Suzanne Collins, Gregor the Overlander and The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins, Gregor the Overlander and The Hunger Games. We have a bad habit in my family of sampling the books we buy for each other before giving them. Anyway, these were fine and pretty well written. Gregor was a story about a young boy going on a mission in a mysterious land to save his father and the kingdom, with the adorable twist that he has to carry his two year-old sister on his back the entire time. The Hunger Games was fun, fast-paced and thrilling (like watching the novel's horrible gladiatorial television show of the same name, no doubt) but I found it a little hollow.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. Better than American Gods. More than a little reminiscent of the Sandman series. Richard Mayhew (a forgettable Neo-ish regular guy) accidentally falls through the cracks into the goth-ish world of London Underground and ends up a hero. Reads like a screenplay and you can just see the costumes (ah, wikipedia just told me that Gaiman wrote it as a television series first, which explains that, although in my mind the marquis de Carabas must be played by Johnny Depp).

Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories.

Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories. Found a lovely copy of these at a used book store; they were not what I expected. Let's just say that you will already know some of these short, hilarious stories about life in the fictional Eastern European town of Kasrilevka.

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather. An ok detective story, I suppose, with Maisie Dobbs as a doubly unconventional private investigator in 1930 London. But intuition, psychology, and mind-body awareness are not the most interesting of investigation methods or conversation topics; and while the background was great, the plot was only unoffensive. I didn't really fall for Maisie, either (internal dialogue can be too explicitly voiced and make a hero boring).The blurb on the back said "If you like classic mysteries you'll love... " - that may be true, but then again, if you like classic mysteries you might like classic mysteries better.

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rock-and-roll, gods and superstars, myth, earthquakes, colliding worlds. Big and florid.

Technology

So I've been reading on my smartphone, substituting reading free ebooks for my old favorite vices of sudoku and crossword puzzles. I really enjoyed Secret Adversary (by Agatha Christie - a Tommy and Tuppence!) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I hadn't read in ages and had totally forgotten. But one of my favorite books, Notes from the Underground, was a little frustrating to read on a three-inch screen so I gave up and dug it off my bookshelf to finish. I think that phone reading is better suited for less complex reading or at least shorter sentences, as it's tough to focus when flipping the pages so frequently, something a bigger screen would help. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to read Henry James on a phone - it would take three screens per phrase.

If I could read in the bathtub with one, I might buy an eReader device of some sort (especially for magazines and journal articles - I print out way too many pdfs). But I think I am too attached to paper books to ever really change over. I like to lend books, to give them away, to browse through piles of them, to acquire them on curbs from dejected little heaps. I still remember plunking down my Christmas money to buy my first book on my own. It was a paperback copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I read it 28 times in a row, memorized it, and eventually made a replacement cover for it out of gold foil and candy-wrappers.

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks

Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks. Four children on summer vacation at a country estate with a dead mother, affectionate yet preoccupied father, and rambunctious family dog. They have adventures, get into scrapes, stick up for each other and make new friends while facing all sorts of obstacles. Sounds familiar, right? The story is explicitly reminiscent of E Nesbit and Edward Eager and CS Lewis - and mentions by the children of really good books are themselves a tradition in these sorts of stories.

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down

Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down. Good. Emotionally convoluted, dramatic, and far-fetched but also emotionally convincing. Beautiful language goes a long way.

Julian Barnes, The Porcupine

Julian Barnes, The Porcupine. The narration of the trial of a deposed party leader after the fall of the USSR. The slyly understated dialogue of the prosecutor and the accused reminded me of Camus.

Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library. Eh. Pretty lame despite some fun details and a decent plot. The journalist/investigator protagonist was a brat. And I'm tired of alchemy, anyway. Not like this, not the historical proto-chemistry (however mystical), but like philosopher's stone, immortality, secret societies, blah blah blah. I can just watch Indiana Jones or something.

Virginia Rounding, Catherine The Great.

Virginia Rounding, Catherine The Great: Love, Sex, and Power. This was recommended by the ladies at Stuff You Missed in History Class. Don't be fooled by the titillating subtitle - this book is perhaps less shocking then any old Russian novel. Catherine did have a series of young favorites, but she and those around her were unfailingly discreet. Catherine is a fascinating figure and the biography itself was decent, and seem to get better and less awkward as it went along. Early in the book it felt as though someone comfortable with more academic prose was trying a bit too hard to be relaxed and conversational. Catherine's letters and those of her friends and visitors to her court were wonderful and the author did a great job of framing people's words; for example pointing out that certain correspondence was often intended to be intercepted and read by people other than the adressee - a sort of free advertising or propaganda. Catherine's letters to Voltaire, for example, were intended for a wider audience. Some letters were just fun to read - the long and frank correspondence between Catherine and her dear friend and art dealer Friedrich Melchior Grimm, full of details about her grandchildren, dogs, and daily life - made her absolutely come to life. Catherine lived in such a fascinating time, right at the beginning of our modern age, and how she managed to efficiently adopt an new country and religion, take it over in a neat coup, efficiently rule and expand a vast empire (based on serfdom) with the longest reign of any Tsar, while simultaneously maintaining within herself at least the ideal of an enlightened ruler modernizing and improving Russia, is incredible.

Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society. An extremely gifted team of orphan children must save the world on their own while deep undercover at a shadowy and Brave-new-world-ish sinister academy. Cute, funny, vaguely unoriginal. I am passing it on to my little brother Ben, who I think will enjoy it more than I did.

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin

Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin. Started reading it out loud in the car to the boys (we recently enjoyed listening to The Neddiad on tape), realized it was a little out of their age bracket and finished it up to myself. Hilarious. Home room, commie infiltration of ROTC, his parents' furnishing misadventures; Robert Nifkin relates his high school (and delinquency) experience in the best Pinkwater deadpan.

Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy

Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy. The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, and Ptolemy's Gate. I loved these. A really fun and funny well-written trilogy. Bartimaus (the sometimes snarky, extremely famous, quite accomplished, infinitely clever, fabulously powerful, and ever modest djinni-narrator) is priceless.

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost. I was going to complain that this book was exactly the same as the last Roth book I read, but to be fair, it was a little better put together than Indignation. But nothing about Zuckerman's (it's another Zuckerman book) terminal obsession with decay and impotence was interesting or even novel - and even in his impotence and senility he can't narrate one damn female character that is anything more than the object of sexual fetish - no life of their own beyond a mirror for their men to gaze into. But really - the only reason I can't forgive this book is that there was not one damn beautiful or funny or amazing moment in it - it was stale and tired, a meandering waste of time.

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Fun, fun, fun!

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake. Gogol (the American-born son if Indian parents) was a little flat, while his expatriate parents' surroundings and personalities were lovingly rendered. Gogol's affairs, academics, career, failed marriage, even his apartment were never convincing; he seemed a construct, a stereotype. His parent's emotions, even their furniture and food, were somehow more textured - it was odd because their role in the story was so traditional (immigrant parents and their American children, tensions ensue...) and yet they were more convincing. I was disappointed.

John Banville, The Infinities

John Banville, The Infinities. Gods, self, mathematics, death, family. A nearly mundane family drama acrobatically spun into a universe with slightly different underpinnings (for example, here Johann Beringer was correct and fossils were indeed the capricious fabrications of God). So much artifice, so many sly jokes, so many lovely narrative turns. The writing was ridiculously beautiful. Words so lovely the story was outshone by its clothes.

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains. The Paul Farmer story. A dangerous book to read; a book to change your life.

E. O. Wilson, Anthill

E. O. Wilson, Anthill. Loved, LOVED the parts about the ants. The early story about Raff Cody falling in love with the longleaf pine forest was lovely, and the view of academia as a very specialized colony was fabulous. However, sadly, the end of the book had a clumsy and perfunctory Grisham-style thriller tacked on. And it wasn't very thrilling or even interesting (and so lacked the only redeeming quality of a real legal thriller). It seemed like a creative writing exercise where you're asked to re-create a certain style and you use a web template. This was especially disappointing, because Wilson can write so beautifully. It's like a lovely book was growing and it suddenly acquired a fifth useless leg mid-development. And I wanted more ants. So I suppose that after clinical rotations I'll stop putting off reading The Ants.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief. Leisel is a foster child in a small town in the outskirts of Munich during World War II. She first becomes a book thief when she finds The Grave Digger's Handbook at her little brother's funeral. Despite the frequent tragedy, the book is funny, original, and emotionally convincing (it's easy to set a tragedy in that time and place, but it isn't easy to be genuine and tell a story that any child or adult can identify with). I loved Leisel and her friends and family; and I loved her discovery of words and the word use in the book itself.

P. D. James, The Private Patient

P. D. James, The Private Patient. One of her usual tight and intricate mysteries. I'm not really an Adam Dagleish fan. He's too perfect; a grown-up's fantasy - I mean, really, a tall, handsome, reserved, and distantly wounded critically acclaimed poet wedded to his work who comes WITH the perfect London flat? And unlike another ridiculously perfect British detective, he is never funny or silly or entertaining or close to human. I always enjoy reading her books, though, because they are like her detective: a little distant, a little chilly, but technically impeccable. This one, set in a private plastic surgery clinic at a lovely old manor house, was no different, and had lovely little plot twists in a nice tight frame.

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. After five travelers die in an "act of God" (a rope bridge collapse), a priest tries to discover a rational system to determine why some are chosen to die and some are chosen to live. What evolves from this research is a beautiful distillation of the essence of five lives.

Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (translated by Carol Brown Janeway). I had forgotten that I had read this, but couldn't stop. It's a surprisingly subtle story. Unbridgeable chasms between individuals. Language, literacy, awareness, guilt.

Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic, Eric, and Feet of Clay

Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic, Eric, and Feet of Clay. Feet of Clay was a detective story featuring golems and the City Watch. Cheery Littlebottem and Dorfl join the Watch, Lord Vetinari gets poisoned, Commander Vimes and Captain Carrot investigate. The Color of Magic and Eric (or Faust) were Rincewind adventures.

Jane Smiley, Ordinary Love and Goodwill

Jane Smiley, Ordinary Love and Goodwill. Two beautiful novellas about family life.

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife. A delicious fluffy layer-cake of a story. I loved the holey time-addled story line (and while chronological impairment is a plot gimmick, it's fun, enlivened the plot, and provided an excuse to talk about the nature of love, identity, and choice). Henry and Claire were lovable, their friends and family were perhaps even more interesting, and the setting in and around Chicago was an extra layer of icing. But I wish Claire had more of her own identity. So much of her self was wrapped up in Henry, waiting for him, helping him, loving him - although I suppose she was essentially a child-bride and so perhaps that level of entanglement is not surprising. I really wonder about her art. Were her thoughts expressed in her sculptures alone and hidden from us? Perhaps not, since most of her works that were described also seemed to revolve around her relationship with Henry or around Henry himself. I would have found the love story more powerful if I felt they both had stronger identities- Henry apart from his time-wandering, and Claire apart from Henry. But I suppose that our personalities are often constrained and defined by the happenstance of our lives.

William Gibson, Spook Country

William Gibson, Spook Country. This book wasn't really science fiction, more like techno-now fiction; sort of a spy-art-gizmo-post-9-11 hodgepodge. The only hazard of writing in the near-present is that the tech in this 07 book already seems quaint. Interesting plot with (wonder of wonders in this genre!) a moderately interesting grown-up female reporter/ex-musician with an actual personality as narrator. Naturally she gets sucked into a strange and intricate caper involving satellites, dirty money, and shadowy government organizations. My major complaint about William Gibson is that he doesn't really like people, he likes things. All his books are absolute love stories to things and designs (they should come with tiny replicas or glossy catalogs) but the people never really go anywhere or develop - if you expect that than they are a fine entertainment.

Samuel Shem, The House of God

Samuel Shem, The House of God. Dr. Roy Basch undergoes a curriculum of self-defense training and skill set acquisition including bouncing, buffing, and turfing during the absurd purgatory of intern year in the Seventies. It's hilarious (and bitter, and very very raunchy). I kept hearing this strange vocabulary and references to characters like the Fat Man over the last few years - so, I thought I had better read this and then anything I get myself into in the next couple of years will seem benign by comparison.

E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods

E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods. Loved it. The better they try to be, the more trouble they make - I love the Bastable kids. And for kicks, check out E. Nesbit's wikipedia page; who knew she was a radical?

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick. Complete muck. Blech. Not even the sermon on parasites at the end saved it.

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. Loved this one. Sports, academia, high fashion, pies, and candle dribbling.

Victor LaValle, Big Machine

Victor LaValle, Big Machine. Ricky Rice gets a mysterious letter and a one-way greyhound ticket to northeastern Vermont. He leaves his job as a night janitor and enters a surreal secret organization in a stone library. He spends his days with ex-criminals and ex-junkies doing research and preparing reports while dressed in immaculate 1920's menswear. It gets weird from there.

More comics

So, it's the end of spring break and we've been on a comics binge at my house. The Iowa City Public Library has a phenomenal collection of comic books (really amazing) and we have them stacked on every surface of our house. It's been great, because the boys are getting to see classic superheroes and lots of new stories. I read Renee French's The Soap lady to the boys. Horrifying and beautiful - I really need to go see the Mutter Museum. Next I read a couple of Neil Gaiman collaborations to myself: Murder Mysteries and The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch. Yawn. But best of all has been Tank Girl by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. She's my new friend. Pow!

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated. Funny, silly, charming, heartbreaking. Sometimes the letters were a little precious - but Alex the letter-writer actually became more human as the story continued (and self-conscious as they could be, the emotions felt genuine). The scenes with Sammy Davis Junior Junior the insane dog were hilarious enough for me to forgive any possible sin of earnestness.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis. A beautiful story.

Edward Marston, The Malevolent Comedy

Edward Marston, The Malevolent Comedy. This is the first of the series I've read - they feature an Elizabethan theater troupe whose dramas spill off the stage and into murder and kidnapping territory. The bizarrely talented and resourceful bookholder, Nicholas Bracewell, leads the investigations (and why a guy who is trained in the finer points of all deadly weapons, accounting, detecting, and general problem solving is working for a theater company I don't know). Fun and light, but not much of mystery. The setting and characters were pleasant, but I'm not dying to read any more of these.

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Don DeLillo, White Noise. Fear of death - wouldn't it be nice if there was a pill for that?

David McCullough, John Adams

David McCullough, John Adams. Could have been a bit shorter, and I admit that I used it to fall asleep a few times. But I loved Adams - his moderation of thought and his independence - and I even enjoyed his inconsistencies, his vanity, and his moodiness. I liked that he was self-aware enough to admit his faults to his wife. I really did fall in love with Abigail Adams. If I was going to do it over, I'd probably read the Wikipedia article on John and get a collection of Abigail's letters. So many letters, to so many people, crossing oceans; really remarkable. Without the letters, the book would have been a dry recounting of official record; with the letters it sometimes had the gossipy feel of a novel or movie. The most suspenseful subplot was the relationship between Adams and Jefferson (and it had a happy ending, too, which was nice).

One fascinating thing was how much illness was a part of the story: so many children dying, adults suddenly taking ill, the widespread fear of epidemics, and seasonal illnesses that we have no conception of today. Infectious diseases lurked in the corners of this book - typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria - sinister characters picking off the players like snipers. I'd forgotten that the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia happened when George Washington was president and displaced the entire Congress, and I had had no idea that Dr. Benjamin Rush was one of Adams' closest friends.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca. The worst book ever. I never read it as a kid because I thought it would be icky and it totally was (so nice when childhood grudges are justified). Horrible people, sloppy dramatic writing, predictable plot. I've never been so annoyed with a protagonist in my life. What a whiny, spineless, melodramatic, pouty little brat. And Max was the most insipid gelatinous sulky condescending love interest ever - I refuse to believe that he would ever have had the balls to shoot his wife. At least Rebecca had orgies and was evil and maybe even interesting. I would have had to thoroughly drug myself before even having dinner with those people. Oh my, it was just so horrible.

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus. Chalk another one up for the elders of Tralfamadore.

Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake. These were like going out for coffee with a friend (who you don't really like, but who is really entertaining when she talks about herself, which is always).

Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times. One last fun book leftover from Christmas. Actually, I think it was my least favorite discworld book so far (which is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it)- Rincewind isn't my favorite wizard and the Counterweight continent doesn't hold a candle to Ankh-Morpork.

Alan Zweibel, The Other Shulman

Alan Zweibel, The Other Shulman. Shulman is your middle aged faintly whiny guy who's just realized he's no longer a promising young man; he's a familiar character, which actually makes the fact that he has an evil double pretty funny. Shulman's lost (and gained) enough weight over his life to make a second person and that person has decided to ruin his life. There are some hilarious moments as Shulman clomps along in training to shamble through a marathon, and his love of stationary is genuinely endearing.

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork. The story unfolds intricately, piece by piece: you have to peer over the narrator's shoulder as he investigates an old murder of a missionary in a hill country tribal village. Anthropology, journalism, and murder in Thailand: it's a good read, and all of the pieces are interesting, but the whole story doesn't feel quite right - I guess I didn't really buy the conclusion.

Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs

Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs. Pretty fun set of essays. Hard not identify when you have kids. He falls into old-fogeyisms occasionally (when I was a kid, yadda yadda, kids nowdays, yadda yadda) that I think are a little much. Enjoyed his stories about drawing superheroes and playing legos with his kids, and his defense of popular culture.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel. Fantastic. Really. So engrossing - you forget that you already know some pieces of the story. The most fascinating parts are not the familiar parts. Who cares about Henry and his stupid sex life - but textiles! And reformation! And painting, and disease, and family life, and finiancial markets, and education and marriage. A beautiful novel with a great story and real flesh on the people and places. Thomas Cromwell was the most interesting main character, and I loved the way Thomas More was depicted (a contrast from "A Man for all Seasons" and lining up more with how I've been privately thinking of him for the last few years). I looked up every painting I could find by Holbein, too.

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. So I did throw this one across the room when I finished it. It was so fucking French. Did you read The Little Prince for French class? Anyway, parts of it I liked. I genuinely liked the protagonists. But the tone struck me as false. As pretentious. As exactly what Renée would have hated. Plus, I'm sentimental. And O. Henry plot twists drive me insane.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. This took me six months to read and I'm still in too much anger or grief to write about it. So exasperating.
update:
So, I loved this book. Even though it took 300 pages to really follow it, even though it was discursive to the point of madness, and even though sometimes I felt like I was swimming in a septic tank of misery. There were times when it was dull, not for the sake of dullness, but to make a point about dullness. But description dragged me in and won me over. Ennet House was perfect to the last detail - hysterical in its maddening triviality and the tiny miseries of living with other people. I loved Hal, and Mario, and Don Gately. I loved the stupid jokes, and I especially loved the words and their ridiculous use. I knew, knew, that the story could not possibly gather up all the threads and tie them off. Even more unlikely that there could be some kind of personal conclusion or completion, much less happiness. It's not like I wasn't warned. Still, I wanted to throw the book across the room when I finished it.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone. Twins, surgeons, nuns, unrequited love, and revolution from India to Ethiopia to New York and back again. It's overblown and dramatic, but who cares? I can't remember the last time I stayed up all night to finish a story.

Roddy Doyle, The Snapper

Roddy Doyle, The Snapper. It's the Rabittes, before The Van. Jimmy Sr is as obscene and soft-hearted as ever. It's the details and the dialogue that make this family so hilarious and right on.

Paul Davies, How to Build a Time Machine

Paul Davies, How to Build a Time Machine. Not quite the practical guide I was hoping for - but a nice little book about wormholes and such. Good pictures, funny text, everything you want in an armchair time-travel treatise. The printing of the book itself was very strange - sans serif with gray highlighting, a strange page layout, and a barcode-like motif around the page numbers - I couldn't figure it out and it was visually annoying.

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms. More post-finals relaxation.

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites and Carpe Jugulum

Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites and Carpe Jugulum. Fighting gender stereotyping in the practice of magic and unconventional vampire battling. Granny Weatherwax reminds me of a few formidable women I know, though they don't have broomsticks (even ones that need jump starting). More school break fun. I haven't yet found a Discworld story that doesn't make me giggle at least once. So be careful if you read these in public or while drinking milk.

John Gardner, Grendel

John Gardner, Grendel. Grendel's story- angry and absurd, with perfect pitch and cadence. And liking and understanding the monster only makes him more terrifying: isn't a despairing and articulate devourer infinitely more horrifying than a mindless voracious beast?

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea. A fascinating glimpse of people working together for community development and education despite incredible geographical and political barriers. Unlikely and beautiful - it's as much a love story of place and a lament about war as a story about building schools.

George Eliot, Silas Marner

George Eliot, Silas Marner. Exactly as I remembered the story nearly 20 years ago. But now I can't quite figure it out.

Laurie Halse Anderson, Fever 1793

Laurie Halse Anderson, Fever 1793. The yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia is one of the most interesting stories in American history and medical history. The account of Mattie Cook, her family, and their coffee shop during the epidemic was well-written, fascinating, and accurate (though fictional). I especially enjoyed the coffee shop and the depiction of Bush Hill. A young adult Bring Out Your Dead, really.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. Luminous and beautiful language - I loved the breathless rush of thoughts. Clarissa Dalloway was perfect and refracted by everyone with clarity and brightness. The book was everything that Orlando could have been and wasn't.

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock

Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock. I loved the sense of place, of geography and geology informing the stories. I'd love to see the country around lake Huron. These characters seemed less distant, sharper than others of hers I've read.

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed

Nicholas Harberd, Seed to Seed: the Secret Life of Plants. A journal sketchbook about plants: growth, life, reproduction, and death. The life cycle of a thale cress plant in an English graveyard describes global growth and development. An explanation of transcription factors and how genetic material connects the growth of the plant to the world. A discussion about science, communicating a series of minute observations, and how to connect them back to the encompassing world. How one scientist can hold the world as sacred, and view it in awe and wonder for its order and beauty.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Virginia Woolf, Orlando. A flowery and playful story of a young nobleman/noblewoman, aspiring poet, hero, patron, and general dreamer and layabout. I loved the gender and time-stretching nature of Orlando and the settings. The style was pompous and sly - toying with literary biography and period literature - but sometimes too half-there, too elliptical. Moments of wit surprised me - for short stretches, the book was so funny, so insightful - but there were also tedious expositions that sapped the story.

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station. This book grew on me like a harmless and grotesque tumor. At first I was annoyed by the florid language, but I stopped noticing, and then deep into the story it seemed a piece with the fecund world of New Crobuzon. Likewise the sprawl of settings and variety of organisms was messy and distracting early, but settled into complex and satisfying patterns.

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and The Light Fantastic

Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! and The Light Fantastic. Silly, snorkly, and endlessly entertaining. I'm glad there are so many of these to read - I'm going to ration them through med school as emergency fun.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Read it.

John Updike, My Father's Tears

John Updike, My Father's Tears. He wrote the same stories over and over again in dozens of gentle variations, exploring every permutation and perspective. Every time I read a collection of his, I remember that I prefer his novels. But I also enjoy thinking about the nature of memory, and defining stories that evolve as they are told over our lifetimes. So if you want to read about a solitary and beloved only child who moved from the town to a farm (or a middle-aged man dealing with bodily decay and the aftermath of divorce or adultery) told and retold in beautiful language, read Updike's short stories.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Cormac McCarthy, The Road. The apocalyptic waste land crossed by vaguely doomed and asymmetrically flawed travelers is Cormac McCarthy's logical end point. The Road is minutely engrossing (like most stories of scavenging survival), and the parent-child emotion pulls more blatantly even than usual. I always love all McCarthy's characters, despite the inevitable, and against my will. I think that's his point though - people love every damn thing and it can't be helped.

Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff. Good stories, but harsh. And not harsh like drinking bad whiskey, harsh like eating cigarette butts soaked in bad whiskey.

William Nicholson, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong

William Nicholson, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong. The rest of the Wind on Fire trilogy. These are dense, allegorical, and unique. The morality is much more nuanced than most fantasy, although on the surface the world is simple. The Mastery is superficially the most totalitarian and brutal state imaginable (just as Amaranth was the most repressive social hierarchy in the first book) but each story element unfolds into a more interesting state. I don't mean to say that the morality is not finally clear, just that the stories recognize complexity and potential for both good and evil in the heroes and villains. These two books didn't have quite the mythical feeling or emotional pull of the first in the trilogy, but the whole story was imaginative and powerful.

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver

Georges Simenon, Inspector Cadaver. My first Inspector Maigret mystery (I don't know how I missed him in my Agatha Christie phase). A provincial investigation of a suspicious death, with a country house, snobbery, hostile gossip, and a sleazy house guest. Inspector Maigret is restrained, ruminative, and reluctant. Well-written, and even in translation the language is unmistakably french.

Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle. Pretty humid, not to say moist. But Molly Bolt is a girl worth the humidity. She's fierce enough to rival Scout and she's less of a brat than Holden.

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief. This was interesting. I would have liked more on the orchids and less on the people. The botany is incredible and the descriptions needed large color plates. I thought the contemporary orchid people were a little boring, but I would definitely read an entire book on the Victorian era orchid hunters. The story was scattered, running off in all directions, but when it focused on the flowers or on the character of LaRoche it was fascinating.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Neil Gaiman, American Gods. This was pretty disappointing. It was a fine thriller but it wasn't really funny or especially creative. The story had moments of spark, but mostly it seemed mechanical. I think the author like describing the background of middle America and the stories of the gods more than writing about the main character. Evidence in favor of my theory that strong silent men make crappy protagonists. And Shadow is a stupid name, anyway (it made me imagine him as a cross between a German Shepard and "The Rock").

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment and Going Postal. More fun. Monstrous Regiment is about the small criminally insane nation of Borogravia and its very unusual recruits. It changed my relationship with socks. Going Postal follows the, er, choice of the very talented con man Moist von Lipwig to go straight (more or less) and take a civil service job reviving the post office.

V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds

V.S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds. The next half of Willie Chandran's life (or the next third of it, anyway). Willie floats with the same reserve and disconnection. He somehow drifts through years of fighting with a guerrilla revolutionary force and further years of imprisonment. He lives more and more within his own skin and the best parts of the story are the details of how he connects minute to minute of time. His return to England pulls away from that focus, and in the end it's no different than his first arrival. He's still amiable, but full of less and less potential.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch. Marvelous. Scratched so many itches at once that I'm going to have to invent a new category of fun reading. This one had all the satisfaction of a good mystery/police novel smooshed in with science fiction and a really great imaginary universe and slathered all over with just slightly over the top hilariousness. Like Douglas Adams with more plot? No, not exactly. But that absurd humor that makes me snort when I'm reading and whisper lines out loud to myself just to hear them again. I can't exactly recap the plot, but Commander Sam Vimes is the kind of archetype who's fun to read about even when he's boring, and he was definitely not boring.

Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children

Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children. These are longer short stories, but the book doesn't have the scattered feeling of some collections. They are coherent and narratives transition smoothly: the people aren't connected, but the personality of the growing city of Washington provides continuity. Many of the characters are transplants, leaving rural communities behind, while others never left but are seeing their city change around them.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March

Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places and King of the Middle March. The second two books in this Arthurian trilogy. Again, the short chapters and the interweaving of two stories are original and pleasing. The book is meticulously researched ("our" Arthur's story is at end of the twelfth century) and therefore absolutely fascinating. The narrative is vivid and nuanced at the same time, which is hard to pull off when writing a squire's account of events leading up to a crusade.

V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life

V.S. Naipaul, Half a Life. Willie Chandran moves from continent to content, half escaping and half creating. He leaves behind his parents, but not quite their resentment and shame. And so he lives a life of repetition. The hypocrisy and entanglement of class and pigment follow him around the world. He's always almost absent, always leaves himself a backdoor open for escape. He manages to never be fully invested, to be continually making time. His half lived life has so far been cushioned by falsehoods and protective coloration. And yet he's attractive, amiable, full of untapped promise.

Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (translated by Archibald Colquhoun). Cosimo, disgusted by snails at dinner, runs away to the trees and never comes down. His little brother records his life as an adventurer, scholar, lover, madman and revolutionary. Wonderful.

Adam Gopnik, The King in the Window

Adam Gopnik, The King in the Window. This story had a wonderful sense of place, and Paris through the eyes of a lonely child was enticing. But that's the best I can say for it. It had entrancing moments, but the plot splayed out and the story wasn't cohesive. The quantum computing subplot was especially clumsily patched on to the world of water, windows, and mirrors.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. A total blast. Best weekend reading ever. Beats my efforts at description right now, but trust me, it's a good time. I've never read Pratchett before, and Stardust was my introduction to Gaiman. After finals I'm going to try some Discworld books.

J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man. Quiet, understated, and perplexing. Paul Rayment's life is jolted and his image of himself is shattered when he loses a leg. A reserved, dignified and solitary man is confronted by his own foolishness. I thought Elizabeth Costello as a mechanism detracted from the core of the narrative; but it's difficult to write about the need for human connection and care without sounding stale, and maybe the device avoided emotional boredom. But she seemed forced and unconvincing and poisoned the story.

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada. Extremely sticky. More than a little affected. And yet- beautifully allusive, velvety, with spurts of enchanting wordplay. But the language was too indulgent to sustain and the romance was more ridiculous and annoying than erotic. I felt it was closely related to to a book I might enjoy, but I was never able to stop rolling my eyes.

Kid's books again

So these books have been a renewed addiction for me. I can read one of these in an evening, even if I'm tired - and if they are really good, I can read them out loud snuggling with the boys.

Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Seeing Stone. A retelling of Arthurian legend in very short chapters. Interesting and detailed snapshots of medieval life.

Eva Ibbotson, The Secret of Platform 13. A cute little story, old-fashioned in feel.

William Nicholson, The Wind Singer. Fantastic. Original, gripping and nuanced. Reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time. Passing this one on to my little brothers, and searching out the other two books in the trilogy.

Patricia Maclachlan, Tomorrow's Wizard. A very little story and very good fun. Perfect read out loud book.

Brian Jacques, Castaways of the Flying Dutchman. Just terrible. Disappointing - the Redwall books were fun, but this wasn't even fun. I was hoping it was going to have seafaring and adventures, desert islands and such. The first chapter was promising, but the rest of the book was just badly written sweetness and light.

EL Konigsburg, The View From Saturday. Championship sixth grade quiz bowl team.

Somaly Mam, The Road of Lost Innocence

Somaly Mam, The Road of Lost Innocence. (I read this for a group at school). While it was shocking, it was not written to titillate. Somaly says that she told her story in a book so that she doesn't have to keep telling it, so that it stands apart from her. What was remarkable was the practical attitude of the book.

"I don't feel like I can change the world. I don't even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering."

It is a personal story about the global sex trade and human trafficking, and more importantly, about the effort to fight it. Her organization (as well as Somaly and her family) have been threatened and attacked as a result of her work against organized trafficking. They continue to provide protection, shelter, education, and support for sustainable employment to victims of human trafficking in Cambodia. Somaly has written a direct and honest story with the purpose of creating awareness and support for her organization and her cause.

More kid's books

Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, More Minds. Good idea, not so great execution, still a fun little fantasy. Unremarkable. Gail Carson Levine, Ella Enchanted. This was actually really cute. Didn't realize it was a retelling of the Cinderella story until 2/3 of the way through it. Always wondered why she was so docile. Good candidate for read out loud. Robert C. O'brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Still just as good as the first time. I've never thought about rats the same way since I first read this. I always imagine them making intricate machines in their vast underground tunnels and only appearing at subway stops and alleys on their way to somewhere else. It is odd to read it now when I view lab animals as convenient models for things. Now I worry about such poor study design, and all that lost data is tragic (although I'm still on these rats' side, of course). I'll probably never be able to do animal work - too many children's books and an overactive imagination.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Zadie Smith, White Teeth. Hilarious and uncomfortable. Layers of commentary and strife. The Chalfens made me wince, probably because I've heard echos of their smugness in their eccentricity in my own head. I actually liked this better than On Beauty, because I liked the people better. Not that anyone was particularly admirable. Samad was possibly the least admirable but the most sympathetic - his hypocrisy actually made him less exasperating and more comprehensible. If he was my husband I'd kill him, though, not just beat him in wrestling in the back yard.

Comfort Food

I wish I could say I've given up reading for pleasure to focus on Human Organ Systems. Unfortunately, I've just reverted to binging on sweets. Full disclosure in the interests of honesty: three old Martha Grimes mysteries (The Man With a Load of Mischief, The Anodyne Necklace, and The Old Contemptibles). Michael Crichton's Sphere (very mediocre). J. K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, and Jane Yolen's Wizard's Hall (both darling). Just think of how much knowledge I could have been gaining. So it goes.

Goodbyes

John Updike died today. He was a good imaginary friend of mine. We'd get in fights, but he'd always write something to bring me back to him. I wish I could thank him. Coming after the deaths of my dear imaginary friends Saul Bellow, Madeleine L'Engle, and Kurt Vonnegut, I'm starting to feel like an elderly person who dreads reading the obituaries.

Robb Forman Dew, The Truth of the Matter

Robb Forman Dew, The Truth of the Matter. A wistful, rounded book. I loved the glimpses of Agnes' internal process - a wonderful description of the corners of consciousness. I thought the story was a little wispy, but it was told sensuously and was quite beautiful.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. (The Peavar and Volokhonsky translation.) I'm not sure what to say about this. I hadn't read it in about 12 years and I have to say it was a lot of fun - it's a big juicy novel. I enjoyed the characters and even the history(diatribes)- in fact I thought the background was the most fun. I had more appreciation for prince Andrei this time, and less sympathy for Pierre. But by the end I was enraged at so many things. The ending- the relationships of Natasha and Pierre, Marya and Nikolai, were so disappointing. Even more than in Anna Karenina, I felt that the women weren't actually people. And Tostoy's attitudes about marriage were infuriating, even in context of the time. Not that the center of a marriage is creating a family, but the relationship between husband and wife is so lopsided. I don't like the implication that the wife is almost solely a vessel for the reflection and refinement of her husband's personality. Natasha was especially obnoxious, and while Marya had potential to be an interesting person, it didn't happen. I want to be clear, I liked the happy domestic scenes (and the breastfeeding), it was Tolstoy's condescending and limiting views on the rest of the role of a wife that was infuriating. The scene with Marya's diary almost made me vomit. But I guess that I've changed a lot in a dozen years, maybe I'm less able to accept things uncritically, or maybe I just have another perspective on life.

After posting, I realized that I had better explain, because I know it's the family tradition to love Pierre. So here's why Pierre is basically worthless. Yes he has a good heart. I like him, especially when he's drinking, feels bad, and won't get off the couch. But his role as an intellectual is a monumental waste. He's a follower - a guru-hopper - he doesn't have any substance. His feelings are good, but he never develops any discipline. What he really needs is a regular job - all that money is bad for him. He's really only any good when he has something to do. At the very least, he needs a counterpoint, a challenge; but Andrei's dead, and Natasha is quite the opposite.

Philip Roth, Indignation

Philip Roth, Indignation. Not so good. The Olivia character was a complete cliche (the main character was something of a cliche too, maybe on purpose -I don't know - but if so, too subtle for me). Despite the dead gimmick, there wasn't all that much to it. There was one supremely funny and outrageous scene that made it worth the time, but only because it was a very short book.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. Daniel Deronda is a smart, sweet, slightly aimless young man with unknown parentage being raised by a kind uncle. Gwendolen Harleth is a bratty, beautiful girl who would be rebellious if she had more brains or imagination. So far nothing surprising, and the story begins like many less imaginative Victorian novels. It's where the story goes that is remarkable. Eliot showed the few options available to Gwendolen and the extraordinary narrowness of her life without making her flat or robotic. Deronda, despite his dubious origins, has much wider horizons, and the only choice he really has to make is what to do with himself. While he doesn't change so much as Gwendolen, his outlook, opinions, and goals subtly shift as he becomes immersed in a different culture and history. The window granted through Deronda into early Zionism as well as 19th century mysticism was fascinating. Although the novel has the slow-moving ornate style of the era, it has great intensity. I'm going to go back and reread Silas Marner and tackle Middlemarch - I appreciate Eliot so much more than I did when I was younger. She's subtle and engrossing and her characters are real people (she's also slyly funny).

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief. I bought this for my little brother for Christmas, but stole it back from him to read in a waiting room. It was fine, a fun little book. Mount Olympus is in NYC (the heart of the west, apparently) and the Greek gods are still up to their mortal-loving ways. Percy Jackson, a young half-blood hero in the making, has to go on a quest and battle mythical monsters and immortal gods while trying to live through middle school. I enjoyed the mythology, but it was laid on a little thick. The writing was too much aimed at middle-schoolers for me to enjoy thoroughly, and it did seem almost pandering to an imagined demographic. Much can be forgiven for a good adventure with swords, though. I guess it's not so much young adult books I enjoy as books that are written for everybody.

John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man

John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man. This story revolves around a young illegal immigrant, an elderly banker, and a human rights lawyer in Hamburg. It's a dissection of the chaos in the intelligence world post 9/11, as well as human rights, law, and morality. By now I ought to know what is coming when I read Le Carré (let's just say I don't expect a happy ending), but I can never guess just how things will go wrong. I love all these books. They have similar themes and even characters, but are all beautifully crafted. The similarity is that each person is utterly lonely, and the central threads of love, generosity, and choice. He keeps writing these wistful books, and they keep getting better. Authors that keep writing after they are sick of their characters and their forms, but go on anyway and write terrible books (I'm thinking Martha Grimes) are more than disappointing. Le Carré is most emphatically not in that category. Another lovely thing about him is that each of his books is thoroughly researched and embedded in the world at the time of his writing, but not in such a way that is forced or didactic.

Karen Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice

Karen Cushman, The Midwife's Apprentice. A fantastic little book. A medieval story, perfect in detail, with a wonderful hero of a girl. I'm sad that this wasn't written when I was 10.

Marilynne Robinson, Home

Marilynne Robinson, Home. A story about family, fault, and sorrow. The love that we have for each other that is impossible to abandon, that withdrawal or absence underlines. Full to the brim with grief - and yet serene. A reminder that the details of housekeeping, of gardening, of simply living, can be an expression of love, that they can keep despair just outside the door. She is a surpassingly beautiful writer. No tears, but I kept swallowing them as I turned the pages, and my heart stayed in my throat.

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces

Charles L. Bardes, Pale Faces: The Masks of Anemia. A lovely old fashioned little book about blood. A scholarly rumination about history and medicine - the nature of diagnosis and illness. Sometimes a little too ruminative, a little too effusive. I didn't mind, although I occasionally rolled my eyes at prose like this:

"A red cell lives for ninety days, give or take, and when it is old and gray and full of sleep the spleen recognizes its senectitude and takes it aside, takes it down, administers some fatal blow and breaks it apart, recycles its parts for future use, its iron and vital stuff."

Even with this lack of restraint, the overall story was pleasing. I wouldn't mind if textbooks were written in the same style, with myth and literature interwoven with description. I picked it up at the library because it was small and attractive, and it lived up to its looks.

Dave Eggers, What is the What

Dave Eggers, What is the What. Simple, direct. Makes me respect Eggers - it's not his, but Valentino's voice telling the story. But the soul of his writing (what saves it from artifice and archness and makes it Staggering Genius despite self-consciousness) is there. I'm not sure what that essence is - saying it is love is inadequate. Anyway, it's a tremendous feat to write a story in the midst of massive human tragedy that is neither saccharine, overdrawn, nor despairing. This story made me cry, but for a friend -another person, not for nameless, faceless masses of people. More than cry, though. It was funny and beautiful, it made me love my life, I wanted to kiss strangers, and hug children. The best part of Valentino Achak Deng's story is that is didn't end when he left Kakuma, but it continues. The end is satisfying, even though completely unfinished.