the first time again, I would make sure it was in book form, as apparently there are neat illustrations and, of course, I wouldn't have to listen to the voices I disliked. And there's an interesting thing that I didn't check out because I didn't want to download something, but if you are reading this with kids they'll probably download it before you even realize — on the CDs and, I imagine, in the book are some illustrations that you can hold up to a webcam and that the aforementioned downloadable program will apparently decode and turn into some sort of interactive image or video or something? If you end up doing this, let me know what it is!

Recommendation: I think kids will like this; I think I would have liked it better as a kid, at least. I imagine that if you like DiTerlizzi's other stuff, this is probably right up that alley.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Caretaker of Lorne Field, by Dave Zeltserman

You may vaguely remember this title from my post on books that followed me home, like, forever ago. I had given Zeltserman's other book, Killer, first dibs on being read, but I didn't get very into it and this A to Z Challenge isn't going on much longer so I picked up Caretaker instead, hoping it would be better.

Boy, is it. The non-alphabet-related reason I had picked this book up was that it mentioned James M. Cain, whom I currently adore, on the cover, and I'd say that NPR is right with that comparison. Zeltserman creates an odd situation, throws a bunch of people into it, and then sees what they have to do to fix it.

I'm not kidding about the odd situation, either — the caretaker of the title spends his days out at the field of the title pulling up monsters that look like weeds but that if left to grow for only a few days will get ginormous and eat the entire world. Nomnomnom.

Or... maybe they're just weeds. The caretaker, Jack Durkin, certainly thinks they're monsters, and so do some of the older community members who have been around to see other Durkins take care of the field (there's a 300-year-old contract involved), but the majority of everyone is pretty sure they're just weeds, including Durkin's wife, who is getting a little sick of being ridiculously poor and thinks that Durkin needs to just get a new job already and stop being a lazy person who weeds for 12 hours a day.

Durkin doesn't like being so disrespected, so he figures out a way to prove that the weeds aren't weeds, but in the process of doing so some TERRIBLE HORRIBLE things happen that might be the monsters' fault or might be Durkin's fault or might be just an accident. And I changed my mind about which one it was just about every page for the last half of the book.

So it's pretty exciting, and a little brain-exploding, and it also throws in a ton of Cain-style completely depressing. Zeltserman takes it a little too far at the end, making the book several pages longer than it strictly needs to be and passing up a few good stopping points, but I was thoroughly satisfied with the ending so that's all right.

Recommendation: For the person who doesn't like to know what's happening at any given moment and/or who likes an existential crisis or two.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, by Kira Henehan

This list of Novels I Don't Understand, Not One Bit is getting longer by the week! I picked this one up primarily because of the title, but also because the jacket copy made it sound like it could be a long-lost cousin of the Thursday Next series, which I adore.

However, Finley (the heroine of this story) has nothing on Thursday. Nothing at all. Unless she does, which I wouldn't know because I know next to nothing about Finley! She's a detective, of some sort, and she may or may not be Russian, and she may or may not be an amnesiac, and she definitely does not like puppets except for tiny ones, and... that's it, I think. That's what I've got.

And I might have given up on this book, except that unlike The Quickening Maze, there seemed to be at least some sort of discernable plot line — specifically that Finley was meant to be investigating a guy who makes puppets. I don't know why, even now, but it seemed like I might find out. But I didn't. I got to the end and there was a "reveal" that revealed NOTHING and I really have no idea what happened in this book. Like, at all. It is possible that I went temporarily insane during the read-a-thon and forgot how to read and that's why I don't understand this book... but it's probably actually the book's fault. Can someone come explain this to me? Please?

Recommendation: Read this book if you've ever thought to yourself, "I like Samuel Beckett, but there's just too much meaning in his works. I want something more abstract."

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds

-makes face- -makes another face- -twitches-

I think we're going to have to file this one under Novels I Don't Understand, Not One Bit. My impetus for starting this book was the A to Z Challenge, but then the prologue was just so darn good and I thought, hey, this could be awesome. And then it was confusing and odd and more confusing, but those first three pages! Good! And so I continued on, hoping that maybe the book would start to make any sort of sense and it didn't and it was never as good as the beginning. -pout-

I can't even give you a summary of what this book is meant to be about. There's this guy, right, and he has an asylum, and people... live there? And they go about their lives? And they tend to be crazy? And then this guy what runs the asylum, he has a Plan for going into business, and he gets people to invest, and then it fails. I think. It's going to fail, anyway.

And one of the investors is Alfred Tennyson, whose brother is a patient at the asylum, and another patient is John Clare, who I didn't know was a poet but apparently he was pretty okay, so maybe this book is about poetry, right? And then that makes a lot of sense, because I don't understand poetry, either, usually. There are a couple of poems in the novel. Maybe that's something.

What really bothers me is that part of the Thing of this novel is that it's based on actual things that happened to Tennyson and Clare, but... you know... I feel like there are other, more interesting, things that one could write about the lives of poets. Is that it? Is this book about how even poets live crappy lives and get swindled? But I already knew that. Maybe the whole book is just an asylum fever-dream. I could get behind that.

I will offer again that the first three pages are beautifully written, and in fact much of the novel is made up of pretty words that make pretty sentences and paragraphs and whatnot. But I can't survive on pretty alone.

Recommendation: I recommend this novel only for perhaps historians who are very well versed in the histories of Tennyson and Clare, or maybe also for people who have been told the secret of what this book is about. If you're one of those people, could you share?

Rating: 5/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Black Minutes, by Martín Solares

I saw this book hanging out in the "new mysteries" section of my library, and I was completely drawn in by the cover. And then I skimmed through the jacket flap and discovered that the author is from Mexico and said, "Hey! Orbis Terrarum book! Excellent!" So I grabbed it.

What a tough book. It starts off with a three-page cast of characters, many of whom have not just a given name but also a nickname (or two). I was glad for these pages later in the novel when I was like, "Who are these people? Is this guy that guy from before? No? Who the heck is he?"

It's also tough because the mystery at the beginning, which is all interesting and stuff, is actually a frame story for a mystery from twenty years earlier which takes up most of the book. So then when it's time to get back to the present, you get a bit of whiplash. The novel is broken up into three "books" to delineate these times, but it's still a little confusing.

And, for even more fun, the book switches from third person to first person (with different first people) on a regular basis, and there are a couple of weird dream-sequence-type things that I'm not sure about. I'm not up on the literature from Mexico, so maybe this is a thing? Or maybe it's just Solares' thing. I don't know.

But, regardless, the story — especially the 20-years-ago mystery — was incredibly interesting and engaging. It reminded me of Tana French's novels in that the mystery is good, but the novel is about so much more than that. In Solares' case, his novel is really about corruption in the Mexican government and police and everywhere, really, and how a man trying to stay uncorrupted can deal with all of that and even, later, how a corrupt man can deal with all of that. Solares does a great job of showing how rampant corruption is, and today, a few days after finishing the book, I'm still feeling a little paranoid. I think that's a sign of an excellent storyteller.

Recommendation: Check this out if you like your mysteries with a little more literary slant, like Tana French's, and have some time to spend reading this through slowly. This is not a novel you'll get through in a day.

Rating: 8/10
(RIP Challenge, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Mexico, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Physics of the Buffyverse, by Jennifer Ouellette

This is the first book I checked out from my new library system in Florida, so I'm glad it was fairly decent. :) It was on a shelf full of non-fiction science books, which are okay in general, but one look at that title and I was sold. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though I've seen probably only half of the episodes (this is getting slowly rectified through the wonders of Netflix), and I've been in an on-again, off-again relationship with physics for a long time, so why wouldn't I pick up this book?

Now, I'd say you really need to have some sort of relationship with physics to read this book. It's not so much "The Physics of the Buffyverse" as it is "Regular Physics Explained Through the Use of Events in Buffy and Angel," which is still cool but by the time you get to string theory, your head might explode, and not because of a scream that resonates as the same frequency as your head (Ouellette's explanation for the death of the Gentlemen).

Other than that, the writing is solid and Ouellette does a pretty good job keeping the confusing bits interesting. I was just really hoping for some creative made-up physics rather than the "Well, this could never happen, but here's something similar that could" avoidances, so I ended up disappointed. In the book, anyway. All of the little spoilers Ouellette gives out have made me even more excited to watch Buffy, and even Angel, which I have never actually seen. Let me just run off to my television now...

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Schrödinger's Ball, by Adam Felber

One of those things that is both a benefit and disadvantage of volunteering in a library three hours a week is that during those three hours, I see a lot of books. And often take them all home with me. This is one of them — I was sent to scour the stacks for short books with which people could kick off the Fifty Book Challenge (if you live anywhere near the TPL you should totes sign up!) and while doing so I found this bright green book with the weird name just waiting for me to take it home! I was even nice and put it in the short books display in case someone else felt it calling, but at 3 p.m. it was mine.

And it is a freakin' weird book. It doesn't really have a straightforward plot, so I will attempt to list the various things that happen early on in the book:
• We meet the President of Montana.
• We briefly meet a kid called Johnny as he is accidentally killing himself while cleaning his gun.
• We meet Dr. Schrödinger, who is magically alive many years after his death and who is explaining his cat theory to some people.
• We meet a girl having an orgasm. (Luckily, this orgasm thing is not really important after the first few pages.)
• We meet Johnny again as he's hanging out in a bar, and find out the point of the novel: "This was several hours after he accidentally shot and killed himself. But he hadn't been found yet, so he wasn't actually dead — he was both alive and dead, and neither alive nor dead, and he was drinking a beer."

Right. So, basically, reading the whole book is like taking some sort of hallucinogenic drug laced with physics and it's really weird but also really awesome if you like physics. And if you don't like physics, here are some things you might like about the book:
• There is a cast of characters at the beginning.
• Every once in a while there is a list.
• One character is voiced entirely in diary entries about made-up history.
• About a third of the way in, the book gets stuck in an infinite loop and crashes.
• A few pages later the narrative is briefly written as a screenplay.
• Another character is voiced entirely in made-up Bible verse.
• Toward the end the narrative is written for a while as a Shakespearean play, with excellent iambic pentameter and puns and all.

The only thing that would make this book better would be footnotes. How were there not footnotes??

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

B is for Beer, by Tom Robbins (28 August)

This is a weird little book. It is subtitled both "A Children's Book for Grown-ups" and "A Grown-up Book for Children" and it has a big ol' glass of beer on the front. Oh, yes.

It's basically an excuse for Tom Robbins to write a book of fun facts about beer and how it's brewed in the "explain this to my five-year-old daughter" way, because the protagonist is five and gets curious about beer. Her uncle, Moe, who is totally that slacker uncle that your kids love and you don't care much for, promises to take her on a brewery tour for her sixth birthday, but when her birthday totally falls apart it doesn't happen. So she drinks a bunch of beer (for a six-year-old, anyway), vomits, and then goes on an adventure with the Beer Fairy. Yeah, you read that right.

It was cute! And entertaining. And wholly unbelievable. And it had some bad puns. Really bad. Terrible. But it's still really funny.

Rating: 7/10

See also:
[your link here]

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

Cause for Alarm, by Eric Ambler (3 June — 6 June)

Generally, I follow the good ol' 50-page rule for books, but something told me that this book could be good if I just gave it a few more, and sure enough, I was totally invested around page 75. So don't give up on this little book!

It's 1930s England, and Nicky Marlow's just been laid off from his engineering job. It takes him longer to find a job than he'd expected (boy, do I understand that feeling! I need employment!), so he ends up taking a job in Italy as a business manager for a firm that sells machines that make weapons. From the start, the Milan job is a bit dodgy — odd people in the office, even more odd people striking up conversations with him, his passport being "mislaid" by the government. When one of his odd acquaintances tells Nicky that he'll be getting an interesting proposition from another, Nicky discovers a whole new side to engineering.

I really liked this book once I got into it. Because of the way the book is written, you know that Nicky's going to be mostly all right in the end, but Ambler still makes it interesting to find out just how he gets out of the scrapes he makes his way into. And in proper thriller fashion, there are some good chase and deception scenes. I'm rather surprised that this was never made into a movie, though other Ambler works have been. I'll have to check those out.

Rating: 8/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

The Weatherman's Daughters, by Richard Hoyt (5 May — 11 May)

Um. Well. Maybe I should learn to read the flap more closely. I picked this one up at the library because of its interesting title and the image on its cover — fish raining down. I looked at the flap. "Two daughters of a Portland weatherman have been killed for no apparent reason and John Denson and his Native American partner, Willie Sees the Night, are called from their remote cabins on Whorehouse Meadow in the Cascade Mountains to help. But for once Denson is stumped—this is a trail he can't seem to follow."

Okay, cool, right? Murder, interesting-sounding detective, let's go! And the first part of the book is cool like that. Denson is out driving when a waterspout causes a rain of salmon; when he pulls off to take some photos and video, he finds a dying body whose last words are "Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle ther. Gurgle, gurgle, ister. Gurgle, gurgle ill gurgle." Yeah.

So then, there's some stuff about the ethics of releasing the salmon storm video, and then eventually we get back to the mystery at hand, and then someone else is dead, oh no!, and then Denson goes on some acid-tripping spirit walk and meets his creator (no really, he meets Richard Hoyt at his house in the Phillipines) and something about owls, and then there's an exotic dancer and a militia and then more killing. I kept going because I really did want to know who killed the weatherman's daughters, but then the mystery got "solved" and I still don't really understand what happened. Blast.

And if I had just read the rest of the flap, wherein the out-of-body flying and exotic dancers, and bear gall bladders are mentioned, I might not have picked it up and wasted that week of reading. Oh well.

Rating: 4/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2003, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

The Book of Murder, by Guillermo Martínez (1 May)

Not that I needed to read another book about murder, I guess, but at least this one is honest about it up front.

Our unnamed, undescribed narrator tells us an intriguing story about a girl called Luciana who was a typist for a month for said narrator, a writer. After the month, Luciana went back to her other writer employer, Kloster, and our narrator didn't think much about her again. But now, ten years later, Luciana has tracked down our narrator to tell a fantastic story about Kloster and how he is killing off Luciana's relatives mysteriously and without drawing any attention to himself. Is he? What's really going on now, and what really happened ten years ago? Our narrator sets off to find out.

This book is really short (215 pages), so that's about all I can tell you. But the story is very good! You should read it and then talk about it with me.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Argentina)

Audiobook Round-up

I got back last night from a week-long camping trip in Alabama, which was awesome. Less awesome is all the internet catching-up I have to do!

Because of the twelve-hour drive, I decided to collect a bunch of audiobooks from the library's fancy-pants online trove of such things. Scott loves them, but I'd never given them a real try. Now I have, and... well. I was right — I can't focus on an audiobook to save my life. So. No ratings (or even decent reviews) for these until I read them proper, but here's the list of things I listened to in the car last week.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
This is a 1988 collection of Barry's columns, which shows in all his talk about Reagan as president! I like Barry, so I enjoyed listening to this hour-long book while I tried to stay awake (we left home at 6am!). Bonus points for having John Ritter as a narrator.

More of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
I can't seem to find this listed anywhere but fancy-pants online troves of audiobooks, so this is possibly audiobook-only. Unsure. Anyway, this is the 1996 collection of awesome columns. Still entertaining. Still narrated by John Ritter. Still capable of keeping me awake, if not listening properly.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (28 March — 29 March)
I knew the general idea going in, of course — Dorian Gray has a painting that ages while he stays young. That turns out to be a gross over-simplification of this novel, which deals with heavy themes of morality and ethics and deception. Grey likes his painting at the beginning, but as it ages and the bad things he's done show up in it he comes to loathe it. And his loathing of it has him doing even more bad things that show up in it. And all the while he has an angel-friend telling him how good he is, and a devil-friend spouting off ridiculous (even to him) notions of how the world works. I definitely enjoyed this book, but I will have to go back and read it to pick up on the hour or two I missed of it!

(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory (8 February)

This morning it felt like forever since I picked up a book, even though I finished Children of God, you know, three days ago. I'd meant to start this book right away, but instead I went to the movies twice (Underworld was okay for not having seen the others; Coraline was awesome and I can't wait to pick up my hold copy from the library) and was otherwise generally lazy. As happens.

Anyway, this book was definitely exciting to me. I picked it up off the new releases shelf at the library because the title had the word "demon" highlighted within "pandemonium" and because the back promised me demonic possession and an appearance by a possessed Philip K. Dick. How do you go wrong with that?

Basically the book tackles the question, what if demons calling themselves The Truth and The Painter and The Captain and several other great stock-character names decided to inhabit people's bodies at random for kicks and giggles? And, also, what if one of those possessed people realized he never got un-possessed and tried to figure out how to get rid of The Hellion inside him?

I liked it. Pandemonium certainly isn't literary, but it's excellent book candy and a quick read. The plot and style remind me of Christopher Moore (whose books I should really get back to reading, now that I think about it), and that's a compliment.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008, Support Your Local Library Challenge)