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.