Robopocalypse: it’s like World War Z, but for robots. Wilson is well positioned to pen this future war, having already penned the advice bookHow to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself from the Upcoming Rebellion. Entertaining, all things considered, but it feels thin compared to the multiplicity of viewpoints in WWZ.
Posted in Uncategorized
Mal Peet, from what I can tell, is somewhere in his 60s, too young to have been around during World War II. However, that war’s legacy seems to have made a significant impact on him as it was central to his 2007 novel Tamar, and also makes a significant appearance in his new book Life: an Exploded Diagram. The examines three generations of a working-class family in Norfolk, England. Grandmother and religious fanatic Win, bewildered mother Ruth and vaguely disappointed father George, and striving artist son Clem’s lives are intertwined with Luftwaffe bombings and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
From helicopter shot panorama to macro lens detail, Mal Peet’s prose zooms from clinical analysis of global crisis to the minutia of Clem’s artistic and sexual development. Several narratives are intertwined, as grown-up Clem covers his family’s history as influenced, more or less directly by historical events. Ruth goes into labor to birth Clem because of the trauma of a German bomber flying over their cottage. Clem is terrified of dying a virgin, which he fears he might do in a global nuclear war precipitated by the USSR putting nuclear missiles in Cuba. When Clem meets and starts a romantic entanglement with Frankie, the daughter of the local landowning gentleman, his lens on the world changes. No longer is he just a scholarship boy at the local grammar school, forced to wear terrible uniforms and teased mercilessly, but a guy who makes out a lot with a really hot girl and who starts seeing the world as an artist even as they are groping their way towards each other both figuratively and literally.
One of my favorite things about this book is the scope of the narrative. How did John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy experience of lack thereof affect a boy in rural England? How did grandmother Win’s prudishness and disapproval affect decades of Ruth and George’s marriage? The narrative spans the years from World War II to 9/11 and using the multi-generational family story in conjunction with history shows how one person’s life has components from so many areas–the idea behind the subtitle. Clever.
Though Clem is the narrator and the central character, the other main characters are complex and interesting. Ruth’s discomfort with her own body and with sex is a direct result of her mother’s disapproval. George is stuck with Ruth and Win because of Ruth’s pregnancy, but is able to make his own life despite their parochial resistance to change. Frankie, though an object of worship for Clem, is also a girl with sexual agency tempered by misinformation and rumor. She is driven by desire but hampered by learning about sex from her classmates who provide tips and facts of dubious accuracy.
The teenage years are obviously formative. The interests and opportunities in this time shape our adult selves and having adult Clem narrate, as a somewhat-impartial third party shows that impact in his grown-up life in New York City, years and an ocean away from his upbringing. I don’t think this book would appeal much to younger teens, but I’d heartily recommend Life: an Exploded Diagram to older teens and to adults of any age.
(Library book)
Posted in Uncategorized
Here are the things I intend to do with this blog this year.
1. Cannonball Read 4. Since I actually completed CBR3, I figured why not do it again. It’s not like I won’t be reading stuff anyway. I will definitely try to keep on top of it throughout the year rather than reviewing way over half the books in the last 2 months of the year. 52 is one per week. I say I’ll do those on Thursdays. Yeah, Thursdays.
2. Other things! There will be other things. Like how challenging it will be to Not Buy Any Yarn In 2012. Serious business people.
Posted in Uncategorized
YA author and Twitter Maven Maureen Johnson just had a new book come out, and it’s by far my favorite thing I’ve read by her (though I’ve not read them all). Credit her publisher (or whoever’s idea it was) for putting up a preview (the first 85 pages) online, but it sucked me right in and I was forced, yes forced!, to order my very own signed copy.
High school student Rory (don’t call her Aurora, no one does) is spending her senior year in England. Her parents are both university professors spending a year there too, though her school is a boarding school in London and she won’t be with them. It’s a lot of new things for her, new country, new ideas, living on her own for the first time, having a roommate, being in the middle of a series of Jack the Ripper copy cat murders. Wait, Ripper copy cats? Yup, someone is killing just like the Ripper and it’s right in Rory’s neighborhood. She and her new friends even visit the pub where the first murder happened.
There have been a lot of boarding school books in the last few years, but this one is nicely different. Sure there are the politics and problems of putting a whole bunch of teenagers together with minimal supervision, but this is more about what goes on outside the school rather than just what happens inside ivy-covered walls. Johnson uses her characteristic humor to enliven the characters and there’s lots of great England detail. This is the first book of a new series and I can’t wait for the next one!
I picked up Sarah Ockler’s debut novel because it was recently banned by a high school in Missouri. And then they made the ridiculous compromise that (and Slaughterhouse Five) could only be checked out by a parent. Thank you to Bookshelves of Doom for keeping me updated on the fracas. I didn’t expect to find this book objectionable, personally, and I sure didn’t.
Anna and Frankie have been best friends and neighbors forever. Now, during the summer before their junior year of high school, they are bound together by that friendship and tragedy–the previous year, Frankie’s older brother Matt and the third in their trio was killed in a car accident by a heart defect no one knew he had. Everyone was understandably devastated, though what Frankie doesn’t know if that Anna and Matt had just started a romantic relationship–after a frosting fight on her 15th birthday, he kissed her–so she can’t even share the whole depth of her feelings and is limited to being the caring best friend.
Frankie has hidden her grief behind sparkles, tight clothes and mascara. She even had sex with a German exchange student! According to Frankie, having sex is something that Anna must do, ASAP. She calls virginity “Anna’s Albatross” and thinks the perfect time to ditch it will be on the 3 week California beach vacation Anna is taking with Frankie and her parents. Zanzibar Bay will be the ideal spot to find a guy, or twenty. The girls don’t intend to sleep with 20 guys, just find 20 prospects.
The girls fill their days with the beach, though Frankie puts on makeup more appropriate for a pageant swimsuit competition than a day of swimming and sunning. And they do meet boys, of course, college boys, high school boys, one creepy older man. Frankie intensely flirts will all of them and Anna is more reticent. Will getting involved with another boy be a betrayal of Matt? Make her forget him? The first person narrative really helps you empathize with Anna as she tries to help Frankie and herself. Their friendship is kind of one-sided, in that regard and makes me wonder what it was like before Matt’s death. In any case, I really enjoyed the book, and read it in less than 24 hours.
The book was challenged for its sexual content which there certain is some of, though it’s not graphic in any way. And the reality of the world is that teenagers have sex, so how do teens benefit by reading about it? I’d argue that best friend/brother’s death aside, these girls are a lot more like normal teens than many. They are interested in sex, even if they have a lot of uncertainty about it. Was the challenge a part of the gender double standard? The cultural shame about sex that is so intense for girls? (Not that boys don’t get shamed about sex, but you know…) I think Dan Savage would approve of this book, which means that there are a lot of religious or conservative or repressed people out there that won’t. Sucks to be them, I say.
The OASIS is the ultimate combination of Second Life and World of Warcraft–a totally immersive environment where players can attend school, go on quests, shop (spending real money on purely electronic goods) and tour recreations of old video games and movies–and it’s a way better place to spend time than the real world for Wade Watts, known in game as Parzival. Wade and the rest of the avatars in OASIS are all involved in the biggest Easter Egg ever which was embedded in the game by creator James Halliday and will give an enormous fortune to the person who solves it. After Wade becomes the first person to get the Copper Key and pass the first gate, the attention of the whole world is on him. He gets zillions of press requests and the more nefarious attention of the Sixers, agents of the company that wants to win the prize and monetize access to OASIS.
Though Wade and his best friend (online only) Aech were born in the late 2020s, they’re far more expert in 1980s culture than I am. They have to be, to try to solve the puzzles. If you like games and movies of the 80s, this book is a quest through so many of the greatest hits of that era. Even if you just lived through the 80s you’ll find references that you get whether it’s Fast Times or Ladyhawke.
The characters maybe aren’t the most well developed, but you can definitely empathize with these underdogs as the plot sucks you along while they compete for the greatest prize any of them could have ever imagined.
(Wow, what happened there. Fell of the blog train, apparently.)
Cannonball Read review number 5:
I wasn’t trying to ignore Vera, I’d just never heard of her before she won a Printz Honor in January. But boy I’m glad I picked up this book. Vera is a senior in high school trying to get through the rest of the year without getting noticed by anyone. Actually this has long been her M.O., but it was made a lot more difficult by the death of her best (and only) friend Charlie under mysterious circumstances. She’s also got a mother who left for Vegas when Vera was 12, a father who buries himself in self-help books, and a full time job at Pagoda Pizza. And she keeps a bottle of vodka under the seat of her car. And she sometimes sees a thousand two dimensional Charlies around her, talking to her, changing the radio station. Pretty overwhelming.
Charlie and Vera had been best friends forever, ever since her dad got clean (he was an alcoholic) and moved their family to the good side of town. They were always together, building a treehouse in the forest behind their houses, hiking the trails to the top of the Pagoda (is it a rock formation? a strange hotel? I’m unsure), Charlie always smoking and disheveled. They were comfortable in their two person world, ignoring Vera’s absent mother and Charlie’s parents’ constant fights, until Charlie fell in with the wrong crowd–the Detentionheads–and things go very wrong, ending with Charlie dead in his own front yard, probably pushed out of a car and left to choke on his own vomit.
The book starts with Charlie’s funeral and wends its sarcastic, pained way through the next several months. Through Vera’s discomfort at school, her flirtation with her 23-year-old coworker James, and ultimately the revelation of what happened to Charlie. Most of the book is Vera’s narration, though Ken, Charlie and the Pagoda all have their say as well. Ken’s dad provides flow charts. Vera also gives us flashbacks of her and Charlie’s past, and the dirty white car that’s the first clue in the mystery of Charlie’s death.
Definitely worth reading for Vera’s voice alone–during an argument with her dad, she describes her rage as a million angry “Kubrick monkeys” who make her want to act crazy.
This book was from the library, as 95% of the books I read are.
One of the books I read at the tail end of 2010 was Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. I first heard of it from Slog or the Boston Bibliophile or Rumpus.net. It came up a few times in feeds I subscribe to. Then it was mentioned again in this year end post from Library Alchemy.
Charles Yu (author) gives us the first person story of Charles Yu (character) who has spent almost a decade of his time in a telephone booth-sized time machine, a technology pioneered, rather unsuccessfully, by his father. The universe in this book’s universe is multiple–minor universes split off based on events and in the novel’s main minor universe, parts of New York, LA and Tokyo have formed one massive city. Yu prefers to stay in his time machine with the company of TAMMY, the machine’s operating system, and Ed, his “nonexistent but ontologically valid” dog. Yu meets himself, shoots himself and gets stuck in a time loop. Time travel is effectuated by thought–the brain is the real time machine and Yu’s father traveled away from his original time stream just by the strength of his own disappointment spurred by his failure to invent a working time machine.
Yu meeting himself in the time machine warehouse is the turning point in the narrative; when Yu meets his future self, future Yu hands present Yu a silver book called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and from that point, what’s printed in the book is what Yu is simultaneously reading and dictating to himself. The actual physical book is bound in silver, nice to see the designers working with the author in that way. And though the book is rather short, it finds plenty of space to delve into the father-son relationship, in beautifully elegiac prose. I thoroughly valued and enjoyed reading it.
Genre, however, is what inspired this post. This book is cataloged in my library’s science fiction section, and I’m not sure it belongs there. It’s not because sci-fi can’t be great or literary, because it certainly can, but because there just isn’t enough science-y stuff in there. Time travel in this universe doesn’t happen because of black holes or crazy wires in space or a TARDIS, but because of the power of human thought. I also think of sci-fi as a plot-driven genre and this book is postmodern character study through and through. The title makes it hard to put it elsewhere, perhaps.
Library patrons will sometimes ask me why a particular book is shelved in the section it’s in, and I have no good answers. I’ve seen Diana Gabaldon in Fiction, Mystery and Romance. Nora Roberts is in all 3 of those as well, so catalogers are not necessarily trying to keep authors’ works all together. The literary v. genre fiction debate has been well hashed out elsewhere and it’s not my intention to recreate that debate, I think it takes all kinds of books to make the world go round. It’s just that this book has more in common with (someone fragmented narrative-y who I’d name if I’d read more stuff) than with Orson Scott Card or Robert Jordan. Dividing up genres in the library or bookstore makes for easier browsing, in this case I think the book is ill served by being hidden in genre fiction. If you liked House of Leaves (which I didn’t) or Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, you’d enjoy this book but you might never see it.
Posted in Uncategorized
Here’s the complete list of books I read in 2010, in handy Google spreadsheet form.
How many books read in 2010? 159
How many fiction and non fiction? 137 fiction, 22 nonfiction (more specifically: 1 mystery, 4 juvenile nonfiction, 7 graphic novels, 18 adult nonfiction, 19 juvenile fiction, 21 adult fiction and 80 teen novels)
Male/Female author ratio? 72/92 (there are more here than books read because of multiple authors/editors)
Favorite book of 2010? My favorites were For the Win, The Help, Will Grayson Will Grayson, Mockingjay and Storyteller (Roald Dahl’s biography)
Least favorite? Er, probably something I didn’t finish. Maybe The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris: middle-aged characters I just didn’t relate to.
Any that you simply couldn’t finish and why? See above. There were a couple of others in this category, including the highly regarded Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater which I’ll probably try again some day.
Oldest book read? Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)
Newest? I read a ton of books published in 2010 (actually 80). I’ll go with Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares which came out 10/26.
Longest and shortest book titles? Are subtitles included? I say no so, I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb is longest. Pop by Gordon Korman and Ash by Malinda Lo are tied for shortest.
Longest and shortest books? Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson at 796 pages was longest, Lucy Long Ago at 64 pages was shortest.
How many books from the library? 146. I am a library power user. Which makes sense, as a librarian.
Any translated books? Yes. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Nowhere, Island Beneath the Sea, The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Legend of the Wandering King.
Most read author of the year, and how many books by that author? 6 volumes of Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley. 3 each by Brandon Sanderson and Brent Weeks.
Any re-reads? Yes, but I don’t track those. I know I read Behemoth twice. I reread a few Harry Potters. I reread John Green’s Paper Towns and Ken Jennings’s Brainiac. There are a few more I’m sure, but they’re not leaping to mind. Oh yeah, Heist Society, Hunger Games and Catching Fire too.
Favorite character of the year? Oliver from I Am A Genius… is a great character, evil and hilarious. I don’t really like him, as a person, but he was unique. Lee Fiora in Prep–boy did she feel like she came straight out of my own soul. And who doesn’t love Katniss??
Which countries did you go to through the page in your year of reading? The US (past, present and future), Canada, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, France, England (past, present and future), Sweden (and wherever else Lisbeth Salander goes), China, Japan, Italy, ancient Arabia, India, Ireland, postapocalyptic Northern Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Denmark, and several imaginary or nonspecific planets and countries.
Which book wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation? I don’t think I would have read Possession without the Boston Bibliophile‘s repeated mentions of it as her favorite book. Hat tip to her as well for this list of questions. And I even enjoyed it too!
Which author was new to you in 2010 that you now want to read the entire works of? I’d like to read more Isabel Allende and Michael Perry.
Which books are you annoyed you didn’t read? I have 18 books on a list in my draft email to read sometime, and about 30 books on request from the library. There are too many books to be read so I can’t be annoyed I haven’t read some of them or I’d be annoyed all the time.
Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read? Not really? Some day, I’ll read Moby Dick. Some day.
Posted in Uncategorized
Nothing like an explosion of social media to light a fire under one. I’ve been wanting to have a site for my various interests for a while. Hope this encourages me to write more books reviews, post pictures of knitting, and rant about the Twinkies.
Posted in Uncategorized
|
