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

Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson

Facts about this book: 1) I put it on hold right when it came into my library in the middle of June, got it quickly, and then proceeded to forget to read it before I had to take it back. But by then people were saying good things about it, so I immediately put it on hold again, on August 1, and it finally came in on November 2.

2) I thought I'd have a minute to start it while waiting for a haircut, but I only got maybe three sentences in. Those three sentences, and the many many following, had me finishing the book in less than five hours after I got home and cracked it open a second time.

Seriously, this book is pretty fantastic. Dennis Lehane apparently thinks that it's "Memento on crystal meth" but, I mean, Memento was already on crystal meth (and AWESOME) so I'm not sure what he's trying to say here.

It is sort of like Memento, though, because our protagonist, Christine suffers from some weird memory problem that only lets her form new memories as long as she's awake, and then once she goes and has a REM cycle her memories are poof gone. So she wakes up every morning thinking she's some single young thing in bed with some old man, except it's her husband and he's actually younger than she is. Oh dear.

But, unlike Memento, we're seeing Christine's world from a very limited perspective — that of a journal she started keeping at the behest of a doctor, with neither the journal nor the doctor known to her husband, Ben. And the journal says not to trust Ben. Suspicious!

So it starts off with Christine getting her journal back (as written in a second journal, or something), and then there's the journal proper, which we go through in chronological order along with Christine, and the facts start piling up on each other and disagreeing with each other and Christine disagrees with herself often and it's all very very very intriguing. And obviously, the journal says not to trust Ben from the beginning, so when Ben turns out to be less than trustworthy it's not surprising, exactly, but I did not quite correctly call the ending and so I declare it a success.

I liked this a lot, just as I liked Memento a lot, because I am such a sucker for unreliable narrators (though Christine is more reliable than Leonard, really). I also thought it was fantastic to watch Christine change her opinions about things slowly but surely as she gets more and more of her backstory, and how also she was very consistent about things she didn't remember. I thought the book was well-paced and didn't go on for longer than it should have (or could have), and that the wrap-up was sufficiently informative and still interesting — it's really easy to throw on the exposition when the character you're expositing to is practically a blank slate, and I think Watson found a good balance there. The only problem I had with the ending was that it was fairly predictable (if not down to exact details), but, I mean, there are only so many ways this kind of story can end and I'd rather it end this way than another.

So, if you're still in RIP mood like I seem to be, this is not a bad way to go! Also, I totally need to go watch Memento again.

Recommendation: If you don't like unreliable narrators, just ignore this book and move on. Otherwise, I don't know why you haven't read this yet!

Rating: 9/10

Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman

Yeah, I know we've been through all these stories together already (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), but I want to have a nice little place where I can summarize my thoughts, so bear with me here!

First note: I've read a few short story collections in my time, but only a few, and with this read-along I think I've figured out why — short stories are meant to be read on their own, not all at once. It's just more cost-effective to lump them into a big book and call it a day. For most of the read-along I listened to one story a day, four days a week, and it worked amazingly better to have that 24-hour period to think about the story before moving on than it ever had to mainline a whole book of them. I am going to follow this slow-reading practice in the future, for sure.

Second note: I read each of these stories twice, once with my ears and once with my eyes, generally in that order. This turned out to be a pretty good practice, especially with Gaiman narrating his own stories, because some of the stories and the poems in general were much better when I could hear the cadence and the word patterns that Gaiman had written in, and others were better when I could see how he formatted them or see the sentences to parse them correctly. And of course, the second time around I could get a better appreciation for the story as a whole since I already knew how it ended. That worked out really well for writing up the stories every week, but I probably won't do that in the future unless I know I'm going to discuss the stories!

Third note: I don't usually read story collections that are comprised of such very different stories, and it was really just amazing to me how large the gap was between the stories I loved and the stories I disloved. I don't think there were any I absolutely hated, but there are a few I don't need to ever think about again, and also there are a few that I would like to have metaphorically tattooed to my body so I could read them every day. It also intrigued me to see that the kind of stories Neil Gaiman writes are not always the kind of stories I think that Neil Gaiman would know how to write. I like that Gaiman is willing to write things that are so outside of the pattern of his popular stuff and just let you like it or not.

Okay, I think that covers it! I hope you guys that did the read-along with me enjoyed the experience as much as I did, and I hope that those of you who didn't are at least moderately interested in picking up this collection, because there really are some fabulous stories. I think my Top Five list would be, in rough order, "Goliath," "Sunbird," "A Study in Emerald," "Feeders and Eaters," and "October in the Chair. I think. Care to share yours?

Recommendation: Fantastic reading, a must for Gaiman-lovers and a should for people who like their stories short and a little fantastic.

Rating: Oh, gosh. I'm going to just throw out the stories I disloved and call this a 9/10.
(RIP Challenge)

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 Lantern, by Deborah Lawrenson

So, in case you haven't been paying any attention to the blog lately, I just finished up a read-along of The Lantern (first week here). If you want my as-they-happened, totally-spoilerful thoughts, you should go check those posts out. If you don't, or if you want to know how I felt about the book as a whole, read on!

The Lantern is not really a story I'd have picked up on my own. It's one of them gothic novels, except set in the present-ish day, and I have not always been a fan of the melodrama and the sekrits and the falling-apart houses. But I think I've read enough of this type of novel to at least sort of know what to expect, and that certainly helps. But but, I have not read Rebecca, which is apparently the basis for this book. Sooooo I may be missing a lot of stuff here.

But but BUT, I still managed to really like this book. It has two narrators, which I love, and goes back and forth in time, which I love, and starts at the end, which I love, and has an entirely unreliable narrator, which I love. It's also got a sensory theme to it, which I am starting to like, and lots of spookyness, which I appreciate. Not terrible, right?

And the stories proper are quite interesting, too. The primary narrator, who is nameless but sort of goes by Eve, meets a guy and sets off on a romantically romantic adventure, moving to the French boonies and fixing up an old falling-apart house, and it's all delightful except that he won't talk about his ex-wife, like, at all. Not a whit. And Eve thinks that's all suspicious and stuff, and so does one of her new neighbors who has at one point met said ex-wife and... misses her? I guess, and then some even more suspicious stuff happens and Eve is like, oh boy. The other narrator, Bénédicte, is from the past and lived in the falling-apart house before it started falling apart. And her brother is insane and her sister is blind and her parents are not terribly good parents and Bénédicte does her best to take care of everyone but you know from early on that they're all haunting her in her old age and she's sure she deserves it.

Quite good, and as of the end of the fourth of five parts, I was like, greatest book ever? It was wonderfully compelling and spooky and interesting and things were quite exciting. But then things kind of derail as the slow build of the book turns into a lot of exposition and explanation, and I think if I had been prepared for this I might not have been so irked by it, so I am telling you now! And certainly with the book a few days in my past now, I'm feeling much better about the ending, but oh my goodness while it was happening... whatever! Moving on!

So I can't give it my endorsement of absolute awesomeness, but I can definitely say that it's worth a read, especially if you can talk about it with others who will pick up on all the things you didn't, like those darn Rebecca parallels. And it is totally perfect for a cool fall evening and a cup of hot cocoa. Mmm, hot cocoa. If you need an excuse to drink some, this is a good one!

Recommendation: For lovers of the Gothic, the spooky, ghosties, and hot cocoa.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Unwritten Vol. 3, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

Nooooo I forgot to pace myself and now I have to wait some unknown amount of time for the next volume! Nuts! But my husband got his hands on it and he's the type of person who accidentally spoils things on a regular basis, so really I had to read it. Had to.

And it is so fantastic. Even if you don't want to read this series, track down this volume at your library and find the page with the amusingly terrible rip-off of His Dark Materials. And then flip forward to the other page that looks like that one and that gets in a dig at George Lucas with a reference to "meta-condrians." Totally worth it.

Other things that are totally worth it: one of the issues that makes up this collection is a Choose Your Own Adventure. Did I mention FANTASTIC? My husband and I proved our perfectness for each other by choosing the exact same path through the story (we apparently are fans of evil evilness), but I also went back and read through a few other iterations and a) they were all interesting and b) some paths made sly winks at other paths that you wouldn't notice except if you read them all. Oh, AND, the whole point of the choosing of your own adventure is to make the point that you, you know, get to do that with your life. Hands-on morals? How intriguing.

Story, you say? There is one, but why aren't you just reading it? Seriously. Okay, fine.

Our friend Tom is presumed dead but still on the run from the Shadowy People. Someone has written a terrible fourteenth (yes, fourteenth) Tommy Taylor book and even though the publishing house knows that it wasn't Tom's dad, they're totes willing to make a jillionty-twelve dollars off of it. It includes the aforementioned scene with Lord Gabriel explaining Powder to Tommy Taylor. Oh, yes. It turns out that the SPs wrote it to bring Wilson Taylor out of hiding, which may or may not end up working. Also, we find out who Tom's mum is and we sort of find out what Lizzie Hexam's deal is ("sort of" because part of it is the CYOA). And if they're giving away all this information now, I am very interested in finding out what they aren't telling me!

I'll just wait here, impatiently, until I can find out.

Recommendation: For people who don't mind parodies of beloved children's fantasy series, people who like to choose their own adventures, and fans of the garrote.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

So, I read this for RIP two years ago and found it pretty fantastic, if easily spoil-able. And then a while back I found it on OverDrive as an audiobook and plopped it on my "for future reference list" and then I had disappointing times with the audio for The Turn of the Screw and I put off listening to it for fear of a repeat.

But I should have feared not! For this audio version is everything that The Turn of the Screw was not, with the narrator all suspenseful and whispery and actually way more creepy than I had previously thought Merricat to be. Excellence!

And so, yes. There's a Merricat, and her family is about half dead, including one person who is basically half-dead himself, and her sister Constance doesn't leave the house on account of the town doesn't care if Constance was acquitted of murdering her family, they're still jerk-pantses who like to sing songs about murder. And they sing them at Merricat when she goes into town, but she just imagines them all falling dead and she feels better.

That's pretty much how the whole book goes. Also: the town is full of mean people, Merricat's house is a refuge, a relative comes to call who starts to combine the two, hell breaks loose. Don't let townies into your house, is the moral of this story. Also beware the power of people in large groups (this is from the woman who wrote The Lottery, after all), the power of very aggressive people, and the power of superstition. And arsenic. Arsenic is bad stuff, guys.

I would tell you more specific things, but part of the charm of the story is in how Jackson sets everything up to be revealed, although even knowing the "secrets" of the book I still found a lot to love in it. So you should just go ahead and read it twice in a row. It's a short book. No problem.

Recommendation: For people who are or like to be creeped out by children and/or mobs. Also people who like poisonous mushrooms.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Unwritten Vol. 2, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I held out as long as I could, but after The Unwritten's super-intriguing start, I just couldn't stay away! And it's still super-intriguing and also baffling and also heartbreaking.

So last time there was Tom Taylor, the namesake of a bigger-than-but-basically-a-ripoff-of-Harry-Potter book franchise who is either not actually his father's offspring and therefore not worthy of the Tommy Taylor franchise or actually Tommy Taylor and therefore an unknown-to-himself Man Wizard. Which is still pretty much where we are, sort of.

Now, at the end of the last book someone murdered a whole bunch of people and Tom was the only one around to take the blame, so this story arc takes place in a French prison overseen by a governor who is not sympathetic to minor celebrity. But the prison thing isn't really important, what's important is all the people in it. Tom makes unlikely friends and allies with some of the inmates and makes a huge enemy of the governor for what seems at first to be no reason at all. Except that then we go look at the events from the governor's perspective and you find out that he has these kids who are obsessed with Tommy Taylor to the point of believing in his real and actual existence, and the governor is not pleased that Tom has effed things up big-time. Oh, and then those shadowy people from the last book decide to burn down the prison. No big.

Also, a trip to Nazi Germany via magical doorknob and an... interesting meeting with Josef Goebbels. Also, also, in the non-Tom comic at the end, an adventure with a foul-mouthed rabbit in a sort of Winnie-the-Pooh land. It's all very delightful, really.

I think the best part about this series so far is that even with the ridiculousness and insanity, it's all very literary. It loves literature and references it, in the form of the aforementioned Pooh spoof and an extended riff on the Song of Roland and of course all of the Harry Potter/fantasy-in-general allusions. It is also way more than its premise; sure, there's adventure and potential wizardliness, but there's also a lot to think about in terms of the role of media, the effect of childhood heroes on children and the adults who love them, and the magical power of attention. That middle one is what leads to the heartbreak in this volume, big time, as it does in real life.

I am definitely in for the next volume, and almost definitely for getting off my duff and patronizing my local comics shop for the issue-by-issue comics when the time comes. It's good stuff.

Recommendation: Yeah, you'd better have that strong stomach for some of the violence in here, and also a strong heart. A love of the f-word can't hurt, either.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge)

The Unwritten Vol. 1, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross

I don't remember where I first heard about this series... one of those blogs or podcasts or something that tells me what's good. I don't remember what I was promised, either, but whatever it was I liked it enough to give it a shot.

That forgetting posed a bit of a problem in the first few pages, which I read and thought, "Whaaaaaaaaat is this? This is not very good. What's with all these words? It's a graphic novel!" And I really almost gave it up right then, but I said to myself, I said self, you've done this before and maybe you should just give it a little bit longer.

And of course, I was right. The second time, with the reading just one more page. Because it turns out that first three pages or whatever are meant to be pages from a not-graphic novel series that is like Harry Potter et al. and therefore is written as a send-up of Harry Potter et al. And once I figured that out, I was much happier!

The real novel, the graphic one, is about this fella called Tom Taylor whose father wrote the aforementioned series that instead of Harry Potter is Tommy Taylor. Tom is emphatically not Tommy, but is still making a living going around to all the cons and whatnot signing Tommy Taylor signatures and talking about his father's work, which his father can't do because he's gone mysteriously missing, or possibly just abandoned everyone. And right now Tom has two opposing problems causing him no end of trouble — a group of people who think he's not really Tommy Taylor but some kid his father absconded with to make himself look good, and another group that thinks he's totally Tommy Taylor, magical wizardry and all. And some people in that last group would really rather him dead...

There's so much to this story, I've barely cracked the surface of it, which makes sense considering these are just the first 5 comics of an ongoing series. But other interesting things so far are Tom's obsession (given to him by his father) for literary locations, a mysterious staircase that has more stairs going down than coming up, people possibly made of words, and some revisionist-history backstory involving Rudyard Kipling.

I may or may not have gone right out the day after reading this volume to get the other two that currently exist. I might have to track down a comic shop if I get through those too quickly...

Recommendation: So far, I'd recommend for people with a good sense of humor about fantasy conventions and a slightly strong stomach.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

I don't want to talk about this book. I want to snuggle with it. Snuggle snuggle snugg—ow, those are some pointy edges! Okay, book, you can just stay over there a minute.

Okay, so, this book. I heard some folks bein' real excited about it earlier this year, and I was like, magicians? Circuses? Secret plots OF DOOM? I am so in. And so I put a hold on it at the library, some ridiculous amount of time in advance. And then in the intervening weeks this book seemed to get ALL the publicity, showing up on lots of blogs and in newspapers and on NPR, and everyone was like OMG THIS BOOK IS TEH AWESOMEST and I was like, ohlord. Because I've read those books before, and I have not liked them.

But as you can tell, this book I liked a ton, possibly because all those things that drew me into the story, and that made me worry that they would not be as good as everyone was shouting about, were really not that important. Yes, there are magicians. There is a mysterious contest so hush-hush that even the competitors have no idea what the contest is or how to win it. There is intrigue and subterfuge. But what I cared about was the circus.

The circus is this nearly completely black-and-white affair, with dozens of little tents with your usual circus fare and a few tents with really magical things — a magician disguised as an illusionist, a labyrinth, a wishing tree, a landscape made entirely of ice but still realistically aroma-ed. And what makes the circus truly special is that the author makes sure you know exactly what everything looks like and smells like and feels like and all those other sensory things. About a bonfire:

"As you walk closer, you can see that it sits in a wide black iron cauldron, balanced on a number of clawed feet. Where the rim of a cauldron would be, it breaks into long strips of curling iron, as though it has been melted and pulled apart like taffy. The curling iron continues up until it curls back into itself, weaving in and out amongst the other curls, giving it the cage-like effect. The flames are visible in the gaps between and rising slightly above. They are obscured only at the bottom, so it is impossible to tell what is burning, if it is wood or coal or something else entirely."

Morgenstern intersperses short sensory passages like that throughout the novel, but she writes all of her scenes in a similarly opulent way. At first I was a bit put off by this seemingly over-verbose writing, and in a few places it sort of gets away from Morgenstern, but in general she makes it work fantastically and it is absolutely my favorite aspect of the book. I really want to get my hands on the audiobook so that this writing and Jim Dale's voice can make beautiful babies in my brain.

Ahem.

If you're more of a story person, I'm not sure you'll be as enamored with the book; the plot is fairly simple, starts off quite slow, and ends abruptly AND with a not-declared-as-such-but-it-totally-is-and-can't-deny-it epilogue, but though I found myself saying more than once "If this goes one step farther I'm calling shenanigans," the book managed never to take that step, at least by my measurements.

I wrote on Twitter the other night that "I've read through the last page of The Night Circus, but I'm certainly not finished with it..." and that holds true today. I spent more than a week reading this book not because I didn't have time to devour it in one sitting but because I didn't want to. I wanted to savor that writing and put off leaving the circus as long as possible. And I'm not kidding about the audiobook. My library doesn't have it yet but when they do, you'll be seeing another post about The Night Circus right here.

Recommendation: If you like shiny pretty things or magic or clown-less circuses, you'll probably be happy here.

Rating: 9/10
(RIP Challenge, A to Z Challenge)

Anya's Ghost, by Vera Brosgol

I heard about this book over at the NPR a couple weeks ago, which makes this an incredibly fast turnaround, for me, for hearing about, ordering up, and reading a book!

It almost didn't happen, though. The first few pages of this graphic novel are all, "Wah, wah, I'm an immigrant child and I don't wanna be, I wanna be AMERICAN and get skinny by eating LOW FAT POP TARTS and I have crush on a guy with a GIRLFRIEND and I get so little allowance I can only buy ONE pack of cigarettes a month, wah wah," and then Anya falls down an abandoned well and I am like HAH YOU DESERVE IT THE END. And I closed the book, and was like, well, there's that then, but then I was like okay, fine, I'll stick around at least 'til the ghost. And then I didn't stop reading.

So, yes, there's all the immigrant stuff, which is rather like the other First Second book I read, American Born Chinese, and really, I shouldn't have doubted, because also like that book Anya gets hers for all the whining and becomes a much better person by the end. Spoilers? Probably not.

What happens is, she falls down this well and finds a skeleton and then finds a ghost, who is all, "I've been trapped down here for 90 years and really, couldn't you help me see the world a bit?" at first, and becomes very slowly more creepy and then menacing and the art is wonderful because you can literally see this change happening. And, as in all good horror stories, the creepy and menacing parts of the ghost are really just exaggerations of Anya's own life and potential future.

And even if you're not into finding-yourself stories or ghosts or whatnot, there's plenty of horrible high school stuff you can look nostalgically back on, like tests you haven't studied for and showing your British-style pants in gym class and finding out that the hot guy at school is a total loser, actually, and did I say nostalgically? I meant HOLY HECK AM I GLAD I AM NOT IN HIGH SCHOOL ANYMORE.

Recommendation: Right, so, yes. Give this one a chance!

Rating: 9/10

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)

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

So Much Pretty, by Cara Hoffman

Here's another book that I didn't start reading until right before it was due — except this time it wasn't on purpose! I even had to pull a little fancy library trickery in order to return the book and get it back again so that I could keep reading it... and it was totally worth it.

At first, I wasn't sure. The book starts out with a narrator (the book has many) being all like, "Oh, I know you've heard the stories and know all about this HORRIBLE TERRIBLE TRAGIC EVENT that happened, which I had a hand in and which I totally regret and now I'm going to tell you the true story." And I'm like, "Right. That event. Yes, totally. What was it again?" And the narrator is like, "I'll get to that."

So, basically, the reader knows absolutely nothing about this something bad that happened for, oh, the first half of the book. And then? Well, then the reader knows what the bad thing is that has happened, but not why or how it relates to all these other narrators' story lines that have been woven in and these weird police evidence report things and strange interviews with people that make no sense until they start making sense and then the reader sees what's coming and is like, "Oh, hell," but there's no stopping it now. Well, that's how I saw it, anyway.

And so, necessarily, I don't want to give too much away, but I think it's safe to tell you that the first and somewhat primary narrator is a reporter from Cleveland (yay Cleveland!) who has up and moved to the sticks of upstate New York chasing down some big environmental story. Other narrators include a couple of neo-hippies from New York City who move out to the same sticks for some tree-hugging reason or another, and their young daughter who grows up learning trapeze and various philosophies — and whom you learn pretty early on is somehow involved in the Big Bad Thing.

It's a really well-put-together story, and even though I was struggling through the first half, once the story started to show itself I could not put the book down. There are a few bits that I found odd or irksome after finishing the book, but since they made reading the book super-interesting I will forgive them.

Recommendation: Not for those who need a solid grip on a story from the beginning. Definitely for those who like a multiple-narrator, back-and-forth-in-time, what-the-heck-is-happening-here setup.

Rating: 9/10

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

I saw a LOT of this book when it first came out, with all these wonderful glowing reviews, and so of course I ignored it because I am nothing if not contrary in the face of hype. I figured I'd let the excitement die down before checking this one out, but then it won the flipping PULITZER and I was like, "I should probably read this now while I still have a chance of getting from the library" and immediately put it on hold. I got it quickly, but then I let it languish for my six-week lending period and found myself preparing to power through it last week so I could finish by the time it was due back.

In fact, I didn't so much "power through it" as "not stop reading it because it's so darn good." I can see why it won the Pulitzer; I am going to have to buy my own copy and read it like sixteen more times before I can even pretend to understand everything Egan's got going on in here. But I so want to.

Very generally, what you've got here is a set of short stories about a set of characters who interact with each other in various configurations over a long period of time.

But each story has its own narrator and voice, with first person chapters and third person chapters and a second-person chapter and a chapter written as a magazine article and a chapter written as a PowerPoint.... And the stories jump around in time and space and Egan does a LOT of reader-trusting by not just giving you the time and place but expecting you to figure it out based on your prior knowledge and also expecting you to remember details from those previous chapters that do interesting things in subsequent chapters. And there are so many recurring phrases and themes and it all fits together just so well. Structurally, this book was fan-freaking-tastic.

I did have some problems with a couple of the chapters for being a little long and boring for being so short, or for being overly odd, and I really disliked the conceit of the last chapter though I appreciated the sentiment behind it. But overall I think that Egan has done a beautiful thing, and if you can stand the continual confusion, I think you will like this book. I could say many more things about this book, but so much of what I loved about it was watching everything unfold and I don't want to take that away from you!

Recommendation: For people who like experimental-type things, confusing things, and very intricate things.

Rating: 9.5/10
(A to Z Challenge)

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

To say nothing of the dog! This book kind of broke my brain, on account of it's about time travel and there is nothing simple about time travel and to make it worse Connie Willis invents a time travel science and when you actually try to explain time travel you are going to make brains explode.

But what I love about this book, and part of why I'm going to go find some more Connie Willis books and read them ASAP, is that the time travel totally breaks the brains of the people doing the time travelling. In multiple ways! First, they don't really understand it any better than I do, and second... oh, second.

"It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by—"

And then the protagonist gets time travelled, but the point of it is that this whole soliloquy is part of the "maudlin sentimentality" that comes with time-lag, which encompasses many amusing (to the reader) symptoms and is a result of too much time travel. Willis writes these passages with obvious delight, and I can't help but love them.

The plot of the book is... simple... Ned Henry, our protagonist, is charged with finding this weird statue thing called the bishop's bird stump, which is apparently very ugly but which is required by a beast of a woman, Lady Schrapnell, to complete the rebuilding in 20... something... sometime in the mid-21st century... of a cathedral that burned down in 1940. Anyway, the vagaries of time travel mean that Henry and others can't get anywhere near the cathedral at the right time, and so they can't find this thing, but Lady Schrapnell is very persuasive and keeps sending Henry back in time until he gets totally time-lagged. The only cure is rest, which he can't get in the present time with Lady Schrapnell all a-crazy, and so he gets sent to the late 1800s instead to help return a cat that got mistakenly time-travelled when it should perhaps have been drowned. Then things start to get crazy.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book, which also features 1930s mystery novels, jumble sales, séances, crazy university professors, and many allusions to the book Three Men in a Boat which I must go read immediately, because it's got to be pretty awesome if it inspired this.

Recommendation: For those who enjoy being totally confused and bewildered.

Rating: 9/10
(TBR 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)

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)

The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell

I said on the Twitters the other day that I don't know whether I want to marry Ms. Vowell or be her when I grow up. But after finishing up this book and starting in on her next, Assassination Vacation, I think I just want to hang out with her and go on strange adventures on an irregular basis. She's delightfully quirky, but I'm not sure I could actually be friends with her.

I picked this book up for many reasons, but the main ones are that Vowell has a new book out, I've never read one of her books, and I've heard that the new one is a little odder than her others so it made more sense to back up and wade into the pool that is Sarah Vowell. Whatever that means.

And let's be honest, I loved it. It merited the Twitter mention as well as three quotes in a row on my Tumblr... I found myself cracking up in the middle of work and hoping that no one asked what was going on, because it would be too hard to explain.

Part of it is the subject matter... this book is a collection of essays mostly about politics and patriotism, which haven't changed terribly much save in name in the last nine years. Vowell is a capital-D Democrat, so she spends a few essays proclaiming her love for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and her distaste for George W. Bush. But there's no proselytizing, just an acknowledgement of her politics and her involvement in the political institution. And outside of politics proper, Vowell includes some essays about the underground lunchroom in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, the current practice of declaring everyone a Rosa Parks, and playing that one basketball game in the arcade.

The other part is Sarah Vowell. I listened to the audiobook, which is primarily narrated by her, with brief cameos from others (like Stephen Colbert as Al Gore), and so each essay is imbued with Vowell's inflections and emphases. Considering her often sarcastic nature, I can imagine that these essays might come across rather differently in print, so I'm glad I went in for the audio. It's sort of like hanging out with Sarah Vowell, right?

Recommendation: Highly recommended, unless you're smitten with George W. Bush.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)