my life in books: a semi review

YA - tally: 3

 

the unlikely hero of room 13B by teresa totten

a john green wannabe with the characters who are deeply & tragically in love and the use of full names (I suspect to fill the pages up quicker without adding actual plot). the layer of OCD was a good addition to teen angst but the point of the Catholicism eluded me. my biggest complaint was laying the blame squarely at the mother's feet and the sheer inconsideration of buying your mom and step mom the exact same present. that would (figuratively) kill any mom out there; your mother is not an interchangeable figure like this novel leads you to believe.

 

brian's return by gary paulsen

this author did 'hatchet' so it's no surprise that this was a great little book about survival that the boys just ate up. the epilogue is fascinating too - turns out much of what he's written has happened to him, and he is a modern day henry david Thoreau


twisted by laurie hales anderson

another disappointment from hales anderson. PLUS I had read it before and could only barely remember the plot points (and I'd only remember them AFTER I read it again, with an 'oh yeah, I forgot that...) is it possible that an author only has one good book in them (Speak) and no other? was I just in the right place at the right time (or the right audience?) I think this is my fourth book of hers and my 3rd disappointment...

 

graphic novels - tally: 5 

 

march book one by john lewis

supposed to be a trilogy. so far it's so-so. I'm learning stuff about the civil rights movement and that's good. not sure it's a self-aggrandizing effort from a politician or a proper piece of history. i'll read the rest and assess.

 

re-gifters by mike carey

I was expecting something more from the author of Unwritten but this was a typical, contrived high school movie. it wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either.

 

fun home by alison bechdel

I could have sworn I read this before but found no record in this blog so I read it. again, as it turns out (alright, the last quarter was new to me. but, as I reread it - and marvelled - I remembered that I DID have to return it to the library and I choose NOT to rush through it because it merited my full attention and it would be a gift to reread it)

this artist is an intellectual and a masterful author. I haven't read such a wonderful graphic novel since blankets by craig thompson. each of the chapter could stand on it's own as a story, or a theme, and be fleshed into an entire book. it's the sparseness, the things that aren't said with words, but are in the drawings, that make this a large book even though it's a mere 230 pages


the watchmen by alan moore & dave gibbons

my second reading - reread because of another book club. still amazed me - especially how they could carry 2 stories in alternating frames that kept the same theme. reminded me of when coronation street does a good 2 story build ups, alternating the stories but continuing to build the tension, even when that first story is on pause.... but this graphic novel does it more precisely, frame by frame rather than scene by scene. more than ever I wonder how the writer and the illustrator collaborate


are you my mother? by alison bechdel

another literarily dense offering from bechdel, who I now hear has turned her first book, 'fun home,' into a musical that's winning all the New York awards. I think this book might be even better, structurally. each chapter opens with a dream that is expanded in that chapter, going forward or back in her timeline to make that theme's point. in fact, I think each chapter could work on it's own.  her stuff is worth owning, and rereading, and using it as a jump-off point to start your own psychoanalysis.

novels - tally: 7

 

the girl who was saturday night by heather o'neill

wow, this girl can write: 'there was a man sitting on one of the chairs, wearing a tiger costume. the head of the tiger was sitting on the chair next to him. both he and the tiger head were looking straight ahead, as if they had had an argument and weren't speaking.'

our hair ruined all the photographs of us as childen. no matter what the setting, even if it was our own birthday party, we looked like Gypsies at some internment camp in Eastern Europe...we looked like the type of people that had driven our car five thousand miles with a refridgerator on top of it.

the black cat johann was purring like it had engine trouble. his tail kept reaching round like an arm scooping up all the poker chips off the table.

... white Pomeranian that had a face like a chewed-up toothbrush. the small dog was sitting in the part of the grocery cart where you ordinarily put a baby. he dog was trembling with excitement, wanting to hop up, like he was  waiting to add a detail to your anecdote.

 

sweetland by michael crummey

this is why I go to bookclub - I enjoyed this book about disassembling a tiny newfoundland fishing village and it's stubborn patriarch. and I liked that it wasn't all 'henry david thoreau' (or even gary paulsen come to think of it) and the guy cannot survive alone, be it the weather, the weevils, the madness of having no human company. but going to bookclub made me realize that every tiny possible death that happened, did happen. and that he never made it off those rocks with his dead grandson in his arms.

 

the imperfectionists by tom ranchman

my favorite type of book - short stories that are linked in some way (in this case, through a newspaper publisher). the characters are wonderfully fleshed out and I found at least 2 of them freshly drawn but immediately recognizable. how can these people not have been on page before? anyhow, so enjoyable (and so slim), that it can be finished in one lovely afternoon.  but I stopped myself from doing that - because I wanted it to last...


the girl on the train by Paula Hawkins

a page turner that had a ridiculous ending. when I closed the back cover, my reaction was: meh. blackout drunks that can function (walk, talk, navigate)?  and bringing other people into the husband's lies that could easily corroborate them (or not) wouldn't have happened. and, as a fellow bookclub member said: you knew who was the killer as soon as the third narrator showed up 1/3rd through the book (which is late for a narrator, and could only be for one purpose). so I'm glad I read this, since it's such a summer phenomenon, but it wasn't anywhere as good as Gone Girl.

 

the bear by claire cameron

I recently had a chat with a fellow bookclubber who told me she HATED literary fiction, and I was, like: what ISN'T literary fiction (after all, she was a book reader, so what did she read?), and she said it was everything that was a genre: romance, suspense, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. 

so now I can recognize that this book was a genre book - suspense. it's a tale of 2 kids surviving a bear attack that kills their parents and the hook is supposed to be that the older of the two, the 5yo, is the narrator. this is my first complaint: she wasn't a consistent child - naming the coleman cooler like a friend but sophisticated enough to view her parent's marriage troubles; having a wide vocabulary when it suited the prose, but losing it just as conveniently. I also disliked a few of the side plots - the parent's trial separation, and the girl's obsession with Barbie. lastly, the therapist treating the girl after she gets back to civilization wouldn't have been so quick to interpret the child's drawing; they are trained for goodness sakes!

who do you think you are? by alice munro

I was curious to re-read this book as an adult, or I mean precisely, an adult mother of teenage children. I remembered the stories being youth centered, meanwhile, they were not (did I only focus on the young one due to my age back then? or did I confuse it with Margaret Laurence books, like "bird in the house"?) And I remembered the mother/stepmother as hated by myself and the protagonist, but not so - rose has room in herself for much more layered emotions, including admiration and compassion. but the biggest surprise was finding, within it's pages, a story I had vividly remembered and retold many times in my life only to be NOT as I remembered. in my youth and innocence, I saw the protagonist as a victim of an action. with my matured viewpoint, I could see she had a more complicit role.

 

did you ever have a family by bill clegg

meh. it was interesting to read - a great start with a desire to see the mystery unfold. but it did so at too slow a pace, and without enough reward when the ending became clear

 

memoirs & anthologies & non-fiction - tally: 5

 

coming ashore by catherine gildiner

the third and final memoir in her series. I still loved the first one the best, but the first half of this book was quite funny in its own right. interestingly enough, if you just read this one, you'd wonder why someone deigned her life worthy of a memoir - it's not terribly exciting or pressing - but I imagine there was a clamor for her first 2 books to continue.

 

parenting: illustrated with crappy pictures by amber dusick

got this one entirely because of the title. turns out it's another blogger cum author but I didn't take it too seriously, read it breezily like a blog, and had quite a few belly laughs over it. (note to self: never listen to a book on tape from a blogger turned author. their niche really is that small feeling of you-and-I. and books on tape are read as if to an audience) 

 

talking with owls about diabetes by david sedaris

it's sedaris, need I say more?

 

no regrets: 101 fabulous things to do before you're too old, married, or pregnant by sarah ivens

yup, I'm too old for this title but I read it anyhow. or skimmed it because it was god awful. even the things that had turned out horribly for her - like getting a Brazilian - was still enthusiastically recommended. smacks of inexperienced youth that was programmed to follow any patriarchal, marketing technique. yuck. not to mention, she's a little full of herself and her youth to think these 101 things can only be done before 30 (ie: before the old, married, pregnant part). as pepper said, she made her journal entries be the goal: live my life or you'll be missing out. ppttttt.

fierce pajamas: an anthology of humor writing from the New York Times edited by david remnick & henry finder

some hit, some miss. but some that hit were incredibly funny: shout-out to George Kaufman for 'annoy kaufman, inc' and Robert Benchley's 'it's fun to be fooled...it's more fun to know' and - believe it or not - woody allen's 'the kugelmass episode'