2009 book 209

Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue
This urban fantasy mystery has a terrible title but a pretty solid concept--a half-fairy PI is trying to track down some missing fairies and ends up as a fish for 14 years, and comes back to an entirely different world. When one of her other fairy friends is killed, she's cursed to find the murderer and get all the answers. The usual intrigues and car chases ensue until the more-or-less satisfying ending. This is the first in a series; the next one will be out in March. A-

YAY!

I am always bitching about the dearth of Hanukkah songs, so thank you, Neil Diamond.

Also awesome: the VCU library has acquired their two millionth comic book and of course it's Obama-Spiderman. I want to go to there . . . .

I also want to go to the Harry Potter theme park--check out these pictures!!

2009 book 208

Roald Dahl's Boy
When you're fasting, it's easier to read things that are kind of mindless and funny (though both this and the Spellman books had way too much about food!). I was talking about Dahl the other night and his hilarious and grisly stories about old-school surgery were on my mind.

2009 books 206 and 207

Lisa Lutz's The Spellman Files and Revenge of the Spellmans
Rereading these light, funny mysteries (the first and third in the series--I don't own the second one) was a pleasant way to spend some of Yom Kippur. Of course I still have some time to kill till break fast--time to peruse the bookshelves.

yom kippur

It must be Yom Kippur, as hits to this post are climbing!

What am I doing this year on Yom Kippur? Hopefully having an easy fast--my schedule made starting it complicated and annoying--and baking a challah, which probably will make me crazy with hunger. Good times!

I'll also read some library books and watch more Buffy--I'm deep into season 5.

partially read

Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters' Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (can't find the link to my review--Blogger's search function is so finicky)--it was an original and funny idea, and I loved the original and this new take. I was a little leery of this rushed-to-market sequel, which is even less Austen text and more add-ins. But actually, the reason I couldn't get through it was that Sense and Sensibility is not one of my favorite Austen books (the romantic foibles annoy me), and the insertion of sea monsters somehow made it even more boring. I only made it to page 56. Oh well.

2009 book 205

Shandi Mitchell's Under this Unbroken Sky
It's inevitable that a novel about Ukrainian farmers in Canada in 1938 is going to be bleak, but MAN was this bleak. Lots of great family drama and great characters, but bleak. Also, I am so sick of authors creating lovable animals just to do bad things to those animals and go for more pathos. It's so obvious. Eh, how do you rate a good book that depressed the hell out of you? B+?

Side note: I still think of the ANTM contestant whenever I see the name Shandi.

2009 book 204

Michelle Zink's Prophecy of the Sisters
I kind of hate when books don't tell you they're the first in a trilogy, so you're getting all into the story and then get near the end and realize you're nowhere near any kind of real conclusion and will now have to wait ages and ages to get one. Not that this is some amazing book where I need to know what happens RIGHT NOW, but I certainly would have prefer being forewarned that there would be waiting. Anyway, it's a YA novel about a pair of twin sisters who discover they're part of a prophecy and destined to be enemies, and there are astral plans and spells and mystical things and whatnot. The characters are well done and the story is strong and even a little bit unusual, so I'll definitely read the next one. B+.

good stuff

This Saturday is Museum Day! That means free admission to cool museums all over the country (including many in NC). I have work and can't take advantage of this awesomeness, but you all should.

Trapper Kindle!

Five reasons to love Castle. (My 6th reason: they wrote a tie-in mystery and sent me a copy! I haven't read it yet though. I love the show without freebies.)

Amos Oz is the bookies' frontrunner for the Nobel. I love a) that people gamble on this, and b) that Oz is the frontrunner! Elsewhere, Perhaps was one of my favorite books for a long time and clearly I should reread it.

Apparently I am not the only one who can't get AT&T reception at home. I'll probably cancel my contract when it's up and hope Verizon gets iPhones soon. Seriously, the sheer frustration I feel whenever I try to make a call (or when my conversation w/ my mom gets interrupted by three dropped calls, as happened last night) is not worth new toys.

Sneak peek at the new Lynda Barry book!

I am bemused at the idea of this automatic pancake maker. I make awesome pancakes but they are never perfectly round. What's the secret???

In other food news: turn a radish into a 1-up mushroom in seconds!

And finally, I cannot wait to roadtrip to the Harry Potter theme park.

Clearly I haven't written one of these link round-ups in a while.

2009 book 203

Lisa Tucker's The Promised World
Tucker's last novel, Once Upon A Day, was one of my favorites of 2007, so I was glad to get her new one from the library. This one also involves a brother and sister and family secrets, though is somewhat darker: after her twin commits "suicide by police" by aiming an unloaded rifle at a school, a literature professor basically loses it, and her husband has to help pull her together to uncover her forgotten past. Parts of this require way too much suspension of disbelief, but the characters are likable and sympathetic and there's lots of great literary references. A-/B+.

2009 book 202

Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply
Con men and orphans and other people cast adrift populate this novel, which consists of three storylines (in one, a man searches for his disturbed twin brother, in the second, a college student flees his life, and in the third, a high school teacher and one of his students run away together) that come together spectacularly. To say much more would give too much away, but this book is definitely worth a read. A/A-.

2009 book 201

Beth Kephart's Nothing but Ghosts
A teenage girl working as a gardener for the summer after her mother's death decides to try and solve a local mystery with the help of some friends and a fashionable librarian. I wished this book had been longer or more in depth--things sort of happen in a rush and so are mildly unsatisfying. B/B-.

2009 book 200

Heather Gudenkauf's The Weight of Silence
I'm pretty bummed book 200 was such a piece of drekkerai. Seriously, this book was terrible. I correctly guessed the end less than 1/4 of the way into it and the path to that ending was tortuously long and boring and stupid. D.

2009 book 199

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs
I have been eagerly awaiting a new novel (or a new anything, really) by Moore for years and years and years. I think this one kind of blew away her earlier ones (though they are hazy in my mind)--it's certainly longer and more ambitious. It's about a college student who takes a job providing child care for a well-to-do couple and their adopted child, but of course things are never that simple. The student seems to float through her life in a dream-like way (or at least that's how it felt to me), and some of the most vivid scenes are discussions she overhears about multiracial families during a weekly group meeting (hilarious liberalism abounds). I did find parts of the story to be mildly unbelievable, but in general it was a good read. A-.

2009 books 196, 197, 198

I'm in Pittsburgh for Rosh Hashanah, but my parents' internet was out yesterday (Verizon failed to fix it, but my brother had things up and running in about three minutes this afternoon) so I had plenty of time for reading.

Chelsea Cain's Evil at Heart
The third book in Cain's series about a detective obsessed with a female serial killer he helped catch felt kind of like it was rushed into publication. The characters are still interesting enough, but things didn't quite line up this go-round. B/B-.

Nellie Hermann's The Cure for Grief
I think I related fairly strongly to this book, since the main character is a Jewish girl born the year before me, and has some typical Jewish girl experiences. Except then tragedy keeps striking her family! I did get a bit teary during parts, but thought the ending could have been a bit stronger. B+.

Anita Diamant's Day After Night
Commenting on Diamant's work in any kind of critical manner (as in, the manner of a critic, not that I'm criticizing) is hard for me, since I know her daughter (who is super nice). Plus I've hardly read any of Diamant's novels, since I was so-so on The Red Tent (loved the first half, thought the second half was weak). But anyway! This was really a good, satisfying novel that looks at a little-known period of Jewish history--when refugees from post-WWII Europe were coming to Palestine in 1945, and the British kept them in internment camps. The story focuses on four women with very different wartime experiences and the characters are all vividly drawn. My only complaint is with some minor anti-Arab sentiments (some espoused by Zionist characters, whcih makes sense, some coming from the 3rd person narrator, whcih glosses over some of the history of Jewish immigration into what is now Israel). Still, really a good story, and my mom's reading it next. A-.

2009 book 195

Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching
I really enjoyed Oyeyemi's first novel, The Icarus Girl, which was creepy and full of Nigerian mythology and good in many ways. This book is her third and has some of the same bits and pieces--twins, hauntings--but the ambiance just isn't there. It's a story about a haunted house, sort of, but the house is one of the narrators, and there's just no internal logic to the story at all. It was a frustrating read, b/c I wanted it to be so much better than it was. C.

P9150139

P9150139
Originally uploaded by wordnerdy

Mac and Laura did a reading from Our Noise at the Regulator tonight and it was awesome! Some great performances (highlight for me: Mac's acoustic version of the Matt Suggs classic "Where's your patience dear") and hilarious readings--not to mention the out of control Q/A session . . . Everyone must buy this book now!

2009 book 194

Jenna Blum's Those Who Save Us
I was more than halfway through this when I put it down to read Catching Fire, and I didn't mind much, since it's a middling and generally implausible story. It's the sort of book Jewish book groups will read, but it wouldn't be one of their better selections. Anyway, it flits back and forth between WWII--when a young German girl gets romantically involved with a Jewish doctor and gets pregnant--and the 1990s, when their daughter, a German historian in America, starts a project to document the German wartime experience. You just spend the whole book waiting for the daughter to find out the truth, and when it finally happens, it's totally anti-climactic. B-.

2009 book 193

Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire
I've been dying to read this book since picking up an advance copy of Hunger Games at ALA, and then it took the library way longer than I wanted to get it to me, and then I was home sick, but it was finally on hold, so of course I went and picked it up and sat down and read it in one sitting! I was a little worried my hopes were up too high, since EW gave it a C, but they have no idea what they're talking about (and on rereading that review, I spot a couple of inaccuracies, indicating the reviewer didn't read the book carefully at all. And for that matter, didn't read the first one carefully at all, if she was expecting something like Twilight). Anyway, it was just as good as the first one, but even more intense, b/c Katniss is not only fighting for her life, she's unwittingly fomented a rebellion and the President is out for blood. Not to mention she's still caught in a love triangle. And there are even more likable characters to root for, and I teared up more than once. Awesome. Now I have to wait how long for the third one? A.

2009 book 192

Erick Setiawan's Of Bees and Mist
This book was good, but weird--even setting aside the mystical bees and mists and things. It has a sort of fairy-tale feel that carries the story along well as a girl grows up in a bizarre household and then finds love, along w/ the rivalry of her new mother-in-law, but things derail a bit toward the end. B.