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!