"The Casual Vacancy" - J.K. Rowling

Published in 2012 by Little Brown

This was a highly anticipated novel obviously and because Harry Potter was so famous worldwide there was much debate whether the press was excited because the new book was good, or just because it was something new.  Well, I have read it, and I can say that it is good on it's own.

Kris can attest to the fact that I am not a big crier, there was one movie that we don't speak of (the puppy was going to DIE!!!!) but other than that, not so much with the waterworks.  So when I finished this novel and burst into tears it was a little confusing to say the least.

Rowling's writing is wonderful and filled with detail.  She is able to get inside the heads of her many characters and unlike Harry Potter, is able to give them honest thoughts for their ages.  The teenagers are horny and unhappy, the adults are. . . well also horny and unhappy, but they are also so much more.  Even though in the US the concept of a Casual Vacancy is not something we are familiar with, she is able to make the book interesting enough for the least politically inclined.

This is a rambling review but I have so many feelings.  All in all, A+ J.K.  Way to get outside of your comfort zone and write an excellent book.

Rating: ****

A New Year of Reading

2012 was a great year for reading! I finished new 44 books, 47 if I include rereading the hunger games, and after a little tallying the facts are in.

Pages read: 15,903

Average pages in a book: 361

Best Books of the Year: "Cutting For Stone" & "Atonement"

Worst Book of the Year: "The Best Ladies Detective Agency"

Favorite Quote:
"We're having an adventure. . . and most people live and die without being as lucky as we are."

As we go into 2013, I don't have a new planned number.  I think this year will be more about re-reading and trying to find books that really call out to me from authors I already know I like.

Now, onwards to the first book of 2013, "Casual Vacancy" by J.K. Rowling!

"How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you" - the Oatmeal

Published in 2012 by Matthew Inman

I'm counting this as a book even though it was cartoons. Funny pictures of kittens and silly comics, count me in.

The oatmeal is an online cartoon that looks at a wide variety of topics including adorable kittens.

Read this book. It's amazeballs.

Rating: *****

Quotes: every page

"In One Person" - John Irving

Published in 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Inc.

I really like John Irving, I like his repetitive themes about abortion, bears, and dysfunctional sexual relationships.  I like his stories about how families form and interact.  I even love his strange obsession with wrestling. But this was not his best.

The World According to Garp introduced me to his style of writing and I loved it.  The Cider House Rules introduced me to some of the most lovable hated characters I have read and was a beautiful story.  But this? This wandered, weaved, ducked, bobbed and nosedived into the floor.

I read this with no pretense, I received it without a book-jacket and started on page one without looking into it at all.  The writing style wasn't quite there and the way the narration looped around itself was distracting at best and confusing at worst.  While we follow the tale of a young man who is bisexual, his attraction to manly women, women with small breasts, men of all ages, and his best friend, it's easy to get confused as to which part of his life Irving is writing about.  The mother is a strange character who is confusing and never has her problem resolved in the story. The inevitable introduction of AIDS and the 100 pages that follow where every person we have been introduced to dies, is not a pleasant read and (Spoiler) when he finally meets his dad it feels thrown in like the publishers wanted some closure.

Overall, I wanted more, I wanted Irving.  But I did love that the Bears in this novel were far different than in any other.

Rating: **

Quotes:
"Like my grandmother, Aunt Muriel managed to be both arrogant and judemental without saying anything that was either verifiable or interesting: in this respect  both my grandmother and my aunt struck me as superior-sounding bores."

"Yet me infatuation with Miss Frost had certainly shown me that my penis had ideas that seemed entirely separate from my own thoughts. And if penises could have ideas, it was not such a stretch to imagine that breasts could also think for themselves."

"Isn't it perfectly possible that Nils and his wife are too depressed to have kids? The prospect of having kids depressed the shit out of me and I;m neither suicidal nor Norwegian"

"When the Killing's Done" - T.C. Boyle

Published in 2011 by Penguin Books

You know what I have always wondered? What does the C stand for.  Not the T, I assume Tom, Timothy, Toreador, who cares. But the C, oh the C.  And now I know.

T. Coraghessan Boyle

wowsers, that's a name.

I shall name my first born son Coraghessan, and he shall stand up to the ridiculously named youth of his generation (Rykers, things with "X" in them, etc)

Moving on.  I am not usually a fan of Mr. Boyle's work.  I couldn't get through 40 pages of Tortilla Curtain, and The Women was taxing at the best of times.  But this was surprisingly innovative and delightful.  While I wouldn't say that it lived up to the hype that the review on the back cover gave it, it also never dragged or dimmed.

The story is about Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands off the coast, it tells of shipwrecks, endangered species, and non-native animals who threaten the balance of life on the island.  The war waging between two environmental groups (one pro-killing of animals not native to the islands, one a douchey guy who Boyle makes sure you know you should hate) and their increasingly dangerous interactions.

Overall, I was a fan.  Hooray Mr. Boyle!

Rating: ***

Quotes:
nothing particularly memorable. meh!

In Between Books

Room was harsh.  It was really really good, but it has left me in this state where I don't want to read another book yet.  This describes it pretty perfectly.

"Room" - Emma Donoghue

Published in 2010 by Little Brown Books

It's Jack's 5th birthday and this year Ma has given him a drawing of himself, Old Nick comes in the night and leaves a gift for JAck too, but Ma doesn't want him to have it.  Jack and Ma live in room with all of their friends: wardrobe, bed, stove, bath, and plant.  Because Jack is a big boy now his other birthday gift is learning about "Outside," a place they haven't ever been but Ma would like to see again.

This leads to a daring escape and the emotional troubles of being freed from captivity.  Told by Jack, the first 1/3 of the story drudges on a bit (yes, I get it, you are in a room) but boy oh boy does it pick up after that.

Not many books really get at my insides but this one made me tear up and have strange dreams of captivity.  It was fantastic how Donoghue was able to convey a ton of information through the mind of a 5 year old.

Rating: ****

Quotes:
"Scared is what you're feeling.  Brave is what you're doing"

"The Solitude of Prime Numbers" - Paolo Giordano

BOOK 40!!!!

Published in 2008, originally in Italian

The stories of Alice and Mattia intertwine in this novel, beginning as children when they both endure traumatic accidents and they learn to live with the scars they have from them.  Alice uses anorexia, while Mattia cuts himself, the two are always alone but they are alone together.  Much like twin primes, separated by just one other number.

While they occasionally try to have romances, they generally fail and both revert to their solitary state.

I started this at 10pm and read it straight through.  Very engrossing.

Rating: ***

Quotes:
"choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains"

"Sweet Tooth" - Ian McEwan

Published in 2012 by Jonathan Cape

King of the Twist! That is my new nickname for Ian McEwan.  If you have read (or seen) Atonement you already know that this guys got endings in the bag.  I was truly surprised when this novel flipped from slightly boring romantic intrigue based in the 1970s, and made me go back a page to catch the twist again.

This is the story of Serena Frome (rhymes with Plume) and her induction and service with MI5.  It is the 1970's in Britain and there is considerable turmoil over communism and how to sneakily keep the citizens from seeing it as a good idea.  McEwan explores the relationship between government and literature, and throws in a healthy dose of girlish anxiety.

It wasn't my favorite novel, a little bland but well written and then end was worth the few days it took.  Unlike atonement, the characters weren't quite as well formed and I personally didn't feel any real emotional bond to them.

Rating: ***

Quotes:
"I didn't use, and hadn't even heard, the word "totalitarianism." I probably would have through it had something to do with refusing a drink.

"I was the bases of readers.  All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form"

"It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say "Marry me" by the end.

"There was, in me view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honor.  No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual.  This was a contract founded on mutual trust."

Sookie Stackhouse Novels by Charlaine Harris

Telepathic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse has her share of problems  from her sweet but mildly idiotic brother to the vampires that have started residing in her town.  While most of the residents of Bon Temps, Louisiana just think her a little strange she spends her days reading the thoughts of others and trying not to be killed.

Harris mixes mystery, romance, science fiction and just a dash of gore into a simply mind-numbing read.  Sometimes her writing can be a little flat but overall it hits just the right chord of guilty pleasure and day time tele-drama.  This explains why the HBO series TrueBlood (based on the novels) has been so wildly popular.

Personally, I was glad it didn't veer to much into romance novel territory.  Call it my prudish Amish upbringing or something like that, but I just don't care for sex books.  This year for my bday, Chelsea sent me the box set of these books and I am just now getting around to them.

Book One: "Dead Until Dark"
published in 2001 by Ace Books

Sookie is introduced to the new resident vampire Bill and as she falls in love with him she must protect her friends and family from a killer on the loose in their town.  If you have ever watched the HBO Series, this is almost identical to the pilot episode, which is pretty cool.


Book Two: "Living Dead in Dallas"
published in 2002 by Ace Books

Sookie and Bill are required to help the Dallas area vampires find a missing Vampire, Sookie's friend gets killed, there's a cult, there's a maenad, there's an orgy.  Book two was kind of all over the place and hectic.  It could have been three books.  Not as good as the first.  Also, rereading sentences like "I may be pretty but I'm also smart. . ." don't really give me a lot of faith in her smarts.  That's like saying "I'm really smart and everyone likes me a lot."  If you have to state it publicly, it's probably not true.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" - Milan Kundera

Published in 1984 by Harper & Row

Following the stories of two couples, intertwined by a 20 year dalliance.  We are introduced to a world where it is not weight but lightness that is the most difficult to bear.  Tomas is married to Tereza, she is young and helpless and every time he sleeps with a new woman it kills her inside.  His longtime lover Sabina is her opposite   Impulsive, carefree and open to everything with no guilt holding her back.  And last there is Franz, a teacher who meets and falls in love with Sabina, even when they are no longer together he still thinks of her and wishes she could be by his side.

There is a lot of war, sex, secret police, death, and talk of bowler hats as well.

Quotes:
"Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling.  It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified we defend ourselves."

"Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity."

"Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.  They are the questions with no answers.  A question with no answer is a barrier that cannon be breached   In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Rating: ***

"Howl's Moving Castle" - Diana Wynne Jones

Published in 1986 by Harper Collins

Sophie is the oldest of three daughters in a land where that is considered a terrible fate.  After her father (Mr. Hatter) dies, she gives in to her fate of running his hat shop while her two younger sisters go off to seek their fortunes.  But when an evil witch arrives in the hat shop and casts a spell on her, all bets are off as she begins an adventure to break the curse and see if the oldest of three can do something more with her life.

She walks into the hills where she finds Howl's Moving Castle.  Howl is a dark wizard known to eat the hearts of pretty young girls but Sophie figures that with the spell cast upon her she might get out alive.

I saw the movie version of this first and didn't even realize it was a book until reading through a list of 100 books you should read before you are 20 (fine, I am over 20, shush).  The movie has more magic and crazy caricatures but the book is a little more fun and the story has a few more crazy twists and turns.

Quotes:
“Go to bed, you fool," Calcifer said sleepily. "You're drunk."
"Who, me?" said Howl. "I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold sober." He got up and stalked upstairs, feeling for the wall as if he thought it might escape him unless he kept in touch with it. His bedroom door did escape him.” 

“I feel ill," [Howl] announced. "I'm going to bed, where I may die.” 

Rating: ***

"The Island of the Day Before" - Umberto Eco

Published in 1995 by Harcourt Brace & Company

"Umberto Eco, why you so crazy?"

Boom, there's my review.

This is the story of Roberto, a young man who gets shipwrecked on a boat and can't swim to shore.  He finds rare animals, crazy companions (real and imagined), begins a novel, writes letters to his true love, and in the end goes just a little bit insane.

My favorite part is where he tries to be a stone.  Yes, you read that correctly, a stone.

While growing up in war-torn areas of Europe, Roberto accidentally angers Cardinal Richelieu and is forced on an expedition to learn how to tell what longitude one is at while sailing at sea.  His ship fails and to save his sanity he begins writing letters to his beloved Lilia.

Quotes:
"If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of perimeters, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most lost of peripheries; because , if there was a center it lay before him, and he was its immobile satellite."

". . . there are people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard love talked about."

Rating: ***

"Ready Player One" - Ernest Cline

Published in 2011 by Dark All Day, Inc.

The year, 2044.  The world, going to hell in a handbasket.  The protagonist, Wade Watts aka Parzival.  In reality (a pretty awful place by this point) Wade lives with his Aunt in a stack of double wide trailers that threatens to fall over at any point, she hawks his technology and school gear to buy drugs and people don't usually live very long without a safe hiding spot.  In the OASIS though, a magical technological other world, he is Parzival, a slightly more muscular fellow with admittedly better skin and the potential for greatness.

James Halliday created the OASIS and introduced the world to a new better place that wasn't overrun by disease, pollution, and general effed-up-ness.  The OASIS is infinitely large and can be whatever the user wants it to be.  Kids attend school there, people meet and date, in fact they don't even need to be people.  Why not be a flying Ork with lighting bolt tattoos   The quest is to find James Halliday's egg.  Before he died, he programmed the world to have three hidden challenges that if completed would give the winner access to his vast personal fortune (in real life and in the OASIS.)  So what's a pudgy kid from the trailer parks supposed to do?  Obviously, battle evil forces and try to win while making some friends along the way.

Filled 100% with strange, funny, cheesy, stupid, wonderful 1980's references, this novel was a quick and delightful read.  It probably won't be winning the Man-Booker prize but after Schindler's List I needed a little pick-me-up.

Rating: ***

"Schindler's List" - Thomas Keneally

Published in 1982 by Hodder and Stoughton

written by an Australian novelist, this book tells the the story of a Nazi Party Member who saves the lives of thousands of Polish and Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.  Through a chance encounter with Poldek Pfefferberg in Beverly Hills, Keneally decided to write this inspiring and somewhat crazy story of Oskar Schindler.

Schindler is portrayed not as a perfect man, but as a flawed human who never stops believing that he is doing what is right by saving the lives of others.  The occasional heart-wrenching scenes of Auschwitz and the other death-camps are few and far between when set against the rest of this story.  And the many encounters between Schindler and party officials bartering over crockery and booze add a laughably human aspect to a group of men that have become somewhat superhumanly evil in our collective world mind.

This was a very very very good book.  And now I want to watch the movie in the hopes that it is as good.

Quotes:

"Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire"

"The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor.  It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender."

"The list was life"

Rating: *****

"Jim the Boy" - Tony Early

Published in 2000 by Bay Back Books

I ran out of books and my mom left this at our apartment on her last visit. So I read it in a day, which was a good plan because it wasn't really entrancing enough to last longer than that.

The story of a little boy turning ten and learning some hard life lessons about friends, family, absence and regret.

Early writes about living in a small town and learning that the world is a big scary place.

Rating: **

"Granta 119: Britain"

Published in 2012 by Granta

Granta is a win-some-lose-some books by mail subscription. Four times a year I receive a compilation of Hirt stories that all focus in some way on a specific topic.

This quarters topic was Britain; the stories, poems, and photos ranged in style and composition but were all somehow clearly linked by the overarching theme.

This was a win-some.

Quotes:
"She paid twenty quid for a private dance with a girl named Clover, who had pigtails and purple nails and a tattoo of a unicorn just above her groin.
'Its my power animal,' she said.
'I'm pregnant,' said Katherine."

"Living in a racist society has a profound psychological impact. It produces in it's victims a sort of hyper-vigilance, as the individual attempts to read those around them and so anticipate the hostility that might assail them."

"Tishomingo Blues" - Elmore Leonard

Published in 2002

This book was not the best introduction to Leonard. Although he started the action early and kept It going through the story, the slow paced dialogue and doltish main characters failed to hold my interest.

Drugs, Murder, High Divers, Civil War battles: this novel seemed like a clear winner. But it just left me feeling like a re-enactor who had to die slowly without the perk of getting drunk in the sun.

Rating: **

"The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - Haruki Murakami

Published in 1997 by Haruki Murakami, 1998 by First Vintage Int. Translation by Jay Rubin.

Murakami starts his novel with a pot of noodles, I was immediately hooked.  The pot boils, he receives a call from a woman who knows him but will not identify herself, he returns to his noodles (slightly overcooked) and he feels confused.

This novel is everything my brain connects with Japanese culture.  It is calm, it is creepily calm, even the fights are calm.  But you can't stop reading.  It centers on Toru Okada, a man who is unemployed and supported by his wife Kumiko who works in publishing.  We follow him as his cat goes missing, then his wife, he meets a psychic prostitute, gains a facial blemish, meets an old veteran who has seen awful things, takes a lot of naps and makes friends with a lot of women.

I am still a little dizzy from everything that happens and at times it gets a bit confusing.  But push on, because the last third is thrillingly well written, and mind-bendingly good.  I don't think I understand what happened yet, but it was big.  Big in a calm way, and that says something.

Quotes:
"Let's go to Crete together.  This is not the place for us anymore: not for you and not for me.  We have to go to Crete.  If you stay here, something bad is going to happen to you.  I know it.  I am sure of it."

"Money had no name, of course.  And if it did have a name, i would no longer be money.  What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability"

Rating: ****

"Slaughterhouse Five" - Kurt Vonnegut

Published in 1969 originally, 2009 by Dial Press


recognized as one of the most influential anti-war books of all time, Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" is a trippy book.  It explores war, free will, fate, love, paranormal activity, and weaves in historical events the entire time.  Vonnegut tells the tale of Billy Pilgrim, a young man who doesn't particularly believe in war and continuously asks to be left behind to die.  He is able to become unstuck from time and can see different points of his life throughout the story.  We are lead through his time before the bombing of Dresden, his boring married life after the war, time spent on an extraterrestrial planet called Tralfamadore, his death, and some other events.


Personally, I enjoyed this book, not in the way people are supposed to appreciate and love classics.  I can't see this ever becoming my favorite book of all time, but I did really like the writing style the ideas were all solidly put together to create a nice mesh of historically accurate sci-fi.


Quotes:
""Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?" said Valencia. In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret.
"It would sound like a dream," said Billy. "Other people's dreams aren't very interesting, usually." 


Rating: ****