"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: *****