This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.
Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
#44:
I read this this weekend while camping. I picked this up after browsing the back cover and on the recommendation of the two ladies I was out shopping with on Saturday. I came back to camp at about 4 PM and started reading. Sometime around 7 or so, my husband came back from the trails. I barely noticed him. We ate dinner– my mind was on the book. I finished it at about 9 PM, by lantern light, while he had wandered off to shower. When I finally surfaced, I had no idea where he was, because I’d been deep in the book when he took off. This was a beautiful, haunting, extremely sad and cathartic book about a young girl who is murdered, and everything that happens to her and her family after that.
In some ways, it reminded me of the Showtime series Dead Like Me. Except this one had an actual conclusion, as opposed to being cancelled in the prime of its existence. And The Lovely Bones is nowhere near as jaded and sarcastic, nor as funny.
My main criticism of the book is that it doesn’t really get into any of the other inhabitants of heaven. It’s as if the other heaven characters only exist there to serve as backdrop, which is unfortunate, because Sebold missed an opportunity to give a lot of insight and depth to the story through them.
#45:
An entertaining suspense novel set in a world where competence is no longer a barrier to employment, which enables a serial killer to work more or less unchecked, until the protagonist comes along. The unfortunate thing about this novel is that the ending is pretty… um… cliche? deus ex? I’m not sure, but it wasn’t very satisfying, and the rest of the novel just wasn’t funny enough or good enough to carry me through the last 10 pages without grimacing. Also, there were many moments in the novel where I flat-out wondered if the narrator was still reliable. Finally, the novel starts out set in the “United States of Europe,” but at the end, they’re talking about the European Union. I realize that doing a shoddy editing job on the novel is somehow supposed to be so “meta,” but for me, it just exposed the other flaws in the novel, particularly the cliche at the end.
#46:
Regency-era romance (I think), about a young woman who runs off to get herself “fallen” in order to avoid a distasteful marriage. I laugh every time I see the Levi’s straight-leg jeans commercials right now, with the soundtrack song “Because you’re mine.”
#47:
A contemporary novel about a woman who follows her cheating soon-to-be-ex-husband into the small towns in Northern California to get revenge, sexually. Kind of a romance/cozy mystery (though the romance part takes the first half of the book). Entertaining, and I liked the fact they “talked dirty” during sex, and actually had vocabulary that didn’t sound ridiculous. Plus: non-virginal romance novel heroines=double-plus good. I didn’t realize the author was local until my husband pointed it out (there’s a tag on the library’s call # label). Turns out she lives probably 8 miles up the road from me– awesome.
#48:
Excellent book. Read it yesterday. Taught my cat to “come here” this morning. Nothing particularly new to readers of Don’t Shoot the Dog!, but there were many useful tips specific to working with felines and adapting positive-reinforcement training to the cat’s particular behaviors. Also, it helped this morning when we needed to hiss at the cat to stop biting us.
#49:
Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich.
A Stephanie Plum mystery novel(la– it’s very short) about an encounter with the Christmas Spirit, who apparently is also a bounty hunter. This is my first exposure to Stephanie Plum, and I quite enjoyed it. It was a fun little romp.
#50:
A Claire Malloy mystery novel set at a mystery writers convention. The ending was odd, and I don’t want to be all spoilery, but I felt as though the protagonist was playing games with the reader, telling you one thing, but hiding information so that you wouldn’t know what was really going on. Writers can hide information, but if the protagonist has an observation, she’d better not hide it from the reader. That’s insulting. On the whole, since I had no expectations, the rest of the novel was good enough to carry me through the last 5 pages without really ruining the whole book.
And that’s my 50 books challenge completed! It’s mid-September. In 2004, the first year I did this challenge, I hit 50 books in November. In 2005, I hit it in October. I guess at this rate, I can switch to a 100-book challenge in 2009!
#51:
This is the sequel to Hidden Empire. I listened to it as an audiobook. It has to be better as an audiobook, because if I had to read this in text, I would have dropped it long ago. It’s repetitive (good if you want to listen in the car and have to stop frequently). There are about 12 different point of view characters, but none of them have a really strong “voice,” so Anderson spends way too much time every time he switches PoV in recapping what happened last time he wrote that character’s storyline. And once he’s done recapping the storyline, he then goes on to tell what happens without showing it. Not a single relationship in the entire novel is described– he just flatly tells you “they had fallen in love.” However, Anderson is a big fan of battle scenes, and those are told in loving detail, both tactically as well as from the flash and bang perspective. There are points where he uses the word “indescribably” as a cop-out to avoid actually describing something, be it a beautiful palace or the destruction of a forest. This is part of a series, but I’m not sure I can hang on through the next one in the series.
#52:
I wish I had known this was written in 1948, and by the same author who wrote One Hundred and One Dalmations and its sequel The Starlight Barking. It would have seemed a lot less overblown. In 2006, you cannot write a book like this– the language is overwrought, the protagonist is too sensitive and dramatic. One thing I liked about this book, in a perverse way, was the fact that even the protagonist is obsessed with money and material comforts, even though she’s also keenly in touch with the natural environment. This, I felt, was very much how even the most non-material person encounters poverty; at some point, you realize that no matter how much you find money to be “beneath you,” you still gotta eat. I read this because I was considering joining a book club at my library, and this was the selection of the month. I didn’t make it to the club this month, though, but I might pick up next month’s selection and give it a try, too.
#53:
A charming “lost on a deserted island” romance novel about an uber-nerd and the object of his desire.
#54:
Steamy Regency-era romance novel.
Abandoned: Code name : baby Christina Skye: A romance novel with spies– it didn’t grab me. I was asked to suspend too much disbelief in the first chapter.
#55:
You probably won’t find this one in America– it’s a UK-published book, and the US seems to have a real problem with bringing in real satire. I, Lucifer is a satirical novel told from the viewpoint, of, well, Satan himself. It’s entertaining, but the reason it’s entertaining is not because something cool actually happens in the novel, but because Lucifer’s voice is very enthralling. He’s also the world’s most unreliable narrator, of course, which makes it even more entertaining as he plays games with the Dear Reader.
Unfortunately, it’s not really Lucifer playing games, but Glen Duncan, who goes so far as to indulge the biggest pretension in literature: naming his protagonist after himself. Not Lucifer, of course, but the human host who Lucifer is invited to take over: Declan Gunn. The pretension is so obvious, “Lucifer” even refers to it early on in the novel.
Anyway, I enjoyed this one, and it’s a good addition to my “satires to learn from” as I work on my own satirical novel. Give me 6 months, though, and I’ll probably be listing it on BookMooch to clear shelf space again.