Chapter One Hundred Fifty: Career of Evil

Career of Evil follows The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm in the mystery series J.K. Rowling writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  I enjoyed this (grizzly) read at least as much as the first two, though it probably is not for the faint of heart (it starts with a severed leg and the brutal crimes continue).  The mystery certainly kept me guessing, and it is interesting to see how the personal lives of detective Cormoran Strike (our hero) and his assistant Robin Ellacott (also our hero) continue to evolve throughout the series.  The end left me eager for the next installment, and I can only hope it will follow the pattern of a book each year and be published in 2016.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Nine: Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

This memoir by Jenny Lawson is actually her second book, and I definitely plan on reading her earlier memoir (Let's Pretend This Never Happened) at some point in the near future.  When I saw the taxidermied raccoon dancing in golden glitter on the front cover of Furiously Happy, I simply couldn't resist.  (Also one of my trusty co-workers had started reading the book and was regaling us with hilarious anecdotes from it.)  Lawson provides a humorous account of her daily life and her serious, sometimes debilitating struggles with various mental illnesses, including depression and anxiety.  This is a fascinating read for anyone interested in a first-hand account of one person's experience of living with mental illness or for people who enjoy contemporary memoirs.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Eight: Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

After seeing a Google Doodle featuring Hedy Lamarr, I was inspired to learn about this pioneering woman who helped invent spread-spectrum radio transmission, a technology key to the later development of the internet and mobile phones.  I looked up biographies of her, and found this one by Richard Rhodes, a well-respected non-fiction author, which also happened to be available at my local library!  Because this was such a busy semester for me, it took me some time to read it, but I did find it really interesting.  Hedy Lamarr led a fascinating life: not only was she a hobbyist inventor, but she was also a famous early Hollywood actress and a person of Jewish descent who fled a pro-Nazi arms-manufacturing husband in her native Austria.  This book also includes information on the life and times of George Antheil (her co-inventor of spread-spectrum radio transmission), an avant-garde American composer who made a living by writing news articles and scoring Hollywood films.  This book chronicles how these two became unlikely inventing partners and how their invention, after years of neglect and obscurity, came to be the unsung technology that makes so much of our modern life possible.  If you want a bit of interesting inventing information or heady Hollywood history, Hedy's Folly is the book for you!

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Seven: Lonely: A Memoir

Lonely: A Memoir is basically what it sounds like: a memoir of chronic loneliness, with a healthy helping of the author's research into international studies on loneliness.  Author Emily White, a Canadian ex-lawyer, intersperses accounts of her own periods of loneliness throughout her life with the interviews she conducted with self-identified lonely people from around the world whom she met online when she started a (now-defunct) blog about loneliness and her research into more clinical studies of loneliness--its causes and its effects, mental, physical, and social.  Along the way, she addresses stereotypes about loneliness and lonely people as well as her own efforts--successful and otherwise--to combat loneliness.  As someone who has experienced loneliness at times, I found this to be an engaging and fascinating book, and I think it would be valuable for everyone to read, even if they have only experienced situational (rather than chronic) loneliness.  As White notes, chronic loneliness is a social issue that affects everyone, whether they experience chronic loneliness or know people who do, yet few people discuss loneliness and there is so much shame associated with loneliness.  Her book is an excellent introduction to the subject of loneliness and I highly recommend it.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Six: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

So I read a New York Times review of this (nonfiction) book by Marie Kondo, translated from the Japanese, about a year ago, and I finally had the chance to get it from the library!  It is a small, compact book that is about precisely what its title suggests.  Marie Kondo offers a fun and informative mix of anecdotes from her years of working with people to tidy their homes and her resultant rules for tidying.  Spoiler alert: basically, she suggests that you get rid of anything that doesn't spark joy.  Kondo tends to anthropomorphize objects, from socks (which she urges you to roll instead of folding, which she says socks dislike) to the home or apartment itself (which she urges you to greet when you return to it each day), and yet this is not a sentimental work in any way.  The writing (or perhaps I should say the translator's rendering of Kondo's writing) is lucid, to-the-point, and humorous.  Whether you need to seriously declutter or are simply curious about different organizational methods, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up is a useful and entertaining source.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Five: Come Rain or Come Shine

Come Rain or Come Shine is Jan Karon's latest installation in the Mitford/Father Tim series, and it is just as delightful as its predecessors.  I have such an affection for these books!  They may be a bit slim on the plot, but the characters are so lovable that whenever I return to these books I feel as though I'm seeing old friends again.  Come Rain or Come Shine is different from the other books in this series in that large parts of it are told from Lace's point of view, and I found this to be a refreshing and intriguing change of pace.  This novel is also a bit more plot-oriented, focusing as it does on the run-up to and celebration of Dooley and Lace's wedding.  The whole book felt like a party to me, in fact, and it makes me want to re-read the whole series again!  (Though that probably won't happen while I'm in grad school...)  If you like this series, you won't want to miss this newest volume.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Four: The Steady Running of the Hour

I have mixed feelings about this novel by Justin Go.  I finished reading it last night, and I didn't love the ending then, and I don't love it now.  It made the whole novel feel kind of pointless to me, though I won't say more in case any of you are planning on reading it.  As for the rest of the novel, it had its highs and lows.  The vivid descriptions of life in the trenches in WWI were a bit more than I had bargained for, but what bothered me the most was the rather strange choice to narrate the story--both the parts happening in the present and in the past--using the present tense.  I found this rather disconcerting, and occasionally the narrative would slip into the past tense for reasons that were unclear to me, which in turn was mildly distracting.  I didn't love the characters, nor did I even really dislike them: they were just sort of there, not making me care about them, so I didn't feel particularly invested in the outcome of the story.  It was really the plot that kept the story going--it's a fairly fast-paced adventure, at least in the thread of the plot that happens in the present day, taking the main character all over Europe on a frantic search for information that would enable him to claim a large inheritance, if he can find the information in time.  I guess on the whole, I would say, read it if you want a story that's mostly predicated on the plot, rather than the likability of the characters, but it wasn't one of my favorites.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Three: The Grift

I encountered The Grift by Debra Ginsberg when I was browsing at the local library, and the title caught my eye.  I wondered what exactly a grift is--and, handily, there is a little epigram at the very beginning defining it as a swindle, basically, and the theme of honesty is certainly central to the book.  The story follows a woman, Marina, who makes a living as a psychic, but she does not believe in psychic powers--until one day she suddenly starts being able to see into other people's lives--past, present, and future.  Her whole world is rocked, of course, and she's also suspected of a murder, there's quite a lot going on in this novel.  I wasn't blown away by The Grift, but it held my interest pretty well, and it was an engaging read in general.

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Two: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

With this post, I will finally be caught up with my backlog of blog posts and my next post will not happen until I've finished the book I'm working on now!  But I'm getting ahead of myself--for now, I want to write about Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer.  I found this book while wandering at random through the local library, trying to find something that caught my interest.  I was intrigued by the title, which I found rather mysterious, and even though the subject-matter seemed a bit darker than I wanted, I was snared by the narrative voice of one of the main characters (the narration switches between them) and decided I'd give this book a go.  On the whole, I'm glad I read it, even though it was a bit dark.  Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots tells the story of a teenage girl and an older woman who meet at just the right time.  The girl, Lorca (like the poet) is trying to avoid being sent to boarding school by her distant mother after she's kicked out of public school for cutting herself.  The woman, Victoria, is trying to deal with the death of her husband, who had been the center of her life for years.  Victoria and Lorca are brought together by cooking, and it's the story of their separate struggles and their newfound relationship.  It's not as corny as I'm afraid I'm making it sound, but neither is it unduly edgy.  I was absorbed into this story and couldn't let go until I got to the end!

Chapter One Hundred Forty-One: The Boston Girl

So I really lucked out that I was able to get my hands on Anita Diamant's most recent novel from the library so quickly, since it's been popular enough that all of the copies are generally on hold.  And then I was stuck with a terrible summer cold, so I had nothing better to do than spend an afternoon reading The Boston Girl.  It was an absolutely delightful afternoon!  (Other than the cold...)   The Boston Girl is the story of one woman's life in Boston and Rockport from 1915 until the mid 1930s, as the main character (Addie) narrates it to her granddaughter.  Addie makes for an excellent narrator: she's thoughtful but not too serious or somber, even when recalling the darker moments of her life, and her narration feels really fresh, like she's reliving her life as she tells it.  The story is her attempt to answer her grown granddaughter's question of how she became the woman she was, and the fictitious Addie--the only American-born daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants--certainly has an interesting life to recount, starting from the time she was 15 and first started to experience some independence from her parents through settlement house programs, particularly a book group and a summer retreat in Rockport.  If you like historical fiction or just a really good story, I'd highly recommend The Boston Girl.  I can see why it's been earning so much praise!

Chapter One Hundred Forty: The World's Strongest Librarian

So the full title of this book by Salt Lake City librarian Josh Hanagarne is The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family.  As the full title suggests, this is a memoir written by a librarian with Tourette's Syndrome.  He was raised Mormon in rural Utah and Nevada and has spent a lot of his life trying to figure out how to deal with his Tourette's--ultimately, he finds extreme strength training to be the most helpful in managing his condition, hence the title The World's Strongest Librarian.  This is a fascinating life story, well-written and thoughtful, and I really enjoyed reading it.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Nine: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman (Trilogy)

So I was in the mood for some lighter fare when I encountered this trilogy by Pamela Aidan while working at the library, and I simply couldn't resist!  I haven't read much in the way of Pride and Prejudice spinoffs or fan fiction or related works or whatever you want to call them, but this trilogy, which retells the events of Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy's perspective, exceeded my expectations.  Of the three novels--An Assembly Such As This, Duty and Desire, and These Three Remain--I only felt the middle installment lagged a little, as it covers the time in Pride and Prejudice during which Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy don't interact at all.  Naturally this is where Aidan's story has to go farthest from the original, and while the plot has a bit more period political intrigue than I'd like, she does an excellent job of fleshing out Darcy's character and personality.  As a casual fan of Pride and Prejudice (I'm certainly not an Austen junkie, not having read any of her other works), I really enjoyed reading this trilogy and found it a lot of fun and an excellent casual summer read.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Eight: Edward Eager's Tales of Magic (Half Magic, etc.)

As far as I know, there is no official title that includes all seven children's books that Edward Eager wrote, but unofficially they are sometimes known as the Tales of Magic, which is how I came up with the title for this post.  Eager's seven books, in the order in which they were written, are: Half Magic, Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, The Well-Wishers, and Seven-Day Magic.  I had read all of the before except for Seven-Day Magic, which somehow I had missed, but I am glad to have read it now (especially because it features a library book).  These books are all chapter books intended for kids, and they are light fantasy at some of its best.  Eager makes very clear that E. Nesbit is his inspiration, and his books are in that vein.  They all take place in the real world (and in America, for that matter, which is refreshing as so much fantasy is set in Britain) and follow real(istic) children who find magical adventures in everyday life, usually by finding a magical object.  Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers are perhaps the least fantastical or the most realistic, but I always feel that they have a magic of their own when I'm reading them, and I certainly enjoy them as much as I do the rest of the series.
Another of the things I like about this series is Eager's use of intertextuality, sometimes referencing other books--often those by E. Nesbit, but not always--and sometimes referencing other books in the Tales of Magic group.  I won't go into the details of the plot or characters for all seven of the books--most of the groups of characters appear in two books, except the characters in Seven-Day Magic don't appear in any other Eager book, because the overall feel of the books is really what connects them.  There is a certain nostalgia, found in a certain kind of children's book, to them, which I enjoy every once in a while, and while the characters face their fair share of magical and non-magical problems, in general these books make the world feel simple and safe and surprising.  They're traditional, comfortable sort of books and while in some ways they are very much of their time (mid-1950s to early 1960s), in other ways they still feel relevant and worth reading.  They remind me in a lot of ways of The Green Knowe Chronicles by L.M. Boston, which I re-read last August, and if you enjoy those you'll probably enjoy these (or vice versa).  If you know a kid who likes light fantasy or if you want some easy, quick, light reads for yourself, consider Edward Eager's books.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Seven: The Thirteenth Tale

After the rather gloomy The Magicians, I didn't know what to read next and solicited suggestions from my library co-workers.  I said I wanted something happy!  (Yes, I said it with an underline.)  Anyway, one of them came up with Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, a novel I probably wouldn't have come upon otherwise (unless I was checking it in or out or reshelving it--I've found a few good books that way).  But I digress!  The Thirteenth Tale follows the stories of two women: a famous and very popular (fictitious) British author near the end of her life and the middle-aged woman she hires to write what will be the only true biography of the reclusive and mysterious author.  Much of the novel takes place at the remote country home of the author, Vida Winter, as she slowly unveils the true story of her childhood and adolescence to her would-be biographer, Margaret.  As Vida's tale unfolds, it intersects in interesting ways with Margaret's life story, shedding light on Margaret's past as well as Vida's.  An emotionally-focused, intriguing novel, it's not perhaps happy, but despite the pain in the story, there is also happiness, and (unlike The Magicians), it left me with a good feeling at the end, a quality I appreciate from a story.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Six: The Magicians

I've heard so much about The Magicians by Lev Grossman for so long that I finally bit the bullet and checked it out from the library.  In fact, since I'd had it recommended to me by two people during the previous year and since the cover was so intriguing, I decided to check out the whole trilogy so I could just tear through them with no interruptions.  Alas, I couldn't bring myself to bother with the second or third books, although I did finish The Magicians (the first in the series).  The problem was partly that I hated most (maybe all) of the characters, who never seemed to change or learn anything or even to really be happy, and also the narrator (not one of the characters, as far as I could tell) seemed totally devoid of emotion or caring, which I found rather off-putting (and slightly psychopathic--I'm not sure whether that was intentional).  The plot was interesting and original enough, but I just couldn't enjoy or get into a story with so little emotional attachment.  The Magicians felt to me like an attempt to create an edgy, adult hybrid of The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, but I love those books because they are neither edgy nor adult--that's not what I want from this kind of story (or for most kinds of stories, for that matter, but that's just my preference), so The Magicians left me feeling cold.

Chapter One-Hundred Thirty Five: The Library of Unrequited Love

The Library of Unrequited Love, by Sophie D'Ivry, is a very long monolog translated from the French.  This strangle little book came into my possession thanks to my grandmother, and as someone studying to be a librarian, it was particularly resonant, as the monolog is spoken by a somewhat disgruntled French librarian.  She works in the geography section (located in the basement!) of a small library in a smallish French town, and one morning she finds someone who was accidentally locked into her part of the library overnight, which provokes the monolog that is The Library of Unrequited Love.  Our heroine explains her love-hate relationship with the library's classification system (UDC, or Universal Decimal Classification, a slight modification of the Dewey Decimal System), her unrequited and probably unknown crush on a young man who frequents the library, her personal quirks and likes and dislikes and past, and her reverence for the French Revolution, among other things.  This is kind of an insane little book, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, especially since it's fairly different from what I normally read.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Four: The Montmaray Chronicles

The Montmaray Chronicles is a young adult, historical fiction trilogy by Australian author Michelle Cooper.  (The individual titles are A Brief History of Montmaray, The FitzOsbornes in Exile, and The FitzOsbornes at War.)  The cover design of the books caught my eye on the library shelves, and I'd been wanting to read this series for a while, and when I finally got around to it, I was more than rewarded for my wait.  These are certainly the best young adult books I've read in a while, and they might very well be the best books of any sort that I've read this summer.  Why do I like them so much?  As is happily becoming more common, The Montmaray Chronicles feature a female protagonist who is, like so many of us, generally strong but with a few weaknesses that she is aware of and works on over the course of the books.  I also really liked that our female protagonist is also the first-person narrator of the stories, which are told as her diary entries, which encompass the years between 1936 and 1948.  I enjoyed the settings (a fictional tiny island kingdom off the coast of northern Spain and also WWII-era England), which felt very real to me, and the plot was more than enough to hold my interest and keep me guessing as to what would happen next, on the whole.  In short, I found this trilogy to be totally and completely absorbing--I could hardly put them down!  If you are at all fond of historical fiction of WWII in Europe or of excellent young adult fiction, then I would heartily suggest Michelle Cooper's Montmaray Chronicles.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Three: Cat out of Hell

Cat out of Hell is a novel by Lynne Truss of grammar manifesto Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame, and I have to say that I think I preferred Eats, Shoots & Leaves (though I am something of a grammar nut, so maybe it's not that surprising).  Anyway, when I discovered Truss had recently published a novel about talking cats (liking cats about as much as I like grammar, which is rather a lot), I decided I had to read it.  While Cat out of Hell has its truly hilarious moments, mostly it's darker than I expected it to be from reading the dust jacket--at times it is quite dark, in fact, rather more so than I would like.  Darkness aside, this is also one of the stranger books I've read, and while I'm fairly open to the strange, Cat out of Hell was nearing the limits of my strangeness tolerance.  Still, the characters and plot held my interest, and I was certainly kept guessing until the end of the book, so on the whole, I guess I would recommend Cat out of Hell with the reservation that you need to be open to reading quite an odd little book about evil talking cats.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Two: Megan's Island

Okay, so I haven't quite managed to post once daily--but I'm posting today, at least!  Anyway, Megan's Island, by Willo Davis Roberts, is a chapter book for upper elementary school kids, and sometimes it's described as a mystery.  It doesn't feel like an adult mystery novel, exactly, but there is certainly a mystery at the heart of the plot, which is also rather suspenseful.  I read Megan's Island at the behest of one of my coworkers, who remembers it as a childhood favorite of hers.  (I had already convinced her to read A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorites as a kid, and still as an adult, so I felt it only right to reciprocate.  Also, I like reading books that people suggest to me, because they're usually not things I would have read otherwise.  But I digress!)  If you're looking for a decent kid's book or a very light mystery, Megan's Island is probably as good a choice as any, and the fact that it was written (and set in) a time before cell phones and helicopter parents makes it interesting if for no other reason than as a reminder that, yes, there was a time when people lived perfectly happily without cell phones.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty-One: As Texas Goes

This fairly recent (2012) nonfiction book by Gail Collins is as smart and entertaining as her other nonfiction works that I've read (but not posted about here, it was too long ago) and as her New York Times columns always are.  It provides an interesting look at how politics in Texas have been influencing national politics.  Normally I would be totally bored or depressed by this topic (or both), but Collins makes it both interesting and funny (though with a rather dark undertone).  If you want interesting political nonfiction, read it before it becomes too outdated to be pertinent.

Chapter One Hundred Thirty: Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Once again, I've fallen grossly behind on updating my blog--I read Pioneer Girl back in June!  To make it up, I am committing myself to posting at least once daily until I am caught up.  In all fairness, though, July was crazy as I was taking two summer courses at once.  But, still...

Anyway, Pioneer Girl.  I loved it!  I can't suggest it to anyone who is not deeply interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House books.  But if, like me, you enjoy the Little House books (despite some of their views that are very much of their time and distasteful in ours) and want to know more about the woman (women?) who wrote them and about the actual childhood of the actual Laura (rather than the fictional one) then this is guaranteed to be a fascinating read.  Photographs of the Ingalls family and the many places where they lived abound and add to the interest of this work.  It's fascinating to read this early draft of what became the Little House stories and to get an idea of how they evolved.  It's also fun to learn all sorts of other facts about the life and times of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  So as I said, if you're a Little House or Laura Ingalls Wilder junkie, this book is not to be missed!

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Nine: The Hundred Year House

I have to admit, I couldn't finish this novel, which is Rebecca Makkai's second.  (I read her first, The Borrower, a little more than a year ago.)  The idea is cool--following the inhabitants of a large, mid-western house over the first hundred years of its existence.  The decision to invoke a sort of reverse chronology--the first part of the book happens during the end of the first hundred years, but within that section, the events are in chronological order; the second part of the book starts fifty years earlier but its events are also told moving forward in time, etc.--was rather strange, but it could have been really interesting if I didn't hate all of the characters so much.  But here's the thing: I did hate all of the characters, quite a lot.  They were sort of okay at first, and then instead of growing on me, I just came to loathe them, and I couldn't even respect any of them.  I did persevere through the end of part one (whose resolution I found unsatisfying), and I really felt the book could have ended there, but instead there were still two more parts.  I started in on the second, but once it became clear that these characters would be at least as disagreeable as the ones in the first part, I gave it up.  The plot and the setting had plenty of potential, it's just that I like to read books with more sympathetic characters.  It was well-written and had an interesting premise, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Eight: Mosquitoland

Mosquitoland is David Arnold's first novel--it was just published this spring--and it is also a YA novel.  Kind of in spite of its almost aggressive quirkiness--an increasingly common YA novel trait in the era of John Green's outrageous popularity--I found Mosquitoland to be a compelling read, and I found the end to be particularly satisfying in that, as in real life, not everything is perfect, nor is everything as I had expected it to be as I was reading, but there was still a good measure hope for the characters.  (In these ways, and in a few others,* in fact, Mosquitoland reminds me of John Green's novels, and I think fans of John Green would likely enjoy Mosquitoland.)  But I digress...

Mosquitoland, set in modern America, follows the journey of 16-year-old Mim, who has been moved from Ohio to Mississippi by her father and new step-mother, and who is determined to make it back to Ohio when she realizes that something is very wrong with her mother.  Along the way, Mim meets a whole host of whacky characters, some of whom become fast friends, and all of whom are a little unbelievable (but no less fun for that).  Mim tells her own story from the first-person--some of it is in the form of letters she's writing--and her voice is so original that it really drew me in, even if I sometimes found myself slightly annoyed by Mim.  And I wanted to know how her crazy adventure would turn out--there's plenty of suspense in this story, and I was kept guessing until the end (although once I reached the end, I felt I should have seen it coming).  Anyway, if you're into YA fiction generally, or if you like John Green's writing and want something similar, or you want a story about someone traveling on a Greyhound bus, definitely give Mosquitoland a try.

*Other similarities with John Green's novels include...
...the importance of traveling around the U.S. unfettered by adults (Paper Towns, An Abundance of Katherines).
...a spunky, highly individual, and extremely idiosyncratic protagonist, who is also a basically normal American teenage girl (The Fault in Our Stars, but also major "supporting" characters (i.e. the girl characters whose lives utterly shape the lives of the boy protagonists) in Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns).
...the use of first-person narration from a protagonist with a really distinctive voice (Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars--also Paper Towns, sort of, though its narrator is not so quirky).

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Fiercombe Manor

Fiercombe Manor is British author Kate Riordan's second novel, and based on this one I will certainly consider reading her first novel (Birdcage Walk), though probably not immediately as they seem sort of similar, and I like a bit of variety in my reading, generally.  But back to Fiercombe Manor: this book's characters were more nuanced than I'd expected them to be based on the cover and the description on the dust jacket, and likewise its setting was more atmospheric than I'd expected.  These elements certainly added to this book's intrigue, at least for me; I found it quite compelling to read.  I enjoyed how the narration of the story switched between the protagonist, Alice, and Elizabeth, a mysterious figure from the past, often serving to increase my suspense while providing another dimension to Alice's discoveries.  There are light elements of romance, as well as stronger elements of mystery and suspense, in this well-written historical fiction novel; if you like historical fiction or are simply looking for a compelling read, I'd certainly recommend Fiercombe Manor.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Six: The Deed of Paksenarrion

The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon is actually a trilogy, but the stories are so closely linked (and were published in one volume, in this case) that I'll speak of them as one unit.  This story is in the high fantasy tradition, a tradition with which I'm not very familiar.  It's not one of my favorite genres, though I found this book to me mostly interesting enough to keep me reading its more than one thousand pages.  (This is not an enterprise for the faint of heart!)  It is a story of wars, of battles, of soldiers and knights and armies, and parts of it I found almost too gruesome to bear, though as readers of this blog might know, I have fairly little taste for that sort of thing.  Still, I found the overall plot and, more important, the character of the story's heroine compelling enough to keep me reading this book.  I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't want to make a big time commitment to reading a long tale of high fantasy, but if that's what you want, then, with my limited knowledge of what else is on the high fantasy market, I would guess that this is as good as anything.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five: Smart Girls Like Me

Smart Girls Like Me, by Diane Vadino, is a novel about a 24-year-old woman living in New York City in 1999, and it was really a great follow-up to The Defining Decade.  The protagonist is half-convinced the world will end with the year 2000, way more upset than she wants to admit that her best friend is going to be married in a few months, and doesn't really know what she wants and how to get it.  Her dating life is miserable--until a cute co-worker at the job she hates but is too wimpy to quit comes back from China and sweeps her off her feet.  (This was the least realistic part of the book, in my opinion.)  As her first serious relationship progresses, the millennium and her best friend's wedding approach, and her job continues to suck, our intrepid protagonist finally starts to figure some things out about who she wants to be, and while this book is sort of depressing, its end is cautiously hopeful.  It's a quick beach type read, good for a warm summer's day.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Four: The Defining Decade

The full title of Dr. Meg Jay's book does a great job of summarizing its contents: The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now.  The author is a clinical psychiatrist who works primarily with clients in their twenties and early thirties, and from this work she claims (credibly, it seems to me) to have noticed a lot about what makes twenty-somethings successful (or not) in their twenties and also for the rest of their lives.  She paints the decade of one's 20s as being formative for the rest of one's life in terms of pretty much everything--work, career, and family are her areas of focus.  While this sort of turned up the pressure on me while I was reading--like, I have to get everything together before I run out of time--she also offers practical and achievable suggestions for how to get everything together, and these made me feel better.  (Figure out what you want.  If you don't know, try different things that will help you figure it out.  Don't take jobs with no possibility of advancement if you want to advance in your field.  Once you know what you want, take steps to make it happen, like going to school, or getting an entry-level job in the field of your choice, or moving to another city.)  I don't know how much value there would be to reading this book if you're not in your 20s--it might still be interesting--but if you're in your 20s now, I'd heartily recommend you read it.  (In fact, it was recommended to me by a friend, also in her 20s, and I'm very glad she suggested it!)

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three: Sam Ellenport & Ron Gordon: Reflections of Two Craftsmen

This funny little book was recommended to me, so I read it--I doubt I ever would have found it on my own.  It consists of two essays: the one by Ellenport is about binding books by hand and the one by Gordon is about type-setting and book design, since those are the crafts they practice.  I found it a lot more interesting than I though I would, and while reading it they even had me convinced that I wanted to start practicing these crafts, despite the fact that current technologies are quickly rendering them largely obsolete.  (I came to my senses when I finished reading the book.)  Ron Gordon designed this book, as he still works as a book designer, and I do have to say that I found it very odd and actually quite distracting that he chose to justify the text to left only, rather than having it justified on both sides.  Nonetheless, if you love books not just as stories but as objects, this is an interesting first-hand look at how books have traditionally been created.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two: The Historian

I've read Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian once before, about eight years ago, so I didn't remember many of the details and it was almost like reading the book for the first time.  I do remember that I found this academic vampire-hunting story really terrifying when I read it as a teenager, and while it is still pretty chilling, I was not nearly so terrified this time around.  This is a long novel, but I was so absorbed with it that I found it difficult to put down and ended up reading it fairly quickly.  One website described it as an atmospheric novel; I'm not sure that's quite the word I'd pick.  While there are frequent descriptions academic research related to Dracula (as fifteenth-century ruler of Wallachia, not as vampire) and of the many beautiful settings--this book takes place all over 20th-century Europe, from Cambridge to Istanbul, Amsterdam to Venice, and of course in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania--there is also plenty of action.  This is, after all, a book about hunting down Dracula and his vampire minions, and it certainly includes the necessary bites to the neck and stabbings through the heart.  There is a lot of mystery to counterbalance the longer descriptive passages, and as I said, I found it really hard to put this book down.  It's not for the faint of heart, but if you're looking for an engrossing read with fascinating characters, lush settings, and a good helping of action and mystery, this is a great choice.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One: The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts

So the full title of this (non-fiction) book is The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts: The Library and the Young Adult.  First published in 1969, it is written by Margaret A. Edwards, one of the earliest well-known pioneers of library services to teenagers and a long-time young adult services librarian in Baltimore's pubic library system.  While many of her attitudes about teenagers are dated--especially regarding what teenage boys like to read as compared to teenage girls--I can really respect most of her ideas, ideas that were largely ahead of her time, namely, her respect for teenagers as people, her belief in the importance of reading for fun (and in the importance of having YA literature available for teens to read), her outreach efforts in schools and in communities, and her insistence that teens deserve library services and materials dedicated to them.  This was not the most thrilling book to read, but as someone who's really interested in public library services to teens, it did provide an interesting historical background to teen services in public libraries.  But if you're not interested in that, I wouldn't suggest you read this book.

Chapter One Hundred Twenty: I Work at a Public Library

This is a collection of extremely short vignettes (all are less than a page long) that recount hilarious real-life interactions between librarians and the patrons they serve.  Its arrangement into themed chapters, with each chapter assigned the appropriate Dewey number, is cute and fits the mood of the book perfectly.  If you're looking for something to make you chuckle aloud, I Work at a Public Library is a strong contender.

Chapter One Hundred Nineteen: The Revelation of Louisa May

This is a newer book by Michaela MacColl (Always Emily), which I also got for free at school, and in many ways it is quite similar to Always Emily.  It is another blend of YA/historical fiction/mystery/literary fiction, with a fictionalized, teenaged Louisa May Alcott as its protagonist.  As with Always Emily, I found the end mostly satisfying, although again I found the treatment of the romantic subplot a bit simplistic; once more, if you enjoy any of its constituent genres, you will probably enjoy this novel, though I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it back to back with Almost Emily, as I did, since they're quite similar.  I should also note that Michaela MacColl also has other YA novels that look similar to the two I've read, although I haven't read any of her other books yet.  I probably will read them at some point in the not too distant future, though.

Chapter One Hundred Eighteen: Always Emily

I got this book by Michaela MacColl for free at school (the perks of being a grad student), and I ended up enjoying it more than I expected to.  This is an interesting mix of genres, blending mystery with historic fiction and literary fiction with many typical YA elements: teenaged Charlotte and Emily Bronte are the main characters in this novel, and they must attempt to figure out some (totally fictional) mysteries that are, in fact, based on their more famous books (somewhat loosely, I think, never having read them--whoops).  The quotes from the Bronte sisters' books that begin each chapter are a nice touch.  The ending is mostly satisfying, although I think MacColl simplifies the romantic element a bit too much, and overall I enjoyed this quick read.  If you like any of the genres this book includes, you'll probably enjoy reading it.

Chapter One Hundred Seventeen: Fortunately, the Milk

This is one of Neil Gaiman's most recent books for kids, and it is a delightful romp of a story.  Skottie Young's delightful illustrations are the perfect completion to this hilarious tale of what happened when a dad went to the corner store to get some milk.  For an adult reader, it's a very fast, light read--it's pure silliness, in the best possible way.  If you need to while away three quarters of an hour, reading Fortunately, the Milk is a great way to spend it.

Chapter One Hundred Sixteen: In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians

Well, I don't usually enjoy short stories as much as I enjoy novels, and that held true in this case as well.  While I did enjoy these stories--and some of them I really liked quite a lot--I just don't feel as motivated to keep reading one short story after another compared to a novel, where I feel compelled to keep reading chapter after chapter to see what's going to happen to the main character.  Short stories lack that buy-in.  Nonetheless, this library-themed and librarian-themed collection was of particular interest to me, as a student in library school, and I enjoyed reading it, even though it took me a long time to work my way through this fairly short collection.

Chapter One Hundred Fifteen: Blackout and All Clear

Okay, so it has only been a year since I read Blackout and All Clear for the first time, but they are so compelling that, when searching for books that would totally and completely absorb me in their universe, I could think of nothing better-suited to the task of complete distraction than this story--told over two books--by Connie Willis.  These books make the most sense if you've already read Willis's Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which set some of the stage for time travel as Willis writes about it in those novels and in these, but I think you could enjoy Blackout and All Clear without having read the other time travel stories.  It's hard for me to put my finger on what exactly it is about these stories that makes them so irresistible to me.  The characters are likable, yes, and the plot is original; the settings are interesting and there is plenty of action... but I think this is one of those stories that is greater than the sum of its parts.  I fully admit that it may not be as magical a story for everyone as it is for me, but if you like time travel stories I'd say you should at least give it a try.

Chapter One Hundred Fourteen: Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home is Carol Rifka Brunt's first novel, and I hope it won't be her last.  I felt dubious about this book until I started reading it, because almost from the first page it drew me in and made me care about the characters--the protagonist, yes, but also her apparently obnoxious older sister and the mysterious man--her dead uncle's lover--who reaches out to protagonist June after her uncle's death.  I thought this book would be corny or predictable, I guess, but it is neither of those things.  Instead, it is well-written with original and complex main characters whose multi-faceted relationships drive the plot.  This story kept me guessing at how it would all, ultimately turn out--and while not all of the questions raised are answered, the most important ones are, making for a satisfying read.  I was very pleasantly surprised by this novel, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good novel.

Chapter One Hundred Thirteen: Feed

So Feed by M.T. Anderson is a book I've been meaning to read for a while for several reasons.  I had been vaguely meaning to read it because in the school library where I worked last year, there were several copies, so it seems like a big YA title and I wanted to know what it was all about.  Then, this year, a teenager I know recommended I read it.  (This was months ago!)  And I've honestly been meaning to read it since, but I just kept being busy.  But finally the time was ripe for me to read Feed, which is a book that really has nothing to do with food--I don't know about you, but to me the title conjures images of huge piles of animal-grade dried corn off the cob sliding around industrial farms.  This is totally misleading.  Basically, the feed in this book refers to a sort of computer implanted directly into the brain, so it's a feed in the sense of a web feed, like an RSS or like the push notifications on smartphones.
Feed  is written in this really convincing slangy prose--I can totally imagine teenagers of the future (and of today) talking how Anderson has written Feed.  In this way, but in no other, it reminds me of an updated Catcher in the Rye (a book of which I am not at all fond, I will note).  And this grim future is fairly believable--that's what makes it, at heart, so depressing, at least to me.  Feed provides a creepy and pretty bleak view of a potential future of the U.S., providing what almost amounts to a reducto ad absurdium of fears about the increasing role of computers in everyday life.   It is done really well--it never feels like a lecture or like there's too much exposition or description at the expense of plot.  Anderson just slips in all of these little details that you have to pay attention to about the state of affairs in this bleak future U.S. and world, so the enormity of the situation only ever creeps up on you from the side, making it much more powerful than if Anderson described it directly. But it's not depressing in a way that makes me regret having read the book--the aforementioned recommender was right to suggest it to me, and I similarly urge anyone to read it, whether you're usually into YA sci-fi or not.  Give it a chance even (or especially) if it's not your usual scene, because it provides a lot of food for thought, as it were.

Chapter One Hundred Twelve: Boy: Tales of Childhood AND Going Solo

Boy: Tales of Childhood and Going Solo are Roald Dahl's autobiographies, intended for children--the audience he is perhaps best-known for writing for, although he also wrote works intended for adults.  Anyway, I don't know why I'd never read these autobiographies before, because I love everything by Roald Dahl that I've read so far (which is not all of his work, not by any means, but I'll get around to it all eventually).  So Roald Dahl actually had this really fascinating life!  I guess that's not surprising--he had to get all those fantastic story ideas from somewhere, so it makes sense that he might have done a lot of interesting things to get those ideas.  Boy focuses on his childhood, up to the age of 18; mostly it relates his days in various boarding schools, which sound fairly miserable (especially the beatings), but also fun times like summer family trips to Norway, and some hairy medical experiences (having his nose almost ripped off his face in a car crash; having his adenoids out without general anesthetic).  Going Solo focuses on his life after he left boarding school: he decided he wanted to see the world, and the best way to do that was to go and work for a large company with many foreign branches.  So he ended up getting a job with Shell Oil that sent him to eastern Africa, to what is now Tanzania.  And then while he was there, World War Two broke out, so he joined the RAF as a pilot and had all sorts of adventures and a horrific injury as well, which he obviously survived or he wouldn't have been able to go on to become a famous writer.  Going Solo ends when he finally returns back to his mother's home from the war, and it is quite possibly one of the most moving ends to a book I've yet read.  Mostly Boy and Going Solo take a humorous or at least light tone, even when the content is a bit heavy--Dahl is a master of that sort of thing, after all--but the end was quite moving, which I wasn't expecting but which I really appreciated.  For anyone who wants to learn about Roald Dahl as a person, or about one man's experience growing up in Wales in the 1920s and 1930s, or about his experience as a fighter pilot in the RAF during WWII in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, or for anyone who just wants an interesting story about an interesting life, I'd highly recommend Boy and Going Solo.

Chapter One Hundred Eleven: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is fantasy author Neil Gaiman's most recent novel (or one of them--I had trouble in my brief search finding a chronological and up-to-date list of his publications).  I've been meaning to read it since it was published, and I finally had the time for it, and now I'm very glad I did.  It is not as heavy as, say American Gods felt to me at times, despite the fact that its plot is largely driven by a creepy and mysterious event buried deep in the narrator's past.  Gaiman does a great job in The Ocean at the End of the Lane at bringing in enough elements of fantasy to satisfy at least my appetite for the fantastical without causing any confusion about what he's describing.  (Again, this is unlike American Gods or Anansi Boys, which I enjoyed but in which I felt I was missing something due to my very shallow knowledge of mythology and folk tale characters.)  Still, if you don't like fantasy this probably isn't the book for you, grounded as it is in realistic-feeling descriptions of a boy's life in 1960s rural England.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a fairly fast-paced novel whose action is fairly quick to start, and it had no problem gaining and holding my interest, so if you want a fun little fantasy read, I'd heartily suggest it.

Chapter One Hundred Ten: The Lake

The Lake is a fairly short novel by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto.  I've read some of her work before, for one of my undergrad classes, and I enjoyed it then, so when I came across some of her novels in the library, I thought I'd check one out.  While the plot and characters are interesting, I think my favorite aspect of the book is actually Yoshimoto's writing style, or at least how her writing has been translated into English.  (Not speaking Japanese, I can't compare it to the original, of course.)  Her prose is not simple, but very straightforward and direct, clean and purposeful.  I'm not sure I'm describing it well, but I really enjoy the way she just says things without any fuss.  Of course, the main characters in The Lake, a new couple in their twenties, are interesting themselves, with their own quirks and, in the case of one of them, a mysterious and traumatic past.  The slow unveiling of that past as their relationship progresses is the main plot element to this story, and when the mystery is finally revealed, it is done right--it isn't overblown or corny, but believable and matter-of-fact.  I found this novel to be a very interesting read, and if you're looking for contemporary, realistic fiction, this would be an excellent choice.

Chapter One Hundred Nine: Bossypants

I've been wanting to read Tina Fey's autobiography for a while now, because it looks hilarious.  I am happy to say that in this case, my expectations were exceeded: Bossypants had me totally engaged and even chuckling aloud at times.  And I should say that, which I have no problems with Tina Fey, I wouldn't say I'm a fan of her work (not that I don't like it--I just haven't bothered to watch it enough to form an opinion).  Even so, with hardly any knowledge of Fey at all, I still thoroughly enjoyed Bossypants and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh and an interesting account of how someone normal ended up being famous.

Chapter One Hundred Eight: La mécanique du coeur

I read La mécanique du coeur by Mathias Malzieu in its original French, and I'm not sure if there's an English translation widely available, so I won't make this a long post.  I was not a huge fan of this novel, at any rate.  While its premise is very interesting--a little orphan boy whose adoptive mother fits his defective heart with a clockwork prosthetic--the potentially cool steampunk atmosphere just falls back on typical tropes with a few distracting anachronisms.  (For example: the book is set in the late 1800s.  Why is the protagonist talking about airplanes?)  The protagonist himself, who narrates the story, veers between sympathetic and irritating as he finds himself bullied at school and obsesses about his love for a girl he saw one single time, singing on a sidewalk.  Still, despite the tropes and the narrator, I felt okay about the story right up until its end, which I did not like at all.  I won't reveal the ending in case any of my readers are planning on reading this story, but I found it totally unsatisfactory.  Still, it was great to read a book in French again; I haven't done that in a while, and it's good practice.

Chapter One Hundred Seven: The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novella that comes to us from South Korean author Sun-Mi Hwang.  This little book doesn't take long to read--I read it in one sitting--but it is definitely a case of a good thing coming in a small package.  The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly has a sort of traditional, fable, or fairy-tale feel to it, possibly because its protagonist is a hen who talks.  All of the animals in this story can talk, in fact, but not to humans, just to each other.  Anyway, Sprout is a plucky hen who escapes the egg-laying coop where she's spent most of her unhappy life to live as a free hen so she can accomplish her one great dream: to hatch one of her eggs and raise a child.  She faces both dangers and joys outside the coop--not everything about her new life is as great as she hoped it would be.  This story could end up feeling a bit too heavy-handed in its possible allegories, but Sprout is such an endearing and engaging character that the story feels natural and is able to focus on her at least as much as the messages being conveyed about the importance of love and family.  I found it to be a very moving piece of writing.  If you're looking for something quick to read but long to linger in your thoughts, I'd highly suggest The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.

Chapter One Hundred Six: Holidays on Ice

I didn't enjoy Holidays on Ice as much as I thought I would.  This little book is comprised of maybe two non-fiction essays of the type its author, David Sedaris, is famous for, and several short fictional pieces that he's written about bitter people exploiting or suffering through the holiday season.  The two pieces that seemed to be non-fiction were by far my favorites in the collection; I enjoyed them immensely.  The fictional stories, however, were a bit too vicious for my taste.  Their characters were mostly overblown stereotypes who were meant to be humorous but were just sort of tired, and the plots were not that surprising or intriguing.  The essays about Sedaris's own life are hilarious and interesting because you can never guess what's going to happen, while his fiction is much more predictable and therefore less interesting.  If you want to read something by Sedaris, I'd recommend some of his other collections of essays (When You Are Engulfed in Flame, Let's Discuss Diabetes with Owls, or Naked).

Chapter One Hundred Five: Passage

Wow!  As per usual, I've let too much time elapse between my previous post and the present time.  Anyway, I re-read Passage by Connie Willis (one of my all-time favorite authors) a few weeks ago now, and I was really into it.  The main characters caught me right from the beginning, even though there isn't much action at the book's start.  I usually find her protagonists immediately likable, which is certainly the case in Passage, and because I like them I want to know what happens to them. If there isn't much suspense at the book's beginning, however, it quickly increases once one of the main characters agrees to participate in the experiment she is helping to administer.  Things get very strange and a bit terrifying pretty quickly after that!  Without giving away any plot points, let me just say that about halfway through this pretty long book, I always find myself sobbing, and that sobbing continues intermittently while I'm reading the second half of this novel.  I find it to be a pretty powerful book.  Even though it makes me sob, I really enjoy reading it every time I come back to it.