Okay, a bunch of these are from that time period where I couldn't get Blogger to work on my computer. Here we go!
"Psycho USA" by Harold Schechter was a fun collection of little remembered killers. Why is it that some crime stick in our collective consciousness and yet others, equally horrific, are forgotten? Interesting question that I don't know the answer to. Schechter does his best to bring them back to mind. Some truly terrible things in this one.
"As I Remember" by Lillian Gilbreth was a sweet memoir about raising 11 children. She was a kind, humble lady who gave all the credit for her professional success in life to her late husband. I wish this world had more Gilbreths and less reality show trash.
"Fables Vol. 17" by Bill Willingham is his latest in the continuing saga of our storybook friends. Now that North Wind is dead, having taken out the Dark Man, it looks like one of Snow White and Bigby's cubs will have to take his place. A newly slim Ms. Pratt is planning her revenge on the fables as they prepare to move back to Manhattan. I was kind of ambivalent about this one: I think he's taken the series as far as he can and it's sort of time to move on.
"Cascade" by Maryanne O'Hara was a great book that takes places during the Great Depression. Dez married Asa because her father was dying and they were losing their home. She was desperate, and had no where to go and no one to turn to. A few months after the wedding, her father is dead and Dez is stuck married to a man who, while nice enough, wants a family and she doesn't. Dez is an artist, and dreams of going to New York. She feels trapped in Cascade, with only her fellow artist friend Jacob to ease the boredom. Meanwhile, it looks like their town will be destroyed in order to build a reservoir for Boston. Dez takes advantage of the situation and creates a series of postcards celebrating small town life that are picked up by a national magazine. Seizing her chance, Dez moves to New York to work for the magazine full time, after making sure her father's beloved playhouse will be moved to another location before the town of Cascade is flooded. There was a neat twist at the end that I didn't see coming.
"Cold Dish" by Craig Johnson is his first Walt Longmire book. I've been watching the show, mainly because the actor who plays Walt looks like Brett Favre :) The show is actually pretty good, but the book was awful. Johnson writes like you're in his head and starts off in the middle of a thought or a sentence, leaving me to wonder if I missed a page or a paragraph. Very frustrating. And the ending in this one was just ridiculous.
Okay, new ones! "Most Talkative" by Andy Cohen was pretty fun, it was light and breezy. Andy works for Bravo and is responsible for some of the most banal reality shows on TV. I don't watch any of them, but I still enjoyed reading how he developed them and puts the shows together.
"Divergent" by Veronica Roth is the first in a YA dystopian series. I liked it. Beatrice is part of a faction called Abnegation: they are selfless. On Choosing Day, her test results are inconclusive: she is Divergent, and could go into several different factions equally well. She chooses Dauntless because she thinks they are brave, and goes through the brutal initiation process. She makes some friends and a boyfriend, but when her mom comes to visit her she asks Tris (as she's now known) to seek out her older brother, Caleb, who joined Erudite, and ask him to investigate the serum that's used during the tests. Tris soon discovers a plot being hatched by the Erudite leaders to wrest control away from the Abnegation by making the Dauntless their soldiers using drugs and simulation. The book ends with a full on war going down. I'm curious to see where this is headed.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce's first novel, "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" was very sweet without being schmaltzy, which is very difficult to do. Harold is recently retired and he and his all but estranged wife, Maureen, live a quiet and dull existence. Maureen blames Harold for their son David breaking off contact with them years earlier. Harold just tries to stay out of Maureen's way. Then one day Harold gets a letter from Queenie, a lady he worked with years earlier. She is dying of cancer, in a hospice 600 miles away. Harold writes a return letter and walks to the mailbox to post it, but instead he just keeps walking and decides as long as he walks, Queenie will live. It was touching and poignant.
On an unrelated note: September 25 marks the anniversary of William Faulkner's birth in 1897. Someday I might even open the Folio Society limited edition of the "Sound and the Fury" that I bought :)
On an unrelated note: September 25 marks the anniversary of William Faulkner's birth in 1897. Someday I might even open the Folio Society limited edition of the "Sound and the Fury" that I bought :)
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Libriomancer; Killing Lincoln; the Internet is a Playground
There are a lot more, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head. I tried updating on Friday, and Blogger was being difficult, so I'll try again later. But in the meantime...
"Libriomancer" by Jim C. Hines was a fun sci-fi book about a librarian who is also a libriomancer--he can pull magic out of books. So if a book has a magical sword that slays dragons in it, Isaac can pull that sword out of the book to slay a dragon. Nifty. So Johannes Gutenberg, the head of the porters (who are the libriomancers' police) is missing, and Isaac, with the help of his trusty fire spider Smudge and a dryad named Lena, go on the hunt and discover Gutenberg is being help hostage by a guy named Charles, who was angry at basically having his magic and memories stolen from him by the porters. It was fun, but I probably wouldn't read the rest of the series. Sci-fi books are tough for me sometimes. If they're a little too far out there, I can't get in to them. This one was borderline.
"Killing Lincoln" by Bill O'Reilly was very thrilling but unfortunately there wasn't much new substance here, at least not for me. He examines the last two weeks of President Lincoln's life and the conspiracy surrounding his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. Booth had a group of people he was planning the murder with, and had also planned on killed vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Seward was attacked but lived, and Johnson's killer chickened out and never confronted him. It's a sad chapter in America's history, and he told it very nicely. For someone who has read a lot about Lincoln and his assassination, it was familiar territory.
"The Internet is a Playground" by David Thorne is his first book. I had previously read most of it, but didn't get to all of it, so I took the time to finish. Lots of fun stuff, he's really quite entertaining.
"Libriomancer" by Jim C. Hines was a fun sci-fi book about a librarian who is also a libriomancer--he can pull magic out of books. So if a book has a magical sword that slays dragons in it, Isaac can pull that sword out of the book to slay a dragon. Nifty. So Johannes Gutenberg, the head of the porters (who are the libriomancers' police) is missing, and Isaac, with the help of his trusty fire spider Smudge and a dryad named Lena, go on the hunt and discover Gutenberg is being help hostage by a guy named Charles, who was angry at basically having his magic and memories stolen from him by the porters. It was fun, but I probably wouldn't read the rest of the series. Sci-fi books are tough for me sometimes. If they're a little too far out there, I can't get in to them. This one was borderline.
"Killing Lincoln" by Bill O'Reilly was very thrilling but unfortunately there wasn't much new substance here, at least not for me. He examines the last two weeks of President Lincoln's life and the conspiracy surrounding his murderer, John Wilkes Booth. Booth had a group of people he was planning the murder with, and had also planned on killed vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. Seward was attacked but lived, and Johnson's killer chickened out and never confronted him. It's a sad chapter in America's history, and he told it very nicely. For someone who has read a lot about Lincoln and his assassination, it was familiar territory.
"The Internet is a Playground" by David Thorne is his first book. I had previously read most of it, but didn't get to all of it, so I took the time to finish. Lots of fun stuff, he's really quite entertaining.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
The Kingmaker's Daughter; Game of Thrones; Long Lankin; Gone Girl
A bunch of really great books lately!
Philippa Gregory's latest, "The Kingmaker's Daughter", was a fascinating fictional look at Anne Neville, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, who was responsible for putting Edward IV and the Henry VI on the throne. He was killed in battle when Edward wanted his throne back, and Anne married Edward's youngest brother, Richard, who later became King Richard III and one of history's most interesting and (in my opinion) maligned figures. I can't wait for her next book, which will be from the point of view of Elizabeth Tudor, who married Henry VII and was Henry VIII's mother.
The first in the Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, "Game of Thrones" was very tense and riveting. At the heart is the basic War of the Roses story, so it was familiar to me: King Robert married a woman against the wishes of his advisers, Cersie Lannister. She is part of a large family which rises swiftly in the land, taking important titles and lands from men who feel they deserve it more. There are rumors that Cersie is a witch. When King Robert's hand (his closest adviser) dies, he approaches his longtime friend, Ned Stark, to come and be his new hand. Ned doesn't want to leave his home, Winterfell, but he hardly feels like he can refuse. There is much intrigue and secrets and people are murdered and while all this is going on half a world away the woman who feels Robert stole the throne from her, Dany, is preparing to launch a battle to win her rightful place back. I haven't seen the HBO show yet, but I'm eager to after reading the first book.
"Long Lankin" by Lindsey Barraclough is a genuinely spooky YA book based on a real English ballad. The book is set in the English countryside in the 1950s. Cora and Mimi turn up on their great Aunt Ida's doorstep with nowhere else to go. Ida makes it painfully clear she doesn't want the young girls there, and there is a long list of rules to follow: doors and windows must never be opened, no playing near the marsh, and never, ever go to the old church. Cora meets a young boy named Roger who lives near by, and of course they go to the church to see what all the fuss is about. It slowly comes out that Ida's family has been terrorized for generations by Long Lankin, who steals little children in order to drink their blood. Ida has lost many family members to Lankin, and it looks like Mimi might be next.
And finally, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn. There is a lot of hype surrounding this book, and it has long holds list at my library, so I was worried it might not live up to expectations, but it was very good. I can't say too much about the plot because there are several big twists, but the book starts out with Nick coming home and discovering his wife Amy is missing and the living room is torn up. The police don't take very long to determine that there was a great quantity of blood in the kitchen that has been hastily cleaned up, and that the struggle in the living room was staged. In between chapters dealing with Nick, who acts guilty, we read past entries from Amy's diary, as she grows increasingly scared of her husband's escalating violence. So did he do it or not? The ending was very satisfying, a lot of times a book will be very good and the ending will fall flat but not this one. Excellent!
Philippa Gregory's latest, "The Kingmaker's Daughter", was a fascinating fictional look at Anne Neville, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Warwick, Richard Neville, who was responsible for putting Edward IV and the Henry VI on the throne. He was killed in battle when Edward wanted his throne back, and Anne married Edward's youngest brother, Richard, who later became King Richard III and one of history's most interesting and (in my opinion) maligned figures. I can't wait for her next book, which will be from the point of view of Elizabeth Tudor, who married Henry VII and was Henry VIII's mother.
The first in the Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, "Game of Thrones" was very tense and riveting. At the heart is the basic War of the Roses story, so it was familiar to me: King Robert married a woman against the wishes of his advisers, Cersie Lannister. She is part of a large family which rises swiftly in the land, taking important titles and lands from men who feel they deserve it more. There are rumors that Cersie is a witch. When King Robert's hand (his closest adviser) dies, he approaches his longtime friend, Ned Stark, to come and be his new hand. Ned doesn't want to leave his home, Winterfell, but he hardly feels like he can refuse. There is much intrigue and secrets and people are murdered and while all this is going on half a world away the woman who feels Robert stole the throne from her, Dany, is preparing to launch a battle to win her rightful place back. I haven't seen the HBO show yet, but I'm eager to after reading the first book.
"Long Lankin" by Lindsey Barraclough is a genuinely spooky YA book based on a real English ballad. The book is set in the English countryside in the 1950s. Cora and Mimi turn up on their great Aunt Ida's doorstep with nowhere else to go. Ida makes it painfully clear she doesn't want the young girls there, and there is a long list of rules to follow: doors and windows must never be opened, no playing near the marsh, and never, ever go to the old church. Cora meets a young boy named Roger who lives near by, and of course they go to the church to see what all the fuss is about. It slowly comes out that Ida's family has been terrorized for generations by Long Lankin, who steals little children in order to drink their blood. Ida has lost many family members to Lankin, and it looks like Mimi might be next.
And finally, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn. There is a lot of hype surrounding this book, and it has long holds list at my library, so I was worried it might not live up to expectations, but it was very good. I can't say too much about the plot because there are several big twists, but the book starts out with Nick coming home and discovering his wife Amy is missing and the living room is torn up. The police don't take very long to determine that there was a great quantity of blood in the kitchen that has been hastily cleaned up, and that the struggle in the living room was staged. In between chapters dealing with Nick, who acts guilty, we read past entries from Amy's diary, as she grows increasingly scared of her husband's escalating violence. So did he do it or not? The ending was very satisfying, a lot of times a book will be very good and the ending will fall flat but not this one. Excellent!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)