I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, by Josh Lieb

Oliver Watson, Jr., is an unpopular, overweight, not very smart seventh grader. Well, at least he wants you to think that last part. In reality, he is the titular genius and also rich and powerful, though he gets other people to stand in for him because little kids can't sign contracts and stuff. You know. Red tape. He absolutely does not care what his father thinks of him, but when he finds out that his dad was once class president, Oliver decides to run. To taint his father's memories of it, of course. But it's not as easy as it seems... Oliver has to deal with opponents and bribe the administration all while working on expanding his evil empire and getting a nice, tasty grilled cheese sandwich. Life is tough!

Yes, this book is that weird. It's also pretty entertaining. What kid didn't wish she had a fake toilet full of candy in his school, or that he could listen in on the romantic goings-on in the teachers lounge? Seventh grade would have been so much more fun! So Oliver is fun, and even pretty realistic outside of the evil genius stuff. He's just a kid who wants to be someone else. And Lieb does a good job of plotting — he throws a few twists and turns in there that I didn't see coming, but that make perfect sense in hindsight, which is definitely a skill. Oh, and there are pictures of important things and also footnotes, and you know how much I like footnotes.

I would totally give this book to my little brother to read, if I didn't think he'd go getting ideas. Maybe after his class elections.

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

What a beautiful book. I listened to this on my commute, which was possibly a bad idea because my tear ducts get a little overactive when potentially sad things are happening.

Yes, this is a fairly depressing book. It's about a teenage girl who gets into a horrific car accident with her family, and has an out-of-body experience while the doctors are keeping an eye on her unconscious and beaten-up body. She watches her family and friends as they come in to see her and as they interact with each other, and she reminisces about her life to this point — how she started playing the cello, how she started dating a super-cool rockstar, how she was anxious about her future, etc. She also wonders if she's strong enough to try to keep living, which is what that title is all about.

I was often expecting there to be some sort of twist that would show that Mia's life wasn't as normal and nice as she thought it was, but that never happened. I appreciated that, in the end — it made her choice that much more difficult, and made her seem more real to me, as a person who has been lucky enough to have a fairly easy life.

And the narrator is awesome. I highly recommend listening to this book.

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

See also:
Maw Books Blog
biblio+chic
My Friend Amy

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

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

I first read this book in eighth grade, and I recall absolutely adoring it. My favorite part was when we discussed it in class, and there were three different interpretations of the ending! I'm pretty sure this was the first book I'd ever read, or at least the first one I had discussed, where there were so many ways to think about it.

The weird thing about this book, which I have read many times since that first, is that every time I re-read it I like it less as a story, but I love it more as a book and as a commentary on society. I attended a library book club meeting about this book, and for all of those adults that seemed to be the consensus: a very interesting book, but not really well-liked. I think it helps to be 13 when you read it first, because all of the plot devices that become overplayed in another ten years of reading are brand new.

If you haven't read it (if, say, you were in eighth grade before the mid-90s!), this is a pretty simplistic book about a dystopian future world. In this world, the focus is sameness: all babies born in the same year are considered exactly the same age and each age level wears the same clothing and hair styles and follows the same rules. The exceptions to sameness are in the form of aptitudes and interests, with children performing volunteer work at different jobs and eventually being assigned to a job that seems to fit them, whether that's Nurturer (taking care of babies), Recreation Director, Laborer, or Birthmother (making babies, but probably not the fun way). However, at this year's job-assigning ceremony, Jonas gets picked for a job that is very different from those: Receiver of Memories. As we read about Jonas's job, the delightful, organized world he lives in starts to fall apart, as dystopias are wont to do.

I really like that this story is low-key — there's a brief period of hurriedness, but the plot generally moves along slowly. It's much more like The Long Tomorrow than, say, The Hunger Games. Good times.

Rating: 8/10 (inflated for sentimental value, probably)
(Flashback Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler

I was totally pulled in by this title. It's pretty much the only reason I wanted to read this book — I didn't know anything about it going in. And I'll tell you this: the book lives up to its title. I read almost all of it in one very quick sitting, and was highly amused when I finished. Good work, book!

She of the Big Round Butt is Virginia Shreves, a tenth grader with, obviously, a few self-esteem issues. She's a bigger girl in a family of tiny people, with a mother who has anorexia athletica (without the diagnosis, but it's obvious) and a father who loooooooves the skinny girls. I think anyone would have self-esteem issues in a family like that! Anyway, the story follows along with Virginia's life as she navigates school with her best friend on the opposite coast, tries to decide if a guy likes her, deals with her revered older brother doing Something Really Really Stupid, and tries to please her parents by shedding a few pounds. Some of these work, some of them don't.

I loved Virginia. She makes lists! She can't be bad! I totally remember what it was like in tenth grade, trying not just to make sense of everything, but to make up rationalizations for things that were never going to make sense. Like her Fat Girl Code of Conduct — completely unnecessary in actuality, but absolutely needed in Tenth-Grader Low-Self-Esteem Land. Even though I felt like she had an inordinated amount of crap dumped on her all at once, I was okay with it because of the way Virginia dealt with it all (or didn't deal with it, as the case may be) like it was as ridiculous as I thought it was.

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

See also:
Persnickety Snark
Blogging for a Good Book
an adventure in reading

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

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

I feel weird about this book. I liked it, but I'm not really sure what happened, or why I should care about the ending... I'm thinking that maybe this was a little too complex a story for me to have listened to it on audiobook. I thought I was paying enough attention, but maybe if I grab it in print I'll realize I missed a whole lot of stuff?

The story is about Daisy, a girl from Manhattan who is sent away to live with some relatives in England for a while, which Daisy thinks is because she hates her new stepmother but is more likely because Daisy has some teenage issues (including hating her stepmother) that are the type of thing that a summer in the English countryside is rumored (rumoured, even) to cure. And things do go pretty well... Daisy loves her cousins, and learns a few things about her dead mother from her aunt, and then loves one of her cousins, which is a little weird but possibly not illegal in England, so whatever, and then war breaks out while her aunt is away. Oops. The cousins get separated when their home is sequestered (is that an appropriate construction?) by the army, and Daisy has to deal first with living with a strange new family, then with the realities of war, and then with trying to survive in the wilderness when those realities go crazy.

It's kind of all over the place, story-wise, but I think the overarching theme is just Daisy bildungsroman-ing (that is not an appropriate construction) as best she can given the insane circumstances she is dealing with. Sometimes life throws you curveballs, I hear this book saying, but has it ever thrown you into circumstances where you have to bivouac? The book thinks not.

And Daisy is a really interesting character — she has those teenage issues, and she sort of knows it, but doesn't really know it and thinks that it is totally normal to be like her. An example that really stuck with me is when the war has broken out and everyone is beginning that whole rationing/starving thing, which is something Daisy is intimately familiar with, if you catch my drift... anyway, she's picking at her food and this woman whom Daisy calls a "big girl" or similar is giving Daisy this look, which we all know means, "Goodness, tiny twig thing, it's not like there's that much food on your plate, I'm sure your stomach can handle it," but which Daisy takes to mean, "I wish I had that tiny twig thing's willpower... I am such a heifer for eating this very tiny portion of food which wouldn't sustain an amoeba." It's a great portrayal of that perfect combination of ego and obliviousness that teenagers have, and I love Rosoff for it. Oh, and Kim Mai Guest, the narrator, does a great job of sounding like an egotistical oblivious teenager without grating on my nerves, so plus ten points to her.

So that's all well and good, but then there's this ending part that's like six years later and I don't really understand that part or what it has to do with anything, let alone the story as told. If someone could explain it, that would be delightful.

Rating: 7/10 (and probably better if I could understand the ending!)
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
medieval bookworm
an adventure in reading
Library Queue
Persnickety Snark
things mean a lot
Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Hmm. I wanted to like this book, I did. It came with good recommendations, and it's even on one or more of those award lists I'm reading from for my YA lit class. But except for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, I spent the six and a half hours of audiobook rolling my eyes and bitching at Hannah. I'm not thinking I was supposed to do that. I am really getting old before my time.

The story revolves around Clay Jensen, who gets a package of thirteen cassette tapes in the mail. He is intrigued by this strange anachronism and begins listening to them, only to find out that they are essentially the last words of Hannah Baker, a girl who committed suicide a couple weeks back. On each tape Hannah details an event or person who made her life so horrible that she was driven to kill herself, and instructs the listeners to pass on the tapes, lest a second set be released to the general high-school public for everyone to listen to.

So on the one hand, it's an interesting read/listen, because most of the events are teeny-tiny things that no one would think anything of on their own, but you can understand how the combination of all of them might make someone want to just disappear off the face of the earth. However, I had a hard time thinking of these things as being enough to make someone want to stop living completely. There were a couple of events that made me think, "Wow. Those suck. I would probably go into a very deep depression if those happened to me," but those were completely unrelated to the other events and as such I think Hannah's cassette package could have been much smaller.

I imagine that back in high school, when I was even less popular than Hannah Baker (but didn't have any crazy rumors floating around... that I know of...), I might have connected more with this book. As it stands, I was a little too busy thinking about how stupid Hannah was to think about other things, like how her situation might apply to my life or how I might go about being nicer to other people.

Rating: 4/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
The Written World
Maw Books Blog
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
My Friend Amy

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

Musing Mondays — The Family That Reads Together

Hey, look! A Musing Mondays question! Today's is... "Who in your family (both immediate & extended) are readers, and who are not?"

I've sort of answered this in other posts, but I am enticed to answer it again because I get to say...

My husband! He's a total reader! Hahahahaha!

Ahem. So my dear Scott has always been kind of a reader, but he's been the one or two book a year style reader and the only reading books by Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind or George R.R. Martin style reader. But then... then he married me, a move he surely regrets now! For a while, he would just humor my readingness, but then I gave him Elantris to read, and then the Old Man's War series, and the Codex Alera, and he's now reading the Dresden Files faster than I'm reading my own books! In fact, he's read them so fast that he's going to have to wait a few days for the next one to come from the library. I don't know what he'll do... I'll have to give him another book to read. :)

I should totally put this on my librarian resume.