Saturday, June 29, 2013

The Creation of Anne Boleyn; The Dinner; And Then I Found You; The Fault in Our Stars; The Tao of Martha; 20th Century Ghosts; Complex 90; Bright Lights, Big Ass; Creamy & Crunchy

Okay! Here we go.

You know what's annoying about historians? When they bitch and complain about other historians inserting their own personal beliefs as facts in a work of nonfiction and then they turn around and do THE EXACT SAME THING. So I was enjoying Susan Bordo's "Creation of Anne Boleyn", even though I thought she was unduly harsh on some of my favorite authors, and then she went and casually announced that OJ Simpson got away with murder. With no "in my opinion" to preface it or anything else, just dropped it like oh, this is fact and everyone knows it. This kind of thing? Drives me nuts. Do NOT be a hypocrite. Seriously. It's annoying. I could hardly finish the book after that, I was so irritated. The section where she discusses how Anne Boleyn has been portrayed over the years in the media was interesting, but overall it wasn't terribly good.

"The Dinner" by Herman Koch was profoundly disturbing, and I mean that in a good way. Paul and Claire are going out to dinner with his brother Serge and Serge's wife Babette to discuss the recent behavior of their teenage sons. Turns out the kids actually did something pretty horrible, and I don't want to say too much because it will give it away. Let's just say the lines between the good guys and the bad guys gets very blurred.

"And Then I Found You" by Patti Callahan Henry was pretty tepid and predictable. Kate and Jack have been in love since they were kids, but due to Kate's inability to make a commitment, Jack moves on and marries another woman, but not before getting Kate pregnant first. Oopsies. Kate gives the baby up for adoption. Fast forward thirteen years and Kate is dating a great guy but still having commitment issues. She thinks she needs to close the Jack chapter in her life before she can move on, but then her daughter finds her on Facebook and they meet in person. It was just one of those books with a saccharine sweet happy ending that you saw coming a mile away and frankly I don't think a person like Kate deserves such happiness.

"The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green blew me away. I was reading it before work and just sobbing so much I had to stop reading it so I could calm down enough to go. Hazel is sixteen and has cancer. An experimental drug is keeping her alive, and she's grateful. She meets Gus in a teen support group. Gus lost his leg but otherwise his prognosis is really good. They start flirting, hanging out, and sharing their favorite books with each other. Hazel's favorite is by an author named Peter van Houten. His book really doesn't have an end, something which bugs both Gus and Hazel. She's written to him a dozen times, asking what happened to the characters, with no response. Gus uses his wish with a cancer group to fly him and Hazel to the Netherlands, so they can meet van Houten in person and ask him about the book. Van Houten turns out to be a jerk, but they have a lovely time in Amsterdam before bad news comes rearing its ugly head. The ending was just amazing.

Jen Lancaster is back!! Yay :) "The Tao of Martha" was brilliant, hysterical. I howled out loud with laughter. Jen decides to live a year of Martha Stewart: going all out for holidays, organizing and redecorating the house, etc. Of course most things go horribly, disastrously wrong in spectacular Jen fashion. I'm glad she has such a great sense of humor and can laugh about herself. And the thing with the frozen bananas? I totally did that too!

"20th Century Ghosts" by Joe Hill is a great collection of his short stories. I'm not normally a big short story fan, but I enjoyed these. Some of them were a bit odd, but most of them were really good. I especially liked "The Cape" and "The Black Phone".

"Complex 90" by Mickey Spillane (RIP) and Max Allan Collins was typical Mike Hammer shoot 'em up and punch 'em down fun. Hammer is kidnapped while in Russia by the KGB and has to fight his way out and back home to determine who exactly set him up. You're awesome, Mike Hammer.

"Bright Lights, Big Ass" by Jen Lancaster was an unintentional reread. I forgot that I read it last year. I was at the bookstore yesterday, and I thought "oh, why don't I buy that one Jen Lancaster book my library doesn't own?". So I bought it, brought it home, started reading it, and went hey, I know this already. Checked the blog--yep, read it last March. Oh well. I was enjoying it so much I read it again :)

And finally, "Creamy & Crunchy" by Jon Krampner was a fun look at the history of one of the world's all time best foods: peanut butter! I love peanut butter. As a kid I didn't get to eat it. My mother always said it was "poor people's food" and wouldn't buy it because dammit, we weren't poor. Never mind that I liked it. So I ate Budding Roast Beef sandwiches every day at school and only had peanut butter at friends' houses. As an adult, I eat my fair share of (read: way too much) peanut butter and it was neat to hear about how it has changed over the years with different types of peanuts.  

Friday, June 21, 2013

NOS4A2

I have the worst time with this title :) "NOS4A2" by Joe Hill was absolutely incredible. I loved his second book "Horns", but this one was even better. And I loved how unlike his dear old dad, he didn't kill off my favorite character in the whole book. I kept telling myself not to get too attached to this person (I don't want to spoil anything) because Joe made this person very likeable and sympathetic, so I was braced for the death that didn't come. Yay! Anyway, the book is about special people like Victoria McQueen, who can use her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike to go across a bridge to find things that are lost, no matter how far away they are. Or Maggie Leigh, a librarian (woot!) who can use Scrabble tiles to spell out information about missing kids. Or Charles Talent Manx, who uses his Rolls Royce Wraith to kidnap little children and take them to a place he calls Christmasland, where it's Christmas every day and no one ever dies. Manx feeds off these children, staying young and alive in the process. Vic goes after him when she is 17 and he ends up in prison in a coma. Vic screws up her life pretty bad during the next 15 years or so but she does manage to do one thing right: she meets Lou and they have a son, Wayne. Manx's not dead, though, not yet and he manages to escape and goes after Vic's own 12 year old son. Vic's Tuff Burner is long gone, but she builds a new bike, a Triumph, and goes after Manx once again to save her son. It was powerful and epic and I loved it. Great!

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Heart of Palm; Joyland; Aviator's Wife; The Autobiography of Us; Forbidden

"Heart of Palm" by Laura Lee Smith is about the Bravos family of Utina, Florida. Dean ran out on his wife and four surviving kids twenty years earlier. Together they've managed to survive without him, although a little worse for wear. Frank runs the restaurant his mother Alma bought after Dean ran off, and now real estate developers are sniffing around, wanting to buy the house and the restaurant for millions of dollars to build a marina. Frank and Alma don't want to sell but older brother Carson does, and since Dean still owns half of everything he finds him to help back him up. It was a good story about how crazy families can be.

"Joyland" by Stephen King was great fun. Set in the summer of 1973, college student Devin Jones takes a job at an amusement park known as Joyland. Like any good amusement park, it is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young woman who was murdered on one of the rides. Devin's friends Tom and Erin are skeptical, until they ride the haunted house ride and Tom sees her ghost. Erin starts doing research to see if she can find out more about the other murders that were committed by the same man. Meanwhile, Devin stays and continues working at Joyland after the park closes for the winter. In town he meets a sweet young boy named Mike who is dying of MD. Mike's mom is very overprotective of her son, but all Mike wants to do is go to the amusement park he's heard all summer long. Devin arranges it and Mike has a wonderful time. Mike is also psychic, and ends up saving Devin's life. It was a great quick read.

"Aviator's Wife" by Melanie Benjamin is a fictionalized account of Anne Lindbergh. From marrying Charles to watching her firstborn son kidnapped and murdered, to having to flee the country because of the never ending houding by the press, to Charles' Nazi leanings that caused them both so much pain, and later, the truth about his infidelity and other families in Europe comes out as he lays dying in Hawaii. It was very touching.

"Autobiography of Us" by Aria Beth Sloss wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Rebecca's family is just barely hanging on in Pasadena, surrounded by wealth and leisure. She becomes friends with Alex, who is rich and reckless and lots of fun. Together the two girls go off to college together but one night of drunken indiscretion  shatters the friendship and they don't see each other for years. Rebecca marries a man she doesn't realize is trying to hide the fact that he's gay (the book takes place in the late 1950s, early 1960s) and moves to New York City. After her mother dies she returns to Pasadena for the funeral and reunites with Alex. Alex is miserable but won't admit it. I don't know, I just didn't find it as interesting as I'd hoped.

"Forbidden" by Tabitha Suzma wasn't as good as I'd hoped, either. The premise sounded good: Lochan and Maya are only in their teens, but because their father ran off and their mother is a drunk who likes to pretend she doesn't have five children at home, they've been forced to grow up before their time. They take care of the younger kids, the house, paying the bills, going to the store, all the things the adults should be doing. This of course really resonated with me because of my own similar childhood. But then Lochan and Maya realize they are falling in love with each other in a romantic way. They try to fight it, but eventually succumb to their teenage hormones. Lochan is terrified they'll be sent to prison if found out, since even consensual incest is illegal in the UK (where the book takes place). The ending really killed the book for me, I was enjoying their struggle and their fears until the last 100 pages or so.  

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

All You Could Ask For; The Demon; Smile, Southern California, You're the Center of the Universe; Paper Valetine; The Storyteller; Midwinter Blood; He's Gone; Golden

"All You Could Ask For" by Mike Greenberg was really touching and I cried at the end. So nicely written! Three women who don't know each other are brought together by breast cancer. Brooke is a mom with a wonderful, loving husband who is scared of how her life might change if she tells him she has cancer. Katherine is a hard working, successful Wall Street executive who has spent 20 years of her life hating the man she thought ruined it but has now finally let go and is ready to embark on a new and exciting adventure when she gets her diagnosis. And Samantha is a young newly divorced, athletic woman who will do anything it takes to improve her odds of survival. It was really amazing.

"The Demon" by Hubert Selby Jr. was disturbing. Interesting, but disturbing. Harry White is a bit of a jerk. He likes to hit on and sleep with married women, and then not see them again. He's bright and his work wants him to move up, but he's lazy and not committed. Harry bites the bullet and marries a wonderful woman and starts putting in the effort at work to move up the chain of command. The more successful Harry gets, the more awful he becomes. He starts stealing, and finally murdering.

"Smile, Southern California, You're the Center of the Universe" by James Flanigan wasn't nearly as interesting as I'd hoped it would be. He mostly just talked about contributions immigrants have made to the region without anything else, so it was a bit one sided.

"Paper Valentine" by Brenna Yaranoff was a creepy YA novel about a town being held hostage by a serial killer preying on young girls. Parents are in a state of panic and no one feels safe. Hannah is being haunted by the ghost of her best friend, Lillian, who died from anorexia related causes six months earlier. Lillian is convinced Hannah can catch the killer and end the nightmares, but Hannah isn't sure she can figure it out.

I finally finished reading Jodi Picoult's "The Storyteller". I started it months ago, got nearly to the end, and then had to return it because there were holds at my library. I went back on the waiting list and finished it. It was pretty good: Sage still blames herself for the auto accident that killed her mom and scarred her face several years earlier. She works at night at a bakery and is sleeping with a married man in order to avoid having a real relationship. She becomes friendly with an elderly man who visits the bakery where she works, and he asks her to help him die. Sage is startled by this until she finds out why: Josef was a Nazi and wants her forgiveness, since Sage was born into the Jewish faith. Sage is horrified by his confession and contacts the authorities, who start building a case against him. Sage's own grandmother is a Holocaust survivor, and her story, along with the fiction tale she was writing as a girl before being hauled off to the camps, is interwoven in the story. There was a *lot* going on in this book, and it was pretty predictable (once you've read one Jodi Picoult you kind of know how it's going to go) but it was still good.

"Midwinter Blood" by Marcus Sedgwick was a forgettable YA novel about an island where two souls keep living, over and over, reincarnated as different people but they always manage to find each other. Eh.

And finally, two Advanced Reader books I read back in March that were published last month. The first is "He's Gone" by Deb Caletti. I really enjoyed this one, it reminded me of "Gone Girl". Dani wakes up one morning, slightly hungover, and realizes her husband is missing. She doesn't think much of it at first, until the day wears on and he doesn't return and there's no word from him. We learn how Ian and Dani met and cheated on their spouses, how Dani's worried perhaps that she did something to Ian that she doesn't remember because she was drinking the night before. The police and Ian's kids from his first marriage all blame her for his disappearance and think she's hiding something. Caletti writes it so you're not sure if you believe Dani or not. Excellently done.

"Golden" by Jessi Kirby was a YA book about Parker, who has spent her high school years working towards the goal of getting a scholarship and going to Stanford to be a doctor. Unfortunately, as graduation approaches, Parker realizes it's more her Mom's dream for her than her own and she's not sure what *she* wants to do. After finding the journal of a girl who died ten years earlier on the eve of her graduation, Parker decides she needs to live her own life and take some chances before it's too late. It was a little sappy but I liked it.